The Leader

Issue date: 4/23/09 Section: A&E

Ever since the election of Barack Obama as president just a few months ago, Americans have gotten into the rather disturbing habit of acting as if racism itself had been vanquished once and for all. Granted, when it comes to acknowledging the elephant in the room, we would be the blind men of the world. We love to act like the past is dead and buried and thus has no effect on the present. Tell that to some of the residents of the 310 Indian reservations scattered throughout the country.

In recent years, it's become fashionable to look back fondly at those who were uprooted from their homes and forced further west to make way for the American machine, as if we wouldn't possibly do any such thing to them today. Wrong. Things are just as bad as ever for Native Americans, the government just got better PR men. At the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, more than half of the people who live there are living below the federal poverty level, and adolescent suicide is four times the national average of the U.S. In spite of making over 33 million dollars in agricultural production in 2002, only 1/3 of that sum went to the tribe; everything else went to the federal government.

The situation is the same in many other reservations throughout the U.S., and in the reservations in the American southwest many are starving because the land simply is not fertile enough. It is very simple to push something aside as either a byproduct of an ugly past or the looming spectra of uncertain future, but ignoring a problem only allows that problem to get worse. Many ignore the homeless who ask for money on the streets, then go home and send their monthly check to the Christian Children's Fund, never wondering if all of this money is actually going to help in the first place.

When it comes to Native Americans especially, we seem to prefer them as seen but not heard, especially around Columbus Day (which, by the way, is akin to celebrating the Night of Broken Glass for many Native Americans). Government persecution of Native Americans continues to this day, and the fact that the government, in spite of recognizing reservations as sovereign nations, still makes them subject to U.S. law in terms of minting their own currency as well as the taxation on supposedly sovereign territory is proof of this. That is not compassion on the part of the government that is kicking people when they're already down.

We cannot continue to delude ourselves into this past tense kind of thinking when it comes to persecution, which is how these cycles manage to start up all over again. If the U.S. government has really changed all that much, and if we're all so nostalgic for this "noble way of life" that was lost so long ago, maybe we need to start seeing the situation for what it really is. A large part of that is recognizing that this still goes on and that these people are still being victimized. Think about that on Columbus Day.

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