“What we now call an Indian nation was a modern invention born at the moment of treaty.”
SCOTT LYONS, X-Marks: Native Signatures of Assent
What is sovereignty?
Sovereignty means supreme and independent authority over a geographic area. Indian nations are sovereign because they have such power and control over reservations. Tribal sovereignty is the basis for most fundamentally different legal and political conditions in Indian country. Treaty rights, casinos, and different tax laws are only possible in Indian country because tribes are sovereign. That sovereignty often enables tribes to protect tribal languages, cultures, and land in ways that would be completely impossible if it did not exist.
Sovereignty is what makes a tribe different from a cultural enclave like the Amish. The Amish have preserved distinct cultural traditions and languages, but they are still subject to federal and state laws. The Meskwaki Nation (Iowa) and other tribes have preserved distinct cultural traditions and language but are not subject to all state and federal laws. Thus, the Meskwaki exercise independent control over their reservation and make their own laws about gaming and taxation. They are sovereign.
Tribal sovereignty is a powerful political authority, but it is not absolute. There are some limitations to scope and depth of tribal sovereignty. Over many decades, the U.S. and Canadian governments have sought to erode the political power of tribes and diminish their sovereignty with some, but not complete, success. Indians nations do not maintain their own armies, for example. The U.S. and Canadian federal governments have significant power over some aspects of tribal life and law. Specific dimensions of tribal sovereignty, including treaty rights, gaming, criminal law, and taxation, are detailed throughout the rest of this book.
Why do Indians have reservations?
Indians used to own all of North and South America. Reservations are not gifts to Indians from the U.S. government: they are retained portions of the original tribal homelands—the parts that were not sold or taken. When tribes made treaties with the U.S. government in which they sold much of their land, those treaties affirmed the special status of the retained, reserved lands and that of tribes as independent governments—another major difference between Indians and other racial or ethnic groups in the United States.
Starting in the 1830s, a series of court cases often called the Marshall Trilogy (after Chief Justice John Marshall, who wrote the opinions for the court) further affirmed the special status of tribal government and reservation land and made it clear that state governments did not have jurisdiction on reservations or over Indian people. Reservations are nations, not just cultural enclaves, landholdings, or communities. Some limitations were later put on tribal nationhood through acts of Congress, but the basic reason for the existence of Indian reservations remains the same.
Why isn’t being American enough? Why do Indians need reservations today?
Reservations are home to around half of the enrolled Indian population in America, and like most Americans, Indians love their home. The connection that Indians have to their reservations is especially strong. In many places, numerous generations of family members are buried in the same ground. Nobody wants to give that up. And there are sacred places and ceremony sites on reservations that serve as the center for spiritual work that still sustains many tribal people.
But the preservation of reservations is about more than special places and ancient histories. The continuation of tribal government is a continuation of tribal self-rule (in spite of some limitations). Many Indians feel that their ancestors paid very dearly—and they themselves are still paying dearly—for the right to have their reserved lands and tribal governments. Reservations are nations in the eyes of many Indians, and they carry powerful patriotism for those nations. It is true that there are plenty of problems on reservations, ranging from poverty to pervasive substance abuse in some places. Quite a few reservations have unemployment rates over 50 percent and most have unemployment rates over 20 percent. Reservation governments are trying to remedy their problems through education programs and employment opportunities. The federal government has been unwilling to make a major intervention on the issue of Indian poverty. Tribal members see the greatest hope for addressing these and other problems in Indian country in the programs of their tribal governments.
In a somewhat surprising counter to these aspects of reservations, there is a common misconception that reservations are nothing more than concentration camps. Some people even think there may be barbed wire or other physical obstacles to the free travel of Native Americans. That view is just plain untrue.
In addition to all the reasons that Indians love their homelands and need their tribal governments, many draw attention to the fact that the federal government promised to reserve those lands and tribal governments in perpetuity as partial payment for the balance of the land obtained in treaties. If the United States reneges on that promise, its own integrity is compromised and the cultural and economic well-being of the tribal population would suffer.
Why do Indians have treaty rights? What other rights do they have that differ from most people?
There are two primary reasons why Indians have certain rights that other Americans do not. The first has to do with treaties. When the U.S. federal government wanted land from Indians, negotiators had to pay Indians or promise Indians different things in order to obtain the land from them. Tribal leaders had a different concept of land ownership than that held by Europeans. When they advocated for their people, the main thing they insisted upon was the right to hunt, fish, gather, and travel on all of their lands, including soon-to-be-ceded lands. Often, the U.S. government obtained title to Indian land but agreed to allow Indian people to retain their right to use the land, even the land that was just sold. These rights, often referred to as usufructuary rights, are the basis of the treaty rights that many Native Americans enjoy today. They explain why hunting seasons and methods may vary and be more liberal for Indians on Indian land than they are for others governed exclusively by state laws and why tribal rights sometimes extend outside reservation boundaries. It is part of the payment the U.S. government made for the land.
The other major reason Indians have different rights is that state governments have no authority over reservations or tribal governments except for individual criminal cases, and that is only in the places where Public Law 280 is in effect. In the U.S. constitution, all rights not specifically granted to the federal government were reserved by the states. As a result, most of the basic regulations and civil laws that Americans deal with on a day-to-day basis come from state government rather than the federal government. Enrolled members living on reservations fall under a different jurisdictional framework.
Tribal fisherman Vincent Wolfe at North Twin Lake (Wisconsin), 1990, waiting by barricades erected by police to protect Ojibwe tribal members exercising treaty rights
Leech Lake (Minnesota) band member Elias Treuer harvesting wild rice, September 2011
What is allotment?
Allotment is the practice of taking tribal land, which was held in trust for the common use of all tribal members, and splitting it into parcels to be owned by each tribal member, with the remaining land sold to settlers and private companies. The profits from the land sales were then to be used by the Department of the Interior to fund assimilation programs for American Indian people. The Dawes Act enabled this policy on tribal land in the United States in 1887. Of the 155 million acres of land held in trust for Indians on reservations, 50 million were allotted to tribal members, usually in 160-acre parcels. The remaining 105 million acres of land were deemed “surplus” and opened for white settlement.
It would have been better for Indians to allot all tribal land to Indians or to avoid allotment altogether. One of the reasons the government created the policy was to open reservations to timber, mineral, and land speculators and settlers. Land allotted to Indians quickly flew out of their hands as well. In spite of trust period protections, in which Indians were not supposed to be able to sell their allotments for twenty-five years, numerous Indians fell victim to land speculators. Over the course of the policy from 1887 to 1933, the federal government passed many amendments to the legislation in order to limit trust protections and to make the sale of Indian parcels easier. As a result of this policy, Indians retain less than 10 percent of their own reservations in many places.
