Native Lives Matter

[Miigwech]

Just a reminder ...... Native Americans are treated like dirt



[link:http://|http://www.mintpressnews.com/police-told-native-american-woman-to-quit-faking-as-she-died-in-jail-cell/208130/

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/32120-police-shoot-and-kill-mentally-ill-native-american-man


http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2015/07/30/couple-allegedly-set-homeless-native-american-man-fire-police-say-161248

http://www.tcdailyplanet.net/native-lives-matter-solution-police-violence-indian-country/]


[link:http://|http://www.mintpressnews.com/police-told-native-american-woman-to-quit-faking-as-she-died-in-jail-cell/208130/

[haikugal]

1. Yes the do and they are...it needs to stop! Thanks for this post, kick, rec and bookmarked.

[Mnemosyne]

2. Another bunch of horror stories. Never ends...nt

[historylovr]

3. K & R. And thank you for the links.

[madokie]

4. We should be ashamed of ourselves

We've treated them like shit for a long time now and it needs to stop. First thing we did after doing genocide all over them is try to bury all the knowledge that they other wise would have worked with us in sharing. Knowledge that they'd gained from centuries of living with nature. many of our patented medicines actually got their start from the medicines that our natives had came up with after all those years of paying attention to nature and seeing that the inter bark of a willow tree, gave us aspirin. That the Sweet gum trees in my yard the one over my back deck actually have about 10 different medicines that were made from them that some of which are the base of some of our medicine today
close to 90 percent of our patented medicine got their start from what the Natives taught us that were synthesized and sold to us at high prices with no or very little mention of what the natives role in all this was. They for the most part used the whole animal when they killed one from the bones to the hair. Living with nature was what they were good at. Some thing that we could learn from ourselves. Cherokees where who taught the original settlers how to make a log cabin that was passed down to them from the norse years before. Look at what we did to the Cherokee in return, Trail of Tears march. We're bad and thats all there is to it.

[cherokeeprogressive]

9. Are you in Cherokee County?

My family has a cemetery in Section 26, Range 23E, Township 16N in Cherokee County. I have no idea what that corresponds to. It is supposedly where my Great Grandfather Toolie is buried.

[madokie]

11. I'm in Mayes county, right north of Cherokee

Our home place is part of the original allotment of Chief John Ross son, john Ross. We bought it back in '61.

Lloyd Dale's property borders us on our west side.

[cherokeeprogressive]

12. Do you have any way of finding out where the land listed in the township is?

I'd love to know the GPS coordinates so I could see it on Google Maps.

[madokie]

14. It might take me a day or two but I will get that too you

I'm off to bed right now.
I'll pm you when I get it

[cherokeeprogressive]

15. You are a God, sir. That would be sooo cool!

I'm pretty sure it's somewhere close to the river.

[jwirr]

21. Ask the county for a plot book. It should be a set of maps with range etc. marked on it as well as

names of the present owners and things like rivers, lakes, communities and cemeteries. That should correspond with info you have.

Information on Native deaths is not well known because most reservations are very rural and some have their own police forces (like the one I live on) but that does not always mean that you are safe because there are some heavy politics on reservations that pit one group against another. Also if one leaves the reservation for the big city then it is very much the same as with the black population. And yes Native Lives Matter.

[cherokeeprogressive]

33. My Grandfather Johnie married a woman who was as white as snow when he came home from WWII.

They knew each other before he went overseas. Once, on vacation, we were camping along the Arkansas River in OK and my Grandma pointed to a ridge on the other side of the river and told me there was a trail on top He used to walk to get to her house. Her and one of her girlfriends found a skull from an old bull and hung it from a tree, then hauled it up off the trail. When my Grandpa was walking to where she lived they waited, then dropped it down in front of him. She said He shrieked like a girl and ran all the way home. He laughed so hard he cried, but he didn't say she was BS'ing.

As their marriage was pretty much a "interracial marriage" in the 40's, they had to move to California where things like that were less frowned upon. They wound up in a place called Hanford, where both of them worked in the fields picking tomatoes. When my Grandma went into labor with my Mom, they took her to the hospital and my Grandpa was with her. Something happened while she was in the delivery room and everyone had to leave... My Grandma gave birth to my Mom with NO ONE ELSE IN THE ROOM. When she told me that story I cried. I'll always wonder to myself how many women have given birth to their child BY THEMSELVES with no one else there to help.

