Proponents of the government
view also omit to (quite willfully, it appears, insofar
as such matters have been repeatedly pointed out to
them), that this unilateral reduction of American Indian
nations to federally subordinate or "quasi-
sovereign" status -- similar to that occupied by the
states of the union or, increasingly, to that of counties
or municipalities, subject to even state jurisdiction and
control -- was and is quite illegal in terms of the
constitutional requirements pertaining to the entities
with which the U.S. government is authorized and
empowered to treat.
This is no mere academic point. For
the federal government to hold that Indian peoples
constitute less than fully sovereign national entities is
to simultaneously argue that the entire treaty-making
process undertaken by the government with those peoples
is and always was illegal. This, of course, would serve
to void the treaties en toto. In turn, insofar as the
treaties include the land cession clauses by which the
U.S. acquired what it contends is "legal title"
to upwards of 70% of its present domestic territoriality,
the basis by which the United States has always claimed a
right to its own land-base would be obliterated.
The only
fall-back position would then be resort to the doctrine
of the "right of conquest," no small problem
for a nation-state which has consistently disavowed this
same doctrine in the name of purported "moral
superiority" (and which assumed a leadership role in
executing the nazi leadership for having engaged in
"aggressive war" while pursuing exactly the
same "right").
Federally oriented legal
theorists and policy-makers are thus forced to advance
and insist upon the validity of a sheer logical
impossibility: that Indian nations are simultaneously
fully sovereign (in the abstract sense) for purposes
treaty- making/transferring land title to the U.S., and
less than sovereign (in the practical sense) for purposes
of allowing "legitimate" federal control
("exercise of trust") over Indian land, water
and other resources, regulation of trade and diplomatic
relations, form of governance, recognition of citizenry,
jurisprudence, and virtually anything else striking the
federal fancy.
Such a convoluted and absurd
"doctrine" must also be maintained in order for
the U.S. to be able to assert in the international arena
that it has always comported itself on the basis of
humane, treaty-anchored (i.e.: nation-to-nation)
understandings with "its" indigenous
population(s) while at the same time insisting that
"Indian Affairs" are a purely
"internal" concern of the U.S., and are thereby
not subject to international consideration, scrutiny or
intervention (as would be the case in any true
nation-to-nation relationship, under international law).
In a number of important ways, it is not difficult to
discover recent parallels to the U.S. attitude toward
American Indian nations. The French, for example, offered
similar arguments to explain and justify their
relationship to Indochina and Algeria during the 1950s.
The Belgians advanced similar rationales in an attempt to
justify their hold upon the Congo during the same decade.
Portugal resorted to the same arguments concerning Angola
during the 1960s and '70s. And, of course, the list could
go on at great length. The point, however, is that the
common denominator of every example which could be
mustered is that the relationship is one of colonialism.
American Indian nations within the United States are
held, then, as colonies -- internal colonies -- of the
United States. Viewed in this light, all of the apparent
inconsistencies and contradictions of U.S. "Indian
policy" disappear; the policy is quite simply
illegal under international law, from top to bottom, side
to side, and at every step along the way; federal
"Indian law" is not and was never so much a
matter of law as it is U.S. colonial domination over
every indigenous nation it encountered.
Many points can
be made from this understanding, but what is of primary
importance for this paper is that, as is the case in any
colonial setting, the notion of
"self-governance" among the colonized -- while
its illusion is often deliberately fostered as a tactical
expedient by the colonizer -- is a cruel hoax. Often, in
advanced colonial settings (such as that evidenced within
U.S.) the colonized are convinced to administer and
impose upon themselves the policies and regulations set
forth by their colonizers. This self-administration is
what is so often cynically touted by the colonizers and
their puppets among the colonized as being
self-governance.
In sum, it is both fair and accurate to
state that America Indian self-governance does not exist
within the United States at the present time, and that it
in fact cannot exist until such time as the fundamental
structural relationship between the U.S. and Indian
nations is radically altered. American Indian nations, if
they are ever to exercise self-governance, must confront
the necessity of a decolonization struggle in the truest
sense of the term.
