'Terminating' the Indians
ECKARDT, W. V.
'Terminating' the Indians Congress threatens to strip America's first inhabitants of their rights and wealth under the guise of emancipating them and making them 'first-class citizens' By W. V....
...This interest appears to make it extremely urgent to "withdraw" Federal services...
...Most of the roughly 11,000 remaining members of the Six Nations, who maintain a precarious foothold in upstate New York, earn their living in factories and steel mills in Syracuse and Rochester, but they still insist on their due, which they traditionally receive in calico...
...We all treasure the symbolic value of this...
...This, the bills say, is done to "emancipate" the Indians and at last give them equal rights as American citizens...
...No one can as yet make any prediction whether and when this legislation will pass in whole or in part...
...Indian Service officers who resigned in protest or were transferred to other, unfamiliar reservations (and there were many) were often replaced by ex-FBI men and former prison wardens...
...Terminating' the Indians Congress threatens to strip America's first inhabitants of their rights and wealth under the guise of emancipating them and making them 'first-class citizens' By W. V. Eckardt Alarmed by a series of Congressional bills which would take the Government out of the Indian business, a hundred or so tribal representatives from reservations all over the country met in Washington recently for an "emergency conference" of the National Congress of American Indians...
...Under one pretext or another, the Indian treaties and Indian rights have been whittled down ever since they were signed...
...McCarran's own 245-acre farm got a little less...
...But the real break for the Indians came during what they still gratefully remember as the Ickes era...
...in addition, the Government is pledged to provide basic health, educational and welfare services through the Bureau of Indian Affairs...
...The paternalistic zeal of these men frequently interfered with Indian self-rule and even, on occasion, with tribal elections...
...Only once, almost imperceptibly, did some of them stir with an incredulous movement of the head...
...Other legislative proposals which stirred the delegates out of their proverbial Indian stoicism are the Butler-Malone Bill (S...
...They are free to leave their 200 reservations scattered over some 26 states...
...This year, Senator Watkins told the tribal council in effect: "No agreement to a withdrawal amendment, no money...
...The Alaska bill (H.R...
...But one Indian, William Fire Thunder of the Ogalala Sioux in South Dakota, said that, of 88 resettled families of his tribe, 50 have come back after a while...
...Until the Indian Bureau turned over its affairs to the State of New York in 1949, the Indian Service superintendent would personally deliver the cloth on one of the reservations...
...It is the basis of their unique cooperative and non-competitive economy...
...1921...
...Only one tribal representative, the Menominee from Wisconsin, seemed somewhat reluctant to join the general opposition to the withdrawal bills...
...A few even derive a modest income, up to $350 per month, from royalties on uranium concessions...
...First they try to get us by administrative actions and then by legislation...
...All of them are aimed at breaking up the Indian communities, so that Indians, as the New Mexico Association on Indian Affairs put it, "cannot bid as tribal units for their old home lands in competition with the gas, oil and uranium interests, the great cattle companies and timber interests, which undoubtedly want possession of these rich tribal assets...
...These interests show their hand quite openly in the Indian bills concerning Alaska and Montana...
...They pay individual taxes like everyone else...
...Among these articles was "First Americans First...
...When the last treaty was signed in 1871, the Indians held 137 million acres of land...
...The Indians also count among their friends scattered liberal groups, some chapters of the General Federation of Women's Clubs, and a few stray Daughters of the American Revolution...
...This money usually goes into the tribal funds...
...But the latter apparently thought it less frustrating to help underprivileged people abroad and joined the Point Four program...
...Hard as it is for American Indians to dodge the cliches which tend to depict them as romantic or comic historical figures, it is even harder for them to arouse the public conscience...
...This additional right is morally theirs, one would think, as members of a defenseless religious and cultural minority...
...Some of the Navajos are working the mines on their vast reservations themselves...
...We treasure our treaty...
...So does the Osage in Oklahoma, quite an articulate fellow, who probably owns a few oil wells and is proud to belong to one of the richest populations in the world...
...The Indian Service was transformed from a biased police force to an effective social-welfare and service agency...
...These blessings were all too short...
...That was when Senator Watkins exclaimed: "We are not trying to take anything away...
...The Department of the Interior itself asked Senator Watkins, in a letter dated March 13, 1953, to please require its Indian Bureau to prepare for the termination of Federal responsibilities over the Indians...
...Few Indians received an opportunity to learn enough to improve their lot or to defend themselves...
