The New Trail of Tears Read online

  © 2016 by Naomi Schaefer Riley

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of Encounter Books, 900 Broadway, Suite 601, New York, 10003.

  First American edition published in 2016 by Encounter Books, an activity of Encounter for Culture and Education, Inc., a nonprofit, tax exempt corporation.

  Encounter Books website address: www.encounterbooks.com

  FIRST AMERICAN EDITION

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Riley, Naomi Schaefer, author.

  Title: The new Trail of Tears: how Washington is destroying American Indians /Naomi Schaefer Riley.

  Other titles: How Washington is destroying American Indians

  Description: New York: Encounter Books, [2016] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015037589 | ISBN 9781594038549 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Indians of North America—Government relations. | Indians of North America—Social conditions. | Indians of North America—Politics and government.

  Classification: LCC E93 .R55 2016 | DDC 323.1197--DC23

  LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015037589

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  What Does America Owe Indians?

  Part One: The False Promise of Sovereignty

  CHAPTER ONE

  Someone Else’s Responsibility: Property Rights as Native Rights

  CHAPTER TWO

  Money Instead of Freedom: The Loophole Economy and the Politics of Poverty

  Part Two: “White people call it nepotism. We call it kinship.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Unprepared: A Narrative of Victimhood

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Walking in Two Worlds: The Weight of Indian Identity

  Part Three: Who Will Stand Up for Civil Rights?

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Equal Protection: The Tribe vs. the Individual

  Conclusion

  Native Americans as Americans

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Index

  INTRODUCTION

  What Does America Owe Indians?

  WHEN MY DAUGHTER was in second grade, she came home with what seemed like a typical assignment. Asked to read about how the Dutch swindled Native Americans into giving up Manhattan for a pile of beads, she then had to write a paragraph about how the Natives must have felt. This exercise in empathy was puzzling for her and I presume millions of other schoolchildren receiving similar instructions – not to mention their parents. There’s rarely much context to these lessons. But more importantly, there’s little sense in our school curricula that American Indians are anything more than a historic artifact.

  Most Americans know nothing about what life is like for the 3 million Indians today, particularly the 1 million living on reservations. If you ask people what ails American Indians, they’ll be quick to tell you about what white people did to them 100, 200, or 400 years ago. Americans who read a newspaper might come across articles every once in a while about suicide or poverty on reservations. They might see stories about rape or child abuse or alcoholism. And sometimes they might take note of a casino being built on Indian land. But these stories are typically so depressing that most of us would rather turn our heads and turn the page.

  According to statistics compiled from various federal agencies, American Indians have the highest rate of poverty of any racial group in the nation – almost twice the national average.1 This deprivation seems to contribute not only to higher rates of crime but also to higher rates of suicide, alcoholism, gang membership, and sexual abuse. In 2011, the suicide rate for Native American men ages 15–24 was 57% higher than for the general population.2 (Suicide is also the leading cause of death for Native American males aged 10 to 14.) Alcohol-use disorders are more likely among American Indian youths than those belonging to other racial groups.3 Involvement in gang activity is more prevalent among Native Americans than it is among Latinos and African Americans.4 Native American women report being raped two and half times as often as the national average.5 The rate of child abuse among Native Americans is twice as high as the national average.6 What’s more, each of these problems is statistically worse when the results are restricted to Native Americans who live on reservations. For example, an estimated one out of every four girls and one out of every six boys in Indian country is molested before the age of 18.7

  It’s no wonder most Americans would rather not think about this population. The United States is the wealthiest nation on earth, but we have what amounts to a third world country within our borders. Critics like to say it’s easy for the wealthy to ignore the problems of our inner cities because the wealthy can simply avoid these neighborhoods. It’s even easier for the wealthy to ignore the problems of Indian reservations in South Dakota and Montana, because they never have to think about these neighborhoods, much less see them from the window of a train or a car.

  By the time most American students get to college and take courses in ethnic studies, they learn that what ails American Indians is their history. Indians’ decades – centuries – of victimization at the hands of whites are only being compounded by non-Indians’ perpetual insensitivity. And if only we could somehow return Indians to their state of nature, “pre-Contact,” professors tell students, Indians would be saved. Barring that, though, there’s little we can do.

  This kind of education tends to lead people to two conclusions. The first is that America should give Indians as much money as possible from the federal coffers. It’s only fair that the nation make good on its promises to provide for them. And really, it should do more than that. It should offer some kind of reparations for the harm inflicted upon Indians by westward expansion, by wars, by racism, and by the reservation system.

  The second is that we should make sure that American Indians don’t have to continue to suffer the indignities of having their culture mocked or degraded. So we should seek out any form of the old way of thinking about Indians and eradicate it.

