My grandparents are the same way. They’re living in the same house they bought over 40 years ago and won’t move until they’re dead. I don’t believe it’s all that common in people under the age of 50 these days.
Marc
I live in Small Town America. My entire family lives within a 30 mile radius, and most of my friends’ families are the same. There’s not much of a push for kids to “go away” to college-- the majority of kids go to the local branch of our state university. Some do leave-- and as I said, it usually makes the paper when they do, and we’re treated to periodic updates on their progress through school and the beginning of their careers.
There are three local factories and two prisons, which are the “good jobs” here in town. Along, of course, with service jobs and medical services, police and all of that. Costs of living are relatively low (you can buy a 4,000 square foot house for about $150,000.) My area is considered one of those places that are good-to-raise-a-family.
Just Small Town America-- it still exists.
Yeah, I have considered going back to the ancestral Rhineland my own self. OTOH, I have no affection for German culture.
Are you arguing that the reservation system is no longer relevant, or what?
I have always been surprised that this has not been more of an issue internationally. I think that it must be behind closed doors, especially in regards to China and issues of sovereignty.
I hope that the status quo does not last another generation, but there is so much apathy it may. The best solution I have seen is transform them to either county governments for the smaller reservations, or a choice between statehood and territorial status similiar to Puerto Rico or Guam for the larger reservations such as the Navajo or Yakima.
Why does that image conjure up the Kennedy family? And I consider that a valid analogy - if reservations are able to create a rentier class living off the income of historical accident, how is that different from any other hereditary/aristocratic family like the Kennedys, Du Ponts, or the Scions of Sam? I always found complaints regarding the casinos sour grapes, and often hypocritical since the locals do not seem to mind giving them business.
Not always- there are many examples in history of conquerors who would have liked to extinguish a conquered political entity, but couldn’t do it. The Hundred Years War, the partition of Poland, and the Soviet war in Afghanistan come immediately to mind.
And most modern Americans don’t have that much in common in those ways with the first colonists who settled here, either. Our economic activities have changed, and we say we practice the same religion, but that’s changed quite a bit, too.
The partition of Poland quite effectively extinguished the state/political entity of Poland. It did not extinguish the ethnocultural nation of Poland, which survived to create a new Polish state. But in the interim, there was no such thing even in theory as Polish “sovereignty.”
With the Indian nations, the picture is less clear.
I think it’s crystal clear. Ask the president:
“Tribal sovereignty means just that; it’s sovereign. You’re a – you’ve been given sovereignty, and you’re viewed as a sovereign entity.”
True enough, but I didn’t bring up the fact that Native Americans have changed for no reason. I was resonding to the romanticized notion that Native Americans are more attached to their land then any other group. I believe that when a lot of people think about modern Indians they view them through a filter made up of their own misconceptions of Indians from the past and popular culture.
Marc
I think that’s his point.
Social and government policy based on an assumption that a culture will remain the same forever - in less polite terms, based on racism - is policy that’s doomed to fail. It can be reasonably argued, I think, that an official policy of treating one ethnic group differently from another at such a fundamental level is not only doomed to fail, but is morally reprehensible.
The legal separation between Indians and everyone else (and here I speak as much of my country as the USA) has worked about as well as you’d expect; not at all. A properly civilized country should treat all its citizens equally, full stop. The half-assed “sovereignty” granted to reservations is nothing more than pablumized apartheid.
As Mr. Miyagi said, you have to pick the right side or the left side of the road; try to walk in middle, squish like grape. Either Indians should be no different from anyone else in the eyes of the law, or negotiations should be started to give them territory that would be separated from the USA or Canada and actually constituted as a sovereign nation-state. Speaking just out of my own perception, the former seems a lot easier than the latter.
Wait, why in the world must we either dissolve the reservations or kick them out?
It makes no sense. Reservations aren’t Bantustans, nobody is trapped on a reservation, Indians are full American citizens, they can move to New York to seek their fortune just like everyone else.
What “traps” people on reservations is the same thing that traps people in small towns or the inner city. They don’t have an education, they are isolated culturally, they have no job prospects, they have no models for living differently. Indians aren’t trapped on a reservation because of indian sovereignty. It isn’t apartheid because the whole point of the South African Bantustans was to deny the homeland residents the right to vote. Indians can vote in America
Here in America we have the Federal government, we have state government, we have county goverment, we have local government, we have territory government…and we have tribal government. What’s so horrible about that? What gives us the right to dissolve tribal sovereignty just because we’ve changed our minds? It takes two parties to dissolve an agreement, if any native tribes want to dissolve and portion out their tribal lands to individual members, I have no objection. But why should we be able to force them to do so? Why shouldn’t it be up to them?
