The New Trail of Tears
Page 20
But how then to determine success? If most reasonable people can agree that poverty, unemployment, family disintegration, alcoholism, suicide, and domestic abuse are problems for any community, not just predominantly white communities, then we have to apply some of the same standards for achievement and behavior that we know can help combat them. Kids who are cared for in responsible two-parent families will do better in school, and those who do well in school will be more likely to find jobs. Those adults will in turn be better able to take care of their own children. Perhaps this sounds like an overly simplistic formula. But the truth of the matter is that when it comes to racial minorities in this country we too often engage in what George W. Bush famously called “the soft bigotry of low expectations.”
In 2013, Congress passed a resolution authorizing the National Museum of the American Indian to create a memorial on its grounds to honor Indian veterans. American Indians, it turns out, have served in the military at the highest rate of any group since the American Revolution. According to the Defense Department, as of 2012 there were more than 22,000 American Indians and Alaska Natives on active duty, and the 2010 census identified over 150,000 American Indian and Alaska Native veterans. Twenty-seven have been awarded the Medal of Honor.
Writing about the memorial in May 2015, Kevin Gover, director of the museum and a member of the Pawnee Nation of Oklahoma, explained the history:
I’ve witnessed first-hand why Native Americans feel compelled to serve. I was raised with stories of friends and family members’ bravery on the battlefield. Native Americans served in World War I even though they were not citizens of the United States. In fact, it was not until after World War II in the 1965 passage of the Voting Rights Act that all states were required to allow Native Americans to vote on the same basis as any other American. Despite decades of persecution and broken promises, despite being dispossessed of, and often forcibly removed from, their ancestral homelands, American Indians have served and continue to serve in our nation’s armed forces in numbers that belie their small percentage of the American population. They step forward when duty calls.19
Indeed, despite centuries of broken promises from the federal government, despite the bitterness that often pervades Indian communities, and despite years of being told by their own leaders and by Washington’s that they must remain a people apart, American Indians largely see themselves as Americans.
For every religious, ethnic, and racial minority in America, identity is a complicated topic. Are you a Jewish American or an American Jew? Are you Hispanic or Puerto Rican? How much does the specific place your ancestors came from matter as opposed to the way you distinguish yourselves from others in this country? Is it important that you look like your brethren or just that you have similar ancestry? And how much does your family background affect your daily life?
For American Indians, the questions are similar. And the answers vary significantly from tribe to tribe, from community to community, and from family to family. The fact that a significant portion of the population continues to live apart does make their situation different. Assimilation for American Indians didn’t happen as quickly or as quietly as it did with so many newcomers to this country. But you can’t spend much time on a reservation today without realizing how much the young people especially have absorbed mainstream American culture. The music coming from their cars, the videos on their phones, the clothing they wear – these are largely the same as in any area of the country.
Nor is it just American popular culture that’s pervasive on reservations. For the most part, American Indians want to be a part of this country, and they see the markers of their success in the same way that most other Americans do. They want their children to be well educated and have the opportunity to choose the best life path for themselves – to make enough money and pursue fulfilling jobs while retaining strong family and community ties and holding close the traditions of their ancestors.
Whereas some would prefer that children stay close to home, others see the necessity of pushing their children out in order to achieve what they want. Either way, they want to see their children grow up with a knowledge and understanding of Native traditions and Native languages.
But just as for any ethnic group in this country, keeping those traditions becomes more difficult with each passing year. When we think about American Indians in the context of other minority groups, it becomes clear that their cultural experience is not unique. For better or worse, they’re experiencing the same kind of assimilation as other groups. Once the traditions and the language are no longer the default for the whole community, they require serious effort to maintain. The children of Korean immigrants may no longer speak Korean at home, but if parents want their children to know Korean, they can pay someone to teach it to them.
Not surprisingly, the Indian communities that have done the most to hold on to their language and cultural traditions have tended to be those with the most money – in other words, those that have most adapted themselves to the American economic system and way of life. Thanks to the revenues from the Foxwoods Casino in Connecticut, for instance, the Pequot Indians were able to open up a massive museum and research center dedicated to their heritage. Pine Ridge’s Red Cloud Indian School, thanks to donations from outsiders, has been able to devote resources to the systematic study and teaching of the Lakota language. When communities are at a loss for food and housing, on the other hand, they simply can’t spend much time worrying about recouping cultural losses.
Although many tribal leaders believe that the key to raising up their communities is reintroducing young people to their cultural and linguistic heritage, it’s not enough to solve their problems, and it probably isn’t the best first step either. As Keith Moore, former director of the Bureau of Indian Education, noted, it’s only one piece of a hundred-piece educational puzzle.
