Standing five feet tall under an eagle-feather headdress with two braids almost touching her knees, Chief Caleen Sisk-Franco of the Winnemem Wintu band of the Native American Wintu tribe began her speech with a prayer on the sacredness of the water.
To celebrate and to spotlight threats to native culture, the Native American Student Union (NASU) sponsored Indigenous Solidarity Day and featured guest speakers and drummers from Native American tribes in the EMU amphitheater yesterday. Sisk-Franco and other members of her tribe said there is a legacy of genocide against native people, part of which includes large corporations stealing and destroying their land.
Sisk-Franco compared the water-bottling industry to gold miners of the 19th century, exploiting the planet with no regard for its health. Water-bottling companies drill into aquifers to get water and destroy the ecosystem in the process, Sisk-Franco said.
“We shouldn’t have to pay for the most basic ingredient of life,” Sisk-Franco said.
“They are leaving big holes in Mother Earth,” she said. “They are cutting down old-growth trees as wide as the stage I am standing on.”
NASU recognizes Oct. 9 as “anti-Columbus day,” NASU member Rachel Cushman said. The day is an effort to spread awareness about the adverse, lasting effects of Christopher Columbus arriving in the Americas.
Beyond facilitating the mass murder of millions of Native people, Cushman said, Columbus and his men brought with them diseases such as influenza and the common cold -diseases that decimated Native populations because they didn’t have genetic immunity. She also said mainstream culture tries to gloss over this legacy.
“People are stuck in elementary school,” Cushman said. “The history books are from a European perspective.”
Students can learn about Native American history and culture in University classes. Part of the introductory History of the United States course curriculum covers the mass murder of indigenous people by European settlers, University freshman Faith Thompson said. Thompson is currently taking the course and plans to enroll in other courses offered by the University that focus on Native American history and culture.
Thompson sat behind the NASU information table in the amphitheater with other supporters of “anti-Columbus day,” speaking with people who support Columbus.
“Most people think that if Columbus never ‘discovered America’ they would grow up a poor European,” Thompson said. “They also say, ‘hey, I was born in America, that makes me a Native too.’”
These people, she said, don’t understand what it is to be a Native American.