US-centric and not touching on the weirder legal bits at all.

When settlers from Europe first came to the United States, many natives had already gotten sick and died. The natives that remained were often relatively friendly to newcomers because they'd been adopting people who'd lost their families for years. They also had extra land because so many had died and really hoped they could add the settlers, who they often saw as white "orphans", to their family. So the natives would give some spare land to the settlers.

The settlers really didn't see it this way but kinda went along because they needed help and couldn't really fight. It was sometimes rough, but settlers and natives mostly got along okay. But more settlers showed up and soon the settlers didn't see themselves as orphans at all and didn't think they needed any help anyway. So they just started taking things because they had guns while the natives did not. The settlers just took things for almost 300 years.

After almost 300 years, some settlers had big cities like New York and Boston. Some of these city settlers felt sorry for the natives and about what they'd done, not too sorry, but a little. But other settlers didn't have cities. They had farms and they weren't sorry at all. They wanted to keep taking things. So a compromise was made between the farmer settlers and city settlers: the natives would get to keep land as long as no settlers wanted it. This worked out well for the settlers but not so great for the natives. After all, who wants land no one wants? Nobody, that's who.

So the settlers took everything but a little bit of land nobody wanted, called it a "reservation", and made the natives move to the land nobody wanted. That land was far away from towns and cities. It couldn't grow food very well, either. This made the natives very poor while the settlers lived it up on land the natives used to own.

But then the settlers wanted the reservations, too. So they told the natives that they'd "help" them with it by setting up mines or logging or whatever else the settlers had in mind. Since they didn't have any respect for the natives, the settlers would keep the money, too. But the natives could trust the settlers, the settlers said, and they'd keep the money in storage for the natives. They did, sometimes, but never let the natives take any out! The settlers thought they were pretty clever and the natives weren't.

Now, I should say that the natives weren't what the settlers thought at all. Way back they'd actually beaten the settlers at one of their own games; the hardest game the settlers had, really, and beat them on their own turf. The settlers' best court told the settlers to cut it out with all the stealing. The settlers didn't listen because the court didn't have guns either.

But now, almost right now, the court had guns and most of the settlers were city settlers. The city settlers and their best court felt sorry about all the stealing, not a little sorry, not totally sorry, but way more sorry than they'd ever felt. And bit-by-bit, the natives started getting back things that had been taken from them. Not all of it, not even close, but a little of it. Some of that money the settlers had been keeping was turned over, too.

But the land the natives had left is still land nobody wanted and it's still far away from everything else. So it's still mostly poor. And not all the settlers are sorry, either, so the natives often still don't have any of the things people should always have, like good food, clean water, schools, or hospitals. When the natives complain about this, they're often told they're just lazy or worse.