  To deal with the question of money first: The two primary agencies charged with overseeing the activities of the roughly 1 million Indians who live on reservations – the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) and the Bureau of Indian Education (BIE), both part of the Department of the Interior – have a total of 9,000 employees. That’s one employee for every III Indians on a reservation. According to a report from the Cato Institute, federal funding for these agencies’ various subsidy programs – which cover programs for education, economic development, tribal courts, road maintenance, agriculture, and social services – was almost $3 billion in 2015. About $850 million of this is the BIE’s share for providing for its 42,000 students (most children on reservations don’t attend BIE schools), which amounts to about $20,000 per pupil,8 compared to a national average of $12,400.9

  But that’s not all. As the report from the Cato Institute notes, “Aside from the BIA and BIE, many other federal agencies have subsidy programs for American Indians. The Department of Health and Human Services houses the Indian Health Service, which has a budget of about $4 billion. The Department of Housing and Urban Development runs the Native American Housing Block Grant Program, which has a budget of about $800 million. And the Department of Education spends more than $300 million a year on BIE schools.”10

  What have American Indians gotten for all this money? Not much, it seems. It’s not just that the education these children receive is deplorable. The BIE can’t even keep the buildings from falling down. As John Kline, a Republica
n congressman from Minnesota, explained at a hearing in May 2015, “You’ve got collapsing roofs, leaking roofs, buckling floors, exposed wires, popping circuit breakers, gas leaks. That’s totally unacceptable.” He noted, “You can’t be well-educated, in my opinion, when you’re attending school wearing your coat, wearing your mittens and hoping that the blanket keeps out the 30-degree below-zero air.”11

  Kline is right, but most observers seem to agree it’s largely a problem of management, not money, that has gotten the BIE to where it is today. The agency is on its 36th director in 33 years. To address the crumbling infrastructure, in the budget for 2016 the Obama administration asked for $1 billion for the BIE. But if the past is any guide, it’s unlikely that things will change.

  As for sensitivity to the cultural and historical plight of Indians, what we teach our children in schools typically is the history of white encounters with Indians over a hundred years ago. A study by Sarah Shear, a professor at the University of Missouri, found that 87 percent of references to American Indians in state academic standards portrayed them in a pre-1900 context. According to Shear, when students arrive in her college classroom, they’re largely ignorant about modern Indians. “What they told me is that they learned about Thanksgiving and Columbus Day,” she told a writer for the Indian Country website. “Every once in a while, a student would mention something about the Trail of Tears. It was incredibly frustrating. They were coming to college believing that all Indians are dead.”12

  Even when states adopt formal standards to address the issue of Native American history, the content is typically about the raping and pillaging of Indian communities in the past. Take Utah’s curriculum on Indians, which teaches high-school students about the five major tribes found there today. Of the Navajos, for instance, students will learn:

  In the winter of 1863/1864, after their crops, livestock, and homes had been destroyed by the United States Army under Christopher “Kit” Carson, over 8,000 Navajos were forced to walk twelve-to-fifteen miles a day – with little food and little or no protection from the winter weather – from their ancestral homelands to the remote and desolate Bosque Redondo Reservation. The memory of the Long Walk has haunted generations of Navajos, and the story of the Long Walk is important to the history of Utah’s Navajos. Some Navajos were able to escape the army and moved into what is now southeastern Utah.13

  To the extent they’re even paying attention, most American children’s knowledge of the history of American Indians will include starvation, death by diseases brought from Europe, and massacres at the hands of white settlers. All of which is certainly true. (They’ll rarely hear about the brutalities that Indians committed against white settlers, however.) These students will come to see Indians as people who lived off the land and worshipped nature – our first environmentalists, perhaps. Indeed, there are those who’ll take from their lessons that the people indigenous to North America are to be emulated in modern times because of their respect for the earth and its creatures.

  Schoolchildren commonly learn the words of Chief Seattle, who allegedly wrote to the U.S. government in 1851: “The President in Washington sends word that he wishes to buy our land. But how can you buy or sell the sky? the land? The idea is strange to us. If we do not own the freshness of the air and the sparkle of the water, how can you buy them? Every part of this earth is sacred to my people. Every shining pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods, every clearing and humming insect is holy in the memory and experience of my people.”

  As Fergus Bordewich notes in his book Killing the White Man’s Indian, “More than any other single document, Seattle’s words lend support to the increasingly common belief that, to Indians, any disruption or commercialization of the earth’s natural order is sacrilege and that the most moral, the most truly ‘Indian,’ relationship with the land is a kind of poetic passivity. Seattle has achieved a kind of prophetic stature among environmentalists.” Too bad much of this mythology is complete bunk. The earliest version of the speech was composed in 1887 “from memory” by a white doctor who claimed to have been present at its delivery. The most commonly reproduced version was actually written in 1972 “by Ted Perry, a Texas scriptwriter, to serve as narration for a film produced by Southern Baptist Radio and Television Commission, which wished to give its audience a warning about the environment.”14

  The use of such stories probably does more to assuage white guilt than it does to alleviate the problems plaguing Indians. The real question is this: if not sensitivity and money, what does America owe Indians?