A few reservations were able to avoid allotment, including Red Lake (Minnesota) and Menominee (Wisconsin). Usually, the success of communities in avoiding allotment had less to do with a kind American government than it did with their relative geographic isolation or other political considerations. In Red Lake, for example, the government asked for allotment, a major land cession, and relocation all at the same time. They got the land cession but not allotment or relocation. Even today, all land at Red Lake is held in trust for all tribal members, and the main reservation has never endured allotment. Red Lake and the few other tribes that avoided the policy are the exception rather than the rule, however: allotment was the means by which two-thirds of the reservation tribal land base was lost.
Why does my land have clouded title?
Most reservations in the United States comprise both tribal land and land that is owned by private citizens. On many of those reservations, nonnative people own most of the private land. A fair number of those people have titles to that land that are “clouded.” Clouded title means that proof of rightful ownership is not clear, usually due to illegal or fraudulent actions in the past. Multiple parties claim a right to the title of clouded parcels.
Between 1784 and 1871, the U.S. government signed 370 treaties with American Indian people to obtain 720 cessions of land. The lands remaining in tribal hands were subject to a lot of land fraud, lease fraud, and mineral lease fraud, especially during the allotment era (1887–1933). Simply put, there were resources on reservations that outsiders wanted. Those who wanted the resources did not always have great respect for the rightful Indian owners of the land. Joseph Auginaush, an elder from the White Earth Reservation, showed me a $24 grocery receipt, explaining that the grocery clerk from Roy Lake went to the allotment officer at White Earth and demanded the Auginaush family allotment in lieu of payment for the family’s grocery bill, by which he obtained exclusive title to their 160-acre allotment. The grocer sold the allotment, but the people he sold it to now had land with “clouded title.” The Auginaush family was never compensated for the theft, even though they had no court hearing or formal notice of the land transactions. Theirs was a typical case.
After generations of ownership by nonnative people and multiple sales of those parcels of land, nonnative families who did not commit fraud and have lived on reservations for generations now cannot obtain clear title to their own land and have lower property values and undergo cumbersome procedures to sell or bequeath land. Many Indians were ripped off, and their descendants have been unable to access the land they should have received as a birthright.
A law that declared all current owners as the rightful owners of land on reservations would simply legalize the theft of many of those parcels from Indians. This solution would be neither morally nor legally right in this country, which has valued property rights above most others. But a law that granted land parcels to the descendants of the original owners would disregard the rights of inheritance and ownership of many nonnative families. Thus, resolutions have been elusive, and many parcels of land on reservations continue to have clouded title.
Is something being done about clouded title?
There have been attempts to clarify clouded title on Indian reservations. By 1946, when the U.S. government established the Indian Claims Commission, tribes had already filed 219 land claims cases in the U.S. Court of Claims. The commission of three judges settled 285 cases but was authorized to offer only monetary compensation for land lost via fraud. However, many tribes preferred land return to monetary compensation, and the commission did not solve all land conflicts. In 1978, the federal government passed legislation ending the ICC and sent the remaining 170 undecided cases to the U.S. Court of Claims. The Oneida and Lakota cases are among the most famous of these. The Lakota refused their large court-ordered settlement, insisting upon the return of ancestral lands. The Oneida encountered many complications because of relocation from New York to Wisconsin and because of state interference in the federal-tribal relationship; their case has yet to be resolved.1
Another ongoing legal action that seeks to quantify land fraud and make reparations for it as a means to secure unclouded title to current owners is in the Cobell v. Salazar land claims settlement. The Cobell settlement is a source of great contention in Indian country today. This settlement focuses primarily on trust funds and trust lands, most of which originated under allotment policy. Native Americans who are enrolled members and can prove fraud on parcels of land or funds that the U.S. government administered on their behalf can work through an incredibly long and enormously cumbersome process to receive partial compensation. Many Native Americans feel that when all is said and done, most Indians will receive, at most, meager compensation, but their right to contest outsiders’ illegitimate title to reservation land will be forever sacrificed.
If tribes had hereditary chiefs, how come there is a democratic process in place for selecting tribal leaders in most places today?
From the genesis of the U.S. government until 1934, its representatives systematically deposed existing tribal leaders and dismantled leadership structures, moved Indian people onto reservations—often concentrating many chiefs and their constituents in one place—and then put nonnative Indian agents in charge of tribal affairs. In 1934, the Indian Reorganization Act shifted the U.S. bureaucracy that dealt with Indians (the Office of Indian Affairs, soon to be renamed the Bureau of Indian Affairs) from a supervisory agency to an advisory agency.
It was a major policy change, but it still took decades for tribal people to organize modern governments. When they did, there was a lot of variation, from more traditional leadership structures to (more commonly) democratic forms. The U.S. government provided draft constitutions to tribes, but those drafts were highly flawed, based on a corporate governance model rather than a political one with checks and balances. Tribes are still (with varying degrees of success) seeking to remedy those draft constitutions and remake tribal government in their own ways. The Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act of 1975 enabled the U.S. secretaries of the interior, health, education, and welfare to contract with and make grants directly to tribes, which served to further strengthen tribal powers.
What’s the Indian Reorganization Act?
The Indian Reorganization Act (IRA), passed in 1934, is the piece of legislation that changed the role of the Office of Indian Affairs (soon to be renamed the Bureau of Indian Affairs) from a supervisory agency that managed every major facet of Indian government (without tribal input or representation) to an advisory one. In a short time, tribes developed modern tribal governments much as they are today, and the era of Indian self-determination began. Tribes could once again have greater say in designing their own futures. The IRA also ended allotment and returned remaining tribal lands to federal trust, which helped stabilize the tribal land base.
The IRA was welcomed by many tribes, but it came with its own problems: the U.S. Department of the Interior retained substantial power over tribal affairs, tribal citizens had few rights or protections, and the new government structures that emerged after the IRA did not usually reflect traditional tribal governance structures or values (see page 94). In some cases, the IRA also merged previously autonomous Indian nations into one tribal government. For example, Sandy Lake (Minnesota) was established as an independent reservation in 1855 and had always had its own chiefs and independent political structure, but after the IRA it was folded into the Mille Lacs Reservation, where it had a district representative but no longer functioned independently, making Sandy Lake a smaller part of a larger Indian political structure. Many people from that community still feel betrayed, isolated, and disempowered by the change.
What are the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe and the Great Lakes Inter-Tribal Council?
Each tribe in the United States is its own sovereign entity—a native nation. They independently make their own decisions, subject only to the Major Crimes Act, Public Law 280, and other federal limitations on tribal sovereignty. However, in some places, those native nations have pooled their political and economic resources to work cooperatively. Sometimes the connections between tribes in these types of arrangements are constitutionally stipulated, meaning the member tribes, the overarching agency (Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, for example), and the Bureau of Indian Affairs all have political interactions with the tribal citizenship process and other critical dimensions of tribal sovereignty.