FANTASY
The origin of what is
typically passed off as being the "model of modern
American Indian self-governance" can probably be
dated from 1921, when Standard Oil sent a group of
geologists to the northern portion of the Navajo
Reservation to investigate the possibility that there
were petroleum deposits in the area. The explorers'
reports being highly favorable, Standard next dispatched
a group of representatives to negotiate -- in cooperation
with the Bureau of Indian Affairs -- a leasing
arrangement by which the corporation could begin drilling
and extraction operations. By provision of the 1868
treaty between the Navajo and the U.S., it was necessary
that Standard secure both agreement from the Navajo
government and approval of the Secretary of Interior in
order for any such contract to be legal and binding.
As it turned out, secretarial approval posed no problem, but
the traditional Navajo Council of Elders voted
unanimously to reject the idea of allowing the
corporation to exploit their land and resources. Such an
outcome was obviously unacceptable to Standard, and to
the U.S. Department of Interior (under which virtually
all "internal" development of lands and
resources was lodged at the time). Consequently, in 1923,
the federal government unilaterally appointed what it
called "The Navajo Grand Council," a small
group of hand-picked and "educated" (i.e.:
indoctrinated in the values and mores of Euroamerica)
Indians, from which representatives of the traditional
Navajo government (with which the U.S. had entered into a
solemn treaty) were entirely excluded.
Washington then
announced that this new council, devoid as it was of any
sort of Navajo support, would henceforth be recognized as
the sole "legitimate" governmental
representative body of the Navajo Nation; the traditional
Navajo form of governance was, at the stroke of the
federal pen and with no popular Din_ (Navajo) agreement
whatsoever, was totally disenfranchised and supplanted.
And, of course, one of the very first acts of the
Washington- appointed replacement entity was to sign the
federally/corporately desired leasing instruments,
setting in motion and "legitimizing" a
sustained process of mineral expropriation on Navajo
which has profited a range of non-Dine businesses and
individuals quite mightily while leaving the Navajo
people in truly abject poverty, their traditional
subsistence economy ruined, and their land-base destroyed
to the extent that it has been seriously considered for
official designation as a U.S. "National Sacrifice
Area."
Throughout the entire period since 1923, the
forms of democratic governance at Navajo -- the
inculcation of voting rather than consensus as a means of
governmental selection, subdivision of the reservation
into electoral districts, expansion of the council to
include representatives from each district, the
hypothetical division of governmental structure into
executive, legislative and judicial spheres, and so on --
have been carefully installed and polished at Navajo. And
the rhetoric of self- governance -- supposedly evidenced
in the fact that leaders of the tribal council always
affix their signatures to business agreements made
"in behalf of" their people, that a Navajo
lobbying office is maintained in Washington, and the like
-- has been consistently advanced by Navajo and federal
politicos alike. It is even possible that at least some
of the actors on both sides of the equation actually
believe what they are saying. But reality is dramatically
different from rhetoric.
During the entire half-century
in which the Navajo council has been functioning in its
mature form, it has never been allowed to negotiate a
single business agreement on its own initiative. It has
continued to be totally restricted from entering into any
agreement with any "foreign government" other
than the that of the United States, whether for purposes
of trade or for any other reason. Consequently, it has
never been able to negotiate mineral extraction royalty
rates on anything resembling favorable terms, to
establish or enforce even minimal standards of cleanup
and land reclamation upon transient extractive
corporations doing business upon its land, or even to
determine the number of livestock which can be grazed
within its borders. For that matter, the Navajo council
has never -- as the ongoing "Navajo-Hopi Land
Disputes" in the 1882 Executive Order and so-called
Bennett Freeze areas of the reservation readily attest --
been able to exert any particular influence in the
determination of exactly what the borders of the Navajo
Nation actually are.
Even the citizenry of the Navajo
Nation has been defined by the federal government,
through imposition of a formal eugenics code termed
"blood quantum" and nearly a century of direct
control over tribal rolls; these federal
"methods" of manipulating and arithmetically
constricting the indigenous population have become so
embedded in the Indian consciousness and psyche that
Washington can rely upon the "self-governance"
mechanisms of Native America to abandon their own
traditions and concern with sovereignty, adhering to
federal definitions of Indian identity, thus imposing the
burden of stark racism upon themselves.
