We told them that we would rather die than leave our lands; but we could not help ourselves. They took us down. Many died on the road. Two of my children died. After we reached the new land, all my horses died. The water was very bad. All our cattle died; not one was left. I stayed till one hundred and fifty-eight of my people had died. Then I ran away…
—Standing Bear, January 1876
WITHIN THE ARENA OF DIASPORA STUDIES, THE QUESTION OF WHETHER THE field's analytical techniques might be usefully applied to the indigenous population of the United States is seldom raised. In large part, this appears to be due to an unstated presumption on the part of diaspora scholars that because the vast bulk of the native people of the U.S. remain inside the borders of that country, no population dispersal comparable to that experienced by Afroamericans, Asian Americans, Latinos—or, for that matter, Euroamericans—is at issue. Upon even minimal reflection, however, the fallacy imbedded at the core of any such premise is quickly revealed.
To say that a Cherokee remains essentially “at home” so long as s/he resides within the continental territoriality claimed by the U.S. is equivalent to arguing that a Swede displaced to Italy, or a Vietnamese refugee in Korea, would be at home simply because they remain in Europe or Asia. Native Americans, no less than other peoples, can and should be understood as identified with the specific geographical settings by which we came to identify ourselves as peoples.
Mohawks are native to the upstate New York/southern Quebec region, not Florida or California. Chiricahua Apaches are indigenous to southern Arizona and northern Sonora, not Oklahoma or Oregon. The matter is not only cultural, although the dimension of culture is crucially important, but political and economic as well.
Struggles by native peoples to retain use and occupancy rights over our traditional territories, and Euroamerican efforts to supplant us, comprise the virtual entirety of U.S./ Indian relations since the inception of the republic. All forty of the so-called “Indian Wars” recorded by the federal government were fought over land.1 On some 400 separate occasions between 1778 and 1871, the Senate of the United States ratified treaties with one or more indigenous peoples by which the latter ceded portions of their landbase to the U.S. In every instance, a fundamental quid pro quo was arrived at: Each indigenous nation formally recognized as such through a treaty ratification was simultaneously acknowledged as retaining a clearly demarcated national homeland within which it might maintain its sociopolitical cohesion and from which it could draw perpetual sustenance, both spiritually and materially.2
At least five succeeding generations of American Indians fought, suffered, and died to preserve their peoples’ residency in the portions of North America which had been theirs since “time immemorial.” In this sense, the fundamental importance they attached to continuing their links to these areas seems unquestionable. By the same token, the extent to which their descendants have been dislocated from these defined, or definable, landbases is the extent to which it can be observed that the conditions of diaspora have been imposed upon the population of Native North America. In this respect, the situation is so unequivocal that a mere sample of statistics deriving from recent census data will suffice to tell the tale:
The ways in which such deformities in the distribution of indigenous population in the U.S. have come to pass were anything but natural. To the contrary, the major causal factors have consistently derived from a series of official policies implemented over more than two centuries by the federal government of the United States. These have ranged from forced removal during the 1830s to concentration and compulsory assimilation during the 1880s to coerced relocation beginning in the late 1940s. Interspersed through it all have been periods of outright liquidation and dissolution, continuing into the present moment. The purpose of this essay is to explore these policies and their effects on the peoples targeted for such exercises in “social engineering.”
During the period immediately following the American War of Independence, the newly formed United States was in a “desperate financial plight [and] saw its salvation in the sale to settlers and land companies of western lands” lying outside the original thirteen colonies.11 Indeed, the war had been fought in significant part to negate George III's Proclamation of 1763, an edict restricting land acquisition by British subjects to the area east of the Appalachian Mountains and thereby voiding certain speculative real estate interests held by the U.S. Founding Fathers. During the war, loyalty of rank and file soldiers, as well as major creditors, had been maintained through warrants advanced by the Continental Congress with the promise that rebel debts would be retired through issuance of deeds to parcels of Indian land once independence had been attained.12 A substantial problem for the fledgling republic was that, in the immediate aftermath, it possessed neither the legal nor the physical means to carry through on such commitments.
In the Treaty of Paris, signed on September 3, 1783, England quitclaimed its rights to all present U.S. territory east of the Mississippi. Contrary to subsequent Americana, this action conveyed no bona fide title to any of the Indian lands lying west of the mountains.13 Rather, it opened the way for the United States to replace Great Britain as the sole entity entitled under prevailing international law to acquire Indian land in the region through negotiation and purchase.14 The U.S.—already an outlaw state by virtue of its armed rejection of lawful Crown authority—appears to have been prepared to seize native property through main force, thereby continuing its initial posture of gross illegality.15 Confronted by the incipient indigenous alliance advocated by Tecumseh in the Ohio River Valley (known at the time as the “Northwest Territory”) and to the south by the powerful Creek and Cherokee confederations, however, the U.S. found itself militarily stalemated all along its western frontier.16
The Indian position was considerably reinforced when England went back on certain provisions of the Treaty of Paris, refusing to abandon a line of military installations along the Ohio until the U.S. showed itself willing to comply with minimum standards of international legality, “acknowledging the Indian right in the soil” long since recognized under the Doctrine of Discovery.17 To the south, Spanish Florida also aligned itself with native nations as a means of holding the rapacious settler population of neighboring Georgia in check.18 Frustrated, federal authorities had to content themselves with the final dispossession and banishment of such peoples as the Wyandots and Lenni Lenapes (Delawares)—whose homelands fell within the original colonies, and who had been much weakened by more than a century of warfare—to points beyond the 1763 demarcation line. There, these early elements of a U.S.-precipitated indigenous diaspora were taken in by stronger nations such as the Ottawa and Shawnee.19
Meanwhile, George Washington's initial vision of a rapid and wholesale expulsion of all Indians east of the Mississippi, expressed in June 1783,20 was tempered to reflect a more sophisticated process of gradual encroachment explained by General Philip Schuyler of New York in a letter to Congress the following month:
As our settlements approach their country, [the Indians] must, from the scarcity of game, which that approach will induce, retire farther back, and dispose of their lands, unless they dwindle to nothing, as all savages have done…when compelled to live in the vicinity of civilized people, and thus leave us the country without the expense of purchase, trifling as that will probably be.21
