Discussion of California Ballot Initiatives

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Originally Posted by innerSpaceman

This may be awfully racist and stupid of me, but I think it's high time we stopped treating native americans as some sort of separate nation. Um, yeah, it's been 300 years. I know they are oppressed, but they are not a nation unto themselves and they should not have separate laws and a separate, illegal economy (which "in" tribes use to oppress the other tribes).


Bah.

You're confusing the idea of nation with the modern nation-state with boundaries and distinctive laws, etc. The term "nation" can be applied to tribes who have an historic sense of where they lived, who they were linguistically and culturally. When you understand that the term "nation" is a broader definition than the modern nation-state, I think you'll agree that Indian "tribes" can also be called "nations" and were recognized as such by the U.S. government when treaties were made defining their territory and rights.

Yes, it's been 300 years but most of those "nations" still have a sense of who they are, where they came from, etc. Some of them were never recognized by the U.S., especially in the East, because their contact with Europeans predated the United States. As a result, there are a number of tribal "nations" in the East that have only been recognized by states and may never gain national recognition. This is unfortunate because their status in the eyes of the U.S. government is not as high as the Western tribes where treaties were made.