KQED: Common Ground : Reflections of Rabbit in the Moon

PATRICIA S T. ONGE
Organizational Consultant & Partner for Seven Generations Consulting
She is of Native American descent.

I was struck when they showed the news clips and they said, you know, they're reclaiming the desert and they have all the comforts of home. At the same time, the United States government was telling indigenous people, we have set up in the cities, jobs and housing and great things for you and they would give them one way bus fare off the reservations into these urban areas and of course when they got there, there were no jobs, there was no housing and there was no way back home. And so it was fascinating for me to think, because I didn't realize that the internment camps were on the reservations. And so if you step back from it, you have this image of the government moving people around in ways that are uprooting whole communities.

After seeing the movie, I thought, this is their story but it's our story too. And I just don't mean our story as indigenous people's story, but really our story as America's story. Every story enriches each of us because we are far more connected than we recognize.