Anyway, casino gambling on Indian reservations is only going to last so long. It will last as long as state governments realize that there’s not much point in making casino gambling illegal statewide when people can go and gamble right next door at the reservation casino. Even today we have all sorts of lotteries, cardrooms, internet gambling, etc, that you used to have to go to Vegas for, all not on reservations. Yeah, you might need to go to the reservation or Nevada for one-armed bandits, but reservation casinos don’t have as much of an edge as they used to, now that gambling restrictions are being loosened everywhere.
In simple terms, a tribe is sort of like a corporation owned by an extended family. We granted these corporations certain rights in return for not exterminating them back in the 1800s. And now we’re upset at the untidiness of the arrangement? The BIA and the reservation system failed because we set them up to fail. Nobody cared if a few indians got cheated. Why was that? “In this country,first you get the money, then you get the power,THEN you get the women!”. Suddenly a few tribes have a bit of money and they are using the particular circumstances of their settlement treaties to their advantage. What’s wrong with that?
Completely asking questions out of my ass here, but what would happen if a group of Native American tribal governments got together on behalf of their tribes, and petitioned for statehood?
Is there any reason it couldn’t happen? A state obviously doesn’t have to be a geographically contiguous area (see also, Virginia and Michigan. There may be others. I’m excluding those states that have islands.) Is there a legal block? Any desire on the part of the tribes to do it?
I would think that the fact that you couldn’t get from one part of the state without going through another state would be a bit of an impediment. Michigan and Virginia have pieces that are reachable by boat without entering another state. Linking the Choctaw, Navajo and Suquamish reservations is going to require something different.
We just need to drop the whole idea of sovereignty. Tribal governments work like county governments, and that’s it. No special rights. If you are a US citizen, then you are treated just like everybody else. No special fishing rights, hunting rights, cigarette sales rights, nothing. Either join the rest of us or head for greener pastures.
I don’t know about the tribes’ interest in the idea, but there is a legal block: Every Indian reservation exist within some state’s territory. (Some, such as the Hopi and Navajo reservations, are within several states’ territory.) And their “sovereignty” does not extend so far that we can say that the Seminole Reservation is not within the jurisdiction, or occupying the territory, of the State of Florida. (I’ve never checked, but I’m pretty sure businesses in the Seminole Reservation have to pay state sales tax to Tallahassee, same as businesses everywhere else in Florida.) The U.S. Constitution, Article IV, Section 3:
IOW, for this plan to work, it would not be enough for the tribes and Congress to agree; the legislature of every affected state also would have to agree to give up some of the state’s territory. Small chunks of it, and not worth much as a tax base, but still, what are the odds?
If it did come off, we would have a non-contiguous Indian State, composed of dozens of small “counties” scattered across the continent, with its own legislature making laws that apply in all of them and collecting taxes in all of them to be spent for the benefit of all residents, by the legislature’s lights; and sending at least one representative and two senators to Congress. Would that work? Do the Choctaws and the Chippewas and the Apache really think they have enough in common to form their own united political entity, separate from the existing state structure, and work together in it usefully?
To give you an idea of what an Indian State would like like, here’s a BIA map of Indian reservations in the 48 contiguous states: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Bia-map-indian-reservations-usa.png
One other wrinkle: Participation in the existing tribal governments, as I understand it, is by hereditary right. Only Indians, members of that particular tribe or nation (by blood or, in extremely rare cases, by adoption), can get involved. And a tribal government need not be a “democracy” by the standards of white society, it can be organized along lines traditional for that nation, including hereditary chieftanships. But the Constitution guarantees every state a republican form of government, and hereditary positions of any kind almost certainly would be considered incompatible with that. Also, the Constitution almost certainly would require that any non-Indians living in an “Indian county” (formerly “reservation”) would have the right to vote in both local and state elections, and run for public office, on equal terms with the Indians.
Thanks for doing the legwork, BrainGlutton. Yeah, OK. It looks pretty ridiculously non feasible, doesn’t it? 
If the planet holds up long enough, Indian nations will eventually breed themselves out of existence. Not sure what the blood line rule is but eventually it will be blurred to a point where nobody will be able to claim protected status. At that point the land will revert back to the State or Federal Gov’t.
BTW, am I the only one who find’s the OP’s phrasing a bit . . . odd? To suggest the Indian reservation system constitutes an Indian “empire” stands reality on its head.
Well, he didn’t last long enough to tell us.
Maybe he lost a bundle at Foxwood’s and was seeking consolation. 
Yep. What right do those Indians have to come over to our country and demand special rights? Why don’t they go back where they came from?