GOVERNMENT AGENCIESPEOPLE HAVE FOUND it hard to think of Indians without conjuring up the picture of a massive bureaucracy oppressing a helpless people. Right-wing news commentators delight in picturing the Indian as a captive of the evil forces of socialism and leftist policy. Liberals view the bureaucracy as an evil denial of the inherent rights of a free man.
It would be fair to say that the Indian people are ambivalent about all this. They fully realize that with no funds for investment in social services they are dependent upon the federal government for services which the ordinary citizen provides for himself and which other poor do not receive except under demeaning circumstances. Yet they are also fully aware that the services they receive are not gratis services. Many services are set out in early treaties and statutes by which Indians bargained and received these rights to services in return for enormous land cessions.
Some Indian people want desperately to get rid of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Others want increased bureau services to help solve problems of long standing. In order to understand this ambivalence it is necessary to understand the history and present organization of the government agencies that provide services for Indian people.
The bureau is a creature of history. It was originally an agency of the War Department because the early relations between the tribes and the government were more those of war than peace In 1819 Congress authorized the President to begin to provide services for the Indian people “to prevent their extinction” and from this statute the basic programs which are now found in the Bureau of Indian Affairs began.
When the Department of the Interior was organized in 1849, the bureau was transferred to that agency. Fortunately Interior was able to take better care of the Indian than it subsequentlv did the buffalo and passenger pigeon, although some Indians would tell you that the policies which led to the demise of the other two species still reign supreme in Interior.
For nearly a century the bureau struggled along, subject to the whims of Congress, churches, and pressure groups. It grad ually developed programs which covered all the possible needs of the Indian people. During the 1950’s, in the midst of the drive for termination, the Health Service was transferred to the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. More recently proposals have been made to transfer the remainder of the BIA to HEW but these ideas have generally been rejected by both Indians and Congress, though for differing reasons.
At present the Bureau of Indian Affairs is divided into ten area offices which are scattered throughout the country. Each area office provides supervision for a number of tribes in the different states. One day an Interior Department official told me that the area offices were scattered “strategically” to serve the tribes. If that is strategy, we should all be thankful these people are in Interior instead of the State Department.
The area office in Minneapolis serves tribes in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Michigan. In fact, that area office ignores the Michigan Indians, persecutes the little Indian settlement at Tama, Iowa, and muddles around in Wisconsin and Minnesota. The last Interior official to visit Michigan came in a covered wagon shortly before Custer organized his famous Michigan regiment. It is unfortunate for the Michigan tribes that he was too late to join the outfit.
In 1968, after two years of loudly proclaiming that the bureau would have thorough consultations with tribes before changing any services, it abruptly closed the grade school at Tama, Iowa, without even mentioning it to the tribe. The tribe fought back and, at this writing, was beginning to get promises from the bureau that it could have its school again.
The area office in Aberdeen, South Dakota, serves the tribes of the Dakotas and Nebraska. It is notorious for its inability to provide services to the tribes for land consolidation purposes. The reservations are all divided into small allotments and the people want to buy all of the land owned by individuals and put it into tribal ownership. During a hearing on the land problem in the 1950’s it was revealed that when the Rosebud Sioux tribe had been fairly successful at land consolidation the bureau area office in Aberdeen suddenly discovered that the process they had been using to provide land consolidation was not legal.
The same hearing brought out that the same bureau office was advocating to the Oglala Sioux, the neighboring reservation to Rosebud, the same process of land purchase they had just denied use of to the Rosebud Sioux. Aberdeen is the most religious of the area offices. The right hand never knows what the left hand is doing.
Billings, Montana, area office serves the tribes of Wyoming and Montana. Although other area offices have been able to find means by which small groups of Indians could be organized under the provisions of the Indian Reorganization Act, Billings has been unable to do anything with the landless Indians of Montana, a remnant of Chief Little Shell’s band of Chippewas who wandered into the state in the closing years of the last century. They have been lingering ever since.
The state of Oklahoma has two area offices, Muskogee for the “civilized” tribes in the east and Anadarko for the “wild” tribes of the west. Somewhere in the operations of the two offices the tribes of Kansas and the Choctaws of Mississippi are handled.
Albuquerque, New Mexico, provides services for the Apaches and Pueblos of New Mexico. They also used to provide services for the Tiguas of El Paso, Texas, in the early years of the present century but one day they decided the trip was too long for them to make. So they simply forgot about that tribe. It took half a century for the Tiguas to get their status as Indians back, and then they had to become a state-serviced tribe, not a federal tribe.
