Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
This goes both ways; Native American people everywhere have a looooong history of being abused, mistreated and corrupted by white settlers, their descendants and the American (and Canadian) governments. However Native American people today have options for bettering themselves and their lives. These people can go to college for free, educate themselves and work together to improve their communities) but not everybody does and people continue to use this as a reason for continuing to treat them unfairly and as insignificant. It's such a shame really.
So in the meanwhile they have no rights and big government state agencies don't have to comply with the law. Let's take away all their kids while we are at it. Sounds pretty fascist and racist to me.
This goes both ways; Native American people everywhere have a looooong history of being abused, mistreated and corrupted by white settlers, their descendants and the American (and Canadian) governments. However Native American people today have options for bettering themselves and their lives. These people can go to college for free, educate themselves and work together to improve their communities) but not everybody does and people continue to use this as a reason for continuing to treat them unfairly and as insignificant. It's such a shame really.
Appreciate the support.
Your bolded statement, though, is not necessarily accurate. This is an oft repeated myth that has unfortunately become fact in many people's minds. Indian people, as a whole group, do not get free college tuition just because we are Indians.
There are various programs, grants and scholarships which are specific to American Indians and most of those are needs based. Generally, one must show a real financial hardship in order to qualify. Of course, scholastic performance in high school is also a factor. Additionally, applicants must be an enrolled member of a federally recognized nation. Just having "indian blood" does not cut it (nor should it). Tuition and grant programs for American Indians also vary depending on which state one lives in and which Indian Nation one is enrolled in. In other words, we have to qualify for scholarships and grants just like everyone else does.
Just needed to clear that myth up. Next time some of you hear it, please correct people. Thanks.
I'm sure there are mistakes by social services; it happens everywhere. I know of a case going on right now where a child may be taken from an adoptive family because of ICWA and in that case, it would be a tragedy.
Antarez, you make it all sound so easy. I have no idea where you are from or if you've ever had any kind of interaction with real Indian people, but there are things you may not be aware of. Myself, I am non-rez, as are all Indians from Oklahoma Nations, but the reservations are a completely different world than you or even I are from.
Have you ever been to places like Pine Ridge Reservation? That is a third world nation right within our borders.
For instance: there is isn’t any train, bus, theater, clothing store, drug store, barber shop, restaurant, place to get a car fixed or home delivery of mail. A car is the only way to get around, yet a fifth of all Shannon County households don’t have one. The few shops are fortresses against burglary, with boards or heavy metal mesh covering their windows. The unemployment rate is 35% to 45% and the median income is estimated to be $6,100.
On the Pine Ridge Reservation, homelessness is at 30% and unemployment at 80%. 60% of its residents live in substandard housing, and the reservation, which is half the size of the state of Connecticut, doesn’t have a single bank. “The housing shortage on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation is so severe that only 16 people living in a four-bedroom house is considered lucky. Next door there are 23 people in a three-bedroom house†(Rapid City Journal). In the 1876 Treaty following the war between the United States and the Lakota, the United States government promised “a comfortable houseâ€. Despite these promises, hundreds of people on the Pine Ridge Reservation are homeless and thousands live in a crowded or substandard housing. The American Indian Relief Council estimates that 44% of Lakota households lack complete kitchens and 55% do not have a telephone.
Lakota Indians in South Dakota have the poorest health of any minority group in the United States. The Indian Health Service says that for every 1,000 children born on the reservation in the late 1980s, twenty-nine died in infancy, almost three times the national average (isn't socialized medicine doing a great job for Indian people?). Death from heart disease, pneumonia, influenza, and suicide was twice the national rate; from alcoholism, ten times; from homicide, more than three times. Diabetes rates are six times that of the general white population. Many factors contribute to the Lakota’s poor health; a distrust of standard medical practices, inadequate funding for Indian medical areas, few trained physicians on the reservations and limited access due to remote living conditions, poor-eating habits and a high-fat diet, and a high rate of alcohol use (itvs.org). The average life expectancy for the Lakota is forty-eight years.
Only 23% of Lakota children graduate from high school, and among that group, only 17% go on to college. Homelessness, poverty, and learning disabilities contribute to the dropout rate, as does the lack of reading and writing experience. Lack of transportation keeps truancy rates high, and lack of electricity in many homes prohibits students from doing schoolwork after dark. Most reservation classrooms are in a deplorable state: many without heat in the winter or air-conditioning in the summer, when outside temperatures can exceed 100 degrees.
