U & D

I like the phrase “original free and independent existence.” It comes from a lucid essay by Steven Newcomb, appearing in the May 1, 2009, Indian Country Today (On Non-Indian, Anti-Indian Law).

Newcomb does not discuss specific laws, such as the one I looked at in my last post. He does not propose new laws or suggest ways to redress specific wrongs. What he does for the Maine Studies educator and student in make clear and understandable the roots of the European attitudes that denied, and continue to deny, Sovereignty to Indian nations. Every student should read (or hear) this short essay – as a “kick off” to any discussion of injustices done, sovereignty, or history.

Read it, for example, along with Dean Suagee’s Tribal Sovereignty and the Green Revolution. Suagee’s call for state and federal governments to make sovereign partnerships with the Indian nations, on energy growth policies, is important; but when read through the lens of Newcomb’s essay, with open eyes so to speak, the reader better understands how difficult the road to such partnerships is going to be.

Follow Newcomb’s essay with a reading of the newly introduced (again) S. J. Res 14 (Apology Resolution), which begins:

To acknowledge a long history of official depredations and ill-conceived policies by the Federal Government regarding Indian tribes and offer an apology to all Native Peoples on behalf of the United States.

Whereas the ancestors of today’s Native Peoples inhabited the land of the present-day United States since time immemorial and for thousands of years before the arrival of people of European descent;

Follow this Resolution, and its partner Resolution introduced in the House (find links in Indianz.com). Write letters to your Senators and Representatives. Debate the points made in the Resolution. If it goes nowhere (again), you might say that Newcomb has a point. If it passes, you might say that perhaps the non-Indians and anti-Indians are turning a corner. You might.