What Still Happens to the Real Minorities

Becket Adams' report barely skims the surface of the situation, but it's worth reading in detail because it shows what happens to real minority groups in the United States today.

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/03/21/sequestration-why-are-special-interest-programs-gettng-funding-but-the-crucial-indian-health-service-faces-major-cuts/

Quick run-down for foreign readers: There used to be dozens of different Native American nations--nobody knows how many, because there was no clear definition of which groups were separate nations. Some whole groups went extinct after exposure to European diseases. Some, notably including Pocahontas's people, lost their cultural identity; Pocahontas's actual descendants are scattered among different existing ethnic groups but their original nation is extinct.

Four Native American nations can still be described as large and active: Iroquois, Cherokee, Dakota, Navajo. Of these groups, the Cherokee can also be described as affluent, because the formerly unwanted territory reserved for them happened to be rich in petroleum. Other Native American groups are not affluent. Dakota communities have held the title of "poorest town in America" for many years. (It's interesting that the dance outfits cowboy movies have taught us to associate with Native Americans are based on pictures of nineteenth-century Dakota costumes.) While Cherokee history is delicious with irony, the history of other Native American nations is just plain depressing.

(Is this why U.S. citizens who claim a Native American ancestor somewhere so often don't know who their ancestor was but assume that s/he was Cherokee? Partly, I'm sure. Cherokee history is definitely more fun to read. Also, affiliation with any Native American nation involves some responsibilities, e.g. financial support for your tribal elders, and many people who may actually be the third or fourth cousins of some American yuppie are living in poverty.)

Since Becket Adams has so far checked with only Cherokee, Dakota, and Navajo informants, he's not even telling us what this administration's brutal use of poor people as a "Washington Monument Ploy" implies for the minority of the minority, e.g. Salish or Yuchi or Apache or other smaller and less wealthy Native American groups. But it's not good.

I think our President needs to be called out on this. His Anglo-American mother apparently told him that she was part Cherokee--many people in Oklahoma are--but no Cherokee relatives claimed him, even when he became President, and it turns out that his remote maternal-line ancestor belonged to one of those smaller, poorer Native American groups. Has our President traced any of his actual distant cousins yet? In sparing frivolous studies from budget cuts and allowing poor people to suffer, what has our President done to his own kinfolk?

And for the rest of us...y'know how this blog usually mentions a charitable cause each day, in case you're feeling munificent? Have you ever visited one of those trading posts on the reservations--other than the Cherokee ones? This might be a good time to do that. Get some facts. Find out who may really need your help during the next few months, while the Loony Left are angling to let people different from them starve in order to scream about the "need" for more pork for their own pet projects.

At least, if you've been in the habit of calling left-wingers "liberals," stop doing that now. Liberal and left-wing are two different things. Becket Adams just proved that.