by Vine Deloria
Phoenix, Arizona, is the area office which serves the tribes of Arizona (except the Navajo), Utah, and Nevada. The tribes of Utah and Nevada are some thousand miles from Phoenix, which makes it easy for them to run down to the area office to check on things. It was this arrangement that was described to me as “strategic.”
Sacramento area office covers the state of California. For decades people have been trying to figure out if it has any relationship to Indians living in that state. Finally someone decided that it was placed there to hide information from Indians which they might otherwise ferret out from other agencies. In recent years this area office has begun to do something for Indians after a long siesta. Whether it will manage to get a program off the ground before California is dumped in the sea by an earthquake is a matter of serious speculation by Indians of that state.
The Pacific Northwest is serviced by the area office of Portland, Oregon. The tribes of Washington, Oregon, and Idaho receive services from Portland. Tribes have told me that tribal resolutions, leases, land sales, and programs disappear into the Portland area office never to be seen again. At one time a rumor spread that Judge Crater and Amelia Earhart were hidden somewhere in the Portland area office. And this rumor was never denied.
Alaska has its own area office in Juneau to take care of the natives of that state. Continental tribes have gotten the impression that the Juneau office is fairly responsive to tribal needs. It has probably the best reputation for service to native peoples of any of the area offices.
The Washington headquarters of the bureau serves the federal tribes that live east of the Mississippi, except the Choctaws of Mississippi. The tribes of New York, the Iroquois, were made the responsibility of the state in 1948, leaving only two tribes, the Eastern Band of Cherokees in North Carolina and the Seminole reservations in Florida, at the mercy of the bureau.
The function of the area office is to serve as an intermediary for the various agencies in the decision-making process. In some ways the area office fulfills its intended function. It can always decide not to do something, leaving the choice up to the tribe to go to Washington and fight out the decision where decisions are made. Perhaps the best service provided by the area offices is keeping records. The area office has copies of all the records kept by the local agency and the Washington headquarters.
When a decision has to be made, it must go from the agency to the area office, lie in state there for a decent period of time, then be stamped “disapproved” and sent on to Washington. In Washington the tribe and the Commissioner get together and try to solve the problem.
Once a decision is reached, the tribe goes back to its reservation, the Commissioner goes to lunch while the decision is mimeographed and sent down to the area office for distribution to the agencies. The agency, personnel then interpret the decision according to their local policies, which usually makes the tribe mad enough to go back to see the Commissioner.
The process described above is the area office at its worst. In fact, most area offices operate quite smoothly and are in touch with tribes continuously. But one unpleasant incident can ruin the reputation of an area office quicker than one would imagine.
One of the biggest stumbling blocks facing the area office is the lack of funds to carry out their assigned tasks. In the Minneapolis area, for example, there are no funds to begin a comprehensive program for the Michigan tribes. The tribes of that state do not demand programs from their Senators and Congressmen and so do not receive consideration. In those areas where tribes are fairly sophisticated about using their Senators and Congressmen to pressure for programs, the area office can generally offer a great many more programs to the tribes because funds are made available to it.
Many area offices do not use tribes in a partnership to secure programs. They often lose sight of the reservations’ needs and plan programs according to the funds they have available. If area offices would work more closely with people to support tribal programs, they would soon find the tribes out seeking more funds for programs.
Within each area are a number of agencies. Larger tribes have agencies of their own and a number of smaller tribes may be gathered together under a general agency. An example of the general agency serving many tribes is Everett, Washington, which is designed to handle the small tribes of the Puget Sound area. The agency provides all of the basic services except health. Thus the agency may be large or small depending upon the size of the tribe to be serviced.
On the whole, the organizational structure of the Bureau of Indian Affairs provides one important feature which makes it capable of handling matters in a manner beneficial to the Indian people. That feature is that tribes are recognized as legal entities of equivalent rank by the office regardless of what level the office is on. Thus a tribe is able to exercise its fundamental sovereignty at all levels of government.
This feature contrasts sharply with agencies serving other American citizens. Social service agencies may be influential on the county level, but when people get to the state and regional levels they become merely another applicant, till at the national level they may be virtual nonentities. Tribes, however, never lose their basic legal rights as governing bodies.
Thus tribes have become eligible for a great variety of programs by qualifying as local sponsoring bodies and then using their federal status in Washington, D.C., as a competitive edge over other applicants for funding. Under the old Area Redevelopment Administration and its successor, the Economic Development Administration, tribes have been able to enjoy a great variety of projects. It would be fair to say that of any agency in the government in the last few years EDA has been the most responsive to tribal programs.
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Wherein, you may ask, does all of the controversy—particularly the charge of paternalism—originate, if everything is operating so smoothly in the bureau?
