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Comment by systemvoltage | Hacker News Reader

Why not everyone assimilate? It is no longer "United States" when we split states off for special treatment for minorities. These minorities will further regress and never get out of the poor living conditions. Reservations are one of the most impoverished regions in the US.

We should then probably go back to Genghis Khan times and challenge the whole Eurasia, Persian inlands and a bunch of other areas around the world. To me, it seems like looking back and expecting special treatment many centuries ago is a minority trump card and instead we should be focusing on giving better opportunities, improving communities and looking forward.

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> Why not everyone assimilate?

Recognized Native American tribes are sovereign nations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tribal_sovereignty_in_the_Unit...

You might as well ask why European settlers aren't forced to assimilate into them.

They aren't really sovereign nations though, right? Like if a tribe decided to build a giant meth industrial complex or a nuclear weapon facility on their land, the US federal govt is going to shut that down ASAP.

It's a bit messy. The US defines them as "domestic dependent nations". You're correct that they couldn't do those things - Federal law has been deemed to apply to Native Americans in most scenarios, and treaties (often broken/disregarded) give and take certain rights.

In any event, a tribe trying to build a nuke would likely be in the same scenario Iraq and Iran find themselves in, regardless of law or treaty.

I wonder about that. Right now, the fact that the Nations don’t have direct representation in Congress (yes, I understand citizens can vote in the state the reservation resides in) makes them appear more like subjects of an Empire than as coequals in a Republic. I think a lot about how to improve this. I think a lot about how to truly reckon with genocide and yet coexist. If anyone has resources about how to improve this, let me know!

> more like subjects of an Empire than as coequals in a Republic

This is a great way to frame it.

> the fact that the Nations don’t have direct representation in Congress

The EU doesn't have representation in Congress either

The EU is not under US Federal jurisdiction, as apparently Indian Nations are.

One solution I thought of in an alternative history universe where the US doesn't genocide Native Americans is a tricameral legislature, where the third house is effectively ethnically-based instead of geographically based.

Although given the actual histories of countries that do have strict ethnic quotas for allotting political power, I doubt it would work quite so well in practice.

Yeah... I think explicit ethnic quotas can be really problematic. but ethnic quotas would've been better than how things worked out (i.e. genocide), though.

(I should point out that tribal membership is more complicated than just genetic background, and that it varies from tribe to tribe. Continuity from the existing tribal governments at the time until today need not have been explicitly ethnic.)

> Why not everyone assimilate? It is no longer "United States" when we split states off for special treatment for minorities.

Reservations are not states that are "split off" from the US. They are independent nations which were mostly annexed by the US.

> It is no longer "United States"

Yes, the first nations are not the United States.

In this case, the United States made a promise, to which two parties agreed.

At issue in this case is whether or not the United States are still bound by this promise. The majority's conclusion is that they are.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23782205.

Forced assimilation is cultural genocide. The US tried it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Indian_boarding_sch...

> Why not everyone assimilate?

Yes, exactly, why not the USians assimilate into the many Native nations they occupy? They've had literal centuries...

> Genghis Khan

Funny you mention that because the majority of ethnic Mongols live in the jurisdictional equivalent of a reservation.

Who should do the assimilating? Why?

We tried the "assimilation" thing for awhile. It ended up as a system of child abuse, kidnapping, forced sterilizations, and theft. There's a pretty decent case to be made for it also having been cultural genocide.

I'd personally prefer that we not go back to that.

> Why not everyone assimilate?

You raise a great question - why don't mostly-European settlers assimilate into American culture?

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