Cornplanter's Revenge

Why Barack Obama is Good for Indian America

2008-05-05T09:34:00.000-07:00

This is the release by the Obama campaign on what he promises for Indian America:

BARACK OBAMA’S PRINCIPLES FOR STRONGER TRIBAL COMMUNITIES
“Perhaps more than anyone else, the Native American community faces huge challenges that have been ignored by Washington for too long. It is time to empower Native Americans in the development of the national policy agenda.” Barack Obama
The hundreds of Indian tribes in America face a unique set of challenges. Issues like sovereignty, health care, and education—issues that are central to tribes’ future prosperity and embedded in the federal government’s responsibility—are often neglected. Barack Obama is committed to tribal nation building and enforcing the federal government’s obligations to Indian people.
SOVEREIGNTY, TRIBAL-FEDERAL RELATIONS AND THE TRUST RESPONSIBILITY: Native American tribal nations are sovereign, self-governing political entities and enjoy a government-to-government relationship with the United States federal government that is recognized expressly in the U.S. Constitution.
Self-Determination: Barack Obama supports the principle of tribal self-determination, with recognition that the federal government must honor its treaty obligations and fully enable tribal self-governance.
Consultation and Inclusion: In furtherance of the government-to-government relationship, Barack Obama will include tribal leadership in the important policy determinations that impact Indian Country. Obama will appoint an American Indian policy advisor on his senior White House staff so that Indian Country has a direct interface at the highest level of the Obama Administration. In addition, Obama will host a White House “Tribal G8” – an annual meeting with Native American leaders to develop a national Indian policy agenda.
Honoring the Trust Responsibility: Barack Obama recognizes that honoring the government-to-government relationship requires fulfillment of the United States’ trust responsibility to tribes and individual Indians. More specifically, Obama is committed to meaningful reform of the broken system that manages and administers the trust lands and other trust assets belonging to tribes and individual Indians. Further, he is committed to resolving equitably with both tribes and individual Indians litigation resulting from the past failures in the administration and accounting of their trust assets.
HEALTH CARE: The Indian Health Service estimates that it receives only 55 percent of the federal funding it requires. Federal per-capita funding for Indian health care amounts to about half of the federal per capita health funding for federal prisoners. Indians are the most at-risk minority group for health problems like diabetes, which they suffer from at a rate 249 percent higher than the national average. Moreover, Indians have the nation’s highest death rates for tuberculosis and suicide. After Haiti, men on the Pine Ridge and Rosebud Reservations in South Dakota have the lowest life expectancy in the Western Hemisphere.
Indian Health Services: Barack Obama voted in the Senate to provide an additional $1 billion for IHS to address these disparities. Additionally, he was an original cosponsor of the Indian Health Care Improvement Act of 2007 which mandates modernization of the Indian health care system and strengthens urban Indian health facilities. Obama has fought against the Bush Administration’s attempt to eliminate urban health care for Indians not living in reservation communities. Obama opposed a federal land acquisition program that would
have diverted funds from the Special Diabetes Program for Indians and the Alcohol and Substance Abuse program. Obama supports sufficient funding for IHS and proper staffing and maintenance for IHS facilities.
EDUCATION: Education is the key to improving the lives of Native Americans and empowering tribal nations to build a better future. Educational policies in the 1970s attempted to reverse past federal policies aimed at eradicating Native American languages and cultures, but Native Americans still suffer from some of the lowest high school graduation and college matriculation rates in the nation. We must continue to honor our obligations to Native Americans by providing tribes with the educational resources promised by treaty and federal law.
COMMUNITIES
Indian Language Education: Tribes are struggling to preserve their languages. It is estimated that by 2050 only 20 of the over 500 Native languages once spoken will remain. Research shows that instruction in tribal language increases Native American academic performance in other areas like math and science. Barack Obama supports funding for Native language immersion and preservation programs.
No Child Left Behind: The goal of the No Child Left Behind Act is the right one – ensuring that all children meet high education standards – but the law has significant flaws that need to be addressed, including in Indian Country. Unfulfilled promises, ineffective implementation, and shortcomings in the design of the law itself have created countless obstacles for tribal educators. Barack Obama would fund No Child Left Behind and reform the law to better incorporate Title VII, the law’s Indian, Hawaiian, and Alaskan education provision. Obama’s plan would provide greater flexibility in integrating Native languages, cultures, and communities into school programs in a manner consistent with principles of tribal sovereignty.
Early Childhood Education: Research shows that half of low-income children start school up to two years behind their peers in preschool skills and that these early achievement gaps continue throughout elementary school. Barack Obama supports increasing funding for the Head Start program, including the American Indian and Alaska Native Head Start Programs, to provide American Indian preschool children with critically important learning skills. He also appreciates the role of parental involvement in the success of Head Start and has called on states to replicate the Illinois model of Preschool for All. Tribes should also be given the opportunity to implement culturally appropriate versions of this program.
Indian School Construction: Many government-funded Indian schools are dilapidated, and many are simply too small to meet the needs of growing Indian populations. A safe, comfortable place to learn is critical to receiving a proper education. Barack Obama is committed to repairing and building Indian schools.
Tribal Colleges: Tribal colleges have played a critical role in improving the lives of Native Americans. Obama supports increased funding for operations and facility construction, as well as the removal of bureaucratic impediments so tribal colleges can thrive.
RELIGIOUS FREEDOM AND CULTURAL PROTECTION
Cultural Rights and Sacred Places Protection: Native American sacred places and site-specific ceremonies are under threat from development, pollution, and vandalism. Barack Obama supports legal protections for sacred places and cultural traditions, including Native ancestors’ burial grounds and churches.
ECONOMIC & INFRASTRUCTURE DEVELOPMENT: Native Americans experience some of the most severe socioeconomic conditions in the United States. Poverty and its effects are pervasive, with more than quarter of all Native Americans living in poverty and unemployment rates reaching 80 percent on some reservations. Obama’s experience as a community organizer working in poor neighborhoods plagued by high unemployment has taught him that there is no single solution to community poverty. Therefore, he supports using a comprehensive approach that includes investment in physical, human and institutional infrastructure, increased access to capital, the removal of barriers to development, and above all, authentic government-to-government relationships between the federal government and tribes.
Minimum Wage: Barack Obama believes that people who work full time should not live in poverty. In 2007, Obama supported legislation that increased the Federal minimum wage for the first time in 10 years. Even though the minimum wage will rise to $7.25 an hour by 2009, the minimum wage’s real purchasing power will still be below what it was in 1968. As president, Obama will further raise the minimum wage to $9.50 an hour by 2011, index it to inflation and increase the Earned Income Tax Credit to make sure that full-time workers can earn a living wage that allows them to raise their families and pay for basic needs such as food, transportation, and housing – things so many people take for granted.
Housing: The federal government has a moral and legal responsibility to assist tribes in providing housing. Yet, Native Americans suffer from some of the worst housing conditions in the nation. Some 14 percent of all reservation homes have no electricity, and on some reservations, as many as 20 individuals are forced to live in a single-family home. Barack Obama supports increased funding for the Indian Housing Block Grant and other Indian housing programs as well as improving the effectiveness of these programs.
Gaming: The Supreme Court has upheld the right of tribes, as sovereign entities, to operate gaming operations on Indian reservations. A total of 225 of the 558 federally recognized Indian tribes operate gaming facilities, creating 670,000 jobs nationwide and paying $11 billion to the federal and state governments through taxes and other revenue. The vast majority of Indian gaming operations are small enterprises providing jobs to tribal members. Because most tribes continue to suffer from high rates of poverty and unemployment, Barack Obama believes that gaming revenues are important tribal resources for funding education, healthcare, law enforcement, and other essential government functions.
Energy: Tribal nations have joined in America’s quest for alternative, renewable energy. Because of their rural land bases and access to natural resources, many tribes have made great strides in economic development in the energy sector. Tribes have successful operations producing gas, solar, and wind energy. In addition to harnessing and producing energy, tribes have an interest in energy rights-of-way. Barack Obama encourages energy companies and Indian tribes to negotiate in good faith to ensure tribes receive just compensation and in furtherance of carrying sustainable energy to all communities.
WOMEN’S HEALTH: Indians are often subject to unusually harsh conditions when it comes to women’s health. A recent study by Amnesty International details the alarming rates at which Native women are subject to violence. The report states that one in three American Indian women will be raped in their lifetime, and they are more than three times as likely to be raped or sexually assaulted than other women in America.
Reproductive Health: In the past, IHS has been criticized for performing forced sterilizations of Indian women. More recently, many Native women have been pushed to receive one type of contraception instead of more suitable alternatives. Although these women often have no alternative to IHS, the program often does not provide them with adequate reproductive health care, and many women are often denied equal access to birth control, and prenatal care. Barack Obama supports the reproductive health rights of American Indian women, and supports ensuring that they receive equal opportunities to make healthy reproductive choices.
Violence against Women: Violence in Indian country is committed at alarmingly high rates, and all too often Indian women are the victims. Medical facilities are few and far between, and are often not adequately prepared to deal with assault victims. Also, because of the unique jurisdictional scheme on reservations, law enforcement can be slow and difficult to come by. If the perpetrator is non-Indian, then the tribe does not have jurisdiction over the crime. This is alarming when more than 86 percent of assaults against Indian women are committed by non-Indians. State and federal law enforcement officials are often far removed from the situation, and the tribes are left without the authority to protect their people. Barack Obama will reexamine the legal framework that allows such injustices, and supports empowering tribes to combat violence against Native women irrespective of whether the perpetrators are Indian or non-Indian.
Law Enforcement: Barack Obama also supports fully funding the Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) program that many tribal law enforcement agencies have come to rely upon. He also recognizes the important role tribal courts play on the reservation. Obama will continue to support additional resources to strengthen tribal courts as well as correction by statute of the jurisdictional gaps that currently inhibit tribes’ ability to protect their communities..
Detention Centers: There is a demonstrable need for facility improvements and expansions of detention centers in Indian Country. Barack Obama understands that federal funding of such improvements is essential to enable tribe’s to effectively protect their communities.
METHAMPHETAMINES: In a 2006 survey, 74 percent of tribal law enforcement officials reported methamphetamines to be the leading threat to their tribes’ livelihood. The same survey reported dramatic increases in cases of domestic violence, child neglect, sex crimes, and weapons charges.
Combat Meth Act of 2005: Barack Obama supported the Combat Meth Act of 2005, major parts of which became law in 2006. The act puts federal funds into the fight against methamphetamine, provides assistance to children affected by meth abuse, and places restrictions on the sale of the ingredients used to make the drug.
Tribal empowerment: Barack Obama believes that funding tribal police programs and tribal courts and resolving longstanding jurisdiction issues will enable tribal authorities to deal more effectively with the causes and effects of this and other crime problems on Indian land.
VETERANS AFFAIRS: Native Americans serve in the armed forces at a higher rate than any other minority group in America. Native Americans have served in every war, and their special place in American military history is widely recognized. The first woman to die in combat in the Iraq war was a young Native American woman. World War II’s Codetalkers are the most celebrated examples of how Indians have been critical to the success of American efforts overseas. As a member of the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee, Obama supports several Veteran measures, including the sheltering and rehabilitation of homeless veterans, securing veterans’ benefits, and easing service members’ transition back into society.
HUNTING AND FISHING: Hunting and fishing are important to many tribes’ diet, culture, and spirituality. Protecting hunting and fishing rights ensures that tribes are able to carry on those aspects of their traditional way of life.
Fishing Rights: The fishing rights of Indian tribes are guaranteed not only by 150 year-old treaties, but by the Supreme Court’s affirmation of the Boldt decision as well. It is our shared duty to uphold these obligations and protect fisheries in such a manner that allows tribal and non-tribal fishing to continue into the future.
The path to equitable fishery management is paved with good science. Barack Obama supports initiatives to improve the science and our understanding of our nation’s fish stocks. Through improved science, we can better guide decisions about how to protect the health of fish stocks, and, in turn, ensure a better, more secure and predictable future for our nation’s fishermen.
“We’ve got to make sure we are not just having a BIA that is dealing with the various Native American tribes; we’ve got to have the President of the United States meeting on a regular basis with the Native American leadership and ensuring relationships of dignity and respect.” Barack Obama, Elko, NV, January 18, 2008

Everyone's Grandmother

2008-05-01T15:53:00.000-07:00

Elizabeth Winnie Waterman was a tall woman and she spoke almost no English. When she might have spoken English, she preferrred her native Seneca language. She was born on the Cattaraugus reservation of the Seneca Nation in 1865 at the end of the Civil War. Her father John Winnie was from Canada. Her mother Eliza Mohawk was a revered medicine person, known as a doctor because she diagnosed and developed treatments for physical ills. She was also born and grew up on the Seneca Nation at Cattaraugus, New York.

The photographs of Elizabeth in her youth reveal a handsome young woman. Those who knew her say she was forthright and clearly the leader of her family after her mother died. Elizabeth practiced midwifery until the week she died at the age of 76. She was on her way to deliver a baby when she fell in a snowstorm and could not get up. She was missed at the home she was walking to and a search ensued. Sometime after she was found she contracted pneumonia and died.

Her equally handsome husband was from Stockbridge-Munsee in Wisconsin. His father had been removed from Cattaraugus to Wisconsin by the United States with a big nudge by the U.S. Army. The Stockbridge had originated in Massachusetts, part of the enormous group of nations known as the Anishinabe. By the time the Civil War was underway, they had been removed to far away Wisconsin. So two Waterman brothers and their families, practically walked back to New York and the Seneca Nation that they had come to feel at home on. Young John Waterman and his brother married two sisters and the families settled in at Cattaraugus. Another brother moved east to Onondaga and married there. That is how the Waterman name became established in the Seneca and Onondaga Nations.

Eliza Mohawk was Seneca through and through. Her membership in one of the medicine societies signified the status of her family. Her personality shone through as sure and confident, attributes needed for a doctor. People noticed her easy laugh and the grace of her small frame. No wonder John Winnie was attracted to her. He was about ten years older than her. They settled in on the southeast corner of the reservation. They had a lot of land for two people as we can see from all that was given or left to Elizabeth and her husband John's children.

Everything went well until John joined the Union Army. Like so many other Indian men the only warrior's path that was opportunities open to him was that of his former enemy. He served diligently, but during night manuveurs he fell into a ditch and hurt himself badly.That ended his active career and he was mustered out as a veteran. For Eliza, like thousands of Indian Union widows, she was denied a pension. She spent the rest of her life trying to get the pension so she and her children could live with some security but approval never came.

More on the life of Elizabeth Waterman to come.

The Holocaust in America

2008-05-01T15:42:00.000-07:00

Whenever a people are killed, imprisoned, or enslaved just for who they are and this is done by people who have the power to do it, that is a holocaust. Formerly used to describe an overwhelming fire, the Ha-Shoah of the Jews in World War II took the english word holocaust. It means the fire, from the Greek, originally referred to fire consumption of sacrifices.

Elie Wiesel, the so-called "Nazi hunter," was a champion of defining the Jewish holocaust, but he was also an outspoken critic who said the Nazi killing of Gypsies, Catholics, and others should not be considered as part of the holocaust. In that way, the holocaust became a numbers game and an exclusionary attempt to make the Jewish holocaust the primary and only example of wide scale genocide in the world. For a long time he got away with it, but now, because genocidal practices are still going on and because other genocide has not been recognized and acknowledged, his arguments are losing credibility in world opinion. Wiesel's writing and influence, along with others made holocaust a singular term and conferred on it the status of "Holocaust" with a capital "H" meant to mean only the genocide against the Jews in World War II.

I have been studying the origins of the war between Minnesota Europeans and the Dakota people in 1862. The antecedents of this war go back a hundred years, more if the French incursions are considered before the 1754-1763 "French Indian War." At the onset of that war, when Wabasha I, who was born at Mille Lacs, went to Canadian territory to meet with the British, an alliance was formed. Meanwhile, the French had already recruited the Ojibwe to the French cause. 100 years later, the Americans and British, having settled their differences, left the Dakota poor and hungry. Is this not a holocaust? Death by war, perhaps not, but death by usurpation, death by starvation, and death by trickery, and death by squeezing the Dakota off their land. That was a holocaust.

I believe the Dakota people are owed an apology, not just by the United States, but also by the United Kingdom and the French government. There is still a long way to go in understanding what happened to the Dakota and their allies who lived along the Mississippi and its connecting rivers. France claimed the Dakota and other Native National lands. The Louisiana Purchase of 1806 by the U.S. contained a provision in Article VI in which the United States agreed to make compacts with the tribes in the sale territory. But the treacherous United States Congress reneged on the Dakota agreements, lied about what it promised, and in the end hanged the largest number of men and boys in the history of the country. It is a record that still stands.

It is a record of infamy. In the Nuremberg trials after World War II, the defense tried to say that little was known about the killings of Jews and of those who did know, little was known about the number killed. The prosecution response was that the number killed was not the point. It was the intent. So Americans can say that 38 is not such a big number, but we know it was the intent.

Are there other holocausts? Assuredly there were and still are in countries such as Brazil. I do think it is the responsibility of the countries who are guilty to admit their guilt and apologize, amend, and commemorate these holocausts. But I think it is the role of we the Indian people to tell these histories and let the world know what really happened in this country and the entire Western Hemisphere. We are the authentic voice and we must be heard.

JUDGING CHARACTER BY WHAT WE SEE NOT WHAT WE KNOW

2007-03-20T01:06:00.000-07:00

We have had a lot of news and comment about Somali cab drivers who won't pick up blind persons with seeing eye dogs. And the constant drumbeat about who is better qualified in school and who is making most of the trouble in public schools is also a topic of extensive comment.

We see comments about this or that group, which comes from seeing what is in front of us rather than an understanding of who the people are.

I do think we have a tendency to look at who is here and assume that means the entire group is defined by those smaller numbers. It certainly was true that the European immigrants of the last 23 million (1880s to 1920s) contrasted in that Jews were not representative of all Jews but Italians were representative of southern Italy.

Now we have Asians and Africans. At some point we will sort that out, too, but it is my unscientific observation that the Hmong immigrants are more representative of the spectrum of their group at home than other Asians who are here might be. The Hmong come in for some unfair comparison criticism as a result.

With American Indians you have the spectrum for sure except that so many were killed or died from European diseases, those who are left may not be as representative as one would hope. It is a population in recovery.

And with Mexicans and Central Americans - this group is highly representative of survivors of either earlier invasions and disease or more recent military actions in their home countries. Who we have here as far as representation is unknown, I think.

With African Americans, we have a preponderance of surviving members from certain areas, not all of Africa, so we should not try to draw broad conclusions. This population has become a truly American group but with a history of brutal killings and diseases suffered that went unchecked. It is a population in recovery.

You might say Africans on the whole represent the world's greatest diversity and American Indians on the whole represent a high degree of relatedness. Both groups have shown tremendous resilience and once allowed to recover their numbers sufficiently (post Civil War and post Great Depression) are now producing many examples of successful individuals who work in every walk of the American power and professional classes.

With Somali and other refugees from East Africa, I think it is hard to know and the taxi, pork handling, dog issues may be more local based on who is here than on Somali attitudes across the U.S. or in Somalia for that matter.

So I am just saying it is hard to talk of minorities and immigrants with a broad brush. We don't know really how representative the groups that live here are or whether they reflect the full population of their homelands.

Mr. Mork speaks of the earlier Europeans to the American continent. It seems clear from the record that those numbers were highly selective at either end of the spectrum from educated professionals to indentured servants. That very imbalance made it relatively easy for the elites to decide on the shape and content of the American government. No storming of the Bastille for them. From that juncture we derive an understanding of accomplished democracy when that was never the fact. It is a process that is yet unfolding.

That's not such a bad idea. We have to keep working on inclusion, day and night. The more the Western European group loses its demographic advantage in the democratic process, the more we will experience the joys of an unstratified society. I look forward to it.

MINNEAPOLIS LIBRARIES COULD COLLABORATE

2007-03-13T18:47:00.000-07:00

Definitions
･ Coordination: The organization of efforts of different parties to reach a common goal. High-stakes issues are not often involved, and parties need not carry a relationship beyond the accomplishment of the task at hand. The goal is static.
Cooperation: A means to an end that involves gains and losses on the part of each participant. This can sometimes foster a competitive environment, and parties need not carry a relationship beyond the accomplishment of the task at hand. The goal is static.
Definitions
Collaboration: All parties work together and build consensus to reach a decision or create a product, the result of which benefits all parties. Competition is a nearly-insurmountable roadblock to collaboration, and the relationship among parties must continue beyond the accomplishment of the task in order to assure its viability. The goal is dynamic.
COLLABORATION
Cross institutional collaboration is an important and often undervalued and overlooked means of extending the reach and capacities of any given institution.
-Wikipedia
Comparison
The general definition of a team is an interdependent group, which suggests that collaborative groups are teams, coordinated groups are not, and cooperative groups may or may not be. Where do teams, partnerships, and joint ventures fit in this schema? Partnerships and joint ventures are both primarily cooperative undertakings, whose objectives evolve over time.
COMPARING PURPOSES

Coordination: Avoid gaps & overlap in individuals' assigned work
Cooperation: Obtain mutual benefit by sharing or partitioning work
Collaboration: Achieve combined results that the participants would be incapable of accomplishing by working alone
EXAMPLES
Coordination: Project to implement an IT application across the MPLS system or city
Cooperation: Summer reading program in the library, parks, school libraries
Collaboration: Discovery of a dramatically better way to deliver services; Co-creation
THE ENVIRONMENT
Collaboration is future directed
It comes about in a reform environment
It can link institutions and governments in new ways
It holds the promise of preventing dismantlement in hard times
It brings people to the table to create new solutions
MINNESOTA TRENDS
In 2003, the Association of Minnesota Counties retained the public affairs firm of Himle-Horner to assess critical issues for county government in Minnesota and assist in the formulation of recommendations for the future direction of county government.
Survey
Survey/Poll Himle Horner contracted with the Twin Cities survey firm Decision Resources, Ltd. to conduct a scientific random-sample statewide telephone survey of 800 Minnesotans. Decision Resources conducted the survey fieldwork/interviewing and compiled the data tables.
FINDINGS OF INTEREST TO MPLS
When asked to generally evaluate Minnesota's tax climate, only 23% supported an increase in taxes to improve government services, compared with 47% who felt Minnesota taxes were already too high. Asked to look specifically at property taxes raised by counties, only 10% preferred having counties increase property taxes in reaction to their current budget situations, compared to 16% who want services reduced and 59% who want counties to find new ways to deliver services.
Public Supports FindingNew Ways to Deliver Services
Public Focused on Reform Rather than Cuts
Public wants changes in service delivery, not cuts in services.
Support exists for reprioritizing county functions within current budget
New Minnesota model is service reform
Public’s attitude is not a California tax revolution (for now).
Attitudes on Taxes Differ Geographically

