Senator Inouye: “I’m not in a position to decide whether it’s appropriate or not, because if I apply my experience from Hawaii, I would say that this was not even robbery. It was murder.”
233 The junior senator from Arizona: U.S. Senate Select Committee on Indian Affairs, Hearing on the Final Report of the Garrison Unit Joint Tribal Advisory Committee. “This was back in John’s anti-Indian days,” reflects Raymond. “He’s come a long way since then. There aren’t many politicians in Washington who command more respect from Indian leaders than John McCain.”
235 President Reagan made an off-the-cuff: University of Wisconsin professor Al Gedicks has explored the Reagan administration’s failed attempts to create a “neo- Termination Era” (Gedicks, The New Resource Wars). Gedicks shows how Secretary Watt relied on the support of right-wing think tanks in Washington to roll back recent court victories that secured rights to the tribes. One of the strongest arguments for turning parts of Indian Country into national “sacrifice zones” was the fact that uranium exploration in Indian Country over the past three decades had left thousands of test holes venting radon into Indian homes and schools. It seemed to administrators in Washington that it would be cheaper and easier to move the Indians into the cities than to clean up the messes left behind by the mining companies. In the end, the government neither filled in the test holes nor moved the Indians to urban centers. Lori Goodman, the founder and director of Diné CARE, was still trying in 2003 to secure monetary compensation from the federal government for the families of hundreds of Navajo uranium miners who have died of cancers linked directly to uranium poisoning.
Gedicks is particularly informative on the subject of Wisconsin’s Chippewa, Potawatomi, and Oneida tribes’ battles against former governor Tommy Thompson and the Exxon Corporation. For nearly twenty years, Exxon tried to open a copper mine near Crandon Lake but was thwarted by tribal environmental standards that were supported by the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA. Eventually, the Wisconsin legislature passed a law forbidding the cyanide-leech mining for copper or zinc. Exxon finally pulled out of the fight and left the state when white sports-fishing groups closed ranks with the tribes.
235 “Maybe we made a mistake”: “Remarks on ‘Humoring Indians’ Bring Protest from Tribal Leaders,” New York Times.
236 the White House sought to smooth the waters: “Indians Confer with President and Top Aides,” New York Times.
237 During the 1940s and the 1950s: U.S. Senate Select Committee on Indian Affairs, Hearing on the Three Affiliated Tribes and Standing Rock Sioux Tribal Equitable Compensation Act of 1991. Senator Inouye opened the hearings with the summary of the taking of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara lands, then concluded the hearings with his statement on the “deceit and deception” used by Congress to abrogate hundreds of treaties. After Inouye finished, North Dakota senator Kent Conrad put his cards on the table in a forceful speech: “All the people of Fort Berthold and Standing Rock want is a chance to rebuild. They pray for a better life for their children, and they demand justice from the government that has treated them with brutality and indifference.”
237 “What you have done is to share”: Ibid.
241 overview of Senate Bill 168: U.S. Senate Select Committee on Indian Affairs, Implementing Recommendations of the Garrison Unit Joint Tribal Advisory Committee.
242 they are still waiting: “Sakakawea Levels Worry North Dakota,” Bismarck Tribune. Following the GDUC hearings in the mid-1980s, Governor Guy and Sinner organized more meetings between congressional delegations and farmers in the Pick-Sloan irrigation district, but they only succeeded in creating frustration in a new generation of farmers.
242 Of the 1 million acres of irrigation: Russell, Promise of Water. Author Michael Lawson manages to introduce a note of humor to this bitter situation.
Navigation, Pick’s pet project on the lower Missouri, has become a bad, very bad, joke. Taxpayers have spent untold millions to float no more than 2.6 million tons of commercial freight up the river each year. The Corps admitted that commercial navigation would no longer be viable after 2000, and in 1973 they admitted that there would not be sufficient water by then to maintain a navigation channel, so they proposed a new plan, with a cost of $60 billion, to constantly dredge the river and extend navigation to Yankton, South Dakota. Congress is still laughing (Lawson, Dammed Indians, p. 187).
242 drought-stricken farmers: After drought devastated a thousand square miles of crops in the Upper Missouri River Valley in the spring and summer of 2002, the region’s farmers turned to Congress, seeking $5 billion in relief. Throughout the ordeal, North Dakota farmers watched helplessly as water levels in Lake Sakakawea were drawn down to keep downstream barge traffic moving without interruption between St. Louis and Sioux City, Iowa.