The cultural problems on Indian reservations – what seems like laziness, an indifference toward work, an antipathy toward education – are really the results of economic and political circumstances that have been foisted upon Indians. If you live in a place where there are no jobs and no access to capital, not working becomes the norm. Any entrepreneurial impulse you have is quickly squelched. If you live in a place where the only jobs to be had are publicly funded and given out as rewards by political leaders, then nepotism (and the resulting corruption) becomes the norm. If you live in a place where the people who become schoolteachers are there because they’re related to someone in tribal government, you start to lose respect for educational enterprises. If students who fail classes end up graduating anyway because of their family connections, school starts to seem pointless. And if you do work hard in school but find that it gets you nowhere afterward, you and the people around you start to wonder what the point of education is at all. In other words, Indians, just like all people, respond to the economic incentives and political conditions around them.
The effects of the current system, though, aren’t only political and economic – why bother trying to extract natural resources from the ground or start your own business when you know it’ll be decades before you see the fruits of your labor? – but also deeply emotional. People are tired, and they’re bitter. They’ve tried to find a way out of their circumstances. But they’re thwarted at every turn. Whether it’s because they can’t buy or sell their land outright, whether it’s because they must ask the federal government’s permission for things that other Americans take for granted, or whether it’s because they’ve been relegated to the worst public schools, Indians can’t seem to catch a break. And every time it seems as if they’ve found a way out – casinos, tax-free cigarettes – the federal government steps in and takes it away. Who can live like this?
The solutions offered by politicians, both tribal and federal, seem obvious – what Indians need is more money. But the trend of downward mobility seen on some of these reservations suggests that throwing more money at this problem isn’t the answer. The sentiment tha
t things used to be better in Indian country is more than simple nostalgia. In the case of the Lumbee community, the older generation really did receive a better education. These older men and women are now raising children whose parents have dropped out of school and dropped out of any kind of productive life. On the Crow and Northern Cheyenne reservations, there are fewer businesses than in decades past. And crime has become more frequent.
If there is a cultural problem, it’s the culture of dependency that the federal government and the tribal governments have created. Whether it’s money from Washington to pay for housing or food or fuel costs, or whether it’s annuities coming from gaming endeavors, it has caused more problems than it has solved. And these funds haven’t done much to alleviate the suffering of individual Indians. Except for the wealthiest of the casino owners, most Indians still live in poverty, with little access to good education, health care, or jobs. The lock-in weekend at the elementary school on Pine Ridge, prompted by the abuse that arises when government checks are spent on alcohol, suggests that people on reservations know exactly where the problems lie and how to stop them.
It’s true that even though individuals have suffered, tribes have become more powerful as a result of the money flowing to them. As David Kimelberg, the Seneca Holdings CEO, points out, no one in Washington would be able to flood Seneca lands now as they did 50 years ago. The legal defense that Senecas would be able to mount would be much too powerful, thanks to the casino revenue filling their coffers.
But amassing political clout isn’t enough. It’s not enough for the individual Indians who live in difficult – sometimes destitute – conditions. The leaders of Indian nations often mean well. They believe that more revenue will fix their schools, their homes, and even their families. But it hasn’t. When the federal government allocates money for reservations, that money becomes mired in the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Even now that it’s run almost entirely by Indians, the BIA still doesn’t behave responsibly. And even when the money gets to the tribes, so much of it seems to fall through the cracks. Meanwhile the involvement of the federal government has meant that individual initiative seems to be quashed completely. As one Crow legislator said, Indians are the most overregulated race on the planet.
But those Indians who do favor more individual responsibility and less dependency, who want Washington out of their lives but also want to create a private economy and alternatives to the tribal school systems, frequently face opposition from tribal leaders. For posing a threat to the status quo, people like Ben Chavis are often tarred as traitors to their race. Schools like Saint Labre and Red Cloud are dismissed as “too white,” despite the fact that they do a better job of educating Indian kids. And representatives of Teach for America are branded as having “a savior mentality,” even when they go out of their way to recruit Indian teachers.
For some Indian leaders, the status quo is simply not acceptable. People like Manny Jules have made it their mission to change the way Indians are treated by the Canadian government, but he too has been criticized as being too quick to assimilate. And his plan for the First Nations Property Ownership legislation has made other tribal leaders question his intentions.
All of this has the effect of ensuring that ordinary Indians don’t rock the boat. From an economic standpoint as well as a political one, there’s nothing to be gained from speaking up. The only Indian voices that most Americans hear are the ones of the political leadership. And that too is a problem.
