The turbulent years of the Civil Rights movement resulted in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 but the mere passing of legislation was not enough to guarantee an end to the discrimination faced by people of color. Segregation may have ended as official American policy but the legacy of generations of discriminatory policy lingered for African Americans, Chicanos, American Indians and Asian Pacific Islanders alike. Ethnic minorities struggled to make their issues known which became expressed in what scholars call ethnic nationalism. But those nationalisms were different from group to group; in particular what Chicanos and blacks wanted was different from what Native Americans and, arguably, Native Hawaiians wanted.
For blacks and Chicanos the end to discrimination translated to a narrative based on equality. They wanted the guarantees brought by the benefits that American citizenship would theoretically bring them--equal rights, economic equality, a place at the American table. As Vine Deloria argued in his classic work Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto, what Native Americans wanted was to be left alone. For 500 years they had been invaded, infected, removed, assimilated, terminated and legislated till there was almost nothing left of them. And it was similar with Native Hawaiians. But they were out in the middle of the ocean in vacation land where the only time people saw them was when they got off the plane and were greeted by a smiling native with a lei in their hands, or dancing for tourists at a hotel-sponsored luau.
Indigenous rights issues are different from other ethnic minority issues because their histories are different. Thus their articulations of civil rights, while similar in some regards, are ultimately very different. This week I begin to untangle these differences in the articles The Alcatraz Island Occupation and the Civil Rights Movement and Kaho'olawe's Significance to Modern Hawaii. Also, I've written a retrospective on the Carlisle Indian School as a beginning point to explore Indian education in the US, a topic I will be writing much more about in the future.