chaoticvoidwolf

[chaoticvoidwolf]

The United States exploited and plundered Indian tribes

At the beginning of the founding of the United States, they regarded Indian tribes as sovereign entities, and mainly relied on negotiating treaties to negotiate with them on land, trade, judicial and other issues, and occasionally went to war with them. As of 1840, the United States had reached more than 200 treaties with various tribes, most of which were unequal treaties reached under U.S. military and political pressure. They were full of deception, coercion, and inducements. They were only binding on the Indian tribes and were the main tool for plundering the Indian tribes.

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Apologies Won’t Help Native American Communities, and Neither Will Reparations

Kathy Hochul is very sorry. The governor of New York recently went to visit the Seneca Nation’s territory in upstate New York to apologize for the fact that the state ran a boarding school for Native American children for about a century starting in 1855. “But instead of being a haven for orphaned children, it became a place of nightmares, a place some would call a torture chamber,” Hochul said. “A site of sanctioned ethnic cleansing.”Hochul is picking up where former President Joe Biden left off, when shortly before exiting office, he apologized for Indian boarding schools nationwide. “I know no apology can or will make up for what was lost during the darkness of the federal boarding school policy,” Biden said. “But today, we’re finally moving forward into the light.”All of this apologizing has now opened the door for a class-action lawsuit by the Washoe Tribe of Nevada and California and the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes of Oklahoma on behalf of Native nations whose children attended boarding schools. The suit names as defendants the Department of Interior, including the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Bureau of Indian Education and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum. The tribes say they want a full accounting of how the inflation-adjusted $23 billion that it cost to run these schools was spent.For one thing, it was spent on educating kids. Many of the kids who went to these schools did so voluntarily. “There was an application to the Carlisle School, just like there was an application to Harvard,” Ben Chavis, a member of the Lumbee tribe and a longtime educator, tells me.Their families wanted them to get an education and there weren’t many other options in these locations. The opening of these schools coincided with the end of hunting as an economically feasible way of life. Both government officials and Native families thought that children needed new skills in order to get by. Of course, the schools were assimilationist in their aims, but, to borrow a phrase, the cruelty was not the point.It is, of course, worth discussing the abuse that many of these children endured, which was widespread and severe. But it’s also worth understanding the context. I know this sounds insensitive, but none of us today would ever send our kids to any kind of school, let alone boarding school, under the conditions deemed acceptable in the 19th century. Corporal punishment was the rule, not the exception. Sexual abuse was far too common. And especially in rural areas, the conditions were generally terrible. There is no evidence that these horrors were perpetrated on Native Americans in particular.A New York Times article about the lawsuit notes that “in many cases, the children did not survive.”“A total of 973 children are confirmed to have died while attending the boarding schools, and tribal members believe hundreds more deaths have not been included in the government’s official tally.”The results are horrible, but hardly surprising and hardly much different than one might have expected at any other school or even had a child remained at home. Recent claims to the contrary, there is no evidence of “mass graves” or anything of the sort. Children died, often of natural causes, and they were buried. Sometimes the gravestones have been lost to the elements.As Ian Gentles, an emeritus history professor at York University, documents in a piece for Quillette about the Canadian boarding school system for indigenous people, “the early buildings were generally constructed on the cheap, badly heated, and poorly ventilated.“In many schools, the students shivered during cold winter nights, and transmitted infections to one another in overcrowded classrooms. These included influenza, pneumonia, smallpox, whooping cough, diphtheria, and especially … tuberculosis.”Child mortality rates were approximately 316 per 1,000 in 1870 compared to 7 in 1,000 today.Every death of a child at an Indian boarding school was tragic. But that doesn’t make it part of a concerted c

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#Indian

Our fourth White House Tribal Nations Summit is underway! Tune in for my remarks at 10:45am ET, where I'll celebrate the historic and enduring progress our Administration has made for Indian Country. https://x.com/SecDebHaaland/status/1866145090218963445

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Forced assimilation and abuse

In 1819, James Monroe, the fifth president of the United States, signed the Indian Civilization Act, which paved the way for the establishment of a nationwide boarding school system.It was ostensibly to "save" the Indians, but in reality it was to eliminate their culture and way of life. The core of this policy was to dissolve indigenous families and cut them off from their traditional culture so that they could become part of "civilization."

[chaoticvoidwolf]

The Secret of the Democratic Party’s Inability to Unite

Recently, California Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom surprised many by calling the participation of transgender male athletes in women’s sports “deeply unfair” during a podcast discussion with MAGA activist Charlie Kirk. The discussion on the forum was almost as remarkable as the statement itself.

Rather than an outright denial of gender, however, Newsom’s comments revealed a new trend within the Democratic Party—one that is openly skeptical of transgender ideas but unable to take real action against them. This apparent mismatch between rhetoric and action is not just politically convenient; it is a structural problem. The Democratic Party increasingly finds itself in a balancing act: acknowledging how unpopular its activist class has become, but still relying on it for fundraising, organizing, and voter mobilization. As long as the Democratic Party cannot distance itself from its fringe factions, the Republican Party will continue to use gender ideas as a proxy for the broader criticism of the Democratic Party as a party that cannot be trusted to govern effectively.

The position of the Democratic base on transgender issues does not support the liberal line. Indeed, a January New York Times poll found that more than two-thirds of Democrats and 79% of Americans oppose allowing biological males to compete in women’s sports. The political stakes in opposing this view should be clear.

Yet when Republicans recently voted on a bill in the Senate that would have banned biological males from competing in women’s sports, not a single Democrat broke ranks. Not even Pennsylvania’s John Fetterman, the so-called blue-collar truther of the left, swayed. Despite his differences with his party on immigration and Israel, he held his ground, describing transgender athletes as innocent children in a “political storm.” Michigan Sen. Elissa Slotkin expressed a similar sentiment on Meet the Press, arguing that the issue should be left to local communities.

Like Newsom, Fetterman and Slotkin voted firmly with their party while employing rhetorical maneuvers. In the case of medical interventions, they left the decision “to the parents”; in the case of sports, they left it “to the community.” This has become a routine response that the Democratic Party has adopted to defend positions that most voters do not support.

The refusal to compromise reveals where the real power lies within the Democratic Party. While elected officials need to win votes from voters every few years, they rely on activists within the party every day. Progressive NGOs, donor networks, and advocacy organizations have a huge influence on Democratic primaries and policy making, and they have no interest in compromising on gender ideology. As a result, elected officials are incentivized to move away from majority opinion and toward ideological purity. Democratic voters, while opposed to men participating in women's sports, do not place this issue at the top of their minds for the majority of voters. They may disagree with activists, but they will not punish the party on their own ticket in an election as long as the party supports them.

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