As Washington himself was to put it a short time later, “[P]olicy and economy point very strongly to the expediency of being on good terms with the Indians, and the propriety of purchasing their Lands in preference to attempting to drive them by force of arms out of their Country… The gradual extension of our Settlements will certainly cause the Savage as the Wolf to retire… In a word there is nothing to be gained by an Indian War but the Soil they live on and this can be had by purchase at less expense.”22 By 1787, the strategy had become so well accepted that the U.S. was prepared to enact the Northwest Ordinance, codifying a formal renunciation of what it had been calling its “Rights of Conquest” with respect to native peoples: “The utmost good faith shall always be observed towards the Indian; their land shall never be taken from them without their consent; and in their property, rights, and liberty, they shall never be invaded or disturbed—but laws founded in justice and humanity shall from time to time be made, for wrongs done to them, and for preserving peace and friendship with them.”23
By the early years of the nineteenth century, the balance of power in North America had begun to shift. To a certain extent, this was due to a burgeoning of the Angloamerican population, a circumstance actively fostered by government policy. In other respects, it was because of an increasing consolidation of the U.S. state and a generation-long erosion of indigenous strength resulting from the factors delineated in Schuyler's policy of gradual expansion.24 By 1810, the government was ready to resume what Congress described as the “speedy provision of the extension of the territories of the United States” through means of outright force.25 Already, in 1803, provision had been made through the Louisiana Purchase for the massive displacement of all eastern Indian nations into what was perceived as the “vast wasteland” west of the Mississippi.26 The juridical groundwork was laid by the Supreme Court with Chief Justice John Marshall's opinion in Fletcher v. Peck, a decision holding that the title of U.S. citizens to parcels of Indian property might be considered valid even though no Indian consent to cede the land had been obtained.27
With the defeat of Great Britain in the War of 1812, the defeat of Tecumseh's confederation in 1811, and General Andrew Jackson's defeat of the Creek Red Sticks in 1814, the “clearing” of the east began in earnest.28 By 1819, the U.S. had wrested eastern Florida from Spain, consummating a process begun in 1810 with assaults upon the western (“panhandle”) portion of the territory.29 Simultaneously, the first of three “Seminole Wars” was begun on the Florida peninsula to subdue an amalgamation of resident Miccosukees, “recalcitrant” Creek refugees, and runaway chattel slaves naturalized as free citizens of the indigenous nations.30 In 1823, John Marshall reinforced the embryonic position articulated in Peck with Johnson v. McIntosh, an opinion inverting conventional understandings of indigenous status in international law by holding that U.S. sovereignty superseded that of native nations, even within their own territories.31 During the same year, President James Monroe promulgated his doctrine professing a unilateral U.S. “right” to circumscribe the sovereignty all other nations in the hemisphere.32
In this environment, a tentative policy of Indian “removal” was already underway by 1824, although not codified as law until the Indian Removal Act was passed in 1830. This was followed by John Marshall's opinions, rendered in Cherokee v. Georgia and Worcester v. Georgia, that Indians comprised “domestic dependent nations,” the sovereignty of which was subject to the “higher authority” of the federal government.33 At that point, the federal program of physically relocating entire nations of people from their eastern homelands to what was then called the “Permanent Indian Territory of Oklahoma” west of the Mississippi became full-fledged and forcible.34 The primary targets were the prosperous “Five Civilized Tribes” of the Southeast: the Cherokee, Creek, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Seminole nations. They were rounded up and interned by troops, concentrated in camps until their numbers were sufficient to make efficient their being force-marched at bayonet point, typically without adequate food, shelter, or medical attention, often in the dead of winter, as much as 1,500 miles to their new “homelands.”35
There were, of course, still those who attempted to mount a military resistance to what was happening. Some, like the Sauk and Fox nations of Illinois, who fought what has come to be known as the “Black Hawk War” against those dispossessing them in 1832, were simply slaughtered en masse.36 Others, such as the “hard core” of Seminoles who mounted the second war bearing their name in 1835, were forced from the terrain associated with their normal way of life. Once ensconced in forbid ding locales like the Everglades, they became for all practical intents and purposes invincible—one group refused to make peace with the U.S. until the early 1960s—but progressively smaller and more diffuse in their demography.37
In any event, by 1840 removal had been mostly accomplished (although it lingered as a policy until 1855), with only “the smallest, least offensive, and most thoroughly integrated tribes escaping the pressure to clear the eastern half of the continent from its original inhabitants.”38 The results of the policy were always catastrophic for the victims. For instance, of the approximately 17,000 Cherokees subjected to the removal process, about 8,000 died of disease, exposure and malnutrition along what they called the “Trail of Tears.”39 Additionally:
The Choctaws are said to have lost fifteen percent of their population, 6,000 out of 40,000; and the Chickasaw…surely suffered severe losses as well. By contrast the Creeks and Seminoles are said to have suffered about 50 percent mortality. For the Creeks, this came primarily in the period immediately after removal: for example, “of the 10,000 or more who were resettled in 1836–37…an incredible 3,500 died of ‘bilious fevers.’”40
Nor was this the only cost. Like the Seminoles, portions of each of the targeted peoples managed through various means to avoid removal, remaining in their original territories until their existence was once again recognized by the U.S. during the twentieth century. One consequence was a permanent sociocultural and geographic fragmentation of formerly cohesive groups; while the bulk of the identified populations of these nations now live in and around Oklahoma, smaller segments reside on the tiny “Eastern Cherokee” Reservation in North Carolina (1980 population 4,844); “Mississippi Choctaw” Reservation in Mississippi (population 2,756); the Miccosukee and “Big Cypress,” “Hollywood,” and “Brighton” Seminole Reservations in Florida (populations 213; 351; 416; and 323, respectively).41
An unknown but significant number of Cherokees also went beyond Oklahoma, following their leader, Sequoia, into Mexico in order to escape the reach of the U.S. altogether.42 This established something of a precedent for other peoples, such as the Kickapoos, a small Mexican “colony” of whom persists to this day.43 Such dispersal was compounded by the fact that throughout the removal process varying numbers of Indians escaped at various points along the route of march, blending into the surrounding territory and later intermarrying with the incoming settler population. By and large, these people have simply slipped from the historical record, their descendants today inhabiting a long arc of mixed-blood communities extending from northern Georgia and Alabama, through Tennessee and Kentucky, and into the southernmost areas of Illinois and Missouri.44
Worse was to come. At the outset of the removal era proper, Andrew Jackson—a leading proponent of the policy, who had ridden into the White House on the public acclaim deriving from his role as commander of the 1814 massacre of the Red Sticks at Horseshoe Bend and a subsequent slaughter of noncombatants during the First Seminole War— offered a carrot as well as the stick he used to compel tribal “cooperation.”45 In 1829, he promised the Creeks that:
Your father has provided a country large enough for all of you, and he advises you to remove to it. There your white brothers will not trouble you; they will have no claim to the land, and you can live upon it, you and all your children, as long as the grass grows or the water runs, in peace and plenty. It will be yours forever.46