Phoenix, Arizona, is the area office which serves the tribes of Arizona (except the Navajo), Utah, and Nevada. The tribes of Utah and Nevada are some thousand miles from Phoenix, which makes it easy for them to run down to the area office to check on things. It was this arrangement that was described to me as “strategic.”
Sacramento area office covers the state of California. For decades people have been trying to figure out if it has any relationship to Indians living in that state. Finally someone decided that it was placed there to hide information from Indians which they might otherwise ferret out from other agencies. In recent years this area office has begun to do something for Indians after a long siesta. Whether it will manage to get a program off the ground before California is dumped in the sea by an earthquake is a matter of serious speculation by Indians of that state.
The Pacific Northwest is serviced by the area office of Portland, Oregon. The tribes of Washington, Oregon, and Idaho receive services from Portland. Tribes have told me that tribal resolutions, leases, land sales, and programs disappear into the Portland area office never to be seen again. At one time a rumor spread that Judge Crater and Amelia Earhart were hidden somewhere in the Portland area office. And this rumor was never denied.
Alaska has its own area office in Juneau to take care of the natives of that state. Continental tribes have gotten the impression that the Juneau office is fairly responsive to tribal needs. It has probably the best reputation for service to native peoples of any of the area offices.
The Washington headquarters of the bureau serves the federal tribes that live east of the Mississippi, except the Choctaws of Mississippi. The tribes of New York, the Iroquois, were made the responsibility of the state in 1948, leaving only two tribes, the Eastern Band of Cherokees in North Carolina and the Seminole reservations in Florida, at the mercy of the bureau.
The function of the area office is to serve as an intermediary for the various agencies in the decision-making process. In some ways the area office fulfills its intended function. It can always decide not to do something, leaving the choice up to the tribe to go to Washington and fight out the decision where decisions are made. Perhaps the best service provided by the area offices is keeping records. The area office has copies of all the records kept by the local agency and the Washington headquarters.
When a decision has to be made, it must go from the agency to the area office, lie in state there for a decent period of time, then be stamped “disapproved” and sent on to Washington. In Washington the tribe and the Commissioner get together and try to solve the problem.
Once a decision is reached, the tribe goes back to its reservation, the Commissioner goes to lunch while the decision is mimeographed and sent down to the area office for distribution to the agencies. The agency, personnel then interpret the decision according to their local policies, which usually makes the tribe mad enough to go back to see the Commissioner.
The process described above is the area office at its worst. In fact, most area offices operate quite smoothly and are in touch with tribes continuously. But one unpleasant incident can ruin the reputation of an area office quicker than one would imagine.
One of the biggest stumbling blocks facing the area office is the lack of funds to carry out their assigned tasks. In the Minneapolis area, for example, there are no funds to begin a comprehensive program for the Michigan tribes. The tribes of that state do not demand programs from their Senators and Congressmen and so do not receive consideration. In those areas where tribes are fairly sophisticated about using their Senators and Congressmen to pressure for programs, the area office can generally offer a great many more programs to the tribes because funds are made available to it.
Many area offices do not use tribes in a partnership to secure programs. They often lose sight of the reservations’ needs and plan programs according to the funds they have available. If area offices would work more closely with people to support tribal programs, they would soon find the tribes out seeking more funds for programs.
Within each area are a number of agencies. Larger tribes have agencies of their own and a number of smaller tribes may be gathered together under a general agency. An example of the general agency serving many tribes is Everett, Washington, which is designed to handle the small tribes of the Puget Sound area. The agency provides all of the basic services except health. Thus the agency may be large or small depending upon the size of the tribe to be serviced.
On the whole, the organizational structure of the Bureau of Indian Affairs provides one important feature which makes it capable of handling matters in a manner beneficial to the Indian people. That feature is that tribes are recognized as legal entities of equivalent rank by the office regardless of what level the office is on. Thus a tribe is able to exercise its fundamental sovereignty at all levels of government.
This feature contrasts sharply with agencies serving other American citizens. Social service agencies may be influential on the county level, but when people get to the state and regional levels they become merely another applicant, till at the national level they may be virtual nonentities. Tribes, however, never lose their basic legal rights as governing bodies.
