Don’t get me wrong. Many of the Amerind tribes were given a raw deal in the past, and as Duckster has shown, a good number still have less than idealic lives. OTOH, some of the tribes with casinos send out a sizable check to each family each month, enough so they can live a very nice life in comfort.
So, I am against handing back land that has been in others hands for generations, land that was always in flux as to actual “ownership”. I am against “handouts” just because a person has Amerind blood. However, many of the programs we have do not seem to be doing enough for the real needy. Since there is no doubt we gave some indians a raw deal, and the Government is still holding a great deal of land, etc, I see no reason not to give something back.
But handing the whole counrty back to 1% of the population just because their great-great 10 times removed grandparents got a raw deal is just crazy. I don’t expect The Ukraine to be handing me back our ancestral lands either- since we likely stole them from someone else at the point of a sword anyway, and it was at least 60 years and three generations ago.
As for how bad it is on some reservations - the Native Americans are often their own worse enemy. Tribal politics, games with land use rights, and a general welfare dependency model that has developed over time do not help. I have Navajo and Oneida friends and they LEFT the reservation thanks to parenting that encouraged them to get out, get educated, and get a job. They still go back to visit family, but they will not stay for long.
Thinking that Native Americans born after their land was stolen are not still horribly disadvantaged is a commonly-uttered privileged fallacy. It goes hand-in-hand with the idea that privilege-blind white Americans do not acknowledge that their own accident of birth is largely responsible for their success or lack thereof in life. There are no bootstraps.
Basically, white people would not be as well-off as they are right now if they hadn’t taken horrible advantage of black slavery and Native Americans in the past. Refusing to help the groups we’ve systematically traumatized up to our level of socioeconomic success is out of the question. Reparations are currently and will continue to be absolutely necessary until equality is reached.
In the mid-late 19th Century, generally. If you consult a calendar you’ll notice we’re now in the 21st Century. Those Cowboy & Indian movies are set quite some time ago, especially by modern standards and when you consider that for a lot of people, WWII is either “Ancient History” or the semi-legendary setting for a large number of computer games.
Do you believe that everyone born with white skin is “privileged”? Do you believe that being born with white skin is the only way to be “privileged”?
Also, could you explain exactly what it means to be “privilege-blind”?
So many people throw this word around…usually white college students who listen to Rage Against the Machine and Immortal Technique and fancy themselves heroic fighters for the world’s oppressed people (as long as they are not white.) I want to know what you believe it to mean.
The methodology used in New York State may be of interest. Essentially, the Treaty of Fort Stanwix (1784) set terms between the Iroquois Confederacy and the U.S.A., which included opening some land for settlement while guaranteeing Iroquois access to other land. Encroachments on the latter reducing the Iroquois (as a nation) to a small number of reservations led to the land claims of the 1970s. The Six Nations accepted a financial settlement in lieu of restoral of lands, which they agreed would be disruptive, but with the proviso that they could purchase back land on the open market that would then resume being “Indian tgerritory” – subject to tribal law, not state regulation, but with a few interesting twists – they continued to owe property taxes on the repurchased lands to the municipalities of which they had formerly been a part, and Indian-nation-owned enterprises on leased land would collect sales tax like any other business.
The Oneida Nation bought land and built Turning Stone Casino, and has invested the profits from this in other land. There is an Indain-owned marina on Oneida Lake in the town of Verona, just south of Sylvan Beach, NY – I was personally involved in a project to build a new marina within Sylvan Beach as part of HUD’s Erie Canal Initiative for economic development in the Rust Belt to profitably take up the boating public’s demand for marina space formerly filled by the now-Indian-owned marina.
While I understand Dr Deth’s point, I would suggest to him that what is being discussed is not the somewhat metaphysical question of who ‘really’ has the right to land that has changed hands through war and invasion dozens of times, but what treaty obligations are outstanding with regard to it now. The U.S. does not have a treaty with the Algonquins about land the Iroquois conquere3d from them decades before white settlement, any more than they do with the Philistines regarding their claim to Gath, or with the Byzantine Empire regarding its claim to Trabzon. The Norman Conquest, our own Revolutionary War, etc., do establish a legal right of conquest – if you as a nation take land by force of arms and hold it against all comers, you perfect a title of sorts to it. The U.S. does have treaties with the Sioux, the Iroquois, the Blackfeet, the Navajos, etc. Article VI of the Constitution demands those treaties be honored, even if it disturbs the laws and regulations of later-formed subordinate jurisdictions.
And one casino, however profitable it may be, is not going to sustain a national economy, not even Monaco’s. Many reservations suffer from enormous lack of amenities or a functional economy – Pine Ridge being an obvious worst-case example. The idea is to use that as a start for building up a tribal-owned business suite that will provide employment for tribe members, plus sponsoring tribe members through college in exchange for their services for a fixed number of years thereafter, e.g., as a doctor or teacher.
I am talking about white Americans who do not acknowledge or understand that being born white in America confers many privileges, most of which are implicit and easy to overlook given a lack of critical thought. This was stated in reference to the original poster who is almost certainly white (and therefore in involuntary possession of racial privilege in the United States), and who has, with their simplistic analysis of the relationship between whites and Native Americans, demonstrated a complete lack of awareness of said privilege.
