The Wild Frontier (47 page)
Authors: William M. Osborn
There is a telling footnote to the Dawes Act. The Cherokee and the Choctaw would not allow the government to make allotments. Indeed, they filed suit in federal court. Congress then passed the Curtis Act in
1898
, which dissolved their tribal governments and all others in Oklahoma.
30
The Meriam Report of 1928
31
was sharply critical of the Indian policies of the government. The report found that most Indians were poor and many destitute. Their diet, housing, sanitation, and health were appalling. Disease was a problem. Indians were discontented, unhappy, and lacking in hope and initiative.
32
After that report, Congress enacted the Wheeler-Howard Act, the so-called Indian Reorganization Act, in
1934.
That act specifically rejected many of the provisions of the Dawes Act and the Curtis Act, which supplemented the Dawes Act. The Indian Reorganization Act did more than simply reverse provisions of the Dawes Act; it reversed Bureau of Indian Affairs regulations designed to force cultural assimilation. The act tried to relate reservation life to the economic life of the nation. It sought to develop Indian democracy and sought to use the tribal councils as training grounds for Indians to start managing their own communities.
33
In most sessions of Congress after the act was passed, bills to terminate
the reservations were introduced. Many thought that the reservations were overcrowded, a kind of concentration camp, and that the Indians should be set free. There were conflicts between the tribes and county governments, between the agency and the states.
34
A joint resolution of Congress in 1953 declared that Indians should be granted all the privileges of citizenship and their status as wards of the government ended. Several tribes were specifically mentioned. This was called the process of termination. The Indians strongly opposed the resolution,
35
but the government proceeded to terminate its relationship with 2 of the named tribes, the Menominees in Wisconsin and the Klamaths in Oregon, both of whom voted in favor of termination, which meant loss of control of their timber lands. The Menominees reversed the termination in 1973, but the Klamaths never did.
36
Termination acts passed between 1954 and 1962 resulted in the termination of 61 Indian tribes and related organizations.
37
The policy of termination continued to be discredited both by Indians who wanted to remain separate political entities and others who thought the Indians were not yet ready for complete independence.
In a special message to Congress in 1970, President Nixon stated, “This policy of forced termination is wrong.”
38
“Self-determination among the Indian people can and must be encouraged without the threat of eventual termination.”
39
The 1984 Commission on Reservation Economics report stated flatly that the policy had failed.
40
President Reagan addressed Indian affairs in 1983 and said, “The only effective way for Indian reservations to develop is through tribal governments which are responsive and accountable to their members.” Reagan recognized the lack of constancy in American Indian policy, but he also added, “Throughout our history, despite periods of conflict and shifting national policies in Indian affairs, the government-to-government relationship between the United States and Indian tribes has endured.”
41
T
HE UNITED
States’ shifting governmental Indian policies were made even worse by incompetent administration of those policies. An indignant congressman complained, “No branch of the national government is so spotted with fraud, so tainted with corruption, so utterly unworthy of a free and enlightened government, as this Indian Bureau.”
42
Under the 1786 act of the Continental Congress, the 2 superintendents of Indian affairs were to license all traders with the Indians and supervise them in their work. Esarey revealed the pitfalls of this system. “It was
the hope of Congress to attract good men into this work, but the majority of the early traders were refugee criminals, seeking a field where their criminal propensities might have freer range.”
43
When the settlers flooded the Ohio Valley, they compounded problems of the administration of Indian policy. During the 5 years between 1785 and 1790, 20,000 people immigrated into the Ohio Valley. Most of them were dissidents, dissatisfied with life in the East and with no strong ties to the government. There was talk for a time that the western settlers might form their own nation or join the British or the Spanish. Secretary Knox told Congress that the “whole western territory is liable to be wrested out of the hands of the Union by lawless [white] adventurers or by the savages.”
44
In response to the flood of new settlers, the “wild nations”—the Shawnee, the Miami, and others—killed between 1,500 and 2,000 settlers in the 1780s. The settlers asked for military help from the government, preferably a general Indian war. The government responded that settlers should stay out of Indian country for now. The settlers were unhappy with this restriction.
45
The Bureau of Indian Affairs, which was created in 1824, had deplorable administrators. According to Alan Axelrod,
The Bureau of Indian Affairs [the administrator of the reservations] was regarded more as a cache of political favors than as a committed policy-making body. Between 1834 and 1907, no fewer than 21 men served as commissioner of Indian Affairs. Almost to a man, they were political hacks for whom the job was a patronage reward—an opportunity for profits both legal and illegal. Between 1834 and 1890, according to one authoritative estimate, 85 percent of all Congressional appropriations for Indian subsistence, education, and land payments were diverted by the Bureau of Indian Affairs to defray padded administrative costs, overpriced supplies, as well as unvarnished graft and fraud.
46
One commissioner was ousted from office for giving a bribe. Another resigned after a House committee rebuked him for incompetence.
47
Indian fighter Kit Carson was appointed Indian agent for the Ute in 1853. He was said by Axelrod to have served “with honesty, intelligence, and compassion—qualities very rare in the generally corrupt and inept Indian agency system.”
48
Henry Benjamin Whipple, an Episcopal bishop, argued that corruption and mismanagement of federal Indian policy inevitably led to armed conflict.
49
After the Santee Sioux Uprising in Minnesota in 1862,
Whipple made a report about the causes of the uprising and reforms in the Indian Department necessary to correct them. He complained to President Lincoln that Indian agents were selected “without any reference to their fitness for the place” but largely as a reward for political party work. They appointed their subordinates on the same basis.
