But when I propose renegotiating the agreements, I am perhaps coming at it from a slightly different perspective. RWP says "I don't think someone should be exempt from state taxes because one... might have been done out of his land by some sharp practice..."
There is no "might" about it. There were two kinds of Indian Wars during the nineteenth century, there were wars caused by the simple competition for land, which might have been unavoidable (unavoidable, in the sense that the settlers had no intention of honoring Indian land claims). And there was a second kind of war, caused almost directly by corruption. Money was appropriated by Congress for the tribes and disappeared along the way in to other pockets. The result, starvation followed by an uprising followed by all out war. And the final destruction of the tribe.
I am aware of several examples of out and out corruption, so the "might" can be discarded out of hand. The treaties were negotiated to settle wars that were fought as settlers moved on to land that was not theirs.
If your ancestors were in Europe during the great Indian Wars, then you don't have any of their blood charged to your account directly, but you are probably living on land that was taken from them by force. I don't think we have any intention of giving it back, and the Hungarians are not moving back to the steppes of Central Asia. But we should approach the matter with a little humility.
I live not far from where small tribes were destroyed by miners out for a Sunday, who would sit up in the rocks and drink and shoot just for a laugh.
I agree that the legal situation should be re-examined, and if possible clarified, simplified, privatized, modernized. But we should approach it from the point of view that the treaties were imposed on the Indians by force, and were the least they were willing to settle for, faced with certain genocide.
"We're living in the 21th century; why are we living with a system that sucked even in the 19th century? " It sucked in the 19th century because it was imposed by force, and the people who administered it put the money into their own pockets. I agree, though, its time to modernize it.
When you say the Indians owned the land, in what sense? the Indians had no legal framework of individual land ownership. Various tribes occupied the land at various time. Conservatives in general reject the idea of collective land ownership - why make an exception in this case?
In this part of the Great Plains, there were no Indians until Europeans introduced horses; and by that time, we had coureurs du bois roaming around here from Canada. And even when they had horses, the Pawnee and Sioux fought bloody battles over Southern Nebraska. So who had title?
Yeah, the Indian wars were a mess. It wasn't all the white man's fault; just north of here, the Santee Sioux massacred 750, mostly Scandinavian, mostly women and children, on land they themselves had ceded in a treaty. By and large, they escaped retribution for it; Abraham Lincoln pardoned all but 39 of them.
My point is this; I have little time for racial entitlements. The fact that someone who now calls himself a Native American is descended from someone who was screwed just makes him equal to the rest of us. There is long standing title to reservation lands, and there are titles spelling out specific obligations of the federal goverment. These should be settled with the present tribal members, as individuals. What they collectively do with the land and the money is their own business. But I want no part of a country where you and I are subject to different laws or obligations, because of our different ancestry.