Native American representation

[A DAY IN THE LIFE]

I propose that the Native American reservations be treated as the 51st State, be divided into Congressional districts and given 2 Senators.

[MineralMan]

1. Write to your senators and house representative and suggest

they introduce that as a Constitutional Amendment. That's what it would take.

[Ghost of Tom Joad]

2. Great idea

that would give an under represented group the voice that they need.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

3. Given that the reservations are scattered

across a bunch of the states, I'm not sure that would be feasible.

I suppose you could group the ones in Arizona and New Mexico together and make one state, and then all the reservations in the Northeast another, and so on. You'd probably get at least 5 or 6 states that way. There are 326 reservations, and over 500 tribes, meaning a good number of recognized tribes don't have their own reservations.

Here in New Mexico we call them Pueblos. There are 19 of them.

To be helpful, here's a link to the Wikipedia article about reservations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_reservation

[Bradshaw3]

4. Representation by tribal rolls, not reservations

The vast majority of Native americans do not live on reservations (between 64 to 85 percent according to one count):
https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/American_Indians_Today/Tribes,_population_and_organization_in_and_out_the_reservations

Most, in fact, live in cities and the state with the second largest largest population, Oklahoma, had few reservations and many peoples like the Cherokee were landowners (some owned slaves before the Civil War). Also, many whites live on and own land reservations in what are called inholdings.

If you go by tribal rolls, where each tribe determines its membership, then that would be a fair way of determining voting rights. It's a good idea, just a long process the repubs would fight at every step.