[ed. I stand corrected. Article says they have an Obama-administration official lined up.]
Odds are the Cherokee would appoint a de facto Republican. They're largely conservative and entrepreneurial Oklahomans. The Cherokee Nation runs a bunch of gambling, energy, and defense contracting businesses.
It's beyond amusing to me that Elizabeth Warren tried to claim in to the Cherokee; that tribe had almost no inclination to overlook her stretching.
> Kimberly Teehee has been nominated to serve as the Cherokee delegate. She is currently the tribe's vice president of government relations, and previously worked as a senior policy advisor on Native American affairs for three years in President Barack Obama's administration. For about 12 years before that, Teehee was a senior advisor to Dale Kildee, then a Democratic congressman from Michigan.
I wouldn't be surprised that they largely appoint Republicans.
But the current Republican party is unlikely to give any extra votes to people of color, because it's a symbolic victory for Progressivism. It's part of why many folks on the right wing have a visceral dislike of President Obama. (You can guess the other 2 big reasons)
So, if true that the Cherokee would likely appoint Republican candidates, and in general vote Republican, it's a sure thing they won't be allowed to get representation. For various reasons, nobody in power is inclined to derive a "win" from it.
Which is unfortunate, because it's the least we can do. It's worth pointing out that Native Americans pay federal income taxes, and Taxation without Representation has, let's say, a bit of a History in this country.
That study specifically says Native Americans aren't as loyal to Democrats as other minority groups.
In the survey at the heart of the paper, "a majority of
American Indians voted Republican in the presidential and U.S. House elections." American Indians in Oklahoma are more likely to identify as Democrat than their white counterparts, but a majority still vote Republican. They're social conservatives, but economic interventionists.
Native Americans have had long experience with "help" from Washington, especially on social integration. They understand it isn't all roses.
A lot of minority people have quite conservative values, but vote Democratic because they perceive Republicans as the party that hates them because of their race.
If the GOP could get a half believable message out there that they're actually, really and honestly, a conservative patriotic free market party for all races and religions, I think they could completely dominate US elections for decades.
But, much like the Democrats, they just can't help being really bad at seeming decent and competent.
>patriotic free market party for all races and religions
If it’s for everybody then it’s for nobody. This is called civic nationalism and it’s a globalist wet dream. The only other groups I respect are ones advocating for their own people like I’m doing.
When you care more about some stupid system than your own people then you don’t stand for anything. Usury and the free market is enslaving everybody. And you stand for that system and call it patriotic? Our country has to borrow its own money (with interest) from the FED. It’s pathetic.
Things have changed so much in the last half few decades that a true conservative doesn’t want to conserve anything and is more of a revolutionary.
Agreed - allowing a native nation or a coalition of them if too small (say roughly the least populous other state as Threshold) to be new States with 2 Senators is the least they deserve.
Contingent on their collectively desire for such an arrangement of course as agency is important and well -learning from history of nations arising from arbitrary divisions causing problems.
This is a very collectivist and racist view. We are all Americans here. According to another comment, the Oklahoma Cherokee are very entrepreneurial and successful in business. They probably want to be treated like Americans instead of being treated like a racist charity project.
I am pretty sure they want the treaty honored and want their tribal rights as promised. They didn't exactly vote to become citizens, that was a decision made by the government, but a high percentage have served this country well. They understand the duality of country and tribe / nation.
> I am pretty sure they want the treaty honored and want their tribal rights as promised.
They were promised a delegate to Congress. Not statehood, which is what I'm responding to. I think they should get their delegate if they want it, just because it's the law.
I wasn't evil. Were you? Human history is littered with blood and conquest. Trying to settle the score seems pointless; we should instead (I propose) recognize that we are all individuals without historical guilt and work together to build a better future.
Ideas don't exist in a vacuum; they emerge from concrete relations of production and power. They serve or hinder the interests of people and groups.
