Dear Editor:

I was in a small local shop this fall while a loud woman "from away" was ranting to the owner. I heard her say, "Indians should forget the past and stop complaining, ‘They stole my land.’ They also should have left Columbus Day alone instead of changing it to Indigenous Peoples Day.”

I spoke up and said that I was part Native American, and the government hasn't done anything good for the Natives and people shouldn't honor a man who was a murderer instead. If they read or even watched Public TV, they would be knowledgeable of the recent issues perpetrated on Native Americans.

This issue isn't a "past" problem but an ongoing one. The government doesn't enforce what few laws of protection they allow the Natives (who still have to "fight" the government) for their God given rights. Cases of Native women who have been raped and murdered by non-Natives go uninvestigated. The government is still taking over what small reservations they were crowded on while they mine, drill, put pipelines, and minimize the acreage of their ancestors' historical sites. You can't forget that soldiers at a fort in Colorado once asked all the chiefs of tribes to gather there to talk about peace. After the Native men camped their families there and went out to hunt for food, the soldiers had slaughtered their women and children, then them. Children still suffer remembering how the government took them from their parents to distant schools where beaten. They killed off the buffaloes, fenced off lands and crowded them on small reservations with no way to provide for themselves. Natives out West are so poor they don't have clean water, electricity, nor enough food. They don't have money to leave their homes as they were forced to by the government in the "Trail of Tears." Their small government allotment isn't even enough to live on (especially when officials have been found stealing the monies from it). The first settlers invaded the Natives territory declaring war on them and they reacted as this country does today to outside invasions with less provocation.