Native Americans Most Likely Victims of Deadly Police Force

[damnedifIknow]

The high-profile shooting of an unarmed teen in Ferguson, Missouri last year focused international attention on police using deadly force against African Americans.

But another minority group in the U.S. — Native Americans — also claims they are frequently subjected to excessive force by police, and recent incidents and protests are drawing attention to their cause.

Three Native Americans are reported to have died during arrest or confinement last month.

One of them was Denver resident Paul Castaway, a 35-year-old Lakota Indian with a history of mental illness and alcohol abuse.

“He recently lost his job and he was devastated,” said his mother, Lynn Eagle Feather. On July 12, he returned home from an outing in a state of high agitation and began waving a knife.

Police found Castaway, armed with the knife, in a nearby trailer park and gave chase.

“There were about 18 children playing in the parking lot and they were running alongside of my son as the police were chasing him,” his mother said.

She says after Castaway came to a dead end, he ran back into the open street and stopped along a wooden fence. That’s when one of the officers approached him, took aim and fired.

After he fell, Eagle Feather said the officers rolled him over and handcuffed him.

“And he looked at them and said, ‘What’s wrong with you guys?’ That’s the last words that came out of his mouth,” she said."

Denver police officials say Castaway had threatened the officers with his knife. But according to Eagle Feather and a local television report, surveillance footage showed that Castaway had been holding the knife to his own neck."

http://www.voanews.com/content/native-americans-most-likely-victims-of-deadly-force-by-police/2918007.html

[Hydra]

1. I'm glad they are getting some spotlight on this

Native Americans are practically non-people in this country.

[brer cat]

5. I think they are invisible

to a large part of the population in the east and despised by many in the west. The first trip I made to NM, I was stunned at some of the brutally disparaging comments I heard from whites about Native Americans. I am dismayed but not surprised that the leos would act the same way.

[southmost]

9. part of the cultural genocide of the indigenous

Act if the surviving population doesnt exist or matter...and relabel their surviving semi-assimilated mixed breed descendants as immigrants and foreigners....gotta admit its been effective

[brer cat]

12. Truth, sad to say. nt

[Heidi]

2. Kick!

[tblue]

3. Just awful! How can we help?

Pls share if you know what we can do. I don't want to just feel bad about this and then move on to the next news tidbit.

[damnedifIknow]

4. It has to stop

This is madness.

[Zorra]

6. Some suggestions ~

NARF may be able to provide the most informed answers to your question "How Can We Help?"

NARF

http://www.narf.org/about-us/

Navajo Nation Mourning, Pleading for Help After Toxic Mine Spill Contaminates Rivers

Though EPA administrator Gina McCarthy said at a news conference today that the agency's slow response was out of caution, Navajo Nation President Russell Begaye said the slow response is frustrating the Navajo people, who are "weeping every day" and in "dire need of clean water," not only for drinking, but also to sustain their organic farms and ranches.

"Our soul is hurting," Begaye told ABC News today. "I meet people daily that weep when they see me, asking me, 'How do I know the water will be safe?' The Animas River and the San Juan rivers are our lifelines. Water is sacred to us. The spirit of our people is being impacted."

http://abcnews.go.com/US/navajo-nation-mourning-pleading-toxic-mine-spill-contaminates/story?id=33011914

Gaining awareness of the historical and present differences in values, consciousness, and worldview between Euro-christian and other cultures long removed from tribal roots and personal physical and spiritual interaction with the natural world, and manifesting constructive action based on this awareness will help not only NA's, but all the peoples of the world and the planet herself. The understanding that the earth is sacred to Native Americans is primary, and witnessing the ongoing attempted sociopathic destruction of the earth by gold obsessed materialistic cultures is literally heartbreaking and soul crushing.

"Your people are driven by a terrible sense of deficiency. When the last tree is cut, the last fish is caught, and the last river is polluted; when to breathe the air is sickening, you will realize, too late, that wealth is not in bank accounts and that you can’t eat money." ~ Alanis Obamasawin

A Basic Call to Consciousness
The Hau de no sau nee Address to the Western World
Geneva, Switzerland, Autumn 1977
snip---
The papers which follow are position papers which were presented by the Hau de no sau nee to the Non-governmental Organizations of the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland in September, 1977. The Non-governmental Organizations had called for papers which describe the conditions of oppression suffered by Native people under three subject headings, with supportive oral statements to be given to the commissions. The Hau de no sau nee, the traditional Six nations council at Onondaga, sent forth three papers which constitute an abbreviated analysis of Western history, and which call for a consciousness of the Sacred Web of Life in the Universe.

