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tv   Moyers Company  PBS  December 28, 2014 4:00pm-4:31pm EST

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this week on moyers and company. >> we had these dualing images of indigenous people. we talk about indians being the first environmentalist. if we want to talk about the superiority we start talking about the tribal peoples in the hills of pakistan. we have a very odd relation with the savage. >> funding is provided by ann gumowitz encouraging the renewal of democracy. supporting education democratic engagement and the advancement of international peace and
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security at carnegie.org. the herb albert foundation supporting individuals whose mission is to promote passion and creativity in our society. the john d. and catherine t. mcarthur foundation. committing to a more just and peaceful world. more information at mcfound.org. park foundation. the colberg foundation and by our sole corporate sponsor mutual of america. designing customized individual and group retirement products. that's why we're your retierlt company. >> welcome. mention america's original sin and most of us will think about the enslavement of black peel with a bitter fruit we're still harvesting. rarely do some think about the fate of indigenous people. indians that were already here when we discovered the so-called new world. even the controversy over the
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name of the washington redskins fails to hold our attention very long. you can bet not many school children are taught that they wound up in the declaration of independence as merciless indian savages right there in the birth certificate of our nation. how is it they were thought of as so ignorant and primitive they didn't know the value of the island which they sold to the dutch and how they were monolific when the opinions as believes are as diverse as any other society. for example suppose you were to think all american indians share a belief that untouched land is sacrtisanct. apaches in arizona were furious that congress just turned over
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sacred land for mining copper or that they protested the ski resorts use of recycled sewer water to make snow on sacred mown mountainsides but at the same time in the state state they want to build a tramway nearly a mile and a half to the floor of the canyon to facilitate tourism. so some indians that would be sacreligious. my guest is out to change how we think about indians and challenge the laws that embody bigotry against them. he represented tribal groups in front of the u.s. supreme court and has written like a loaded weapon about the legal history of racism against indians in north america and my favorite
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savage anxieties the invention of western civilization. welcome. >> thank you for having me. that gives a big mining company land in arizona. what's your take on that? >> it involved land that is really part of the most sacred land to this tribe. many members of san carlos trace their ancestry back to the apache warriors and folks fighting the federal government over their land rights and cultural rights for a long time. it's going to be the largest copper mine in the united states and one of the poverty rates they're trying to stop this. they brought in a large coalition and indian tribes from all over the u.s. to try to fight it but they couldn't understand the power of the copper industry quite frankly and the economic benefits that this would bring.
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>> when you say sacred land, help me understand what you mean by that from your history. >> all land is sacred in the sense that it sustains the tribe. some has significance. many navajos believe that point was the point of emergence of the navajo by the creator. you can go on reservations and ask is that mountain sacred and maybe half will say yeah and the other half will say it doesn't mean anything to me. it's difficult for a tribe to sit down and come to a consensus on which particular pieces of land are sacred. each family will have a different idea. >> many consider the sacredness of the land by their definition
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more important than the jobs it would produce. >> in this particular case yes. >> the opposite in the grand canyon. >> in the grand canyon. >> navajos want to build this. >> and at the same time they're fighting a sacred lands battle involving a ski resort so the tribe has to come to a consensus. in some cases it won't have so much associated with it that we can't let it go but in other instances with the apache. >> gettysburg too. >> it would be very similar if at gettysburg people wanted to build an amusement park. people would be offended. >> you represent tribes in dispurities such as these. what are these stories. what do they have in common? >> we see tribes moving into the 21st century and facing problems of globalization of
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multinational resource developments of jobs. they're elected to protect sacred lands but also to provide jobs, improve quality of life. so these are the types of situations tribes are confronting on a daily basis and you find lots of different conflicts in the tribe and how sacred is this and which particular part of the tribe so you'll find a lot of diversity and they have to manage that diversity and do what's best for the tribe. >> so the deal that's gone through is it familiar to you? >> yeah, that land was taken away from the tribe and many people in the tribe will tell you this this day it was taken away. but once they issue an indian claims commission and pays off on it that's it your rights are exhausted. and i keep seeing the same guy find that treaty again and again
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and i asked my students what that guy's name is x. >> and that says. >> what it says is that the tribes didn't -- they had a document handed over to them. they didn't know what they were signing. sometimes treaties would be ratified even though the signatures weren't there. for indian tribes the fact that there may be a treaty and they may have been compensated for lands in the process that didn't award them interest from the date of the taking doesn't mean the case is over. u.s. law and international human rights law have ratticly diverged in the past 20 years in terms of the recognition of indigenous people's rights. international human rights law looks at not whether or not they have formal ownership or legal titles in a western legal conception but rather the tribe's historical connection to that land. >> so u.s. courts couldn't address it. >> no, they wouldn't be able to. in fact the way the legislation is written the environmental review process is going to be concluded before the land is
