PragerU Live: New York Post Columnist Naomi Riley (4/25/17)

hey everyone I'm Elicia Krauss here once again at the Prager U Q with another great Facebook live for you this week featuring our presenter of this week's video Naomi Riley She's a New York Post columnist and author of the new book the new trail of teers and her new video is up on prageru.com of course and you can watch it here on Facebook as well American Indians are still getting a raw deal and it has over 600,000 views since it's released yesterday Naomi thanks so much for being with us today thanks for having me we really appreciate it I found your video incredibly fascinating I'm from the land of the red people which I guess is Politically Incorrect to say Oklahoma so I grew up with a lot of Native Americans have Native Americans in my family have Native American Heritage and uh I think that this is an issue that a lot of people are kind of aware of but not really educated about so I love this video that you brought us for Brer you this week thanks for doing that but most people assume that the government's history of hurting American Indians was back during the time of Andrew Jackson you know Trail of Tears and that we've made things right by giving them reservations and all of these government benefits billions of dollars of which you talked about in your video this week but did you find what did you find in the process I guess of writing your book the new Trail of Tears have we really helped them and benefited them in any way well I think you're right that most Americans are really not educated about these issues beyond what we learn in second or third grade about American Indian policies 100 or 150 years ago um in fact of course as everybody may recall the reservations were a way of pushing the Indians out of the way um so that we could pursue western expansion um but somehow the reservations now have morphed into a policy that we somehow view as protective of their interests uh that these are reservations where white people can't destroy their land in fact the reservations are a purely paternalistic policy whereby we restrict the rights of American Indians particularly their economic rights and their property rights um what a reservation means is that the land is held in trust by the federal government um as I say in the video and in the book the only other people that we hold things in trust for legally are children and the mentally incompetent so I think that tells you just about where we are in terms of our views of American Indians today and our policies um but what that means in effect uh that we hold this land in trust it means that American Indians cannot buy it or sell it or use it as capital in order to make investments um they simply don't have the same kind of property rights and economic freedoms that other Americans do so how big of a problem for American Indians are the names of these sports teams that we always hear about in the news uh the Washington Redskins or Chief Wahoo mascot for the Cleveland Indians so um as I as I talk about a lot in the book uh the the indicators uh the social and economic indicators for American Indians are pretty horrendous um they are the most impoverished group in the country um they have uh higher rates of of child abuse of domestic abuse of alcoholism of suicide um of of violence even gang violence than any other racial group in the country um and a lot of this really does stem from uh the economic problems that they have um unfortunately I think a lot of our conversations about Native Americans this country have really focused on uh these debates over political correctness whether they be um you know team names or or other uh you know people are offended by Columbus Day or you know or Thanksgiving in some cases um but honestly you know these are not the issues that are really hurting American Indians in these communities today I mean if if you had uh you know if you had the highest suicide rate of any racial group in the country you know you would not be sitting around worrying about what the Washington you know DC residents call their football team uh so the federal government as your points out spends billions of dollars and has thousands of employees a year focused on serving or they're supposed to be serving American Indians do you think that it's helping make their lives any better I think it's really making their lives a lot worse and um a lot of American Indians will tell you this I mean I went to a bunch of reservations for this book and I interviewed a lot of American Indians on the ground and none of them are particularly happy with the way they are treated by the Bureau of Indian Affairs for for instance um as I say the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Bureau of Indian education have 9,000 employees among them um and that's about one employee for every 110 residents on a reservation and they're really micromanaged like children in some ways I mean the the I talked to one American in just to give you an example I was on the Northern Cheyenne reservation and I spoke to a man who basically wanted to uh buy a very small piece of land to raise some of his cattle on um and he wanted to purchase it from his neighbor who was another American Indian and they had spoken and the two of them had agreed on the price for this small parcel of land again just a few acres and then um a Bureau of Indian Affairs representative came in and said no you can't do that because we don't think that that's fair market value for the land now of course in any other uh you know real world situation fa market value is what people pay for the land it's not some madeup number in Washington DC by some bureaucrat but on Indian reservations that's what it is and the the particularly cruel irony of this situation is that this number had been made up because the Bureau of Indian Affairs had recently had the land appraised for a kind of buyback program they were doing and they specifically told the appraiser to make the appraisal high so is quote not to screw over the Indians wow and it screwed over at least two Indians circum fre time so can you explain because the land analogy there the story that you just shared can you explain the idea of land trusts and how American Indians really don't have total property rights if they own land