Established at the town of Shiprock (in the northeastern part of the reservation, in New Mexico) in 1969, the plant became the single largest industrial employer in New Mexico by 1975. Twelve hundred Navajos made up the initial workforce. By 1974, the numbers had lessened to a thousand, but still Navajos were 95 percent of the workforce. Then, during 1974–75, the Navajo workforce shrunk to six hundred. Fairchild’s Mountain View, California, headquarters claimed that Navajos were quitting, something very common in the electronics assembly industry. Non-Indians were being hired to replace Navajos. What actually had been happening were layoffs, not resignations. The federal government subsidized the wages for the six-month training period on the job, for which little training is required, and Fairchild was laying off those workers whom they would have to pay and hiring new trainees at no cost. Local Navajo activists and former Fairchild employees, along with help from American Indian Movement leaders, organized a protest at the plant, which led to the workers occupying it. Fairchild decommissioned the plant and moved it overseas. Documents recovered by protesters revealed that Fairchild was seeking a pretext to break its lease. The Navajo Nation had built the plant to Fairchild’s specifications at a cost of three and a half million dollars.17
The Indian Self-Determination Act of 1975 validated Indigenous control over their own social and economic development with continuation of federal financial obligations under treaties and agreements. Acting upon the new mandate, a number of Indigenous nations with mineral resources formed the Council of Energy Resource Tribes (CERT). Patterned after the federation of oil-producing states, OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries), CERT sought to renegotiate mineral leases that the BIA had practically given away to energy companies. Native lands west of the Mississippi held considerable resources: 30 percent of the low-sulfur coal in the United States, 5 percent of the oil, 10 percent of the natural gas, and 80 percent of the uranium. CERT was able to establish a center of information and action in Denver to serve its members with technical and legal assistance. The Jicarilla Apache Nation slapped a severance tax on the oil and gas taken from their lands. A corporate legal challenge to this wound up in the Supreme Court, which found that Native nations had the right to tax corporations that operated in their boundaries.
Navajo chairman Peter MacDonald was the force behind the founding of CERT and was its first director. But he quickly found his scheme of mining as the basis for economic development challenged by young Navajos who perceived the downside of ecological destruction. Strip-mining of coal and uranium in the Navajo Nation was bad enough, but then a coal-gasification plant was established to feed into the Navajo electricity-generating plant that sent power to Phoenix and Los Angeles but provided Navajos with little or none. Navajo activist John Redhouse, who became director of the National Indian Youth Council, led decades of struggle against unrestricted mining, with new generations continuing the fight.18
Like many de-industrializing US cities and states in the 1980s, some Native nations turned to gaming for revenue. In 1986, they formed the National Indian Gaming Association for the purpose of lobbying state and federal governments and to represent the interests of its members. But in 1988 Congress passed the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, which gave the states some control over gaming, a dangerous surrender of sovereignty for those Native nations operating casinos. Indigenous gaming operations now constitute a $26 billion industry annually that employs three hundred thousand people, with about half the 564 federally recognized nations operating casinos of various sizes. Profits have been used in myriad ways, some for per capita payments, others earmarked for educational and linguistic development, housing, hospitals, and even investing in larger projects such as the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian. A good portion of profits go to lobbying politicians of state and federal governments. The Indian gaming lobby in California, for instance, is second only to the prison guards union in the state.19
THE NARRATIVE OF DYSFUNCTION
The mainstream media and books regularly expose and denounce the poverty and social dysfunction found in Indigenous communities. Rates of alcoholism and suicide are far higher than national averages, and higher even than in other communities living in poverty. In a book of case studies of poverty and neglected sites of deterioration in the United States, journalist Chris Hedges offered an impassioned account of the Pine Ridge Reservation.20
As well-meaning and accurate as such portrayals are, however, they miss the specific circumstances that reproduce Indigenous poverty and social scarring—namely, the colonial condition. As Vine Deloria Jr. and other Native American activists and scholars have emphasized, there is a direct link between the suppression of Indigenous sovereignty and the powerlessness manifest in depressed social conditions. Deloria Jr. explained that for the Sioux, everyone has responsibility and rituals to perform that involve a particular geography. In their case, this means sites in the Black Hills: “Some of the holy men up there will say that a lot of the social problems with the Sioux are the result of losing the Black Hills, so you couldn’t perform your duties and become a contributor to the ongoing creation. And consequently, people began to fall away and they started to suffer and they started to fight among themselves.”21 In continuing to disregard treaty rights and deny restitution of sacred lands such as the Black Hills, the federal government prevents Indigenous communities from performing their most elemental responsibilities as inscribed in their cultural and religious teachings. In other words, sovereignty equates to survival—nationhood instead of genocide. Ethnographer Nancy Oestreich Lurie provocatively described Indian drinking as “the world’s oldest on-going protest demon stration.”22 The effects of continued colonization form similar patterns among Indigenous communities throughout the Americas, as well as among the Maori of New Zealand and the Australian Aborigines.23