The Minnesota Chippewa Tribe (MCT) is comprised of six Ojibwe nations in Minnesota, each with its own reservation. They have much in common: language, culture, history, and treaties, some of which were signed by leaders from most of the member reservations. In fact, the Nelson Act of 1889, which implemented allotment for most Ojibwe in Minnesota and addressed other land issues for them, created some of the impetus for creating the MCT. Several independent Ojibwe nations shared interest in tracts of land and compensation from the sale of that land, which was officially held “in common” for all of them. When modern tribal governments were created after the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act, establishing the MCT two years later seemed like the easiest way to deal with the land and money issues for the member tribes in the future. The MCT administered trust lands for member tribes for a long time, but over the past twenty years Leech Lake and other tribes have been slowly asserting greater control over trust land and tribal leases of it.
The MCT was designed to enable cooperative work and greater political clout. But it has had other effects as well. One of the reservations, White Earth, comprises one-third of the MCT’s tribal population (and one-third of many revenue streams). White Earth has often been stymied in its efforts to pass major meaningful constitutional reforms because the other member reservations do not agree with the proposed changes to tribal citizenship and do not want to release White Earth from the MCT because of the financial repercussions.
The Great Lakes Inter-Tribal Council has membership from twelve different reservations in Wisconsin, some of which have very different tribal heritage, languages, and cultural practices. The conceptual framework for the Great Lakes Inter-Tribal Council is to empower all member reservations politically and financially. The GLITC has nothing to do with the MCT, but some of the benefits and problems of the organizational structures are similar.
Why do so many Indians live in urban areas today? What is relocation?
Some reservations have unemployment rates over 50 percent. Anyone who lives in a place with limited opportunities for financial betterment or even basic survival seeks a way out. That’s how America filled up with immigrants, and it’s part of the explanation for how so many Indians left reservations. It’s also true that Indians have a high rate of marriage to people of different races, which helps bring a lot of Indians off-reservation.
Also, some reservations like Leech Lake (Minnesota) own less than 4 percent of their land due to policies like allotment. Even enrolled members have a hard time finding housing, and people are forced to look elsewhere. Enrollment criteria for reservations are a major source of contention as well: there are now more than twice as many Indians self-identifying for the census than there are enrolled members (tribal citizens). The non-enrolled Indians are not eligible for tribal housing and other programs.
In addition to all of these variables, the U.S. government made it official policy to relocate Indians from reservations to urban areas in the 1950s. The government appropriated funds to provide tribal members with one-way transportation and rental assistance for the first month. Thousands of Indians took advantage of the program, believing they would find greater financial opportunities in cities. Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Chicago, Denver, and Oakland developed large Indian populations as a result of this policy. But relocations failed to deliver the financial betterment promised. There was still a racial barrier to gainful employment for people of color in the 1950s and 1960s, and Indians who moved under the policy were soon even more impoverished than their reservation counterparts. Still, the establishment of substantial urban Indian populations was a permanent change.
The U.S. government circulated brochures to Indians to entice them to move to urban areas as part of relocation initiatives in the 1950s.
What is termination?
The U.S. government did a lot of experimenting with Indian policy. Although the Indian Reorganization Act (1934) had opened the self-determination era, only two decades later the government was looking for ways to diminish tribal sovereignty and terminate it altogether, which is exactly what this policy was all about. The government compiled a list of tribes from the most “acculturated” to the least, with plans to terminate their political existence in that order. They didn’t see termination as a punishment but rather as the culmination of years of successful assimilation programs.
As the government proceeded to terminate the sovereign status of tribes one at a time, it quickly became evident that the policy was a disaster. The Menominee, who had pioneered the world’s first sustainable forest harvesting program and banked $10 million with no help from the U.S. government, had to shut down the operation. Without legal standing as a sovereign nation, Menominee land and business operations became taxable, they lost their management team, and then they started to lose the very land on which they harvested trees. The revenue stream diminished and then disappeared. Tribal members had no jobs. The new Menominee “corporation” that owned the former reservation lands had to sell the land to pay the taxes on the remaining land. Tribal member Ada Deer said, “It was like burning your house down to stay warm in the winter.”2 The federal government had to spend more in welfare payments to tribal members than it had cost to support the Menominee tribal government, and Menominee County became the poorest in the state of Wisconsin.
After years of sustained protest, the terminated Menominee were reinstated, as were some other tribes in the 1970s and 1980s, such as the Klamath, Coquille, and Catawba. Most of the other 109 terminated tribes were never reinstated.3 Many continue to struggle to gain a return of status. Any trust tribes and tribal members had for the federal government was shattered once again.
Why do Indians have their own police and courts in some places?
The right of tribes to maintain their own police and court systems is inherent, even though the court system and government have often tried to recast and diminish the nature of tribal sovereignty. Unless a treaty or act of Congress limits tribal sovereignty (see page 86), it is unhindered. For this reason, tribes have different laws about gaming and gambling, hunting and fishing, and many other things. Despite the fact that the right of tribes to build their own police and courts is inherent, some have not exercised that right. The U.S. government controlled reservations for decades and systematically dismantled tribal leadership structures in most places. Only since 1934 have tribes been able to assume greater control over their own governments.
Building courts and successfully managing police forces takes a tremendous amount of logistical support and money. Although federal appropriations and grants can augment a tribe’s efforts to build police and court systems, government support is never enough, and most tribal court and police administrations have to do a lot of external fund-raising. It takes time to develop qualified police officers, lawyers, and judges. Tribes are reluctant to spend the resources needed to develop a court if they can only hire outsiders. Therefore, tribes with small populations or limited financial resources have been somewhat less likely than larger tribes to develop police and court systems, although there are exceptions. The federal government has passed laws like Public Law 280 (see page 104), which further eroded the jurisdiction of tribal governments for some states, but those laws are complex and not in place on all reservations.
Indian police force, White Earth Reservation, Minnesota, 1908
Why does the FBI investigate murders on some reservations?
Most lawyers do not understand Indian law and jurisdiction very well, and most citizens understand even less. Tribal leaders used to have exclusive say about matters of justice in their communities. Over a period of many decades, the U.S. government systematically attacked and eroded the authority of tribal leaders.
One of the first major legal intrusions into tribal sovereignty came in the late 1800s in response to a decision from the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of Ex Parte Crow Dog. A Lakota man named Crow Dog killed another Lakota named Spotted Tail in 1881. Tribal leaders convened a traditional tribal council and decided that Crow Dog would have to make financial reparations to Spotted Tail’s widow and provide for her well-being for the rest of his life and furthermore exiled him and his entire family for four generations. (Leonard Crow Dog, a well-known spiritual leader for the American Indian Movement, is the last of the four generations to live in exile from the main community at Rosebud.) Spotted Tail, who had been acknowledged as a chief by General George Cook in 1876, had cooperated with the U.S. government rather than resisting. Many nonnative officials felt that Crow Dog was getting away with “the red man’s revenge.” They arrested him, tried him for murder, and sentenced him to hang.
Crow Dog obtained a lawyer and fought his case all the way to the Supreme Court, where he won a major decision. The court ruled that the Lakota could not be subject to the jurisdiction of a federal, state, or territorial court and that the ability of tribes to address such offenses was an attribute of tribal sovereignty that had not been specifically ended by an act of Congress. Neither the states nor the federal government had the power to hang Crow Dog. There was a public outcry in the United States about Indians getting away with murder; many lawmakers used that sentiment to develop a new policy approach that would strengthen the U.S. government’s power over Indians on tribal land.
