How America Accidentally Gave 20% of its Oil Reserves to the People it Was Trying to Murder

And the tactics of oppression that were used to steal those resources back

I took a class on treaty rights when I was in college. It was an interesting class, but I was still frustrated by what I perceived to be half-truths and an unwillingness to find fault with the actions of the United States.

To put it bluntly, conversations between colonizers and Native People were nothing more than declarations of an intent to commit genocide.

“We’re going to move you off this land forever. You have to move somewhere else and then pull yourself up by your own bootstraps.”

These were never fair or honest negotiations. Colonizers took advantage of language barriers to obtain marks on treaties that they could then use as legal justification for murder. History then turned around and patted the oppressors on the back.

In my college class, the professor declared that in our “enlightened” times, the legal policy is to interpret treaties in a way that most benefits the Native People. Then he smiled as if that was the fairest possible solution.

“So what happens if oil is found on a reservation?” I asked. “All landowners own the mineral rights in the United States. So if we’ve taken a ‘beneficial’ approach to interpret treaties, Native People must own the oil reserves on their reservations, right?”

The professor coughed.

Reservations were often rocky, barren landscapes

Upon their arrival, colonizers commenced slaughtering all the people already living peacefully on the American continent. Once a population had been decimated, the colonizers moved the survivors onto reservations.

Again, sanitized history textbooks say things like: “They generously gave them a new place to live.”

Except the reality is that marching people to the reservations was another way to murder them.

Meanwhile, the lawyers who ran the country chortled to themselves about how clever they were. They’d obtained marks of approval on incomprehensible contracts.

It’s difficult to have any form of conversation with somebody who speaks a language you don’t understand. Now consider trying to negotiate with a lawyer in a different language about whether you should live or die. On top of that, imagine that the lawyer wants you dead.

The moment after you sign the paper, the lawyer is going to get on a ship and go thousands of miles away so he doesn’t have to witness the consequences of the agreement.

It went on like this for almost a hundred years.

Then came the discovery of oil…

Our historical distance from atrocities of the past does not give us the right to ignore them. If you don’t study how evil human beings operate, you allow them to keep perpetuating the same evil.

Huge fortunes were amassed as the nation was built. Lawyers patted themselves on the back and chortled about how they used ironclad contracts to stick the Native People on rocky land that wasn’t suitable for sustaining life.

The end of treaty-making came in 1871. The lawyers had won. The Native People had been exiled to worthless, rocky, barren landscapes.

In 1895, the oil boom began. Oil is most commonly found in rocky, barren, landscapes. Almost overnight, the land nobody wanted became the opposite of “worthless.”

All the lawyers went, “Whoops, we gave away the most valuable mineral asset on the continent. Well, it was unfair, we didn’t fully understand the terms of this agreement.”

Suddenly, those contracts weren’t so ironclad.

In a perfect world…

It could have been poetic justice. The Native People had been forced against their will from the lands of their forefathers and onto desolate landscapes. But then the discovery of oil should have made the Native People among the wealthiest populations on the planet.

That would have been fair, right?

Well, white people didn’t allow it to play out like that.

We often forget how oil-rich the American continent is. Talk of “foreign oil” is always in the news, but we’re fixated on foreign oil because we want to preserve our own.

Energy is what makes the world run. Oil has been the dominant source of energy for more than a hundred years. By rights, Native People should control a huge percentage of American oil:

Native American reservations cover just 2 percent of the United States, but they may contain about a fifth of the nation’s oil and gas, along with vast coal reserves — Trump advisors aim to privatize oil-rich American Indian reservations

That quote should make you shake your head. It demonstrates just how deliberate colonizers were in “settling” Native Americans on badlands. Also, my understanding is that the “fifth” is a starting number based on the original reservations and that much of that oil is no longer under tribal control.

I’m also convinced that there’s a deliberate effort to hide the real numbers. People have been getting away with cheating for hundreds of years. It’s important to not get bogged down in the specifics. When you establish a range of the amount of theft that has occurred, both the low and high estimates represent a staggering amount.

