But because hysterical right-wingers are hysterical right-wingers, they are seizing on this document as yet more proof that Obama wants to forcibly redistribute all the wealth, from productive hard-working Real Americans to swarthy welfare leeches. Take it away, World Net Daily!

President Obama is voicing support for a U.N. resolution that could accomplish something as radical as relinquishing some U.S. sovereignty and opening a path for the return of ancient tribal lands to American Indians, including even parts of Manhattan.

The issue is causing alarm among legal experts.

Oh, I bet it is. WND-founder Joseph Farah has a little column where he repeats this insane story, but then he quotes some egg-head professor who says that all the tribes want is some “open lands/spaces for repurchase,” which doesn’t really sound like “giving back” Manhattan to the Native Americans.

I say if you’re gonna do it, do it right and actually give New York back to the Delaware Indians! I’d rather be ruled by them than by Bloomberg and Albany.

(Also why don’t Scalia-style Constitutional originalists ever insist that America honor its various broken treaties with all the Indians whose lands we stole as we systematically removed and massacred them? I know that would entail giving them back the entirety of Oklahoma, among lots of other amusing things, but the supremacy of treaties is in the damn Constitution! Although I guess Article Six, with its federal supremacy clause and its no religious test talk, has always been the article that right-wingers are not particularly enthusiastic about.)

Correction: This article originally stated that WND founder Joseph Farah repeated the phrase “Carter era” in his incredibly silly column. That is incorrect. It was the incredibly silly “news story” on his incredibly silly website that repeated that phrase, even though the story has nothing at all to do with Jimmy Carter. I apologize for the error.

Custer and more than 200 troopers were massacred by Lakota Sioux and Northern Cheyenne warriors in the infamous 1876 battle. Of the five guidons carried by Custer’s battalion only one was immediately recovered, from beneath the body of a fallen trooper.

And while Custer’s reputation has risen and fallen over the years — once considered a hero, he’s regarded by some contemporary scholars as an inept leader and savage American Indian killer — the guidon has emerged as the stuff of legend.

“It’s more than just a museum object or textile. It’s a piece of Americana,” said John Doerner, Chief Historian at the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument in southeastern Montana.

The other flags were believed captured by the victorious Indians.

The recovered flag later became known as the Culbertson Guidon, after the member of the burial party who recovered it, Sgt. Ferdinand Culbertson. Made of silk, it measures 33 inches by 27 inches, and features 34 gold stars.

For most of the last century the flag was hidden from public view, kept in storage first at the museum and later, after a period on display in Montana, in a National Park Service facility in Harper’s Ferry, Md., according to Detroit Institute of Arts director Graham Beal.

Dating to an era when the museum took in a variety of natural history and historical items, the guidon was sold because it did not fit with the museum’s focus on art, Beal said.

“The irony is you get all these people phoning the museum upset we’re selling the flag, and no one knew we owned it,” he said.

A second 7th Cavalry guidon was recovered in September 1876, at the Battle of Slim Buttes near present-day Reva, S.D.

Now in possession of the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument, that flag was poorly cared for and is now in horrible condition — “almost dust,” according to the monument’s chief of interpretation, Ken Woody.

As for Culbertson’s Guidon — or Custer’s Last Flag, as Sotheby’s has billed it — Woody pointed out that without the Custer mystique, it would be just another piece of old cloth.

“Some people like memorabilia and Americana, and they all want to own a little piece of it,” Woody said.

Sealed in a custom-made plexiglass case by the Detroit museum since its return from the Park Service in 1982, the flag has several holes and the red of some its stripes has run into the white stripes. Its once-sharp swallow tail tips are now tattered and torn.

Culbertson’s Guidon also is missing a star and a section of striping about 9 inches wide and 6 inches high — apparently cut away as a souvenir before its acquisition by the museum. Yet on the auction block, even what’s missing is worth a story.

“I’m sure Culbertson let other men take small snippets for themselves,” Sotheby’s vice chairman David Redden said.

A hearing on preliminary approval of the deal is set for Oct. 29. Sullivan indicated he was pleased with the agreement, calling it historic and coming down off his bench to shake hands with lawyers from both sides.

Assistant Attorney General Tony West and Joseph Sellers, lead attorney for the plaintiffs, both said they were encouraged by the judge’s positive reaction.

“Based on the court’s comments, we’re optimistic,” West said after the hearing adjourned.

The lawsuit filed in 1999 contends Indian farmers and ranchers lost hundreds of millions of dollars over several decades because they were denied USDA loans that instead went to their white neighbors. The government settled a similar lawsuit filed by black farmers more than a decade ago.

Unlike a second round of the black farmers suit that is now pending in Congress, the American Indian money would not need legislative action to be awarded.

The Obama administration has said settling the American Indian case is a priority. Hispanics and women farmers also have pending cases.

