The New Trail of Tears: How Washington Is Destroying American Indians

By Naomi Schaefer Riley

If you want to know why American Indians have the highest rates of poverty of any racial group, why suicide is the leading cause of death among Indian men, why native women are two and a half times more likely to be raped than the national average and why gang violence affects American Indian youth more than any other group, do not look to history. There is no doubt that white settlers devastated Indian communities in the 19th, and early 20th centuries. But it is our policies todaydenying Indians ownership of their land, refusing them access to the free market and failing to provide the police and legal protections due to them as American citizensthat have turned reservations into small third-world countries in the middle of the richest and freest nation on earth.

The tragedy of our Indian policies demands reexamination immediatelynot only because they make the lives of millions of American citizens harder and more dangerousbut also because they represent a microcosm of everything that has gone wrong with modern liberalism. They are the result of decades of politicians and bureaucrats showering a victimized people with money and cultural sensitivity instead of what they truly needthe education, the legal protections and the autonomy to improve their own situation.

If we are really ready to have a conversation about American Indians, it is time to stop bickering about the names of football teams and institute real reforms that will bring to an end this ongoing national shame.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Encounter Books
• Release date: Nov 30, 2021
• ISBN: 9781641772273

Book preview

praise for

THE NEW TRAIL OF TEARS

The New Trail of Tears is a much-needed revelation of heart-breaking conditions on American Indian reservations—and of the attitudes, incentives, and politics that make the people living on those reservations even worse off than other low-income minorities, including American Indians living elsewhere in American society. The laws and policies behind these human tragedies have wider implications for welfare state assumptions and politically correct decisions, including the grossly misnamed Indian Child Welfare Act. This book is an insightful and much-needed introduction to a subject that deserves much more public attention than it gets, both for its own sake and for what it reveals about the political and ideological climate of our time.

THOMAS SOWELL, author of Black Rednecks and White Liberals

I’ve grubbed in the data regarding American Indian poverty for years, but none of my numbers will have the effect of Naomi Riley’s investigation and prose. Through clear thinking and personal accounts, she articulates why this ignored minority remains in poverty and how they can escape it. The New Trail of Tears is a must-read if you care about the plight of poor people, in general, and American Indians, in particular.

TERRY L. ANDERSON, author of Unlocking the Wealth of Indian Nations and senior fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University

Clear evidence of the tragedy that results when individual property rights are equated with group rights.

AMITY SHLAES, Presidential Scholar at The King’s College and author of Coolidge and The Forgotten Man

The New Trail of Tears is a powerful antidote to the romantic nonsense about the history of American Indian groups that pervades our school curriculum today, and it is a stinging indictment of the paternalistic public policies that continue to keep most Indians mired in poverty…. Written in lively and lucid prose, it is my candidate for the book-of-the-year on racial issues in the United States.

STEPHAN THERNSTROM, Winthrop Professor of History Emeritus at Harvard University

Riley’s eye-opening book should launch a national dialogue on the federal government’s dysfunctional relationship with Indian country. It’s a conversation whose time has come.

CARLA T. MAIN, City Journal

An unpleasant but utterly necessary view into a world that most Americans never think of.

STEVEN MARTINOVICH, founder and editor of Enter Stage Right

I knew it was bad, very bad—but never realized that it’s this bad. Not until I read The New Trail of Tears.

FRED J. ECKERT, Washington Times

Readers who reach the end of [Riley’s] eye-opening book will no doubt agree that radical change is needed to empower a group that has been treated so poorly in our nation’s history.

TYLER ARNOLD, Washington Free Beacon

Riley’s book is not bleak. On the contrary, she profiles several heroic individuals who are today fighting the odds—and often fighting tribal governments—to improve the lives of Native Americans.

TIMOTHY SANDEFUR, Claremont Review of Books

The Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota … has the lowest life expectancy in the Western Hemisphere outside of Haiti—an average of just 48 years for men and 52 years for women. In The New Trail of Tears, Naomi Schaefer Riley colors … facts [like this one] with anecdotes that illustrate the consequences of a broken system.

DANIEL FISHMAN, Philanthropy

A thought-provoking work that brings light to a subject that deserves our national attention.

KATE KELLY, HuffPost

The New Trail of Tears

NAOMI SCHAEFER RILEY

The New Trail of Tears

How Washington Is Destroying American Indians

© 2016, 2021 by Naomi Schaefer Riley

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by

any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording,

or otherwise, without the prior written permission of

Encounter Books, 900 Broadway, Suite 601,

New York, New York, 10003.

First American edition published in 2016 by Encounter Books,

an activity of Encounter for Culture and Education, Inc.,

a nonprofit, tax exempt corporation.

