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Date Posted: 08:57:43 06/07/01 Thu
Author: Anonymous
Subject: American Indians have a new will to survive

American Indians Have New Will To Survive
by AP, The Associated Press


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Oklahoma City (AP) - A stronger will to survive and preserve their culture will make up for a bleak socio-economic outlook for American Indians this century, an expert believes.

A recent international report on human rights concluded that American Indians have the lowest incomes, highest unemployment rates, least education, shortest life span, worst health and housing conditions and highest suicide rates of any race in the United States, said Richard West, the keynote speaker at Monday's opening of Sovereignty XIV, a statewide symposium on American Indian sovereignty.

West said he is "not disheartened" by the statistics, since "a seminal and historic shift has occurred in the thinking of native people about their future."

West said as executive director of the National Museum of the American Indian, he and the staff try to focus on the size, depth and contributions of native communities that lived "in what is now known as the Americas."

West, a member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma, said demographers estimate that in 1492, the year Christopher Columbus arrived, 75 million native people lived in the Americas. Six million to 9 million of those lived in what is now the United States.

West said American Indians had thriving cultures and huge settlements at the same time Rome was "literally nothing more than a minor, largely rural village."

When Europeans arrived, he said, thousands of native communities exhibited 700 distinct languages and cultures. But in less than two generations, that diversity was cut in half.

The number of people in the most densely populated native area, Central America, declined 75 percent.

"Entire civilizations and communities that had time depths of thousands of years were destroyed and eliminated, quite literally wiped out in a generation through disease and military action," West said.

By 1900, the first year American Indians were counted in a U.S. census, it was estimated only 250,000 remained in this country, he said.

After West's address, Neal McCaleb, a Chickasaw tribal member and President Bush's nominee to run the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs, spoke of sovereignty and taxes.

"Sovereign governments must have tax revenues," he said. "If we are dependent on another government ... we are subordinate to that government."

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