The answer lies, I believe, in understanding the nature of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the political sense. Unless one understands the outside pressures that operate on the bureau, one does not understand the flaws in the system which give rise to the various charges that are leveled against it.
To begin with, the bureau should not be characterized as paternalistic. It should be characterized as “fear-ridden,” for the circle of fear that operates within it is much more detrimental to its efficiency than is its desire to paternalize.
America has been brainwashed to define government programs as paternalistic per se. Part of this tendency originates from the natural reluctance to pay higher taxes. People grumbling against taxes generally find some irrelevant thing their government is doing and place on it the entire blame. It becomes a paternalistic program simply because it is unpopular Often an agency, bureau, or program is defined as paternalistic whether it accomplishes anything or not.
Over the years the average citizen has come to accept the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Federal Housing Authority, the Social Security system, the Federal Reserve, and other programs as essential services of government. Few would want to eliminate these programs because they serve general needs.
With the Bureau of Indian Affairs only Indians receive services, not citizens in general. The BIA is therefore tagged as paternalistic because people feel that its services are holding Indians back. Few have ever defined “back” for me. I would define it, as did Congress in 1819, back from extinction.
The Bureau of Indian Affairs is one of twenty-six odd bureaus within the Department of the Interior. Its top job, the Commissionership, is a job filled by appointment, a survivor of the political spoils system of the last century. The Commissioner has one basic task—to keep the members of the Interior and Insular Affairs committees of the House and Senate happy—not to serve Indians or even to run his own bureau.
Members serving on the Interior and Insular Affairs committees have little time to worry about Indians. Indian legislation is a chore that distracts the Congressmen and Senators from other legislation which is much more important to
their careers. Most members of the two committees are from the West, where few electoral votes are available to the national parties. Their only chance for national political advancement is, therefore, as Vice-Presidential candidate or cabinet officer. Consequently they spend as little time on Indians as possible and concentrate on areas like Foreign Relations, Armed Services, and Commerce.
When tribes are unhappy, they traditionally contact their representatives for redress. When people become concerned about how Indians are being treated, they write their representatives in Congress demanding an answer. All of these pressures fall upon the few members of the two Interior committees.
Imagine, therefore, a Senator from the West, busy with Foreign Relations Committee work, being interrupted by newspaper reports that Indians are starving in West Elbow, Utah, or Baby Bear Butte, Nevada. He has to put away work he enjoys to answer questions on the starving Indians. Chances are that the newspaper reports are highly exaggerated but the Senator has to handle all accusations about how the federal government is not treating Indians right.
The next time an Indian bill is heard before the Interior Committee the Senator makes sure that the Commissioner hears about the starving Indians. In turn, when the Commissioner gets back to his office, field personnel find out rather quickly about the treatment of the Commissioner before the committee.
Thus fear in massive quantities is injected into the field operations of the bureau. Subsequent dealings with tribes begin to reveal a real lack of enthusiasm for taking chances. The possibility of backfire is a real consideration. Decisions are made according to the book in case any fracas results.
The tribe eventually gets furious at the attitude of the bureau and comes into Washington to complain to their Senator and the cycle begins once again. When one considers that this type of movement has been pounded into an organization for over a century then one can understand why things move at a snail’s pace within the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
In my experience there are several incidents that stick out vividly as examples of bureaucratic fear. One day I got a call from a tribe that was trying to find out if its attorney contract had been approved. The Secretary of the Interior, or his delegate, has to approve all attorney contracts with tribes. I called the Phoenix area office for information and was told to check with Washington because the area office had sent the contract to the Bureau of Indian Affairs there to be approved. At the bureau in Washington I was told that all attorney contracts were approved out in the area office and none were sent east. I called Phoenix again and was again told that the area office had sent the contract to D.C. So I went in to see the Commissioner and asked his help in finding the contract. Nearly two weeks later the tribe informed me it had finally gotten the contract approved. The contract was, of course, in Phoenix all the time. But there was a duplicate copy in Washington also. In both places the bureau had failed to notify anyone that the contract had been approved. So rather than admit they were behind on their correspondence, both offices pushed the problem to and fro in an effort to absolve themselves from the blame, if any.
When I was working with the United Scholarship Service my job was to find capable Indian high school students for our secondary school placement program. I visited several schools and looked at achievement tests and grades. At one bureau school I found several students of above-average ability who could easily qualify for our program. I asked for assistance from the bureau teachers in getting these students to apply for the program, but they refused to do anything to help. Their big argument was that they had to produce certain marks and standards or their school would fall below that of other bureau schools. To let these better students go on to schools in the East would have meant fewer students capable of doing college work in their school.