Encounter Books website address: www.encounterbooks.com

Manufactured in the United States and printed on acid-free paper. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

FIRST PAPERBACK EDITION PUBLISHED IN 2021.

PAPERBACK EDITION ISBN: 978-1-64177-226-6.

THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGUED

THE HARDCOVER EDITION AS FOLLOWS:

Names: Riley, Naomi Schaefer, author.

Title: The new Trail of Tears : how Washington is destroying American Indians / Naomi Schaefer Riley.

Other titles: How Washington is destroying American Indians

Description: New York : Encounter Books, [2016] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015037589 | ISBN 9781594038532 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781594038549 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Indians of North America—Government relations. | Indians of North America—Social conditions. | Indians of North America—Politics and government.

Classification: LCC E93 .R55 2016 | DDC 323.1197--DC23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015037589

CONTENTS

Preface to the Paperback Edition

Introduction

What Does America Owe Indians?

Part One: The False Promise of Sovereignty

CHAPTER ONE

Someone Else’s Responsibility: Property Rights as Native Rights

CHAPTER TWO

Money Instead of Freedom: The Loophole Economy and the Politics of Poverty

Part Two: White people call it nepotism. We call it kinship.

CHAPTER THREE

Unprepared: A Narrative of Victimhood

CHAPTER FOUR

Walking in Two Worlds: The Weight of Indian Identity

Part Three: Who Will Stand Up for Civil Rights?

CHAPTER FIVE

Equal Protection: The Tribe vs. the Individual

Conclusion

Native Americans as Americans

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

PREFACE TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION

THE POPULATIONS THAT were hardest hit by the COVID-19 pandemic were the ones that were already the most vulnerable. Nowhere did this observation seem truer than on Indian reservations. According to the Centers for Disease Control, the rate of infection among American Indians was 3.5 times that among white Americans, and young American Indians were affected more severely than young members of other races, likely because of pre-existing health conditions like obesity and smoking.¹ In Montana, the hard-hit Northern Cheyenne tribe lost about 50 people – 1 percent of the reservation’s population – to COVID. Nationwide, American Indians were nearly twice as likely to die from COVID compared to non-Hispanic whites; the death rate among Native Americans was one in 475, compared with one in 825 among white Americans and one in 645 among Black Americans.² The true death toll for Native Americans is likely much higher, due to spotty reporting of reservation COVID data by many states.

In the five years since this book was originally published, things have not improved for folks living on reservations and, in many ways, have worsened. The health outcomes of this population are inextricably tied to the poor performance of the Indian Health Service. With a $6 billion program serving more than 2.6 million individuals, the IHS has been the subject of numerous scandals since its inception, but investigations by the Wall Street Journal in recent years have revealed an unimaginably corrupt agency with an arrogant and unaccountable leadership.

In 2019 the Journal revealed that it had examined 163 malpractice claims against the IHS that the government settled or lost since 2006. One out of four doctors involved in those cases worked for the IHS despite a history that should have raised red flags by the agency’s own standards. Further, At least 66 of the patients died as a result of the alleged malpractice. While insurance actuaries say U.S. doctors typically have one malpractice claim every 20 years or so … the IHS was willing to hire doctors with many more lawsuits in their past, in some cases more than 10 in less than a decade.³

A separate joint investigation between PBS’s Frontline and the Wall Street Journal found that a doctor with the IHS was able to treat children for 21 years despite leaving behind a trail of sexual-assault allegations. The reporters also found that IHS repeatedly missed or ignored warning signs, tried to silence whistleblowers and allowed [the offending doctor] to continue treating children despite the suspicions of colleagues up and down the chain of command. Moreover, the agency tolerated a number of problem doctors because … managers there believed they might face retaliation if they followed up on suspicions of abuse.⁴

When an independent report was commissioned to see what went wrong, the IHS refused to release its contents, claiming that to do so would violate medical confidentiality laws. When members of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs demanded its release, the IHS defended its position, saying that revealing the findings would serve to dampen, not encourage reports of misconduct in the future. The agency said it was working hard to change a culture of fear; astonishingly, keeping criticisms from the public eye seemed to be part of that process.⁵

In other words, the leadership of a federal agency caught in a scandal that shattered numerous lives suggested that the agency should not be subject to any kind of government oversight. Should we really be increasing the budget and expanding the role of unaccountable agencies with such poor track records?