...If a native wins a claim, he can be given money in compensation, even if he wants the land...
...More often than not, superintendents would side with hostile white settlers against them...
...There are attractive dam sites worth $30 million, the Burr Dam among them, on the Flathead reservation, which the Montana Power Company is interested in...
...Diego ABIT, an Islet, representing the Jicarilla Apache tribe in New Mexico as well as the All-Pueblo Council, was perhaps the most vociferous in denouncing the bill...
...How do we know the Secretary of the Interior is competent to declare us competent...
...We discovered a while ago that we had found oil, and that disturbed a lot of people...
...The fresh wind which blew over the reservations from Washington suddenly turned into a thick fog of bias and authoritarianism...
...1921) would settle "possessory land claims"??in favor of the white settlers...
...As things look now, Watkins and Butler might easily speed some of these bills through this session of Congress before anyone realizes what has happened...
...2515), the Heirship Bill (S...
...To shoot an Indian for some minor infraction of Indian Bureau rules or merely to keep the tribe in check was hardly a punishable offense...
...Now we have discovered we're sitting on a pile of uranium, and that is driving them crazy...
...Myer's close cooperation with Senators who have an interest in Indian affairs received considerable publicity a few years ago when Senator McCarran caused the resignation of E. Reeseman Fryer, superintendent of the Pyramid Lake Acute tribe in Nevada...
...Overall figures are not available...
...got through, the Indian death-rate was cut in half, Indian land holdings increased again, and the American Indian had changed from a ward of the Government to a respected member of an honored minority who was helped to help himself...
...Other citizens average 68 years...
...His tribe, it turned out, had tacitly agreed to Indian Bureau withdrawal??under duress...
...I am as free as anyone in the world," says Joseph Garry...
...it defies generalizations and simple solutions...
...Under one of these treaties, signed in 1794, the United States is required to pay $4,500 worth of "clothing, animals or implements of husbandry, yearly and forever" to the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy...
...They also, however, enjoy the right to live as Indians if they choose to stay with their tribes...
...Under the verbal crossfire of his examiners, it began to falter...
...Assisted by two professional cloth cutters, he would spread the calico ($4,500 buys anywhere from 7,000 to 12,000 yards) on the floor of the town hall and proceed to rip off a piece for each of the Indians who signed the tribal roll...
...The little ceremony got each Indian family a bed sheet or two and provided the Indian Bureau with an up-to-date membership list of the Six Nation tribes...
...One of his first official acts was to arbitrarily exercise the power to disapprove lawyers whom the Indian tribes had chosen to retain, if he felt that they were in his way...
...Indian Commissioners have tried in vain, as one Commissioner put it, to teach the Indians to say 'I' instead of 'we.' Their failure has been the Indians' success...
...Most prominent among them is Democratic Senator James E. Murray of Montana...
...331) and the Goldwater Bill...
...In order to get our lands," he cried, "they are going to declare us competent...
...It rarely did until very recently...
...Right now, the Indians have only a few friends on Capitol Hill...
...An Act of Congress, dated June 2, 1924, bestows full citizenship on every Indian born in the United States who did not previously enjoy it...
...This all works very neatly in favor of Libby, McNeil and Libby, a canning concern, which already has taken over the Indian-owned fishtrap sites in Hydaburg, Alaska while the Indian Bureau looked the other way...
...The real gimmick in this bill is the provision allowing any "competent" Indian to request that his land be sold for his benefit...
...He had earned a reputation as "efficient administrator" of, among other things, the odious Japanese detention camps on the West Coast during the war...
...The Indian visitors, all the while, stood completely motionless...
...The most sweeping of them is the so-called "competency bill," sponsored by Congressman Stewart of Montana...
...The New Leader, January 26...
...Nor has the Ketchikan Pulp Company concealed its interest in either Alaskan timber lands or H.R...
...others are trucking the stuff to mills in Utah and Colorado...
...We are trying to give them something...
...But the flood-gates for the legislative proposals which brought the irate Indians to Washington had already been opened...
...Since the Bureau closed out, the calico is shipped direct to one of the tribal councils...
...It is not easy to explain to ourselves," said the New York Times recently, "??much less so to outsiders??why our own native Indian has been so slighted in the midst of all our programs for aid to the rest of the world...
...But the Indians still line up to receive their shares when it arrives...
...Its excuse was that the tribe had not elected its Governor properly...
