What can be done to help Native Americans?

Great Debates
1

Another board I’m a member of suggested that Native American culture is dying. A person who claimed to be a Native American (I forget of which tribe) basically agreed that this is the case; that as time goes by, the traditions and languages are dying off (in large part because of the forced assimilation in the early 20th century; but also because of apathy on the part of the younger generations and a desire to fully blend in and ‘escape’ the reservations).

If this is true, what can be done to save the Native American peoples, and what remains of their identities and cultures?

What can we do as a people to further make up for the atrocities committed upon the Native Peoples? I am not very experienced in this issue but I feel like reservations are basically ghettos (I mean in terms of boxing people off in a separate location with differing laws). As I understand it, the rape of Native women on reservations by outsiders is an ongoing issue, because of legal issues which don’t allow for the rapists to be jailed - I forget the exact legal quagmire, but I read that it is a big, largely unspoken issue.

2

I suggest exploring ideas like reparations to eliminate the wealth gap between Native Americans and other Americans.

3

I could see this working, but what about the issue of reservations?

On one hand, them being isolated has helped to maintain a sense of solidarity and kept their culture going; on the other hand, reservations seem to be (from the POV of posts by Natives I’ve seen quite depressing places to live, which is why alcoholism and such flourishes. They’re basically ghettos.

How can we successfully integrate the Native American into mainstream society without taking away his dignity, his culture, and his language? That is, if they want to integrate, which from what I’ve read, a lot of younger Natives do to “escape the reservation.”

4

This may seem a somewhat insensitive statement but, to a large extent, Native American culture is dying because it sucks.

Despite what Fern Gully and Avatar might say, sleeping on a dirt floor, practicing subsistence farming or hunting/gathering, having your illnesses tended to by a man whose only real medical ability is to sing and dance, having no TV or radio, no school, no equality of the sexes, no democratic process, etc. all suck.

After all, consider the throngs of hippies just rushing to go enter the forest and live a Neolithic life. There ain’t no one stopping any of you from swapping out your Levis for a thong, grabbing a sharp stone, and trying to find a nice chunk of natural clay near a stream that doesn’t give you dysentery too often. Don’t worry, you’ll learn to love the 30% infant mortality rate!

Native Americans are, unfortunately, in a bad place. They feel like they’re not supposed to abandon their traditions, at the same time as realizing that the life that was stolen from them would have been worse than the one they were forced to have. But by virtue of not being part of the country and through prejudice on the part of the white governments through most of history, they’ve always gotten last rate everything in terms of schools and infrastructure.

Their population has stayed small and isolated to undesirable locations. Widespread alcoholism has kept crime high and the desire for someone to start a factory, farm, or other sort of serious business low.

Effectively, they tried to walk a middle path and that failed them. Now that the outside world has stopped being hostile to them, it also has become a clearly better place than the old dream, but the middle path and centuries of hostility has left them in a poor place to start building. Taking advantage of reservation sovereignty afforded them some opportunities to create tax havens, etc. but so far that hasn’t panned out terribly well. Casinos seemed like they might start to help the communities, but that just seems to have caused the states to start legalizing gambling all over the country, by proclaiming any old land “Native Territory” and granting some white guy ownership.

5

The reservations are theirs – there are some issues related to sovereignty that should be resolved, probably mostly in the favor of the reservations, but IMO if the wealth gap were eliminated, we might start to see significant changes in services and opportunities on reservations because the people living there would suddenly have the resources to change it.

6

Are the reservations ‘theirs’? Do they actually own them? Can they borrow against, mortgage, sell or develop them as they so choose?

I think not. No one is going to invest in development on your spread of land if you’re not the title holder. How much do you expect the natives themselves to invest in developing that land, when it can, and historically HAS, been taken away should it prove of any value?

Maybe that’s a good place to start?

7

Most reservations are small towns in isolated places. Those haven’t been doing well no matter the skin color of the inhabitants. Reparations wouldn’t transform reservations anymore than big checks to inhabitants would transform midwestern WASP small towns.

8

Big checks to every inhabitant of any locality would indeed change that small town. If everyone in a shitty place suddenly has money to spend, then businesses will come to sell things they want. Those businesses will have jobs. And so on.

Maybe not a panacea, but big inputs of money really can change a place.

9

Canada faces the exact same issues. We have many native groups and many reserves, but most of the reserves are very small and have very high unemployment. There’s just not enough of an economic base. In many cases there are not enough people to preserve the language. When the numbers are that small, I don’t believe it’s possible to save that culture.

Some Canadian native groups are large and successful. I believe there are nine of them. There are far more than nine reserves, though.

10

They’d get some more retail, restaurant jobs and the like. Exactly the kind of low paying jobs people have in dying small towns. In order to be prosperous, a place has to be a good location to produce particular goods and services above basics like retail, restaurants etc. It’s wishful thinking to think reparations will turn reservations around. They’re usually shitty places to conduct anything but basic, low yielding economic activity.

