America and Canada Relationship with their Indigenous Population

[AlizsahTheBard]

So while the title is wide-reaching the big question of this discussion is do you believe that Indigenous people should get their land back?

I am of the opinion whatever the difficulty we as the future generation owe it to these people like America and Canada constantly broke their agreements and treaties. I am aware it will be difficult, but pretending it is too difficult is burying our heads in the sand. Of course, it feels overwhelming, yet even now our crimes against the Indigenous population continues, Pipelines, Building on their Sacred Land, Poisoning their rivers.

I will say up front I am white and don't know nearly as much about this, but to me, it feels we need to do something.

[Skynet]

So I've been meaning to do a PROC thread about Missing & Murdered Indigenous Women, and as part of my plans I came across some intersecting issues.

I'd have to ask what you mean in regards to getting land back. Many Indigenous people had and continue to have very different concepts of property and land ownership than Western legal systems. They're also an extremely tiny portion of the population due to being almost entirely genocided, so there's not a lot of them left to occupy large portions of the USA and Canada which are almost entirely non-Indigenous now.

Still, there are things that can be done to make restitutions for past injustices which continue to affect their communities today. There's well over a hundred different tribes in the USA alone, many with their own problems facing their communities even if many have a uniting factor of suffering from racism and colonialism. I can't speak to Canada as I know very little about that country. A quick Googling led me to this Huffington Post article outlining many contemporary issues affecting Indigenous communities in the United States. As you can see, it's not one major problem so much as several overarching ones combining for a deadly decrease in living standards.

For what it's worth, Indian Country Today is the most prominent news site focusing on Native American issues in the United States, often covering stories that never get picked up in the mainstream press.