U.S. must heal native peoples' wounds, return lands: U.N.

[sofa king]

38. Yep, even the term "Indian" is contentious.

There are at least three major groups of Native Americans: American Indians, who primarily live and control territory in the Lower 48, Alaska Native Corporations and Villages, most of which have much less sovereignty thanks to Alaska being created a state during the Termination Era; and other native peoples including Native Hawaiians, who have little to no status as sovereign entities.

Then if you go back to American Indians, it gets even worse. California Indian tribes have a reduced set of rights thanks to some evil legislation that culled their power a hundred years ago; Oklahoma tribes have similarly reduced rights. Many tribes from the east coast, having pre-existed the United States within the original 13 colonies, were left for the individual states to deal with, and many of them are still not federally recognized at all, but still retain a tenuous relationship with their parent state and even hold state-protected "reservations." One or two of those entities even retain treaty rights, even though they are not officially "tribes."

"Indian" therefore has a potentially different legal definition from that of "Native American;" Indians signed treaties and have guaranteed rights; Native Americans, not so much. It used to be easy to spot which tribal bills were written by Democrats, and which were written by Republicans, because the Republican bills were always harmful and always had "Native American" in the title--specifically because the GOP has been trying for 20 years to use the "Native American" legal term as an anchor so that they can one day push it over the side and drag Indian tribes with it.

But I'm not kidding at all about us all being Indians now. The Republicans figured out how to steal your pensions and your homes by stealing Indian trust funds and land (No, really! One of the GOP's favorite tactics was to issue reservation land to individual Indians in fee, then wreck the economy on the reservation, raise property taxes, and steal their homes, just like Bush did to the rest of us). They're going to steal your Social Security like that, too (and have already tried), and any other potentially valuable resource to which we are entitled or control.

When those of you reading this lose all that, if you haven't already, just remind yourself that standing up to protect the tribes was the way you could have protected yourself. But now, you're fucked, because none of us gave enough of a damn to protect our most vulnerable people.

The fleet slowed down for its slowest ship, and now we're all dead in the water.