I am my Grandfather's only grandson. That made me the only nephew to my Mom's brothers and sister. I was also First Born. Christmas was "Chris' Day" LOL.

The last time I was on the Cherokee Res in Tahlequah I was about 14 and that was in the mid 70's. My Grandpa's Sister Cindy's house still didn't have running water and we had to use an outhouse. IN THE FUCKING 1970's.

[Enthusiast]

39. Thank you for sharing that!

[jwirr]

48. Thank you for sharing. In the 40s many of my family had been moved to California to work in the

defense industry. Most came back to MN. And yes your story sounds familiar. There are very few 100% Natives any more. In fact many tribes are thinking about changing the quantum blood rules because so many of the children can no longer enroll and are considered white. Yet they live the Native way. BTW some of our houses still have the outhouse - by choice.

My family has pretty much moved into the 21st Century because of things like the Casino and computers. Still follow the traditions but adapt them to our own style.

[passiveporcupine]

5. Yes, NLM

[ellennelle]

6. indigenous peoples

are treated more like the dirt ground in under dirt. maybe because they are the closest to the earth, whence comes all our power, including humility?

i've often felt, as glad as i am we have finally elected an african american president, that even greater than a woman will be when we elect a native american as president.

we will have finally begun to atone then, and only then. especially if she is a woman!

[JoeOtterbein]

7. Yes again...

...we have always, since we arrived, treated them horribly...

[Liberal_in_LA]

8. k&r

[LostOne4Ever]

10. Maybe all minorities should create a similar movement to BLM

Last edited Fri Oct 2, 2015, 06:24 PM - Edit history (1)

[font style="font-family:'Georgia','Baskerville Old Face','Helvetica',fantasy;" size=4 color=teal]Cause it seems that the lives of anyone who is not a cis-white-male-heterosexual-protestant seems to be of less value in this country.

Maybe something like We are human too![/font]

[840high]

13. There was a white teen shot by a cop in N.C.

[LostOne4Ever]

16. Yes, but there is not a systemic pattern of devaluing white lives like there are for minorities. nt

[7962]

25. They dont seem to be of much value to the cops doing the shooting.

[LostOne4Ever]

44. Enough value that the violence and incarceration rates against them is far lower

[font style="font-family:'Georgia','Baskerville Old Face','Helvetica',fantasy;" size=4 color=teal]than against African Americans.

The murder rate of African Americans is 6x greater than that of white americans. They also make up 60% of all inmates while only making up 11% of the population.

This report shows that in 80% of Philly shootings were against African Americans who only make up 44% of the population.[/font]

[7962]

56. Only 15% of the cases you cite were unarmed. The "report" is meaningless

You cant focus on the higher rate of interactions with police as the problem. We MUST look at the "unarmed" aspect. If you want to bring up ALL incidents, then you have to also realize that blacks commit a higher percentage of crime than their proportion of population; so there is going to be a higher rate of involvement with police. Not just in Philly but nationally. We all know the murder rate of blacks is higher; its also 93% black on black.

The focus HAS to remain on the incidents where unarmed people are injured or killed. Yes, there are more blacks than whites, but there isnt as big a difference as many would think.
Power hungry agressive cops are the problem and those types get amped up over ANYONE who they THINK wont bow to them

[7962]

19. And one in SC too. Here:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10141163795

Odd how when the white kid gets shot hardly anyone posts about it.

[840high]

22. Did you notice how the media

ignores it, too?

[7962]

26. And the cops LOVE it. They'll get away with more that way

People who dont pay attention, which is most people, will think its a shame the cops are getting more violent, but hey, I'm white so I guess it wont affect me. Wrong.

[7962]

20. It happens more than people think too.

Thats why people need to stop trying to make it only a race problem when in reality its a BAD COP problem

[Chakab]

23. You can't pretend race isn't part of the equation. Bad cops are a problem, and white people suffer

because of corrupt police culture. However, bad policing disproportionately affects communities of color.

Here's an interview with a former Baltimore cop who talks specifically about how he and his fellow officers viewed people in poor black communities in Baltimore as "the enemy" and how he was afraid to use the same kind of policing tactics on white people that he interacted with when he was on the job. He talks specifically about how he would go into black communities to fill his arrest and citation quotas when he was actually assigned to patrol a predominantly white area because he was afraid of the repercussions of hassling the white people on his assigned beat.

