The Other America - The first Americans

by Don Wheeler

In our neck of the woods, descendants of native peoples are nearly invisible to most of us. I suspect most folks have some awareness of the poverty on Indian Reservations. Some may think gaming establishments have alleviated much of that. Some may be aware of high rates of substance abuse. In reality, things are much worse than this.

I lived in Minnesota for around seven years, and a significant portion of the northern part of the state is set aside for Reservations (Chippewa mostly, I believe).

I found Minnesotans to be a generous people, mostly, but many exhibited notable bigotry towards their Indian neighbors. In fact, I observed less hostility towards African Americans than Native Americans. 'Course, there were far fewer African Americans.

Having spent some time on Minnesota reservations, I recall my impression was "What a beautiful place to be hungry". But at least in Minnesota, there are abundant fish and game to subsist on. Further west, this is often not the case.

When I lived in the Twin Cities area (Garrison Keillor's home town of Anoka, actually), I was doing some old debt collection work - which took me to an apartment complex which I think was called Ogema Place. It was scary. The elevators didn't work, quarry tile floors were busted up, walls and doors scarred and covered with graffiti. No great surprise, the target apartment showed no sign of occupancy.

I came to realize then, or shortly later, that Ogema Place was where poor Indians were concentrated in the Twin Cities.

Later on, in my early days of sled dog racing, we stayed with a family on the Grand Portage Indian Reservation. Very nice folks. He ran a fur trapping line, while she kept their house and looked after their kids. Their lives didn't seem too bad, but they sure didn't have much.

Later still, when I moved up to the Walker area I came to know some folks from the Leech Lake Indian Reservation. Most of the folks at these reservations lived in fairly new, quite modest homes. But as is often the case - when the occupants have few prospects, the properties often suffer from neglect and even abuse.

I remember one Leech Lake couple in particular. She was a warm, attractive, generous soul and he was mean to her and drank hard. I wanted to be the knight in shining armor, but thought better of it. And as sad as it made me, I know it was the right decision.

These people all lived in beautiful places, but there was pretty much no work. In the Leech Lake area there were three sawmills - making oriented strand board (OSB) and pressure treated wood, mostly. The waiting lists for those jobs were well over a year out. Otherwise, there were menial, seasonal jobs and a very few year-round small business employment opportunities. Leaving the reservation seemed to offer little advantage and would put one in a completely foreign environment.

These memories came back to me when I read a recent OpEd in The New York Times by N. Bruce Duthu: Broken Justice in Indian Country. Here's how the piece begins:

ONE in three American Indian women will be raped in their lifetimes, statistics gathered by the United States Department of Justice show. But the odds of the crimes against them ever being prosecuted are low, largely because of the complex jurisdictional rules that operate on Indian lands. Approximately 275 Indian tribes have their own court systems, but federal law forbids them to prosecute non-Indians. Cases involving non-Indian offenders must be referred to federal or state prosecutors, who often lack the time and resources to pursue them.

The situation is unfair to Indian victims of all crimes — burglary, arson, assault, etc. But the problem is greatest in the realm of sexual violence because rapes and other sexual assaults on American Indian women are overwhelmingly interracial. More than 80 percent of Indian victims identify their attacker as non-Indian. (Sexual violence against white and African-American women, in contrast, is primarily intraracial.) And American Indian women who live on tribal lands are more than twice as likely to be raped or sexually assaulted as other women in the United States, Justice Department statistics show.

I strongly recommend reading the entire commentary. It shows the obvious problem and the complications of an apartheid - like jurisdictional setup.

While I was nosing around, I found an earlier New York Times article about a problem I also had at least a limited awareness of. From EVELYN NIEVES in June 2007:

The young man, 19 years old, played varsity football and basketball at Todd County High School. He was admired across the reservation, in that way small towns follow and celebrate their teenage athletes. The girl, weeks shy of her 14th birthday, made straight A’s at Todd County Middle School,
played volleyball and basketball and led a traditional Lakota drum corps.

They hanged themselves. This happened at the end of a particularly brutal two and a half months, from Jan. 1 to March 13, when tribal authorities were called to three suicides and scores of attempts. The next day, with the reservation (population 13,000) reeling, tribal officials declared a state of
emergency.

Since then, a woman in her early 20s killed herself with pills, and scores more young people have tried to kill themselves — a total of 144 so far this year, at doctors’ best count; the computer used for recordkeeping was down for six weeks. In May, seven youths who tried hanging, poisoning or slashing themselves to death were admitted to the reservation hospital in one 24-hour period.

What is happening at Rosebud is all too common throughout Indian Country. American Indian and Alaska Native youth 15 to 24 years old are committing suicide at a rate more than three times the national average for their age group of 13 per 100,000 people, according to the surgeon general. Often, one suicide leads to another. For these youths, suicide has become the second-leading cause of death(after accidents). In the Great Plains, the suicide rate among Indian youth is the worst: 10 times the national average.

(link)

For those of us who believe in One America, this is not acceptable. It doesn't have to be this way.