Treaties Can End When Land Is Returned

Several years ago I wrote that the struggles between Indians and whites had shifted from the battlefields to the courtrooms. It now appears the battles are shifting to the halls of Congress.

Several Republican representatives and senators are looking at ways to abrogate the treaties between the various Indian nations and the federal government. They are studying the U.S. Constitution, Article II, Section 8 which grants Congress sole authority to “regulate trade with the Indian tribes,” and, according to an article by Carol Sowers in the Arizona Republic, the Supreme Court has interpreted “trade” broadly to include nearly all aspects of federal-tribal affairs.

Sowers begins her article with a paragraph that is clearly editorializing. She writes, “For more than a century, U.S. taxpayers have shelled out hundreds of millions of dollars to subsidize the lives of American Indians: schools, food, clothing, law enforcement, housing and health care.”

What she fails to mention is the millions upon millions of acres of land and the millions of dollars in natural resources the tribes surrendered to the United States in exchange for placing their “X’s” on the very treaties Congress would abrogate.

Sowers continues, “What’s more, are the treaties supposed to last forever? And can and should tribes become more self-sufficient, as some congressmen insist?”

When taking the prime land and resources, did Congress suggest that the land would be returned at a certain date? Obviously no time limit was placed on the continued use of the land or on the dollar amount gained from the extraction of precious metals and minerals. How much did the tribes profit from the lands they surrendered?

Perhaps Sowers should have used a calculator and determined how much the land was (and is) worth and how much wealth was extracted from the earth. The dollar amount taken from the Black Hills of South Dakota, the sacred Paha Sapa of the Lakota, runs into the billions of dollars. The Sioux tribes have received not a single penny of this wealth.

Treaties were documents signed at a different time in the history of the United States and were intended to halt bloodshed and war. Often the treaties were signed with Indian tribes that still had plenty of power and were still capable of inflicting great harm on the invading settlers.

They were mutual peace agreements. Any historian will tell you that many of them contained the phrase “as long as the grass grows and the rivers flow” as the time frame for the life of the treaties. Perhaps Congress merely intended these treaties to be holding patterns until the tribes could be further subjugated, but the tribal leaders who placed their “X’s” on them took them to be the word of one great nation to another.

In lieu of monetary compensation for the land surrendered, most tribes settled for the paltry sums which included an education for their children, health care and self-government. The United States was more than willing to promise these few things in exchange for the millions of acres surrendered.

Sowers writes, “No other ethnic group is guaranteed such benefits, however. Some Republicans are calling for more sacrifice from the tribes in a push to roll back a sizable deficit.” Well, first off, no other ethnic minority gave most of what is now the United States to Congress. Secondly, no other ethnic minority has had to make so many sacrifices in order to just survive in America.

There isn’t an Indian tribe in the United States that has not, at some point in its history, attempted to become self-sufficient. After all, we were selfsufficient long before the advent of the white man. It was a paternalistic Congress that impeded every effort by every tribe to stand on its own. Rather than allow the tribes to decide their own futures, Congress, in a grossly benevolent fashion, set up governmental policies intended to assimilate, to acculturate and eventually to destroy the Indian nations.

So now, as we face a budget deficit that cannot be the fault of the Indian nations, a people, previously pushed onto reservations in order to be out of sight and out of mind, are once again facing the fanaticism of a desperate Congress.

Here we have a country that spends billions of dollars on a single weapon of destruction but is overly concerned with a paltry sum being given to the Indian nations although guaranteed by their predecessors in the still valid treaties. What hypocrisy. What dishonesty.

It has been written that great nations are judged on how they treat their weakest citizens and from day one to the year 1995, the United States of America has nothing to be proud of in the way it has treated the first Americans.

America’s track record with the American Indians is a disgrace so now Congress wants to compound it by making a mockery of the treaties signed between what Indians believed to be two honorable nations.

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