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as usual, a very interesting topic from mr. mcslanterson
american indian studies (that's aboriginal peoples, we just call them american indians - which is not to be confused with indian amricans - those who have immigrated from india) is my minor ~ so i spose this is where i shine (yes, replying to a thread - good thing i'm in college).
i can't speak with 100% sureness about the canadian treatment of aboriginal peoples, i can say what happened here.
i think most people are familiar with the whole pushing indians west and how settlers killed them off because the natives were seen as less than human. even as early as 1825, there were reservations popping up in georgia. there is a supreme court case that was filed in the 1830s by the cherokee nation (cherokee nation v. georgia). the state of georgia was trying to encroach onto reservation land and sell it to settlers, then they tried taxing the cherokee too. the cherokee asserted that the land they had recieved from georgia was their own, and shouldn't be touched by state and federal governments. the supreme court agreed, calling reservations "soverign nations" - untaxable, untouchable by state and partly untouchable by the federal government (there were a few things that the feds hung onto). in dissenting opinions, justices referred to the cherokees as "petty crawls" and "less human than the negro." but the "soverign nation" standard was set with the case.
then the concept of pushing ALL the american indians to oklahoma began (trail of tears). the idea was to have oklahoma as just an "indian haven" -where all the tribes would live and basically be out of the settlers' way.
but tribes from say...minnesota like the ojibwae can't move to oklahoma and thrive. the lakes are their base, and oklahoma just doesn't have enough lakes to offer the ojibwae. some states made deals with their tribes, giving them bad acreage on bad land. most tribes took it so they wouldn't have to leave their sacred grounds.
in south dakota, there was a great sioux war. it involed the battle at wounded knee (where custer and his men made a surprise attack on a sioux village killing thousands of women and children who were defenseless. all the warriors were out trying to track custer and custer KNEW this and led an attack on a defenseless village anyway), which basically ended the sioux war simply because he dissipated their numbers so greatly they couldn't keep fighting. after the war, the treaty of fort laramie was signed in 1848, giving everything west of the missouri river to the border of south dakota and montana/colorado to the sioux nation. it was left alone for about a year. then the request was made by the federal govt to make a trail through the black hills for settlers to get to the west. the sioux said ok, but that settlers straying from the one trail would be shot.
off that trail, custer led an expedition into the black hills and found gold. once this discovery was made, the federal government sold off a ton of the reservation land (though it wasn't the fed govt's to sell) and kicked off the sioux nation, making smaller reservations (about 1/8 the size of the original reservation). in the 1950s, the federal government has gone back to saying that these reservations (which are now about 1/124th the size of the original one) shouldn't get federal money because they are soverign nations. the american indians have now given up many of their rights in order to become a domestic dependent nation so they could get funding (wow, $10,000). there are autrocities like icwa (inidan child welfare act, which took children from indian parents and put them into white homes to make them "civilized"), the banning of religious practices like sundancing and the use of payote (freedom of religion? or...), the worst being the active practice of eugenics on indian women...taking their uteruses out so they can't ever reproduce becuase they were deemed unfit as humans (this went on until 1982).
now, the rosebud sioux tribe is the poorest in the nation (that's saying a lot) with 89% unemployment on its land. they also have no special access to the black hills (which is their spiritual place, like the vatican is to catholics, the black hills is to the sioux), and are fighting to get posession over it.
the "lazy and drunk" stereotype still flourishes, its origins come from the very beginning. the first settlers came in late september, and saw that the native americans did not actively hunt all winter long, so they spread the word that the indians were lazy. but the indians didn't have to hunt, they saved food all summer long so they would not have to hunt in sparse winter conditions. the drunk stereotype came from when settlers would use liquor to trade with indians to get land. since the native americans had never seen it before, drunkenness ran rampant amongst the tribes, and the settlers knew that if they negotiated with someone who was drunk for land, they would surely win out. states like pennsylvania actually banned sales of liquor to native americans to prevent such abuses.
now, the few registered native american tribes that are left have lost their culture. they cannot embrace their culture, because of the stereotypes that go along with it. but abandoning the culture is something they're not all about either.
it's kind of a cultural catch-22.
