Native Americans had Spanish citizenship almost 300 years earlier and also retained their lands, affiliation, and culture under the law of the Spanish Empire.
“Spanish explorers arrived on California's coasts as early as the mid-16th century. In 1769 the first Spanish Franciscan mission was built in San Diego. Local tribes were relocated and conscripted into forced labor on the mission, stretching from San Diego to San Francisco. Disease, starvation, over work and torture decimated these tribes.”
It is completely unreasonable - people are allowed to have dual citizenships, sometimes even by birth. And of course you can follow two sets of laws at once - for example, fundamentalist Christians strive to follow biblical laws and local laws all the time. There may be occasional contradictions, but it's hardly a common problem.
The European immigrants likely had dual citizenship, so why not the Native Americans? It was extremely unfair and served no purpose.
And regarding your point under two laws. Any American citizen living overseas has to follow both US law and local law. Its not difficult. You don't even need dual citizenship to be in this situation.
If the constitution said nobody could have dual citizenship, like Japan as one of many examples, then that would be something else altogether.
It definitely served a purpose--to attempt to wipe out tribal identity and force assimilation.
That being said, dual citizenship was outright banned during most of the 19th and 20th centuries.
To this day naturalized citizens symbolically renounce their former citizenships.
"I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen"
Sure, he's a racist troll, but as someone else pointed out the portrait of Andrew Jackson hangs in the Oval Office for exactly the same purpose. How to avoid "feeding" that one?
> but as someone else pointed out the portrait of Andrew Jackson hangs in the Oval Office for exactly the same purpose. How to avoid "feeding" that one?
Easy. Don't get pissed off by it. When an action is obviously taken for no other purpose than to piss you off getting pissed off over it is just stupid.
Sure doesn’t seem like it’s constitutionally sound. If they’re born in the country, they’re citizens. Personal affiliation isn’t specified in the constitution or its amendments.
Elk v Wilkins (1884) was the constitutional position at the time. Indians were not deemed "subject to the jurisdiction of" the US, as required by the 14th Amendment.
This is a misinterpretation of the 14th amendment. It's precise wording is: All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside....
That subject to the jurisdiction thereof was not put in there without thought. It leaves room for a degree of interpretation. But for Indians residing on sovereign independent reservations there's no ambiguity whatsoever - they are excluded and there remains a supreme court ruling on the books upholding this. However, congress can choose to grant citizenship to whomever they choose and indeed a special exception was carved out for natives in the early 20th century - The Indian Citizenship Act. [1]
If reservations weren't US land - and if you're making treaties with the owners then it's at least sort of "not US land" - then they weren't born in the country.
Has anything changed? The man who signed and implemented this lopsided "agreement" was president and is still celebrated by many. His nickname was "the Indian killer". His portrait hangs in the Oval Office.
Progress doesn't happen in a straight line. The last President, who was elected as a reaction to the one before him, attempted to remove Andrew Jackson from the $20 bill. The current President, who was also elected as a response to his predecessor, put Jackson's portrait in the Oval Office to make liberals mad.
...but the reaction to the current backlash will likely end with Andrew Jackson removed from our currency and the Oval Office.
The fact that most people acknowledge that what was done to Native Americans was bad is at least some small progress.
"This unfortunate race, whom we had been taking so much pains to save and to civilize, have by their unexpected desertion and ferocious barbarities justified extermination and now await our decision on their fate."
General Sherman on exterminating natives
"After the 1866 Fetterman Massacre, Sherman wrote Grant that "we must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women and children."
Instead, the greed for gold wealth led to a second option which was, literally, termed a "war of extermination" by Governor Peter Burnett who declared warfare would not cease with Native Americans "until the Indian race becomes extinct"
The inescapable truth is this country ( and before if we include the pilgrims ) was subdued with conquest and series of genocides. Pretty much everyone political, academic and business leader implicitly or explicitly supported genocide. Of course some ( like Jefferson ) wanted to negotiate first but when push came to shove, they all supported explusion and/or genocide.
But they also did a lot of great things. You have to take the good with the bad. Else we are in an untenable position. Columbus was far more brutal to the natives and he didn't contribute anything to the growth of america ( like andrew jackson did ). George Washington was also far more brutal against the natives. What should we do? Rename Washington DC ( District of Columbia )?
The only reason Andrew Jackson is being targeted by the establishment today is because he was the most anti-central bank president we've ever had.
