Custer Died For Your Sins Read online

  Under the laws and courts of the present there is no way for Indian people to get the federal government to admit they have rights. The executive branch of the government crudely uses Indian lands as pawns in the great race to provide pork-barrel agencies with sufficient dam-building projects to keep them busy.

  Until America begins to build a moral record in her dealings with the Indian people she should not try to fool the rest of the world about her intentions on other continents. America has always been a militantly imperialistic world power eagerly grasping for economic control over weaker nations.

  The Indian wars of the past should rightly be regarded as the first foreign wars of American history. As the United States marched across this continent, it was creating an empire by wars of foreign conquest just as England and France were doing in India and Africa. Certainly the war with Mexico was imperialistic, no more or less than the wars against the Sioux, Apache, Utes, and Yakimas. In every case the goal was identical: land.

  When the frontier was declared officially closed in 1890 it was only a short time before American imperialistic impulses drove this country into the Spanish-American War and the acquisition of America’s Pacific island empire began. The tendency to continue imperialistic trends remained constant between the two world wars as this nation was involved in numerous banana wars in Central and South America.

  There has not been a time since the founding of the republic when the motives of this country were innocent. Is it any wonder that other nations are extremely skeptical about its real motives in the world today?

  When one considers American history in its imperialistic light, it becomes apparent that if morality is to be achieved in this country’s relations with other nations a return to basic principles is in order. Definite commitments to fulfill extant treaty obligations to Indian tribes would be the first step toward introducing morality into American foreign policy.

  Many things can immediately be done to begin to make amends for past transgressions. Passage of federal legislation acknowledging the rights of the Indian people as contained in the treaties can make the hunting and fishing rights of the Indians a reality.

  Where land has been wrongfully taken—and there are few places where it has not been wrongfully taken—it can be restored by transferring land now held by the various governmental departments within reservation boundaries to the tribes involved. Additional land in the public domain can be added to smaller reservations, providing a viable land base for those Indian communities needing more land.

  Eastern tribes not now receiving federal services can be recognized in a blanket law affirming their rights as existing communities and organized under the Indian Reorganization Act. Services can be made available to these communities on a contract basis and the tribes can be made self-sufficient.

  Mythical generalities of what built this country and made it great must now give way to consideration of keeping contractual obligations due to the Indian people. Morality must begin where immorality began. Karl Mundt, in commenting on the passage of the Indian Claims Commission Bill in 1946, stated:

  . . . if any Indian tribe can prove that it has been unfairly and dishonorably dealt with by the United States it is entitled to recover. This ought to be an example for all the world to follow in its treatment of minorities.

  The Indian Claims Commission opened a special commission for tribes that had been swindled in land transactions in the last century. But a great many cases have not been heard and a great many others which have been heard produced exceedingly harsh decisions against the tribes. In addition, eastern tribes were not allowed to press claims at all. And since the termination policy has been in effect, additional moral claims of tribes who were severely hurt by that policy have arisen.

  The Indian Claims Commission is, or should be, merely the first step in a general policy of restitution for past betrayals. Present policy objectives should be oriented toward restitution of Indian communities with rights they enjoyed for centuries before the coming of the white man.

  The world is indeed watching the behavior of the United States. Vietnam is merely a symptom of the basic lack of integrity of the government, a side issue in comparison with the great domestic issues which must be faced—and justly faced—before this society destroys itself.

  Cultural and economic imperialism must be relinquished. A new sense of moral values must be inculcated into the American blood stream. American society and the policies of the government must realistically face the moral problems created by the roughshod treatment of various segments of that society. The poverty program only begins to speak of this necessity, the Employment Act of 1946 only hinted in this direction. It is now time to jump fully into the problem and solve it once and for all.

  3 THE DISASTROUS POLICY OF TERMINATION

  PEOPLE OFTEN FEEL guilty about their ancestors killing all those Indians years ago. But they shouldn’t feel guilty about the distant past. Just the last two decades have seen a more devious but hardly less successful war waged against Indian communities. In the old days blankets infected with smallpox were given to the tribes in an effort to decimate them. In the past they were systematically hunted down and destroyed. Were an individual citizen to do this it would be classified as cold-blooded murder. When it was done by the U.S. Army it was an “Indian war.” But during the past twenty years federal medical services have been denied various tribes, resulting in tremendous increase in disease.

  The Congressional policy of termination, advanced in 1954 and pushed vigorously for nearly a decade, was a combination of the old systematic hunt and the deprivation of services. Yet this policy was not conceived as a policy of murder. Rather it was thought that it would provide that elusive “answer” to the Indian problem. And when it proved to be no answer at all, Congress continued its policy, having found a new weapon in the ancient battle for Indian land.

