Now the situation is getting bleaker. HUD, the tribal leaders tell me, refuses to build any more homes until the money is paid back. And so no homes are being constructed or repaired. Instead more and more people are moving into each small trailer home. The result is that 75 percent of tribal members between the ages of 18 and 40 “don’t have homes,” according to Stewart.
Stewart blames part of this problem on the tribal government’s lack of forethought. “They were thinking about the short term, because a lot of times the administration – they campaigned and then they got that one year to do something. Well, the next year it’s campaign season again.” Tribal governance was no doubt an issue here. And the Crow tribe has taken steps to improve the situation. In 2001, it instituted four-year terms instead of two-year terms for the chair and other executive positions. “Now we have three years of business and one year of campaigning,” notes Stewart with forced optimism.
Even so, when the tribal government attempted to pass legislation that would require people to pay their debt to HUD, Stewart says, the “old-timers” were telling people, “You do this and then they’re going to take all our homes and then they’re going to kick everybody out on the streets. Everyone will be homeless.” Fourteen versions of the financial protection and procedures laws intended to address this situation were reviewed before one was passed. Says Stewart of this legislative ordeal: “These people would cut your throat.”
Of course, for anyone with a basic understanding of economics and political science, nothing in this story is surprising. If your political representative is also your landlord and you don’t feel like paying your rent, you’ll vote him out of office. But when you do that, it’ll affect both your own ability to get credit and others’ ability to convince someone to build them a home.
But what choice do Crows have? Almost no one on the reservation can afford to build a home, because no one can get a mortgage. And no one can get a mortgage because the property on the reservation is held “in trust” by the federal government and most of it’s “owned” communally by the tribe. Which means, effectively, that no bank could ever foreclose on a property, because the bank can’t own reservation land.
Even town centers on many Indian reservations are desolate places. Small says there are fewer shops now in Lame Deer, Montana, the capital of the Northern Cheyenne reservation, than there were when he was growing up. There’s a small casino – the size of a suburban house – just outside of town. Few non-Indians have a reason to come through Lame Deer, however, so the dozen or so customers at the casino are almost all Indians. These gamblers are effectively taking money given to them by the tribal government for food or housing and giving it back to the tribe through its slot machines.
And the leaders in Lame Deer don’t seem particularly interested in bringing more visitors to town. Winfield Russell, vice president of the Northern Cheyenne tribal council, complains to me about the 18-wheelers that use the town’s main road to avoid the interstates. But rather than a rest stop (which would bring the tribe some revenue), he shows me a design for a new traffic pattern that will discourage truckers from using the road at all.
Small and I spend three days driving around southeastern Montana together. The early May scenery is beautiful and yet somehow depressing as the occasional snow flurry falls. But every few miles, we come upon a group of 10 to 30 trailer homes that, as anyone can see, are a blight on the land. Broken-down cars and trucks are scattered outside the homes like crushed soda cans. Many homes’ windows are broken, with only a kind of tarp separating the residents from the elements. (Residents say they’re waiting for HUD to come fix things.) Children’s toys are piled up haphazardly, mixed with lawn chairs and trash. Menacing stray dogs roam everywhere, searching for food.
“A man’s home is his castle,” Small mutters over and over as we survey these neighborhoods. Sometimes he laughs. A big man, with darkened skin and a full head of white hair, Small sometimes seems angry. But mostly he looks tired.
As we drive through the Crow and Cheyenne reservations, Small points out the places he and his extended family have lived. He has spent most of his life here. His mother was Crow and his father was Northern Cheyenne. He grew up with his six siblings on a farm. Their house had no running water. He’s somewhat nostalgic, though: “At least, back then, there wasn’t so much crime.” Violent crime on the country’s 310 reservations is on average about 2.5 times as high as the national average.2 Fueling the crime are alcohol and drugs – methamphetamines, especially. But Small thinks there’s too little law enforcement, both from the federal government and from the tribe itself.
Each morning I set out with Small, he stops in Lame Deer. The town contains a gas station, a half-stocked supermarket, a Catholic church, a school, and a coffee shop. On the first morning we arrive, the woman making Small his latte tells us that the shop was robbed the night before. The culprit stole all the candy in the glass display case, as well as five left flip-flops from a shelf full of gift items. “At least it won’t be hard to find him,” another customer jokes, imitating a man hobbling on one foot.
The same dark sense of humor pervades the conversation about the condition of the reservations, particularly among older residents. They’ve seen it all before, and they don’t expect anything to get better. Small, who owns some land and a few head of cattle, recently tried to buy land from a neighbor of his on the Crow reservation. The two had agreed on the price. But the Bureau of Indian Affairs blocked the deal. The BIA had recently had land on the reservation appraised as part of a buyback program – the federal government was going to trade one plot of land to the tribe for another – and the appraiser had put a higher value on the land than the price that Small and his neighbor had agreed upon. In fact, as Small tells it, the BIA told the appraiser to overvalue the land so as not to “screw the Indians.”
Small is past the point of anger, though, and he laughs. He’s no economist, but he’s well aware, as he tells me, “Land is worth what someone will pay for it,” not what some outside appraiser decides.