The experience of generations of Native Americans in on- and off-reservation boarding schools, run by the federal government or Christian missions, contributed significantly to the family and social dysfunction still found in Native communities. Generations of child abuse, including sexual abuse—from the founding of the first schools by missionaries in the 1830s and the federal government in 1875 until most were closed and the remaining ones reformed in the 1970s—traumatized survivors and their progeny.24 In 2002, a coalition of Indigenous groups started the Boarding School Healing Project, which documented through research and oral history the expensive abuses that go beyond individual casualties to disruption of Indigenous life at every level. Sun Elk was the first child from the very traditional Taos Pueblo to attend the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, spending seven years there beginning in 1883. After a harsh reentry into Taos society, he told his story:
They told us that Indian ways were bad. They said we must get civilized. I remember that word too. It means “be like the white man.” I am willing to be like the white man, but I did not believe Indians’ ways were wrong. But they kept teaching us for seven years. And the books told how bad the Indians had been to the white men—burning their towns and killing their women and children. But I had seen white men do that to Indians. We all wore white man’s clothes and ate white man’s food and went to white man’s churches and spoke white man’s talk. And so after a while we also began to say Indians were bad. We laughed at our own people and their blankets and cooking pots and sacred societies and dances.25
Corporal punishment was unknown in Indigenous families but was routine in the boarding schools. Often punishment was inflicted for being “too Indian”—the darker the child, the more often and severe the beatings. The children were made to feel that it was criminal to be Indian.26 A woman whose mother experienced boarding school related the results:
Probably my mother and … her brothers and sisters were the first in our family to go to boarding school.… And the stories she told … were horrendous. There were beatings. There [was] a very young classmate—I don’t know how old they were, probably preschool o
r grade school—who lost a hand in having to clean this machine that baked bread or cut dough or something, and having to kneel for hours on cold basement floors as punishment.… My mother lived with a rage all her life, and I think the fact that they were taken away so young was part of this rage and how it—the fallout—was on us as a family.27
Ponca historian Roger Buffalohead verifies that testimony:
The idea of corporal punishment, so foreign to traditional Indian cultures, became a way of life for those students returning from their educational experience.
Yet you find by the thirties and forties in most Native communities, where large numbers of young people had, in the previous years, attended boarding schools, an increasing number of parents who utilized corporal punishment in the raising of their children, so that although you can’t prove a direct connection, I think you can certainly see that boarding school experiences, where corporal punishment was the name of the game, had [their] impact on the next generations of native people.28
Sexual abuse of both girls and boys was also rampant. One woman remembers: “We had many different teachers during those years; some got the girls pregnant and had to leave.… [One teacher] would put his arms around and fondle this girl, sometimes taking her on his lap.… When I got there, Mr. M put his arm around me and rubbed my arm all the way down. He rubbed his face against mine.” At one mission school, a priest was known for his sexual advances. “Anyway, I ended up beside him [the priest] … and all of a sudden he started to feel my legs.… I was getting really uncomfortable and he started trying to put his hands in my pants.”29 Nuns also participated in sexual abuse: “A nun was sponge bathing me and proceeded to go a little too far with her sponge bathing. So I pushed her hand away. She held my legs apart while she strapped the insides of my thighs. I never stopped her again.”30
Much documentation and testimony attest to the never-ending resistance by children in boarding schools. Running away was the most common way to resist, but there were also acts of nonparticipation and sabotage, secretly speaking their languages and practicing ceremonies. This surely accounts for their survival, but the damage is nearly incomprehensible. Mohawk historian Taiaiake Alfred asks, “What is the legacy of colonialism? Dispossession, disempowerment, and disease inflicted by the white man, to be sure.… Yet the enemy is in plain view: residential schools, racism, expropriation, extinguishment, warship, welfare.”31
Indigenous women, in particular, have continued to bear the brunt of sexual violence, both within families and by settler predators. Incidence of rape on reservations has long been astronomical. The colonialist restrictions on Indigenous policing authority on reservations—yet another legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery and the impairment of Indigenous sovereignty—opened the door to per petrators of sexual violence who knew there would be no consequences for their actions.32 Under the US colonial system, jurisdiction for crimes committed on Native lands falls to federal and state authorities because Native justice can be applied only to reservation residents, and then only for misdemeanors. One in three Native American women has been raped or experienced attempted rape, and the rate of sexual assault on Native American women is more than twice the national average. For five years after publication of a scathing 2007 report by Amnesty International, Native American and women’s organizations, including the National Organization for Women (NOW), lobbied Congress to add a new section to the 1994 Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) addressing the special situation of Native American women living on reservations.33 The added provision would allow Native nations’ courts jurisdiction to arrest and prosecute non-Native men who enter reservations and commit rape. At the end of 2012, the Republican-dominated US Congress denied reauthorization of the VAWA, because it included the provision. In March 2013, however, that opposition was overcome, and President Barack Obama signed the amended act back into law—a small step forward for Native sovereignty.