Let’s take a closer look

According to the “fifth” number referenced above, Native Americans should control about 7,000,000,000 barrels of oil, and that’s what’s available in modern times after more than a hundred years of production. According to this chart, that number is roughly the equivalent of the entire nation of Azerbaijan, and more than Oman, Norway, and Sudan.

Based on that statistic alone, you’d think Native Americans would be rich. Instead, we have this:

Based on the data from the 2018 US Census cited by Poverty USA, Native Americans have the highest poverty rate among all minority groups — Racial Wealth Snapshot: Native Americans

So what happened? As always, this is a result of deliberate exploitation and oppression.

In the United States, you’re taught to assume that any group that controls a fifth of the nation’s oil reserves must be wealthy. The reality is that you’re not allowed to be wealthy in the United States if you’re not a member of the dominant society.

The Tulsa Race Massacre

Today, there’s more awareness about the Tulsa Race Massacre, but even now few discussions are honest about what really happened. The current narrative tries to suggest that “Black Wall Street” was burned to the ground because of something a black man said to a white woman. But that’s always the excuse for any racially motivated violence white people inflict on the Black Community.

To get to the real story, all you have to do is follow the money.

What really happened is that after the Civil War, the one group of slaves that were given reparations were those that had been owned by Native American tribes. The government required that these former slaves be given 40 acres of land.

The only land the Native American tribes had to give away was the barren, rocky, oil-rich reservation lands that they controlled.

Essentially, the US government saw another way to “stick it” to the Native Americans they’d already exploited by forcing them to give their reservation land away. They didn’t foresee that, within a few decades, that land would be the most valuable land in the whole nation.

Around the turn of the century, Tulsa, Oklahoma was the world’s top oil producer. For the first time in the history of the United States, a Black Community, thanks to their control of significant oil reserves, had begun to prosper.

At that point, white people came in, murdered everyone, and burned Black Wall Street to the ground, thus establishing white dominance of American oil.

This should be taught in schools.

The mechanism of oppression

It’s simply a historical oddity that the rise of oil happened to overlap with the end of American slavery. Naturally, delusional Southern whites viewed oil as a gift from God to help restore the “stolen” glory of the south. And from there the idea arose that only white people were “entitled” to enjoy any financial benefit from the oil.

Once again we see an example of how religion was leveraged to maintain and expand white supremacy in this country. When you take a step back and look at the facts, the absurdity of the conclusions becomes apparent.

• White people expressed and exploited the Black Community

• White people launched a campaign of genocide against Native Americans

• White people exiled members of the Black Community and Native Americans to rocky, barren, wastelands and laughed about it

• Those rocky, barren wastelands turned out to be the most oil-rich lands in the country

• White people concluded that God wanted only white people to have oil so they either murdered the people who owned the lands or just stole the oil

I mean, it’s offensive! Any reasonable person who assesses this sequence of events could only arrive at the conclusion that if there is a God, that God wanted Black People and Native People to control the most valuable resource of the modern world.

But of course, white people didn’t believe that. Nope, religion has long served as an excuse to become violently angry if you don’t submit to everything an irrational person demands.

So, armed with “divine right” and the privilege of being members of the dominant community, white people immediately murdered everyone in a prosperous Black Community and began writing laws designed to separate Native Americans from their oil.

I don’t fully understand the significance of why different tactics were used to oppress Native Americans versus Black Americans. They murdered everyone at Tulsa, but they just used the slow pressure of legal inevitability for oil on reservation lands. Maybe it played out like that because Black Wall Street was only one location while the reservations were spread out all over the country.

In any event, white people achieved absolute control of oil.

Tribal law

Legal matters are already complicated, but tribal law is exponentially more difficult to understand. There are state issues, there are federal issues, there are treaties that go back hundreds of years, and there are another hundred years of court cases that establish precedents.

The main strategy that was launched to steal oil rights seems to be The General Allotment Act of 1887 which was amended in 1891 to include “mineral leasing.”

