Indian Affairs Hearings: Beyond the Destruction
Indian Affairs Hearings: Beyond the Destruction
When the White House Indian Affairs Subcommittee holds hearings Dec. 4-6, the destruction and damage to the Bureau of Indian Affairs that occurred during the occupation by the Trail of Broken Treaties Caravan will once again be directed to the public's attention. Only government witnesses will be heard in the hearings, which are certain to receive a good deal of newsaper and TV coverage. While no responsible person can condone the destruction and the theft of important files and valuable Indian art and artifacts, those should not be the only facts the public remembers from the hearings. Some effort should be made to look back at the week of Nov. 2 to recall who the members of the Trail of Broken Treaties Caravan were and why they came to Washington. Someone should point out that the majority of them came with peaceful intentions; that they came, as one Caravan member put it, "to focus national attention on the state of our lives, on our very poor health, education and housing, the poorest in the nation, and onthe continuous violation of our water, land and treaty rights."
While the hearings will undoubtedly recall those intent on becoming martyrs in a buring building, someone should also remember Josetts Wahwassuck. She is 74 years old and a member of the Prairie Band Potawatomi from Kansas. She had no water in her house until last year. She had to teach her children and grandchildren about their culture and heritage at home because the schools only taught "mainstream" Anglo customs and the history books painted the Indian people in a deprecating light. She says that her son's head was split open when he led a group of tribal members to the BIA office in their region to inquire about the "freezing" of certain needed funds, money that was legally designated theirs but held "in trust" for the tribal members by the government.
Or the 32-year-old man from a reservation in Montana who asked not to be identified. He says that he can't sell or lease any of his land without the authorization of the BIA and Interior. He tried for a year to get BIA approval for a lease but instead got a continuous runaround. By the time of the Caravan, the opportunity for the original transaction had evaporated and with it went his hopes for enough money to start a business on his other property.
Many in the Caravan, though not part of the elected leadership of the tribes, did represent the thoughts and problems of Indian people throughout the country. And a number of the position papers in the Caravan's 20-point proposal for governmental action—especially those on self-determination, Indian control of federal Indian services, and protection for Indian land and water rights—fell clearly in line with President Nixon's Indian Message of July 8, 1970, a message that has been widely endorsed by reservation tribal leaders and chairmen.
When the administration chose not to evict the Caravan members occupying the BIA, it chose human life over property. The administration realized very clearly that lives would be lost if it moved in with the police and it chose reparable over irreparable loss. It is hard to understand those who would have taken the opposite course.
ON THE LAST DAY of the BIA occupation, I found a typewriter sitting in a pile of rubbish near the commissioner's office. It was not smashed or splattered with paint as many of the other items in the pile were. Rather, the damage was confined to the key board—each and every one of its keys was completely and irretrievably twisted. Can you imagine the kind of patient fury that it takes to destroy 44 keys, one by one? If you could envision how many hundreds of bureaucratic forms those keys typed over the years and how many they will never type again, would that make it any easier to understand? Will the subcommittee understand that, or will it ever bother to ask about it?
What should be the major direction of a congressional inquiry? It should start with a fundamental question directed at itself: Why can a President introduce a new, progressive approach to governmental Indian policy in 1970 and still have a Congress ignoring its most important legislative components in 1972? In 1970, President Nixon stated that Indian tribes and communities should have the right to self-determination without termination and should have the right to control and operate Indian service programs which are presently administered by a federal agency. If a tribe wished to assume operation of such a program, the government could not deny it that right and the administration would continue to fund the program, at least at the same level as before the tribe assumed control. But Congress said that such actions would involve a major shift in governmental policy and that legislation was required—or those programs could find themselves without funding. So, two-and-one-half years later no bill has reached the floor of either the House or the Senate for a vote. And then the Congressional Interior Committee want to know why Indian people are so frustrated.
IN 1970, PRESIDENT Nixon also stated that the federal government is frequently faced "with an inherent conflict of interest" in legal actions that involve Indian land and water rights. The government, as legal trustee for those rights, has the obligation to protect the interest of the beneficiaries of the trust. However, the Secretary of the Interior and the Attorney General are also charged with the duty to advance the "public" interest in the utilization of land and water. What this has meant is that in land and water disputes between Indians and non-Indians over increasingly scarce resources, the Indians usually have been the losers.
In order to correct this conflict situation, the President called for the creation of an Indian Trust Counsel Authority "to assure independent legal representation for Indians' natural resource rights." The Authority would be independent of the Departments of Justice and Interior and would be empowered to bring suit in the name of the United States as trustee. The U.S. would waive its sovereign immunity from suit in connection with litigation involving the Authority. Again, two-and-one-half years have passed but the Western dominated Interior Committees have not moved the legislation.
In addition, many questions could also be directed at the federal bureacracy. For example, why is the bureaucracy still balking at the concepts of the President's message more than two years after its announcement as policy? And why, even in non-controversial program areas, does the bureaucracy find it so difficult to effectively administer services and to have those services actually reach the people in need?