Recently, President Obama visited the Standing Rock Sioux Tribal Nation on his way to California for a Democratic National Committee fundraiser. A nice little spoon feeding of PR by the administration, but I digress. That's nothing new to this or any other administration, so it's not what has my undies in a twist. What has been molesting my conscience since I read the article and the subsequent comments is this - How fucking long are we and future generations going to pay for the perceived(and in many cases, actual) wrongdoings of our forefathers?
Remove emotion and the following is fact: All though history, lands occupied by civilizations have been conquered by other civilizations. What happened to the conquered? In the most barbaric cases, they were exterminated. In other cases, they were given the option to assimilate to the new culture, or move on and find a new location to call their own. In the case of early American settlers, some natives were displaced through commerce(land prices were negotiated and agreed upon and legal transactions were made) and some by forceful overtaking. Many of the acts committed by settlers in effort to claim land were indeed inappropriate and sometimes horrific. There is no denying that. Many of the natives cooperated, assimilated, and became valued members of the new society. One thing that seems to be easily forgotten however, is that many of the more abhorrent acts committed were in response to the refusal of a small number of natives who violently resisted, asserting their rights of sovereignty. The Native American population have had unlimited opportunities to assimilate into modern American culture, and many have chosen not to and continue to live on reservations.
America's first experiment in socialism has failed miserably. American Indian reservations are a glaring example of what happens when a civilization is subsidized, free of state and federal taxes, given infrastructure, and has essentially no motivation to better itself. In many states, the reservations enjoy exclusive gambling rights. Aside from that, there is very little commerce. There is little initiative to develop, create, invent, or any of the other ideals that built the American culture and economy. To this day, you'll find very little industry on reservations. Crime, substance abuse, and failure to complete high school are among statistics on reservations that are staggeringly higher per capita than in other areas. I'm all about accepting personal responsibility, and I do believe some fault for this failure lies on the tribes themselves. However, I think there's another problem at work - special interest groups, activists, and federal government involvement including but not exclusive to the Bureau of Indian Affairs has stunted the growth and well being of these people, hurting them under the guise of "helping."
What needs to be done for the greater good of all involved parties, is to stop treating Native Americans like a population of people who need our help. What needs to be done is to simply start treating "Native Americans" as Americans. The Sovereign Nation status needs to be dropped, and the land the reservations occupies should be granted to the tribes to be divided among themselves as they see fit. The people should be treated as American citizens in every way effective immediately, subject to our rights and our laws. The land should be treated as private property subject to the same rights and regulations as any other private property within the confines of the United States. After a small grace period, the land they've been granted should be subject to all federal, state, and local taxes.
Native Americans are people. They're no different than you or me and they deserve to be treated as such; no better, no worse. It's not your fault or mine that European settlers forced them from their native land, and it's not your fault or mine that people died in the sometimes violent resistance to this land grabbing. It's an important chapter in American history; something that should be remembered, and something from which lessons should be learned. The only thing that will ever be accomplished by saddling generations of people with the burden of guilt from historical mistakes is to create dividing lines where they need not be, and perpetuate the resentment.
On top of 80 years of reparations(The Indian Reorganization Act of 1934), wouldn't a grant of nearly 2.5% of the total land mass of the United States(currently 55.7 million acres are reservation land) finally be enough of an apology on behalf of people who have been dead for decades?
-DS