You talk about poverty in reservations like it’s a Keynesian, cyclical problem which some demand boosting will solve. It just isn"t.
Plus, you know, reparations aren’t happening.

11

Native Americans mostly weren’t hunter-gatherers before Euros arrived, and they aren’t ‘subsistence’ farmers or hunters today. Some of them (not most) are farmers or hunters today, but they’re commercial farmers/hunters who sell their products on the market, the same as any other American or Canadian would. And there are quite a lot of people who enjoy being commercial farmers or hunters, if there weren’t there wouldn’t be so many of them (people do not enter these professions because they’re either safe, easy or financially rewarding, they aren’t).

Most Native Americans today also use modern medicine, live in normal houses, go to school and watch TV, so all I can say is you have a strange idea of what modern conditions are like.

As for the main question, reparations seem like a decent idea. Back when it was still possible, a hundred or a hundred fifty years ago, I would have said stopping American expansion and allowing indigenous people to have independent countries would be the way to go, but clearly that horse has left the barn.

12

We should get on this then. Handing the Native Americans reservations and casinos to me feels kind of insulting, to be honest. “Sorry for the genocide of your people and the gutting your culture. Here’s some land no one else wants, and a couple of casinos. We’re good, right?”

I’d fully support a reparation package if it would help them flourish. I don’t want to see their cultures lost entirely.

13

What does this mean to you? If you had a magic wand that could change anything, excluding human nature, how would you wave it so as to “save the NA peoples, identities, and cultures”?

Let me try…

With a magic wand I could gather a large contiguous area of good farmland / forest land in the central Midwest and transport a bunch of one or another tribe to the area. I could even re-imbue them with all the practical knowledge and spiritual ethos their GGGGGGGG grandfathers/mothers had in 1780. Plus all their meager possessions. I could turn loose a suitable supply of whatever wildlife was appropriate back then. And Presto Change-o I’ve rebooted a chunk of NA culture as it was before Europeans showed up.

And then they’d have some kids who, just like the Amish, would quickly learn that they’re embedded in 21st Century America. Some would stay in the band, most would go become ordinary modern Americans of a particular ethnicity. Within a couple generations they’d run out of people to sustain the culture.

In a sense, NK is an example of a culture being forced to remain backwards. That’s not something I’d want for anyone I care about either.
So we with our magic wand face a choice: we can reboot the traditional NA lifestyle and watch it die a painful natural death … again. But this time without us actively trying to wreck it as we did in the 1800s. Or we can reboot it then operate it like a cultural concentration camp to ensure it continues to function.
With that thought experiment in mind I come to some conclusions …

  1. “Primitive” cultures cannot survive contact with modernity unchanged. The rest of humanity is voluntarily moving into the future plus/minus local details. Because at least most people like the idea of modernity. You’re not going to be able to prevent that happening and you’re not going to be able to prevent “defections” from the tribal culture to the modern culture. Even if, by some draconian Prime Directive thingy, you can prevent cultural “pollution” from injecting modernity into the tribes.

  2. The culture of e.g. 12th Century Germany is dead, dead, dead. Who’s mourning that and making noises about bringing it back? Nobody. There’s artifacts in museums and academic learning about those times. And plenty of dusty stories in our collective literature. And that’s about it. Ditto 15th century China, or any other bygone era and place you care to name. Cultures die out and are replaced by other cultures. More accurately, they evolve and morph over time.

  3. The Europeans / Americans have plenty to atone for. But sentencing yet another generation of people born in the 21st Century to live as primitives just so we can assuage our ancestor guilt seems perverse in the extreme.

  4. As bad as our guilt, the NA people themselves have a different guilt problem. As somebody said up thread, they too feel guilty about not exactly wanting to continue living in a hide tent while freezing in the winter and dining on pemmican.

  5. I’m not sure why anyone thinks that giving them money now will preserve their culture. Nor will bringing businesses into the reservations. That’s just a different way to spell “apartheid homelands.” If they are running 21st Century businesses in 21st Century ways they’re not preserving their culture. Money will preserve their diet, and get them nicer pickup trucks. It won’t do squat for culture.

  6. The NA religions are potentially save-able. The fact the mainstream religions in the 21st Century are all at least a thousand years old implies that’s possible. Perhaps we should focus on that while encouraging assimilation in all other things.

14

I don’t want to get into every point, but I thought I would hit a couple here.

  1. 1780 is too late. By then, disease had already wiped out huge chunks of many populations, and cultures were already dying. The surviving people were developing new ways to cope with their new situations by then, and much institutional knowledge had already been lost.

  2. Native Americans weren’t and still aren’t a monolithic culture. The US government many times uprooted and moved nations from their homes to somewhere else. Why would a Florida tribe want to be moved to the midwest? That was just one of the very, very many problems with how the natives were treated.

