The Indian Movement

The 1950's through the 1970's provide some of the most important examples of protest and change in America in which many minorities where fighting for social justice. It is less well known that the Native American population of the time was struggling right along side other major groups for change and it was this very aspect of the time that I found most interesting this week in class. At time it was hard to learn about many of the hate related crimes that went on against the Indian population and even harder to learn that many times no action at all was taken to bring the suspects to justice. The story of Raymond Yellow Thunder's murder in Gordon really shed light on the fact that Indians were treated very poorly and often not even cared about. I also didn't know about such events as the occupation of Alcatraz Prison and I found this to be a strong point in the collective effort to raise awareness among the American people. This semi-militaristic takeover ended up as peaceful way of letting the media know that there were issues among Native Americans that needed to be looked at.
The presentations this week also provided me with informative/disturbing knowledge. It is hard to believe, in my opinion, that nearly a quarter to half of all Indian women were being sterilized and that public awareness was so low that no one either knew about it or cared about it. This sounds like a prime way to erase a culture from the planet and I wonder how the doctors performing these operations felt about their dishonest, corrupt work. The mascot presentation was also very interesting and I do feel that some colleges do use Native American images in negative ways and was happy to hear that some attention was being payed to this topic. I would like to know more about the colleges that still do support Indian images which have had some agreement with the tribes involved and some of the advantages that the tribe might gain from lending their icons over to some university.