The Major Crimes Act (1885) gave the U.S. government jurisdiction over major crimes between Indians on Indian land. From 1885 on, federal authorities investigated Indian-on-Indian crimes in cases of murder, rape, arson, manslaughter, burglary, larceny, and assault with deadly intent. Initially, this was done through auspices of the Indian agent on each reservation. Courts of Indian Offenses, administered by the U.S. government, were the venue through which justice was administered to Indians. Eventually, as the Office of Indian Affairs became advisory rather than supervisory, the FBI assumed the role of primary investigator for Indian-on-Indian crimes on Indian land. The Major Crimes Act was amended many times, and the list of offenses expanded significantly.
All of this was complicated enough, but the U.S. federal government later passed legislation that sought to give some state governments authority over criminal affairs in Indian country. Public Law 280 further complicated the arena of jurisdiction in Indian country. Essentially, the U.S. federal government has authority over major crimes everywhere in Indian country unless Public Law 280 has specifically granted that jurisdiction to state governments. A detailed discussion of Public Law 280 appears below.
Crow Dog’s landmark case affirmed tribal sovereignty but also convinced the U.S. government to pass the Major Crimes Act and assert federal jurisdiction over major crimes on Indian land.
Murder is not a federal crime in America. Each state government has declared murder to be illegal and devises its own statutes on crime. Because each state maintains its own jurisdiction, some states have the death penalty while others do not. Indian law is the only significant exception to state jurisdiction over capital crimes. Among other things, sentencing guidelines tend to be stricter at the federal level, meaning that Indians in many states endure harsher punishment than do their white neighbors who commit the same crimes.
Why do state law enforcement agencies investigate murders on some reservations? What is Public Law 280?
In 1953, Public Law 280 was passed, and it has had a substantial and long-lasting impact on many tribes.4 This federal congressional act only applied to tribes in five states—Oregon, Nebraska, California, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. Eleven other states were later added to the list. Many states declined the jurisdiction when it was offered to them because it would require them to provide services to tribal members that the federal government had previously funded.
Until passage of Public Law 280, tribes had authority over their own reservations, free from all but U.S. federal interference. The federal government had controlled reservation courts and government before the Indian Reorganization Act in 1934 (see page 95) and assumed an advisory role after that. Major crimes remained under federal jurisdiction since passage of the Major Crimes Act in 1885. With Public Law 280, states specifically named in the law would assume all criminal and limited civil jurisdiction over Indians. The complex web of state criminal law now formally applied to Indians in several states for the first time in history.
A few exceptions to Public Law 280 exist, even in states where it was applied. Red Lake Tribal Chairman Roger Jourdain (Minnesota) was an exceptionally shrewd and savvy leader who constantly scrutinized every legislative agenda and U.S. government action. Jourdain immediately recognized Public Law 280 as an intrusion into Red Lake’s sovereignty, intervened before the bill was introduced to Congress, and successfully fought to have Red Lake exempted from the law. Tribes facing impending termination like the Menominee were also exempted.
In the 1950s, tribal governments were new, weak, and unaware of Public Law 280’s implications, so the law passed without the consent of or consultation with other tribal leaders in affected communities. It soon became clear how deeply sovereignty would be affected by state jurisdiction. The U.S. government wanted to get out of the Indian business, and its steps to realize this goal included relocating members, terminating their tribal governments, and extending state authority over Indians.
Red Lake developed and maintained its own criminal code, court system, and police force (through auspices of the Bureau of Indian Affairs). The federal government intervenes and assumes jurisdiction over major crimes, but the State of Minnesota has no authority at Red Lake. That is why, when a school shooting occurred there in 2005, for example, federal law enforcement agencies investigated. The Bois Forte Reservation (Minnesota) was initially subject to Public Law 280, but it succeeded in getting an exemption in 1975. It also maintains its own courts, police, and legal code. Bois Forte and Red Lake are now exploring ways to use their courts to exert jurisdiction over major crimes as well. In 2009, for example, a Bois Forte tribal member burned down the tribal headquarters and was charged with arson under the Major Crimes Act, but Bois Forte also charged him with arson in tribal court. The dual charge was not double jeopardy because the United States and Bois Forte are separate sovereigns under the law. This tactic has the potential to expand tribal jurisdiction and undermine the role of the Major Crimes Act in thwarting tribal sovereignty.
As tribes have become better educated about sovereignty and the law and better funded, most have begun to develop their own court systems and police forces. As of 2012, Fond du Lac is the only tribe in Minnesota that does not have its own court. A few have negotiated memoranda of agreement with state, county, and municipal law enforcement agencies. Pressure is mounting for a repeal of Public Law 280 or a case-by-case exemption for many reservations. Many tribes have also had success in legal challenges to the civil authority of states over Indians in Public Law 280, as demonstrated by Bryan v. Itasca County and other cases.5
Don’t tribes ever investigate murders on Indian land themselves?
Yes. States have formal jurisdiction in murder cases where Public Law 280 is in effect, and the FBI has formal jurisdiction in murder cases in all other parts of Indian country. However, tribal police do a great deal of investigative and police work relative to murder and drug charges on reservations. Tribal police often exercise arrest and search warrants, cooperate with the FBI and other law enforcement agencies, and participate in joint task forces to make their communities safe.
Do Indians face racial profiling from law enforcement?
Racial profiling does still happen.6 Whites can be sure that the color of their skin was not a factor in being pulled over for speeding, but an Indian, especially one with tribal license plates, never knows for sure. Beltrami County (Minnesota) and Red Lake have had disagreements about exercising one another’s arrest warrants, and the Beltrami County sheriff’s office intentionally profiled Indians, pulling over cars with Red Lake plates to see if the subjects of the warrants were in the vehicles, using only the racial profile (tribal license plate) to decide whom to pull over and investigate. That problem is being actively addressed by the Beltrami County sheriff’s office now.
Red Lake (Minnesota) tribal justice complex
In Minnesota, Indians comprise 1 percent of the state population and 17 percent of the state’s prison population. But Indians are not seventeen times more likely to commit crimes. The system investigates, charges, tries, convicts, and incarcerates Indians at a rate much higher than the general population. There are some great people working in law enforcement today who are trying to change this situation, but clearly much more needs to be done. A 2010 Arizona law intended to combat illegal immigration allows police to pull over anyone who they have “reasonable suspicion” is an illegal immigrant, which many people believe has increased racial profiling of Indians and Mexicans.
Most Indians are policed by nonnative people. That’s only a problem when race becomes a factor in how citizens are treated by law enforcement. Since race is a factor in many Indian cases, racial profiling continues to be a problem.
Should Leonard Peltier be freed?
