The Indian Affair

By Vine Deloria

In The Indian Affair Deloria traces the history of broken treaties with the Indians, describing how they were swindled out of their rights and pulling no punches in naming indiviuals, agencies, and corporations th

• Language: English
• Publisher: Friendship Press, Inc
• Release date: Jun 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9781733075961

Book preview

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Indians Today

For the last two decades the subject of race relations in America has dominated our concern. Beginning before the early Civil Rights movement and continuing until the present many people, particularly church people, have been determined to bring a higher sense of justice into the relationships between groups of people. It should be no surprise, therefore, that American Indians should receive attention.

The mythology of the American Indian has long stood in the way of a more profound understanding of where Indians fit into the general American scheme of things. In the days when the melting pot theory was popularly expounded as the explanation of American social dynamics, Indians were seen as a vanishing group that had to give up their traditional ways and become Indian Americans. Today many people still insist on calling Indians Indian Americans because the term symbolizes to them the unity which they hope will one day come about in our country.

Indian Americans is not a welcome name in Indian circles, however, since the name implies a general blurring of issues and an assumption that the strong tribal traditions have no ultimate reality in themselves. Just what Indians are to be called today remains a subject of great debate. Anthropologists have attempted to call us Amerindians or Amerinds, but the phrase has not caught on. A great many younger Indian people have tried to popularize the phrase Native Americans, but the older generation feels ill at ease with this name. In all probability no name other than Indians will ever satisfy most of the people known popularly as Indians.

Hundreds of books trace the early history and culture of the respective tribes. Indeed, the subject of the Indian wars, from 1862-1890, must be one of the most frequently covered subjects in all of publishing. Dee Brown was not the first writer to tell the story of those years, but may have been the best and most sympathetic of those who did. We shall not deal with tribal histories or Indian wars, including Wounded Knee I, in this book. Rather, we shall deal with some aspects now coming into view that give a different perspective to the problems of American Indians today.

One of the most intriguing aspects of Indian life today is the manner in which the past continues to dominate the present and future. Most of the protests and struggles of the last five years have dealt with the violation of treaties or with efforts to get tribal lands restored to the tribes. In developing the arguments used to support the Alaska Native Land Claims legislation, or to justify the restoration of Blue Lake to the people of Taos Pueblo in New Mexico, or to get the Menominees treaty rights restored to them, we have seen the beginning of a new field of understanding. That field combines history and law and could be called historical law or legal history, depending on which subject receives more stress from the writer and which receives more interest from the reader.

It is through the device of historical law that we shall try to understand the situation of American Indians today. Through historical law we shall come to understand the background of the modern Indian movement and try to project where that movement is going and what can be done to make it more effective.

There are some American Indians in each state of the union, including Hawaii. Not all of them are living on their traditional lands. In fact, a great many of the Indians in the United States today are living far from the places that their ancestors originally inhabited. At least a part of the current protest involves the history of how the different groups of Indians came to live where they are now.

The census of 1970 showed that about 763,594 Indians live in the United States today. Of that number 70 percent live off their reservations and half live in small towns and cities. This figure is in sharp contrast to previous censuses which showed a majority of the Indians living on their reservations or within a short distance of them. One major reason why so many Indians live off their reservations is that nearly twenty years ago the United States government began a program called Relocation. Its purpose was to move as many Indians to the large cities as possible with the hope that they would be assimilated into the urban population and disappear.

Relocation operated in this fashion. An employee of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the government agency with responsibility for providing services to Indians living on the reservations, would visit an Indian home on the reservation and would talk with the family and paint a beautiful picture of how good it was to live in the city. He or she would then use every trick conceivable to convince the family that they should move to the city. The government, the agent would say, offered training in job skills, payment of rent and living expenses while they were learning a trade, and assistance in finding a home in the urban area where they were to be relocated.

The program sounded fine, but it didn’t work. The families were brought to cities on the West Coast and in the Midwest and put into a training program. Since the purpose was to get as many Indians off the reservation as possible, the government tried to limit its assistance to families in the program and put them on their own quickly. A man who had been promised assistance in learning a trade found that, if he was offered a job of any kind while in training, the government bureaucrats would insist that he take it. Once he did, he would lose all support and would be expected to earn a living for himself and his family, even though the job did not pay enough to support a family in the city. The dropout rate in this program was extremely high.

A number of other factors caused Indians to move back to the reservations. Some misguided people, including many church people who wanted to help Indians, insisted that the Indian families should not live in the same neighborhood. The theory was based on