Many families have moved off the reservation in the hopes of finding jobs and creating a better future for their children. In Rapid City, a nearby large city where thousands of Indian families have settled, Native people face prejudice and hardship due to cultural differences. I myself got a dose of it when I went to South Dakota, where the population can't tell the difference between a Comanche, a Lakota, a Navajo or a Choctaw. Hell, many of them mistake Mexicans for Indians.
This is just Pine Ridge . It doesn't include all the other reservations out there, nor does it count "urban Indians" or Oklahoma Indians, such as myself, who haven't a reservation (our rez was taken from us in 1903). Our tribe has our poor too like any other population, but reservations have a unique set of circumstances that do not affect the general American population.
It's all so easy to say "stop drinking" or "lose weight," but when these things become endemic to a population due to their circumstance, what exactly are they to do? How are they to get good food when the can't afford it, there is nowhere nearby to get it and the government provided commodities are the very crap that casues the obesity problem in the first place? Hell, the can't even grow or raise their own good foods because not only are many rez lands non-arable, but as on Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota the best farming/ranching lands on the rez were leased to white farmers by the Bureau of Indian Affairs!!!! Again, what are they to do?
As to the adoption issue, this has been a sore point for Indian people for a long time. And why is that? It's because tribal identity and culture are important to us. It, in many ways, is all we have left. When these children are adopted or fostered out to non-Indian people, that native identity is lost. Until the passage of the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 (ICWA), NDN children were being adopted out to non-NDNs at a rather alarming rate. In the 1950s and 1960s, the Indian Adoption Project placed hundreds of Native American children with white parents. This was devastating to the nations and furthered Washington's aims to "terminate" the Nations. The effects of this are still being felt by many tribes today. The ICWA reversed that. These adopted children had no chance to learn what it meant to be a member of their nation. Many of these people do look to remake that connection and they should be encouraged to do so. Indian children should be placed in good native homes so that sense of culture and identity are not lost.
Well put. It begs the question if this is the price being paid to retain sovereignty. Reservations I am familiar with look upon state and federal government negatively with constant battles to maintain their own laws and government. This isolates the community, the shield that keeps out intrusion also locks in their problems. The Native American culure of today has evolved in to one of poverty and despair. Is the price being paid to retain culure and identity of yesterday worth it?
Clearly the native people of this country got a raw deal. They are still paying for it today. Unfortunately I don't see it getting better without changing the culture that values isolation over inclusion.
They are still paying for it today? Really? Present day Native Americans recieve free land, free housing, free medical care, free food, free utilities and free education. My children's great grandchildren will be paying for it in the future. There is no evolution of poverty and dispair, only a choice to live this way.
Well put. It begs the question if this is the price being paid to retain sovereignty. Reservations I am familiar with look upon state and federal government negatively with constant battles to maintain their own laws and government. This isolates the community, the shield that keeps out intrusion also locks in their problems. The Native American culure of today has evolved in to one of poverty and despair. Is the price being paid to retain culure and identity of yesterday worth it?
Clearly the native people of this country got a raw deal. They are still paying for it today. Unfortunately I don't see it getting better without changing the culture that values isolation over inclusion.
You know, its one of those things we debate among ourselves quite a bit. Being from an Oklahoma Nation, I sometimes think about the fact that my people were put on a reservation in Oklahoma and that reservation was then dissolved and opened for white settlement. A little history is important to understand what I am saying.
Our last war with the United Stated occured in 1875. This was called the Red River War. After that, our leaders surrendered and the people were placed on the Comanche reservation. By 1892, the Jerome Agreement began the reduction of the Comanche reservation and by 1906 it was gone. Eventually all former reservations in "Indian Territory" were opened up to white settlement and thus we now have Oklahoma and no reservations. It seems the United States found that land wasn't so useless after all.
I think about how we were put on a reservation, then they took the reservation away from us. I find that this was wrong. At the same time, I sometimes think it was a good thing in the long run. I say that because it forced the Oklahoma Nations to integrate with the dominate culture more than our rez cousins. We had to live among whites and learn how to exist in that world.
Our last great paraibo (leader), Quanah Parker, knew once he surrendered at Ft. Sill in 1875, that the old ways were gone forever. He knew that we Comanche had to change or disappear forever. He taught the people the necessity of living and adapting to the white world, yet retaining our Comancheness.
To show this new road, one of his first acts was to set a business where he charged tolls to the Texas cattlemen to drive their cattle through the Comanche rez. This money he shared with the people. He learned how to invest and became the wealthiest American Indian of his day. He shared his knowledge of these things with the Comanche people and stressed education. The legacy of this is that today the people of the Comanche Nation are, per capita, the most educated of Indian Nations.
