What do u think.

i have mixed feelings about the native americans...on one hand, we did treat them pretty gnarly. on the other hand, people have been conquered all throughout history, with some of the people being enslaved (like with the roman empire). also, native american tribes have also been given casinos, which gives them a lot of money.

what i'm also against is how they can like, commit a crime on "american soil" and retreat to their reservation and they cannot be touched.

 

Oh I think you'll find a lot of them mind it quite a lot.

I just finished watching a really good documentary on the settling of the American West called "The West" (produced by super-documentarian Ken Burns). It's pretty horrific in terms of how native people in the States were treated. Actually, it's pretty horrific in terms of how all non-white people in the States who pre-dated the American settlement fared.

 

I come from Native American heritage as my great granddad was Muskogee. Regardless, I have never lived on a reservation nor been to one...but I think they're all just people,too...capable of committing crime etc. It really is a shame that the land that was rightfully theirs is doled out in tiny reservations, though. I think it's good that they have the Casinos. It's a real mess, the whole thing, in my opinion. Reservations and the like.

 

I love that in the Phoenix area that the state and federal government has been forced to buy back some of the "worthless" land they gave them in order to build highways.

I also love it when a stretch of their previously worthless land becomes surrounded by urban sprawl and their enterprises become mainstream fixtures of a community.

Personally, I feel that at this juncture in history it would be a mess to even try to give more complete assets back. I think too much time has passed. And I think it is time to encourage as much integration as possible.

 

Not to take anything away from the way the Native American people were treated - but - what horrifies me is the way the Aboriginees were treated down in Australia.

I'm not sure of the exact dates but it was not so very long ago that killing an Aboriginee was not considered a crime - I'm talking very recent history like early 1900's! I'm sure someone here will know the specifics much better than me.

But to go back to the Native American folk - I think it was bad the way they were treated but am not sure you could ever begin to undo it all now.

 

It is pretty horrible what the white man did to Native Americans, but they have got it pretty good now, with their tax free gas and casinos.

 

I see it this way. What happened to them back then was horrible. But the problem is that the Native Americans living today are not victims. This is just how things are. I think we should spend lees time focuesed on what happened then, and more on how to move forward in the future.

 

Talking from a Canadian perspective on Canadian "First nations"

It really is quite a sad state of affairs, given the extremely high amount of substance abuse, poverty, and crime in Reservations due to the way things are setup, and how many people end up leading what are essentially useless lives doing nothing.

What happened several hundred years ago was wrong, however it is in the past, and instead of dwelling on it, we should all be aiming to move forward to a bright future. And as others have pointed out, it is not the current generation who were displaced, or did the displacing, therefore no one is actually "owed" anything.

It also annoys me how natives tend to cherry pick what they want to their advantage. For example they defend their right to not pay tax on anything, and push their fishing / hunting "rights", yet wish to use modern non-native means of doing so. Traditionally Native cultures aren't extremely possessive of land yet the modern native is very much so and demanding compensation for having "their" land taken away.

As someone else mentions, there were a huge number of Africans enslaved in America, yet at some point they were freed, yet are now essentially integrated into society. I know Canada is very welcoming to those from other cultures, and it is their very integration into society that makes Canada the diverse nation that it is. So why the segregation?

So what should be done? Well, there's no quick fixes, I think that since it is not the current generation that was displaced, and due to the high amounts of poverty and substance abuse, the best plan is to integrate natives into mainstream culture, while still celebrating their culture. However with things as they are it is not a matter of giving every Native $100, closing all the reservations and wishing them good luck. Somehow there must be a system in place to provide the tools and encouragement to get an education and a real meaningful work. This will cost a lot of taxpayers' money, but I think it is a very worthwhile investment.

 

I love how some of you seem to think this all happened hundreds of years ago, or decades ago. At least in Canada, there were residential schools operating well into the 1970s and 80s, so that means there are plenty of Native people alive who were forcibly removed from their families, not allowed to speak their first language, in some cases had their actual names changed, were forced to practice Christianity... how people think tax breaks and casino licenses somehow make up for having the whole fabric of your family and society systematically and DELIBERATELY destroyed is completely beyond me.

As for why we care when in the past people have been conquered and enslaved and no one batted an eye--uhm, we care today because supposedly we're better than we were in the past, and that we've actually grown as people/societies/whatever, and that maybe we recognise that genocide, cultural and otherwise, is not a good thing?

And there are certain systems in place in America to try to redress the incredible damage that slavery did to African Americans. Affirmative action, for starters.

"Integration" is such a convenient buzzword, but what it translates into practically is just what the residential school system, and reservations, and hundreds of years of law in America and Canada were trying to accomplish, which is the dismantling and erasure of Native societies, traditions, and religions. These people weren't immigrants--they didn't come here by choice and in hope of a better future. They were here, and white Europeans came over and decided they would take what the Native peoples have and if they objected, they would kill the heathen savages as was their "right" as decreed by "God."

And if certain Native groups have decided to try to work the white man's laws and ways to their advantage in terms of "grabbing land," I for one can hardly blame them. By those standards, the entire North American continent is stolen land. And don't tell me that if someone had stolen your family lands a few generations ago and gotten away with it that your family wouldn't harbour ill will towards the thieves and be mortally offended if they were told to just get over it because "the past is the past."

 

They're teaching you pretty much what every American kid is taught, which is not terribly much about anything outside America, sadly.

 

Yes it was wrong, very wrong, but what else can we do? Let them rot their lives away in Reservations? Should all non-natives leave the country and take all our technology with us?

Yet people wonder why the Palestinians hate the Israelis.

 

im from australia so im worried about the Aborigines because we took there land

 

china could buy the entire U.s with the money we owe them.