And it’s not just in health care services. In education, too, the government has continued to fail the Native population. During the 2018–19 school year, fewer than one in four Native American students in grades three to eight and grade 11 were rated as proficient in reading and writing on standardized state tests. Roughly one in seven Native American students was proficient in math, and just one in eight was proficient in science. In North Dakota, Native students’ graduation rate is about 20 points lower than white students’. In South Dakota, the gap between Native students and students of all other backgrounds is 30 points.⁶

The schools run by the Bureau of Indian Education continue to turn in abysmal performances. Though they educate only 8 percent of Native students, they regularly post the lowest achievement outcomes.⁷ And like the IHS, the BIE’s long tradition of corruption has continued in recent years. In 2016, the Government Accountability Office reported that at one BIE school, four boilers had failed an inspection due to high carbon-monoxide levels and a natural gas leak but not been repaired for about eight months.⁸ The BIE director since November 2016, Tony Dearman, became the 37th person to hold that position in 37 years, after his predecessor used his influence to get jobs for a close relative and a woman with whom he had a romantic relationship. Dearman himself has been accused of impropriety in the handling of fiscal reviews at BIE schools.⁹ Never mind that; the BIE budget will grow to almost $1 billion in 2021.

Meanwhile, viable educational alternatives for Indian students have remained limited. Of the five states without charter-school laws, three – North Dakota, South Dakota, and Montana – are home to some of the largest Indian populations.¹⁰ In February 2021, a push to allow the creation of charter schools in South Dakota was defeated, with lawmakers arguing that they did not want money taken away from traditional public schools.¹¹ Of course, the fact that those schools are failing Native kids (and plenty of other kids too) was not much considered. The voices of American Indian leaders, who wanted to import a charter-school model that had had success in closing achievement gaps in New Mexico, were ignored.¹² And while high-achieving charter schools in places like New York and Texas continue to improve the test scores of large populations of poor and minority students, these schools are not allowed to open locations in areas that could serve Indian populations.

Native parents are not only deprived of a decent education for their children, but also unable to raise them in a safe environment. There is little good news to report when it comes to combating violent crime on Indian reservations. In 2020, President Trump signed two bills to address the ongoing epidemic of missing, murdered, and trafficked indigenous women.¹³ But these laws – intended to improve coordination between tribal and federal authorities and create an advisory council to help the Departments of Justice and the Interior do a better job of investigating these crimes – are unlikely to tackle the real problems behind the violence. Most of these crimes are committed on Indian lands by Indians themselves. And law enforcement in these communities is lacking and often ineffective. Moreover, federal authorities are loath to become entangled in these matters, even when it is their responsibility.

A 2017 report from the Inspector General highlighted U.S. attorneys’ uneven track record of prosecuting serious violent crimes on reservations. A law had been passed in 2010 to help improve prosecution rates. Before the law, the Government Accountability Office found that U.S. attorneys declined to prosecute fully half of cases on reservations, leading to concerns that the practice was creating a safe haven for criminals on tribal lands. The latest figures, from 2016, show that U.S. attorneys declined to prosecute 46 percent of reservation cases, marking only marginal improvement. That included rejecting more than 550 assault and sexual assault cases – more than any other type of crime. Prosecutors cited insufficient evidence as the reason for the vast majority of rejections.¹⁴

But the danger is only likely to grow for law-abiding citizens living on reservations. The Indian crime problem is on a collision course with growing demands by tribes for greater sovereignty over their territory. In June 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that about half of Oklahoma, including the city of Tulsa, is within a Native American reservation.¹⁵ While the ruling’s ramifications will depend on a forthcoming agreement with Congress, it seems certain that tribes will have greater authority to administer justice in their lands. This will not only require more and better law enforcement, but also test the tribal court systems. On many Indian territories, defendants can be sentenced to only a year in prison.

The Supreme Court decision makes it possible for a tribe to assert its jurisdiction even in serious cases. This is raising concerns among those who worry that some tribes don’t want to incarcerate their members at all. Tribes will sometimes use alternative forms of punishment, including banishment or rehabilitation and restitution. These alternatives could include mowing grass, picking up trash, or removing graffiti.¹⁶ Or they could involve more culturally specific options, such as participating in religious ceremonies, writing research papers on tribal history, or being subject to public shaming. What are the chances these penalties will deter serious criminals?

Other delegations of power to the tribes seem to disregard the safety of vulnerable citizens as well. In 2019, the state of North Dakota signed an agreement with five tribes, including Spirit Lake, to expand their authority to certify foster homes located off their reservations as well as those on reservation land.¹⁷ The results have been sadly predictable. Take the fate of 5-year-old Raven Thompson, whose body was found in May 2020 in the home of her foster parents, Erich and Tammy Longie, on the Spirit Lake reservation. Raven’s autopsy revealed blunt force trauma to her head, neck, chest, abdomen, and extremities. Her brother Zane, aged 7, was found with similar injuries and in critical condition in the back of a Suburban parked outside. The two other children in the couple’s care also showed signs of severe abuse and were immediately removed from the home.

