Sunday, September 4, 2016

If Native Americans had been given their own state instead of reservations, where would it have been located?

It was sort of tried with what is now Oklahoma -- old maps show it as "Indian Territory." But it couldn't be a state because US policy, which it inherited from the British in colonial times, was that the native Americans were citizens of their own nations, not the USA. Also, efforts to move them around were a disaster. There are over 500 tribes in the USA, and they didn't all live in the same environments. There were some well-meaning efforts in the 19th century to "bring them into the modern world" by making them become farmers, but the nomadic peoples' and hunters' social structures were not suited to it. And people from the humid green southeast simply had no idea how to live in hot, dry Oklahoma.

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