Agree with the ecological preservation objectives, hard disagree with handing over of sovereignty, whatever that actually means,to a group based on their ethnicity / ancestry.
I grew up in the area, those shores aren't tribal lands other than a few tiny bits. And most of it is already preserved shore/ocean, so this just appears to be a land grab attempt.
I agree that this area should be protected, but giving it to a few people based on ancestry is ridiculous.
Native tribes are and have always been sovereign entities, that didn't end with European colonization. The degree to which the US government acknowledges this has varied over time, obviously, but as recently as the SCOTUS case on the Indian Child Welfare Act (Haaland v. Brackeen[0,1]), it has at least recognized that sovereignty exists.
Funny, because the same Americans who refuse to recognize the sovereignty of native people claim their own is an inalienable manifest destiny granted to them directly by God. The white man speaks with a forked tongue.
Isn't this how most nations work? If one's parents are American, they inherit all the rights due to Americans, including the ability to run for political office. This gives the descendants of Americans sovereignty over a chunk of land in North America known as the United States.
Yes there are other routes to sovereignty over US soil other than familial inheritance, including being born on the land or becoming a naturalized citizen.
Still, the predominant route is via a claim to the correct ancestral lineage. Here I mean that one’s ancestors form an unbroken chain of people who also had sovereignty over the land. This route is also the predominant one taken by citizens of most other countries.
I think usually the sovereignty must be handed down through an unbroken chain. This is how monarchy and dynasty worked. Once the chain was broken, then you have a new sovereign entity. I think this is how citizenship works in most countries.
In modernity we have different notions of justice where it becomes meaningful to claim that a chain of sovereignty was unjustly broken from one group of people and handed to another. If this were the case, you might have claims in Europe in some people’s eyes.
Whether this is the actual case or not, parental lineage is a major force that justifies claims of sovereignty in the American legal system and elsewhere.
Tribes were sovereign, signed treaties that enshrined sovereignty—within limits,to be sure—and continue to exercise that sovereignty. Nothing is being handed over, it’s always been there.
Interestingly the idea that tribal membership is based on ancestry originated with Europeans and (white) Americans, more than native tribes. Historically (generalizing wildly), tribal membership is about citizenship in a community much more than it is about who ones’ grandparents were. Blood quotient was a US legal concept that reflected the American fondness for racial categories. A Navajo friend has Scottish and Arab ancestors who’d married into the tribe, just to give an example. Or check out _The Unredeemed Captive_, for a practice that would make no sense if tribal membership were racial.
Communities often want to continue as communities, in a way that’s only possible with self-determination. That can land as either a left- or a right-flavored interest, depending on who’s asking and the overall context. But it’s too big a part of human nature to brush aside.
A close read of the statement suggests that this is more of a feel-good thing and not much to worry about. If those tribes get actual sovereignty over those waters, they’ll soon find them full of Chinese fishing trawlers.
They're indigenous, nothing is being "handed over" it's land that they were forced to live on when they were forced of their original land in the area. They already have sovereignty.
A lot of people were forced to leave a lot of land all over the world. Borders shifted constantly within Europe. People were constantly expelled and relocated. Now of course they shouldn't have been, but that was a long time ago and we've generally agreed not to do that anymore.
Should former Roman land be given to the Italians? Should the Louisiana purchase be undone because it was the result of a military defeat in the Napoleonic Wars? Should the non-first-nations parts of California be returned to the Mexicans because it was ceded in the Mexican-American War under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo? What framework do you propose we use to decide which land is worthy of sovereign rule - and which isn't? Which groups are worthy of sovereignty, and which aren't, and on what basis?
I think all groups should be represented within the government and there's no reason to revisit the question of sovereignty because there's no framework that makes sense. There's no easy place to stop that isn't totally arbitrary.
Well there are actually frameworks that are generally agreed upon.
https://social.desa.un.org/issues/indigenous-peoples/united-...
While it's true that some lines will be arbitrary, that doesn't mean they can't be drawn based on ethical principles, international norms, and democratic practices.
I think we should probably try our best, as a society to be ethical and address damage caused by our society in the past and present. Not doing so because we think it would be too hard to parse is not admirable.
I guess my question is this. The Spaniards who lived in the non-First-Nations part of California are indigenous to the region too. Exactly as indigenous, IMO, as the First Nations who walked across the land bridge from Russia and set up camp. So why shouldn't they be sovereign and granted the same rights? And what's to say that in 100 years this agreement will not be torn up too, because of, say, it feeling 'forced' due to 'economic conditions'?
It's time to stop looking backwards, and start figuring out how to move forwards together as one.
We should all be looking after this marine zone together.
"It's time to stop looking backwards, and start figuring out how to move forwards together as one."
This is a much easier perspective to have if you are raised in a society that predominantly thinks of indigenous people as extinct and a thing of the past.
It is a much harder perspective to have if you live with the understanding that these issues dont originate in the past but in the modern consequences of historical events.
I too would like a world in which we dont really need to worry about how indigenous peoples are treated. Unfortunately we live in a world where the dominant power structure is all too willing to trample over indigenous rights while certain parts of society appear in droves to defend said trampling.
This may also not be the context of whats being discussed in the article but we are touching on the broader topic of indigenous rights and sovereignty.
To be clear I don't think they're "extinct" I think they're a unique and distinct part of our society like people of any other background. Their stories deserve to be taught in school, in the context of our shared history (good and bad) - and they deserve to be represented in government - like everyone else. And they deserve to live the way they want, like everyone else. Nobody's rights should be trampled.
> This may also not be the context of whats being discussed in the article but we are touching on the broader topic of indigenous rights and sovereignty.
Maybe, but I do appreciate you sharing your perspective.
To take things a step further, all the various North American indigenous groups have been waring, slaving and migrating their way across the continent for millennia, just like every single other people group on earth for all of history, so it's almost certain that whatever indigenous "Nation" is claiming a given piece of land "Stole" it from some other indigenous "Nation" at some point in the past, yet we never hear them talking about returning "their" land to those "Rightful owners" do we?
>yet we never hear them talking about returning "their" land to those "Rightful owners" do we?
I mean, they might if they didn't have bigger problems to worry about, and they might have in the past, because native cultures were as complex and multifaceted as any other.
Unfortunately, Europeans completely obliterated those cultures and only fragments of their knowledge and histories only remain, unrecognized by American culture and untaught in American schools, so we'll never know.
> Agree with the ecological preservation objectives, hard disagree with handing over of sovereignty, whatever that actually means,to a group based on their ethnicity / ancestry.
I’m sure many people in the various tribes object to the handing over of most of their sovereignty over to the USA based on the guns held to their head (and where land was retained, it often being not merely a small subset of their land, but often completely different and worse land) but their vigorous excercise of the sovereignty they retain is not a “handing over” of anything to them “based on their ethnicity”, even to the extent that there is a rearrangement of sovereign rights between the three relevant sovereigns (state, federal, and tribal) such that there is something being handed over at all.
I agree that this area should be protected, but giving it to a few people based on ancestry is ridiculous.