on a reservation right so this is um there's a you know famous economist named Hernando doto and he he referred to this as dead Capital um you know if a lot of Americans obviously uh you know they want to purchase a house they go to a bank and they get a mortgage and if they for if they don't pay their mortgage payments the bank can foreclose on the house and the piece of land that they've tried to buy but if American Indian goes to a bank they can't get the same deal because the bank could never foreclose on the property because a bank cannot own reservation land and this affects people not only in terms of mortgages and by the way the housing situation on these reservations is perfectly horrendous I mean you have people squeezing you know 15 people into a trailer home because they can't afford a mortgage and you have these vast hundreds of thousands of empty acres and you have a housing shortage like it's Manhattan um but but more to the more the one of the bigger problems though is that American Indians also can't use that land then in order to start a small business um a lot of Americans when they want to start a business they use the collateral from their homes um in order to to borrow against it in order to start up a business but American Indians again they don't have access to that even though all the all other Americans do so do you believe that the reservation system was maybe set up with good intentions because it seems that's the amazing thing the reservation system was set up with terrible intentions it was set up with the intention of kind of warehousing these people but somehow we have sort of turned it into this thing where we're suggesting that now it has good intentions that now we're using it to protect them but in fact we're not protecting them and it goes by the way it goes far Beyond economics not only are we denying them economic rights but as I talk about in my book we Are denying them a decent education they have a terrible Health Care system and all of this is on the federal government we have no one to blame but the people in Washington we are even denying them proper constitutional protections American Indians on reservations are victims of crimes at just astronomical rates and it is because of overlapping jurisdictions and problems with you know tribal courts giving American Indians their proper rights um that that the rights of American Indians who are I should emphasize full American citizens are not being protected so is there any way to turn I guess the current reservation system or the way the federal government handles the American Indian Community around or do we just need to cut it off completely well the most interesting trip that I took for my book was to Canada actually and they have a similar situation up there they call it the Reserve System instead of reservations um but a number of the First Nations there have been pushing something through the Canadian Parliament called the first nation's property ownership act which would basically give tribes underlying title to the land so they would be like you know the city of Boston so even if American Indians bought and sold the land among themselves um the the land would not you know the the the ultimate title to it would be held by the tribe not by the national government and I think one of the things that's nice about the First Nations prop property ownership Act is that tribes can actually opt into it so you know if you're a tribe that believes you know you want totally communal property and you want the federal government to be protecting your land and be in charge of it at all costs you know so be it you can stick with what you have but if you are you know someone who is uh you know Native American and you really want your community to be able to experience the kind of economic growth that comes from having property rights you can opt into this legislation and it would be great to see something like that here as well so final question and on an entirely different topic I really loved your piece this week and aulter about the dangers of helicopter parenting you specifically talked about the scenario at the playground I have a three and a halfy old and I'm six months pregnant with kid number two and I'm sure you know like La is this Mecca of helicopter parents or and then the worst ones are the helicopter parents with the nannies too anyway but I was wondering if you have any thoughts as to whether Millennials could or should learn some valuable parenting lessons from their grandparents parents Generation Well they absolutely should um you know what prompted the piece I think was uh an Hathaway acknowledged that she had been uh sliding down a slide with her one-year-old and you know doctors will even tell you that this is dangerous because if you you know a 150 pound person is sitting behind you know a one-year-old on a slide gravity takes over and you get a lot of broken bones like this um so it's I think on a very practical level this shows you what the dangers of helicopter parenting are but in terms of Millennials I mean you know a lot of people are pointing to this kind of behavior as the reason that we're seeing this you know snowflake culture on college campuses now that these people have been hovered over and babied and overscheduled their whole lives um so yes I mean I really would like you know uh young people who are parenting today to kind of think like well you know what kind of kid would I like would I like a kid you know who's independent who is able to go down a slide by themselves um you know who who is able to experience the outdoors who is able to you know find things for themselves and walk to the park by themselves and you know I think that's one of the reasons why you know the kind of freerange parenting movement is gathering steam because people are looking at this and thinking you know maybe it's not the best thing for my children to be sort of raised in this hot house environment well thank you for that piece it was really great and everyone should be sure to watch Naomi's latest prageru video it's pinned to the our Facebook page right here R prayer you Facebook page and go to Amazon and get her book the new Trail of Tears Naomi thank you so much for your time today and thanks for this great video for us thank you have a great day