After the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee, as both Treuer and Dunbar-Ortiz write in their books, the machinations of the U.S. government were many to wipe out the existence of Indigenous peoples as peoples. (The right to negotiate treaties, as I mentioned yesterday, had already been ended unilaterally by the U.S. in 1871.) Treuer emphasizes that this also made Indigenous people wards of the state, and — as history later showed — they were wards who seldom had advocates with their best interests at heart, and many exploiters.
The federal administrative state of the variously named versions of the Office of Indian Affairs (later the Bureau of Indian Affairs) grew tremendously to take up these tasks, and the boarding schools sprang up, run by the government and Catholic Church. The first boarding school opened in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in 1879 by the man who used the phrase "Kill the Indian in him, and save the man." Attendance was coercive, including use of police (Treuer, p. 138). The basic practices at the schools were inhumane:
At Carlisle, the punishments of choice were having one's mouth washed out with lye soap (for speaking their native language), daily beatings, and being locked in an old guardhouse with only bread and water for rations (Treuer, p. 139).
That doesn't include the unofficial practices, such as sexual assaults and death from disease, physical trauma, or malnutrition:
According to the Meriam Report, Indian children were six times as likely to die in childhood while at boarding schools than the rest of the children America (Treuer, p. 140).
Children often could not go home for long stretches of time, though on paper they were supposed to be at school for "only" nine months of the year. Treuer says that his grandmother was sent to the Tomah (Wisconsin) Indian Industrial School in 1930 when she was 4, and didn't return until she was 10 (p. 137). Boarding schools in the U.S. were mostly ended in the 1930s, after the 1928 Meriam Report's findings were implemented.
Based on the General Allotment Act of 1887 (the Dawes Act), much of the land that had been held in common was individualized and some that was declared "surplus" was sold to white people. That self-serving idea of so-called surplus was based on the idea that there would never be an increase in the Indian population; Treuer quotes the commissioner of Indian Affairs at the time literally saying that (p. 144). Selfishness was decreed as necessary, indeed as the bedrock to civilization. About that idea, Dunbar-Ortiz says:
Although allotment did not create the desired selfishness, it did reduce the overall Indigenous land base by half and furthered both Indigenous impoverishment and US control (p. 158).
Since the tribes had no rights anymore, they had no say in the Allotment Act. Some of the money from selling the "surplus" land was used to fund the boarding schools. Treuer says:
If we look back at the period now, it is impossible not to feel a kind of sickness at the thought that the government stole Indian land in order to fund the theft of Indian children (p. 146).
Allotment brought the legal structure of tribal "enrollment," which had never existed before. Treuer gives a good description of why this was problematic (pp. 146–151). The idea of "blood quantum" came from European law, so eugenic concepts (of course!) entered into it. And the records were kept by white people, so that when allotments were sold as surplus, the best ones often managed to go to white people: the lakeshore properties, the best farmland. Treuer is not in favor of blood quantum as a method ("relying on blood to measure culture, all you are doing is showing that you don't have much culture left anyway" [p. 382]).
As a general statement, Treuer says that the assaults on Indians and their homelands from the end of the 19th century until the 1930s:
were perhaps at their most creative, if not their bloodiest. It was a new kind of Indian war, fought not by the sudden attack of cavalry or by teams of buffalo hunters. These years were more of a siege. The government's weapons were cupidity and fraud. Indians resisted (p. 172).
A few decades later, the 20th century brought whiplashing policy, from the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924* to the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 (which, though imperfect, ended allotments, and made constitutions possible for Indigenous nations) to the 1946 Indian Claims Court.
The ICC was set up so that "Settlement was limited to monetary compensation based on the property's value at the time of the taking, and without interest" (Dunbar-Ortiz, p. 173) — and minus any compensation sent by the feds to the nation making the claim, whether they had asked for the "services" or not. The idea that money alone could compensate for the harms done was absurd in the face of the history of death and destruction wrought by the U.S. government. Treuer gives just one example of a lesser known case, the Ho-Chunk, who were removed from Wisconsin to Nebraska, where many people died of starvation and exposure. Their case was dismissed by the court "not because the Ho-Chunk hadn't experienced serious harm, but because [the court] could not set a value on what they had lost" (p. 252). Yeah, no surprise.
More than 200 claims for damages were filed in 1946 alone, but only 29 were addressed, with the majority dismissed for technicalities. In 1947, Congress passed the Indian Claims Commission Act, which set a five-year deadline for filing suits. That deadline was extended, then extended again, into the 1970s. "The last claim on the docket wasn't finalized until 2006" (Treuer, 253). But all of this was coercive: poor people were forced into selling their birthright for pennies compared to its worth, or not even pennies.
The ultimate piece of legislation was the Termination Act of 1953, administered by the federal head of Indian Affairs, who (fittingly) had also been in charge of the Japanese internment camps during World War II. That act took away tribal sovereignty, such as it still remained. By 1960 more than 100 nations had been terminated.