Not every white person is privilege-blind (as I and many other white people acknowledge the existence of and our own possession of racial privilege). But yes, every white American possesses certain privileged traits whether they want to or not, and all of us have benefited from them. My opinion here has nothing to do with whites or nonwhites who do not live in the United States; therefore assuming I am championing the rights of non-whites around the world is specious at best, and a distraction at worst.
Frankly I’m not sure why you’re attacking me, except as a red herring to distract from the issue that’s actually being debated. You would certainly succeed if I chose to take the bait, but let’s keep further discussion outside of this thread. You’re free to create another thread to discuss this issue, or send me a PM to discuss my views on the matter.
If you do choose to create a new thread discussing the existence and definition of white privilege, I would be more than happy to participate. Alert me if you do via PM.
That’s exactly my view. The reason we should uphold our treaty obligations is not out of “niceness” to Native Americans, it’s to show that as Americans we respect our system of law. If the govt can renege on Indian treaties, then what prevents it from fucking me over?
Well, if the nation is small enough- the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians of the Agua Caliente Indian Reservation do very very well indeed. Of course it only has less than 400 members, but I think each household gets a monthly stipend larger than most peoples monthly paycheck.
And certainly, each Tribe has a right to what is guaranteed them in treaties and later decisions and dealings. A treaty can be amended. Nor are all Indian Treaties actually "Treaties’ under the Constitution.
And- any Treaty made after 1871 isn’t really a Treaty, since by then the various Tribes weren’t fully soverigen.
“*Treaty-making between various Native American governments and the United States officially concluded on March 3, 1871 with the passing of the United States Code Title 25, Chapter 3, Subchapter 1, Section 71 (25 U.S.C. § 71). *”
Certainly, however, any agreement that the USA made is legal unless superceded, and of course various Tribes have indeed made suit against the USA for violation of said agreements as Duckster’s cite shows.
I don’t have a cite, but when I was living in Miami, c. 1996, one of my coworkers was a Seminole, I met through him several members of the tribal council. One of them told me about the US Government wanting to move them from their current stretch of swamp during the 1980s and that they credit Spain’s help for getting out of that mess (the help was on the lines of “a reminder of the possibility of an international incident, due to that move being in non-compliance of the treaty by which the US acquired Florida”). Admittedly, for some people anything which took part last year is ancient history, much more so something which happened last century…
It was the Pine Ridge reservation I really had in mind when I posted. I lived in South Dakota and was lucky enough to be on a semi-friendly basis with a few Sioux tribesmen. The people on that reservation are living proof of the axiom “out of sight, out of mind.”
People in the South are often excoriated, right here on these boards, about “our” treatment of Blacks. I suggest those people doing the excoriating would benefit by first hand observation of “our” treatment of many of our Native Americans. Treatment that continues even as we speak.
Although I don’t lose sleep over the kind of things the OP complains about, I do think that there needs to be a “statute of limitations” on claims of “I would have inherited more if history had been different, therefore I’m owed”.
It’s simply not practical for inheritance to be an absolute principle in a modern, diverse society with limited resurces.
To quibble a bit, there’s “limited autonomy”, but doesn’t “sovereignty” imply an absolute degree of independence from other nations? With their own currency, military, foreign policy, border controls and so on?
How about the fact that if white settlers hadn’t come here at all, these people wouldn’t have been dislocated or so drastically reduced in population to begin with?
To say “get over it” is by far the biggest statement in irresponsibility one could possibly make.
Reminds me of an international law professor at university who would regularly tell us to avoid “the S word”. Sovereignty is a word that causes more confusion than clarity in legal discussions, because people think it implies absolute independence of the sort you describe, which it doesn’t. In international law, the word is avoided nowadays (and replaced by more sober terms like “statehood”’) because there is no question that states (in the international law, not the U.S. constitutional law, sense - in that sense, the U.S. is a “state”, i.e. an independent country, but the U.S. states are not) can give up some, or most, of these rights without losing the quality of being states. This is what the EU is all about, and still the EU is not a state, whereas its component entities are; and even more, each time a state concludes a treaty, which creates obligations on it, that treaty limits the freedom of action of the state under international law and thus the state’s s “sovereignty”. In political science, writers still sometimes say that states “give up their sovereignty”, but as said, this term really causes confusion and doesn’t have a clear-cut meaning.
How do “we” treat them? They live on their own land, with limited sovereignty, run by a tribal council. More or less, what occurs there is the responsibility of the tribal council or the individual. Mind you, I agree that in some areas, the sitrep isn’t very good.
Each tribe member may enter the USA and work or live anywhere they choose. It has been quite a while since we discriminated against “the redskins”.
My personal observation as a resident of both South Dakota and Oregon is that “we” do, in fact, discriminate daily against Native Americans. “They” are denigrated, looked down upon, refused employment (except for the most menial jobs), and are treated with open scorn. This being especially true of South Dakota, where numbers of “us” openly state that “the only good Indian is a dead Indian.” While this was also true where I lived in Oregon, Oregon had not at that time felt the large influx of immigrants from California; most of Oregon still had a rather “small town” attitude and I can assure you that day to day discrimination against Native Americans was common place. YMMV but I saw that discrimination on a daily basis and I know what I saw. I haven’t lived in SD in many years and it’s longer yet that I lived in Oregon; change may occurred and I hope it has. But I doubt it.
Hell, Oregon sez the same about Californians. They slash tires, write “Californians go home” and so forth.
Here in CA I have not seen any of what you’re talking about.
