Since the Government of the United States first coveted Indigenous property for its continental dominion, U.S. policy has consisted exclusively of false promises and real threats to American Indians; what it couldn’t take through brute force, it took by sleight of hand. No deal was ever done; reservations established by treaty were later unilaterally diminished, divided and devastated by the U.S. in pursuit of plunder.
Today, two and a half centuries into American governance, the U.S. has yet to honor a single treaty with the Indian Nations. Despite international law and court rulings that exposed ongoing collusion between the U.S. Government and industries in defrauding American Indians of extraction royalties, the U.S. is still looking for ways to steal what little wealth these nations manage to produce for themselves.
Having neglected its obligations and betrayed its promises to American Indians, one might think the U.S. Government would at least be willing to let tribal governments provide housing, health and education to tribal members without interference, but that is apparently not the case. As illustrated in a recent article, the Internal Revenue Service has attacked tribal sovereignty by claiming the right to tax tribal benefits.
Whatever one might think about the historical injustices that led to the current conflict between the U.S. Government and the 566 Indian Nations in the U.S., it is a fact that the theft of their lands caused their impoverishment, the theft of their children caused their dysfunction, and the theft of their culture shattered their identities.
While many of us in the U.S. feel cheated by a government that spends our money bailing out banks and rewarding fraud, is that any reason to support punishing American Indian tribes for trying to take care of their people? As citizens of the U.S., we have a choice between a wrecking or a reckoning of our relationship with American Indians. Should that choice be left to the duplicity of the U.S. Government, or should we, too, have a say?
*For further information, see the Intertribal Tax Initiative compiled by the National Congress of American Indians.
That is exactly right – there is one thing, above all, that I don’t understand. In spite of all the expropriations, the Lakotah and the Apache, for instance, still have a viable territorial base. There is no constitutional reason why their national territory can not be recognised as two additional U.S. states. I would favour independence but an equal footing with the other states should be an absolute minimum – it isn’t impossible, it has happened a thousand times over. Nunavut is one example from Canada.
Until lands rights and sovereignty are restored, I think the first nations of North America should follow the example of Russell Means and work towards the reality of self-government rather than any concession from institutions incapable of understanding the question. They are no longer very useful to their own electorates but they are certainly useless in advancing the rights of indigenous peoples.
The federally-recognized Indian nations in the US have international treaties with the federal government that recognize their right to self-government over their territories and peoples. To lower themselves to the status of states would mean abolishing these treaties and submitting to the plenary power of the federal government. While few Indian nations are ever likely to seek outright independence (like Catalonia), they would not be in a position to oppose such things as federal taxation of their tribal trust benefits if they were just another state. If they lose the power of self-governance altogether, they will eventually cease to exist as distinct cultures, and the assimilation (also considered annihilation) will have become complete.