  The roots of termination extend backward in time to the early years of the Roosevelt administration. The New Deal ushered in a new program for the Indian people. The Meriam Report of 1928 had shown that Indian tribes were in a desperate situation. There had been no progress of any kind on the reservations since they were set up. The people were in the final stages of demise.

  Pressures for reform coincided with the election of Roosevelt, who appointed John Collier as Commissioner of Indian Affairs. Collier was a well-known anthropologist of liberal persuasion. He quickly pushed the Wheeler-Howard Act through Congress in 1934 and gave the reservations their first taste of self-government in nearly half a century.

  The Senate Interior Committee that handled Indian legislation kept alive its investigative powers over Indian Affairs by periodically renewing the original Congressional resolution which authorized it to initiate the Meriam Report investigation. The committee intended to ride herd on the programs of the New Deal lest any “foreign” influences should develop. It could not conceive of returning self-government to a people who should have disappeared long ago.

  By 1943 the Senate Interior Committee was convinced that the Indian Bureau should be abolished. But the sentiment did not take hold in any discernible policy determinations because of the war.

  The House Interior Committee, not to be outdone by its colleagues in the other chamber, authorized an investigation of Indian Affairs by a special subcommittee headed by Karl Mundt, Republican of South Dakota. The committee reported that the Wheeler-Howard Act was not accomplishing its task of bringing the Indian people up to the level of their white neighbors.

  In 1947 the Senate Civil Service Committee held hearings on ways that government payrolls could be cut and expenditures reduced. The Republicans had captured Congress that autumn and they were looking for defenseless New Deal programs to trim. They found a natural in the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

  William Zimmerman, Acting Commissioner of Indian Affairs, was asked to give testimony on the possibility of reducing personnel in the bureau by releasing some of the tribes from federal supervision. The com
mittee was primarily interested in a consolidation of functions and the subsequent saving of federal funds.

  Zimmerman was anxious to remain a neutral party and so presented the committee with a series of recommendations, none of which would have resulted in substantial savings.

  He classified the existing tribes into three categories. The first class was composed of tribes that could immediately be terminated from federal services, providing certain protections were given them. The second class consisted of tribes that might possibly achieve self-sufficiency within ten years following an intensified program of development. The last class had an indefinite time period in which federal services were needed.

  In view of the three categories it is clear that Zimmerman had assumed the tribes would make substantial progress under already existing programs and take on increasing responsibilities for those programs. He also assumed that Congress would adopt a rational and understanding approach to the subject.

  So Zimmerman laid out the criteria by which he had classified the tribes:

  . . . in making up these three groups of tribes, I took four factors into account.

  The first one is the degree of acculturation of the particular tribe. That includes such factors as the admixture of white blood, the percentage of illiteracy, the business ability of the tribe, their acceptance of white institutions and their acceptance by whites in the community.

  The second factor is the economic condition of the tribe, principally the availability of resources to enable either the tribe or the individuals, out of their tribal or individual assets, to make a reasonably decent living.

  The third factor is the willingness of the tribe and its members to dispense with federal aid.

  The last criterion is the willingness and ability of the State in which the tribe is located to assume the responsibilities.

  There was no doubt that Zimmerman regarded Indian consent and understanding as among the important factors to be considered in any alteration of the existing relationship. But there was also an emphasis on the willingness of the state to assume responsibility for the tribe and its members.

  Zimmerman had prepared sample withdrawal plans, which he shared with the committee members:

  I have prepared separate bills for the Klamath, Osage and Menominee tribes.

  I took those as examples, as specimens, because each of them has substantial assets, each of them has a small degree of tribal control, and each of them has indicated that it wants to assume more control, if not full control, of its tribal assets and its tribal operations.

  Each of those tribes further has prior legislation under which the Department supervises the operations. For that reason it seems to me best to suggest, as types at least, these three different tribes, [emphasis added]

  The Acting Commissioner suggested three special plans by which the bureau might consider it possible to end federal supervision and enable the tribe to have some chance of success. For the Klamath, a rich timber tribe located near Crater Lake, Oregon, it was envisioned that all funds would remain subject to Congressional appropriation so that the tribal council would not be subjected to undue pressure for distribution by the reservation people.

  A corporation to operate the massive Klamath forest by sustained-yield methods would be organized by the tribe. Officials would be subject to federal laws and courts for acts of malfeasance, to guarantee proper administration of the corporation. Because of treaty rights of tax exemption the forest would remain untaxable until Congress provided otherwise in consultation with the tribe.

  The plan advanced for the Menominee tribe of Wisconsin was similar. Earlier it had been awarded $1.5 million in a claim against the United States and took its judgment in land, consolidating its reservation into one large tract. The Menominees had previously successfully resisted the Allotment Act and issued use rights to members of the tribe instead of allotments. In that sense only were they different from the Klamaths, who had an allotted reservation.

