The reservations of the Indian - broken beyond repair?

Bernstein

The Bureau of Indian Affairs was created in 1824 by the War Department of the U.S. government. Its main function was to control Native American opposition to white American expansion into Indian lands.

The bureau became a part of the Interior Department in 1849, and the concept of containing the Indians within a system of reservations became official government policy.

Today, the bureau costs U.S. taxpayers about $3 billion dollars a year. Its primary purpose seems to be to attempt to legitimize the 200-year-old injustices suffered by the Indians at the hands of the U.S. government, by perpetuating them.

The federal government now recognizes more than 500 sovereign Indian tribes, representing more than two million Native Americans and controlling more than 55 million acres of, mainly, not very good land, where these so-called sovereign Indian nations have done little to improve the living conditions of the aforementioned two million Native Americans. Tribal management of health services, schools, courts, job training and the all-important casinos has mainly resulted in the enrichment of the few at the expense of the many. Just like in the good old days.

In 1988, President Reagan signed into law the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, which created a monopoly for tribal gaming and which regulated nothing except the funneling of money from the pockets of the predominantly poor whites and Indians into the pockets of the few politically connected wealthy whites and Indians, to the tune of more than $30 billion current annual revenue.

As of today, there are a dozen or so federal agencies and task forces whose function is to monitor Indian gambling. In June 2004, the FBI and the National Indian Gaming Commission created the Indian Gaming Working Group, which consists of representatives from the Economic Crimes Unit, the Money Laundering Unit, the Organized Crime Unit, the Asian Organized Crime Unit, the Public Corruption/Government Fraud Unit,the Racketeering Analysis Unit and the Indian Country Special Jurisdiction Unit, as well as representatives from the Department of Interior Office of Inspector General, the Internal Revenue Service Tribal Government Section, the Department of Treasury Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, the Department of Justice, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs Office of Law Enforcement Services. Your tax dollars hard at work, creating jobs for everyone, except the Indians.

Many Indians have a deep and spiritual attachment to the lands that white America stole from them, and they have a vision of a society based on an intelligent, more healthy way of living on those lands. But that isn't what is happening on the Rez. Instead, what we mostly have is the Mexican border town syndrome, where the actual way of life reflects the worst of both societies. A few recent examples of malfeasance, conflict of interest, and/or outright corruption are:

• According to a former Rocky Boy tribal chairman, there are millions of dollars missing from a Bureau of Reclamation water pipeline project on the Chippewa-Cree Rocky Boy reservation. The estimated cost has gone from $228 million to $361 million, with 80 percent of the project yet to be completed. The former tribal chairman said he is cooperating with federal prosecutors in an investigation into alleged corruption on the reservation. A company he controls was awarded a $1.9 million construction contract for the pipeline, and another company, controlled by a cousin of the tribal attorney, who was CEO of the pipeline project, received a $633,000 contract to supply pipe for the project.
• At the Assiniboine and Sioux Fort Peck reservation in Montana, four tribal employees pleaded guilty to embezzling $400,000 from a tribal credit union.
• Tonkawa tribal officers in Oklahoma pleaded guilty to stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars from tribal casino proceeds.
• The secretary-treasurer of the Apache of Oklahoma tribal council was found guilty by a federal jury of embezzling oil and gas royalty taxes.
• A former president of the San Juan Southern Piute Tribe in Arizona pleaded guilty to stealing and money laundering hundreds of thousands of dollars.
• Former tribal officials of the Cheyenne and Arapaho were found guilty of embezzling at least $750,000 from the tribes' jointly-operated Lucky Star Casinos.
• The federal Government Accountability Office recently issued a report stating that the Indian Health Service, for just a three-year period, had more than 5,000 pieces of equipment missing, with a value in excess of $16 million, and continues to lose equipment at the rate of more than $3.5 million a year. Among the items listed as lost or stolen are a $170,000 ultrasound machine, a $100,000 x-ray machine, various diagnostic monitors, and several dental chairs. It is probably difficult to lose or misplace these kinds of items.

Theft, conflict of interest, influence peddling and other forms of criminal activity seem to be widespread within the tribal areas supposedly supervised by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Does this not indicate that the system of sovereign nation Indian governments, and their federal oversight, doesn't work and should be abolished?

Maybe the concept of separate "nations" existing within our federal system is an idea that never did make much sense, any more than it would make sense to have any other ethnic grouping as sovereign nations within the United States. Would anyone really benefit from having separate nations of Mexicans or Irish or Japanese within this country? Didn't we once fight a civil war over this idea?

If the purpose of government is to bring its citizens into the mainstream of American society, to the benefit of all, maybe we should consider dismantling the Indian bureaucracy at all levels, both tribal and federal, and the dystopian society it created and begin to develop a more just society for all.

(Norman Bernstein is a roving correspondent for the Havre Daily News.)