Federal Indian Education

2007-03-13T18:46:00.001-07:00

1. The Snyder Act Public Law 67-85 25 U.S.C 13 November 2nd, 1921, Under Section 13. Expenditure of appropriations by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, this law enables the Bureau of Indian Affairs to “expend such moneys as Congress may from time to time appropriate, for the benefit, care, and assistance of the Indians throughout the United States for the following purposes: General support and civilization, including education.”
Two important amendments to this law are: any “institution of higher education” administered by the Secretary of the Interior is eligible for funds authorized by the Higher Education Act of 1965. (25 U.S.C. 13); and, Section 8 of Public Law 93-638 (enacted January 4, 1975) 88 Stat. 2206, adds that any funds appropriated for any fiscal year which are not obligated and expanded shall remain available for obligation and expenditure during a succeeding year.
2. The Johnson O'Malley Act of 1934, as amended. Provides federal funding for formula-based supplemental education programs to tribes and state public schools for the special educational needs of Indian students. Requires local Indian education committees to review applications and be involved in operations. Tribes receive preference when applying for JOM funding through the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
3. The Impact Aid Laws of 1950, Public Laws 81-874 and 81-815, as amended. Provide federal subsidies to state public school districts to construct facilities ('815) and educate children residing on federal lands including Indian country ('874). Amendments were passed in 1978 based on the government-to-government relationship between the United States and Indian tribes. These amendments require school districts to have policies and procedures which ensure that Indian parents and tribes have an opportunity to comment on the funding application process and are consulted in the development of school programs. Indian tribes may also file complaints with the Secretary of Education against school districts for violation of Impact Aid policies and procedures.
4. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, Public Law 89-10, as amended. Provides supplemental federal funding for a variety of education programs including those that are known today as Chapter 1 and Bilingual Education. Both Chapter 1 and Bilingual Education funding may be provided to state public schools, Bureau of Indian Affairs schools, and to tribal contract or grant schools.
Chapter 1 formula-based funding provides supplemental educational services and programs, usually to develop basic academic skills, for disadvantaged youth including Native Americans. Bilingual Education competitive, discretionary funding provides supplemental bilingual education services and programs for limited English proficient youth including Indians. Both programs have a parent advisory committee requirement to provide schools with advice in the planning, implementation, and evaluation of their programs and services. This requirement may be waived and the elected school board may serve as a PAC in tribal contract and grant schools.
5. The Head Start Program Act of 1965, as amended. Provides formula-based federal funding for comprehensive health, educational, nutritional, social, and other services to economically disadvantaged preschool children including children on federally recognized Indian reservations. Federally recognized Indian tribes may directly receive Head Start funding and operate Head Start programs for Indian children on their reservations.
6. The Indian Elementary and Secondary School Assistance Act of 1972, Public Law 92-318, as amended. Provides formula-based federal funding for supplemental programs known as Title V. These programs are designed to meet the special educational or culturally related academic needs of Indian students. Title V formula funds may be provided to state public schools, Bureau of Indian Affairs schools, and tribal contract and grant schools. Indian parent advisory committees must approve Title V programs and be involved in program administration in the state public schools.
This Act also makes tribes eligible for certain competitive, discretionary grants for elementary and secondary school demonstration and pilot projects, special teacher training programs, Indian controlled schools projects, and adult education programs.
7. The Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act of 1975, Public Law 93-638, as amended. Allows Indian tribes to contract for the operation of schools that were formerly operated by the Bureau of Indian Affairs or that were funded by the BIA and privately operated. Authorizes direct funding to tribal schools for programs and operations that are regulated under the Education Amendments of 1978, Public Law 95-561.
8. The Education Amendments of 1978, Public Law 95-561, as amended provide broad statutory guidance to schools that are operated or funded by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Provides for Indian school boards in BIA operated schools. Requires the BIA to actively consult with tribes in all matters that relate to Bureau schools. Allows the Secretary of the Interior to implement cooperative agreements between tribes, school boards of Bureau schools, and state public school districts. Establishes formula-based funding for all BIA operated schools and BIA funded tribal schools. Requires that such schools be accredited or meet standards that are equal to or exceed those accreditation requirements. Allows tribes to set academic standards for BIA operated or funded schools that take into account the specific needs of Indian children.
9. The Tribally Controlled Community College Assistance Act of 1978, Public Law 98-192, as amended. Provides federal funding for post-secondary institutions controlled by Indian tribes. Tribal governments now operate 24 tribally controlled colleges. Two of these colleges are four-year institutions.
10. The Indian Education Act of 1988, Public Law 100-297, as amended. Allows tribes to operate BIA funded schools as grant schools rather than as contract schools. Grant school funding allows tribal schools to receive funding on a more timely basis, to invest those funds under certain restrictions, and to use the interest gained for further educational costs in their schools. This Act also authorizes federal funding for tribal early childhood programs and tribal departments of education. To date no money has been appropriated for tribal departments of education.
11. The Carl D. Perkins Vocational and Applied Technology Education Act of 1990, Public Law 101-392. Provides funding for competitive, discretionary project grants that will provide vocational education opportunities for Indians. Allows tribes and tribal organizations to plan, conduct, and administer vocational education programs that will provide Indian students with skills related to jobs or further post-secondary training. Also allows tribal post-secondary institutions to compete for post-secondary vocational education grants.
12. The Native American Languages Act of 1990, Public Law 101-477. Recognizes the right of Indian tribes to use their native languages to conduct tribal business and as a medium of instruction in all Bureau of Indian Affairs funded schools. Directs federal agencies to consult with tribes in evaluating the agencies' policies and procedures and bringing these in compliance with the Act.
13. The Goals 2000: Educate America Act, Public Law 103-227. Provides funds and a framework for schools to meet the National Education Goals. Includes American Indian and Alaska Native students in public schools and allots set-aside funds for schools operated or funded by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Authorizes the Secretary of the Interior to establish a plan to develop a reform and improvement plan for BIA education and to conduct a cost analysis of BIA academic and home living/residential standards. Specifically mentions Indian education in the activities of the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI), including placing the Director of BIA Education on the National Educational Research Policy and Priorities Board and the inclusion of American Indian and Alaska Native students in OERI research institutes/activities.
14. The Improving America's School Act of 1994, Public Law 103-382. Amends the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, including Title I (formerly Chapter 1), Bilingual Education, Impact Act, and Title IX. This Act also amends the Education Amendments of 1978, which pertain to Bureau of Indian Affairs schools and programs. This Act also provides land-grant status to tribal colleges in accordance with the provisions of the Act of July 2, 1962.
15. The No Child Left Behind Act, Public Law No. 107-110, 115 Stat. 1907 (2001). The statutory policy provisions for this program were amended to state that it is the policy of the United States to fulfill the federal government's unique and continuing trust relationship with and responsibility to the Indian people for the education of Indian children, and the federal government will continue to work with the public school districts, Indian tribes and organizations, post-secondary institutions, and other entities toward the goal of ensuring that programs that serve Indian children are of the highest quality and provide for not only the basic elementary and secondary educational needs, but also the unique educational and culturally related academic needs of these children.
The primary objective of this program is to provide federal financial assistance to support public school districts, BIA funded schools, and, in some instances, tribes, in their efforts to meet the unique educational and culturally related academic needs of American Indian and Alaska Native students. 20 U.S.C. 7402(a).
Funds under this program must be used for the establishment, maintenance, and operation of supplementary comprehensive programs that are specifically designed to meet the needs of Indian students, including language and culture needs, and to assist Indian students in meeting state content and student academic performance standards. 20 U.S.C. §§7424(b) and 7425.
Programs and projects must be designed in response to a locally conducted needs assessment and with the full cooperation and involvement of an elected Indian parent committee. 20 U.S.C. §7424(c)Programs, projects, and activities may include culturally related activities, early childhood and family programs for school readiness, enrichment programs that directly support the attainment of state academic content and achievement standards, career preparation activities, substance abuse prevention activities, culturally responsive teaching activities, and tribal curriculum. 20 U.S.C. §7425(b).

American Indian Education

2007-03-13T18:37:00.000-07:00

Demographics & Education Status

Indian education sprang from the misguided notion that assimilated Indians would be happy Indians. They would not be Indians at all, in fact. That was the goal of government and the religious community. For two hundred years, the federal government and the states have had great difficulty reconciling a free country with free nations located within the boundaries of that country. The Declaration of Independence itself stated an unreasonable and unfounded fear when it described the American Indian in this way: "HE {the King} has excited domestic Insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the Inhabitants of our Frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known Rule of Warfare, is an undistinguished Destruction of all Ages, Sexes and Conditions."

The belief that when Indians are educated, the courses provided should be in the mechanical and domestic areas operationally persisted well into the 1960s. Strong undertones of racism larded reports that identified Indians as "good with their hands," or possessing "natural" artistic abilities. An entire school of art was developed and taught to Indians early in this century, leading to Indian "genre" art expression in painting and sculpture.

Understanding the losses sustained by the tribes begins with looking at the loss of homelands. The land area of the United States is 2,423,884,160 acres. Excluding Indian lands and other trust areas, federal lands total 549,473,923 acres, or about 23% of all land belonging to states. Federal land areas vary throughout the states, from 63% of Utah to less than .5% of Iowa.

American Indians and Alaska Natives currently hold 100,015,221 acres of tribal lands in 33 States (excluding Hawaii), or a little over 4% of their original land base. There is very little room to grow.
Over 2.3 million people identify themselves as American Indians, an increase of 38% over the previous decade. However, to be identified as an Indian and recognized as such by the United States, an individual must be a confirmed citizen of a tribe. That number is thought to be around 1.9 million. Conflicting numbers arise when counts are attempted for reservation and urban dwellers.
It is generally estimated that 80% of the Indian population lives away from tribal homelands. This is in part due to the former U.S. government policy of removing Indians to distant cities and in part to the inability of the mostly rural and thus isolated Indian nations to sustain growing populations.

From a base that incorporates the U.S. Constitution mandate with respect to Indian nations and the many hundreds of treaties and laws, the United States has undertaken its charge as trustee. The federal agency charged with the responsibility of executing the trust responsibility of the United States is the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). There are twelve geographic area offices of the BIA.
Below is the 1995 BIA estimate of Indians living on or near tribal lands in the service areas, showing the population subset of children under 16 years of age. The BIA is careful to caution that these numbers have not been finalized and will be tested by the 2000 Census.The Census Bureau puts the median age for all Indians at 27, ten years younger than the median for the white population.
The average representation of the under 16s is 34%, with a high of 40% for Anadarko (Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas and a part of Nebraska), and a low of 29% for Sacramento (California). However, Anadarko does not have the highest population. Muskogee has a much higher population and thus has more children under the age of 16.

TOTAL

CHILDREN UNDER 16

ABERDEEN AREA OFFICE

128,412

41,813

33%

ALBUQUERQUE AREA OFFICE

59,598

18,668

31%

ANADARKO AREA OFFICE

45,535

18,224

40%

BILLINGS AREA OFFICE

42,427

15,943

38%

EASTERN AREA OFFICE

50,272

16,187

32%

JUNEAU AREA OFFICE

85,259

28,040

33%

MINNEAPOLIS AREA OFFICE –

76,883

23,963

31%

MUSKOGEE AREA OFFICE

284,740

91,426

32%

NAVAJO AREA OFFICE

225,668

87,736

39%

PHOENIX AREA OFFICE

100,854

33,366

33%

PORTLAND AREA OFFICE

104,841

37,951

36%

SACRAMENTO AREA OFFICE

55,717

16,284

29%

1,260,206

429,601

34%

Generally, American Indians have a poverty rate of nearly one-third (compared to 13% national poverty rate, a high school dropout rate of 34%, and a four-year college degree attainment rate of 9.4%. The number of families are 450,000, 34.2% of which are single parent households. These characteristics vary considerably from one geographic area to another, but as averages, they describe a population under stress.

Tribes have control of tribal schools and aspects of federal schools, however, not every tribe operates a school system or has a federal school nearby. Eighty seven percent of all Indian elementary and secondary students go to state public schools, even on reservations. Under current federal law, tribes have yet to define their rights and roles in relation to state public schools, according to the Native American Rights Fund.

The U.S. National Center for Education Statistics, reports that in 1995, 131.3 thousand Indians were enrolled in college, of which number 120.7 thousand were undergraduates, 8.5 thousand were graduates, and 2.1 thousand were first professionals (law, medicine, etc.).

In terms of degrees earned, distribution for the Indian population is very small compared to other groups. For example, for 1994, 4,975 earned associate’s degrees, 6,189 earned bachelor’s degrees, 1,697 earned master’s degrees, 134 earned doctor’s degrees and 371 earned professional degrees. No other group is even close to this low attainment record. Of 41,610 doctorates conferred in 1995, 77.1% went to whites, 4.6% to Blacks, 13.5% to Asians, 3.3% to Hispanics and 1.6% to persons of unknown background. Only 0.5 went to Indians. This includes zero for Indians in Earth Sciences and Computer Sciences, two very important academic fields with high worker demands.

The significance of these figures to Indian education can be found among the 5,260,000 instructional faculty in the U.S. Of the total, 2,820,000 (54%) are between 46 and 60 years of age. This group will retire in ever increasing numbers starting in 2003. The numbers retiring now are already said to be larger than the replacement rate. Indians are only 3,000 of the faculty now. If low numbers continue for master’s and doctoral programs, the effect will be extremely negative on future quality of Indian education.

With 429,60l Indian children under the age of 16 (table above), the potential is there to raise the number of Indian earned doctorate and professional degrees considerably in the next decade. But, there are many factors working against this outcome.
Indian Education’s Bitter Legacy

It is extremely difficult for today’s tribes to overcome the history of educational experiments on Indians and the terrible effect this had on generations of people. The inability of the federal government to conduct successful social programs is nowhere better exemplified than in its record regarding Indian education.

From the provision in the U.S. Constitution reserving the federal right to transact with Indians to the end of treaty-making in 1871, the federal government in its various administrative departments along with Congress, attempted to address a range of social issues facing Indian people. This included education. After pushing Indians onto lands that could not support them, government then had to bring in food for distribution.

From the beginning, corruption was evident in the system. The federal practice of tribal allocations was operated under the worst set of colonialist attitudes imaginable. This included theft, inferior goods, services not rendered, immorality, and inhumane cruelty. Right up until 1952, tribes were actually charged for the provisions they received—recorded as "offsets" of lease payments and sales of minerals, land, timber and other natural resources. This despite the wording of treaties and the presumed reluctance of the government to give back the land ceded by the tribes.

Education followed a similar misguided and corrupt pattern. From the beginning, the intent of the U.S. government was to make Indians into white people. Only European education was considered. All of Indian life: culture, education, social and political systems, norms and religion were disregarded.

There was no uniform agreement among tribes that European education was desirable. Some embraced it in a desire to be progressive, others refuted it for teaching the wrong skills for the Indian environment. Treaties from 1794 (with the Oneidas), included education provisions, but not all treaties contained them. A national Indian education policy did not develop until 1802, when Congress provided that thereafter there would be an annual appropriation "...for teaching their children reading, writing, and arithmetic, and for performing such other duties as may be enjoined according to such instructions and rules as the President may give and prescribe for the regulation of their conduct..."

In a blatant transgression of the separation of church and state, the President handed over the job of educating Indians to Christian religious groups. This top-down policy having no regulation or monitoring, resulted in widespread corruption, extreme cruelty to the children, and it started to produce generations of children forced into long separations from their families. Meanwhile, other Indian policies were forcing families into poverty and dependency.
Not all tribes capitulated. The Choctaw (1805) and Cherokee (1841) ran public school systems for their citizens even before an American system developed.

Interestingly, most of the money for the misbegotten federal school system did not come from Congress. For example, from 1845 to 1855, Congress spent $102,000, the tribes spent $400,000, private donations paid $830,000, and $824,000 came from treaty funds (funds owed Indians from land and other sales). The money, regardless of source, was issued without controls on the missionary operators of the schools.

A secular approach to Indian education came about after the Civil War. In 1878, the United States Indian Training and Industrial School at Carlisle, Pennsylvania was authorized. On October 6, 1879, Lieutenant General Richard Henry Pratt, after months of recruiting in the Black Hills, brought 82 innocent children to Carlisle. It was the middle of the night and the BIA had not delivered the promised provisions and furnishings for the children. That was the ominous beginning of the federal boarding school system which still exists today.

Although secular, Pratt said of his mission, "In Indian civilization I am a Baptist, because I believe in immersing the Indians in our civilization and when we get them under, holding them there until they are thoroughly soaked."

His goal, Pratt said, was to "Convert him in all ways but color into a white man and in fact the Indian would be exterminated, but humanely, and as beneficiary of the greatest gift at the command of the white man - his own civilization."

It made no difference that Pratt was not an educator, or that he summarily cut the hair of the children (an act reserved for the death of a loved one) and put them in itchy woolen uniforms. He practiced military drill as a means of discipline and control. Carlisle stayed open until 1917. No Indian child who entered the school was ever allowed to speak his or her birth language.

Pratt thought Indians should be schooled in the practical arts. No academics for them. Training was the model. He went so far as to take squadrons of students and put them on exhibit at the (Chicago) Columbian Exposition in 1891. Rows of Indian children marched, holding the implements of farming, cooking, sewing, and mechanics.

In a letter home, published in the school newspaper (and thus approved) Harry Shirley, a young Caddo boy, wrote to his father: "And I am coming home in two years from now if Captain Pratt will let me and how are you getting along with the big house and will you tell me in your letter when you write and we get at Carlisle on Thursday and when we got here I did not like the place but since I have being here two or three days I have got used to the place and I like it very well but when we got I felt very home sick and be sure and send my bow and some spike arrows. And we go to church every Sunday. And I have a blue suit to where and there was one Shyenne boy shot himself with a pistol..."

The fear felt by this little boy comes through clearly, despite the cheerful prose. He asks for his bow and arrows twice in the letter and earlier mentions the death of a "Negro boy" in a railroad mishap.
As with other types of boarding schools, putting large numbers of children together invited infectious disease and contagion. Large numbers of children succumbed to illness. The cemetery at Carlisle and at all federal boarding schools, grew as the years went by.
Pratt was able to convince Indian leaders to send their sons and daughters to the school, although it is highly unlikely he told them what he told the white public about his motives. The children of American Horse, Spotted Tail, Two Strike and even Red Cloud’s grandson were sent to Carlisle. Spotted Tail was clear about why he wanted his children to go to school: he wanted to deal more effectively with an untrustworthy government. Treaty violations and encroachment into the Black Hills was commonplace only three years after the defeat of Custer.

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Essays by Laura Waterman Wittstock

"Seeing Whiteness" Essay | "American Democracy: An Invention or a Discovery?" | "Calling the Color Question" | "American Indian Alcoholism's Dark Past & Uncertain Future" | "Native Women and American Feminism" | "Press Coverage of American Indians" | "Minnesota Tribal Sovereignty" | "Rural American Indian Education: A Review of Issues"
Rural American Indian Education: A Review of Issues--Continued
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There seemed to be no end to the federal Indian education policy. No one feared reprisal for the wrongs committed and public opinion, although divided, was not greatly divided. Confident Indian commissioners sent in reports describing their work and popular writers expressed the sentiments of many.

Charles M. Harvey, writing in the Atlantic in 1906 stated, "To tempt the Indian into individual ownership Congress in 1862 passed an act to protect him in the enjoyment of his property if he would abandon his tribe and live the white man's life. As a further incentive Congress in 1875 passed a law to give him a share of his tribe's property if he would give up the tribe and settle on a quarter section of land under the free homes law signed by Lincoln in 1862. In 1877 an act was passed making appropriations to educate Indians for citizenship, and in 1887 one granting citizenship to all Indians who, separated from their tribes, accepted lands in severalty, and adopted civilized life. This act was extended to the Five Tribes of the Indian Territory in 1901, and thus covered all the red men in the United States."

"What use is the Indian making of his opportunities? Let these facts answer. Outside of those in the Five Tribes, in New York, and in Alaska, 30,000 Indians are attending school, or one out of every six of the population. Of these, 26,000 are in the government's 257 schools, and 4000 are in schools supported by churches or by contracts with the government. Civilized clothes are worn wholly by 116,000 Indians, and are worn partly by 44,000; nearly all of these reside in dwelling-houses; 70,000 talk English enough for ordinary purposes, and most of them can read it; and 40,000 are members of churches."

Harvey proudly states, "Only 26,000 blanket Indians are left in the United States."

Then in a marvelous string of prose, Harvey paints an overwrought picture of the dying Indian culture for his readers:
"Down in the foothills of the Wichita Mountains of Oklahoma the Comanches' Epictetus, the aged Quanah Parker, discourses philosophy and stoically awaits the end. Like the Moorish king Abu Abdallah, looking mournfully backward at his lost Granada, Geronimo, from Fort Sill, gazes westward across prairies and hills to the Arizona of his great days, which he will not see again. Up at Pine Ridge agency the Sioux nonogenarian Red Cloud, the most famous of living Indian warriors, who could tell as many marvels as Aeneas told to Dido, refuses to accept the government's offer of an allotment of land, and goes down, like Dickens's Steerforth in the storm at Yarmouth, waving his hand defiantly in the face of destiny."
Ninety two years later, if Harvey were alive today, he would be astounded at the status of American Indians. What the tribes lost in education, they won in sovereignty protection in the courts. Had they not won, perhaps Harvey’s predictions could have come true. The reality is quite different. Now, from a position of strengthened sovereign status as recognized by the federal courts, all manner of treaty-based, trust responsibility mandates are on the books in support of Indian education.

Indian Education’s Great Potential

One hundred years ago, through the benevolence of some benefactors a few Indians became doctors, engineers and received other advanced degrees. But by the 1920s, the norm was more of the numbing curriculum of animal husbandry, mechanics, and "domestic science," very much like that designed by General Pratt. The only change was the relentless attacks on Indian culture had begun to ease. After Pratt resigned from Carlisle in 1904, Indian culture found some acceptability. Without the strength of will of individuals like Pratt, crushing Indian culture became less of a priority.

Now, the old ideas are gone, culture has made a dramatic comeback, languages are being studied and preserved, but educational practice is still stuck in the 1950s, when industrial and manufacturing jobs were plentiful. The overwhelming majority of Indian students are not educated to go on to higher education and professions. Support is there, for the few. But if the numbers were 50% higher, the strain on resources would be tremendous.

The BIA offers the following programs:
The Higher Education Grant Program is available to an individual who is a member of a Federally recognized Indian tribe. The program provides financial aid to eligible students, based on demonstrated financial need, who have plans to attend an accredited institution of higher education.

Graduate Funding: Funding is provided under a contract with the American Indian Graduate Center in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to individuals wishing to do postbaccalaureate studies. All fields of study are given consideration with priority given to business, engineering, Health, Law, and Natural Resources.

Tribally Controlled Colleges: Currently, the BIA provides grants for the operation of 24 tribally controlled community colleges. The number of Indian students enrolled in these colleges in school year 1995-96 was about 25,000 with a total funding of about $28 million.
BIA Post-Secondary Schools: The BIA operates two post-secondary schools: Haskell Indian Native University in Lawrence, Kansas, and Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute in Albuquerque, New Mexico. These schools have a total enrollment of 1,346 students. For the 1995-96 school year they were funded at about $11.4 million.

There are four parts to the puzzle that must fit together if Indian education is to realize the success it is capable of achieving: responsible tribal control, a continuing trust responsibility, cooperation from states and local government, and the partnership and support of the private/philanthropic sectors. Each of these puzzle pieces has its own set of complex internal issues which present challenges to success. Any one missing from the picture will leave behind a barrier to success.

Tribal control: The complexity of tribal conditions and history make general statements difficult. In addition, federal tinkering created the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934. It was well-intentioned but incomplete. The idea was to create democratic government on reservations along with a legislative/administrative body to carry out the business of the tribe. Not all tribes signed on as IRA governments, but the majority did. Since the 1970s the tribes have had to break free from this model by adding judiciary branches, longer terms of elected office and business operations. This progress did not occur in a vacuum. As tribes were democratizing, so was America. Civil rights and recognition of imbalances were opening up the country. Congress hungered to bring individual freedoms and rights to the reservations. It was difficult in that environment to understand that tribes are not democracies, nor should they become them just because it is such a good idea. The trend was so strong that only a few tribes politely told Congress they did not need the white man’s measures of equality

Today there are Indian nations with balanced governments, developing infrastructure, good schools, and thriving business enterprises. The percentages of their high school and college graduates are up and climbing. There are other tribes who are rich in children, but little else. It is fair to say that tribes have uniformly recognized the value of educating their citizens. Only a few, however, have the power and steady control necessary to carry out their educational goals.

In the middle, there are a great number of tribes with internal problems: everything from political corruption to widespread poverty, poor infrastructure, and undulating stability, which make them susceptible to damage from downtrends. Bad economic times in town often spell disaster on reservations. To work with these realities, planning must happen in an organized and sustained way, from one tribal administration to the next.

Continuing trust responsibility: Every decade or so, there is some congressional or administrative shift that makes life hard for the tribes. The curse of the 1950s was termination of the trust responsibility. It started as a congressional resolution, but before it was stopped, the policy led to the destruction of several tribes. That termination trend was reversed in the 1970s and throughout the 1980s to the present time, new tribal recognition has taken place.
But there are congressional representatives who think the trust responsibility is something dispensable. Because the United States has never subjected itself to the authority of the World Court, tribes have been frustrated in attempts to have their issues with the United States heard in a court of international law. Thus, the power game goes on, year after year, and as is the case now, a bill is introduced that would wipe out the trust responsibility of government to the tribes.

Balancing these political outbursts has been the record of law and the interpretations and findings of the federal courts. Given no collusion between judiciary and the legislative bodies, the trust responsibility will go on. The level of support is another question. For years, funds for school construction, administrative support and repairs have been withheld. Release of these funds alone will go far to increase the quality of education of several reservations dramatically. An increase in funding would be miraculous.

Cooperation from states and local government: The Native American Rights Fund (NARF) has compiled a state by state record of laws and regulations relating to Indian education. An analysis of this record will probably show variations based on the general political leanings of the state, the number of reservations located in the state, the relations between the state and the tribe(s), and the level of racism generally expressed and tolerated in the state. Few tribes overcome a sustained environment of hostility.

But some do. An outstanding example of this is the Choctaw Nation located in Philadelphia, Mississippi. While the high school graduation rate is 52.9% and only 2.5% of the population have bachelor’s degrees or higher, unemployment has dropped to 20% and the tribe takes in an estimated $100 million a year from gambling alone. It is building its infrastructure and it probably resembles a "developing nation" in many respects. All of this was done in a hostile state environment where removal of the Choctaws was tried twice and tribal members were reduced to being fugitives or sharecroppers to survive after leaving their land and going into hiding. Education is high on the priority list for the tribe. Given its economic base, success is likely.

For the tribes with gambling operations, there is varying hostility from states. Some states want to tax tribes, others deny services. The uneven see-saw effect of this changing public policy and practice make tribes wary of dealing with states. Unfortunately, it is a state by state struggle, with no blanket solutions.
The partnership and support of the private/philanthropic sectors: American Indian nonprofits, the tribal colleges, and in some cases the tribes themselves, have been successful in convincing corporations and philanthropy to put money into tribal futures. However, the level of support is still a small fraction of overall support from these sources as well as a small fraction of the support needed.