Council members
like to point out that they have a court system, police
force and jails operating on the reservation, and submit
that this is evidence of self-governance, but the fact of
the matter is that Navajo possesses no jurisdictional
authority at all over non-Navajos committing crimes
within the Navajo Nation. For that matter, they have
equally little jurisdiction over their own citizenry when
it comes to felony and serious misdemeanor crimes, as
well as in a number of important civil areas. In order to
resolve issues between themselves and any of their
corporate lessees, they have no recourse but to pursue
matters in U.S. courts rather than their own. In order to
resolve issues with the federal government, they must
secure permission from that same government to litigate
in that government's own courts. In order even to impose
a severance tax upon their own mineral resources as these
are extracted by trans-national corporations -- the
uncontested right of every state of the union -- they
must secure permission from the federal government to
seek (and in limited way secure) a federal court opinion
allowing them to do so.
Things are at this point so
confused that one can hear Navajo Tribal Chairman Peter
McDonald, in all apparent seriousness and in the context
of the same speech, spout the rhetoric of being head of a
"sovereign, self-governing nation," and propose
that the Navajo Nation be elevated to the status of a
state within the United States. This is national
self-governance? The fact is that, fantasies to the
contrary, the Navajo council and its chair have exactly
zero control over any aspect of Navajo affairs. Every
shred of their policy is and always has been utterly
contingent upon the approval of the U.S. Interior
Secretary, the federal courts, and often enough corporate
leaders and the governments of the three states within
which the Navajo Reservation technically lies. Beyond
this it is true that -- with a minuscule number of
exceptions -- the same situation presently prevails in
every reservation area of the country.
The reason for
this is that the Navajo Grand Council model had, by the
early 1930s, proven itself so successful in
simultaneously serving U.S. interests while offering
illusions to the contrary that it was imposed across the
face of Indian Country through 1934 Indian Reorganization
Act (I.R.A.). Imposed is the correct word because,
although each American Indian nation which was
"reorganized" under the statute -- having its
traditional governmental structure usurped and replaced
by a council directly patterned after a corporate board
-- supposedly voted affirmatively in a referendum to
undergo the process, the reality is (as always, in these
things) rather different.
At the Pine Ridge Reservation
(Oglala Lakota Nation), for example, a number of dead
people somehow managed to crawl out of their graves to
vote for reorganization; even after this was documented
as being the case, the referendum results were allowed to
stand and reorganization to proceed. At Hopi, to another
example, more than 85% of all eligible voters (federally
defined) opposed and actively boycotted the referendum;
their abstentions were counted as "aye" votes
by the Bureau of Indian Affairs and reorganization
proceeded. The list of such examples can be extended, in
one or another degree of virulence, to every Indian
nation which was reorganized in accordance with the
federal prescription.
All fantasies of self-governing
characteristics aside, the absolute predicate of any
I.R.A. government is its acceptance -- indeed,
reinforcement -- of the emphatically sub-national status
accorded American Indian nations by the U.S., to
legitimize their peoples' subordination through their
public endorsement of it, to toe the line of limitations
decreed by the federal government and ultimately barter
the genuine interests of their people in exchange for the
petty position and essentially minor material
compensation which serving as puppets of a foreign power
affords them.
This is advanced colonial administration in
its very purest form, whether one wishes to draw one's
parallel to the leadership of Vichy France or the Thieu
regime in what was once called the Republic of South
Vietnam. Self-evidently, such governments will not, and
in fact structurally cannot, pursue actual
self-determination, self- governance and sovereignty.
They will never and can never attempt to consolidate real
control over their remaining land-bases, physically
recover lands illegally taken from their people, throw
the federal bureaucrats and supporting police off their
reservations, try to physically bar the corporate rape of
their territories, or enter into diplomatic and trade
relations with other nations.
They will not and they
cannot, because in the final analysis they owe their
fealty and their allegiance not to their own people (or
even themselves) but to their colonizers. It is the
colonizer, after all, not their people, who provides the
positions they occupy, whatever claim to legitimacy it
really carries, the means for its continuation. The
relationship is one of symbiosis and mutual perpetuation
in an unbalanced sort of way.
From here it is but a short
step to viewing I.R.A. governments, not as champions of
American Indian self-governance, but as literal barriers
to it. This is true in the mere fact of the existence of
such entities, and the confusion this inherently
engenders concerning "who are the real
representatives of Indian people." But, more, it has
become true in the sense that these self-proclaimed and
federally validated "responsible (To Whom? To what?)
representatives" of Native America have increasingly
taken to lending their energies and their voices to
discrediting any Indian or group of Indians audacious
enough to address the questions attending true resumption
of national prerogatives by American Indian peoples.
