US should return stolen land to Indian tribes, says United Nations

[alp227]

Source: The Guardian

A United Nations investigator probing discrimination against Native Americans has called on the US government to return some of the land stolen from Indian tribes as a step toward combatting continuing and systemic racial discrimination.

James Anaya, the UN special rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples, said no member of the US Congress would meet him as he investigated the part played by the government in the considerable difficulties faced by Indian tribes.

Anaya said that in nearly two weeks of visiting Indian reservations, indigenous communities in Alaska and Hawaii, and Native Americans now living in cities, he encountered people who suffered a history of dispossession of their lands and resources, the breakdown of their societies and "numerous instances of outright brutality, all grounded on racial discrimination".

"It's a racial discrimination that they feel is both systemic and also specific instances of ongoing discrimination that is felt at the individual level," he said. Anaya said racism extended from the broad relationship between federal or state governments and tribes down to local issues such as education.

Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/may/04/us-stolen-land-indian-tribes-un

---

Unfortunately, this statement only feeds red meat to the conspiracy kooks who are the UN as an evil organization out to replace American sovereignty with one-world government. Isn't the ENTIRE nation stolen from the native Americans, under UN logic?

[enough]

1. Stolen lands, you mean the entire continent? (nt)

[elleng]

3. Something like that.

[HereSince1628]

5. I dunno...did the indigenous people have the right to sell/trade it?

Can you have that right if you really don't have any understanding of the concept of SELLING land?

Because I am aware that my ancestors paid representatives of the indigenous people twice for the land they occupied in what is now Southampton, Long Island.

The native people came back for a third payment--making me wonder if both sides understood whether the transaction was a sale or a lease?

At any rate the European immigrants on the eastern end of Long Island refused to cough additional payments.

All that leaves me to wonder about the nature of what happened. Did those in original possession of the land there either not really comprehend the permanent nature of the transaction, OR did the founders of Southampton misrepresent the nature of the change in possession, OR were persons involved who had no authority to transact that transfer represented as sellor?

[may3rd]

10. They didn't believe in ownership of land so when they sold Manhattan

They pretty much laughed it off.

[HereSince1628]

13. Is that generalizable? Did all tribes think that? With respect to Manhattan does it matter at all?

The UN is saying that the US should give back native lands...

but the US got control of Manhattan from the BRITISH, and the British got control of Manhattan from the Dutch?

Who should be compensating whom? I mean if the deal with the Dutch was bogus, maybe the Netherlands owes the indigenous people AND the US people should be co-defendants?

I'm an American with ancestors on all sides of this issue. I've never really been able to completely understand how the nations of the indigenous people established and maintained territorial claims. I'd like to know that as my lineage runs up both sides of the territorial claim.

If the indigenous people's standard in the 1600's was merely based on the ability to maintain possession then dispossession would actually have been a recognized as typical, although unfortunate, transfer of a territorial claim.

The standard of possession as sufficient, was very much a part of European national territorial claims at the time. I don't think the Europeans acted outside their own traditions.

Obviously it is uncertain whether the indigenous people with whom they dealt fully understood the traditions and practices of the Europeans.

But I can't actually say whether the traditions of the indigenous people's national claims did or didn't mirror European practices in which territorial possession wass 99.9% of the evidence substantiating a national territorial claim.

[sofa king]

39. There's a good reason for that.

As Jared Diamond has eloquently pointed out, North America was lacking in several things which were critical to the establishment of an agrarian, property-owning society. Pre-Columbus Indians had no draft animals to turn soil or move heavy loads. The largest domesticable animals were turkeys and dogs. No domesticable crop supplied enough protein to replace hunting.

So the Indians moved, in pursuit of game and areas where annually planted crops had been left in years past. Indian "ownership" of was an ever-changing zone of control which ebbed and flowed according to dozens of factors beyond the control of the Indians themselves.

