'America's Great Shame' by Douglas Burns

"American “Indians,” said the brilliant Native American writer and leader Vine Deloria Jr., are probably invisible because of the tremendous amount of misinformation about them.

That assessment from the late Deloria, an Iowa State University graduate, is no doubt one of the reasons you likely know more about Paris Hilton than what should be one of the biggest news stories in America.

Last Saturday, The New York Times ran a Page 1 story on Paris Hilton. Is she drunk? Is she in jail? Does someone have a new video of her giving it up? Is she wearing underwear?

Meanwhile, deeper in the newspaper, on Page 9 to be precise, there was a horrifying story about a suicide epidemic on the Rosebud Sioux Reservation in South Dakota, only a few hours' drive from Carroll, Iowa.
According to The Times, in the first 10 weeks of 2007, tribal authorities were called to three suicides and scores of attempts. A state of emergency was declared on March 14.

“Since then, a woman in her early 20s killed herself with pills, and scores more young people have tried to kill themselves — a total of 144 so far this year, at doctors’ best count,” The Times reports.

The reservation has a population of about 13,000 people. That’s roughly the size of the Des Moines suburb of Clive.

Imagine if 144 white Clive kids had tried various means of killing themselves in a matter of months..."

Read more from: America's Great Shame: If It Was Were Clive, People Would Care

Follow up story to 'America's Great Shame.'

Comments

[Sandra Bodah]

Your absolutely right. It's a shame that this is 2007 and people of America still do not take notice of Indigenous peoples of this land. Now if this were an incident in the lower urban areas or the anything else to do with a non-native indivudal, Odds are it may end up to be closer to the front page or on the front page. Reasons for this would be anywhere from, oppression, supression, discrimination, rascism, injustice, profiling, harassment, targeting, financial, media gain, and personal exposure, ignorance and failure to assimilate.
Anyone of this can be twisted and turned and dragged out for the sole purpose of attention or recognition or finger pointing. But let it be on a reservation or a known Native neighborhood or area most frequented by Natives, and the news becomes some filler in the middle of the paper. I've seen one to many times.