Include Native Americans In MTV's Anti-Hate Crimes Campaign

Dear MTV,

While the decision of your network to confront and take on discrimination and hate crimes of all kinds is truly commendable, the author and signees of this petition feel it is important to point out your great ommission from the scroll you aired January 10, 2001 following the premire of the film "Anatomy of a Hate Crime", detailing the hate crime suffered by Matthew Shepard, a resident of Laramie, Wyoming who was brutally murdered over little more than his sexual preferences.

The scroll covered almost but not all, groups of American society who have suffered from hate crimes. MTV, you forgot the first Americans, American Indians, and Alaskan Natives. While we have been reduced to a sliver of the U.S. population due to previous hate crimes and genocide, that doesn't mean we don't suffer from hate crimes and day to day discrimination. Several modern crimes come to mind, including those against Helen Betty Osbourne, a teenaged Cree Indian from Manitoba, CAN.On one horrible night in November of 1971, Betty was kidnapped by four white men who beat her badly, raped, or attempted to rape her, and then stabbed her to death with a screwdriver. All because she happened to be Indian. Some of the men involved in Betty's murder brutally assaulted a young half Cree woman who told the police what she knew about the murder. Many white women also came forward. None of them were assaulted. In the U.S. there is the assault of an Indian mother and her son whose car broke down alongside Idaho property belonging to the Aryan Nations, an organization also implicated in the shooting at a Jewish Community Center in Los Angeles, CA which left many children injured or killed.

Your Fight For Your Rights campaign, Take A Stand Against Discrimination is to be a year long effort. We hope you will try much harder to include American Indians and Alaskan Natives in your otherwise well rounded campaign.

Sincerely,
American Indians, Alaskan Natives, and their supporters