The sale of Manhattan, like virtually all of our soundbite history, is mostly bullshit, based on one Dutch letter recording a land sale for 60 guilders' worth of goods from "the Indians," and amplified by jingoistic Americans in the 19th Century.

http://international.loc.gov/intldl/awkbhtml/kb-1/kb-1-2-1.html

But yeah, whomever did sell Manhattan to the Dutch probably did laugh, not because they were blissfully unaware children, but because they knew what the Dutch and George Washington were going to have to find out the hard way: that Manhattan is indefensible and the very best place to place a new neighbor if you're thinking about rolling in and killing them all some day. (Wall Street was an actual wall, which wouldn't have saved them.)

Relations between the tribes and the Dutch steadily declined through the 1600s, beginning with them provoking the absolute worst possible enemy, the Mohawks, but New Amsterdam's day of reckoning at the hands of the Indians was averted in 1664 when the English ran them out. By then all tribes on the Eastern Seaboard were wracked by disease and internal conflict, and lacked the numbers needed to run the new colonists out.

[maindawg]

26. the answer is C.

They had no authority to sell any land.

[RebelOne]

37. Yes. The entire U.S belongs to them. The European settlers stole it. n/t

[Purveyor]

2. The UN is always an 'evil organization' unless it is doing something that one supports. Same old

song, tired old dance.

Personally I do wish they would set up shop in another 'responsible' country so they could do their work without having to kiss the ring of the US gov't.

[caraher]

4. Well, they do say "some" of the land...

and not to return what was stolen, but "as a step" toward ameliorating certain problems.

[may3rd]

12. The UN needs to be more specific.

Tribal beliefs on daylight savings time;

'Only a white man would believe that you could cut a foot off the top of a blanket and sew it to the bottom of a blanket and have a longer blanket'

[Beartracks]

18. Ha, I never thought of it that way.

Kinda makes me wonder why, instead of shifting the time to make for "daylight savings" why we didn't just shift the workday from 8-5 to 9-6 (or 7-4, whichever makes sense)?

=============

[caraher]

30. That's what I've always thought, too

Kind of shows you the power of clocks on behavior...

[gtar100]

35. Because our minds have been synchronized to clocks, not the rising and setting of the sun.

One of the downsides to having such precision with keeping time.

[Beartracks]

41. Synchronized to clocks - because roosters don't have snooze buttons! n/t

[aquart]

25. Perhaps now would not be a good time to mention the land bridge.

Or the arrowhead in the Pueblo skull or the fortifications in the Mississippian culture or the AT LEAST four separate language waves of immigration linguists can nearly agree on.

And let's not forget how easy it is to read a Nahuatl Aztec calendar with a glossary of indoeuropean word roots.

[libinnyandia]

6. The Trail of Tears story by itself shows how evil the government was in its treatment of Native

Americans in the South. Most Amricans don't have a clue about the history of abuses against Native Americans.

[Kalidurga]

7. We can start by giving them their reservations.

Just quit this nonsense of governing the reservations through the Federal Government and at least give them the same status as states. Except that the Indians should own their land outright and not have to rely on the Feds to keep their treaties. Like that ever worked out.

[XemaSab]

42. I've wondered before

in this new, high-tech world whether one couldn't have a large, discontiguous state composed of all the native lands throughout the country. Give them two senators and however many representatives and delegate to the new state whatever powers are held by the existing states.

At the very least it would give them some self-determination.

ETA: The problem with giving Natives national sovereignty is that I suspect it would just be another way to strip them of their rights as American citizens. Right now they are not treated as "real" Americans and the ghettoization of Natives on the reservations is a national shame. It has to end, and making them more "other" instead of moving towards full inclusion in American society is a step in the wrong direction.

Though a step in the right direction would be to start by moving the BIA from Interior to State or at the very least HUD or something. I mean, Interior... how racist is that? Interior, the department which deals with public lands, minerals, wild critters, Native Americans, and other natural resources.

(And no, I am not Native, so feel free to tell me that I am talking out of my ass.)

[Auntie Bush]

8. You mean we have to give back NYC?

[HereSince1628]

9. Well, no. The DUTCH would have to give back NYC.

We got it from the Dutch. We're innocent.

