Opinion
Shutting down the Trail of Tears
Eric Wang, Cavalier Daily Opinion Columnist
AMIDST all th attention given to Terri Schiavo, it was easy last week to
overlook America's second deadliest school shooting in its history. Jeff
Weise, a high-school student on a Minnesota Native American reservation,
gunned down nine people, mostly schoolmates, before killing himself.
While the Schiavo story is sad, the case of Jeff Weise is arguably more
significant as a reminder of an enormous social problem we often neglect.
The issue is not firearms, as some gun control activists will try to make
it; Weise wrested his weapons from his grandfather, a police officer. Nor
is the issue youth alienation per se. Rather, the Minnesota murders were a
case study of the dangers of what The Washington Post, in a news
article,called "a long tradition of self-enforced isolation" on Native
American reservations.
In our national dialogue about race, much ado is made about the continuing
inequalities between whites, blacks and Hispanics. However, the disparities
in respect to Native Americans are far greater. According to the Post, the
violent crime rate among Native Americans is twice as high as that of
blacks, while Native American youths commit suicide at twice the rate of
other groups. Native Americans are by far the poorest ethnic group, with
half the average income of other Americans; the unemployment rate on
Weise's reservation was 40 percent. Native Americans also experience an
alcohol fatality rate that is a whopping 670 percent higher than other
groups. It was amidst this background of despair that Weise snapped.
Americans cannot help but feel some sense of moral responsibility for this
plight. The "Trail of Tears," referring specifically to the 1838 forced
relocation of Cherokees, is also a term that applies to all modern Native
American history up to this day. Through slaughters and disease, European
settlers literally decimated the Native-American population from the
millions in the sixteenth century to a few hundred thousand in the early
twentieth century.
Nothing we do today, however, can possibly restore Native Americans to
their status before colonization. Returning the territory Americans have
claimed, beyond that which already has been set aside for reservations, is
impossible given the way our country has developed. While paying
reparations will ease the immediate poverty, it cannot solve the long-term
structural dysfunction on Native American reservations. Even the lucrative
gaming industries some tribes have developed are of dubious value; a
society cannot gamble its way past its pathologies.
The problem among Native American reservations is an extreme example of a
problem that plagues all ethnic enclaves. Amidst a majority culture and
society, self-segregated segments cannot succeed. One Native American
blasted national politicians' silence in the wake of the Minnesota
shootings. "From all over the world, we are getting letters of condolence …
but the so-called Great White Father in Washington hasn't said or done a
thing," The Washington Post quoted her as saying. But, according to the
Post, the Minnesota tribe rejected federal programs, and one tribal member
defiantly stated, "We have just not ever been too crazy about white people
coming around the reservation."
It is this kind of marginalizing attitude that discourages reservation
residents from participating in the national economy and encourages the
rest of the nation to ignore them. Under "tribal sovereignty"
self-government agreements, the reservations have no stake in the national
political system, and vice versa. On the campaign trail last year, when
President Bush was asked about the issue, he rambled, "Tribal sovereignty
means just that; it's sovereign," before tacitly admitting he didn't have a
clue as to what he was talking about.
Native Americans should not be forced to assimilate, as they were in the
late nineteenth century. However, assimilation should also not be the dirty
word it has become in our Orwellian, multiculturalist, politically correct
society. Rather than continue to imprison individuals in the ethnic
enclaves of our de facto apartheid, we should embrace assimilation as the
way to shut down the trail of tears for individuals of all physical races.
Eric Wang's column appears Wednesdays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be
reached at Eric Wang
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Last updated on April 05, 2005