Are Indian Reservations Examples Of Socialism?

We maka dem an offer dey can't refuse!

 

Maybe, but for sure they are examples of conquering invaders placing the indigenous population out of the way of the so-called 'Manifest Destiny.'

AS my deceased friend said when I mentioned this to her--"well, they weren't using it."

 

Tell me about it. My Chickasaw people were living peacefully (well not exactly, we were pretty warlike) in our homeland east of the Mississippi, and we were using it! Then Andrew Jackson and his greedy redneck constituents noticed how rich and productive our farmland was and decided to take it for themselves. They put us and related tribes on the Trail of Tears to Oklahoma where we were supposed to live on reserved land under tribal government and the watchful protection of the Great White Father. Then came the Land Rush, and in 1906, statehood. No more Reservations, they said! We got U.S. citizenship, which IMO was not a bad deal. I grew up on the Chickasaw Reservation, but wasn't aware of it, cuz it wasn't supposed to exist! This is an area consisting of 13 Oklahoma counties! Most of the folks living on it are non-Native American, and if you don't watch the road signs, it looks like the rest of Oklahoma. There was of course an entity called the Chickasaw Nation, which was restored in 1982 under a new constitution and even an "ambassador" to the U.S. It wasn't really a Reservation in the usual sense, but it had jurisdiction over us Chickasaws, issue its own license plates, and engaged in economic development projects with federal grant money. Actually, IMO, they do a pretty good job bringing in revenue with a couple hundred programs, including hotels, retail stores, a chocolate factory, tourism/cultural centers, and of course 18 casinos. (How "socialist" is that?)

But in 2020, in the case of McGirt v. Oklahoma, the the U.S. Supreme Court held that the reservations in Oklahoma weren't dis-established after all, at least when it came to criminal jurisdiction. That case applied at first only to the Muscogee (Creek) nation, but the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals held that it included nine other tribes, including us Chickasaws! Suddenly, about half of the State, including Tulsa, was on Native American reservations, and a million non-indigenous folks found they were living on them! Actually, the holding was that the State of Oklahoma had no jurisdiction to prosecute Native Americans in criminal cases, but it seemed like the beginning of things to come. Then, a couple of years later came the familiar step backward. In the case of Oklahoma v. Victor Manuel Castro-Huerta, SCOTUS clarified that actually the Oklahoma state government had concurrent jurisdiction to try cases where the perpetrator was non-tribal. This wasn't just the Great White Father speaking with forked tongue. The principal offender was the Retrumplican Governor, Kevin Stitt, a Cherokee, who instigated the challenge. The case didn't sit well with the tribes, and the Cherokees tried (unsuccessfully) to remove Stitt from the tribal rolls. As their Principal Chief put it, Stitt "just fundamentally does not see a role for tribes in the modern world".

 

In other words---cheaters. Oh yeah "legally" open to settlement.)

 

Their is an irony there. Movie producers top priority is making money.

 

Hey, I liked the movie! Of course, it was set in my state of Oklahoma, and I was familiar with the area. I thought DeNiro and DiCaprio did great jobs and Lily Gladstone won an academy award for her performance. At least she's Native American, if not Osage. Critics said the film was one of Scorsese's best. Bur audiences didn't seem to like it, probably cuz it was godawful long and hard on bladders (3.5 hours), And the action and murders were tame compared to the ususal Marvel comics fare. And there was that weird cameo by Brenden Fraser, who may have wandered onto the set by mistake from his latest mummy movie. And I didn't read the book.

 

My only connection to Oklahoma was by working with Fred Zinnemann. Is the corn REALLY as high as an elephants' eye, or don't you have any elephants.
The only time I worked with DeNiro, was on the UK post production and opening of Taxi Driver. The UK premier was at my base at Haymarket Odeon, where it ran for more than 6 months.
That one has a really funny story, when a guy bought a ticket and seemed puzzled why he needed to wait for more than an hour. Things only got worse when an usher showed him to his seat. He went ballistic, having thought that the theatre was a fancy taxi office running New York yellow cabs. All he was waiting for was his ride to Heathrow.
When they tell you that at a London theatre there is more comedy watching the audience than on the stage, it is certainly true.
One of the best was when a brash woman from your part of the world rushed over to another woman in the foyer and announced "OMG, has anyone ever told you that you are the spitting image of the queen". The reply was even better, "A few people have mentioned it over the years". That poor woman probably went back to the US without realising what she had done.