'Wiping the slate clean' is a noble path to peace when both sides have done something wrong; it is a far less noble idea when the injustice was severely one-sided, instead it can actually make the injustice worse.
Suppose someone had -unprovoked- attacked you violently and and taken your home and possessions, and then moved his family into what used to be your home. Then suppose his family, still living in that house and intending to continue doing so, suddenly proposed 'wiping the slate clean'. Would you be right in suspecting their proposal of 'wiping the slate clean' to be in this case completely self-serving?
I hope you do realize that they were conquerors themselves (between the tribes) and that many tribes happily fought besides the Europeans in order to gain the upper hand over other tribes, specifically, the Cherokee:
It also begs the question: What are the Romans and the Arabs going to give my country in return for having conquered us 2000 and 1000 years ago, respectively.
"Other people were also bad back then" does not negate "we were bad back then".
White colonists have had the upper hand for a few centuries now. It's undeniable that some indigenous groups are still actively suffering from the colonial occupation in the USA. Any and all attempts to help level the playing field are laudable.
If you feel like you are currently underserved by your state as a result of the Roman / Arabic occupation of your state then I hope you too are seeking to redress the balance.
The point was not the "other people were also bad back then" the point was that, the Chereokee themselves were bad people back them.
Chereokee were oppressing the other tribes before the arrival of the Europeans and then fighting along the Europeans in order to dominate other tribes.
You would if you lived in Washington, D.C. Due to its unique status as a “Federal district” ceded to the government by Maryland and Virginia, the only Congressional representation the 700,000 residents of D.C. get is a single non-voting delegate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_of_Columbia%27s_at-la...
>Due to its unique status as a “Federal district” ceded to the government by Maryland and Virginia,
It should be noted that Virginia's portion was given back -- retrocession -- in 1847. This is why one option that comes up for providing voting rights is to give the non-federal government portions of DC back to Maryland. This would keep the Federal District separate from any state; but, residents of what is currently DC would have voting representation.
What was Virgina's contribution is Arlington County, VA.
I hope this happens. Native Americans have unique challenges. A thing I ran across on twitter: Native Americans were being de facto disenfranchised because they couldn't use a PO Box as an address for purposes of voter registration and the reservations they were on only had PO Boxes as addresses for the residents.
I am guessing that this wasn't conscious and intentional. I'm not suggesting some conspiracy theory to purposely disenfranchise them. But the sorts of issues Indigenous peoples face are not faced by most other Americans and they at least need a voice to begin educating the powers that be about ways in which their reality is overlooked and how this negatively impacts them.
I suspect it is 100% intentional and they know exactly what they are doing sadly - property ownership or a fixed address is not a prerequisite to voting and it isn't permissible to establish new reasons for ineligibility. There is sadly a rich tradition of screwing people over and ignoring the plain text of the law.
Social Security numbers aren't intended to be a national ID. Social Security cards have no address or photo. They just have your name and social security number. They are flimsy cardboard, not plastic, and I think they state right on it that laminating it invalidates the card.
They aren't designed to be used like ID. They are designed to actively undermine attempts to use them as ID.
This varies by state, but note that, in North Dakota, for example, the 911 coordinator can have an address assigned in a quick process: https://vip.sos.nd.gov/pdfs/Portals/VotingInformationforTrib.... Voting in places that lack infrastructure people tend to take for granted (fixed addresses) definitely poses challenges that state officials must address. I suspect at least with larger reservations, progress could be made by delegating more control over voting and polling places to tribal governments.
At the same time (as reflected in the comments below), people unfairly deride any sort of voter identification requirement as a conscious attempt at disenfranchisement, when in reality U.S. states have some of the laxest voter identification requirements in the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_Identification_laws. I voted recently in Maryland, and I was actually quite shocked and a little perturbed how little verification was performed at the polling site. (I didn't have to show ID, just wrote down my address. Anyone could've pretended to be me.)
