For fairly obvious reasons it’s not allowed for non-Indians to own land on Indian land. The reservations would have all been bought up for half a bottle of firewater by now if they could be.
Then people complain about not being able to get a mortgage on Indian land.
Hmm.
Why does anyone need a mortgage for their wigwam?
Don’t they all own casinos ?
I thought of writing a screed about how the reservations seem like a good thing but are really jails which keep the native populations down and that is reprehensible.
Then I thought that maybe it’s not too long before I’m living in a preserve of English culture kept subsidised by the alien latecomers who have taken over.
Time for an Enclosure Act: split up the reservations and let each Indian hold his land as freehold. If you like, as part of the Act restrict the ownership with a covenant that it may be sold, leased, or left, only to Indians who inhabited the reservation or their descendants or spouses.
Easy peasy. The land would be mortgageable albeit it would be valued at less than land free of such a covenant.
land on or in tribal lands is inalienable
This takes me back to the black hills of Dakota (not in the Doris Day sense though):-
Stolen by the white man from the Lakota,
Who stole them from the Cheyenne,
Who stole them from the Kiowa,
Who stole them from the Pawnee,
Who stole them from the Crow,
Who stole them from the Arikara,
Who stole them from the Clovis,
Who stole them from whoever was already living there, and who presumably considered them their “sacred ancestral homelands” just like everybody else who subsequently acquired them (apart from Whitey).
You can’t get a mortgage because the *tribal government* owns the land – not because non-indians can’t own it.
Though the two are related not even the tribal government can sell land – because actually the federal government owns it.
John, exactly. There are similar lines in the movies “Red River” and “Bury my heart at wounded knee”. Stealing (or anything else for that matter) is only EVER a problem when whites do it.
Land ownership is more a European thing, you can see it in land acknowledgments in parts of Canada where you have to list multiple groups that used the area. Then there’s also groups that were nomadic and claim the range over which they traditionally wandered, there was a recent case in Canada where the claim related to a massive area larger than the U.K.
In Montreal there’s been discussion on land acknowledgments as the Europeans brought some other groups with them, their claim is that while they displaced the locals they were related to them so it still counts as traditional territory.
“Then I thought that maybe it’s not too long before I’m living in a preserve of English culture kept subsidised by the alien latecomers who have taken over.”
The lack of reservations as part of any non-English country shows it’s unlikely the aliens will be anywhere near as merciful. The past takeovers have been of the “kill all the men, take the women and children as slaves”. The exceptions have been when the aliens are vastly outnumbered by the natives.
Or do you speak some Celtish dialect?