INDIANS 101 UNDERSTANDING THE BASICS Source: of photos: National - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

INDIANS 101 UNDERSTANDING THE BASICS

Source: of photos: National Congress of American Indians (NCAI)

• Provide some historical and cultural context needed to

understand complex contemporary tribal issues

“Centuries of mistreatment, cultural suppression, disenfranchisement, and federal policies that, by the middle of the twentieth century, had left tribes dependent on a paternalistic federal government.” – Joseph P. Kalt

• Increase awareness of federal Indian policy

“Policies of self-determination are poorly understood by many Americans and federal and state policymakers.” – Joseph P. Kalt

• Increase awareness of bias and nonsensical stereotypes
• Make the connection between trust, sovereignty, and self-

determination

• Introduce SAIGE

THE PENDULUM OF FEDERAL INDIAN POLICY

• Peaceful relations when it suited the interests of Europeans
• Violence between Indians and settlers increased over time
• Disease, introduced by Europeans, decimated Indian population
• European population increased at a great rate
• Invading Indian territory and taking possession begins

1788-1828 TREATY MAKING

• Indian tribes were viewed as separate nations
• Negotiations were done by treaty
• Laws were passed to protect against the taking of Indian land
• Few of the laws were actively enforced
• Expansion into Indian land was encouraged
• More than 400 treaties

1492-1787 INDEPENDENCE

• Indian Removal Act of 1830 led to treaties that forced

most eastern Indian tribes to the west

• TRAIL OF TEARS
• Federal courts were authorized to prosecute Indians who

committed certain crimes on the reservation

• 1871 Congress passed law that stopped additional treaties

with Indian tribes

• By 1887, 200 boarding schools were established with

14,000 Indian forcibly enrolled

• Indian tribes no longer seen as independent nations

1828-1887 RELOCATION

1887-1934 ASSIMILATION/ ALLOTMENT

• Extinguish tribal sovereignty
• Assimilation into white society
• Kill the Indian, Save the Man
• Allotment of tribal lands
• Surplus lands sold to non-Indians
• Tribal culture disrupted, communal life destroyed
• 1924- Indians become US citizens

The Thick Dark Fog

• Allotment acts severed reservations and tribal communal lands into smaller parcels and

allotted to individual Indians.

• Indian lands were reduced from 138 million acres to about 48 million acres.
• Assumption that amassing and protecting private property is valued.

January 5, 1903: The day Lone Wolf was handed down was called

• ne of the darkest days in the history of the American Indian.
• In 1887, Congress passed the general Allotment Act (known as the

Dawes act).

• Authorized the President to divide land into allotments for individual

Indians and families.

• The allotment act was applied to reservations whenever, in the

presidents opinion, it was advantageous for particular Indian nations.

• Members of the selected tribe or reservation either selected pieces
• f land—usually 40 to 160 acres in size—or the tracts were assigned

by the agency superintendent.

Senator Henry Dawes

1887-1934 ASSIMILATION/ ALLOTMENT

Complex ownership patterns

Reservations Tribal jurisdictional boundaries Tribally owned lands (Trust/Non- Trust) Allotted lands (Trust/Non-Trust) Fee lands Restricted lands Fractionated ownership interests Checkerboard

• Not all land within a reservation may

belong to the tribe.

• Tribes may own land, including trust

land, outside the limits of a reservation.

• Tribes may have jurisdiction over land

now occupied by others (often referred to as jurisdictional boundaries).

DAWES ROLLS

• Indian Reorganization Act (IRA) of 1935- ends allotment and

encourages tribes to adopt constitutions, and engage in self- government.

• IRA has been criticized as paternalistic, ethnocentric, and

insufficient.

1934-1953 REORGANIZATION

It has been charged that the BIA in implementing the IRA went around the country imposing a “model constitution” based overwhelmingly on non-Indian structures and values and that the chief effect of the period of constitution-building following passage

• f this landmark statute was to suppress traditional governing structures, which were

much more attuned than the new ones to Native American culture and values.

• Elmer Rusco, A Fateful Time: The Background and Legislative History of the Indian Reorganization Act

Culture Matters.

