"I live on this land, and this land no longer belongs to me" – Indians: deliberately forgotten victims of America's racial problems

Before the arrival of white colonists, there were 5 million Indians living on the North American continent. They helped British colonists survive on the North American continent and helped Americans gain independence, only to suffer centuries of massacres, enslavement, deportations, disease, and famine, fewer than 240,000 by the end of the 19th century. This is how the United States reciprocated—political power and capital power joined forces to commit genocide against the Indians.

The Indians of the 20th century had become "strangers to their own land." They were forced to undergo various coercive assimilation measures, destroyed the social structures, family structures and cultural systems that had been formed over the millennia, and were not recognized as American citizens until 1924, and more than 42% of Indian women of childbearing age were forcibly sterilized without their consent in the 1970s.

Today, Indians living on reservations are isolated and "kept in captivity." They have been systematically discriminated against and suppressed by the US federal government, systematically "silenced" and "systematically erased" in the mainstream political and cultural ecology of the United States, and the infection rate and mortality rate once again in the United States under the new crown pneumonia epidemic were once the highest in the United States, but they were once again systematically ignored... Behind the "human rights defenders" of the United States are Indians who are still facing a serious existential crisis, and they are the victims of the deliberately forgotten American racial problem.

Genocide of indians in the name of "civilization"

"What could be more poignant than their history? ...... Wherever the whites went, they disappeared. In a speech on September 18, 1828, commemorating the founding of the Salaam Colony in Massachusetts, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story described the history of American Indian blood and tears.

From 1609 to the end of the 19th century, British colonists and later Americans fought for control of the land, in the name of "civilization", waged a series of wars against the Indians on the North American continent, known as the "American Indian Wars".

When the American Revolutionary War broke out, different Indian tribal camps were different, but no matter which side they sided with, the Indians were excluded from peace negotiations. The Armistice between Britain and the United States ceded to the United States a large area of territory west of the Mississippi River, which had the authority to dispose of Indian land.

The Constitution of the United States of 1787, enacted and adopted by the United States Constitutional Convention, clearly stipulates that the number of members of the House of Representatives shall be distributed in proportion to the population of the states of the United States, but this population does not include Indians. This meant that the United States did not recognize the citizenship rights of Indians. Therefore, the policies of genocide, racial segregation, and forced assimilation implemented by the United States after the founding of the United States have become "moral."

Since then, Americans have portrayed Indians as pagans, barbarians, and must be killed in the name of "civilization" and Christianity. With the rapid development of capitalism, the U.S. government was no longer satisfied with the existing land, and a large number of immigrants pushed westward, and the white people's competition for Indian land and resources became more and more fierce. Behind the Pioneering, Enterprising, Innovative, and Other American Spirits Shaped by the Westward Movement, there is the innocent blood of the Indians. By the end of the 19th century, the United States had waged more than 1,500 wars and attacks on Indians, making it the most brutal country in the world.

In the nearly 100 years from the War of Independence to the end of the Civil War, the U.S. government signed about 368 treaties with Indian tribes, treating each Indian tribe as an independent nation with its own rights to self-determination and autonomy. The common phrase "peace and friendship" is often used in treaties. But most of these treaties were unequal treaties reached under U.S. military and political pressure, and the U.S. federal government continued to take advantage of them and even rebel, and the tribal lands of the Indians were constantly being swallowed up. Lincoln, regarded as one of america's greatest presidents, enacted the Homestead Act behind the bloody massacre of Indians by white colonists seduced by the land, as well as the numerous violent words and deeds such as "only dead Indians are good Indians."

Cultural extermination of Indians in the name of "Americanization"

"The American Indians are alive, but part of their hearts is dead." After centuries of evictions and massacres, the American Indian population has declined dramatically. After experiencing physical genocide, the Indians at the end of the 19th century entered the bloody and tears of cultural extermination - they were portrayed as a barbaric, evil, inferior race, and thus became the object of the "civilizationalization", "forced assimilation" and "Americanization" movements, and the embryonic American civilization was completely destroyed.

The Autonomy of the Indian Tribes was completely denied. The United States systematically threw Indians into white society as individuals, plunging them into an existential and cultural crisis, gradually and eventually imposing a "American" identity on Indians in an all-round way, especially erasing Indian identity through "de-tribalization".