To encourage greater participation and support, understanding of sovereignty and Indian education issues is needed on the one hand and overcoming fear of exploitation is needed on the other. Partnership models should be developed as well as illustrations from some successful cases.
Recommendations

The NARF review of state laws addressing Indian education included a conference on education reform. Following are some NARF observations and recommendations regarding Indian education.
These laws form the basis of Indian education today:

1. The Johnson O'Malley Act of 1934, as amended. Provides federal funding for formula-based supplemental education programs to tribes and state public schools for the special educational needs of Indian students. Requires local Indian education committees to review applications and be involved in operations. Tribes receive preference when applying for JOM funding through the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
Recommendation: Tribal Education Departments could administer JOM funds with other supplemental and categorical funds to provide more coordination and focus on education issues.

2. The Impact Aid Laws of 1950, Public Laws 81-874 and 81-815, as amended. Provide federal subsidies to state public school districts to construct facilities ('815) and educate children residing on federal lands including Indian country ('874). Amendments were passed in 1978 based on the government-to-government relationship between the United States and Indian tribes. These amendments require school districts to have policies and procedures which ensure that Indian parents and tribes have an opportunity to comment on the funding application process and are consulted in the development of school programs. Indian tribes may also file complaints with the Secretary of Education against school districts for violation of Impact Aid policies and procedures.
Recommendation: If Impact Aid funds went through the tribes, they would have more responsibility for program operation and results.

3. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, Public Law 89-10, as amended. Provides supplemental federal funding for a variety of education programs including those that are known today as Chapter 1 and Bilingual Education. Both Chapter 1 and Bilingual Education funding may be provided to state public schools, Bureau of Indian Affairs schools, and to tribal contract or grant schools.
Chapter 1 formula-based funding provides supplemental educational services and programs, usually to develop basic academic skills, for disadvantaged youth including Native Americans. Bilingual Education competitive, discretionary funding provides supplemental bilingual education services and programs for limited English proficient youth including Indians. Both programs have a parent advisory committee requirement to provide schools with advice in the planning, implementation, and evaluation of their programs and services. This requirement may be waived and the elected school board may serve as a PAC in tribal contract and grant schools.
Recommendation: If Chapter 1 and Bilingual Education funds were administered through tribal education departments, the tribe could assist in providing more coordination and focus on education issues.

4. The Head Start Program Act of 1965, as amended. Provides formula-based federal funding for comprehensive health, educational, nutritional, social, and other services to economically disadvantaged preschool children including children on federally recognized Indian reservations. Federally recognized Indian tribes may directly receive Head Start funding and operate Head Start programs for Indian children on their reservations.
Recommendation: If the tribal education department administered Head Start funds, there could be better coordination and transition from preschool into elementary school with fewer political complications.

5. The Indian Elementary and Secondary School Assistance Act of 1972, Public Law 92-318, as amended. Provides formula-based federal funding for supplemental programs known as Title V. These programs are designed to meet the special educational or culturally related academic needs of Indian students. Title V formula funds may be provided to state public schools, Bureau of Indian Affairs schools, and tribal contract and grant schools. Indian parent advisory committees must approve Title V programs and be involved in program administration in the state public schools.
This Act also makes tribes eligible for certain competitive, discretionary grants for elementary and secondary school demonstration and pilot projects, special teacher training programs, Indian controlled schools projects, and adult education programs.
Recommendation: Tribes could administer Title V funds with other supplemental and categorical funds to provide more coordination and focus on education issues.

6. The Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act of 1975, Public Law 93-638, as amended. Allows Indian tribes to contract for the operation of schools that were formerly operated by the Bureau of Indian Affairs or that were funded by the BIA and privately operated. Authorizes direct funding to tribal schools for programs and operations that are regulated under the Education Amendments of 1978, Public Law 95-561.
Recommendation: Tribal education departments could work with contract and grant schools to coordinate tribal education standards, implement tribal education policies, and promote education goals that perpetuate the tribe.

7. The Education Amendments of 1978, Public Law 95-561, as amended provide broad statutory guidance to schools that are operated or funded by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Provides for Indian school boards in BIA operated schools. Requires the BIA to actively consult with tribes in all matters that relate to Bureau schools. Allows the Secretary of the Interior to implement cooperative agreements between tribes, school boards of Bureau schools, and state public school districts. Establishes formula-based funding for all BIA operated schools and BIA funded tribal schools. Requires that such schools be accredited or meet standards that are equal to or exceed those accreditation requirements. Allows tribes to set academic standards for BIA operated or funded schools that take into account the specific needs of Indian children.
Recommendation: Tribal education departments could assist BIA operated or funded schools in lobbying for or obtaining the resources needed to implement the 95-561 requirements.

8. The Tribally Controlled Community College Assistance Act of 1978, Public Law 98-192, as amended. Provides federal funding for post-secondary institutions controlled by Indian tribes. Tribal governments now operate 24 tribally controlled colleges. Two of these colleges are four-year institutions.
Recommendation: Tribal education departments could assist tribal colleges in trying to gain needed resources, and tribal education departments could gain assistance from tribal colleges in solving Indian education problems.

9. The Indian Education Act of 1988, Public Law 100-297, as amended. Allows tribes to operate BIA funded schools as grant schools rather than as contract schools. Grant school funding allows tribal schools to receive funding on a more timely basis, to invest those funds under certain restrictions, and to use the interest gained for further educational costs in their schools.
This Act also authorizes federal funding for tribal early childhood programs and tribal departments of education. To date no money has been appropriated for tribal departments of education.
Recommendation: Tribal education departments could be funded through this law when appropriations match authorizations.

10. The Carl D. Perkins Vocational and Applied Technology Education Act of 1990, Public Law 101-392. Provides funding for competitive, discretionary project grants that will provide vocational education opportunities for Indians. Allows tribes and tribal organizations to plan, conduct, and administer vocational education programs that will provide Indian students with skills related to jobs or further post-secondary training. Also allows tribal post-secondary institutions to compete for post-secondary vocational education grants.
Recommendation: Tribal education departments could assist vocational education programs and post-secondary institutions in focusing their training on employment areas relevant to the tribe.

11. The Native American Languages Act of 1990, Public Law 101-477. Recognizes the right of Indian tribes to use their native languages to conduct tribal business and as a medium of instruction in all Bureau of Indian Affairs funded schools. Directs federal agencies to consult with tribes in evaluating the agencies' policies and procedures and bringing these in compliance with the Act.
Recommendation: Tribal education departments could assist BIA funded schools and tribal councils in making the transition to greater use of tribal language to increase in student cultural awareness and self-esteem.

12. The Goals 2000: Educate America Act, Public Law 103-227. Provides funds and a framework for schools to meet the National Education Goals. Includes American Indian and Alaska Native students in public schools and allots set-aside funds for schools operated or funded by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Authorizes the Secretary of the Interior to establish a plan to develop a reform and improvement plan for BIA education and to conduct a cost analysis of BIA academic and home living/residential standards. Specifically mentions Indian education in the activities of the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI), including placing the Director of BIA Education on the National Educational Research Policy and Priorities Board and the inclusion of American Indian and Alaska Native students in OERI research institutes/activities.
Recommendation: Tribal education departments could assist BIA funded and operated schools and public schools in complying with the National Education Goals. Tribal education departments could also help the OERI with Indian education research.

13. The Improving America's School Act of 1994, Public Law 103-382. Amends the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, including Title I (formerly Chapter 1), Bilingual Education, Impact Act, and Title IX. This Act also amends the Education Amendments of 1978, which pertain to Bureau of Indian Affairs schools and programs. This Act also provides land-grant status to tribal colleges in accordance with the provisions of the Act of July 2, 1962.
Final Observations

A major question for tribes will be how to serve tribal members who do not live on the homelands. These citizens currently have limited access to services and frequently have no right to vote on tribal matters. If 80% of the potential workforce is estranged from the tribe, how will it make up for the loss?

Tribal governments may also have to do the heavy lifting in developing comprehensive educational policies and plans. NARF gives the example of the Rosebud Sioux in South Dakota. The Tribal Education Code, enacted in 1991, was developed and enacted after the Tribe went through an extensive self-assessment of where it was and where it wanted to be in education. The Code establishes a tribal education department. It regulates all schools on the reservation including the state public schools. It establishes guidelines and regulations in curriculum and education standards, staffing, alcohol and drug abuse education, and parental and community involvement.

Since enactment of the Code, the Rosebud Sioux Tribe has reached an agreement with the state public school district on its reservation regarding Impact Aid funding. The school district and the Tribe are equal partners in the Impact Aid funding application process and expenditure planning. And the district and the Tribe work jointly to monitor and improve student performance. With federal law changes and further tribal / state cooperation, this model could be extended to other reservations and Indian communities.

Government has to learn the lesson of sovereignty. For the Feds, that’s the trust responsibility and adequate financing of the authorizations. It will require the BIA to take its foot off the brakes and put it on the gas, instead.

State governments will have to find a benefit in having a better educated citizenry and a partner tribe that knows its way around Indian education issues.

And all outsiders must understand that Indian culture was once ripped away from the people. They won’t let it happen a second time.

Meaning of Democracy

2007-03-13T18:32:00.000-07:00

The meaning of democracy seems to be shifting in these contemporary times, making footing difficult. Questions arise and fall away, to be replaced by other questions. Is it more democratic to forbid abortion than to guarantee health coverage? Is it less democratic to sit out an election without voting than to deliver votes to party bosses to ensure a winning ticket? Perhaps the saying is right that says, “the Democrats want to run our public lives and the Republicans want to run our private lives.” The guarantees in the U.S. Constitution that we the people will ensure domestic tranquillity and promote the general welfare seem more like suggestions now. The real concerns seem to be balancing the national budget and finding blame that will stick on one party or the other for wrongs politicians believe will resonate with the voting public.
Power politics is a more useful term to describe today’s interpretation of the meaning of democracy. The cowboy nation of the United States is the preeminent superpower in the world. The biggest and best six-guns, for sure—but are our boots getting a little splashed on as we belly up to the bar? Others appear to be moving away from self-absorption and the tough-guy demeanor.
Some other democratic countries openly scoff at our rough antics. They are fed up with our Cuban embargoes, failure to act in Bosnia, failure to pony up the dough we owe the United Nations, and they don’t seem to like our insistence on forging trade agreements that force American imports on unwilling partners, like insisting that inferior American rice be traded to people who have developed their own exquisite grains for over 2,000 years.
Other democratic countries look at us and think they can get away with more now that the United States is tougher, too. Capital punishment? Not a problem. Imprisonment for long periods on flimsy convictions or even no convictions? Not a problem. The United States can hardly get high and mighty on human rights when it is building prisons at record rates and some states are throwing drug possessors into prison for over 100 years! Cutting short public assistance to the poor in the U.S. is just another signal that it is okay to rough up the general populace in other countries possessing less evolved forms of democracy. If we don’t value the humanity of our citizens, why should they?
If it appears democracy is coming off the high hill and settling into the lower regions, what is society to make of these changes? For some, less reliance on government means greater individual freedom to act as one pleases within the confines of one’s own perimeters (private land, private home, corporation, cult or religion). For others, less reliance on government means living in the streets, early death, or the proverbial dependency “on the kindness of strangers.” One group gains while another loses. That is a lower form of democracy, sloping away from ideals and Constitutional promises, and settling instead for cold cash transacted in walled enclaves. In this landscape, the poor are discarded through neglect and the rich become indifferent. It is hard to tell who is punished more by this process and who loses more humanity.¬¬

Into this environment of governmental devolution come politicians and the media, who seem to be in a race with one another to capture American sensibilities. Defining democracy by limiting it to small bites, the American public is being spoon-fed to death. National politicians are prone to calling upon God and asking God’s blessings for the American people, though apparently not all of them.
Some politicians speak easily of “family values” and tell us what we think, want, and need. With candor and apparent sincerity, they characterize gay and lesbian citizens as undeserving of full citizenship. What can they be thinking? They demonize immigrants while knowing new and vital talent has always come into the county by this means. They denigrate the poor, knowing that bad education, low wages, and low quality health care will increase the numbers of poor, increase suffering and further alienate the middle class. Democracy takes a hit.
Somewhere between politicians and the media are the religious leaders who use broadcasting to influence the political process. With high moral impunity, they slash away at diversity of viewpoint, the right of privacy, and the behavior of those who do not believe in the particular brand of religion being promoted. Democracy takes another hit.
The media pretend that image approximates reality and that information approaches the level of news. The sound bite has replaced sound reporting. Broadcast journalism, particularly the group reporting from the White House, seem to have lost the connection between the public’s right to know and their right to slide into gossip by means of the unsupported short news segment. At one time, reporters confined themselves to repeating what the president said. Now the public hears what the president “admitted.”
Aristocratic reporters who cover government moonlight on the speakers circuit, pulling in six-figure incomes. When it comes to informing the American public, we hear their opinions and colorful twists of language, which help to make already suspicious American listeners more wary of slick presidents and hard-boiled First Ladies, but these things also make us less informed on what the president is proposing. Public opinion polls confirm that the general public knows less about American foreign or domestic policy than it does about the personality of the president. Democracy takes another hit.
Print journalism is going through its own devolution. The previous separation of news from opinion has now been blurred. Like the rules for the citizens of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, only those with the longest memories will recall that unsubstantiated allegations in a newspaper belong in the opinion pages or in paid advertising.
The corrections needed in the media will have to be more explicitly defined than these few examples. The gathering and production of news for the reading and listening public will have to undergo a vigorous housecleaning, and the many superstars put to work earning honest money. It will take more time to rehabilitate the errant religious leaders and politicians, but before the preamble to the Constitution becomes a sound bite, we’d better get cracking.

Press Coverage of American Indians

2007-03-13T18:24:00.000-07:00

From 1970 to 1973, I served two stints in the Washington, D.C. —the Oz of print reporting; one as editor of the Legislative Review, a publication reporting on national legislation affecting American Indians, and the other as executive director of the American Indian Press Association a copy service to Indian newspapers and other print publications nationwide.
The first noticeable trouble began when Senate and House press tables were filled with “mainstream” press people who sometimes politely, sometimes not, advised our reporters that the tables were reserved for the press. After a while, it became routine to flash our press cards and a disdainful look at the hacks at the table. They would rather be covering the White House, and we were rubbing that in with our presence. There were, after all, no Indians in the White House press corps in the early 1970s.
If daring to share a press table with our betters was not insult enough to them, they were forced from time to time to call us up and ask background questions to get them into some story on Indians that was just too big to keep out of the paper or media.
It is now twenty years since the “occupation” of Wounded Knee, South Dakota. But shortly after February 27, 1973 when Federal military forces were called to the closest thing to a war inside the U.S. borders, the telephones at the press association and my publication began ringing off their hooks. All of the national newspapers, dozens of locals, all of the networks and many news services and local stations called. It was jokingly estimated that the staff spent more time answering the questions of the “majority” press during the early days of the siege than doing the work of turning out the news.
Careful not to become newsmakers, the staff worked hard to educate the laughably ignorant press and media, while directing them to sources for quotes. It was the most clear and compelling argument the staff had ever experienced -- the white press had not a clue about American Indians-- and up to that point had neither an interest nor any experience in reporting on the one segment of the population that has a legal, historical, treaty-based relationship with the United States government.
Even journalists of color had the impression that because Indians are U.S. citizens--conferred by the U.S. without being asked in 1924--we were just another minority. That made Wounded Knee doubly hard for them to understand. Some even said, “you guys lost the war; what’s the beef, now?”
Least of all could they understand why some Indians would not want to be U.S. citizens.

Twenty years later, is anything different? Yes and no. Since the 1974 report of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Window Dressing on the Set, which found virtually no Indians working in the mainstream media, there has been progress. But some problems remain. Because Indians lack the numbers of other people of color, statistical information is more difficult to come by. Stories on people of color tend to discuss blacks, Asians, and Latinos. Political figures seldom mention Indians. Other people of color seldom mention Indians. The appearance of invisibility is an issue.
On the other hand, most people in the country have heard of Indian casinos. And the press is paying more attention. It used to be common to look for Minneapolis Indian stories next to the obituaries. It was a joke in the Indian community. “Our section” was op the obits. Now, casinos have forced newspapers to cover Indian related stories in the more respectable business sections and, occasionally, the front of the newspaper
But with casino clout has come journalistic and societal “high sticking,” to borrow a hockey term. Everyone from Minnesota legislator Charlie Berg, to foundation staff, to reporters for City Business and City Pages think they can hard ball Indian questions without race-checking themselves, in the name of tough but honest coverage.
The questions always come down to, “why don’t the casinos fund the Indian programs?” The variations are, “why don’t they fund them more?” And, “don’t you think the casinos should fund the Indian programs?”
Because casinos are Indian owned, and more significantly, owned by sovereign tribal governments, other questions vary from, “why won’t they reveal their profits?” to “is this wealth increasing Indian alcoholism?”
Some might say this is just part of what comes with success and the spotlight. But as little children from the Prairie Island reservation have experienced, they are no longer called “dirty little Indians” in the school yards. They are now taunted as “dirty little rich Indians.”
To the credit of the press, there is not nearly the level of malevolence such as Senator Charlie Berg exhibits, nor the outright racism of the trunk-stuffing Minneapolis cops who tucked two intoxicated Indians in the far back of their police car before driving them around, eventually getting them help. But ignorance and misunderstanding still prevail. The days are probably over when the news director at Minnesota Public Radio would slough off a proposed Indian story on the basis that it did not affect many people. But the dual negative image of Indians as the lurching drunk or the money grubbing entrepreneur prevails in a press that plays to the suburban peanut gallery.
Numbers will never be the coverage attention-getter for the Indian population. The Indian strategy has always been to produce a home grown press. There is a thriving radio station affiliate group around the country. However, coverage in the majority press and media is still vitally important. The danger, many feel, is more that of press silence and inattention than of blithering sensationalism. Except for casinos and Indian fishing rights, the stories come few and far between. But when they do come, they should be from an educated press.

MAKING GOOD ON EDUCATION’S PROMISES

2007-03-13T17:59:00.000-07:00

In America today, the popular slogans are “make my day,” and “three strikes and you’re out.” These hip-shot judgments are making it easy to once again question Indian education. History is not something Americans learn from very well. The treaties are over. The Indian wars are over. They lost. What’s the issue? Indians are just like everybody else, so they should quit whining and take care of themselves. Stop looking to the government for a handout. The taxpayers won’t stand for it. And so the arguments go.
But trying to bury and forget history can have serious repercussions as we have seen with the Mille Lacs fishing rights issue, for example. Sports fisher people ringed the Minnesota State Capitol last year, objecting to Indian fishing rights and proclaiming that any treaty-based obligations ended long ago.
The former coach Bud Grant, having retired his venerable Vikings hat, sank to the more run of the mill racist level as he joined the debate and hissed in the face of Indians who came to remind him that the treaties are bigger than his ego.
Now the treaty debate will be in Federal court, where such arguments rightfully belong, many have said. The State of Minnesota tried to force a deal on the Mille Lacs people. Finally, the U.S. Justice Department stepped in and said the United States had an obligation to represent the interests of the tribe.
Unpretty confrontations such as those of Bud Grant and the miffed fisher persons are the outcome of very incomplete educations on the part of most Minnesotans. Had treaties been taught in the schools, the debate would not have erupted into violence and hatred. Had respect for the original inhabitants of Minnesota been taught in the churches and homes, the idea that Indians can be robbed twice would have been summarily discarded. Somehow the biblical command, “Thou shall not steal,” has lost its edge.
This April, the Minnesota legislature failed to stifle the few malevolent members who fearlessly put their historical --and legal--amnesia on record regarding Northern States Power Company’s request to store 17 casks of spent nuclear materials on the doorstep of the Prairie Island Dakota Nation.
They wrote in an amendment to Senate File 1706, “If an alternative site is not licensed and dry cask storage eliminated at Prairie Island by December 31, 1997, the state must, by purchase or condemnation, acquire 1200 contiguous acres of land in Goodhue county by December 31, 1999, for transfer without consideration to the United States in trust for the Mdewakanton Sioux Tribe at Prairie Island.”
The authors go on, “The state shall also provide relocation assistance to members of the Mdewakanton Sioux Tribe residing at Prairie Island for relocation to the land acquired and transferred by the state.”
Minnesotans’ lack of education about Indian treaties contributed to this shameful language which will now become part of Minnesota’s history. Lack of acknowledgment in churches and in homes contributed to the appalling belief that one group could simply uproot and move a people without their consent. This is what happened in one European capital after another. And this is what eventually led Germany to believe it could not only move people, but murder them with impunity.
Not two months earlier, on February 23rd, over 160 Minnesota senators and representatives went to the World Trade Center in St. Paul to take part in diversity training. The training seemed to go well. The lessons in power and tolerance seemed to be well received. But the language on removal of the Dakota people showed that racism is not so easily unlearned.
In 1972, the U.S. Congress enacted the Indian Education Act, following a long period of study. Indian education was made law in part as reparation for the genocide of Indian people, broken promises and neglected treaties. But it was also a belated recognition of the continuing treaty-based obligation on the part of the United States toward those who had become foreigners on their own lands.
The United States Senate hearings “investigating the problems of education for American Indians,” began in 1967. Senator Robert Kennedy traveled extensively to learn firsthand about the conditions of Indian people. At that time, widespread poverty, poor health, and punitive education methods were widespread among Indian people. After Robert Kennedy’s assassination in 1968, Senators Wayne Morse and Ralph Yarborough served as chairmen of the investigating subcommittee, and Kennedy’s brother, Senator Edward Kennedy finished the report in 1969. It was entitled, Indian Education: A National Tragedy - A National Challenge.
Senator Edward Kennedy went on to author the major bill that became the Indian Education Act of 1972. The report stated, “A careful review of the historical literature reveals that the dominant policy of the Federal Government toward the American Indian has been one of force assimilation which has vacillated between the two extremes of coercion and persuasion.”
“At the root of the assimilation policy has been a desire to divest the Indian of his land and resources.”
The report went on to explain the exchange between land greed and education: “Between 1778 and 1871, when the last treaty was signed, Indian tribes ceded almost a billion acres to the United States. In return, Indians generally retained inalienable and tax-exempt lands for themselves, and Government pledges to provide such public services as education, medical care, and technical and agricultural training.”
But, for nearly one hundred years from the end of treaty-making with Indian nations, the objective of education was for “civilizing” purposes. Most of the language of governmental support carried such language, i.e., “to provide civilization among the aborigines.”
In 1944, the House Select Committee on Indian Affairs began terminating treaty obligations, calling this “the final solution of the Indian problem.”
All of these lessons from history formed the basis of the 1972 Indian Education Act. It was clear. It was based on the historical record and the obligation of the U.S. Government. The only alternative would have been to give the land back.
But now in 1994, the renewal of the Indian Education Act’s authority is folded in as Title VI of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, an “omnibus” catch all bill.
On the House of Representatives’ side, the new legislative language says in a rather lukewarm way that the purpose of Indian education is to “support the efforts of local educational agencies, Indian tribes and organizations, postsecondary institutions, and other entities to meet the special educational and culturally related academic needs of American Indians and Alaska Natives, so they can achieve the same challenging State performance standards expected of all students.”
Now, the treaty obligations of educational services to American Indians is tied to a new form of “civilizing,” and that is to meet GOALS 2000:
•All children will be ready to learn upon entry into school.
•The high school graduation rate will increase to 90% nationally.
•U.S. students will be competent in core academic subjects.
•U.S. students will be first in the world in science and math.
•Every adult American will be literate and able to compete in a global economy.
•Every school in America will be safe, disciplined and drug free.
It had been clear enough that land for education was the exchange. But perhaps it would be more real to Americans if the Federal budget contained an item that said, ‘TREATY OBLIGATIONS,” or if there were a treaty tax like the social security tax which withheld from all taxpayers amounts to be paid annually for the governmental responsibility.
There would be far less ambiguity, less talk about “that was then---this is now!” Schools would have a very deep interest in teaching about treaties and where the American lands came from. There would be no more talk of “discovery” and vast empty territories. Every taxpayer would know quite directly that his/her land did not come free of charge and that continuing ownership requires care and responsibility.
Indian education should be left to the policies of Indian governments and people. The GOALS 2000 describe everything American Indian students have not received from the Federal, State and local school systems so far. But that is not because Indian education has lacked goals. It is because the educational systems throughout the country were built for European Americans. If the systems had been built for Indians, most others would fail and most Indians would succeed. That is the political and power imbalance.
America has not learned to appreciate what it came by so cheaply. Americans have not learned responsibility.
The legal scholar and author of the reform that led to the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, Felix S. Cohen, in 1953 described Americans in the following way:
It is a pity that so many Americans today think of the Indian as a romantic or comic figure in American history without contemporary significance. In fact, the Indian plays much the same role in our American society that the Jews played in Germany. Like the miner’s canary, the Indian marks the shifts from fresh air to poison gas in our political atmosphere; and our treatment of Indians, even more than our treatment of other minorities, reflects the rise and fall in our democratic faith.
Senators Robert and Edward Kennedy, and members of the special subcommittee on Indian education quickly found the historical and legal precedents supporting Indian education. When the report was issued in 1969, the committee’s first recommendation was: “That there be set a national policy committing the nation to achieving educational excellence for American Indians; to maximum participation and control by Indians in establishing Indian education programs; and to assuring sufficient Federal funds to carry these programs forward.”
GOALS 2000 is just so much window dressing. The reauthorizing legislation needs to look to its origins and relearn the lessons of history.