I'm sorry, but it is absolutely asinine and dangerous to ignore the racial dynamics that are play with regards to the policing crisis in the US.

[7962]

28. I said acting like its ONLY a race problem. Not ignoring it

And as i said above, the cops are loving these divisive protests. It makes it easier for them to get away with the abuse by making people think its isolated.
Making someone actually apologize for saying that everyones life matters is about the stupidest thing to do to try to expose bad policing

[Chakab]

29. Look dude. You want to be obtuse. That's fine, but it's a fact that there are a ton of people using

#alllivesmatter as a means to belittle the Black Lives Matter movement rather than making a statement about everybody being equally susceptible to mistreatment at the hands of the police irrespective of race.

Case in point:



Context matters. That's why O'Malley apologized.


If you think that there's a problem with addressing the fact that bad policing in most cases specifically targets minorities, then the conversation isn't worth having.

[Igel]

31. And we let them define how we use the phrase?

Perhaps we let them define us, too?

When did we elect them to make all the decisions for everybody, or did we just shrug and say, "Sure, go for it, too much responsibility for little old us?"

But what's odd is that while we let them dictate the one true meaning of that phrase, we insist that what some say they think the Confederate flag means (at least to them) must be a lie. It can only mean hate to them. So we insist that the cede authority over the meaning of that symbol to us. (Was there a committee meeting I missed that parceled out symbols and who got to decide their meanings? Dammit, I want to be able to dictate a symbol's meaning!)

It's like being offended by mere words or symbols. I decide when and where to let somebody offend me. If I give them the power to push my buttons by mere symbols, that's on me for making them my master, at least in part. If they stab me, that's different. My boss can fire me, sure. But those that can just wound me with a word? No stranger. No mere acquaintance. Wife, child, brother, a couple of friends ... 7 billion people, and there are perhaps 5. Used to be 6, before my father died.

And if we didn't elect them or cede the authority to them, why assume that somebody here is automatically one of "them"? Doesn't that just assume a whole lot of mistrust and ill-will? That's seldom the basis of any kind of cohesion.

[7962]

37. You said it better than I.

The reaction for some here is that if you think the whole BLM thing is the wrong approach, well then you MUST be an apologist for the bad cops or you're just simply a racist.
Showing and explaining to people that EVERYONE is at risk will go a lot further. Its a fact that most white victims are getting little attention, so its almost like they're never victimized because no one sees it. Yet if you look, you find that it DOES happen frequently.

[Alfalfa]

35. AllLivesMatter is inclusive

It's not meant to belittle.

[A Simple Game]

41. True and BLM is a form of descrimination and segregation. People should realize the

long term consequences of using such a term.

Most people using the term are well meaning but short sighted.

The civil rights movement was about inclusion and equality, why all the sudden a change in direction towards exclusion and segregation? Who actually is behind this?

[LostOne4Ever]

43. No it is not

[font style="font-family:'Georgia','Baskerville Old Face','Helvetica',fantasy;" size=4 color=teal]It about drawing attention the disproportional of violence by society (and the police in particular) against the black community.

That is no more a form of discrimination than the civil rights movement drawing attention to the unfairness of black people being forced to sit at the back of the bus. They were not discriminating against white people by pointing that out.

That argument is absurd.[/font]

[A Simple Game]

51. It's discrimination and segregation.n/t

I will leave it up to you to look up the definition for both.

[LostOne4Ever]

53. First off n/t means "no text" your post should end there

[font color=teal] secondly, simply saying so does not make it true.

I gave you a perfect example disproving your point. You ignored it and doubled down.

Pointing out discrepancies is not discrimination or segregation. That is just a smokescreen to obscure the actual discrimination going on here. That of society valuing white people over minorities.[/font]

[A Simple Game]

59. Sorry about the n/t, I decided to add the text and forgot to clean up my post.

I see you failed to take my advice and look up the definitions.

