You see, I guess I'm naive. Here I thought that "reservation" meant that it was some patch of land that "we" "gave" them; and you come along and educate me: THEY CHOSE IT! (Do you have any idea what their second choice might have been?)
ML/NJ
You are obviously unfamiliar with the history of NM Indian tribes. As I stated, 18 or so of the 22 registered Indian tribes in the state are Pueblo Indians.
Pueblo means village or town. Most of these pueblos have been inhabited since well before the Spanish, much less the Americans, showed up. Taos Pueblo, for instance, is over 1000 years old and Zuni over 1300.
Should we have evicted these settled town-dwelling Indians from their ancestral homes and forced them to live somewhere else because you don’t think the setting is attractive enough?
The Navajo, in addition, live very nearly on the same land they did at the time of the Mexican War, although perhaps their reservation is now somewhat smaller than their semi-nomadic range prior to that time. Most of their reservation, of course, is in AZ, with a small amount in UT.
The two Ute tribes that extend partly into NM from CO did have a bunch of their range stolen, but mostly in UT and CO. They didn’t come into NM much historically, because when they did the Kiowa, Comanche, Apaches and Navajo killed them.
The two Apache tribes that now have reservations in NM, Jicarilla and Mescalero, used to range over much of the American southwest and far into Mexico. They’ve been restricted to much smaller ranges, but where they live now is part of where they always lived. The Jicarilla Res is pretty bleak, but the Mescalero Res ain’t bad.
You seem to be under a misapprehension as to what the term “reservation” means. It hasn’t, for well over a century, meant somewhere Indians were forced to stay. It means land “reserved” for their exclusive use, land they can’t sell off to white men for a quick buck. Kind of like a wildlife preserve for humans.
Any Indian who wants to can go live anywhere he can pay for, just like any other American.
Your criticisms of reservations are perfectly valid for much of the West, and even more for the East and South, where Indians were largely ethnically cleansed. They just aren’t particularly valid for the state of New Mexico.