From Ken Nerburn
Via karboncountymoos
Also please go read this

They are all our children

I awoke this morning to the leafy richness of an Oxford University
spring day, far from the cold confines of my northern Minnesota home. I
am here across the pond with a group of students from a small Minnesota
university who are having their lives changed by a series of brilliant
lectures and a city of timeless civility.

But as I sit here another group of students from the Red Lake
reservation near my home town in Bemidji, Minnesota are also having
their lives changed. But those changes are coming at the hand of a
student who walked through the hallways of a high school where I once
taught and aimed a gun at the teachers with whom I once worked and the
children of parents with whom I have shared tables and friendship.

It is a sad and tragic and story, made all the more poignant by my
knowledge of the people, the reservation, and the land on which this
all took place. I wish there was something I could do.

But I cannot reach across to my friends; I cannot share the grief of
the Red Lake community that I have grown to know and love. What I can
do is reach out to those of you in your cities and homes and commuter
trains and ask you to watch.

Watch as the journalists and t.v. reporters fly out from their home
cities, land in Minneapolis, catch a commuter flight to the small
airport in the forests of Bemidji, and drive their rental cars thirty
miles north through the pine and popple to the Red Lake Reservation.
Watch them as they go to the small convenience store, interview a few
folks, and push their way as near as possible to the school building
that sits on the gravel parking area near the edge of the great
northern lake that gives the reservation its name.

Watch them go into the tribal offices, try to interview the tribal
chairman, a young man with a dream of making his reservation a better
place, and then scurry back on the dark country roads to their hotels
in Bemidji and where they can issue dispatches about a student caught
in a culture of poverty and hopelessness on a rural reservation.

It will all be quite earnest and at least partially true. But it
will not get to the heart of the matter. It will not show the love and
sense of family that is at the core of the reservation. Nor will it
will reveal the unique sense of grief that fills a culture where the
drum is the metaphor for community — when the drumhead is struck in
one place, the whole membrane shudders and the sound reverberates
everywhere.

What it will do, I’m afraid, is reduce this tragedy to a sociological event.  "Rural reservation" is carte blanche for journalistic speculation about social problems and cultural hopelessness. 

So watch to see if that is what this story becomes. And wonder why
the same story in the wealthy suburbs of Denver did not immediately
become fallow ground for sociological speculation about wealth, anomie,
and fundamentalist Christianity gone awry.

This Red Lake story is hidden beneath two layers of mythology and
misunderstanding that pervade contemporary American culture: "rural"
and "Indian reservation." In each lies a series of expectations and
misconceptions that obscures the truth of events and makes what takes
place there something "other" than the workaday affairs of our urban
and suburban lives.

Watch, now, and see if that mythology and misunderstanding obscures
the truth. I know Red Lake. I know those kids. They are just like my
students asleep in their beds here in Oxford, just like your children
brushing their teeth and packing up their books down the hall from
where you are sitting reading this paper.

It was Sitting Bull, the great Lakota chief, who said it best:
"Come, let us put our minds together to see what kind of life we can
create for our children."

Those children in Red Lake are your children. Hear their cries and the cries of their parents as if they were your own.

Kent Nerburn
Author, "Neither Wolf nor Dog:  On Forgotten Roads with an Indian Elder"
Founder and past director of Project Preserve at Red Lake High School on the Red Lake Reservation

Because they are our own.