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Comment by blondie9x | Hacker News Reader

Honestly after all the Native Americans went through, give them the whole state at least. People in the United States speak and reflect often about the atrocities of slavery. We need to equally reflect on and remember the atrocities against Native Americans.

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What do you mean "them"? You do realize that there were many different tribes who had very drastically different interactions with the US, right?

And in almost every corner of the continent.

http://www.emersonkent.com/map_archive/native_american_tribe...

Maybe counties would be a better unit to consider.

This is correct. People treat native Americans as some sort of monolithic bloc when they were anything but. The tribes themselves had many warring feuds going back centuries and developed competing alliances with imperial forces when they arrived, some allying with the French, others with the British or Spanish.

I believe the answer would be

> Native Americans.

Whether that encompasses multiple tribes or not, doesn't change that.

Giving the Florida Seminoles territory in Oklahoma (or giving land to an Oklahoma tribe and calling that a ceding to Seminoles?) would be weird at best.

Of course it changes it. How do you "give Oklahoma" to a bunch of distinct nations that have no relationship?

This is what Oklahoma was initially meant to be. There were even talks of having two Native American states in the united states, the other being Sequoia I think. Then the US renegged on those promises, land was given to railroad companies, and flooded colonists.

In many ways we're seeing the same thing with Tibet and China. It's horrific.

Oklahoma was originally all Indian territory, and reserved for future allotment of reservations. The western half of Oklahoma was (mostly) never assigned, and instead opened up to white settlers in a variety of land rushes, relegating Indian territory to the land already allotted to reservations in the eastern half.

That rump Indian territory applied to be a state as the Sequoyah, but it was turned down, so it was merged with Oklahoma territory to become the State of Oklahoma.

As the article suggests, this doesn't really give the land to the first nation. It simply means that it falls under federal jurisdiction.

Which Native Americans should we give the state to, the ones that lived there originally or one of the tribes we force relocated to the area?

I'd rather not. In the NorCal (Jefferson) reservations, the natives setup huge nets to catch fish, load them into refrigerated trucks, and sell the catch to San Francisco restaurants. It's devastating to the ecosystem. As with building casinos, or the Grand Canyon Skywalk, they tend to commercialize/exploit as much as they can when they are free from state laws.

They are sovereign. Neither you nor the state of California should impose your views on them. If anything, we should ask permission from them to be on California land.

Ok, how about your state?

(I'm not disagreeing, just trying to highlight one of the fundamental challenges here...)

It's also disappointing how little has been done to close the racial wealth gap from the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. It seems the gap hasn't changed much since the 1950s and 1960s and I don't see how it gets better short of a massive reparations package and investment in building up distressed communities.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/todays-racial-wealth-gap...

I am not from US, so i am not very clued in to this, but a State or mini-state would sound a lot better than a 'reservation'

In Canada we use the term "nation".

In Northern Arizona, where I'm from, we often say Navajo Nation. I think partly that's because of the alliteration.

“Indian Nation” is sometimes used, if I understand correctly.

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