We know of the many problems facing American Indians on reservations such as high poverty rates, alcoholism & drug abuse, health problems, high suicide rates (with tragic stories like one). Another problem facing American Indian reservations are environmental problems using reservations as dump grounds.
It is an atrocity what America has done to the American Indian. Whenever I hear a right-wing white xenophobe going off against immigrants I get deeply annoyed. Don't they realize 'immigration' already destroyed this land and a people? (Ah! If only the Native Americans told Columbus and the Pilgrims to f#ck off. Perhaps we wouldn't have the likes of Tom Tancredo.)
Over the last 150 years, the government has tried a series of conflicting ways of dealing with the natives of this continent -- making war on them, making treaties with them, breaking treaties with them, sending them to Oklahoma, forcing them onto reservations, forcing them off reservations, permitting them to own land collectively, forcing them to divide the land into individual plots, dispatching their children to boarding schools hundreds of miles from home, closing the boarding schools and sending the children home, outlawing practice of their religions, legalizing practice of those religions, discriminating against them in employment at the Bureau of Indian Affairs, discriminating in favor of them in employment with the Bureau of Indian
And here is another sad story of the oppression that haunts American Indian lands.
Illegal dumps spread across the Torres Martinez reservation like ugly wounds, making it the most polluted tribal land in California, Nevada and Arizona. Vast swaths of desert have been transformed into toxic trash heaps threatening the tribe and nearby communities. There are at least 26 illegal dumps here, including the largest one in the state. Federal officials struggle to shut them down, but new ones pop up all the time.
The result, federal officials say, has been widespread contamination along with toxic smoke drifting over cities, schools and farms across the Coachella Valley...Fires routinely sent poisons into the air; more than 34,000 square feet of arsenic and chromium ash littered the place...A mile or so away is the towering Lawson dump, the biggest in California. The 40-acre site has mountains of debris 50 feet high and a million tons of buried waste. Subterranean fires smolder endlessly, occasionally flaring up through cracks. Since a federal judge shut it down last year, there have been more than 20 fires injuring nine firefighters.
Nurses in the Valley have reported high rates of asthma, bronchitis and skin rashes amongst students.
It is sad how we took a people who lived in deeper relationship with the earth, how we took their land in the name of economic progress, and in the end we use some of their land as gigantic trash bin.
------------------------------------------------
How about a little justice? How about the American government frees Leonard Peltier!
He commented on
"The poverty level is so rampant, so bad, that even someone such as myself, who has grown up in it, my conscience is shocked to the core that such poverty exists in a country that claims the title of wealthiest in the world. Over the past hundred years, figures were released that 292.2 billion tons of gold was mined out of the Black Hills by encroaching settlers and taken from the Lakota Nation. Where does one even begin to do the math to estimate just how much money they have stolen from my people without compensation? I contacted you (NAEG) personally because I was able to see that your track record of helping Native Americans is genuine."
"There is a huge movement to free Leonard Peltier who has been unjustly imprisoned since 1976. Current and past supporters of clemency for Indigenous political prisoner, Leonard Peltier include the Dalai Lama, Nelson Mandela, the late Mother Teresa, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Robert Redford, Oliver Stone, (the late) Coretta Scott King, David Geffin, Steven Spielberg, Amnesty International and many international governments."
Here is a list of 'VIPs' who support Peltier