Rez Life

by David Treuer

  The Osage, after more than a century of fighting, were relocated to the Indian Territories (now Oklahoma) and given what was, more or less, worthless farmland. However, in 1894 large quantities of oil were discovered beneath Osage land. Henry Foster, a petroleum speculator, was granted exclusive oil and mineral rights provided he pay to all the enrolled Osage a 10 percent royalty on all the oil sold. Within a few years, the Osage were among the richest people in the world. When royalties peaked in 1925 one family of five, all of whom were enrolled, earned about $65,000, or approximately $800,000 in today’s currency. The ugliness that follows money like stink on shit found its way to Osage territory: white speculators married Osage women to get their royalty rights, and one man, Ernest Burkhart, married an Osage woman and conspired to kill her and her family so he would receive her royalties.

  But these were accidental grants of wealth. Reservations in ­general —far from urban centers, lacking infrastructure, without strong government, with no strong representation to speak of, with little ability to protect or exploit natural resources, and far from shipping and transportation networks—were poor. Poverty kills. Indians were supposed to be dead.

  The Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, begun in 1987 and designed to address economic inequality and development, identified about a dozen reasons why life on the rez was virtually synonymous with a life of poverty. Lack of access to capital was a significant roadblock. “Unfair lending practices, the difficulty of collateralizing assets held in trust by the U.S. government, and low penetration of banking facilities continue to limit the supply of capital in Indian country.” This is a polite way of saying that, for at least three reasons, no one wants to lend to Indians. (1) They are Indian. (2) Since most Indian land, what there is left of it, is held in common and in trust, it is not generally possible to use this land as collateral for loans; thus Indian individuals and communities are deprived of the number one asset with which most Americans strive toward the middle class—the houses they live in. (3) There simply weren’t many banks on the rez until casinos were established. The nearest banks were off-reservation and owned, operated, or staffed by non-Indians who were not always keen on acquiring Indian accounts.

  The Harvard Project also suggested that the lack of human capital (education, skills, technical expertise) and the means to develop it was also a problem. “The need for skilled employees in all aspects of economic activity is critical,” the report says. “Because of high rates of unemployment, ‘work until the grant runs out’ experience, and common incidences of political nepotism, a large segment of the reser­vation workforce typically has been unable to develop consistent workplace experience and a career path. For years, the U.S. government has underwritten job training skills and education programs for adults and children. But without related economic opportunities, these efforts have either been wasted or led to ‘brain drains,’ in which new or newly trained talent flows off-reservation.”

  The Harvard Project went on to list other impediments to economic development: lack of infrastructure, of effective planning, of access to natural resources, or of control over the available resources; distance from markets; the high cost of transportation; corruption; factionalism; the instability of reservation government; and a lack of entrepreneurial skill.

  This is nowhere more true than on Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Pine Ridge is the eighth largest reservation in the United States—larger than Rhode Island and Delaware combined—and has an Indian population of about 15,000, as of the 2000 census. Unemployment is at about 80 percent, so only one in five people has steady employment, though this is not for lack of trying. The result? Half of all the Indians on Pine Ridge live below the poverty level. While there are a few small businesses owned by individuals and also a few owned by the tribe, there is little else. The tribe began a moccasin factory, a meatpacking plant, and a fishing tackle business. All of them failed. In contrast, it opened the Prairie Wind Casino in 1994 in three double-wide trailers, and by 2007 this casino was successful enough that the tribe opened a $20 million upgrade with hotel and restaurant. It provides hundreds of jobs, mostly to Indians from Pine Ridge. Despite the casino, which is far away from any urban center and doesn’t generate the kind of revenues one sees at Foxwoods or Morongo Casino and Spa, Pine Ridge is still crushingly poor, like most reservations.

