A report published this week by a Native American-led non-profit examines in detail the dispossession of $1.7tn worth of Indigenous homelands in Colorado by the state and the US – and the more than $546m the state has reaped in mineral extraction from them.
The report, shared first with the Associated Press, identifies 10 tribal nations that have “aboriginal title, congressional title and treaty title to lands within Colorado” and details the ways the land was legally and illegally taken. It determined that many of the transactions were in direct violation of treaty rights or in some cases lacked title for a legal transfer.
“Once we were removed, they just simply started divvying up the land, creating parcels and selling it to non-Natives and other interests and businesses,” said Dallin Maybee, an artist, legal scholar and enrolled member of the Northern Arapaho Tribe who took part in the Truth, Restoration and Education Commission, which compiled the report.
“When you think about examples of land theft,” Maybee continued, “that is one of the most blatant instances that we could see.”
The commission was convened by People of the Sacred Land, a Colorado-based non-profit that works to document the history of Indigenous displacement in the state. The commission and its report are modeled after similar truth and reconciliation commissions that sought to comprehensively account for genocide and the people still affected by those acts and governmental policies.
The report also recommends actions that can be taken by the state, the federal government and Congress, including honoring treaty rights by resolving illegal land transfers; compensating the tribal nations affected; restoring hunting and fishing rights; and levying a 0.1% fee on real estate deals in Colorado to “mitigate the lasting effects of forced displacement, genocide and other historical injustices”.
“If acknowledgment is the first step, then what is the second step?” Maybee said. “That’s where some of the treaties come in. They guaranteed us health and welfare and education, and we just simply want them to live up to those promises.”
That could look something like what happened not long ago in Canada, where, following the conclusion of a truth and reconciliation commission in 2015, the government set aside $4.7bn to support Indigenous communities affected by its Indian residential schools.
The US currently has no similar commission, but a bipartisan bill co-sponsored by congressman Tom Cole, a Republican of Oklahoma and a Chickasaw Nation citizen, and congresswoman Sharice Davids, a Democrat of Kansas and a citizen of the Ho-Chunk Nation, would establish a commission to research and document the long-term effects of the Indian boarding school system in the US. That measure passed the House education and workforce committee on Thursday with bipartisan support.
“The United States carried out a federal policy of genocide and extermination against Native peoples, and their weapon against our youngest and most vulnerable was the policy of Indian Boarding Schools,” said Ben Barnes, chief of the Shawnee Tribe.
The commission also found that Native American students in Colorado have lower high school graduation rates and higher dropout rates than any other racial demographic. It determined that state schools teach about Native American issues only once in elementary school and then again in high school US history classes, and it called on the Colorado department of education to increase the amount of its curriculum that focuses on the histories, languages and modern cultures of tribal nations that are indigenous to the state.
The education department said in a statement that it is “committed to elevating and honoring our Indigenous communities”.