Aaron Huey sets in front of us the conflict that we’ve shared with native americans throughout american history. The speech that he produced centered around pictures that he took while at an indian reservations (lagoma?). He then talked about the injustices that America dealt to Indians in the form of a timeline. He started in the 1800s and progressed to the present, where the reservation is in shambles. In the beginning, the U.S signed a treaty with the tribe that potentially would have made their colony larger than the state of Idaho, and over time, America rejected the treaty until the reservation was only about 100 square miles which is considerably smaller than what it was originally. America not only turned its back of the native american nation, but also massacred it almost entirely. The population of Indians now is around 250,000, while the population around the 1500s was around an estimated 6 million!
In current time, the nation faces severe social issues because of the american government abandoning it. Alcoholism rates are skyrocketing, poverty rules over the nation, and the average male life expectancy is only about 47 years old! Clearly the government has not taken watch over this nation.
Aaron Huey finishes by describing how the tribe views the white man. Being white himself, he had to exert plenty of effort in befriending the tribe because they despise the white man. They consider the white man greedy, and he relates it to “taking the best cut of meat for themselves”. When talking more about the tribes struggle, he begins to tear up onstage, and there is an apparent pain in what he is talking about that I’ve yet to see on Ted Talks.
Social justice to Huey would be the reform of Native American tribes. He would want to give the native americans the land that they originally had, and to give them all of the benefits that americans have. All Huey wants is equality, and for America to uphold the treaty that we’ve manipulated and destroyed a long time ago.
lmm466 