Second I didn't think your poor example needed any comment. But here goes: The difference between the civil rights movement and BLM is that the civil rights movement was about inclusion and acceptance into the whole, not about increasing discrimination and segregation. The BLM movement is exclusionary in it's wording and defense thereby increasing discrimination and segregation. It makes a distinction (one of the words in the definition) between Blacks and everyone else. BLM is inadvertently undoing some of the good work done to include Blacks into the whole of humanity.

To support BLM is being short-sighted because it opens itself to criticism which is exactly what is happening.

Do "Native Lives Matter"? How about "Chinese Lives Matter", oh how about my special one "Irish Lives Matter"? All of these group and many more were at one time or are being discriminated against and subject to segregation. Why don't you tell me where should it end? At what point does it all become meaningless?

Or better yet, tell all of us whose just who's lives don't matter, or would that be too long a list?

[Alfalfa]

47. I don't know who's behind it

But it's certainly divisive and counterproductive.

[A Simple Game]

52. At the very least it leaves the movement open for criticism.

Which is the very problem the defenders of the movement are complaining about.

You want to use an exclusive term and go against the history of civil rights, be ready to pay the price.

[LostOne4Ever]

42. No, what "all lives matters" does is marginalize and derails attention from the issue

[font style="font-family:'Georgia','Baskerville Old Face','Helvetica',fantasy;" size=4 color=teal]That issue being that the lives of white Americans are valued far more by society than African Americans (and as this OP shows other minorities as well). That police are far more likely to shoot a black suspect than a white one.

Every time someone say all lives matter it distracts from that point. It distracts from the point that the murder rate of African americans is 6x higher than white americans despite african americans making up only 1/7 the amount of whites.

Its like going to a hospital and saying "My arm got cut off" and the attendant saying lots of people get their arms cut off. Or saying The X-whatever is crashing at 10 times the rate of all other cars and someone replying "all types of cars crash."

It not inclusive it is a RW derailment tactic.[/font]

[Alfalfa]

46. The issue is police brutality

And it can affect anyone. A hospital still treats everyone who gets their arm cut off, so why not AllLivesMatter?

[LostOne4Ever]

50. No that is a separate issue that has intersectionality w/ BLM

[font size=4 color=teal face=Georgia] BLM is about the systemic devaluation of the lives of African Americans by society. Police brutality is a large part of that and current focus of BLM, but it goes beyond that.

By misappropriating the saying and distorting it into all lives matter you are not only stealing a slogan that is for a different issue from your cause, but derailing and marginalizing the very thing the slogan was created to bring attention to.

When you are in a hospital w/ a missing hand you don't want to hear about other people missing hand YOU WANT THEM TO FOCUS ON YOUR HAND. You want them to treat you THEN & NOW not listen to a lecture as you bleed to death.[/font]

[Alfalfa]

54. Everyone in a hospital wants their hand to be focused on

Giving preferential treatment to some groups but not others will only create resentment. You might not want to hear about other people "missing their hand", but they are just as important and deserving of treatment as you are.

[LostOne4Ever]

55. And lecturing people about someone not even at that hospital

[font color=teal]Someone who has already had their hand taken care of while the other person bleeds to death in front of you will get you much than resentment. It will probably result in a dead body you being fired and a gigantic lawsuit against you and the hospital.

But you got to lecture a critically injured person about someone who was in no danger of dying, was not taking up space in your unfilled hospital and to whom you could do nothing for.[/font]

[Alfalfa]

58. But the person hasn't had their hand taken care of already

If they had, it wouldn't be an issue and we wouldn't be discussing it.

[Beartracks]

71. But a hospital also triages all the cases...

... so that the most critical cases get seen and treated first.

Just thinking out loud about your analogy...

==============

[7962]

36. You say "belittle", I say "inclusive". Show everyone they're at risk

You're forgetting how most people just dont pay attention to the news much.
Time will tell which one of us is correct.

[LostOne4Ever]

45. And by doing so you marginalize the disproportionality of how it affects minorities. nt

[Miigwech]

17. Not recent but the same

http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2015/07/19/while-were-condemning-the-confederate-flag/#more-24764

[Zorra]

18. Most hateful people I've ever encountered were in

N. Dakota, S. Dakota, and N. Nebraska. Lots of hate for NA's there, if you look deep, you can see it steam out from the hater's eyes and up around their John Deere hats like smoke from burning sulphur.

