A Case of Stolen Lands and Much More

James Anaya conducted an inspection trip of 12 days and found out what was already known, but is almost always hidden about the historic injustice that remains among the Native American villages of the United States. In the U.S., 5.2 million people are treated in a manner that renders the group one of the poorest and most marginalized populations in the entire country.

Anaya, the United Nations special rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, warned that their lands need to be returned. This was after the first investigation conducted by the UN concerning the treatment of these American indigenous communities, in which unemployment can reach more than 70 percent. He also presented education and health statistics, which are similarly disproportionate compared to those of the nation, as cited in The Guardian, a British newspaper.

The official did not limit his visit to indigenous reserves, but also examined indigenous populations living in cities. He found the same results in the huge mainland as in the appendix of Alaska and in the paradise of Hawaii: a history of territorial and resource dispossession; the rupture of their societies; absolute brutality based on racial discrimination; and every class of social disorder associated with this status of rejection, marginalization and postponement.

Anaya also spoke about discrimination shown by the invisibility of the natives. Media and public figures portray them to Americans with the preconceived notion that “indigenous peoples are either gone or as a group are insignificant or that they're out to get benefits in terms of handouts, or their communities and cultures are reduced to casinos, which are just flatly wrong.”

For this reason, I found it interesting and, at the same time, very disturbing that among the comments from readers of the article, there were such views as those of one commentator, Albert: “It is really time to kick out the UN; it has become an anti-American organization ironically financed for many years by America.”* It is already known that this “America” is the self-designation of the United States and its manifest destiny, which one of their leaders described categorically as “America for Americans.”

And who are these Americans? Perhaps the “civilized Europeans” that dispossessed the nations of the Navajo, Shinnecock, Haudenosaunee, Hopi, Tohono O’odham and Apache tribes (known as the Six Nations); as well as the Yaqui, Yavapi, Quechan and Hualapi peoples, to name only a few native groups that were decimated in a brutal territorial conquest. These are the “Americans,” such as the Dutch, who “paid” the equivalent of $24 for Manhattan. They were later displaced by the English, who murdered for control of the lands of Connecticut in the 1637 Pequot massacre, the descendants of Anglo-Saxons that robbed Mexico of most of its territory.

These are the Americans that also drew a veil over the history of these peoples before declaring a “discovery,” forced them to speak another language and to forget their own words, buried their culture or corrupted it and vilified and degraded them in Hollywood films or in pseudo-historical books.

These are the same people that brought black slaves from Africa to subject their descendants to discrimination even today, dropped atomic bombs in Japan, committed genocide in Vietnam and are now engaged in a prolonged war of attrition against numerous peoples.

Yes, this is a theft of lands and much more….

*The following quote, while translated accurately, could not be verified in English.