The Treatment of Indians

Exclusive to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

Another charge that gets leveled at the United States, is its ill treatment of the country’s indigenous people, who are known as Indians or Native Americans. It is usually the far-left that takes great joy in pointing out that the land that we are sitting on now was land stolen from Native Americans in the same way that they like to keep bringing up slavery. Yes, just like the horrors of slavery, the treatment of America’s indigenous people is not a shining moment for America’s history. The government used tactics against the Indians that ranged from unsavory to downright horrific. I would never deny any of these truths. As a matter of fact, I used to have a t-shirt that said “Sure You Can Trust Your Government. Just Ask an Indian.” However I am reminded of what one of my professors said when I took a class on American Indian history in college. He noted that it was interesting how the history books went from portraying the natives as mindless savages to total victims. I think my professor was putting it mildly.

With the way that the modern left portrays America’s indigenous people, you would have thought they were peace-loving hippies that were living in harmony with everything until the evil white man showed up. This is not only laughable, but downright insulting to both white settlers and the natives. As libertarian comedian, Gavin McInnes once said, “The Indians were our most worthy adversaries for four hundred years. It took us less time to topple Nazi Germany.” The one thing that the Indians have always prided themselves with is their warrior culture. That is why you will see them line up in droves to volunteer during a time of war. As Gavin McInnes also said, “portraying these people as victims is an insult.”

As for the part about us living on stolen land, how exactly do you think these larger tribes were able to obtain so much land? A great example of this is the history of the Black Hills in South Dakota and Wyoming. We had obtained this vast amount of land from the Sioux tribe through military conquest. This is far from what anybody would call a shinning moment for our nation, which is why the Supreme Court in the United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians offered the Sioux a settlement of a hundred and six million dollars. Yet, the Sioux righteously refused the settlement and will accept nothing less than having the actual land given to back to them. It’s not to say that I don’t admire the determination of the Sioux Nation, even if it does seem somewhat foolhardy. There is just one little fly in the anointment. The Sioux believe that they are the rightful owners of the land, but one has to ask how did they come by so much land in the first place? Well, they took it by forcing the much smaller and weaker tribes out of the area. In the documentary America Dinesh D’Souza points out that the Sioux don’t seem to harbor the same amount of guilt as America does for the way they acquired the land. D’Souza also said that the representatives of the Sioux tribe have been asked if they plan to give any of the land back to the descendants of the weaker tribes that their ancestors had conquered many centuries ago, if they by some miracle manage get the Black Hills back from the United States government. They usually look at the guy posing the question as if he is insane before telling him, “Hell, no. The land is ours.” It’s interesting that America feels so guilty about acquiring the land through military conquest, yet the decedents of the strongest Indian tribes seem almost proud about the way they took their land through same exact means.

There is also a misconception that it was the genocidal policies by the white man that decimated the Native American population. In reality, it was actually diseases, such as Small Pox that caused the devastation of the indigenous population. It is true that there were atrocities committed by the white man against the native tribesmen. Unlike Holocaust deniers, Japanese and Turkish nationalists, I would never try to downplay or deny the horrors that were inflicted upon these people, mostly from the US government. What I take issue with is the cartoonish way that the white man is portrayed as an evil villain that spouts devil horns, while Native Americans are portrayed as peaceniks with halos hovering above their heads. As I have already pointed out, the Indians were warmongers that were willing to take land from other tribes through force and were just as willing to commit horrible atrocities against their enemies. You had certain Indians that were willing to murder women and children, just because they happened to belong to a different tribe. There was a reason why many of the small and weaker tribes were willing to alley themselves with the newly arrived colonists.

I also find it interesting that we are supposed to feel so guilty about the treatment of America’s indigenous people that we can’t allow ourselves to celebrate Columbus Day or Thanksgiving. Columbus Day is now controversial because Howard Zinn, a Marxist hack disguised as a historian went out of his way to defame Christopher Columbus by taking his words out of context. There was an excellent book on the subject titled “Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History that Turned a Generation Against America” by Mary Grabar. To be fair, I don’t think there are that many people who celebrate Columbus Day anyway. Thanksgiving on the other hand is a different story, though it never made any sense why this holiday is now controversial. I always thought that celebrating one of the few days when both sides were peacefully breaking bread at the same table instead of killing each other was a good thing. To me it’s just as trivial and nonsensical as issues such as giving sports teams Indian related names or whether non-Indians should be allowed to wear fetters or headdresses for Halloween.

It’s these nonsensical issues that actually distract from the real problems that the decedents of America’s original people face every day. Just about anybody who has ever visited a modern Indian Reservation will tell you that it is almost like visiting a third-world country. There the inhabitants are plagued with crime, alcoholism and poverty. When I say poverty, I don’t mean Inner City poverty where you can still find shops that sell five-hundred-dollar Air Jordans. As Dinesh D’Souza once put it, the reservations are so poor that you won’t find a Starbucks or a McDonald’s there. Seriously how poor does a society have to be not to even have a McDonald’s? Yet, there seems to be more outrage over sports teams having Indian related names or Indian mascots. I even remember an Indian activist on Twitter who complained about the way that Native Americans were portrayed in Avatar. Apparently, nobody told her that the tribal people in Avatarr were aliens and not Native Americans. The fact that they were blue and ten feet tall should have been her first clue. I even tweeted this woman and told her that it must be nice to have finally solved all the problems that her people face everyday on the reservations, so that she can spend her time complaining about a fictional race of people that only has a passing resemblance to America’s indigenous people (if that).

The real solution is for the government to get the hell out of the way, but of course that is a solution that so-called activists will never get behind. These activists don’t want their pets to find Independence, otherwise they will be out of a job.