“Today’s settlement can never undo wrongs that Native Americans may have experienced in past decades, but combined with the actions we at USDA are taking to address such wrongs, the settlement will provide some measure of relief to those who have been discriminated against,” Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said in a statement.

Claryca Mandan of North Dakota’s Three Affiliated Tribes, a plaintiff in the case, stopped ranching after she and her husband were denied loans in the early 1980s. She said she was pleased with the settlement.

“This is a culmination of 30 years of struggle,” she said.

The Church Rock flood is only one incident among many in the “slow-motion disaster” investigative journalist Judy Pasternak comprehensively recounts in her chilling new book, “Yellow Dirt: An American Story of a Poisoned Land and a People Betrayed.” Based on a prize-winning four-part series she wrote for the Los Angeles Times, “Yellow Dirt” begins during World War II, when secretive government surveyors first appeared on the remote reservation, supposedly looking for deposits of an ore called vanadium, used to strengthen steel needed for the war effort. Uranium was the real prize, and after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the ramping up of the Cold War, the American demand for the radioactive substance boomed.

The Navajo Nation and the area around it contained some of the richest deposits of uranium ore in the world, and certainly the most conveniently located. For about a decade, various corporations and government agencies reaped 1.4 million tons of uranium ore from the Monument Valley region alone; Pasternak makes a single mine there, known as Monument No. 2, her primary focus. The mining operations were relatively rudimentary, and by ordination of the tribal government, worked almost entirely by Navajo men. Even the cheapest and most elementary safety practices, such as wetting down blast areas to keep the miners from breathing toxic dust, were neglected in the rush to satisfy the Atomic Energy Commission’s insatiable appetite for uranium.

By the 1960s, the need tapered off, and the mining companies blithely abandoned the sites, leaving piles of radioactive tailings lying around for Navajo kids to play on and their parents to scavenge for conveniently sized rocks with which to build houses, ovens and cisterns. The dust and gravel made seemingly excellent concrete for floors. Monument No. 2, once a mesa, had been nearly leveled, its uranium-laced innards exposed to the open air, reduced to what Pasternak characterizes as a “radioactive pit.” Old quarries filled up with rain- and groundwater, new “lakes” from which local residents watered their herds and gratefully drank.

The next boom, unsurprisingly, was in cancer rates (previously so low among the Navajo that they were thought to be miraculously immune to the disease), and in a birth defect, christened “Navajo neuropathy,” that caused children’s fingers to fuse together and curl into claws. Still, it took decades for the cause to be fully recognized and even longer for it to be addressed; it wasn’t until 2008 and under the lashing of Rep. Henry Waxman, that the federal government made serious efforts to clean up the mine sites, purify water supplies and relocate families living in houses built from radioactive materials.

The challenges in telling this story are manifold, and Pasternak doesn’t always conquer them. There were so many contaminated spots, so many minor and major players, so many corporations that are then swallowed by other corporations, and so many government agencies and officials that the unfolding tragedy becomes a Kafkaesque tangle of names, acronyms, institutional rivalries, regulatory loopholes, legal boondoggles and jurisdictional buck-passing. From the very beginning there were renegade voices — white as well as Navajo — calling for greater safety precautions in the mines, testing of the land and water, studies of the cancer clusters and so on, but each one got slapped down, outmaneuvered, shut out and otherwise thwarted by self-interested supervisors and shortsighted authorities — Navajo as well as white. This is no “Erin Brockovich,” with a plucky hero triumphing over powerful, mustache-twirling baddies.

Nevertheless, “Yellow Dirt” has the cumulative power of scrupulous truth-telling and the value of old-style investigative reportage. With the exception of one sagacious patriarch, the Navajo, eager to escape the poverty of the reservation, unquestioningly embraced the mines. The officials charged with ramping up uranium production chose to ignore early evidence of the effects of radioactivity. Researchers assembling that evidence were torn between warning the potential victims and getting the data needed to prove that they were endangered in the first place. The EPA, when it came along, preferred not to stir up requests for a cleanup it couldn’t afford, and even the Navajos’ own tribal government prevented testing of the land and water in an effort to protect its turf and forestall annoying demands for help. Miners and their descendants, many of whom had grown up in houses without running water or electricity, had a hard time seeing how rocks — pieces of the very land they revered, could hurt them, especially when the harm only emerged after years of exposure.

It was, ultimately, Pasternak’s coverage of the legacy of uranium mining in the Navajo Nation that galvanized Waxman — who, as a congressman from California, didn’t even have a dog in the fight. Following the intricate unfolding of the disaster, it’s easy to spot countless points at which a little more information, education and communication (not to mention accountability) might have contributed to saving many lives. That’s not a Hollywood story, and there sure isn’t a part for Julia Roberts in it, but that’s all the more reason why it needs to be told.