I was homeless for a few years. I'm abundantly familiar with how lacking the usual assumed default living arrangements can negatively impact one's life.
I'm also quite clear that most of it was not some intentional effort to make my life unnecessarily harder. I certainly ran into genuine prejudice and discrimination, but most problems I wrestled with incidentally happened to be more challenging because my life didn't neatly fit standard assumptions.
I've generally found it helpful in life to not assume malice where ignorance/obliviousness are sufficient explanations.
And if two people claimed to be you, it would raise red flags. Although it would not be possible to annul the earlier vote, the incident would be investigated, and in all likely hood be a widely reported news item.
In my recent memory, reported voter fraud has been in maybe a few broad categories:
Communications intended to dissuade people from voting (a notice claiming the election was moved to another day)
An ineligible person being allowed to register, but later determined ineligible and charged with a crime (a felon voting in a state where that's not permitted)
Someone voting under the name of a dead person, usually absentee, usually a relative of the deceased.
An ID requirement may solve the last one, if the fraud is happening in person, but not if absentee. And it might solve the hypothetical case where people are voting in other people's names. However, it causes real problems for people who have trouble getting a government ID. It might be reasonable to do it in concert with a program to ensure everyone can get an ID issued, but these initiatives have not often been done together. Imagine how hard it would be to get ID if you didn't have it already: if you need to go to a government office, I hope the bus goes there, because you can't drive without ID; if you don't have ID, it may be hard to get an official birth certificate, since a notary may be reluctant to certify they verified your identity; if you need to go to the records office in person, travel without ID is much more difficult; some people may not have had a certified birth, or may not know where thseir certified birth happened, or their birth name. Certainly, these conditions would bring challenges to many aspects of someone's life, but imparing their constitutional right to vote seems a step too far.
That is a terrible example to lean on. Gay people did exactly that. They organized, persisted and got gay marriage legalized, with relatively very little help (out of the total population) and an immense amount of resistance. The extreme majority were against them for decades.
You can in fact get something legalized in precisely that manner as a tiny minority. You don't require a 50.1% vote to convince the Supreme Court to rule in your favor. The US is not a majority rule democracy. One person, one case, can change the country dramatically through the Supreme Court. Historically individual rights take precedence over whim-based mob rule in the US. If that were not true, gay marriage would probably still be illegal, as there remained a large amount of mob resistance to it when it was legalized.
> I am guessing that this wasn't conscious and intentional.
I'd assume the exact opposite. We know for a fact that e.g. lawmakers have requested IDs listing classified by frequency of ownership / use, so they would allow and reject IDs based on which group used them most.
This sort of strategy is perfectly in line with what Atwater explained in his infamous '81 interview: abstracted impact and plausible deniability (as long as the emails where you explain why you're doing this don't get leaked, and even then it might go through regardless).
>Some organizations could mount legal challenges to the Cherokee Nation's push for a delegate, Rosser added, potentially arguing that the move gives citizens of the tribe more representation in Congress than non-indigenous US citizens.
This is going to prevent the representative from being seated. This is why tribes opposed the Indian Citizen Act of 1924 [1] in the first place; they were afraid that giving all Indians citizenship would fundamentally change the nature of their relationship with the US government.
The Cherokee can't have it both ways. They can't have American citizenship—and, thus, representation in Congress in Oklahoma or elsewhere—and an extra delegate of their own. Such exists in New Zealand, but that's explicitly provided for by law, and it's controversial; the New Zealand First Party,[2] which a few years ago held all seven Maori seats,[3] has a policy of wanting to abolish said seats, and no longer runs candidates for them.
It can be done. In New Zealand, our indigenous population (Māori) has New Zealand citizenship, and has an opt-in seperate electoral roll which has 7 seats of the 120 seat parliament [1]. Māori citizens have the choice whether to vote on the "General roll" or the "Māori roll".