  Like Pine Ridge, the Cabazon Mission Band of Indians, the owners of the Morongo Resort and Casino, were desperately poor in the early 1980s. The Cabazon Mission Band has a tiny reservation along with eight other bands of Cahuilla Indians in Southern California. Located in the arid Coachella Valley, bounded by the San Bernardino, San Jacinto, Santa Rosa, and Little San Bernardino Mountain ranges, the homeland of the Cahuilla Indians is dry, nearly unfarmable if not for the Coachella Canal, which was completed in 1948 and brings the troubled waters of the Colorado River into the valley to support fruit farming. As of 2006, 100,000 acres of the valley were irrigated and farmed, bringing in revenues of $576 million, or almost $12,000 per acre. Ninety-five percent of all the dates grown in the United States are grown in the Coachella Valley, but aside from the date trees, which are almost all owned by whites, there was little to recommend the valley or the reservation except for Palm Springs.

  In the 1950s the Cahuilla Indians of the Coachella Valley weren’t doing well. Not that you would know it by looking at the non-Natives who lived in the valley. Nearby, in Palm Springs, located at the northern end of the valley, Frank Sinatra was entertaining his brat pack friends in bungalows named after his hits. (You could stay in “New York, New York” or “My Way” or, if you came with a lover, the “Tender Trap” was open to you.) Albert Frey and John Lautner were designing houses for Bob Hope, Robert Mitchum, Mary Pickford, Shirley Temple, and Charlie Chaplin. Meanwhile the Agua Caliente Indians, half of whose reservation is within the city limits of Palm Springs, were living in huts and shacks. Joseph Benito, a Chemehuevi tribal member who grew up near Indio and who served for many years as the spokesperson for the Cabazon Band, remembers: “Life was pretty primitive in those days. There wasn’t much on the reservation except sagebrush and rabbits. We didn’t even have electricity until the 1950s. Housing was limited to makeshift quarters. . . . There was no running water. We walked two miles to school every day, even in the summer heat, and thought nothing about it. . . . A highlight of our lives was the monthly trip to Torres-Martinez Reservation where the Indian Agency handed out rations for our food allotment. We always could count on a good meal after that.”

  The total number of members of the Cahuilla Tribe was around 800 as of the 1990 census, and the Cabazon Band of the Cahuilla is tiny. In the last fifty years the number of enrolled Cabazon Indians has fluctuated between thirty and forty. By comparison, the Cherokee have more than 100,000 enrolled members. There are also Cahuilla Indians living in the Coachella Valley—the Augustine Band of Mission Indians. The Augustine Band is the nation’s smallest federally recognized tribe, with an enrollment of eight. From the 1950s through the early 1980s, such low enrollment numbers were a drawback for a tribe that wanted to make its lot better. Some populations were smaller than many family Thanksgiving parties. The first Thanksgiving, celebrated in 1621 in Plymouth, Massachusetts, was actually three times larger than the entire population of the Cabazon Mission Band.

  With such a small population the Cabazon Band had tremendous difficulty in obtaining basic social services, let alone coercing an unwilling government into honoring treaty obligations, such as providing housing, education, roads, and annuities. It sometimes paid to be a big tribe, either warlike (such as the Dakota) or more conciliatory (such as the Cherokee). In 1852 and again in 1877 both the state of California and the federal government unilaterally refused to ratify existing treaties or simply rewrote the treaties without the input of the Cabazon. The government was more interested in courting prospectors and railroad developers. Both groups wanted something from the valley—the ra
ilroads wanted to go through it and the miners wanted to go under it. There was nothing to compel the government to act; nothing about the geographic position or political insignificance of the Cabazon encouraged the government to even remember them.

  For instance, in 1967 the Cabazon Mission Band submitted a budget for the fiscal year to the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). The budget totaled $350: $200 for committee expenses, $100 for telephone charges, and $50 for miscellaneous expenses. The band then realized that actual expenses exceeded those reported and submitted a revised budget for $1,500. The budget resolution was returned to the Cabazon Band on July 3, 1967. The accompanying letter from the BIA stated: “The resolution is not in good form, because the Resolved clause does not state who is to be paid. However, if you have telephone bills which are marked Paid, and if you can determine the bills were paid by Mr. Joseph Benitez, Chairman, you could accept the resolution as authority to reimburse the Chairman. If you do not obligate FY 1967 tribal funds by submitting MOR document to OS in Albuquerque, it appears that you will have to delay payment until FY 1968 budget has been approved, and until funds have been allotted. The original resolution is returned herewith.”

