To speak further of the conflicts of history, many tribes, including the Muscogee (Creek) tribe involved in the most recent Supreme Court decision in Oklahoma, were slaveholders. After the Civil War, the terms of the Reconstruction Treaties contributed to their land loss.
Likewise, the Native Americans who controlled the land before the US likely didn't have it gifted to them freely. Tribes were constantly at various stages of war with each other, and some wiped out completely.
Do they owe reparations to each other, too? And what about the ones that are completely gone?
All of the discussion of reparations and making good on centuries-past injustices always leaves out how it all gets swept under the rug if there are no decendents around to make claims.
Native American land laws are a disaster, and it’s not their fault. It’s a large contributor to poverty as well. I’m still not sure if that was an unintended or intended consequence of US govt treaties.
On the Indian reservations in the US, the land isn't wholly owned by the individuals. It is kept in a tribal trust where a lot of people own slivers of the land (called land shares), and it cannot be used for things like securing loans and economic development if often redistributed through various means. There has been a lot of write ups on this over the years.
It is also the poorest and most corrupt parts of the country. Shit happens on the reservations that would even make Congress blush. If you want to see what happens when land is devalued and not ownable, look at the reservations.
We have to recognize how much we screwed over the Native Americans. We took away their prime land on the East coast. We gave them some shitty land in Oklahoma that we didn't think we would ever want. We made them walk there in the "Trail of Tears", and lots of them died along the way. Then we decided to screw them out of the land in Oklahoma after all, but didn't go though the process properly because we didn't think it mattered.
It's insulting to hear people talk about them as not having "initiative" or being somehow responsible for being poor. When they resisted being screwed, we sent in the US Army to kill them, then kept them under control.
Reconciling this after all these years is going to be tough, but acknowledging it is a first step. Giving them back the land is disruptive, but giving them a few billion dollars is pretty easy. It would be interesting to see a VC fund focused on Native Americans building businesses. Or some real educational funding in Oklahoma. It would be a lot better than what the Republicans are doing to the state. All they want to is protect the rich and the oil industry.
Oh, I'm totally in agreement that the situation is unfair and that the US government engaged in genocide and cultural extermination of native peoples, and that reservations were created as ghettos for Indians so the whites could take their desirable lands. I am merely pointing out that there are tribes that have been denied federal recognition or reservations and want them, because a crappy deal is still better than no deal.
I've heard of half of Oklahoma being declared Indian country but I haven't at all heard that public services were revoked and casinos were set up. We'd also hella hear about it because it would mean Tulsa would've been forcibly removed as a city!
This isn't a speculation of malice, but I will say narratives like that were precisely the false and sometimes racist presumptions that had to be fought in that case! Oklahoma was claiming as soon as the land is declared Indian country, the tribes would let all the rapists and murderers out of the state prisons.
Indian land was taken over the course of hundreds of years of false promises and violated treaties. European settlers were predominately the ones drawing the maps, and consistently taking what was not only not theirs to begin with, but what they had agreed belonged to the native tribes and then took anyway. We're not talking about thousands of years of human history, we're talking about very real injustices that are still being perpetuated by one current-day party (largely the states) against another (various tribes). Would you prefer the tribes resort to rebellion and bloodshed to reclaim what is theirs by treaty? Would you prefer that contracts and treaties are simply ignored when inconvenient?
I don't think McGirt v. Oklahoma actually gave ownership of the land to Native Americans. It might seem that being on reservation land would mean that but apparently it doesn't.
It's actually a lot more complicated than that. Tribal law is mostly for intra tribal criminal cases, and does not have jurisdiction over people who aren't members of the tribe or when a crime is committed outside a reservation. So, going from having a relatively small portion of a state, where most people were probably part of a tribe to having have a state in that status makes thinks very complicated for law enforcement. It's not like the tribes just randomly took over half of Oklahoma and established a new state. For most people, Oklahoma will still have jurisdiction over them.
The federal government continues to horribly mismanage reservation lands and the resources located on them.
"Tribes historically had little or no control over their energy resources. Royalties were set by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, but the agency consistently undervalued Indian resources. A federal commission concluded in 1977 that leases negotiated on behalf of Indians were 'among the poorest agreements ever made.'
Unfortunately, it hasn’t gotten much better. A recent class action suit alleged that the government mismanaged billions of dollars in Indian assets. The case settled in 2009 for $3.4 billion—far less than what was lost by the feds."
Court decisions in the US (As in any other country in the world) are made in the context of the current social climate.
The current American social climate is not ready, willing, or interested in meaningful reparations. I doubt the tribe will be successful in suing for any damages.
> Native Americans have always contended that the Black Hills of South Dakota belong to them, and that the sacred land was stolen after gold was discovered there. In 1980, the Supreme Court agreed, ordering the federal government to compensate eight tribes for the seizure of Native land.
I don't think enough people know this. Or know that the tribes refused the money saying they would only accept the return of their land. The money currently sits in an account gaining interest and is over a billion dollars.[1]
I personally hope someday this land is returned to them and Mount Rushmore is removed (possibly preserved as history if technologically possible) much as we do with Confederate monuments.
"The Court has only decided that the federal government has no prosecutorial jurisdiction against citizens of the so-called "Five Civilized Tribes" in about half of OK"
The issue at hand was state government prosecutorial jurisdication, not federal. From the article:
Under U.S. law, tribe members who commit crimes on tribal land cannot be prosecuted in state courts and instead are subject to federal prosecution, which sometimes can be beneficial to defendants.
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