[Miigwech]

24. More facts .. Native American abuse of civil rights

http://lastrealindians.com/native-lives-matter-report-by-romero-institute/

[Miigwech]

27. Indy Blog The Native Lives Matter Movement

By
Brian Ward and Ragina Johnson
February 16, 2015

Students from the American Horse School, located on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, were invited to Rapid City, South Dakota, to watch the Rush, a minor league hockey team. At the game, the Lakota students were subjected to racial slurs by a handful of fans in a corporate suite, who told them "to go back to the rez" and poured beer on them.

This incident may sound like something out of the history books, but it happened just a few weeks ago, in late January. Racism against American Indians is alive and well.

The Black Lives Matter movement has pushed U.S. society to recognize the racist legacy built into its very foundations. Actions by protesters in Ferguson, New York City and around the country have brought the issue to the front doorstep of U.S. political leaders.

Many liberal and conservative commentators have proclaimed the U.S. to be a "post-racial" society after the election of an African American president. Obviously, readers of this website are not fooled by such rhetoric. We know African Americans continue to face brutality and death at the hands of police and vigilantes, along with continued economic discrimination and inequality, from soaring unemployment and poverty rates to substandard housing.

Native Americans, though a significantly smaller percentage of the population than African Americans, also face racial profiling and police brutality around the country, especially in the Western states.

The incident at the Rapid City Rush game is just one example of the daily racism experienced by Natives. For that reason, many Natives have been inspired by the Black Lives Movement to take up slogan Native Lives Matter and build a new movement. One of the first Native Lives Matter protests took place on December 19 in Rapid City to demand fair treatment by police and to stand in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement.

Allen Locke attended the protest. The next day, he was killed by Rapid City police. Locke's wife Celeste Two Crows had called the cops, wanting Alan out the house until he was sober, but police reacted with deadly force. She told Al Jazeera that her husband was not threatening her or the officers when they shot him five times.

Not surprisingly, when the police investigated the case, they determined their officers did nothing wrong.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

The history of police murders of Native Americans is a long one. Sitting Bull, one of the leaders of the famous Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876, was arrested and killed by Indian Police officials. Today, Native Americans only represent 0.8 percent of the population, but are 1.9 percent of those killed by police, according to the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice.

Much like African Americans, Native Americans are disproportionately represented in the prison population, especially in states with a significant Native population. In South Dakota, for example, where Natives are 8 percent of the population, they make up 29 percent of the prison population.

Unemployment rates among Native Americans reach as high as 90 percent on some Indian reservations. Nationally, Natives have a jobless rate that is twice that of the white population--similar to African Americans. Roughly 25 percent of American Indians and Alaskan Natives live below the poverty line. On some reservations, the poverty rate is as high as 50 percent.

Racial profiling toward Natives is still prevalent in many Western states. In the Great Plains and Southwest, which have large Indian reservations, license plates identify drivers who are from a reservation. In South Dakota, those living on Indian reservations have license plates that start with the number 6.

Unlike the slogan "All Lives Matter" which aims to obscure the fact that Blacks and people of color generally face disproportionate violence at the hands of the police, the slogan "Native Lives Matter" focuses on the brutal history of this country which was built on the paired horrors of the genocide of Native Americans and the enslavement of Africans and how that history lives on for both groups through structural racism and inequality. And it points toward a common determination to stand up against violence and hate.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Native Americans have faced oppression and discrimination since the first Europeans came to this continent.

After the U.S. won independence from England, the seizure of Native land--and the violence necessary for this theft--was the backbone of the new country's capitalist development and expansion. To enforce these land seizures, the use of the military and the later development of an Indian Police force were necessary to keep indigenous peoples who survived the hundreds of wars on them in line.

The modern police force in the U.S. has its roots in tracking fugitive slaves and breaking strikes and workers' protests, but also in the hunting down of Native peoples who refused to be rounded up into reservations. The Texas Rangers were the most famous of these vigilante groups--they were known for defeating the Comanche, Kiowa and Apache peoples in the Southwest.

Many Indian agents, who ruled reservations with an iron fist, took it upon themselves to transfer their position from the cavalry into the Indian police forces, which were funded by Congress, starting in 1878. The agents often hired Natives to police their own reservations.

