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James George Abourezk (b. February 24, 1931, Wood, South Dakota – d. February 24, 2023, Sioux Falls, South Dakota) was an American attorney and politician from South Dakota. A member of the Democratic Party, Abourezk served as a United States Senator and as a United States Congressmember for one term each, and was the first Arab American to serve in the United States Senate. He was also the founder of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee.
He was the first Greek Orthodox Christian of Lebanese Antiochite descent to serve in the United States Senate. He was seen as generally critical of United States foreign policy in the Middle-East and North Africa (MENA) area, particularly regarding Palestine and Israel.
Abourezk represented South Dakota in the United States Senate from 1973 until 1979. He was the author of the Indian Child Welfare Act, passed by Congress in 1978 to try to preserve Native American families and tribal culture, by arranging for the placement of Nature American children in homes of their cultures, as well as to reunite them with families. It gives preference to tribal courts with custody of Native American children domiciled on reservations and concurrent but presumptive jurisdiction in cases of children outside the reservation.
James George Abourezk was born in Wood, South Dakota, the son of Lena (née Mickel), a homemaker, and Charles Abourezk, an owner of two general stores. Both of his parents were Lebanese immigrants, and he was one of five children. Growing up on the Rosebud Indian Reservation, Abourezk spoke only Arabic at home and did not learn English until he went to elementary school. At the age of 16, he was expelled from school for playing a prank on a teacher, and left home to live with his brother Tom. He completed high school in 1948.
Between 1948 and 1952, Abourezk served in the United States Navy before and during the Korean War. Following 12 weeks of boot camp, he enrolled in Electricians' Mates School, after which he was sent to support Navy ships stationed in Japan.
Following military service, Abourezk worked as a rancher, blackjack dealer, and as a judo instructor. He earned a degree in civil engineering from the South Dakota School of Mines in Rapid City in 1961, and worked as a civil engineer in California, before returning to South Dakota to work on the Minutemen missile silos. At the age of 32, he decided to pursue law, and earned a Juris Doctor degree from the University of South Dakota School of Law in Vermillion in 1966.
Abourezk began a legal practice in Rapid City, South Dakota, and joined the Democratic Party. He ran in 1968 for Attorney General of South Dakota but was defeated by Gordon Mydland. In 1970, he was elected to the United States House of Representatives and served from 1971 to 1973.
In 1972, Abourezk was elected to the United States Senate, where he served from 1973 to 1979, after which he chose not to seek a second term. He was the first chair of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs. In 1974, TIME magazine named Senator Abourezk as one of the "200 Faces for the Future".
Abourezk's legislative successes in the Senate included the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act, as well as the American Indian Religious Freedom Act. His signature legislation was the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA, 1978), designed to protect Native American children and families from being torn apart. Native American children had been removed by state social agencies from their families and placed in foster care or adoption at a disproportionately high rate, and usually placed with non Native American families. This both deprived the children of their culture and threatened the very survival of the tribes. This legislation was intended to provide a federal standard that emphasized the needs of Native American children to be raised in their own cultures, and gave precedence to tribal courts for decisions about children domiciled on the reservation, as well as concurrent but presumptive jurisdiction with state courts for Native American children off the reservation. He also authored and passed the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act, which provided Indian tribes with greater autonomy. The BIA made grants to the tribes but they could manage contracts and funds to control their own destiny. That legislation also reduced the direct influence of the Bureau of Indian Affairs on the tribes.
Abourezk was an early supporter of a National initiative process. With fellow Senator Mark O. Hatfield (R-OR), he introduced an amendment to support more direct democracy. However, this amendment failed to receive sufficient support.
As a senator, Abourezk criticized the Office of Public Safety (OPS), a United States agency linked to the USAID (United States Agency for International Development) and the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency), which provided training to foreign police forces. Officers they trained were used to suppress civilians in several countries in Central and South America during a period of military governments, dirty wars, and social disruption.
In 1973, Senators Abourezk and George McGovern attempted to end the occupation of Wounded Knee by negotiating with American Indian Movement leaders, who were in a standoff with federal law enforcement during a protest against the federal government’s treatment of Native American tribes.
