“You don’t need to travel to Beijing to see central planning at work,” writes Naomi Schaefer Riley in The New Trail of Tears: How Washington Is Destroying American Indians (Encounter Books, 2016). “It’s everywhere on [American Indian] reservations.”

Riley, a weekly columnist for the New York Post, provides a reality check for those whose nostalgic but erroneous image of American Indians derives from Chief Seattle’s (falsified) “environmental” speech. It’s a wake-up call for a Congress that in recent years enacted unconstitutional laws adversely affecting American Indians. Congress then salved its conscience by throwing money at circumstances that, at their roots, involve fundamental freedoms, and “get over it” tough love for a patriotic people — their willingness to fight and die in defense of their country is second to none — whose leaders seek perennial title as the most deserving of “victim cultures.”