Ann Coulter is facing backlash for a violent remark about Native Americans.
On Sunday, the far-right pundit reposted a video of University of Minnesota professor and Navajo Nation member Melanie Yazzie discussing decolonization and climate change at a 2023 conference.
“We didn’t kill enough Indians,” Coulter wrote in the since-deleted post.
The comment sparked swift condemnation from Indigenous leaders and others.
Chuck Hoskin Jr., principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, called the post “beyond abhorrent” and “dangerous hate speech” in a Facebook statement.
“Coulter’s statement, on its face, is a despicable rhetorical shot trained on the First Peoples of this continent, designed to dehumanize and diminish us and our ancestors and puts us at risk of further injury,” he wrote.
“We’ve faced enough of that since this country’s founding,” Hoskin continued. “This kind of rhetoric has fueled the destruction of tribes, their life ways, languages and cultures, the violation of treaty rights, and the perpetuation of violence and oppression.”
Hoskin added how Coulter’s words did “not take place in a vacuum” but come amid a rise in attacks on marginalized people, “used to score political points, to advance policy agendas, and sometimes to scare people to advance all of that and more.”
“The country frequently seems on the verge of political violence,” he wrote. “Coulter’s post implicitly encourages it.”
Though he acknowledged the temptation to ignore such rhetoric, Hoskin warned against letting hate speech go unchecked.
“We can get used to the frequent attacks and watch silently as this group and that group is dehumanized and diminished,” he said. “Hatred in the public will become white noise, accepted as ‘just the way it is.’ Alternatively, we can speak out against it.”
“What Ann Coulter said is heartless, vicious and should be repudiated by people of good faith regardless of political philosophy or party,” Hoskin continued. “Some things are simply wrong and we cannot validate it through our silence.”
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Asking others to join him in speaking up, he said he remained “optimistic that people of good will across parties, faiths, philosophies, regions, races, political status can work to unify the country” and reject Coulter’s comments.
Vice President of the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes Tasha Mousseau also called out Coulter for invoking a deeply dated colonial mindset.
“In Indian country, either in the Western sense with education or taking our traditions back and learning our languages, we say that we are our ancestors’ wildest dreams,” she told Oklahoma’s KOSU public radio. “I would argue that she’s her ancestors’ wildest dreams. She is what colonizers would like to continue on in this country.”