Answer May Be to Switch Off the Color

2007-03-13T17:58:00.000-07:00

People of color—as we call those who are not white—have had an uncomfortable and sometimes adversarial relationship with the American media since the first days of the republic, when newspapers were the medium (no plural).
In British colonial times, during the occupations of India and parts of Africa, “people of color,”a term invented by the colonizers, meant Indians and black Africans. The secondary immigration waves coming to America included people from southern Europe and the Middle East. They were not considered “white people” when they arrived. Today, Jews (but not Arabs) and southern Europeans are “white” while the category “people of color” has broadened to include Asians and Western Hemisphere Indians.
The power to define who we are/are not—including color—has rested among the powerful, which now includes those who own broadcasting entities and who spread information to the highest number in the population.
In the newly created United States, broadcast was limited to the eastern states. The Atlas of Early American History (Princeton University Press, 1976) calculates that an event occurring in Boston in the 1790s took 15 days to be published in the Philadelphia newspapers. From Charleston, South Carolina the time lag was 22 days. Information flow skewed to the east coast, to the cities, and to those who could read. The rest of the population—most women, slaves, the indentured, and American Indians—were shut out except for what they could get from secondhand reports.
There were, to be sure, alternative sources for the unprivileged, but these were mostly circuit riders, travelers and the mail, with one exception: The powerful Six Nations Confederacy of the Iroquois had been sending runners over well established trails for centuries. Their job was to carry the information that kept the far-flung confederacy together, and they could reach destinations in very short periods of time by means of an elaborate relay system. Before, during, and after the Revolutionary War, Iroquois couriers were vital to the confederacy’s war intelligence. Had this system been converted to a general information “network,” who knows what unique social transition might have taken place?
But the emerging eastern presses were either unaware of this alternative and were so bent on creating the most purchased source of information that they could only move in one direction—proliferation of reporting and development of a rapid distribution system.
Now, in the 1990s, continuously broadcasting networks spread televised information virtually instantaneously to a global audience which can view it with no reading skills. To have access, however, the audience must be close to a broadcast outlet and a receiver. In the 1790s, reading was for the privileged. Today, access to information depends more on infrastructure, (formidable political barriers in some cases) and the funds with which to buy a television set.
But before information gets to the viewer, it must be collected and processed. And it must be paid for. Neither the readers of newspapers nor viewers of broadcasting are prepared to pay the full cost of gathering and delivering information. For that, producers go to third parties who have an interest in influencing those who get the information. It is this economic fact that has for over 200 years attracted more buyers into the “power to define” equation.
Broadcast reporter and analyst Jeff Greenfield says broadcast news is undergoing extremely rapid change. Greenfield notes that the 1960s introduced the first U.S. Presidential debates on television (1960). From 1961 to 1965, some television stations refused to run network stories on civil rights. Television broadcast the assassination of President Kennedy, the escalation of the Vietnam War, the massive tumult in American life, and covered the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Presidential candidate Robert Kennedy. By 1969, the networks were being attacked by conservatives as ideologically biased, hostile to American values, neutral in the freedom-versus-Communism struggle, and indifferent to traditional values.
As bystanders in the liberal-versus-traditional values debate, people of color and women may have done well as they increased their on-screen numbers and made modest gains in the ownership class, but they certainly were trivialized in portrayals as the 1980s and 1990s arrived. When we look at the current commercial and cable fare of comedy, action, drama, talk shows and news, the shallowness of the content is extraordinary, especially compared to earlier decades. Color and gender are only incidental to the wretched lack of brilliance coming into America’s homes. Viewers are far more likely to see diversity and depth on the “live” cop shows, historical documentaries, and America’s Funniest Videos.
Some critics point out in a hopeful sort of way that the public airwaves are a part of the public trust. And indeed, there is a major difference between newspapers as protectors of free expression and electronic broadcasting. This difference is succinctly defined by the District of Columbia District Court in United Church of Christ v. FCC (1966): “A broadcaster seeks and is granted the free and exclusive use of a limited and valuable part of the public domain; when he accepts that franchise it is burdened by enforceable public obligations. A newspaper can be operated at the whim or caprice of its owners; a broadcast station cannot.”
Sure enough, the Federal Communications Act of 1934 treats the public trust generously. It grants licenses to broadcast operators provided that “the public convenience, interest, or necessity will be served thereby,” and it allows the operator to renew the license as long as the “public interest” continues to be served. But as with all good intentions, what defines the “public interest” has since 1934 been the subject of bitter debates and extensive case-law record.
If people of color care to be part of the power to define identity in America, there will have to be a diminution in the power of broadcast networks and newspapers—monopolies seldom change of their own accord. Second, people of color must gain greater access to the capital flows and ownership of the media. Third, those so labeled must resolve self-definition by color—the very core of separateness. There may be more limitations than gains from holding onto that concept.
Fortunately, the first two of the changes are underway. The third will be the sticker.

NATIVE WOMEN AND AMERICAN FEMINISM

2007-03-13T17:57:00.000-07:00

The exciting message of the 1960s Berkeley Free Speech Movement which spread from California across the country carried with it the startling awareness that women did not have an equal place in the movement. It had been presumed, wrongly, that women students and faculty would share every level of responsibility in the free speech and anti-war organizing efforts. But early on, it became clear that the male leaders would not share the stage with women. As one student put it, “we were welcome to make the coffee and pass out the handbills, but the front of the stage was for the men.” This souring led almost instantly to the beginning of the women’s movement.
At the same time the American Indian Movement and other groups were organizing to push the causes of Native sovereignty and government accountability. The 19-month occupation of Alcatraz island in San Francisco Bay spread the word of Native sovereignty from California throughout the rest of the country. Prior to Alcatraz, several urban Indian centers had been established to provide services to Native people who had been relocated by the Bureau of Indian Affairs from their homelands to big city ghettoes. These centers became launching pads for the larger organizing efforts.
The emerging women’s movement and the Native justice movements of the late sixties took different paths, and there are several reasons why they did. Some say those paths may never converge.
During the Berkeley Free Speech days, attempts were made to form alliances between the university students and the emergent Black Panther organization. It was thought that civil rights, free speech and black power all had much in common and that support of one should include support for all. However, the cultural gap between the mostly white students and the black power group was never bridged, and after a time each continued on separate courses. Among the Native movements, white participation was viewed with suspicion and separation was the preferred posture, and even though an occasional meeting was held and declarations of cross-support were issued, in the main the groups remained apart.
As time passed, the strengthening women’s movement came to be seen as a culturally white organizing effort and a distance developed between it and other groups. In the excitement of organizing and pressing claims on behalf of feminism, inclusivity was not paid much attention to until it was quite clear that there were many missing faces. By then, after the organizing work had been done, it seemed like window dressing to try to bring in women of color, particularly since the leadership roles had been well-established, and they were occupied by almost all whites.
Meanwhile, the Native groups had gender problems of their own. The structure of these groups was loosely organized around tribal models, with “councils” of the leadership, charismatic spokesmen (nearly 100% male), and large numbers of “warriors” or support workers. In this configuration, women found themselves in the support roles of cooks, security, clerical help, messengers, and medical personnel. Nevertheless the glue holding all of this together was culture. A strongly defined sense of history and the challenge of righting wrongs done to Native people united everyone in the group to press forward together as a single body. There was no room in this organizing model for women to press separate claims of feminism. In fact, feminism was seen as a white concept that had to be rejected as the cultural model was embraced. Participation in the Native movements by large numbers of professional women never occurred, in some part due to the male dominance of the leadership and the lack of opportunity for educated women to play much more than minor supporting roles in the development of the groups.
Eventually, Native women as well as other women of color did join the women’s movement, although never in the numbers that should have been there, nor in any significant representation in the leadership. By that point, fifteen years after Berkeley, the icons of the women’s movement were well known, and none of them included women of color. In an evolution very much like all of the other movements, a few women became preeminent and closely identified with the very essence of feminism, thus mirroring in most aspects what spokeswomen said they rejected in male-dominated organizations. They replaced white American culture with its subculture in a white female dominated organization that had few avenues that would allow women of color to feel comfortable or succeed. Yet, inclusiveness became a watchword. Great effort was made to recruit women of color, Native women among them. But it was not until the battered women’s groups became a subgroup of the larger women’s movement that greater numbers of Native women joined. Here, women had a common experience—the domestic violence that cut across all cultures. To a lesser extent, the reproductive rights groups also had success in recruiting women of color for participation. The greater women’s movement had to find areas where the common experience cut across cultures and where the issue had a fundamental link to the relationship between men and women. This was to become no more evident than in the competition for jobs.
Whereas the great thinker of the African American civil rights movement, W.E.B. DuBois said that women’s suffrage and the equality of slaves were so similar as to be linked, feminism in the late twentieth century pressed hard for economic parity but did little to support men of color. This attitude was not lost on women of color who sensed a similar betrayal was in store for them if they became too closely aligned to feminism.
Now, some thirty years after Berkeley, it cannot be said that any of the movements have evolved into permanent institutions. Perhaps it was not the natural path for these large social groups to take. A great number of social changes have occurred which acknowledge the prejudice practiced against women and attempt to remedy the inequity by means of rules similar to civil rights rules. However most of these remedies put women in a category like those of identified people of color, the so-called “racial minorities.” Stuck in this clutch of protected groups, women are permanently in a minority status, even though they are neither a minority nor a cultural group per se. It is the latest dilemma that the women’s movement must face—whether to maintain the protective cover of a special class or solve the problem of being defined in such a way that women are set apart from men more or less permanently. To some, it is a matter of timing—a certain level of economic parity must be reached. To others, it is a matter of history—men must never be trusted or they will always take the upper hand.
In this mix, Native women, like some of the other cultural groups, are doing fairly well. There is a strong leadership group, professional women’s ranks are growing, and pay, while not at parity, is closer than that of women overall. By sitting out the women’s movement’s organizing phase, Native women seem to have reaped many of the benefits while not compromising a strong cultural affiliation. It is hard to tell. The Native movement also brought about changes in U.S. governmental practice, thus opening up many opportunities for men and women. The outcome is Native women seem to have suffered less as a result of their exclusion from the women’s movement than feminism suffered from a lack of participation by women of color. Feminism finds itself in dire straits, struggling to define itself in the new twenty—first century context of competition and individualism. A reexamination of the cultural chasm might help the women’s movement to build a bridge to other groups that have long eluded the feminist embrace.

WOMEN’S HISTORY MONTH

2007-03-13T17:56:00.000-07:00

March is women’s history month. It is a time of the year when the accomplishments of American women of history are remembered and celebrated. Without taking anything away from the importance of women of history, included in this review are some contemporary women, particularly a few who have accomplished much at a very young age,with many more years of creative expression to come. These young women are the living proof that the fight for women’s rights was worth the effort and sacrifice.
It is easy to think of the past as the time in which women overcame trials and attacks to make their way in the world. But it was only one year ago this month that the South Carolina military academy, the Citadel, announced that two women cadets had been attacked by ten male cadets. Of this number, two were accused of setting fire to the sweatshirt of one of the women.
We celebrate women’s history month and we salute young women in America who are moving ahead to meet today’s challenges and tomorrow’s promise.
A HISTORICAL WOMAN OF POWER:
MADAM C.J. WALKER
Madam C.J. Walker was America's first woman self-made millionaire. She was born Sarah Breedlove on December 23, 1867 — the daughter of former slaves — on a Louisiana cotton plantation. They died by the time she was seven. Breedlove was married at age 14 and widowed with a small daughter by age 20.
Despite this harsh beginning, Breedlove is the only African-American woman in the U.S. National Business Hall of Fame. She was the founder and CEO of the Madam C.J. Walker Manufacturing Company, the nation's first successful black hair-care products firm. It was headquartered in Indianapolis, Indiana.
At age 37, after working for 20 years doing other people’s laundry, she used her creative genius to develop grooming and conditioning products. "I am a woman who came from the cotton fields of the South," she said. I was promoted from there to the washtub. Then I was promoted to the cook kitchen, and from there I promoted myself into the business of manufacturing hair goods and preparations."
Starting with $1.50 in capital, she mixed her first products in her washtub and personally marketed her "Wonderful Hair Grower" door to door. Slowly, with patient work, she built a fortune that was estimated, at her death to be over $2 million.
Her company was founded in 1905, and it grew to become a factory employing 50 people. Thousands of women were trained in her Walker Hair Care Method at her beauty school, Lelia College, and through special courses she established at black schools and colleges. Some of her employees went on to operate their own hair salons. "I am not merely satisfied in making money for myself, for I am endeavoring to provide employment for hundreds of women of my race," she said.
Madam Walker organized a sales force of more than 20,000 in the U.S., Caribbean and Central America. She took her professional name from her third husband, Charles James Walker. He was a salesman for a black newspaper, and his marketing skills were helpful in building the Walker company. Although the couple divorced in 1912, he was a Walker sales representative for the rest of his life, and she kept his name. She died on May 25, 1919.
SHE STAYED TRUE TO HER VISION:
MAYA YING LIN
Renowned architect and artist, Maya Lin is the designer of the U.S. Vietnam Veterans Memorial. In 1981, at the astonishing age of 21, Lin won a competition to design the Memorial on the Mall in Washington D.C. Her design called for the placement of two massive v-shaped black granite stones— mostly below ground level— in an open field. The walls would bear the names of over 58,000 Americans who died or remain missing in Vietnam. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial was dedicated on November 13, 1982 to honor and recognize the men and women who served in the armed forces in Vietnam.
When Lin's dramatic design was selected for the Memorial, veterans groups, special interests and several politicians opposed the design, but Lin could not be dissuaded from her original vision. These critics attacked her vision, her design, her creativity, her age and her gender .The proposed monument was said to be "dishonorable" and "a scar."
"I believed that this was going to help people," she says. "The only thing that really hurt me was when people said it was my ego getting in the way...."
Lin was born October 10, 1959, in Athens, Ohio, and she holds a BA in Architecture from Yale College, where she graduated in 1981. She received a Masters of Architecture from Yale in 1986, and she also holds honorary doctorates from Yale, Williams and Smith.
She was commission to design the Women's Table by Yale University. It is a granite circular slab with a concentric spiral of zeros for each year that Yale was male only. Numbers begin to appear at the mark for the year 1969, to commemorate the time when Yale graduated its first women.
Today, she runs her own design studio in New York. Of her childhood years, Lin says, "I was lucky. There was never any pressure from my parents to become anything I didn't want {to be}." As a child, she spent a lot of time in the artists' studios at Ohio University in Athens, where her father was an art professor.
Another dramatic memorial is the Civil Rights monument in Montgomery, Alabama, where a sheet of water runs over a granite table which bears the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: "We are not satisfied and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream."
START PUBLISHING!
CHRISTY HAUBEGGER DID
Christie Haubegger was born Aug. 15, 1968 in Houston, Texas to a Mexican-American mother, but she was adopted by an Anglo couple as an infant. Fortunately, her new parents were determined to raise their daughter with a strong awareness of her ancestry. She started learning Spanish in pre-school.
As she got older, differences began to be more apparent to the adolescent as Haubegger looked more critically at the world around her. She says the blonde, blue-eyed models she saw in women's magazines as she was growing up did not reflect her body type or her beauty concerns. When she went to college and law school, she found that she and her fellow Latinas had trouble finding professional role models. "I wanted to change the way Latinas see themselves, as well as how others see them," was her conclusion. Haubegger earned a BA in Philosophy and Spanish literature from the University of Texas, and a Juris Doctor ( JD), from Stanford Law School in California.
In 1996, she became the founder, president and publisher of Latina, the first glossy national magazine for Hispanic women in the U.S. The magazine’s circulation was 300,000, but it was not yet profitable. Latina went monthly in July 1997.
The magazine is published in Manhattan. Latina covers a range of women's issues with a Hispanic slant. Recent features include a cover piece on "La Bombshell" actress Salma Hayek, and the first all Latina sex survey. The main articles are in English—with summaries in Spanish presented in sidebars—for Latina readership, ages 18-49. Many of the advertisements are in Spanish. The magazine find its readers in areas of the country with large Hispanic populations, such as Los Angeles, New York City and parts of Texas.
A CUT ABOVE THE OTHERS:
VERA WANG
Vera Wang became a household name in 1994 when she designed those beautiful and dramatic costumes for figure skater Nancy Kerrigan to wear in the Winter Olympics. "Offering a dress to Nancy started as a way to make a statement in the skating world, being a skater myself," she says. Wang had Olympic dreams too. They were dashed in 1968 when she didn't place in the National Figure Skating Championships. "I wanted to make an artistic contribution to the sport. I never thought I would get the exposure I did. I don't know if designing costumes for Nancy has been good in terms of actual sales, but it has been tremendous for name recognition."
Famous clients include actors Alicia Silverstone, Mare Winningham, Penelope Ann Miller; singers Mariah Carey and Chynna Phillips; and models Donna Peele and Vendela. Designing for individuals takes anywhere from one hour to six months—more when a client vacillates about the style of her gown. Wang creates with what she calls "illusion" netting that gives the appearance of bare skin while being totally covered.
Wang says, "I wanted to build a fashion company starting with one market. I chose bridal wear. It was important to me to become an expert in this one market, and then expand into others."
She was born in New York City, June 27, 1949, and holds a BA in liberal arts from Sarah Lawrence College. Because her father would not let her go to art school, Wang has no formal design training.. Dad wanted her to concentrate on more "practical subjects," she says.
Yet, Wang has become a significant contributor to the fashion industry in just six years. She opened her first boutique on Madison Avenue in Manhattan in 1990 following work as an editor at Vogue for 17 years and a short stint as design director for Ralph Lauren for two years. Wang moved into the mid-cost line of ready-to-wear bridal and evening dresses in 1992 and 1993.

American Indian Alcoholism’s Dark Past & Uncertain Future

2007-03-13T17:55:00.000-07:00

The enduring stereotype of the indigenous native of this country is that of the public drunk. It is an image that has prevailed since colonial times. Accompanying the strong visual nature of this impression is the vague sense that American Indians are somehow more susceptible to the lure of alcohol than other people. They either can’t hold their liquor or they can’t resist it and will drink until they drop, no matter where they happen to be; thus the public drunk image.
The likelihood that the average American has actually seen a drunken Indian is infinitesimal. With regional exceptions, few Americans see Indians at all. This is because the second most common stereotype of Indians is the fully costumed dancer. In mufti, doubtless many Indians pass by average Americans without registering the response, “isn’t that an Indian?”
Yet behind the drunken stereotype is some truth. In colonial times, alcohol was used by Europeans as a negotiating tool, among themselves and with Indians. The stress of the European invasion went hard on the native people who had lived in North America for a hundred thousand undisturbed years. So prevalent was the use of alcohol in dealings with Indians that the early history of the country is full of references to the drug. It was the excuse for the first prohibition laws—not because alcohol was a drug, but because when manipulated by special interests, it disrupted Federal Indian policy and the settling of the west.
Part I: The U.S. Structural Approach
The extent of alcoholism among American Indians, as verified by demographic and statistical data, shows that it is the most severe problem of its kind to appear among any definable cultural population in the United States. But unlike the other social problems which affect the general population, Indian alcoholism has historical roots that extend to the first contact made with Europeans 500 years ago.
Initial exposure to distilled alcohol coincided with forced social disruption, wars, land loss and the introduction of new diseases for which there was no Indian resistance. As dependence on alcohol increased, so did repressive laws that began to define the legal relationship between Indians and the United States.
Did alcohol exist here before the Europeans came? Oral traditions handed down over the centuries refer to the consumption of drugs and some forms of non-distilled alcohol in relation to specific rites, usually associated with religious practice, or in some cases, agricultural celebrations.
The practice of ingesting drugs or alcohol in non-ceremonial settings is not to be found in any oral recollections. There is no evidence of distilled spirits having been produced by native people.
Here is an excerpt from Maria Chona’s autobiography, as told to Ruth Underhill in 1936, when Chona was 90 years old:

It was good at cactus camp. When my father lay down to sleep at night, he would sing songs about the cactus liquor. And we could hear songs in my uncle’s camp across the hill. Everybody sang. We felt as if a beautiful thing was coming. Because the rain was coming and the dancing and songs...

Then the little rains began to come. We had jugs of the juice that my mother had boiled, and all the women carried them in their nets as we came running down the mountain back to our village. Much, much liquor we made, and we drank it to pull down the clouds, for that is what we call it. It was too little to drink. They put me on the house top with my solder sister. Our jars of liquor were up there, too. The housetop was the only safe place.

We heard the people singing over by the council house:

There sits the magician of the east
Holding the rain by the hand
The wind holding by the hand
He sits.

Then we began to drink. Making themselves beautifully drunk, for that is how our words have it. People must all make themselves drunk like the plants in the rain and they must sing for happiness...

The next day a relative came and said: ‘Your father and mother are out by the arroyo sleeping. Let a child go and stay with them until they wake...

At last my father and mother awoke and came home very happy...