We see this classically in example of former Rosebud Sioux
Tribal Chairman Webster Two Hawk, wandering around on the
federal dole like a clown, wearing a crew cut and
"war bonnet," parroting the views of the Nixon
administration vis a vis the American Indian Movement's
finally (in 1972) calling the Bureau of Indian Affairs to
account for its colonial arrogance and at least a few of
its more blatant transgressions at the expense of Indian
people.
More grimly, we see former Pine Ridge Tribal
Chairman Dick Wilson forming a cabal of gun-thugs known
as the GOONs to act as surrogates for the FBI, engaging
in outright mass murder to prevent an insurgent
grassroots movement of traditional Oglalas pursuing their
rights under the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty from
"spoiling" a planned secret expropriation of
uranium deposits in the northwest quadrant of the
reservation.
And again, more immediately, we observe the
same phenomenon -- somewhat less sharply defined -- in
Navajo Tribal Chairman McDonald's sending of his
gun-thugs (this time called "tribal police") to
evict the staff of the Navajo Times newspaper from their
offices for the offense of having publicly criticized and
exposed certain of his federal/corporate relationships.
And, as should be a sad refrain by now, this list of such
examples could be extended at length.
PROSPECTS FOR THE FUTURE
Native America is at a crossroads. If the present
hegemony of I.R.A.-style governance is maintained and
allowed to continue its give-away program in terms of
American Indian national rights, the future looks bleak
indeed. Remaining on the course sketched above can result
only in the permanent reduction of American Indian
sovereignty and self-governance to, at best, the level of
very minor components within the overall U.S.
governmental/political apparatus. In the case of many
(or even most) of the smaller Indian nations, eventual
termination -- "auto-termination" may be a
better term -- and absorption directly into the
"melting pot" seems the most likely outcome. In
other words, the final liquidation of Native America is a
distinct possibility over the next half-century or less.
Fortunately, alternatives have emerged since 1970. These
have related a considerable degree to the momentum
created by the actions and activities of the American
Indian Movement and related "militant"
organizations, particularly during the period 1972-78. In
retrospect, there can be no serious question that the
1972 Trail of Broken Treaties occupation of the Bureau of
Indian Affairs Building in Washington, for example, did
more to bring Indians into the BIA than all the petitions
and letters of "more responsible" and
"legitimate" tribal officials over the
preceding 50 years. And the so-called Twenty Points
advanced by Trail participants as a cohesive American
Indian socio-political agenda still represent a benchmark
expression of indigenous sovereignty. Ironically, those
indians hired as a result -- during the major BIA
"integration" period lasting from 1976-77 --
seemed to take it as a matter of faith that they should
comport themselves in a manner which can only be
described as anti-AIM.
Similarly, AIM's actions at
Gordeon, Nebraska in 1972, and Custer, South Dakota in
1973, yielded an incalculable impact upon the concept of
Indian rights and the value of Indian life among
reservation-adjacent non-Indians throughout the United
States. In a tangible way, these AIM undertakings brought
to a screeching halt a nation-wide rash of ritual or
thrill killings of Indian people which had been mounting
for some time. By any estimation, this was vastly more
than had been accomplished by more than a decade of
"polite" discussions about the
"problem" by the federally-approved Indian
leadership with state, local and national U.S. law
enforcement officials. Yet, predictably,
"official" Native America did little in
response but criticize and condemn AIM's "violent
tactics" (One is forced to ask here exactly how
diminishing a wave of homicides through utilization of
methods involving no loss of life could ever have been
reasonably construed as "violence").
Again,
AIM's stand on the Pine Ridge Reservation from 1973- 76,
refusing to swerve from its support of Oglala national
rights under terms of the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty -- in
the face of a hideously lethal federal repression -- can
only be viewed as a tremendously important point of
departure for the general rebirth of American Indian
pride in the U.S., and an increasing Indian willingness
to stand and attempt to (re)assert their broader rights
to genuine self-determination.
As always, "duly
elected" tribal officials tended overwhelmingly to
attack AIM while defending the federal "right"
to maintain "order" on the reservation,
regardless of the cost and consequences of such order to
Indians. It is now a sublime paradox that many tribal
council members have themselves begun to mimic AIM
viewpoints and AIM pronouncements of a decade hence,
never having abandoned their clever description of those
who showed them the way as being "Assholes In
Moccasins." What the AIM "radicals" were,
and in many cases still are, demonstrating is that in
order for Indians to make gains, to self-determine and
self-govern, it is absolutely essential to proceed by
something other than the self-serving "rules of the
game" laid down by the U.S. government. Put another
way, those who would claim sovereignty must endeavor to
exercise it, to rely upon their own sense of legality and
morality, and to act accordingly.
