The Inconvenient Indian (16 page)

To be fair, some of the big boys did not wait for the government to step in with its bag of taxpayer money. During the financial meltdown in the United States, Goldman Sachs busied itself
bundling mortgage stocks that the company knew were worthless and selling them off to unsuspecting investors. Lead plated to look like gold. And then the company helped itself to some $12.9 billion of public bailout money and promptly paid its executives large bonuses for their good work and business acumen.

Perhaps this is the kind of economic sophistication that North America wants Native people to learn.

But we’ve gotten ahead of ourselves. We need to find our way back to the nineteenth century. And, as luck would have it, we can get there from here.

AND HERE WE ARE: 1887
.

In Canada, there was a federal election that year, and the Conservatives under John A. Macdonald retained power. Some of Macdonald’s support surely came from his decision, two years earlier, to hang the Métis leader Louis Riel, though he probably lost votes in Quebec for this unnecessary act of hubris. The numbered treaties were underway, but none was signed that year. In British Columbia, delegates from the Commission of Enquiry into the Conditions of the Indians of the Northwest Coast were sent to meet with the Tsimshian and Nisga with instructions to assert Crown ownership of the land and to dismiss any claims of
Indian title. The one bright spot was the birth of the Onondaga long-distance runner Tom Longboat.

In the States, fifteen-inch snowflakes fell on Fort Keogh in Montana. In Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, the first-ever Groundhog Day was observed. In May of that year, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show opened in London as part of Queen Victoria’s Jubilee. Sitting Bull was not with the show, though he had been the year before. Black Elk, the Lakota medicine man who would later share his vision with the poet John Neihardt, did make the Queen’s party. But when the show wrapped up in Manchester, Black Elk missed the boat home and wound up stranded in Europe for two years, working for Mexican Joe’s Wild West Show.

That year, 1887, was also the year in which the U.S. Congress passed the General Allotment Act.

By 1887, Native people in North America had already spent the last 280 years laid up with European colonialism, a condition much like malaria. Malaria, in case you’ve forgotten, is an infectious disease that sickens and kills millions of people every year. The disease causes fever, headaches, retinal damage, shakes, vomiting, anemia, and convulsions. Children who contract malaria can suffer severe brain damage. The disease is incurable. There is a vaccine that works on mice, which is great if you’re a mouse. My brother Christopher got malaria when he was in Vietnam, and he can tell you all about it.

It’s a remarkable disease. Like colonialism, it can lie dormant for years. And it can flare up at any moment.

In 1887, it flared up again.

The General Allotment Act, also known as the Dawes Act, would be Washington’s new and improved effort at assimilating
Indians. Removal and relocation hadn’t been as successful as had been hoped. Nascent residential schools might prove to be the answer to the “Indian Problem,” but educating and assimilating children would take one or two generations, and delayed gratification is not a North American trait.

When I imagine this historical moment, I can see politicians, reformers, and the general public standing at the borders of reservations across America with their placards and signs, holding hands, and chanting:

“What do we want?”

“Assimilation.”

“When do we want it?”

“Now.”

Since the arrival of Europeans, private ownership of land has been one of the cornerstones of non-Native society and economy. Land, to the European mind, gave an individual station within society and was a certain source of wealth. Land could be bought, sold, and traded with more assurance than currency.

Indians, through inclination and treaty, held land in common, and when people of goodwill gathered together in Washington and at places such as the Lake Mohonk resort in southern New York to plan the future of Native people, they decided that land was too important to be left in the hands of a community that had no real sense of its value.

“While the Dawes Bill will change the Indian’s legal and political status, it will not change his character. The child must become a man, the Indian must become an American; the pagan must be new created a Christian. His irrational and superstitious dread of imaginary gods must be transformed into a love for the All-Father;
his natural and traditional hatred of the pale-face into a faith in Christian brotherhood; his unreasoning adherence to the dead past into an inspiring hope in a great and glad future.” This was the conclusion that the Friends of the Indian came to when they met for their annual meeting at Lake Mohonk in October of 1886.

All these imperatives, all these insistences, and not one voice in the room took a moment to ask, “Why?” “Why?” was not a question anyone asked of assimilation. The only proper question was, “How?”

And, in 1887, the answer was allotment. Reservations, which had seemed a good idea earlier, were now decried as an affront to Christianity and capitalism. Indian agents and church officials complained that so long as Indians were allowed to live on reservations, they would retain their pagan customs and cultures. So long as Indians were allowed to hold land in common, they would lose the advantages that free enterprise offered.

The General Allotment Act directed the government to break reservations into individual pieces. As a general rule, each head of household received an allotment of 160 acres. Single Indians over the age of eighteen and orphans under the age of eighteen got 80 acres, while minors under the age of eighteen got 40 acres. The federal government would hold each allotment in trust for a period of twenty-five years, during which time the allotments could not be sold and were tax-free. Each allottee lost their treaty status but was given U.S. citizenship.

Rather similar to a “kiddie-deal” at a fast food outlet. Order the burger, fries, and a drink, and the citizenship is free. Whether you want it or not.

At the end of the twenty-five-year trust period, each allottee would own their own allotment free and clear, and Indians, who
had been communal members of a tribe, would now be individual, private land owners. Reservations would disappear. Indians would disappear. The “Indian Problem” would disappear. Private ownership of land would free Indians from the tyranny of the tribe and traditional Native culture, and civilize the savage.

What’s not to like?

Instead, what allotment did was liquidate all of the reservations in Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma), along with the land base of many of the tribes in Kansas, Nebraska, North and South Dakota, Wyoming, Montana, New Mexico, Oregon, and Washington, and give the surplus land to White settlers and business interests.

