Impoverished Indian Reservations: Indians can't get it together

[K-D-K-D-K]

Looking at the stats on some Indian Reservations are alarming. Whats wrong with this picture and why cant Indians break the Poverty barrier. I have Oil rig hands that work for me on the low end of the Totem Pole that makes more than these guys. What are these people doing for a living. In Louisiana we have casinos that are operated by Indians that they all make good money. Is it education that is the problem or is it something else like laziness or substance abuse which I have heard runs rampant in reservations like smoking peace pipes filled with marijuana. I have traveled through several reservations in Oklahoma and I witnessed the same third world atmosphere including the people. They wanted their land and to have their independence and wealth and prosperity seems to elude them. Its seems a over all change needs to be made or the reservations need to be seized and the Indians need to be dispersed by the Feds and sent into society. That will assure them to a better life where they can make a good living and pull out of this mess they are in. If anything the Spirits in the sky have surely let them down. Look at this article and make a decision.


http://danawilliams2.tripod.com/reservations.html

[Buck Laser]

I'm just wondering if there's anyone KD doesn't dislike? I'm not keeping a serious count, but he seems to have attacked just about everyone except protestant white males during his brief tenure here.

[ECW]

Invade a land, decimate the population, strip the culture, confiscate the value of the land and keep it for yourself, introduce negative influences to replace the culture that was stripped, then sit back and wonder why the people don't prosper. Yep. KDKDK sure is clueless about which spirits let down who, as if he actually believed that for a second. More racist rantings from Louisiana.

[apdst]

Invade a land, decimate the population, strip the culture, confiscate the value of the land and keep it for yourself, introduce negative influences to replace the culture that was stripped, then sit back and wonder why the people don't prosper

That was 150 years ago. It's time to move on.

I wish I were more than 1/4 Tunica, so I could collect my royalty check every month.

[Shintao]

Invade a land, decimate the population, strip the culture, confiscate the value of the land and keep it for yourself, introduce negative influences to replace the culture that was stripped, then sit back and wonder why the people don't prosper

That was 150 years ago. It's time to move on.


No, that is today, and when the Indian has attempted to anex himself from America the government seeks to deny them that right. When Indians have wanted casinos, government has fought them. Government has fought the Indian harder than the veteran in America.

The best thing American government can do for the Indian is to leave them the hell alone.

[PatrickHenry]

Crushing a culture results in despair and hopelessness.

The people seek oblivion in drink, drugs and violent misbehavior.

It's not surprising that Native Americans have an element of dysfunction in their modern life.

How can the larger society help them find their way towards greater cultural and individual mental health?

[moses2792796]

I went to some native Indian areas during my visit to the US and they seemed quite pleasant actually. Nothing like the crime ridden aboriginal areas we have in Australia. So what if they aren't super wealthy, they're living respectably and not causing great destruction to the environment.

[PatrickHenry]

I went to some native Indian areas during my visit to the US and they seemed quite pleasant actually. Nothing like the crime ridden aboriginal areas we have in Australia. So what if they aren't super wealthy, they're living respectably and not causing great destruction to the environment.
Pfff! You went to some casinos! That ain't the rez...

[moses2792796]

No casinos actually, just passed through a few settlements and picked up some of their hand-made trinkets.

[Scorpion]

No casinos actually, just passed through a few settlements and picked up some of their hand-made trinkets.


Handmade in China.

[underdawg]

Perhaps if we gave them back the more agriculturally productive land that they once had might be a start. If there is one important lesson that I have learned as living as a homeless person when I was younger, is that you need hope, a sense of self worth, a certain amount of money to start with, you need to know certain types of people, and you have to overcome the bias of others, especially if you were not born white. That is a hard thing to do if your parents have never known wealth and a hope for the future.

White people did a good number on the destruction of the many different native American peoples here. We wiped out launguage, culture, religion, and their knowledge of their past. We gave them small pox, alcohol, drugs, a new disfunctional religion, and moved them to the most agriculturally poor land in the country and we wonder why they are not doing better.

Yes it might have been 150 years ago, but this country still carries on its old traditions of sexism, racism, homophobia. In fact Christians still claim to be persecuted and that hasn't happened since Roman times.

[NDNdancer]

The stats are true, the reasons are complex, but it's true that we have third world stats on the rez in almost every indicator you want to choose. For instance, the life expectancy for an Indian male is 44.

Does that surprise you? It should. It should also bring an inordinant amount of shame to the US. It doesn't have to be that way. All the US has to do is to live up to any one of the over 600 treaties they've signed and broken with us. Hell, just the interest alone on what they owe would bring us out of poverty.

