All My Relations: RFK Jr.’s History of Solidarity with Indigenous Peoples

By Anne Keala Kelly, The Kennedy Beacon

By Anne Keala Kelly, The Kennedy Beacon

Though it had been looming large for months, when Robert F. Kennedy Jr. broke with the Democratic Party, the date and location of his announcement were so weighted with history and consequence that it just was one symbol shy of overwhelming. 

The day was October 9, Indigenous Peoples’ Day (aka Columbus Day), and the place was the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. There he stood, a stone’s throw from the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall, declaring his own independence from the political duopoly that has become so entrenched and bitter it’s hard to tell one party from the other. And he was challenging Americans to do the same: declare their independence as citizens and voters.

If he wins the presidency, history will look back on that day’s event with a glaring floodlight and decipher every utterance, beginning with why Kennedy chose that day and asked a Native American to give the invocation. With a few brief remarks and a prayer, Lewis Grassrope, a Lakota of the Kul Wicasa Oyate and a council member of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe, brought something poignant and potentially healing for the soul of the country.

 

He began by saying, “Hello relatives.… The first and foremost part we must always do as relatives is … recognize the [Lenape] relatives of the land we are on.” Then Grassrope asked for forgiveness from the ancestors of those lands that people now call Philadelphia, saying, “We must pay our respect to them.” And he said all of this before remarking what an honor it was to be there, before offering his prayer. 

Why does this matter, and what does it mean for a candidate to kick off the most important campaign of his life with a Native American leader setting the spiritual and historical tone?

The long paper trail of Kennedy’s legal and personal connections with Native peoples is in alignment with his stated commitment to mend the broken relationship between the US government and the Native peoples whose lands that government has taken. His campaign website says, “[Kennedy] sees the poverty and suffering in Indian Country as our country’s greatest shame and he believes that the federal government’s unfair dealings and broken treaties with the tribal nations are our nation’s original sin.”

It’s easy for a candidate to pander and promise and then turn their back, close their ears, and treat their stated agreements as a lawyer’s meaningless word salad. We never really know what a politician means until they take the oath and get on with the task of actually governing. 

So, what’s different about Robert F. Kennedy Jr.? Why should anyone, especially the hundreds of Native American nations, believe his campaign pledge? It states, “Under a Kennedy administration, historic wrongs done to Native Americans will be addressed and made right. The spirit as well as the letter of treaties must be honored as the highest law of the land: documents made between sovereign nations.” That’s a heavy guarantee to make, given the hundreds of years of lying, cheating, and murdering the US government systematically inflicted on the first peoples of the land. 

But if we consider a few of Kennedy’s past dealings with Indigenous peoples in general, through the Waterkeeper Alliance and the Natural Resources Defense Council, some of which took him beyond US borders (Native peoples of North and South America don’t recognize borders between Canada, South America, and the US), his campaign promise has legs.

Kennedy assisted the Cree in Quebec in their fight to stop phase 2 construction of hundreds of dams along eleven rivers in James Bay; as described in the Global Nonviolent Action Database, the Cree had lost phase 1 and settled for healthcare and fishing rights, which the government reneged on. When phase 2 was announced in 1989, they organized and began protests and legal battles and a public awareness campaign that led to indefinite postponement of the project. Kennedy also worked with Canada First Nations fighting logging in the Clayoquot Sound on the coast of Vancouver Island, British Columbia, from 1993 to 1999, during and after the heated protests known as “the War in the Woods,” as described in Environmental News Magazine.

According to Outside Magazine reports, Kennedy and NRDC lawyers were part of an international coalition that included human rights and grassroots organizations fighting to stop the Chilean energy company Endesa from constructing six dams on the Futaleufú (Mapuche word for great waters). Endesa had already damaged a portion of the Bio Bio Valley watershed, home to the Pehuenche people. Ultimately, as Ecowatch reports, the 20-year-long fight for the Futaleufú was successful. (Kennedy’s personal connection to Chile dates back to a trip there in 1973 that coincided with the coup against Salvador Allende, which led to the reversal of JFK’s “Alliance for Progress.” The Alliance was JFK’s attempted contribution to dismantling the colonial stranglehold Latin America’s oligarchs had on the land, resources, and economy in their coalition with US multinational corporations like Anaconda Copper and United Fruit.) 

Abbie Rowe, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

But Kennedy’s sincere commitment to Native Americans, and his sense of justice and morality toward Native peoples, was perhaps best expressed in an op-ed he wrote for EcoWatch in 2016. “I’ll See You at Standing Rock” is about the protest to stop the construction (eventually completed) of a section of the Dakota Access Pipeline, as Sierra reports, through Lake Oahe in South Dakota; the Standing Rock Sioux and other tribes get their water downstream of Oahe. 

After a brief welcome ceremony for him at the protest, Kennedy remarked about how that resistance “invokes the memory of the 1960s when we saw, when Americans saw on television German Shepherd dogs and firehoses being deployed against African Americans who were trying to make themselves a part of American democracy.”

What Kennedy wrote in his op-ed two weeks later makes his reasons for solidarity with Natives abundantly clear, reminding people of the Wounded Knee Massacre and the fact that the US government has breached its treaties with all the Indian nations. He stated, “It’s worth remembering that the lands and waterways now coveted by Dakota Access, a subsidiary of Energy Transfer Partners, are the same lands our government and the U.S. Army Corps deeded the Sioux in the treaties of 1825 and 1851.” 

Kennedy also tied the protest at Standing Rock, which he attended with his son Conor, to a personal, formative moment in his own political consciousness, when his father was initially reluctant to fly to California to meet with a farmworker and labor organizer named Cesar Chavez. He recalled how, when Senator Robert Kennedy learned that the Kern County sheriff was jailing peaceful protesters to (purportedly) protect them from the violent thugs hired by growers, his attitude changed. Kennedy wrote, “The prospect of law enforcement officials deploying the state’s police power on behalf of lawbreaking corporations against law abiding citizens whose only crime was their poverty and powerlessness made him steam. My father despised bullies and believed in the rule of law.” 

In his prayer on October 9, Grassrope said, “We are gathered here today on the Indigenous Peoples’ Day within Turtle Island.… This day is in recognition of those Native ancestors who showed their warrior spirit to maintain our beliefs and our value system left for us as a guidance to protect Mother Earth.… Through that vision we will find a way to mend the sacred hoop of all Indigenous peoples in unity for all creation.… We come to you [Tunkashila] … to pray for all creation, and all the relatives.” 

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. may be the only candidate ever to run for president who has a commitment to Native Americans based on his own experience, their legal and human rights, and an honest desire to heal the country.