Happy Thanksgiving!

Will do, assuming I even get a receipt.

By the way, you should donate to those charities too. It's the least we can do for our part in the invasion & capture of North America (assuming you're white).

Spirit Bomb I bet you're a blast at parties.

Balder Really? He thinks you should all be miserable about something. He thinks all white Americans should somehow be accountable for stuff that happened long, long ago, even though no one alive today was responsible for said crimes. Someone needs to get off his soapbox and chill!

BTW you, Cervantes and I aren't even American or in America. Why are we even in this thread?

It is just one of those Holidays in which everyone likes to participate. Over here you see familes from all different kinds of races, religious background, and ethnicities celebrating it on their own. I had always been fascinated by that phenomenon.

My guess is that if people have an excuse to make a feast, they will do it just for the sake of feasting.

Luckily, my amazing qualities are self evident. Unlike Balder, I don't need to promise to watch a movie that everyone else has already seen hundreds of times or suck up to anyone who will listen in hopes that they might like me. 

You're definitely going to want to ask for a receipt, unless you like paying taxes on money you've given away.

Your heart is in the right place, Maestro, but unfortunately giving to an American Indian charity will do little to nothing for the people you're trying to help. And they do need some help.

The situation that the Indians find themselves in is terrible. They are statistically the poorest race in the U.S. as well as the least educated, but that's not for a lack of funds. The Federal government has at least three agencies I can think of devoted solely to the Indians which employ thousands of government workers with annual budgets in the billions of dollars.

If nothing else, we should look to the Indians as a cautionary tale of what happens when you strip people of their incentive to work and take away their individual property rights. The Indians, believe it or not, do not own their reservations. That land is owned by the Federal government and held in a trust for the tribal leaders. What that means for the individual Indian is that he doesn't own the land he lives on. He can't sell it and no one can buy it. In an ideal world, you might expect that would build a sense of community, that the tribe would work together for the common good. In practice, no one invests in the land because it isn't theirs. In economics we call this the "Tragedy of the Commons."

The land the Indians live on is actually good land. We know this because the surrounding properties are often doing much better than the reservation. Plus, the Indians are sitting on billions of dollars of resources - coal, natural gas, uranium. Unfortunately, because the land isn't theirs, no one mines it and no one profits from it.

The answer for why that is the way it is, is complicated. Part of it is government interference - reservations are heavily regulated by the Feds on what can and cannot be done with the land. The other part is Indian reclusiveness. The Indian tribes have their own courts, separate from the State. That makes doing business on a reservation risky for outsiders, who can have deals changed or disregarded by courts that are less than impartial. I hate to use a stereotype, but when the courts have such an incentive to rule one way over the other (remember, a deal that's good for your tribe is also good for you) it's easy to be an Indian Giver. 

That reclusive behavior is, I think, just part of their current culture. They are afraid of assimilating and losing their heritage and they suffer for it. Tribal leaders don't want property rights because they fear it will destroy  their tribal communalism. And even if they wanted it, I doubt they'd get it. Remember those agencies I mentioned? They love the way it is right now - It's how they keep their jobs!