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Probably no other country would take quite so seriously land claims that propose, in effect, the impossible rolling back of history. The inherent absurdity of such a proposition might be clearer, say, in a suggestion that Australia be handed back to the aborigines. Even the angry blacks of South Africa are not openly challenging the right of possession held by descendants of the whites who invaded that land long ago. Surely one of the oldest realities of the earth is that the dispersal of all population has been by conquest, dispossession and conquest again. And if history could be unwritten, the world simply would not be the world. England would be bereft of the English and France of the French.
Whatever settlements are reached in the U.S. must, of course, be weighed by Congress. Congress should be able to be fair without suffering the delusion that the country can really be given back to the Indians. The time for that passed forever with the vanishing of the pioneers who took it from them. Frank Trippett