C'mon. He just has Indians' best interests at heart.
Last Wednesday in a radio
interview on the
The Laura Ingraham Show, presidential candidate Rand Paul said American Indians “don’t do very well because there’s been a lack of assimilation." Simon Moya-Smith
writes:
“I think assimilation is an amazing thing. A good example of how even in our country assimilation didn’t happen and it’s been a disaster for the people has been the Native American population on the reservations,” Paul said.
Paul suggested that Native Americans could be as successful as the rest of country in as little as 10 years if the Indians who live on the 325 reservations across the nation assimilated into American culture.
“Um, if they were assimilated within a decade they’d probably be doing as well as the rest of us, but instead, um, seclusion and isolating them—we took their land, and then put them on small [unintelligible] of land, but they don’t do very well …”
How many times before have we heard this nonsense?
The fundamental problem with Paul's assimilation approach is that it's an old idea that was very much a part of the taking of the land. And most Indians who did assimilate, unless they left their Indian identity completely behind, did not benefit.
Take, for example, the Cherokee of Georgia. By the time Congress passed the Indian Removal Act in 1830, a large portion of the Cherokee were highly assimilated. They had adopted white ways, lived in European-style houses, farmed the European way, followed property laws, created their own alphabet, published their own newspaper, worshiped in Christian churches, wore European-style clothes and even kept chattel slaves. It didn't matter. They got sent off to what would become Oklahoma at gunpoint anyway, losing a fourth of their population from the rigors of the Trail of Tears and more when they got to the land of their exile.
In 1887, the Dawes Severalty Act was passed with the idea of alloting 160 acres to each individual Indian who would live separately from the tribe and assimilate.
More on Rand Paul's scam below the fold.
As D.S. Otis would later write in The Dawes Act and the Allotment of Indian Lands, Sen. Henry M. Teller of Colorado said the idea behind allotment was "to despoil the Indians of their lands and to make them vagabonds on the face of the earth [...] to get at the Indian lands and open them up to settlement. The provisions for the apparent benefit of the Indians are but the pretext to get at his lands and occupy them. [...] If this were done in the name of Greed, it would be bad enough; but to do it in the name of Humanity ... is infinitely worse."
This effort at assimilation was remarkably successful at grabbing that land. When the law was passed, tribal lands still accounted for 138 million acres. By 1934, when allotment ended, the tribes held only 48 million acres.
But that wasn't the end. Next, a Hoover Commission report in 1949 bolstered the idea that had begun in 1940 of getting rid of the reservations altogether. Not just terminating the reservations but the tribes themselves. More than 100 were terminated and some 2.5 million more "surplus" acres were sold to non-Indians. The majority eventually had their tribal status and at least some of their land returned. But more than a dozen have not. Although termination ended informally in the late 1960s, it wasn't until 1988 that Congress did it officially.
That wasn't the end of the idea of getting rid of reservations. For example, former Sen. Slade Gorton III or Washington was hard on that path for his entire time in the Senate. Obviously, there are still some politicians who haven't given the idea up.
We know what you're up to, Senator Paul. And you can stick it.