Why not true tribal sovereignty in the U.S.A.?

What’s the downside? From the eastern-most reservation to the overthrown islands of Hawaii, the U.S. owes the very earth of its existence to the indigenous peoples. Life is demonstrably Not Great on the res, so what’s the great downfall in leaving the descendants of the indigenous peoples to totally govern the spit of land they have left?

You don’t see any possible downside with having a bunch of independent nations in the middle of the United States?

I doubt they’d want it. The poorer reservations presumably are net beneficiaries of federal tax dollars, while the richer ones often depend on casinos or exporting natural resources, both which might suffer if separated from the US by a national boundary.

Europe gets by.

This is going to sound incredibly crass, but…

We won. They lost. Get over it.

(Actually, I have ancestors on both sides of this particular issue, although I have a considerably higher percentage of Caucasian ancestry than Indigenous American.)

For the native Americans, it means being cut of from $2.9 billion in federal subsidies every year, in addition to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and other payments. As the National Congress for American Indians puts it:

So, making all 310 tribes sovereign nations means condemning most of them to even worse levels of grinding poverty.

For the rest of the nation, it means 310 new countries interwoven throughout the U.S. The potential problems are legion: companies setting up factories on a cash-strapped reservation to avoid pollution regulations, pouring out pollutants that drift into the U.S; criminal organizations setting up on a reservation to avoid prosecution; having to set up customs and border patrol around each reservation…

Spike: I just can’t take all this mamby-pamby boo-hooing about the bloody Indians.

Willow: Uh, the preferred term is…

Spike: You won. All right? You came in and you killed them and you took their land. That’s what conquering nations do. It’s what Caesar did, and he’s not goin’ around saying, “I came, I conquered, I felt really bad about it.” The history of the world is not people making friends. You had better weapons, and you massacred them. End of story.

The downside for the government would be less power. That’s why it doesn’t happen.

Which continent has had more wars, Europe or North America?

Yes, it sounds “crass” as well as racist, and saying “this is going to sound” before you say it doesn’t make it less so.

That said it’s a completely unworkable solution that I can’t see any number of people who legitimately can call themselves Indian supporting this.

Good point about corruption and opportunism.

Europe is a continent, not a country-totally different situation.

Well, if the tribes got full sovereignty, we wouldn’t be a single country anymore, either. But the real reason is what was said earlier. It’s not economically feasible for these tribes to be independent countries. Most of them are small (while the largest reservation, the Navajo reservation is about the size of Latvia, most are much smaller), most aren’t very populated, and there’s no real economic base. As mentioned, most are only able to stay solvent because of federal subsidy.

And when was Europe ever a single country that got divided up into individual nations by the people indigenous to those areas?

800, large portions of it. But I think you might be focusing on an irrelevant point?

In post #4 the OP used Europe as a direct example of his position.

He did, but you didn’t really rebut him. What he was saying was that the fact that you have a lot of little countries all in one area doesn’t mean that the place will be a failure.

It seems to me this sounds like an American version of the Apartheid-era South African government’s “Bantustan” scheme.

It worked for South Africa!

eta: Ninja’d by some punk kid! :stuck_out_tongue: