Conservative political pundit Ann Coulter: ‘We didn’t kill enough Indians’
By KEVIN ABOUREZK
ICT
Conservative political pundit Ann Coulter sparked backlash from Native leaders Sunday, July 6 after posting on her X account, “We didn’t kill enough Indians.”
Coulter’s comment came in response to comments made by University of Minnesota Professor Melanie Yazzie during a December 3, 2023, event (not a 2025 event like Coulter asserted in her X post) featuring Native people discussing the similarities between Palestinians and Indigenous people of America. The event occurred nearly two months after the October 7, 2023, attack by Hamas militants that sparked the most recent Israel-Palestine conflict.
Yazzie, Diné, had talked about the Land Back movement and the need to decolonize America.
“Because the U.S. is the greatest predator empire that has ever existed. So we want U.S. out of everywhere … and the goal is to dismantle the settler project that is the United States,” Yazzie stated in the posted video.
Coulter’s statement immediately drew criticism from Native leaders across the country, including Cherokee Nation Principal Chief Chuck Hoskin, Jr., who issued one of the first public statements the same evening after Coulter posted her incendiary comment.
“Coulter’s statement, on its face, is a despicable rhetorical shot trained on the First Peoples of this continent, designed to dehumanize and diminish us and our ancestors and puts us at risk of further injury,” Hoskin posted on Facebook. “We have faced enough of that since this country’s founding. Such rhetoric has aided and abetted the destruction of tribes, their life ways, languages and cultures, the violation of treaty rights, violence, oppression, suppression and dispossession.”
Political leaders calling for genocide of Native people and decrying their complete eradication is nothing new to Indigenous people. Hoskin referenced President Andrew Jackson as a former leader who might have agreed with Coulter if he were alive today. Jackson has long been considered to have demonstrated hostility to tribes having championed the Indian Removal Act of 1820, which led to the forced removal of eastern tribes from their homelands to Indian Territory (today Oklahoma).
Another former president, Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt once made a controversial statement during a January 1886 speech in New York. In his speech, Roosevelt spoke about his own experiences with Native people.
“I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are the dead Indians, but I believe nine out of every 10 are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the 10th,” Roosevelt said.
Later, his statement was later erroneously abridged and popularized as: “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.”
Hoskin said he feared her statement shared on her X account, which has 2.1 million followers, might contribute to normalizing hatred toward marginalized populations, especially during the current polarized political climate.
“The country frequently seems on the verge of political violence,” he said. “Coulter’s post implicitly encourages it.”
Other Native leaders and advocacy organizations also took aim at Coulter this week, including Eastern Band of Cherokee Principal Chief Michell Hicks, who called her statement “genocidal rhetoric that glorifies violence against Indigenous peoples.”
Hicks expressed defiance as well, saying “despite every attempt to erase us, we are still here. We have survived and we have prospered.” He said he feared Coulter’s would incite further hatred and violence against Indigenous people
“It stokes division and it places Indigenous people, and other communities targeted by hate, at greater risk of harm,” he said.
Indeed, many of Coulter’s followers on X expressed support for her statement, posting comments such as: “She’s just saying what everyone is thinking,” “We did our best; we simply ran out of blankets,” and “Now I want to open a cheap firewater store near a reservation with drone home delivery service. These things are more tolerable when they are destroying themselves.”
National Congress of American Indians President Mark Macarro issued a statement Monday condemning Coulter’s statement.
“We will not sit silently at attempts to normalize this abhorrent behavior,” he said. “We demand an immediate retraction and public apology — and we expect leaders of every political persuasion to denounce this abomination without equivocation.”
John E. Echohawk, executive director of the Native American Rights Fund, said Coulter’s comment echoed the voices of past U.S. leaders who have sought to assimilate and eradicate Indigenous people.
“Although abhorrent, this language is not new,” he said. “Getting rid of Native Americans has been the stated goal of a slew of U.S. policies from the Trail of Tears to the Termination Era. … Genocidal language aimed at Native Americans was supposed to be something of the past. It was something that mainstream society had rejected and moved past – until Coulter’s post.“We call on all those who are decent, who have moral values, to denounce this type of hate speech,” he said. “We should not treat each other in this way. The dark history of the United States’ policies towards Native people should not be repeated.”
Appeals court rules against ND tribes in voting rights case
BISMARCK, N.D. (AP) — A federal appeals court won’t reconsider its decision in a redistricting case that went against two Native American tribes that challenged North Dakota’s legislative redistricting map, and the dispute could be headed for the U.S. Supreme Court.
The case has drawn national interest because of a 2-1 ruling issued in May by a three-judge panel of the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that erased a path through the federal Voting Rights Act for people in seven states to sue under a key provision of the landmark federal civil rights law. The tribes argued that the 2021 map violated the act by diluting their voting strength and ability to elect their own candidates.
The panel said only the U.S. Department of Justice can bring such lawsuits. That followed a 2023 ruling out of Arkansas in the same circuit that also said private individuals can’t sue under Section 2 of the law.
Those rulings conflict with decades of rulings by appellate courts in other federal circuits that have affirmed the rights of private individuals to sue under Section 2, creating a split that the Supreme Court may be asked to resolve. However, several of the high court’s conservative justices recently have indicated interest in making it harder, if not impossible, to bring redistricting lawsuits under the Voting Rights Act.
After the May decision, the Spirit Lake Tribe and Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians asked the appeals court for a rehearing before all 11 judges. Attorneys general of 19 states, numerous former U.S. Justice Department attorneys, several voting rights historians and others also asked for a rehearing.
But in a ruling Thursday, the full court denied the request, which was filed by the Native American Rights Fund and other groups representing the tribes. Three judges said they would have granted it, including Circuit Chief Judge Steven Colloton, who had dissented in the previous ruling.
The majority opinion in May said that for the tribes to sue under the Voting Rights Act, the law would have had to “unambiguously” give private persons or groups the right to do so.
Lenny Powell, a staff attorney for the fund, said in a statement that the refusal to reconsider “wrongly restricts voters disenfranchised by a gerrymandered redistricting map” from challenging that map.
Powell said Monday that the tribes are now considering their legal options.
Another group representing the tribes, the Campaign Legal Center, said the ruling is “contrary to both the intent of Congress in enacting the law and to decades of Supreme Court precedent affirming voters’ power to enforce the law in court.”
The office of North Dakota Secretary of State Michael Howe did not immediately respond to a request for comment Monday.
The groups said they will continue to fight to ensure fair maps. The North Dakota and Arkansas rulings apply only in the states of the 8th Circuit: Arkansas, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota. In the wake of the Arkansas decision, Minnesota and other states have moved to shore up voting rights with state-level protections to plug the growing gaps in the federal law.
The North Dakota tribes filed their lawsuit in 2022. The three-judge panel heard appeal arguments last October after Republican Secretary of State Michael Howe appealed a lower court’s November 2023 decision in favor of the tribes.
In that ruling, U.S. District Judge Peter Welte ordered creation of a new district that encompassed both tribes’ reservations, which are about 60 miles (97 kilometers) apart. In 2024, voters elected members from both tribes, all Democrats, to the district’s Senate seat and two House seats.
Republicans hold supermajority control of North Dakota’s Legislature.
