Mission trip[

I just returned from a week on the Oglala Lakota Indian Reservation on South Dakota. It was a week of eye-opening lessons. The standard questions like "Why don't they just move away?" or "Why don't they just pull themselves up by their bootstraps?" become ridiculous when you've seen the conditions there. A combination of spiritual beliefs (isn't America supposed to promise freedom of religion?) and severe poverty exacerbates the problems. The US has violated every treaty it ever signed with the Indians, and yet we wonder why they can't dig themselves out of the rut we've put them in. We guaranteed to protect them--a compromise since we took away their lands just because we wanted them. There are no easy answers, but there are steps that can be taken. I'll try to educate anyone who will listen a bit over the next year...through blogs and, I hope, through cartoons.

The organization we worked with, Re-Member, is doing great work. A large part of that is to educate volunteers so we can spread the word. It was fun to watch people who were skeptical and who nonetheless took the trip with us change their attitude as they learned more.

Re-Member is also educating the people on the Rez to realize that some outsiders try to do right by them. Unfortunately, we're still in the minority on that. In a nation with a black president, increasingly equal treatment of women, and forward-moving attitudes on civil unions and/or same-sex marriage, we still treat the people who were here before us worse than we treat our pets. These are not "noble Indians", nor are they lazy. They are people, like you or me, who are in a financial morass not of their making.

Let's hope that we can correct this in this century.