Simon Moya-Smith, a left-wing Native-American writer, envisions a primordial progressive utopia in North America — before the arrival of the colonists, Indian tribes held hands, sang kumbaya, passed the Green New Deal, doled out abortions and sex-change surgeries like candy, and enjoyed the fruits of fully automated luxury communism …

Native Americans themselves, on the other hand — the ones who exist in the real world, rather than Moya-Smith’s Rousseauian imagination — tend to disagree. In fact, tribal lands are some of the last places in America where same-sex marriage is still illegal: Obergefell, which unilaterally changed the definition of marriage in the rest of the country, doesn’t apply to tribal jurisdictions. And most of those jurisdictions have seen fit to carry on with the same old marriage laws that most Americans lived under prior to the past few decades. “There are more than 550 tribes in the U.S,” Chynna Lockett of South Dakota Public Broadcasting told NPR in 2019. “And while hard data is difficult to find, only a handful have legalized same-sex marriage.”

Take the Navajo Nation.