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One romantic notion about Native Americans is that they're connected to the land
in some sacred sense forever inaccessible to non-Indians. More plainly, an Indian's
link to the reservation is historical and indissoluble. An Indian can move from
house to house, or to a far away city, but his roots in the land of his tribe's
reservation will never be cut, because the reservation is not to be bought and sold.
It's worth remembering, at the same time, that reservations are an unhandy accommodation
set up by the grandsons of European immigrants for a conquered, darker-skinned people,
where the conquerors still act as "trustee" of tribal resources. While it is helpful
sometimes to recite that reservations are "domestic dependent nations" with special
status in the U.S. Constitution, they are also entangled in the laws and lives of
their non-Indian neighbors, some of whom also have been there a long time, at least
by non-Indian standards. Only in a few instances - the Shoshone at Wind River are
one - were reservations demarked on a people's ancestral homeland. And "home" was
a seasonal concept for nomadic tribes before the European conquest: the Shoshone
passed through the Wind River Valley like birds through a field.
Despite this adulterated origin, reservations are one key to the differences between
whites and Indians. As an Indian, you're part of a community interminably grounded
in a place. For better or worse, it was the land of your parents and will be the
land of your children, whether they live there or not. By your lineage, you share
in its ownership with thousands of others, share in its responsibilities, its past,
its suffering, its future. The minerals, the soils, and the waters - that most essential
resource in the West - are as mutual as ancestral blood. For the rest of us, it's
rarely so: We buy and sell property in widely various places, and drive our land
cruisers from home to home.
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