The Problem With Make Indians Great Again

The original "Make America Great Again" slogan carries a specific ideological freight. Its premise is that the country was once great, that something caused it to decline, and that the correct response is to return to an earlier state. The "again" is doing a lot of work. It implies that the past was better, that the present is a deviation, and that restoration is the goal. When this rhetorical structure is applied to Indigenous communities, it produces a set of problems that deserve careful examination.

What the Framing Gets Wrong About Indigenous Goals

The most immediate problem is the nostalgic logic. Indigenous rights advocacy is not, at its core, about returning to a pre-contact past. The political demands being made by tribal nations today are not requests to turn back time. They are claims grounded in present-day legal rights, in the terms of treaties that are still legally binding, in federal trust responsibilities that continue to exist, and in constitutional principles about sovereignty that have been established through more than two centuries of litigation and legislation.

When Native nations argue for water rights, they are not asking to be transported back to 1491. They are asking that the provisions of existing federal water compacts be honoured. When tribal governments seek control over their own education systems, health services, and land management, they are exercising authorities recognised under federal Indian law, not staging a cultural re-enactment. When the Standing Rock Sioux and their allies opposed the Dakota Access Pipeline, the argument was not that pipelines are wrong because pipelines did not exist before Columbus. The argument was that specific treaty rights, federal environmental review processes, and the tribe's legal standing as a sovereign nation had been disregarded.

These are forward-looking, rights-based arguments. They engage with law, with policy, with government institutions. They require exactly the kind of sophisticated political engagement that the "again" framing obscures by casting Indigenous aspirations as a backward-looking desire for a lost golden age.

The Nostalgia Problem in Indigenous Representation

The framing also intersects with a much older pattern in how Indigenous people have been represented in popular culture and political discourse. For well over a century, the dominant representation of Native Americans in the United States has placed them firmly in the past. The imagery has been of warriors, of pre-industrial life, of the frontier era. The implicit message of this representation is that Native Americans are historical figures rather than contemporary citizens, and that their significance is primarily symbolic rather than political.

This representation has real consequences. When public figures and media consumers think of Native Americans primarily as symbols of a vanished world, they are poorly positioned to understand that the Navajo Nation has a larger land area than ten US states, that tribal governments hold federal recognition and exercise governmental powers, that the Indian Child Welfare Act is a piece of active federal legislation with real stakes in current child custody cases, or that hundreds of outstanding treaty claims are being litigated in federal courts right now.

The "Make Indians Great Again" framing, whatever the intentions behind it, feeds this representational problem. It positions Indigenous people as objects of nostalgic sentiment rather than as political actors with specific legal claims. It invites supporters to feel something about the past rather than to engage with the present. That may be emotionally satisfying, but it is not politically useful to the communities it claims to support.

There is also the question of who is defining what "great" means. One of the consistent themes in Indigenous rights advocacy over the past several decades has been the insistence that Indigenous communities speak for themselves about what their priorities are, what their visions for the future look like, and what they need from government and from allies. The "again" framing assumes an answer to those questions before they are asked. It pre-defines the goal as restoration of a past state rather than the achievement of a future one determined by Indigenous people on their own terms.

What Genuine Solidarity Looks Like

People who are genuinely motivated to support Indigenous communities and rights can do so in ways that engage with what those communities are actually asking for. The specific requests are not hard to find. Tribal nations publish their legislative priorities. Indigenous advocacy organisations produce detailed policy platforms. Native scholars and journalists write about the issues that matter most to their communities. The information is available to anyone who looks for it.

What comes up consistently is not a desire to return to the past. What comes up is the fulfilment of treaty obligations that have been violated or ignored. It is the proper funding of the Indian Health Service, which operates at a per-capita expenditure far below what is spent on other federal health programmes. It is the resolution of the land and water rights claims that have been in federal courts for decades. It is the protection of sacred sites from extraction and development. It is the full implementation of the Violence Against Women Act's tribal provisions, which address the epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous women. It is the return of ancestral remains held in museum collections under the terms of legislation passed in 1990 that has still not been fully implemented.

None of these goals require nostalgia. They require political will, legal follow-through, and a willingness by non-Indigenous Americans to understand that the relationship between the federal government and tribal nations is a live legal and political relationship with specific, enforceable terms. Supporting that relationship means engaging with those terms, not with a sentimental vision of what Indigenous life looked like in a distant century.

Language Shapes Politics

The choice of political language is not a trivial matter. Slogans condense complex realities into memorable phrases, and in doing so they inevitably simplify. The question is whether the simplification they produce is accurate enough to be politically useful, or whether it distorts the underlying reality in ways that undermine the cause it claims to serve.

"Make Indians Great Again" distorts. It maps the logic of one political movement, rooted in particular cultural grievances about demographic change and economic displacement, onto Indigenous communities whose circumstances and political goals are fundamentally different. It suggests that what Indigenous people want is what that other movement wants: a return to an earlier time when things were better. But the political condition Indigenous communities are seeking to remedy was created by colonisation, which means the "again" in their case would require reversing the foundational processes of American settlement. That is not what the original slogan was ever about, and the two cannot be neatly combined.

People who want to help should ask the communities they want to help what they actually need. They will get specific, concrete answers that have nothing to do with nostalgia and everything to do with law, funding, sovereignty, and the fulfilment of long-standing obligations. That is less emotionally resonant as a slogan, but it is what the work actually requires.