Thus tribes have become eligible for a great variety of programs by qualifying as local sponsoring bodies and then using their federal status in Washington, D.C., as a competitive edge over other applicants for funding. Under the old Area Redevelopment Administration and its successor, the Economic Development Administration, tribes have been able to enjoy a great variety of projects. It would be fair to say that of any agency in the government in the last few years EDA has been the most responsive to tribal programs.
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Wherein, you may ask, does all of the controversy—particularly the charge of paternalism—originate, if everything is operating so smoothly in the bureau?
The answer lies, I believe, in understanding the nature of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the political sense. Unless one understands the outside pressures that operate on the bureau, one does not understand the flaws in the system which give rise to the various charges that are leveled against it.
To begin with, the bureau should not be characterized as paternalistic. It should be characterized as “fear-ridden,” for the circle of fear that operates within it is much more detrimental to its efficiency than is its desire to paternalize.
America has been brainwashed to define government programs as paternalistic per se. Part of this tendency originates from the natural reluctance to pay higher taxes. People grumbling against taxes generally find some irrelevant thing their government is doing and place on it the entire blame. It becomes a paternalistic program simply because it is unpopular Often an agency, bureau, or program is defined as paternalistic whether it accomplishes anything or not.
Over the years the average citizen has come to accept the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Federal Housing Authority, the Social Security system, the Federal Reserve, and other programs as essential services of government. Few would want to eliminate these programs because they serve general needs.
With the Bureau of Indian Affairs only Indians receive services, not citizens in general. The BIA is therefore tagged as paternalistic because people feel that its services are holding Indians back. Few have ever defined “back” for me. I would define it, as did Congress in 1819, back from extinction.
The Bureau of Indian Affairs is one of twenty-six odd bureaus within the Department of the Interior. Its top job, the Commissionership, is a job filled by appointment, a survivor of the political spoils system of the last century. The Commissioner has one basic task—to keep the members of the Interior and Insular Affairs committees of the House and Senate happy—not to serve Indians or even to run his own bureau.
Members serving on the Interior and Insular Affairs committees have little time to worry about Indians. Indian legislation is a chore that distracts the Congressmen and Senators from other legislation which is much more important to their careers. Most members of the two committees are from the West, where few electoral votes are available to the national parties. Their only chance for national political advancement is, therefore, as Vice-Presidential candidate or cabinet officer. Consequently they spend as little time on Indians as possible and concentrate on areas like Foreign Relations, Armed Services, and Commerce.
When tribes are unhappy, they traditionally contact their representatives for redress. When people become concerned about how Indians are being treated, they write their representatives in Congress demanding an answer. All of these pressures fall upon the few members of the two Interior committees.
Imagine, therefore, a Senator from the West, busy with Foreign Relations Committee work, being interrupted by newspaper reports that Indians are starving in West Elbow, Utah, or Baby Bear Butte, Nevada. He has to put away work he enjoys to answer questions on the starving Indians. Chances are that the newspaper reports are highly exaggerated but the Senator has to handle all accusations about how the federal government is not treating Indians right.
The next time an Indian bill is heard before the Interior Committee the Senator makes sure that the Commissioner hears about the starving Indians. In turn, when the Commissioner gets back to his office, field personnel find out rather quickly about the treatment of the Commissioner before the committee.
Thus fear in massive quantities is injected into the field operations of the bureau. Subsequent dealings with tribes begin to reveal a real lack of enthusiasm for taking chances. The possibility of backfire is a real consideration. Decisions are made according to the book in case any fracas results.
The tribe eventually gets furious at the attitude of the bureau and comes into Washington to complain to their Senator and the cycle begins once again. When one considers that this type of movement has been pounded into an organization for over a century then one can understand why things move at a snail’s pace within the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
In my experience there are several incidents that stick out vividly as examples of bureaucratic fear. One day I got a call from a tribe that was trying to find out if its attorney contract had been approved. The Secretary of the Interior, or his delegate, has to approve all attorney contracts with tribes. I called the Phoenix area office for information and was told to check with Washington because the area office had sent the contract to the Bureau of Indian Affairs there to be approved. At the bureau in Washington I was told that all attorney contracts were approved out in the area office and none were sent east. I called Phoenix again and was again told that the area office had sent the contract to D.C. So I went in to see the Commissioner and asked his help in finding the contract. Nearly two weeks later the tribe informed me it had finally gotten the contract approved. The contract was, of course, in Phoenix all the time. But there was a duplicate copy in Washington also. In both places the bureau had failed to notify anyone that the contract had been approved. So rather than admit they were behind on their correspondence, both offices pushed the problem to and fro in an effort to absolve themselves from the blame, if any.
