Can White Turn Red?

What Color Is an Indian?

Naughty Krishna holding a piece of candy

I

t was like a punch in the gut when I saw an article about the female singer and American-Indian activist Buffy Sainte-Marie.

Now I have never met Buffy Sainte-Marie and I have only heard a few of her songs, so why did I react when I saw that the Order of Canada had canceled her membership in the prestigious organization?

It’s about prejudice. Yes, racial prejudice makes my body tense up. It makes my eyes feel hot, and it gives me an urge to punch somebody. And I have Lord Krishna on my side.

But getting back to Buffy: She  was not canceled for being an Indian. Just the  contrary. The Order claims to have proof that Buffy was not born on a Cree Indian reservation in Canada, as she claims, but that she  was  born to an Italian-American family in Boston. She was canceled not for being Red but for being White.

But who cares where she was born? Why did she receive the Order in the first place? For being born on a reservation? Or for her many contributions in the fields of music and Indian activism? And that hasn’t changed even if she might have been born in the wrong place.

And it’s not the Indians who have rejected her for being White but the White people.

Shame on you, Order of Canada! Look what you’re doing. You have ranked someone’s race at  birth higher than a lifetime of accomplishments. Look again. Don’t you know how much human suffering has come from people doing as you have done?

The enslaved Black man dripping with sweat as he picks cotton  under the burning Louisiana sun; the Jew at Auschwitz taking a last look at the sky  as he is led to the gas chamber;  the Native American wife weeping over the dead body of her husband killed in tribal warfare.

And all because people like you judge others by the race they were born into,  oh Order of Canada. Is this all you know?

But how does Krishna fit into the picture? First, let us leave the American Indian and turn to the other Indian, the kind that lives in India. It’s not a question of race here but of social status. And it’s just as bad.

Much of the modern world scorns India’s caste system, where a person is forced to live their whole life in the social class they were born into. Were you born into the laboring class? Then live and die in the laboring class.

But Krishna had something else in mind, As he says in the Bhagavad-Gita:

According to the three modes of material nature and the work associated with them, the four divisions [castes] of human society are created by Me. (4.13)

In other words, Krishna’s idea is that a person’s position in the social order should be determined by the quality of the person’s work. Krishna says nothing about birth here.

And Krishna showed the example for the world to follow when he bowed to the great sage Narada though Narada was the son of a servant-woman and Krishna is the Supreme Lord.

Krishna again showed the example when he came into this world as Lord Chaitanya and designated Haridasa Thakur as the Teacher  of the  Holy Name though Haridasa had been born in a Muslim family.

So, my dear Order of Canada, you should follow Krishna’s example. Use your prestige to set an example for the world and look at a person’s accomplishments and not at their birth.

If you don’t have to be born Christian to be a Christian, and you don’t have to be born American to be an American, then must you be born an Indian to be an Indian?

The Indian’s don’t seem to think so. Over the years, White people would sometimes move in with the Indians and adopt the Indian way of life.

In the 1970s I had the pleasure of knowing a woman who, like Sainte-Marie, claimed to be Indian but was later accused of being White.  Her name was Sacheen Littlefeather, and we both worked at radio station KFRC in San Francisco. We had a few conversations about the situation of the American Indians, and she told me she was from the Apache, a tribe known for its fierce warriors.

She went to Los Angeles and was succeeding as an actress until the FBI forced the movie studios to blacklist her because of her Indian activism. She created a controversy in 1973 when she stood in for the actor Marlon Brando to refuse the prestigious Academy Award because of the movie industry’s depictions of Native Americans.

After she died in her 70s, her sisters claimed that she had no Indian blood, but still she spent the last years of her life living among the Indians as an Indian.

So if the Indians themselves can look at a person’s heart instead of the person’s birth, why can’t the Order of Canada do the same?

Terrible things are happening in the world today because of racial judgment. But Krishna, the Supreme Lord, has set the example of peace for the world to follow. Shall we follow it?

⁓Umapati Swami, March 24, 2025

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ove it? Hate it? Got a question? Write to me: hoswami@yahoo.com

© Umapati Swami 2024

Srila Prabhupada

His Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada is the teacher who brought Krishna Consciousness from India to the West and then to the rest of the world. He is the founder of the worldwide Hare Krishna Movement as well as the author and compiler of many works of Vedic knowledge. He left this world in 1977.

Umapati Swami

One of the first American devotees of the Hare Krishna Movement, he became Srila Prabhupada’s disciple in 1966. Since then, he has preached Krishna Consciousness in many countries and is the author of “My Days with Prabhupada,” available from Amazon. Now 88 years old, he maintains this blog to share what he has learned.