Jackson was, to put it bluntly, lying through his teeth. Even as he spoke, he was aware that the Mississippi, that ostensible border between the U.S. and Permanent Indian Territory proclaimed by Thomas Jefferson and others, had already been breached by the rapidly consolidating states of Louisiana, Arkansas, and Missouri in the south, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Minnesota in the north.47 Nor could Jackson not have known that his close friend, Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, had stipulated as early as 1825 that the Rocky Mountains rather than the Mississippi should serve as an “everlasting boundary” of the U.S.48 By the time the bulk of removal was completed a decade later, Angloamerican settlement was reaching well into Kansas. Their cousins who had infiltrated the Mexican province of Texas had revolted, proclaimed themselves an independent republic, and were negotiating for statehood. The eyes of empire had also settled on all of Mexico north of the Río Grande, and the British portion of Oregon as well.49
Peoples such as the Shawnee and Potawatomi, Lenni Lenape and Wyandot, Peoria, Kickapoo, Sac, and Fox, already removed from their eastern homelands, were again compulsorily relocated as the western Indian Territory was steadily reduced in size.50 This time, they were mostly shifted southward into an area eventually conforming to the boundaries of the present state of Oklahoma. Ultimately, sixty-seven separate nations (or parts of nations), only six of them truly indigenous to the land at issue, were forced into this relatively small dumping ground.51 When Oklahoma, too, became a state in 1907, most of the territorial compartments reserved for the various Indian groups were simply dissolved. Today, although Oklahoma continues to report the second largest native population of any state, only the Osage retain a reserved landbase which is nominally their own.52
The U.S. “Winning of the West” which began around 1850—that is, immediately after the northern half of Mexico was taken in a brief war of conquest—was, if anything, more brutal than the clearing of the east.53 Most of the U.S. wars against native people were waged during the following thirty-five years, under what has been termed an official “rhetoric of extermination.”54
The means employed in militarily subjugating the indigenous nations of Califor nia and southern Oregon, the Great Plains, Great Basin, and northern region of the Sonora Desert devolved upon a lengthy series of wholesale massacres. Representative of these are the slaughter of about 150 Lakotas at Blue River (Nebraska) in 1854, some five hundred Shoshones at Bear River (Idaho) in 1863, as many as 250 Cheyennes and Arapahos at Sand Creek (Colorado) in 1864, perhaps two hundred Cheyennes on the Washita River (Oklahoma) in 1868, 175 Piegans at the Marias River (Montana) in 1870, and at least a hundred Cheyennes at Camp Robinson (Nebraska) in 1878. The parade of official atrocities was capped by the butchery of more than three hundred unarmed Lakotas at Wounded Knee (South Dakota) in 1890.55
Other means employed by the government to reduce its native opponents to a state of what it hoped would be abject subordination included the four-year internment of the entire Navajo (Diné) Nation in a concentration camp at the Bosque Redondo, outside Fort Sumner, New Mexico, beginning in 1864. The Diné, who had been force-marched in what they called the “Long Walk,” a three-hundred-mile trek from their Arizona homeland, were held under abysmal conditions, with neither adequate food nor shelter, and died like flies. Approximately half perished before their release in 1868.56 Similarly, if less dramatically, food supplies to the Lakotas were cut off in 1877—militarily defeated the year before, they were being held under army guard at the time—until starvation compelled their leaders to “cede” the Black Hills area to the U.S.57 The assassination of resistance leaders such as the Lakotas Crazy Horse (1877) and Sitting Bull (1890) was also a commonly used technique.58 Other recalcitrant figures like Geronimo (Chiricahua Apache) and Satanta (Kiowa) were separated from their people by being imprisoned in remote facilities like Fort Marion, Florida.59
In addition to these official actions, which the U.S. Census Bureau acknowledged in an 1894 summary as having caused a minimum of 45,000 native deaths, there was a far greater attrition resulting from what were described as “individual affairs.”60 These took the form of Angloamerican citizens at large killing Indians, often systematically, under a variety of quasiofficial circumstances. In Dakota Territory, for example, a $200 bounty for Indian scalps was paid in the territorial capital of Yankton during the 1860s; the local military commander, General Alfred Sully, is known to have privately contracted for a pair of Lakota skulls with which to adorn the city.61 In Texas, first as a republic and then as a state, authorities also “placed a bounty upon the scalp of any Indian brought in to a government office—man, woman, or child, no matter what ‘tribe’—no questions asked.”62 In California and Oregon, “the enormous decrease [in the native population of 1800] from about a quarter-million to less than 20,000 [in 1870 was] due chiefly to the cruelties and wholesale massacres perpetrated by the miners and early settlers.”63
Much of the killing in California and southern Oregon Territory resulted, directly and indirectly, from the discovery of gold in 1848 and the subsequent influx of miners and settlers. Newspaper accounts document the atrocities, as do oral histories of the California Indians today. It was not uncommon for small groups or villages to be attacked by immigrants…and virtually wiped out overnight.64
It has been estimated that Indian deaths resulting from this sort of direct violence may have run as high as a half-million by 1890.65 All told, the indigenous population of the continental United States, which may still have been as great as two million when the country was founded, had been reduced to well under 250,000 by 1890.66 As the noted demographer Sherburn F.Cook has observed, “The record speaks for itself. No further commentary is necessary.”67
Under these conditions, the U.S. was able to shuffle native peoples around at will. The Northern Cheyennes and closely allied Arapahos, for instance, were shipped from their traditional territory in Montana's Powder River watershed to the reservation of their southern cousins in Oklahoma in 1877. After the Cheyenne remnants, more than a third of whom had died within a year of malaria and other diseases endemic to this alien environment, made a desperate attempt to return home in 1878, they were granted a reservation in the north country, but not before the bulk of them had been killed by army troops. Moreover, they were permanently separated from the Arapahos, who were “temporarily” assigned to the Wind River Reservation of their hereditary enemies, the Shoshones, in Wyoming.68
A faction of the Chiricahua Apaches who showed signs of continued “hostility” to U.S. domination in the 1880s were yanked from their habitat in southern Arizona and “resettled” around Fort Sill, Oklahoma.69 Hinmaton Yalatkit (Chief Joseph) of the Nez Percé and other leaders of that people's legendary attempt to escape the army and flee to Canada were also deposited in Oklahoma, far from the Idaho valley they’d fought to retain.70 Most of the Santee Dakotas of Minnesota's woodlands ended up on the windswept plains of Nebraska, while a handful of their relatives remained behind on tiny plots which are now called the “Upper” and “Lower Sioux” reservations.71 A portion of the Oneidas, who had fought on the side of the rebels during their war for independence, were moved to a small reservation near Green Bay, Wisconsin.72 An even smaller reserve was provided in the same area for residual elements of Connecticut's Mahegans, Mohegans, and other peoples, all of them lumped together under the heading “Stockbridge-Munsee Indians.”73 On and on it went.