  This is a classic example of the “death by bureaucracy” that plagued Indian reservations across the country; uneducated and unsavvy tribal officials who were trying simply to have the needs of their communities met were stonewalled by a corrupt, clumsy, inept, and uncaring BIA.

  The late 1960s—filled with the furor and success of the civil rights movement, Johnson’s War on Poverty, and the rise of the American Indian Movement (AIM)—gave way to the 1970s. And while tribal councils watched as grassroots organizations fought for justice and as a cadre of educated Indians took positions and gained experience in Johnson’s Great Society (in the BIA; in the Office of Economic Opportunity; in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare; and as administrators for CAP), the 1970s turned out to be pretty good years for Indian tribes. Nixon’s administration turned out to be a good one for Indians—millions of dollars were appropriated for the Indian Financing Act of 1974 and the money went into insurance, loan, land, and business projects.

  The Cabazon Band capitalized on the experience of its members and on the increased availability of funds. Band members opened a smoke shop and sold tax-free cigarettes. When the state tried to collect taxes on the proceeds of the smoke shop, they fought it. Other tribes around the country were doing the same thing—the Seminole, Oneida, Seneca, and others were reaching out and exercising what strength they had. Many of them, having cut their teeth on small businesses like smoke shops and trading posts, began venturing into the realm of gambling—mostly bingo or small card halls. And this is where two significant, jagged pieces of history going back, once again, to the dawn of Indian-Anglo relations came into play. Both pieces of history, one involving the Trail of Tears, the other the taxes on a trailer amounting to $147, spoke to the issue of sovereignty. Both moments were not merely a struggle between the United States and the Indians, but actually a three-way struggle between states, the federal government, and Indian tribes. The outcome of these two struggles between three powers, in turn, paved the way for Indian gaming as we know it.

  One question people always ask is: why do Indians get to have casinos and we don’t? Fortunately, the question is easy to answer: because of the Cherokee and because of a mobile home in Squaw Lake, Minnesota.

  In the first part of the nineteenth century the Cherokee were doing very well. They had alternately befriended and fought the British, the Americans, and various other Indian tribes and somehow always managed to come out on top. The Cherokee had fought the Shawnee and forced them north of the Ohio River. In 1711 the Tuscarora began attacking colonists in North Carolina, as a last resort after treaty negotiations continued to whittle away their rights. The colony of South Carolina, short of troops, sent two armies against the Tuscarora. Each army was made up of just a few white colonists and both armies were dwarfed by the numbers of their Indian allies—Yamassee, Catawba, and Cherokee. The Tuscarora were soundly defeated and fled north, eventually settling in upstate New York and becoming part of the Iroquois Confederacy. The Cherokee, having thus secured the friendship of the English, watched as the Yamassee were defeated by the colonists. And then the Cherokee themselves drove out the Yuchi and then the Creeks. This made them the dominant power in the region. By the mid-1700s the Cherokee and their allies were powerful enough to treat on a nation-to-nation basis with England. Trade increased. The Cherokee started farming on the southern plantation model, and many Cherokee bought and worked black slaves—a signal of their economic and social status in the region. (In fact, a lot of African Americans with Indian blood have Cherokee blood—and not because the Cherokee and African Americans were good friends, but because Cherokee masters slept with their black slaves.) Then, in 1828, gold was discovered on Cherokee land in Georgia, and the Cherokee, the state of Georgia, and the U.S. government all came into conflict with one other over the pleached issues of control and power.