In 1975, two FBI agents were murdered in South Dakota. This event occurred shortly after a major police and military action at Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Several different reports and investigations, well synthesized for the public in the video documentary Incident at Oglala and a special on 60 Minutes, have now made it clear that the two most damaging pieces of evidence used to convict Leonard Peltier of the murders should not have been admissible in court. One was a ballistics report that was clearly fabricated by the FBI. The other was an affidavit from a woman named Myrtle Poor Bear, who later stated that the FBI coerced her by threatening to permanently remove her children from her home.
Many people feel that Leonard Peltier was made into a scapegoat and punished for a crime he did not commit. Those who argue for Leonard Peltier’s release also often state that we owe it to the families of the FBI agents who were murdered to find their true killers. If Leonard Peltier had received a fair trial or a retrial without the pieces of clearly tainted evidence, he probably would not have been convicted. But did he kill those FBI agents? Maybe not, but I don’t know.
The American Indian Movement (Clyde Bellecourt, one of its leaders, shown here) gained international fame for its takeover of the Wounded Knee Trading Post and other acts of civil disobedience, but the things for which its members are less well known are most appreciated by the Indian community.
Is AIM good or bad?
I do not agree with everything that the American Indian Movement (AIM) or its leaders have done or said, but I do believe that AIM has done more good than bad. Ojibwe and other Indians in Minneapolis founded the American Indian Movement in 1968.7 AIM was catapulted to national fame for its poignant protests. Some members participated in the takeover of the federal prison at Alcatraz in 1969, although they did not organize that event. AIM did organize a takeover of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1972. As a result, many Americans heard, felt, and understood Indian discontent with government policies for the first time, even though the protests did little to change policy.
AIM also got embroiled in reservation politics and the profoundly disturbing injustice of the American legal system through the Custer courthouse burning and the Wounded Knee Trading Post occupation in South Dakota in 1973. The organization’s activism again raised the group’s public profile and made known the issues that motivated it but did little to bring new government action or to address the underlying issues that caused so much unrest in the Indian community.
AIM’s greatest achievements are the ones for which it is less well known nationally but far more appreciated by Indians.8 AIM was initially created to deal with Indian urbanization and poverty in Minneapolis. In 1968 it founded the AIM Legal Rights Center, which provided free legal counsel and representation to Indians. More than thirty thousand people have been served by the legal center to date. In 1968 AIM also founded the AIM Patrol, which sought to police the police, document cases of police brutality and racial profiling, assist Indians with legal grievances, and advocate for victims of crimes. The AIM Patrol evolved over time: in 1986, when a serial killer was targeting Indian women in Minneapolis, the patrol provided free protective escorts for native women who needed to walk or ride to work, school, and shopping centers. In 1979 AIM also developed the American Indian Opportunities Industrialization Center, a very successful source of job training and placement for urban and reservation Indians.
The American Indian Movement also provided innovative leadership in education by pioneering the first Indian culture–based K–12 school in Minnesota. The Heart of the Earth Survival School was created in 1971, and it graduated more Indians than all of the other Minneapolis-area schools combined. Heart of the Earth underwent some serious struggles and eventually closed, but its historic achievements in serving urban Indian youth and inspiring other tribal school initiatives are remarkable.
What is the Indian Child Welfare Act?
The Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) sought to address a horrific problem in adoption and foster care of native children. Expert testimony presented at the legislative hearings for the act included surveys conducted by the Association on American Indian Affairs and other organizations indicating that as many as 35 percent of native children were separated from their homes by adoption or foster care.9 In Minnesota, as much as 25 percent of the infant Indian population was being adopted. Minnesota’s out-of-home placement rate for Indians was five times that of nonnative children. More than 90 percent of the adoption and foster placements were with non-Indian families. The trend disempowered parents in the raising of their own children and disconnected native youth from their families, reservations, and culture.
Social service agencies were plagued with oversight and procedural problems. Most of the native kids removed from their homes never had a social worker visit those homes. Racial bias was prevalent. Many tribal members were terrified of losing their children—not because they were bad parents but because they were Indian.
The 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act was the first serious legislative attempt to counteract these tendencies. It provided mandates to state courts and county social service case agencies for placement of children who were removed from their homes, prioritizing placement with (1) preference of the child and parent, (2) extended family, (3) other tribal members, and (4) other Indians. It also required that agencies notify tribes of cases affecting their members, and it granted tribal courts and agencies the right to intervene in their children’s welfare.
ICWA was a big step in the right direction, but there were many problems with the law. First, it had no teeth: there were no fines, sanctions, or punishments for individuals or agencies that did not comply with the act. It was also difficult for caseworkers to know if a child was Indian and what tribe the child was enrolled in (or even if the child was enrolled) and to find qualified native homes for placement. Canadian Indians living in the United States and Indians whose tribal affiliation was not known were not covered by the act because they were not “federally recognized.” The act also provided no means or guidance for education or training social service workers about native culture, history, language, or even the act itself.
All social service agencies were so grossly underfunded that even after passage of the act the trends were barely affected. Furthermore, while foster care placements usually involved a house visit by a social worker, even years after the act only a small percentage of the Indian foster care removals did. Legal processes also take time. Often tribes received no notice, or a late notice, and by the time they tried to intervene and advocate, the affected children had already been removed from their homes for two years or more.
Today, state social service agencies must develop permanency plans within one year of initiating litigation such as a CHIPS (Children in Need of Protective Services) petition, and communication between tribal and county agencies has greatly improved. Judges routinely query social service workers about site visits in many states as well. Some state and tribal governments signed memoranda of agreement that obligate states to pay for foster care placements ordered by tribal courts. Some states passed additional legislation, like the Minnesota Indian Family Preservation Act, which sought to strengthen and expand some provisions of ICWA. Minnesota saw a 92 percent decline in Indian adoptions and a 66 percent decline in the Indian foster care rate over the first two decades after ICWA. In spite of that dramatic improvement, the effects have been insufficient. Indians still have the highest foster care and adoption rates of all racial groups in the United States and in most states occupy a percentage of the caseload ten times their percentage of the overall population. Much more needs to be done to ensure tribal involvement in the process, racial sensitivity training and cultural education for county social service workers, reduction in unnecessary removals of Indian children, and connection of removed children to their communities and culture.
What is blood quantum, what is tribal enrollment, and how are they related?
Blood quantum is the percentage of a person’s racial lineage that can be documented as Indian. Tribal governments keep lists of enrolled members, otherwise known as tribal citizens. Eligibility for enrollment in most tribes is dependent on blood quantum. This is the political definition of Indianness.
Blood quantum was first used in Virginia in the eighteenth century to restrict the rights of people with half or more native ancestry. By the 1930s, the federal government and many tribes were using blood quantum to determine who was eligible for tribal citizenship. The fractions are expressed up to sixty-fourths—one might have a quantum of 37/64.