15

Germany here is perhaps a bad example since the historical experience of WWII has tainted nationalism in German popular culture, so let’s take some of their neighbors. Polish culture isn’t ‘the same’ as it was in the 12th century, but there’s a distinct historical lineage that makes modern-day Polish culture the heir of Polish culture in the 12th century, and gives them a continuous identity as a culture. This persisted even a hundred years ago when there was no country called “Poland” on the map, and it’s persisted through a radical change of socioeconomic system in the 1950s and then a change back in the 1990s. The current government of Poland was elected at least partly because Polish voters were freaked out about losing their ethnic and cultural identity to immigration and more broadly ‘liberal modernity’, and I don’t think they would be consoled by hearing about ‘well cultures always change, you’re not the same as 12th century Poles anyway’. Same goes for most other European countries (Germany may be an exception for the reasons stated), certainly most Czechs, Austrians, Danes etc. feel that sort of continuity. I don’t see why Native Americans would be any happier about losing their culture, and no, embracing some of the benefits of modern technology doesn’t mean ‘losing their culture’, unless you think all modern societies are part of a single culture today. Japan, Poland, Barbados and the United States are all developed societies but they’re all also very different.

If Native American nations were transplanted to Iowa I’d imagine they would function more or less like people in Iowa do today, i.e. have a robust farming economy based on growing corn and pigs for the world market.

Your comparison of the Amish is also sort of weak since in contrast to the Native Americans Amish culture developed largely in reaction to modernity, but in any case the Amish aren’t having any problem replenishing their numbers, quite the opposite. Neither are the Haredim. (In contrast to the Amish and Haredim, Native Americans have the lowest fertility rate of any major ethnic group in America).

I’m sure if they had well functioning economies, Native Americans today would be able to decide what elements of their traditional cultures they wanted to keep, and so forth, just like other peoples around the world do.

16

ETA: @ D_Odds

  1. Agreed. My choice of 1780 was arbitrary and I was mostly thinking of tribes in the desert Southwest where the whites had not yet penetrated. You’re obviously right that 1780 was far too late in New England or Florida or Louisiana. So pick whichever date you want to use as the “before first contact” date.

  2. Likewise. Agree that Seminoles or Apaches or Algonquins had different cultures. As did the mound tribes along the Mississippi vs. the high plain nomadic tribes. Pick one, any one, and reboot that. Of pick them all. Clearly with our magic wand we could depopulate all but the coast of the US and give the NA the entire interior. Plus we could reserve them some useful fraction of the coast to boot.
    The key point isn’t really the reset itself, but that once you reset them, they’ll re-start their history in the presence of the surrounding 21st Century USA and the whole rest of the 21st Century world. With all the consequences that flow from that.

The only way for us to not pollute them is to build a “wall”, which may be legal rather than physical, to prevent anything modern entering their land. It’s a separate decision whether to permit anything to flow out.

But whatever we decide, it’ll have consequences for the tribes. Consequences they may not agree with as individuals or as societies.

I’m asking the OP to imagine doing the very best thing he can think of. Then play the movie forward from there and see what happens next. A lot of failed policies are created when people think of only “This is bad, how can I Band Aid it?” without thinking on to steps 2 through 10.

17

You’ve said something really interesting in your whole post. Something that’s too important for me to struggle with at this hour. I’d intended to make my prior post my last for tonight but was surprised to see you’d slipped in. I’m leaving on vacation tomorrow morning but may get to it in the next couple days if the thread doesn’t move too far along.

You raise a fascinating comparison with the Amish. That might indeed be a successful model for at least some NA groups to emulate. Certainly the more farmer-ish as opposed to nomad-ish ones. The Amish have no reservations. Instead they buy their land and live on it. They cluster, but ordinary modernity operates at least some of the farms next door.

Could we & they get there, how might we do so, and would that be close enough to “preserving their culture” in the OP’s estimation?

What’s the corresponding thing for the nomads?

18

OK!

Real reparations would literally mean giving back everything. There is no part of the USA which is legitimately white, and no part that wasn’t basically seized by violence in the final analysis.

So how do you fix that?

Better go ahead & pack your bags, son, in case you soon don’t live on North America anymore. See, the city you live in? That was the good land, stolen from the indigenous peoples. The reservations? A fair bit of that is scrub and desert, or little patches of land that aren’t developed.

19

I don’t think trying to preserve traditional technology is the main thing, really. I mean, groups like the Society for Creative Anachronism exist to preserve old European folkways, but they’re not really trying to reset technology to 1453 France.

I think it’s more about language and lore, and an identity that goes beyond genes and a few names.

The best way to save that is institutions that teach this stuff. We have things called universities, and schools, and churches, that do that for western culture. You need something like that for the indigenous languages and traditions, and not in a “no outsiders” way, nor in a “preserve the noble savage” way.

20

I’m sorry for post #18. That was mean.

But if you want to save “Indian” culture, the trick has to be to teach it, and, yes, even to assimilate people into it. A Tennessee which had always been Cherokee-speaking and Cherokee-ruled would be a very different thing than one purged of Cherokee, however many Europeans immigrated into its territory. Something to think about.