The practice of ingesting drugs or alcohol in non-ceremonial settings is not to be found in any oral recollections. There is no evidence of distilled spirits having been produced by native people. Neither were there any secular places established for the ingestion of alcohol, such as the tavern (a northern European invention).
Felix S. Cohen, former legal counsel in the U.S. Department of the Interior from 1933 to 1948, made a partial listing of laws relating to alcohol and American Indians in his seminal work, Handbook of Federal Indian Law. There were dozens of laws enacted in Colonial America and later by Congress which show the extent of a structural approach to alcohol regulation by the political powers of the day.
Massachusetts colonial laws (1660 to 1672) restricted the sale of liquor to Indians. Pennsylvania and New Jersey passed similar laws. On January 28, 1802, president Thomas Jefferson asked the United States Congress for a prohibition of “ardent spirits” among Indians for the “benefit of Indians” and “to keep peace.” The Act of March 30, 1802 (Sec. 21, 2 Stat. 139, 146), gave authority to the president to “prevent or restrain the distributing of spirituous liquors among all or any of the said Indian tribes.”
Then on July 9, 1832 Congress passed a general statutory prohibition on the traffic in liquor with Indians (C.174, Stat. 564). Two years later, on June 30, 1834, Congress added to section 18 of the Act to Regulate Trade and Intercourse with the Indian Tribes (4 Stat. 729), referring to the Constitutional powers of the Federal government to regulate affairs having to do with Indian tribes.
Continuing through the 1800s to the 1860s, treaty language in compacts with tribes included specific language regarding the prohibition or introduction of liquor. The Act of December 19, 1854, (10 Stat. 596 Chippewa), imposed liquor restrictions on lands adjoining reservations. Other non-contiguous lands would be regulated by states. The restriction was withdrawn in 1934.
On February 13, 1862, liquor laws were amended further (C.24, 12 Stat. 338) to apply prohibition laws to Indians who were under “the charge of a superintendent or agent” (wherever they might live). Indians and whites alike could have committed this crime.
The Act of July 23, 1892 (27 Stat. 260) established two classes of Indians who could not be sold or introduced to “ardent spirits: any Indian to whom an allotment of land has been made while the title to the same shall be held in trust by the government (Indians who held trust land as compared to fee simple land), or to any Indian who is a ward of the government under charge of any Indian superintendent or agent.” (This class included any Indians who were under the guardianship of any department of the Federal government). The 1892 Act also provided for a general prohibition against any introduction of liquors, wines, beers, and sales into Indian Country. Penalties included one year imprisonment and a fine of up to $500 with second offense penalties of five years in prison and a fine of up to $2,000.
What comes to mind when most Americans hear the term “Prohibition” is the Volstead Act, the 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, 1919. Special language was inserted so that the enactment and the repeal of Prohibition, “had no effect to supplant or repeal any of the special Indian liquor laws,” as researched by Cohen.
By 1916, possession of liquor in Indian Country had become “prima facie evidence of unlawful introduction” (39 Stat. 123, 124, 25 U.S.C. 245). In 1918, possession became a crime in itself. (40 Stat. 561, 563).
What comes to mind when most Americans hear the term “Prohibition” is the Volstead Act, the 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, 1919. Special language was inserted so that the enactment and the repeal of Prohibition “had no effect to supplant or repeal any of the special Indian liquor laws,” as researched by Cohen.
The Act of June 21, 1906, established the special officer’s jurisdiction in Oklahoma, “through detective operations, to supplement the efforts of superintendents in charge of reservations.” From 1909 to 1911, the effort was expanded to 21 States with a staff of 159 officers and local deputies imposing fines of $84,463—more than the $70,000 appropriation to carry out the work. Clearly, the effort paid for itself.
Ordinary rules of social behavior were generally suspended in the push westward by Europeans. Into this chaos came disruption and devastation in the daily lives and customs of the Indian tribes.
These laws, referring exclusively to prohibitions against alcohol relative to American Indians, are just a small part of the vast array of federal laws, executive orders, federal regulations, and agency rules that governed the daily lives of American Indian people. In amended form, they continue to govern today. A systematic effort was made from colonial days to suppress and subjugate the indigenous peoples of the American continent. This suffocating approach clearly led to social problems among Indians as a result of the accompanying oppression.
There were also waves of social clashes with encroaching settlers and individuals who wanted to exploit the country’s resources for personal gain. Ordinary rules of social behavior were generally suspended in the push westward by Europeans. Into this chaos came disruption and devastation in the daily lives and customs of the Indian tribes.
In his work The Sovereignty of American Indian Tribes: A Matter of Legal History, George S. Grossman, writing for the Minnesota Civil Liberties Union Foundation, divided the chaos into time periods. Thus the waves of destruction can generally be categorized chronologically:
•The Colonial Era, ending with the U.S. Constitution, 1788. This period saw enactment of hundreds of colonial laws relating to Indians, including trespass laws, vagrancy laws, and religious laws.
•U.S. Federal early period. Taking England’s lead, the United States reserved the right to deal with Indians as a federal power and moved quickly to regulate trade and interaction with Indians.
•The Removal Period. Frontier land greed led to the election of Andrew Jackson as President and the interests who wanted Indians out of the way were successful in the 1830s in removing thousands to “Indian territory.” This is commonly referred to as one of the most shameful periods in American history.
•The Civil War Era. Troops were used against tribes and bands with disastrous results. Provisions provided for by treaty were not sent. Later, President U.S. Grant asked religious groups to assist with Indian policy. This is one clear example of church/state collaboration in official U.S. policy.
•The Plains War period. Following the Civil War up to the last battle at Sugar Point, Minnesota, U.S. Army troops were called out again and again to open European settlement routes and quell “rebellions” by Indians. Thousands of Indians died as a result of the wars, from starvation or from disease introduced accidentally or purposefully by military and civilian personnel.
•End of the Treaty Making/Allotment period. As the military power of tribes ebbed, Congress declared an end to treaty making in 1871. In 1887, the General Allotment Act was passed. Its purpose was to destroy the tribal concept of commonly held land and take more land away from Indian control. Parcels or “allotments” were assigned to heads of households and 90 million acres of the “surplus” land was opened up to European settlers.
Several developments followed swiftly on the heels of the 50-year period at the end of treaty making and allotment. The 1934 Indian Reorganization Act attempted to create Indian governments by setting up political structures according to strict federal guidelines and oversight. Felix Cohen was recruited by the Franklin Roosevelt administration to lead this effort. He eventually had 250 staff persons working with him to help extricate Indians from what was beginning to look like political annihilation.
In the 1950s, Federal regulation without the benefit of Federal law was used to remove thousands of Indians from reservations and move them to distant urban centers. In the same decade, Congress, probably illegally, terminated several tribes from trust status and offered criminal and civil jurisdiction over reservations within their borders to states that wanted it.
Two decades later, the 1975 Indian Self-Determination and Education Act sought to consolidate several laws dealing with tribes to restore tribal powers of “self-determination” in the areas of law and order, construction, education, and health, among others. However, the federal government still retained broad powers to approve tribal decisions and the law restricted several areas of tribal governance. It was more than a halfway measure, but less than self-rule.
From the end of the U.S. Civil War to the 1975 Act, government and missionary-controlled schools refused to let Indians speak their native languages, practice their religion, wear their native clothing, or practice any custom that did not suit the methodology of “acculturation” which was being applied. Under such conditions, families were torn apart, kinship systems were destroyed, cultural and religious customs were torn away from previously orderly societies.
Dispossessed of national status, tribes became reactionary bodies, unable to govern the affairs of their citizens. By the 1970s, several social indicators were showing the resultant effects on the general Indian population:
The United States Health Report of 1979, issued by the then U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare stated that:
a. The health of American Indians and Alaskan Natives lags 15 to 20 years behind that of the general population.
b. An Indian child born in 1970 has a life expectancy of 65.1 years.
c. Infant mortality has been reduced by 74%. Maternal mortality has been reduced by 91%.
d. The accidental death rate for ages 25-54 is 5 times that for the total U.S. population of comparable ages.
e. Alcoholism death rates for Indians are 4.3 to 5.6 times the rates of the total population.
There has been considerable recent effort to redress past oppression, with some positive political effect. However, the changes are too recent to have any discernible effect in the short term. Now that all the prohibitions and repeals have occurred, Indian alcoholism remains a widespread problem.
A clear and consistent approach has not been maintained in addressing alcoholism or other problems experienced by Indian people. This has resulted in a continuation of problems including high unemployment, low educational attainment, the continuing breakup of families, and stratification of the Indian population at the lowest level of society.
The federal government, state government, and in some instances local government all continue to play key roles in addressing Indian alcoholism. Because these political entities reflect the attitudes of the general population, and because American Indians by and large represent a weak segment of the electorate, societal trends and government policies ebb and flow without much regard for Indian opinion. A clear and consistent approach has not been maintained in addressing alcoholism or other problems experienced by Indian people. This has resulted in a continuation of problems including high unemployment, low educational attainment, the continuing breakup of families, and stratification of the Indian population at the lowest level of society.
Arguments that Indians are “predisposed” to alcoholism, that Indians are susceptible to widespread mental illness, or that Indians simply “won’t help themselves,” do nothing to alleviate the problem.
As long as governmental policy waivers with the general mood of society, an even larger burden on public dollars will be the result. A few public planners understand that early changes are more effective and less costly than later treatment, but the arguments over spending public dollars are usually made to reflect or lead public opinion.
Part II: Societal Attitudes and Trends
Partly because there is disagreement as to the causes of Indian alcoholism, and partly because the changes necessary to retard the incidence of the problem have not been defined, the status of drug treatment among Indians is in a sort of limbo. Further, the fact that no widespread alcoholism existed before colonization by Europeans has not deterred some medical researchers from attempting to assign a genetic cause to Indian alcoholism.
Some treatment strategies, such as having Indians treating Indians and allocating more funds for programs, depend in the main on a generous public policy because the greatest majority of clients are poor. But when public dollars are not sufficiently allocated to the problem, fewer Indian victims are treated, no matter what the strategies are.
Indian alcoholism was seen as a nuisance and at times dangerous to early European settlers; thus many of the laws were enacted as a result of complaints against those who provided the liquor. There was no mention made of treating the victims. At the same time, official delegations from the federal government, local governments, and private companies had a practice of supplying alcohol to groups and individuals when negotiations or treaty making were underway. A dual policy existed: prohibitions with penalties were in place for those who wanted to deal in alcohol to Indians, and the federal government alone had the constitutional right to negotiate with tribes; nevertheless, government representatives often themselves used alcohol in the treaty making process. In this dangerous environment, the key actors experiencing the problem were neither part of policy making nor enforcement, nor could they exert any control over the “unofficial” practices of the government representatives.
Colonial laws regarding American Indians were enacted as early as 1660. The first federal law on alcohol and Indians was passed in 1802. During this same period, waves of northern Europeans were settling the Indian territories east of the Mississippi. After the Constitution was ratified, and relations with Indians were reserved to the federal government, laws and treaties made by colonies and states were nullified. This alone did nothing to deter territories and states from attempting to pass restrictive laws on Indian tribes and encroach on Indian land, but there was at least an avenue of relief for those lucky enough to gain federal attention. Out on the prairies, Washington’s reach was not long enough to inhibit territorial governors in a timely fashion.
Those who made claims about Indian alcoholism were usually not Indians. A few individual chiefs and other powerful members of tribes were able to make themselves heard. They made expensive and time-consuming trips to Washington, D.C. to ask that alcohol not be brought among their people or into their territories. These requests must be viewed in the context of the times. As heads of nations, Indian leaders were asking the federal government to control its own wayward citizens. The leaders were not applying as supplicants for relief.
There was also a humanitarian element, particularly among missionary groups who did wish to reduce the trade in alcohol to Indians. They included some members of congress and President Thomas Jefferson. The most powerful white voices, however, had reasons unassociated with alcoholism for asking that laws be passed restricting the trade in alcohol to Indians. They were in favor of restricting all trade with Indians in order to reduce the tribes’ military capability to fight off further land encroachment.
Arguments in favor of free trade were coming from private companies and wealthy individuals who were supplying the alcohol and arms to tribes in trade for furs and other commodities. In the process of the bigger shutting out the smaller interests, entreprenuerism was stifled.
These varying interests soon collided—Indian leaders who wanted commerce in alcohol curtailed; missionaries supporting humanitarian measures; and the ruling class who wanted to weaken tribes militarily. The powerful who desired capital gain prevailed. Extremely few individuals occupied the top strata of American economic life and they had direct access to public policy formation. The group included congressmen, governors, military leaders, land company officials and bankers.
The smaller entrepreneurs who wanted to trade with tribes on a free market basis were shut out and found they had no political power. The overwhelming majority of the population was illiterate, could not vote, and had no organizing ability. American Indians in this configuration occupied a position totally outside of this stratified system. As time passed and Indian power and curiosity status waned, tribes were subsumed into the social system at the bottom.
Treatment for alcoholism did not come into acceptance until tribes were subdued militarily and politically, forced into citizenship of the United States, and recognized as having treaty rights.
American social custom changed over time, so much so that present day alcoholism has little connection with its historical roots. More than a century passed following enactment of the first prohibition before any thought was given to the effect alcohol had on habitual users. Treatment for alcoholism did not come into acceptance until tribes were subdued militarily and politically, forced into citizenship of the United States, and recognized as having treaty rights.
In fact, the treatment of Indian alcoholism did not really begin until Indian prohibition was repealed in 1953. Recognition began with two views: that alcoholism is a widespread problem among Indians which has devalued their quality of life (no blame), or that alcoholism is the fault of a system that encourages consumption (blame and thus obligation to treat).
Twenty years later, alcohol would be classified as a disease, and the only effective treatment was said to be total abstinence. There is more general agreement now on what the problem of alcoholism is and how it affects its victims, but much less agreement on how to treat it and how much government should pay for care. The disease classification clearly is of some advantage to the middle class who can argue for insurance coverage for their treatment. For poor Indians, who must rely on public assistance, the disease classification is less useful.
Importantly, the disease classification labels American Indians as individual alcoholics. Indians have become socially identified with welfare cheaters and other types of presumed weak personalities. Any connection between tribes and the federal government is lost in the disease definition.
Some medical researchers have theories on the genetic causes of Indian alcoholism. This view has the tendency to relieve government of responsibility, thus feeding into political arguments that public dollars to address the problem should be limited. Others cling to the earlier social view that Indians could stop consuming alcohol at any time if they wanted to. Indians themselves either agree with these arguments wholeheartedly or attempt to finesse the issue by creating alternative treatment models, usually strongly tied to cultural and spiritual connections. Rarely will Indians totally refute the disease model for another theory.
Two views seem to prevail alongside one another: one is that alcoholism is widespread and deleterious and it was introduced to Indians for covert reasons. Those holding this view see no one as responsible. The disease is just something that happened as a result of an unfortunate weakness for alcohol among Indians. This position tends to embrace the disease model and wants to find the causes of Indian alcoholism in the Indians themselves.
Those holding the second view see the history of organized introduction of alcohol to Indians as a tale of seduction and later abandonment. In the current context, they see a system passively promoting alcohol by permitting its widespread use as a cheap drug while at the same time withholding sufficient funds with which to treat the victims. Most holding this view agree that alcoholism is a disease but, curiously, may also see Indian alcoholics as weaker members within their own race.
If alcoholism is a disease, shouldn’t the drug be regulated more closely at the source and the pushers punished when tragedy strikes?
In either view, there are profit-making and non-profit facilities and institutions that stand to gain from a continued definition of the problem as a disease. Advertising to increase awareness about the effects of alcoholism are widespread in print, on the radio and on television. The subject of the advertising is invariably the individual alcoholic—again stressing the disease model. The alcoholic is depicted as dying young, being a strain on the family, being a dangerous person to others or himself, and being a poor worker. The images focus on awareness by stigmatizing the victim. Drunk driver laws, for example, punish the driver, not the providers of alcohol. If alcoholism is a disease, shouldn’t the drug be regulated more closely at the source and the pushers punished when tragedy strikes?
Unfortunately, as in the past, the target of responsibility is the individual alcohol user. Little research is being done to support another point of view. Almost no literature reports on why alcohol is used so frequently in the general population, why poor people become chronic users, or why the promotion of alcohol far outstrips the dollars spent on a search for prevention. Indian tribes and organizations, lacking political power, are not in a position to offer alternative definitions or treatments, even if they were to believe an alternative is possible.
Indian efforts have been confined to the fringes. Spiritual movements have surfaced over the years that offer to help individuals. Social gathering places and events have been established for non-users. While most of these alternative strategies have clearly been established to reward non-alcohol using habits, some must also be seen as image-polishing efforts that attempt to dispel the myth of Indians and alcohol as inseparably linked.
In the 44 years that have ensued since the end of Indian Prohibition, Indian tribes and organizations have attempted to identify the problem, bring it to national attention and establish treatment programs for victims, but the attempts have been resisted and they have been made secondary to what the better organized and more powerful groups are saying about causes and cures.
Part III: Possible Solutions
In the general population, the mood could be trending away from a disease definition of alcoholism. As public dollars for treatment decline, drunk driving penalties have increased, signaling a shift in public mood against the alcoholic as a victim, and toward a definition of criminal perpetrator. If drunk drivers are criminals, it is a short step to making drunkenness itself punishable.
Add to this that the insurance industry, disorganized as it might be at the moment, is moving away as fast as it can from the area of mental health treatment. Treatment coverage has been shortened, and this trend will likely continue.
Indian organizations find themselves in the hapless position of having little or no influence on change in definition—disease or not—and having to support the status quo in order to get whatever financial support there is for the treatment of victims. As weak partners in the greater network of alcohol treatment organizations, they serve to confirm the mainstream theory that alcoholism is a disease but that the individual is ultimately responsible for making the changes in her or his life that will arrest the disease. It doesn’t seem to matter that Indians never had the disease before European contact.
It would be quite a different picture if Indian organizations could nudge the debate away from the developed power base. Then a re-connect with a unified tribal/cultural model for defining and treating Indian alcoholism might be possible. Original thinking will have to occur, throwing out the established assumptions about alcoholism that stem in part from a legacy of Indian hatred. It will take a leap of faith to realize that education and jobs will lower alcoholism rates more than anything in the Physician’s Desk Reference. The interests of established treatment centers and practitioners will have to be heard and transformed. Most importantly, the “alternatives” of spiritual and cultural approaches will have to be elevated and restored to former prominence within the tribes.
In some respects this is already happening. Commonly, events on tribal lands prohibit alcohol. Now, rather than sounding vaguely like a threat, the prohibition could be a declaration of independent and positive tribal choice.
The first part of the model might be to focus away from the victim. Alcohol abusers have learned to self-medicate themselves when life becomes hard. In indigenous societies around the world, such conditions arise. Some groups have gained access to alcohol and some have not. They cope with the underlying problem within the context of their own culture. That is what Indians did before Europeans came and that is what must happen once more.
Access to alcohol will always be there and thus “cures” will not be possible. But to the extent that tribes can restore their economic, political and cultural strength, the rates of alcoholism will drop. Perhaps some day alcoholism will be known as another one of the “white man’s” diseases, rare among American Indians.

American Democracy : Invention or Discovery?

2007-03-13T17:47:00.000-07:00

-by Laura Waterman Wittstock
Democracy—rule by the people—is widely believed to have been invented by the brash but brave Americans of the 18th century. Their creation was a new kind of government, free from monarchs or the equally despised rule of aristocratic despots. They created a representative government in three parts: administrative, legislative, and judicial. Lifting liberally from the Greeks, early Americans took the word democracy and expanded it to represent everything from Massachusetts town meetings to the Virginia House of Burgesses’ bicameral representative assembly.
Best of all, it is said the Americans created a democracy which guaranteed individual rights so fundamental and universal they are collectively called a “Bill of Rights,” and they became the first set of amendments to the United States Constitution.
But was American democracy thus invented? Or did the revolutionists, kicking around to find something different from their historical political roots in England, discover a new way to govern right under their noses?
For all of the credit given to republican ideals, it is tragic that the freedom so loved by 18th-century Americans and held up as an example for the rest of the world, did not include African slaves, women, children nor any members of the non-human fauna family. The one exception was Natives, who in a peculiar way were conceptually free in America, because treaties with England and later with the United States acknowledged that Native nations had rights, including those of individuals (safety, education, land and water use, among others). But Natives were not literally free. They could not safely travel outside their shrinking territories, nor within them, in some cases. Families were in constant danger of attack by European settlers who were not content to build homesteads in their own territory, especially during expansionist pushes.
Interestingly, the concept of democracy, although known, was held in considerably lower esteem by 17th-century Americans. Democracy was scorned in those days because it meant the inclusion of the lower classes. The aristocratic grandees who founded Massachusetts and Virginia preferred rule by landowning white men (25 acres and a house, for example). Landless white men had virtually no chance of partaking in government, nor were they considered fit for the genteel business of government, religion and trade, inseparable as these three pursuits were in Colonial times. It was the revolutionary war that embraced the common man, enlisting him in the struggle for freedom from England. His muscle was needed for the effort. Therefore, after the war was won, the elite could hardly retreat to their former habits. Thus “democracy” began to lose its former negative connotation of “rule by the rabble” and took on a new luster among the gentry as a dignified label for the new republic.
Freely interpreting Greek philosophy, architecture, literature and art, 18th-century Americans immersed themselves in a romantic revival of a Golden Age that never was. It certainly wasn’t much in the way of being democratic.
However, back in the 17th century, particularly around the time of the Virginia Company (1607) and the Massachusetts Bay Company (1628), European “adventurers” began to colonize North America in larger numbers, with profits on their minds. Those with money ventured their capital; those without ventured their persons for labor in the hopes of making fortunes through hard work.
Virginia became a royal colony in 1624, having floundered before Native tobacco saved its failing commercial efforts. England’s Civil War (1652 to 1660) led to the ouster of the English governor in Virginia. After the war, the weakened royal monopoly over the slave trade gave Virginia planters the access to cheap labor they wanted. At the end of the century, Virginia’s primary trade was in slaves. By 1720, up to 40 percent of the Virginia population comprised African slaves.
Massachusetts never fulfilled the dreams of its Puritan backers. The financiers of the effort were aristocratic adventurers who had grown tired of the Massachusetts “Pilgrims” and, turning their attention to another Puritan colony, backed what they hoped would be a profitable investment. The colony was called Providence Island, located just off the coast of Nicaragua. (This is not to be confused with Providence, Rhode Island, which was founded by Roger Williams in 1636 after he was kicked out of Puritan Massachusetts).
Providence Island came into being in 1630, as religiously-inclined English lords hoped to get huge profits out of their efforts—profits they believed would not come out of Massachusetts—with which to launch their hotly desired Civil War against Charles I. They went heavily into tobacco, which failed. The colonists then turned to a vigorous slave trade, setting the stage for the first slave rebellion in an English colony.
This group of aristocrats, religious though they were, had no dreams of democracy. They wanted the king dead, and their class in power. The colonization process had to do with making a lot of money, so slavery was quite appropriate to their way of thinking. The colony had been deliberately positioned to be in the middle of the bloodthirsty Spanish empire as a sort of religious taunt—a Protestant Reformist’s finger, of sorts. After the 1638 slave rebellion, Spain invaded and within two years exterminated the English presence on Providence Island. The war against Charles had to wait another nine years.
It is fascinating to see that, finding themselves in the midst of a dark people who worked hard at maintaining a harmonious place in nature, the 17th-century colonists took little notice except to cook up charges to expel Natives from coveted land. The noble savage, as some were to call Native people, lived in a world where women, children and animals had just as much right, perhaps more, to inhabit space as men. Individual wealth was not an entree to society, trade and government.
Competition was used as a convenient bridge for white men to walk across the backs of the less fortunate on the way to individual wealth and glory, but this technique found no favor in the Native “New World." There was no Protestant reformer whispering in men’s ears that wealth was good and meritorious, and that some men were superior to others, God having said so. Such contradictions would resurface in the U.S. Constitution later.
Unlike the slums of London, in the wilds of America known dangers lurked. Having allies was thus preferred over individualism, no matter how rugged. The singular authority of Pope or King was unknown among the Natives encountered by the English. There was no King Henry VIII, who, as was his wont, might barge into a woman’s birthing room to force sex upon the just-delivered mother. Henry could be rugged and an individual, but no bloody one else had dare try, at least not in his royal earshot.
This and the many other accouterments of “civilization” had not reached the council fires of the northern Native people, leaving them content to live in their territories of village, town, city, or farm, building governments and confederations that reinforced group unity and welfare. Their societies, nearly perfectly suited to their environments, included choruses of hecklers who could and did run individual leaders out when they became convinced their pomposity was just the thing the tribe needed to get on with life, an acknowledgment that self-aggrandizement lurks in every population. Native government and English colonizing did collide. The question is, did they also make exchanges?
Consider the Massachusetts town meeting, one of the great examples of America’s uniqueness. The Plymouth colony of Puritans came from an Anabaptist religious background. They were Protestant separatists, or reformers, who vehemently opposed the monarchy. To say they were persecuted is perhaps understating what they would have done to the royalists if they were in power. Present day distant cousins can be seen in the gentle Amish farming communities throughout the United States.
By the time (1635) Massachusetts towns (from the Dutch “tunnes”), were defined to include not just fenced gardens, but a community with a church at the center, the Puritans had worked out several problems within their ranks. Primary among these was that members did not have to work for one another without compensation. Bickering and crop failure followed an early impasse when communal work was promoted. The historic Native figure Squanto is credited with saving the community and showing them how to live together.
Upon arrival in America, the Plymouth band of settlers took over a recently-abandoned Native town, Pawtuxet. The fields were already cleared and it was a habitable area. It was, in fact, Squanto’s home town, and he was the sole survivor of his community. He escaped death because he had been in England when a plague struck, killing the entire town. He returned to see the English taking over—members from the same group that had enslaved him—but he helped them nevertheless. Reports from the period record the unwillingness of Puritans to help one another freely without pay. Squanto introduced them to the Native model of individually-owned plots within a commonly-owned community land area. Once the Puritans had family plots, they worked diligently and learned the value of community life.
Puritan councils grew to include non-landowners, causing friction, and some plantation owners left to begin other towns, taking with them, nevertheless, the Native model of mutual help. “Town meetings,” called by the beating of a drum, included landowners and plot holders alike. Votes were often counted using beans and other seeds. Town replaced plantation, and that term went out of vogue, after the old planters who had held complete control in matters of the community moved away. The town meeting was truly born.
In their first year in America, the Puritans could not survive because they would not work in common. By subdividing their lands in the Native fashion they maintained their community and went on to include all members in the town meetings, just as the Natives did. Thus the first steps toward representative federalism were taken that would eventually lead to the Bill of Rights. The Native roots of this new democracy took hold among a people who needed Native wisdom and tutelage to survive. It was a communion of secular need and spirituel oblige, with the Natives doing the giving.
One hundred forty years later, the Iroquois Confederacy and others were invited to attend the “Grand Council Fire” in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to take part in the debates that would shape the future United States. In 1776, an Iroquois delegation visited Congress. The confederacies were held in such high esteem by William Penn that in 1683 he said of them “the kings move by the breath of their people.”
Earlier, on July 4, 1744, the Iroquois leader Canasatego spoke at Lancaster, Pennsylvania on the merits of unity. “We are a powerful Confederacy; and, by your observing the same methods our wise forefathers have taken, you will acquire fresh strength and power; therefore whatever befalls you, never fall out one with another.”
Benjamin Franklin printed the speech and sent 300 copies to London for sale.
Franklin’s Albany Plan of Union drew from Iroquois government. He attended Iroquois ceremonies in 1753, less than a year before writing the plan. His plan would include a Grand Council, a speaker, and a general government under which all colonies would retain their own constitutions, just as the Iroquois confederacy did.
Importantly, Franklin’s plan gave the Americans an identity separate from the English. This was something desperately sought. To continue to be associated with European labels made creating an American identity more difficult, and the northern colonies readily adopted Native symbols, particularly the symbol of the arrows bound together. Thirteen bound arrows signified the unified colonies. The thirteen arrows appear today in the talons of the eagle on the United States Seal.
In 1777, a small publication of the Continental Congress hinted that America was developing a government that reflected the Iroquois government, which was in fulfillment of an Iroquois prophecy that predicted an European and Iroquois symmetry of governments. Strength through unity, the Iroquois standard, became the revolutionary cry of the Americans. This sentiment was later expressed as E pluribus unum— one out of many.
By 1784, the Virginians Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and James Monroe had made plans to visit the Iroquois. Madison went first, traveling with the Marquis de Lafayette to Fort Stanwix, New York. The Virginians had come from a different background than the Pennsylvanians. Slave owning Virginia had saturated its society with the ideals of the plantation, the gentry and the deeply rooted right to own slaves.
Among the Natives, Madison was surprised to hear the stories of French and American adults who lived among the Iroquois as their preferred countries. A young American woman told Madison, “I am the equal of all the women in the tribe.... I shall marry if I wish and be unmarried again when I wish. Is there a single woman as independent as I in your cities?”
Monroe went in 1784. Jefferson, who was to have gone with him, instead went to Paris as the American French Ambassador.
French interest in Natives continued. In 1796, Louis Philippe, then a future king of France, visited America over a three-and-a-half year period, spending some of his time with the Cherokees in Tennessee. The king, then the Duc d’ Orleans, kept a diary of his travels, leaving a rare record of a monarch’s view of the times. Many of the King’s observations about Natives seem to have come from the reports of others, but he did attend a pipe ceremony and met face to face with Natives. Of them he says, “Hospitality is the rule among all Indians....Any man’s tobacco and taluma are always available to all without offer or permission.” (Taluma is believed to be sumac or lobelia).
The culmination of all of this contact which resulted in a United States government had two sides. On the one, the continued alliance ( “The Covenant Chain”) between the Iroquois and the English strengthened the nation to nation relationship between two vastly different governments. After 1701, the alliance was expanded to mean that the Iroquois would take a neutral position with regard to conflicts between the French and English. The alliance was then expanded to include the colonies. Canesetago’s 1744 speech in Lancaster was part of this expansion. He told the colonists “We heartily recommend Union and a good agreement between you and our brethren. Never disagree, but preserve a strict friendship for one another, and thereby you, as well as we, will become stronger.”
Iroquois control extended from Virginia northward, a vast territory, particularly because the bulk of European settlement was along the eastern seaboard and no further west than Ohio.
On the other side, as soon as the fledgling United States had won independence and the new country was underway, revisionists began the job of creating the myth of democracy. Benjamin Franklin and his kind died, and the Virginians took center stage among the “Founding Fathers” group. This was quite far from the truth. The Virginians, including the beloved Thomas Jefferson, were never able to escape their slave-holding societal norms. They were very different from the New Yorkers and Pennsylvanians in their acceptance of human cruelty and the rule of the elite. Creating George Washington in the image of the “Father of our country” took some doing. He was a slaveholder who refused to give up this inhumane practice, even upon death, when he could have released his chattel.
Thomas Jefferson no doubt struggled with his ideals as he continued to live in a society that accepted human degradation. His words, “all men are created equal” penned into the Declaration of Independence must have haunted him to the grave, particularly since he had an African mistress. Yet the only slaves he freed upon death were the two sons and three other male kin of his mistress.
The revisionists also sought to dismiss the statesmanship, diplomacy, and cunning politics of the Iroquois in ways that emphasized the confederacy’s fading military power to the exclusion of anything else. The military forced Iroquois and other eastern tribes off their land and carried out the “removal” of dozens of tribes to the western territories. This unfortunate circumstance did not bode well for the western tribes. As the westward expansion continued, the United States choose Virginian thinking over Pennsylvanian, and created an “Indian policy” that resulted in war, disease, and enormous loss of life for Native people.
Only one gift, left by the English, mitigated the probability of Native annihilation once the Americans won independence and the United States was formed. That gift was the treaty between nations. The English crown, unlike the more sanguine Spanish, readily entered into treaties with Native governments as nations. That meant a government-to-government relationship. That meant diplomacy and the search for common ground was possible. It meant the possibility of alliance rather than intractable enmity. The American colonies followed the pattern. It would have been foolish to have done otherwise and face the military might of the confederated tribes, as the Americans might have, were it not for the treaties. After all, if the Virginians deluded themselves that slavery was possible in an otherwise free society, how without treaties would they have dealt with Native people who were considered to be wild and unschooled beings—not slaves, but not white, either?
However earnestly the Americans tried to disengage themselves from the European models of government and social norms, it would not be long after the Constitution and Bill of Rights were established before the United States began to take an imperious posture. For some, this was the beginning of America’s descent from democracy.
Jefferson wanted to expand westward. The Merriwether Lewis and William Clark expedition to map the northwest was part of the plan. Jefferson’s purchase of the Louisiana territory from France was intended to create a unified country, free of foreign presence. The extreme form of this policy was called “Manifest Destiny,” and it was adopted in the mid-1840s to promote nationhood in the United States—extending from sea to sea and from Canada to Mexico (or as much of Mexico as the United States could get).
America would brook no other country within its borders—not Mexico, and certainly not any independent Native nations. Manifest Destiny involved, in part, removing Native nations to the west as well as weakening the treaty tradition by creating ever less meaningful compacts.
When treaty-making ended in 1871, none of the later agreements had been ratified individually by the United States Senate. U.S. Courts routinely allowed the rest of the government to violate the treaties with Native nations in absolute violation of international law—which allowed unilateral amendment of treaties only in narrow, specific circumstances. The United States simply failed to enforce the rule of international law.
The steady deterioration of Native and U.S. Government relations hit bottom during the western expansion and the western “Indian wars.” More recently, there has been a ragged and tenuous climb back to a United States policy of true government-to-government relations.
The story of democracy, and the Native nations who found themselves hosts to the most misbehaving guests in history, is still unfolding. As it does so, there will be, sadly, a race against time for the Native nations. In order to help the United States move back toward democracy, Native nations will have to survive long enough to discharge their duty as foretold in the old Iroquois prophecy. The optimistic view is that there is just enough time.
Resource List
Brodie, Fawn M., Thomas Jefferson An Intimate History, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1974
Burton, Bruce A., “Squanto’s Legacy: The Origin of the Town Meeting,” Northeast Indian Quarterly, Volume VI Number 4 (Winter 1989): 4-8
Faragher, John Mack, editor, The Encyclopedia of Colonial and Revolutionary America, New York: Da Capo Press, 1996
Drinnon, Richard, Facing West, The Metaphysics of Indian Hating and Empire Building, New York: Schocken Books, 1990
Grinde, Donald A. Jr., “Iroquoian Political Concept and the Genesis of American Government: Further Research and Contentions” Northeast Indian Quarterly, Volume VI, Number 4 ( Winter 1989): 10-21
Grossman, George S., The Sovereignty of American Indian Tribes: A Matter of Legal History, edited by Matthew Stark, Minneapolis, Minnesota: Minnesota Civil Liberties Union Foundation, 1979
Kupperman, Karen Ordahl, Providence Island 1630 - 1641, The Other Puritan Colony, Cambridge, England: University Press, 1995
Merk, Frederick, Manifest Destiny and Mission in American History, with the collaboration of Lois Bannister Merk Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1963
Prucha, Francis Paul, Documents of United States Indian Policy, 2nd ed. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990
Prucha, Francis Paul, The Great Father, The United States Government and the American Indians, Vols l and 2 unabridged, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984
Venables, Robert W.”The Founding Fathers: Choosing to Be the Romans” Northeast Indian Quarterly, Volume VI, Number 4 (Winter 1989): 30-55

