But They Have Reservations!

TW : Racism against Native Americans

 

First, a bit of housekeeping:

Today, I decided to look up Native perspectives on living on a reservation.  In my search, I found a Cracked article that listed a few of the more egregious ways the United States’ policy harms Native Americans.

Yesterday, when I was talking about schools, I mentioned hearing about a boarding school that closed in 1996 and that my meager search had not found it. The Cracked article mentioned it.

The school in question was in Canada, (which explains why I didn’t find it in a search of United States schools.)  Though Canada is a different nation, the impetus behind this schooling is the same. And, as I said yesterday, this is happening right now. To people my age. They watched the Crow when it came out. They grew up with an analog childhood and a digital adulthood. Their movies were on VHS. They were me.

Because of assimilation policies that created these schools, a lot of Native Americans were taken from their families and moved far away. So they don’t live on reservations anymore. The author of this article from the Guardian talks about being the son of a man who was relocated and the effect it had on his dad.

Indigenous people are not supposed to have money. We were never meant to. My tribes occupied our homelands consistently for 13,000 years without it, and we were rich beyond our wildest dreams. We had advanced seasonal permaculture, hunting and fishing patterns, and vast amounts of leisure time. Yet we’ve had about 150 years to change 13,000 years of subsistence lifestyle into a complete dependence on money. To us, that is an incredibly weakened state.

Here are a few other places to learn about life on a reservation.

Here is a blog by a woman who has lived off the reservation, but is back on, I believe. She is Lakota Sioux from the Rosebud Sioux Reservation.

This is another piece written by a student living on the Wind River reservation, in response to a negative article written by the NY Times.