NDN Support North America

Reservations are Indian land?

And actually, the very term "reservation" is quite offensive, because we are not dealing with animals being on any endangered species list but with actual people. But at the time they were obviously just not seen like that. Just have a look at the two women on the left in their stiff turn-of-the-century wasp waists and how they're looking with disdain at the old woman sitting on the ground. As non-Indians they had no right to judge what they do not know but they did it anyway. Christian missionaries believed that they had to "save the souls" of the "pagans" without knowing anything about the spirituality or religion of those that they wanted to convert. And to be honest, it's really in the English-speaking countries of the

Western History Collections, University of Oklahoma Library, Norman

Americas that most of the cultural genocide took place. At least they were much more into forcing European culture and christianity on them than the French and the Spaniards have. Surely the Spaniards had their missionaries too but the reservation system and the boarding schools can be attributed to the English settlers. Even today, where the Mexican constitution acknowledges a multi-racial and multi-cultural basis and the FUNAI in Brazil want to preserve cultures and languages, I just don't see the BIA doing that. While FUNAI operates under the Ministry of Defense, the BIA does so under the Department of the Interior, and that really does matter, because this way the US makes it an internal affair where the UN has less of a grip on it and also the injustices can more easily made invisible to the outside world, especially with all kinds of Indian laws that only apply to Indians and not to any other ethnic group in North America.

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