NEWS JUNKIE POST
Jul 23, 2010 at 1:59 amIndigenous Sovereignty Threatened by UK LaCrosse Decision
The Native American Indian confederacy of tribes known as the Iroquois Nation, or Haudenosaunee were recently denied access to the World Lacrosse Championships in England, despite their ancestors invented the sport. This brings up an important indigenous rights issue: sovereignty.
The Haudenosaunee (Iroquois Nation) are rather unique in North American history, and consist of the Mohawk, Seneca, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Tuscaroras tribes, who unified into a League of Nations as early as 1450 C.E. Their union played a pivotal role in the formation of the US Constitution.
There is a long and complicated legal history behind the status of Native American lands in the United States. The Federal Government officially considers them to be domestic dependent nations, despite the fact that they predate the arrival of Old World populations and current American governments by thousands of years.
Since 1923, a few Indian tribes have issue their own passports, including the Hopi, Western Shoshone, and Iroquois. However, increasingly strict security measures enacted during the Bush administration have started to hamper the rights of North American indigenous populations to freely travel across borders.
The Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative, which also forces American citizens traveling to Canada to have a US Passport to gain re-entry (and by default, entry into Canada) is behind this latest LaCrosse case. This international accord requires that passports have to be scanned, something not present on Haudenosaunee documents, and no provisions were included to allow exceptions for native people.
This is not the first case where the freedom of mobility of tribes has been infringed upon by the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative. Many Native Americans who used to freely cross the Arizona border to ancestral, ceremonial, and traditional lands in Mexico are now being denied access.
Tohono O’odham elder Ofelia Rivas stated in 2007, “We were all born at home with a midwife, and nobody at the time recorded our births… I have no birth certificate so how am I supposed to get a [US] passport?”
The question we are all confronted with by this latest round of travel restrictions is this: is the status of sovereignty of indigenous nations in the United States threatened?
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I hope their sovereignty is threatened. As an archaeologist I am aware that I am in a minority of people that feel this way but it is a valid point. The Native Americans of this country need to adapt to the new way of life that they are surrounded with. Hanging on to tribal beliefs and customs in such a rigorous way only harms their history and causes others to see them as trouble makers. They lost their land through an unfair fight but that is the way it goes sometimes. They need to embrace their new roll in this world and tell people their histories but they are not going back to the way things used to be. That just isn’t feasible.
Webby, don’t you think they have a right to self-determination, considering they predate non-native peoples and the US? I know that is difficult since current reservations are pretty tiny compared to other nation states in the world, but perhaps some way to preserve their independent status?
LOL, OK that makes a lot of sense I guess.
Lou
http://www.post-anonymously.at.tc
Webby, don’t you think they have a right to self-determination, considering they predate non-native peoples and the US? I know that is difficult since current reservations are pretty tiny compared to other nation states in the world, but perhaps some way to preserve their independent status?
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