the Native American  'rip-off' continues... big time 9/11/2016 0 Comments   Months-long protests against a multi-billion-dollar oil pipeline have boiled over into tense clashes as snarling dogs were used against protesters and the tribe claims burial grounds were bulldozed. The North Dakota protest site at the reservation of the Standing Rock Sioux has grown into “the largest gathering of Native Americans in more than 100 years,” All of this activity is getting public attention and the government has called for a pause in forward movement until the situation quiets down and they can move forward again without so much negative public attention.  The pretense, according to the government's own statements is to wait until it can determine whether it will need to reconsider any of its previous decisions regarding the Lake Oahe site under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) or other federal laws. two questions:  (1) within the existing statutory framework, what should the federal government do to better ensure meaningful tribal input into infrastructure-related reviews and decisions and the protection of tribal lands, resources, and treaty rights; and (2) should new legislation be proposed Can anyone seriously believe that the government will now decide, after all of these centuries, that the law has been wrong all of this time and that we will move in a different direction regarding Native American concerns??? Or, can we all recognize that this is just a stall and a move to quiet public opposition.  Is it possible that anyone is fooled into thinking that the United States is seeking to treat Native Americans fairly??? And even if there is a slight shift in direction on this particular episode, only the fully deluded can believe that the shift will be permanent or broad based, and that is the truth !!! There is no point in American history (history of the United States of America) in which Native Americans were considered anything other than a nuisance to be eliminated or controlled.  Over more recent times, the attitude has shifted slightly allowing that 'they' should be 'tolerated'.  There has never been a goal of including them equally. To manage 'them', the government established the Bureau of Indian Affairs.  The Bureau of Indian Affairs  is an agency that manages 55 million acres of land the federal government 'holds in trust' for Native owners. Established in 1824, the agency is tasked with promoting economic opportunity on Native land. To use the phrase 'holds in trust' is a sick joke...  and the promotion of opportunity on Native American land is the punch-line... ha! ha! ha!... opportunity for anyone other than Native Americans. While congress has passed many laws regarding Native Americans throughout the history of this great nation, those laws have always been negative as related to Native American people.  That they are 'laws', however, makes everything associated 'legal'.   “arbitrary and capricious” One ultimately must stop and wonder, 'why did the government not continue and simply kill them all off and eliminate the 'problem' completely?'  We were well on the way toward complete and total genocide.  What held us back?  Was it conscience?  Were there ethical and moral concerns?  As it is, we have done everything destructive other than complete and total genocide.  Native Americans have been pushed into unimaginable levels of poverty.  They have the shortest life expectancy, lowest education level, highest infant-mortality rate and greatest exposure to violent crime of any demographic in these United States of America. One of the reasons for the current 'conflict' is that over the decades, we have pushed Native Americans away from the lands of their ancestors, away from their historic homelands, away from 'productive' land and forced them to live on lands so remote and so barren that nobody could imagine there being any value to the land 'given' to Native Americans. Suddenly, we find value in the land and are now in a new exploitive effort to strip the value from these lands... the correct phrase to describe our actions is "to rob the Native American people, again", and that's the truth !!! How the U.S. Government Is Helping Corporations Plunder Native Land from In These Times by Stephanie Woodard Of Course, everything the United States government does is 'legal'... 'legal' being defined by the the United States government !!! Columbus’ “Discovery” ... millions of acres of Native land were signed away through treaties or stolen by force. The 1887 General Allotment Act, aka the Dawes Act, set the stage for what would become the prime tactic outsiders use to extract profit from Native land: exploitative leasing. The law privatized many of the communally held reservations by dividing them into small, individually owned “allotments.” Some tracts were given to tribal members and the rest declared surplus and sold to settlers. The idea was threefold: weaken tribes, “civilize” tribal members by turning them into property owners and open up prime agricultural and timber land to non-Natives. In a 1901 message to Congress, President Theodore Roosevelt praised allotment as “a mighty pulverizing engine to break up the tribal mass.” The Bureau of Indian Affairs The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) is the agency that manages 55 million acres of land the federal government holds in trust for Native owners. Established in 1824, the agency is tasked with promoting economic opportunity on Native land. The question is, opportunity for whom? The BIA arranges deals that allow outside companies and individual operators to use Native land and resources, but landowners believe they often get the short end of the stick. Many remaining Native lands now sit atop valuable oil and gas reserves, and stories abound of giant corporations cutting questionable deals. A special congressional committee reported in 1989, following a yearlong investigation, that Koch Oil had for years been undertaking “sophisticated and premeditated theft” by deliberately mismeasuring oil extracted from Native land. Expert witnesses testifying before the committee described Indian country