Now and Then: Native Peoples in the United States
Harjo, Suzan Shown
As this century draws to a close, Native Peoples are better off than at the start of the 1900s. However, in some respects little has changed. In these ninety-six years, the number of...
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...Supreme Court ruled in 1989 that neither the American Indian Religious Freedom Act nor the First Amendment of the Constitution provided a cause of action for protection of Indian sacred lands, noting that Congress could enact a statutory cause of action to fill the void...
...Our circulation has grown with each issue for the last several years...
...In other words, the act was a good statement of intent and federal entities should comply with it, but Native Peoples could not use it to sustain a lawsuit to protect any holy place...
...Good public policy is rarely developed for cartoons...
...The president signed the money bill into law, along with the waiver of all environmental and cultural reviews required by statutory law and by a recent court ruling on an Apache worship and burial site...
...And tell your friends about this major financial/technological innovation at DISSENT...
...This view is helped along by Hollywood, with even recent movies, such as Dances with Wolves and Geronimo, declaring Indians dead, nation by nation...
...Modern black-gold mythology has it that Indians are rolling in gambling dough...
...Apaches now contemplate the familiar problem of where to turn when the law of the land is twisted into legal fiction...
...Much of the rest of the story is less than positive...
...Because of the success of the very few, several legislators want to cut federal Indian funding for health, education, and other programs that are sorely needed and that were the price the United States promised to pay in perpetuity in order to gain vast territory over which to govern...
...58 • DISSENT Native Peoples Beginning in the 1950s, hate groups began to take aim at Indians...
...These are significant advances.Along with the recently established National Museum of the American Indian, which will grace the National Mall near the Capitol at the start of the next century, they represent genuine progress and give Native Peoples reason for optimism...
...population today...
...This left the Native Americans as the only people in the United States who cannot use the First Amendment's freedom of religion clauses to protect places of worship from desecration and destruction...
...But fewer than a hundred of the five hundred-plus Native nations have gambling enterprises at all...
...Infant mortality has dropped to the second highest rate, and smallpox has been eradicated worldwide...
...It is little wonder that some policy makers have difficulty crafting laws to address the pressing needs in Indian country...
...Native Peoples were denied access to sacred lands, many of which have been desecrated and destroyed by federal, state, and private actions that continue today, and religious materials were confiscated by the U.S...
...He reportedly responded to a tribal leader's inquiry about the order with, "I thought I signed that already...
...This is an accurate profile of Native Peoples today, with two exceptions...
...Only a handful are making the kind of profits that make headlines, while the rest are around the breakeven level...
...Native families now have more control over the health, well-being, and education of our children, and tribal governments now have a greater say in the administration of certain federal programs designed to benefit American Indians and Alaska Natives...
...In an odd exchange during a fundraising breakfast in February, Clinton revealed that he was in the dark, too...
...Other hate groups have formed for the sole purpose of wiping out federal Indian treaties and all "special Indian rights...
...In a case that pitted a Forest Service logging road against a California Indian sacred site, the U.S...
...In order to gain passage of the act— and to overcome opposition from federal landmanaging agencies, states, and developers—its sponsor had to state on the floor of the House of Representatives that the legislation had "no teeth...
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...Because the U.S...
...Black Sambo" and the "Frito Bandito" are no longer visible, but Native Peoples are still used to sell products of all kinds...
...President...
...In the first half of this century, there was a popular misconception that all Indians were oil-rich, because black gold was found on some Indian lands...
...Today's cultural and environmental laws also offer some protection against the excesses of Western civilization and have improved Native American lives and lands...
...socioeconomic indicators, with the lowest levels of life expectancy, per capita income, employment, and education...
...We welcome these new readers, but each copy they buy costs us money, and money is hard to come by for a left magazine...
...More than a few proponents of this school of thought now serve in Congress...
...KKKrelated groups, such as the Aryan Nation, have taken up residence within the boundaries of Indian reservations and are attempting to undermine Indian rights from within, insisting, for example, that they should vote in tribal elections and participate in tribal governing, as if they were citizens of the Native nations whose prerogatives they oppose...
...Army and federal Indian agents and otherwise stolen for church coffers, museums, educational and scientific institutions, and other "collectors...
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...When the perception of Indian wealth is added to this mix of ignorant views, the result is often an epidemic of envy and greed...
...in the controversy during the 1970s and 1980s surrounding tribal claims to land in Maine, Rhode Island, and other eastern states, which had acquired property in violation of the first federal Indian law, enacted in 1790, prohibiting the taking of Indian property by non-Indians without federal approval...
...and in water rights cases, which have continued throughout the century...
...Post Office, in good social democratic fashion, is the cheapest distributor of magazines, we make money on subscriptions...
...In these ninety-six years, the number of Native Americans has grown from a near-extinction level of a quarter million to nearly two million, still less than 1 percent of the total U.S...