With the native ability to militarily resist U.S. territorial ambitions finally quelled, the government moved first to structurally negate any meaningful residue of national status on the part of indigenous peoples, and then to dissolve them altogether. The opening round of this drive came in 1871, with the attachment of a rider to the annual congressional appropriations act suspending any further treatymaking with Indians. This was followed, in 1885, with passage of the Major Crimes Act, extending U.S. jurisdiction directly over reserved Indian territories for the first time. Beginning with seven felonies delineated in the initial statutory language, and combined with the Supreme Courts opinion in U.S. v. Kagama that Congress possessed a unilateral and “incontrovertible right” to exercise its authority over Indians as it saw fit, the 1885 act opened the door to subsequent enactment of the more than five thousand federal laws presently regulating every aspect of reservation life and affairs.74
In 1887, Congress passed the General Allotment Act, a measure designed expressly to destroy what was left of the basic indigenous socioeconomic cohesion by eradicating traditional systems of collective landholding. Under provision of the statute, each Indian identified as such by demonstrating “one-half or more degree of Indian blood” was to be issued an individual deed to a specific parcel of land—160 acres per family head, eighty acres per orphan or single person over eighteen years of age, and forty acres per dependent child—within existing reservation boundaries. Each Indian was required to accept U.S. citizenship in order to receive his or her allotment. Those who refused, such as a substantial segment of the Cherokee “full-blood” population, were left landless.75
Generally speaking, those of mixed ancestry whose “blood quantum” fell below the the required level were summarily excluded from receiving allotments. In many cases, the requirement was construed by officials as meaning that an applicant's “blood” had to have accrued from a single people; persons whose cumulative blood quantum derived from intermarriage between several native peoples were thus often excluded as well. In other instances, arbitrary geographic criteria were also employed; all Cherokees, Creeks, and Choctaws living in Arkansas, for example, were not only excluded from allotment, but permanently denied recognition as members of their respective nations as well.76 Once all eligible Indians had been assigned their allotments within a given reservation—usually from the worst land available therein—the remainder of the reserved territory was declared “surplus” and opened to nonindian homesteaders, corporate acquisition, and conversion into federal or state parks and forests.77
Under the various allotment programs, the most valuable land was the first to go. Settlers went after the rich grasslands of Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas; the dense black-soil forests of Minnesota and Wisconsin; and the wealthy oil and gas lands of Oklahoma. In 1887, for example, the Sisseton Sioux of South Dakota owned 918,000 acres of rich virgin land on their reservation. But since there were only two thousand of them, allotment left more than 600,000 acres for European American settlers… The Chippewas of Minnesota lost their rich timber lands; once each member had claimed his [or her] land, the government leased the rest to timber corporations. The Colvilles of northeastern Washington lost their lands to cattlemen, who fraudulently claimed mineral rights there. In Montana and Wyoming the Crows lost more than two million acres, and the Nez Percés had to cede communal grazing ranges in Idaho. All sixty-seven of the tribes in Indian Territory underwent allotment… On the Flathead Reservation [in Montana]— which included Flatheads, Pend Oreilles, Kutenais, and Spokanes…the federal government opened 1.1 million acres to settlers. A similar story prevailed throughout the country.78
By the time the allotment process had run its course in 1934, the residue of native land holdings in the U.S. had been reduced from approximately 150 million acres to less than fifty million.79 Of this, more than two-thirds consisted of arid or semiarid terrain deemed useless for agriculture, gazing, or other productive purposes. The remaining one-third had been leased at extraordinarily low rates to nonindian farmers and ranchers by local Indian agents exercising “almost dictatorial powers” over remaining reservation property.80
Indians across the country were left in a state of extreme destitution as a result of allotment and attendant leasing practices. Worse, the situation was guaranteed to be exacerbated over succeeding generations insofar as what was left of the reservation landbase, already insufficient to support its occupants at a level of mere subsistence, could be foreseen to become steadily more so as the native population recovered from the genocide perpetrated against it.81 A concomitant of allotment was thus an absolute certainty that ever increasing numbers of Indians would be forced from what remained nominally their own land during the twentieth century, dispersed into the vastly more numerous American society at large. There, it was predictable (and often predicted) that they would be “digested,” disappearing once and for all as anything distinctly Indian in terms of sociocultural, political, or even racial identity.82 The record shows that such outcomes were anything but unintentional.
