COLONIALISM: U. S. STYLE
Cohen, Felix S.
Colonialism: U.S. Style By Felix S. Cohen IT WAS on a late Spring afternoon in 1950 that the seven councillors of the Omaha Tribe gathered with their "nephews and nieces" on a little fragment of...
...For thousands of Indians have thousands of problems, just as white men do...
...Federal promises that the Indians would be allowed to assume control of their own affairs go back at least to the 1830's...
...Most of these programs were directed to particular reservations or states, but several were of national scope...
...Decisions that are made on the reservation cannot be very efficient because they are made in the presence of Indians, who like to participate in such decisions and require time for thinking, which is not as necessary for loyal Bureau employes...
...Unfortunately, as Keynes has noted, in the long run we are all dead...
...In the special vocabulary of Indian Bureau Gobbledegook, policy decisions made by Indians for themselves are "politics" while decisions made for Indians by the Bureau are "sound administration...
...The tide of western migration had reached the wide Missouri, and the Great White Father wanted to buy five million acres of the fat Omaha land, at about 15 cents an acre, to sell to white settlers at $1.25 an acre...
...The Omaha case is not unique...
...But when decisions are made in Billings or Portland, most of the Indians affected are hundreds of miles away, and their Congressmen are thousands of miles away...
...The letter was opened and read circumspectly, as men of other races might read a letter from an Archangel or a commissar...
...The Bureau never has carried out these acts of Congress, which have remained largely dead letters...
...II Back in the 1830's the "transition period" was generally fixed at 10, 15, or 25 years...
...They insisted that the 15 cents be paid to them and not to Indian agents...
...Back in 1854 the Omaha chiefs were invited to the White House...
...But the real corruption of the Indian Bureau is institutional, not personal...
...Decisions in Washington are made under Congressional scrutiny, and since many Indians are voters this scrutiny interferes with speed and efficiency...
...Suddenly, down the center aisle of the meeting house, walked the young wife of the council chairman, carrying an airmail special delivery letter from Washington...
...Similar reports were made by the Commissioner in 1886 and 1887...
...These were originally called "regional" offices, but when Congress, in response to Indian appeals, refused money for such offices, they were re-christened "district" offices, and when district offices were forthwith abolished by Congress they were re-named "area" offices...
...The policy of cutting down Bureau controls and encouraging our Indian citizens to assume full responsibility for their own affairs has been vigorously proclaimed by every Commissioner since 1884...
...Essentially this is the philosophy of colonial administration in all parts of the world...
...Obviously, it is more efficient to have one official make decisions than to have 450,000 individual Indians scattered all around the United States and Alaska making different decisions for themselves as to how they will earn their livings, spend their money, use their land, litigate their grievances, or educate their children...
...Instructions had therefore been issued, according to the Commissioner's statement, "to turn over to the Omaha councilmen, in trust for the tribe, the mills, shops, dwellings, schoolhouses, livestock, and all public property on the Omaha reservation...
...Having started our existence as a nation by repudiating colonial status, and having repudiated the role of empire with equal vigor, at least during the first 122 years of our national existence, we are not accustomed to the high moral talk by which great empires "aid" and "protect" backward peoples out of their independence, and impose a dependent status and a dependent psychology upon people who once managed their own affairs in a self-reliant way...
...They have attended to their own business and paid for their own work and are more independent and manly than before because of the consciousness that they are becoming men...
...Any Bureau employe who uses it invites attention to his own inefficiencies...
...The silver dime was brought to the Omaha reservation and was cherished as a symbol of a great victory in the Indians' struggle for freedom...
...Obviously there was danger in the air...
...Nor is much reporting done today on current Bureau activities which are depriv-ing Indian tribes of the right to hold local elections without Bureau interference, the right to employ their own lawyers and technicians, and other rights that were guaranteed to them under the Roosevelt-Ickes-Collier administration...
...The mounting delight that showed in Indian eyes suddenly blurred and the anxious brows of the two Government "observers" relaxed...
...To extend such democracy to Indians—to let Indians spend their own money, run their own schools, use or lease their own lands, and hire their own lawyers to defend their rights, just as neighboring white communities do, would not establish Utopias on our 200 Indian reservations, but at least it would remove from our democratic professions, in our dealings with non-white peoples, the taint of hypocrisy...
...At their request all their employes were discharged and they were left to themselves...
...From long experience these Indians knew that the process of turning their land over to white men always began with an attack on the honesty, intelligence, or competence of Omaha Indians...
...And this is as it should be...
...There is not much left of the six million acres or more that was once their own, along the Nebraska bank of the Missouri River, but what is left, with its deep black soil and its bursting corn-cribs, its heavy mud and its fat horses, these Indians love, as they love the little fragments of self-government they still enjoy...
...Usually but not always, there is a time qualification to the promise...
