CROW AGENCY, Mont. – Ta’Shon Rain Little Light, a happy little girl who loved to dance and dress up in traditional American Indian clothes, had stopped eating and walking. She complained constantly to her mother that her stomach hurt.
When Stephanie Little Light took her daughter to the Indian Health Service clinic in this wind-swept and remote corner of Montana, they told her the 5-year-old was depressed.
Ta’Shon’s pain rapidly worsened and she visited the clinic about 10 more times over several months before her lung collapsed and she was airlifted to a children’s hospital in Denver. There she was diagnosed with terminal cancer, confirming the suspicions of family members.
A few weeks later, a charity sent the whole family to Disney World so Ta’Shon could see Cinderella’s Castle, her biggest dream. She never got to see the castle, though. She died in her hotel bed soon after the family arrived in Florida.
“Maybe it would have been treatable,” says her great-aunt, Ada White, as she stoically recounts the last few months of Ta’Shon’s short life. Stephanie Little Light cries as she recalls how she once forced her daughter to walk when she was in pain because the doctors told her it was all in the little girl’s head.
…
American Indians have an infant death rate that is 40 percent higher than the rate for whites. They are twice as likely to die from diabetes, 60 percent more likely to have a stroke, 30 percent more likely to have high blood pressure and 20 percent more likely to have heart disease.
American Indians have disproportionately high death rates from unintentional injuries and suicide, and a high prevalence of risk factors for obesity, substance abuse, sudden infant death syndrome, teenage pregnancy, liver disease and hepatitis.
While campaigning on Indian reservations, presidential candidate Barack Obama cited this statistic: After Haiti, men on the impoverished Pine Ridge and Rosebud Reservations in South Dakota have the lowest life expectancy in the Western Hemisphere.
Four Muslim men also pleaded their innocence before a judge in a White Plains, N.Y., courthouse after being accused of plotting to blow up a pair of synagogues and down military aircraft with a shoulder-fired missile. The feds had been keeping tabs on the men for a year and sold them the missile and explosives, which had been deactivated. The four were reportedly angered over the deaths of Muslims in Afghanistan at the hands of U.S. forces.
A note on the second one – this is not an example of Muslims being evil. This is an example of oppressed groups being encouraged to scapegoat Jews for what those who are actually in power are doing. In other words, this is how anti-Semitism works.
(Cross-posted at Alas, A Blog.)
I don’t get the connection between the two news items. In Afghanistan and Pakistan, the United States is actively killing Muslims. In the United States, our government is neglecting the care of Native Americans. I’m not sure I’d call either genocide, but the latter particularly seems like a poor candidate for the name. The Muslims in Afghanistan and Pakistan can say, “If you’d leave us alone, we wouldn’t have all these dead from raids, bombs, Predator strikes, etc.” The whole problem on the reservations is that they are being left alone — they are not close to medical centers, it’s an unpopular place for physicians to practice, they aren’t budgeted enough money to cover the needs, and people are insufficiently informed about their eligibility and the need to sign up for Medicare and Medicaid. Such neglect might be called genocide if Native Americans were forced to live in such isolated areas — if the reservations essentially were ghettos in which NAs are required to live without any way of obtaining what they need except through the government — but from what I understand they are not.
I’d be surprised if the comparison to whites would be so dramatic if the comparison were to whites in Appalachia and other parts of the country that are similarly isolated from modern medical care. The United States is a bad country in which to be a poor rural-dweller, but I don’t think there’s any malice in that fact. We simply do not take seriously the idea of our government’s having to care about all citizens’ well-being (contrast with places like Japan, which insists on building bridges and roads to link even very sparsely populated areas to the rest of the country, even though this probably fails on a cost-benefit analysis of the most effective way to spend money, because of the government’s sense of obligation to every citizen).
We simply do not take seriously the idea of our government’s having to care about all citizens’ well-being
That’s because this country was not founded on that concept. In fact, it was pretty much founded on the concept that the primary responsibility for a citizen’s well-being is the citizen, followed by their family, followed by their local community (which would often have a lot of overlap with their local churches). The role of the Federal government was intended to be that it would take care of things like the common defense, the Post Office, interstate commerce, foreign policy, etc., and to ensure that people and the State and local governments did not interfere with your attempts to take care of yourself.
A note on the second one – this is not an example of Muslims being evil.
Oh, I don’t know. They’re Moslems, right? Their intended act was evil, right? So it looks like a primary example of Muslims being evil.
Mind you, I wouldn’t take it as an example of “All Muslims are evil” or “Most Muslims are evil” or “Islam is evil”.
This is an example of oppressed groups being encouraged to scapegoat Jews for what those who are actually in power are doing.
I’d be interested in your take as to what the specific oppressed group is and how you would classify “those who are actually in power”.
In Afghanistan and Pakistan, the United States is actively killing Muslims.
Yes. And they’re also actively protecting Muslims from being killed. And there’s plenty of Muslims killing Muslims, the same ones who were killing other Muslims before we showed up and stopped them – for a while, although we’re trying to spin that back up again.
Concur with RonF@3. I’d also note, incidentally, that this is a prime example of privilege and oppression cross-cutting. Certainly, Muslims (and Black Muslims) in the US face oppression. On the other hand, some of the primary actors fomenting and encouraging this sort violent anti-Semitic activity by Muslims are … empowered Muslim entities such as Saudi Arabia and Iran (both state apparatuses and privileged groups preaching extremist hate). Islamic groups lie on both sides of the equation.
Um, I think the point here is we should get out of Afghanistan and Iraq in order to actually help those in our country. We are only bringing danger to our own home and harming those overseas. Ron, we really aren’t saving muslims over there, we really aren’t. The Taliban’s popularity is rising again, for god’s sake.
I’ll clarify by saying that I was using the term “evil” in the George Bush sense – as in, “We must defeat the evildoers.” That is, as a stand-in for any deeper analysis.
Kweh?
The Taliban’s popularity is rising? That’s not what I’ve been reading. And the reports I read tell me that the Taliban tend to do a lot of killing of fellow Muslims.
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