The following speech was given by Russell Means in July 1980, before several thousand people who had assembled from all over the world for the Black Hills International Survival Gathering, in the...
I've got cystic fibrosis so anprims get the wall, but I don't think Amerindian skepticism about Western science and medicine is off base. Given that native peoples in the United States have been forcibly sterilized, experimented on for the sake of science with live-virus vaccines that often have blowback, condescended to and called "savages" by racial science and phrenology etc etc it'd be ridiculous not to look at modern medicine with a skeptical eye. As I explain in my other comment here, the primary contention is with the idea that modern medicine is "progress" when that very modern medicine has been weaponized against native peoples of the United States and therefore has not resulted in "progress" for them in the slightest.
I've got cystic fibrosis so anprims get the wall, but I don't think Amerindian skepticism about Western science and medicine is off base. Given that native peoples in the United States have been forcibly sterilized, experimented on for the sake of science with live-virus vaccines that often have blowback, condescended to and called "savages" by racial science and phrenology etc etc it'd be ridiculous not to look at modern medicine with a skeptical eye. As I explain in my other comment here, the primary contention is with the idea that modern medicine is "progress" when that very modern medicine has been weaponized against native peoples of the United States and therefore has not resulted in "progress" for them in the slightest.