Last week, John Stossell said that "no group in America has been more helped by the government than the American Indians." There was immediate pushback, but now there's some pushback against FOX as a whole from Native Americans:
The obtuse rhetorical questions have created groans of outrage from coast-to-coast in Indian Country and prompted Chief Allan, chairman of the Coeur d'Alene Tribal Council, to write a letter to Fox News president Roger Ailes demanding an apology from Stossel and the network.
"In a matter of minutes, Mr. Stossel made a series of misinformed and irresponsible statements that has insulted an entire population of Native Americans and highlighted his level of disrespect and misunderstanding toward Indians," Allan writes in his letter.
Neither Stossel nor the other Fox personalities in the segment are aware that, unlike other minorities or ethnicities, Indians have a unique relationship with the federal government through executive orders and treaties made as — often scant — compensation for land grabs, conquests and genocide.
Had Stossel been better informed, Allan writes, he may have learned "U.S. military campaigns ordered to forcibly remove Indians from those lands, did so with lies, deception and ultimately by slaughtering our men, women and children."
The entire letter can be found here.
Also, it's worth noting that the Constitution practically demands the existence of a Bureau of Indian Affairs. – Congress is specifically charged with regulating commerce "with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes." To make a very long story short (i.e.: the framers did not explain well at all what the status of tribes were, mostly because it did not come up much), the Constitution has been interpreted as saying that Indians are not part of states, and that the federal government has to deal with them. That's why there's a Bureau of Indian Affairs, john Stossel. The same reason there's a State Department or a Treasury Department: the federal government has specific agencies to do the specific duties the Constitution lays out.
But this is a somewhat charitable interpretation: the reality has been worse. One of the most famous Indian cases is Cherokee Nation v. Georgia. In this case, famed Justice John Marshall held that "domestic dependent" nations did not own legal title to the land (no matter how long they had held it) but instead legal title was held by the United States, and these native populations could use it. This meant that Native American tribes could only sell their land to the United States government. In essence, this made Native populations the wards of the United States.
This has been the rationale used throughout all of American history to oppress Native American populations: that they are wards of the state that America must do something with. That's how we've ended up with Indian wars, forced relocations, and essentially genocide. For John Stossel to repurpose this as something good for Native Americans is truly astonishing. Stossel is lucky to still be employed.
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