Meet the Native Americans standing up for Palestine

Indigenous Americans, repressed and marginalised for centuries, are emerging as an important voice against the US government’s support for Israel

A gathering at Pine Ridge Reservation in solidarity with Palestinians under attack in Gaza. Photo: Wanahca Martinez

For Davidica Little Spotted Horse, a member of the Oglala Lakota tribe in South Dakota, seeing the death and destruction in Gaza reminds her of her own people's past experiences.

“We know the true story, as grassroots people, of how the Palestinians have struggled and how they’ve been colonised and occupied for the past 75 years,” the recording artist and resident of the Pine Ridge Reservation says.

“To the masses it might seem like Israel was saying [Hamas] tried to pull off this attack for no reason, because people aren’t aware of what’s really going on in Palestine because of the media coverage.”

Online and in person, Ms Little Spotted Horse has been vocal in her opposition to Israel’s attacks on Gaza and the high civilian death toll. She says there has been widespread support among Lakota people for Palestinians during the war.

“In my housing [area], there’s a lot of people with Palestinian flags hanging from their window. I have one in my window, so does my neighbour,” she says.

“In indigenous country, this has been going full force since October.”

Indigenous Americans, themselves repressed, displaced and marginalised for centuries, are emerging as an important internal voice against the US government’s support for Israel amid the war in Gaza.

For months, Native American tribes and groups have held pro-Palestine demonstrations, and tribal members have been at the forefront of the campus protest movement that rocked dozens of universities this year. Some pro-Palestine Native American protests have been attacked by pro-Israel demonstrators.

“Every time we’ve stood up since the 1970s, as Lakota people, the Palestinians have been there for us. They showed up here in 1973, when we had a stand-off against the government at Wounded Knee,” Ms Little Spotted Horse says.

That year, about 200 Oglala Lakota and followers of the American Indian Movement occupied the town in South Dakota, which was the site of a brutal massacre by American soldiers in 1890.

“At Standing Rock [protests against a pipeline project in 2016 and 2017], they came to show us support and to stand with us to protect the water. We’ve been allies for a long time.”

For months, indigenous organisations such as NDN Collective and Honour the Earth have been at the forefront in leading awareness among indigenous communities of the campus protests.

Indigenous students and professors have played an important part in the protest movements at universities across the country.

In November, Native American activists tried to block a ship believed to have been carrying arms to Israel from leaving the Port of Tacoma in the state of Washington.

“The genocide in Gaza right now is fully backed by the United States and a lot of the soldiers in the [Israeli military] and the political leaders of Israel have been trained in the United States,” says Rain Metteba of K’e InfoShop, a queer and lesbian space in the Navajo Nation’s Window Rock community in Arizona.

“What’s essentially angering about the situation in Gaza is how long it’s been allowed to drag on. The carnage has only gotten worse. It gives us some insight into the kind of violence that was inflicted on indigenous people at the time of the westward expansion of the US.”

Metteba, who prefers not to use honorifics, says all K’e InfoShop’s public events involve distributing information about the history of the occupation of Palestine.

Last spring, the makers of the film, Spaces of Exception, were invited to the Navajo Nation for a screening and a question-and-answer session on the shared challenges facing indigenous and Palestinian communities.

But not all indigenous North American communities side with Palestinians. The Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana, an indigenous group of less than 1,000 people, established official ties with Israel in 2008, becoming the first tribe to do so. Since then, trade missions have been exchanged and the tribe has worked with several Israeli companies.

Last winter, Metteba and others called for the president of the Navajo Nation, Buu Nygren, to issue a proclamation calling for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza.

“We met him, provided reading material to him and his representatives to contextualise the siege in Gaza. We talked about why a ceasefire proclamation would be an important gesture to demonstrate that the Navajo Nation is growing popular support for Palestine,” says Metteba.

But he angered many by instead issuing a statement that called for an “end of hostilities in Gaza and Israel".

The Navajo Nation’s official stance on Gaza is complicated by the presence of a Raytheon facility in north-west New Mexico that employs a large number of indigenous workers. Raytheon supplies a host of military and defence weapons to Israel, including elements of its Iron Dome missile defence system.

“He did not once say the word ‘ceasefire'. It was only a general call for peace,” says Metteba. “Nothing has really happened since.”