File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1998/marxism-international.9803, message 102


Date: Sun, 08 Mar 1998 09:35:41 -0500
From: Louis Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu>
Subject: M-I: American Indian sovereignty


(Louis Proyect: This article, the first of 2 parts, was featured
prominently on the front page of the NY Times, a sure sign of the growing
political importance of Indian land claims. The article is filled with two
distortions. The first is that the Goshute tribe is in some way typical of
tribes by inviting in a nuclear dumping corporation. Right now, as PEN-L'er
and Blackfoot Indian activists Jim Craven pointed out on Friday, the
Shoshone tribe is organizing a protest against a similar deal. When 92 out
of 93 new nuclear dump sites are to be located on reservations, we can
assume that the explanation is coercion, not bids to become more
prosperous. The other thing to be aware of is that the upward mobility is
grossly exaggerated. The NY Times, an ideological servant of the ruling
class, feels the need to depict the American Indian in much more powerful
and successful terms than is actually the case. This will allow government
counter-attacks against Indian claims to be easier accept by a misinformed
American population.)


March 8, 1998

New Prosperity Brings New Conflict to Indian Country

By TIMOTHY EGAN

SKULL VALLEY, Utah -- Not long after the Goshute Indians stopped resisting
the Mormons who had poured into the sun-cracked bowl of the Great Basin,
the tribe seemed to disappear, gone like most natives into sepia tones of
the past, their poses ever frozen -- noble, doomed, vanquished.

But then, nearly a century and a half after the first state lines were
stamped on an area once known as the Great American Desert, the Goshutes
reappeared. Suddenly, last year, the most powerful politicians in the West
became deeply concerned about the actions of a tiny tribe that had been
left in the alkaline dust of central Utah.

With barely 100 members, the Skull Valley Band of Goshutes declared what
few people outside the reservation had taken seriously: that they were a
sovereign nation. As such, the Goshutes -- looking for a
multimillion-dollar infusion -- have offered to lease part of their
reservation as the temporary storage ground for high-level civilian nuclear
waste. Utah's Governor and Congressional representatives are outraged,
vowing to block the border of Indian country to any shipments.

The Goshute proposal is a very un-Indian-like thing to do, critics say;
native people are supposed to be keepers of the earth, not protectors of
its poisons.

But in fact, the Goshutes say that what they are doing is the most
characteristic action a tribe can take in the modern era -- asserting
itself to be a nation within a nation, free to make its own decisions.

The clash in a forgotten valley of the unwatered West is but one awakening
of sovereignty by hundreds of American Indian tribes. From the smallest
bands in the desert to groups that govern from glass towers in the East,
native tribes are actively shoring up the bonds of nationhood.

What is happening in Indian country, an archipelago of 554 nations within
the boundaries of the United States, goes far beyond the popular image of
modern tribes.

Between two extremes of Indian life -- the poverty of the Pine Ridge
Reservation in South Dakota, which includes the poorest county in America,
and the gambling gusher at the Foxwoods Casino in Connecticut, where
Mashantucket Pequots are running the biggest casino in the country -- is a
forceful drive for independence from the states.

"Some people think we're living in teepees out here," said Leon Bear, the
Goshute tribal chairman. "They come up to my house and see a satellite dish
and a big color TV, it surprises them. We are alive and well and a
sovereign nation. And we're using that sovereignty to attract the only
business you can get to come here."

A new generation of Indian leaders, schooled in the nascent sovereignty
movement of the 1970's, has come to power at the same time that many tribes
are getting their first taste of prosperity, through tribal casinos. Now,
there is a convergence of economic strength, legal muscle and political will.

The number of Indian lawyers has increased more than ten-fold to about
1,000 in the last 20 years, and there has been a four-fold increase to just
over 300 in the number of tribal courts.

"What we've seen is simply the civil rights movement for Native Americans,"
said John Echohawk, executive director of the Native American Rights Fund,
a nonprofit legal defense group based in Boulder, Colo. "Tribal rights are
finally being enforced because more and more tribes have the resources to
have their own lawyers."

On Wednesday, Congress is set to hold hearings on tribal sovereignty,
pushed by some lawmakers who are alarmed by tribal assertions of
nationhood. While the tribes fear that the hearings will be a platform to
attack Indians, others see the hearings as a chance to make the case that
Indian sovereignty is "un-American," as some members of Congress have
called it.

The tribes have never had a stronger presence in Washington, donating a
record amount in the last Federal election. They share legal resources,
under the mantra that a threat to one Indian tribe is a threat to all.

Though some tribes fight each other over casino locations -- and seldom
share the spoils with poorer tribes -- they say they are more united than
ever behind the idea that sovereignty equals survival. And they are using
this sustaining idea for a mix of cross purposes. Some of it is nakedly
commercial, some is based purely on principle.

