Taiguei d’ituno kena atiaono. Yurumein Arawak daka d’iri Claudia Fox Tree. I introduced myself in my indigenous language. All of the indigenous people of North and South America now speak a colonizer’s language: Spanish, French, British English, and Portuguese. So when I say something in my language, my original language, my ancestor can hear me and know that I have survived.
I’ve been really fortunate to come here for a few years and every time I hear people’s stories, I am again reminded that how, as a human species, we seem to constantly have no empathy and to hurt each other. And, it’s difficult to hear over and over again. And, I’m going to tell about a story that started over 500 years ago and it’s still going on today.
My introduction included the name of the Caribbean island that my ancestors were last associated with. That name comes from a colonizer’s name. For us, it’s Yurumein, and for other people it’s Saint Vincent.
So, when Columbus arrived, he first thought that the people he greeted were kind. But within a few hours, he said, “They are good to be ordered about, to be made to work, plant, and do whatever is wanted, to build towns, and be taught to go clothed and accept our customs… They would make fine servants… With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want[ed].”
In 1493, on his second voyage - he came with 1,500 men, women, and children - he ORDERED 1,500 men, women, and children from the nations on the island, letting 500 go, and condemning 600 to be enslaved by Spanish men remaining on the island. He ordered another 500 to be sent to Spain where 200 died on voyage, and were thrown by the Spanish into the Atlantic. He enslaved 5000 indigenous people during his career, more than any other individual in history ever.
As soon as the 1493 expedition got to the Caribbean, before it even reached Haiti, Columbus was rewarding his lieutenants with indigenous women and children to rape.. As Columbus himself wrote in 1500, “… girls… from 9-10… are… in demand.”
Between 1970-1976, the Indian Health Service sterilized between 25-50% of Native American women. By 1968, 35% of Puerto Rican women were sterilized. In 1976, the government admitted it forcibly sterilized 3,406 women, without their permission. 36 women were under age 21, despite court-ordered moratorium on sterilizations of women younger than that age.
Currently, Indigenous women are raped, murdered, and disappearing at alarming rates. A recent federal study reported that Native American women face murder rates over 10X the national average and are raped at 2.5X the average.
On August of 2018, Tamera Bear-comes-out, went downtown to the Yellowstone County Sheriff’s Office to file a missing person report. It would be one of the nearly 300 cases of missing American Indian women and girls reported to law enforcement agencies in Montana that year, which is just last year.
American Indians make up 6.7% of Montana’s population, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. But they accounted for 26% of missing person reports from 2016-2018. Nearly two-thirds of those cases involved women or girls.
Say her name: witness the names Mary Anne Costin Medwayosh and Shacaiah Harding. I wear red to honor the MMIWG2s as part of the Red Dress Project. May 5 is another day that you can all wear read to honor this project.
With the new Congress in D.C., we now have a bill, introduced in April and referred to committee, called: Studying the Missing and Murdered Indian Crisis Act of 2019
Here in Massachusetts, we have FIVE bills currently before the MA state legislature. These are bills that affect all of us. They aren’t the kinds of bills like tribes looking for their lands or getting their recognition.
The first one is banning racist mascots and not using them for high schools and other kinds of events. The second is changing the state flag and seal, which have an arm with a knife over a Native American on a white background with the blue around the Native person. If you think of that arm being a tomahawk and that image being a Pilgrim, I think you’ll see that there might be a problem with message that it portrays. The third is making Indigenous Peoples Day a national holiday and that means eradicating Columbus Day. The fourth is supporting Indigenous education. And the fifth is protecting Native cultural items. That means returning bones and artifacts from museums.
When you include direct and indirect effects of disease, wars, enslavement, removals, relocations, and changes in society, culture, and subsistence patterns which accompanied European colonization, First Nations experienced genocide of apocalyptic proportions. From a 100% population, we’ve been reduced by (correction of “to”) 95% in that first initial time period and now the U.S. Census says Native people identify as 3% of the population.

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