TROUBL

The activities of Native Americans rarely make the news, since most of us don’t think about them very often. Most people I know think of them as a dead society, or as a sad, romantic story from the past.

So, I was tickled to read a recent Newsweek article called Taking Back the Land. It was about Native American tribes using money from tribal casinos to reclaim their homeland. They are basically using white America’s greed to their own advantage, and using it to buy their land back! Not only are they buying it, but many of the tribes are, then, converting it into cultural trusts, thereby exempting it from local taxes, and refusing to develop it for anything but tribal use.

Outsiders are taking all this as a giant middle finger to the European Americans who devastated the Native way of life centuries ago. Lawsuits are under way in New York, Minnesota, California, and possibly other states as well, against tribes for buying and refusing to develop the land and against the Feds for allowing tribes to turn their land into trusts. In New York, Oneida County is suing a tribe because “the loss of the tax base [is] significant.” In Minnesota, the city of Shakopee is filing a federal appeal to overturn the legality of its namesake tribe’s purchase of land. They say the tribe is “disrupt[ing] the orderly development of the community” and interfering with the city’s economic development. All of these tribes, in the eloquent words of Shakopee Mayor John Schmitt, are “out to garner as much as they can get, wherever they can get it.” This sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Ring a bell–from about a hundred years ago? And, in an even more ridiculous move, non-native s in Santa Barbara, California are outraged that the Santa Ynez are turning 6.9 acres in a rural community into a cultural museum, because “the local community doesn’t have a say.”

When I first read this, I couldn’t stop laughing. “The local community doesn’t have a say”? Are they serious? Did Native Americans have a say when their lands were snatched from them with brute force? Were concerns heard when European Americans broke treaties to illegally settle on sacred lands? In this country, Native Americans have been pillaged, murdered, thieved and ignored for long enough. But, they have been patient, and they have learned that the only binding tie in American culture is money. So, they have earned it, and they are now using it wisely and legally. And yet, somehow, now that Native Americans finally have enough to buy back land fair and square, white America has the audacity to whine about it!

Sure, it might stink for some investor who had his eye on a patch of land for the newest mega-super-ultra Wal-Mart. But, I can’t help pitting the disappointment of a real estate developer against the unlawful killing of thousands of people whose descendants were forced from the land they held sacred, shipped off to boarding schools; whose defendants were stripped of their language and culture, then sent back to be forgotten by the outside world and to live in poverty. When I put these situations into perspective, I have to side with the Native Americans. Does upstate New York really need more Starbucks locations? Will Minnesota wither and die if it doesn’t get one more Home Depot with a gigantic parking lot? Will California drop into the sea if a cultural museum highlighting avocado growth goes in? I don’t think so. But, for Native Americans who spent centuries in poverty and despair on tiny reservations, cut off from their sacred areas and land; the situation is dire. I have lived with Native Americans and studied them from afar, and I can say that land is not just a development opportunity. It is a chance to reconnect with the part of them that was broken long ago. It is a chance to regain their culture.

I only hope that in the next few years the courts hold up their hands against developers. Let economic interests and tax offices complain all they want. These lands have been bought and paid for in the only language Americans seem to understand–cold , hard cash. As Senator Barack Obama, who was given the name “He Who Helps People Throughout the Land,” recently said at his Native American adoption ceremony on the Crow reservation in Montana, “Few have been ignored by Washington for as long as Native Americans – the first Americans.” I hope that the rest of the federal government can see how right he was. They need to recognize and uphold the rights of Native Americans at long last.