Your marmot study is flawed, as you failed to compensate by employing a floating point system.
The hell!? Not only did I not intend to post to this thread, I’ve never even seen this thread! One of the hamsters must have gotten distracted while parsing my post or something.
Yes, but we can never pay it.
Why not write some honest history books that say what the original population was. I have seen a book that says estimates range from 2 to 18 million. Surely we could get more accurate figures than that if we wanted.
I wonder how many Indians want to upchuck their lunch every time they hear some paleface say homeland.
Dal Timgar
While I don’t disagree many might long for this (hell, even I dream of throwing all my stuff away and living on a island in the south pacific) I highly doubt very many would go through with this given the chance. Perhaps through spring and summer but come winter when food is thin and it’s snowing I think many would bail out of their dugouts for a nice warm home, running water and colour TV.
This reminds me of a case a tribe near LaConner brought up. They went after teh State of Washington demanding shellfish rights in the Sound somewhere near Whidby Island. Their case was their people farmed the shellfish on those beaches in the past, they want the same rights.
Two problems with this.
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The beaches had been developed in the last 100 years for oyster farming. What they proposed was to dive into a commercial farm and help themselves to the grown oysters.
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The indians who lived there years ago might have gathered clams and things from the beaches, but it wasn’t intended for commercial sales. They lived off the food they gathered.
In that case, I think they lost. And for good reason I say.
I have a major problem with indians given permission to net across entire rivers to catch salmon for any other reason but personal tribal use. But, they sell most of the catch. In a way it even goes against their own tribal beliefs (catching/using only what you need).
Oh, yikes. What the hell is this nightmare thread? I’m glad I didn’t see this three years ago or I’d be as banned as the person who started it.
I’ll give you a few citations which show roughly what obligations the United States officially has toward American Indians and why.
But first, you’ll notice that almost none of those citations are from the federal government itself. That’s because most of the Bureau of Indian Affairs has been taken off line as a result of a court order in the Cobell v. Norton lawsuit.
On December 21, 1999, Judge Royce Lamberth ruled that the United States breached its trust obligations to American Indians, and had been doing so almost since the creation of the Indian Trust Fund in 1887. The case is continuing in order to determine exactly how much the federal government owes the Indians.
That should be the end of the damned debate right there, if you ask me.
The Constitutional Status of the American Indian
The federal obligation to provide services in order to protect tribal self-government
The Office of the Special Trustee for American Indians
Want an estimate on how much we owe the Indians? Ten billion dollars is actually a low estimate
$135 billion is the high estimate
But Congress has the power to rip off the Indians one last time. How about $40 million instead?
If you really think that the United States “won” over the American Indians and don’t owe them anything, you’re arguing contrary to two hundred years of law which proves that we bought the United States from American Indians. In return for the land, we used the supreme law of the land–treaties–to extend guarantees which explicitly had no statute of limitations, and are considered immune from most other legal remedies.
Sorry, chumps. You made a deal with entire nations of lawyers who didn’t trust you. To gain their trust, you made the deal iron-clad. Then you ripped 'em off anyway, thinking your ancestors would find a way to weasel out of it. They suffer today for what we illegally did to them then, and they have the right to come after us.
We’re gonna pay, someday.
In case you missed it, they live in the middle of nowhere with no jobs because our government put them there, often in violation of previously agreed to treaty terms.
It’s very interesting to drop into this discussion at a time when the New Zealand political scene is currently being dominated by the same problem: indiginous people’s rights under a treaty (Google ‘Treaty of Waitangi’ or references to a recent speech by Dr. Don Brash, leader of the Opposition).
Claims for redress under the ‘Waitangi Tribunal’ for land and monetary compensation from the Crown (then British in the 1840’s) to indiginous Maori have been going on for a number of years, and there appears to be an upswelling of popular support for the view that, whilst such redress is necessary, it has been hijacked by a minority and turned into a gravy train for the lawyers, arguing over customary rights and suchlike.
There is never any easy answers to such old problems, but the solution is neither to ignore such calls for redress, nor to give in to all demands. Often, the initial demands are for little more than a token of land and a formal apology, but sadly, it’s all to easy for such things to rapidly escalate into unreasonable calls for land and the ‘lost income’ of the last hundred and fifty years.
Yes they did. Check your facts before shooting off your mouth.
Yeah, real traditional :rolleyes:
Max, read this:
If the Makah want to build a floating barrel big enough to shoot whales with a battleship, they can do it, on their traditional whaling grounds.
The entire reason why the Makah resumed whaling in the 1990s was to exercise a right which they feared would be taken away by Congress if they failed to do so. The fundamental point is that the area in which they are allowed to hunt is traditional; there is no reason whatsoever for them to dress like an Outkast grammy presentation and risk their lives spearing whales with tree limbs.
The fact that they still incorporate some of their traditional methods demonstrates precisely why Indians still regard themselves as a separate, sovereign, and unique people. They are not required to demonstrate their unique qualities to you or anyone else. You can, however, learn about them, if you bother to take the time to listen to them.
Sure, the NAs live in some awful places. Is there some law against them living elsewhere? I’ve met and worked with exactly one NA in my life, he was a programmer and if he hadn’t mentioned it I would have never known. He had exactly the same opportunities and problems as anyone else and did a reasonable job. The guy came off a reservation in Canada and was a success. Why don’t the rest do the same?
Regards
Testy
Yikes, whats with all the bold?
I work with a NA who has a bumper sticker saying “Custer died for your sins”. He thinks it’s all in the past and we should just move on, and I agree. I’m not going to demand that the italians and huns repay me for the misery that my ancestors endured. Sheesh. As for my NA coworker, his ancestors were scouts for Custer. Does taht mean he gets less rights in some repayment plan? Does he get less renumeration because he left the reservation and did something with his life? Can we got back and rip apart europe because of treaties made and broken in the past? Should the desendants of Irish immergrants get favorable treatment from the government because they were abused when they came over to the U.S.? When does it end? Just bust yer butt and make a life for yourself, stop looking to everyone else to fix your problems.
Why are you getting on my case? Did I say they were “required to demonstrate their unique qualities to [me] or anyone else?” I really don’t understand where you’re coming from with your post.
I was pointing out to JDeMobray that the Makah did, in fact, kill at least one grey whale, after he emphatically denied that they did. Merely trying to get the facts straight.
If the Makah want to kill grey whales, that’s fine with me. They aren’t endangered and it’s none of my business.
Personally I think that the legal fiction of Native sovereignty is pretty much an anachronism, but that’s neither here nor there, nor does it have any bearing on whether they have the right to hunt whales or not, as the quote you posted clearly states.
Max, I’m sorry if I unintentionally projected my previous post directly toward you when I was attempting to explain a situation I am fairly familiar with. One tends to get a little bit prickly in my line of work.
And one reason why one tends to get a little prickly is when the term “legal fiction” is bandied about so carelessly. It is not a fiction; it is the reality for somewhere between 800,000 and 1.2 million Americans living in tribal relations today, not to mention the often exasperated neighbors who have to deal with the side-effects of that “fiction” in their everyday lives.
Those neighbors would be far less exasperated if they fully understood the concept of sovereignty and the reasons for why Congress insists to this day on guaranteeing it.