INDIGENOUS GOVERNANCE
For generations, Native nations, occasionally with the help of federal or state government, treated the symptoms of colonialism. But with the powerful Indigenous self-determination movements of the second half of the twentieth century, those nations participated in drafting and instituting new international law that supports their aspirations, and they began working on shoring up their sovereignty through governance. Through this work, US Indigenous peoples have reconceptualized their current forms of government based on new constitutions that reflect their specific cultures. Navajo thinking on a future constitution expresses that desire. Like some other Native nations, the Navajo, the most populous and the one holding the largest land base in the United States, has never had a constitution. But others do have constitutions similar to that of the United States. Nearly sixty Native nations adopted constitutions before 1934. Following the Indian Reorganization Act of that year, another 130 nations wrote constitutions according to federal guidelines but without significant participation of their citizenry.34 The movement to create, revise, or rewrite constitutions has seen notable success in two instances during the first decade of the twenty-first century.
From 2004 to 2006 the Osage Nation, located in northeastern Oklahoma, engaged in a contentious process of reform that produced a new constitution. The preamble reflects the extraordinary context and content of the new law:
We the Wah-zha-zhe, known as the Osage People, having formed as Clans in the far distant past, have been a People and as a People have walked this earth and enjoyed the blessing of Wah-kon-tah for more centuries than we truly know.
Having resolved to live in harmony, we now come together so that we may once more unite as a Nation and as a People, calling upon the fundamental values that we hold sacred: Justice, Fairness, Compassion, Respect for and Protection of Child, Elder, All Fellow Beings, and Self.
Paying homage to generations of Osage leaders of the past and present, we give thanks for their wisdom and courage. Acknowledging our ancient tribal order as the foundation of our present government, first reformed in the 1881 Constitution of the Osage Nation, we continue our legacy by again reorganizing our government.
This Constitution, created by the Osage People, hereby grants to every Osage citizen a vote that is equal to all others and form a government that is accountable to the citizens of the Osage Nation.
We, the Osage People, based on centuries of being a People, now strengthen our government in order to preserve and perpetuate a full and abundant Osage way of life that benefits all Osages, living and as yet unborn.35
Similarly, in 2009, the White Earth Nation of the Anishinaabeg (Ojibwe people) adopted a new constitution. White Earth is located in central Minnesota and is one of a number of Anishinaabe reservations in Minnesota, with others in Wisconsin, South Dakota, and Canada. The preamble to the White Earth constitution is revealing:
The Anishinaabeg of the White Earth Nation are the ancestors of a great tradition of continental liberty, a native constitution of families, totemic associations. The Anishinaabeg create stories of natural reason, of courage, loyalty, humor, spiritual inspiration, survivance, reciprocal altruism, and native cultural sovereignty.
We the Anishinaabeg of the White Earth Nation in order to secure an inherent and essential sovereignty, to promote traditions of liberty, justice, and peace, and reserve common resources, and to ensure the inalienable rights of native governance for our posterity, do constitute, ordain, and establish this Constitution of the White Earth Nation.36
Gerald Vizenor, a citizen of the White Earth Nation, best-selling author, and leading intellectual, participated in the writing of this constitution. Explaining the concept of “survivance,” a term he coined, he stresses that it originates in Indigenous narratives:x “The conventions of survivance create a sense of Native presence over nihility and victory. Survivance is an active presence: it is not absence, deracination, or ethnographic oblivion, and survivance is the continuance of narratives, not a mere reaction, however pertinent. Survivance stories are renunciations of dominan
ce, the unbearable sentiments of tragedy, and the legacy of victimry.”37
The Doctrine of Discovery is dissolving in light of these profound acts of sovereignty. But neither arcane colonial laws nor the historical trauma of genocide simply disappear with time, certainly not when conditions of life and consciousness perpetuate them. The Indigenous self-determination and sovereignty movement is not only transforming the continent’s Indigenous communities and nations but also, inevitably, the United States. The ways it is doing that are explored in the concluding chapter.
CONCLUSION
THE FUTURE OF THE UNITED STATES
That the continued colonization of American Indian nations, peoples, and lands provides the United States the economic and material resources needed to cast its imperialist gaze globally is a fact that is simultaneously obvious within—and yet continually obscured by—what is essentially a settler colony’s national construction of itself as an ever more perfect multicultural, multiracial democracy. . . . [T]he status of American Indians as sovereign nations colonized by the United States continues to haunt and inflect its raison d’etre.
—Jodi Byrd
The conventional narrative of US history routinely segregates the “Indian wars” as a subspecialization within the dubious category “the West.” Then there are the westerns, those cheap novels, movies, and television shows that nearly every US American imbibed with mother’s milk and that by the mid-twentieth century were popular in every corner of the world.1 The architecture of US world dominance was designed and tested by this period of continental US militarism, which built on the previous hundred years and generated its own innovations in total war. The opening of the twenty-first century saw a new, even more brazen form of US militarism and imperialism explode on the world scene when the election of George W. Bush turned over control of US foreign policy to a long-gestating neoconservative and warmongering faction of the Pentagon and its civilian hawks. Their subsequent eight years of political control included two major military invasions and hundreds of small wars employing US Special Forces around the globe, establishing a template that continued after their political power waned.
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