Let’s talk about liberals and conservatives, in spite of the fact that Indian issues do not split that way. Environmental and economic issues do split that way, and Indians have not yet figured out how to segregate air and water and wildlife. To the extent reservation economies are segregated from the globalized economy, that’s a bad thing, because it turns reservations into political money pits and our status into perpetual dependency.

The bad rap on liberals is they want to tax and spend and rely on government for everything. News flash: all humans rely on their governments for things they cannot provide for themselves. If some liberals seem ignorant of the truth that there’s no such thing as a free lunch, then it’s up to voters to educate them.

American Indians have great insight to contribute about the perils of dependence. We have been made dependent on purpose to suit the goals of the colonists that we assimilate or die, and breaking free of that purposefully imposed dependence is our central political problem, made more complex by US and Canadian politicians who paint us as shiftless welfare skates.

Sometimes we buy into our designated role as welfare skates, and that’s as tragic as politics gets. Let us consider who is on welfare and who skates in terms of policy issues on the front burner in the US right now.