Sarcasm.. It escapes you often?
Rarely. Maybe dig a bit for the point before trotting out the superficial dismissal, next time.
And what do you think led to that? What is the direct cause?
Could it be.. possibly.. that the attitude from back then has carried through to today? Could it be remotely possible that the lack of empathy and lack of care about them as a people stems from what existed in the past? I don't know, could it?
Of course - that's exactly the contention. Well, not
exactly: it's more than a lack of empathy. It's a failure to even concieve of the natives as people to begin with, rather than a policy problem that needs solving. They're just statistics about school attendance, alcoholism, poverty, and whatever lurid sex crimes will enrage the population into writing blank checks for your military-industrial complex to run wild on the natives.
So the reservations where they (Native Americans) live are...?
Am I just supposed to invent some question there on my own, or what?
And they don't all live on reservations. Even without counting all of the Mexican Americans of predominantly native ancestry.
And not all reservations are created equal. It's a big country, with a lot of tribes, and there are fairly considerable variations in their situations. Some are very isolated and marginalized, others are integrated and empowered. Some just want to be left alone, while others wish to engage more extensively. Some don't really consider statistics about employment or education to be a huge priority for them. Some takes steps to ban alcohol and gambling on their lands, while others embrace it. The important thing is to empower them to make the appropriate decisions for themselves.
What about the reduction in their landholdings?
What about it?
How about their conditions?
What about them?
Native Americans rank the highest in unemployment and poverty rates, infant mortality and life expectancy. According to the 2009 Census Bureau, unemployment in Indian country ranks anywhere between 50 percent and 85 percent while in some reservations, nearly 90 percent of native people live below the federal poverty line. Indian reservations in the Midwest are plagued by alcoholism, domestic violence and teen suicide, all of it contributing to an epidemic of hopelessness within America’s indigenous populations.
Right, and?
An advantage of relating to the natives as (quasi-)sovereign nations is that it reduces the incentive to get all White Man's Burden on them. Would I like to see them doing better? Of course. But it would disrespect them to suggest that ensuring they do so is for me to concern myself with. When I say I want to see them do better, I mean it very literally. It's not a euphemism for wanting to see better done to them. They are to be subjects, not objects, and the kudos for improvements is to accrue to them and not some colonial apparatus managed from thousands of miles away.
Replace the natives in any of this rhetoric with any other nationality, and the offensiveness should become obvious really quickly. "What is to be done about those poor backwards Afghans? Better send in the Marines to make sure the girls learn to read."
Those casino's must be working well, huh?
You should have seen it before (supposing you've seen it now, which doesn't seem such a hot supposition, but whatever).
The reservations near where I live now (and the ones by my home town) now have massive multi-million-dollar resort hotel/casinos (along with gas stations, restaurants, golf courses, concert venues, etc. -
and new schools) where 20 years ago there was - literally - nothing more than a portable building selling fireworks and tax-free cigarettes. They've actually got real lawyers pushing their land and water rights in real courts (and winning) now. It's a massive improvement over the situation 20 years ago, and visibly so.
I never said it was a perfect, or complete, or even particularly great response. But it does at least treat them as sovereigns on their lands, enabled to draw an income of their own to fund their own governance, police, infrastructure, etc. It's at least change in the right direction (however incomplete), unlike the neo-colonialist approach pursued Down Under.
Or how about we "let 'em operate casinos".. You mean that kind of self determination?
Yeah. Not sure where the sarcastic dismissal is coming from. The ability to legislate gambling (and also drug production and use) on reservations (in pointed variance with the laws of the states these reservations are situated in) is a pretty significant chunk of self-determination. Sovereignty, in fact - the reason they can do it is that
the reservations are not subject to the laws of the surrounding state(s). If I decide to operate a casino on my property, I go to jail. They, on the other hand, get to advertize and make money hand-over-fist (and host many of the best concerts in the area, owing to the proliferation of newer, bigger music venues at the resort casinos).
Contrast that with the Aussie approach of making townships in government property and enforcing measures on pornography and alcohol, literally reducing entire communities into wards of the state. As if they were orphaned infants, or something.
My colour does not make the problems go away.
It's not up to you to make their problems go away, is the point. It's up to you to respect them, and help empower them to figure out their own way forward. This process where their fitness for self-determination is reduced into scare statistics to be judged by distant, unaccountable city-dwellers - who then deploy political and military resources to enforce their putatively superior standards - has a name. It's "colonialism."
So when Aboriginals talk of combating alcoholism and abuse and violence in their communities, when they talk about getting their children into schools, when they talk about getting access to equal health care and education, that's being racist?
Of course not. But when
you talk about how
your government needs to figure out how to do that for them, that's being racist (and colonialist). When they figure into national political discourse mainly as a collection of bad statistics to be fixed through state intervention, that's being racist (and colonialist). I know this because it works exactly the same way in the US. This PC neo-racism works by drumming on the problems so hard that people demand state solutions, and skip right over the basic issue of just empowering people in the first place. Which colonialism is, of course, the entire point. That's why the state goes in for it - it enhances their power and prerogative.
As they advise themselves, throwing money at the problem is not enough.
That's true. You need to give them power, as well.
Although plain old money would fix much of the things you mention, like frayed wiring and old school buildings. Those really are just simple matters of spending money.
The Government has to step up and do what is right. But apparently that's racist in your opinion?
Not at all. My contention is that the government is doing wrong, because the nation is racist. I'm all for the government empowering the natives. It's doing the opposite, and taking a great many fools along for the ride with all of the associated PC racism.
Apparently less racist is what the US has done, which you actually advised we do..
How do you figure?
And: "has done" or "is doing?"
to "let 'em operate casinos".. and how successful is that again?
More successful than not doing so. And, again, preferable to sending in the army like y'all.
Oh yes, that's right.. the stats for Native Americans in the US is worse than that of the Aboriginals in Australia.
Again, the pervasive insistence of reducing natives into statistical quantities to be handled through state policy, from a position of condescending superiority. Go tell it to Rudyard Kipling.
