The Erasure of Native America

Written By Mindy Lu

By Jaike SpottedWolf

Three Affiliated Tribes (Mandan, Hidatsu, Arikara)

Sunrise Nutrition is happy to welcome guest blogger, Jaike SpottedWolf, to share her experience as a Native, the continued trauma and oppression faced by Natives in this country, and the place for Native lives in the current, heightened focus on systemic oppression and racism.  Jaike, we welcome your voice!

As America wrestles with its history of oppression and systemic racism it might serve the country to remember that we have left one stone unturned. What became of the Indigenous on this land?

My father.

My father.

My White mother could hide my Native identity from the world, because I was light skinned, but she couldn’t hide me from my father’s generational trauma. He was Assiniboine, Mandan, Hidatsu, and Arikara Sioux. He was also an all-star basketball player who lettered in high school and went to junior college on scholarship, yet he died slumped over in a chair on his mother’s porch when his body gave in to the battering ram of decades of active addiction and alcoholism. There were many attempts at sobriety, year after year, but he finally succumbed to the colonizer’s wish to self-eradicate and vanish into the spirit world; remembered only to some rez members and family, lost to the rest of the world.

A peek into what life looked like for him, and what it looks like for my nieces and nephews, siblings and stepparents, explains how Natives are somehow absent from the picture that makes up the current American diaspora.

Native Americans die due to police violence at a rate 12% higher than other populations. The suicide rate among Native Americans is the highest of all demographics in this country (22.1%, or 8 percentage points above the overall rate). Childhood poverty (29.2%), teenage pregnancy (29.4%), domestic violence (48% for native women, 41% for native men), and the high school dropout rate (10.1%, 2 full points above Hispanic youth and 4 points above black youth). Natives account for 2.3% of prisoners in this country out of a nationwide total population of approximately 5 million. I’ll let you guess who leads in homelessness.

We have the highest rates for every race to the bottom, but ask a friend to name a native cultural icon and they likely can’t outside of war heroes from the 1800s without using Google. No Native Oprah, Kardashian, Dan Rather, Beyonce, Einstein or Obama.

How?! How is it that we have some of the best basketball players on reservations but you can’t name any famous Native players on NBA teams?

Memories of Powwow.

Memories of Powwow.

Memories of Powwow.
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In March, before COVID shut us down, I directed a play about the residential school system in early 1900s America. Actors of every other race were plentiful indeed, but I couldn’t fill a cast of 13 Native Americans in an area where 15 reservations dot the crest of the Puget Sound. Do natives not want to act? That doesn’t make sense — storytelling is hereditary for us.

But Natives haven’t been brought in to the White spaces of pop culture, fashion, finance, travel, theater, STEM, or industry. The list is endless where public knowledge is concerned and all to the detriment of what it’s like to try to find an identity when the culture you were born into has been historically annihilated and the culture of the White world doesn’t accept you for your pagan ways.

While race talks have at least been on the radar in city councils, colleges, board meetings and in HRs around the country for decades, White Americans seem to have a strange — almost abstinent approach to a discussion sharing the incredible challenges plaguing Natives. If I talk to people and bring light to those issues, reactions are flat, even if sometimes well meaning. “How terrible — these things never should have happened to the people that were here before us, I don’t know what I can do to help.” And it is there the conversation ceases. No round tables, no community meetings, no parent groups come together, no protests marching the streets to address the crimes Native Americans face every day. Is it paralytic shame? Is it guilt? Fear that keeps everyone tight lipped?

Me with my Aunt Neva.

Me with my Aunt Neva.

Natives still (and justifiably so) have a distrust of white saviors who try to swoop in to help. They know the cost: give up your identity and we’ll give you White medicine instead. But the Native system is allergic. We used to heal each other with food, with song, with purpose, and intention. We don’t understand psych meds, 24-hour holds, jail time or praying to a god who lives inside four walls and paying money for his love.

