The Mass Genocide of Native Americans has Never Stopped
The fight that began back when Columbus landed, is the same fight that my tribe and all others cannot win. We are a dying breed of human beings due to mass genocide and government corruption that continues to this day.
For almost everyone who does not live on a reservation, clean drinking water isn’t something that you struggle for. On the reservations, their water is being poisoned every day due to highly harmful, abandoned uranium mines that can be found on all reservations throughout the United States. The Dakota Access Pipeline is a great example of reservation’s water being contaminated by the U.S government.
The pipeline was made to run from the Bakken oil fields of North Dakota and Southern Illinois which means that the pipeline would have to cross under Missouri and the Mississippi Rivers. Also, the pipeline would have to cross under Lake Oahe by the Standing Rock Indian Reservation.
As of today, the construction of this pipeline has not stopped. As a result, thousands of people will get sick and hundreds can potentially die from the harmful substances in the reservation’s water.
This world is especially dangerous for our Native American and First Nations women.
Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) is a human-rights crisis that affects indigenous communities throughout Canada and the United States.
In 2016, known incidents of missing and murdered indigenous women reached above 5,000 cases. However, only 116 cases were logged into the DOJ database. Between the years 2005 and 2009, 67% of U.S attorneys refused to prosecute native community matters involving sexual abuse. On some reservations, 96% of all sexually violent crimes against Native women are committed by non-native people according to the National Institute of Justice and the Urban Indian Health Institute.
Speaking of the law and so-called justice, “Native Americans are more likely to be killed by police than any other racial or ethnic groups,” according to the CDC. The mortality rate of Native Americans who are killed by law enforcement is 12% higher than African Americans and three times the mortality rate of whites who are killed by law enforcement.
In our “woke” society today, it is surprising that almost no one seems to talk about Native Americans and First Nations people. No one bats an eye to the fact that living conditions on Indian reservations are ‘comparable to Third World’ or that “there are 90,000 homeless or under-housed Indian families, and that 30% of Indian housing is overcrowded and less than 50% of it is connected to a public sewer,” according to Partnership with Native Americans Inc (PWNA). All of this mistreatment is happening to our indigenous peoples and it has been happening for way too long. Don’t our Native American tribes deserve to be equal with everyone else?
