In his op-ed about the current GOP hostility toward American Indian tribes, Gabriel Galanda notes that over the last forty-five years, Republicans in Congress and the White House alike supported the Indian Self-Determination policies initiated by President Nixon. This spring, the GOP-controlled House of Representatives signaled a reversal of those policies might be in the making, especially if a Republican is elected President of the United States in 2016.
So where did this 180-degree turnaround on American Indian termination come from? Partly from the jurisdictional relationships between tribes and states, where taxation is an ongoing source of conflict, and partly from tribes reacquiring control of trust lands previously managed by the U.S. Department of Interior.
But the irrational hostility toward American Indians is not explained by greed and racism alone; at the core of this wild swing in the moral compass of the GOP is a fanatic religious motivational belief in Christian white supremacy, that is virulently opposed to what its adherents view as “pagan socialism”. Mandates from God, a film project by Public Good Project and IC Magazine will explore this attempt to merge Church & State in the US.