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Native Lives Matter, Too
Wednesday, October 14, 2015 17:50
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Today in the New York Times, Lydia Millet crafted an Op-Ed that shines a harsh light on police killing of American Indians in the United States. At a time when #BlackLivesMatter is driving media attention and conversation, Millet writes in “Native Lives Matter, Too” that American Indians are virtually invisible when it comes to loss of life at the hands of law enforcement when per capita, American Indians suffer a higher percentage of killing at the hands of law enforcement than any other race. The Op-Ed states:
“American Indians are more likely than any other racial group to be killed by the police, according to the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, which studied police killings from 1999 to 2011 (the rate was determined as a percentage of total population). But apart from media outlets like Indian Country Today, almost no attention is paid to this pattern of violence against already devastated peoples. When it comes to American Indians, mainstream America suffers from willful blindness.”
She further writes: “Economic and health statistics, as well as police-violence statistics, shed light on the pressures on American Indian communities and individuals: Indian youths have the highest suicide rate of any United States ethnic group. Adolescent women have suicide rates four times the rate of white women in the same age group. Indians suffer from an infant mortality rate 60 percent higher than that of Caucasians, a 50 percent higher AIDS rate, and a rate of accidental death (including car crashes) more than twice that of the general population. At the root of much of this is economic inequality: 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.”
Source: http://corporatejusticeblog.blogspot.com/2015/10/native-lives-matter-too.html
