Tag: Native Americans

This is a diary by AndyT, cross posted from Big Orange and the Pretty Bird Woman House blog.

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Department of Justice officials have quietly opposed Native Hawaiian self-determination but the administration didn’t outright come out against the recognition bill until last fall.

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The anti-Hawaiian campaign has since been extended to urban Indians, lineal Indian descendants and certain Alaska Natives. In testimony to the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, a DOJ official said that health care for these groups could violate the U.S. Constitution.

I feel less than optimistic about Native American concerns. The recent year has been very difficult and heartbreaking. Since it’s a long list, I will summarize what I am aware of by saying that vital Native American concerns failing within the courts and within congress are far outweighing Native American concerns succeeding within the courts and within congress. So, I will be direct in what I want.

(Correction: it was/is an American developer, not an American company. Plus, a new character)

I think this is a case in point of why the Neoconservative forces in the U.S. and in Canada de-affirmed the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Final update is at the end.

Manifest Destiny is a thing of the past, but its philosophy didn’t die with the forced relocations. The American company developer Henco attempted to encroach on Native lands in 2006, and I speculate that George W. Bush’s having signed NAFTA treaties which eroded some limits on U.S trade borders enabled Henco to proceed to Canada and attempt stealing Native soil from Six Nations. While it wears only a shadow in sound comparison to the Seige of Wounded Knee 1973, (I think it’s more so comparable now than before; however, I don’t have the expertise about treaties and prior circumstances in Canada to say how much more or less it is. There was a treaty violation here. I’m not sure it’s my place to say more in general) it bears valid comparison in the display of overt racism against the First Nations.

Krisztina Kun, a staff member at SFPIRG, and eyewitness to the standoff remarked that the blockade was characterized just as much by racial tension as it was by disputes over land ownership.
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