Black lives matter. This is correct and should be highlighted everywhere and the push for change and equality must continue, both in the UK, US and other nations where inequality for black people and other ethnic minorities occur. Australia, South Africa, India, China, and Myanmar among many other nations. But do Native American lives matter? Seemingly not. The more one researches these subjects, the more the individual must be increasingly horrified. The USA has a long and horrific history with the native American. Never fully recognising them as a people, let alone as human beings! This is noted in the Declaration of Independence (July 1776) and in Founding Fathers, such as Thomas Jefferson, third president of the nation.
Even today, in the mid of anger and uprising against killings and murders of black people at the hands of white law enforcement, Native American issues are continuously being ignored.
Further dispossession of various kinds against Native Americans continues into the present, although these current dispossessions, especially in terms of land, rarely make major news headlines in the country (e.g., the Lenape people’s recent fiscal troubles and subsequent land grab by the State of New Jersey), and often even fail to make it to headlines in the localities in which they occur. Through concessions for industries such as oil, mining and timber and through division of land from the Allotment Act forward, these concessions have raised problems of consent, exploitation of low royalty rates, environmental injustice, and gross mismanagement of funds held in trust, resulting in the loss of at least $10–40 billion.
The Worldwatch Institute notes that 317 reservations are threatened by environmental hazards, whilst Western Shoshone land has been subjected to more than 1,000 nuclear explosions. There are, probably, people, both Native American and white American, protesting, lobbying and fighting on behalf of the Native American cause, through legal channels and other means. But it is a largely unheard and unrecognised struggle, mainly unacknowledged by the mass American Public and definitely by the wider world.
It won’t affect most of us, who are rapped up in our daily struggles and lives, but it is something I wanted to highlight as we go forward in our lives and, prehaps some of us, attempt to make the world a ‘better’ place. Thanks for taking the time to read and maybe listen.
I fight for the minority, because I am one of them: a disabled person! Have a wonderful day. Thanks, tony :).
