Indian Documents Tell Shabby Story
Indian Documents Tell Shabby Story
The Broken Treaties Papers, which were smuggled out of government files by wrathful Indians during their occupation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs building, have been scattered in secret stashes across the United States and Canada.
We had had access to them. We have also been given a message for President Nixon. "Tell the President," we were asked, "that Indians do not want the documents any longer than it takes to duplicate and index them so that every tribe in America can educate itself to the double-dealing of the federal government and finds ways to forestall it."
We have inspected thousands upon thousands of documents, some almost brittle with age, others as fresh as today’s headlines. They tell a shabby story.
Some documents describe multimillion-dollar land deals in South Dakota’s Black Hills. Others reveal how the White House played politics with Indian rights.
There are also poignant papers, like the account of an Indian woman whose foot was broken by the police but was left to spend the night in jail untended.
But above all, the documents indict the bureaucrats who have pretended to help the Indians but have often exploited them instead. Indians whose forebears fought the cavalry have been reduced to battling the bureaucrats. It has been a tawdry, tedious war without glory.
Like the cavalry, the bureaucrats have remorselessly driven the Indians deeper into their reservations. The stolen documents contain evidence that Indians have been cheated out of their land, robbed of their water rights, deprived of their fishing streams and hunting grounds.
Grim Statistics
As in any war, the statistics are grim. Indian life expectancy is 47 years compared with 71 for other Americans; the Indian unemployment rate is 45 per cent compared with 5.8 per cent for the nation at large; the average Indian family struggles along on $4,000 a year, less than half the $9,867 median for the rest of the country; and finally the Indian suicide rate is twice the national rate.
The FBI has been searching up and down the country for the stolen documents. Except for one small seizure in Oklahoma, however, the documents remain in Indian hands.
We learned they had been broken down into several caches and hidden in diverse locations at the far ends of the United States and Canada.
My associate Les Whitten flew to Phoenix for the first tryst. At one airport, Indian security men one jump ahead of the FBI told him to wait on a corner away from the terminal building. They hustled him by a devious route to a motel where some of the Indian leaders were assembled.
Furtive Meetings
The Indians wouldn't talk about the papers in the motel or even inside their cars for fear of FBI bugging. Furtive meetings were arranged, instead, at a bowling alley, a coffee house and on a parking lot.
Next day, Whitten was instructed to fly to another city, many hundreds of miles away. He was met by one of the leading Indian militants, who questioned him closely. At least, Whitten was given four documents and questioned again about their meaning to find out what he knew about Indian matters. Then, for 12 hours, he was deserted.
The following morning, many thousands of documents were delivered to him. The door of his room was bolted and a tough Indian security man planted himself on a chair pushed against the door. As Whitten waded through the papers, Indian experts helped him with the unfamiliar tribes and names.
Except for protecting our sources and keeping the hiding places secret, we have been placed under no restraint by the Indians. They have made no attempt to tell us what to write.
In future columns, we will describe how the Indians pulled the greatest document heist in history right under the noses of the FBI. We will also reveal, in detail, the contents of the Broken Treaties Papers.