Criteria for tribal citizenship vary from tribe to tribe. Some, like the Pueblo, are very exclusive. Others, like the St. Croix Ojibwe (Wisconsin), require prospective members to prove 50 percent Indian blood. Most tribes still require prospective members to prove that they have at least 25 percent Indian blood, although some will now accept lineal descent. Most tribes also do not acknowledge Indian blood from other tribes. Fathers who are not named on birth certificates or don’t sign voluntary recognition of paternity papers do not have their blood counted.
There are many more self-identified Indians than enrolled members.10 Some of those self-identified Indians have tenuous ties to native communities; they know only that someone way back in their family tree might have been Indian. Many other self-identified Indians grew up and now live in native communities, have dark skin, and even speak tribal languages—but are still not eligible for enrollment. The obstacle is that tribal citizenship is not determined by residence at time of birth, as for most nations, but rather by proof of a percentage of blood from a given tribe and a completed enrollment application.
Tribes have a clear right and responsibility to decide who belongs and who does not. The primary alternative to the racial basis of blood quantum as the determinant for membership is lineal descent: to open membership to those who can demonstrate that they have a direct Indian ancestor. But opening enrollment to more members might result in a flood of returnees, potentially allowing people who have never lived on the reservation to take over tribal politics and reduce the political power and economic resources of those who have lived there the longest. The tribes that have casinos and distribute per capita payments have further disincentive to expand tribal membership criteria, for fear of diluting benefits to current tribal members. In California, over 2,500 tribal members have been disenrolled by their tribes in recent years—and every one of those tribes operates a substantial casino.11 The economic and political climate on reservations is inherently divisive just when it needs to be inclusive.
Unfortunately, the enrollment records used to determine blood quantum are highly flawed. The original blood quantum calculations at White Earth (Minnesota), for example, were compiled during a lawsuit over land fraud in the 1910s by eugenics-trained scientists Albert Jenks and Ales Hrdlicka, who measured head shape, analyzed hair thickness, and scratched enrollees’ skin, noting pink marks as evidence of nonnative blood.12 By reducing the number of official full bloods at White Earth from over 5,000 to 127, they vastly diminished the compensation that the U.S. government had to pay for land fraud. Amazingly, their lists—built on exactly those criteria—still comprise the database for determining blood quantum and tribal enrollment at White Earth today.13
There are people whose tribal enrollment records show a 100 percent blood quantum, meaning that, on paper, they are biologically 100 percent Indian. But many of those people have one relative way back in the family tree who is not Indian. There are many people whose tribal enrollment record says they are 25 percent Indian when they and their communities know for a fact that their blood quantum is much more. As a result of this arcane system, many Indians who by most measures would count as full-blooded cannot get enrolled.
While the Indian population in America is growing very rapidly, the enrolled population is advancing much more slowly and on the verge of declining on some reservations. A demographic report on the Salish and Kootenai tribes of the Flathead Reservation (Montana) showed that the death rate has now eclipsed the enrollment rate and a current slow decline in the enrolled population will accelerate significantly after 2020.14 The tribes appear to be breeding themselves into extinction, completing what forced assimilation could not accomplish. It is a tremendous source of frustration for many Indians who want to belong to, vote for, and serve their tribes and people as bona fide members, but cannot. The net result is that more than half of America’s self-identified Indian people suffer the drawbacks of societal discrimination and their pernicious history and current community dysfunction but enjoy none of the benefits of tribal membership. And the debate about identity fuels the bad feelings and paralysis that have plagued tribes for decades.
Blood is part of identity, but the stuff on the inside matters more than exterior color, hair type, and height of cheekbone. Participation in culture and knowledge of the tribal language do not directly correlate to one’s percentage of Indian blood, and these things often impact identity, tell us who we are, more deeply than color. By extending the privileges of tribal citizenship only to those who have a certain racial pedigree and ignoring all other variables of identity, tribes are actually participating in racism. They are alienating and excluding not just non-Indians but also identifiable Indians who have Indian blood, language, and culture. That is not okay.
Many Indians believe that if tribes are ever going to be effective in attacking the root of the problems that plague their communities, they must open the doors to tribal membership for all their people.15 Concerns about being overrun by newcomers could be somewhat mitigated by making prospective members apply in person on the reservation. In New Zealand, Australia, South America, and Central America, blood quantum has never been the primary measure of legitimacy or citizenship for tribal peoples, and its absence has not harmed indigenous people. In the United States, the most important questions for an Indian tribe are not about us as a race. They are about us as nations.
How has tribal enrollment affected you personally?
I am not an enrolled member of any tribe, although I have enrolled relatives from Leech Lake, White Earth, Mille Lacs, and Red Lake reservations in Minnesota. But errors in enrollment records can be corrected, and I have hopes of being enrolled eventually, either at Leech Lake (where my ancestral village of Bena is located and most of my family is from) or White Earth (where my mother is enrolled).
For you to understand the depths of this question in the lives of Indians who are not enrolled, though, it’s easiest for me to simply tell you about my children. We have a large blended family, with nine children who don’t all have the same biological parents. They are all identifiably native in appearance, and they have grown up around Ojibwe ceremonies, language, and lifeways—snaring rabbits, harvesting wild rice, and processing maple syrup. For all of them, being Indian is something you are, believe, and do. It has nothing to do with a piece of paper or blood quantum. They don’t even know what blood quantum is. But three of my children are enrolled members at Leech Lake and six are ineligible for enrollment.
They learned about enrollment very young, though. One year I took the kids to Leech Lake’s community Christmas party. When they lined up with other reservation children to receive a gift “from Santa,” tribal employees handed one present to each of my children on the tribal enrollment list and told their un-enrolled siblings that they could not receive a gift. Being rejected by anyone is painful, but being rejected by the people with whom you identify most strongly and the community or government that represents them is excruciating. For the rest of their lives, three of my children will get to vote in tribal elections, receive modest college scholarship assistance from the tribe, and participate in the tribal fish harvest. Six will not. Three will be eligible to run for tribal office. Six will not. My beautiful, smart kids are some of the most culturally knowledgeable people of their generation, so Leech Lake loses too, because only three of these incredible kids get to represent the tribe as bona fide members.
Enrolled or not, all of my children know who they are, but I cannot protect them all from the very tangible pain of exclusion by their own tribe—exclusion from a petty Christmas ritual, yes, and from the deep sense of belonging that accompanies tribal citizenship.
How come some tribes ban the use and sale of alcohol?
The U.S. federal government used to regulate—and for a long time prohibit—the sale of alcohol on Indian land. Some of the tribal prohibitions against alcohol stem from old U.S. Indian liquor laws. However, in this day and age, it is up to each tribal government to decide whether to ban the sale of alcohol on their land. Many tribes have removed the restriction. Some have removed it recently, with the advent of tribal gaming operations, hoping to lure more patrons to “wet” casinos. In other places, tribal leadership and their constituencies have insisted that their reservations remain “dry.” In addition to the problems that many native communities have with substance abuse, many tribal members see alcohol consumption as a practice contrary to traditional cultural values.
Is there a solution to substance abuse in Indian country?