The Bureau of Indian Affairs is quite blunt about purpose of Indian Police:

Duties of the Indian police included arresting and turning back intruders, removing squatters' stakes, driving out cattle, horse or timber thieves, escorting survey parties, serving as guards at ration and annuity distributions, protecting agency buildings and other property, returning truants to school, stopping bootleggers, making arrests for disorderly conduct, drunkenness, wife-beating and theft, serving as couriers, keeping agents informed of births and deaths and notifying agents of any strangers. (emphasis added)

The fear of the police and military was key to maintaining control of Native nations that became more and more impoverished due to structural and economic racism alongside continued treaty violations.

Many Natives were forced to move off reservations into cities, only to find that the jobs promised by the U.S. government during "relocation" didn't exist, and that they were now aggressively patrolled by urban police.

As police harassment and brutality increased, organizations such as the militant American Indian Movement (AIM) were founded to combat dehumanizing harassment and racial profiling. The first march that AIM organized in 1968 was against police brutality toward Natives in Minneapolis.

At the time, Minneapolis' prison population was 70 percent American Indian, though they made up 10 percent of the city's population. AIM invigorated a whole generation to stand up to the police and for American Indian rights.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Today, the police are still being used for a purpose they always have: to suppress Native rights so that the capitalist class can gobble up more Native resources. The police protect the land that the U.S. government stole in the past and keep Indians in line so that the government can go after more vital natural resources that still lie under Native lands.

Today, the U.S. economy has expanded in large part through a boom in fossil fuel extraction. This expansion of the polluting energy industry threatens all of our abilities to live on this planet in a healthy environment, while also attacking the sovereignty and rights of Native American tribes and First Nations.

South Dakota is home to the Black Hills, which are sacred to many indigenous communities--including the Lakota. The Black Hills have been the battleground against mining and resource extraction for almost 150 years, from gold in 1871 to uranium in 1977 to oil and gas today.

Chinese energy corporations are currently attempting to gain fracking permits "to extract water from the Madison Aquifer and Inyan Kara formation, totaling about 12,960,000 gallons a day, 94 billion gallons of water for the projected 20-year lifetime of the project," according to one newspaper report.

Rapid City, the site of the Native Lives Matter movement and Allen Locke's murder, is situated right next to the Black Hills.

The plunder of Native lands by U.S. and foreign corporations is far from over, and this never-ending theft can't be separated from the oppression Native people face by the police and the U.S. state.

Madonna Thunder Hawk is a member of the Oohenumpa band of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, a leader in the American Indian Movement (AIM), a co-founder of the American Indian organization Women of All Red Nations, and an organizer and tribal liaison of the Lakota Law Project. She explained in an interview how a new generation is starting to connect the dots:

Young people are making the connections. You have the pipeline struggle and Black Lives Matter, and it's not like we have to wait for the media to say something about what is going on. The information is getting out there through social media. The younger generation in South Dakota put together a demo in Rapid City with Ferguson. These struggles are happening all over this country.

People understand police violence and murders are happening all over the country. It's got to be a nationwide change. It can't be just local areas.

Just as the Black Lives Matter movement is pointing to the structural and systematic nature of racism against African Americans, we need to look at how this country's political and economic system has treated Native peoples historically, and the ways it continues to do today.

More importantly, we can see how these two movements can unite to fight a sick system. Thomas Pierce and Dave Ortiz point out that this is the ruling class' biggest fear:

When you look at the cases of Latinos with indigenous heritage and indigenous North Americans, you will see that the United States is still at war with indigenous people. In the jails of Minnesota, South Dakota, Montana and most of Indian Country, indigenous people are incarcerated at almost three times the amount of the white population. There has been civil unrest. There have been lawsuits filed. Many protests have been carried out in Oklahoma. Yet the nation's media is focused elsewhere. Is it because they are afraid of what will happen if American Indians, African Americans, Latinos and working class whites rise up against this unjust system? Yes!

[Enthusiast]

40. +100%

[greatlaurel]

30. K and R

Thank you for posting.

[Mr_Jefferson_24]

32. K&R Thanks for posting.

[bravenak]

34. Native Lives Matter.

We treat them like shit. I see it everyday here in my city. We have a high native population. We are very cruel people.

[Scuba]

38. K&R

[retrowire]

49. i am ashamed of all of my white forefathers

to have done this to a fellow man such as the natives. I'm sorry.