In terms of his racist views and policies, he wasn't anything exceptional ( especially during the 1800s ). If we have to remove him, then we have to remove Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Sherman and an unending list of public figures. Where does it end? We should teach and accept that genocide and slavery was part of the making of america rather than try to hide it. And it's okay to praise Washington, Jackson, Franklin, etc for their part in founding and building the country and also condemn them for their wrongs.
"And it's okay to praise Washington, Jackson, Franklin, etc for their part in founding and building the country and also condemn them for their wrongs."
How do you convince people that current portraits, monuments, etc aren't praising the good and bad OR (and I think this is much more the case) are praising the good and turning a blind eye to the bad?
It sounds like we need new portraits, monuments, etc to replace what we have currently.
Or maybe present them as they were, perhaps through explanatory plaques to go along with the statues, portraits and monuments: "To someone who did a lot of good for America through A, B and C, but also ratified/genocided/did whatever else we now know to be bad".
It probably wouldn't hurt to have commemorative objects of Indian leaders and country-shapers as well (of which I have no doubt there a good number), to present something more "complete" regarding American history (which, like any nation's history, is complicated and more like a series of connected creeks and streams than a single river sequence of events).
I feel like this standard is somewhat uniquely held for US historic monuments and artwork. I think it would be laughable to go over to Europe and start suggesting people tear down thousand year old works of art because the people who created them or are depicted in them weren't very nice. I suspect Michelangelo didn't have very progressive views on race or gender, but his works are safe. Is it because the US history isn't as old? This isn't a rhetorical question, and I'm not going to attempt to debate any points. I'm genuinely curious about the position.
>The inescapable truth is this country ( and before if we include the pilgrims ) was subdued with conquest and series of genocides.
Any sort of large scale immigration is going to cause friction. That doesn't have to take the form of wars and ethnic cleansing though.
The Pilgrims showed up in 1620 and occupied land that had formerly belonged to a tribe that was wiped out with smallpox and generally had peaceful relations with the natives.
The Puritans started their caliphate (I'm unaware of a corresponding Christian term) in 1630 and shortly thereafter got into wars with the natives, engaging in literal witch hunts and were generally so disagreeable that they provided the motivation for people to settle further and further west (away from them) further encroaching on the natives. Everybody tends to white wash this because they had high literacy rates and treated women better than most at the time.
The early pre-US settlers varied widely in their relations with the natives. The French had a pretty darn good relationship with the natives until they sold out to the US but they didn't do much settling (which probably helped).
>The only reason Andrew Jackson is being targeted by the establishment today is because he was the most anti-central bank president we've ever had.
I agree this is definitely a large part of it. If Jackson was a highly regarded president for other reasons people wouldn't complain about his mistreatment of the natives but instead he opposed central banking which does not make people hold him in high regard today.
>I don't think this squares with The Scarlet Letter being read in just about every high school in the US.
I guess I should have said "My Massachusetts public school education tends to white wash the Puritan regime".
I've made comments about it before but getting most of my high school education in a different state as well as having my siblings get their education in different states really opened up my eyes to how politically tilted school curriculum are. Anything that's politically inconvenient gets covered at an age to young to think critically about it or covered to fast to have time to think about it. I assume the southern states whitewash everything pre-1865 and the plains states whitewash the Indian wars.
I think that "burning at the stake" while not historically accurate better conveys the circumstances under which those people were executed because it calls to mind a "witch hunt" in the metaphorical sense which is a fitting description of the (literal) witch hunts in question. At the end of the day "witch hunts" were a thing of the past and Europe (rightfully) regarded the Puritan's witch hunts in Massachusetts colony the way we would regard hearing about a some practices that we consider barbaric and have long since moved on from.
In any case I have edited my original comment to be technically correct.
We should stop praising and erecting monuments or memorializations to murderers and slaveowners and teach and accept how this nation was founded by them, not pretend like this is a nuanced issue.
But it IS a nuanced issue. The founding fathers on one hand founded the nation ad a democratic republic with a government obligated to respect the rights of the people in an era when totalitarian monarchy was the norm. They also killed natives and kept slaves. That does not mean the good things they did do not deserve to be memorialized.
I think it's a little telling when people think slavery, imperial conquest, genocide, etc., which are features of a society designed by people who are avowedly in favor of Democracy, does not create a contradiction. You can either acknowledge the contradiction and resolve one end of it, or the word itself is incoherent.
