The misinformation created in our reactive haste is covering up all the actually bad stuff

Jace Frey
Jace Frey
Nov 5 · 2 min read

“Change” is the wrong verb. The WH ~did~ officially declare this November as National Native American Heritage Month, 2019. But Trump’s WH ~also~ declared it as the inaugural National American History and Founders Month, 2019.

(The WH simultaneously proclaimed November as Alzheimer’s Disease Awareness Month; Veterans and Military Families Month; and Entrepreneurship Month. Not sure that any of those are related to this conversation, other than to say that November hasn’t been exclusively proclaimed Native American month historically, and that the rebuttal will be that also declaring this as Founders month is no different than those.)

While the optics of this WH proclamation would look like a dressed up version of “very fine people on both sides” — pulled together by someone who learned history from the “This is America, Charlie Brown” special typically shown in November — the actual points of the proclamation are more insidious.

What we should be talking about is what the Trump’s proclamation for Native American Heritage month does say. It is more cruel and distorting than not declaring a Native American Heritage at all.


“During National Native American Heritage Month, we reaffirm our commitment to work with tribal communities to address serious issues affecting them and to help protect their rich and diverse heritage:”

This includes:

  1. “Their legacy of service spans the history of our Nation, and includes the Indian Home Guard during the Civil War and the Code Talkers during World War II.” — paragraph 2
    This statement both denies a history for Native Americans spanning time before “our Nation” (or even the Civil War) and frames the primarily-mentioned valuable legacy of Native Americans as service to “our Nation”.
  2. “In 2018, the Department of Interior’s Opioid Reduction Task Force seized more than 3,200 pounds of illegal narcotics with an estimated value of approximately $9 million.” — paragraph 3
    The second talking point of the proclamation on Native American Heritage is opioids?
  3. “[M]y Administration began a series of public safety listening sessions … [which] are focused on strategies to address the trend of violence and illicit activity affecting these populations and have addressed the problem of missing and murdered indigenous women.” — paragraph 4
    The third talking point of the proclamation on Native American Heritage is domestic violence and human trafficking?

If these are the proclaimed points on Native American Heritage, maybe we would be better off NOT declaring it. But the WH did declare November as Native American Heritage month, and used that proclamation to give Native Americans another black eye.


We’re going to lose the chance to have this broader conversation because we — the Facebook and Twitter-verse — inaccurately spread misinformation; we didn’t portray the mechanics of the WH proclamations accurately. While we should instead be talking about what Native American Heritage is, Trump gets to declare that “dems overreacted” with “fake news” and then wrongly claim that he is the one honoring Native Americans.

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