Sarah Lee Circle Bear, 1990-2015, and her children. Circle Bear died after being placed in a South Dakota county jail. Photo from RFH
Outrage over the killing of Cecil the Lion has writer Terese Marie Mailhot wondering why the media and the public aren't paying as much attention to the deaths of Native people:
Cecil the lion has me rethinking my style choices. I might opt for some hair teasing and furry suits. Maybe we’ve been going about ‘Native Lives Matter,’ all wrong. We’re silly to think the public would care about brown bodies—let’s be cats instead. We are like the majestic lion: forcibly removed from resources, hunted down and subject to conquest. It’s not radical to be angry over the murder of Cecil; it’s simply decent. Even Jimmy Kimmel got teary-eyed over the precious cat, as he went on a four-minute tangent. Keep in mind that he has never once bothered to say, “Black Lives Matter.” Yes, let’s be cats. It’s too political to say, “Native Lives Matter,” but if we were cats, the left and right would be leaping to save us, and it wouldn’t be political; it would be human. I might be ok with being seen as an animal by the media if it meant our women would be looked for, or our men would have justice. Maybe if the Native men shot down by Roy Clyde had been cats, they wouldn’t have been reported as homeless. Nobody’s calling a cat homeless, right? This month we’ve seen a lot of “homeless Native” references, as two men were shot down in their sleep, and a couple set a Native man on fire, shooting him with fireworks, simply because they wanted to. Last summer, three teenage boys beat two Native men to death in a vacant lot in Albuquerque. Yes, had these men been cats, they would have been referred to by name and not described as homeless. Whereas before it seemed like the media could only handle covering one minority at a time, now we must wait in line behind cats?Get the Story:
Terese Marie Mailhot: Cecil the Lion Can Teach Us About #Native Lives Matter (Indian Country Today 8/3)
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