{"id":13078,"date":"2016-07-07T06:50:06","date_gmt":"2016-07-07T12:50:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lastbestnews.com\/site\/?p=13078"},"modified":"2016-07-07T13:47:25","modified_gmt":"2016-07-07T19:47:25","slug":"reasons-for-hope-at-native-american-lecture-series","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/2016\/07\/reasons-for-hope-at-native-american-lecture-series\/","title":{"rendered":"Reasons for hope at Native American lecture series"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Johnson\"<\/a>

Russell Rowland<\/p>

The Native American Race Relations and Healing Lecture Series has been held in the Royal Johnson Community Room at the Billings Public Library.<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cWhen I started telling people in Amherst that I was Native American, their most\u00a0common response was \u2018Wow, that\u2019s really cool!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

This was one of the more striking statements made by Caleb Williams, who was the speaker at the most recent\u00a0Native American Race Relations and Healing Lecture Series. And the striking thing about it was the expression on his face when he said it. It was clearly not the reaction he is accustomed to getting when he talks about his heritage.<\/p>\n

Caleb\u00a0was the valedictorian at Billings West High School this year, and he has\u00a0been awarded a full-ride scholarship to Amherst College, where he plans to study pre-med. His\u00a0accomplishments would be impressive for any young man of his age, but what makes his story\u00a0unique were the obstacles he had to overcome to get to this point. Unlike some Native Americans,\u00a0or teenagers from any race who grew up in difficult circumstances, the obstacles in Caleb’s\u00a0life\u00a0were often subtle, more persistent than dramatic.<\/p>\n

When he was in fourth grade, his teacher suggested one day that all the kids make the “Indian noise,” where they repeated “woo-woo” over and over while slapping their palms\u00a0against their lips. Caleb remembers being very confused about this suggestion.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019d never\u00a0done that in my house, so I wasn\u2019t sure why he called it the Indian noise,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

\n
Law enforcement on the rez<\/h5>\n

The next installment of the Native American Race Relations and Healing Lecture Series will start at 7 p.m. on Thursday, July 14, in the Royal Johnson Community Room of the Billings Public Library. Carolyn Pease-Lopez and John Robinson will talk about law enforcement on indian reservations.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Later that year,\u00a0the same teacher would inform the class that there was nobody left who spoke the languages\u00a0of any of the Native American tribes. Caleb raised his hand and protested this claim, but the\u00a0teacher would not budge.<\/p>\n

Caleb was mostly raised by his grandmother, a proud, accomplished woman who now\u00a0works in the admissions department for City College at MSU Billings. When he told her what the teacher had said, she was prepared to confront him and give him a piece of her mind. Instead, Caleb made arrangements, without her knowledge, to bring his grandfather to class.\u00a0His grandfather stood in front of the class and spoke his native language.<\/p>\n

Caleb\u2019s father was out of his\u00a0life early on, and his mother was a substance abuser,\u00a0so he was often left to deal with these kinds of encounters without counsel, which is the most heartbreaking part of his story.<\/p>\n

Although it\u2019s clear that his grandmother provided the kind of\u00a0steady presence and support that a kid needs, Caleb\u00a0talks openly about the constant reminders that\u00a0he was never going to be fully accepted among the white crowd. And because he did well in\u00a0school, he was also never quite accepted among most of his fellow natives, either. He heard the\u00a0usual accusations of thinking he was too good for them, that he was an apple\u2014red on the\u00a0outside, white on the inside.<\/p>\n

This is what is most important to me about Caleb\u2019s introduction to his future home in\u00a0Amherst. It\u2019s hard to imagine that he has ever had a single encounter with anyone here in his\u00a0home state where someone expressed such admiration for the fact that he\u2019s Native American.<\/p>\n

