Only because of the threat of not being recognized. It's worse in places like California, where someone used the phrase 'Tribelet', and so a vast swathe of groups were not recognized. I'll not get into much in real world examples: the politics behind it is very touchy.

The main thing that amused me about the Shadowrun setup is the arrangement of which tribes were created as nations. Pueblo, for instance. If I had written it up, it would be a great number of smaller nations bound together, or lands called The Tribes, or things of the sort. There is a lot of old blood between some of them.

Personally, I always find the "world explodes if you look too close at it" line to be both weak and uninspired. It is the GMs task to make it make sense and, furthermore, we have many examples in the real world of very nonsensical movements or power shifts. No offense, by the way: I just choose to disagree with the statement when it comes up. Your comment on there being more Natives is a good example of thinking it through. That, and their magic can identify people with even the smallest percentage of Native blood or aid in the past, so it would be easy to find people to fill the ranks.

Does anyone know what Tribe Daniel Howling Coyote was from, by the way?

I thought that PCC was set up based on a corporate charter type government where anyone could join up so long as they buy a piece of stock. No reservations or back to the land anything as far as I could tell. Just a total communist state... I guess.

I'd go with "Tribe Badass"

Ute (NAN Volume 1, page 120, and Shadows of North America, pages 13 and 181).

The idea that any government would have allowed corporations to have a THOR SHOT is so ridiculous that I feel my eyes wanting to bleed. Having armies, maybe (though why would they... not profitable), but space-borne WMD's push that farther than my "I BELIEVE!!!!!!" button will work.

I think the idea is that by the time it got that far, the governments had no real ability to stop them.

The whole thing boils down to how you define a people, the most common answer being "uhmm..." (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

edible? om nom nom.

You do know nothing is for free.

OK, try this out for size: As we all know energy can neither be created nor destroyed, just altered in form. The energy being released from a THOR shot is said to be on the order of a small tac nuke.

Now to get that THOR shot up there you have to use an equal amount of energy released by the shot, PLUS the energy needed to get the delivery vehicle into orbit, PLUS the energy needed to get the fuel used by the delivery vehicle up to orbit, etc, etc, ad nauseam.

The cost effectiveness of a THOR shot is questionable... to say the least. Now for a corporation to waste the money needed to do it...

Nope. That breaks my "I BELIEVE!!!!!!" button. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/silly.gif)

The problems there being relocating.

1st, you have to kick a bunch of people out of their homes, i.e. everyone who doesn't have that small percentage. These people tend to get a bit grumpy about being kicked out and the neighbors they're close to become less predictable.

2nd, you then have to relocate the people with a percentage to their new homes. Not all of them are going to want to make the trip because the ones you want to invite for the most part are the ones with real jobs. Do you really want to build a new nation from squatters and go-gangers?

If you go along the lines of "kick out whitey, replace him with anyone of Indian blood", you turn everywhere just east of the timezone into the West Bank and it would have been nice if someone might have mentioned that situation.

3rd, you have a bunch of Indians who were doing really well where they were who aren't going to be happy about this. How unhappy? 22 years after the treaty of Denver, someone blows up one of the Indian casinos in Connecticut. If it's not an Indian Casino, that should be explained. Then again, if it's still an Indian Casino, that should be explained too. (Alternatively, I find it humorous to think that the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation might have been denied access to the NAN when the NAN found out none of the members actually had any Native American DNA markers.)

Writing this out, I realize one thing I'd love to see is a copy of 6th world with references to original sources if the original source had more details.

Well, we don't really know enough about the technology to talk cost-effectiveness, though I would tend to lean more to the "not" side of things. But that's not what you were saying in your last post (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

Don't forget that Corporations that have armies are extraterritorial, and are countries in their own right. In fact, if you take into consideration all their holdings, they're about the size of a country as well. (Of course, there's some really small countries out there.).

As for having a Thor Shot... Well, someone has to put them up there. And the Corporate Court had to have a way of "Equalizing" things with the UN.

Not that the UN has any real teeth, now, does it?

The UN lost most of it's teeth shortly after the Korean War. No international oversight organization will be truly effective till it has an independent military and mandate to do what is needed to enforce it's goals. This is why NATO has had much higher success on it's "peacekeeping" missions then the UN. In the SR universe, the UN is a dead idea. The Corporate Court has more resources and will to effect and maintain global peace (or at least stop MAD) then any other organization. The only reason they do the job the UN is suppose to is because MAD is bad on the bottom line.

In the end Greed will save the day.

"Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures, the essence of the evolutionary spirit." - Gordon Gekko.

Assimilation of people from outside the group had been a practical answer to attrition through warfare, disease, etc. among many North American peoples from long before the arrival of Europeans. The focus on descent, lineage and DNA is at least in part a construct of modern governments that wish to limit their financial and territorial expenses under those few treaty obligations they choose to honour.

It would make sense that a long-standing practice from before colonization would be re-instituted after the formation of the NAN for similar, practical reasons.

I'm of the opinion that the relocation thing, there's probably equitable numbers of people moving west (metas, eastern SAIM supporters, Latinos) as people moving east (disgruntled Anglos), so while it still might be a logistical mess, it's not a unidirectional mass expulsion. There's houses on the East Coast opening up for people moving east, while people moving west take over their ranches or whatever. Secondly, I guess I was under the impression that Anglos were "encouraged to leave", which I interpreted as "those not supportive of the NAN ideal don't get to vote and have to pay taxes to a regime they don't support, not to mention being first fired and last hired," not "they are threatened with guns and told to gtfo." If the latter had been the case, we wouldn't be seeing the Anglo reservations and such, with one possible exception being the Ute nation. There's a reason that shit turned in to the new Bosnia.

Also, again, I think the "pinkskin" population of people who stayed on in the NAN and assimilated is probably pretty significant, so this migration is not necessarily, like, the entire Western state population. I think the logistics of this would be pretty ugly, but not fundamentally unmanageable.

And then there is the Trail of Tears and long memories. Hurt feelings really weren't high on the list for this interpretation of Native nations based off of the back history and Daniel Howling Coyote's questionable morality.

Thanks go to Nath for the information and source.

-- The original NAN boundaries are rather incomprehensible from a "traditional range" perspective, and lump together tribes that have NOTHING to do with each other. The Salish-Shidhe for example, has a lot of areas with tribes that are not even part of the extended Salish language family (e.g. the Nez Perce)!

-- I used to get really worked up on this issue, but assuming that Shadowrun was a significantly divergent alternate reality that only "rhymed" with our reality solved a lot of my cognitive dissonance (IMG:style_emoticons/default/grinbig.gif) (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)