In Idaho, the Coeur d'Alene tribe has just started an international on-line
lottery, offering the chance at million-dollar jackpots to anyone on earth
with access to a modem.

In Montana, the Assiniboine and the Gros Ventre tribes have held up
expansion of a major gold mine, using their sovereign status to protect the
water and land that borders the mine, even if it deprives a neighboring
small town of needed jobs.

In New Mexico, the Isleta Pueblo, acting as a separate government, is
forcing the City of Albuquerque to spend $300 million to clean up the Rio
Grande before it flows downstream through Indian land.

"What most people don't understand is that we are governments first, and
racial entities second," said Anthony Pico, chairman of the Viejas Band of
Kumeyaay Indians in Southern California.

People who have rarely given a second thought to the natives in their midst
suddenly find there really are four major levels of government in America:
Federal, state, local and tribal. Until recently, one of them was nearly
always invisible.

A Power Restored: Decreeing Nations Within Nations

In a visit to Pueblo communities in New Mexico last month, Speaker Newt
Gingrich told Indian leaders that he had trouble understanding the concept
of tribal sovereignty. He was surrounded by Apaches, Navajos and numerous
Pueblo tribes whose people have lived in well-ordered communities along the
Rio Grande for nearly a thousand years.

The president of the Navajo Nation, Albert Hale, offered Mr. Gingrich an
explanation, telling him how an Indian leader would prefer to be treated.

"When I come to Washington, you don't send me to the Bureau of Indian
Affairs," said Mr. Hale, leader of a tribe with nearly a quarter-million
members. "You have a state dinner for me."

A week after the visit, Mr. Hale announced that the Navajo might block all
roads for one day into their vast reservation, an area the size of West
Virginia, as a demonstration of sovereignty. Three states overlap Navajo
lands, and Mr. Hale's suggestion set off harsh criticism by members of his
own tribe as well as neighboring communities.

Local talk radio in the Southwest went aflame with anti-Indian talk, with
people volunteering to arm themselves and storm past roadblocks. Mr. Hale
has since resigned, under pressure over financial and personal
improprieties, and the roadblock idea has yet to be revived.

When Indians were held up mainly as icons, or poverty-crippled examples of
failed policy, it was rare for any action in Indian country to become talk
radio fodder. They were considered largely powerless.

But in fact, the power was nearly always there, imbedded in Article VI of
the Constitution, which holds treaties backed by Congress to be "the
supreme law of the land."

Congress ratified 371 treaties with native people, the first in 1778 with
the Delaware, the last in 1871 with the Nez Percé. In most cases, Indians
were forced to give up land in return for self-governing rights and a
tribal homeland. But those rights were often ignored, and the homelands, or
reservations, were sliced up or overrun.

When Georgia declared Indian laws on designated Indian land within the
state to be null and void, the Cherokees sued -- and won. Writing in 1830,
Chief Justice John Marshall held that the Cherokees were "a distinct
political society, separated from others, capable of managing its own
affairs and governing itself."

It was one of three Supreme Court decisions in the 1830's that established
the right of American Indian tribes to be free from state control, while
they remained subordinate to the will of Congress. A century and a half
later, this remains the governing framework.

Indian nations were not judged to be stand-alone countries. Instead, the
Supreme Court defined them as "domestic, dependent nations" -- a unique
status that is still subject to much contention. Indian country is an
evolving political experiment, trying to live the oxymoron of being nations
that are still subject to a greater political power.

For more than a hundred years after the last treaty, virtually every census
found Indian lands to be islands of squalor and poverty, with chronic
unemployment and rates of disease and early death unmatched in the country.

Then came the "new buffalo" -- gambling operations on Indian land, approved
by Congress in 1988. A third of all tribes now operate some form of
gambling enterprise, and though the windfall is unevenly spread, it
generates more than $6 billion a year.

"The Indians in California have been poverty stricken for 150 years," Mr.
Pico said of the Viejas band. "We've never been to a point where we could
exercise our rights. Now we have an economic base, and suddenly we're on
people's radar screens."

Indian country came alive, in ways both unintended and planned, with
gambling. Suddenly, little patches of long-forgotten ground blossomed into
cash centers in neon, which gave rise to cultural programs, language
revival, scholarships, better schools.

The venture into gambling also changed the average American's view of
Indians, prompting talk of "rich Indians," even though an overwhelming
majority of the tribes have seen no windfall from gambling.

The tribes with money started to buy into the political process, giving
more than $2 million in campaign contributions, mostly to Democrats, in the
1996 election.

But even the tribes without money have seen their sons and daughters --
educated at law schools from Stanford to Dartmouth -- return to the
reservations. They are well-versed in court rulings, treaties and laws
passed in the 1970's and 1980's that gave the tribes more independence.

