> Access and collaborative agreements — and sometimes even land return agreements — come with requirements specifying what tribes can and cannot do with the land. Many require navigating sometimes tricky relationships with land managers who may have different priorities. It’s a ways off from tribes outright holding their homelands as sovereign nations, with the freedom to take care of the land as they see fit; however, these agreements can also help support tribes that do not yet have the capacity to single-handedly manage hundreds or thousands of acres.

When push comes to shove, too many (arguably most) on the left will choose to recapitulate the methods of the "white supremacists" they claim to abhor. Of course, in their mind its because their predecessors had evil intentions, while theirs are pure. But that generally wasn't true--for the most part, albeit with plenty of exceptions, people have always screwed over Native Americans with what they believed were good intentions. The fundamental problem has been substituting their own judgement about what's best for Native Americans, and that judgement will inescapably be self-serving, reflecting their own priorities and expectations.

If people really wanted to right the wrongs of the past, just transfer the land. If the tribe wants to turn it into a nuclear waste dump, or pave it over with asphalt, so be it. Anything else is just the same old oppression, updated to reflect modern mores of the majority. Once upon a time it was about "helping" them integrate with schooling and work programs, whether they wanted to or not; now it's "helping" them steward the land, whether they want to or not. Of course, today plenty of Native American activists do want to steward the land for the cause of environmentalism; but 100+ years ago plenty of Native Americans activists wanted to pursue integration. But when there's no real choice in the matter, it's not really an exercise in granting liberty and autonomy, and history will not look any more kindly on today's flavor of imposed progressivism then it does on yesterday's imposed progressivism.

The barrier isn’t restrictions on development. The barrier is being excluded from the developmental trajectory of the United States. Imagine if the treaties had been respected and the reservations had remained as quasi-sovereign nations. They’d be among the poorest countries in the world. Maybe a few with natural resources would be able to export them, but they’d probably be like the African countries that have natural resources which suffer from resource curse.

As it is with the trajectory of semi-integration, we just created a bunch of pockets of poverty for no reason. Think of it in unromanticized economic terms. Imagine Mark Zuckerberg takes over your company and then later builds it into Facebook. If he gave you the option to keep 2% of the company, would you rather have that in pre-IPO Facebook stock, or cash out and go your own way?

If we had privatized whatever land we were willing to allocate to reservations, and fully integrated it into US jurisdiction, then at least the Indians would have gotten some shares of USA Inc. Instead what happened is that, by creating the reservations and encouraging them to maintain their traditional lifestyles, we took the same amount of land, but gave it to them in shares of Native American Inc. Whatever land we gave them was vastly less valuable because it was excluded from the U.S.