Today

About 70 percent of Native Americans live in urban areas today. Many of them live thousands of miles from their homeland which has caused them to be unable to maintain rituals and speak the language. Sometimes they try to keep these things going in their lives but often it proves to be a bit difficult.

Time after time, the American government has made sure these things don't continue and they destroy their homelands for unreasonable things.

It's extremely sad to know and see the things Native Americans have had to overcome over the years and what they are still dealing with today.

Tragedy within the Native Americans today.

Throughout the years the Native American suicide rate has soared and has kept rising. In wisconsin it's 25% above state average just this year, but the rates have been climbing in Native Americans since the 70's. Just in wisconsin between 1999 and 2008, 86 Native Americans have died from suicide.

Sadly, higher rates of suicide have been tied to drug and alcohol use which is extremely prevalent in Native American communities.

I could have seen this coming. After all they have been through they should be emotionally disturbed, or at least they are allowed to be. I just wish they had a different way of handling it and dealing with everything they've been through without such drastic measures.

Abuse

The American culture has always twisted the image of Native American Indians. They have said Indians are savage and uncivilized.

The sad thing is, the AMERICANS were trying to rush them out, destroy them, so over course they had to be savage in order to fight back and try to keep their land.

Then, there is the government. Them and the native americans signed treaty's and one by one the American government destroyed and broke every treaty that had made with the indians leaving them pushed into unwanted and unusable land. Their rational was out of site, out of mind.

Now we have indians selling their land in vegas.... not so out of mind now are they?

Native American Culture

So, I think it is safe to say that no one has a richer or more storied culture than Native Americans. It is rich is struggle, strife and triumph. There are many things of their culture that we actually take for granted, like moccasins, tee pees, peace pipes, and totem poles.

Animals were considered spirits in their culture. Although they were hunted and killed, their skins were made from clothing and drums and their meat was never wasted and their spirits lived on in the minds of those in the tribe. Spirituality is a huge part of Native culture, but they do not consider is just a part of them or a practice, more of who they are as a being and it's included in their every day life.

Another thing that we have seen through the years are dream catchers. We see them hanging on walls, windows of cars, and many other places. They are based on an old legend told by the Lakota tribe. It symbolizes holding onto the good things in life, while the holes in the catcher are there to filter out the bad thoughts and feelings. I remember having a dream catcher above my bed in hopes it would keep away bad dreams. I would even take it on trips with me. They have always kind of been a big thing in my family without me even realizing it was the ONE thing that kept us connected with our Native American heritage until now. That's kind of cool to think about.

Cherokee Indians:::The Tribe

My great great grandmother was in the Cherokee tribe. When people ask what I am, I proudly say "Cherokee Indian." With doing this, I've actually met a ton of people from the same tribe. Though we know nothing about it, it's always cool to find out.

Cherokee, or spelled "Tsalagi" is Creek, meaning "people with another language." There are still 22,000 people who speak it today and 350,000 Cherokee still alive in the world today. Most of them are in North Carolina and Oklahoma though. The point is, they still exist, just not very many of them compared to before. The government starting in the fifties actually started to remove the Cherokee children from their Tsalagi-speaking homes, deteriorating the number of children being raised bilingual from 75% to less than 5%. Really? Was that necessary?

Sadly, they were forced to relocate quite earlier in their time from the southeast to Oklahoma. They were rounded up, made to relocate without any of their processions or shoes for that matter and sent on a 800 mile journey. Many died of exposure, starvation, disease, and exhaustion.

OH, and despite the myth of indians living in tee pee's, Cherokee's actually lived in log houses. I'd like to think my people were bad ass.

Native American History

I've doing a lot of research of Native Americans. I've got a little bit of their blood in me and it's always made me a bit curious as to what the history of them were and what they endured to survive in America with all of the other countries invading their space.

Native Americans have always been here. There were about 10 million inhabiting America during the the time of European arrivals. They were here before any other man had set foot on the land for many many years. Also the name "Indian" was given to them by Christopher Columbus which mistakenly thought he had landed himself in the Indies.

Through their beliefs that have always respected the land and the gifts it has to offer in return. They used the land to their advantage by learning and becoming extremely skilled hunters, fisherman, they built homes with any available recourses, and farmed their own crops.

When the colonists and explorers came over, they brought many sicknesses with them, such as; measles, smallpox, cholera, yellow fever and many more. This alone began to wipe out a mass amount of Native Americans.

Kind of stinks they were being wiped out so easily. They seemed pretty eco-friendly.