Native American Politics Today
Issues Today:
Nuclear Waste Deposits and Uranium Mining
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Land Disputes
"Many of them considered where they buried their ancestors as their home."
___Before explaining the issues, past and present, between the U.S. government and Native American nations it is necessary to correct a common misconception about Native Americans when the first white settlements were established in North America. Native Americans "certainly had notions of land tenure, land and group boundaries, and right of usage." (Thornton, p.48) The ideas that were strange to the Native Americans had to do with exclusive possession of land or the alienation of land.
___Instead, many of them considered where they buried their ancestors as their home. Spirits dictated the concept of hunting rights- Native Americans believed that if a person had a way of connecting to particular animal spirits of the area, the person would be able to hunt in the area. (Thornton, p.48) How much of a role these beliefs still play in the relation of Native Americans to their land today varies between nations. It's also hard to determine because of the level to which Native American nations are forced to deal with land based on Western concepts.
___"In the 1997 Yankton Sioux Tribe v. South Dakota case, which is an example of one of the most recent land thefts based on this reasoning, the U.S. Supreme Court further 'diminished the Yankton Sioux Lands by 168 thousand acres,' and gave these lands, possessed and occupied by the Yanktons for hundreds of years, over to the state of South Dakota in violation of the principle that treaty rights holds primacy over states' rights" (Cook-Lynn, p.100). This is just one of many examples of the land disputes between Native American nations and the U.S. government.
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