Dedrick and Dyalekt discuss how the racial wealth divide affects Indigenous people and how, by recognizing our similarities and differences, we can band together to work toward bridging the divide. Episode Highlights:Dyalekt: Thanksgiving is a contradiction for a lot of folks, and everybody feels weird about it but it's one of those things about power structures, right? I railed against it very much, many a time, until I realized that for a lot of my family members that's the only time, we have to be able to break bread.Dedrick: What I try to do is recognizing that the conquerors, when they conquer people, they usually take the holidays of the conquered and put their own holidays on top of it.Dedrick: I hope everyone figures out some way to celebrate in a way that is meaningful to the family and disrespectful to history and our current reality of racial inequality.Dyalekt: I feel like Indigenous, Native, First Nation people often get left out of a lot of these racial wealth divide discussions. There is the idea that, there aren’t many of them left and they’re scattered on reservations, so their data is really small. Then there’s other folks who are like, well they got their casinos and everything so they’re doing all right. So, in one way or another, they’re kinda left alone.Dedrick: And some people think they are actually doing much better than they are. I do think this lack of data is a very big problem. It is challenging because there isn’t good wealth data on Native Americans. National wealth data, even basic income data, unemployment data is hard to find.Dyalekt: When people talk about folks being scalped, everyone likes to say, ‘Oh Native Americans were running around scalping the Europeans who came’, when that is the opposite of what was happening. Native people were scalped! There were too many Native folks on this land that the Europeans claimed on their own. So, what they said was that, if you clear out Native Americans, we will pay you. They would pay you for every scalp you brought because that was proof that you had actually killed a person. Whenever you are talking about scalping, remember you know it completely backwards.Dedrick: Native American median income is about $36,000 which is exactly the median income for African Americans. They also have twice the unemployment rate of White Americans. I think there is a lot more reparations that need to occur for Native Americans. We need reparations for African Americans. We don’t want reservations, we want reparations, right? So that they have capital that allows them to succeed in this economy on their own.Dyalekt: The least that we can do is to be informed about the ways that we have points of tangency no matter our backgrounds. To have a better understanding of the similarities that the other groups have all together in this country so that we can have a better understanding of the umbrella of oppression that is happening to all of us so that we can see what actual areas, what policies we want to endorse and what points we want to attack. Dedrick: The most we can do is, as we are creating for ourselves our own ways of advocacy for our particular communities, recognizing that supporting different community’s advocacy that is also for justice, really in many deep ways is inherent to your struggles as well. I am not on this thing where everybody is the same. No, no, no. There are distinct differences, recognize the difference and understand that. But also, in the difference understand that there are similarities in basic economic redistribution and that you are going to need to actually step out of your community to work with other communities.
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