"When it comes to American Indians, mainstream America suffers from willful blindness."
—Lydia Millet, The New York Times, October 13, 2016
Marcus Lee, Lance McIntyre, Daniel Covarrubias, Raymond Eacret, Jessie Lee Rose, Jacqueline Salyers, Mah-hi-vist Goodblanket, Richard Estrada, Jeanetta Riley, Larry Kobuk, Jamie Lee Brave Heart, Loreal Tsingine, Corey Kanosh, Allen Locke, Sarah Lee Circle Bear.
Say their names because odds are you have not heard about them, or read about them. Say their names because all of them are Native Americans killed by police. However, if the relatively recently organized Native Lives Matter can build a movement that links up with other organizations combatting police killings and racial bias, the deaths of these Native Americans might become the roots of change.
Nearly seven months ago I wrote a piece for Buzzflash titled “Mainstream Media Are Egregiously Negligent in Reporting on Indigenous Peoples,” which maintained that not only are stories about Native Americans rarely reported, when they are reported at all, they are all-too-frequently awash in stereotypes. Nowhere has this been more evident than the paucity of reporting about police killings of Native Americans.
According to an In These Times special investigative report by Stephanie Woodard, titled “The Police Killings No One Is Talking About,” “When compared to their percentage of the U.S. population, Natives were more likely to be killed by police than any other group, including African Americans.”
Despite evidence gathered by Mike Males, senior researcher at the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, “killings of Native people go almost entirely unreported by mainstream U.S. media,” Woodard pointed out. She noted that in an April meeting of the Western Social Science Association, Claremont Graduate University researchers Roger Chin, Jean Schroedel and Lily Rowen presented their study of reviewed articles about deaths-by-cop published between May 1, 2014, and October 31, 2015, in the top 10 U.S. newspapers by circulation: the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, New York Daily News, New York Post, Chicago Sun-Times, Denver Post, Washington Post and Chicago Tribune.
According to Woodard, an award-winning journalist and veteran reporter on issues of Native American rights, “Of the 29 Native Americans killed by police during that time, only one received sustained coverage — Paul Castaway, a Rosebud Sioux man shot dead in Denver while threatening suicide.” The Castaway killing was the subject of six Denver Post articles totaling 2, 577 words.
“The killing of Suquamish tribal member Daniel Covarrubias, shot when he reached for his cell phone, received a total of 515 words in the Washington Post and the New York Times (which misidentified him as Latino),” Woodard reported. “The other 27 deaths received no coverage.”
While being careful not to condemn the media for its’ much more extensive coverage of African Americans killed by police – “largely a testament to the organizing skills and growing influence of the BLM [Black Lives Matter] movement” – Woodward recognized that there has been no similar national outcry over police killings of Native Americans, in street confrontations and “jailhouse deaths.”
Sadly, Woodard notes “Native Americans’ experiences of violence and discrimination in the United States often parallel those of African Americans. Federal investigations have found that on the borders of reservations, Native Americans are treated as second-class citizens by police and public agencies in ways that echo the experience of black Americans in towns like Ferguson, Mo.”
Citing “numerous hearings” by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (USCCR), an independent government agency, Woodard reported that Native Americans experience extraordinary discrimination particularly “in border towns surrounding reservations: in New Mexico, near the Navajo reservation; in South Dakota, near the Sioux reservations; and, just this August, in Billings, Mont., near the Crow and Northern Cheyenne reservations.”
Incidents aired even in recent hearings sound like tales from the pre-civil-rights Deep South. They ranged from denial of service in public places to police brutality to the failure to investigate murders. In Northern Plains states, USCCR members personally observed staff in restaurants and stores hassling or refusing to serve Natives. In South Dakota, the commission heard testimony about a police department that found reasons to fine Natives hundreds of dollars, then “allowed” them to work off the debt on a ranch. USCCR Rocky Mountain director Malee Craft described the situation as “slave labor.”
The lack of mental health services available to Native Americans contribute to suicide threats, and other destabilizing situations that ultimately account for “one-quarter of all those killed by cops in the first half of 2016, according to data collected by the Washington Post; they made up nearly half of the Native deaths examined by the Claremont researchers.” Unfortunately police become “first responders” to situations they are untrained for and ill-equipped to handle.
According to statistics compiled by the National Congress of American Indians, “In 2013, Indian Health Service per-capita expenditures were $2,849, compared to $7,717 per person for healthcare spending nationally.” Meanwhile the suicide rate for Natives in 2010 was 16.93 per 100,000, compared with 12.08 for the population as a whole, according to the Suicide Prevention Resource Center (SPRC).
Two years ago, Chase Iron Eyes, a Lakota attorney, and now a Democratic candidate for Congress from North Dakota, became one of the founders of Native Lives Matter (NLM), inspired by Black Lives Matter. The “movement is attempting to bring attention to the deaths, and to the larger social and economic oppression of Native Americans.”
Native Lives Matter intends to shine a spotlight on a myriad of issues affecting Native Americans, “from child welfare to incarceration disparities.” The Native Lives Matter Facebook page and Twitter feed “show the idea has proliferated across Indian country, with grassroots groups adopting the slogan as an umbrella term to advocate for environmental and social causes. ‘We don’t own it; everyone has a right to it,’ says Iron Eyes.”
As Lydia Millet recently pointed out in an op-ed piece in The New York Times, there are many barriers standing in the way of Native Lives Matter: The Native American and Alaskan population is small, totaling about three million or 5.2 million “if you include mixed-race individuals, compared with about 45 million African-Americans”; “population densities off the reservation tend to be low … [and] They have a small urban presence”; and, “economic inequality” looms large – “Indians are the poorest people in the United States, with a poverty rate in 2013 that was about twice the national average at 29.2 percent — meaning almost one in three Indians lives in poverty.”
Whether Native Lives Matter can get the national media to pay attention to the disproportionate murders by police remains to be seen.
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