RFK Jr’s lifelong battle for Indian Country

Fifty-eight years ago, New York Senator Robert Kennedy (RFK) campaigned for president in South Dakota. He visited the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, lamenting that the money spent on the Vietnam War would be better spent alleviating the poverty on the reservation. In the primary he won 99 percent of the Native vote. His next stop was California, where he had a stunning win, ensuring he would be the Democrat nominee. Sirhan Sirhan, a 24-year-old Palestinian, angry at RFK for supporting Israel in the 1967 war, allegedly shot and killed RFK in a kitchen hallway of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. A liberal icon, the 42-year-old Kennedy represented the future of the Democratic Party, and was a champion for Native rights, being on the Senate Subcommittee for Indian Education.

Robert Kennedy Jr (RFK Jr) was 14 years old at the time of his father’s death. In 2018 RFK Jr visited Sirhan Sirhan in prison, and told reporters that he did not believe that Sirhan’s shots had killed his father, but that an Ambassador Hotel security guard, Thane Eugene Cesar, who was standing right behind Kennedy, fired the fatal shots.

Like his father, RFK Jr would be a champion for Native rights, but his path to being the current Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) was a rocky one filled with drug abuse and failure. Traumatized by his father’s death, Kennedy began experimenting with drugs as a teenager and admits to 14 years of heroin use. He was arrested for cannabis possession when he was 16, expelled from two boarding schools, and was considered the ringleader of a group of rich kid hooligans called the “Hyannis Port Terrors.” His cousin, Caroline Kennedy, called him a “predator” who led other family members “down the path of drug addiction.”

On September 6, 1983, 29-year-old RFK Jr was busted for heroin possession in Rapid City. He pleaded guilty and received a sentence of two years of probation and community service.

This was the nadir of RFK Jr’s struggles, and in the next two years he would turn his life around.

The silver lining in his struggles with drugs and the law was RFK Jr experienced life outside the bubble of Kennedy privilege, he developed a perspective hewn from the school of hard knocks.

Once he got his public figure bearings, RFK Jr became a leading world advocate for environmental protection. This brought him into close contact with many indigenous peoples throughout the western hemisphere. He befriended Native journalist icon Tim Giago, and contributed to Giago’s paper, just after its transition from the Lakota Times to Indian Country Today. RFK Jr contributed $150,000 to help Giago make that transition and stayed at Giago’s home for two weeks. Giago treasured a photo he took of RFK Jr sleeping on his recliner, which he proudly displayed in his office for years.

RFK Jr went on the road, traveling all over the western hemisphere, intent on assisting tribes fighting against the encroachment of energy and mining companies on Native land. RFK Jr was one of the founders of the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC), whose mission was both to protect the environment and defend the rights of marginalized and indigenous people.

Down in Chile, the Pehuemches tribe were battling the construction of dams on the Biobio River. With RFK Jr’s help, the Pehuemches were able to reduce the number of proposed dams to one.

The next battle was on a far bigger scale. RFK Jr came all the way north to the land of the Cree Nation in Northern Quebec in 1992. He assisted them in resisting the construction of 600 proposed dams on eleven rivers flowing into James Bay.

The next year, RFK Jr and NRDC hooked up with Cultural Survival, an indigenous rights organization. He called out Texaco for its pollution of the Amazon in Ecuador. He represented CONFENIAE, a united organization of Native peoples, with two goals in mind: to reduce oil development in the Ecuadorian Amazon, and Conoco would extract benefits for local tribes from the energy development that did continue.

Vancouver Island Indian tribes were fighting industrial logging operations by MacMillan Bloedel in British Columbia. RFK Jr worked on their behalf for six years.

Cuba was planning to construct a nuclear power plant, and RFK Jr met with Fidel Castro to persuade him not to build the plant. Castro speculated that the relationship between Cuba and the US would have been better had President Kennedy not been assassinated.

Mitsubishi wanted to build a salt facility in Baha, Mexico, a breeding ground for grey whales. Representing NRDC, Kennedy met with Japanese Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi, opposing Mitsubishi’s project.

In 2016, RFK Jr found himself back down in Chile, where he assisted the Futaleufu Riverkeepers in their fight against a Spanish power company Endesa who owned the right to dam the river. Endesa stepped away and opted not to dam the Futaleufu River.

Once a leading figure on the American left, RFK Jr has seriously alienated the left, and even his own family, by questioning the efficacy of vaccines, especially the mRNA Covid vaccine. For this reason, his attempts to compete in the recent Democrat primary, ran into untenable roadblocks, despite his long standing record of fighting for indigenous rights and environmental protection, both signature causes of the left. He elected to run as an independent, but ended that campaign when the populist upswell headed by Trump offered to make him Secretary of Health and Human Services. For this, he has been deeply vilified by the Democrat elite, and their propaganda campaign has alienated much of the Democrat rank and file against him.

The Trump cabinet appointees are poised to shake up Washington DC, especially with the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), headed up by the world’s richest man, Elon Musk. DOGE gutted USAID, contending it was rife with graft and corruption, but it also went out to trim the fat from all the other government agencies, and one of those agencies was the Indian Health Service, once under the umbrella of the Interior Department, but now assigned to HHS. On the chopping block were 950 jobs, but on February 14, RFK Jr rescinded the layoffs just hours before they took effect.

RFK Jr sent a letter to Indian Country Today, explaining that with the backing of President Trump, improving the Indian Health Service will be a “priority over the next four years.”

“My father often complained that IHS was chronically understaffed and underfunded,” RFK Jr wrote. “President Trump wants me to rectify this sad history.”

(James Giago Davies is an enrolled member of OST. Contact him at skindiesel@msn.com)

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