Custer Died For Your Sins Read online

  Instead of providing assistance or admitting that a horrendous mistake had been made years ago, Frank Church admonished the Menominees to be more energetic.

  But even Church, boy liberal from Idaho, had his moments of lucidity:

  This is the thing that disturbs me. We have come to the nub of this morning. All of the reasons that are put forth in support of extending the termination date make it plain that a 6 month extension is patently insufficient. This is evident on the face of the statement you have made. You support the extension because you say you have a marginal economy. You are going to have a marginal economy at the end of 6 months because to make it any other kind of economy is going to be an effort that will extend over many years.

  The first War on Poverty by the Democrats was conducted in 1960 against a defenseless Indian tribe that asked only for justice. These same Senators who cold-bloodedly created a pocket of poverty in Wisconsin would later vote for the War on Poverty with good conscience.

  With termination came the closing of the Menominee hospital. The tribe was unable, with the additional burden of taxation, to keep up its health program. Deprived of medical services and with poor housing, the infant death rate continued to rise. By July 1964, 14 percent of the county, which was the former reservation area, was receiving welfare payments. The State Department of Public Welfare estimated that Menominee county needed a transfusion of ten to twenty million dollars to bring it up to par with other Wisconsin counties.

  How much did the Menominee termination save the federal government? By 1960 the costs simply to plan for termination had become tremendous:

  MR. LEE: First, about how much money has been appropriated; there has been $500,000 appropriated to reimburse the tribe for their termination expenses. We have spent, including the reimbursement termination expenses $700,000 for special road construction, $644,000 I mentioned on special adult education program. We have already reimbursed $195,500 to the tribe for their termination expenses. We anticipate between now and the termination, if the termination does not drag on, another $161,000. HEW, as I understand it, has committed $510,000 for school construction. We have spent $136,000 in addition to agency expenses which were previously carried by the tribe. We are in the process of completing a survey for about $35,000. We have just made another assignment of a Bureau staff member mentioned this morning, of $6,000. This will bring a total we anticipate of $2,357,039 by December 31 (1960).

  In addition to the $2,357,039, however, in 1961 the federal government had to give the Menominees $1,098,000 over a period of five years, to cover education and health subsidies for problems caused by termination. In 1966, because the county was rapidly going downhill, another law was passed giving the tribe another $1.5 million over a three-year period. By 1964 the state of Wisconsin had granted the tribe some $52,363 in special contributions to welfare costs. But by then the situation was so desperate that the state was forced to make a special grant of $1 million to individuals in the county to keep their shares in the Menominee Enterprises from going out of Menominee hands and disenfranchising the tribe from its forest.

  Clearly, with some $5 million of special federal aid, over $1 million in state aid, and a rapidly sinking economy combined with increasing health and education problems and a skyrocketing tuberculosis rate, termination has not been a success for the Menominees. It has been a rationally planned and officially blessed disaster of the United States Congress.

  Whenever a tribe has been terminated all federal assistance stops. The number of Indian people who have died because health services were unavailable is difficult to define, but must certainly run into a significant number.

  * * *

  With the advent of the War on Poverty the push for termination has slowed, but certainly not stopped. Chief advocate of termination is James Gamble, staff member of the Senate Interior Committee, which is the parent committee of the Indian Subcommittee. Gamble has remained in the background while Henry Jackson, Chairman of the committee, has had to accept public responsibility for Gamble’s moves against the tribes.

  Rarely does a judgment bill come before the committee but what Gamble tries to have a termination rider attached. So powerful is Gamble that Jackson might be characterized as his front man. But Jackson is busy with his work on the Foreign Relations and other important committees and so he accepts Gamble’s recommendations without much consideration of alternatives.

  The chief termination problem in recent years has been that of the Colville tribe of Eastern Washington, Jackson’s home state. In the closing years of the 1950’s the Colvilles received some land back. This land had been part of the reservation and was opened for homestead. However, when some of it remained unused, the tribe asked for its return. Termination was the price the Colvilles were asked to pay for their own land.

  Analysis of the Colville termination bill as it is now proposed reveals Gamble’s method of operation. The bill provides that the act will become effective after a referendum of the adult members of the tribe. No provision is included to require that a majority of the enrolled adult members vote in the referendum. Thus a majority of fifty voters out of the five thousand plus tribal members would be sufficient to terminate the tribe. Zimmerman’s original proposal, which incidentally contained no reference to the Colvilles, provided for a majority of the enrolled adults to initiate any movement toward termination of supervision. The bill is comparable to a corporation being required to liquidate on the vote of those present at a stockholders’ meeting, with no majority of stock being sufficient to carry the motion.