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transferred and of course once it's transferred there's a mandatory transfer date. those processes have little meaning anymore. >> once the land is transferred environmental law -- because private property and federal environmental laws don't apply. >> it's this idea of private property. when europeans came to the new world they said indians don't appreciate property. we don't have to pay them for it or give them what the land is truly worth. they have very clear conceptions of their traditional boundaries and maintain their rights over their land and you can go out there on the reservation and it might be established by the united states but then there's traditional land boundaries. the navajo regard their traditional lands as within the four sacred peaks. one is where the ski resort one
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of the holiest sacred mountains in navajo cosmology and here they're selling reclaimed water. >> put it into another cultural context and you wouldn't be able to think of that with any other racial group but with indians because we think they have primitive ideas or they don't have ownership we completely disrespect that. >> this has been your passion, almost your obsession to help us understand how american law came to embody this savagery. it opened my eyes to this long 250 year history that you talk about institutionalizing savagery as a concept to discriminate against them. >> what i try to show in the book is the fundamental conflict
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between savagery and civilization goes back to the beginning of western history. i go back to the greeks and the romans. you can read homer and he has his great heros involved in the myth. when you think about the roman empire what was it made of? it was made of conquests of the tribes of central europe. the germans the picks you have tribal wars in the middle ages fought on behalf of christianity. western civilization has been at war with tribalism for 3,000 years. that war was brought to the new world by the spanish and by the english collinists. you find at a very early point in american law chief justice john marshall is asked to decide the status of indian tribes and i like to tell my students he goes to the s card. he calls them savages that like the same rights as the white people that came over here and
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collinize their land under what many americans might call an obscure doctrine. the doctrine of discovery. >> which holds. >> when columbus and the other european explorers came to the new world and sailed along the shores and claimed it for their crown so long as they were occupied by savage people their property rights didn't have to be recognized. marshall says in the famous 1820 case when the great nations of europe discovered this continent they were eager to appropriate to themselves as much as they could acquire but the character and religion of its inhabitants made thelda a people over who the superior genius of europe might claim it. when we discovered america it was occupied by a bunch of uncivilized brutes and we were going to make better use of the land so we could take it from them. >> i grew up in texas in a town
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named after john marshall. marshall, texas. no one ever told me what chief justice john marshall said in that 1823 decision you just mentioned in which he refers to indians as hethens and fierce savages and you say this is one of the most important indian rights case ever handed down. >> absolutely. >> because. >> because it defines the property rights of indigenous people in this country and it says upon discovery the european nation or the nation that succeeds to its interest the u.s. and great britain holds superior title and sovereigntry to the land belonging to the indians. it can be taken away by purchase, conquest or any other means. the reason this case is important is it sets the foundation for this radical approach to understanding the basic human rights of indian people to hold and control the
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lands that they occupy. it gives the u.s. government the right to relocate. stands at the bottom of the ethnic cleansing campaigns in the removal era and it's continued to be cited today by the supreme court. even the most liberal member of the court and footnote one of one she wrote cites the doctrine of discovery. the court never questions it. >> the fact that the europeans quote discovered the new world carries with it an inherent right to dominate the people? >> oh absolutely. that's exactly why congress can pass legislation as it did with the land mine deal because congress took the land from the tribes. ignores their sacred connections to it. their culture connections and does whatever it wants with it. it's why congress can order tribes removed in the 1950s. congress terminated tribal status for more than 100 tribes and basically said you're not a tribe anymore and we're not going to pay attention to the treaties. the supreme court held when
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congress breaches a treaty with an indian tribe it's not reviewable. it's called a political question and if they have a problem with that go back to congress, the people that broke your treaty. >> you write about cherokee nation versus georgia. the chief justice describes indians as constituting a race of people once numerous, powerful and truly independent but who gradually sank beneath our superior policy, our arch and our arms. this from one of the most brilliant men of the founding generation fought with washington at valley forge and became the chief justice and this is what he's saying. >> that's right. that was the opinion shared by the founders to a man. in fact george washington two weeks after the treaty of paris is signed ending the revolutionary war to ask about his opinions on indian policy. he's been an indian fighter since the french and indian war. a lot of folks in the red states and southern states wanted to
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remove all of the indians to canada. let them go with the english and washington said you can try and chase the indians off the land but the savage is like the wolf. they'll return so more expedient to negotiate treaties with them because and again this is what the founders believed indians are a vanquished race. they won't be here two to three generations. >> he said african americans are bound and tethered by the reality, the mythology and the legacy of slavery. what are you saying is the equivalent of that if hephenomenons for indians. >> it's very much like african americans. it's taking from one racial group to give to the dominant racial group. in that sense there's a very
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similar experience but the dispossession experience, african americans were dispossessed by being brought over here on slave ships where as indians were on the land and fought literally wars against europeans for control of that land. and if you look at treaty it's very interesting everybody is ripped off in their treaty if you look at the first round of treaties from about 1800 to the civil war tribes secured 150 million acres in those trytys. that's a large amount of real estate. in the 1880s after tribes were defeated and put on the legislation that act ended up dispossessing tribes of 90 million acres. most turned over to white homesteaders and most were the besz land on the reservation. >> whether it's dismantling