More than ever, the tribes are acting like states and counties, levying
their own taxes, enforcing their own land use regulations, building codes
and criminal statutes. Some tribes are thinking of issuing their own
driver's licenses.

"I remember my dad used to take me out in a pickup truck, and he'd say,
'This is our land, only the people around us have changed,' " said Roy
Bernal, chairman of the All-Indian Pueblo Council, which represents tribes
in New Mexico. "Over the years, we have had sovereign recognition from
Spain, from Mexico and the United States."

But just as the full consequence of the nation-within-a-nation architecture
designed by the Supreme Court is being realized, the sovereignty movement
is bumping into a wall of opposition.

Members of Congress from California, Utah, Washington and Montana, alarmed
by the latest assertions of Indian nationhood within their states, ask:
What right does a small minority have to ignore their neighbors' concerns?

"I don't think this is what the Founding Fathers had in mind," said
Representative Merrill Cook, Republican of Utah, referring to new tribal
ventures like casinos and nuclear storage proposals. "It's just not right,
this use of sovereignty. The implications are frightening for us as a
nation."

Nearly half the American states have no Indian tribes or reservations
within their borders. But elsewhere, tribal land is etched in shades all
over the national map, most of it in the West.

Indian country today is 56 million acres, 314 reservations and about 1.4
million people living on or near tribal land -- less than 1 percent of the
overall population of the United States spread over a bit more than 2
percent of the land. An additional 500,000 or so people who listed
themselves as Indian in the last census live mostly in urban areas.

The Government was supposed to hold tribal lands in trust, acting as
guardian to the nations it had warred against. But instead Congress opened
up tribal lands to sale, trying to make commercial landowners out of
individual Indians.

>From the 1880's to the 1930's, the reservations lost more than 90 million
acres -- nearly two-thirds of the land base -- as big pieces of Indian
country were sold to non-Indians.

The low point, for many tribes, was in the 1950's, when more than 100
Indian governments were dismantled under an Eisenhower Administration
policy known as termination. Erased from official recognition in exchange
for cash, many tribes simply ceased to exist.

Flash Points: When Tribal Law And Others Collide

But in the last quarter century, there has been a strong rebound, as
Indians have defiantly rejected assimilation. There are now 554 tribes,
each recognized by the Federal Government as a sovereign entity with
varying degrees of power.

"Sovereignty sounds like something from the King of England, but all it
really boils down to is the right to make your own laws and be ruled by
them," said Kevin Gover, a Pawnee who is the new Assistant Secretary of the
Interior for Indian Affairs.

By any measure, Indian country is deep in social problems. Unemployment is
more than 30 percent. Among people who have jobs, nearly a third earned
less than $10,000 a year in 1995 -- the last full year surveyed.

Indians have the highest rates of alcoholism, suicide and child abuse in
the country, though some progress is being made.

More than 250 languages are spoken in Indian country. There are courts and
statutes that are grounded more in tribal and family customs than English
common law, but basic American Constitutional rights supersede. In 1924,
Congress declared that all Indians were American citizens, though many
reject the label.

"I don't belong to two nations," Mr. Bear said, strolling on Goshute land
in central Utah. "I belong to one -- the Skull Valley Goshute Nation."

Today, governments collide with greater frequency, particularly where
Indian country rubs up against major urban areas. And tribes are doing what
any corporation or government with something to protect has done: they have
hired top-tier lobbyists, publicists and legal talent to make their case.

A scholarship fund, started more than 20 years ago by the Federal
Government but now guided by private donations, has allowed any Indian with
the grades to go to law school.

"We started cranking out 20 to 30 graduates a year back in the 1970's," Mr.
Echohawk said. His group, the Native American Rights Fund, recently argued
a case before the Supreme Court that would have expanded Indian country
through much of Alaska. In February, the Court ruled against the Indians,
saying that the native lands in that state would not fall under tribal
jurisdiction.

The Alaska fight was about traditional native concerns: fish, game and
culture. In Washington state, the conflict is how a modern Indian nation
can coexist in a big city. A plan by a historically poor tribe to build an
amphitheater has engaged everyone from President Clinton to leaders of
Congress.

The Muckleshoots, once a fishing tribe, were all but swept away by the
growth of metropolitan Seattle. The tribe has held to a patch of land
granted them by treaty in 1854. Just under 3,500 acres between Seattle and
Tacoma, this land has become increasingly valuable as the suburbs marched
south and north. Now they are using that land, and the ability to make
their laws regardless of state and county concerns, to prosper.

Several years ago, the Muckleshoots built a casino -- the closest to
Seattle. It has become one of the most successful tribal gambling ventures
in the country. Just as the Goshutes view a nuclear waste storage site as a
chance for full employment, the Muckleshoots say the amphitheater would be
a major step toward economic self-sufficiency, coupled with the jobs tied
to the casino.