The purpose of all this was “assimilation,” as federal policymakers described their purpose, or—to put the matter more unabashedly—to bring about the destruction and disappearance of American Indian peoples as such. In the words of Francis E.Leupp, Commissioner of Indian Affairs from 1905 through 1909, the Allotment Act in particular should be viewed as a “mighty pulverizing engine for breaking up the tribal mass” which stood in the way of complete Euroamerican hegemony in North America. Or, to quote Indian Commissioner Charles Burke a decade later, “[I]t is not desirable or consistent with the general welfare to promote tribal characteristics and organization.”83
The official stance was consecrated in the Supreme Court's determination in the 1903 Lone Wolf v Hitchcock opinion—extended from John Marshall's “domestic dependent nation thesis of the early 1830s—that the U.S. possessed “plenary” (full) power over all matters involving Indian affairs. In part, this meant the federal government was unilaterally assigning itself perpetual “trust” prerogatives to administer or dispose of native assets, whether these were vested in land, minerals, cash, or any other medium, regardless of Indian needs or desires.84 Congress then consolidated its position with passage of the 1906 Burke Act, designating the Secretary of the Interior as permanent trustee over Indian Country. In 1924, a number of loose ends were cleaned up with passage of the Indian Citizenship Act, imposing U.S. citizenship upon all native people who had not otherwise been naturalized. The law was applied across the board to all Indians, whether they desired citizenship or not, and thus included those who had forgone allotments rather than accept it.85
Meanwhile, the more physical dimensions of assimilationist policy were coupled to a process of ideological conditioning designed to render native children susceptible to dislocation and absorption by the dominant society. In the main, this assumed the form of a compulsory boarding school system administered by the Interior Department's Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) wherein large numbers of indigenous children were taken, often forcibly, to facilities remote from their families and communities. Once there, the youngsters were prevented from speaking their languages, practicing their religions, wearing their customary clothing or their hair in traditional fashion, or in any other way overtly associating themselves with their own cultures and traditions. Instead, they were indoctrinated—typically for a decade or more—in Christian doctrine and European values such as the “work ethic.” During the summers, they were frequently “farmed out” to Euroamerican “foster homes” where they were further steeped in the dominant society's views of their peoples and themselves.86
Attendance was made compulsory [for all native children, aged five to eighteen] and the agent was made responsible for keeping the schools filled, by persuasion if possible, by withholding rations and annuities from the parents, and by other means if necessary… [Students] who were guilty of misbehavior might either receive corporal punishment or be imprisoned in the guardhouse [a special “reform school” established to handle “incorrigible” students who clung to their traditions] …A sincere effort was made to develop the type of school that would destroy tribal ways.87
The intention of this was, according to federal policymakers and many of its victims alike, to create generations of American Indian youth who functioned intellectually as “little white people,” facilitating the rapid dissolution of traditional native cultures desired by federal policymakers.88 In combination with a program in which native children were put out for wholesale adoption by Euroamerican families, the effect upon indigenous peoples was devastating.89 This systematic transfer of children not only served to accelerate the outflow of Indians from reservation and reservation-adjacent settings, but the return of individuals mentally conditioned to conduct themselves as nonindians escalated the rate at which many native societies unraveled within the reservation contexts themselves.90
The effects of the government's allotment and assimilation programs are reflected in the demographic shifts evidenced throughout Indian Country from 1910 through 1950. In the former year, only 0.4 percent of all identified Indians lived in urban locales. By 1930, the total had grown to 9.9 percent. As of 1950, the total had grown to 13.4 percent. Simultaneously, the displacement of native people from reservations to off-reservation rural areas was continuing apace.91 In 1900, this involved only about 3.5 percent of all Indians. By 1930, the total had swelled to around 12.5 percent and, by 1950, it had reached nearly eighteen percent.92 Hence, in the latter year, nearly one-third of the federally recognized Indians in the United States had been dispersed to locales other than those government officials had defined as being “theirs.”
It is likely, all things being equal, that the Indian policies with which the United States ushered, in the twentieth century would have led inexorably to a complete eradication of the reservation system and the corresponding disappearance of American Indians as distinct peoples by some point around 1950. There can be no question but that such a final consolidation of its internal landbase would have complemented the phase of transoceanic expansionism into which the U.S. entered quite unabashedly during the 1890s.93 That things did not follow this course seems mainly due to a pair of ironies, one geological and the other unwittingly embedded in the bizarre status of “quasisovereignty” increasingly imposed upon native nations by federal jurists and policymakers over the preceding hundred years.
As regards the first of these twin twists of fate, authorities were becoming increasingly aware by the late 1920s that the “worthless” residue of territory to which indigenous people were consigned was turning out to be extraordinarily endowed with mineral wealth. Already, in 1921, an exploratory team from Standard Oil had come upon what it took to be substantial fossil fuel deposits on the Navajo Reservation.94 During the next three decades, it would be discovered just how great a proportion of U.S. “domestic” resources lay within American Indian reservations. For example:
Western reservations in particular…possess vast amounts of coal, oil, shale oil, natural gas, timber, and uranium. More than 40 percent of the national reserves of low sulfur, strippable coal, 80 percent of the nation's uranium reserves, and billions of barrels of shale oil exist on reservation land. On the 15-million-acre Navajo Reservation, there are approximately 100 million barrels of oil, 25 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, 80 million pounds of uranium, and 50 billion tons of coal. The 440,000-acre Northern Cheyenne Reservation in Montana sits atop a 60-foot-thick layer of coal. In New Mexico, geologists estimate that the Jicarilla Apache Reservation possesses 2 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and as much as 154 million barrels of oil.95
This led directly to the second quirk. The more sophisticated federal officials, even then experiencing the results of opening up Oklahoma's lush oil fields to unrestrained corporate competition, realized the extent of the disequilibriums and inefficiencies involved in this line of action when weighed against the longer-term needs of U.S. industrial development.96 Only by retaining its “trust authority” over reservation assets would the government continue to be in a position to dictate which resources would be exploited, in what quantities, by whom, at what cost, and for what purpose, allowing the North American political economy to evolve in ways preferred by the country's financial élite.97 Consequently, it was quickly perceived as necessary that both Indians and Indian Country be preserved, at least to some extent, as a facade behind which the “socialistic” process of central economic planning might occur.
For the scenario to work in practice, it was vital that the reservation-based indige nous nations be made to appear “self-governing” enough to be exempt from the usual requirements of the U.S. “free market” system whenever this might be convenient to their federal “guardians.” On the other hand, they could never become independent or autonomous enough to assume control over their own economic destinies, asserting demands that equitable royalty rates be paid for the extraction of their ores, for example, or that profiting corporations underwrite the expense of environmental cleanup once mining operations had been concluded.98 In effect, the idea was that many indigenous nations should be maintained as outright internal colonies of the United States rather than being liquidated out of hand.99 All that was needed to accomplish this was the creation of a mechanism through which the illusion of limited Indian self-rule might be extended.