  The federal government, the state of Georgia, and the Cherokee all fought over and for their respective sovereignty. The federal government believed that the states fell within its power as a sovereign nation—it and only it could make treaties, raise an army, negotiate trade relations, etc. The state of Georgia (like North Carolina and South Carolina) believed it could ignore and dismiss any laws it considered “unconstitutional.” The Cherokee—with their own army, representative government, laws, courts, customs, language, writing system, and mode of dress, and the might to enforce their desires, thought they should be in charge of their own destiny. And so began a tripartite dispute. In the same year that gold was discovered, the state legislature of Georgia passed an act that made Cherokee territories part of and subject to the laws of Georgia. As a way of proving its power, Georgia created a test case. In 1830 a Cherokee man, George Tassels, killed another Cherokee man on Cherokee territory. This case was clearly within the physical and legal bounds of the Cherokee to prosecute in their own courts. But Georgia took Tassels into custody and planned to try him. The Cherokee, led by Chief John Ross, prepared to petition the U.S. government because they wanted to deal with Tassels according to their own laws. Georgia ignored them. What began as a legal wrangle became much more melodramatic. Messages were rushed to the Georgia legislature, which ignored them. The government did not intervene. The Supreme Court ruled that sovereignty was not affected by states, but Georgia ignored the ruling (even though today it remains the basis for tribal sovereignty and gaming). The dispute ended with Tassels hanging from a tree on Christmas eve in a barren field. Georgia had stood its ground and hanged Tassels above it.

  With Tassels hanging from a tree, Chief John Ross, with the support of many people in the national Republican Party, including Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, Ambrose Spencer, and Davy Crockett, continued his efforts to uphold the sovereignty of his people by filing a case against Georgia with the U.S. Supreme Court. The Cherokee had tried this before, in 1829. At that time the secretary of war, John H. Eaton, informed the Cherokee delegation that Andrew Jackson would support Georgia’s right to remove the Cherokee and other tribes to territories west of the Mississippi. Cheered by the verdict, in 1832 Georgia began offering lotteries to settlers who wanted Cherokee land. Ross, representing more than 20,000 Cherokee and armed with a Cherokee constitution and the will of the people, brought his case before the Supreme Court. Worcester v. Georgia ended in a semi-victory for the Cherokee; they were a “dependent nation” in the eyes of the court. Chief Justice John Marshall ruled that neither Georgia nor the U.S. federal government had jurisdiction over the matter, because the Cherokee nation and other Indian tribes who had treated with the U.S. government were “denominated domestic dependent nations,” a phrase that haunts the legal wrangling between tribes and the government to this day. Justice Marshall’s narrative was compelling and poetic: “A case better calculated to excite them can scarcely be imag
ined. A people once numerous, powerful, and truly independent, found by our ancestors in the quiet and uncontrolled possession of an ample domain, gradually sinking beneath our superior policy, our arts and our arms, have yielded their lands by successive treaties, each of which contains a solemn guarantee of the residue, until they retain no more of their formerly extensive territory than is deemed necessary to their comfortable subsistence. To preserve this remnant, the present application is made.” It wasn’t until Worcester v. Georgia that the court recognized the complete independence and sovereignty of the Cherokee.

  Despite Marshall’s poetry, or because of it, Georgia ignored the ruling. Andrew Jackson lent his support to Georgia. Jackson is probably the least-liked president in Indian country. Born three weeks after his father died in an accident, Andrew Jackson grew up fast. He enlisted as a courier during the Revolutionary War at age thirteen. An incident that testifies to his toughness occurred when he was a prisoner during the war. A British officer commanded the fourteen-year-old Jackson to shine his boots; Jackson refused; the officer attacked him with a sword, cutting his hand and head badly, and instilling in Jackson a violent hatred of the British. After an early career in politics and in business as a landowner (and slaveholder) he found success in the military. He was instrumental in putting down Tecumseh’s rebellion during 1812 and 1813, when the Red Stick Creeks rose up and killed 400 settlers. During the ensuing battles more than 800 Red Sticks were killed by Jackson and the Tennessee militia. Cherokee, Southern Creek, and Choctaw soldiers were under his command—the very Indians he would remove to the Oklahoma Territories twenty years later. The war effectively ended at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend in 1814. Jackson went on to fight more British (at the Battle of New Orleans) and more Indians (during the Seminole Wars). While engaged in fighting the Seminole he succeeded by dint of his ruthlessness in getting Spain to relinquish its title to Florida. While Seminole warriors were fighting, Jackson attacked Seminole villages, burned them to the ground, and destroyed the crops. He executed British traders who were supplying the Indians. Spain could not afford to battle against such a ruthless adversary. It was largely as a result of military service and military victories that Jackson became president.