Behind the Indian Protest
Behind the Indian Protest
Once again, in the seizure of the Bureau of Indian Affairs building by a group of Indians, Washington is witness to a protest which itself has become a focus of media attention and public dispute, while the purpose for which the Indians came to town is largely ignored. We leave it to the sponsors of this particular demonstration to decide whether their tactics have helped or hurt their cause. Here we offer some notes on the cause.
Europeans arriving in America made treaties promising the Indians care and compensation in return for their lands; they widely and often brutally broke those treaties; and then in 1871 they took from Indians their very right to make treaties. Indians, bereft in land and spirit, became wards of the state. Their condition since has been a national shame. President Eisenhower, with congressional consent, went further, unilaterally adopting a "termination" policy aimed at eventually closing down Indian reservations and forcing Indians to assimilate into American society, as European immigrants and blacks have tried (with more or less success) to do.
In 1970 in a step of exceptional enlightenment, President Nixon changed course. He recognized that Indians wanted not assimilation but acceptance of their difference and separateness and he proposed legislation to implement this compassionate insight. Although Congress has yet to act on the most substantial parts of his Indian program, some Indians have worked within existing parts of it.
But as in so many other passages of social change, the first stirrings of progress have whetted appetites for more. So it is that last week a group called "The Trail of Broken Treaties" arrived in Washington. Its basic demand, going much beyond Mr. Nixon's proposal of greater self-determination, is that the treaty-making power be restored to Indians and that they then be dealt with as a sovereign nation. This is what they mean by calling for abolition (by 1976) of the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
That any President would propose or any Congress grant sovereign-nation status to Indians is, frankly, inconceivable. The point should not be lost, however, that Mr. Nixon had already started building a new and more positive federal-Indian relationship. Further, his administration had shown itself open to Indians' suggestions on how to shape that relationship. "The Trail of Broken Treaties," before its quite inadvertant and unfortunate seizure of the BIA building, was on its way to a cordial White House reception. The protest has not yet run its course. It would be better if it had been directed at the slow-moving and still overly paternailistic Congress. However it ends, the protest should not be allowed to delay or sidetract the hopeful experiment that was already under way.