You might wonder where this “surplus land” came from. Okay, let’s create a hypothetical example, and we’ll work with nice round numbers to keep the math simple. Say you’re an Indian. Your tribe has a population of a thousand other Indians, and the community holds three hundred thousand acres of land in common. Allotment comes along, and the tribe’s land is divided up. You would expect that the government would divide one thousand into three hundred thousand and come up with three hundred acres per Indian.

But that’s not what happened. Three hundred acres, the government decided, was too much land for an Indian. One hundred and sixty acres was more than enough. One hundred and sixty acres was plenty. And, after you allowed multiplication and subtraction to work their magic, the tribe wound up holding onto just one hundred and sixty thousand acres of their original three hundred thousand acres, while the government miraculously came away from the exercise with one hundred and forty thousand acres of “surplus” land.

The actual size of each allotment varied with tribes and the land they held, but in almost each instance, Indian land went in one end of allotment and surplus land came out the other. Native people, who had held title to some 138 million acres in 1887, saw that figure reduced to around 48 million acres, much of it desert.

Then, in 1934, allotment, as U.S. government policy, was repealed, and colonialism went into a brief remission.

In Canada in 1934 the Dionne Quintuplets were born, marking the period, but aside from that, and the births of Jean Chrétien, Peter Gzowski, Leonard Cohen, and novelist Rudy Wiebe, it wasn’t a particularly exciting year. In the United States, Donald Duck appeared for the first time in a cartoon called “The Wise Little Hen.” John Dillinger, Bonnie Parker, and Clyde Barrow were killed in shootouts with FBI agents, and Alcatraz became an official Federal Bureau of Prisons prison.

And in Washington, the Indian Reorganization Act was passed.

When Franklin D. Roosevelt became president in 1933, his administration quickly put together a series of programs that were to lift America and Americans out of the depths of the Great Depression. At the same time, he appointed John Collier to the post of Commissioner for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Collier was a rare politician, a social crusader who rejected the forced assimilation of Indians and argued instead for a form of cultural pluralism whereby Indians could speak their languages and practise their religions without government interference. More importantly, Collier understood that if tribes were to maintain their traditions, they would have to maintain their land base.

It was under Collier’s leadership, with Roosevelt’s blessing, that the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act (IRA), or the Wheeler-Howard
Act, became national policy. In many ways, the legislation was a departure from previous programs and represented a positive shift in government thinking. Most importantly, it ended allotment as official policy and slowed the erosion and theft of Indian land by extending trust protection indefinitely. It allowed that surplus lands created by the allotment process might be returned to tribes. The IRA even created a fund, not to exceed two million dollars a year, to buy back lands that had been lost.

The act looked good on paper, and it
was
a reprieve from the programs that came before it. And to give Collier his due, his administration was more actively committed to the protection of Indian rights and lands than any before or after him.

As Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Collier could influence policy and he could advocate for Native people, but he could not control what the government actually did. While the Indian Reorganization Act “allowed” that Native people might control their own destinies, the reality was that all of the major decisions were still left firmly in the hands of the government.

I have a soft spot in my heart for John Collier, but for all his determination and reasonable ideas, he was not destined to prevail. While Collier was able to slow the destruction, he was up against a political cabal that was not about to let one man change the “proper” course of government Indian policy.

The Indian Reorganization Act was officially in effect for about nineteen years. But that’s misleading. With the beginning of the Second World War in 1939, Indians, in both the United States and Canada, vanished from their respective governments’ agendas. Canada declared war on Germany in 1939. America officially came on board in 1941. By the time the conflict ended
in 1945, the small “generosities” that had been allowed in the Indian Reorganization Act were clawed back, and colonialism, which had been dormant, came back with a fierce virulence.

It came back in the guise of another new and improved government program.

This mid-century version of colonialism was called “termination,” and it became official U.S. government policy in 1953 with the passage of House Concurrent Resolution 108. HCR 108 declared the intent of the United States to abrogate all treaties that it had made with Native people and abolish federal supervision over tribes. The resolution called for the immediate termination of the Flathead, the Klamath, the Menominee, the Potawatomi, and the Turtle Mountain Chippewa, along with all the tribes in Texas, New York, Florida, and California. Passed at the same time, Public Law 280 allowed a number of states to assume control of Indian reservations.

And that was that. No treaties. No reservations. No Indians. Problem solved. Again.

For the next thirteen years, termination worked its way through America like a plague. Before the policy was officially ended in 1966, 109 tribes had been terminated and another million acres of Indian land was lost.

Canada tried its hand at termination three years after the United States gave it up. In 1969, Pierre Trudeau and then Minister of Indian Affairs Jean Chrétien released the 1969 White Paper, which, had it become law, would have been a first step in abrogating treaties, eliminating Indian status, and effectively breaking up the land base of every Native tribe in the country.

I know what Ottawa’s political managers were thinking. They were thinking the same thing their American cousins had thought.
The Indian business was complex and difficult. Indians and treaty rights were irrelevant in a modern world. Treaties were an instrument between sovereign nations, and Ottawa decided it was now unwilling to deal with such sovereign nations, even though treaties were the way in which Canada and Native people had always conducted their business.

So, in terms of government action, government policy, and Indians, one could argue that the twentieth century was just like the nineteenth, was just like the eighteenth. Business as usual. But there was something else afoot. After five hundred years of being legislated, policied, and programmed out of existence, Native people began to say, rather loudly, “Enough.” Sure, we were worn out by the centuries of exploitation, neglect, mistreatment, and oppression, but by the 1960s, we were also angry as hell.