  In the past two years, I’ve traveled to Indian communities around the United States and Canada. I’ve interviewed tribal leaders, economists, educators, businesspeople, and government officials, all in an effort to understand what ails American Indians, particularly those on reservations. The results are by no means a comprehensive history of American Indians or even a complete picture of American Indians today. There are 562 federally recognized Indian nations in the United States – about half of which are in Alaska – and 310 reservations. Any book about American Indians will have to make some generalizations. And for that I apologize in advance. But the fact that these groups have different cultural traditions, different treaties, and different economic, political, and social situations doesn’t mean they have nothing in common.

  As you’ll see in this book, the problems American Indians face today – lack of economic opportunity, lack of education, and lack of equal protection under the law – and the solutions to these problems require a different approach from the misguided paternalism of the past 150 years. It’s not the history of forced assimilation, war, and mass murder that have left American Indians in a deplorable state; it’s the federal government’s policies today. These policies were begun by officials who didn’t know or didn’t care about what might help Indians; today they’re carried on by officials who claim to care but can’t seem to grasp the problems these policies are causing.

  The tragedy of America’s Indian policies demands immediate examination – not only because they make the lives of millions of American citizens harder and more dangerous but also because they’re a microcosm of everything that has gone wrong with modern liberalism. They’re the result of decades of politicians and bureaucrats showering a victimized people with money and sensitivity instead of what they truly need – the autonomy, the education, and the legal protections to improve their own situations. American Indians, like all Americans, must be able to avail themselves of the economic and legal freedoms this country guarantees. Until then, they’ll remain mired in poverty, social pathology, and the kind of anger that comes from knowing that your fate is controlled by ill-informed and ineffective bureaucracies.

  What America really owes Indians is nothing less than the opportunity to live lives of freedom and dignity in the land we all share.

  PART ONE

  The False Promise of Sovereignty

  CHAPTER ONE

  Someone Else’s Responsibility

  Property Rights as Native Rights

  “IT’S FREE MONEY!” a Crow legislator by the name of Karl Little Owl tells Ivan Small. Small, an older man who has known Little Owl since he was a child, laughs skeptically. “Really? How’s that?”

  “We didn’t have to spend a dime of the tribe’s funds on this.”

  “A good thing,” Small replies, chuckling, “since the tribe doesn’t have any money.”

  We’re standing just outside a tent where a ceremony to mark the breaking of ground on Apsaalooke Warrior Apartments is about to begin. The first development project on the Crow reservation in about a decade, Apsaalooke Warrior Apartments will be a 15-bed veterans’ home perched on a hill overlooking Crow Agency, the reservation’s political center. A couple of miles from the battlefield where Custer made his last stand, the home will no doubt be a reminder of Indians’ Pyrrhic victory here in Montana and the fact that it was short-lived. Soon after the Battle of the Little Bighorn, the U.S. Army succeede
d in removing the remaining Indians from their land and putting them on reservations. In recent times, the policies that resulted in the mass extinguishment of Indian lives have been replaced by policies that result in their mass impoverishment and an existence circumscribed by violence and tragedy.

  Here, under the tent, though, there’s great celebration. Representatives of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the state of Montana, and the tribal leadership are present. One person after another takes the podium to congratulate the individuals who spearheaded this development, applied for the grants, and waded through the bureaucratic morass (though no one dares call it that) to get this project off the ground. After about a dozen speeches, the four tribal leaders don feathered bonnets and sing a traditional song in their native language. Then each takes a golden shovel and turns over a piece of the soil.

  At a cost of just under $8 million, the development wouldn’t have been possible without a combination of federal, state, and private donations. The Crow tribe is broke, as Small observes, for a variety of reasons. There’s next to no economic activity on the reservation. In this desolate area in southeastern Montana, the unemployment rate is 47 percent (when you include people who have given up looking for jobs).1 The people who are employed almost all work for the tribal government.

  And then there’s this: the tribe, according to its leadership, owes the Department of Housing and Urban Development about $3 million. In the 1990s, HUD built most of the homes on the reservation, and the tribal leadership promised to exact a small monthly payment from each homeowner. Conrad Stewart, who used to work in the tribal housing office and now chairs the Natural Resources Infrastructure Committee for the Crow tribe, says that the payments were to be between $20 and $30 a month.

  But then the tribe members, among them people in Small’s own extended family, refused to pay. Instead, Stewart says, “When the tribe tried to go and recoup some of the money, they made threats. They said the tribe should pay for this. And the tribe has been paying for it [ever since].”