Thread by @mahtowin1

Native people have additional, contextual reasons to be upset about what happened to the two Indigenous students who were detained by campus cops while visiting Colorado State Univ CSU. (1)

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Most colleges are PWIs (predominantly white institutions) and already feel like a hostile environment to Native students. (2)

Native students in the US are less likely to graduate from high school, enroll in or graduate from college. In 2016, 10% of Native people had college degrees compared to 43% of white people. (3)

Always lurking in the background is that settler systems of education were historically used to both indoctrinate Indigenous youth and destroy Native cultures, languages and families, via boarding/residential schools run by governments and churches. (4)

Indigenous youth are disproportionately suspended and expelled from schools, representing less than 1% of the student population, but 2% of out-of-school suspensions and 3% of expulsions. These disproportionate figures are much higher in some states. (5)

Indigenous youth are arrested at a rate of 3X the US national average. Native people have higher rates of death by police than any other race. So any situation involving cops is fraught with danger/terror for Native people just as it is for Black people. (6)

When considering what happened at Colorado State Univ, Native people also may consider the history of the location. Fort Collins is entirely rooted in whiteness, having been created to protect settlers and a mail route from "hostile Indians." (7)

Consider that Colorado, like every other US state, has a brutal & continuous settler history. Arapaho, Cheyenne, Shoshone, Bannock, Navajo, Ute, Apache, Comanche & Kiowa were dispossessed & their people massacred, most infamously at Sand Creek. #CSU (8)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sand_Cree…