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October 20, 2007

Tribal 'Nations' Within U.S. Aren't Justified
October 20, 2007; Page A9

Your front-page article "Plaintiffs Suing U.S. Tribes Can't Get Their Day
in Court1" (Oct. 12) provides yet another reason to reconsider the
privileged legal status of so-called Native Americans. Our school-taught,
collective guilt over the demise of those who presided over North America
500 years ago has left us reluctant to broach the subject, but broach it we
must. The costs to U.S. society of the aberration of a sovereign Indian
"nation" within our borders are neither justified nor sustainable.

The sad fact is that American Indians were displaced by the successive
pressures of the colonization, settlement and economic exploitation of
North America. They lost a series of battles against soldiers and disease,
and ultimately against the onslaught of a more advanced civilization. It is
absurd to act as if the Indians didn't lose those battles and that war; to
carve out an imaginary sovereign state belonging to them, the borders of
which are continually shifting to the detriment of U.S. citizens; to
include Indians as beneficiaries of U.S. social programs while exempting
them from the obligations of their taxpaying neighbors; to allow their
legal claims in U.S. courts while precluding claims against them; and to
pretend they exercise a superior sort of stewardship over land or nature
such that they can be made exempt from environmental regulation.

However unpopular it may be, we need to repeal the recognition of Indians
and their Tribal Governments as a land within our land. The survivors of
the lost Indian civilization can and should be made citizens, with the same
rights and responsibilities as the rest of us. Their cultural heritage can
be maintained just as well without tax- and regulation-exempt casinos and a
free ride in matters of national security, economic infrastructure, social
welfare and civil jurisprudence. Their well-being, and their right to
cultural and ethnic self-determination and self-expression, don't require
our paternalistic treatment of them as children whose rights we hold in
trust.

The harsh treatment of indigenous Americans by their conquerors, though
typical of the time, was in hindsight incorrect and regrettable. But the
subsequent sequestering of their tribes, first geographically and then
politically as a sovereign "nation," was also incorrect and regrettable. It
was a compounding of errors, rather than a cure, and of the two errors only
one can be undone.

Andreas Danckers
Libertyville, Ill.