This blog is dedicated to you, the wonderful indigenous people of America, The Native Americans

To enter into a new land, which offers freedom and opportunities, is a blessing.
To contribute to its destruction by killing its people
and robbing their lands is a sin.
May those who sin be stopped before it’s too late.
For there may not be anything left,
for the future generation of this land to call their own.

A friend of mine the other day said to me, ‘You know Rain, you should write a blog about the Native Americans. You’ve always admired them. And at least all those Americans in favor of the war in Iraq and Lebanon will remember that their addiction for killing another race has been running in their veins from generation to generation. First they tried to destroy the Native Americans and African Americans. Now they’ve gone one-step further, they’ve gone international, waging war on countries who they feel are a danger to them and threatening to stop aid to countries who try to defy them ”. I didn’t agree with everything my friend said, but one thing I did agree was that, yes, I should write a blog dedicated to the Native Americans, whom I have always considered to be true surviors.

“Most scientists agree that the human history of North America began when the ancient ancestors of modern Native Americans made their way across a land bridge that once spanned the Bering Sea and connected northeastern Asia to North America. However, some Native Americans believe their ancestors originated in the Americas, citing gaps in the archaeological record and oral accounts of their origins that have been passed down through generations” (© 1993-2006 Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved).

Who do you agree with, the scientists or the Native Americans? I tend to agree with the Native Americans. Not only because I’ve been fascinated with them and their way of life ever since I was a child, but also because as I gathered the research necessary to write this blog, I learnt so very much of how these people have had to suffer and lose everything which was rightly their own. I sometimes wonder if the reason scientists had tried to prove that the Native Americans did not originate from America, was so that they could show proof that their land was never forcibly taken from them, and therefore they too would be considered just settlers and not the true people of the land.

It’s one thing having your land forcibly taken from you, but when it comes to the destruction of your race, that’s immorally wrong and cruel.

“European settlement of the Americas drastically reduced the Native American population. The European conquest was primarily a biological one. Explorers and colonists brought a wide range of deadly communicable diseases directly from crowded European cities. These diseases spread quickly among Native Americans, who had no immunity to them” (© 1993-2006 Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved).

“Although the introduction of new diseases was the main cause of the rapid decline of indigenous populations, other reasons were genocidal warfare, massive relocations and removals of Native Americans from their homelands, and the destruction of traditional ways of life. With white encroachment on their land, Native Americans no longer had access to their traditional hunting, gathering, and farming areas. Their subsistence patterns broke down, leading to malnutrition and greater susceptibility to disease” (© 1993-2006 Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved).

“By 1900, these factors, along with increased mortality and decreased fertility, had reduced the Native American population to its low point of only about 250,000 people in the United States and about 100,000 in Canada” (© 1993-2006 Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved).

Native Americans still suffer today because of unemployment, lack of a proper education, lack of proper housing, health facilities. Take a look at the following facts by the Native American Emergency Relief if you don’t believe me.

Read These Shocking Indian Facts:

· Poverty on Indian Reservations includes homes without ovens and children with almost no clothes--regardless of season. Thousands of Indians barely survive. They are a “Third World” country right here in the U.S.

· Thousands of Native American children cry themselves to sleep every night . . . just because they are hungry.

· Average family incomes are far below poverty levels.

· Deadly diseases--including TB and diabetes--are common. The average lifespan is 46 years.

· Native American teen suicides run over four times the national average.

· Thousands of youngsters have little food, no protection from summer's heat or winter's cold, and no hope.

· Child abuse and spousal abuse are almost epidemic.

· Native American youngsters face a bleak future without food, medical care or hope. We provide these essentials; so Indian children will be more productive citizens for our country and their tribes.

And another thing, when the Native Americans were being killed by the thousands, no one knew the meaning of the word “GENOCIDE”. “Only when white people exterminated each other did the language of genocide begin to be defined, they did not care to discuss it when black and red peoples were the victims”. (http://www.iwchildren.org/calif.htm) Do you find this hard to believe? I know I don’t.

Something else I find to be shocking is the fact that if intermarriages take place between Native Americans and “nonnative people”, their children cannot be registered as a Native American. “Those who marry outside their race or tribe will have children who are no longer given the acknowledgment of being of their parent's tribe. Registered/enrolled Native Americans are forced to marry inside their tribe or face the extinction of their tribe and the termination of all things connected to that tribe. Native Americans are forced to be racist against all others never loving or marrying another or they become extinct as a people. After a decade of work this was the failed goal of Hitler, but it still remains the goal of America after centuries (http://www.iwchildren.org/calif.htm).

But what I still find hard to understand is why “only registered Jews were allowed to pass their inheritance on to their children” and not the Native Americans?

And here are two very sad facts that I found at http://www.iwchildren.org/calif.htm:
A Native survivor of the California terrorist attacks relates her experience:

1)"About ten o'clock in the morning, some white men came. They killed my grandfather and my mother and father. I saw them do it. I was a big girl at that time. Then they killed my baby sister and cut her heart out and threw it in the brush where I ran and hid...I didn't know what to do. I was so scared that I guess I just hid there a long time with my little sister's heart in my hands."


2) The 1849 agreement between California territorial and federal governments provided $1,000,000 for the arming and supply of persons who would seek out and destroy Native American families. The campaign promised all "plunder" and horses taken from the Indians, which will be the vigilante's bonus.

I never realized that the California and federal governments, 157 years ago, would have so much money. What a lot of money to spend to wipe out an entire human race.

I hope someday very soon, that the children of these wonderful people will get a chance to get a proper education so that when they are all grown up, they will be able to uplift the standards of their community before it is too late.
After all, their ancestors did shed their precious blood on this earth so that they, the next generation could exist. I hope the blood they spilled was not in vain.

Rain