As Americans rise up from coast to coast in support of social justice, it’s enthralling to see the nation demand progress in addressing the institutionalized racism that has plagued our country since its founding.
The heartbeat for meaningful change is growing stronger by the day. Americans of all ethnicities and ages are coming together as one to demonstrate our nation’s finest values of equality, justice and equal opportunity for everyone in our nation.
This is a historic moment and is a ripe time to not only take on the lingering malignancy of slavery but to face another of our nation’s foundational sins — the destruction and disempowerment of Native Americans.
As Americans talk about the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, systemic racism and lack of access to equal resources that affect the black community, the same things are true of the indigenous peoples of the U.S. other than this: their hardships have been largely shuttered from the public eye.
While blacks endured the sin of slavery, Native Americans endured the sin of genocide. And today, both sets of Americans continue to suffer racial hatred in forms that include systemic inequality in the judicial system, police brutality and brutal neglect of communities.
For Native Americans, as with blacks and other people of color, that neglect is reflected horribly in the effects of the coronavirus epidemic on native populations. Indigenous communities are suffering a massive blow from the pandemic — the per-capita infection rate among our neighbors the Navajo is higher than any U.S. state, and health officials have identified 500 tribes with higher-than-average rates.
To put the Navajos’ disparity in context, consider that the nation of about 170,000 members is roughly one-tenth the size of West Virginia yet has more cases than that state.
Why? Experts cite chronic underfunding of the federal Indian Health Service budget, delays in the delivery of federal relief funds and social determinants that place Native Americans — many of whom live in remote areas with limited access to high-quality health care, nutritious food supplies and so on — at higher risk.
Meanwhile, native populations are systematically disempowered through voter suppression and gerrymandering. As outlined in a recent report from the Native American Rights Fund, those efforts include intentionally inconvenient placement of polling sites, voter intimidation tactics like stationing heavy law enforcement presence outside of polls, and refusal to provide voter education on how to register and cast ballots.
Indigenous peoples also continue to suffer appalling inequity under the law. For years, national lawmakers have dithered amid an epidemic of violence against Native American women, among whom the murder rate is up to 10 times higher than the national average. The Department of Justice also reported that more than half of Native American women have suffered sexual assault, and a third have been raped — a rate 2.5 times higher than that among white women.
Yet with the exception of leaders like Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nev., who co-sponsored a bill to address the issue, lawmakers have done little to provide equal protection for women or anyone else in native communities.
The dire situation on American reservations is a social justice issue that must be addressed, but those communities tend to be so remote and their populations so small that they’re a forgotten victimized people.
But make no mistake, they’re passionate about lending their voices to the call for social justice. Like their fellow Americans nationwide, Native Americans are actively campaigning for Black Lives Matter.
Today’s protests properly focus on the specifics of police violence against black Americans. As time passes, the issues will broaden to include many issues of social justice. When that happens, the mistreatment of Native Americans must be a central part of the reform conversation.