A Review of Native People of Minnesota

2007-03-13T17:46:00.000-07:00

A REVIEW OF NATIVE PEOPLE OF MINNESOTA
By Laura Waterman Wittstock

Native People of the Hemisphere
The western hemisphere stretches 9,000 miles from top to bottom. This is the originating place for Natives of what is called Turtle Island. When Native people are referred to as “minorities” or they are represented as a small percentage of the population, that is because they have been killed, have died, or have been displaced by other people, usually Europeans. In the United States, English has displaced many Native languages. In other parts of the hemisphere, Spanish or Portuguese are the displacing languages. However, none of these European languages has succeeded in entirely replacing Native languages. For example, while Spanish is the dominant language of Guatemala, there are also over 30 major Native languages in this Central American country where the Native people constitute the population majority.
Linguists have identified twelve major Native language groups in the hemisphere. Within these groups called “phyla,” are many subgroups of related languages called “families,” and within these many more individual languages. Several others have never been identified and some are yet to be understood.
Millions of Native people once lived in the Hemisphere undisturbed. It is estimated that Christopher Columbus and his men killed five to ten million Natives on Haiti and on the other islands known as Hispanola in the first decade after Columbus’ first expedition in 1492. So complete was their work that Native people are now extinct on Haiti.
It is perhaps more pleasant to imagine what the reactions of the Europeans might have been the first time they tasted pineapple, as Columbus surely did. It was grown first in the Caribbean. Columbus was so impressed with the nutritional power of manioc that he brought quantities back to Europe and is credited with introducing it to famine-stricken Africa as a cultivated plant. It is likely Columbus and his men also used tobacco for the first time. Spanish adventurers brought coca leaves back to Spain where they quickly became a royal drug. Commoners were punished if caught with the leaves. The word barbeque is a Native term meaning essentially the same thing it means now, and comes from the area Columbus dominated. One can imagine the many delicious meals he and his men had - most likely a diet more nutritious and varied than any they had ever experienced in their lifetimes!
Two other great combinations quickly found their way into European cuisine - chocolate and vanilla. The introduction of potatoes, tomatoes, peppers and beans took somewhat longer, but they are now clearly staple foods all throughout Europe.
And, it should be remembered, these were cultivated foods from the western hemisphere, not the discoveries of Europeans.
One of the continuing controversies that extend into the current time is that when the European-style nations formed, the previous Native territories were ignored. Thus we have tribal groups living on two sides of the Canadian and Mexican political borders. The same is true in most countries of Central and South America, and the same is true of many State borders in the United States, including Minnesota.
Making Maple Sugar
Across the northern Great Lakes area of the United States and parts of Canada, northern Native people acclimated a wide variety of seeds to the shorter growing seasons. In addition, wild plants and products were harvested and processed seasonally. The two most famous of these from the Great Lakes area are wild rice and maple sugar. These foods increased people’s ability to live through harsh weather situations.
The process for producing maple syrup has been essentially the same for over 500 years. The sugar maple tree (Acer saccarum) was tapped from upper Canada to Ohio. The tapping was done by a slash method, rather than the more familiar spigots or hosing that is seen today in commercial productions. Boiling baskets were used for the evaporation process.
It takes approximately 30 gallons of sap to make a gallon of syrup or about four pounds of granulated sugar. Through evaporation, the water is removed and a variety of syrups, candies, and sugar are processed and used throughout the year. The work was labor-intensive but rewarding.
Ojibwe sugaring is done each Spring in Minnesota, beginning in March, depending on the region of the State.
Working Toward Religious Freedom
In the United States, where religious freedom is held to be one of the most fundamental rights of all people, Native people have been trying to save their spiritual practices.
Now, after the bloody wars and a long missionary period of prohibitions, Native spiritual practice has not died out and is undergoing a resurgence that promises to bring balance and health back to many groups.
A remedy was proposed for Congressional enactment by Senator Daniel Inouye of Hawaii. The measure extended religious freedom to Native people, something taken for granted by most Americans, but subject to interference, prohibition and even arrest for religious practices.
The measure was enacted. It stated: “on and after August 11, 1978, it shall be the policy of the United States to protect and preserve for American Indians their inherent right of freedom to believe, express, and exercise the traditional religions of the American Indian, Eskimo, Aleut, and Native Hawaiians, including but not limited to access to sites, use and possession of sacred objects, and the freedom to worship through ceremonials and traditional rites.”
Congressional protection was extended in January, 1994 to include the religious use of peyote, following a Supreme Court decision that such use was unprotected and users were subject to arrest.
Alcohol in the History of Native-U.S. Relations
Prior to European contact 500 years ago, there were several drugs and alcoholic beverages prepared and consumed by Native people, although there is no evidence of distilled liquor being one of the forms. These drugs and beverages were used ceremonially and seasonally by people throughout Native lands. Even today, tobacco, peyote and some other drugs are used as part of spiritual ceremonies. Consuming drugs and alcohol apart from ritual is a northern European invention which was imported into the western hemisphere. Even coffee in the Minnesota region was labeled in the Ojibwe language as “black medicine water,” (muck-a-day-moosh-ki-ki-wah-boo), thus relegating it to a non-social drug.
Beginning in 1620, Massachusetts colonial laws restricted the sale of liquor to Native people. This was the beginning of a trend that lasted into the 1950s. The idea was not to restrict sales out of concern for Native people who were unused to distilled liquor, but to regulate all trade with them. Those that controlled the trade became rich and powerful.
Throughout the 1800s, United States treaty language usually included some form of prohibition of liquor. These provisions had the effect of creating a flourishing subrosa market. By 1862, Natives or others could be in violation of the prohibitions. This was the turning point, and by 1916, the possession of alcohol was a crime, as “prima face evidence of unlawful introduction.” Like the Chinese who were singled out for prosecution regarding opium, the Native people were linked with alcohol and experienced the first punitive efforts, long before national Prohibition
There is little doubt now that alcoholism would have taken a much lower toll on Native people had the introduction and use of the drug been normalized as it had been in Southern Europe, that is, associated with family and religious practice. By becoming a tool in the struggle to wrest land away from Native people, alcohol in the United States was historically linked with Natives. A far different outcome would have been likely without the constant interference of government and the extensive lawlessness that was the norm for over 200 years.
Native People in Minnesota
Minnesota’s boundaries were permanently set in 1858 with statehood, but they don’t approximate the territorial markers of Native people. Most indigenous Native families have relatives north in Canada, west in North and South Dakota, and Nebraska, east in Wisconsin and Michigan, and south in Iowa and Illinois.
The recent nature of the Minnesota boundaries is a reminder that Native people have lived in this area permanently before the end of the last ice age ten thousand years ago. Skeletal remains from about 20,000 years ago have been found. It is thus incorrect to refer to Native people in Minnesota as “minorities.” The name preferred by the Ojibwe language group, the largest in the State, is “Anishinabe,” or “original people.”
Minnesota is the homeland of Native people from different Nations who were then displaced by Europeans. But whereas Native Nations moved into the territory for living space and self-sufficiency, the Europeans came primarily for lumber, nearly stripping Minnesota bare in just under one hundred years. Complete destruction was averted by President Theodore Roosevelt, who established the Superior National Forest. It is virtually the only place in the State where pre-European timber can be found.
Native people who lived in the area before 1600 hunted extensively, gathered and preserved a variety of wild foods, and raised cultivated crops from seed stock, rhizomes, and cuttings. Because food was plentiful and nutrition high, the Native populations grew rapidly as soon as the glaciers from the last ice age receded.
Lakes and waterways were named for their geographic characteristics, and the Mississippi was used to carry trade goods south while bringing other goods back to the territory. It was only after the arrival of Europeans that places and bodies of water were named for individuals.
The Dakota people farmed and hunted, developing a highly organized cultural and political structure. A predominant characteristic of Dakota culture is the concept of family and alliances. Families extended to many hundreds of people in some cases. Alliances with other close language groups resulted in agreements for common defense and safe passage across thousands of miles of open territory. Art flourished and some of the most beautiful quill and beadwork ever made can be seen in museums that exhibit Dakota artifacts.
The Ojibwe people were later arrivals and they brought with them powerful political alliances. The Three Fires Confederacy which included the Ottawa, Potawatomi and Ojibwe Nations were hundreds of thousands strong. Today in Minnesota there are still extensive and complex systems of clans, bands and nations that attest to the power of the Confederacy. Far from being extinguished, Ojibwe culture and spirituality are extensively practiced in several areas.
Ho-Chunk people lived and continue to live in the region. Their reservations are located in Wisconsin and Nebraska. A sizeable population lives in Minnesota, primarily St. Paul. The tribe may be called Winnebago by some. They have an extensive culture that is associated with Great Lakes peoples. A deeply intellectual people, the Ho-Chunk have devised a highly complex spiritual code and have composed thousands of stunningly beautiful songs.
It is difficult for most Minnesotans to intimately know the cultures of the Native peoples of Minnesota, but there are some avenues to gaining insights beyond what is seen on television and in the newspapers.
Eleven “reservations” (Native tribal lands legally excluded from the rest of Minnesota) are dispersed around the State. These lands are independent and should be thought of as different countries rather than as parts of Minnesota. Even though the exact nature of tribal land is challenged from time to time, as in the recent fishing disputes, treaties still prevent Americans from running roughshod over tribal sovereignty.
The American laws known as “Indian law,” contain four doctrinal bases: 1. Tribes are independent entities, 2. The independence of Tribes is only subject to exceptionally great powers of Congress to regulate and modify, 3. only the federal government may deal with Tribes, and 4. the federal government has the responsibility for the protection of Tribes and their properties (including encroachments from States and their citizens). These are the four basic themes from which all laws dealing with Native Nations must flow.
For many people, the new gaming industry operated on tribal land is not well understood. But as the industry approaches mega-status among corporations, the net gains for at least some of the Native people have included a return to former self-sufficiency.
On September 24, 1993, the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe Indians opened the Nay Ay Shing Primary and Secondary Schools. The schools will serve Native children from early childhood through grade 12. The funds used to build the schools have come entirely from gaming revenues earned by the Nation. No federal or state tax dollars were used.
270 children will learn Ojibwe language and culture in a full academic curriculum. The two schools are located in a woodland setting 10 miles north of Onamia. The buildings are designed so that students enter a circular room with a skylight. Included in the design are the four sacred colors and directions of the earth.
Advising the school is a group of Ojibwe elders who will share their knowledge, wisdom and language with the students.
This latest development in Native resiliency and creativity is proof positive that the Native people of Minnesota are strong and able to care for their own communities when afforded opportunity and freedom from interference.
Interesting Facts
1. In Minneapolis, a city named for a combination of Dakota for water (mnii) and Greek for city (polis), there are some misplaced and just plain wrong names. The poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, in his poem “The Song of Hiawatha,”(1855) mixed Iroquois culture with Ojibwe culture, and came up with the hero Hiawatha from Iroquois history, and Minnehaha, a fictional character with a name which was supposed to mean something like, “laughing water.” Mnii, as we see in the name of the city is the Dakota word for water, and “ha ha” was a figment of Longfellow’s imagination!
2. Minnetonka is Dakota for a large body of water.
3. Chaska is Dakota for the title given to a first born son.
4. Mahtomedi is Dakota for White Bear Lake.
5. Chicago is Ojibwe for a place where skunks live.
6. There are over 100 Native languages spoken in the United States today.This is a probable decrease of over two- thirds.
7. Before Europeans came, treaties were common between Native Nations. The first treaty between the United States and a Native Nation was with the Delaware in 1778.
8.As with dealing with foreign nations, the U.S. Constitution stipulates that only the United States, not the individual States, may make treaties with Native Nations, and the U.S. Government comes first over States when there are conflicting laws.
8. The first United States Trade and Intercourse Act (1 Stat. 137, 1790), said there would be no transfer of any Native lands to any individual or State except by treaty “under the authority of the United States.”
9. A short description of the laws known as “Indian law,” contains the following four doctrinal bases: 1. Tribes are independent entities, 2. The independence of Tribes is subject to exceptionally great powers of Congress to regulate and modify, 3. only the federal government may deal with Tribes, and 4. the federal government has the responsibility for the protection of Tribes and their properties (including encroachments from States and their citizens). These are the four basic themes from which all laws dealing with Native Nations must flow.
10. Native Nations, unlike women and former slaves, did not ask for the right to vote. They held no citizenship in the United States. Yet Congress passed a statute conferring citizenship on all U.S. born Native people in 1924. Some Nations to this day neither recognize citizenship nor practice it.
11. Beginning in 1953, Congress started to “terminate” Native Nations. Once such Tribe, the Menominee in Wisconsin, not only won its status back, but the new Assistant Secretary of Interior for Indian Affairs in the Clinton Administration is a member of that Tribe. Her name is Ada Deer. She was one of the key fighters against the unjust ruling of Congress.
12. Nearly 800 treaties between Native Nations and others have been signed. Over 400 of those treaties were between Native Nations and the United States.
State Names From Native Sources
Of the fifty States in the United States, the names of 28 are taken directly from Native languages. One (Indiana) refers to Native people,and another (California) is of unknown derivation. Twenty have no references to Native languages in their names. This means 56 percent of all the States have a “Native connection.”And, interestingly, most of the States with the no connection (except Montana, Colorado, Nevada, and Washington) are those that were established early, on the United States eastern seaboard. There was a stronger propensity at that time among the British to name places after their own homelands that they had left behind.
States with no connection
Colorado
Delaware
Florida
Georgia
Louisiana
Maine
Maryland
Montana
Nevada
New Hampshire
New Jersey
New York
North Carolina
Pennsylvania
Rhode Island
South Carolina
Vermont
Virginia
Washington
West Virginia
States with Native connections
Alabama: Choctaw, referring to thick vegetation and the reaping thereof.
Alaska: Aleut, referring to the mainland, as compared to the islands.
Arizona: Pima, for “small place of the spring.”
Arkansas: French corruption of the name for the Quapaw Nation.
Connecticut: Mohican (Maíingun) word for “the long river.”
Hawaii: Named by the Native people for their homeland.
Idaho: Shoshonean languages describing the sun coming down the mountains.
Illinois: Ojibwe, referring to men.
Iowa: Named for the Iowa (Native) people.
Kansas: Named for the Kansas (Native) people.
Kentucky: Iroquoian languages, referring to meadow land.
Massachusetts: Algonkian languages for “great hill.”
Michigan: Ojibwe, referring to a big lake.
Minnesota: Dakota, referring to the reflection of the sky on the water
Mississippi: Algonkian languages for “great river.”
Missouri: Named for the Missouri (Native) people.
Nebraska: Siouian languages, referring to a flat, wide waterway.
New Mexico: Aztec, referring to the “place of the war god.”
North Dakota: Named for the Dakota (Native) people.
Ohio: Iroquoian languages, for ‘beautiful.”
Oklahoma: Muskogean for “red people,” named by Allen Wright, a Choctaw leader.
Oregon: Shoshonean languages referring to a bountiful land.
South Dakota: Named for the Dakota (Native) people.
Tennessee: Cherokee, for the name of one of their villages.
Texas: Native derivation of the Spanish term “Tijas,” or allies.
Utah: Named for the Ute (Native) people.
Wisconsin: Ojibwe, referring to the confluence of waters.
Wyoming: Delaware (Algonkian) for “large meadows.”
A Short Chronology Of Events In Native History
1400 Iroquois Confederacy of five nations formed.
1500 European diseases ravage Native people.
1512 Spain makes it legal to make slaves of Native people.
1512 The Pope declares that Native people are descended from Adam and Eve.
1520 Hernando Cortes murders Montezuma. His crown of feathers still reposes in Vienna, where Austria refuses to give it back to the Aztec people.
1539 Francisco de Vitoria in Spain tries to advocate that Native people are free and exempt from slavery.
1585 Roanoke settlement from England is founded, disappears in one year.
1589 Acoma people revolt against the Spanish. One year later 800 Natives are killed in retaliation.
1616 Smallpox epidemic in New England.
1620 Pilgrims arrive in Wampanoag territory. They learn farming and how to give t hanks for nature’s gifts. (Thanksgiving ceremonies were practiced extensively by all Nations that had developed agriculture.)
1631 Roger Williams argues that Native lands are being illegally expropriated. He urges a more humane policy.
1633 More smallpox epidemics kill Native people.
1675 British establish a Secretary of Indian Affairs in Albany, NY
1676 Metacomet killed trying to protect home lands.
1680 Pope, a Tewa spiritual leader succeeds against the Spanish. The effort is defeated in 1689.
1682 William Penn devises treaty with the Delaware, opening up friendly relations between Natives and Quakers.
1689 75 years war between England and France; Iroquois side with British, Algonkian Nations with French.
1751 Benjamin Franklin cites the Iroquois Confederacy as a model for the Union.
1778 U.S. Treaty with the Delaware.
1787 Northwest Ordinance calls for the sanctity of Native lands but also urges further white settlements in Native territory.
1789 Department of War established and assigns matters relative to Indian
Affairs to it.
1790 Intercourse Act, requiring a treaty to sell Native land and instituting criminal
procedures for crimes against Natives.
1817 Federal courts given jurisdiction of Natives and others in Native territory.
1819 First efforts to “civilize” Native people using missionaries and other “persons of good to widespread cheating of Natives.
1830 Indian Removal Act, “voluntary” movement of Native people to west of the Mississippi River.
l849 Department of Interior established. Commissioner of Indian Affairs moves from the Department of War to Interior.
1871 Ended treaty-making without public debate. Also severely limited power of the President. Probably unconstitutional, but tolerated.
1887 General Allotment Act divided Native lands and opened up “surplus” for homesteading, pitting one vulnerable group against another.
1892 Authorizing forced attendance at Indian Service schools.
1918 Limited appropriations to Native Nations by defining blood quantum.
1921 Snyder Act; permanent authority for services to Natives. Later formed the basis for Federal services to State reservations and urban or off-reservation Natives.
1924 Citizenship conferred without being requested on all Natives born in U.S.
1934 Johnson-O’Malley Act. U.S contracts with States for services to Native people.
1946 Indian Claims Commission established to settle Indian land claims.
1953 Infamous House Concurrent Resolution 108 terminating many Native Nations.
1953 Public Law 280 passed without Native consent and allowing States jurisdiction on many reservations.
1955 Federal responsibility for health shifted from the Bureau of Indian Affairs to the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (Now the Department of Health and Human Services.)
1969 Occupation of Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay. Island reclaimed by Native people.
1971 Alaska Native Land Claim Settlement Act, land settlement with 20-year termination clause.
1972 Indian Education Act assuring some community and Native control in programs to educate Native students.
1972 American Indian Movement occupies the Bureau of Indian Affairs and forges 20-point position paper, leading to several legislative reforms.
1972 Yakima Nations receives 21,000 acres of land back.
1973 American Indian Movement battle U.S. forces at Wounded Knee, SD over horrendous living conditions and rigged tribal elections.
1975 Indian Self-Determination Act permitting Nations to manage some of their own programs.
1978 Indian Child Welfare Act establishes standards to protect Native children from being separated from their families and tribes.
1984 President Reagan’s Commission on Reservation Economies accuses BIA of excessive regulation and recommends assigning the agency’s responsibility to other Federal agencies. Proposal is rejected by Native Nations.
1996 Case Law: Corbell v. Norton is a class-action lawsuit filed on June 10, 1996, in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. to force the federal government to account for billions of dollars belonging to approximately 500,000 American Indians and their heirs, and held in trust since the late 19th century.
Through document discovery and courtroom testimony, the case has revealed mismanagement, ineptness, dishonesty and delay by federal officials, leading U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth to declare their conduct "fiscal and governmental irresponsibility in its purest form."
Then-Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt, Assistant Secretary of the Interior Kevin Gover and Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin were held in contempt of court in February 1999 by Judge Lamberth for their departments' repeated delays in producing documents, destruction of relevant documents and misrepresentations to the court in sworn testimony. As the case proceeds, new revelations of false testimony, financial misconduct and bureaucratic retaliation have continued to surface.
The facts underlying the litigation involve a broad sweep of United States history. Although U.S. policy in the 1870s was to locate Indians on reservations, hunger for the land by non-Indians led to a break-up of most of the reservations starting in the 1880s. Thousands of individual Indians generally were allotted beneficial ownership of 80- to 160-acre parcels of land in the break-up. As trustee, the government took legal title to the parcels, established an Individual Indian Trust and thereby assumed full responsibility for management of the trust lands. That included the duty to collect and disburse to the Indians any revenues generated by mining, oil and gas extraction, timber operations, grazing or similar activities.
As a result of more than a century of malfeasance, the United States government has no accurate records for hundreds of thousands of Indian beneficiaries nor of billions of dollars owed the class of beneficiaries covered by the lawsuit. The suit encompasses approximately 500,000 Indian beneficiaries.
The purpose of the litigation - which was filed by Elouise Cobell, a member of the Blackfeet tribe in Montana, and her co-plaintiffs - is two-fold: to force the government to account for the money, and to bring about permanent reform of the system.
Judge Lamberth bifurcated the case along those lines. After a trial on Phase One - reform of the system - Judge Lamberth ruled on December 21, 1999 that the secretaries of Interior and Treasury had breached their trust obligations to the Indians. The court retained judicial oversight of the system for a minimum of five years, to ensure that it is overhauled, and ordered Interior to provide an historical accounting of all trust funds. An appeal by the government, arguing that the judge had overreached his authority, was unanimously rejected by a three-judge appeals court panel on February, 23, 2001.
To help enforce his orders, Judge Lamberth has appointed both a special master, who oversees the preservation and production of trust documents, and a federal monitor, who provides the judge with assessments of the truthfulness of Interior's representations to the Court regarding execution of trust reform. In his first report to the court - 19 months after Judge Lamberth's December 21, 1999 order - the federal monitor declared that Interior's stated efforts to provide an accounting in compliance with the order are a sham, are "still at the starting gate" and have been marked by "unrealistic responses and evasion."
A trial on Phase Two - accounting for the money - has not yet been scheduled.
Resources
Periodicals
The Circle newspaper, published monthly, Minneapolis, MN
News From Indian Country, the Native Nations Newspaper, published twice monthly, write to the paper at Rt. 2, Box 2900-A, Hayward, WI 54843
A Small Group of Fundamental Book Resources
Frederic Baraga. A Dictionary of the Ojibway Language. St. Paul, MN. Minnesota Historical Society Press. 1992.
John Bierhorst. A Cry from the Earth: Music of the North American Indians. New York. Four Winds Press. 1979.
Dee Brown. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. New York. Henry Holt. 1970.
William C. Canby, Jr.American Indian Law: In a Nut Shell.St. Paul, MN: West Publishing. 1988.(with updates in 2004)
Stewart Culin. Games of the North American Indians. 2 Volumes. Nebraska. University of Nebraska Press. 1992.
Richard Drinnon. Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire Building. New York. Schocken Books. 1990.
Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission Biological Services. Biological Impact of the Chippewa Off Reservation Fishing. Odanah, WI. P.O. Box 9, Odana, 54861. 1989.
Rayna Green and Lisa Thompson. American Indian Sacred Objects: A Resource Guide. Washington, D.C. Smithsonian Institution. 1992.
Inez M. Hilger. Chippewa Child Life and Its Cultural Background. St. Paul, MN. Minnesota Historical Society Press. 1992.
Fredrick E. Hoxie.America in 1492: The World of the Indian People Before the Arrival of Columbus, ed Alvin M. Josephy, Jr. New York: Knopf. 1992.
Francis Paul Prucha. Atlas of American Indian Affairs. Nebraska. University of Nebraska Press. 1990.
Francis Paul Prucha. Documents of United States Indian Policy. Nebraska. University of Nebraska Press. 1990.
Gordon Regguinti. The Sacred Harvest: Ojibway Wild Rice Gathering. Minneapolis, MN. Lerner Publications. 1992.
Alan R. Velie. American Indian Literature: An Anthology. Norman, OK. University of Oklahoma Press.1979.
Virgil J. Vogel. American Indian Medicine. Norman, OK. University of Oklahoma Press. 1982.
Jack Weatherford. Indian Givers: How the Indians of the Americas Transformed the World. New York. Ballantine Books. 1988.
Jack Weatherford. Native Roots: How the Indians Enriched America. New York. Ballantine Books. 1992.
Laura Waterman Wittstock. Ininatig’s Gift of Sugar: Traditional Native Sugar Making. Minneapolis, MN. Lerner Publications. 1993.
Audio
The Cloud Family Collection. 8 Radio Plays. Cassette. MIGIZI Communications, Inc. 3123 East Lake Street. Minneapolis, MN 55406
Coming From America. 2 -hour Documentary. Cassette. MIGIZI Communications, Inc. 3123 East Lake Street. Minneapolis, MN 55406.