It is a call which can be expected to be both ignored and misunderstood for some period of time. But the position papers themselves are absolutely unique -- they constitute a political statement, presented to a representative world body, pointing to the destruction of the Natural World and the Natural World peoples as the clearest indicator that human beings are in trouble on this planet. It is a call to a basic consciousness which has ancient roots and ultra-modern, even futuristic, manifestations.

It is a statement which points to the fact that humans are abusing one another, that they are abusing the planet they live on, that they are even abusing themselves. It is a message, certainly the first ever delivered to a world body, which identifies the process of that abuse as Western Civilization -- as a whole way of life -- and which acknowledges the immense complexity which that statement implies.

What is presented here is nothing less audacious than a cosmogony of the Industrialized World presented by the most politically powerful and independent non-Western political body surviving in North America. It is, in a way, the modern world through Pleistocene eyes.

http://www.ratical.org/many_worlds/6Nations/6nations1.html

[Beartracks]

15. "Hau de no sau nee Address" -- Wow, I'd never heard of this. Incredible.

Thank you for sharing.

============================

[OneGrassRoot]

17. Thank you for this. n/t

[Doctor_J]

14. you can vote for someone who believes ALL lives matter

[historylovr]

7. K & R

Thanks for posting this. It needs to be heard.

[jtuck004]

8. An injury to one is an injury to all. n/t

[Octafish]

10. Paul Castaway

"What's wrong with you guys?"

[Chathamization]

11. Reservation law enforcement isn't allowed to apprehend non-Native rapists

Here:

Why did it matter? If the girl's rapist was, in fact, an enrolled member of a Native American tribe, then Cummings had every right to continue the investigation. But now the girl struggled through her shock and inebriation to recall the story: The men, she believed, had been white and Latino. If true, then the right to investigate and prosecute the case belonged not to Cummings, nor to the U.S. attorney, but to the state. "I did what I could," Cummings later told me, but in the end, she called a county deputy to take the girl off the reservation.

In 1978, the Supreme Court case Oliphant v. Suquamish stripped tribes of the right to arrest and prosecute non-Indians who commit crimes on Indian land. If both victim and perpetrator are non-Indian, a county or state officer must make the arrest. If the perpetrator is non-Indian and the victim an enrolled member, only a federally certified agent has that right. If the opposite is true, a tribal officer can make the arrest, but the case still goes to federal court.

The result has been a jurisdictional tangle that often makes prosecuting crimes committed in Indian Country prohibitively difficult. In 2011, the U.S. Justice Department did not prosecute 65 percent of rape cases reported on reservations. According to department records, one in three Native American women are raped during their lifetimes—two-and-a-half times the likelihood for an average American woman—and in 86 percent of these cases, the assailant is non-Indian.

Last April, Senate members added a provision to the Violence Against Women Act, first passed in 1994, that would allow tribal courts to prosecute non-Indians who sexually assault tribal members. But the bill has languished since House Republicans opposed the measure as a dangerous expansion of tribal independence—it is, after all, a partial reversal of the Supreme Court's 1978 decision.

The way Native Americans are treated is both evil and completely insane.

[Lee-Lee]

19. There is an easy fix to this and it's done in lots of places

Simply have the county sheriff swear the tribal police in as deputies also.

That's how it is done on several east coast tribal departments.

The only rub is that for this to happen the tribal officers must be trained and qualified to the standards that state and county requires for a deputy and maintain those standards. If the tribe is setting standard for its officers that are not equal or greater than the county/state standards than they can't be sworn.

I know for a fact the the tribal officers for the Eastern Band of Cherokee carry a tribal ticket book and one for both Swain and Jackson County- tribal members get a tribal ticket, anyone not an enrolled member of the EBCI gets a standard NC citation based on what county they are in.

They won't go to tribal court, but to state court in the county the offense happened in.

[Chathamization]

20. Thanks for the info. N/T

[Doctor_J]

13. #ILM

Let's not

[OneGrassRoot]

16. I've actually been searching for info like this...

so, thank you.

All people of color are being brutalized. I really have no adequate words for the sorrow I feel for how the Native American community has been decimated and dehumanized.

K&R

[Eleanors38]

18. Any indication if police abuse is stemming from LEOs in general, or

from tribal police forces?