#cherokee

Something I feel is not brought up often enough in the discussion of land back and the indigenous genocide of the United States in white spaces especially is that they were running over entire sovereign states. The Cherokee were themselves an industrializing nation that was more literate than the United States itself before Andrew Jackson enacted his genocide, the Haudenosaunee were a state propped up by the west for a long time before they decided them to not be useful anymore, the Lakota were legally recognized as a sovereign nation by the United States government before they tore them down. Reservations today are still technically "sovereign" nations even if you never see them on the map and they're about as sovereign as the West Bank, they still don't get to govern themselves or return to their lands.