We are very pleased to welcome veteran blogger Winter Rabbit as a guest front pager. He is a teacher and a musician who writes at Native American Netroots, from which this piece is cross posted. -- FC
He says of himself:
My circumstances have found me in South Dakota with some frequency in recent years. I was ignorant of the area's history for the first two years and so I finally decided to educate myself. This opened my eyes to the point that I vowed to help people understand, so that the assimilation and cultural genocide might cease. One day, I hope, that sect of the Dominant Culture that is religiously intolerant will be civilly restrained, because the entirety of the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples will be adhered to. My tribal heritage is unknown.
Religion and state have united to assimilate the American Indian in the past, such as with Ulysses S. Grant's Peace Policy that created the Indian Boarding Schools, and in more recent times, pro-Peabody Western Coal Indians and obtaining a false Hopi-Navajo Tribal Counsel designation by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, who were several First Mesa Hopi who had been converted to Mormonism. Problems cannot be solved at the same level of awareness that created them, and you cannot change what you do not acknowledge.
Indian Boarding Schools with the "incest, child abuse, hostage negotiations, kidnapping, and religious abuse" that accompanied it created two things in the victims: trauma bonds and Stockholm Syndrome by definition.
http://www.talk2action.org/story/2011/2/8/214752/1935/Front_Page/Dominionism_s_Threat_Against_Indian_Country