American Indians make up the largest ethnic minority group in four states – Montana, North Dakota, Oklahoma, and South Dakota. These are the places where Indians represent a large enough population that politicians have to be truly responsive to the demands of the leadership. But the leadership isn’t demanding reform. It’s demanding more money.
The politicians representing those states – like those in other states – have a clear directive: bring home the bacon. Their goals in Washington are mostly to figure out how to get funding for programs that help people from their state. They’re not being sent to Washington to reform the Bureau of Indian Affairs or introduce legislation that would clarify property rights on the reservation. They’re not in Congress to try to get the courts to fix the jurisdictional ambiguities that make law enforcement on reservations a nightmare.
As mentioned in chapter 1, American Indians make up 1.7 percent of the U.S. population, according to the 2010 census. Their median age is under 30 and about seven years below the median for the population as a whole. And their numbers are projected to grow significantly, to 8.6 million by July 2050, when they might compose as much as 2 percent of the population.20
From a political perspective, this means that the problems of American Indians are growing as well. We can’t assume there’ll be some mass exodus from reservations. And we can’t assume that politicians are going to work to solve these problems.
So what can we do? At one end of the spectrum, solutions to the problems of Indian reservations might require rethinking reservations altogether. As William Allen, former member of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, suggests, the only way to give Indians the sovereignty to take control of their economic and political destinies, while ensuring that Indians enjoy all the protections of American citizens, is to make reservations into states. This would never be feasible for smaller tribes and smaller reservations, but Allen is right that under current law these semi-autonomous entities and the people who live within their borders are prevented from succeeding.
It would be hard to overstate the political obstacles to creating new states – are Montana and South Dakota going to voluntarily give up their land? – but there are solutions short of statehood that might help. The question of whether the First Nations Property Ownership Act being seriously considered in Canada can work in the United States is a useful one. Manny Jules and his colleagues aren’t asking for the creation of new provinces to accommodate them. They see reserve land, for these purposes, as becoming more like cities. The underlying title would be turned over to a separate governing entity, and even when the land was sold, it’d remain part of the city, just as no one can sell a part of New York City to Newark. But individuals would be able to buy and sell it among themselves, without the permission or over-sight of tribal or federal officials. Whether property reform can work in Canada remains to be seen and is a complicated question because of the treaties and agreements that most tribes have with the Canadian government, not to mention the centuries of legal precedent governing these matters.
The reforms that are possible – given the political will to change things – are at the bureaucratic level. Despite numerous attempts, no one has yet been able to change the Bureau of Indian Affairs. If Terry Anderson is right and the BIA has succeeded in creating more and more regulations in order to perpetuate the need for its existence, reforms will be very hard to institute. To change things will require real oversight from Congress and the secretary of the interior. But it will also require transparency. It’s hard to shock the American people with reports of wasteful spending in Washington. They’ve come to expect it. But in this case, the spending is actually helping create economic problems for many Indians.
Perhaps one of the easiest problems for the public to understand is the problem of law enforcement. The competing claims of jurisdiction when it comes to investigating and prosecuting criminals on Indian lands have contributed to lawlessness on many reservations and the suffering of their most vulnerable citizens. In principle, this is a problem that law enforcement agencies deal with all the time – off reservations, too. The question of whether the FBI, the state police, or local authorities should be asked to handle a particular crime isn’t unique. What is unique, though, are the political and cultural sensitivities on reservations. Federal and state authorities don’t want to suggest that tribal authorities aren’t doing a good job of policing their own communities. And they’re certainly reluctant to report or publicize the more heinous crimes occurring on some reservations. Bu
t the time has come for some honesty. Firing or threatening federal employees for reporting on child abuse or rape is unacceptable. And covering up these problems will only make them worse.
Whether the cause of these crimes is the boarding-school experience of Indian parents or grandparents or some other factor not being considered, the cycle has to stop somewhere. Attempts to deflect the blame – by suggesting, for instance, that non-Indians are responsible for the bulk of these misdeeds, coming onto Indian land to assault and rape – are dishonest and do a great disservice to the victims. Federal agencies should be reporting on these matters correctly, and the media has a duty to uncover the worst abuses, even if that means there may be politically incorrect conclusions to their articles.
Laws and lawmakers who continue to protect the tribe even over the interests of individual Indians must be reconsidered. The Indian Child Welfare Act, which was conceived as a way of protecting Indian children, has become a way of increasing the rolls of tribal membership even at the expense of finding a decent home for a child. Unlike for some of the other reforms discussed in this book, there’s a coalition of people who could potentially lobby Congress for changes to ICWA, including adoption agencies and civil rights organizations. In the summer of 2015, the Arizona-based Goldwater Institute filed a class-action lawsuit to challenge the constitutionality of ICWA.