Abourezk was also instrumental in the creation of both the American Indian Policy Review Commission and the Select Committee on Indian Affairs. Deeply interested in representing the tribes in Congress to work toward better federal relations, he chaired the Policy Review Commission the entire time it existed. He took the gavel as chair of the Indian Affairs Committee from its creation in 1977 to 1979, when he retired.
In 1977, Senators Abourezk and McGovern went to Cuba with a group of basketball players from the University of South Dakota and South Dakota State who played against the Cuban national men's basketball team.
In 1978, Abourezk chose not to run for re-election. He was succeeded in office by Republican Larry Pressler, with whom he had a long-running political feud.
Following his retirement in 1980, Abourezk founded the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, a grassroots civil rights organization.
In 1989, Abourezk published his Advise and Dissent: Memoirs of South Dakota and the U.S. Senate. He is also the co-author, along with Hyman Bookbinder, of Through Different Eyes: Two Leading Americans — a Jew and an Arab — Debate U. S. Policy in the Middle East (1987).
In 2007, Abourezk gave an interview to the Hezbollah funded news channel Al-Manar TV. In this interview Abourezk said that he believed that Zionists used the terrorists that perpetrated the 9/11 terrorist attacks as a way to sow Islamophobia, that Zionists control the United States Congress, and that Hezbollah and Hamas are resistance fighters.
After his retirement from the Senate, Abourezk worked as a lawyer and writer in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. He continued to be active in supporting tribal sovereignty and culture. In July 2015 Abourezk spoke out against a suit filed against the ICWA (Indian Child Welfare Act) by the Goldwater Institute. It was one of three suits seeking to overturn the act. Some states and adoption groups, who make money off adoptions, have opposed any prohibitions on their placements of Native American children. Abourezk considered this his signature legislation and the new rules instrumental in protecting Native American children and preserving tribal families. He noted that the late Senator Barry Goldwater, his friend and colleague, had voted for the legislation in 1977 and had often consulted with him in tribal matters.
In 1952, Abourezk married his first wife, Mary Ann Houlton. They had three children. Abourezk's marriage to Mary Ann Houlton and his subsequent marriage to Margaret Bethea ended in divorce. Abourezk married Sanaa Dieb in 1991. They had one child from this union along with a step-child.
Abourezk lived in South Dakota for most of his life. He died at his home in Sioux Falls on February 24, 2023, his 92nd birthday.
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James Abourezk, the First Arab American Senator, Dies at 92
A Democrat from South Dakota, he found the freedom to act on principle in the House and Senate by choosing not to seek re-election.
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James Abourezk, who was elected by South Dakotans as the first Arab American senator, and who used his prominence to support the causes of Palestinians and Native Americans while also pushing for friendlier relations with Cuba and Iran, died on Friday, his 92nd birthday, at his home in Sioux Falls, S.D.
His daughter Alya James Abourezk confirmed the death.
Mr. Abourezk (pronounced AB-ur-esk) was a double novelty for a senator. He was a left winger from a generally conservative rural state and a politician who gave up the chance for re-election to focus on pursuing the political objectives he believed in, rather than those supported by his party, his constituents or even, in some cases, most Americans.
In 1970, when Mr. Abourezk won a race for South Dakota’s second district seat in the House, the state’s newly elected governor was a fellow Democrat, Richard F. Kneip, and its other senator was the progressive standard-bearer George McGovern. Mr. Abourezk’s victory came as a surprise nevertheless: A Democrat had not occupied that House seat since the era of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s dominance in the 1930s.
He was elected to the Senate in 1972. After he stepped down, Larry Pressler, a Republican, succeeded him and served for nearly 20 years.
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Mr. Abourezk attributed his success to his reputation as “more populist than liberal or leftist, a brand of politician that resonates with people from South Dakota,” he told The Capital Journal, a South Dakota newspaper, in 2013. “One comment I constantly heard from people was that, ‘I don’t agree much with Abourezk, but by God, he’s honest.’”
His biggest achievements as a senator concerned support for Native Americans. He proposed the establishment of the American Indian Policy Review Commission, which studied legislative possibilities to address problems in that community.
