When you live in the truck that the government gave you for free, and get drunk every day, then maybe you should not expect much.
That's one hell of an ignorant way to look at it.
The alcoholism is one of the results of being victims of genocide, utterly helpless and their cries falling on deaf ears. A quick bit of research would cure that ignorance, but hey. Wouldn't want to find out that you're a racist, eh?
I'll guide ya along.
Victims of sexual abuse, racism, hate crimes and the like, are far more likely to become drug addicts and alcoholics. This
source states the following statistics:
Sexual abuse is defined as sexual-based acts or events that cause trauma to the victim. These events or acts include sexual assault, child molestation, rape, incest, hate crimes based on gender identity or sexual orientation and sexual harassment.
Sexual abuse can cause significant physical and mental harm to the victim, some of whom take a long time to be able to move on from the abuse.
Studies have shown that there is a strong correlation between the history of sexual abuse and the manifestation of addictive behavior, especially in women. 1 out of every 6 women and 1 in 33 men in America have been the
victim of sexual assault or rape in their lifetime. 15 percent of victims are under age of 12.
Sexual abuse victims are 3 times more likely to suffer depression, 6 times more likely to suffer post-traumatic stress disorder, 13 times more likely to abuse alcohol and 26 times more likely to abuse drugs than those who have not been sexually abused.
Now, let's tally up what's happened to the Natives in recent years (won't bother with what's happened a century ago, that's all well-known fact, or should be). We have:
Insane levels of rape.
1 in 3 Native American women have reported being raped. And when we account for the fact that only
a 3rd of all rapes are reported, that only leaves a small few number of Native American women that haven't been raped.
And when you dig
into the stats, you find that Native Americans suffer mainly from the hands of non-Native Americans. From the above source:
But it doesn't end there. Let's read up on the so-called, innocently named, "boarding schools", where Native Americans were routinely raped, beaten, tortured, sexually enslaved and victims of live organ harvesting. Here is an
AmnestyUSA article on the subject:
Dolphus is one of more than 100,000 Native Americans forced by the U.S. government to attend Christian schools. The system, which began with President Ulysses Grant's 1869 "Peace Policy," continued well into the 20th century.
Church officials, missionaries, and local authorities took children as young as five from their parents and shipped them off to Christian boarding schools; they forced others to enroll in Christian day schools on reservations. Those sent to boarding school were separated from their families for most of the year, sometimes without a single family visit.
Parents caught trying to hide their children lost food rations.
Virtually imprisoned in the schools, children experienced a devastating litany of abuses, from forced assimilation and grueling labor to widespread sexual and physical abuse. Scholars and activists have only begun to analyze what Joseph Gone (Gros Ventre), a psychology professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, calls "the cumulative effects of these historical experiences across gender and generation upon tribal communities today."
....
Government officials found the Carlisle model an appealing alternative to the costly military campaigns against Indians in the West. Within three decades of Carlisle's opening, nearly 500 schools extended all the way to California. The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) controlled 25 off-reservation boarding schools while churches ran 460 boarding and day schools on reservations with government funds.
....
Native scholars describe the destruction of their culture as a "soul wound," from which Native Americans have not healed. Embedded deep within that wound is a pattern of sexual and physical abuse that began in the early years of the boarding school system. Joseph Gone describes a history of "unmonitored and unchecked physical and sexual aggression perpetrated by school officials against a vulnerable and institutionalized population." Gone is one of many scholars contributing research to the Boarding School Healing Project.
Rampant sexual abuse at reservation schools continued until the end of the 1980s, in part because of pre-1990 loopholes in state and federal law mandating the reporting of allegations of child sexual abuse. In 1987 the FBI found evidence that John Boone, a teacher at the BIA-run Hopi day school in Arizona, had sexually abused as many as 142 boys from 1979 until his arrest in 1987. The principal failed to investigate a single abuse allegation. Boone, one of several BIA schoolteachers caught molesting children on reservations in the late 1980s, was convicted of child abuse, and he received a life sentence. Acting BIA chief William Ragsdale admitted that the agency had not been sufficiently responsive to allegations of sexual abuse, and he apologized to the Hopi tribe and others whose children BIA employees had abused.
...
The report says church officials killed children by beating, poisoning, electric shock, starvation, prolonged exposure to sub-zero cold while naked, and medical experimentation, including the removal of organs and radiation exposure.
In 1928 Alberta passed legislation allowing school officials to forcibly sterilize Native girls; British Columbia followed suit in 1933. There is no accurate toll of forced sterilizations because hospital staff destroyed records in 1995 after police launched an investigation. But according to the testimony of a nurse in Alberta, doctors sterilized entire groups of Native children when they reached puberty. The report also says that Canadian clergy, police, and business and government officials "rented out" children from residential schools to pedophile rings.
....
It goes on and on. I highly recommend reading the entire article.
But it doesn't just end there, oh no. Native American communities are
forbidden from prosecuting non-Natives that commit crimes on the reservations.
Tribal prosecutors cannot prosecute crimes committed by non-Native perpetrators. Tribal courts are also prohibited from passing custodial sentences that are in keeping with the seriousness of the crimes of rape or other forms of sexual violence. As a direct result of passage of the Tribal Law and Order Act, the maximum prison sentence tribal courts can now impose for any crimes, including rape, is three years, up from the previous maximum of one year. In comparison, the average prison sentence for rape handed down by state or federal courts is between eight years and eight months and 12 years and 10 months respectively.
So not only are Native Americans victimized greatly by non-Natives, the communities are forbidden from doing anything about it. Want to get away with rape scot-free? Rape a Native American.
And they're also
far poorer than the rest of the USA.
The
extreme poverty rate of a population is the percentage of families earning less than half of the poverty threshold. For a family of four in 2010, the extreme poverty threshold was approximately $11,000, or less than $3,000 per person.
[6] On large reservations, the extreme poverty rate is as much as six times the national rate. On average, the extreme poverty rate on the largest reservations is almost four times the national rate. A breakdown is provided in the following table.
So we have an entire race that are in poverty, suffer sexual abuse & rape, without clean drinking water, sparse telephone access, without internet and prevented from prosecuting those who victimize Native Americans.
Then we factor in thing such as "starlight tours", an activity presented as some sort of innocent treatment for drunkards by the media, that involves police personnel abducting drunk Native Americans and being dumped in the middle of nowhere. They count themselves lucky if they aren't beaten and taken advantage of, before being dropped off.
And what about "Indian rolling", where non-Native Americans cruise around, looking for Native Americans, where they then brutalize and murder the Native?
The persecution and injustice that Native Americans suffer, is more than just some lackadaisical affinity to alcohol. You would know this, if you bothered to actually do anything in regards to learning about Native Americans.
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