America's Treatment of Native Americans

The United States of America is known as the nation of equality, the nation of freedom, the nation of utmost safety and protection. It began as a vast, empty land occupied by the indigenous people who built their lives thriving off of it – their crops, their homes, their clothes, their whole lives revolved around using the resources they had around them. However, when the first settlers came over to explore this seemingly unoccupied land, they ended up kicking the natives out and calling it their own. Native Americans endured years of torture, rape, racism, discrimination, arguably every form of evil imaginable, by the foreign invaders who took over their lands – even to this day. And yet we still call ourselves the nation of freedom if we ignore the rights and issues of those whose land we stole in the first place?

Native Americans suffer the highest rates of alcoholism, depression, suicide, and more compared to any other minority group…plausibly as a result of our actions as a nation. In Sherman Alexie’s piece “Because My Father Always Said He Was the Only Indian Who Saw Jimi Hendrix Play ‘The Star Spangled-Banner’ At Woodstock,” he brings to light how white society has affected life on the Indian reservations. Alexie talks about how a young Native American boy’s parents constantly drank and strayed away from the native culture, especially his dad, as a result of the impact white society had on him. The father’s reliance on alcohol is brought up when the narrator says, “I was born a goofy reservation mixed drink, and my father needed me just as much as he needed every other kind of drink” (Alexie 27). In that time, “all the hippies were trying to be Indians,” yet he was never the perfect Indian nor the perfect white man – caught in the empty space between what he is and what he is not (Alexie 24). Eventually the stresses placed upon the father became too much and caused him to leave his family and seek a life of isolation on his own.

We stole aspects of the Native American culture and called ourselves hippies. We stole their clothing to use for Halloween costumes. We supplied them with alcohol in exchange for vegetables, and left them completely isolated with no form of counseling or help when they started abusing it. We caused their families to break apart and relationships to become strained. We ridiculed and abused these people, yet celebrate their culture by adapting it into our society and still discriminating against them.  How can we possibly hold our nation to such high standards when we treat the people whose soil we are stepping on like animals? Like anything other than human? Like everything they do is wrong, from the way they dress to their outlooks on life, yet when we do the same things it suddenly becomes “innovation,” “mainstream,” and “trendy”? Americans should be disgraced.