Simon Moya-Smith, a left-wing Native-American writer, envisions a primordial progressive utopia in North America — before the arrival of the colonists, Indian tribes held hands, sang kumbaya, passed the Green New Deal, doled out abortions and sex-change surgeries like candy, and enjoyed the fruits of fully automated luxury communism:
Before white people came to this land, there were no jails, no homelessness, no laws against homosexuality or abortion. For thousands of years, Indigenous peoples emphasized health, housing, freedom to love who you love and the fact that we need Mother Earth. She doesn’t need us.
— Simon Moya-Smith (@SimonMoyaSmith) March 4, 2023
Native Americans themselves, on the other hand — the ones who exist in the real world, rather than Moya-Smith’s Rousseauian imagination — tend to disagree. In fact, tribal lands are some of the last places in America where same-sex marriage is still illegal: Obergefell, which unilaterally changed the definition of marriage in the rest of the country, doesn’t apply to tribal jurisdictions. And most of those jurisdictions have seen fit to carry on with the same old marriage laws that most Americans lived under prior to the past few decades. “There are more than 550 tribes in the U.S,” Chynna Lockett of South Dakota Public Broadcasting told NPR in 2019. “And while hard data is difficult to find, only a handful have legalized same-sex marriage.”
Take the Navajo Nation. As of 2021, the Navajos were the largest Indian tribe in the U.S., boasting nearly 400,000 citizens. But same-sex marriage has been explicitly banned in the Navajo Nation since the tribal council passed a law to that effect in 2005 — and continues to be prohibited to this day, despite multiple repeal efforts by LGBT activists. In 2018, a Navajo LGBT activist recounted to High Country News that “a recent president of the Navajo Nation told him gay and lesbian couples should leave the reservation because he thought marriage equality was a ‘white man’s way of thinking.’” A 2015 New York Times report on the intra-tribe debate, in the lead-up to the Obergefell decision, revealed a similar traditionalist strain in the thinking of Navajo leadership:
To Navajo traditionalists, however, the rapid redefinition of marriage in states around the country has made the 2005 tribal law more important than ever.
“It’s not for us,” Otto Tso, a Navajo legislator and medicine man from the western edge of the reservation, said of gay marriage. “We have to look at our culture, our society, where we come from, talk to our elders.”
I’m no expert on Native-American history. But Moya-Smith doesn’t have to take it from me — he can ask tribal leaders themselves.