I'm Terrible with Logistics

As a young man I often heard my father speak of the Shawnee tribal leader Tecumseh.  My father is a staunch conservative, a patriot (I don't know why I felt the need to articulate both, they are synonymous) and he has always fostered this deep constitutional conviction that all people are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights.  As the youngest of four he has always had this remote rebellion within him.  I suppose as time has gone on it has been tempered to a sympathy toward peoples with a legitimate cause for rebellion.


I knew Tecumseh to be a brave Native American leader, and I had heard stories of the Battle at Tippecanoe.  My father had told me many stories of men seeking just secession.  Sir William Wallace fought for freedom in Scotland, Tecumseh in the States. He greatly admired General Robert Edward Lee of the Confederate army.  He spoke of how the south was truly seeking to secede based on political and economic differences between an industrial North and an agrarian South.  The issue of slavery was superfluous for most of the beginning of the war.  General Lee's wife and her mother endeavored to return many Native Africans to Liberia.  Human equality is an innate Christian value, passivity is not.


I have occasionally thought of the actions of those who preceded us in regards to the indigenous Americans.  How much weight does our generation need bear in regards to the treatment of Native Americans by our Anglo American predecessors?


I heard a man named Aaron Huey (TED.com presentation), a photographer not a historian or politician, speak to the history of American dealings with the Native Americans.  He gave a compelling lecture on his time amid the Lakota people, a subset as I understand it of the Sioux.  I cannot lie, I was stirred with angst when I considered the history of America's dealings with the indigenous people they conquered.  Huey contests that the story of the Lakota people extends in both directions in time from the Battle of Wounded Knee.  This massacre really conveys the heart the American nation held toward these indigenous people at the time.

I'm torn as I write this, my American idealist mind longs for the actualization of the melting-pot moniker, yet my heart has deep sympathy toward the idea of a geo-political boundary of sorts, returning some land to the Native Americans.


Many Native Americans are sequestered in abject poverty on reservations.  I've looked at the statistics and it is really alarming.  I'm terrible with logistics but I wonder what it would take to return significant quantities of land to the Native Americans.  I think the Black Hills would be a great way to start.  A few other places like the Hocking Hills in Ohio would do more than assuage some American guilt, it could offer a real new beginning for a people deeply wronged.

If organized as tribal states, part of the American Union, I'm certain that much could be done to reclaim heritage, and bolster an economy.  Tourism could be a valuable asset, and many other enterprises could allow many to begin rising from the poverty in which they are currently entrenched.  I don't really have an answer for this problem, it is merely a thought.  I have no idea what would happen to the newly displaced residents, or to the elderly woman in the hills that has known only them as home for fifty or more years.  Its just a really great picture in my mind.


While the proper role of government is not massive bale-outs, socialized healthcare, or exorbitant government spending, it may be the role of government to return quantities of land, to a people deeply wronged in a nations history.