There is no easy answer. If there were, we wouldn’t have a problem. Contemporary issues of poverty, joblessness, historical trauma, violence, and substance abuse are all deeply intertwined. It is impossible to target one of those issues effectively without addressing all of the others. Indians and non-Indians alike have been scratching their heads for decades without making major progress on curbing substance abuse.
The most promising solutions we have lie in the realm of cultural revitalization. Decades upon decades of consistent effort to assimilate Indians have damaged native communities in horrifying ways. The more disconnected native people have become from their motherlands, languages, and cultural ways, the more dysfunctional they have become. And as outsiders have attempted to change Indians over the years, Indians have felt more and more isolated and misunderstood. This helps explain why culturally based treatment programs are significantly more successful for Indian addicts than mainstream ones.16 In a few places, concerted broad-based efforts have revitalized traditional tribal language and culture. In those places, we often see a parallel strengthening of community cohesion, declining rates of substance abuse, and improvement in academic achievement.
For native communities, these examples are the most promising effort to bring meaningful solutions to the people. For others, it is important to realize that America’s greatest strength and greatest potential in helping Indians lies not in attempting to assimilate and integrate them further but rather in respecting and supporting the cultural and linguistic diversity that makes this country truly great.
Do all Indians have drinking problems?
No, but a lot of people have a problem seeing it that way. If someone walks into a crowded bar and sees two hundred inebriated white college students, they do not say, “See, all white people are drunks.” But if someone walks into the same bar and sees two hundred inebriated white college students and one inebriated Indian, it is reasonably likely that he or she would at least think if not say the same about Native Americans.
Over the Thanksgiving holiday in 2010, Station 280 (a St. Paul, Minnesota, bar) produced a poster featuring a scantily clad Native American woman posing provocatively in front of a drawing of a happy cowboy with his arm around an Indian man who was passed out drunk. The poster read, “Drink Like an Indian, Party Like a Pilgrim.” The poster encapsulated negative stereotypes about Indians and alcohol—that Indians have drinking problems, that Indian men can’t handle their liquor but white men can—with the additional gratuitous sexual objectification of Indian women.
The stereotypes about alcoholism and Indians are complicated by the reality. Substance abuse is a problem in Indian country. We cannot rewrite history, nor can we rewrite well-documented statistics. Many reasons explain the issue of widespread substance abuse in the tribal population. The evidence about genetic predisposition to alcoholism is conflicting and not always conclusive. However, environmental elements, historical factors, and issues of poverty all play heavily into this problem.
At the same time that there is a problem with substance abuse in Indian country, it surprises some people to know that a large percentage of the U.S. tribal population abstains entirely from the use of alcohol. For many tribes, alcohol is considered taboo in traditional ceremonial circles. That, along with the fact that there are many recovering alcoholics in Indian country, has led a large percentage of the population to abstain from alcohol use of any kind. It also means that when Indian people are true to their beliefs and customs, they can find value systems and places that support and reinforce the culture of mental and physical health, free from substance abuse.
The pervasive negative stereotype of the drunken Indian strengthens an indigenous sense of otherness and dislocation from mainstream society. And because traditional ceremonial lifestyles and belief systems are threatened in many places, many native youth have internalized negative stereotypes of themselves. It is not sufficient to tell native kids to be proud of who they are if we do not also at the same time tell them who they are. The struggle in connecting young people to their traditions is compounded by a school system that consistently provides opportunities to learn about others but very few for native kids to learn about themselves. We have a lot of work to do.
Why is there so much concern about mascots?
Not all Indians find the use of Indians or Indian imagery by sports teams offensive, but many do. They view nonnative people dressed as Indians, doing a “tomahawk chop,” or singing fake Indian songs as a mockery of their culture and history. Those opposed to the use of Indians as mascots usually point out that most people would not tolerate white sports fans dressed up in fake Afros singing mock African songs for a sports team using a stereotype of black people as a mascot. The protest against using nonnative racial groups as mascots has been so overwhelming that the practice was universally abandoned. In Red Wing (Minnesota), in 2008 and 2009, sixty to seventy white students dressed in low-slung pants and sports jerseys and flashed gang signs in a caricature of black culture the students called “Wigger Day.”17 A lawsuit was filed that resulted in school officials actively discouraging and suppressing the custom, with some resistance from students. But similar caricatures of Indians in other places have often been widely defended by school officials and community members, even officially celebrated as part of the sports culture at the schools.
The two biggest defenses of Indian mascots are pretty weak. The first is the claim that “we are honoring Native Americans.” If all Native Americans felt honored, then that argument would bear some weight, but most do not feel honored. And even if a home team truly believes it is honoring Indians through its mascot, opposing teams caricature and abuse each other’s mascots in the name of team spirit. Thus, other teams in the same conference with a team that has a native mascot will most definitely not be honoring them.
In 1992, a large crowd gathered to protest the use of Native Americans as mascots during the Super Bowl between the Buffalo Bills and the Washington Redskins. So far, the NFL and its teams have been unwilling to address the issue.
Nonnative people also justify the practice by pointing to Indians who use Indian mascots for teams, such as the Red Lake Warriors. The difference is that the Indians at Red Lake are the descendants of warriors, so their use of that image or name is not a mockery. However, I never miss a chance to encourage Red Lake and other native schools to change their mascots to something more benign so that it does not confuse others about appropriate mascots. The bottom line is that if any mascot is truly offensive to a large percentage of the population, then that mascot should go. Stick to lions, tigers, and bears. Human beings will never feel dishonored by that.
Why don’t tribes do more to support language and culture?
This is a very important question, and because it touches my work, I have some strong opinions on the topic. Language and culture receive little more than token support in many places, even where language and culture are strong enough to warrant an intervention that has a good chance of preserving and revitalizing tribal societies.
Priorities compete for tribal support. Poverty is a real problem in most Indian communities in the United States and Canada, and many tribes have well-designed and much-needed programs to combat it. But tribal governments also spend a lot of money on powwows and charitable donations to nonnative organizations like churches—a painful irony. For most tribes, powwows are a new cultural form, one that did not come from their people. And churches and missionary organizations were at the forefront of efforts to assimilate and change Native Americans. Their role in advocating for removal to reservations and their participation in the residential boarding school experiment did tremendous damage to many Indian people and communities. But it’s relatively easy to support a local powwow that people understand and enjoy and to give money to a church that many tribal leaders and members belong to.
Learning a tribal language is hard. Many tribes have very few or no speakers left, making prioritizing tribal language or ancient cultural ways much more difficult. Indian cultures and identities are changing very rapidly. Many tribal members find it easier to redefine what it means to be Indian, with greater emphasis on things like holding a tribal enrollment card, rather than trying to preserve and revitalize cultural forms and a concept of identity that is more recognizable to their ancestors.
Supporting tribal language and culture also involves taking a good hard look at one’s self and community. Exploring this dynamic is especially important because it is language and culture revitalization that offer our greatest opportunities for strengthening political, economic, educational, and community health.
