PANEL TO DISCUSS HUMAN RIGHTS FROM AMERICAN INDIAN PERSPECTIVE
by Bob Kelleher, Minnesota Public Radio
Minnesota Public Radio, MN
Oct 15 2007
Minnesota’s 150th birthday is being celebrated over the coming year.
There are going to be hundreds of events, however, one of the
first focuses on a dark topic. It’s human rights as experienced by
Minnesota’s American Indians – an experience that to many is nothing
to celebrate.
Duluth, Minn. – The University of Minnesota opens its state
sesquicentennial observance in Duluth with an unvarnished look at
the American Indian experience in the state.
It’s not all a happy story, which includes American Indian children
forced into boarding schools, young women sterilized for life, and
the largest mass execution in U.S. history.
Alexis Pogorelskin heads the University’s Center for Genocide,
Holocaust, and Human Rights Studies on the University of Minnesota
Duluth campus. She saw the opportunity through the state’s birthday
celebration, to link history and human rights.
Alexis Pogorelskin"The programming that the center has done has
focused on Darfur, the holocaust, the Armenian genocide," Pogorelskin
says. "And as Director of the center I have long wanted to do American
Indian issues, and with the boost of the sesquicentennial I was able
to put this panel together."
Panelists include Pogorelskin, Linda Grover with UMD’s American
Indian Studies Program, and Native American speakers Jim Northrup
and Dr. Robert Powless. Northrup is a celebrated writer and poet from
the Fond Du Lac Band of Ojibway. Powless is professor emeritus with
UMD’s Center for American Indian Studies.
"I’m going to focus on what does human rights actually mean?" says
Powless. "And how does that relate to what has happened to Indian
people in the past, and what we would like to think is going to be
happening to them in the future."
According to Powless, the American Indian experience today is still
one of human rights denied.
"If we’re not aware of these issues then we, as a community, cannot
appropriately address them."
– Alexis Pogorelskin"Part of a definition of human rights – a
dictionary definition of human rights – is equality before the law,"
Powless says. "Certainly if you look around here in Duluth, you don’t
find that."
Powless says he believes some crimes against Duluth’s American Indians
have not been given a thorough investigation.
But he says things aren’t hopeless. Powless says the popular image
of Indian people has improved since the 1930s and 40s.
"And I’m saying today, we’ve got to somehow learn from each other,"
Powless says. "Indians have to go into the mainstream, yes. But they
also have to teach their culture, or cultures, to non-Indian people,
if we’re going to have, in my estimation, true human rights."
Alexis Pogorelskin says she’s hoping participants leave with a
different sense of who we are.
"That what we think of ourselves as Minnesotans and Americans and what
we take for granted, and what we assume, that these things are really
not true," says Pogorelskin. "And when certain members of our larger
community are under threat, there’s a way in which our understanding
of who all of us are is likewise under threat."
Robert PowlessPogorelskin says a consideration of the American Indian
experience can lead to a reconsideration of the way the United States
relates to other countries in the world, and the treatment of minority
cultures.
"I think if we’re not aware of these issues then we as a community
cannot appropriately address them," Pogorelskin says. "We can treat
them as historical, but I think they are topics we need to consider
in terms of who we vote for, what we stand for, what we represent,
and what we’re going to fight for."
The panel being held in the Kirby Student Center on the UMD campus is
the first in a series of lectures the University of Minnesota plans
through the coming year on the American Indian experience.