as “wide open” for theft. Given the poverty, she says, “people will sign for food or gas money.” ​ Majority-Native counties regularly make it onto the U.S. Census list of the nation’s 10 poorest. The Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis reported in 2015 that tribal members’ average income countrywide barely topped $10,000, with unemployment averaging 50 percent. Natives have the nation’s shortest life expectancy, lowest education level, highest infant-mortality rate and greatest exposure to violent crime. With few or no businesses on reservations, tribes and tribal members also must look to border towns for goods and services. The Bureau of Indian Affairs origins: “The BIA’s perceived mission for many years was to develop Indian-owned resources for the public benefit,” Sawers notes. Despite reforms, the federal agency “has little incentive to bargain hard with potential lessees.” from The Free Thought Project  ​by Jay Syrmopoulos Upon arriving on the white sands of Guanahani Island, Christopher Columbus performed a ceremony to “take possession” of the land for his benefactors, the king and queen of Spain. His actions were legitimized under the international laws of Western Christendom. Virtually all American school children are taught about Columbus’s “discovery” as some type of mythical adventure. However, few are aware of the religious doctrine that underpins his taking “possession” of the newly arrived upon land, which has come to be known as the Doctrine of Discovery. ​ Fewer yet are aware that currently – over five hundred years later – the U.S. government still uses this doctrine to uniformly deny Native Americans’ their rights. So how did something that was a papal doctrine within the Catholic Church become adopted by the U.S. legal system? The U.S. Supreme Court, in 1823, adopted the Christian Doctrine of Discovery into U.S. law in the celebrated case, Johnson v. McIntosh. Chief Justice John Marshall, writing for the unanimous court, made note that Christian European nations had taken “ultimate dominion” of America during the Age of Discovery. Upon “discovery” – the Natives had lost “their rights to complete sovereignty, as independent nations,” claiming they only retained a right of “occupancy” in their own lands. U.S. law was based upon precedent of the “Law of Nations,” and that it is was permissible, as such, to ignore native rights as they were considered “heathens.” All “unoccupied lands” of America, rightfully belonged to any Christian European nation that claimed them. Of course, it’s extremely important to understand that the term “unoccupied lands” referred to “the lands in America which, when “discovered,” were occupied by Indians’ but ‘unoccupied’ by Christians.” The Doctrine of Discovery, now encoded in U.S. law, has been used to commit one of the largest genocides in human history. The doctrine has been cited by the US Supreme Court as recently as 2005, in City of Sherrill, NY v. Oneida Nation. The decision read, “Under the ‘doctrine of discovery…’ fee title (ownership) to the lands occupied by Indians when the colonists arrived became vested in the sovereign-first the discovering European nation and later the original states and the United States.” In recent years, Native landowners have shown in court that they were getting not just a raw deal, but a fraudulent one. While serving as a treasurer of the Blackfeet during the 1980s, tribal member Elouise Cobell discovered irregularities in the Interior Department’s accounting system for disbursements to Native people. In 1996, she became lead plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit that revealed improper records for more than a century’s worth of payments. Billions of dollars were missing. Documents had disappeared. ​“I have never seen more egregious misconduct by the federal government,” wrote U.S. District Court Judge Royce C. Lamberth. A $3.4 billion settlement for Cobell v. Salazar was reached in 2009. This is a relic of the Dawes Act, which eliminated traditional Native means of bequeathing land—via the family or clan, for example. Instead, Native people were made subject to state laws for those who died without a will. Those familiar with the BIA’s operations say difficulty obtaining information is the norm. “On what planet is a trustee allowed to withhold information from a beneficiary and charge an exorbitant price … to find out what the trustee is doing?” This reporting was made possible by a grant from the Leonard C. Goodman Institute for Investigative Reporting. STEPHANIE WOODARD is an award-winning journalist whose articles on American Indian rights and other topics have been published by many national publications and news sites. She is also a contributing writer to Rural America In These Times. The United States' impoverished tribes cannot buy or sell reservation land. Changing federal policy could improve their fortunes. from the Atlantic by Naomi Schaefer Riley ​This is the grinding poverty on some of America’s Indian reservations, many of which resemble nothing so much as small third-world countries in the middle of the wealthiest nation on earth. The 2 million Natives in the U.S. have the highest rate of poverty of any racial group—almost twice the national average. This deprivation seems to contribute not only to higher rates of crime but also to higher rates of suicide, alcoholism, gang membership, and sexual abuse. As of 2011, the suicide rate for Native American men aged 15 to 34 was 1.5 times higher than for the general population. Suicide is the second leading cause of death among Natives aged 10 to 34. Alcohol-use disorders are more likely among American Indian youths than among any other ethnic group. Involvement in gang activity is more prevalent among Native Americans than it is among Latinos and African Americans. Native American women report being raped two-and-a-half times as often as the national average. The rate of child abuse among Native Americans is twice as high as the national average. And each of these problems is worse among the half of Natives who live on reservations. at no point in history has this organization benefited Native Americans