So a number of Indian students were denied an opportunity to get a better education because local bureau employees wanted to make a respectable record for themselves. The teachers were actually afraid to tell any of the students about our program because they were afraid the students might decide to enter it. That would have meant fewer capable students enrolled in the bureau high school and the subsequent questioning by higher bureau officials of the school’s program.
Another time while I was working for the United Scholarship Service, Tillie Walker, the director of the program, and myself stopped in an area office to check on scholarship money that might be available that fall for Indian students. We were dumbfounded to learn that the bureau had seventeen thousand dollars on hand, expected another seventeen thousand dollars before the end of the year, and didn’t expect to give any of it out.
We asked the man in charge of scholarships why the bureau, which had nearly one million dollars in scholarship money, couldn’t use its funds to pick up eligible Indian students and let the USS with its meager resources provide funds for ineligible Indian students, those living off the reservation.
His explanation was a classic statement of the fear that pervades the bureau. He stated that he had worked in that job for some ten years, through both Democratic and Republican administrations. The Republicans, he said, frowned on expenditures, the Democrats encouraged them. And although it was a Democratic administration at present, someday, he said, the Republicans would be in office. They might, he told us, examine the books of that area office and discover that he had spent to the limit every year he had the money. He was laying the groundwork for his defense years before it would be necessary!
Bureau officials are very reluctant to defend tribal rights. Time and again tribes have come more than part way in pushing for a vital issue only to have the bureau fall back in fear at the last moment. Classic in this field has been the failure of the bureau to defend the fishing rights of the Northwest tribes. Although it is federal law that the bureau is responsible for defending Indian treaty rights as trustee, the bureau dodged the fishing rights issue for years. Finally, when Robert Bennett became Commissioner he took the bull by the horns and got the bureau to intervene. But the attitude of local bureau personnel, western Washington people told me, was to compromise Indian rights as much as possible.
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Since the days of termination in the 1950’s the situation in Indian Affairs has bordered on the irrational. There have been few changes on the Congressional committees, the bureau has changed little, tribes and the general public have been more vocal about their problems. Fear has increased proportionately.
One of the favorite games of the Congressional committees has been to threaten termination every time the bureau requests anything. I say games because it has been well known in Congress that, since 1960, tribes have petitioned for removal of the area offices and a concentration of personnel and decision-making authority at the local level. If Congress were serious about termination it would help the tribes to dismantle the bureau office by office, function by function.
Threats of termination have been disastrous from the Indian point of view. Tribes rarely know where they are in terms of national policy. They seldom know which tribe is programmed for new roads, new schools, new hospitals. No one knows until the dirt is turned. So tribes have come to take the word of bureau people as to their place in the overall program for development.
When it is known nationally that Congress is considering termination once again, bureau employees use this threat to keep tribes in line. Whenever a tribe begins to show a bit of independence, a BIA official will throw broad “hints” that the tribe had better forget it or be recommended for termination.
Recommendation for termination is no idle threat. As we have seen, in the 1950’s the bureau offered every possible excuse for terminating tribes. No Indian is so foolish as to believe that it can’t happen again. So the tribe generally gives in and follows the bureau line. The risk of total destruction of the Indian community to too great to treat lightly.
When I was Director of the National Congress of American Indians, the bureaucrats would tell me that the NCAI was advocating termination by following a course
opposite to the BIA. Fortunately we always had an active tribal membership that thrived on combat and never took the threats seriously. But had I been leading a small tribe in western Washington, Wisconsin, or Nevada, the threat would have been enough to stop me cold.
One of the main problems of the bureau operations in the field has been the lack of Congressional policy directives. Tribes are obviously incapable of doing without federal services at present. Yet with proper training and development of community facilities many tribes could become self-sufficient and federal services and supervision would become nominal.
As long as the bureau is expected to prepare the tribes for termination it will fail in its programs. Many tribes have said that there is no incentive in building up their reservations if there is a chance they will be sold out unexpectedly in the near future. If there was a change in Congressional policy to promote the development of human and natural resources on the reservations, programs would be philosophically oriented to total development. There would be a means by which development could be evaluated—that of self-sufficiency. Motivation would change from fear to enthusiasm as programs became oriented to realistic goals based upon the expectation that the Indian people were building for the future instead of playing for time.
The annual process of budgeting also provides a great stumbling block for the bureau in its attempts to provide services to Indian people. Budgets too often reflect ongoing administrative overhead rather than funds which can be used to do a specific job. Thus an area office may have a surplus in education funds and a deficit in funds for roads or law and order. Funds must be spent for the purpose for which they are appropriated. So it may take a number of years to work an item up to the point where there is sufficient money available to do a job.