You see on trhe "Rez" any Native American, especially a girl, who excelled in school was seen as uppity, as being stuck up, "acting better than us".
And the pressure was telling. I met with the girl for hours to try to bolster her spirits. Our counselor did so as well, literally helping the girl question by question to fill out her financial aid forms.
The girls mother came in and we talked for hours as well,as to what we could do. The girl was depressed, angry, disorientated even and scared. She had never been off the "Rez", had barely travellel at all. She was a local Native American, had attended the school district all of her life.
And she was a winner. She was one of those I met in my 35 years in education who you just knew was going to do great things.
So graduation came, she was Valedictorian and she prepared to attend Yuba College and end her "Rez" stay.
I retired that year. In the fall I received a letter from her mother, thanking me for the countless hours of counseling, and informing me her daughter had at the last minute changed her mind, had got a boyfriend and moved to Willows. At least she was out of here the mother said. She hoped her daughter would enroll in Yuba College in the winter semester.
A year later the letter came. The girl had hung herself. She was gone. Yet another Native American statistic, of a number that shoulld shame us all, more Native Americans commit suicide by percentage than any other group in America. So a flame for the future, a hope for us all, was extinguished at 20 years old.
This last week I did a WASC in a remote area of California (I won't give the location for reasons you will soon know). The next to last day of the visit, the Principal came to us and told us the visit would be very different. A "sporatic student", a Native American sophomore who lived on the "Rez" had hung herself. The girl had drug issues was all the Principal said.
The girl was 15 years old.
A little over a century ago, this country deliberately stole billions of acres of land from countless Native American tribes. Then a system of genocide killed millions. The ones who were left, were "civilized" with a system of reservations, forced into inhuman conditions, and then took the children away to be "Americanized". Carlillle Indian School put five year olds into uniforms, locked the children in dorms, with no mothers and little adult supervision, beat the children if spoke their native language, and produced Jim Thorpe, America's Greatest Athlete.
Later, his coach, Pop Warner, moved on to Stanford, who changed its mascot to Indians. When I played there I was an Indian....Stanford changed it mascot to Cardinal because the history you are reading here, and some alumni still are upset. We had a African American quarterback, who the publicity department put a Indian Headress on, and made him into a Chief as quarterback. He wasn't Native American. And the "song dollies", all white, put on short little skirts with Native American logos on them, the tom tom would sound, and here came the wild Indians.
Later, when I found out the whole story that I was part Cherokee it made me ill! And today we still have the Redskins, the Braves, the Utes, the Seminoles; etc.
Meanwhile a wasteland of cultural destruction resulted in generations of alcoholism, drug use and yes suicide. The noble savage and brave warriors the cartoons white culture put on the sides of football helmets, were in reality living in poverty, hopelessness and yes, suicide!
And, if it could be worse, then the dominiant culture discovered oil, took even more land, and plunged us into an industrial age that has loaded the atmosphere with CO2, cut all the trees down, and today it will be 95 degrees in Redding, California in April, and it hasn't rained for weeks.
Death, destruction, hate, genocide, environmental genocide; you name it, the white dominiant culture did it. And they are still doing it!
Fifteen years old and hung from a door in her "Rez" room. Twenty years old and dead of a deliberate overdose and she was the top graduate in her class, with a limitless future.
You see, that is what it did, the American Holocaust, it killed the future for millions of Native Ameircans:including my great great grandfather who was lynched because he was a Cherokee and married a white woman: and they made the children watch.
Several Native American Chiefs talked about this tragedy and foretold the furture. They speak of a Reckoning, a time when nature and the Great Mystery, reacted to the holocaust, and strikes back at the invaders.
I have grandchildren. I don't want them hurt no matter what. They are a small amount mixed blood, with Cherokee history as part of them.
But the dominant white culture continues in its headlong rush to reckoning. Republicans don't believe in global climate change. They scoff at any laws to build human beings rather than Apple watches. They cut education. They cut aid to the poor. And they have cut assistance to Native Americans always....Democrats have done this too. It as if the dominant culture does the same thing over and over expecting a different result, but their greed blinds them to the enormous danger!
Reservations and Racherias are not very nice places. They are underfunded and underserved. Only the Casino movement has helped put some money into education, health and welfare, but only for a small minority: and even they are fighting amongst themselves for the bounty, as their white masters stand back and chuckle.
But someone else is not chuckling. The Great Mystery is not laughing. And the reckoning is coming for all of us, a living hell on earth, of wars, starvation and ultimate the extinctiion of us all
I hope those two beautiful souls are in a better place. I know we aren't!
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