The latest bad news about Indian reservations is getting worse; but there is a silver lining. U.S. Attorney Ken Gonzales says violence on Indian reservations is “a kind of brutality that I don’t think a lot of people understand completely.” Homicides, child sexual assaults, and domestic violence against women are commonplace.

Columnist Nicholas Kristoff discusses poverty and “suffocating hopelessness” as characteristics of reservation life. He suggests changes in Tribal land laws and more traditional cultural education as responses.

The New York Times reports “epidemic levels” of child abuse on the Spirit Lake reservation. U.S. Attorney Timothy Purdon asked the Bureau of Indian Affairs, “What are you doing to make sure we’re responding to this appropriately?”

The question of what is appropriate is key. It needs to be answered by prosecutors, educators, and B.I.A. personnel, and, especially, by people working with federal Indian law. Federal Indian law is the reason reservations are failing and people are being suffocated by hopelessness. Here are some analytical steps to demonstrate this:

• federal Indian law is the infrastructure of American Indian reservations

• federal Indian law is founded on the Doctrine of Christian Discovery

• the Doctrine of Christian Discovery is racist religious domination under the appearance of law

• racist religious domination produces generational psychological and sociological dysfunctions

• generational psychological and social dysfunctions produce crime and interpersonal abuse

• the appropriate fundamental response to crime and abuse is to heal the causative dysfunctions

• the way to heal the dysfunctions is to remove the root domination

• the way to remove the root domination is to repeal the Doctrine of Christian Discovery

• repealing the Doctrine of Christian Discovery will purge the core of federal Indian law

• a purged federal Indian law will consist of respectful government-to-government relations

• respectful government-to-government relations is the opposite of domination

The first practical step to implement this analysis is to overturn Tee-Hit-Ton v. United States. That goal deserves to be on the to-do list of every lawyer working to improve the conditions of American Indian life. It’s that simple, which is not to say that it is easy.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE: Christian Discovery as Source of Reservation Crime – ICTMN.com.