The Bureau Of Indian Affairs

Theodore W Taylor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780367290443
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000314984
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Landmark legislation, such as the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act of 1975, as well as increasing federal subsidies for Native Americans, growing demand for the energy resources located on the 50 million acres of Native American lands, expanding numbers of Native Americans and their interest groups, devastating reservation unemployment, and other factors have in the last decade radically changed the environment in which the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) operates. This book presents an up-to-date description and analysis of the BIA, including its missions, organization, functions, administration, problems, and decision-making and -implementing processes. Attention is given, too, to the often friction-laden interactions of the BIA and other governmental units (among them the Department of the Interior, Office of Management and Budget, Congress, the courts, Indian Health Service, and tribal, state, and local governments) with each other and with Indian interests. Abundant tables provide information on such topics as the 1980 Indian population and land by state, BIA budgets, and agricultural and mineral production on Indian lands. Dr. Taylor examines the current operations of the Bureau under the Reagan administration and explores possible policy decisions that will affect Native Americans as well as non-Indian citizens. The book includes a foreword by Phillip Martin, chief of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and president of the National Tribal Chairmen's Association.

Part One
The Challenge

1
Brief History of Indian Policy

Early Contacts

History records the migrations, conquests, and shifting of peoples and cultures along with the creation of successive empires such as the Babylonian, Egyptian, Persian, Athenian, and Roman and such later empires as the Portuguese, French, Spanish, and English. In the New World, the English, though arriving later than the Spanish or the French, succeeded in colonizing parts of North America with their own people who brought their own culture and economy. "Unlike the Spaniards and other empire builders, the English succeeded in founding a new state, which became vast in extent, independent in government, and basically European in stock. That achievement is one of the capital facts of world history."¹ Today the United States is one of two superpowers and regarded as a world leader by much of humanity.

There were people in the New World before the European empire builders arrived. The current theory is that the inhabitants of the New World came across the Bering Strait, and the immigration may have gone on for centuries. These early people were divided into hundreds of groups and varied in physical appearance and language. Those in Central and South America were more numerous and most advanced. These southern groups developed corn, built fantastic cities of stone, devised a calendar with no leap year, and had strong governments and a division of labor. Harold Driver states that the Maya "were the most intellectually advanced of all Indian peoples." They exceeded the Greeks and the Romans in their knowledge of mathematics and astronomy, but they had only an "ideographic glyph stage" of writing.² Spaniards demolished the Mayan civilization in the name of Christianity, plundered for gold, and along with Indian survivors, became the basis of the present Latin American nations after the revolution against Spain (about 1810 to 1830).

North of Mexico the Indians contacted by the first European invaders were less advanced than the Indians in Central and South America (Figure 1.1). However, the pueblos in Southwestern United States and the mounds further east indicate that higher forms of culture had existed and declined. The Temple Mound culture existed from A.D. 700 to 1700 and reached its highest form in the Mississippi valley. About 1540 Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto found substantial fields of maize and large mounds with temples and palaces and "witnessed the arrival of male and female chiefs on litters carried on the shoulders of commoners."³ At the time of European contact many Indians north of Mexico grew corn or other vegetables, but others relied on berries, wild grass seeds, nuts, fish, and game for their food.⁴

Many of the estimated 800,000 to 2,000,000 inhabitants of what is now the United States⁵ were seminomadic Indian bands with individual leaders. Others resided in villages and adobe pueblos. Frederick Hodge states that "the social, political, and religious institutions of the tribes of North American Indians differed in both kind and degree" but that the "organic units" and the "social fabric were based on kinship and its interrelationships and not on territorial districts or geographical areas."⁶ Larger and more complex governmental forms existed in the Powhatan confederacy in Virginia, the Creek confederacy in the Gulf plains, and in the League of the Iroquois, which included the five Iroquois tribes and later the Tuscarora. The Iroquois League, a federal union formed about 1570, "attained the highest form of governmental organization reached by any people north of the valley of Mexico."⁷ The Iroquois example was cited by Benjamin Franklin in his 1754 proposal for a union of the colonies, and Alvin Josephy states that "in such forms and methods by which Senate and House conferees work out bills in compromise sessions, for instance, one may recognize similarities to the ways in which the Iroquois League functioned."⁸

Edward Spicer points out that beginning in the middle of the sixteenth century, when the first European invasions occurred, "the struggle for dominance continued for nearly three centuries" among the various European powers. The Indians did not know what the future held, but until the late 1870s "the view of most of the Indians seems to have been that some kind of a balance of power might be struck among the warlike Europeans and themselves."⁹

The encounter of the Indian and European cultures altered both.¹⁰ The relationship between the various groups of Indians and the people and governments of the colonies and later the United States is as an important a part of the history of the United States as it is of the history of the Indian peoples.

There were several motives for the invasion of North America by the Europeans. First, the initial explorations sought an ocean passage to the Orient for the rich cargoes that otherwise had to go overland. Second, since the Spanish had found much gold in Central and South America, many other Europeans were spurred by the hope they too would find treasure in North America. Third, many of the English settlers were fleeing religious and other conditions they did not like in their homeland. Fourth, the Europeans were also interested in trade; if it could not be oriental cargoes, they would settle for furs.

The English tended to consider themselves and their way of life superior to the aboriginal people they encountered, and they expected that such persons and societies would see the logic of adopting English ways. But such was not to be the case.

The difference in the Indian and English views of land use and ownership caused much trouble over the years. Indians did not have the concept of land ownership according to metes and bounds, with an individual owner's having exclusive control of the use of the land. Indians thought in terms of general territorial areas. If no one was using an area, it was proper for anyone to use it. (Of course, some tribes drove others from favorite hunting grounds when they had the power to do so, and intertribal wars were frequent.) Land was not owned by individuals but was for communal use. Thus, there often was difficulty on the part of both non-Indians and Indians in understanding what the other party meant when a treaty provided for the cession of a given area of land. With a sparse population and a great deal of acreage the Indian concept worked fine. With increased population density and European farming practices it did not work so well. The Europeans cut trees, plowed fields, and drove the game away.

Even though Driver indicates that farming was practiced by eastern Indians, many Indians, especially the men, were not particularly receptive, to European farming practices. Thomas Jefferson spoke to the chiefs of the Shawnee nation in 1807 and encouraged them to engage in agriculture and learn civilized ways,¹¹ but providing the Indians with farmers, blacksmiths, teachers, and carpenters, which was specified in many treaties and done in many instances without treaty requirements, often did little good. The European concepts of such artisans and teachers often did not coincide with the culture, including the values and lifestyles, of the Indians. In general, the Indians thought their way of life was better.

With the increasing number of settlers ways to obtain land for the increased numbers of non-Indians and ways to maintain the peace

Figure 1.1 Probable location of Indian tribes north of Mexico about A.D. 1500. (Source: Clark Wissler, Indians of the United States [New York: Doubleday and Co.,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART 1 THE CHALLENGE
• PART 2 INTERRELATIONSHIPS AND INVOLVEMENT
• PART 3 THE FUTURE
• Appendixes
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index of Names and Subjects
• Index of Indian Tribes and Groups
• About the Book and Author