Keep in mind that this is just one aspect of a strategy of oppression that’s been going on for hundreds of years. Every now and then you’ll find evidence of a sympathetic administration making efforts to minimize some of the damage, but overall it’s just a series of detrimental attacks.

Of course, everyone benefiting from the malicious action always presented it as if they were doing the Native Americans a favor. “Well, they have this valuable resource on their land and we just want to give them the opportunity to profit from it.”

Except the people who say things like that conveniently forget that there is already an established mechanism to ensure Native Americans stay in poverty. They use all the standard tactics including limited access to quality education and increased legal harassment on a variety of fronts.

The result is that when oil drillers show up at the reservation with an offer to lease mineral rights, they know they’re negotiating with an oppressed population that will accept an offer much lower than the fair market value.

The illusion of fairness

My dad is a lawyer, so even though I don’t have any formal training in law, I have developed a conditioned response that has served me well. It’s pretty simple really, when a lawyer starts talking I become nauseated and I refuse to agree to anything they have to say.

I guess that’s what they mean by “listen to your gut.” Even when my mind says, “that sounds fair,” my gut always knows that I’m being cheated. It knows this because you’re always cheated. That’s how lawyers work. They hold information back.

For example, if a lawyer has a property he wants to sell for $5, his starting offer won’t be $10. His starting offer will be one hundred billion dollars. Then he’ll drop down to ninety billion and act like you’re robbing him. He’ll refuse to shake your hand and leave the meeting angry.

That’s. How. Lawyers. Operate.

But it doesn’t end there. If at a later date they feel they can get even more for the property, they’ll refuse to acknowledge the legitimacy of the original deal.

All of this duplicity is done under the pretense of fairness. “If you move away from your sacred homelands, we’ll give you some other lands that will be yours forever and we’ll never bother you.”

“Well, we don’t want to move, but okay.”

Then, when oil is discovered…

“Remember how we said you ‘owned’ that land? What we meant was that you’re ‘shepherds of the surface’ but that doesn’t mean you own anything beneath the surface. We thought that was clear…”

It’s never about honest negotiation

We’re ruled by sociopaths. They create the illusion that we have “freedom” and that we can “participate” in our own governance, but that’s nonsense.

The people who have gotten rich off stolen oil pick the candidates. The rest of us just get to decide between two options that met the approval of the dominant community.

There’s this absurd misconception that America is a country where hardworking people can rise above their station. Why do people believe that when there is so much historical evidence to prove it isn’t so?

The whole idea of “the lottery of life” is that maybe good fortune will befall you. You know, you end up with a piece of property, and then, lucky you, oil is found there. “All my problems are solved, now I’m rich!”

Nope. That’s not what’s going to happen. What’s going to happen is that entitled white sociopaths are going to swoop in and trump up some reason to steal your rightful fortune. 100% guaranteed. The only reason you don’t know this already is that stumbling upon fortunes is statistically improbable.

Listen to your gut

For about 150 years, oil has been the source of energy that makes the world go around. Every fortune in the United States can be tied in one way or another to oil. Our country spends so much on the military-industrial complex to protect our energy interests abroad. The modern philosophy of the oil industry has its roots in the Lost Cause narrative that emerged after the Civil War.

If anything in the United States was fair, both the Black Community and the Native American community would have major stakes in the US oil industry. But they were deliberately and maliciously shut out.

Every time the price of oil goes up and the price of goods goes up and inflation goes up, you feel the squeeze. That’s because the same sociopaths who have been robbing you for 150 years have every intention to continue to rob you today and tomorrow and every day until you’re dead.

At some point, we have to stand up and stop sociopaths from making all the rules. Everything sociopaths say about the past, the present, and the future is a lie.

We must all stop submitting to the narrative of oppression and instead start listening to our guts. Deep down, you know the truth. We can’t be content to placate sociopaths anymore. Always remember that this is a life-or-death negotiation, and your life means nothing to them.