How Hit Musical “Hamilton” Propagates White Supremacy
By: Coka Brown
Tags: Culture, America, Racism, White Privilege, Indigenous

How Hit Musical “Hamilton” Propagates White Supremacy

The ongoing erasure of Indigenous people

Cover of Hamilton soundtrack

Don’t get me wrong. I love the musical Hamilton. Most of the in-your-face lyrics have been tattooed on my brain since I first heard Lin-Manuel Miranda as Alexander Hamilton exclaim that he is not throwin’ away his…shot! I’ve already seen the show twice. Among the COVID-19 casualties for my family and me is a canceled trip to New York City to take my niece to see Hamilton. The rap battles are brilliant, and the story of how a “bastard, orphan, son of a whore” grows up to be a “hero and a scholar” truly is remarkable. So yeah, I get it. Hamilton is a hit for a reason.

But as much as I love the show and the music, one major issue bothers me. Nowhere in this narrative of the creation of the United States are the first inhabitants mentioned, i.e., Native Americans. African-American slaves at least get an honorable mention, but Native Americans aren’t even an afterthought.

Alexander Hamilton and company “roll like Moses, claimin’ their promised land” in the musical as if the land was theirs for the taking. This feeds into the dangerous myth that America was a vast, largely uninhabited wilderness before the arrival of Europeans. It propagates the idea that Turtle Island, a.k.a. North America, was a ripe, fertile land just waiting to give birth to a “young, scrappy, and hungry country” with the insemination of seeds from genius, ambitious white men.

Why does this matter and what does it have to do with white supremacy? Why is it so harmful to view the land as mostly uninhabited before the arrival of Europeans? Because it continues to erase Indigenous people, not only from American history but from America today. It continues to justify the displacement and killing of Native Americans.

It is unbelievable how many people think that “real” Indians, a.k.a. Native Americans, don’t exist anymore and how many have no awareness at all of the atrocities Native Americans endured, and continue to endure, in the name of colonization. How many times have you heard the phrase “We’re all immigrants!” when referring to Americans? No actually, we are not. It is much easier to look away from the oppression and injustice of Indigenous people when you don’t even know they exist.

White supremacy and racism

No, I am not saying the musical is racist or that fans of Hamilton are racist. In fact, I fully appreciate Mr. Miranda’s motivation for hiring an ethnically diverse cast to star as the white founders of the nation.

When I refer to white supremacy in this context, I am referring to the idea that European culture, language, people, thinking, and worldview are perceived as somehow superior to the culture and way of life of Indigenous people. I am referring to the idea that George Washington, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, etc. had a right to create a nation from the ground up on stolen land. White supremacy, in this case, means that people of European descent saw native inhabitants as inferior and therefore had a right to displace and dispossess them. It is easy to gloss over this by repainting history with a heroic brush. It is easy to omit Indigenous people by referring to the heroes in Hamilton as our “Founding Fathers.”

Long before Alexander Hamilton “headed to New York to be a new man,” my ancestors had been living in what would later become known as New Mexico and Colorado for centuries, even millennia. My Native ancestors were likely people who farmed the land, danced, sang songs to the Creator, and honored what they considered sacred. My Spanish ancestors arrived in the 1500s. Some may have been explorers and conquistadors. My Native ancestors were then forced to adopt a whole new language, religion, culture, and identity. We descendants of these Indigenous and Spanish peoples would later be called mestizos, or “mixed-bloods,” without any tribal identity. We would then get a bunch of other labels slapped on us, such as Hispanics, Chicanos, and Latinos, or nowadays Xicanx or Latinx. My ancestors’ home became part of Mexico and then eventually became part of the United States.

Obviously my family and I have deep roots in America, yet we are not included in the American narrative as celebrated in Hamilton. Sure, “immigrants get the job done.” But so do Indigenous people.

I understand the history is much more complex than can be explained in a musical. I understand that George Washington actually had ties with some of the local Native American leaders and negotiated with them. “The Indian World of George Washington: The First President, the First Americans, and the Birth of the Nation” by Colin G. Calloway goes into further detail about this. I‘m aware that some Native tribes were even allies of Europeans.

None of this excuses the continued erasure of Native people.

“Yeah, yeah, why does everything always have to be about race?”

That is an incendiary question and nearly impossible to answer without incurring eye rolls and exasperated sighs from people who have never felt the sting of racism. Yet the question is unavoidable when discussing the existence of Indigenous people, colonization, and the concept of white supremacy. Addressing that question inevitably comes with gas lighting and repeated accusations of being too sensitive, and the most tired trope of all, being a snowflake. That is partly because we have been so conditioned to see America as a great nation justly founded by immigrants, with no mention at all of the genocide or displacement of Native people, that even so much as questioning American exceptionalism invokes defensiveness, such as “Well if you don’t like it, leave!”

