By Zak Cheney-Rice, , Identities.mic
The end of 2014 was a bloody time for Native Americans.
Even as protesters rallied against the police killings of unarmed black people like Michael Brown and Eric Garner in December, Rapid City police fired five bullets into Allen Locke, a 30-year-old Lakota man living in South Dakota.
In a tragic bit of irony, it was later revealed that Locke had been at a demonstration against police killings of indigenous people just one day earlier. Yet while devastating for his family and community, Locke’s death illustrates a much bigger problem: From 1999 to 2013, Native Americans were killed by law enforcement at nearly identical rates as black Americans, tying them for the most at-risk populations in this respect.
The difference is that almost no one is talking about them.