By the 1980s, this
dynamic had become clearly consolidated in the occupation
of Yellow Thunder Camp near Rapid City, in the Black
Hills, part of an overt program of reclaiming Lakota
territory guaranteed under the Fort Laramie Treaty, but
illegally taken during the 1870s by the U.S. The same may
be said of the ongoing resistance to federally imposed
relocation of traditional Din_ from their land in the Big
Mountain area of the Navajo and Hopi reservations in
northeastern Arizona, and there are many other examples,
ranging from the continuing fishing rights struggles in
the Pacific Northwest to the stands taken by the Six
Nations Iroquois Confederacy along the U.S.-Canadian
border in the Northeast, to similar positions adopted by
the O'Otam (Papago) along the U.S.-Mexican border in the
Southwest, to the refusal of nearly half of all the
Seminole people of Florida to accept federal recognition
as a *validation* of their personal and national
existence.
Again, one might view the emergence of an
American Indian presence in the international arena,
through the United Nations Working Group on Indigenous
Populations (a sub-part of the U.N. Commission on Human
Rights) to have come from the same impetus and to be
following the same general trajectory.
Perhaps the purest
articulation of the AIM alternative to I.R.A. colonialism
may be found in the platform assembled under the title
TREATY for use by Russell Means in his candidacy for the
Pine Ridge tribal presidency in 1984. Here for the first
time (at least in terms of the 20th Century) was offered
a truly comprehensive program by which a given American
Indian nation could undertake to recover control over its
own affairs, abolishing the I.R.A. system and restoring
political power to the traditional Councils of Elders,
opening up diplomatic and trade relations with other
nations than the U.S., begin a systematic effort at
restoring its own land-base and revitalizing a
traditionally oriented economy thereon, asserting
jurisdictional prerogatives and control over the
definition of its own membership/citizenry, and
converting the educational system to its own rather than
its opponents uses.
All of this was conceived by way of
using the I.R.A. structure against itself in a sort of
exercise in political ju jitsu. So effective and
threatening was the TREATY concept seen by federal
authorities and those Indians on Pine Ridge who owe their
allegiance to that government rather than to their own
ostensible constituents, that they conspired to
disqualify Means from the reservation ballot, not on the
basis of any alleged offense against the Lakota people or
Lakota law, but because he had been convicted of
expressing contempt toward an alien South Dakota court
some years previously.
Despite the fact that it was never
actualized on Pine Ridge, the point should be made
insofar as the I.R.A. establishment was prepared to go to
such lengths to suppress the TREATY, it obviously bears
extensive study, adaptation and implementation by other
Indians, in other places. And, indeed, this appears to be
occurring, either in literal or more diffused fashion.
The Haida Draft Constitution, generated by a people whose
territory is split between the U.S. and Canada in the
Alaska region, embodies many of the same elements
embodied in the TREATY Platform. Many of the gains posted
by Pacific Northwest nations such as Quinault and Lummi
in recent years also proceed in accordance with many of
the same liberatory principles expressed in TREATY. And,
to a certain extent at least, many of the ideas
concerning Lakota land recovery and self-governance
contained in the present S 705 "Bradley Bill"
are drawn from the TREATY framework.
These are all
encouraging signs, and there are a number of others which
might be cited. It is time, if American Indian
self-governance in any real sense -- as nations rather
than as integral components of Euroamerican empire -- is
to once again become a functioning reality, to begin to
consciously destroy the I.R.A. system, to discard
"leaders" who profess fealty to it, to renounce
the "federal trust relationship" and reject all
interaction with the BIA, and to begin to assert actual
Indian alternatives.
It will not be a quick or pleasant
process. There will no doubt be severe costs and
consequences associated with such a line of action and
development. But the fact is that the costs and
consequences attending subordination to the federal will
are, and have always been, far higher. The choice is
really between extinction and resurgence. And viewed in
this way, there is simply no real choice at all.
*******
Taken from _Indian Self-Governance: Perspectives on the
Political Status of Indian Nations in the United States
of America
Ed. by Dr. Carol J. Minugh, Prof. Glen T. Morris, Rudolph C. Ryser
Center For World Indigenous
Studies, 1989.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