Tribal Social Services of North Dakota had placed the Thompson children with the Longies after their father was sent to prison. According to the Order of Detention filed by the U.S. attorney in North Dakota, four other children previously placed with the Longies had been removed by tribal social services, and placement agreements prohibited any contact between Erich or Tammy and those children.¹⁸ It has been a decade since whistleblowers informed federal and state officials that Tribal Social Services repeatedly placed children in dangerous situations, sometimes with known sex offenders. The whistleblowers were at first ignored and then punished. And now, apparently, the answer is to give these agencies more power to make life-changing decisions about the placement of children.

The question of who is in charge of protecting the residents of reservations from violent crime remains unclear, even to those responsible for enforcing the law. In 2017, the movie Wind River – a fictional thriller about a rape and murder on a reservation in Wyoming – illustrated this problem better than I ever could have. At the climax of the film, when authorities think they have found the perpetrator, there are seven men and one woman – including members of tribal police, a private security firm (guarding a drilling site), and the FBI – all with guns drawn on each other.¹⁹ And they are screaming about who has jurisdiction. Sadly, this is not far from reality.

Poverty is both a cause and an effect of this lawlessness. People cannot build their lives and plan for the future when their safety and the safety of their families are always in question. But building wealth requires other conditions besides the rule of law. It requires property rights. And there has been little progress on this front. Reservation land is not owned by individuals; it’s held in trust by the federal government, making it almost impossible for Native Americans to get mortgages or borrow against their homes to start small businesses. Efforts by Indians to use their land for development – reservations cover 2 percent of the United States, but they may contain about a fifth of the nation’s oil and gas, along with vast coal reserves – almost invariably meet with meddling from the federal government and environmental activists.²⁰

Meanwhile many Indian leaders are placing their own short-term interests over their tribe’s ability to participate in and profit from the energy market. The resolution of the Dakota Pipeline controversy in 2016 was instructive. Even though the Army Corps of Engineers conducted 389 meetings with 55 tribes to discuss the path of the pipeline from Iowa to North Dakota, protests by the Standing Rock Sioux and many activists (including Hollywood celebrities) persuaded the Obama administration to divert the pipeline.²¹ The pipeline was never going to be constructed on reservation land itself. But the federal government ensured that it wouldn’t even travel near a reservation.

The decisions about what happens on Indian lands have little to do with any concern for the well-being of tribes or individual Indians, who could use the money and the jobs that come from such development. These policies are merely an extension of environmentalist politics. Whether it’s the Keystone Pipeline or the Dakota Pipeline, the problem is the pipeline. Both would supposedly destroy the pristine environment. If blocking one means also being able to claim the mantle of support for indigenous rights, well, so much the better.

President Obama ushered in an era of regulatory uncertainty in Indian country. Now, when private firms want to undertake any kind of construction project, they know to keep economic activity as far from Indian territory as possible. Though the Trump administration did try to give Native Americans more control over some lands – for instance, by reducing the size of the Bears Ears National Monument, in southeastern Utah, to allow Indians the freedom to farm, graze cattle, and drill for oil and gas – the Biden administration has already rolled back these reforms. Even though there is evidence that tribes manage lands better than the federal government, the interests of folks like Leonardo DiCaprio who like to vacation in Bears Ears took precedence over the interests of American Indians who actually live, work, and engage in tribal rituals there.

Terry Anderson, former president and executive director of the Property and Environment Research Center (PERC, based in Bozeman, Montana), told me he was initially optimistic about the Trump administration’s ability to make some inroads into the paternalism of the tribal economy. But whether because of other more pressing issues or simply because the bureaucracy is too dense to reform, Anderson says, they didn’t do much to open those doors. And that window of opportunity is now shut. Deb Haaland, President Biden’s pick for Secretary of the Interior (who oversees the Bureau of Indian Affairs) is likely to continue these harmful policies. While Haaland is being hailed as the first Indian cabinet secretary, her views on energy development are likely to hurt Indian economies. Her opposition to fracking and her support for the Green New Deal will come at the cost of much-needed development on Indian lands.

When it comes to what the most vocal Indian leaders say they want from the new administration, the list is as predictable as it will be ineffective: more money for public infrastructure projects, the IHS, and education. But more money won’t fix the problems. It will go to the exact same federal agencies that have suffered from mismanagement and corruption for years. And what little trickles down to reservations will have almost no long-term impact.

