Bobbie Conner - Treaty Impacts and Property Rights [extended version]

Summary: 
Bobbie Connner describes the multiple impacts on indigenous cultures of dividing people into tribal nations, including forced changes to land ownership and segregation into boarding schools.
Description: 

The following text is a transcription of this video.
"So what we experience now on the river sometimes is hard and I don't think most white people understand that when the government went through the treaty process they said okay you people, you Cayuse, Umatilla, Walla Wallas and other Indians living in Southeast Washington and Northeast Oregon are now this confederate tribes and what you own, you own as as tribe and we're extinguishing all your ownership of your fishing sites on the river, we're extinguishing. It's not in the treaty language but this is what they did by that treaty. They extinguished the individual property rights of all of our campsites in the hunting grounds, all of our campsites in the berry picking fields, all of our digging sites and all of our scaffolds. Those were no longer individually owned by families, they became collective ownership. So they extinguished that kind of structure, infrastructure in our families and then took the children away and put them in boarding schools where they had a loss of cultural transmission for a few years. And then in the ‘50s, through relocation and termination, continued to try to break down the fabric of our social structure. And now we're trying to do things to put it back together. And I don't know that we'll ever be whole cloth. We may look different, we may sound different, but we'll still be here."