June 13, 2001
Indian Affairs
Many American Indians breathed a sigh
of relief when George Bush picked Gale Norton to head the Interior
Department. It wasn't that Norton had shown much interest in
native issues during her tenure as attorney general of Colorado.
But many Indians had despaired that Bush was going to tap the
former Washington senator Slade Gorton for the post, a man possessed
by an unrelenting hostility toward the aspirations of Indian
people. Indians had spent millions helping to defeat Gorton and
feared that he would be hot for revenge.
And, indeed, the early days
of Norton's tenure seemed promising to many Indian leaders, filled
with alluring inducements about increased mineral revenues, secure
water rights, more spending for schools and health care facilities,
and less federal interference in day-to-day tribal life. During
her senate confirmation hearing, Norton even suggested that reservations
should be viewed as something akin states.
Of course, the Clinton years
had also been infused with evanescent rhetoric about improving
conditions on reservations, addressing problems of environmental
racism and honoring tribal sovereignty. But the 1990s saw little
improvement in the quality of life in Indian country. The numbers
are bleak: more than forty percent of Indians live in substandard
housing, compared to six percent for the rest of the nation.
More than 90,000 Indians remain homeless. Indians are twice as
likely to be murdered as other Americans and their death rate
from alcohol related causes is four times the national average.
According to the American Medical Association, one in five Indian
girls attempt suicide before they leave high school. Only nine
percent of American Indians have college degrees, compared to
22 percent of whites and 20 percent of all Americans. The numbers
go on and on.
But the initial sense of relief
about Norton in Indian country has been short lived. Within the
last month, the Bush administration has put forth a slate of
policies that have outraged tribes across the West, from plans
to open up Watcherman Draw, a sacred site for Crow, Blackfeet
and Cheyenne tribes in Montana's Pryor Mountains, to oil drilling
to Dick Cheney's push to store nuclear waste on Shoshone lands
at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, to gutting of salmon protections
in the Pacific Northwest in order to send more hydropower to
power hungry California.
Bush's pledge to boost funding
for Indian education programs also evaporated. A 1997 GAO report
disclosed the deteriorating conditions of Indian schools: overcrowding,
no air conditioning, inadequate heating, leaking roofs, poor
plumbing systems and backed up sewers. The GAO estimated that
$754 million a year will be needed to bring these schools up
to minimal standards of safety. But the Bush budget requests
only $292 million, a decrease from current levels. School transportation
funds also got slashed.
Indian housing and drug treatment
programs have taken an even bigger hit. The Bush budget slashes
housing block grants to the tribes by more than $52 million.
The cut comes at a time when fewer and fewer Indians can afford
to own their own homes, less than 30 percent according to the
last census compared to 66 percent in the nation at large. Plus,
the Bush budget eliminates entirely the $300 million drug treatment
program that had been administered by the tribes. "These
programs have done well in the past to fill in the gaps of other
HUD programs, as well as to provide more diversity of funds that
can fit the particular needs of each tribe," Chester Carl,
chairman of the National American Indian Housing Council, told
CounterPunch. "Indian country needs more options, not less."
The biggest blow, however,
may have come with Bush's nomination of Neal McCaleb as Assistant
Secretary of Interior for Indian Affairs. McCaleb now serves
as director of Transportation for the state of Oklahoma. But
back in Reagantime, McCaleb was appointed to the Presidential
Commission on Indian Reservation Economies. The panel was headed
up by Robert Robertson, a vice president of Occidental Petroleum,
and was charged with developing ways to open reservations to
"private sector" money. This was during the time that
James Watt denounced reservations as "the last bastion of
socialism in North America."
The real objective of the commission
soon became clear: it sought to reduce the federal obligation
to the tribes while at the same time making it easier for oil,
coal and mining companies to exploit tribal resources. The final
report, released in November 1984, recommended a wholesale assault
on tribal sovereignty and McCaleb, who then ran an architectural
firm in Oklahoma City, became it's chief promoter. Among other
things, the report recommended subjecting tribal courts to the
authority of federal appeals courts, imposing strict limits on
tribal sovereign immunity, getting rid of the BIA, and including
non-tribal members in tribal votes on taxation.
At the time, McCaleb, the most
outspoken supporte of the report, said the commission's report
had been approved on a unanimous vote. Not true says David Matheson,
who was then chairman of the Coeur d'Alene Tribe and a commission
member. McCaleb said we voted for it unanimously, but I didn't,"
says Matheson. "If you become part of a commission like
that and you think you know more than the tribal governments,
then you're wrong. When I hear someone say sovereignty is a problem,
I'm concerned."
Elmer Savilla, former director
of the Tribal Chairman's Association, was more succinct. Savilla
called the McCaleb report "the most dangerous paper on proposed
Indian policy to be written in many years."
For his part, McCaleb doesn't
seem to have retreated from his view that reservations should
be either privatized or simply cut loose from federal supports.
"There's been 150 years of failure and it's obvious that
the federal government is not going to be able to deliver a viable,
self-sustaining economy to the reservations."
These darkening prospects have
prompted a renewed militancy on the part of Indian activists.
In Alaska, for example, the confederation of tribes have decided
to take their complaints against the US government to the United
Nations, who may get a fair hearing with the US voted off the
human rights commissions. They have prepared a human rights complaint
citing dwindling federal funds, crumbling schools and hospitals,
deteriorating roads and mounting levels of white on Indian violence.
The UN option didn't appeal to Senator Frank Murkowski, who summoned
tribal leaders to a hearing Washington on May 11.
Murkowski, who as ranking member
of the Interior Appropriations Committee controls the flow of
federal cash to Indian issues, threatened the tribe, saying that
the UN human rights commission was "a sham" and that
the Indians would "be used improperly by countries whose
primary purpose is to undermine the credibility of the United
States."
But Ed Thomas, head of the
Tlingit and Haida tribes, didn't back down. Thomas told Murkowski
and the Bush crowd had pandered to Indians during the campaign,
but had delivered nothing. "You're quite happy to give hand
outs to city mayors when they come calling, but not to us, even
though tribal needs are often much greater." CP
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