The MAGA Teens' Defense for Staring Down a Native American Veteran Doesn't Add Up

The viral video of MAGA hat-wearing teens and Native American marchers is both more and less complicated than it seems.

By now most of the internet has seen the viral video of Native American veteran Nathan Phillips and MAGA hat-wearing high schoolers at the Indigenous Peoples March in D.C. Since then, longer and longer videos have surfaced that show the events leading up to that encounter, and who was in the right seems to vacillate depending on how far back any given video goes.

The student featured most prominently in the video, Nick Sandmann, put out a statement on Sunday giving his version of what happened. The teens were in D.C. with their school, Covington Catholic High in Kentucky, for the annual anti-abortion March for Life, which had wrapped up by the time the events in the videos took place. Near the Lincoln Memorial, they reportedly crossed paths first with a group of Black Hebrew Israelites (which the Southern Poverty Law Center has designated a hate group) who began taunting the students. In response, the boys started doing school chants to drown them out when Phillips and other activists with the Indigenous Peoples March approached. Sandmann writes:

I never interacted with this protestor. I did not speak to him. I did not make any hand gestures or other aggressive moves. To be honest, I was startled and confused as to why he had approached me. We had already been yelled at by another group of protestors, and when the second group approached I was worried that a situation was getting out of control where adults were attempting to provoke teenagers. I believed that by remaining motionless and calm, I was helping to diffuse the situation," he said. "I realized everyone had cameras and that perhaps a group of adults was trying to provoke a group of teenagers into a larger conflict. I said a silent prayer that the situation would not get out of hand.

This mostly tracks with Phillips' account of what happened leading up to the clip that went viral. Indian Country Today compiled several videos that clearly show the Black Hebrew Israelites jeering at the Covington students, and Phillips approaching. But from there, the accounts of what exactly happened split. According to an interview with the Detroit Free Press:

Phillips said some of the members of the Black Hebrew group were also acting up, "saying some harsh things" and that one member spit in the direction of the Catholic students. "So I put myself in between that, between a rock and hard place," he said.

But then, the crowd of mostly male students turned their anger towards Phillips.

"There was that moment when I realized I've put myself between beast and prey," Phillips said. "These young men were beastly and these old black individuals was their prey, and I stood in between them and so they needed their pounds of flesh and they were looking at me for that."

Some people, like Native writer Kelly Hayes, see the defense of the Covington students as a continuation of a race-based double standard that affords white boys bottomless mercy and doubt (versus, for example, the blame put on 11-year-old Tamir Rice when he was shot to death by police).

And on MSNBC, Native American activist Chase Iron Eyes stressed that the situation can't be divorced from the much broader social and political context. “We have a racially charged environment with a president who is giving license to this behavior,” he said. "These kids show up being very loud, very disruptive, and doing the tomahawk chop, it is on video, making the fake war whoop we all know how to make.”

“It doesn’t matter how people spin it,” he added. “Our elder felt threatened there.”