AMIDST all th attention given to Terri Schiavo, it was easy last week to overlook America's second deadliest school shooting in its history. Jeff Weise, a high-school student on a Minnesota Native American reservation, gunned down nine people, mostly schoolmates, before killing himself.
While the Schiavo story is sad, the case of Jeff Weise is arguably more significant as a reminder of an enormous social problem we often neglect. The issue is not firearms, as some gun control activists will try to make it; Weise wrested his weapons from his grandfather, a police officer. Nor is the issue youth alienation per se. Rather, the Minnesota murders were a case study of the dangers of what The Washington Post, in a news article,called "a long tradition of self-enforced isolation" on Native American reservations.
In our national dialogue about race, much ado is made about the continuing inequalities between whites, blacks and Hispanics. However, the disparities in respect to Native Americans are far greater. According to the Post, the violent crime rate among Native Americans is twice as high as that of blacks, while Native American youths commit suicide at twice the rate of other groups. Native Americans are by far the poorest ethnic group, with half the average income of other Americans; the unemployment rate on Weise's reservation was 40 percent. Native Americans also experience an alcohol fatality rate that is a whopping 670 percent higher than other groups. It was amidst this background of despair that Weise snapped.
Americans cannot help but feel some sense of moral responsibility for this plight. The "Trail of Tears," referring specifically to the 1838 forced relocation of Cherokees, is also a term that applies to all modern Native American history up to this day. Through slaughters and disease, European settlers literally decimated the Native-American population from the millions in the sixteenth century to a few hundred thousand in the early twentieth century.
Nothing we do today, however, can possibly restore Native Americans to their status before colonization. Returning the territory Americans have claimed, beyond that which already has been set aside for reservations, is impossible given the way our country has developed. While paying reparations will ease the immediate poverty, it cannot solve the long-term structural dysfunction on Native American reservations. Even the lucrative gaming industries some tribes have developed are of dubious value; a society cannot gamble its way past its pathologies.
The problem among Native American reservations is an extreme example of a problem that plagues all ethnic enclaves. Amidst a majority culture and society, self-segregated segments cannot succeed. One Native American blasted national politicians' silence in the wake of the Minnesota shootings. "From all over the world, we are getting letters of condolence
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