How Race, Resentment, and Ideology Shape Attitudes About Native American Inherent Rights and Policy Issues

• Published date: 01 December 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/10659129231180515
• Author: Raymond Foxworth,Carew Boulding
• Date: 01 December 2023

Article

Political Research Quarterly

2023, Vol. 76(4) 1843–1856

© The Author(s) 2023

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DOI: 10.1177/10659129231180515

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How Race, Resentment, and Ideology

Shape Attitudes About Native American

Inherent Rights and Policy Issues

Raymond Foxworth

1

and Carew Boulding

2

Abstract

What shapes attitudes about Native American policy issues and inherent rights? Race and ethnicity are important in

shaping US public opinion, but Native Americans have been almost entirely excluded from this research. We use data

from an original survey and focus groups collected from the Reclaiming Native Truth project to examine the fact ors that

shape attitudes toward Native American inherent rights and broader race conscious policy issues. We f‌ind high levels of

support overall, but several factors inf‌luence lower levels of support. Many people have very low factual knowledge about

Native American issues and rely heavily on partisan shortcuts in forming opinions, especially for policy issues. Overall,

attitudes about inherent rights are less consistent as many people have very little knowledge about them. People of color

tend to be more supportive than white people and white people tend to re ly more on partisan shortcuts. Specif‌ically,

conservative whites are the least supportive across most issues. We also explore the effect of Native American re-

sentment, f‌inding there are people who hold overtly hostile views of Native Americans and are unsupportive of their

rights and policies. Our f‌indings contribute to growing literature on Indigenous resentment, settler colonialism and public

attitudes toward Indigenous peoples.

Keywords

Native American resentment, inherent rights, settler attitudes, Indigenous politics

In July 2021, the Cleveland Major League Baseball team

changed its name from the Indians to the Guardians. This

followed the July 2020 change of the Washington football

team who announced that they would change their name

after decades of using a racial slur for Native Americans as

their teams’mascot. For many Americans, these deci-

sions, and the debates around them were the f‌irst time they

seriously considered the issue of using images of Native

peoples as sports mascots. Overall, many Americans

know very little about issues that are important to Native

Americans (Foxworth and Boulding 2022). While the

mascot change issue has garnered high-prof‌ile national

attention, there are also other issues that are important to

Native nations and peoples, including issues of sover-

eignty, treaty rights, land rights, and more. What shapes

American attitudes on these policy issues and rights?

In this paper, we explore the attitudes of Americans

toward Native American inherent rights and other general

racialized policies that are intended to help Native

Americans. We are interested in understanding how

Americans view issues related to Native peoples, and we

make a distinction between inherent Indigenous rights and

policy issues that have clear parallels with other racial and

ethnic groups. Our goal is to better understand the range of

opinions Americans hold toward Native American issues

and the factors that are associated with greater support.

Moreover, we are interested in understanding the types of

shortcuts that individuals use when evaluating Native

American issues. We draw on focus groups and a na-

tionally representative survey conducted by the Re-

claiming Native Truth project in 2017 to map support for a

range of different policy issues important to Native

Americans today.

Overall, we f‌ind high levels of support for most Native

American rights and policies. People of color, however,

1

First Nations Development Institute, Longmont, CO, USA

2

University of Colorado at Boulder, CO, USA

Corresponding Author:

Raymond Foxworth, First Nations Development Institute, 2432 Main

Street, 2nd Floor, Longmont, CO 80501, USA.

Email: rfoxworth@f‌irstnations.org