A very important reminder that the Buffalo Genocide was a very real thing that happened and not just a shock factor thing. Bison fur was sought after and their tongues were considered a delicacy by the colonizers.
But they also knew they were a main source of food for plains indigenous people. Plains Indigenous tribes would follow the herds over the year to be able to hunt when needed. Bison were quickly hunted to near extinction so that natives would be forced to depend on the colonizers for food and aid.
After the children were taken and forced into residential schools that were intended to “Kill the indian save the man.” They cut our hair, made it illegal to speak out languages, made us catholic and kept the children at these “schools”. Any surviving adults were sold into slavery and put into Ghettos. Many of which we still live on. Babies were sold as property. For a long while killing and keeping native scalps, yes their scalps, was done for sport some generals buying them for money.
This was one of many reasons on top of disease that nearly wiped us all out. The last residential school closed in 1997 the year I was born. My parents and grandparents all attended them. Bodies of children that were killed in the schools are still being found and we’ll never really know how many there were.
I say all of this because the amount of people that aren’t taught this is horrifying. Natives are treated like mystical story pieces or like we simply don’t exist anymore. It couldn’t be further from the truth.
If you take anything from this film please start by being educated since most of the land you stand on was taken. Your home, school, job. Everything around you exists because of this.
Only just now in 2022 are indigenous actors and media finally starting to get taken seriously. Our stories are finally mattering and not just dismissed. We’re finally allowed to create our own worlds and stories that people actually like. It’s so important that if you like these stories you get educated. You listen and donate. Share. Educate. Speak up for us when other white people try to silence us. Give reparations and actively try to unlearn your stigmas.
I’m so happy this film exists because I finally feel pride in a native role and like people are finally maybe going to listen.
It simply must be said. A major (or even the main) reason that american city planning is so atrociously bad, and continues to be that way, has a everything to do with racism in America. Cities do not want easy transit to all parts of the city, because the city is designed with the intention of keeping white people separated from black people. This exists not only in the lack of decent public transit, but also to the dominant form of transit in the USA: the car. Setting aside the fact that cutting up a city with highways is always a poor design choice that worsens life for everyone in the city, you may notice that these borderline impossible to traverse, noise machine, air quality killing, auto insurance payout generating death trap roads tend to conveniently isolate the portions of the city where everyone except fairly well off white people live, thereby not only making the city environment significantly worse in general, but also actively preventing any sort of integration of various communities in a way that is uniquely difficult to work around.
As if that wasn’t enough of a clue, the often scarce public transportation itself can serve as a further means of isolation, by acting not as a dedicated transit network for inhabitants of the city to wherever they wish to go, but a means of transporting poor minority workers to and from work, completely out of sight of the white upper class, who often wouldn’t be caught dead on public transit. This particular failure of design isn’t necessarily racist, it’s a nearly universal trait of American public transit that has to do with the fact these systems were designed exclusively with the idea of transporting poor people who can’t afford cars to work, and not to facilitate movement across the city no matter the destination. This is why american cities often have fairly minimal train systems with immense rail line transfer hubs near where the majority of non-car owning commuters work: they’re optimized for capitalism, not convenience.
There’s an interesting historical parallel to this, too. The early predecessor of the inner-city highway, the large boulevard, was originally developed into the distinctive feature of Paris during Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s renovation of the city in the 1800s, with one aspect of the project being to do just this - to cut off the poorer areas, and provide wide stretches that couldn’t be barricaded during revolts.
Not a single Republican in Congress voted to cap prescription drug expenses at $2,000/year for seniors on Medicare. Democrats took on Big Pharma and won.
