Absence makes the heart grow colder: the harmful nature of invisibility of contemporary American Indians

ABSTRACT

In settler colonial societies, settlers employ various practices to eliminate, replace, and erase Indigenous Peoples. We posit that the rarity of representations of contemporary American Indians in mainstream US culture legitimates other settler colonial practices in US society. We studied whether less exposure to representations of contemporary American Indians is associated with less support for challenges to other settler colonial practices. Using survey data from 903 White Americans, we examined associations between exposure to representations of contemporary American Indians, belief that American Indians are “a people of the past”, and support for challenges to settler colonial practices. We found that less exposure to representations of contemporary American Indians was indirectly associated with less support for challenges to settler colonial practices. This association occurs via double mediation – first through belief that American Indian Peoples are not contemporary and second through belief they are “a people of the past”.

KEYWORDS:

• Native Americans
• political attitudes
• prejudice
• mass media
• settler colonialism
• education curriculum

Acknowledgements

We thank Lawrence R. Baca, Jennifer J. Folsom, Paula Kilcoyne, and Virginia McLaurin for their assistance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The dataset associated with this journal article is available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Statement of ethics

This research project was approved on July 7, 2021 by the Institutional Review Board at Springfield College (#3262021), and we secured informed consent from all participants.

Notes

1 We use the term “American Indian” because of its association with AI nation sovereignty. To reduce verbiage and ease reading we abbreviate this term as “AI”. When referring to individuals or collections of individuals we use “AI people”, while for multiple AI nations and pan-nation ethnic groups we use “AI Peoples”.

2 Fryberg, Dai, and Eason (2023) refer to this phenomenon as a “relative omission”, rather than as a commission.

3 We use the term “Indigenous” when referring to both American Indians and people indigenous to other settler colonial societies.

4 For an explanation of the trust relationship, see the measure “Support for the AI Trust Relationship” in the Method section.

5 We excluded participants from Alaska and Hawaii because settler colonial history and the present-day situation of Indigenous Peoples in these states differs in some ways from the 48 contiguous states (e.g. regarding treaty rights).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a $2,500 Summer Grant from Springfield College.