Similar stories could be told about jobs, health care, and land management on reservations. We’d like to think that stricter regulation or larger grants or other forms of government intervention or support would solve the many problems on reservations. But there are too many policies standing in the way of real improvements. It’s not only that the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Bureau of Indian Education are perhaps the most inefficient of all federal bureaucracies. It’s not only that Washington officials are far removed from the people they serve – though 90 percent of the staff of these bureaucracies are Indians themselves.3 It’s that the BIA’s purpose is unclear.
How did we arrive at this sad state of affairs? Between 1777 and 1871, the federal government signed over 400 treaties with American Indians. In the 1850s, the reservation system was devised as a way of ending the Indian wars and moving Indians off of land that white settlers wanted for farming, ranching, or mining. Tribes agreed to give up the land they occupied and move to reservations in exchange for payments and other benefits. Often, of course, these promises weren’t kept.
Tribes often ended up far from their homelands. Not only were their new lands less desirable because they had fewer natural resources, American Indians had no idea how to live on them. But, in small ways, they began to adapt. This evolution in fact was already underway. In his book Sovereign Nations or Reservations? Terry Anderson notes, “Even before interaction with Europeans, Indian institutions were evolving as a result of changing resource values and technology. Perhaps as much as any other factor, the horse changed the lives of Indians. With the horse, transportation costs declined significantly as did the costs of harvesting buffalo. The result was that many otherwise sedentary tribes took to a more nomadic life.”4 In principle, there’s no reason that tribes couldn’t have adapted themselves again to a more sedentary life on the reservation, however unjust the reason they’d wound up there in the first place.
B
ut tribal autonomy had been compromised. American Indian communities’ ability to subsist often depended on the federal administrators assigned to each tribe, who treated them like children assigned to their care. For example, Indians weren’t permitted to leave reservations in search of food; thus, many tribes needed outside shipments of food and other resources in order to survive. This meant that any small delay of appropriations from the federal government could lead to mass starvation or armed conflict.
Agents were supposed to supervise the relationship between Indians and white settlers – including any commercial activity – but by the late 19th century, their roles had shifted to include the forced assimilation of Indians into American culture. Agents oversaw the education (in English) of Indians, enforced a prohibition on alcohol, and ensured that “no Indian should be idle for want of an opportunity to labor or of instructions as to how to go to work, and, if farm work is not extensive enough to employ all idle hands, some other occupation should be introduced.”5
Of course, this relationship was understood mostly in racial terms. The late 19th and early 20th centuries saw a popular as well as an academic fascination with racial classification. New waves of immigration from Europe, the post–Civil War period of reconstruction, and the Indian wars out west made white Americans hugely interested in and receptive to all sorts of theories of racial differences. The application of Mendel’s genetic theories about dominant and recessive traits in plants to human beings launched a wrongheaded and dangerous foray into eugenics.
From the early 19th century, self-styled scientists had developed all sorts of theories about the inferiority of the Indian race. Samuel George Morton, a Philadelphia patrician who had two medical degrees, hypothesized that skull size was correlated with mental capacity. As a result of his phrenological studies, he concluded: “It must be borne in mind that the Indian is incapable of servitude, and that his spirit sunk at once in captivity, and with it his physical energy [whereas] the more pliant Negro, yielding to his fate and accommodating himself to his condition, bore his heavy burden with comparative ease.”6 One of Morton’s successors, Josiah Nott, wrote, “It is vain to talk of civilizing [Indians]. You might as well attempt to change the nature of the buffalo.”7
Those who didn’t see race as destiny, though, had plenty of theories of their own. Many Christian missionaries saw it as their duty to “civilize” American Indians, almost as soon as settlers made contact with Indians – in the 18th century, the founder of Dartmouth College told his sponsors he’d “cure the Natives of their Savage Temper” and “purge all the Indian out” of his Indian students.8 As Fergus Bordewich says in his book Killing the White Man’s Indian, “Education was seen by well-intentioned Americans both as a moral imperative and as a practical gateway to modern civilization. However their optimism was often rooted in the naïve conviction that Indians were but blank slates waiting to be inscribed with the vigorous script of American civilization.”9
Senator Henry Dawes of Massachusetts (who served from 1875 to 1893) wasn’t quite so insensitive, though, as Bordewich tells the story. In fact, Dawes considered the history of U.S.-Indian relations to be one “of spoliation, of wars, and of humiliation.”10 More importantly, he believed that Indians had the same capacity for education, independence, and economic success as their white brothers – if only the right policies were put in place.