  After the referendum is taken, the members will find out what they voted for. The reservation will then be appraised by three independent professionals and the three figures averaged. The average value is the price the United States will pay the tribe for its reservation. Any other group of American citizens would not dream of selling their property without knowing what the price was. Yet, since Congress is presumed to act with good faith toward the Indian people, this bill is considered to be sufficient justice for them. Can you imagine Henry Jackson, sponsor of the bill, walking into the offices of white businessmen in Everett, Washington, and asking them to sell him their property, with values to be determined six months after the sale? Jackson expects, and intends to write into law, a provision for Indians to do exactly this.

  Section 15 of the bill is a typical Gamble gambit. There is a provision that while the money is being distributed, the Secretary of the Interior can determine whether any member of the tribe is incompetent and appoint a guardian for him. Incompetency is never mentioned as a requirement for voting in the first part of the bill. But hidden in the middle is a provision giving the Secretary of the Interior unlimited discretionary power over Indian people. Theoretically the Secretary could declare all of the Colvilles incompetent and place them under a private trustee. They would then be judged too incompetent to handle their own money, but competent enough to vote to sell their reservation. Is it any wonder that Indians distrust white men?

  The major tribes of the nation have waged a furious battle against the Colville termination bill. Fortunately the House Interior Committee has been sympathetic to Indian pleas and has to date not passed the bill. Another mood, however, can come over the House committee and sentiment may turn toward termination. This uncertainty creates fear and resentment among Indian people.

  Under consideration at the present time is another termination bill. In 1964 the Seneca Nation of New York finally received its compensation for the land taken for the Kinzua Dam. Kinzua, as you will recall, was built by breaking the Pickering Treaty of 1794, which had pledged that the Senecas would remain undisturbed in the use of their land.

  But before the Senecas could get the Senate Interior Committee to approve their judgment bill they had to agree to section 18, a termination rider, which required the Senecas to develop a plan for termination within three years. The Senate was determined to punish the tribe for having the temerity to ask for compensation for land whi
ch the United States had illegally taken.

  If termination means the withdrawal of federal services in order to cut government expenditures, then the Seneca termination requirement is truly ironic. The only federal assistance the Senecas received in recent years was a staff man assigned by the Bureau of Indian Affairs to assist them in problems caused the tribe by the building of Kinzua Dam.

  The Seneca bill proposes to capitalize annuities payable to the Senecas under a number of treaties and pay the tribe outright. Annuities amount to very little, but the Senecas regard them as highly symbolic, as they represent the historic commitments of the tribe and the United States. They have more of a religious and historical significance than they do monetary value.

  Section 9 of the bill provides that the act shall not become effective until a resolution consenting to its provisions has been approved by a majority of the eligible voters of the Seneca Nation voting in a referendum. Why the difference between the Seneca bill and the Colville bill as to voting requirements? Gamble and Jackson are responsible for the Colville bill. The Bureau of Indian Affairs drafted the Seneca bill.

  Termination is the single most important problem of the American Indian people at the present time. Since 1954 the National Congress of American Indians and most inter-tribal councils of the various states have petitioned the Senate committee and the Congress every year for a change in policy. There has been no change.

  Sympathetic Senators and Congressmen have introduced new policy resolutions to take the place of the old HCR 108—which, Gamble insists, is Congressional policy though such resolutions usually die at the end of each Congress. Rarely do these new policy statements receive more than perfunctory attention. None are ever passed.

  Indian people receive little if any help from their friends. Churches have been notably unsympathetic, preferring to work with the blacks, where they are assured of proper publicity. The attitude of the churches is not new. My father was fired from his post with the Episcopal Church for trying to get the church involved with the termination issue in the 1950’s. Had the churches supported the Indian people in 1954, we would be tempted to believe their sincerity about Civil Rights today. But when the going is rough, churches disappear from sight. Judas, not Peter, characterizes the Apostolic succession.

  The response from the American public has been gratifying at times, disappointing at other times. Public support for the Senecas was widespread but the land was still taken and a termination rider added. Interest on the Colville termination has not been great because the problem of fishing rights in the same area has received all of the publicity. In general, the public does not understand the issue of termination, and public statements of termination-minded Senators make it appear to be the proper course of action.

  Too often termination has been heavily disguised as a plan to offer the Indian people full citizenship rights. Thus the Washington State legislature has been continually and deliberately misled by a few urban and termination-minded Colvilles into passing a resolution asking for the extinguishment of the Colville tribal entity and the vesting of the Colville people with “full citizenship” rights.

  In fact, the Citizenship Act of 1924 gave all Indians full citizenship without affecting any of their rights as Indian people. So the argument of second-class citizenship as a justification of termination is spurious from start to finish.

  In practice, termination is used as a weapon against the Indian people in a modern war of conquest. Neither the Senecas nor the Colvilles were listed in the original discussion of termination by Acting Commissioner Zimmerman in 1947. Nor were these tribes listed in House Concurrent Resolution 108, which outlined termination and mentioned tribes eligible for immediate consideration.

  Both tribes have had to submit to termination provisions in legislation which had nothing to do with the termination policy as originally defined by Congress. The Senecas and the Colvilles got caught in the backlash of Congressional ire at the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The Senecas had money coming to them because of the gross violation of their rights under treaty. The Colvilles wanted land returned which was theirs and which had been unjustly taken years before.