...Cohen teaches jurisprudence at Yale Law School and philosophy at the City College of New York in his spare time...
...Every 30 or 40 years since then Congress has passed a new law to the same effect and several such bills have recently been introduced with much fanfare...
...It is, of course, the duty of loyal Bureau employes to protect Indians from all "cranks," "grafters" and "paid agitators...
...The date of the statement was 1884...
...According to this theory, Indians are inefficient, dishonest, wasteful, ignorant, selfish, impatient, and generally drunk, or, at least, not so efficient, honest, economical, wise, public-spirited, patient, and sober as their Indian Bureau tutors...
...And during this entire 96-year period the Indian Bureau has been reporting to Congress on the steady progress that it is making in turning over to Indians an "increasing responsibility for the managing of their own affairs" and in cutting down controls which the Bureau still exercises over Indian life...
...Such attacks, inside and outside the Indian Bureau, had reached a new high intensity in recent months...
...Something more than a "devil theory" is needed to locate the source of the Indian Bureau's drive for expansion and aggrandizement and to understand the mental makeup of the men who carry on this drive while they think and talk (quite sincerely) of "liquidating" their Bureau...
...The result, which then seemed doubtful, has shown the wisdom of their choice...
...At the end of the conference President Pierce agreed that no In-dian agent would handle the Indians' money...
...He had carefully considered the plea of the Omaha Indians "that the Government give the tribe entire control of its own affairs, without the interference or expense of an agent or of agency employes...
...It is thus possible for such decisions to be highly efficient, that is, to disregard all the human desires and intangibles that do not show up in efficiency reports...
...When the Federal courts held that the New Mexico Pueblos were not under Indian Bureau control, the Indian Bureau produced reams of gossip as to the immorality of various Pueblo Indian customs and ceremonials, and the Federal courts then backed down and admitted the necessity of Indian Bureau supervision...
...Ninety-six years have passed, all Indians are now citizens, and yet today no Indian on the Omaha reservation is allowed to lease his own land and handle his rental income without the interposing of Bureau fingers...
...It had been dug out of musty archives and mailed to the tribe by a friend in Washington...
...It is like the corruption of prisons, insane asylums, concentration camps, fascist and communist states, and other societies in which men cannot "talk back" to officials...
...III The most plausible argument against local self-government, Indian or white, is the argument of inefficiency...
...Reluctantly the Indians agreed, FELIX S. COHEN handled many Indian problems during the decade he served the Interior Department as associate solicitor and chairman of the board of appeals...
...During this period of intensive "liquidation" the annual Indian Bureau budget has increased from less than $6,000,000 to approximately $80,000,000...
...To the experienced bureaucrat a cut in funds is always the best possible reason for centralizing power, which means transferring authority from people to agencies, or from local agencies to area offices or Washington officials...
...The great Omaha orator, Chief Joseph La Flesche, had used a silver dime to illustrate the plea of his people for the right to handle their own finances...
...Before the Indians can be trusted to take over complete responsibility for their own affairs, we are told, there must be a period of preparation during which the Indian Bureau will help to "civilize" (the current term is "rehabilitate") the Indians...
...The great thing about American democracy is that most of us have an unprecedented power to shape our own lives, make our own mistakes, and attain new understanding and strength from the mistakes we make...
...And yet these Omaha Indians, like many other tribes, have far less control over their own affairs than they had in 1884, and less in 1950 than in 1949...
...Back in 1834 the Congress decided that the time had come to wind up the fast-growing Bureau of Indian Affairs and that one of the best ways to do this was to allocate Indian Bureau positions to the Indians themselves...
...Moreover, any white man outside the Bureau who seeks to help Indians is either a "crank" or a "grafter" or a "paid agitator"—a "grafter" if the Indians pay him for his help, a "paid agitator" if white sympathizers pay him, and a "crank" if nobody pays him...
...Only in obscure places in the Indian country, in Alaska, and in a few small Pacific islands can we see what happens to our own Government experts when they are not responsible to the people they are governing or aiding...
...but only on one condition...
...The Indian Bureau itself has a ready explanation for the discrepancies between proclaimed Federal policy and actual practice...
...His Handbook of Federal Indian Law, now in its fourth edition, is a standard reference work...
...The Indian Bureau never has given a general employment preference to Indians outside of ditch-digging and similar inferior or temporary jobs that whites were reluctant to tackle...
...Now a practicing Washington attorney, he argued the cases that won Indians the right to vote last Summer...
...V Thousands of solutions have been proposed in the last 450 years for "the Indian problem...
...We see the most recent example of this "efficiency drive" in the latest Indian Bureau orders transferring authority over 200 reservations from the reservations to half a dozen so-called area offices...
...If they are notorious, he will find it safer to pitch his arguments on a plane of high morality...
...The harm that good commissioners do is often greater than the harm bad commissioners do...
