THE FORGOTTEN CITIZENS: A NATIVE AMERICAN TRAGEDY

I think it really got ugly when the United States Calvary put a $200 bounty on the head of any Indian in Nevada. Over in California, Indians were rounded up and herded off to San Francisco with the promise of a better life; many were slaughtered, others were put into servitude and by the time they got back to their native lands several decades later, they found out they had been stripped of their heritage, culture, and timber.

Today, we visualize them as being filthy rich casino moguls, playing on American greed, and we pat ourselves on the back and say, "Well, after what we did to them, they deserve a break."

But, here are the facts. Only a few Native casinos are making significant money; many are losing propositions and those tribes who own them are in a sea of red ink. Not every tribe owns a casino. In fact, countless tribes across the country have no economic development at all, either because their land bases are too small or remote, or because they have never been able to accumulate enough money and education to get anything started.

When you go out there onto "the rez," you see government buildings with leaky roofs and that haven't been painted or properly maintained since the day they were built, forty or fifty years ago. You see countless houses with plywood over broken windows that no one could afford to repair, surrounded by yards full of junk cars that no one can afford to have hauled away. In IHS hospitals, you find hundreds of human beings suffering from maladies that cannot be treated because IHS doesn't have enough money while, on the other hand, illegal immigrant criminals who land in American jails get full medical benefits.

Every year, the Federal Government has systematically been decreasing the funding for IHS and BIA activities, resulting in tribes being on the short end of the human social services stick. Education, the key to breaking away from a poverty rate above 50%, has also been cut, cut, cut.

Now, the Congress is hell-bent on giving hundreds of billions of dollars away to the fat cats because the fat cats are having to eat beans one night a week. Congress is willing to mortgage the future of our children and grandchildren in order to bail those fat cats out of their short-sighted ways, and Congress wants to cut some more from the IHS and BIA budgets while they do it.

There are children with empty stomachs running down the unpaved streets on their way to desparity and depression, and Congress is turning its collective back and a blind eye to the problem.

As an American, I ask for your help on behalf of these people. Write, wire, phone your Congressional representatives today. Interrupt their drunken stupors just long enough to ask them to add $3 billion to help Native Americans instead of adding $10 billion to build a bridge to nowhere.

Otherwise, we are still to blame for this national tragedy.