  In the case of the Colvilles the record is doubly ironic. The tribe rejected the provisions of the Indian Reorganization Act and was determined to operate under a constitution of its own choosing. At the same time, under the IRA the Secretary of the Interior has full authority to return lands to the tribe, but he does not have authority to return lands to non-IRA tribes. Thus failure years before to adopt a constitution under the Indian Reorganization Act unexpectedly backfired on the tribe.

  When the Kennedys and King were assassinated people wailed and moaned over the “sick” society. Most people took the assassinations as a symptom of a deep inner rot that had suddenly set in. They needn’t have been shocked. America has been sick for some time. It got sick when the first Indian treaty was broken. It has never recovered.

  When a policy is used as a weapon to force cultural confrontation, then the underlying weakness of society is apparent. No society which has real and lasting values need rely on force for their propagation.

  It is now up to the American people to make their will known. Can they condone the continual abuse of the American Indian by Congressmen and bureaucrats who use an unjust Congressional policy to threaten the lives and property of Indian people? Is the word of America good only to support its ventures overseas in Vietnam or does it extend to its own citizens?

  If America has done to us as it wishes others to do to her, then the future will not be bright. America is running up a great debt. It may someday see the wholesale despoliation of its lands and people by a foreign nation.

  4 ANTHROPOLOGISTS AND OTHER FRIENDS

  INTO EACH LIFE, it is said, some rain must fall. Some people have bad horoscopes, others take tips on the stock market. McNamara created the TFX and the Edsel. Churches possess the real world. But Indians have been cursed above all other people in history. Indians have anthropologists.

  Every summer when school is out a veritable stream of immigrants heads into Indian country. Indeed the Oregon Trail was never so heavily populated as are Route 66 and Highway 18 in the summer time. From every rock and cranny in the East they emerge, as if responding to some primeval fertility rite, and flock to the reservations.

  “They” are the anthropologists. Social anthropologists, historical anthropologists, political anthropologists, economic anthropologists, all brands of the species, embark on the great summer adventure. For purposes of this discussion we shall refer only to the generic name, anthropologists. They are the most prominent members of the scholarly community that infests the land of the free, and in the summer time, the homes of the braves.

  The origin of the anthropologist is a mystery hidden in the historical mists. Indians are certain that all societies of the Near East had anthropologists at one time because all those societies are now defunct.

  Indians are equally certain that Columbus brought anthropologists on his ships when he came to the New World. How else could he have made so many wrong deductions about where he was?

  While their historical precedent is uncertain, anthropologists can readily be identified on the reservations. Go into any crowd of people. Pick out a tall gaunt white man wearing Bermuda shorts, a World War II Army Air Force flying jacket, an Australian bush hat, tennis shoes, and packing a large knapsack incorrectly strapped on his back. He will invariably have a thin sexy wife with stringy hair, an IQ of 191, and a vocabulary in which even the prepositions have eleven syllables.

  He usually has a camera, tape recorder, telescope, hoola hoop, and life jacket all hanging from his elongated frame. He rarely has a pen, pencil, chisel, stylus, stick, paint brush, or instrument to record his observations.

  This creature is an anthropologist.

  An anthropologist comes out to Indian reservations to make OBSERVATIONS. During the winter these observations will become books by which future anthropologists will be trai
ned, so that they can come out to reservations years from now and verify the observations they have studied.

  After the books are written, summaries of the books appear in the scholarly journals in the guise of articles. These articles “tell it like it is” and serve as a catalyst to inspire other anthropologists to make the great pilgrimage next summer.

  The summaries are then condensed for two purposes. Some condensations are sent to government agencies as reports justifying the previous summer’s research. Others are sent to foundations in an effort to finance the next summer’s expedition west.

  The reports are spread all around the government agencies and foundations all winter. The only problem is that no one has time to read them. So five-thousand-dollar-a-year secretaries are assigned to decode them. Since these secretaries cannot read complex theories, they reduce the reports to the best slogan possible and forget the reports.

  The slogans become conference themes in the early spring, when the anthropologist expeditions are being planned. The slogans turn into battle cries of opposing groups of anthropologists who chance to meet on the reservations the following summer.

  Each summer there is a new battle cry, which inspires new insights into the nature of the “Indian problem.” One summer Indians will be greeted with the joyful cry of “Indians are bilingual!” The following summer this great truth will be expanded to “Indians are not only bilingual, THEY ARE BICULTURAL!”

  Biculturality creates great problems for the opposing anthropological camp. For two summers they have been bested in sloganeering and their funds are running low. So the opposing school of thought breaks into the clear faster than Gale Sayers playing against the little leaguers. “Indians,” the losing “anthros” cry, “are a FOLK people!” The tide of battle turns and a balance, so dearly sought by Mother Nature, is finally achieved.