casinos havent done any good have they? Depression, domestic violence, alcohol and drug addiction, wide spread poverty. It is this that has helped destroy the fabric on reservations and even towns and cities outside too. I pray this keeps on track, it is a perfect answer, leading the Acoma back to the land :)
If you look at Maslow's heirarchy of needs, you find esteem of self and esteem by others above the physiological requirements of existence. When our physiological needs are met, that is where our mind goes.
Esteem of self, and esteem by others are intertwined and sometimes switch places, but we are pack animals that are concerned about our standing in the pack, as well as how we feel about our selves.
Native Americans had our free will taken away, and were not trained to be all we could be on the reservation. Casinos are service organizations, designed and operated to capitalize on one of mankind's vices, namely gambling, and trains its people in service roles, toward that end.
None that looks challenging or exciting to me enough to lay awake nights pondering, nor one that I would spend time bragging about to my friends. Also not one that pays enough to see the world or build the estate of our dreams around.
A better situation that one I observed in North Africa, where some countries pay for their citizens education through grade 16, and have multitudes of well educated citizens, but no jobs available for them, because the cottage industry is tourism. Lots of depression, anger, and boredom.
What Native America needs to escape the bonds that bind us, is to feel better about ourselves, so that we set higher standards and accept nothing less! I am me, hear me roar!
We are where we are, so that is where we are starting from, but developing our bag of tricks to include growth in the professions and trades that capitalize on our innate proclivities, not just white man's greed, is the way I see back into the sunlight for my Native American brothers and sisters.
Here in the 21st century, it is hard to visualize that as recently as my great, great grandparents, Native Americans (Injuns) were considered the lowest form of life on the planet, and were shot on sight in some locales. Less valuable than the black slaves, because they kept running away, unless they were sent to the East Indies as slaves, so they couldn't.
I'm a mongrel, because my European ancestors were dirt poor, and willing to be looked down on as a sqawman, in order to have a wife and family, cause white women were in short supply and choosey. Native American women were in greater supply, worked hard at the job, possessed a plethora of native skills, and charms, as well as pleasing personalities.
My great, great grandfather was actually the Native American on one side, who was shot and hung on his wedding night to a local white ranchers daughter, by Night Riders, and my great, great grandmother was abandoned by her English husband, so he could obtain a better paying job than was available to him as a sqawman.
By now my ancestry includes Welch and German, and except for high cheekbones, eye folds, and square mandible, my native ancestry goes un-noticed. For every generation after my great grandparents, we have been engaged in technical trades or professions and depression, domestic violence, alcohol and drug addiction are less of an issue, plus we've escaped poverty.
I say less, because those are conditions possible for all mankind, and it becomes numbers and degrees. Some of my hybrid family members still suffer from all of them, starting with either depression or addiction.
