Gonna drive by a reservation on your way to tell folks how racist the Confederate flag is?

[Cleita]

67. I used to feel like you, especially since I wasn't even born in this country but to an ex-pat dad.

I actually grew up in a mining community in Northern Chile that an American company was exploiting for their benefit. One of the miners' union leaders, an Aymara Indian and a communist brought the truth to me. Europeans, this time Spaniards, had taken from the natives all they had and turned them into slaves. Well there is much more to our conversations than this, but he convinced me that even though I was only eighteen years old that everything I benefitted from up until now was because Americans and Europeans had stolen the wealth of their nations from them, in this case copper. It was true, my dad worked there forty four years and most of his dollars from copper made it back to the States to support my mother and me and my education. In the meantime, the mine laborers, who were mostly Aymara indians, worked for minimum wage and basically got nothing back except some diseases that are prevalent among miners and a few paltry benefits the union was able to get for them. That mine was eventually nationalized and the Americans thrown out, but then the Chileans got Pinochet courtesy of Nixon, Kissinger and Company.

Fast forward and I'm now living and working, getting married, etc. in the USA. Everytime I went through an Indian Reservation or inner city neighborhood in my travels, I was aware of the base poverty, poverty you don't see in the pretty white enclaves of this nation. You and I live in one of those places of white privilege. Yet, there is poverty hidden in our communities of the brown people who work in our fields for big Agra companies like Simplot. Although we call them Mexicans, they are mostly Native Americans.

I don't suggest we have to individually do reparations, but I think Simplot and Phillips Conoco and any dozens of big national and international corporations that are exploiting the Central Coast should pay a tax to be returned to the descendents of our former slaves and native Americans to uplift their circumstances with whatever they need for good health, good education and a middle class quality of life.