As seems to be a consistent trend lately, I head to class in the evenings and something thought-provoking is said during the lecture and I am consumed by it for the next twenty-four hours or so. Last night I had the pleasure of attending the first of four lectures being given by a distinguished professor who advises multi-ethnic countries in drafting constitutions and bills of rights. Constitution-drafting is already a daunting task, meant to enshrine principles and protections that will be the cornerstone of law in a country, but the whole process becomes infinitely more complex when undertaking the task in a multi-ethnic country. Group rights and individual rights must both be considered. Anyway I digress from my blogging thought of the moment. A classmate of mine mentioned last night during this lecture that the “ethnic minority” that are the Native Americans in the USA seem to be doing pretty well in America, so the theory goes, that our Bill of Rights adequately protects them. This got me to thinking, for all the things I know about minority groups or poverty or suffering of people outside of America, I know very little about that which goes on inside America. I went home and spent a couple hours on the internet reading intently and watching various documentaries on the Native Americans.
I certainly do not pretend to be an expert in this field (in fact I know VERY LITTLE) but I was impacted by a number of things that I saw and read. First, when people think of Native Americans a couple of visions may pop up: teepees and headdresses, or casinos and gaming facilities on reservations. After doing some reading, I reconfirmed that neither are really ubiquitous when it comes to Native Americans any more. Surely culture is very important to them and rituals are remembered and passed down generation to generation, but they do not live in teepees anymore. Additionally, this vision of Indian reservations being prosperous b/c they allow gambling is also somewhat misguided because that is not a source of income for most reservations and it often leads to grave gambling problems amongst people living on reservations.
Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota struck me as somehow a failure on the part of the people and government of my country. It is one of the largest reservations in the country, larger than the state of Delaware, is home to about 50,000 people, most of which are Lakota Indians and is almost the poorest area of America. Life expectancy on this reservation doesn’t exceed about 50 years, teen suicide is 150% higher than the American national average, unemployment stands somewhere between 70-90% depending on the time of year, an estimated 80% of people there struggle with alcoholism (it was decided that the reservation would be a “dry” reservation once the alcohol situation reached such dire levels, but a tiny town next to the reservation with a population of just 22, has 4 liquor stores and ostensibly just exists to serve the people and their disease on the reservation) and average annual incomes may be as low on average as US$3000. To put this into perspective, a life expectancy that low is right up there with countries like Ghana or any other third-world country not suffering from an epidemic or in the middle of war. How could this be in America? Families of 17 or more live in tiny trailers, not insulated from the cold, holes in the floor and black mold in all of the walls. Many are homeless. Many live in cars. A particularly poignant image for me was from an Al-Jazeera news clip: it showed a man pushing a car that did not work and had a tv in the backseat, he was taking the tv to the pawnshop to pawn to get money to feed his family, it was too heavy to carry and the car didn’t work so he and his family had to push the car with the tv all the way to the pawnshop.
The professor reminded me last night that poverty is a constant sense of vulnerability. The Lakota are living in serious poverty and the tragedy is two-fold: on the one hand it is tragic because America is a wealthy and developed nation, and on the other hand it’s terrifically tragic because America used to be only their land. Over the course of 150 years, they have been marginalized to “reservations” amounting to about 2% of the land area of the United States. Initial reservations “reserved” for the Native Americans were reduced in size because the white people in America thought the land grants were “too generous”.
It was suggested to me that while this phenomenon that I have described is tragic, it is partly on the onus of Indians themselves to change their current situation. It was suggested that they could just leave the reservations and seek a better life in a different place where employment and suitable housing could be found. But to me, the answer is not just as simple as: pick up and leave. Reservations are what is left of ancestral land, maybe leaving is effectively abandoning part of who they are. I do not really know, but to me it just seems woefully inadequate to see this state of life for anyone, especially native americans. It seems that somehow dialogue has broken down and the governance of the country as a whole and the somewhat autonomous governance of the various Indian nations are not working together for solutions – for if it was working, surely there would not be this disparity of economics and quality of life. For me, my lasting thought is: how can you resolve a situation where values rooted in the ancestral land, modernity and a lack of reconciliation over a feeling that America is built upon stolen property, are all clashing against one another exacerbating the conditions of a large group of Americans? How can history be embraced, atrocities be acknowledged and a plan for a better future be crafted? Opportunity should not only be available outside a reservation.
For beautiful and haunting photos of Pine Ridge Reservation see Aaron Huey's NYTimes photo journal from last year: http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/20/behind-22/
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