From Common Dreams via Guardian
A United Nations investigator probing discrimination against Native Americans has called on the US government to return some of the land stolen from Indian tribes as a step toward combating continuing and systemic racial discrimination.
James Anaya, the UN special rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples, said no member of the US Congress would meet him as he investigated the part played by the government in the considerable difficulties faced by Indian tribes.
Anaya said that in nearly two weeks of visiting Indian reservations, indigenous communities in Alaska and Hawaii, and Native Americans now living in cities, he encountered people who suffered a history of dispossession of their lands and resources, the breakdown of their societies and "numerous instances of outright brutality, all grounded on racial discrimination".
"It's a racial discrimination that they feel is both systemic and also specific instances of ongoing discrimination that is felt at the individual level," he said.
Anaya said racism extended from the broad relationship between federal or state governments and tribes down to local issues such as education.
"For example, with the treatment of children in schools both by their peers and by teachers as well as the educational system itself; the way native Americans and indigenous peoples are reflected in the school curriculum and teaching," he said.
"And discrimination in the sense of the invisibility of Native Americans in the country overall that often is reflected in the popular media. The idea that is often projected through the mainstream media and among public figures that indigenous peoples are either gone or as a group are insignificant or that they're out to get benefits in terms of handouts, or their communities and cultures are reduced to casinos, which are just flatly wrong."
http://www.commondreams.org/...
What we did to the Native Americans was nothing short of genocide and ethnic-cleansing. The arrival of Europeans on this continent reduced the Native American population from 12 million to 237 thousand four centuries later.
The trend continued under subsequent U.S. Presidents, once the Europeans either left or assimilated to the land. For instance,
The Removal Act of 1830 set into motion a series of events which led to the "Trail of Tears" in 1838, a forced march of the Cherokees, resulting in the destruction of most of the Cherokee population." The concentration of American Indians in small geographic areas, and the scattering of them from their homelands, caused increased death, primarily because of associated military actions, disease, starvation, extremely harsh conditions during the moves, and the resulting destruction of ways of life.
http://www.iearn.org/...
Even to this day, Native Americans face severe institutionalized discrimination, racism and displacement
Native Americans are the most harshly affected by institutionalized racism. The World Watch Institute notes that 317 reservations are threatened by environmental hazards. While formal equality has been legally granted, American Indians, Alaska Natives, Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders remain among the most economically disadvantaged groups in the country, and suffer from high levels of alcoholism and suicide.
This racism and “otherness,” manifests itself in the ill-treatment and abuse of Native-American women:
Native American women are also at a high risk of sexual and physical abuse, recorded at three and a half times higher than the national average. This estimate is very low because 70 percent of abuse cases go unreported, often due to mistrust Native American women feel towards government and police. Seventy percent of the violence experienced by Native American women is from non-Native American men.
http://www.dosomething.org/...
Returning some of their land to them will not eradicate all of our transgressions towards them, but it is an important step towards alleviating some of their burdens, correcting past wrongs and perhaps most importantly giving them a chance to restart their life for the better.