Are we at the end or the beginning of our minorities project?
Prague 2007: Common Ground
I tried not to think anything about Native Americans before I came to United States. I was trying not to have any preconceptions, or prejudice. I was hoping that I could make my own opinion, my own image of Native Americans, based on what I will see and hear during our project – in the country, where Native Americans live daily life. So far for me, the only “Indians” I had seen were the skillful musicians playing beautiful music on crowded streets in Prague, with tourists buying their CDs, or the mysterious notions from books and articles I have read to prepare for the Media and Minorities project.
I was surprised to see how poor and desperate the people living on reservations are. Only a few-hours drive from beautiful Missoula, the American life “happily ever after,” we can find reservations with about 70 percent unemployment, with people struggling on welfare or addicted to alcohol or meth. For a stranger like me, who doesn’t live on a reservation, the whole situation might seem irresolvable. Where did it all start? What went wrong?
Rachel Lopez, an addictions counselor in Montana, thinks that the whole chain of troubles on reservations started about 150 years ago, when the families were torn apart by taking children from their parents and placing them in distant boarding schools. “These children,” she says, “didn’t know how to raise their own children, because they weren’t raised up in a family themselves.”
We could tell she had a point when we talked to inmates in Montana State Prison, where about 23 percent of them are of Native American origin, of which 90 percent had some kind of problems with drugs and alcohol. Most of them don’t have proper family relations. One of our respondents described his family this way: “I lived with my family first, but we didn’t have a very good relationship, my parents were alcoholics. I went to live with some foster parents in Washington when I was like 13. Our mother couldn’t really take care of us because she was drinking and she was dying of cancer. I have seven brothers and sisters; we each went to a different family. ” The other inmate whom we talked to left his family and school at the age of fourteen, and claimed his family didn’t care about it. Recently, he met two of his sons in the prison he is currently in, for his fourth time.
We also visited a traditional pow wow. I hope it does not sound evil from me if I say that I didn’t like it. It was actually Independence Day, so the audience was dressed-up in the motif of the American flag. You could hear a lot of speeches of gratitude towards big America letting Indians live in their country. You could hear a lot of clapping after these speeches. You could watch Indians walking and dancing in a circle on stage. To make your stay even more comfortable, you could buy a nice hamburger and coke. You could make hundreds of pictures of posing people in “traditional costumes.” And I just felt awful. Is this something Native Americans should be proud of? Do they actually like it?
In the last three weeks in United States I was trying to observe, to absorb as much as possible. Some of the people and their life stories really moved me and I know I won’t forget them for the rest of my life. There were not only Wayne and Lester in prison, but also Sandra, whose daughter died of a methadone overdose. There was one of the most charismatic people I have ever seen, Darrel Kipp - founder of a private school in Browning, and Rachel Lopez, who is trying to get a job as an addiction counselor on the reservation, but struggles because she is not a Native American.
I do not feel educated and well-read enough to try to find a solution to minority issues. But this project gave me a great opportunity to look at people I only had chance to read about thus far, for which I feel extremely grateful. For me, the project Media and Minorities does not end. I feel I am at the very beginning and actually – the project for me has just started.
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