They are often men without any fitness, sometimes a disgrace to a Christian nation; whiskey sellers, barroom loungers, debauchees, selected to guide a heathen people. Then follows all the evils of bad example, of inefficiency, and of dishonesty. The school a sham; the supplies wasted; the improvement fund squandered by negligence, or curtailed by fraudulent contracts. The Indian bewildered, conscious of wrong, but helpless, has no refuge but to sink into depths of brutishness never known to his fathers.
50
Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton was incensed by Whipple’s blanket indictment and in 1864 asked General Henry Halleck,
What does Bishop Whipple want? If he has come here to tell us of the corruption of our Indian system, and the dishonesty of Indian agents, tell him that we know it. But the Government never reforms an evil until the people demand it. Tell him that when he reaches the hearts of the American people, the Indians will be saved.
51
Lincoln took a different view. He was shaken by Whipple’s report. “If we get through this war,” he said, “and I live, this Indian system shall be reformed.”
52
Whipple proposed a complete reform of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, elimination of the appointment of agents through political patronage, and establishment of a cabinet post exclusively for the management of Indian policy. He was a respected voice on Indian issues through many administrations.
53
In 1867, Grant’s Peace Commission came down heavily on the bureau:
The records are abundant to show that agents have pocketed the funds appropriated by the government and driven the Indians to starvation. It cannot be doubted that Indian wars have originated from this cause.
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Two years later, the
Times
charged that “the management of the Indian Bureau has brought about the present [Cheyenne] uprising, and that Bureau clearly is not fit to deal with them in the future.”
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Congressman
Lawrence in 1869 joined the chorus of criticism, complaining, “The whole Indian Bureau is rotten and a mere den of thieves.”
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Helen Hunt Jackson wrote in 1885 that “the Indian Bureau represents a system which is a blunder and a crime.”
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The government representatives who were to administer the Dawes Act, Edward Lazarus said,
continued for the most part to be political appointees with little or no experience in Indian affairs. A state governor blithely admitted that for party workers fit for nothing else, he found jobs in the Indian service. One inspector found an “abandoned woman” in charge of one Indian school, a lunatic in charge of another.
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William T. Hagan added to the list of things gone wrong:
Contracting to supply an Indian reservation was a lucrative business. Collusion between contractor and agent provided “steel chopping knives made of cast iron; best brogans with paper soles; blankets made of shoddy and glue, which fell to pieces when wet … forty dozen elastics … when there was not a stocking in the tribe.” … Honest mistakes were as damaging. Sawmills were erected miles from any timber; bakeries were built which the Indians declined to patronize; agency farms were opened where drought was a chronic condition.
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The United States Senate itself made fundamental criticism of our Indian policy in Report No. 91-501, 91st Congress, 1st Session (1972):
A careful review of the historical literature reveals that the dominant policy of the Federal government toward the American Indian has been one of forced assimilation which has vacillated between the two extremes of coercion and persuasion. At the root of the assimilation policy has been a desire to divest the Indian of his land and resources.
More recently, Fergus M. Bordewich said that President Reagan’s Commission on Reservation Economics report in 1984 accused the Bureau of Indian Affairs of “excessive regulation and incompetent management, with the agency consuming more than two-thirds of its budget on itself, and recommends assigning the agency’s programs to other federal agencies.”
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The Bureau of Indian Affairs remains incompetent even today. In 1985, in what was called by Bordewich “one of the most stunningly shortsighted decisions for which it has become famous,” the bureau announced
that welfare recipients would no longer be permitted to attend school.
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Bureau financial affairs are equally bad. In a 1991 report, the Department of the Interior found Bureau of Indian Affairs accounting systems were “totally unreliable.” Two specific examples: The Bureau of Indian Affairs Muskogee Area office inventoried 3 chainsaws at a total of $297 million, a television set at $96 million, and 2 typewriters at $114 million. The Albuquerque Area office valued a computer disk drive at $3 million; its actual cost was $495. “The agency could not locate $23 million worth of property in 1991.”
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In 1993, federal inspectors reported that the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ financial system was in such disarray that they could not audit $3.2 billion of $4.4 billion in bureau assets. Until recently, the Bureau of Indian Affairs was 8 years behind in paying its local telephone bills. The $2.1 billion Indian trust fund was never audited until 5 years ago. That fund has not been able to reconcile its accounts for more than 100 years, a fact that Congress has characterized as a national disgrace. Although the Bureau of Indian Affairs budget for 1994 was about $1.8 billion, some bureau officials estimate that less than 20 percent of money received trickled down to the reservations. Accountants at Arthur Andersen & Company have been hired to try to sort out the books, but estimate it could cost $390 million just to reconcile accounts in the $2.1 billion Indian trust fund.
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There is current litigation involving bureau financial affairs. The bureau manages 300,000 individual Indian land accounts worth an estimated $500 million.
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It admits it cannot document $2 billion worth of transactions in tribal accounts over a 20-year period.
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In February 1999, the judge in a class-action suit filed against the government held 3 government officials in contempt of court for failing to turn over bureau records, holding they “must take blame for years of delays and ‘Outright false statements.’“
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He also said, “Justice has not been done to these Indian beneficiaries.”
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The same day, a joint statement from the Treasury and Interior Departments said, “We deeply regret the mistakes that we made in this case.”
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In May 1999, Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt charged that the bureau’s critics were “racially motivated.” He added that it was “a deep condescension to the fact that any institution which is primarily managed by Indians is incompetent of managing in the modern world.” The bureau’s workforce is 90 percent Indian. A Cherokee lawyer replied that “if criticizing the BIA is anti-Indian, then most Indians are anti-Indian.”
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