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I live out west. I work with and know people who work on the Res; from social workers to jailers. They amaze me with the stories of what life is really like out there. But the rape and child molestation (usually by relatives) blow my mind. Raping babies, gang raping young girls and women of all ages, etc etc. And how prevalent it is...and not just a few reservations, but all across the country!
Obviously drugs and alcohol don't help, but was it always like this?
Also, the inbreeding is apparently currently far, far worse than I'd ever imagined---brothers and sisters having families, etc. Was that always that way? I mean, was there really anything in their culture beliefs that said incest was wrong--ever?
edit: by always, I mean pre-reservation and post reservation.
No it was not always like this. Forcibly taking away people's religion, language, family, and culture, taking their babies away, forcing their children into horribly abusive (including sexual abuse) boarding schools, and then grinding them under the boot of poverty on top of everything else led to this.
Tribal cultures before extensive European contact were, in many ways, 100% opposite of what we consider acceptable today. Girls were often pregnant and mothers by 12. Women were traded for horses, stolen by waring tribes, and collected in numbers by men with more power. Read some books on actual accounts of Native American culture concerning sex and women to gain a more clear understanding. Even Africans brought over a few 100 years ago were still living in very primitive cultures, covered in body scarification, teeth filed to points, polygamous and polyandrous tribes where women were often treated like sex slaves, pack mules, monetary pawns, and breeding machines - often before puberty was even reached. In some tribes where fatness was considered beautiful, girls would be force fed by their parents in order to make them obese and command a higher bride-price. Even today girls are sexually mutilated, isolated outside of their village during menstruation, etc.
These groups of people were tossed into European culture to assimilate, and the results can questionable. In the big scheme of things, we are really just a few generations removed from when the majority of this forced assimilation started taking place in the late 1600's.
It's hard to generalize because you are talking about hundreds of different tribes with their own diverse culture. But it's my understanding that men, women, and children all had distinct traditional roles and there was a certain respect over it - men hunt, fished, went to war; women pretty much did everything else. Then again, we don't want to portray them as "the noble savage" either - slavery was a component of many indian tribes - women and children of the enemy would be captured and put to work as slaves and pretty much treated as property.
I think the modern day answer however is that this is just the result of poverty and drug abuse.
Inbreeding was not present to any large degree prior to "the res.". Most mammals have an instinctual reluctance to engage in inbreeding, and humans have an additional cultural reluctance in virtually every known culture. That said when you have an isolated population which already has slim reproductive choices, then you add the extra restrictions in mate selection created by poor economic and educational opportunities, and then you add in the reduced chance of meeting outsiders of a population living behind a legal boundary you can see why such things might happen. Most tribes in the Wesf already had relatively small populations to begin with, and the reservation eliminated the slave raiding and adoption o outsiders that allowed new and diverse genetic material to be introduced into the community.
Now for the first part. Broadly speaking relationships in Indian and white communities 150 years ago would be noticeably different from what we experience now. It would have been unremarkable in either community for a man of 30 or even 40 years of age to be married to a woman in her teens. Similarly, in almost all tribal cultures a constant low level of warfare was a fact of daily life. Part and parcel of this was men attempting to raid neighboring communities for horses and wives. Should it be entirely surprising if echoes of this way of life still occur when those on the reservation have so many barriers to adopting and experiencing mainstream American culture?
Tribal cultures before extensive European contact were, in many ways, 100% opposite of what we consider acceptable today. Girls were often pregnant and mothers by 12. Women were traded for horses, stolen by waring tribes, and collected in numbers by men with more power. Read some books on actual accounts of Native American culture concerning sex and women to gain a more clear understanding. Even Africans brought over a few 100 years ago were still living in very primitive cultures, covered in body scarification, teeth filed to points, polygamous and polyandrous tribes where women were often treated like sex slaves, pack mules, monetary pawns, and breeding machines - often before puberty was even reached. In some tribes where fatness was considered beautiful, girls would be force fed by their parents in order to make them obese and command a higher bride-price. Even today girls are sexually mutilated, isolated outside of their village during menstruation, etc.
These groups of people were tossed into European culture to assimilate, and the results can questionable. In the big scheme of things, we are really just a few generations removed from when the majority of this forced assimilation started taking place in the late 1600's.
You are painting an entire country of people with quite a broad brush. While I do not deny the things you list happened, there were plenty of tribes that were "civilized" and quite integrated into white ways, like the Cherokee - but they were still put off their land.
There were/are also many tribes that are matriarchal and matrilineal. Women were allowed to choose their husbands, leave their husbands and take another if they chose, and children inherited through the mother's line, not the father's.
I'm not sure why you're comparing African natives to Native Americans - to completely different societies on every level - nor why you are calling their customs "primitive" - as though no one pierces, scars, and otherwise decorates their body today?
And finally, they weren't "tossed into European culture to assimilate" - European culture engulfed them, for the most part against their will AND illegally - with the wonderful, Manifest Destiny assumption that everything the settlers/colonists/American government was doing was the right thing to do. And to that I say "Pshaw!"
It's hard to generalize because you are talking about hundreds of different tribes with their own diverse culture. But it's my understanding that men, women, and children all had distinct traditional roles and there was a certain respect over it - men hunt, fished, went to war; women pretty much did everything else. Then again, we don't want to portray them as "the noble savage" either - slavery was a component of many indian tribes - women and children of the enemy would be captured and put to work as slaves and pretty much treated as property.
I think the modern day answer however is that this is just the result of poverty and drug abuse.
I agree with with your first paragraph - there was good and bad among all the peoples, I'm sure.
But as for your last sentence, I cannot agree that the answer is that simple. Just throwing money at people on the rez wouldn't fix anything. Their language, culture, spirituality, and families were stolen. That would break most people, and it would not be easily recoverable.
There are some similarities across the globe when our European but also Asian civilizations encroached on tribal / native cultures. We see similar problems in New Zealand, Australia, Brazil, Siberia, South Africa and South-East Asia (Vietnam/Laos/Cambodia for example). Rampant alcoholism, rape and child abuse are prevalent. Nowhere there is a solution at hand.
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