Social Change: The Native American Rights Fund - Essay Example

As per the data available from 2000, the most noted of these tribes were Pueblo, Iroquois, Blackfeet, Lumbee, Apache, Chippewa, Sioux, Choctaw, Cherokee, and Navajo.2 However, it should be mentioned that all these tribes and suffer from ill health and poverty and related menaces like alcoholism and suicides. It is extraordinary data to find that the American Indians consist only 1% of the population yet score extremely high when poverty rate, suicide rate, and alcohol percentage are taken into consideration.

By the 2003 census report, it was found that about 88% of the Native American population lives under the poverty line.3 Other reports like Amnesty International of 2003 revealed that about 23% of all suicides committed in the US are by American Indians. American Indians also rank extremely high in the context of alcohol consumption and substance abuse. It is reported that 31% of alcoholism is linked to the American Indian community. Drug abuse is also reported at a rate of 26%. Unemployment is also high on this list of backwardness.

It has been estimated that 34% of American Indians are completely unemployed and about 40% of American Indians are partly unemployed. The American Indians also top the list of community ill health. They are the most vulnerable community to diabetes and heart-related disease. They also record the highest percentage of infantile death. 4 There are several causes of this backwardness. Initial military defeat has been morally and physically ramifying and this was corresponded by several factors like termination policies of the post world war period and slavery in the 19th century.

In the modern era, they are deprived of favoritism, the outlawing of language and culture, cultural assimilation with force, reservation related to confinement, and overall cultural pressure along with economic and social discrimination. The "Digital Divide" is as well a major area of anxiety for Native Americans and other minority groups for the reason that many American Indians and Alaskan Natives have hitherto been associated with basic telephone networks and are consequently unable to access the Internet, they are in jeopardy of falling even further behind in their facility to access employment, educational, and other prospects made accessible by information technology.

6 American Indians are also a racial community who from time to time face favoritism the same as African Americans do. In truth, earlier than the civil rights laws were endorsed, in some states three separate drinking fountains labeled "whites," "Colored" and "Indian" were found. There were as well three segments in some movie theaters. All of the civil rights decrees defend people from favoritism for the reason of race or color or national origin as well as protect American Indians.7Lately the Department of Justice took legal action against a school district in Utah for not having a high school in the isolated community of Navajo Mountain.

The Navajo and Paiute high school-age students who reside in this community all had to go over 90 miles from home and live in dormitories or with relatives and attend boarding schools functioned by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The school district had constructed high schools in the communities where non-Indians lived.