Brown Dot in a Sea of White

               I live in Montana, my husband and 3 children are black. Why is that relevant? Well... if you live in Montana then you are very aware of why that is relevant. According to U.S. Census Bureau Black or African American people make up .6% of the states population. Needless to say we weren't expecting a warm welcome when we moved here but much to our delighted surprise Montana's have been nothing but great to our family and we love it here. Now, that being said the main minority here is Native American and Montana's are not so nice to or fond of them in glaringly apparent ways; much the same as the south feels about Black people, Montana feels about Indigenous people. It's sad and 99.9% of the time they cannot see past their ingrained racism and prejudice to acknowledge the root of the problem, so much like the south, they write the entire population off as lost causes and treat them as second class citizens. It's truly heart breaking to witness, especially considering this was their land first, we all but eradicated them and took it. 

                I've found myself having the conversation about the root cause of Native American suffering one too many times so today I've decided to bang out some of my frustration on this keyboard. The main concern up here seems to be that they receive monthly checks and were "given" land so they need to better themselves by themselves and stop looking for a hand up. Wow... To me that only speaks of their extreme privilege that is so deeply ingrained in who they are they can't even begin to believe it exists. **sigh** Ok, I'm just going to brush the surface today, I don't want to go too deep into the woods because this post would turn into a novel; here goes. 

                Indigenous People need to be allowed to develop the land and federal funding needs to be directed to provide that development not limited to but to include basic infrastructure that literally costs millions of dollars to put in place. They need basic working plumbing and electricity run to and through the reservation and things like **gasp** modern updated Internet and cell towers so they can operate in the real world. To implement these things cost way, way, way, more than the nations as a whole are allotted and it needs to be done in one lump sum or the federal government needs to tack the bill onto our already huge deficit and find the money like they do for every war we decide to jump into.Tribal leaders do the best they can with what they have and that money doesn't stretch nearly far enough. I understand people are upset that Natives receive monthly money from the government but to be honest the government is getting off cheap considering the millions they murdered, the complete way of life they ended and entire nation they stole. Allowing them to live on their land undisturbed is sub par at best. We need to take an ACTIVE interest in righting the wrongs we’ve committed not just with Indigenous culture but also with other minorities we’ve wronged. Until we as Americans take ownership of the mistakes our nation has made, acknowledge them and actively work to fix them we will continue to treat minorities in this nation as second class citizens, as if they are guests we “allow” to be here. No. We are better than that, we are AMERICA. We are land of the free, home of the brave, we are a beacon to those who are lost and have nowhere to turn.

                It is not enough to allow Indigenous people a plot of land, that does not right the wrong we committed. Nor is the stipend we pay them sufficient to wash the blood from our hands. We need to work with the tribes and provide infrastructure to their reservations just as if we would if we established a new state. They need to be set up correctly to be allowed the chance to be their own successful nation in the 21^st century. They need a federal budget similar to the one states get and yes I’m aware they don’t pay taxes but until we’re concerned with massive companies worth billions of dollars, like Amazon, (who make a huge percentage of that money from Americans) NOT paying their fair share of taxes; miss me with your tax propaganda. You use their lack of paying taxes as a shield to hide your deep rooted racism because that’s what it boils down to. If you don’t enough to rage and picket in the streets about Whitey McBalderson Good ol’ Boy Jeff Bezos being one of the richest men in the world LEGALLY getting away with not paying taxes and you don’t mind our orange Commander in Chief bragging that he would be stupid if he paid his fair share of taxes; please have several seats. This article isn’t for you because you’re clearly too innately stupid to possess the capability of looking outside of your own reality and the propaganda bullshit that’s been shoveled to you for your entire life and dig down to the root of a problem. After all, isn’t the only way you can fix a problem to dig down and discover what caused it? Otherwise you’re just wiping the top layer of puss off, putting on a clean bandage then strutting around like you just saved the day… and that shit is how sepsis happens. But I digress…

                Similarly, we brought over slaves from Africa and exposed who we are at our core which is an utter monster, evident by the way we treated them for centuries. We took their babies and fed them to alligators, raped their men, women and children, beat them bloody for daring to look up, sold them like sacks of dirt then fought a war to keep them in chains. Yet somehow we feel vindicated because we eventually set them free and let them look us in the eye on occasion and only killed a few of them for drinking from the same water fountain as us or not sitting in the right seat on the bus. Our schools don’t even teach Redlining so as a whole our nation is completely ignorant of the fact that even once we allowed their freedom WE created the ghettos then spit on them for not being able to get out. Not all of us are born with bootstraps and our failure to acknowledge that is privilege in itself. 

               It is our responsibility as Americans, as the ones who hold the power to acknowledge and fix our mistakes. We cannot expect to bridge the racial divide and to live in harmony if we are unwilling to put in the work, friends. Our nation has cancer, it has for a long time. If we want to cure that cancer and move towards the amazing hodgepodge, great nation we could be then we have to dig to the root of that cancer and burn it out. We owe it to ourselves to be as good as we claim to be but more than that we owe it to the entire populations that we've attempted genocide against, that we've committed atrocities against. We do. Until 'We the people" is truly inclusive America will never be great, we will always be hiding our ugly face behind a mask of benevolence.