[Turbineguy]

11. They'd have to move

UN Headquarters.....

[era veteran]

14. My son did some volunteer work at Pine Ridge about 7 or 8 years ago.

He had seen E Kentucky but was not prepared for that America.
A national disgrace.

[tawadi]

15. As if that would ever happen. eom

[RT_Fanatic]

16. Yeah...

...like that's gonna happen. It would be the right thing to do, however impossible.

[Kalidurga]

29. But it would not be impossible for the US Government to...

give Sovereign Nation status to all the tribes on reservations. Our government has no right to control reservations, which they oversee as if their oversight was benign, which it isn't. To this day the federal government uses this oversight to steal from reservations.

[Speck Tater]

17. So would this set a precendent...

for returning all lands ever seized by an invading force?

Do we Homo Sapiens have to return Europe to the Neanderthals?

Should the descendants of the Aztecs have to return the land they hold to the descendants of the tribes they decimated when they conquered their vast territories?

I didn't conquer anything from anybody, and nobody alive today had their land taken from them. That's called history. Populations get conquered and displaced by invading forces, and this has been going on since the dawn of time. More recently, does this mean that Israel must give back the land to the Palestinians? And England needs to give back Scotland and Ireland. Oh, and France and Spain both need to return the Basque lands to their proper owners.

And to which tribe should return the land? The one that held it when we stole it, or the one that held it before that tribe stole it? Or the tribe before that? Or the tribe before that?

[aquart]

23. Pretty much.

And you don't wanna touch the fun historical map of Bosnia/Serbia/Croatia.

[harmonicon]

36. England never conquered Scotland.

Last edited Mon May 7, 2012, 06:10 AM - Edit history (1)

They were united as one kingdom when the Scottish monarch was also the heir to the English throne. If one did conquer the other, it was the Scottish conquering the English... which didn't happen.

edited for spelling - derp

[Speck Tater]

40. Those who don't learn from history

are doomed to repeat it in summer school.

But even then, it didn't really soak in.

[Judi Lynn]

19. Here was the post made by DU'er dipsydoodle when the UN undertook the study:

dipsydoodle (Original Post)
Sun Apr 22, 2012, 05:25 PM

0. UN to investigate plight of US Native Americans for first time

Source: Guardian

The UN is to conduct an investigation into the plight of US Native Americans, the first such mission in its history.

The human rights inquiry led by James Anaya, the UN special rapporteur on indigenous peoples, is scheduled to begin on Monday.

Many of the country's estimated 2.7 million Native Americans live in federally recognised tribal areas which are plagued with unemployment, alcoholism, high suicide rates, incest and other social problems.

The UN mission is potentially contentious, with some US conservatives likely to object to international interference in domestic matters. Since being appointed as rapporteur in 2008, Anaya has focused on natives of Central and South America.

Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/apr/22/un-investigate-us-native-americans

Earlier post:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/1014104358

[center]~~~~~[/center]

It's a shrieking shame when U.S. Americans DON'T take the time available to them to start doing their homework to finally understand the truth of what HAS HAPPENED in this country, and stop trying to side-step the issue by claiming, "Well, THEY stole it from some other tribe before took. when they it from them." That's downright evil. There is no excuse in the universe to cover what has happened to these people at the hands of the U. S. government, the same government which as you know, took innocent, unknowing people in Guatemala quite recently and infected them with sexually transmitted diseases just for the hell of it, to see what the heck would happen to them. People who had no power whatsoever to refuse to go along, or even understand what was happening had no more recourse then than at any point in North America history as they were murdered in their sleep, infants, elders, men, women, healthy, sick, all slaughtered in massacres, or with small-pox-infested blankets, died of hunger when the U.S. calvary went on campaigns and created MOUNTAINS of dead buffalos on the plains, destroying the animals they hunted for sustainance with one deadly slaughter, died of exhaustion, cold, sickness, disease during the long, torturous marches they were forced to endure as the government relocated entire groups over great distances in order to take their land, and transfer them to new, foreign, climates, environments, to start life all over again in armed guard-enforced spaces with nothing but a fence to keep them all from trying to walk away once they regained their strength, IF they regained it.