This acts to ensure indigenous people always have a voice in parliament, and is seen as fulfillment of the treaty obligations on which this country is founded. This -combined with "mixed member proportional" style voting largely prevents any attempts at racist gerrymandering.
In practice, while the number of seats may not be large, MMP governments frequently are made from coalitions between parties, meaning that both our two largest parties are interested in contesting either the seats themselves or securing an alliance with whichever smaller party might win them, meaning the presence of these seats does translate into actual policy concessions to our indigenous people.
I should note here that at the time of its historical origin in 1867, the seperate Māori roll was compulsory for Māori, and was intended as a way to disenfranchise Māori by proportionally reducing their influence.
I always thought the Māori electorate was a way to give Māori voting rights while acknowledging that they didn't have the same concept of land ownership as the colonists. At the time voting was tied to land ownership. The Māori electorate is tied to race and not land ownership like the general electorate was.
For reference, the Māori seats were created in 1867 during the period where much Māori land was confiscated by govt, provoking wars, and the property ownership requirement for voting in the general roll (basically for "white" people, which in NZ are now referred to as "Pakehā") was scrapped a little over a decade later in 1879; while for almost the next century Māori were forced to participate on only the Māori roll, determining only handful of available seats -effectively forcing them into underrepresentation - until 1976.
If we were to say the intent was to "give Māori voting rights", I think it could be far more fairly characterized as "give Māori some voting rights but systematically ensure that this counts for substantially less than their non-Māori peers".
Māori electorate seats have a "controversial" history in the same way anything related to the Treaty of Waitangi does. Anything related to the treaty and it's settlements will always bring out the noisy racists.
Winston Peters, the leader of the New Zealand First Party is known to say and do anything to ruffle feathers and make the days front page. If you kept researching, you'd see he back pedaled hard on his Māori seat comments and said it should be voted on by a referendum. Then, in the most recent election he "compromised" even further and dropped the idea completely because he knew labour (coalition partner) wouldn't tolerate that shit.
After all the shit the invader ruling classes in the United States did to the native population it's in fact THE LEAST it could do. Political representation is a very very small gesture to address invasion of homeland and subjugation of all of its people by Europeans. Too bad nothing similar happened to the British or the Germans where we are arguing that they can't have a very small political place in what is in effect their land occupied by foreign invaders.
> The Cherokee can't have it both ways. They can't have American citizenship—and, thus, representation in Congress in Oklahoma or elsewhere—and an extra delegate of their own.
The Cherokee nation initially inhabited parts of what you now call Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Alabama. If they are in Oklahoma now is due to ethnic cleansing.
The Cherokee have a more legitimate claim to representation than you do. They have been here for thousands of years, you just got here.
If you want to appeal to fairness there are a lot of things that are wrong about your narrative.
I think your argument makes some sense logically, but I conjecture that a workaround would be by means of two criteria: 1) being an (extreme) minority and 2) having some kind of historical status (in contrast to minorities that are newer to the continent).
The US has made treaties with many Native American nations. "American law is that international accords become part of the body of U.S. federal law." (same Wikipedia page).
> The government eventually broke the terms of the treaty following the Black Hills Gold Rush and an expedition into the area by George Armstrong Custer in 1874, and failed to prevent white settlers from moving onto tribal lands. ... The 1868 treaty would be modified three times by the US Congress between 1876 and 1889, each time taking more land originally granted, including unilaterally seizing the Black Hills in 1877.
Thus, if treaties are supposed to be legally binding, and it is broken in order to take more land, then that land is illegally occupied, yes?
Indeed,
> On June 30, 1980, the US Supreme Court ruled that the government had illegally taken land in the Black Hills granted by the 1868 treaty, by unlawfully abrogating article two of the agreement during negotiations in 1876, while failing to achieve the signatures of two-thirds the adult male population required to do so.
Thus, it's also possible to take more than a century for the courts to recognize that the land was taken illegally.
I feel like "universal moral concept" is a different concept. Treaties are also not universal moral concepts either, are they? Yet you see people refer to treaties as being legally binding.
