What a bunch of shit. Those poor poor Indians . They have it so rough. I guess they will just have to go back to their government subsidize land and live in their government subsidize houses and those poor poor people will just have to go shoot elk, because the government subsidize food program just doesn’t provide enough. Meanwhile the only thing they take is the back straps and head.
Yeah, they are poor. For a lot of reasons, mostly for reasons that resulted from them acting in good faith with an entity that proved to not be acting in good faith, the US Government and its elected officials. We effed them over, time and time again. We signed deals with them, then broke the deal, then when they starting shooting people over those broken deals, the US Government signed more deals, which again got broken.
Our Government signed deals with them, the same way the US Government signs deals with others, yet for some reason that is hard to understand, many feel those deals do not need to be honored. The deals were commonly a contract where we get their land for pennies on the dollar in exchange for a lot of empty promises. We get claim to most the resources we previously said belonged to the tribes.
We rounded them up on reservations and said we would manage their lands and other resource in a Trustee-Beneficiary relationship on their behalf. We stole billions of dollars from them as part of that Trustee-Beneficiary relationship, where it would have never been acknowledge and partially repaid except for a PO'd Blackfoot woman who demanded an accounting and payment of monies the US Government has been withholding. Even with that, they didn't get all that was owed, rather they had to make a compromise settlement -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobell_v._Salazar
What they get is not "Government Subsidized." What they get is a small portion of the payment/compensation/renumeration that was promised to them. They gave up an asset, their amazing lands, in exchange for these things, all documented under Treaties, which at their basic level are nothing more than contract. The US Government never has, and probably never will, make good on these deals.
We can't even manage their lands properly or keep an accounting of the payments that are owed to them, even though we promised that is what we would do. The reason they have "Government subsidized" houses is because that is how the US Government set it up for them. On most reservations, you do not, and you cannot, hold fee title to the land/house you might live in. Imagine not being able to own the roof over your head. That would provide almost no incentive to care for it, improve it, invest in it. Hard to have much future or stability when you cannot have a property right in the most basic essential, your house.
These tribal law settlements are part of a deal that was made to buy/steal their land from them. We made a lot of promises that we would forever manage what little land they were allowed to retain and that we would give them the proceeds from management of that land. We also promised that in exchange for all that land we would forever provide certain items to them. That is the deal we made. We don't have to like it, but that is what our leaders of the past thought was a good deal at the time, and in retrospect was surely a great deal for everyone other than the tribes and their members.
Having grown up next to a reservation and a lot of friends from tribes, I could go on and on.
If we want to have a discussion about the impacts of this case, and those impacts could be far reaching, then let's have the discussion. That discussion can be had without the BS comments about the tribes and the implication that this is the future they wanted or the future they bargained for when negotiating treaties and renegotiating broken treaties.
This case has a lot of undercurrents that can make for some ugly comments by those not inclined to think about Treaties as a contract to be followed by us. Those ugly comments will not be tolerated on this forum. Anyone making such comments, either outright or implied, will be toasted without warning.
Now, let's have a discussion of the case, what is unoccupied lands, how Wyoming will respond, what impacts this has on wildlife conservation, the fact that late winter tribal hunting has been occurring around Yellowstone Park for decades and includes bison, elk, sheep, deer, etc. , and on the many other points relevant to the case/topic.
