S01E08 Kerry Hawk Lessard, Politics of Native America
Black Lives Matter Helps Native American Movement
Horrors of Slavery Likened to the long “American Holocaust” of Indians
November 1, 2020 – The Black Lives Matter movement protesting the police killings of unarmed Black men has help amplify long smothered Native American voices, an expert said Sunday.
On a special Thanksgiving edition of the Retail Politics Podcast with Gerry Shields reviewing the current state of Native America, Kerry Hawk Lessard said African Americans are inspiring the American Indian.
“On one hand, it’s sad that our voices have not been enough,” said Lessard, executive director of Native American Lifelines, an inner-city Indian health care agency. “We’ve been talking about these issues for decades but that kind of gave the push needed to get our issues before people.”
More Indians are being elected to Congress and state office, Lessard said. Native Americans voting for Joe Biden in the recent presidential election helped him win Arizona, once a Republican stronghold, political analysts state.
“There are a lot of get out the vote efforts to really mobilize the native vote and why it’s important to vote and what we’re voting for,” Lessard said. “There is this certain momentum in this country right now that feels really good and it feels a little bit more sustainable in that it builds off what happened in the 1970s with the Native American movement that kind of fizzled out.”
Lessard noted that Native Americans were not given citizenship until 1924 in their own homeland. Since explorers settled America in 1697, an estimated 12 million Native Americans have been killed, which Kerry described as “America’s Holocaust.” Two times more Indians were killed than the estimated 6 million Jews who died at the hands of the Germans in World War II.
“I referred to the genocide of our people as that and there were some folks that were Jewish that really pushed back on using that word,” Lessard said. ”That word was the term that was just used for what happened to them.”
Contrary to public opinion, Lessard said, 70 percent of Native Americans now live in cities, not reservations as many believe. The urban landscape called Indians in the 1950s to fill growing manufacturing jobs.
“Part of that is obscured by the way Native people have been presented in film and art and literature that we are a people that existed in the past and that we don’t exist in a contemporary way,” Lessard, a Baltimore native said. “We’ve been very reduced to kind of the plains Indian with the bonnet. That really overlooks the great diversity of how we existed historically and how we exist now. People don’t see us as real human beings.”
Almost 300 years after the first Thanksgiving, the horrific treatment of Native Americans is finally being acknowledged, Lessard said.
“I think there is such push back now in talking about or contending with slavery because you have to admit that this isn’t a perfect country,” Lessard said. “There are some who still struggle with that. I think you would have to acknowledge that the land you sit on belongs to a people that you completely decimated to build your country and people don’t want to deal with that.”
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The Retail Politics Podcast with Gerry Shields can be heard at: retailpoliticspodcast.com and on Apple and Spotify. Shields is a former congressional correspondent and author of the new book: The Front Row: My Jagged Journey Recording American History from Reagan to Trump now available on Amazon.com.
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