It's not hard to believe that constitutional issues could prevent the Cherokee from getting their own representative. That doesn't mean it's not worth it for them to push the issue, though. Even if they do not, ultimately, succeed in getting a representative, maybe they can get other concessions. They do have a treaty, after all.
For comparison: I live in Poland. Here legislative power is called "Sejm" and deputies are selected in elections (as usual in typical European country).
However, there are two places in Sejm, for German minorities deputies. There are barely few thousand Germans living in Poland but in location surrounding Opole city. These people have two representatives in our Sejm.
78 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 139 ms ] threadOdds are the Cherokee would appoint a de facto Republican. They're largely conservative and entrepreneurial Oklahomans. The Cherokee Nation runs a bunch of gambling, energy, and defense contracting businesses.
It's beyond amusing to me that Elizabeth Warren tried to claim in to the Cherokee; that tribe had almost no inclination to overlook her stretching.
But the current Republican party is unlikely to give any extra votes to people of color, because it's a symbolic victory for Progressivism. It's part of why many folks on the right wing have a visceral dislike of President Obama. (You can guess the other 2 big reasons)
So, if true that the Cherokee would likely appoint Republican candidates, and in general vote Republican, it's a sure thing they won't be allowed to get representation. For various reasons, nobody in power is inclined to derive a "win" from it.
Which is unfortunate, because it's the least we can do. It's worth pointing out that Native Americans pay federal income taxes, and Taxation without Representation has, let's say, a bit of a History in this country.
In the survey at the heart of the paper, "a majority of American Indians voted Republican in the presidential and U.S. House elections." American Indians in Oklahoma are more likely to identify as Democrat than their white counterparts, but a majority still vote Republican. They're social conservatives, but economic interventionists.
Native Americans have had long experience with "help" from Washington, especially on social integration. They understand it isn't all roses.
If the GOP could get a half believable message out there that they're actually, really and honestly, a conservative patriotic free market party for all races and religions, I think they could completely dominate US elections for decades.
But, much like the Democrats, they just can't help being really bad at seeming decent and competent.
If it’s for everybody then it’s for nobody. This is called civic nationalism and it’s a globalist wet dream. The only other groups I respect are ones advocating for their own people like I’m doing.
It would only be for conservative, patriotic, free market supporters.
That's far from everybody and far from not standing for anything.
Things have changed so much in the last half few decades that a true conservative doesn’t want to conserve anything and is more of a revolutionary.
Contingent on their collectively desire for such an arrangement of course as agency is important and well -learning from history of nations arising from arbitrary divisions causing problems.
They were promised a delegate to Congress. Not statehood, which is what I'm responding to. I think they should get their delegate if they want it, just because it's the law.
None of us voted to become citizens.
'Wiping the slate clean' is a noble path to peace when both sides have done something wrong; it is a far less noble idea when the injustice was severely one-sided, instead it can actually make the injustice worse.
Suppose someone had -unprovoked- attacked you violently and and taken your home and possessions, and then moved his family into what used to be your home. Then suppose his family, still living in that house and intending to continue doing so, suddenly proposed 'wiping the slate clean'. Would you be right in suspecting their proposal of 'wiping the slate clean' to be in this case completely self-serving?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee
It also begs the question: What are the Romans and the Arabs going to give my country in return for having conquered us 2000 and 1000 years ago, respectively.
White colonists have had the upper hand for a few centuries now. It's undeniable that some indigenous groups are still actively suffering from the colonial occupation in the USA. Any and all attempts to help level the playing field are laudable.
If you feel like you are currently underserved by your state as a result of the Roman / Arabic occupation of your state then I hope you too are seeking to redress the balance.
Chereokee were oppressing the other tribes before the arrival of the Europeans and then fighting along the Europeans in order to dominate other tribes.
