Missing or Murdered: The fate of Native American Women is a national disgrace.

The situation that exists among the Native people in the US is the result of a centuries old genocidal war against the people whose land this was. It is not just in Montana or among the Crow that we are seeing in the video above, but in all the states where there are significant Native populations.  

We only have to watch TV shows about serial killers to see that poor women, prostitutes, and other women on the fringes of society are the majority of the victims. They are not only vulnerable with regard to their social power and economic conditions, but most importantly because the institutions that are supposed to protect them do not. This is particularly the case with indigenous women. In addition to this systemic crisis, there is the poisoning of Native lands and water supply through mining and other polluting industries. Mining on the Navajo Nation has left a legacy of cancers and sickness in that community.

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I would recommend to my friends and comrades, particularly abroad, that you read Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz's book, An Indigenous History of the United States. It should be required reading on the brutal history of colonization in the US. I do not have the confidence to write a review of it, as I couldn't do it justice, but I will say that what jumped out at me in particular was a history lesson that reveals that the most difficult, prolonged and brutal war the US has fought was the centuries old war to take ownership of the land in the face of heroic resistance from the people that lived on it. There is great similarity to Israel's ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian population, the British against the Kikuyu in Kenya (Mau Mau) and so on. As it did with the Vietnamese, US capitalism used chemical warfare against the Native resistance and had a policy of destroying their food supply in order to starve them in to submission.  Despite facing a more technologically advanced military, the Native People are still here today, and have not lost their identity and culture. The recent battles at Standing Rock, a near civil war over land and water rights, is strong evidence of the determination that exists in the Native American communities.

Native American women and young girls go missing and/or are found murdered at an alarming rate. As the man in the video says, if they are lucky to find them, it is almost always after they have been killed. In the mainstream media we hear more about the horrible conditions of China's  Uyghers ( a Muslim minority) than we do about our own Native population on our doorstep. It is nothing short of a national disgrace; the result of a failed state.