[lbo-talk] "American Indians"

[Chris Doss]

Thank you John -- very interesting and informative. I
suppose it's only natural for tribes to understand
themselves in regional terms due to shared local
issues and shared common cultures.

I had a discussion on the net recently contrasting the
states of American and Russian "indigenous" peoples a
while ago in which my interlocutor claimed that the
Russian ethnic republics were the equivalent of the
Indian reservations in the US, which I had problems
swallowing, given that the native peoples are 30-60%
of the population in most of the former and they
sometimes cover huge areas.

--- jthorn65 at sbcglobal.net wrote:

> Certainly there is a collective sense of Indianness
> regardless of tribe for all Native Americans. There
> is an 
> unfortunate tendency for some tribes, but not all,
> to think of themselves as their tribe first and
> Native 
> American second. It isn't something that is obvious
> to society at large however. Solidarity tends to be 
> regional with Great Lakes tribes feeling they have a
> common interest and Southwestern tribes feeling the 
> same but there is not much communication between the
> regions.
> 
> Right now there is a rather scary civil liberties
> lawsuit that brings this problem home for native
> Americans. I 
> don't know how it's going to wash out but I'm afraid
> it will not work out for the best and will undermine
> tribal 
> sovereignty in the end.
> 
> John Thornton
> 

Nu, zayats, pogodi!

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