The laws that resulted included the 1975 Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act, which granted tribes more autonomy in administering government programs, and the 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act, which established controls on the adoption of Indigenous children by white families.
That measure continues to draw praise, even from tribal representatives and legal advocates who say it did not go far enough.
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On some issues, Mr. Abourezk was content to oppose most other senators — or even the entire rest of the chamber. In 1977, he was a lone dissenter in an 85-to-1 vote on an amendment concerning child pornography. He questioned the legality of a ban on selling or distributing material that might not be considered obscene.
The same year, he organized an almost comically unusual good-will trip to Cuba for a delegation of South Dakota college basketball players to compete against the Cuban national team.
“Sports is noncontroversial, and this should do a lot for normalization of relations,” Mr. Abourezk told The New York Times in Havana. “It’s fitting South Dakota should be involved because we’re famous for pioneers of all kinds.”
Traveling from 25-degree Sioux Falls to 85-degree Havana and being served frozen daiquiris upon arrival, the South Dakotans reacted to the trip with wonderment. “I’ve never even seen the sea before,” Bob Ashley, a 6‐foot‐10 center from the Sioux tribe, told The Times.
Mr. Abourezk brought his dissident sensibility most vocally to issues involving the Middle East, particularly the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In a 1975 article for The Times, he argued, “No settlement can come about and no peace can endure unless the Palestinians have been settled in a homeland of their own.”
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The next year provided another occasion for him to vote against the rest of the Senate. The issue was a measure to cut off foreign aid to nations that harbored international terrorists. Mr. Abourezk said that the amendment was aimed at Arab terrorists but had no provisions for what he termed terrorist acts by the Israeli military.
Some opposed his appearance at a 1977 Democratic dinner in Denver on the grounds that he was too critical of Israel. He replied, “Just as we have seen U.S. Presidents wrap themselves in the American flag in efforts to stifle criticism of their policies, so do we see a foreign country wrapping itself in its state religion, so that criticism of the state or its policies is perceived as a form of racism.”
After leaving the Senate, he became “Iran’s Man in Washington,” as The Times labeled him in 1979, serving as counsel for the Iranian Embassy and seeking to recoup money that the Islamic Republic said had been stolen by the Shah. He also founded the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, which drew attention to prejudicial treatment of Arabs by the government and in everyday life.
James George Abourezk was born on Feb. 24, 1931, in Wood, S.D. He grew up there and in Mission, two tiny towns that were on the Rosebud Indian Reservation of southern South Dakota. His father, Charles, had moved to the United States from Lebanon as a peddler in 1898 and managed to open general stores in Wood and Mission. His mother, Lena (Mickel) Abourezk, a Lebanese Greek Orthodox immigrant like her husband, ran the family store in Wood, while Charles managed the one in Mission.
Mr. Abourezk served for four years in the Navy. He got a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, and in 1966 he earned a law degree from the University of South Dakota School of Law.
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Before entering politics, Mr. Abourezk worked as a farmhand, wholesale grocery salesman, car salesman, bartender and bar owner. He became passionate about politics after a family doctor lent him copies of I.F. Stone’s Weekly, The Nation and The New Republic.
Mr. Abourezk’s marriages to Mary Ann Houlton and Margaret Bethea ended in divorce. He married Sanaa Dieb in 1991. She survives him, along with Alya, their daughter; two sons, Charlie and Paul, and a daughter, Nikki Pipe On Head, from his first marriage; a stepdaughter, Chesley Machado; more than 30 grandchildren; and several great-grandchildren.
Mr. Abourezk’s wife runs Sanaa’s Gourmet Mediterranean, a restaurant in Sioux Falls that The Times credited in 2014 with kicking off “an epicurean trend” in the city. In 2019, when he was 89, The Aberdeen News reported that Mr. Abourezk enjoyed holding court at the restaurant, telling stories of his colorful life and sharing his views on politics.
He suggested to The Capital Journal a way to ensure more independent-minded legislators such as himself: term limits.
“If a member of Congress is not worried about getting re-elected, he or she will more often than not vote in the public interest rather than in his or her own electoral interest, which is now what happens,” he said.
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