Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

U.S. Supreme Court deems half of Oklahoma a Native American reservation

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

371–380 of 1001 posts

Re: U.S. Supreme Court deems half of Oklahoma a Native American reservation

#371

Post by bluGill »

kebman wrote: post #329

Being part Sami I think it's fascinating to read about the system of reservations in the USA. I'm not sure about minority rule, but I'm clearly in favour of saving the unique cultures and ethnicities from dying out. After many years of persecution in Northeren Europe—including forced assimilation often called "Norwegianization" or "Swedification," and near extinction in Russia—we've finally gotten some recognition as…

Note that most of these tribes were moved form somewhere out east in the 1800s (or north, tribes came from all over there was not a common culture) . Most of their culture could not be kept because the climate is different (desert, or just enough rain to technically not be desert). Much of old the way of life is not possible. Nobody alive lived in their in their own home to remember it. They are making the best they can.

Re: U.S. Supreme Court deems half of Oklahoma a Native American reservation

#373

Post by paulmd »

SubiculumCode wrote: post #342
war1025 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because of the massive failure that congress is This is a conclusion I'm coming to more and more. It's easy to blame Presidential overreach or Supreme Court overreach, but the Congress seems to be steadily abdicating responsibility while still managing to get very little of substance accomplished. They are supposed to be the most powerful branch of government, but instead they have deadlocked themselves into useles…

It may be that the 17th Amendment changing the appointment of Senators to a popular vote from elections by state legislators was a mistake, as "anti-democratic" as that may sound, it may be a good principal in a Republic. The house weighs the popular opinion, the Senate, the will of States.

the senate itself existing was a mistake. It only is fair in the context of some kind of relative equality of states, letting low-population states grind policy to a halt is inherently antidemocratic.

(by design! the point was to give smaller states a say and that itself is the problem, it is a bad idea to let a minority be able to grind all action to a halt. You say "but what if they do something I don't like" and the answer is vote them out next time, elections should have consequences and winning an election should result in a government that is able to accomplish policy. Setting it up deliberately to deadlock just because they might do something you don't like is a terrible idea and needs to stop being viewed as some kind of virtue of the design of the American system. Just because the founders did it, doesn't mean that it is a good design, they had lots of bad decisions... like slavery, and setting up the government to allow slave states to have equal control to the free states.)

if you assume some kind of relative equality of states, then on the whole the senate should approximate the house, and you can easily come to the conclusion that we really don't need the senate itself at all. abolish it and go to a unicameral system.

Similarly the parliamentary system where the executive is chosen by the majority of the legislature is a much better idea - again because it results in a government that is actually able to accomplish policy.

there is very much a reason that none of the other countries whose constitutions we wrote over the years (Japan, Germany, etc) use the American system. Everyone in power realizes that the American system is terrible and doesn't produce a mandate to govern.

Re: U.S. Supreme Court deems half of Oklahoma a Native American reservation

#374

Post by jrumbut »

tempestn wrote: post #349
seehafer wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Madison thought it highly unlikely that people who held immense power would not choose to use it. The Framers' model (and fear) was Rome, and much of our Constitutional design is intended to prevent an American Caesar. (One of the reasons Washington was universally revered was because he acted so contrary to what everyone thought was human nature.) "Ambition must be made to counteract ambition" he tells us in Federal…

Ironic, given that these same tendencies were very present around the fall of the Roman republic. Rome had a similar gridlock of opposing positions of power, and similarly fell into a state where little could be accomplished due to the regular undermining and vetoing. Edit: Since most replies are talking about the empire, I just want to reiterate that my comment was regarding the end of the Republic, which imo is a m…

I wanted to provide a little near-contenporary source material to back up this answer which ought to be read by everyone. From Suetonius' The Twelve Caesars:

"The violent death of Caligula [the previous emperor] afforded the Romans a fresh opportunity to have asserted the liberty of their country; but the conspirators had concerted no plan, by which they should proceed upon the assassination of that tyrant; and the indecision of the senate, in a debate of two days, on so sudden an emergency, gave time to the caprice of the soldiers to interpose in the settlement of the government.

By an accident the most fortuitous, a man devoid of all pretensions to personal merit, so weak in understanding as to be the common sport of the emperor’s household, and an object of contempt even to his own kindred; this man, in the hour of military insolence, was nominated by the soldiers as successor to the Roman throne."

Re: U.S. Supreme Court deems half of Oklahoma a Native American reservation

#375

Post by kendallpark »

throwawaysea wrote: post #248
thekingofh wrote: post #25

I had the pleasure of driving through and visiting Oklahoma a decade or so ago. Some people don't like the rural states, but it felt so serene out there. We stopped at a shaved ice place off of some random exit and just sat there on the hood staring out at the plains. There's not much out there but it felt so peaceful. It felt like home.

