The Great Turning by David C Korten

Author:David C Korten [Korten, David C]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: book, ebook
ISBN: 9781887208079
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Published: 2007-10-22T00:00:00+00:00

Citizenship for the Original Citizens

One of the darkest of all the dark chapters of U.S. imperial history concerns the fate of the Native Americans against whom the European American settlers waged a campaign of genocide to expropriate their lands and destroy their cultures. Massive waves of European immigration fueled an explosive population growth in the new nation, which rose from an estimated 4 million people in 1790 to 31 million in 1860. Territorial expansion proceeded apace. The new nation occupied a land 205area of 865,000 square miles in 1790. When the westward expansion to the Pacific was completed in 1853, the continental United States occupied 3 million square miles.10 What was for the European immigrants an experience of liberty, expansion, prosperity, and opportunity was for the Native Americans who stood in their path an experience of tyranny, contraction, poverty, and confinement.

Initially the Native Americans—steeped in the values and ways of Community—sought accommodation with those they had at first greeted as their honored guests. Steeped in the values and ways of Empire, the guests responded with ruthless duplicity. It was the endlessly repeated story of the landing of Columbus.

As the United States encroached ever deeper into Native lands in the relentless drive to the West, Native resistance grew, but it was ultimately overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of the immigration and the superior firepower of the U.S. military. Reduced to a tenth of their number from the days when the intrusions began, those Native peoples who remained were confined to reservations on isolated fragments of land the Europeans considered to be of little or no value. Even then, the press to appropriate what remained of Indian lands and to assimilate the remaining indigenous population into the European culture continued. In the period between 1946 and 1960, Indian tribes lost an additional 3.3 million acres of land.11

Many of the Native American cultures those of European descent sought to destroy gave far greater expression to the Enlightenment ideals of liberty, democracy, and human dignity than any European culture before or since. Many Native peoples remain to this day repositories of the ancient wisdom of those who lived in Community, and they retain a memory of human possibilities that Empire denies. Those whose special status rests on the ruthless injustice of Empire have good reason to consider that memory a threat to their privilege.

It was not until 1924 that Native Americans won through their struggles an act of Congress granting them full and automatic citizenship in the land that was once their own. In 1978, the U.S. Congress passed the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, guaranteeing the right of Native Americans to practice their traditional religions.12 Finally, citizenship was restored to the original citizens of North America who in a more just world would have been the ones to decide who among the visiting Europeans were qualified to become citizens of the continent’s preexisting First Nations and on what conditions. 206

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