Let me educate you. After "giving" us our lands in "perpetuity" for us to live there "as long as the grass shall grow", the US systematically proceeded to steal what was left. Depending on where you live the illegal land grabs were enormous and found to be illegal in todays courts. They labeled them "land sales" and then neglected to pay for those sales. We're still waiting. Or, we had to pay for our shackles and chains and blankets and food when we were forcibly removed from those lands we "sold" to the US.

Anyone wants any of the legal cases or citations, just pm me. I have them all.

One of the biggest land thefts occurred during enactment of the Dawes Act of 1887, the allotment act. It was devised to divest us of the last remnants of our lands. Before the allottment period, our lands were held in common trust and the Tribe itself "owned" the land. Allottment divied up the land, gave every adult Indian a portion and sold off the rest to white settlers. Even the allotted land wasn't ours, it was held in trust by the government for 25 years. Then, Indian landholders could become citizens of the US if they put it into "fee status", which meant it could be taxed. We lost a lot more land that way because people didn't understand taxation and the land was sold to pay taxes. Lots of people in those states got very rich off of Indian land during those days.

The first governor of your state KKK guy became a millionaire by going around, finding all the Indian "orphans" and taking them away from their aunts, uncles, grandparents and putting them into orphanages, and made himself, his wife, his brother, etc their "guardians" and stealing the oil rights to their land. A lot of the first politicians, famous men, got their starts stealing from the Indians. Funny thing, they only took those kids who had oil rights.

From when the Allottment Act was passed until it was repealed in 1934, we lost about 2/3 of our land, 90,000,000 acres of land was stolen and about 90,000 Indians were made landless.

Every policy of the US government in regards to Indians has been enacted for these reasons:
1. Steal the land
2. Steal the land
3. Steal the land
AND
4. Steal the resources on those lands

Outright extermination didn't get rid of us so they tried using small pox infected blankets. Proud moment for General Jeffry Amherst, brilliant idea. The first biowarfare on this continent. BTW he's the guy Amherst is named after. I have a site you can view his letters outlining the plan to exterminate the "vermin".

My people were never defeated by the US nor the RCMP, but small pox decimated our bands. It's estimated that in a time frame of about 15 years, we lost 85% of our people.

So, they "defeat" us, put us on land they don't want, reserving the best land for themselves of course, until they found gold in the Black Hills, then they stole that. Or when they found gold on the Ft. Berthold Rez, and stole that land, or when they found uranium on the big rez and stole that. Anyway, you get the drift.

Now, we're fighting over water. Don't get me wrong, we're still fighting over resources, timber, gold uranium, oil, natural gas, coal, but water has become the huge battle. Because you see, in almost every case, those treaties gave us the rights to the "headwaters" and "waterways" of almost every single river system on this continent. Gee, they forgot to put that in the treaties and forgot about in in their hunt for land, gold and oil. So, now we battle again.

So, here we are stuck on land they don't want and they try to make farmers of us. High Plains people were not farmers, but nevermind that if we want to be white and "saved" like our Christian masters, then we'll learn. Nevermind that the land is plains land and never meant to be plowed or that it's in some of the most inhospitable places on earth in terms of weather and watershed. It's those damned Indians, they're lazy, they won't farm the land. We give them plows, mules and seed and they can't make anything grow!

So, some of us, they give us cows, thinking we can be ranchers. After all, we followed the great herds of bison, we should know something about livestock right? During this wonderful time, it was determined by the US gov't that it took about 150 head of cows per family to make a sustainable living. But, despite their own research, they gave us 30 head of cows. So, yeah, we ate them because we couldn't make a go of being ranchers.

In the meantime, any of us lucky to have land left, and land with resources....... well, we were dumb Indians and it was held in trust for us. The US government leased our land, sold our water, our timber, our mineral rights and lots more white people got rich. We didn't.

My aunt filed a lawsuit against the US on behalf of those Indian trustees and the feds themselves found out that they probably owed us dumb Indians tens of billions of dollars in accrued monies that were paid to the US treasury, but never disbersed to those dumb Indians. She gets death threats daily. Dumb Indian.

So, lets talk about food shall we? Our weapons were taken away from us so we couldn't hunt. We couldn't leave the reservation. We were dependent on the government for "rations". Of course, not many honest, good people wanted to come to the ends of the earth and ration out paltry amounts of food to us, so we got some really doozies for Indian Agents. The food was rotten, maggot infested, unedible or never arrived because they were selling it before it even got to us.

Their friends, the whiskey traders (if that stuff could be called alchohol) were allowed to freely trade with the Indians during these times. They were actually encouraged and paid by the US gov't to go to the reserves. The thinking at that time was "We can't kill them, they won't die of starvation, get em drunk and let them kill themselves." Another one of those lovely "Manifest Destiny" things that Americans don't get to read about in your history books in your education institutes. During the "whiskey years" we lost more lands because they targeted those Indians who refused to sign away their lands.

So, they couldn't kill us with guns, booze, germ warfare or starve us out. What the hell to do about the "Indian Problem". Let's make them white men!

