Handsome young man with long hair in an outdoor setting
Scott Griessel
Posted
By RON HUTCHCRAFT
They're in all the paintings of the First Thanksgiving. And all the season's grade school plays.
Native Americans. The First Americans.
We invited them to dinner that historic day.
Then we forgot them.
And today their monumental battle to survive is nowhere on our radar. Take the suicides of young Native Americans, for example. Happening again and again in Native communities. With a suicide rate at least three times of the rest of the nation — skyrocketing to seven and ten times greater in some areas.
If suicides were happening like this in your community or mine, it would be Page One. It's happening all over in indigenous communities — and no one notices.
The same is true of the staggering rates of sexual abuse, sexual violence against women, drug and alcohol addictions.
But we never hear the cries. This country's Original People are its Forgotten People.
And its almost Lost People. There were an estimated ten million Native Americans here when Columbus came. By 1900, there were 200,000.
After near annihilation, the surviving Native children were shipped across the country to "boarding schools" to make them "white." Many were sexually abused. Families were shattered.
They lost their land. They lost their language. They lost their culture. They lost their lives.
Broken. Grieving. Forgotten.
Oh, the reminders of who was here first are all over the land — from a river called Mississippi to a city named Chicago to states known as Massachusetts or Ohio.
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