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Native Americans

Thursday 25th of April 2024

By the numbers Up to two-thirds of adults live with alcoholism. One in four children are born with with fetal alcohol syndrome. Life expectancy is just 66.8 years. Fueled by poverty and addiction – the unemployment rate  hovers  around  80% – the suicide rate is over four times the national average. The Guardian, September 29, 2017, on Pine Ridge Indian reservation in South Dakota © 2017 Kwiple.com
COVID-19 coronavirus Look, I fully support banning travel from Europe to prevent the spread of infectious disease. I just think it's 528 years too late.  Rebecca Nagle, a Cherokee writer, 6:25 PM ยท Mar 12, 2020  © 2020 Kwiple.com
Native Americans As the efforts to assimilate us largely failed and we remained, mostly, in our homelands, Americans have gradually assimilated to our  cultures, and our  worldview, and our  modes of connecting to nature. The parks enshrine places, but they also emphasize and prioritize a particular way of interacting with the land. In the nation's mythic past, the wilderness may have been a dangerous environment, some- thing to be tamed, plowed under, cut down. But that way of relating to the land is no longer in vogue. For many Americans, our wildplaces are a solace, a refuge — cathedrals, indeed. America has succeeded in becoming more Indian over the past 245 years than the other way around. David Treuer, The Atlantic, May 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Native Americans A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one, and that high sanction of his destruction has been an enormous factor in promoting Indian massacres. In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man. Richard H. Pratt, founder and superintendent of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School,  the famous government-run boarding school where Native American children who were forcibly removed from their familes were sent to erase vestiges of their tribal culture by being taught to act like whites © 2023 Kwiple.com
Native Americans I don't go so far as to think that the only good Indians are the dead Indians, but I believe nine out of every ten are, and I shouldn't like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth. Theodore Roosevelt © 2021 Kwiple.com
Native Americans In 2000, as the expanding Native American casino industry in upstate New York threatened his own gambling interests in New Jersey, the businessman took aim at the St Regis Mohawk tribe. Trump secretly spent $1m on local newspaper adverts that portrayed the tribe as organized criminals and cocaine pushers. Under a photograph of syringes and lines of powder ran the question: “Are these the new neighbors we want?” The Guardians, September 29, 2017 © 2017 Kwiple.com
Parks All 85 million acres of national-park sites should be turned over to a consortium of federally recognized tribes in the United States. (A few areas run by the National Park Service, such as the National Mall, would be excepted.) The total acreage would not quite make up for the General Allotment Act [1887], which robbed us [Native Americans] of 90 million acres, but it would ensure that we have unfettered access to our tribal homelands. And it would restore dignity that was rightfully ours. To be entrusted with the stewardship of America's most precious landscapes would be a deeply meaningful form of restitution. Alongside the feelings of awe that Americans  experience while contemplating the god-rock of  Yosemite and other places like it, we could take inspiration in having done right by one another. David Treuer, The Atlantic, May 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Resisters say Sober Indian Dangerous Indian Placard, Pine Ridge Indian reservation protest against liquor sales to its residents, 2017  © 2017 Kwiple.com
Snapshot Yesterday, Trump signed an order slashing the size of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase national monuments. Hey, come on – it's reasonable that he doesn't care about them: they're just national monuments; they're not Confederate monuments. Donald Trump portrayed by Stephen Colbert on The Late Show, December 5, 2017, after Trump withdrew protections from two million acres of federal land in Utah sacred to Native Americans to open it up to miners, loggers, oil and gas companies  © 2017 Kwiple.com
State of the union All the problems we face in the United States today can be traced to an unenlightened immigration policy on the part of the American Indian. Pat Paulsen © 2017 Kwiple.com
 
Voter suppression They didn't need an address when they took our children and rounded them up into boarding schools, and they didn't need an address when they conscripted us to fight in the military and make a worthy and honorable sacrifice. But now they need our address when we want to exercise our right to vote. Iron Eyes, member of North Dakota's Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, on the Republican legislature's attempt to disenfranchise Native Americans, who typicially vote for Democrats, by requiring registering to vote using an ID having a street address, which don't exist on reservations in the state © 2018 Kwiple.com