[Alfalfa]

57. Makes no sense to be ashamed of things you didn't do

[retrowire]

61. makes sense to be ashamed of what my ancestry did

I'm ashamed of those who did what they did so I could have what I have today. I am not so grateful that I take my white liberty for granted.

Natives went through genocide and mass murder because my people of my race thought that had some right to land that was not theirs. I am ashamed of what I have today because of what my ancestry did.

I will not disassociate myself with it just because I wasn't directly involved. natives of today aren't directly involved with genocide and the trail of tears but their present is what it is because of that past.

so therefore yes, I am ashamed of that past because it relates to what I have today. to disassociate myself of that is to be ignorant of the big picture.

I stand in solidarity with all people and will never forget what I have because of the shameful atrocities committed by those who represented me before hand. I will actively denounce their actions and be ashamed.

[Alfalfa]

62. You're not responsible for what your ancestors did

Or what people of your race did. That is racist thinking.

[retrowire]

64. im not responsible

you're right about that.

but I do reap the benefits of the atrocities they committed. for that, I am ashamed and am sorry.

what I have today, I did not rightfully obtain. my ancestry stole it.

[Alfalfa]

65. Atrocities were committed on all sides

[CountAllVotes]

60. Screwed so bad it still hurts

List of lands lost in my family alone:

600+ acres in Rowan, NC
100+ acres in Oldham, KY
95+ acres (removal) to some suck ass swamp lands in Indiana and yes, I have a copy of Andrew Jackson's land deed or what the hell ever it really is!

To death they all went after that not telling a soul that they were Indian because Indian's suck and should be exterminated as was the law of the land at the time c. 1700 --->

So yeah native lives matter!!!

& recommend!!

[L0oniX]

63. NLM - You missed one...

http://www.colorlines.com/articles/native-woman-sarah-lee-circle-bear-died-police-custody-south-dakota

[etherealtruth]

66. K and R

[saidsimplesimon]

67. Miigwech, every time I travel to Safford I am overcome with

great sorrow when passing the Apache Reservation. Yes, Native Americans were/are treated to the standard conquer's brew of disease, military might and discrimination.

Every link worth the read, thank you

[Cleita]

68. Yes, they are and they don't get enough attention in this forum either.

Besides the abuses you chronicle most recently there is the blatant breaking of treaties by mining and oil companies to extract minerals from their property and they can't do anything about it.

[hopemountain]

69. miigwech, miigwech!

during wwII my dad (chicano and american indian) was on leave with a couple of buddies in the south - tennesee, if i remember correctly. they went to a local eatery and found a sign posted on the door stating "no niggers, no dogs, no mexicans, and no indians"…so he was unable to enjoy a meal with his buddies. according to my dad, he faced a hard truth - even though he was good enough to offer his life for his country - the country did not feel the same for him - he was not good enough to eat in their cafe.

people who are exploited, marginalized, segregated, economically disenfranchised and murdered based on racist (and sexist) stereotypes have the right to stand up for themselves when they are persecuted. they have the right to state who they are and that their lives do matter - particularly when they are persecuted in dispproportionate numbers by the governing society and their institutions for governing.

when people of color are pesecuted and isolated for their particular color AND culture, there are variations in the persecution. the persecution becomes very personal even though its intent is to end in the same way - genocide or execution.

some posters here can try to whitewash everything with "all lives matter" all they want. the truth is their "see me, i love everyone, kumbaya" statements are perceived as insincere by people of color. we see right through the whitewashed statements as phony appeasement pr.

"all lives matter" will not change a damn thing for people of color. the white washing of crimes against people of color is a perversion and a diversion. "all lives matter" perpetuates the myth that all lives are important when statistics deny, deny, and deny the statement over and over and over again. all lives are "supposed" to matter in the sunshiney blue sky pictures of puppies playing with butterfiles and lambs laying with lions. all lives do not matter where racism, the black mold of society, persists.

nope. the reality is that not all lives matter to all people. for those of us of color this is a very bitter truth we learn to live with and overcome in a variety of ways - in the best ways we can with what we have - and always with a price. it becomes very personal when taking shit meets the threshold and the only thing left to do is to stand up and shout our "native lives matter!"

[glinda]

70. Yes. Boozhoo Miigwech and welcome.