Some tribes, though, are trying to take matters into their own hands. Anderson views the Winnebago tribe in Nebraska and the Southern Ute in Colorado as leaders in opening the eyes of tribal leaders to the potential of weaning themselves from grants and focusing on revenue that can be generated from construction and energy development.

Among Canada’s First Nations, the COVID crisis seems to have accelerated this inclination toward self-development. Indigenous Canadians started to think: We seem to be at the back of the line for all this government aid. We better look out for ourselves, says Andre Le Dressay, director of Fiscal Realities Economists, which does development work with some bands in Canada. When it came to a real crisis, where do you rank? Not as high as you think. So First Nations are taking small practical steps. From building a more sensible land title–registry system to streamlining the process for infrastructure projects on reserve land, indigenous leaders to the north are moving to increase their economic independence and increase opportunities for wealth creation.

Money from gambling continues to trickle in (both in Canada and in the United States), of course, but COVID hampered the ability of even the most successful casinos to operate. For instance, Connecticut’s Foxwoods Casino’s profits fell 31.6 percent in 2020.²² And state governments have begun to see the profits that Indian casinos do bring in as another source of public revenue. In 2019, a court upheld a claim that the Seneca tribe owed about $255 million to New York State. According to the terms of a 2002 agreement, the Senecas were supposed to send a quarter of revenue

Reviews for The New Trail of Tears

[staciele · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Naomi Schaefer Riley is a Harvard graduate in English and Government and a regular columnist for the New York Post where her writings focus on higher education, religion, philanthropy, and culture. Her newest book looks at the problems facing American Indians and the reform necessary to stop the decline of their culture. The title of the book immediately puts the reader into blaming mode, making it appear that government failures are the reason behind the increased crime, poverty, and alcoholism found in many of the tribes. But, can the government really be at fault? Schaefer Riley describes the fallout of too much government control, too much dependence on tribal annuities, and failures in the education systems in her thorough research of American and Canadian Indian tribes and reservations.Living near a reservation and seeing first hand the level of poverty and splintering families, I found myself nodding along to many of the author's points. Many tribes have become so dependent on the government and tribal handouts from casinos and programs that there is no desire to be educated or to work. Those that want to escape the stronghold of the tribe can't because they are limited by tribal rules regarding loans and property ownership. The government bureaucracy is such that the help provided has become a hindrance, yet the political structure is so deep that changing the system would be nearly impossible. Schaefer Riley has interviewed tribal leaders in Montana, New York, and South Dakota with some finding ways to get around the laws and others feeling defeated and have given up. I found the most frustrating part of her research to be their educational system. To me, everything depends on education and without it, no one can succeed. My nephew is a high school English teacher on a Minnesota reservation and has talked frequently about the difficulties teaching his students. Many have to walk miles to get to school and in the winter, under feet of snow, students just won't show up for days, even weeks. Attendance is spotty due to severe poverty and violence in the home. School may be the only place they can get a meal that day and truly feel safe, yet the obstacles to getting there are too many. How can you make reading and writing important when their parents' only importance is focused on their next drink or how soon the next annuity check is coming? Reform is needed in many areas including the allowance of land ownership, education, and effective law enforcement. Some reservations, like ones in Northern New York, have found ways to succeed by circumnavigating the government and creating their own businesses and schools. Finding ways for the rest of the reservations across the country to follow suit will be difficult, but necessary to save the future generations of American Indians from the prevalence of suicide, poverty, crime, and drugs. The personal stories shared in this book are quite depressing and frustrating. It's hard for the reader to determine who to express anger to, the Bureau of Indian Affairs with its billion dollar budget and thousands of employees or the local leaders who are turning a blind eye to the needy families right in front of them. I hoping this book makes it way into the right hands to start the conversations that need to be had.

[cherylk_44 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I have no knowledge of what life is really like living on the reservation. I only know what I have read in history books and what my mom has told me about her experiences growing up around some Indians. I like reading about true stories or people. Therefore I was interested in reading this book. While I did find it to be an interesting read at times it did read a little stiff for me with not a lot of moment. I don't disagree on what our National has done to the American Indians is terrible but reading this book, it did seem that how they live now is not all the product of the past. It seemed that some of it has to do with how the American Indians choose to life their lives that has caused the outcome of some to live in deplorable conditions. This book is a table read. One that can be brought up as a conversation piece. Because there is so much to take in and the fact that I did not always find myself engaged, I had to take a break from this book and come back to it. Although, I am glad I checked this book out.

[billrob_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Sobering take of the continued domination and "enslavement" of the American Indian population. The US Government is not helping them and is keeping them under a boot because of Tribal Leadership.