Whites Will Not Pay for Everything

The U.S. Government Will Repay Debts to Native Americans

According to a decision made by the American authorities, the indigenous population of the United States, the Native Americans (also referred to as Indians), will receive $3.4 billion as compensation for the profit made from the use of 56 million acres of their land for commercial purposes.

Despite the fact that descendants of Chingachgook and other Native American tribal chieftains have been seeking “fair compensation” from the White House in court for the past 13 years and named a figure of $47 billion, in accordance with a decision made by Barack Obama’s administration, the majority of Indians will now receive checks averaging $1,000.

Back in 1996, Native Americans filed a collective lawsuit against the federal government, demanding compensation for over 100 years of undisguised deceit regarding the use of their land for the extraction of oil, gas, coal, logging and other tremendously profitable activities. This story began last century, when many Native Americans voluntarily surrendered enormous plots of land to the U.S. government in 1887 and trusted them to manage it, under the condition that they would receive appropriate royalty payments. Then-President Cleveland and Congress promised to return these parcels of land to the Indians in 25 years but, in the overwhelming majority of cases, the Indians’ trust was broken. As a result, the heirs of the once fearsome Apache, Comanche, Chinook and other tribes found themselves simply deceived.

Paradoxically, according to the conservative newspaper “The Washington Post,” the Indians were themselves to blame: Many of them died without leaving wills and dividing royalty payments among numerous relatives proved to be too difficult. In addition, the U.S. government has been suspiciously careless in maintaining the records and documents concerning these transactions. As a result, an overwhelming portion of them have been destroyed by fires, floods and insects. Consequently, for an entire century, numerous legal owners of vast territories, on which their own reservations were located, have lived in poverty and received either meager payments or none at all.

It is noteworthy that the person to reconcile the whites and the American Indians and to close the book on this issue was the African American Barack Obama, who, during the course of his election campaign, made corresponding statements. Obama has already called the resolution of payments “an important step towards reconciliation between Indians and the federal government.” However, of the $3.4 billion, no more than $1.4 billion will be in the form of direct payments to the Indians, with the remainder to be put aside for the future purchase of their fragmented land. Notably, the question of returning land to the Indians outright is not on the agenda, since, in the words of officials in the American administration, the government fears they “may sell land on their reservations to people of non-Indian descent.”

Thus, many Indians remain dissatisfied with the decision of the White House, which still requires the approval of Congress. It is not surprising that, given the Native Americans’ memory of history, “compensation from Obama” is considered to be the next deception in a sequence that started with the purchase of Manhattan – the future center of New York – for only $24 and a certain amount of “fire water.”