Public In Dark about Library Danger

2007-03-13T17:45:00.002-07:00

The City of Minneapolis provides a pie chart to illustrate the recommended $1.3 billion 2007 budget. It reveals at a glance the fat and thin slices, fat for more money, thin for less.
Among the thin slices of two-percent or less are Health & Family Support, Regulatory Services, the City Attorney, Other City Services, Other Boards, and the Library Board. That’s two cents or less of the city dollar.
Among the fat slices of nine-percent or more are the Police Department, Public Works, Debt Service, and Community Planning and Economic Development. That’s almost a dime or more of the city dollar.
The Mayor’s recommended revenue for the Library Board is $22.8 million, a 2.4% sliver of an increase over the adopted budget of 2006. In the details are differences between how the library calculates revenue and how the City did its calculations. It’s safe to say that the real increase is not an increase at all, given rising costs. The 2007 proposed budget is radically insufficient to support the operations of the Minneapolis library system.
So what is the Library Board to do?
Because the Library Board is an independently elected board in Minneapolis, voters have been asking why the Board is not able to set its own tax levy, subject to the approval of Board of Estimate and Taxation. Some of the answer lies in the City Charter itself.
The Charter is Minneapolis’ Constitution that describes the powers the people of the city give their city government. In the Charter, Minneapolis citizens give the Library Board the power to levy taxes for its operating requirements. This, as with all levy intentions, goes to the Board of Estimate and Taxation, which sets the annual levy limit for the city for the year.
This process is intended to give the boards their independence and ability to represent all Minneapolis citizens in the operation of the library system. Six of the eight Library Board Trustees, as they are called, are elected in citywide elections. They do not represent districts or wards, but all of the citizens of the city.
Under then Mayor Sharon Sayles Belton, with no doubt advice from the city’s finance department, a formula was fashioned to thwart the Charter process for the independent boards. The formula held property tax increases to 3% and gave the Mayor and city council authority to adjust the Local Government Aid (LGA) portion of the library’s revenue. This meant that if the library raised property taxes, approved by the Board of Estimate and Taxation, the city would then reduce the amount of LGA by the same amount. The net outcome would be zero. Power is stripped from the Library Board.
Even setting aside the fact that the 1994 City Council resolution set in place policy by the numbers instead of policy by the wishes of the citizens for the service levels they desired, the practice over the past 12 years has resulted in a Library Board that can only offer representation without taxation. It is hobbled from exercising the wishes of the public as stated in the City Charter.
Transferring the power of the purse to the City Council was not intended in the language of the Charter. The council members are elected in wards and have no citywide constituency as the Library Board does. And, there is little collegiality between the City Council and the Library Board. So opportunities for collaboration and negotiation as peers are absent in the relationship. The Library Board is reduced to the status of a supplicant, again a position not envisioned in the Charter nor expressing the intention of the citizens of Minneapolis.
In 2002, the City Council increased the property tax levy limit to 4% and kept the LGA controls firmly in its hands. None of this envisioned a radical change in the LGA amount coming to the City, nor did the Council’s policy change even after the devastation to the library system made the case that policy by the numbers does not work for all systems. Further, the wishes of the citizens were ignored.
In 2003, the Library Board accepted what it thought was the desire of Minneapolitans and kept all libraries open in 2004, even though this meant the loss of over 70 staff and workers. Short hours forced library users to fit their needs into the very short library hour schedule. No one was happy.
Faced with irrefutable evidence that future budgets will fall short of providing for the entire library system, some in the City Council say sell the new Central Library or close and sell some of the community libraries, a prospect the Council has made likely by its control of the library’s budget.
What is really at issue here is that the public knows little about the annual budgeting process of the City. The City Charter is a mystery to the greater majority of the citizens. When there is a lack of transparency in how the City does its business, and when policies are made that are expected to fit every service in every situation, the people are no longer served well.
Citizens should be assured that their elected public officials are not gathering power to themselves inappropriately.

Librarian: Make My Day

2007-03-13T17:45:00.001-07:00

One of the best resources for area businesses is hiding in plain sight at the Minneapolis Public Library. And, the services are free or incredibly cheap.
Downtown businesses have applauded the new Central Library with its vistas, spaciousness, and architectural beauty. What is not so easily seen are the 80,000 volumes of circulating and reference materials available for business users. The business collection, especially its reference section, has had a lot of and frequent use as seen by reference statistics which show business use as substantially higher than any other area of the library. This includes electronic databases in business subjects.
The Library is also developing small business sections in both East Lake and North Regional – set to open in Spring 2007 when renovations are complete. North Regional will have 400 books, periodicals and newspapers at its Business and Careers Center and there will be about 500 items at the East Lake Library.
While the library system operating revenues are only two percent of the Minneapolis budget, the library system also offers smart and fast research. INFORM is the research service of the Minneapolis Public Library. It relies on current information from reliable resources to provide research and document needs to small businesses, multinational corporations, law firms, and professionals in marketing, advertising and public relations, and media organizations. The service is also used by investment and engineering firms.
Fabulous as this all is – and this is not hyperbole – revenue shifts toward the negative are coming down hard on the glass jewel in downtown Minneapolis. And glass, as we know, can shatter under pressure.
This is essentially a supply side issue. By artificially narrowing the stream of revenues through caps and ceilings, the Minneapolis City Council has forced the library system to cut everything but essential services. But even after curtailment, which is not good when the services are virtually free to the public, including the business community, the library system faces forced closures to remain in operation. Yes, it is eating the seed corn to stay alive.
Of primary importance to business is its future workforce. Failure to invest in this area has resulted in some alarming statistics as far as new entries into Kindergarten are concerned. Less than 50% of entering students in Minnesota are proficient enough to succeed. An important link in addressing this statistic is the availability of free, open libraries. These services are invaluable for helping the coming generations of future workers in our city.
So on the demand side, the legendary Minneapolis Public Library rate of new items in the collection is going down as circulation increases. All over the country, library circulation is rising. Patrons are thirsty for collection depth and breadth. When it isn’t there, the population at the bottom of the economic ladder loses first, but eventually everyone loses.
However, the Minnesota attributes we love and have come to expect may desert us if we don’t pay more attention to demand. The Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development (DEED) points to the top ten. These include business friendly climate, fertile ground for innovation, excellence in education, proven performance, wealth of resources and our ranking as a “most livable state.”
We wear all of these labels proudly and with a lot of optimism. But it is time to take stock. Our inventory is shrinking and that has gone largely unnoticed. In the future, when we start to see the effects of this, it will be too late to market the best we have to offer. Now, while we enjoy these high ratings, attention must be paid to our resources.
Minneapolis has to come to a better solution than a one size fits all fiscal policy that is bearing down hard on one of its greatest resources, its libraries. She may not be a cop, but a librarian is one of best public servants we have for the price, and little kids are not afraid of her.

Public Meetings with No Choices

2007-03-13T17:44:00.001-07:00

From September 14 to September 25, five public meetings were conducted by the Minneapolis Library Board to hear what the public thinks of its 2007 to 2009 budget approaches for the library system. Because the Library must have an annual balanced budget, continuing shortages of revenue going back as early as 1994 are forcing damaging changes to the entire system, changes that now include selling libraries for one-time revenues.
In addition to the public meetings, the library conducted a survey that was available to all library patrons either online or in paper form, displayed at all Minneapolis libraries. The survey was offered in multiple languages. Further, four listening sessions with library patrons, drawn from the roster of those who hold library cards were conducted. And finally, an online discussion forum is available on the library’s website.
The Library Board intends that these efforts open the discussion about the operating budget as broadly as possible to the Minneapolis public. This is an important function of the Library Board because its work comes under the Minneapolis Charter, the City’s Constitution that describes the powers the people of the city give their city government. In the Charter, Minneapolis citizens give the Library Board the power to levy taxes for its operating requirements. This, as with all levy intentions, goes to the Board of Estimate and Taxation, which sets the annual levy limit for the city for the year.
This process is intended to give the boards their independence and ability to represent all Minneapolis citizens in the operation of the library system. Six of the eight Library Board members are elected in citywide elections. They do not represent districts or wards, but all of the citizens of the city.
As with all Constitutions in our country at least, the granted powers in the Charter result in representative government. As the elected Library Board members sit in session and govern, they are acting on behalf of all of the citizens of Minneapolis. This is a great and distinguished privilege, one not to be taken lightly, nor one to be confined into smaller and smaller spaces, slipping away from public control.
Yet this appears to be the case when it comes to controlling the annual budget of the library system. The public’s ability to tax itself for high quality library services has been thwarted. It was done so easily because voters are largely unaware of the limiting controls placed on the Library Board’s fiscal role under the Charter. This has resulted in the long history of shortchanging libraries.
When this fact was brought to the attention of the City Council’s Ways and Means Committee in October 2005, and along with it the suggestion that while the damage done may not have been anyone’s fault, future damage to the library if sustained, could be considerable. That was the awakening point, which the City Council should have taken to heart and reconsidered its one-size-fits-all policy of capping annual budget increases while using the Local Government Aid allocation to Minneapolis to control budget levels. One fiscal policy does not fit all systems in the city.
Placing a noose around the library system and pulling it tighter and tighter each year has been the result. But with irrefutable evidence at hand that the library system is on the brink of breaking apart, the recommendation from the City is to go ahead and break apart. The only choice now left to the independently elected Library Board is to decide which library stands and which library falls. That is not the choice given to the Library Board in the Charter.
On the subject of library buildings, the voters have already spoken. They approved a new Central Library and renovations to all existing community libraries. But when they voted on these improvements, they did not know (or very few knew) that back in 1994, the City Council had passed a resolution affecting the Library Board, among others. Under then Mayor Sharon Sayles Belton, with no doubt advice from the city’s finance department, a formula was fashioned to thwart the Charter process for the independent boards. The formula held property tax increases to 3% and gave the Mayor and city council authority to adjust the Local Government Aid (LGA) portion of the library’s revenue.
This meant that if the library raised property taxes, approved by the Board of Estimate and Taxation, the city would then reduce the amount of LGA by the same amount. The net outcome was zero. Power was stripped from the Library Board.
So what have citizens been saying in this last round of public meetings? At the Nokomis meeting on September 19th, held at a nearby Methodist Church, there was a group of about 70. Two comments stand out.
“If the City were going to close down and there weren’t going to be any people living here – then some of the alternative approaches (presented) would make sense.”
And from State Senator Wes Skogland: “The reason not to close libraries is that they will do it again. You will take care of their (the City’s) problem for them.”
In the Southeast community, with its advantageous proximity to the University of Minnesota, the outstanding public schools of the old Southeast Alternatives, a generational turnover is underway, likely to pick up its pace as we move further into the century. The Southeast Library may not be in the best building it could be. There are few, if any options for expansion and enhancement. But the idea of a library, the presence of a public place of free learning, fits exceedingly well in this community that is the home of a diverse population, growing numbers of new families and a cultural strain that reveres soccer over football and books over video games. Said a Somali elder at the Nokomis meeting: “When we close libraries, we close the door on knowledge and we close the door on life.”

The City Council's Heavy Boot

2007-03-13T17:43:00.000-07:00

Back in the late summer of 2005, the candidates for Library Board (there were 19 in all) were invited to ten forums in the community libraries to meet directly with the public and answer questions. Another of several other forums was with Insight News. One specific question asked had to do with experience in working with communities of color. Some candidates answered more in depth than others. Fortunately, at least three of the candidates with deep experience in communities of color are now elected trustees of the Library Board. To their company has been added Hussein Samatar, who comes from the Somali Community. And, it must be said, all of the current trustees have a sincere commitment to the communities of color.
Another question, repeated over many times was, “will you close libraries?” All of the responses from those who currently sit on the Library Board were that the future was too unclear to know if that choice would have to be made. Further, they said the issues were too important and too far-reaching to close down any possible options that might otherwise benefit the broader library community. At the time, the trustees were communicating with City Council candidates and elected officials, making the case for increased funding for libraries.
But now that tragic time is here, and it’s a good thing the trustees now in office said they would keep the door open to all possibilities. Inflexibility is not a criticism that can be hurled at the Library Board. It is working hard to avoid the prospect of closed and sold libraries while reaching out more broadly to others who can help with longer-term recommendations. No one on the Library Board wants closed libraries.
The Library Board’s work comes under the Minneapolis Charter, the City’s Constitution that describes the powers the people of the city give their city government. In the Charter, Minneapolis citizens give the Library Board the power to levy taxes for its operating requirements. This, as with all tax intentions, goes to the Board of Estimate and Taxation, which sets the annual tax levy limit for the city for the year.
This process is intended to give the Library Board its independence and ability to represent all Minneapolis citizens in the operation of the library system. Six of the eight Library Board members are elected in citywide elections. They do not represent districts or wards, but all of the citizens of the city.
So why has budget support for community libraries such as North Regional and East Lake Street been put in such jeopardy? These great libraries on the North and South sides of Minneapolis surely deserve better.
Yes, they do, and when a small increase in the Local Government Aid (LGA) was allocated to the library budget, the trustees opted to save that money for North Regional and East Lake. But, it was not enough. Nearly $700,000 was needed to provide the hours needed.
People ask, “Why can’t the library manage its money better?”
The voters of Minneapolis spoke loudly when they approved a new Central Library and renovations to all existing community libraries. The old Central Library was in violation of several city codes and was in danger of being shut down. 80% of the library collection was out of immediate reach of library users. The referendum passed with the approval of 67% of those voting. But what voters did not know (or very few knew) was that back in 1994, the City Council had passed a resolution that held property tax increases to 3% and gave the City Council authority to adjust the Local Government Aid (LGA) portion of the library’s revenue.
This meant that if the library raised property taxes, approved by the Board of Estimate and Taxation, the city would reduce the amount of LGA by the same amount. The result was that power over the budget was taken from the Library Board.
Most voters are unaware of the limiting controls placed on the Library Board’s fiscal role under the Charter. This has resulted in a 12-year history of shortchanging libraries.
The City Council needs to lift its heavy boot off the budget of the Library Board and let the public have the full service of libraries it is asking for.

Libraries At Risk

2007-03-13T17:42:00.000-07:00

Given a choice, every neighborhood of the City of Minneapolis would say it wants its library to stay in service. This has been especially true for the residents surrounding Southeast Library near Dinkeytown. The old Pillsbury Library building was vacated and the new location for the Southeast Library in 1967 was a building designed by Ralph Rapson. The library hopes to celebrate 40 years next year. Southeasters have been fighting valiantly since 2003 to make the case for continuation of their library.
And for those who used to go to the Pierre Bottineau Library in its old cramped location, the new Bottineau Library delights with its architecturally warm, slightly Art Deco atmosphere. But with short hours, it is difficult to make full use of what this new library has to offer.
The 20th Century was a spectacular growth period for library use, particularly during the tenure of Gratia Countryman, the Minneapolis Public Library system’s most beloved librarian. Her 1953 obituary said in part: “During her 32 years as librarian she played a major role in the library's organization and early recognized the need for ‘bringing the library to the people.’
“She often said: ‘This isn't the century when Abraham Lincolns walk 12 miles for a book.’ And she did something about it.”
That was still the spirit in the city in 2000, when voters approved a new Central Library and improvements to the community libraries with a resounding 67% yes! But along the way, a recession came and everyone felt the effect of a loss of taxes paid that hurt the State and the City severely.
During that dark time in 2003, the saddest evening in recent memory was the farewell for the 70-plus library employees who lost their jobs because of the cuts in Local Government Aid (LGA). It was held at Bottineau Library. The cold weather only served to remind everyone of the bitter price the library system paid. Whether it was because of the harsh economic times or the hard-edged City Council policy, the resulting pain was the same. It seemed things could not get worse.
But then it did. Library income has sunk so low that it will take $6.5 million in 2007 to restore the system to full capacity.
Most voters are unaware of the limiting controls placed on the Library Board’s fiscal role under the Charter. This has resulted in a 12-year history of shortchanging libraries. From 2003 to 2008, the amount of property taxes and LGA will go up 13.79% for the City, and 9.5% for the Park Board. But for the same period the Library Board will suffer a 1.50% decrease in its operating budget.
If the Library Board did raise property taxes and got the approval of the Board of Estimate and Taxation, the City Council will reduce the amount of LGA by the same amount. The result will be no gain in the library budget.
However, on the homeowner side, there are tax issues, too. According to the Minneapolis Star Tribune on October 14, “Minnesotans are on track to pay about $1.6 billion more in residential real estate taxes in 2007 than they did in 2002. For the average household, that means about $800 more next year than they paid five years ago -- or more than double the $348 income-tax break they received when the state cut its income taxes in 1999-2000.”
What’s more according to the Star Tribune, “Residential property taxes in the past four years have climbed at nearly triple the increase in personal incomes in Hennepin County…”
Minneapolis residents coming to the recent public meetings to discuss library options tilted heavily toward saving their highly valued libraries. Many said a few more dollars in taxes would not be a big burden.
Young people and families need more access, meaning more open hours at libraries. Technology is no longer an option but a necessity for many people. The answers for Northeasters, Southeasters and all other neighborhoods in the city will not come easily, but more than ever close communication with City Council Members will let them know the wishes of the public.
It’s not a matter that can be left to chance.

Behind the Scenes

2007-03-13T17:32:00.000-07:00

It is my experience as a member of the tiny opposition minority that the alignment and agreement to shift the library system from Minneapolis to Hennepin County is a political process of remarkable dimensions. When the present city council was elected in 2005, there was concern that voting blocks and lack of agreement would be the norm, not the exception to come from this rambunctious bunch. The independent minded candidates that made the cut and were voted in said a lot about city services, including supporting libraries. Similarly, the new members of the library board that were elected reflected deep concerns about the revenue shortfall the library system had undergone and there were loud and diverse statements about how to reverse this trend. None of these included giving the library system away. It is my belief that the voters believed these campaign promises of thinking independently and actively seeking solutions to the library revenue shortfall would be on the agenda.

The notion of the shift was in none of the campaign rhetoric. It came from only one source: the staff.

Now we are at 2007 and an amazing alignment of agreement has emerged: the ONLY solution to the library revenue issue is to give the system away and dissolve the library board. Had the predictions of independent mindedness held, such a decision would not have been possible either at the library board or the city council level.

It is quite obvious that once in office, the candidates went through a transformation from independent mindedness to great conformity. I expect political historians will investigate this phenomenon for clues as to predictability. Voters need some reliability that their choice of candidate will hold to his or her values once elected. The 2005 election will be unusual in that nearly all new candidates who were elected quickly fell toward the status quo. That is an amazing conversion.

Library board responses to the public have varied, from "I did not know how serious the problem was," to "my heart is heavy but this is the best way to save the Minneapolis libraries." These statements (paraphrased here) indicate to me that a powerful bureaucracy had developed both in city hall and in the library offices - enough to become significant players in directing the change from revenue support to system giveaway from one municipal power to the regional one. It was a silent blanket of death that unobtrusively fell over the elected officials, smothering whatever independence they once had.