Dawes proposed to take all the reservation land that was held in common, divide it up among Indians individually, and put the rest up for sale to white settlers. He told a group assembled at Lake Mohonk in upstate New York, “If you will prepare the Indian to take care of himself upon this land that is allotted, you will find the solution to the whole question. . . . He shall have a home and be a citizen of the United States; shall be one of us, contributing his share to all that goes to make up the strength and glory of citizenship in the United States.”11 After he proposed this allotment, one of his colleagues told the assembly, “I have more than once spoken of Senator Dawes’s severalty bill as the act of emancipation for the Indian. I believe when it is passed it will enroll his name with that of Lincoln as an Emancipator of those in bonds.”12
In 1887, Congress passed the General Allotment Act, known as the Dawes Act, which surveyed Indian lands and divided them into parcels, allowing individual Indians to apply for ownership of plots of land (though many of these parcels weren’t actually given over completely). The head of a family could receive 160 acres. People under the age of 18 would receive 40 acres. Indians had four years to select the plot they wanted. After that, the secretary of the interior would select it for them. The federal government would hold the land “in trust” for the Indians, but after 25 years had elapsed, the Indians would own the land outright. Well, almost. According to the language of the Dawes Act, “At the expiration of said period the United States will convey the same by patent to said Indian, or his heirs as aforesaid, in fee, discharged of said trust and free of all charge or incumbrance whatsoever: Provided, That the President of the United States may in any case in his discretion extend the period.”13
There are interesting similarities to the “40 acres and a mule” policy implemented after the Civil War to give freed slaves rights to abandoned land previously owned by slaveholders. Of course, in that case, the land was rarely allotted, and there was no federal money to purchase it for former slaves either. But the connection between owning land and having full citizenship was a strong one. Dawes and his colleagues in Washington clearly believed that if Indians got the former, they’d be entitled to and embrace the responsibilities of the latter. Their confidence in Indians’ ability to take their fate into their own hands was striking – and it’s a sentiment rarely heard among politicians today.
The wording of the Dawes Act continued:
That upon the completion of said allotments and the patenting of the lands to said allottees, each and every number of the respective bands or tribes of Indians to whom allotments have been made shall have the benefit of and be subject to the laws, both civil and criminal, of the State or Territory in which they may reside; and no Territory shall pass or enforce any law denying any such Indian within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the law. And every Indian born within the territorial limits of the United States to whom allotments shall have been made under the provisions of this act, or under any law or treaty, and every Indian born within the territorial limits of the United States who has voluntarily taken up, within said limits, his residence separate and apart from any tribe of Indians therein, and has adopted the habits of civilized life, is hereby declared to be a citizen of the United States, and is entitled to all the rights, privileges, and immunities of such citizens, whether said Indian has been or not, by birth or otherwise, a member of any tribe of Indians within the territorial limits of the United States without in any manner affecting the right of any such Indian to tribal or other property.14
The way the Dawes Act was carried out, though, was not as Dawes or his contemporaries had promised, nor were its effects what they had expected. In some cases, Indians who didn’t choose a parcel of land were jailed. Whites often got the best land and sometimes the only land that was adjacent to water sources. Some of the land had been surveyed badly, and so its ownership was unclear. By the time the policy ended in 1934, land under Indian ownership had shrunk by 65 percent.15
In 1934, the Indian Reorganization Act placed all the land not held fully by individuals into a “trust.” Sometimes known as the Indian New Deal, the Indian Reorganization Act was intended to stem the flow of land out of Indian hands. Land that hadn’t already been transferred into fee-simple ownership – that is, land that wasn’t owned outright – was put into trust by the federal government. From that point on, the land couldn’t be sold to non-Indians, but even land transfers among Indians or between Indians and the tribal government were heavily monitored by the federal government. In fact, as Anderson points out, bureaucratic interests as much as anything have historically driven the
U.S. government’s Indian policy.16
The effects of the trust have been disastrous for economic development on Indian lands. First, because most trust land is held communally, individuals don’t want to invest in it, and they can’t use it as collateral either. As John Koppisch, a writer at Forbes, explains: “This leads to what economists call the tragedy of the commons: If everyone owns the land, no one does. So the result is substandard housing and the barren, rundown look that comes from a lack of investment, overuse, and environmental degradation. It’s a look that’s common worldwide, wherever secure property rights are lacking – much of Africa and South America, inner city housing projects and rent-controlled apartment buildings in the U.S., Indian reservations.”17
As one tribal leader describing a similar situation in Canada explained to Koppisch, “Markets haven’t been allowed to operate in reserve lands. We’ve been legislated out of the economy. When you don’t have individual property rights, you can’t build, you can’t be bonded, you can’t pass on wealth. A lot of small businesses never get started because people can’t leverage property [to raise funds].”18
Even if an individual technically holds the land, the fact that it’s trust land means that the federal government has a say in how it’s used. Which makes it significantly less valuable. A 1992 study by Terry Anderson and Dean Lueck found that agricultural productivity on individual trust lands was 30 to 40 percent less, and on tribal trust lands 80 to 90 percent less, than on fee-simple lands on a reservation, where a given title rests entirely with an individual.19
Although tribes have been granted somewhat more power over decisions regarding their land in recent years, “at least four federal agencies are involved in the execution of any energy lease on tribal lands. . . . Not only does the BIA’s trust authority raise the cost of energy development on Indian trust lands, it has a long history of not living up to its fiduciary responsibility of managing Indian trust funds.” In 1996, a class-action suit against the BIA for this mismanagement resulted in a settlement of $3.4 billion.20
The New Trail of Tears Page 2
