The life of American Indians in the USA through the eyes of a Russian

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

I think we've all heard about the vaunted, American "FREEDOM"! Recently, I personally visited the Native American reservation, today I would like to show you real "freedom", real Americans, driven into reservations and more like vagrants.

Of course, the first step is to introduce yourself

We moved to the USA three years ago and live in California, Glendale. Usually I write about the domestic side of life in the United States, prices, salaries, taxes, etc., but sometimes I dilute the content, for example today.

Last week I had the opportunity to go to Arizona, my friend and former colleague called us, we went on business, but I thought that it would be useful for a Russian emigrant tourist to look at the native Indians, it's like living in Russia and not seeing matryoshka dolls. So, in addition to our main goal, we stopped at a small reservation, which was just nearby, in the northeastern state of Arizona.

Once upon a time, when America was actively colonized, the Europeans who arrived here first traded with the Indians, and then began to push them back, occupying their fertile and resource-rich lands. Most often forcibly, with the help of weapons or deception, as a result, the indigenous population (Indians) was pushed out to empty, lifeless lands, under the pretext of preserving their culture, they say, let them stick together, preserve their heritage, and so on, just over there, in the desert.

All areas of the accumulation of Indians are called reservations, most often it is a really large, deserted piece of land on which Indian settlements are scattered. They have their own power and administration here, and legislation is also largely their own, all this is done to preserve their culture, in general they live separately, they command themselves, sometimes they receive payments from the government, it doesn't sound so bad.

In fact, everything is not so great at all, you understand this immediately after you get into one of these reservations, I say this from my own experience

In general, the state itself (Arizona) is one continuous longing, in fact it is a desert lined with highways and covered with scattered, small settlements. Previously, looking in films as a car rushing along a straight, deserted road, I thought - cool! Having driven on it for 6 hours, I can tell you with complete confidence - it's not cool! But that's what it is! Then we began to come across settlements of the Indians, and this is where the biggest shock began.

I completely forgot! We stopped at the reservation of the proud Hopi people

Almost all the settlements on this reservation are very tiny, literally a couple of dozen houses, 75% of the houses are huts like the one in the photo above. Yes, there are also ordinary houses, but there are fewer of them.

A strange feature, schools and hospitals stand apart here

For example, right on the highway, in the middle of the desert, there is a secondary school, with several mini-villages scattered around it at a distance of 1-3 miles, from where the children are taken to school every day by bus.

However, not only at home, but the people themselves also disappointed me, while I was driving I even read a little about the Hopi people, I thought maybe now I’ll get acquainted with national characteristics, buy souvenirs, but …

The photo is very close, so I apologize for the quality.

In fact, almost all of those that we have seen are either ordinary, gloomy workers, farmers, or marginal individuals. We stopped at a roadside cafe for a bite to eat, stumbled upon some kind of drink, you can see from their faces that most likely Indians, but no souvenirs …

It should be noted here that in large reservations where tourism is developed and the locals earn money from this, the Indians still dress up, paint, sell souvenirs, and another circus. However, most reservations are small and godforsaken.

It is in such real (not ostentatious) reservations that unemployment is very high, there is either no job, or it is low-paid, benefits help out. But this way of life prevents the locals from breaking out to big cities, sending their children to study - there is simply no money.

By the way, he himself only recently learned that the reservation has a very high level of alcoholism, almost three times higher than in the United States as a whole

In general, the picture depressed me, of course, I expected to see small, original, rural settlements, but what I saw is more like a beggar backwater right in the middle of the desert, and after all, once this very people were great, they wrote books and films about them, eh, sorry.