The vehicle for this purpose materialized in 1934, with passage of the Indian Reorganization Act, or “IRA,” as it is commonly known. Under provision of this statute, the traditional governing bodies of most indigenous nations were supplanted by “Tribal Councils,” the structure of which was devised in Washington, D.C., functioning within parameters of formal constitutions written by BIA officials.100 A democratic veneer was maintained by staging a referendum on each reservation prior to its being reorganized, but federal authorities simply manipulated the outcomes to achieve the desired results.101 The newly installed IRA councils were patterned much more closely upon the model of corporate boards than of governments, and possessed little power other than to sign-off on business agreements. Even at that, they were completely and “voluntarily” subordinated to U.S. interests: “All decisions of any consequence (in thirty-three separate areas of consideration) rendered by these ‘tribal councils’ were made ‘subject to the approval of the Secretary of the Interior or his delegate,’ the Commissioner of Indian Affairs.”102
One entirely predictable result of this arrangement has been that an inordinate amount of mining, particularly that related to “energy development,” has occurred on Indian reservations since the mid-to-late 1940s. Virtually all uranium mining and milling during the life of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) ore-buying program (1954–81) occurred on reservation land; Anaconda's Jackpile Mine, located at the Laguna Pueblo in New Mexico, was the largest open pit uranium extraction operation in the world until it was phased out in 1979.103 Every year, enough power is generated by Arizona's Four Corners Power Plant alone—every bit of it from coal mined at Black Mesa, on the Navajo Reservation—to light the lights of Tucson and Phoenix for two decades, and present plans include a four-fold expansion of Navajo coal extraction.104 Throughout the West, the story is the same.
On the face of it, the sheer volume of resource “development” in Indian Country over the past half-century should—even under disadvantageous terms—have translated into some sort of “material improvement” in the lot of indigenous people. Yet the mining leases offered to selected corporations by the BIA “in behalf of” their native “wards”—and duly endorsed by the IRA councils—have consistently paid such a meager fraction of prevailing market royalty rates that no such advancement has been discernable. Probably the best terms were those obtained by the Navajo Nation in 1976, a contract paying a royalty of fifty-five cents per ton for coal; this amounted to eight percent of market price at a time when Interior Secretary Cecil Andrus admitted the minimum rate paid for coal mined in off-reservation settings was 12.5 percent (more typically, it was upwards of fifteen percent).105 Simultaneously, a 17.5 cents per ton royalty was being paid for coal on the Crow Reservation in Montana, a figure which was raised to forty cents—less than half the market rate—only after years of haggling.106 At issue are not profits, but the sort of “super-profits” usually associated with U.S. domination of economies elsewhere in the world.107
Nor has the federally coordinated corporate exploitation of the reservations translated into wage income for Indians. As of 1989, the governments own data indicated that reservation unemployment nationwide still hovered in the mid-sixtieth percentile, with some locales running persistently in the ninetieth.108 Most steady jobs involved administering or enforcing the federal order, reservation by reservation. Such “business-related” employment as existed tended to be temporary, menial, and paid the minimum wage, a matter quite reflective of the sort of transient, extractive industry—which brings its cadre of permanent, skilled labor with it—the BIA had encouraged in Indian Country.109 Additionally, the impact of extensive mining and associated activities had done much to disrupt the basis for possible continuation of traditional self-sufficiency, destroying considerable acreage which held potential as grazing or subsistence garden plots.110 In this sense, U.S. governmental and corporate activities have “underdeveloped” Native North America in classic fashion.111
Overall, according to a federal study completed in 1988, reservation-based Indians experienced every indicia of extreme impoverishment: by far the lowest annual and lifetime incomes of any North American population group, highest rate of infant mortality (up to 14.5 times the national average), highest rates of death from plague disease, malnutrition, and exposure, highest rate of teen suicide, and so on. The average life expectancy of reservation-based Native American males is 44.6 years, that of females about three years longer.112 The situation is much more indicative of a Third World context than of rural areas in a country that claims to be the world's “most advanced industrial state.” Indeed, the poignant observation of many Latinos regarding their relationship to the U.S., that “your wealth is our poverty,” is as appropriate to the archipelago of Indian reservations in North America itself as it is to the South American continent. By any estimation, the “open veins of Native America” created by the IRA have been an incalculable boon to the maturation of the U.S. economy, while Indians continue to pay the price by living in the most grinding sort of poverty.113
And there is worse. One of the means used by the government to maximize corporate profits in Indian Country over the years—again rubber-stamped by the IRA councils—has been to omit clauses requiring corporate reclamation of mined lands from leasing instruments. Similarly, the cost of doing business on reservations has been pared to the bone (and profitability driven up) by simply waiving environmental protection standards in most instances.114 Such practices have spawned ecological catastrophe in many locales. As the impact of the Four Corners plant, one of a dozen coal-fired electrical generation facilities currently “on-line” on the Navajo reservation, has been described elsewhere:
The five units of the 2,075 megawatt power plant have been churning out citybound electricity and local pollution since 1969. The plant burns ten tons of coal per minute—five million tons per year—spewing three hundred tons of fly-ash and other waste particulates into the air each day. The black cloud hangs over ten thousand acres of the once-pristine San Juan River Valley. The deadly plume was the only visible evidence of human enterprise seen from the Gemini-12 satellite which photographed the earth from 150 miles in space. Less visible, but equally devastating is the fact that since 1968 the coal mining operations and power plant requirements have been extracting 2,700 gallons from the Black Mesa water table each minute—60 million gallons per year—causing extreme desertification of the area, and even the sinking of some ground by as much as twelve feet.115