Thus is ushered in the "boarding school days". Children from the age of 3 were taken from their families and sent to boarding schools far away from their families. Over 500 schools were opened up and run like military schools, many by churches. Children were beaten for speaking their language, they were told their cultures were savage, heathen and evil and good Indians were those who learned the white man's ways. They were taught, reading, writing, and manual labor. Girls were taught to be maids and boys were taught to be laborers. They were also subjected to torture and sexual abuse and only when they were "educated" were they sent home. They were also taught to "snitch" on eachother and thus arose the boarding school bullies. When they got home, they didn't fit in and were given the only government jobs and became the new oppressors. They learned how to oppress and abuse very well in those schools. Over 100,000 of them were sent home and unleased on us.

The Japanese internment camps are based on the boarding schools and Hitler lauded the Reservation system and the US for it's wisdom and used it subsequently in Germany.

I think that takes us up through about 1935 or so.

We went through a period where "termination" and "relocation" was the policies used to "assimilate" us. Termination started in about 1950 and many reservations and 109 Tribes were terminated and lost about 1 1/2 million acres of land, rendering about 15,000 Indians not only homeless, but legally white. It was a disastrous policy and many of those Tribes who were terminated fought to get back their lands and status with some success. BTW, President Nixon undid a lot of the damage that termination had wrought.

Relocation was going on about this same time. Again, assimilation was the goal. They rounded up young men and women and their families with promises of a good life and jobs in the cities. Relocation offices were set up in Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Jose, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Cleveland and Dallas. About 750,000 Indians left the reserves and were promised, a house, a job, money to get on and training. Not many of those promises were met and there were now a bunch of Indian ghettos established in those cities. It failed miserably.

Let's talk about education. On most reservations, in most Indian schools, the teachers are white. The administrators are white, even the janitors are white. You might find an Indian counselor or two, but even they are rare. In many cases, these white people are just starting out in their careers and can't find any other work. Once they have enough "time" in, they leave as fast as they can gas up their cars. So, we have teachers who don't want to be there, who don't like our children and who leave as soon as they're able. All of the educational studies show that the key to success of any student, is the teacher. We have largely lousy teachers. I wanted to go to college and went to the counselor. He told me I could find a husband right there on the reserve, I didn't need to go to college. I went in spite of him and now have two Ph.Ds, one in microbiology, the other in biochemistry. I skipped the Masters.

How about health care. In the US the gov't allocates about 7000/per capita head each year for medicaid/medicare. The Indian Health Service gets about 3700 per capita head for each Indian. Third world health statistics, well duh! I could go on and on about health care and how totally screwed up the system is, but I think you get the drift.

So, we're still here and we're still alive. I think we're a phenomenal success story!!!

[AnnEsthesia]

*hugs to Kyi* That is about what I have read, plus some I have never heard before. Very good post. Thank you for that!

[ECW]

I wonder where kdkdk is now that his topic has been slammed into the next solar system by Kyi Yo. Got any more "words of wisdom" for us from down there in Louisiana, sparky?

[moses2792796]

No casinos actually, just passed through a few settlements and picked up some of their hand-made trinkets.


Handmade in China.


Why so cynical? The Indians seem to have a better system worked out than most westerners, at least they retain some of their traditional values.[hr]In my opinion the best thing for Indians, and all native people who have suffered because of the western conquests, would be to cut them off completely. Give them all their land that hasn't been destroyed by industry/concreted and allow them to fend for themselves. While aid to Africa may prevent a few people from dying now, it makes them more and more dependent upon this aid. If they were forced to fend for themselves it would eventually force them to support themselves. While many whites may feel guilty about the suffering native populations have endured the fact remains that we can no longer help them. We have already screwed them around enough, if we had any decency at all we would just leave them alone.

[ECW]

No casinos actually, just passed through a few settlements and picked up some of their hand-made trinkets.


Handmade in China.


Why so cynical? The Indians seem to have a better system worked out than most westerners, at least they retain some of their traditional values.[hr]In my opinion the best thing for Indians, and all native people who have suffered because of the western conquests, would be to cut them off completely. Give them all their land that hasn't been destroyed by industry/concreted and allow them to fend for themselves. While aid to Africa may prevent a few people from dying now, it makes them more and more dependent upon this aid. If they were forced to fend for themselves it would eventually force them to support themselves. While many whites may feel guilty about the suffering native populations have endured the fact remains that we can no longer help them. We have already screwed them around enough, if we had any decency at all we would just leave them alone.


If we were going to give back the land we took and not the land we pushed them onto, I might agree with you. If we give them all the money that has been collected by the government on their behalf and never disbursed back to the tribes, there would be very few problems left to deal with. Leaving them alone may work but only if we return to them that which was stolen in the beginning.

Never gonna happen.