Column: Take responsibility for colonization of Indian Nations

Tuesday, February 15, 2011  

"For example, take the colonization of what is now the United States by England and France. Prosperous nations – such as that of the Iroquois – were devastated by what started as trade and ended as a genocidal land grab in which the weapons were disease, empty promises, other men's wars and alcohol. Though the people are still very much here, they no longer exist as a truly separate sovereign nation. Instead, they have been subjected to categorization by the United States' government through the years, and generations having their own traditions marginalized by the government, society and academics in the early stages of anthropology. Their Algonquian neighbors fared little better.

Further west, the Oglala Sioux on the Pine Ridge reservation – the eighth largest in the United States – is established in the two poorest counties in the U.S. Though the USDA catalogued over $33 million in receipts for 2002, less than one-third of the tribe is benefitting from any agricultural endeavors. Throughout the past decade, the federal government violated the tribe's sovereignty on the reservation. In one instance, the U.S. destroyed industrial hemp crops intended to help lower the reservation unemployment rate.

These are hardly the only examples of indigenous people that have been hurt in their attempts to assert sovereignty and lift themselves out of their situation of poverty and cultural downward spiral – the recommendation of Australia's Gillard. But what Gillard and other leaders need to recognize is that dislocated people need help to reestablish themselves as ethnically-based communities. In the United States, we treat our criminals better than we do the people from whom we stole this nation. Now, what we have to decide is why this happens, and if we will tolerate it any longer. My personal guess is because politicians and businessmen have a certain amount of pull in the legal system and anticipate incarceration to an extent, and so want to make sure that they are comfortable while behind bars, while the indigenous people really have no effect on the lives of policymakers, unless those people visit reservation casinos. But those policymakers speak for the American people, and if enough of us speak up, our government will have to listen."

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Michelle Anjirbag: We need better answers to native question (The Daily Campus 2/14)