Thanks for posting this. I grew up in an area heavily populated by native peoples, and the version of the noble warrior that is being perpetuated by these advocacy groups is tragically false. (I am part native by blood myself, and not 10 generations ago.) Many of these people are solid citizens, but too many homes are marked by alcoholism, violence, incest and rape. I watched people abandon their children in the snow outside bars at -40 F when the welfare money came in. My uncle was a priest, and he told me it was all he could do to contain himself during confession when still another father bragged about raping his daughters. Flame away if you will, but unless you’ve lived it, you have no idea of how misguided this law is.
I had no idea this existed. This is awful. Almost everyone I know has some Indian blood including my husband.
Good post.
I won’t read George Will’s piece, but that is not to say I don’t have issues with how we treat our native peoples. I have come to the opinion over many years that we are perpetuating a deep and residing injustice by keeping American Indians separate. I think that someone somehow needs to take a stand and resolve to discontinue the reservation concept of all the separation that that entails. It would be nice and consistent if all laws applied to all our peoples. How to do that without further (yet more) injustices to them is the rub. Hopefully, minds greater than mine (which isn’t saying a whole lot) can conceive of a way to equitably bring them into the the fold and afford them equal justice under the law. Maybe I’m just dreaming?
I often go over into Oklahoma, and in the Cherokee areas see the billboards on how to report domestic violence to authorities.
Saw the same type of signs in various other Reservations out west.
I grew up in an area heavily populated by native peoples, and the version of the noble warrior that is being perpetuated by these advocacy groups is tragically false.
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Would it be wrong of me to think of them as “first settlers” rather than native?
It makes me sad.
my close friends (a childless, middle-class white couple) adopted a baby girl who is at least 25% native American. The birth-mother, for reasons I now suspect approximate those you outline below, left her home and travelled 500 miles to have the child, and immediately put it up for adoption with the Catholic Agency in our town.
They did not meet the mother, and only know she was quite young, didn’t want to identify the biological father and wanted to be as far away from “the tribe” as possible. Both Will’s article and your comments give some clarity to her decision.
The child is now with kind, church-going parents, who have the ability to provide for her and with an extended family of grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins who will give her the most stable and living family imaginable.
It turns me off to see the fake dance regalia, all the dayglo dyed, machine stitched crap. Someone has obviously watched too many movies.