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traditional tribal government structures and what's been taken away. and our systems are better our ways of owning land, our education. >> your savage. even though we come from a continent racked by blood and violence and cruelty beyond measure but that never stuck to the white european the way it did the indian. >> you see it used in australia. >> it's in the declaration of independence. >> it was a word that werners use to consciously differentiate themselves from nonwernersternnonwesterners to support that superiority. no matter where they were. whether it was india or asia or
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australia or whatever it's that mission that characterizes so much of the history of western colonialism. so what this myth is would really excuse america for the disappearance. it wasn't our fault. they were an inferior race so marshala don'ts that and the tragedy in the present day circumstances of that decision are that those racial attitudes are so deeply imbedded in these foundational principles of american indian law. so has there been any improvement in the way -- >> no in fact native american rights have a project called the supreme court project and it's focused on trying to keep cases out of the supreme court. this supreme court justice roberts is hard to believe worse than the other court if you look at the few decisions that it's issued and the justice before he became chief justice had written several highly negative
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stereotype charged opinions about indians. one was a horrible case. it denied tribes the right to criminally prosecute nonindians that commit crimes on their reservations. that decision had horrible consequences for law enforcement on indian reservations but if that opinion he cites language from the 1830s to explain why whites didn't trust tribes. they were savages. >> i was shaking my head as i read to realize the real meaning of that term the long arm of the law. what you're describing here is supreme court decisions in 1823 and 1830 in that era that still shape how the indians, the people that were here before john marshall and the others are perceived and governed. i did my job then, thank you.
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>> you can be anxious about the supreme court decisions and policy makers. there may be a little bit of irony there but our savage anxieties when i titled the book i wanted to focus people on the challenge that tribes in this country are confronting. that's the challenge of them saying we don't want to go your way we want a land base and right to govern ourselves and everybody that steps on to the land base and according to our law. that's something that they have never accepted. it's going to be very hard to get it back and to start recognizing those things taken from tribes. indian people don't regard that as a permanent situation.
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it's just a project that needs to be worked on. it's a project that indiana state yand-- indian people are dealing with around the world. >> if there were one stereotype you could end what would it be? >> that indians are lawless people. i would change that because it's the most harmful stereotype. one of the prime backers of the land bill was a republican congressman and when he was challenged by an apache on this bill he said well you know indians are wards of the federal government. this happened recently. a member of congress from arizona whose district includes lots of indians characterized indians as wards of the federal government. that's a 19th century notion. that congress person is obviously stuck in the 19th century when he thinks about indians. how is that person going to legislate and treat indians fairly and respect their rights when he has this image of
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indians as not being up to the same level of responsibility of everybody else but i make this point in my books. until we start attacking the root of the historical problems of discrimination against indians and those roots again in these stereotypes that indians are less civilized and less able to exercise functions, until we get to the roots of the problems we're not going to change legislation and we're not going to change the hearts and minds of the supreme court. >> it's the invisible hand at our back. >> that's the problem today. many of the situations we talked about whether it's the san carlos or navajo fighting for their land rights or to develop their land to try and provide recent lands on their reservation the backdrop of all of that is the history of dispossession. the story isn't over for american indians. you may think -- americans may think indians are in the past. we don't have to worry about that anymore but like those guys that signed that treaty indians know those treaties were often
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times negotiated under duress. how can you give away a sacred land. how could any tribal member think about giving away something that means so much to the tribe? it's impossible to conceive. whether or not it may have been through the indian claims commission in the 1950s or through a treaty or congressional legislation the fact that the tribes may not have title to that land doesn't mean there's not still a strong connection there and tribes will continue to assert that. >> let's continue this conversation online and thank you for being with me. >> i very much like that. thank you, bill. >> we're near the end of our broadcast. next week will be our last but we're continuing our website bill moyers.com and that's because democracy is in pearl.
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the moneyed interest are winning and even public media cowers from exposing their power and calling them to account. we need every possible venue for skeptical voices and we intend bill moyers.com to be one of them. i'll see you there and i'll see you here one more time. >> don't wait a week to get more moyes. visit bill moyers.com for exclusive blogs establish sassays and video features. >> funding is provided by ann gumowitz encouraging the renewal of democracy.
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carnegie corporation supporting democratic engagement and the advancement of international peace and security at carnegie.org. the ford foundation working with visionaries on the front lines of social change worldwide. the herb albert foundation supporting organizations whose mission is to promote compassion and creativity in our society. the john d. and catherine t. mcarthur foundation. committed to a more just and peaceful world. more information at mcfound.org. >> park foundation dedicated to heightening public awareness of critical issues. the colberg foundation and by our sole corporate sponsor mutual of america designing customized individual and group
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coming up, our annual look back at the top religion and ethics stories of the year that is almost over. major funding provided by the lily endowment an indianapolis-based private family foundation dedicated to religion, community development and education. additional funding provided by mutual of america. designing customized, individual, and group retirement products. that's why we're your retirement company.