When I was working with the United Scholarship Service my job was to find capable Indian high school students for our secondary school placement program. I visited several schools and looked at achievement tests and grades. At one bureau school I found several students of above-average ability who could easily qualify for our program. I asked for assistance from the bureau teachers in getting these students to apply for the program, but they refused to do anything to help. Their big argument was that they had to produce certain marks and standards or their school would fall below that of other bureau schools. To let these better students go on to schools in the East would have meant fewer students capable of doing college work in their school.
So a number of Indian students were denied an opportunity to get a better education because local bureau employees wanted to make a respectable record for themselves. The teachers were actually afraid to tell any of the students about our program because they were afraid the students might decide to enter it. That would have meant fewer capable students enrolled in the bureau high school and the subsequent questioning by higher bureau officials of the school’s program.
Another time while I was working for the United Scholarship Service, Tillie Walker, the director of the program, and myself stopped in an area office to check on scholarship money that might be available that fall for Indian students. We were dumbfounded to learn that the bureau had seventeen thousand dollars on hand, expected another seventeen thousand dollars before the end of the year, and didn’t expect to give any of it out.
We asked the man in charge of scholarships why the bureau, which had nearly one million dollars in scholarship money, couldn’t use its funds to pick up eligible Indian students and let the USS with its meager resources provide funds for ineligible Indian students, those living off the reservation.
His explanation was a classic statement of the fear that pervades the bureau. He stated that he had worked in that job for some ten years, through both Democratic and Republican administrations. The Republicans, he said, frowned on expenditures, the Democrats encouraged them. And although it was a Democratic administration at present, someday, he said, the Republicans would be in office. They might, he told us, examine the books of that area office and discover that he had spent to the limit every year he had the money. He was laying the groundwork for his defense years before it would be necessary!
Bureau officials are very reluctant to defend tribal rights. Time and again tribes have come more than part way in pushing for a vital issue only to have the bureau fall back in fear at the last moment. Classic in this field has been the failure of the bureau to defend the fishing rights of the Northwest tribes. Although it is federal law that the bureau is responsible for defending Indian treaty rights as trustee, the bureau dodged the fishing rights issue for years. Finally, when Robert Bennett became Commissioner he took the bull by the horns and got the bureau to intervene. But the attitude of local bureau personnel, western Washington people told me, was to compromise Indian rights as much as possible.
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Since the days of termination in the 1950’s the situation in Indian Affairs has bordered on the irrational. There have been few changes on the Congressional committees, the bureau has changed little, tribes and the general public have been more vocal about their problems. Fear has increased proportionately.
One of the favorite games of the Congressional committees has been to threaten termination every time the bureau requests anything. I say games because it has been well known in Congress that, since 1960, tribes have petitioned for removal of the area offices and a concentration of personnel and decision-making authority at the local level. If Congress were serious about termination it would help the tribes to dismantle the bureau office by office, function by function.
Threats of termination have been disastrous from the Indian point of view. Tribes rarely know where they are in terms of national policy. They seldom know which tribe is programmed for new roads, new schools, new hospitals. No one knows until the dirt is turned. So tribes have come to take the word of bureau people as to their place in the overall program for development.
When it is known nationally that Congress is considering termination once again, bureau employees use this threat to keep tribes in line. Whenever a tribe begins to show a bit of independence, a BIA official will throw broad “hints” that the tribe had better forget it or be recommended for termination.
Recommendation for termination is no idle threat. As we have seen, in the 1950’s the bureau offered every possible excuse for terminating tribes. No Indian is so foolish as to believe that it can’t happen again. So the tribe generally gives in and follows the bureau line. The risk of total destruction of the Indian community to too great to treat lightly.
When I was Director of the National Congress of American Indians, the bureaucrats would tell me that the NCAI was advocating termination by following a course opposite to the BIA. Fortunately we always had an active tribal membership that thrived on combat and never took the threats seriously. But had I been leading a small tribe in western Washington, Wisconsin, or Nevada, the threat would have been enough to stop me cold.
One of the main problems of the bureau operations in the field has been the lack of Congressional policy directives. Tribes are obviously incapable of doing without federal services at present. Yet with proper training and development of community facilities many tribes could become self-sufficient and federal services and supervision would become nominal.
