Smoke Signals March 1991 page 10
Native American Tribe Making a Real Effort at Sovereignty
"If they fail, it will ripple throughout Indian country for
years to come," said Gay Kingman, executive director of
the National Congress of American Indians.
The self-government initiative has divided the nation's
Indians. Tribes more sophisticated at government
lobbying tend to favor it, while others see it as an
attempt by the federal government to abandon its trust
responsibility to Indians.
Even on the reservations that are part of the experi
ment, there is broad debate. While many Indians say
they despise the BIA, they are uncertain about abandon
ing the one agency that has been a constant through
nearly two centuries of ties to the government.
SD., and a fellow in Harvard University's Nieman study
program for journalists.
Thus, even as government policy in the last 20 years
has granted Indians more say in education and cultural
areas, the Tribes say a single federal agency continues to
run their lives.
"We don't think some BIA bureaucrat in a regional
office should be making all our decisions," said Raynette
Finkbonner, who is in charge of the self-government
project on the Lummi Indian reservation, about 80 miles
northwest of Seattle.
The Quinaults, more than most Tribes, seem to have a
special reason to distrust the BIA. In the past 50 years,
the agency has sold most of the reservation's old-growth
timber in contracts with private industry. All but a few
By Timothy Egan
New York Tunes
Taholah, WA. In trying to assert the right of Ameri
can Indian Tribes to exist as nations within a nation,
Joseph DeLaCruz has chased non-Indian cars off Tribal
beaches, introduced separate license plates and quashed
a federal road leading into the coastal rain forest at
land's end in Taholah.
Each measure was small, born of frustration, with an
effect that was largely symbolic
But now DeLaCruz, longtime president of the Quinault
Indian Nation, has embarked on what he and other
Tribal leaders consider one of the most significant steps
toward self-determination in more than a century.
With the eyes of Indians across the United States on
them, the Quinaults and six other Tribes have begun a
three-year experiment in self-government. In it, they are
negotiating with the United States virtually as sovereign
nations, a status the Tribes have long sought.
Besides the Quinault (pronounced kwin-ALT), the six
other Tribes that have signed self-government contracts
are the Mille Lacs Chippewa band in Minnesota; the
Jamestown Klallam in Washington; the Hoopa Valley
Tribe in California, the Absentee-Shawnee and the
Cherokee both in Oklahoma and the Lummi of Wash
ington State.
The Tribes are seeking to break a cycle of paternalism
by eliminating their dependence on the Bureau of Indian
Affairs (BIA), the federal agency that has governed
Indians since 1824.
Essentially, the experiment allows certain Tribes to set
their own budgets, run their own programs and negoti
ate directly with the federal government for services. All
those functions are usually performed by the BIA, one
of the nation's oldest and most criticized bureaucracies.
The Tribes say they are using their newfound power to
bring lost languages back to the schools, create jobs in
areas long overlooked and channel money directly into
such things as fixing potholes in Tribal roads without
having to go through government bureaucrats in
regional offices.
The current system delivers to the reservations only
about 11 cents of every dollar appropriated to them and
is rife with mismanagement and accounting lapses,
according to recent federal investigations. An audit
released last week found that the BIA could not account
for $95 million, or nearly one-tenth of its budget, in the
last fiscal year.
"Basically, what brought us to this point was that
Congress said things were so bad let's turn it over to the
Indians and let them sink or swim on their own,"
DeLaCruz said.
On a practical level, the shift to self-government,
though in its infancy, is already having some effect. The
Lummi Tribe has used its new power to add tutoring to
its Indian school, where the native language is now
taught. The Hoopa Valley Tribe is developing a forestry
program.
Some of the biggest Tribes in America, the Navajo and
Sioux among them, are opting to see how the smaller
Tribes fare before taking part in the project.
There are 20 additional Indian nations that are ready
to sign up for the second phase of the self-government
project in the next three years. At the end of 1993, the
experiment will be evaluated by Congress and the
Interior Department and considered for enactment as
policy.
If the seven Tribes taking part in the experiment
succeed, the experiment could change the way the
government treats the nation's 310 recognized Indian
Tribes.
"On the one hand, we always cuss the BIA," Kingman
said, "but any time the government has tried to remove
it, the Tribes have objected."
The memory of President Dwight Eisenhower's policy,
in which some Tribes lost their sovereign status under
the government after being given payments for past
grievances over land and resources, is still feared by
many Indian leaders.
That policy, which became known as "termination,"
was designed to bring Indians into the American
mainstream. Instead, its critics charge, by eliminating
some longstanding Tribal fishing, hunting and land-use
right, the policy only solidified the Indians' poverty.
"This is not termination," said Interior Secretary
Manuel Lujan, whose agency is responsible for most of
the $3.5 billion budget allocated to Indians this fiscal
year. "We still have trust responsibility and intend to
keep it. But with this experiment, I foresee a day when
we have true government-to-government relations."
True nation status, while holding the United States to
its duties under 19th century treaties, is what the Tribal
leaders say they want. Since the J930's, most reserva
tions have had their own police forces, courts and
government councils.
But the BIA has controlled the federal budgets of
reservations, where nearly 1 million Indians live. Even
the smallest decisions, Tribal leaders complain, have to
be cleared by federal officials.
"As long as they continue to control the purse strings,
the BIA has all the power," said Tim Giago, an Oglala
Sioux, who is editor of The Lakota Times in Rapid City,
acres of the Tribe's vast rain-forest home was liquidated,
the ground cover burned and the land never reforested.
The Tribe has lived near the present-day Olympic
National Park for thousands of years, hunting whales,
fishing for salmon and building elaborate cedar long
houses. They clashed with the Spaniards, who landed a vessel
on the shores of the rain forest in 1775, and were among
the last of the Northwest Tribes to give up large portions
of their land to whites. A treaty signed in 1855 and
enlarged in 1873 established the 200,000 acre Quinault
Reservation.
What happened to the Tribe during the next 100 years
has been cited by some scholars as a textbook example
of the failure of the government's Indian policy.
In what is now seen as a government attempt to break
up the reservation, the government in the late 1800's
allowed individual Indians to sell reservation land
piecemeal.
By 1933, there was no Tribally owned land on the
reservation, although some individuals still owned
parcels. The adults were urged to take up farming and
the children were forced into white schools.
When DeLaCruz took over as chairman in the early
1970's, he began the drive to reclaim most of the
reservation land for Indians, buying some with money
earned from Tribal enterprises and trading with the
Forest Service for other tracts.
The Quinaults built a fish-processing plant and started
their own Tribal timber policy, which was often at odds
with the BIA. The Tribe now owns 46,000 acres, or
about one fourth of the reservation, and its per-capita
income is $3,100.