(Despite this, they are of course taxed the same as everyone else, creating a weird modern-day case of “taxation without representation”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_taxation_without_representa...)
A couple other interesting things related:
1) One East Coast tribe was not defeated militarily. It's lands were gradually nibbled away with lawyering (zoning changes) over a period of decades.
2) During the Western Indian Wars, an equal number of soldiers and warriors died on both sides, about 10,000 each.
It should be noted that Virginia's portion was given back -- retrocession -- in 1847. This is why one option that comes up for providing voting rights is to give the non-federal government portions of DC back to Maryland. This would keep the Federal District separate from any state; but, residents of what is currently DC would have voting representation.
What was Virgina's contribution is Arlington County, VA.
I am guessing that this wasn't conscious and intentional. I'm not suggesting some conspiracy theory to purposely disenfranchise them. But the sorts of issues Indigenous peoples face are not faced by most other Americans and they at least need a voice to begin educating the powers that be about ways in which their reality is overlooked and how this negatively impacts them.
Also, it occurs to me that representation is based on residency. A homeless guy in my city isn't necessarily a resident of exactly one district.
Here, every national has a unique citizen card, but in the US it's stranger, using driver's license since there's no citizen ID...
They aren't designed to be used like ID. They are designed to actively undermine attempts to use them as ID.
The US is a long way off from a national ID.
Not saying that’s explicitly what’s happening here but there’s quite a precedent for such a conspiracy.
At the same time (as reflected in the comments below), people unfairly deride any sort of voter identification requirement as a conscious attempt at disenfranchisement, when in reality U.S. states have some of the laxest voter identification requirements in the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_Identification_laws. I voted recently in Maryland, and I was actually quite shocked and a little perturbed how little verification was performed at the polling site. (I didn't have to show ID, just wrote down my address. Anyone could've pretended to be me.)
I'm also quite clear that most of it was not some intentional effort to make my life unnecessarily harder. I certainly ran into genuine prejudice and discrimination, but most problems I wrestled with incidentally happened to be more challenging because my life didn't neatly fit standard assumptions.
I've generally found it helpful in life to not assume malice where ignorance/obliviousness are sufficient explanations.
And if two people claimed to be you, it would raise red flags. Although it would not be possible to annul the earlier vote, the incident would be investigated, and in all likely hood be a widely reported news item.
In my recent memory, reported voter fraud has been in maybe a few broad categories:
Communications intended to dissuade people from voting (a notice claiming the election was moved to another day)
An ineligible person being allowed to register, but later determined ineligible and charged with a crime (a felon voting in a state where that's not permitted)
Someone voting under the name of a dead person, usually absentee, usually a relative of the deceased.
An ID requirement may solve the last one, if the fraud is happening in person, but not if absentee. And it might solve the hypothetical case where people are voting in other people's names. However, it causes real problems for people who have trouble getting a government ID. It might be reasonable to do it in concert with a program to ensure everyone can get an ID issued, but these initiatives have not often been done together. Imagine how hard it would be to get ID if you didn't have it already: if you need to go to a government office, I hope the bus goes there, because you can't drive without ID; if you don't have ID, it may be hard to get an official birth certificate, since a notary may be reluctant to certify they verified your identity; if you need to go to the records office in person, travel without ID is much more difficult; some people may not have had a certified birth, or may not know where thseir certified birth happened, or their birth name. Certainly, these conditions would bring challenges to many aspects of someone's life, but imparing their constitutional right to vote seems a step too far.
Isn't that like asking a gay person why they didn't just legalize gay marriage on their own?
You can in fact get something legalized in precisely that manner as a tiny minority. You don't require a 50.1% vote to convince the Supreme Court to rule in your favor. The US is not a majority rule democracy. One person, one case, can change the country dramatically through the Supreme Court. Historically individual rights take precedence over whim-based mob rule in the US. If that were not true, gay marriage would probably still be illegal, as there remained a large amount of mob resistance to it when it was legalized.
