Why Native Americans are still facing a survival crisis
2024-08-11
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An investigation report recently released by the U.S. Department of the Interior shows that between 1819 and 1969, at least 973 Native American children died while attending boarding schools operated or supported by the U.S. government.
For years, Native Americans have sought recognition of their identity, way of life, and their rights to traditional lands and natural resources. Throughout history, their rights have been violated.
However, to this day, Native peoples remain marginalized in the United States and face a survival crisis.
'This is nothing short of genocide'
On July 30, the U.S. Department of the Interior released the second volume of the investigative report on the Federal Indian Boarding Schools Truth Initiative project.
The report shows that Aboriginal children were physically abused, forced to convert and punished for speaking their native language in residential schools, actions that left lasting trauma on the Aboriginal community.
The Federal Indian Boarding Schools Truth Initiative: Volume II
Deb Haaland, the initiative's initiator and the first Native American Secretary of the Interior, said after the release of the second volume of the report that one of the reasons for launching this initiative was to ensure that this important matter was widely known and to "let the whole of America understand the impact these policies have had on generations."
In fact, the history of the founding of the United States is a history of blood and tears of the Indians.
If the Native American issue is America's original sin, then Indian boarding schools are the biggest evidence of the crime.
Starting with the Civilizing and Enlightenment Act in 1819, the United States enacted a series of laws and policies to promote the establishment of boarding schools for Native Americans across the country and force Indian children to attend school in order to erase their national characteristics and completely destroy their cultural roots. To use a popular slogan at the time, it was "eliminate their Indian identity and save the man."
These boarding schools were conducted under the guise of education, but they were actually experiments in "assimilation". Forest Kutch, former head of the Utah Indian Affairs Department, once said that these boarding schools affected young Indians in a very tragic way:
Forest Kutch: "It was so ineffective that it didn't train us to be able to assimilate into the white world. (Instead) it took us so far away from our own culture that we no longer even had the ability to be Indians."
Roy Smith, a Navajo, was forced to go to boarding school at the age of 9. The painful childhood experience is still unforgettable to him.
Roy Smith: "There were whippings, there were spankings, there were kneeling punishments. If you got caught doing something, they would make you stand there with a dictionary and do something to you. The worst punishment I ever had was kneeling in one place. I passed out."
Redon Thomas, a Dakota language teacher from Nebraska, bluntly stated that Native boarding schools were established to carry out genocide.
Redon Thomas: "It was nothing short of genocide. Residential schools were set up with one purpose, to destroy our belief systems, to destroy our family systems, to change our identities."
Racial discrimination brings intergenerational trauma to Native Americans
Luis Urrieta, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, once said that the problems faced by Native Americans today are the result of more than 500 years of colonialism. They have experienced genocide, displacement, isolation, relocation, continued oppression and intergenerational trauma.
Today, Native Americans still experience systemic racial discrimination in the United States: their status is marginalized and their survival is at risk.
Statistics show that from 1887 to 1933, the U.S. government plundered about 360,000 square kilometers of land from the Indians through unequal agreements, extortion, or massacres and plunder.
Today, there are more than 300 Native American reservations in the United States, covering a total area of about 220,000 square kilometers, accounting for only 2.3% of the territory of the United States. Most of these reservations are located in remote and barren places, with poor living conditions and lack of water and other important resources.
Lauren Eberly, a medical expert at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote in the Los Angeles Times last month that Native Americans face huge gaps in health care.
The article states that according to data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, American Indians have the highest mortality rate and the shortest life expectancy among all ethnic groups in the United States. According to research by Eberly's own team, nearly half of American Indians who participate in US health insurance suffer from at least one serious heart disease; in 2021, the life expectancy of American Indians and Alaska Natives is only 65.2 years, which is equivalent to the average life expectancy of Americans in 1944.
Eberly said these differences are not genetic, but the result of generations of land theft, violated treaty obligations, forced displacement, discrimination and genocide.
The economic situation for Native Americans was equally difficult.
The latest data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that the U.S. unemployment rate reached 4.3% in July. Looking at different ethnic groups, the unemployment rate for Native Americans was as high as 9.8% in July.
Screenshot of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics website
Data from the U.S. Census Bureau show that 15.3% of American children lived in poverty in 2021, and Native American children had the highest poverty rate among all ethnic groups, at over 29%.
It can be said that the crises faced by Native Americans in health and economy and the systemic racism in American society are mutually causal, and have also further deteriorated the living conditions and social status of Native Americans.
The U.S. Department of Justice released a report on June 13 this year stating that the police in Phoenix, the capital of Arizona, violated civil rights, discriminated against minorities including Native Americans in law enforcement, and used excessive force.
The report noted that Phoenix police enforce certain laws more harshly against Native Americans and others than they do against white people who engage in the same behavior.
In June this year, when the above-mentioned U.S. Department of Justice report was released, Kristen Clark, assistant attorney general for civil rights at the U.S. Department of Justice, said in a statement that the Phoenix police, the capital of Arizona, discriminated against minorities including Native Americans in law enforcement. The statement said that in Phoenix, Native Americans were 44 times more likely to be summoned or detained for possessing or drinking alcoholic beverages than white people.
The Phoenix police's systemic racial discrimination against Native Americans is just the tip of the iceberg of racist practices in the U.S. police system. Due to the lack of police protection, Native American women and children also face crimes including murder, rape and human trafficking.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lin Jian said at a regular press conference a few days ago that historically, the United States has systematically carried out cultural genocide, spiritual genocide, and genocide against Native Americans. To this day, they are still an "invisible group" and a "disappearing race." Regrettably, the United States has not only long avoided and tried to conceal this dark history, but also spread false information about "forced labor" and "forced assimilation" in other countries under the guise of human rights, and committed heinous crimes such as indiscriminate killing and torture of prisoners in other countries.
Lin Jian said that the historical injustices against Indians must be faced squarely, and the human rights abuses committed by the United States around the world must be corrected.