It\u00a0reminds me of a story my friend Adrian Jawort tells about being in Rome and having a bartender try to\u00a0speak Spanish to him.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy friend told him I wasn\u2019t Spanish, that I was Native American,\u201d Adrian says. \u201cSo this\u00a0guy looks at me and says, \u2018Really? What tribe?\u2019 So I told him Cheyenne, and he really surprised\u00a0me then. He asked, \u2018Northern or\u00a0Southern Cheyenne?\u2019 That guy cleared off the whole table and\u00a0said \u2018Drinks are on the house tonight.\u2019 He knew more about Native American culture than most\u00a0of the people I\u2019ve met in Montana.\u201d<\/p>\n

I was recently watching a documentary about the Civil War, and one of the talking heads\u00a0was explaining how it was possible for those revered Founding Fathers to have such a blind spot\u00a0about slavery during the writing of our nation\u2019s Constitution. The fact that they were able to write\u00a0so eloquently about all men being equal in the Declaration of Independence, while at the same time making it clear that these\u00a0conditions were never going to apply to slaves, was possible because the people of that time\u00a0honestly believed that African Americans were inferior.<\/p>\n

\"CapreAir_Variable\"<\/a><\/div><\/div>They were basically in the same\u00a0category as any other commodity, like farm animals. So there was no hypocrisy in their minds,\u00a0although many of them clearly felt differently deep down.<\/p>\n

To me, this is one of the most obvious oversights in our view of the Native American\u00a0population. Patricia Limerick, in her book “The Legacy of Conquest,” points out that because the\u00a0North won the war, America was forced to face the truth about slavery, and simultaneously,\u00a0about African Americans.<\/p>\n

So there has been a forward motion in the narrative for black\u00a0Americans. We can argue for hours about the level of progress in that arena, but one only has to\u00a0look at the White House to see that progress has been made. The idea of an African American in\u00a0that office would have been inconceivable to the Founding Fathers.<\/p>\n

Today, the idea of a Native American in that office is still inconceivable, and according to\u00a0Limerick, part of the reason for this is that\u00a0the narrative about Native Americans ended with\u00a0the Indian Removal Act. The intent of that piece of legislation was to rid our country of\u00a0these people. And we almost accomplished that. I would argue that the intent is still there,\u00a0because we have never been forced in the same way we were with black Americans to\u00a0acknowledge that Native Americans\u00a0matter, that they deserve to be treated as equals.<\/p>\n

In this month when we celebrate our national\u00a0independence, it might be worth considering that there are still people among\u00a0us who aren\u2019t enjoying that same luxury.<\/p>\n

For a year now, Adrian Jawort and I have been hosting a monthly lecture series to try to\u00a0bring this issue and others surrounding the Native American population to the attention of\u00a0the community. We have been fortunate to have hosted some wonderful speakers, the most recent\u00a0of whom was Caleb Williams.<\/p>\n

Our intention for this series, which we have called The Native\u00a0American Race Relations and Healing Lecture Series, is not only to focus on the things that are\u00a0wrong, but to encourage people to help us come up with solutions. Native Americans who\u00a0look at the plight of their people honestly will admit that things are bad, and that many of the\u00a0problems have become self-perpetuating.<\/p>\n

The constant presence of drugs and alcohol abuse,\u00a0crime and child abuse have created an atmosphere of self-destructiveness that is hard to\u00a0overcome. But a large segment of this population is working very hard to change not\u00a0only the culture, but the perceptions.<\/p>\n

And they need our help. That\u2019s why it\u2019s been such an\u00a0absolute pleasure to work with them. Because they have suffered long enough.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cWhen I started telling people in Amherst that I was Native American, their most\u00a0common response was \u2018Wow, that\u2019s really cool!\u2019\u201d This was one of the more striking statements made by Caleb Williams, who was the speaker at the most recent\u00a0Native American Race Relations and Healing Lecture Series. And the striking thing about it was the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":13079,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3864],"tags":[137,4653,4654,608],"class_list":["post-13078","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-opinion","tag-adrian-jawort","tag-caleb-williams","tag-city-college","tag-russell-rowland","prominence-category-featured"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13078","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13078"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13078\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13079"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13078"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13078"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13078"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}