A New Entry For Annals Of Injustice

In the old days, the U.S. government broke treaties with American Indian tribes as quickly as it made them.

First, Uncle Sam forced Native Americans to cede aboriginal lands for a pittance and move onto reservations. Then, the government unilaterally reopened negotiations about those boundaries every time a group of miners or settlers coveted gold or lands within them.

The tribes knew federal negotiators couldn’t be trusted, but they had little power to resist. Those who did were treated ruthlessly.

Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce was hounded by soldiers in his brilliant, yet futile, retreat. The Coeur d’Alenes lost great swaths of their historic lands over the course of several treaties and then saw their diminished reservation opened to homesteading.

The only things of abiding value that the tribes got from the United States were their sovereignty and funding for basic services like health care, housing and education. Now, U.S. Sen. Slade Gorton, R-Wash., is spearheading a move to fatally undermine Indian sovereignty. Worse yet, he’s being sneaky about it.

Without fanfare, Gorton has attached riders to a $13 billion spending bill that contains such provisions dear to President Clinton as funding for new parks and for the National Endowment for the Arts.

One of the measures would force the tribes to waive sovereign immunity from civil lawsuits or lose $767 million, about half of the federal money provided to operate reservations. The other measure would deny funding to tribes if their income was above a certain level.

Without sovereign immunity, the tribes say, they could face bankruptcy by lawsuits and would be unable to operate as governments. And subjecting them to income requirements would be singling them out, they say, because other city and state governments do not have to go through such tests for their share of federal funds.

Incredibly, Gorton proposed his radical changes in a vacuum. No hearings are scheduled. No debate. No trips to Indian reservations.

The legislation apparently is prompted by the mistaken notion that American tribes are cashing in on the casino craze. A handful of America’s 554 tribes have done so. But most of them barely are getting by. Unemployment on the reservations is more than three times the national average, and 38 percent of all Indians age 6 to 11 years old live below the poverty level.

Too much is at stake here to allow this sneak attack. If changes are needed, they should be discussed at length - with the tribes participating equally, as befits their status as nations within a nation.

Broken treaties should be a thing of the past.

, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = D.F. Oliveria/For the editorial board