‘It haunts your life’: California’s legacy of police violence against Native American women

Amid a reckoning over police brutality against Black Americans, Native women are speaking out about their experiences

Kelly started teaching each of her seven children about the police around the time they entered middle school and began venturing outside on their own in their hometown of San Jose, California.

“Make sure you just, ‘yes sir, no sir,’ hands where they can see them,” she’d tell them. “Don’t get smart, don’t talk back, just do the best you can to just walk away.”

Related: Native American ‘land taxes’: a step on the roadmap for reparations

There’s still so many of the legacies of that violence that we see today, and police brutality is one piece of that

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