As long as the bureau is expected to prepare the tribes for termination it will fail in its programs. Many tribes have said that there is no incentive in building up their reservations if there is a chance they will be sold out unexpectedly in the near future. If there was a change in Congressional policy to promote the development of human and natural resources on the reservations, programs would be philosophically oriented to total development. There would be a means by which development could be evaluated—that of self-sufficiency. Motivation would change from fear to enthusiasm as programs became oriented to realistic goals based upon the expectation that the Indian people were building for the future instead of playing for time.
The annual process of budgeting also provides a great stumbling block for the bureau in its attempts to provide services to Indian people. Budgets too often reflect ongoing administrative overhead rather than funds which can be used to do a specific job. Thus an area office may have a surplus in education funds and a deficit in funds for roads or law and order. Funds must be spent for the purpose for which they are appropriated. So it may take a number of years to work an item up to the point where there is sufficient money available to do a job.
During 1968 Senator Clinton Anderson announced that the federal government was spending nearly a half billion dollars a year on Indian people and therefore he didn’t think they were so neglected. The general public probably heard the figure and wondered what was happening in the bureau with all those funds.
In reality the funds were probably so earmarked that it was impossible for the bureau to do much with the money to overcome existing problems. Most area offices probably broke about even last year without being able to start new projects.
One glaring example of allocated funds being a detriment to Indian people is the school construction fund which is used to build new schools on the reservations. For years the bureau knew that the Navajo population was exploding and that classroom space would soon be at a premium. Yet nothing was done to reallocate funds for school construction on the Navajo reservations until Philleo Nash became Commissioner and by then it was too late.
For the past several years Navajos have been shipped all over the country in an effort to get the Navajo children in school. This policy resulted in the widespread displacement of children from other Indian tribes in schools near them. Thus northwestern tribes were denied entrance to the school in Chemawa, Oregon, and Nevada Indians were denied school space at Stewart, Nevada, a school they had used for decades.
The Navajo situation has begun to ease now, but the dropout rate of the other tribes who had to send their children to public and parochial schools increased during that period so that nationally the Indian education picture is about the same as it was years ago. The same story exists with regard to roads on several reservations.
In 1966 Commissioner Bennett was sent around Indian country to determine the needs of the tribes in order to plan Udall’s great legislative masterpiece. In Minneapolis, Minnesota, site of the first of the regional meetings, several tribes presented their ideas on welfare. They complained that handouts undermined the educational programs they were conducting to encourage people to work. They asked that all welfare be turned into a work program so that people would not be idle all day long and then spend their welfare and unemployment checks carelessly.
Unfortunately this idea was never adopted. It couldn’t be adopted under the present laws. And when the idea was subsequently discussed, various “liberal”-minded people said that it would be demeaning for people to have to work for welfare. So all possible avenues for development of this idea were blocked from the very beginning. It should be no wonder that the bureau has a hard time getting things done.
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The other agencies working with Indian people—the Public Health Service, the Office of Economic Opportunity, the Labor Department, the Federal Housing Authority, and the Economic Development Administration—have a great deal more flexibility than does the bureau. They operate primarily on the grant basis. Funds are allocated by tribe according to projects. Primary responsibility for programming is on the tribe, and tribes who do not project a well-reasoned feasible plan for development do not get funds.
These agencies have had great success in assisting Indian tribes with their programs. One can hardly visit a reservation today without finding some new project under way. Many people arriving on a reservation for the first time bemoan the apparent lack of progress being made by the Indians. They are horrified by the poverty and living conditions. Automatically people seem to agree that the bureau has been incredibly derelict in its duty. Oh, if they had only seen these same reservations twenty years ago, they would have known what poverty was.
Consider for a moment, when did the reservations ever have the benefit of a program of major investment? Tribes went on the reservations in the late 1870’s. For the most part the people lived in log cabins and tents. Indian Affairs was regarded as merely a matter of administration and record-keeping until the Meriam Report in 1928. Under the Indian Reorganization Act during the 1930’s tribes were finally beginning to move, but World War II stopped all progress and funds were very scarce during those years.
In the 1950’s and early 1960’s tribes had to spend all of their time defending their lands and treaty rights from the whims of the terminationists. Little was done to develop the reservations because all energies went into saving them from obliteration. Finally in the 1960’s, after nearly a century of neglect, funds began to become available for capital improvements such as tribal buildings, community halls, roads, and housing. The past few years have been the first time there has been money available for development of the reservations.
