Hundreds of Native American Treaties Digitized for the First Time really grabs my attention.
Those hoping to delve into the trove can use Indigenous Digital Archive (IDA) Treaties Explorer, a free tool optimized for easily searching and studying the documents. In addition to providing a framework for research, the portal offers maps of different treaty land designations, as well as extensive historical and contextual information.
So, I follow the link.
Thanks to an anonymous donation, the US National Archives conserved and digitized the Ratified Indian treaties in its holdings. Here you can see the original documents spanning more than a hundred years. Most are now available, and more will be added as the National Archives completes preservation and scanning.
Needless to say, treaties are instrumental in disputes over land and water rights.
As Kimbra Cutlip reported for Smithsonian magazine in 2018, a group of Native American tribes has long contested its right to land in South Dakota’s Black Hills. The tribes’ argument hinges on the Fort Laramie Treaty, an 1868 legal document forged between a collective of Native American bands—including the Dakota, Lakota, Nakota and Arapaho—and the U.S. government. Though officials had initially designated the Black Hills as land reserved for Native use, they reneged on the treaty when gold was discovered in the region less than a decade later.
The importance of historic Native American treaties once again surfaced in the news in July, when the Supreme Court ruled that much of the eastern half of Oklahoma falls within Native American territory. Though no land changed hands, the McGirt v. Oklahoma decision was hailed as a win for tribal sovereignty because it demonstrated that Native reservations established by treaties with the U.S. in the 1830s were still valid despite the fact that Oklahoma became a state in 1907.
And what needs attention, but doesn’t get it, is Untreated, the past festers, Neiman writes. In time, it becomes an open wound.
We can tell ourselves that the Holocaust is a singular phenomenon — that no ground cries out like Auschwitz or Treblinka or Dachau. But even if that’s true, that doesn’t preclude our learning from the German process, however incomplete. “What Germans have done, which the United States has not done thus far as a nation,” Neiman says in an interview, “is to be honest: ‘We suffered, but we have caused other people to suffer more, and we have to face that. We cannot continue to cover up the crimes of our past.’ The fact that Germans didn’t do it wholeheartedly at the beginning — that can be something that gives us hope.”
Atonement depends on renewed commitment; the return of anti-Semitism and far-right ideologies in the former Reich have proven as much. But is it possible to see Germans’ sustained effort to heal as a model? Can we hold up a mirror to ourselves and accept the repellent parts of our own reflection?
Can we hold up a mirror to ourselves and accept the repellent parts of our own reflection? Well, depends on how many think I and people like me are Satan-worshiping pedophiles, doesn’t it?Suffice it to say, it doesn’t look good.
So what also grabs my attention is wondering how the extremely ignorant will avoid the reality,'We cannot continue to cover up the crimes of our past,’ because Our youth will be taught to love America.
Speaking at a conference in Washington DC on Thursday, the president announced a new national commission to promote “patriotic education” and counter the “decades of leftwing indoctrination” to which he claims US schoolchildren have been subjected. “Our youth will be taught to love America,” he said.
I predict they’ll say Columbus discovered the global child sex-trafficking ring. That'd be one way to avoid it, wouldn't it? Hence, the need.
Author is a member of the Metis Nation of the United States