I wonder what things would be like if the European settlers hadn't displaced the indigenous Americans. (If the American Indian way of life evolved and was still predominant today.)
I go to pow-wows annually. It's not all beautiful. There's still lots of racism, drug use and alcoholism. Racism is especially bad, I have friends that we're basically ostracized from their tribes for having non native fathers. The annual pow-wows sometimes feel like one big D.A.R.E. lecture and it's really sad because they talk about how every other generation gets caught up in addiction and grandparents are always raising grandkids.
My mother intentionally never got us properly set up for tribal membership because she didn't want us anywhere near the negative aspects of the culture. (I'm also not even sure if I could qualify despite tracing my ancestry back to the baker rolls.) And she didn't even grow up on the rez, just in Appalachia. It's been a blessing and a curse.
Navajo alone is spoken by 200,000 people. I'm learning lushootseed, the Salish language of the Seattle area, to help in its revival. Beautiful phonemes and totally unlike English.. it doesn't seem to have nouns exactly, and all words are made of many particles.
They're teaching it in reservation schools right now.. hopefully in another 15 years there'll be an active speaker community!
Not really the same thing. Most are just a shell of their former culture and independence.
It’s similar to native Hawaiians. Despite significant effort, that culture is being drowned by tourists and the massive non-native population influencing them. Sure, you can celebrate the culture and the language, but it doesn’t even begin to give you a glimpse of what it could have been without European invasions.
A good model would probably be one of the central or South American countries. Mexico would probably be a good model for the northern states and Brazil would probably be a good model for the southern states (due to the large degree of African ancestry in its population). In Mexico there was a high degree of mixture between Europeans and indigenous and current day Mexico has a socio-economic gradient that roughy follows degree of European ancestry. That is, more European ancestry = higher class. Brazil has a similar gradient, just with the added admixture of African slaves.
Of course, the specific cultural practices would be different, since the European and indigenous cultures in the US would have been different than they were in Mexico and Brazil.
In Mexico rural indigenous peasants were treated as subhuman garbage.
White landowners pretty much did what they liked: murder, rape, theft, kidnapping, forced labor, mass-murder, destruction of whole villages, forced relocation, ...
Within living memory, indigenous people would have their property stolen or destroyed by Spanish-speaking thugs with no legal recourse, would be forced into labor, would be murdered or raped on a whim by wealthy landowners. Until recently, indigenous people were not allowed in some Mexican cities after dark and had essentially no political representation. Etc.
* * *
By contrast, in the USA we just killed all of the indigenous people and took their land.
The difference is that in Mexico & Central America the whole economic system was based on a colonial overseer class who used indigenous labor to produce goods for export, whereas in the USA the economic system was originally based on European immigrant settlers farming their own plots of land (or in the US South, based on plantations worked by African slaves), and indigenous people were economically extraneous.
The Catholic church also tried to destroy literally all indigenous writings in Mexico, and criminalize indigenous languages and cultural practices. So they had to operate in stealth. Some remain, but many things have faded from history and practice into myth.
It was too difficult, since it was easy for locals that knew the land to just run away and take refuge with other tribes. In Florida, some black slaves notoriously ran away and joined the Seminoles, a tribe that led a pretty notable resistance for sovereignty. This is a simplification, another big factor would have been the fact that many tribes had already established themselves as political entities, expect the five civilized tribes, via trade and intermixing. I would hazard that many white people from the south and southeast would have some native ancestry. Finally, when all blacks we're defacto slaves and free blacks were uncommon, it was easier to identify a run-away. In fact several Southeastern tribes owned slaves themselves and the Cherokee were actually split in their support for the Union vs the Confederacy.
When the Europeans settled in the Carolinas, they brought malaria with them. The ensuing epidemic affected both the natives and the settlers (and malaria, with lethargy as its major symptom, is especially bad for a manual labor force). People of West African descent tend to have a very strong resistance to malaria that's related (in a way I don't understand) to the sickle-cell gene. Since the ships trading back and forth across the Atlantic were also trading to the western coast of Africa (and exchanging sailors/slaves/passengers at all stops), eventually some west African laborers ended up in the carolinas, and someone noted that they were unaffected by malaria.
The eventual presence of large groups of west african laborers, combined with a tradition/economy of chattel slavery among the Carolina natives that predated the settlers to create a very economically effective slavery system that spread across the southern US.
