Perhaps one of the most revealing cases of the disappearance of the other in a terrible place is that of the confinement of North America’s native population in the more than 300 reservations that currently exist in the United States and that have a total population of about a million people. These reservations have their origin in the lands that the natives surrendered, often under pressure or deceit, to the government of the United States after the first peace treaties. These treaties, which were carried out between entities with sovereignty, were constantly violated by the government of the United States, especially when it was discovered that indigenous lands had precious metals such as gold. In total, about 400 treaties were signed and later violated by the government to appropriate 800 million hectares of native territories. This dishonorable attitude, which has condemned the indigenous populations of North America ever since, was succinctly expressed by Sioux Chief Sitting Bull:
What treaty that the whites have kept has the red man broken? Not one. What treaty that the whites ever made with us red men have they kept? Not one. When I was a boy the Sioux owned the world. The sun rose and set on their lands. They sent ten thousand horsemen to battle. Where are the warriors today? Who slew them? Where are our lands? Who owns them? What white man can say that I ever stole his lands or a penny of his money? Yet they say I am a thief.1
Indian reservations like Pine Ridge, South Dakota, are true ghettos without walls (7.11, 7.13). Disgraceful repositories of alterity in which a large part of the population succumbs to addiction, alcoholism, domestic and sexual violence, and gang wars.
The Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, also known as the Pine Ridge Agency, or Wazí Ahánhan Oyánke in Lakota, was established in 1889, in the southwest corner of South Dakota for the Oglala Sioux after Washington broke up the Great Sioux Reservation… [It] is the the eighth largest reservation in the United States, larger than the states of Delaware and Rhode Island combined. Population estimates on the reservation run from twenty-eight to forty thousand. In addition to high unemployment, forty-nine percent of those on the reservation live below the poverty level, a figure that rises to sixty-one percent for all those under the age of sixteen. The infant mortality rate is five times the national average. The teen suicide rate is 159 percent of the national average. At any given moment more than sixty percent of the dwellings including sod huts that can hold as many as as a dozen people, lack electricity or running water.
The invisible borders that have segregated the native population of America—meaning the entire continent, not just the United States (6.10)—follow the “westward” pattern of expansion of the domus and of human domination, which cancels out huge segments of the population (and the natural world) and condemns them to oblivion and alterity.
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