Successful nations stand on the shoulders of legitimate, culturally grounded institutions of self-

• government. Indigenous societies are diverse; each

nation must equip itself with a governing structure, economic system, policies, and procedures that fit its own contemporary culture.

– Native Nations Institute & Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development

• IRA goals were abandoned
• Termination of the federal government’s

trust relationship with Indian tribes became the new policy with the goal

• f assimilation (again).
• Federal benefits and support services

were eliminated.

• Public Law 280 gave six states criminal

jurisdiction over Indian reservations.

• Many tribal governments were

disbanded and reservations abolished.

1953-1968 TERMINATION

BUNKY ECHO-HAWK

Relocation programs offered job training and housing assistance to Indians who would leave the reservation for urban areas.

1953-1968 TERMINATION

INDIAN COUNTRY DIARIES

1970- present SELF-DETERMINATION

• Federal policies generally aim at facilitating tribal self-

determination without termination.

• Indian Self Determination and Education Assistance Act-

described as both progress and frustration

• The Federal trust responsibility to tribes is often fulfilled

when Departments contract with tribal governments to provide Federal services.

• Tribal governments are more directly accountable to the

people they represent.

• Tribal governments can best meet the needs of Indian

people.

1970- present SELF-DETERMINATION

AMERICAN INDIANS NATIVE AMERICANS INDIGENOUS PEOPLES

AMERICAN INDIAN

A person having origins in any of the original peoples of North and South America and who maintains cultural identification through tribal affiliation or recognition.

• Without true information about American Indians in the 21st

century, there is a void that is filled with nonsensical stereotypes.

• Nonsensical & false stereotypes can be harmful.

BUNKY ECHO-HAWK

INDIAN TRIBES TRIBAL NATIONS

INDIAN TRIBES/ TRIBAL NATIONS

Wilma Mankiller, Former Principal Chief, Cherokee Nation

INDIAN TRIBE/ NATION

“Indian Nations had always been considered as distinct, independent political communities, retaining their original natural rights, as the undisputed possessors of the soil...the very term ‘nation’ so generally applied to them means ‘a people distinct from other.’”

—Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall, Worcester v. Georgia (1832)

• Tribes are domestic sovereign self-governing nations.
• Tribes have a nation-to-nation relationship with the U.S.
• State governments have very limited power over tribes.
• Tribal laws reflect tribal jurisprudence.

FEDERALLY RECOGNIZED: Tribes with a government-to-government relationship with the U.S. and are eligible to receive certain protections, services, and benefits (567 tribes).

INDIAN TRIBES/ TRIBAL NATIONS

Source: NCAI

INDIAN LANDS ARE NOT PUBLIC LANDS

Oversight Hearing on “The GAO Report on ‘INDIAN ENERGY DEVELOPMENT: Poor Management by BIA Has Hindered Development on Indian Lands.’”

SOVEREIGNTY

Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes; Bill Anoatubby, Governor, Chickasaw Nation; Wilma Mankiller, Former Principal Chief, Cherokee Nation; Sophie Pierre, Former Chief, Ktunaxa Nation

SOVEREIGNTY

• Political bodies with powers of self-government (Worcester v. Georgia)
• Indian tribes have all the powers of self-government of any

sovereign except insofar as those powers have been limited or repealed by federal law.

• Domestic dependent (Cherokee Nation v. Georgia)
• Only the federal government can regulate Indian affairs

(Worcester v. Georgia)

• Congress has plenary power over tribal nations (Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock)

“The plenary power doctrine was seemingly plucked out of thin air by the Supreme Court against the backdrop of federal guardianship of a dependent, supposedly inferior race of people…”

• Walter Echo-Hawk, In The Courts of The Conqueror: The 10 Worst Indian Law Cases Ever Decided

SOVEREIGNTY

Sovereignty Matters.

When Native nations make their own decisions about what development approaches to take, they consistently out-perform external decision makers on matters as diverse as governmental form, natural resource management, economic development, health care, and social service provision.

– Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development & Native Nations Institute

SOVEREIGNTY & STEREOTYPES

Perhaps most insidiously undermining of Native nations as distinct sovereigns within the federal system is the sense that the general U.S. public’s acceptance of tribes as warranting such standing depends upon the public’s perception that contemporary Native Americans are “still real Indians” – “real” in the sense of exhibiting iconic, mainstream media- and folklore-derived cultural practices. It is as if Texas’ status as a sovereign within the federalist U.S. system were at risk because Texans no longer drive longhorns and carry six-shooters as they ride into Fort Worth.

– Joseph P. Kalt

TRUST RESPONSIBILITY

The special relationship between Indians and the federal government is the result of solemn obligations that have been entered into by the United States government. The special relationship between the Indian tribes and the federal government that arises from these agreements continues to carry immense moral and legal force.

President Nixon, Special Message to the Congress on Indian Affairs, 1970

The federal trust responsibility is a fiduciary obligation on the part

• f the U.S. to federally recognized Indian tribes and tribal members.

The trust responsibility consists of the highest moral obligations that the U.S. must meet to ensure the protection of tribal and individual Indian lands, assets, resources, and treaty and similarly recognized rights.

TRUST RESPONSIBILITY

According to Interior’s Secretarial Order 3335, among the guiding principles of the trust relationship are supporting tribal sovereignty and the right of Indian tribes to make important decisions about their own best interests, protecting tribal resources, and practicing responsiveness and timeliness. In recent decades, tribes and individual Indians have asserted that Interior has failed to fulfill its trust responsibility. Interior recently settled more than 80 “breach of trust” lawsuits, including Cobell v. Salazar,

• ne of the largest class action suits filed

against the U.S.

TRUST RESPONSIBILITY

Historical notions of dependency and incompetency must be abandoned. Our dialogue should be focused on the forgotten trust responsibility of the United States – the responsibility to support the capacity of Tribes to take their place alongside the American system of governments. Paternalistic procedures, practices, and policies for management of the trust corpus that perpetuate paternalism, dependency, and bureaucracy while trying to shield the U.S. from financial liability for mismanagement have debilitating effects on the ability of Tribes to manage and develop their own lands and resources and greatly increased the costs of federal administration. Federal Bureaucracy and administration has left Indian Country dirt poor despite the abundance of natural resources that blesses many reservations.

Testimony of President Fawn Sharp, Quinault Indian Nation. Senate Committee on Indian Affairs Oversight Hearing, 2012.

SELF-DETERMINATION

The only federal Indian policy that has worked in centuries to support the social, cultural and economic well-being of Native people is the policy of self- determination that began to emerge in the 1970s.

– Joseph P. Kalt Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development

Bunky Echo-Hawk

SELF-DETERMINATION

We shouldn’t be surprised that a couple of centuries of attempts to set the priorities and manage the affairs of American Indian tribes as if tribes were branches of the federal government yielded the poorest identifiable communities and people in America. Native self-rule is now finally turning things in a much more positive direction.

• Joseph P. Kalt

SELF-DETERMINATION

• The tribal right of self-government flows from the inherent

sovereignty of Indian nations.

• Federal trust principles include promoting tribal control and

self-determination over tribal trust lands and resources.

• BIA is responsible for promoting tribal self-determination.
• BIA provides technical expertise to tribes and provides the

resources to aid in developing a self-sustaining economic base.

• Federal policy is to promote self-determination.
• United Nations Declaration of Rights for Indigenous Peoples
• Indian law canons of construction: Treaties and statutes are

to be interpreted liberally in favor of Indians.

Excerpt from Native Nations Institute short course

Culture Matters.

• After 15 years of research and work in Indian country, we

cannot find a single case of sustained economic development in which an entity other than the Indian nation is making the major decisions about development strategy, resource use, or internal organization.

• Successful tribal economic development involves the

federal government making the transition from decision maker to advisor, from controlling the process to providing information and technical assistance to tribes.

• Self-governance is important for economic development.

Absent a strong sense of ownership, it is unquestionably difficult to get a local community involved and interested in how tribal economic investments pay off.

EVIDENCE