But the tribe has attracted powerful opponents. In a recent letter to
President Clinton, Representative Jennifer Dunn, Republican of Washington,
characterized the amphitheater as an outlaw project, rising without
environmental review or state and county building permits. A group of
non-Indians who live near the project has just filed suit, making the same
point.

The Muckleshoots say Ms. Dunn never raised any concern when the latest
non-Indian shopping mall rose on wetlands south of Seattle. In her home
state, she is not known as a friend of the environmental movement.

As the dispute heats up, Indian children are being taunted as they wait for
school buses, and in some cases fruit has been thrown at them, tribal
members say. It was much easier to like the Indians, the Muckleshoots note,
when they were visible only at annual salmon ceremonies.

More than 8,000 people signed petitions urging the local government to
block the amphitheater. The issue is not about Indians, they say, but about
a project that would destroy the rural way of life. But a majority of the
King County Council concluded in a recent vote that there is little they
can do, unless Congress wants to intervene.

Congress has been sending conflicting signals -- on the one hand pushing
for greater autonomy and self-determination, on the other warning that
assertive tribal governments are going too far.

More than a decade ago, in amending the Clean Water Act, Congress gave
Indian tribes the same authority as states to set water pollution standards.

The Isleta Pueblo, living along the river just south of Albuquerque, took
Congress up on the offer, setting water standards that were much stricter
than New Mexico's. The tribe wanted clean water not just for health, but
for religious purposes.

The city fought the tribe, saying it would cost $300 million to meet the
Indian clean water standards. Albuquerque officials appealed all the way up
to the Supreme Court, but were rebuffed last fall.

To the tribes along the Rio Grande, the court victories on behalf of clean
water are part of a logical extension of their power, even though most of
them have no treaties with the United States.

What they do have is a long attachment to the land. The Pueblos often show
outsiders the silver-tipped canes given them by President Abraham Lincoln.
It was Lincoln's way of rewarding people in this part of Indian country for
standing by the Union in the Civil War. The canes are stronger symbols of
sovereignty, they say, than anything written.

The Future: Collision Ahead Over Sovereignty

In Skull Valley, cattle sleep in the middle of the main road and Navy
fighter jets scream overhead. Petroglyphs older than the United    States
are etched in the rocks. The few people who stumble upon the Goshutes
wonder why the only real tribal businesses are a money-losing mini-mart and
a sliver of dry land leased to a rocket-testing company.

The curious often follow the ghost trails that border the Goshutes -- the
Pony Express route to the south, the Donner Party Trail to the north.

"They want us to be traditional," Leon Bear said. "Sure, we'd like to be
traditional. But you can't eat wild rice anymore because those lands are
polluted. And you can't hunt around here -- they've poisoned the watering
holes up in those mountains." He motioned toward a range with two
commercial toxic waste dumps.

In Salt Lake City, Mr. Cook, the Congressman whose district borders Skull
Valley, sees a collision ahead. Nobody wants the nuclear waste site but a
handful of Indians trying to get rich, he says. Plus, parts of Utah may be
Indian country, but it is also earthquake country -- a potential safety
problem, he says.

"Something is dead wrong when a small group of people can ignore the will
of 90 percent of our state," Mr. Cook said.

It is possible, Mr. Cook said, that parallel nations may never work, a
feeling shared by some experts. The sovereignty movement "is creating a
hodgepodge of economically and perhaps politically unviable states whose
role in the United States is glaringly undefined in the United States
constitution," Fergus M. Bordewich wrote in a recent book, "Killing the
White Man's Indian," (Anchor, 1997; Doubleday, 1996).

Mr. Bordewich took a journalistic tour of Indian country and came away
greatly worried. He imagines a future where nearly every major city has a
tribal casino, and passports are needed to travel from one area to the next.

The Indians scoff at such suggestions. For more than two centuries, the
tribes have been in retreat. They once had a peak population of perhaps as
high as 10 million people living 500 years ago in what is now the United
States, according to the estimates of some historians. The population fell
to barely 300,000 by the 1920's.

"I believe we will be here as long as the United States will exist," Mr.
Gover said. "By sheer tenacity, we have held on." The grip of life, he
said, is the very sovereignty movement that scares non-Indians.

But what about this nuclear waste site, these casinos and amphitheaters?
What do these have to do with being an Indian, with living the old way?
Leon Bear and other Indians have a ready reply.

"We have our traditional values," he said, sorting through an application
to bring 4,000 casks of nuclear waste to the leathery ground of the
Goshutes. "Sovereignty -- that's what we've held onto."

Next: The backlash against Indian sovereignty.

Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company 




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