Yet, he also ensured that he retained the Comanche culture. He refused to cut his hair, refused to adopt monogamy (though of course he was like the last polygamous Comanche!), rejected Christianity in favor of tradition and founded the Native American Church and spoke Comanche though he could also speak English. The legacy of that is I refuse to cut my hair; I can speak Comanche; I reject Christianity and follow our traditional beliefs; I know my dances/songs/stories; i was taught to maintain the traditional Comanche values of community, family, cherishment of children and valuing elders, generosity, and knowing that the needs of the whole are more important that those of the individual all the while functioning in the dominant culture. Most Comanche people are this way, as are our Kiowa brothers and people from other Oklahoma Nations in general. Had we not been forced to do so with the loss of the Comanche reservation and the foresight of Quanah Parker, I often wonder where we'd be. Like any population, we have our challenges and struggles, but they are not of the same proportions as our rez cousins.
At the same time, I do envy the greater sense of community you find on many reservations, regret the loss of landbase and just wonder a little if we somehow lost a little something of ourselves because we have adapted so much to the dominant American culture. On the same note, I don't know if this adaptation would happen so fast if reservation lands were suddenly opened up and dissolved. I don't think it would go so well without intensive education and training of the peoples. When it was done to us, it was some 30 years before my mother was born. It was a different world back then. It would also require the consent of reservation people. It would be a hard transition for many of them and if not done carefully, could make things worse.
As I said, we debate this whole thing among ourselves quite a bit.
Last edited by Fullback32; 10-28-2011 at 04:12 PM..
They are still paying for it today? Really? Present day Native Americans recieve free land, free housing, free medical care, free food, free utilities and free education. My children's great grandchildren will be paying for it in the future. There is no evolution of poverty and dispair, only a choice to live this way.
Bull****, bull****, bull**** and more bull****. You know a handful of Indians and some anecdotes from your experiences with, what, one tribe and then proceed to say "Native Americans" this, that and the other. You do not know what you are talking about all this "free stuff" because I sure as hell never saw any of it nor do most Indians I know. Every nation is different in their agreements. If you want to say the Blackfeet of Browning do or get x, y and z, then fine. But avoid your 12" brush strokes. I tire of your generalization of Indian people based on your obviously very limited interaction with us.
Let's see: free land (given what the whites didn't want), free housing (part of treaty agreements if that is the case - take it up with your government), free medical care (yeah, such a boon and why Indian people have the poorest health statistics in the United States), free utilities (simply not true across the board - there may be exceptions), free education (what the hell is public school? I already addressed the free college myth BTW).
As to what your chldren and great grand children will be paying for, well so will mine. We do pay taxes too, ya know. The whole "Indians don't pay taxes" nonsense is yet another myth that needs to be put in it's grave BTW. I, in all likelihood, paid more in taxes than you did this last year. Besides, the part of the federal budget that goes to the BIA and its programs is but a thimble full of water in a vast ocean of federal spending. Just this year, the Obama administration cut the BIA budget to $2.5 billion. That's $118.9 million, or 4.5 percent, below current levels and less than the cost of one B-2 bomber. Additional cuts are coming in construction ($120 million reduction), road maintenance ($26 million reduction) and post secondary programs ($66.4 million reduction) and in community and economic development ($10 million reduction). $2.5 billion compared to, what is it now...$12 trillion?
Again, you do not know what you are talking about and should probably just stop before you make yourself look more foolish than you already do.
Last edited by Fullback32; 10-28-2011 at 04:01 PM..
Read through this entire thread and it seems like virtually no one got the essential point of the OP.
Sorry TigerLily, I don't mean to detract from the OP. There have been some statements, though, from certain individuals that I absolutely will not let pass without rebuttal.
Obviously, what is happening in South Dakota concerns me very much and I do get it. This has been a problem for a very long itme. I'm glad that it's finally getting some light.
Your bolded statement, though, is not necessarily accurate. This is an oft repeated myth that has unfortunately become fact in many people's minds. Indian people, as a whole group, do not get free college tuition just because we are Indians.
There are various programs, grants and scholarships which are specific to American Indians and most of those are needs based. Generally, one must show a real financial hardship in order to qualify. Of course, scholastic performance in high school is also a factor. Additionally, applicants must be an enrolled member of a federally recognized nation. Just having "indian blood" does not cut it (nor should it). Tuition and grant programs for American Indians also vary depending on which state one lives in and which Indian Nation one is enrolled in. In other words, we have to qualify for scholarships and grants just like everyone else does.
Just needed to clear that myth up. Next time some of you hear it, please correct people. Thanks.
It was my understanding that registered members of federally-recognized tribes received free education but I stand corrected.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