Deploring the lack of modern conveniences on the reservations is like beating your old horse for not being able to fly. If the tribes or the bureau could have developed the reservations any sooner, they would have done so.
In 1966, when the tribes met at Santa Fe, New Mexico, to pressure the bureau for changes, they had a specific idea in mind. The programs of the OEO had taken hold on the reservations and the idea of granting funds directly to the tribes for specific programs was very popular.
At the meeting, Udall wandered around holding a paper written by a superintendent from Arizona who advocated a strict contract method of providing services comparable to the OEO programs. It was a radical departure from traditional policies and no one was sure that it could be sold to higher ups in the administration or Congress but the tribes all felt that it was the wave of the future.
Finally in 1968 the bureau set up a contracting project at the Salt River reservation in Arizona. After some two years in discussion it appeared that the way originally advocated by the tribes at Santa Fe would be tested on one reservation. To date the Salt River project has proved successful and plans are being made to expand the idea to other tribes.
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Tribes today have a good grasp on the future. If they can work out the basic programs for contracting, they may be able to push on into new areas which have been unserviced or only partially serviced in the past. A lot depends upon the reactions within the bureaucracy and Congress as to whether or not the program will be continued.
The role of the Bureau of Indian Affairs must change radically if Indians are to make the progress necessary to keep them abreast of developments in the rest of society. It would be foolish to outline the basic problems of the bureau without offering alternative ideas by which it could be made more responsive.
There are a number of things the bureau could do immediately to completely change the rate and manner of progress of the Indian people. Here are some of them:
Too often tribes are simply lumped together as if they had identical profiles and it were merely a matter of tribal response to bureau programs which differentiated the tribes.
In fact there are about thirty-five tribes with sufficient population, land, and resources to make large programs feasible. These tribes average some two thousand people, generally have in excess of 100,000 acres of land, and have a large enough tribal income to provide a basic working budget for development.
These tribes should be given special consideration for funding from the major granting agencies within the federal government. Wherever possible they should be given responsibility for minor services which the bureau now provides. This could be done on a contract basis annually with a declining federal share as tribal income rises.
The rest of the two hundred odd tribes fall below one thousand people, have little natural resources, and have a small land base. As their tribal income ranges from zero to very little, certainly none would have sufficient income for programming.
These tribes should submit projects directly to the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The projects would include all areas now served by bureau programs and would be set up on a cost plus fixed-fee basis so that the tribe could conduct its own programs and have a little income for the tribe as well.
Special loan-grant funds would be made available to the tribes for land consolidation programs. In many cases federal lands, of submarginal or public domain character, would be added to tribal holdings to provide a decent land base for development.
These tribes would be encouraged to develop basic community strength and tribal income necessary for ongoing overhead expenses. They would receive declining grants according to projects completed until the basic community development plan had been realized. After that they would become eligible for grants in the same manner as the other larger tribes.
Area offices and agencies should be given the bulk of their annual budgets in undesignated funds for total reservation development so that as tribes began to assume responsibilities they could set up immediate contracting arrangements. In addition the tribe and the bureau would set the priorities for expenditures each year instead of having the priorities set in Washington. In that way maximum flexibility in meeting local needs would be possible. Supplemental appropriations, now common to cover emergency situations, would become a thing of the past.
As the tribes began to take over the programs on their reservations, need of top personnel would become critical as it is now with the various poverty programs on the reservations. Employment within the Bureau of Indian Affairs would be dropping as jobs were displaced through the contracting procedure. People leaving the bureau to seek employment with the tribes would be given Civil Service status. They would thus not lose their time in grade in federal service by leaving the bureau but would continue to work toward retirement while working for the tribe on a program contracted with a government agency.
Under this method of offering tribal employment to people in the bureau the most capable people would soon be hired for tribal programs. The remainder, obviously not in great demand by the Indian people, could be transferred to the Department of Agriculture where they could spend their remaining years in relative retirement.
As the programs of the tribes began to cut into the superstructure of the bureau the need for supervisory services would radically decrease. Thus there would be a great need for reorganization of the bureau to meet the changing situation.
