What To Do Now?
Matters are never really simple in the judicial system. At least, that’s what I’ve learned over the past couple months. With regards to sacred land cases, the underlying elements run deep. It turns out that a solution for protecting Native American religious freedoms is way more complicated than I had originally anticipated, and I was expecting this to be fairly difficult.
There are two key acts, the American Indian Religious Freedom Act (AIRFA) and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA). Both of them have been important for Native American religious freedom cases. However, AIRFA has as much teeth as an old man with his dentures taken out, and RFRA has been slithered around. These two acts also pull my solution into two different directions. On the AIRFA side, there is the broader legislative change to be made. On the RFRA side, there is the problem of nitty gritty legal definitions and tools. Why do the acts pull me in these two directions? Well you’ll have to read the paper to find out because it’s too much to explain in this post and without background for the issues. However, what I can say is why this solution is so difficult. As I read court cases and articles, I find that legislation is not always interpreted as we may want it to be. Because of this, my ideas will have to be concrete and enforceable, and that is more difficult than it seems.
Several nights this week were spent sitting after I got off of work, putting my clusters of thoughts about my outline onto paper and trying to gather how I want to organize this final product. One night, a coworker and friend of mine sat down and asked me what I was working on. He asked me to explain some of my project and some of the issues, and it made me reflect a bit. I’ve noticed this feeling come up inside me each time I try to explain my project to someone: “If only they knew how bad it really is.” There’s only so much I can explain in ten minutes, but the big problem I notice is that there is so little public awareness of how Native American religious freedoms have suffered. I am guilty of this as well; my knowledge was very limited at the start of this. These issues get almost no publicity, and they are not widely discussed. I noticed how the protests over Dakota Access Pipeline put it in the spotlight, and it intrigued me how the more people knew, the more they cared. The lack of public knowledge about sacred land issues makes a huge difference. If we can begin to put these issues in the spotlight, to teach people what has happened and the issues with it, it could create big change. I’ve also reflected on the miniscule amount we learned about Native Americans in more recent US history. I’m not sure which would come first, publicity or teaching about current religious freedom struggles, however both are very important changes to be made.
We could start fixing our problems if the general American public had an updated, realistic view of American Indians and their fight for religious freedom.