...Other reservations are rich in minerals which Anaconda Copper could use...
...Their claims, even though they might go back for centuries, would have weight only from the time they were staked or asserted...
...They'll get us one by one...
...4985, is to "free" the Indian ??without his consent...
...The non-native claim need only be "determined...
...Under the Hoover Administration, this sorry state of affairs began to improve at last...
...But, apparently, it is not yet sufficient to provide the Navajos with adequate health services...
...As they stood, uninvited, in the back of the chamber, the Senators and Congressmen fired questions at a testifying friend of the Indians...
...Dillon S. Myer appears to be one of those incredible Truman appointments...
...In Montana, where 4 per cent of the population lives on seven Indian reservations, the problem seems to be twofold...
...From this fund, Congress, by passing a law each year, releases the amounts needed for their expenses and tribal welfare...
...and A. L. Miller (R.-Neb...
...The accompanying stories made much of the missing war bonnet, hatchet or peace pipe, but paid scant attention to the plight of America's most downtrodden minority...
...One of the pending bills would abrogate the treaty and, without the consent of the Indians, pay them out once and for all in one lump sum...
...Congress wants to do away with this old-fashioned nonsense...
...Today, they hold 56 million acres...
...It would terminate the Indians themselves...
...We all want our calico, even if each of us only gets a handkerchief out of it," said Chief Elton Greene, President of the Confederated Tuscarora tribe, which has its reservation near Niagara Falls...
...A recent survey found that, due to tuberculosis, dysentery and other preventable diseases, the average life expectancy of a Navajo is 20 years...
...If they get one, they get all of us," seemed to be the theme of the meeting...
...Practically every one of the ten or more pending bills??and more are constantly being thrown into the hopper??are, in one way or another, concerned with securing some profitable piece of real estate for non-Indian interests...
...One of these was the late Felix S. Cohen, an eminent authority on Indian legislation, whose brilliant articles greatly enhanced the dossier on Dyer and his Bureau...
...Reservations were disease-ridden slums in the wilderness...
...All these treaties are valid for all time or, as the Indians like to say, "for as long as the wind shall blow...
...The fabulous Secretary of the Interior, with the help of devoted, energetic specialists like John Collier, moved in with all the zeal and ardor of the early New Deal to bolster the dignity and welfare of the American Indian...
...Chief Greene, like other Indian leaders, speaks from bitter experience...
...Organizations which advance the cause of the American Indian??like the National Congress of American Indians, Oliver leafage's group, and the Institute of Ethnic Affairs of former Indian Commissioner John Collier and the brilliant Martha Jay??lack the funds for effective publicity...
...Men like Senators Arthur V. Watkins (R.-Utah), Hugh Butler (R.-Neb...
...It finds jobs for the Indian and settles him and his family outside the reservation...
...The proposed legislation, said Joseph R. Garry, son of the chief of the Coeur D'Alene tribe in Idaho and President of the Indian Congress, "would quickly result in the end of our last holdings on this continent and destroy our dignity and distinction as the first inhabitants of this rich land...
...Elsewhere, the percentage of returnees, lonely for their own community and disillusioned about the world of the white man, is even greater...
...Myer's monkey wrench had two prongs: (1) Leave the Indians to their own devices as quickly as possible...
...The stated purpose of this bill, H.R...
...They are sacred to them??even those which today appear quaintly outdated...
...Fryer made the mistake of helping the much-harassed Paiutes enforce a Supreme Court decision against some white "squatters" on their reservation...
...Again, in April 1952, a Commissioner of Indian Affairs proposed that the Bureau agents carry arms and make arrests, searches and seizures without warrants for violation of Bureau regulations...
...This "perennial, drought-resistant spirit of generosity and cooperation," wrote Felix Cohen, "is the secret of their survival...
...The Seminole, too, whose tribe never signed a peace with us, may vote and be drafted, if the Indian Bureau ever catches up with him in the swamps of Florida...
...Under these treaties, Indian land is held in trust, tax free, by the Federal Government...
...The Menominees make their living logging timber...
...As late as 1951, the Montana Supreme Court upheld the full treaty rights of the Indians under tax-exempt Federal trust...
...For, by taking their land, you take away their way of life...
...If he owns the land jointly with other members of the tribe, as he usually does, he can still get the Secretary of the Interior to sell out the joint holdings for his share...
...Their culture, their religion, their self-respect depend on the tribal community...
