A couple of weeks ago, on November 24, the United States of America awarded a bushy haired Native man, Billy Frank, Jr., the Presidential Medal of Freedom. That’s a big deal—that’s an honor that very few people of any color achieve. The amount of Natives who have won this honor?

Almost non-existent.

So that’s rare enough. But if a person were to check Billy Frank’s arrest record, you’d probably think that his chance of winning any award from the government was probably the same as Billy the Kid, Al Capone or Wild Bill Hickok. In fact, maybe Billy Frank, Jr. had less of a chance than those guys—they didn’t get arrested nearly as many times as he did.

He was arrested over 50 times. He must have been a bad dude, right?

The truth is that Uncle Billy Frank was arrested over 50 times for you. And for me. He was arrested for Native kids that he would never meet and many who would never know his name. Billy was arrested for telling white people that, no, Native people were not all dead and, yes, those white people will have to honor the agreements that they signed with Native people. If anybody thinks that Native people are marginalized today, 50 years ago white folks treated Natives (and all people of color really) infinitely worse and so people like Billy Frank literally had to stand up and stop white people from taking our food sources from right in from us.

We were starving. And languishing. And nobody knew about it because we were invisible.