South Carolina was founded as a rice-growing colony to supply food to the sugar-growing colonies in the Caribbean. They bought enslaved agricultural workers from west Africa because they had the skills to grow rice more effectively. Rice wasn't native to the Americas, so buying natives wouldn't have resulted in the significantly higher rice yields.
----
sidenote: They also bought people who knew how to cultivate indigo for dyes. This meant that indigo was the dye most-available for the continental army in 1775.
> Mexico has a socio-economic gradient that roughy follows degree of European ancestry. That is, more European ancestry = higher class. Brazil has a similar gradient, just with the added admixture of African slaves.
The interesting part is that the gradient is self-sustaining and even self-exacerbating over time because it's based on perceived ancestry, and perceived "European ancestry" becomes a very real signal of privileged status. It's kinda ironic; it shows us that 'structural racism' and 'white privilege' can be very real social mechanisms, and what they actually look like on the ground, in a society where they've been around for many centuries! If you didn't know any better, you'd predict that SR and WP are concepts created by scholars in Latin-American Studies, to explain these societies (much like, say, the Clientelism concept was). The reality is somewhat different!
That would require the Columbian Exchange of diseases to have been a non-event. That massive population loss opened up the continent.
Also, American Indian tribes are not a monolith so the contrast would be interesting. Given the migration of some tribes, I would expect a lot more tribal wars.
Do you know why disease seemed to almost eradicate indigenous populations in North America vs leave a large portion the indigenous population intact in central and South America? Asking because there is an obvious, massive difference in degree of indigenous genetic representation in, for example, the US vs. Mexico.
Disease was pretty indiscriminate and wiped out the vast majority of the population throughout the Americas. Before European arrival there were a massive number of people living throughout Central America, the Amazon rainforest, etc. Populations didn’t recover until several centuries later (and in some places, still haven’t).
The big difference between the USA and regions further south is that in the USA white settlers just mass-slaughtered most of those who remained post-disease so they could steal their land, whereas further south they were instead pressed into forced labor in service of a relatively small group of white colonial overseers.
It’s kind of like the difference between bison and cows. The former are economically extraneous so mostly got wiped out, whereas the latter are economically important domesticated slaves and therefore survive. (If this metaphor seems racist, note that throughout the Americas the ideology of ruling whites held that indigenous people were subhuman and undeserving of basic rights.)
> The big difference between the USA and regions further south is that in the USA white settlers just mass-slaughtered most of those who remained post-disease so they could steal their land, whereas further south they were instead pressed into forced labor in service of a relatively small group of white colonial overseers.
This seems to be at odds with the fact that the US colonies (some of them, at least) imported African slaves. In theory, if they needed slave labor, why not make slaves out of the indigenous? Which leads me to believe that there's another distinction at play. I like umanwizard's explanation that the North America was settled by families whereas Central and South America were settled by single men. This would seem to jive with the genetic evidence from Central and South America that there is a high degree of admixture between Europeans and indigenous people, but that it is heavily skewed toward European males mating with indigenous females.
EDIT: Though now that I think about it, perhaps disease resistance in African slaves was an important factor in why they were preferred over indigenous.
> In theory, if they needed slave labor, why not make slaves out of the indigenous?
It's a lot harder for an imported slave to run off than a local one. Local slave knows the land, knows where to run to, has a decent expectation that if they run there things will be better... An imported slave who runs doesn't really have that.
And where systems could be put in place to keep slaves from running, like the islands of the Caribbean? Well, those natives were worked to death, and then African slaves were imported to replace them. (And then more replacements came, because they were serious about that "working to death" thing)
One reason is that Mesoamerica was much more densely populated.
Tenochtitlan alone was one of the biggest cities in the world at the time of the conquest (several hundred thousand people). There wasn't anything remotely similar in present-day US and Canada.
Another reason is that most Spanish colonists were single men whereas most English colonists of North America were families.
North America got a lot more colonists than Mexico and also got them a lot sooner after the first significant contact was made. Mexico City was conquered in 1521 and New Spain received 1-1.5 million colonists (including slaves) before independence in 1810. In North America the first colony was Roanoke in 1584 (only including English colonies and this failed one for simplicity) and had 2.4 million settlers by 1788. So in Mexico the population had more time to bounce back and less of a European influx to contend with.
South America also had a lot less colonists (Portugal only had 2 million people and tried to restrict emigration) they also received a lot more slaves (North America got <10% of the slave trade) which mixed with with the native population.