At that time the bureau should be transferred, not to Health, Education and Welfare, but to Commerce. Since the bureau would be primarily a granting and technical assistance agency, it would need to be in a department where economic development was the primary mission. It could then become merged with the Economic Development Administration in a special Indian section where it would act as a fact-finding agency matching tribal projects with available programs in government and opportunities available in the private business sector.
Indian tribes would continue to be eligible for grants from all federal agencies as long as the tribe remained functional. In this way the United States would be meeting its basic responsibilities to assist the Indian people and it would also fulfill now unfulfilled treaty promises of “free and undisturbed use” of reservation areas.
Income from tribal lands and tribal lands themselves would continue to be tax exempt as long as the lands and the income derived from them were used to provide social and community services to reservation residents. When all services had been provided, income could be distributed to enrolled members of the tribe. But then the tribe would no longer have eligibility for grants from federal agencies.
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It remains to be seen what will happen to the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the future. Movements to abolish it continually interrupt the basic service programs so that it is very difficult for continuity of program to be achieved. Few people consider what would happen to the Indian people if the bureau were suddenly removed. Indians would be cast adrift in society at the mercy of sharp operators. Eventually they would be dispersed into the cities, having been cheated out of their lands.
Cities would all have ghettos of Indians on welfare. Conditions would rapidly deteriorate in the urban ghettos and eventually the issue would be joined with urban racial problems.
In recent years discussion has been going on in Indian Affairs advocating giving the Indians “more responsibility.” This is useless talk. Designed to cover up a multitude of sins, particularly does it cover up the basic responsibility of the federal government toward the Indian people.
More, less, or no responsibility is irrelevant to the problem. When we talk about responsibility in these terms we are talking about play acting. Responsibility can never be given unless it is welcomed and desired. I could no more give my children responsibility than I could give them the far side of the moon. They must have a real status and stake in the process or they will recognize my overtures as tricks.
That was the primary misunderstanding of the Interior thesis over the past several years. People continued to talk about giving the tribes more responsibility. But they could not define for themselves what that responsibility should be, where it should be exercised, and what limits would be placed on it.
If responsibility is irrelevant, sovereignty is not. States have sovereignty, counties have sovereignty, cities and towns have sovereignty, water districts have sovereignty, school boards have sovereignty. Why shouldn’t tribes have total sovereignty? Originally they did. Treaties recognize this basic fact of legal existence. Tribes agreed to go to the reservations provided they could have their basic community rights of self-government.
As the system of providing services to the tribes grew up, ideas of the government and the tribes grew farther apart. Much of the problem was caused by the agitation of the churches for franchises to hunt souls on the reservations. This demand created the feeling that Indians were to be pawns in the great experiment of civilizing a savage people.
Over the years programs have been designed to accomplish secretly what cannot be accomplished openly, the de-Indianization of the Indian. In 1934, John Collier began to move the Bureau of Indian Affairs in a new direction. He figured that the movement to make white men out of Indians had not succeeded in four centuries and there was no reason to expect it to succeed in his lifetime.
But Collier also realized that Indians were already Indians. It was a simple matter, therefore, for Collier to advocate the creation of a legal status whereby tribes could become competitive in modern society and undertake development programs which would be a result of community desires. So the official tribal status of the Indian Reorganization Act was created and each tribe was given a right to have a constitution and charter under the law. It was then up to the tribe to plan its own development to fit its own needs.
Congressional policy should recognize the basic right to tribal sovereignty. Such sovereignty should include all promises contained in treaties and should recognize the eligibility of tribal governments for all federal programs which are opened to counties and cities. In this way the onus of having failed the Indian people would not be placed on Interior or Congress. Tribes would be free to develop or not, according to the desires of the people in the tribe.
The charge has frequently been leveled at the bureau that it has set up puppet governments on the reservations and somehow mysteriously governs all aspects of tribal life by remote control. As long as policies remain so nebulous with respect to the actual status of tribal governments this charge will continue to be made. Recognition of basic sovereignty would provide a solution for this problem. The integrity of the tribal entity would be guaranteed by Congressional fiat in much the same manner as Congress makes a certain type of soldier an officer and a gentleman by fiat.
Until a new ideological basis is placed under the federal-Indian relationship it seems certain that the bureau will struggle along on one cylinder, carrying the burdens of misinformation and acting as the scapegoat for the collective sins of both red and white. It is unfortunate that one agency has to be designated as the target for the frustrations of people who have not recognized their confusion between culture and technique. Perhaps the future will be brighter.