Tribal Lands:Doing What's Right and Figuring Out What That Means

There are two sides to every story, so the saying goes, so I sift through the story of the Klamath Indians wishes to restore their reservation after having sold it off to the US government back in the 1950s. Their money was held and dispersed by trustees who paid themselves well for their services. The Klamaths say they were terminated as a tribe vis a vis the US government. A website against the Klamaths receiving US federal lands as a reservation uses the Klamaths own constitution to supposedly show that the Klamaths were never terminated as a tribe. However, it was not the Klamaths' contention that they thought they had ceased to exist, they knew the US government tried to force them out of existence.

Much is the same with our local Indian tribes. Many supposed land sales in which a few supposedly bartering on behalf of a whole nation, or a clan on behalf of a whole tribe all the while selling lands at a mere fraction of its worth or the sale of the land is still considered justified even when the rest of the treaty has not been honored.

A while back it was proposed that the local tribes step forward to assert their claim to the property that is now being proposed as a site of the LNG holding terminals. I think we see, over and over again, how dishonor is rewarded by further dishonor. We steal and in turn the land is stolen from us, we then wish that the original land owners would fight to get their land back.

If we want to protect the land from the LNG corporations we can, indeed, fight to restore these lands to their indigenous owners, and I would hope we would honorably continue the fight to see that they are federally recognized and their lands permanantly preserved. I wonder if that is something we would really do, locally?