  The Menominees had a sawmill with a dual purpose—to provide jobs for tribal members and income for the tribe. Zimmerman foresaw a fifty-year period of tax exemption on the Menominee forest as the most feasible proposal.

  The Osages had already distributed shares of their tribal estate in “headrights,” allotted the land, and retained the subsurface mineral rights, which provided oil royalties to holders of headrights. The sample bill for the Osage provided that all funds administered by the Interior Department would henceforth be administered by the tribe, subject to audit at any time by Interior officials.

  Proposals were also made that California and North Dakota take over the affairs of the tribes within their boundaries. The federal government would provide a subsidy to the states equal to what it had been spending on the Indians in the two states, to ensure that no programs be cut back. After a ten-year trial period the arrangement would be made permanent, unless Congress made other provisions. Part of the California proposal included the requirement that the state match a five-million-dollar development program for Indian families.

  Every plan put forward by Zimmerman required that the tax immunity remain on Indian lands until the tribal enterprise was financially secure in its new method of operation. Plans also included provisions for approval by a clear majority of the adult members of the tribes before they were to go into effect, and some proposals were not to be initiated by the bureau but had to come from the tribal governing body at its own request.

  The suggestions were basically sound. They incorporated plans that had been discussed in the past between the bureau and the tribes. If carried out according to the original design, the program would have created a maximum of self-government and a minimum of risk until the tribes had confidence and experience in the program.

  Unfortunately, the committee dropped Zimmerman’s suggestions when it was discovered that the termination of even fifty thousand Indians would have had little effect on the Interior budget. Using the criteria of the committee—the reduction of federal expenditures—termination of Indian tribes was not a significant program. But discussion of the proposal provided the ammunition that would later be used to sink tribal ships of state.

  Three years after the Senate hearings the House Interior Committee began a massive study of Indian Affairs. Unbelievably, it recommended using the philosophy of René Descartes, French rationalist of the 1600’s, as a method of research:

  As a multitude of laws often only hampers justice, so that a State is best governed when, with few laws, these are rigidly administered; in like manner, instead of the great number of precepts of which Logic is composed, I believed that the four following would prove perfectly sufficient for me, providing I took the firm and unwavering resolution never in a single instance to fail in observing them.

  The first was never to accept anything for true which I did not clearly know to be such; that is to say, carefully to avoid precipitancy and prejudice, and to comprise nothing more in my judgment than what was presented to my mind so clearly and distinctly as to exclude all ground of doubt.

  The second, to divide each of the difficulties under examination into as many parts as possible, and as might be necessary for its adequate solution.

  The third, to conduct my thoughts in such order that, by commencing with objects the simplest and easiest to know, I might ascend little by little, and as it were step by step, to the knowledge of the more complex; assigning in thought a certain order even to those objects which in their own nature do not stand in a relation of antecedence and sequence.

  And last, in every case to make enumerations so complete, and reviews so general, that it might be assured that nothing was omitted.

  In sum, the committee declared: “If we can order our treatment of materials in Indian Affairs after this fashion it should be possible to grasp firmly the essentials or the problems involved and to cope with them correspondingly well.”

  This insight was not the least of the committee’s recommendations, however, as committee
members fancied themselves to be powers of great historical importance. Thus they further proposed to use the Domesday survey of 1086 as the model for a twentieth-century investigation of Indian problems:

  This extensive report on an entire nation should serve as a model for the administration of Indian Affairs today. There is a need for an exact, highly localized and thorough accounting of all Indian properties and Indian tribes as a complete allotment and dissolution of separate Indian tribal economic and political organization is contemplated. A survey along the lines of the Domesday project would furnish an inventory of all the basic facts needed to complete Indian assimilation. The Congress and Federal Government exercise the function of sovereignty over the Indians in the same manner as that by the King of England over his domains. The title to Indian lands and federal public domain lands would be clearly and precisely stated for every locality. Present day information on Indian property and population is generally piecemeal, confused, and probably unreliable. There is a real need for a Domesday Survey of Indian Affairs.

  Little did the general public or the Indian tribes realize the bizarre theories underlying Congressional thinking on termination.

  If any other group had been subjected to research techniques of the era of William the Conqueror the nation would have risen in indignation and called for an investigation. But in the whimsical world of the Interior committees, Indians were such an unknown commodity that the ridiculous made sense, the absurd was normal.

  With this contemptuous announcement of royal power of Congressional committees, the stage was set for the disastrous era of the Eighty-third and ensuing congresses and the termination period in Indian Affairs.