Presidential Candidate Mark Charles to Address Recent Declaration from the White House

Mark Charles thinks it is time for America to have a national dialouge about race, gender and class.

Published November 12, 2019

WASHINGTON — The Committee to Elect Mark Charles for President is pleased to announce that Mark Charles (Navajo) will host a live stream on the MarkCharles2020 YouTube Channel on Tuesday, November 12th at 1pm Eastern Time; 10am Pacific.

In this live stream, Charles will address the two Presidential Proclamations regarding National American History and Founders Month and Native American Heritage Month that President Trump made on October 31, 2019.

The Proclamation for American History and Founders Month states “To continue safeguarding our freedom, we must develop a deeper understanding of our American story. Studying our country’s founding documents and exploring our unique history — both the achievements and challenges — is indispensable to the future success of our great Nation.”

Mark Charles, a dual citizen of the United States and the Navajo Nation who is running as an Independent candidate for the office of President of the United States, would like to use this opportunity to highlight the challenges that our founding documents and history pose. In a videot eleased on May 28 announcing his candidacy Charles references a quote by George Erasmus, a leader from the Dene Nation in Canada who said, “Where common memory is lacking, where people do not share in the same past, there can be no real community. Where community is to be formed, common memory must be created.”

Throughout his campaign, Charles has referenced this quote stating that “It is genius and gets to the heart of our Nation’s problem with race, which is that we do not have a common memory. The United States has a white majority population that remembers a mythological history of discovery, expansion, opportunity and exceptionalism. And we have communities of color that experienced a lived history of stolen lands, broken treaties, slavery, Jim Crow laws, Indian massacres, boarding schools, internment camps, segregation, mass incarceration and families separated at our borders. Our nation does not have a common memory and looking back at our history there is not a single period where relationships and community across racial lines has been healthy.”

On the campaign trail, Mark frequently highlights areas of disagreement that he has with President Trump including the President’s repeated affirmation of the lie of white supremacy along with his explicitly racist and sexist statements, values, policies and behavior. But in this area, the President’s call to “develop a deeper understanding of our American story”, Charles wholeheartedly agrees. In fact, to that end, of creating a Common Memory, Mark recently co-authored a book titled “Unsettling Truths: The Ongoing Dehumanizing Legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery.” A book he hopes President Trump with read with earnest as it highlights the many ways the Founders and the documents they wrote are the root of our nation’s struggles with racism, sexism and white supremacy. This includes the Declaration of Independence, which thirty lines below the statement “All men are created equal’ refers to natives a ‘merciless Indian savages’”. Additionally the Constitution includes in the preamble the inclusive term “We the Peeple”, but just a few lines later, in Article I Section II, women are never mentioned, Natives are specifically excluded and Africans are counted as three-fifths human.

Please join Mark Charles on his live stream November 12 as he responds to these two Presidential proclamations and invites the nation to join his campaign to create a Common Memory and build a nation where “We The People” truly means #AllThePeople.

WHERE: MarkCharles2020 YouTube Page

WHEN: Tuesday, November 12th, 2019

TIME: 1pm Eastern Time // 10am Pacific Time