...1953.??Ed.] Again, the Indian Bureau was apt to side against the Indians rather than help them...
...But their number is small...
...Right now, it is even more confounded by the fact that the sponsors of the current Indian legislation are neatly putting the American conscience at ease...
...Liberals like Hubert Humphrey, Paul Douglas and Herbert Lehman will lend a sympathetic ear when they can...
...With the change of administration, Myer was replaced as Commissioner by Glen L. Emmons...
...You should see the pride and joy on the faces of our people when they line up each year for their cloth...
...But all these bills claim merely to "withdraw" or "terminate" outdated or unnecessary Federal services and protection on the reservations...
...And that is true of all the other 450,000 remaining Indian citizens in this country...
...The native Indians and Eskimos need not be given notice on a hearing in a conflict...
...Between sessions of their conference, a number of the Indians took time out to attend the Joint Senate-House Indian Affairs Committee hearings on the bills they came to protest...
...President Truman, who heard about the case just before he took off for his Wake Island conference with General MacArthur, put in a phone call on behalf of Fryer...
...As part of its termination policy, the Indian Bureau has launched an extensive relocation program...
...Their lands were so badly mismanaged by the Government that they won a multi-million-dollar law suit...
...They're trying to hang us and then make it legal...
...Mont...
...One couldn't be sure they were even listening...
...Although he may not be able to read and write, the most miserable Hopi or Navajo, herding his sheep on the barren Arizona desert, has the same rights and obligations as any other citizen...
...The tribal representatives who gathered in Washington had heard about this bill...
...What is happening now is more than a "slighting" of our Indian minority...
...Only a generation ago, Indians still had cause to tremble and hide when their Indian Service officer approached...
...Thousands of discriminatory and humiliating restrictions were replaced by programs for the health, education, culture and economic rehabilitation of the Indian...
...If they abrogate our treaty, they'll abrogate others...
...Atkins got Congress to oblige with House Concurrent Resolution 108, on which most of the current bills are based...
...In 1950, a man whom the outspoken "curmudgeon" later described as "a blundering and dictatorial tin-Hitler [who] tossed a monkey wrench into a mechanism he was not capable of understanding" was appointed Commissioner of Indian Affairs...
...It provides that any Indian who is given a "degree of competency"??and all Indians are born into competency once the bill is passed??shall be relieved of his tribal obligations, as well as the right to use tribal facilities, such as Indian schools and hospitals...
...It is also legally guaranteed by solemn treaties, agreements and statutes??more than seven heavy volumes of them??which were signed by the United States and the once sovereign and equal tribal governments...
...who are leading the current legislative offensive against the Indians, are doing so in the name of "freeing" them...
...Uranium has brought some slight prosperity to the Indians of New Mexico and Arizona...
...They convened to organize their defense against what some of them call "the worst Indian betrayal in a hundred years...
...and Congressmen Wesley A. D'Ewart (R...
...New legislation, to be sure, is needed...
...That old maverick, William Anger, will put up a good fight...
...He saw to it that the Paiutes got a fair share of their own water resources...
...There must be new action and a bold domestic Point Four program which looks toward the eventual self-sufficiency of the tribes...
...Unfortunately, the Indian "braves," as the newspapers called them, had little success in attracting public attention to their cause...
...2) please Congress at all costs...
...Before Ickes, Collier & Co...
...But the Indians, factory workers or not, are unanimously opposed to any tampering with their treaty...
...Schools and hospitals sprang up on reservations throughout the country...
...The Indian Congress encouraged the Nominees to resist...
...But they were amazed that it had gone as far as the House consent calendar...
...The "Indian problem" is complex...
...Again, as in the case of the San Ildeforo Pueblo in New Mexico, the Indian Bureau seized and sold valuable Indian land...
...But the present termination bills, the majority of Indians agree, would not merely abruptly end needed Government services to the Indians...
...The Bureau had testified in favor of the bill...
...the ailing Pat McCarran (D.-Nev...
...The local newspapers, of course, duly printed the pictures of some of them...
...At first, the voice of the friendly witness rang clear and brave...
...They discovered that most hearings on it were held in executive session, despite the fact that more than 60 tribes, representing some 200,000 Indians, had officially protested...
...He can do this even if the land is held by, say, 36 members of his family, and 35 of them, like Hoover's Vice President Curtis, prefer to remain "incompetent" and keep their land in trust...
Vol. 37 • April 1954 • No. 17