The conditioning begins in the earliest teachings in most American standardized public school systems. In some elementary and middle schools, American history begins in the year 1492, the year of Christopher Columbus’s arrival on land that would become part of the Americas, and is taught primarily from a European point of view. What does it teach children when you tell them American civilization began in 1492? Among other things, it teaches them that people who lived on the land before 1492 were uncivilized, unworthy even of mention. It teaches kids that life before Columbus’s arrival did not matter, nor did the original inhabitants. The propaganda continues with movies and books that portray Native Americans as savages, sports mascots that turn Native people into caricatures

Concepts such as the Doctrine of Discovery and Manifest Destiny give credence to the belief that America was formed at the hands of brave men intent on creating a land of the free, home of the brave, ignoring the fact that the fine print did not include African-American slaves, women, or Native Americans. These concepts condition us to believe that European descendants had a divine right to form a new nation, even if it came at the cost of genocide for large swaths of Indigenous people.

As Sicangu Lakota Hip Hop artist Frank Waln powerfully said in his song “What Made the Red Man Red” in which he challenges the portrayal of Native people in the Disney cartoon Peter Pan:

“Tell me why you think the red man is red…..Stained with the blood from the land you bled…..Tell me why you think the red man is dead….With a fake headdress on your head….Tell me what you know about thousands of nations….Displaced and confined to concentration camps called reservations….We died for the birth of your nation.”

“But that’s all in the past. We’ve made so much progress since then!”

Have we? Have we gone far enough? Have we done enough? If so, then why was the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline allowed in 2017, despite strong resistance from the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and other Indigenous nations who argued that its construction violated treaty rights and put the source of clean drinking water for the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe in jeopardy?

Why are builders allowed to bulldoze through sacred tribal sites of the Tohono O’odham Nation to build a border wall between the U.S. and Mexico, yet we are expected to honor other “sacred” spaces, such as St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City and other cathedrals? Why is the fact that the southern border wall crosses through Tohono O’odham land not front-page news?

Why do Indigenous women go missing and murdered at a rate 10 times higher than the national average? Why was Indian Country initially not included in federal funding in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, even though Indian Country is at a particular risk to the virus?

The very foundation of America is based on the notion that certain people are sub-human and inferior to others. Without this belief, the fifty nifty United States would not exist. As long as we continue to ignore and deny this foundation, history will never end. White supremacy will never end. And we will continue to ignore this if we don’t acknowledge the absence of Indigenous people in the mainstream story of America’s birth.

How can anyone be shocked that racism and discrimination continue well into the 21st century when they are part of the very foundation on which America exists? When you plant and cultivate an apple tree, is it really a surprise when centuries later the tree still produces apples?

No, I am not suggesting that we take an ax and chop down the apple tree. i.e. dismantle the U.S.A. But we can at least take an honest look at the foundation, the long-reaching roots, and acknowledge what it actually is. Taking an honest look explains why racism persists, why class divisions persist along color lines.

Mark Charles, a Native American activist from the Navajo nation, explains it well in his Ted talk “We the People.” Racism and white supremacy persist because of our foundations, not in spite of. That may be a difficult truth to hear and may not even be accepted by some. But it needs to be acknowledged.

A fly in a web

I have yet to find a way to thrive in America and not be complicit in colonization on some level. Take the construction of pipelines across tribal land, for example. Most of us depend on fossil fuel, which increases the demand for oil, which enriches big oil companies and enables them to construct the “Black Snake” through tribal land. I think of this every time I turn on my car or get on an airplane. It is all interconnected, intricately woven together so tightly that we don’t realize we are flies caught in a web that is nearly impossible to untangle. I try to do my part, but I know it will not undo the strong fiber that has been woven for many generations. I once asked a sweet Lakota elder how one unravels colonization. He told me, “You don’t. You either go along with it, or you live as a prisoner of war, like me.”

Even if I have no choice but to go along with colonization, I can at least be aware of what that means. I can remember to acknowledge the people who lived, breathed, loved, and worked on the land long before I was born.

With all of this being said, believe me, the last thing I want to do is discourage anyone from seeing Hamilton. By all means, once we’re all released from our cages and can go see live performances again, go see it! Try watching the show and not singing and dancing along to “Rise up….when you’re livin’ on your knees you RISE UP!”

All I am asking is to remember Indigenous people when you watch Hamilton. Think of the people who thrived on the land before Alexander Hamilton came and forever changed history. Keep Indigenous people in mind when the cast sings “how lucky they are to be alive right now” in the midst of the revolution. Remember Indigenous people when you hear that “we’ll never be free until we end slavery.” Remember that Indigenous people are still here, too, and are not going anywhere.