Sunday, August 3, 2014

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   To me I find this picture of wild horses living within their environment happy and strong and a sense of familiarity to their environment in which they live and roam with questions of where they originated and if they are native to the area or not involving their inherit rights to roam freely on the ranges in the West,  as a theme in taking away a group of wildlife which are native, further questioning of this animals freedom and right to live freely within North America as another form of a motive from individuals or business to serve as further personal gains, with no recourse by  forcing these wild horses  to leave a peaceful land in which they have roamed their entire lives as well as generations prior.     
   
               Many Indian groups still struggle with health issues and lack of money to survive and live in poverty. Many still strive to re claim their heritage and culture by taking back what is rightly theirs. The lands in which their ancestor's harvest and lived and gave birth to their fathers and their mother's for generations. Today the "Buy Back Program" is beginning to be implemented at Crow Nation, Fort Belknap, and Fort Peck to facilitate purchases from individual landowners.

              American wild horses are descended from domestic horses, some originating from the horses that Europeans brought to America when they began to settle here. Today the federal government is aware that special interest groups are concerned that the groups do not want to see any more wild horses taken from lands and ranges. Different view points concerning the horses falling under "native" have furthered the question of rights in which recently a petition was filed June 11, 2014 in which recent research concluded that the modern horse "genus Equus" originated in North American 3 to 4 million years ago, spread to Eurasia by crossing the Bering land Bridge 2  to 3 million years ago and became extinct in North America approximately 13,000 years ago. Jay F. Kirskpatrick, a leader in horse reproduction in Billings, Montana

             After 1913, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled lands be granted to Southwestern Indian groups by Spanish crown from three centuries prior, now being classified as reservations. After this decision over 3 thousand non Indian families who were living illegal on Pueblo lands were evicted. To counter the ruling in 1921 New Mexico Senator Holm Bursum drafted a bill validating claims of individuals who had squatted on Pueblo land from 1902 or earlier. Approximately 18 tribes were affected and could lose at least 60 thousand acres, as long as their old form of self government due to an appended clause regarding domestic quarrels being controlled by white man's court system. Many Indians viewed this Bursum bill as related to revived campaigns by the Bureau of Indian Affairs and various missionary organizations to condemn ceremonies for making rains come and the crops grow as "heathenish" and immoral." The bill was defeated as a result of lobbyist and new polices for Indians were being established to review and revise Indian policy through the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

References: Nabokov, P. 1991

1 comment:

  1. First of all I never knew that about the horses....very interesting. There have been many instances where people are on tribal lands and have no claim what so ever to them. In my discussion for this mod I made comments about a family that was removed form my reservation. Their father was an enrolled Seneca however the mother was non native. So the Seneca Nation ruled that they had no rights to live on our Territory. So they were given 30 days to vacate the premises and had to move their modular homes elsewhere. It was sad to see but I can understand why the government did it. The City of Salamanca is actually leased out by the Seneca Nation so even though they couldn't live on the reservation they could still reside within the city limits. There was obviously hard feelings and things were said but in the end they agreed and understood why it had to be done.

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