Corporations engaged in uranium mining and milling on the Navajo Reservation and at Laguna were also absolved by the BIA of responsibility for cleaning up upon completion of their endeavors, with the result that hundreds of tailings piles were simply abandoned during the 1970s and ’80s.116 A fine sand retaining about eighty-five percent of the radioactive content of the original ore, the tailings constitute a massive source of windblown carcinogenic/mutogenic contaminants affecting all persons and livestock residing within a wide radius of each pile.117 Both ground and surface water have also been heavily contaminated with radioactive byproducts throughout the Four Corners region.118 In the Black Hills region, the situation is much the same.119 At its Hanford Nuclear Weapons Facility, located near the Yakima Reservation in Washington State, the AEC itself secretly discharged some 440 billion gallons of plutonium, strontium, celsium, tritium, and other high-level radioactive contaminants into the local aquifer between 1955 and 1989.120
Given that the half-life of the substances involved is as long as 250,000 years, the magnitude of the disaster inflicted upon Native North America by IRA colonialism should not be underestimated. The Los Alamos National Scientific laboratory observed in its February 1978 Mini-Report that the only “solution” its staff could conceive of to the problems presented by wind-blown radioactive contaminants would be “to zone the land into uranium mining and milling districts so as to forbid human habitation.” Similarly:
A National Academy of Sciences (NAS) report states bluntly that [reclamation after any sort of mining] cannot be done in areas with less than 10 inches of rainfall a year; the rainfall over most of the Navajo Nation [and many other western reservations] ranges from six to ten inches a year. The NAS suggests that such areas be spared development or honestly labeled “national sacrifice areas.”121
Tellingly, the two areas considered most appropriate by the NAS for designation as “national sacrifices”—the Four Corners and Black Hills regions—are those containing the Navajo and “Sioux Complex” of reservations, the largest remaining blocks of acknowledged Indian land and concentrations of landbased indigenous population in the U.S. For this reason, many American Indian activists have denounced both the NAS scheme and the process of environmental destruction which led up to it, as involving not only National Sacrifice Areas, but “National Sacrifice Peoples” as well.122 At the very least, having the last of their territory zoned “so as to forbid human habitation” would precipitate an ultimate dispersal of each impacted people, causing its disappearance as a “human group” per se.123 As American Indian Movement leader Russell Means has put it, “It's genocide…no more, no less.”124
Regardless of whether a policy of national sacrifice is ever implemented in the manner envisioned by the NAS, it seems fair to observe that the conditions of dire poverty and environmental degradation fostered on Indian reservations have contributed heavily to the making of the contemporary native diaspora in the United States. In combination with the constriction of the indigenous landbase brought about through earlier policies of removal, concentration, allotment, and assimilation, they have created a strong and ever-increasing pressure upon reservation residents to “cooperate” with other modern federal programs meant to facilitate the outflow and dispersal of Indians from their residual landbase. Chief among these have been termination and relocation.
As the IRA method of administering Indian Country took hold, the government returned to such tasks as “trimming the fat” from federal expenditures allocated to support Indians, largely through manipulation of the size and disposition of the recognized indigenous population.
By 1940, the…system of colonial governance on American Indian reservations was largely in place. Only the outbreak of World War II slowed the pace of corporate exploitation, a matter that retarded initiation of maximal “development” activities until the early 1950s. By then, the questions concerning federal and corporate planners had become somewhat technical: what to do with those indigenous nations which had refused reorganization? How to remove the portion of Indian population on even the reorganized reservations, whose sheer physical presence served as a barrier to wholesale strip mining and other profitable enterprises anticipated by the U.S. business community?125
The first means to this end was found in a partial resumption of nineteenth century assimilationist policies, focused this time on specific peoples, or parts of peoples, rather than upon Indians as a whole. On August 1, 1953, Congress approved House Resolution 108, a measure by which the federal legislature empowered itself to enact statutes “terminating” (i.e., withdrawing recognition from, and thus unilaterally dis solving) selected native peoples, typically those who had rejected reorganization, or lacked the kind of resources necessitating their maintenance under the IRA.126
Among the [nations] involved were the comparatively large and wealthy Menominee of Wisconsin and the Klamath of Oregon—both owners of extensive timber resources. Also passed were acts to terminate…the Indians of western Oregon, small Paiute bands in Utah, and the mixed-bloods of the Uintah and Ouray Reservations. Approved, too, was legislation to transfer administrative responsibility for the Alabama and Coushatta Indians to the state of Texas… Early in the first session of the Eighty-Fourth Congress, bills were submitted to [terminate the] Wyandotte, Ottawa, and Peoria [nations] of Oklahoma. These were enacted early in August of 1956, a month after passage of legislation directing the Colville Confederated Tribes of Washington to come up with a termination plan of their own… During the second administration of President Dwight D.Eisenhower, Congress enacted three termination bills relating to…the Choctaw of Oklahoma, for whom the termination process was never completed, the Catawba of South Carolina, and the Indians of the southern California rancherias.127
It is instructive that the man chosen to implement the policy was Dillon S.Myer, an Indian Commissioner whose only apparent “job qualification” was having headed up the internment program targeting Japanese Americans during the Second World War.128 In all, 109 indigenous nations encompassing more than 35,000 people were terminated before the liquidation process had run its course during the early 1960s.129 Only a handful, like the Menominee and the Siletz of Oregon, were ever “reinstated.”130 Suddenly landless, mostly poor, and largely unemployed, the others were scattered like sand in the wind.131 In this, they were joined by a rapidly swelling exodus of people from unterminated reservations, a circumstance fostered by yet another federal program.
