The Indians and the Law

...In the Northeast, tribes such as the Passamaquoddy and Penebscot of Maine are claiming rights to millions of acres long held and cultivated by non-Indians...

...The county lost, but in arguing as they did its lawyers underscored the palimpsest-like complexity of what is referred to as Indian law...

...She went on to explain that while Indians "get all the goodies from the government," they don't have to pay taxes...

...In the West, the tribes have discovered a bonanza of coal and oil beneath reservation soil—soil the whites of an earlier generation had considered useless and therefore suitable for Indians...

...The present Commission seems considerably more open than any of its predecessors...

...It has solicited the help of Indian leaders (but not, alas, those who head the militant American Indian Movement), and it has even attempted to reach the rank-and-file through a series of forums, journeying from reservation to reservation in a kind of traveling roadshow...

...they are wary of coal-mining executives who come bearing leases...

...Thus the pendulum swings, from sovereignty to termination, from government philanthropy to tribal autonomy...

...It will cover the entire range of Indian affairs, from sovereignty and land tenure to education and nutrition...

...Their object is to regain control of about 50 million acres of land now held "in trust" by the Federal government...

...Having survived to tell the tale?an astonishing ethnic miracle in itself—the tribes are now groping for ways to increase and prosper...

...their dream is to achieve tribal sovereignty, a status they define roughly as that of "nations within a nation...

...it set ground rules for the Indian Reorganization Act, passed six years later...

...Meeds' co-chairman...

...It is a measure of the Indians' recent legal successes that their white neighbors in the West have felt called upon to organize against them in groups with "newspeak" titles, such as Montanans Opposed to Discrimination...

...On the matter of goodies, a new Congressional study indicates that counties adjoining Indian reservations invariably receive larger Federal subsidies than the reservations...

...And here, within a legalistic maze that surpasses most people's understanding, the Indians have been making remarkable progress...

...Their labors are paying off handsomely...

...Observers tend to agree that his work on the Commission turned many whites against him...

...The last such wide-ranging study undertaken by Congress led to the Merriam Report of 1928...

...They have discovered a partial avenue through the courts, and they are making the most of it...

...Many of the documents have been negotiated on their behalf by the BIA—a part of the Department of Interior, that tireless servant of the coal and oil industries...

...There are those 106 obdurate tribes and those 175 indefatigable lawyers...

...Senator Abourezk, who has endured a similar backlash in South Dakota, two months ago announced he would not seek reelection in 1978...

...If many whites find this dream farfetched and even threatening, most Indians find it natural, practical and more within reach than at any time since the American Revolution...

...Interstate claims to be a registered national lobby, though I could find no listing for it in the Washington telephone directory...

...But demographics are not the whole story...

...These conflicting approaches seem once again to be headed for a collision, an event that is repeated every three or four decades...

...The 1934 measure had itself been a belated response to the infamous 1878 Dawes Act, legislation that demoted tribes from "nations within a nanon" to Federal wards and parceled out their land to individual Indian families (many of whom were soon cheated out of it by white neighbors...

...has already distributed a draft report to more than 1,100 tribes and organizations —white groups as well as red ones —and is scheduled to submit a final version to the Congress by May 17...

...The Commission, co-chaired by Senator James Abourezk (D.-S.D...

...Politically outgunned in the West, frequently ignored or romanticized in the East, thev suffer from a chronic shortage of allies on the Hill and in the White House...

...That is a common complaint, but it doesn't stand up...

...We just want equality for white people, too...

...This "termination" policy was essentially a reaction to the New Deal's Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, an attempt to strengthen tribal government and block further erosion of tribal land holdings...

...A recent Congressional report says Indians are poorer today, compared with other Americans, than they were in 1965 when the great "war on poverty" was officially declared...

...For obvious reasons—land control, tax revenues and the like —the white majority would prefer to deal with weak tribes and to assign ultimate jurisdiction over Indian life to the state legislatures, those provincial bastions of white racism...

...These have withstood both the passing of the years and the politics of white as-similationists—the boarding schools that separated children from their clans and forbade them to speak their native tongues, the missionaries who replaced an Indian pantheism with Christ, the relocation programs that lured them off the reservation and into city slums, and through it all the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), that enervating father-figure of a Federal agency that thrives on Indian weakness and dependency...

...There are still 106 tribes of varying size and cohesiveness—each with its own government, language, religion, and history—currently living in the United States...

...We need not despair, however...

...Who save their enemies could fail to applaud or wish them well...

...and Representative Lloyd Meeds (D.-Wash...

...The rhetoric of these people is all backlash, circa 1966...

...Indeed, half the state, they have told the courts, legally belongs to them, and so far the courts hearing their cases have agreed...

...Some experts estimate that over half our untapped energy supply lies under Indian ground...

...As a result, the Commission's report will undoubtedly reflect Indian aspirations to self-government and tribal development—precisely the reforms that many white people, especially those in the rural West, do not want...

...They have read our law and made it theirs...

...Moreover, the average Indian can expect to die at age 47, or 24 years earlier than his white compatriot...

...AU of these issues, plus many others, have been subjects of intense debate among Indians these past two years, thanks chiefly to the American Indian Policy Review Commission, a creation of the Congress...

...The law is eminently clear on this point, yet the county argued that the judges should make an exception since Minnesota was a "280 state"—that is, one of a half-dozen states given special jurisdiction over reservation Indians by the United States Congress some 20 years ago...

...We have nothing against Indians," an Interstate spokesperson assured me when I telephoned her...

...Title 280 was passed by an Eisenhower-intoxicated Congress eager to break up the reservations and assimilate the former residents into the prevailing white culture...

...Looked at through the usual demographic telescope, the Indians' situation remains hopeless: They are the most poverty-stricken, disease-ridden, unschooled, and unemployed minority group in all America...

...Consequently, the Indians are fearful of being left with the worst of both worlds: less than their share of dollars from the energy profits, and more than their share of erosion and ugliness from the mining...

...This time the scales appear likely to tip toward sovereignty, although predictions today about red-white relations are riskier than ever: The stakes are higher now and the opposition to reform more bitter...

...Nevertheless, the white opposition is having some effect...

...A decade ago there were fewer than a dozen Indian lawyers...

...Of the last 12 "Indian cases" heard by the U.S...

...No wonder the Indian suicide rate?32 per 100,000—is twice the non-Indian rate and still rising...

...A Minnesota Chippewa rejected the right of Itasca County to levy a tax on his trailer, noting that he and his home occupied Federal ground (a reservation) and were therefore exempt from all but Federal taxes...

...There is also an organization known as the Interstate Congress for Equal Rights and Responsibilities, with headquarters in Wynner, South Dakota, a village on the eastern border of the Rosebud Sioux reservation...

...Indians do pay taxes, although not to states or municipalities, only to the Federal government...

...So the Indians still have a long road to travel...

...Land is the problem and land is the prize...

...today there are about 175, and nearly all are working for tribes or for national Indian organizations...

...Lloyd Meeds, usually a popular politician in his Washington district, barely scraped by in last November's election, winning by a scant 300 votes...

...The most recent case Bryan v. Itasca County, was typical...

...Supreme Court—in which tribes challenged one or another aspect of white authority?1 were decided in favor of the Indians...

...As an Indian acquaintance remarked, "All America is on the dole...

...The tribes want to profit from their luck, but they also want to protect their environment...

...There is also the Indians' relation to the law to be considered, a complicated network of treaties, Congressional acts and judicial decisions covering more than two centuries of disputes and settlements between the red and the white...