chat

How come you didn't reply at all to the comment with all sorts of stats about how the state continues to oppress the indigenous?

It's literally not a stretch, in his memoirs Hitler refers to the taking of Eastern Europe as his 'Manifest Destiny' and the clearing of the slavs as the clearing of his 'removedskins'. He mostly thought that the U..S. wasn't thorough enough, with the Boer War encampments being the direct experience that the S.S. would draw from to create the concentration camps.

It's not 'today's' reservations, because there was a major reformation and native rights movement that was tied into the larger civil rights movement in the 1960's, with it's own occupation movements, marches and sabotage groups, which I am sure you know about.

However, what is always interesting to me is that they only started winning cases and gaining significant independent rights with the neo-liberal turn of the 1970's and 80's, because they provided the blueprint for corporate-run independent entities. There is a reason that justices such as Niel Gorsuch are so big on native rights, because it gives a legal precedent for the creation and maintenance of powerful non-state entities within U.S. soil. I'm not going to argue if this is a good or bad thing, as it's very grey, but the goal of the conservative empowerment of reservations seems to be eventually allowing the legal precedent for the development of a U.S. Hong Kong, an entity that is part of the U.S. but not the U.S.

However that being said, when larger corporate interests are at stake, native rights always get thrown to the way-side.

I have spent significant time on reservations across the country and there's certainly higher poverty rates there, much like many parts of rural America.

if this were true you wouldn't compare the former to the latter because you'd know just how different they are.