Hideously treated, as if they were criminals, dangerous lunatics, and not good enough to be respected. That filthy way of dealing with these innocent citizens continued to operate in this country socially and never ended. They continue to be the target of evil, racist hostility by local thugs everywhere.

There's no way possible for a person of conscience to look the other way on this issue.

It was far, far worse for the citizens who were here originally, then, and in the nightmare of the following years.

[a la izquierda]

31. This semester was truly eye-opening for me.

My students had absolutely no idea about the basics of our history with native peoples. I was simply stunned.

[Archae]

20. The problem would be who owns what.

Even the tribe that sold Manhattan was selling another tribe's land!

[rayofreason]

21. Next stop, Tibet.

Or maybe not. The Chinese don't take such things lightly.

[DebJ]

22. I have often suggested such a thing to explain Palestinian angst.

When I ask people, what if the UN insisted we give California to Native Americans, how would
Californians feel? Same for Palestinians. Somehow this seems to hit home.

[aquart]

24. Actually, dear, you mean same for the Israelis.

Israel is the nation. Palestine...uh....when was that a country?

[maindawg]

28. They never did

But they are a tribe. Its a great analogy .

[randy3000]

38. Well dear!

Palestine was a "country" as far back as 1150 BCE. Egyptian writing refers to the "Peleset" people. We also have 7th century records of the "Filistin" people. How about the Palestine Mandate? How about UN recognition in 1948? Apparently you have to be Jewish in your mind to be recognized as a people. The Palestinian people are genetically identical to Jewish people - excepting European converts and racially mixed Jews from Europe. It's generally agreed that Samaritans who split off from the Jewish religion when the Old Testament was codefied eventually converted to Islam. Do they lose their homes just because they changed their religion?

[Behind the Aegis]

27. It seems to hit home, despite being a false anology and factually lacking.. No surprises there.

[AlbertCat]

32. Why just the US? What's the statutes of limitations?

I mean.... should homo sapiens just go back to a small portion of South Africa?

[PufPuf23]

33. The Cobell vs Salazar settlement - A "win" for the Obama administration.

There is much confusion about the issue of of American Indian Trust lands.

The Cobell vs Salazar settlement ended all American Indian claims against the US Federal Government for Indian Trust lands (Reservations and Allotments) sold under the Dawes Act and monies lost by BIA mis-management of natural resources on Indian Trust lands.

The settlement was for less than $0.02 on the dollar in economic terms ignoring cultural damage and excludes most American Indians.

Many American Indian leaders and the Obama Administration consider the settlement a "win" rather than a political convenience even though most American Indians are excluded.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobell_v._Salazar

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dawes_Act

About 100 million acres of Indian Trust lands were sold by the DOI/BIA under the Dawes Act. Individual Tribes were harmed more than the $2 Billion allotted for the entire USA. About 38 million acres of Indian Trust lands remain.

From the FAQ at : http://www.cobellsettlement.com/


2. What am I giving up as part of the Settlement?

If the Settlement becomes final, you will give up your right to sue the federal government for the claims being resolved by this Settlement. The specific claims you are giving up against the federal government are described in Section A, paragraphs 14, 15, and 21 of the Settlement Agreement. You will be "releasing" the federal government and all related people as described in Section I of the Settlement Agreement.

If you did not receive an IIM account statement for 2009, you may request your IIM account balance as of September 30, 2009 by calling 888-678-6836. If you request your IIM account balance, you are agreeing to the balance provided by Interior unless you excluded yourself from the Settlement (see Excluding Yourself From the Settlement).

The Settlement Agreement describes the released claims with specific descriptions, so read it carefully. If you have any questions, you can talk to Class Counsel for free or you can talk to your own lawyer at your own expense.

[Taverner]

34. Yep. At least parts of South Dakota to the Dakota and Lakota

as a start