242 in January of 2004: In an earlier ruling over the best use of upstream water, the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals held that in a contest for water impounded on the Upper Missouri, barge traffic should take precedence over recreational uses upstream. As far as the upstream states were concerned, “recreational uses” was a red herring that allowed lower states to finesse the real issue. In January 2004, North Dakota’s attorney general, Wayne Stenehjem, petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to review the management plan of the Army Corps of Engineers in light of the original O’Mahoney-Millikin Amendment to the Flood Control Act of 1944.
242 “I’m afraid it’s [Pick-Sloan’s] all been one huge scam”: Farmers on the Upper Missouri have learned that falling water levels always result in unforeseeable trouble. As water levels drop, industrial and agricultural toxins become more concentrated and, consequently, more lethal to fish and migratory bird life. Dozens of species that once flourished on the Missouri River bottoms are now on the federal government’s endangered species list. In late 2002, the nonpartisan watchdog group American Rivers declared the Missouri the most endangered river in America.
242 “There are dwellings all about me”: Catlin, George Catlin.
245 At every venue thus far:“Dollars, Sense, and Salmon,” Idaho Statesman. Also see Whitelaw, “Breaching Dam Myths.” “Between 1988 and 1997, logging in Oregon and Washington fell 87 percent on federal lands and 47 percent overall, and the timber-industry employment dropped 21 percent,” writes Whitelaw, “but total employment actually increased 32 percent, and real per capita income grew 21 percent. When politicians like George Bush and Gordon Smith claim that breaching the dams will hurt the region’s economy, the hard numbers tell a different story.” The numbers, in fact, argue that those claims are political nonsense. “In the case of the dams the most conservative estimates show that dam breaching will actually result in a $200 million annual windfall.”
246 In 1991, only one sockeye salmon returned to Redfish Lake: “Dollars, Sense, and Salmon,” Idaho Statesman, and Barcott, “Blow Up.”
In 1892, commercial fishermen on the Columbia netted 873,106 sockeye salmon heading upstream into the high mountains of Idaho and Montana. When the Ice Harbor Dam was built on the Snake in 1962, sockeye counts “crashed” to 1,118. By 1981, with all four dams in place, the counts were down to 218, and in 1991, only one fish made it home.
Reporters for the Idaho Statesman newspaper have documented recent efforts by state and federal fisheries’ biologists to reintroduce the sockeye to Redfish Lake. Tens of millions of dollars have been spent on the effort. To date, fewer than sixty fish have returned.
Bibliography
This book stands on the broad shoulders of skilled and dedicated predecessors. Roy Meyer’s The Village Indians of the Upper Missouri is a journeyman’s monument to the craft of the academic historian. Not to be overshadowed, James Rhonda’s Lewis and Clark Among the Indians is a work from which all other writings on Lewis and Clark are measured. Similarly, Marc Reisner’s exhaustive investigation of the Bureau of Reclamation and the Army Corps of Engineers, Cadillac Desert; Henry C. Hart’s The Dark Missouri; and Michael Lawson’s Dammed Indians gave me firm footing for t
he water wars that have been waged for the past fifty years on the Upper Missouri River. Reisner’s bibliography could be published under its own title: “Anatomy of an American Paradox.”
Alfred Bowers’s twin volumes, Hidatsa Social and Ceremonial Organization and Mandan Social and Ceremonial Organization, were indispensable for shaping the background of this story. Bernard DeVoto’s The Course of Empire; Walter Prescott Webb’s timeless study, The Great Plains; and the extraordinary journals of the Spanish adventurer Cabeza de Vaca, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, framed the larger boundaries of the discovery-era Americas. Both DeVoto and Webb were indebted to Hiram Martin Chittenden’s three-volume work, The American Fur Trade of the Far West. In the decades since the publication of these academic landmarks, renowned archaeologists W. Raymond Wood and Thomas Thiessen, in Early Fur Trade on the Northern Plains: Canadian Traders Among the Mandan and Hidatsa Indians, 1738-1818, have systematically exposed mythologies about Lewis and Clark that have been masquerading as historical fact in school classrooms for generations.
The American Indian in Western Legal Thought: The Discourses of Conquest, Robert Williams’s investigation into the evolution of Western legal thought from the twelfth-century Crusades to the Marshall Court, belongs on a shelf all by itself. David Getches’s reductive analysis of the Rehnquist Court, “Conquering the Cultural Frontier,” from the California Law Review, and Raymond Cross’s penetrating analysis of John Marshall in two major law-review monographs, “Sovereign Bargains” and “Tribes as Rich Nations,” join Wilcomb Washburn’s and Francis Paul Prucha’s works, Red Man’s Land/White Man’s Law and The Great Father, respectively, to contribute fresh insights into Marshall and the intellectual big bang that resulted in the formulation of federalism and the United States of America.
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