Through all this, it's important to remember that the original pre-1871 treaties were still — legally — in effect, so none of this had any basis in law, but it happened anyway:
"Despite the piecemeal eating away of Indigenous landholdings and sovereignty and federal trust responsibility based on treaties, the US government had no constitutional or other legal authority to deprive federally recognized Native nations of their inherent sovereignty or territorial boundaries (Dunbar-Ortiz, p. 174).
In 1956, the Indian Relocation Act was passed. Treuer says it was a response to Termination: What do we do with all of these Indians now? The answer was to get them to move to cities, as had been happening with non-Indian people since the early 20th century. Job-training programs and housing programs in cities enticed many people to move away from reservations. Here in the Twin Cities, it created Little Earth of the United Tribes, a Section 8 housing project south of Franklin Avenue in Minneapolis, and the numerous Indian organizations and businesses along Franklin Avenue. "By 1970, half of all Indians lived in urban areas" (Treuer, p. 278), when only 6% had before the act was passed. While this had some negative effects, both Treuer and Dunbar-Ortiz say it led to building pan-Indianism and connection with the Civil Rights Movement. "They learned to be Indians of America rather than simply Indians in America," as Treuer puts it (p. 279).
Treuer gives a detailed description of the development of the American Indian Movement (AIM) and its activities in the 1970s (beginning on page 296). Just before its founding, Bay Area activists began the occupation of Alcatraz Island. Then in fall 1972 AIM and other activists traveled to the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington, D.C., and sat in at the BIA, just a week before the presidential election. They called it the Trail of Broken Treaties. Organizers created a 20-point position paper, which later became the basis for the UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous People. Treuer is critical of AIM's role and behavior in the standoff, but ends with this:
[AIM's] leaders were obsessed with image and given to grandstanding. Yet...AIM was doing one thing right: it was showing Indians around the country that they were proud of being Indian, and in the most uncomfortable ways possible for the mainstream. Indians from reservations and cities alike were, for the first time, pushing back against the acculturation machine that was a part of America's domestic imperial agenda, and doing it loud and proud (p. 307).
Understanding what happened at Wounded Knee, not long afterward, in 1973 is difficult. Dunbar-Ortiz gives no detail about what happened there, only saying that it was a turning point in two decades of resistance, an important part of defeating termination. Treuer, in contrast, devotes a number of pages to it. AIM had been born among urban Indians and lacked a strong base among reservation leadership, Treuer says, including at Pine Ridge in South Dakota. There was division there between Christianized people, who were more powerful on the reservation, and "traditionals" who were also Lakota-speaking. The power centered in the the village of Pine Ridge, and there were accusations of nepotism against the tribal chairman, Dick Wilson, who had a private security force working with a CIA commando force (according to Treuer, p. 320). Wilson called them his GOONs, Guardians of the Oglala Nation.
Russell Means of AIM was also Oglala, and challenged Wilson. Impeachment of Wilson was tried, but failed. AIM members began filtering in to Pine Ridge and the village "became increasingly militarized" (p. 320) with FBI, U.S. marshals, and the GOONs. Machine guns were placed around tribal headquarters. The entire AIM leadership arrived, and soon caravanned to the Wounded Knee site to hold a ceremony at the 1890 grave. While they were doing that, other AIM members attacked the village of Wounded Knee and quickly took it over. Law enforcement, coming from Pine Ridge, surrounded the small village and blocked the roads on February 27, and a siege began. It lasted for 71 days.
Gunfire was exchanged. Demands were sent. Supplies and backup forces got through to the militants in the village. Treuer's description of the standoff is very detailed and makes it clear that the government violated the Posse Comitatus Act, while some of AIM's leadership was grandstanding (as usual, as he wrote earlier). After some unnecessary deaths among the militants,
...the Oglala who had invited AIM to come...ended the siege. They'd had enough. The AIM leaders—not from Pine Ridge—wanted to continue, but the rank and file didn't support them. A hasty agreement was drawn up and the siege ended.... Wounded Knee was both the high-water mark and a deeply disappointing action for AIM (p. 326)
After Wounded Knee, AIM and 5,000 Indigenous representatives created an International Indian Treaty Council (IITC), which received UN consultative status in 1975, followed by a 1977 conference. Its clear statement was: "We wish to continue to exist" (Dunbar-Ortiz, p. 204). In 2007, the UN approved the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People. There were four votes against it: the U.S., Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. All later changed their votes.
Since the 1960s, instead of payments, nations have demanded restoration of treaty-based land rather than money, Dunbar-Ortiz says. The terms shifted away from reparations to restoration, repatriation. An early example in the right direction is the North American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, which passed in 1990.
The Black Hills (Paha Sapa) of South Dakota, which include the defaced Mount Rushmore is another case, still contested. The Supreme Court ruled in 1980 that the Black Hills were taken illegally and remuneration should be paid. That may sound good, but the amount they ordered was an absurdly low amount even in 1980: $106 million. The Sioux refused it, demanding return of the land. The money was placed in an interest-bearing account, where it accrued to $757 million by 2010. The Sioux Nation continues to refuse it.
