If you are not indigenous, you live on stolen land.
“Okay, but why are you talking about it?”
I’m white. I also get that this site isn’t necessarily one that you’d all expect me to talk about this on. That doesn’t mean it’s not important or that those of us who want to end injustice should stay silent on. That combined with my new job in public health and us talking more in general about injustices and, well, here we are.
“So, what’s going on?”
The US government stole and conquered this nation, pushing indigenous folx to smaller and smaller spaces, violating treaties over and over again while openly engaging in genocide and causing irreparable harm to folx.
We then tried to steal indigenous culture by using social workers and others to steal their children and raise them in ‘boarding schools‘ [pronounced institutions] meant to make them more like white Christians. We stripped them of their native languages as well as family and tribal connections.
The harm continues.
Things like healthcare that our government stated they’d provide are woefully inadequate. Tribal services are often not culturally competent and there aren’t enough providers – or resources given to them – to actually provide care. Many indigenous folx have been pushed to reservations where water is scarce, they have little to no access to the internet and power or other services, and food doesn’t grow in addition to being miles away from grocery stores.
To top it off, we white folx have carved monuments to our whiteness into their holy areas like Mount Rushmore. When indigenous folx try to speak up about things like this or proposed pipelines like Standing Rock, they’re met with violence of the worst kind. The police have become increasingly militarized against the people we stole this land from. If you’re reading this the weekend of July 4, 2020, this is literally happening as you read.
That doesn’t even get into the inability of indigenous folx to arrest white folx committing crimes on their lands and against them. Law enforcement in the white world doesn’t give a shit and rarely does anything when there’s a ton of evidence, let alone if they have to actually investigate. This lends itself to the problem related to Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women. There are so many resources on MMIW that I can’t include them all, but please make sure to read more below:
- Addressing the Epidemic of Missing & Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls
- An untracked number of Indigenous people have more than one relative missing or murdered in unexplained circumstances
- Lakota Law’s MMIW Resource Guide
- MMIW families still need enforceable legislation: Too often, tribal, state and federal governments mishandle cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women. This has to change.
- MMIW USA
- Police In Many U.S. Cities Fail To Track Murdered, Missing Indigenous Women
- The Tragedy of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women
There are also very real issues with policing harming indigenous folx, both directly and indirectly. For more, read:
- Fatal Encounters Between Native Americans and the Police (PDF)
- Maze of Injustice: The failure to protect Indigenous women from sexual violence in the USA (PDF)
- Native Americans deserve more attention in the police violence conversation
- When tribal law conflicts with federal law: “Unlike most U.S. communities — which have a local police force to handle all types of crimes — Native American communities fall under the authority of a combination of tribal, state and federal law. How much authority each agency has varies by state, tribe, the type of crime that’s been committed and whether the perpetrator is American Indian or not.”
So, today I urge y’all to learn about whose land you occupy by visiting https://native-land.ca/ I live on stolen land of the Kiikaapoi, Peoria, Ho-Chunk, Miami, Očeti Šakówin, and Sauk and Meskwaki tribes. What about you?