Content area
Full Text
A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle. Two things, which in truth are but one, constitute this soul or spiritual principle. One lies in the past, one in the present. One is the possession in common of a rich legacy of memories; the other is present-day consent, the desire to live together, the will to perpetuate the value of the heritage that one has received in an undivided form. . . . A nation is therefore a large-scale solidarity, constituted by the feeling of the sacrifices that one has made in the past and of those that one is prepared to make in the future.
-Ernest Renan, "What is a Nation," 1882
Our land is everything to us. It is the only place in the world where Cheyennes talk the Cheyenne language to each other. It is the only place in the world where Cheyennes remember the same things together. I will tell you one of the things we remember on our land. We remember our grandfathers paid for it-with their life. -John Woodenlegs, "Speech to the Association on American Indian Affairs," 1960
The authors of "The International Reason" section of the October 1947 report of the President's Committee on Civil Rights noted that in the United States government's battle for hearts and minds worldwide, "our domestic civil rights shortcomings are a serious obstacle. . . . Those with competing philosophies have stressed and are shamelessly distorting our shortcomings. They have not only tried to create hostility toward us among specific nations, races and religious groups. They have tried to prove our democracy an empty fraud, and our nation a consistent oppressor of underprivileged people." As the historian Thomas Borstelmann has argued, "There was no greater weakness for the United States in waging the Cold War than inequality and discrimination." Indeed, the Soviet Union and its satellites offered a stream of criticism of American race relations into the 1960s and beyond. For example, a Moscow radio broadcast of February 1958 declared that American Indians, "the most underprivileged people in the United States," were forced to live on reservations that the Soviet commentator called "huge concentration camps. . . . Today, gradual extinction is the fate of the people in these reservations." Ironically, Soviet propagandists...