A thorny question: Should American Indians and Alaska Natives buy their own health insurance?
April 6, 2010 Comments OffThe enactment of health care insurance reform raises a thorny (and complicated) question for Indian Country: Should American Indians and Alaska Natives eligible for services in the Indian health system buy their own insurance? The first answer ought to be a resounding “no.” Clearly the United States has an obligation for health care because of [...]
Continue reading …ALBUQUERQUE – The “listening session” held by the U.S. State Department on March 16 at the University of New Mexico Law School drew more than 100 Native leaders, legal scholars and human rights activists, many of whom called on the United States to adopt the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Testimony [...]
Continue reading …Native American veterans claim racial discrimination by VA in South Dakota
March 29, 2010 Comments OffThere is a credo lamented daily in the waiting rooms of the Veterans Administration Hospitals scattered across America. It goes, “First you apply, then they deny and hope you will die.” This has a special meaning to Native American veterans. For too many Indian veterans it strikes close to the bone. They are so entangled [...]
Continue reading …In 1952 the Bureau of Indian Affairs, a subsidiary of the U. S. Department of the Interior, initiated a program for Indians living on reservations that sounded a heck of a lot like a pogrom used in Nazi Germany during World War II. America’s “pogrom” was called the “Urban Indian Relocation Program.” Looking back from [...]
Continue reading …There is a colonization connection the indigenous people of Australia and America share
March 1, 2010 Comments OffBoth were driven to the brink of annihilation by invaders. Both had their children ripped from their arms and placed into institutional boarding schools intent upon acculturation by whatever means (See the movie Rabbit Proof Fence). Aborigines make up two percent of Australia’s population of 22 million and, like their American Indian counterparts; they are [...]
Continue reading …By Luay Broadnax If you’re white and say you have Native American blood, then that’s alright. It’s looked on in some places as a badge of honor. But if you’re black, you’re accused of not wanting to own your African lineage. I have lived more than 70 years as an African American and I have [...]
Continue reading …“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore.” The Statue Of Liberty. And Native Americans. My dude, Nish Chad, brought up an interesting theory to me. Bringing up interesting thoughts to me is not unusual, mind you, since Chad’s somewhat of a conspiracy [...]
Continue reading …Like millions of other Americans I watched the State of the Union address by President Barack Obama almost as a moth drawn to a flame. I saw something afoot that I haven’t read about in the words of other columnists even though it was not something I expected. Whenever the President made a point that [...]
Continue reading …President Barack Obama took to the podium in Boston last week pleading for the Democrats of Massachusetts to support his candidate, Martha Coakley, to win the senate seat left vacant by the death of Sen. Ted Kennedy. Obama said, “Understand what is at stake here, Massachusetts. It’s whether we’re going forwards or backwards.” His efforts [...]
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