Native people need more than a proclamation

The U.S. government has for two decades designated November as “National Native American Indian and Alaska Native Heritage Month.” According to the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Indian Affairs, it was “established to recognize the significant contributions the First Americans made to the establishment and growth of the U.S.”

November is also the month of the national holiday celebration of so-called “Thanksgiving,” a day portraying the myth of peaceful European colonizers breaking bread with Indigenous people. However, the reality is that the genocide of millions of Native people took place, as did the wholesale attempt to destroy their cultures and steal their lands.

Designations and proclamations do not put food on the table, guarantee living-wage jobs, provide adequate health care or uphold housing rights. Native people continue to struggle to survive the legacy of past and present-day racism, oppression and marginalization.

For many Native people, financial hardship has been a way of life. According to the Economic Policy Institute, about half of Native Americans nationally are unemployed or are not even counted among the unemployed because they are “discouraged workers” who have given up looking for a job.

Race matters. The economic crisis in the U.S. has worsened racial disparities in employment, wages and income for people of color, who have historically faced job market inequities.

The recession has only increased the hardships faced by Indigenous people. Their unemployment rates continue to rise. Due to employers’ discrimination, the jobs that are open to them are usually low paying and have few benefits. Some of the largest disparities in employment between Indigenous peoples and whites are in Alaska and the Northern Plains, areas where the employment situation is best for whites. For instance, in the first half of 2010, only 44 percent of Native workers in the Northern Plains were employed, the worst employment rate for Native Americans regionally.

Especially hard-hit, Indigenous people living on reservations and in rural areas must often move off the reservation to find work, leaving their families for long periods. Those who are college educated are also forced to leave their communities due to lack of local job opportunities.

There are glaring disparities in monetary wealth between Indigenous people and those of the dominant culture. For Native people, though, wealth consists not only of quantifiable assets like land and money but also non-tangible assets like culture, language, spirituality and kinship networks.

Federal government policies have subjugated and exploited Indigenous peoples for centuries. Yet, in the face of this, Native people have pressured, pushed and demanded greater political power and influence and more support for policies that respect self-determination.

In order to end this structural inequality, there has to be increased federal aid to bridge the racial wealth divide. The Indian Services Program must increase funding and accessibility to medical facilities and channel federal and state funds for social services through tribal governments in order to give tribes a fair shake in accessing economic recovery funds.

Unless targeted policies address these inequities, Native and other communities of color will continue to bear the brunt for generations to come.