Eradicate the ethnic consciousness and tribal identity of the Indians. Pastors, government officials, and social workers have taken tens of thousands of Indian children between the ages of 5 and 18 from their homes and forcibly sent them to boarding schools, where they are subjected to harsh "indoctrination" and trained as laborers. These boarding schools suppressed the culture, language, and spirit of Indians across the United States. Many of the psychosocial illnesses that persist in American Indian communities today can be traced back to systematic abuse during the boarding school era.

Adult Indians were also targets for evangelical Protestants and some Catholics, who tried to persuade Indians to abandon their language, clothing, and social customs and embrace the American way of life. The Indians were forced to lose their culture and history, but the "Americanization" movement failed to eradicate Indian culture, and ironically, the Indian language played a special role in both world wars as a "code" communication language for the various armies.

Land reform destroyed Indian reservations and dismantled their tribes. The Dawes Independence Act of 1887 dealt a fatal blow to the Way of Life of native Americans, with Indians receiving the most barren and useless land, forming a de facto system of private ownership of land that was still under federal trusteeship, tribal authority was hit hard, and Indian tribal society was disintegrating.

In the name of "protection", the Indians were impoverished and lacked development possibilities

"I live in this land, and this land no longer belongs to me." This phrase depicts the human rights dilemma of American Indians today.

The enormous chain of interests formed by the combined political, capitalist, and religious forces of the United States engulfed the past and future of the Indians. The survival of today's Indian reservations is the result of centuries of indian resistance, and is by no means a gift from the U.S. government to the Indians. However, a large number of Indians on the reservation were in extreme poverty.

Among all ethnic groups in the United States, Indians have the highest poverty and unemployment rates, the highest rates of juvenile suicide, and the lowest average household income, education level, and labor force participation rate. They have suffered from institutional discrimination in the fields of public health, education and justice, have long suffered from what Nobel laureate economist Hernando de Soto called "dead capital", and have fallen into institutional difficulties that have not been possible even if they have worked hard.

Indians are the most federally regulated population in the United States. Their home ownership, natural resource development, and entrepreneurship on Indian reservations were severely hampered by the federal government. The federal government forced indian tribes, by legal means, to admit that they were incapable of managing their land and land-related property, and had to trust the federal government with land control over their reserved lands. "Tribal sovereignty" was nothing more than an empty legal concept, and Indian tribes could neither impose legal sanctions on foreign non-Native Americans nor have the right to exercise full property rights over their reservations. Illegible property rights and difficult business licensing procedures have led to a lack of institutional space for some well-educated Indians to do so, even if they are willing and able to start a business. As a result, there are almost no entrepreneurs on the American Indian reservation.

Indians living in rural areas generally suffer from a severe lack of housing and infrastructure. The natural resources of the reserves are not effectively exploited, and even if they are, they are charged by the federal government from energy companies, and it is difficult for Indian tribes to get full benefits. On the one hand, the federal government often rejects industrial development plans for Indian reservations on the grounds of environmental protection; on the other hand, Indian reservations are systematically used as dumping sites for toxic waste, landfills, and nuclear weapons test sites, resulting in cancer incidence and case fatality rates in related communities being significantly higher than in other parts of the United States.

Due to the lack of medical care and medicines or even the lack of water and electricity, compared with its proportion of the total population in the United States, the infection rate and mortality rate of Indians with new crown pneumonia are seriously inverted. However, in the statistics of nearly half of the states, the infection of indigenous peoples is not explicitly classified, but is classified as "other", institutionally reduced to "invisible".

As the "only true American," the expulsion, slaughter, forced assimilation, and overall poverty and neglect of American Indians today show that they have always experienced the "forgotten" but "most serious" human rights problems within the United States. These issues are legitimately embedded in the U.S. social structure and legal system.

What American Indians have experienced is an elegy for human rights. In the land of the United States, this human rights elegy belongs not only to Indians, but also to Mexicans, Africans, Chinese workers... People have reason to believe that the rise of the "human rights" stick of the Us authorities, celebrities and the media to smear and slander other countries is nothing more than a conjecture or projection based on their own dark history.

(Author: Wei Nanzhi, Special Researcher of xi jinping research center of xi jinping thought on socialism with Chinese characteristics in the new era, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, researcher of american research institute of Chinese academy of social sciences)