I learned this from actual Natives bitching about the problem. Seems like a perfectly fine source of information to me.
I'd assume the exact opposite. We know for a fact that e.g. lawmakers have requested IDs listing classified by frequency of ownership / use, so they would allow and reject IDs based on which group used them most.
This sort of strategy is perfectly in line with what Atwater explained in his infamous '81 interview: abstracted impact and plausible deniability (as long as the emails where you explain why you're doing this don't get leaked, and even then it might go through regardless).
This is going to prevent the representative from being seated. This is why tribes opposed the Indian Citizen Act of 1924 [1] in the first place; they were afraid that giving all Indians citizenship would fundamentally change the nature of their relationship with the US government.
The Cherokee can't have it both ways. They can't have American citizenship—and, thus, representation in Congress in Oklahoma or elsewhere—and an extra delegate of their own. Such exists in New Zealand, but that's explicitly provided for by law, and it's controversial; the New Zealand First Party,[2] which a few years ago held all seven Maori seats,[3] has a policy of wanting to abolish said seats, and no longer runs candidates for them.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Citizenship_Act
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Zealand_First
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Māori_electorates
This acts to ensure indigenous people always have a voice in parliament, and is seen as fulfillment of the treaty obligations on which this country is founded. This -combined with "mixed member proportional" style voting largely prevents any attempts at racist gerrymandering.
In practice, while the number of seats may not be large, MMP governments frequently are made from coalitions between parties, meaning that both our two largest parties are interested in contesting either the seats themselves or securing an alliance with whichever smaller party might win them, meaning the presence of these seats does translate into actual policy concessions to our indigenous people.
I should note here that at the time of its historical origin in 1867, the seperate Māori roll was compulsory for Māori, and was intended as a way to disenfranchise Māori by proportionally reducing their influence.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Māori_electorates
If we were to say the intent was to "give Māori voting rights", I think it could be far more fairly characterized as "give Māori some voting rights but systematically ensure that this counts for substantially less than their non-Māori peers".
Winston Peters, the leader of the New Zealand First Party is known to say and do anything to ruffle feathers and make the days front page. If you kept researching, you'd see he back pedaled hard on his Māori seat comments and said it should be voted on by a referendum. Then, in the most recent election he "compromised" even further and dropped the idea completely because he knew labour (coalition partner) wouldn't tolerate that shit.
The Cherokee nation initially inhabited parts of what you now call Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Alabama. If they are in Oklahoma now is due to ethnic cleansing.
The Cherokee have a more legitimate claim to representation than you do. They have been here for thousands of years, you just got here.
If you want to appeal to fairness there are a lot of things that are wrong about your narrative.
The US has made treaties with many Native American nations. "American law is that international accords become part of the body of U.S. federal law." (same Wikipedia page).
It has also broken some of these treaties. Eg, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Fort_Laramie_(1868) :
> The government eventually broke the terms of the treaty following the Black Hills Gold Rush and an expedition into the area by George Armstrong Custer in 1874, and failed to prevent white settlers from moving onto tribal lands. ... The 1868 treaty would be modified three times by the US Congress between 1876 and 1889, each time taking more land originally granted, including unilaterally seizing the Black Hills in 1877.
Thus, if treaties are supposed to be legally binding, and it is broken in order to take more land, then that land is illegally occupied, yes?
Indeed,
> On June 30, 1980, the US Supreme Court ruled that the government had illegally taken land in the Black Hills granted by the 1868 treaty, by unlawfully abrogating article two of the agreement during negotiations in 1876, while failing to achieve the signatures of two-thirds the adult male population required to do so.
Thus, it's also possible to take more than a century for the courts to recognize that the land was taken illegally.
I feel like "universal moral concept" is a different concept. Treaties are also not universal moral concepts either, are they? Yet you see people refer to treaties as being legally binding.
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics [...] If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
This article is about U.S. internal politics and literally starts with a TV show segment.