Answering a Police Brutality Survey While Native


Simon Moya-Smith, ICTMN Culture Editor, above standing in Central Park in New York City, apocalyptically responds to a questionnaire about police brutality by the University of California-Berkeley.

Simon Moya-Smith, ICTMN Culture Editor, above standing in Central Park in New York City, apocalyptically responds to a questionnaire about police brutality by the University of California-Berkeley.

UC-Berkeley: Many years from now, as you bounce your grandchild on your knee, give us one image that captures the new era of policing – with respect to your community – that your work will have helped bring about.

Moya-Smith to his future grandchild: “You know, my dear, they never lifted the bounty on Native American heads. So the hunt continued into 2016. The authorities were killing all of us — yes, even Native American kids, and these bastards were still getting medals for killing an Indian or Indians [depending how many bullets he had left in his clip] 120 years after Wounded Knee. I once tried to re-build the Mayflower so as to send the rotten eggs back to Europe, but there were too many by then. And we couldn’t get the mainstream media to talk about the killing of our people either. Not black reporters. Not Latino reporters. Not gay reporters. Not Asian reporters. Or at least not nearly enough, my dear. The conversation was seriously binary on the matter of police brutality: Black and white. Black and white. Black and white. And then when we tried to talk about police killing Native Americans more than any other race, we’d get, “We’re not talking about that right now! You’ll have your chance, Indian!” But we never did, love.

Full Column Here.

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