This has been my experience as well. I live in a city now, but I love the times I have spent traveling through or to rural areas. They have a bad reputation that is based on false notions of urban superiority and stereotypes that feel as baseless and unhinged as claims of other types of superiority (e.g. racial). The reality is when you visit these rural places, talk to the people there, take part in their culture, t…

> I come from Minneapolis, and before that I lived in Seattle and Boston — three of the bluest, most left-leaning cities in the United States. I was an urban woman and couldn’t imagine living anywhere other than a city. My husband concurred. Then our 28-year-old son died in late 2016.

> Suddenly the traffic and noise and confusion became too much. John and I took off on a year’s driving tour of gentler parts — both of us working from the road, a computer security consultant and a writer. We grew nearly silent in grief.

> We considered Asheville, N.C., and Santa Fe, N.M. But on a chilly, silver January day, we drove into the Ozarks of Northwest Arkansas. Though neither of us could put our finger on exactly why, this felt like our place. People back home were flummoxed: I heard them say a lot about white, rural Christians who reject outsiders and “cling to their guns.”

> But what city folk don’t know is how beautiful it is here, and by that I mean way more than you imagine. We’re surrounded by low mountains, bony shale bluffs, forest, shining lakes and mysterious twisting roads. The wide-open sky brings every bird formation and low-hanging planet into relief.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2018/09/14/i-was-yan...

Re: U.S. Supreme Court deems half of Oklahoma a Native American reservation

#376

Post by zumu »

_bxg1 wrote: post #3
threatofrain wrote: post #2

> The ruling means that for the first time much of eastern Oklahoma is legally considered reservation land. More than 1.8 million people live in the land at issue, including roughly 400,000 in Tulsa, Oklahoma’s second-largest city. McGirt v Oklahoma (9 July 2020) pdf: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/19pdf/18-9526_9okb.pdf

Very interesting. Is this the first time a major city has fallen within a reservation?

Parts of Tulsa already overlapped with reservations, I believe.

Re: U.S. Supreme Court deems half of Oklahoma a Native American reservation

#377

Post by flomo »

jandrese wrote: post #261
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't know if you'd qualify it as a "major" city, but over 10% of Palm Springs CA is on an Indian reservation. For interesting historical reasons, though, the reservation is basically shaped like a checkerboard, where every other 640-acre square is reservation land. This obviously has huge implications on real estate - none of the reservation land is sold, just leased, and there were some recent cases where the tribe…

That seems like an insane way to divvy up land. My first instinct was that it was done that way to make the land effectively unusable as tribal land, just because that's how the government tends to roll in these cases

Railroad land grants in the Western US were generally handed out in a checkerboard pattern, and that's apparently what happened here.

https://www.pscondos.com/palm-springs-indian-lease-land/

Re: U.S. Supreme Court deems half of Oklahoma a Native American reservation

#378

Post by S33V »

spaginal wrote: post #321
NonEUCitizen wrote: post #233

The numbers should really be 100% instead of 25% and 10%. Much has been stolen from them.

You have a distinctly queer idea of what happens after a war. This isn't an American idea to take land after conquest, it's how it's always worked throughout human history, even with the Indians that warred amongst themselves prior to the American government becoming the ultimate victor against them. You may disagree with the foundations of the conflict, and you can argue on those merits if you choose, but the result…

I find it amusing that you hold a blanket thought that the theft of Native American land was the result of war games and not a mixture of deception, racism, genocide, breach of trust, and thievery.

Re: U.S. Supreme Court deems half of Oklahoma a Native American reservation

#379

Post by pbhjpbhj »

hvs wrote: post #197
war1025 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because of the massive failure that congress is This is a conclusion I'm coming to more and more. It's easy to blame Presidential overreach or Supreme Court overreach, but the Congress seems to be steadily abdicating responsibility while still managing to get very little of substance accomplished. They are supposed to be the most powerful branch of government, but instead they have deadlocked themselves into useles…

Unfortunately, that precisely the opinion that the Romans came to as well.

Why is Rome important here? I can see the symmetry between Rome and what USA currently has - different rich powerful groups arguing and ignoring half the people, for example; rife corruption and nepotism - but how is Rome a model for a democracy, and one that seeks (in theory) not to divide the people into ruling and subservient classes at that?

Re: U.S. Supreme Court deems half of Oklahoma a Native American reservation

#380

Post by bananabreakfast »

irrational wrote: post #14

Are all the other treaties going to be reviewed? What percentage of the USA would become reservation land if all the treaties were honored? If it was >50% would we still call them reservations?

They're not saying the treaty must be honored. They're saying, unlike the many other treaties that were explicitly invalidated by laws passed, these ones were never really directly addressed so they must de facto still stand.

Also, no where near 50% of the US was ever granted in treaties. The vast majority was simply taken militarily without compromise.

Post reply on HN