Dunbar-Ortiz says that one of the roles played by the pan-Indigenous movement has been to begin to make the mainstream remember all of the past violence, and bring it up at key points. Some examples are:
- When the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting was called the worst mass killing in Virginia history, right around the time that was 400 years after Jamestown, Indigenous people pointed out the inaccuracy.
- When the Vatican attempted to valorize the arrival of Columbus 500 years after 1492, they describing it as "Europeans bearing the gifts of civilization and Christianity to the Indigenous peoples" (Dunbar-Ortiz, p. 197). The entire African delegation walked out of the UN meeting where celebration was proposed. A counterproposal was made to make 1992 the UN year of mourning for the onset of colonialism, African slavery, and genocide. Spain and the Vatican fought it, joined by Latin American countries (except Cuba). The U.S. (under George H.W. Bush) cooperated. The compromise that resulted gave us the Decade for the World's Indigenous Peoples, which began in 1994, inaugurated in December 1992, and August 9 as World Indigenous People's Day. The celebrations of Columbus that were planned flopped, according to Dunbar-Ortiz, and had significant protests.
Despite the protests over commemorating Columbus, the Doctrine of Discovery remains the legal basis for land ownership in the U.S. and for federal law that controls Indigenous peoples' lives. It was codified in the 1823 Supreme Court decision Johnson v McIntosh, written by Justice Marshall. (Overturning that would be an earthquake in the U.S. legal system!)
Dunbar-Ortiz points to the inherent conflict in the idea of forming a "more perfect union" of a multicultural, multiracial democracy when American Indians are sovereign nations colonized by the U.S. She ties the essential verminization of natives to U.S. foreign policy today with our country's anti-terrorism and enemy combatant methods. She describes the John Yoo memos, written during the George W. Bush administration, which used the concept of Homo sacer, from the 1873 Modoc Indian Prisoners Supreme Court decision: "anyone who could be defined as 'Indian' could thus be killed legally, and they also could be held responsible for crimes they committed against any U.S. soldier" (p. 224).
In closing her book, Dunbar-Ortiz uses the phrase "race to innocence": people assume they are innocent of complicity in structures of domination/oppression. This is particularly true of new immigrants and children of recent immigrants, she says, but she was writing in 2014, well before the Trump years when every white person declared themselves innocent of everything. She is having none of it:
"Yet, in a settler society that has not come to terms with its past, whatever historical trauma was entailed in settling the land affects the assumptions and behavior of living generations at any given time, including immigrants and the children of recent immigrants." p. 229
She lists a number of ways all of us who live in a settler society are complicit in its structures: wars of aggression and occupation, "defense" budget and military bases/personnel instead of social services and schools, corporate profits to avoid taxes and the offshoring jobs, mass incarceration, hyper-individualism, high rates of social problems (suicide and gun violence, substance abuse, homelessness, sexual violence). The Civil Rights Movement and other actions toward social justice began to make changes, reach truth and reconciliation, but backlash resulted. And I would add, has accelerated in the last 10 years. It has become a more sophisticated version of the race to innocence.**
Dunbar-Ortiz ends by looking to the future. What steps can begin to make any of this right? Indigenous peoples, she says, "offer possibilities for life after empire, possibilities that neither erase the crimes of colonialism nor require the disappearance of the original people colonized under the guise of including them as individuals" (p. 235):
- Start by honoring the treaties.
- Make Indigenous history integral to curricula.
- Restore sacred sites (the Black Hills, federally held land and items).
- Pay to reconstruct and expand nations. Again, there is a lot of federal land, especially west of the Mississippi. Give it back.
In recent years I have become convinced that putting land into the hands and therefore management of Indigenous people is right in terms of reconciliation and justice, and a climate solution as well. Indigenous leadership against pipeline construction has demonstrated this in multiple places, as Treuer shows by ending with a description of the Dakota Access Pipeline action at Standing Rock.
As he said, "We Indians are a plurality. We have always been a plurality." As such, "we don't have a Martin Luther King... I have always considered this a loss, a gap, a hole. But maybe it's not. Maybe we don't have one because we both don't need and can't have a King" (p. 438).
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*The 14th Amendment had specifically made it clear that Indigenous people were not citizens of the U.S. The 1924 law was passed in part because such a high proportion of Indigenous men had served in World War I. Treuer reports it passed "without much fanfare," and suddenly 300,000 people became citizens of the U.S., as well as their birth nations. Suffrage, however, remained out of reach in many parts of the country until after World War II (pp. 199–201).
**Dunbar-Ortiz includes her version of what I've come to think of as the required statement about responsibility for the past: "while living persons are not responsible for what their ancestors did, they are responsible for the society they live in, which is a product of that past. Assuming this responsibility provides a means of survival and liberation." p. 235
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