Passed in 1956, the “Relocation Act” (P.L. 959) followed a steady diminishment throughout the first half of the decade of federal allocations to provide assistance to people living on reservations. The statute provided funding to underwrite the expenses of any Indian agreeing to move to an urban area, establish a residence, and undergo a brief period of job training. The quid pro quo was that each person applying for such relocation was required to sign an agreement that s/he would never return to his or her reservation to live. It was also specified that all federal support would be withdrawn after relocatees had spent a short period—often no more than six weeks—“adjusting” to city life.132 Under the conditions of near-starvation on many reservations, there were many takers; nearly 35,000 people signed up to move to places like Los Angeles, Minneapolis, San Francisco, Chicago, Denver, Phoenix, Seattle, and Boston during the period 1957–59 alone.133
Although there was ample early indication that relocation was bearing disastrous fruit for those who underwent it—all that was happening was that relocatees were exchanging the familiar squalor of reservation life for that of the alien Indian ghettos that shortly emerged in most major cities—the government accelerated the program during the 1960s. As a result of termination and relocation during the fifties, the proportion of native people who had been “urbanized” rose dramatically, from 13.5 percent at the beginning of the decade to 27.9 percent at the end. During the sixties, relocation alone drove the figure upwards to 44.5 percent. During the 1970s, as the program began to be phased out, the rate of Indian urbanization decreased sharply, with the result that the proportion had risen to “only” forty-nine percent by 1980.134 Even without a formal federal relocation effort on a national scale, the momentum of what had been set in motion over an entire generation carried the number into the mid-fiftieth percentile by 1990, and there is no firm indication the trend is abating.135
Despite much protest to the contrary, those who “migrated” to the cities under the auspices of termination and relocation have already begun to join the legions of others, no longer recognized as Indians even by other Indians, who were previously discarded and forgotten along the tortuous route from 1776 to the present.136 Cut off irrevocably from the centers of their sociocultural existence, they have increasingly adopted arbitrary and abstract methods to signify their “Indianness.” Federally-sanctioned “Certificates of Tribal Enrollment” have come to replace tangible participation in the political life of their nations as emblems of membership. Federally issued “Certificates of Degree of Indian Blood” have replaced discernible commitment to Indian interests as the ultimate determinant of identity.137 In the end, by embracing such “standards,” Indians are left knowing no more of being Indian than do nonindians. The process is a cultural form of what, in the physical arena, has been termed “autogenocide.”138
The Indian policies undertaken by the United States during the two centuries since its inception appear on the surface to have been varied, even at times contradictory. Openly genocidal at times, they have more often been garbed, however thinly, in the attire of “humanitarianism.” In fact, as the matter was put by Alexis de Tocqueville, the great French commentator on the early American experience, it would occasionally have been “impossible to destroy men with more respect to the laws of humanity.”139 Always, however, there was an underlying consistency in the sentiments which begat policy: to bring about the total dispossession and disappearance of North America's indigenous population. It was this fundamental coherence in U.S. aims, invariably denied by responsible scholars and officials alike, which caused Adolf Hitler to ground his own notions of lebensraumpolitik (“politics of living space”) in the U.S. example.140
Neither Spain nor Britain should be the models of German expansion, but the Nordics of North America, who had ruthlessly pushed aside an inferior race to win for themselves soil and territory for the future. To undertake this essential task, sometimes difficult, always cruel—this was Hitler's version of the White Man's Burden.141
As early as 1784, A British observer remarked that the intent of the fledgling United States with regard to American Indians was that of “extirpating them totally from the face of the earth, men, women and children.”142 In 1825, Secretary of State Henry Clay opined that U.S. Indian policy should be predicated on a presumption that the “Indian race” was “destined to extinction” in the face of persistent expansion by “superior” Anglo- Saxon “civilization.”143 During the 1870s, General Phil Sheridan is known to have called repeatedly the for “complete extermination” of targeted native groups as a means of making the West safe for repopulation by Euroamericans.144 Subsequent assimilationists demanded the disappearance of any survivors through cultural and genetic absorption by their conquerors.145 Well into the twentieth century, Euroamerica as a whole typically referred—often hopefully—to indigenous people as “the vanishing race,” decimated and ultimately subsumed by the far greater number of invaders who had moved in upon their land.146
Many of the worst U.S. practices associated with these sensibilities have long since been suspended (arguably, because their goals were accomplished). Yet, largescale and deliberate dislocation of native people from their land is anything but an historical relic. Probably the most prominent current example is that of the Big Mountain Diné, perhaps the largest remaining enclave of traditionally oriented Indians in the United States. Situated astride an estimated twenty-four billion tons of the most accessible low sulfur coal in North America, the entire 13,500 person population of the Big Mountain area is even now being forcibly expelled to make way for the Peabody corporations massive shovels. There being no place left on the remainder of the Navajo Reservation to accommodate their sheepherding way of life, the refugees, many of them elderly, are being “resettled” in off-reservation towns like Flagstaff, Arizona.147 Some have been sent to Phoenix, Denver, and Los Angeles. All suffer extreme trauma and other maladies resulting from the destruction of their community and consequent “transition.”148
Another salient illustration is that of the Western Shoshone. Mostly resident to a vast expanse of the Nevada desert secured by their ancestors in the 1863 Treaty of Ruby Valley, the Shoshones have suffered the fate of becoming the “most bombed nation on earth” by virtue of the U.S. having located the majority of its nuclear weapons testing facilities in the southern portion of their homeland since 1950. During the late seventies, despite being unable to demonstrate that it had ever acquired valid title to the territory the Shoshones call Newe Segobia, the government began to move into the northern area as well, stating an intent to construct the MX missile system there. While the MX plan has been dropped, the Shoshones are still being pushed off their land, “freeing” it for use in such endeavors as nuclear waste dumps like the one at Yucca Mountain.149
In Alaska, where nearly two hundred indigenous peoples were instantly converted into “village corporations” by the 1971 Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, there is a distinct possibility that the entire native population of about 22,000 will be displaced by the demands of tourism, North Slope oil extraction, and other “developmental” enterprises by some point early in the twenty-first century. Already, their landbase has been constricted to a complex of tiny “townships” and their traditional economy mostly eradicated by the impacts of commercial fishing, whaling, and sealing, as well as the effects of increasing Arctic industrialization on regional caribou herds and other game animals.150 Moreover, there is a plan—apparently conceived in all seriousness—to divert the waterflow of the Yukon River southward all the way to the Río Grande, an expedient to supporting continued nonindian population growth in the arid regions of the “lower forty-eight” states and creating the agribusiness complex in the northern Mexican provinces of Sonora and Chihuahua envisioned in the North American Free Trade Agreement.151 It seems certain that no traditional indigenous society can be expected to stand up against such an environmental onslaught.
Eventually, if such processes are allowed to run their course, the probability is that a “Final Solution of the Indian Question” will be achieved.152 The key to this will rest, not in an official return to the pattern of nineteenth-century massacres or the emergence of some Auschwitz-style extermination program, but in the erosion of sociocultural integrity and confusion of identity afflicting any people subjected to conditions of diaspora. Like water flowing from a leaking bucket, the last self-consciously Indian people will pass into oblivion silently, unnoticed and unremarked. The deaths of cultures destroyed by such means usually occur in this fashion, with a faint whimper rather than resistance and screams of agony.153
There are, perhaps, glimmers of hope flickering upon the horizon. One of the more promising is the incipient International Convention on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Drafted over the past decade by the United Nations Working Group on Indigenous Populations, the instrument is due for submission to the General Assembly at some point in the near future. When it is ratified, the Convention could at last extend to native peoples the essential international legal protections enjoyed by their colonizers the world over.154 Should it be adhered to by this “nation of laws,” the instrument will effectively bar the United States from completing its quietly ongoing drive to obliterate the remains of Native North America. If not—and the U.S. has historically demonstrated a truly remarkable tendency to simply ignore those elements of international legality it finds inconvenient—the future of American Indians looks exceedingly grim.155