Why are Indian politics often such a viper’s pit?
Why are American politics such a viper’s pit? Political processes and politicians everywhere evolve in a contentious world, but there are additional complications in Indian country. Indian communities are small, and tribal leaders, while responsible to all tribal members, trust and rely upon their extended families with big responsibilities. That dynamic is not a bad thing by itself, but in many places its effect is a high turnover rate in tribal government jobs and an electoral process that is not just loaded with the angst and hope of voters who care about the political and economic future of their people but of tribal citizens who are worried about their personal job security.
The biggest problem in tribal politics has very little to do with people and much more to do with the structure of tribal government today. The U.S. constitution provides checks and balances. If the president does something outrageous or illegal, he can be impeached. The courts can check legislation and make sure that laws are not onerous or oppressive. The executive and legislative branches have to work together and come to agreement on spending money. But most tribes were given constitutions by the U.S. government that were drafted on a corporate governance model, without effective checks and balances. In many of those places, if the tribal chair is accused of malfeasance and the court rules against the tribal chair, the tribal chair can then appoint an appellate judge, with no need for approval, and see to it that the appellate judge overrules the lower court’s decision.
Many tribes have effectively revised the constitutions that the U.S. government handed to them. But constitutional reform is difficult and contentious for any government. And many tribal governments have yet to effectively reform their structure to provide for greater checks and balances. Without an effective system of checks and balances inherent in the structure of the tribal governments, things function well when tribal leadership has impeccable integrity, but things fall apart when someone does not. Tribal leaders are no more prone to corruption than any politician in the American system—but they are also no less prone. The primary difference is in the structure of the governments.
The other problem with politics in Indian country is that indigenous values and leadership structures are not at the center of tribal politics. In many places, hereditary chiefs from numerous communities were smashed together in one small place. Nobody would be chief of them all. And the fault lines, factions, and cliques that plague many Indian communities today had their beginnings at the start of the reservation period, with the very identities of the people. Combine that with the fact that the modern world involves networking with the U.S. government, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and many other political and financial institutions.
Tribal politics are complicated. The work involves an understanding of financial and legal contracts. Yet the constituents to which tribal leaders are responsible are often unfamiliar with and especially untrusting of those institutions and processes. This distrust makes it far easier for tribal leaders to be misunderstood or demonized. And it also makes it easier for tribal leaders, some of whom are unfamiliar with modern financial and political processes themselves, to make mistakes.
In spite of all those pressures and complications, there are still many wonderful tribal leaders who have worked through the problems with great integrity and helped make their communities safer, healthier, and more prosperous. That’s pretty amazing.
Are tribes getting better?
Yes, things are getting better. The political and economic power of native nations has grown tremendously, especially following the advent of casino gaming. Tribal leaders are more astute and effective operating in the American political system, and the American public has become slightly more aware of and knowledgeable about what is happening in Indian country, which helps generate outside support.
In spite of all that, there remains an incredible amount of work to be done. While poverty and substance abuse still plague most Indian communities, they may not be the greatest threats to survival. The Seminole (Florida), for example, have eliminated poverty for their people. They were even able to write a check to the state of Florida to help fill a major shortfall in the education budget for the entire state, which of course bought them a great deal of love from their nonnative neighbors. But if you ask the Seminole what keeps them up at night, they usually respond, “Language and culture loss.”
Tribal leaders across the land work very hard, many of them with great integrity, to climb the mountain to political empowerment and financial prosperity. While these are worthy goals, my fear is that they will manage to climb that mountain to the very top, look around, and say, “Oh my god, we just climbed the wrong mountain. We should have been climbing the mountain of language and culture revitalization while we had the chance, while we had the speakers and the cultural carriers and the opportunity.” After all, why would we need sovereignty and tribal government if we were completely assimilated with the rest of America? And if Indians have a hard time answering that question satisfactorily to other Indians, they’re going to have a really hard time answering it to the rest of America.
Why do Indians have so many kids?
Throughout history, many ethnic or racial enclaves have been famous for their large families. For Indians, it is true that many tribes have a culturally ingrained love of family. But the same can also be said for many cultures across the globe. The larger family size in many parts of Indian country is less because of culture and more because of other variables. All disproportionately poor subsections of the population tend to have children at a younger age and more often.
Access to and knowledge of birth control, combined with pre- and postnatal care, have improved dramatically over the past several decades in Indian country. The birth rate is moderating. The trends that have slowed the birth rate throughout the industrialized world are slowly changing and reducing the birthrate in Indian country too. Having six children or more in a family was very common for the grandparent generation and even many people in the parental generation but is quite rare for Indians who are raising young families today.
I heard that a lot of Indians serve in the U.S. military. How do they reconcile their service with the fact that the U.S. Army killed so many of their people?
Indian people have fought in every American war from the Revolution to Afghanistan. And Indians have served in the U.S. armed forces in larger numbers on a per capita basis than any other racial group in every conflict since World War I, before they were even U.S. citizens. Many Native Americans enlisted for financial reasons. Poverty has been and remains prevalent in most Indian communities. The service was a way to earn money, provide for one’s family, and escape from despair on the reservations. Many servicemen also seek a place in their families’ military histories and the bonds of brotherhood that can only be forged in combat. Many tribes have long, storied military traditions, and serving in the armed forces is also a way to gain respect within their tribes and use the vaunted position of warrior to speak at ceremonies, carry eagle staffs and flags at powwows, and remind others of their people’s proud warrior heritage.
Native soldiers are typically well aware that the flag they serve under also persecuted Indians and many others throughout its history, but they serve the U.S. military proudly. According to Gulf War veteran and Mille Lacs (Minnesota) tribal member Sean Fahrlander, “I said that if I have to protect white people in order to protect my people, I’ll do it. Don’t ever forget—this land is still my country.”18
How do Indians feel about the use of Geronimo as the code name for Osama Bin Laden?
On May 2, 2011, U.S. Navy SEALs killed Osama Bin Laden, architect of the 9/11 terror strikes against America. The U.S. military used Geronimo as the code name for Bin Laden in that action. Audio snippets from the raid included the lines, “We have a visual on Geronimo,” and “Geronimo is K.I.A.”
The real Geronimo was a legendary leader among the Apache and remains an iconic symbol of Indian resistance, pride, and power to many native people. Many Indians viewed the code name as a slap in the face and an effort to recast a tribal hero into the role of villain, terrorist, and enemy of the United States. The use of Geronimo as Bin Laden’s code name may have been a thoughtless blunder on the military’s part, but that oversight hurt the morale of many native soldiers, who still serve in the U.S. military in higher numbers on a per capita basis than any other racial group in the country.
When I heard the use of the code name in the media coverage right after Bin Laden’s death, I immediately thought of my grandfather, Eugene Seelye, who enlisted in the U.S. Army, putting his life on the line and earning a Purple Heart storming Omaha Beach during World War II. He gave so much to his country, and I wondered when his country would drop its callous disregard for Indians and reciprocate with a little respect.