James Giago Davies. Photo courtesy Native Sun News Today

James Giago Davies: Racism against our Indigenous relatives

Reservation racism against Hispanics

Disney decided to have a Black Little Mermaid, and this upset some people. Beyond the question of whether dissatisfaction with the change was racist, is the choice itself…why Black?

Black people are 13% of the USA population, whereas Hispanics comprise 18%, but Disney never considered making Little Mermaid Hispanic. Why? Because bigotry against Hispanics hides in plain sight.

Sometimes the connective threads between what we share so overwhelm a balanced perspective, we cannot see as a culture, even Hispanics cannot see, the depth of the bigotry against them, their language, their culture.

Many times you will see a politically correct commercial, with a Black person and an Asian person and no Hispanic. Compared to Hispanics, Blacks dominate the entertainment industry, and yet they have legitimate concerns about exclusion, how much more so, given that, are the Hispanic concerns about exclusion?

Hispanics are a broad group. Some, are Black, but most of them, especially those gathered at our southern border, struggling to escape the hellholes our foreign policy has helped create, are tribal peoples from Central and South America. They are as much our Aboriginal brethren as are the Cheyenne or Arapahoe or Dine. DNA tests confirm that. But we do not see them as Indians because we are conditioned not to. Most of us are ignorant of history, and we do not understand who these people are and how they formed after Spanish colonization.

Even on my own reservation, ignorance about Hispanic culture abounds. Zimiga, Giago, Martin, and Tapio are actually Zuniga, Gallego, Martinez and Tapia. These are Hispanic surnames. They came to the reservation as Indio vaqueros from Pueblos in New Mexico.

NATIVE SUN NEWS TODAY

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James Giago Davies is an enrolled member of the Oglala Lakota tribe. He can be reached at skindiesel@msn.com

Copyright permission Native Sun News Today

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