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Almost all people, regardless of race or income, agree that it’s important to honor your agreements.
Yet all too often, local, state and federal governments seem incapable of living that value when it comes to honoring treaties with Native Nations.
Native Nations received very little in treaty agreements. Native Nations have relatively small populations, making them easy targets for bullying. At every turn, when treaty disputes arise, Native Nations have sue to enforce what benefits they have.
The latest case comes from Mille Lacs County, where the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe won the latest legal dispute with the county over the Band’s reservation boundaries and the extent of Tribal police authority.
Perhaps county leaders are pressing the case to hold onto power through division, treating the Mille Lacs Band as an enemy.
In all likelihood, the county will continue challenging the Band’s treaty boundaries.
Everyone in Mille Lacs County has the opportunity to honor the treaty agreements that have not, and are not, being followed. They can encourage county leaders to drop any further litigation.
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(Correction: An earlier version misstated the pollution contribution from individual industries to East Phillips’ overall pollution problems. It has been corrected. This post also was updated with information from the MPCA.)
The City of Minneapolis has declared racism a public health emergency, pledging to “allocate funding, staff, and additional resources to actively engage in racial equity in order to name, reverse, and repair the harm done to BIPOC in this City.”
The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) has committed to environmental justice, saying it will focus “on developing strategies to reduce pollution and health disparities in communities most at-risk.”
Unfortunately, neither of those promises are protecting the residents of East Phillips, one of Minneapolis’ poorest and most racially diverse neighborhoods, and home to Little Earth, a 212-unit housing development that gives preference to Native American applicants.
The neighborhood has several pollution sources: Smith Foundry, an iron works; Bituminous Roadways, an asphalt plant; the city’s Hiawatha Public Works yard, and Hiawatha Avenue, a major thoroughfare.
City leaders should know that East Phillips is part of the “pubic health emergency.” The city’s 2021 Racial Equity Impact Analysis said residents living in the area “experience much higher levels of cumulative pollution than residents from majority white city neighborhoods … leading to [higher] levels of asthma and hospitalization for children and adults.”
(East Phillips asthma levels were more than double the state average in 2019, MinnPost reported.)
Unless things change soon, East Phillips will soon get even more pollution and related health problems, further exacerbating health disparities.
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Last year, Rev. Dr. Kelly Sherman-Conroy and two colleagues traveled to the World Council of Churches in Geneva, Switzerland to discuss the liturgy, weekly reflextions, and Bible Study they had been asked to create for the 2023 International Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. “They wanted the perspective of Black and Indigenous people,” said Sherman-Conroy, who is Lakota.
What should have been positive experience was traumatic, as Sherman-Conroy’s Christianity was called into question.
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Russia troops have absconded with thousands of Ukrainian children who were separated from their families during the war, the Washington Post reports. While the numbers aren’t clear, Ukraine’s top children’s rights official said family and friends have reported more than 10,000 unaccompanied Ukrainian children have been sent to Russia.
For example, Oleksandr, a 12-year-old boy injured in a Russian attack in Mariupol, was separated from his grandmother while seeking medical help, the Post story said. Troops took him to a hospital in Donetsk, in Russian-occupied Ukraine, where he was told Russian parents would adopt him.
Lyudmila, the grandmother, somehow was able to save him before he left for Russia. She shared her grandson’s experience: They “told him that Ukraine is bad and Ukrainians are evil,” she said. “They forced the children to speak Russian.”
I couldn’t read this story without thinking about the legacy of Indian boarding schools and other U.S. assimilation policies.
We rightfully condemn Russia’s actions, which are war crimes. At the same time, we need to take a hard look at our own history, and our failure to repair the deep harm U.S. actions have inflicted on Indigenous children, families, and communities.
We can’t condemn the one, and ignore the other.
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