There seems to be a dogmatic insistence on the potency of the the widespread epidemic that happened after the first contact. The assertion seems to be:
1. There was a drastic fall in the population density of the natives
2. There is a critical density of population below which the indegenous people's claim on land in relinquished
3. A density of population below this was seen in North America before mass immigration of Europeans.
4. If it were not so the Settlers would have been culpable of genocide of the Natives
I don't see anyone insisting on 2 or 4 here, just you.
If a particular group with a narrow territorial claim is wiped out by disease (that is, population density drops to 0), it seems like 2 should apply to that narrow territory.
It's not like each the native of the Americas asserted a territorial claim on all territories of the Americas. There were different groups with different, sometimes competing, claims, and each enforced those claims with military power or lost them. This was true both before and after European arrival.
I think everyone here agrees that genocides did occur, especially in North America and the Carribean, but is pointing out that the overwhelming majority of the native population decline was due to diseases that few people understood and none could effectively control.
I think the argument is that when all the Taino are dead from disease, it's not clear that any of, say, the Algonquins have a better claim to any of the lesser Antilles than the Spanish crown does.
There is an alt-history story (whose title I wish I could recall) about an American time traveller who goes back to visit a young Alexander of Macedon and his tutor Aristotle. To disguise the origins of his superior science he pretends to be from a far province of the Persian empire. Upon his return to his own time he is shocked to find a largely agrarian US still populated exclusively with its indigenous peoples - the European invasion has not happened. The conclusion is that Aristotle, and by extension the entire classical intellectual movement, was so intimidated and overwhelmed to discover this visitor's vastly greater scienctific knowledge that their own curiosity was extinguished, and hence Western civilisation was stillborn.
That depends on the meaning of “these treaties”. The texts have probably been in the PD forever, assuming they were drafted by government lawyers (somewhat likely judging by the content), because everything created by the federal government is. Barring that, copyright would have long expired. So go ahead, I really want to see an adaptation of Indian law to VC term sheets.
The physical documents are not PD, because the concept has no meaning in the physical realm.
Photographs are works separate from the objects they show, but the same limitation as to government works as above applies.
I am not a constitutional law expert, but I believe that under article 6 section 2 (the supremacy clause) treaties are held to be equal to the constitution. Thus, there is a very high bar for a treaty to by nullified based on contradicting the constitution. There is very little case law on this, and I believe the only instance in which an international executive agreement (not a treaty) was thrown out by the Supreme Court was Reid vs Covert. In that case, it was throw out on the grounds that it violated 5th and 6th amendment protections of Americans in foreign countries.
I don't understand how the United States could even form a treaty with a group of U.S. citizens born on U.S. soil.
Could I make a treaty with the U.S. that everyone in Connecticut loses their property and has to move to Utah? I was born in Connecticut. If the State of Connecticut explicitly rejected it, but I made a side deal with the Federal government?
In this specific case, the supreme Court ruled that the removal of the Cherokee was unconstitutional in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia [0].
Andrew Jackson said "John Marshall has made its decision, now let them enforce it" [1], violating the Court's decision and ordering the Trail of Tears.
He committed treason, this country was founded in genocide, and Jackson's portrait is proudly hung in the Oval Office. This is why I'm ashamed to be an American.
Yes, terrible things were done in the founding of America, but terrible things happened all over the world throughout history (including between warring native tribes). But what we need to take from this isn't that our ancestors were horrible human beings, but that they did wrong things and more importantly, we need to strive to learn from it, not repeat their mistakes and generally be better people.
> the current property "owners" are criminal trespassers in my view.
Then pretty much every single American is a trespassers because basically the entire United States (or North America in general) was settled by native American before the Europeans "discovered" it, and in most cases, they didn't sell them their land.
Sure, current "owners" would try to argue good faith hostile possession. Maybe they win.
It would be interesting to adjudicate whether kidnapping someone and removing them from their land and then selling it to another counts as a criminal conspiracy.
It would also be interesting to adjudicate whether "I didn't think I was stealing, because I don't believe that person is a human being with rights" counts as a good faith argument.
I could see it going either way, but I am excited to see how these cases are resolved. I hope they are brought in my lifetime. There is probably trillions of dollars of property implicated, at least half of which rightfully belongs to first nations people.
Somebody mentioned "genocide and slavery was part of the making of america rather than try to hide it" but it disturbs the narrative of the shining beacon on the hill and Thanksgiving.
Virtue and compassion are not geographical traits.