 

Wow! That's impressive!

We don't have no stinkin' elephants. That's the other Indians!

Don't tell me that other really was the queen!

 

Us Chickasaws and the other four so-called "civilized tribes" are so-called because early on we saw advantages of a degree of assimilation to the white man's ways. We realized that a good education was critical for defending ourselves against the wiles and snares of the white man's government. https://www.redriverhistorian.com/post/the-academies-of-the-choctaws-and-chickasaws Shortly after our forced "relocation" to Oklahoma, the Chickasaw Nation petitioned the U.S Government to set up a manual labor boarding school, the idea being that our youths would at least receive an education in our own homeland. We did this twenty years before the feds opened their first off reservation boarding school pursuant to the forced assimilation program covered on the video. The Chickasaw boarding school program was funded with tribal money, but in co-operation with Protestant missionaries, principally the Episcopal Methodists and Presbyterians. By 1852, the the Chickasaw Manual Labor Academy was in operation, followed by three other boarding schools , including the flagship Bloomfield Academy for girls, called "the Bryn Mar of the West". Chickasaw Schools | The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture Of course, partnership with the missionaries entailed a Christian education, and the kids weren't allowed to speak Chikashshanompa. But we seem to have avoided the worst abuses reported on the youtube video.

 

Fred Zinnemann was a wonderful person to work with and a complete perfectionist.
By the time I worked with him, Oklahoma had already been released, so I just checked the lab work on the 70mm prints. They were one of only a few films shot in Tod,AO at 30fps. This meant that the general 3mm prints were shot separately on a different camera. The cost of editing and dubbing was therefore almost doubled.
Tod,AO and Super Panavision 70 reverted to 24fps, to save the additional costs. The 3mm interneg was therefore an optical transfer from the 70mm interpos.

I worked on the post production and London openings of Julia and The day of the Jackal. I enjoyed every moment of it, particularly developing and recording he incidental soundtracks. They were timed to the second.

One of the funniest moment of my career, was when a guy arrived to watch a print rehearsal of Julia for the London opening claiming to be a personal friend of Fred Zinnemann. Thinking nothing of it, I let him in and just mentioned to Fred that a friend had arrived. What followed would have made a feature film. Fred went over and started chatting, giving me a wink. He started off by saying that he had never met Fred Zinnemann and asking the guy whether the stories were true about him being a grumpy old fart and impossible to work with. This went on for almost an hour until the film ended, As they were leaving, Fred asked the guy to stop for a moment at the top of the stairs. Confused the guy asked why. The reply. I just want to kick your ass and watch you going ass over tit down the stairs. That awful moment when the penny suddenly dropped. LOL

The real queen, both she and her late mother loved the theatre and attended at least once a month. On these non state occasions, they expected no red carpets or special treatment.
The security was simple, until a phone call 10 minutes before their arrival, no one knew that they were coming. On that day I mentioned the phone was not answered because the manager was in the pub. LOL

A very funny side note.
The security cost per day during Donald Trump's visit, was more than we spend on our entire royal family AND government in a YEAR.
An incident that you are unlikely to have heard about (It was never made public outside the UK), was when a mentally disturbed guy climbed a drainpipe, broke into the queen's bedroom at buckingham palace and sat chatting to her for 20 minutes before the alarm was raised.
When all hell broke loose, she insisted that he was not arrested, but taken to a psychiatric clinic and given the help that he needed.

 

If they are it’s not a very good argument for socialism most reservations are not well off economically of course there are other factors to why they are struggling I don’t want to down play that