Native American Life Today
Native Americans today face some extraordinary challenges. By nearly every measure, social, cultural, economical, and physical, Native American communities and Native American families are uniquely and negatively impacted by patterns of struggle.
While it is important to be positive and hopeful about the future of life for Native Americans in this country, it is first important to have a genuine understanding of what Indigenous people face, collectively and individually.
To understand what Native American life is like today, we first need to understand what it used to be like. For the past 500 years, Native Americans have faced genocide, dislocation, and various forms of physical, mental, and social abuse. These factors have led to high rates of violence, assault, and abuse among the Native American people today.
We have to understand the historical destruction that has occurred and how this destruction feeds the overwhelming hopelessness experienced by many Native Americans in the 21st century.
Part of the challenge is that Native Americans are a diverse and scattered race of peoples. There are currently 6.7 million Native Americans living in the United States. However, only 22% of Native Americans live on reservations. The rest are scattered across the country. For people of Native American descent who live off reservations, the challenge is to see what their Native American identity and ancestry means for their lives. In many cases, people of Native American descent are full of a longing to know more about their ancestors and to reconnect with a tribe or culture they have lost.
For Native Americans, these challenges are ever present and self-evident. But many non-Natives are completely ignorant about the real lives and struggles that Native Americans face in the present era. This ignorance is part of a larger forgetfulness. It seems as if the rest of the country and the Western world has chosen to forget that this race of peoples is still here and still struggling to understand how to carry their tribes and their cultures forward in the modern world.
The indigenous peoples of this continent have faced 500 years of genocide, dislocation, and variations of physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual violence. From the biological warfare through the introduction of Western diseases, the dislocation and violence of European expansion across the continent, the cruel and discriminatory policies of the 19th century that banned cultural and spiritual expressions of Native life and that forcibly removed Native children from their tribal homes to send them to faraway boarding schools, to the discrimination and ignorance that persists to this day, Native Americans are dealing with generations of collective group trauma.
This massive trauma expresses itself today in the form of high rates of addiction, violence, alcoholism, and sexual abuse within Native families and communities. Many accounts suggest that the boarding school generations in particular were permanently scarred by their experiences of physical, mental, and sexual abuse in the school system. When these Native children returned to their homes and families, having lost their culture and identity, and began to have families of their own, they were unable to form healthy bonds and passed on these patterns of abuse to their own children, creating cycles of broken families.
Native communities are impacted by some of the worst health outcomes of any race in the United States. Poor health amongst Native Americans is caused by many contributing factors including high rates of poverty, isolated geography, poor education and nutrition, inadequate sewage disposal, and unhealthy living conditions.
The serious issues with mental health among Native Americans are closely linked to other risk factors like high rates of violence, assault, and abuse.
All of these current challenges--lack of educational opportunity, physical and mental health disparities, the intense impact of historical trauma, lack of economic independence--are part of the great tragedy facing Native Americans: the loss of Native American culture and identity.
The traditional ways of life, the tribal languages, the songs and dances, the wisdom of elders, and the strong values that once animated Native cultures have in many cases been threatened or extinguished. Even for tribes who have managed to recover or maintain a strong sense of their cultural heritage, there is still the present difficulty of understanding how tribal identity can coexist with modern, Western culture which opposes it in so many ways.
Many Native Americans, especially young people, are ashamed of whom they are and wish they could be different. They look at themselves and their families, and they do not see goodness or resilience, only pain and suffering.
The pain and the suffering of the Native American people cannot be ignored any longer. We have to acknowledge the huge barriers that exist that work to keep young Natives stuck in the same cycles of abuse and poverty as have existed for generations. In order to move forward into a new era of revitalization and hope, we must confront and understand the enormous destruction and suffering that has been caused by centuries of discrimination and hardship.
by Native Hope