We will have to pay tribute eventually to the mayor's office, the county staff, and the library administration but probably not in the immediate future. That will be the task of future city councils who will be in awe of what was accomplished and they will be afraid to mount any independent actions without the implied consent of the powerful bureaucrats.

Meanwhile, several presently seated public officials are scarcely aware of how deeply they have been wounded. And, on balance, the voters are even less aware. That's the sadness about this whole thing.

Who in 2005 said, "Give Away the Libraries?"

2007-03-13T17:29:00.000-07:00

H.F. No. 1973, as introduced - 85th Legislative Session (2007-2008) Posted on Mar 12, 2007
1.1A bill for an act

1.2relating to local government; enabling the merger of the Minneapolis Public
1.3Library and the Hennepin County library system; authorizing the transfer of
1.4property, assets, and certain bond proceeds related to the Minneapolis Public
1.5Library to Hennepin County; authorizing the transfer of Minneapolis Public
1.6Library employees to Hennepin County;amending Minnesota Statutes 2006,
1.7sections 275.065, subdivision 3; 383B.237; 383B.239; 383B.245; 383B.247.
1.8BE IT ENACTED BY THE LEGISLATURE OF THE STATE OF MINNESOTA:

1.9ARTICLE 1

1.10LIBRARY MERGER

1.11 Section 1. PURPOSE AND PREEMPTION.
1.12This act enables the merger of the Minneapolis Public Library and the Hennepin
1.13County library system for the purpose of providing better service to the public, building
1.14on the respective strengths of the two systems and maximizing long-term operating
1.15efficiencies, service effectiveness and the advantages of new technology, and providing
1.16programs and services responsive to the diverse and changing needs and interests of all
1.17persons and communities served. This act supersedes any contrary Minnesota laws and
1.18provisions of the home rule charter and ordinances of the city of Minneapolis.

1.19 Sec. 2. DEFINITIONS.
1.20(a) For the purposes of this act, the terms defined in this section have the meanings
1.21given unless the context clearly indicates otherwise.
1.22(b) "Merger date" means the first day after certificates of local approval of this act
1.23have been filed by the Minneapolis Library Board, the city of Minneapolis, and Hennepin
2.1County in compliance with Minnesota Statutes, section 645.021, subdivision 3, and the
2.2transactional documents have been executed.
2.3(c) "Hennepin County library system" means the system of public libraries created
2.4and maintained by Hennepin County pursuant to Minnesota Statutes, sections 383B.237
2.5to 383B.245.
2.6(d) "Minneapolis Public Library" means the system of public libraries, including real
2.7property and assets, under the jurisdiction of the Minneapolis Public Library Board.
2.8(e) "Minneapolis Library Board" means the library board created in chapter 17,
2.9section 1, of the city of Minneapolis Charter.
2.10(f) "Transactional documents" means the agreements and documents needed to
2.11effectuate the efficient merger of the Minneapolis Public Library and the Hennepin County
2.12library system pursuant to this act.

2.13 Sec. 3. TRANSFER OF ASSETS.
2.14Notwithstanding any other law to the contrary, the Minneapolis Library Board and
2.15the city of Minneapolis may transfer to Hennepin County any and all of their interest in
2.16and rights and title to real property and assets of the Minneapolis Public Library for use in
2.17and for the benefit of the consolidated Hennepin County library system. The real property
2.18and assets include, but are not limited to, all buildings and land, leasehold interests, the
2.19full library collection, and all equipment, copyrights, trademarks, licenses, artwork,
2.20furnishings, and other personal property of the Minneapolis Library Board.

2.21 Sec. 4. MINNEAPOLIS CENTRAL LIBRARY PARKING RAMP.
2.22(a) Notwithstanding any other law to the contrary, the city of Minneapolis may
2.23transfer to Hennepin County all of its interest in and rights and title to the parking ramp
2.24attached to the Central Library of the Minneapolis Public Library.
2.25(b) After the transfer of the parking ramp, Hennepin County will have the right to
2.26operate, or contract to operate, and receive all revenues from the operation of the ramp.
2.27(c) The city of Minneapolis will continue to be responsible for any outstanding
2.28bonds or other debt instruments issued to fund construction of the parking ramp. Hennepin
2.29County must reimburse the city of Minneapolis in amounts equal to payments for
2.30principal and interest on the bonds or other debt instruments attributable to the debt for
2.31the construction of the ramp or redemption payments, according to terms agreed between
2.32the county and the city.

2.33 Sec. 5. TRANSFER OF EMPLOYEES.
3.1(a) All persons employed in a permanent position by the Minneapolis Library Board
3.2on the day before the merger date shall be transferred to the employment of Hennepin
3.3County on the merger date and be subject to the provisions of Minnesota Statutes,
3.4sections 383B.26 to 383B.457. The transfer of employees pursuant to this section does
3.5not constitute severance or termination of employment or a layoff entitling transferred
3.6employees to severance pay, termination benefits, a retirement plan refund, or any other
3.7right that may be applicable in the case of severance, termination, or layoff.
3.8(b) Employees transferred pursuant to this section shall be allocated by the Hennepin
3.9County Human Resources Director to a position in an appropriate classification within
3.10the county's classification system. Transferred employees who are classified into a
3.11Hennepin County job classification that is represented by an exclusive representative
3.12under Minnesota Statutes, chapter 179A, shall be assigned to the existing Hennepin
3.13County collective bargaining unit that represents the transferred employee's Hennepin
3.14County job classification.
3.15(c) Employees transferred pursuant to this section shall retain employment and
3.16accrued benefits and, for seniority purposes, their date of county employment will be
3.17recorded by the employee's most recent date of employment with the Minneapolis Library
3.18Board. "Accrued benefits" for the purposes of this section means the balance of accrued
3.19hours of vacation, sick leave, paid time off, compensatory time, and deferred holidays.

3.20 Sec. 6. MINNEAPOLIS EMPLOYEE RETIREMENT FUND PARTICIPANTS.
3.21Employees transferred to Hennepin County employment pursuant to section 5 who
3.22are members of the Minneapolis Employee Retirement Fund, under Minnesota Statutes,
3.23chapter 422A, on the day before the merger date may continue their participation in that
3.24retirement fund upon agreement between the city of Minneapolis and Hennepin County
3.25set out in the transactional documents that the city shall indemnify Hennepin County for
3.26any and all unfunded liabilities of the Minneapolis Employees Retirement Fund related
3.27to these transferring participants.

3.28 Sec. 7. EXISTING DEBT AND UNISSUED CAPITAL IMPROVEMENT
3.29BONDS.
3.30(a) The city of Minneapolis shall be solely responsible for payments on all bonds
3.31already issued that relate to the Minneapolis Public Library.
3.32(b) The city of Minneapolis shall issue bonds, as provided in the transactional
3.33documents, for the remaining balance of the sum authorized by the November 7, 2000,
3.34voter referendum to finance public library improvements, and bonds for library capital
4.1improvements contained in the city's capital improvement plans. The city of Minneapolis
4.2shall be solely responsible for all payments thereunder.
4.3(c) All unspent proceeds from outstanding bonds referenced in paragraph (a)
4.4and proceeds to be received from unissued bonds referenced in paragraph (b) shall be
4.5transferred to Hennepin County as provided in the transactional documents to be used
4.6solely for capital improvements for the libraries located within the city of Minneapolis
4.7and in a manner consistent with the terms of the purposes established for the issuance
4.8of the bonds. Nothing in this section obligates Hennepin County to fund any capital
4.9improvements in any amounts above and beyond the amount of the proceeds transferred
4.10under this section.
4.11(d) The outstanding principal and interest due for all bonds issued by Hennepin
4.12County pursuant to Minnesota Statutes, section 383B.245, prior to the merger of the
4.13Minneapolis Public Library and the Hennepin County library system shall be paid by levy
4.14of a tax on the taxable property within the county outside the city of Minneapolis.

4.15 Sec. 8. OPERATING FUNDS.
4.16(a) In addition to any tax revenues that may be levied by Hennepin County to
4.17operate the consolidated Hennepin County library system and in addition to any other
4.18obligations set out in this act, the city of Minneapolis shall contribute funds as specified
4.19in paragraphs (b) and (c).
4.20(b) The city of Minneapolis shall contribute operating funds to Hennepin County for
4.21the library system for a period of ten years after the effective date. The contribution in the
4.22first year will be in the amount of $7,800,000. The annual contribution after the first year
4.23will be in an amount that declines $780,000 per year from the previous year.
4.24(c) The city of Minneapolis shall contribute funding to Hennepin County in addition
4.25to the operating funds referenced in paragraph (b) for a period of eight years after the
4.26effective date to extend the hours of operation of the public libraries located in the city
4.27of Minneapolis as determined by the city in an amount provided in the transactional
4.28documents. In the first three years after the effective date, the city of Minneapolis will
4.29provide full funding for any such extension of hours of operation, including the costs of
4.30reopening any shuttered Minneapolis public libraries. The contribution by the city of
4.31Minneapolis will decline by an equal amount per year over the remaining five years as
4.32provided in the transactional documents.

4.33 Sec. 9. PLANETARIUM.
5.1Any unspent balance in the grant to the city of Minneapolis provided in Laws 2005,
5.2chapter 20, article 1, section 23, subdivision 16, paragraph (a), shall be redirected and
5.3assigned to Hennepin County for the purposes of completing design and to construct,
5.4furnish, and equip a new Minnesota planetarium and space discovery center in conjunction
5.5with the Central Library of the Minneapolis Public Library.

5.6 Sec. 10. MINNEAPOLIS PUBLIC LIBRARY BOARD.
5.7(a) Notwithstanding any other laws to the contrary or any provision of the
5.8Minneapolis city charter, the Minneapolis Library Board and all of its functions will be
5.9dissolved upon the merger date.
5.10(b) All outstanding liabilities of the Minneapolis Library Board as of the merger date
5.11will be assumed by the city of Minneapolis as provided in the transactional documents.

5.12 Sec. 11. BALLPARK TAX LEVY.
5.13(a) The funds allowed pursuant to Minnesota Statutes, section 473.757, subdivision
5.142, for the purpose of extending the hours of operation of Hennepin County libraries and
5.15Minneapolis public libraries shall apply to the merged system of the Minneapolis and
5.16Hennepin County libraries after the merger date.
5.17(b) Any funds expended pursuant to Minnesota Statutes, section 473.757,
5.18subdivision 2, shall be in supplement to those funds used to extend the hours of operation
5.19referenced in section 8, paragraph (c).

5.20 Sec. 12. TRANSACTIONAL DOCUMENTS.
5.21The Minneapolis Library Board, the city of Minneapolis, and Hennepin County
5.22may enter into transactional documents to effectuate the merger of the library systems as
5.23provided in this act.

5.24ARTICLE 2

5.25STATUTORY CHANGES

5.26 Section 1. Minnesota Statutes 2006, section 275.065, subdivision 3, is amended to read:
5.27 Subd. 3. Notice of proposed property taxes. (a) The county auditor shall prepare
5.28and the county treasurer shall deliver after November 10 and on or before November 24
5.29each year, by first class mail to each taxpayer at the address listed on the county's current
5.30year's assessment roll, a notice of proposed property taxes.
5.31(b) The commissioner of revenue shall prescribe the form of the notice.
6.1(c) The notice must inform taxpayers that it contains the amount of property taxes
6.2each taxing authority proposes to collect for taxes payable the following year. In the case
6.3of a town, or in the case of the state general tax, the final tax amount will be its proposed
6.4tax. In the case of taxing authorities required to hold a public meeting under subdivision 6,
6.5the notice must clearly state that each taxing authority, including regional library districts
6.6established under section 134.201, and including the metropolitan taxing districts as
6.7defined in paragraph (i), but excluding all other special taxing districts and towns, will
6.8hold a public meeting to receive public testimony on the proposed budget and proposed or
6.9final property tax levy, or, in case of a school district, on the current budget and proposed
6.10property tax levy. It must clearly state the time and place of each taxing authority's
6.11meeting, a telephone number for the taxing authority that taxpayers may call if they have
6.12questions related to the notice, and an address where comments will be received by mail.
6.13(d) The notice must state for each parcel:
6.14(1) the market value of the property as determined under section 273.11, and used
6.15for computing property taxes payable in the following year and for taxes payable in the
6.16current year as each appears in the records of the county assessor on November 1 of the
6.17current year; and, in the case of residential property, whether the property is classified as
6.18homestead or nonhomestead. The notice must clearly inform taxpayers of the years to
6.19which the market values apply and that the values are final values;
6.20(2) the items listed below, shown separately by county, city or town, and state general
6.21tax, net of the residential and agricultural homestead credit under section 273.1384, voter
6.22approved school levy, other local school levy, and the sum of the special taxing districts,
6.23and as a total of all taxing authorities:
6.24(i) the actual tax for taxes payable in the current year; and
6.25(ii) the proposed tax amount.
6.26If the county levy under clause (2) includes an amount for a lake improvement
6.27district as defined under sections 103B.501 to 103B.581, the amount attributable for that
6.28purpose must be separately stated from the remaining county levy amount.
6.29In the case of a town or the state general tax, the final tax shall also be its proposed
6.30tax unless the town changes its levy at a special town meeting under section 365.52. If a
6.31school district has certified under section 126C.17, subdivision 9, that a referendum will
6.32be held in the school district at the November general election, the county auditor must
6.33note next to the school district's proposed amount that a referendum is pending and that,
6.34if approved by the voters, the tax amount may be higher than shown on the notice. In
6.35the case of the city of Minneapolis, the levy for the Minneapolis Library Board and the
6.36levy for Minneapolis Park and Recreation shall be listed separately from the remaining
7.1amount of the city's levy. In the case of the city of St. Paul, the levy for the St. Paul
7.2Library Agency must be listed separately from the remaining amount of the city's levy.
7.3In the case of Ramsey County, any amount levied under section 134.07 may be listed
7.4separately from the remaining amount of the county's levy. In the case of a parcel where
7.5tax increment or the fiscal disparities areawide tax under chapter 276A or 473F applies,
7.6the proposed tax levy on the captured value or the proposed tax levy on the tax capacity
7.7subject to the areawide tax must each be stated separately and not included in the sum of
7.8the special taxing districts; and
7.9(3) the increase or decrease between the total taxes payable in the current year and
7.10the total proposed taxes, expressed as a percentage.
7.11For purposes of this section, the amount of the tax on homesteads qualifying under
7.12the senior citizens' property tax deferral program under chapter 290B is the total amount
7.13of property tax before subtraction of the deferred property tax amount.
7.14(e) The notice must clearly state that the proposed or final taxes do not include
7.15the following:
7.16(1) special assessments;
7.17(2) levies approved by the voters after the date the proposed taxes are certified,
7.18including bond referenda and school district levy referenda;
7.19(3) a levy limit increase approved by the voters by the first Tuesday after the first
7.20Monday in November of the levy year as provided under section 275.73;
7.21(4) amounts necessary to pay cleanup or other costs due to a natural disaster
7.22occurring after the date the proposed taxes are certified;
7.23(5) amounts necessary to pay tort judgments against the taxing authority that become
7.24final after the date the proposed taxes are certified; and
7.25(6) the contamination tax imposed on properties which received market value
7.26reductions for contamination.
7.27(f) Except as provided in subdivision 7, failure of the county auditor to prepare or
7.28the county treasurer to deliver the notice as required in this section does not invalidate the
7.29proposed or final tax levy or the taxes payable pursuant to the tax levy.
7.30(g) If the notice the taxpayer receives under this section lists the property as
7.31nonhomestead, and satisfactory documentation is provided to the county assessor by the
7.32applicable deadline, and the property qualifies for the homestead classification in that
7.33assessment year, the assessor shall reclassify the property to homestead for taxes payable
7.34in the following year.
7.35(h) In the case of class 4 residential property used as a residence for lease or rental
7.36periods of 30 days or more, the taxpayer must either:
8.1(1) mail or deliver a copy of the notice of proposed property taxes to each tenant,
8.2renter, or lessee; or
8.3(2) post a copy of the notice in a conspicuous place on the premises of the property.
8.4The notice must be mailed or posted by the taxpayer by November 27 or within
8.5three days of receipt of the notice, whichever is later. A taxpayer may notify the county
8.6treasurer of the address of the taxpayer, agent, caretaker, or manager of the premises to
8.7which the notice must be mailed in order to fulfill the requirements of this paragraph.
8.8(i) For purposes of this subdivision, subdivisions 5a and 6, "metropolitan special
8.9taxing districts" means the following taxing districts in the seven-county metropolitan area
8.10that levy a property tax for any of the specified purposes listed below:
8.11(1) Metropolitan Council under section 473.132, 473.167, 473.249, 473.325,
8.12473.446 , 473.521, 473.547, or 473.834;
8.13(2) Metropolitan Airports Commission under section 473.667, 473.671, or 473.672;
8.14and
8.15(3) Metropolitan Mosquito Control Commission under section 473.711.
8.16For purposes of this section, any levies made by the regional rail authorities in the
8.17county of Anoka, Carver, Dakota, Hennepin, Ramsey, Scott, or Washington under chapter
8.18398A shall be included with the appropriate county's levy and shall be discussed at that
8.19county's public hearing.
8.20(j) The governing body of a county, city, or school district may, with the consent
8.21of the county board, include supplemental information with the statement of proposed
8.22property taxes about the impact of state aid increases or decreases on property tax
8.23increases or decreases and on the level of services provided in the affected jurisdiction.
8.24This supplemental information may include information for the following year, the current
8.25year, and for as many consecutive preceding years as deemed appropriate by the governing
8.26body of the county, city, or school district. It may include only information regarding:
8.27(1) the impact of inflation as measured by the implicit price deflator for state and
8.28local government purchases;
8.29(2) population growth and decline;
8.30(3) state or federal government action; and
8.31(4) other financial factors that affect the level of property taxation and local services
8.32that the governing body of the county, city, or school district may deem appropriate to
8.33include.
8.34The information may be presented using tables, written narrative, and graphic
8.35representations and may contain instruction toward further sources of information or
8.36opportunity for comment.

9.1 Sec. 2. Minnesota Statutes 2006, section 383B.237, is amended to read:
9.2383B.237 LIBRARY SYSTEM.
9.3The Hennepin County Board of Commissioners may establish and maintain a system
9.4of public libraries for the free use of the residents of the county. The board shall determine
9.5the locations of the libraries, and may levy taxes for library operations and maintenance
9.6on all taxable property within the county which was not taxed in 1980 by the city of
9.7Minneapolis for the support of any free public library. The county may acquire, lease,
9.8construct, alter, or contract for the use of any real or personal property necessary for the
9.9establishment and operation of a free county library system. Acquisition of real property
9.10may be undertaken in accordance with chapter 117.

9.11 Sec. 3. Minnesota Statutes 2006, section 383B.239, is amended to read:
9.12383B.239 BOARD.
9.13The county board shall direct, operate and manage the county library system. A
9.14county library board consisting of seven ten members who reside in the county library
9.15service area shall be appointed by the county board. For the first three years following
9.16the merger of the Minneapolis Public Library and the Hennepin County library system,
9.17three of the members shall be residents of the city of Minneapolis. The library board shall
9.18provide advice and make recommendations on any matter pertaining to the library system
9.19to the county board and the library director and shall exercise the powers and perform the
9.20duties delegated to it by the county board, which may include, but are not limited to, the
9.21establishment of rules governing library operations, review of the annual operating budget
9.22for submission to the county board, development of a long-range plan and acceptance of
9.23gift and trust funds. The library board shall determine the contents of the collections of the
9.24library system and shall be responsible for the use of library meeting rooms.

9.25 Sec. 4. Minnesota Statutes 2006, section 383B.245, is amended to read:
9.26383B.245 LIBRARY LEVY.
9.27(a) The county board may levy a tax on the taxable property within the county
9.28outside of any city in which is situated a free public library of the city to acquire, better,
9.29and construct county library buildings and branches and to pay principal and interest
9.30on bonds issued for that purpose.
9.31(b) The county board may by resolution adopted by a five-sevenths vote issue and
9.32sell general obligation bonds of the county in the manner provided in sections 475.60 to
9.33475.73 . The bonds shall not be subject to the limitations of sections 475.51 to 475.59, but
10.1the maturity years and amounts and interest rates of each series of bonds shall be fixed
10.2so that the maximum amount of principal and interest to become due in any year, on the
10.3bonds of that series and of all outstanding series issued by or for the purposes of libraries,
10.4shall not exceed an amount equal to 0.01612 percent of market value of all taxable
10.5property in the county, which was not taxed in 1987 by any city for the support of any
10.6free public library, as last finally equalized before the issuance of the new series. When
10.7the tax levy authorized in this section is collected it shall be appropriated and credited to
10.8a debt service fund for the bonds in amounts required each year in lieu of a countywide
10.9tax levy for the debt service fund under section 475.61.

10.10 Sec. 5. Minnesota Statutes 2006, section 383B.247, is amended to read:
10.11383B.247 MERGER.
10.12The county and the library board of the city of Minneapolis may agree to merge their
10.13public library systems at a time and in a manner as they may agree as enabled pursuant to
10.14this act. The merger shall be subject to enabling legislation by the legislature.

10.15 Sec. 6. EFFECTIVE DATE.
10.16This act is effective the day after the transactional documents have been fully
10.17executed and certificates of local approval have been filed by the Minneapolis Library
10.18Board, the city of Minneapolis, and Hennepin County in compliance with Minnesota
10.19Statutes, section 645.021, subdivision 3.

Take My Library, Please!

2007-03-05T07:39:00.000-08:00

STATEMENT ON THE CONSOLIDATION OF THE MINNEAPOLIS PUBLIC LIBRARY SYSTEM INTO HENNEPIN COUNTY

-- To be read into the minutes of March 7, 2007 in its entirety

I have been on the Minneapolis Public Library Board since March, 2002, when I attended my first meeting after having been appointed to the board by Mayor R.T. Rybak . At that time I knew very little about the library board but I knew a lot about literature, nonprofit administration, community dynamics, and government (from my days as a reporter for the American Indian Press Association).

It has been my observation that there are considerable benefits to the people of Minneapolis that resulted from having an independent library board. The 80-plus year history of the board has given us the system we have today –15 libraries that acknowledge the importance of neighborhoods to ongoing knowledge acquisition by people of all ages and stations, and at the same time aspiring to have available to the public the most extensive collection of materials possible given the context of the city and the library budgets. That would not have happened if the Minneapolis system had been run by bureaucrats. We would long ago have disappeared in that instance. As a member of an American Indian nation and knowing of others, the lack of oversight and management of the Bureau of Indian Affairs has come down over about 170 years to a state of overwhelming disaster. The largest lawsuit in United States history is ongoing now on the alleged massive mismanagement of this bureaucracy.

The balance and representation the public receives from having an independent library board is unqualifiedly superior to a library system run with no supervision.

It is difficult in the present circumstances to look at the situation the Minneapolis public library system is in and not look around for blame. It is the natural human impulse to do this. However, the result of that kind of exercise will leave the public frustrated. The public is losing its library system. Whether the new consolidated library system, to be called the Hennepin County Library will succeed is something we do not know. Those who say they know are only expressing the persuasion they hope to have over those who are now empowered to make the decision for or against the change.

We can however, question the process. There is room for a great deal of argument and deliberation as the consolidation is considered. We are told, however, that there is no time for this. We must decide because the State Legislature has a deadline for the submission of new bills. If ever there were in the history of Minnesota a weaker reason to consolidate a library system, I do not know what it is.

This is as everyone understands a political process. The people’s voice will not be heard in the courts. Those who support the consolidation without question and those who oppose it with questions are all in the same boat together. History is in the making at earthquake speed and not much can stop it. The Minneapolis Public library board began its fast track to irrelevancy on October 18, 2006 when it refused to stand up for the people to the Minneapolis City Council. In its action the library board released the brake it had on the annual budgeting process and the system began to slide downhill. Along the way, three community libraries closed, perhaps for good. We just don’t know the answer to that today.

Whatever the post voting booth public opinion has been of the officials elected in 2005, this group will forever be known for its decision on the fate of the Minneapolis libraries. The public may in the majority agree with the decision. We have not asked.

I have throughout my life been a strong union supporter. This is due to the hard fought place in the unions my brothers achieved. As controversial as this may seem, one of my brothers was a friend of Jimmy Hoffa. Another brother broke ground for new union entry by young Seneca men who had been previously shut out because of race. Still another brother represented unions in the very difficult environment of the Arizona districts.

If there is one profession, besides teaching that I hold in the highest esteem, it is professional librarians. Many, many of those I have known in my thirty-four years of living in Minneapolis and going to Minneapolis libraries. I am particularly fond of the Franklin Library. I have spent countless hours there. But I have also been, pre-internet, in the foundation center of the Central Library, pouring over reference materials. In all of this time, I have been helped, taught, and guided by librarians.

I cannot throw this personal history of mine away, and wish our librarians good luck as they face an uncertain future. They have invested heavily in the minds of Minneapolis residents over these 122 years and it is now our turn to show our appreciation. We need to be very concerned about librarians as we give away the libraries.

I am very pleased to cast my lot among them in opposition to the consolidation. I also stand with the brave and passionate users of the Roosevelt, Southeast, and Webber Park libraries for open libraries forever.