...They also face a potentially nightmarish problem of how, when, and where to conduct their religious ceremonies and to rebury their returning relatives...
...In 1978, Congress articulated a broad policy, the American Indian Religious Freedom act, which acknowledged past error and promised to protect and preserve the traditional religions of American Indians, Alaska Natives, and Native Hawaiians...
...with the poorest health and housing conditions...
...A proposed Executive Order for Native American Religious Freedom and Sacred Lands Protection was negotiated with the Interior and Justice Departments early in 1995...
...The Ku Klux Klan was removed forcibly from Robeson County, North Carolina, by the Lumbee Indians in 1958...
...Since then, President Clinton has said that the order will be signed soon, which has Indians wondering not only when it will be signed, but what has taken so long and what exactly "it" is...
...Sports mascots like "Chief Wahoo" and team names like the "Redskins" (the most derogatory word in the English language for Native Peoples) are not uncommon...
...A concerted effort was undertaken in 1994 to achieve administrative action that could protect some of the endangered sites...
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...and with the highest rates of alcoholism, suicide, infant mortality, plague, tuberculosis, diabetes, cervical cancer, and smallpox...
...There remains a widespread perception that Native Americans, for the most part, ceased to exist at the end of the last century...
...Many Indian people who could not read or write were cheated out of their property and money by bankers, lawyers, federal agents, and others they depended upon to help in their transition from poverty to wealth...
...Now, as then, Native Peoples do not own what we should and do not control what we own, and our treaty and sovereignty rights, resources, and religious liberty are under persistent attack...
...From 1934 to 1936, the regulations that forbade such "civilization offenses" as traditional dancing, praying at sacred sites, "practicing the arts of a conjurer," perpetuating tribal languages, and teaching Indian children "heathenish ways" were replaced by directives and a law respecting American Indian religious and cultural rights...
...The exercise of tribal rights, particularly to tangible resources, often evokes a backlash from states, local governments, and those non-Native businesses and individuals who are the nearest competitors for Native resources, with rhetoric as intense as the epithets that accompanied the Indian wars of the 1800s...
...Those laws set in motion the return of human remains, sacred objects, and cultural property from museums and other institutions...
...In the eleventh-hour negotiations on the massive federal funding bill in May of this year, the White House caved in on only one of the many environmental riders it had vowed to veto: the one of paramount importance to Native Peoples...
...This was evident in the treaty fishing rights struggles during the 1960s and 1970s in the Pacific Northwest and during the 1980s in the Great Lakes region...
...The largest increase has been in bookstore and newsstand sales...
...On the positive side, Native Americans now have the right to be buried and stay buried, as a result of repatriation and graves protection laws of 1989 and 1990, which changed longstanding federal policies that considered dead Indians the archaeological property of the United States...
...Although these matters were resolved through orderly processes—the Indian treaty fishing rights were upheld in court and the water and land claims were resolved primarily through congressional settlements—cars can still be seen in many states sporting bumper stickers with such slogans as "Spare a Salmon / Spear an Indian" and "Save a Deer / Shoot a Pregnant Indian...
...A White House staffer is said to have corrected his boss with, "Not quite yet, Mr...
...Beginning in the early 1970s, as the United States continued to permit actions that destroyed sacred sites and impeded religious practices, it also took steps to return specific sacred sites and to remove some barriers to religious practices...
...According to White House staffers, the agencies talked among themselves for most of 1995, finally transmitting their own version to the White House at the end of the year...
...At the beginning of the century, Native Peoples ranked at the bottom of all U.S...
...An example of federal Indian policy making at its worst can be found in the area of Native Peoples' religious freedom...
...Many scholars hold the view that being written out of history, being written about wrongly and being dehumanized in popular culture contributes to the low self-esteem among Native youth and to the overwhelmingly high rate of Indian teenage suicide, which is four times the national average...
...As negotiated, the order would direct the federal agencies to develop Sacred Lands Protection Agreements with tribal and traditional religious leaders to prevent damage to specific sites...
...Non-Indians murdered scores of Indians, mainly Native women in Oklahoma, for their land and mineral rights...
...While Native people were portrayed in early films as the "noble Savage" or the "savage Savage," the most popular of the 1995 crop emphasized for children the nonthreatening "good Indian" stereotype in Indian in the Cupboard—about an inch-high Indian toy man—and Pocahontas...
...Efforts since the ruling have failed to produce new laws for the protection of Native Peoples' traditional churches...
...These new mandates halted the across-the-board violations of religious and cultural liberties, but SUMMER • 1996 • 59 Native Peoples did not prevent continued encroachments on religious freedom or damage to places of worship...
...Indian religious ceremonies and practices were outlawed by regulations of the Secretary of the Interior in 1880, 1884, 1894, and 1904, and through circulars that were issued until the mid-1930s...
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...Racial and ethnic stereotyping and namecalling are not considered suitable in polite society today...
Vol. 43 • July 1996 • No. 3