...In the latest Indian Bureau drafts of tribal "rehabilitation bills" the date 1994 is generally fixed as the point at which Bureau supervision over Indian finances can safely be terminated for the more progressive tribes...
...None of us would ever learn to walk in childhood if the job of walking were assigned in each family to the expert walkers, as the theories of colonialism and Indian Bureaucracy would require...
...The date of the Commissioner's statement was read...
...Some of the "rehabilitation" bills recently put forward by the Indian Bureau, often over the protest of the alleged Indian beneficiaries, would triple or quadruple Bureau expenditures for the more progressive tribes, in the expectation that by 1994 these Indians might safely be allowed to take care of themselves...
...But if a Democratic President picks a Democratic Indian Commissioner, if such a Commissioner appoints old friends to high posts, and if an Indian superintendent has his wife appointed to a job in an institution financed by his Indians, this is accepted as a part of the democratic process...
...If to this simple measure of justice were added a full and prompt settlement of all Federal debts to our Indian fellow-citizens, we would have no need to worry about how they would fare under the self-determination we have so long promised and so long withheld...
...How come...
...The cult of efficiency thus makes it possible to recite all the proper phrases about liquidating the Indian Bureau while at the same time upholding every extension of Indian Bureau power over Indian lives on the ground that a poor (or rich) Indian cannot possibly be as efficient as an 80-million-dollar-a-year Indian Bureau...
...All of the agency employes except those engaged in medical and educational work were being relieved of their posts...
...IV The argument of Indian inefficiency has one serious inconvenience...
...The simplest explanation of the gap between Commissioners' programs and Bureau performance is the "devil theory," according to which the Commissioner of Indian Affairs is a Satanic hypocrite, who makes fine promises merely to fool Indians and Congressmen...
...It is instructive to see how this philosophy works out in day-by-day Indian administration...
...When and how and why the Indian Bureau crept back and took over control of Indian fields, buildings, and funds does not appear in any Commissioner's reports to the President or to Congress...
...This is a naive view...
...Every now and then a Commissioner reveals the large number of dishonest officials that held jobs under a prior administration...
...Inexperienced freshman Congressmen sometimes think that Indian bureaucracy can be cut down by trimming appropriations...
...If elected Indian councilmen select friends and supporters for tribal jobs, this is described as "nepotism" and proves that Indians cannot be trusted with self-government...
...In 1885, the Commissioner reported: "More than a year ago the Omahas felt themselves competent to do their own work and attend to their own affairs...
...And yet during this period Commissioners of Indian Affairs have inaugurated more than 500 programs for liquidating Bureau activities...
...There is no tribe that has more control over its own affairs today than it had a year ago or a hundred years ago...
...He thought this request reasonable and in line with his own policy of encouraging Indians "to take care of themselves...
...Those Bureau officials who are most active in breaking down Indian self-government have their own "devil theory" to explain their failure to carry out the Bureau's public promises and policies...
...Dark eyes widened as the reader intoned the words of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs himself...
...According to the adherents of this popular view, the only good Indian Commissioner is a dead Indian Commissioner...
...These laws have great popular appeal because they conform with the American creed that self-government is better than expert government and that men and children learn by doing...
...The puzzle is particularly baffling because we Americans have had so little direct experience with colonialism...
...How a Bureau's efforts to "work itself out of a job" can produce these results presents a fascinating puzzle for white men as well as Indians, and for students of law and government of all colors and political faiths...
...There are few tribes that have as much control over their own affairs as they had in 1884...
...Once grant that expert government is better than self-government and there is no stopping the expansion of the Indian Bureau, or any other bureau, until it fills the whole space of the individual's life...
...The next Omaha play would have to start 66 years behind the line of scrimmage...
...Unfortunately, life is not so simple...
...In fact every expansion of a bureau function is customarily justified on the ground that it will bring economy in the long run...
...Perhaps if we understood the psychology of such officials more clearly we could see more plainly what is happening in other parts of the world where "liquidation" and the "withering away of the state" go hand in hand with a tremendous increase in bureau controls over individual freedom...
...It is what Lord Acton had clearly in mind when he pointed out that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely...
...Accordingly, it is the un-shirkable duty of the Indian Bureau to carry on its shoulders the "white man's burden" of telling the Indians what to do...
...Most Indian tribes in the United States can report similar experiences...
...They were deeply disturbed over schemes hatched in high places to dispose of the remaining fragments of their age-old homeland...
...All but three or four of the 36 Commissioners of Indian Affairs who have served during the past 118 years have been honest, sincere, hardworking men who wanted to help the Indian and wanted also to work themselves out of the world's worst job...
...Style By Felix S. Cohen IT WAS on a late Spring afternoon in 1950 that the seven councillors of the Omaha Tribe gathered with their "nephews and nieces" on a little fragment of what was once their great corn-land empire to plan defenses against white aggression...
Vol. 15 • February 1951 • No. 2