Do White folx know that sovereignty affects real estate on reservations, with the federal government intervening every single step of the way? New developments can take up to five years thanks to the excessive permitting, legal issues, and byzantine financing processes that block opportunity and prosperity. What about the residential school system and the kidnapping, rape and deculturalization of thousands of Native children in the late 1800’s well into the 1960’s? Do they know Natives were forced to stop speaking their language, wearing their traditional clothing, dancing, hunting, praying to their god in attempts to modernize and enculturate them into the White way? Does White culture know that Indian Health Services forced sterilization onto 3,406 Native women in the ’70s, essentially killing thousands and thousands of future Native children? Does anybody ask…where are the Natives?

With my sister, Stacie, at my naming ceremony.

With my sister, Stacie, at my naming ceremony.

From the angle myself and my fellow Natives stand from, White America still seems invested in perpetuating the symptoms because accountability feels too hard and too uncomfortable. That shame, guilt, or fear must inform some notion that Natives will somehow take back what White America has claimed for itself. The only cost to White America is the deeply rooted injury to Natives that remains a gaping and festering wound. It seems — if we don’t talk about it nothing will have to change for the sake of White America’s comfort, so White mouths stay stubborn and silent. While Native mouths disintegrate slowly into the background of a land once theirs.

Because the conversation is hard, disinformation and ignorance around Native culture prevails. Can most Americans name the tribes in their local regions? Can they name the local traditions within those tribes? Do they realize that not every native dances in powwow or lives in tipis? Are those local tribes celebrated in those regions? Or do Natives feel the burn of insolence and bigotry for being who and where they are, how they look and what they do?

Natives aren’t commonly discussed in the dialogue for equanimity, status or reparations. Those biases that persist don’t help our cause. “Natives don’t wanna work, they just wanna live off of percaps and casino money,” or “the Redskins weren’t an offensive team name,” even if the term was coined as a hateful slur by White men when they watched the blood run down faces of Natives that had been scalped for small bounties late in the 19th century.

A guy on the Seattle Vintage social media site told me Natives should be grateful that White people brought technology and a civilized way of life when I strongly rejected the sharing of a picture of an old pin that read “Scalp The Indians.” He also stated that we need to remember history so we don’t repeat it. A phrase I’ve heard endlessly in this lifetime.

The 17% of Native Americans who don’t have running water in the Navajo Nation could care less about how technology forgot about them.

Natives on reservations throughout the land are dying at exponential rates faster per capita than other demographics due to COVID; and…outright racism.

There may be a month celebrating Native American history, but how many books are passed around between friend groups then? Is there an influx of storytelling about native leaders and historical figures on social media? Are there parades? Do kids bring home the art projects they made in honor of natives that month?

Me, present day

Me, present day, post treatment.

The very Constitution that Americans swear by is based loosely on the constitution of the Iroquois tribe. How many times has America celebrated the Iroquois on July 4?

Sacagawea was kidnapped from her tribe as a teenage girl, sold to a white man and forced to lead Lewis and Clark to the Pacific Northwest. She was their interpreter, navigator, and the expert on the land they would eat, drink, and forage from. She led them all while carrying an infant on her back.

It is largely due to her guidance that not one man was lost on that expedition.

May 5th is the National Day of Awareness for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls and Two Spirits — or MMIWG2S. Native women are dying at rates seven times higher than other races.

For the Sacagaweas — wolakhota. And for everyone else — do the work.

Stop the genocide.

Over time IBPOC have spent their physical safety, emotional wellbeing, and spiritual energy trying to share with the world exactly the conditions they exist in oppressively through systems of racism built from colonization. Writing this piece and participating in consistent activism has no doubt cost me all of these elements. 

Should you feel inspired to do so, you can donate to the Native American Rights Fund, or to me personally for any learning this essay may have offered you.

Venmo- @Jaike-SpottedWolf

Cashapp- $JaikeSpottedWolf

Edited to add*
To the BIPOC community — I still stand with you, for you, and in allegiance to the BLM cause. This essay doesn’t aim to diminish those efforts in any way, shape, or form. I will take more cans of pepper spray to the face, continue marching until my heels bleed, and fight for you until days end if that is what it takes to win justice and liberty for every fucking human in this country.

Mindy Lu
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