Photo: Richard Nixon, a strong advocate for tribal self-determination, signs a Self-Determination Policy on July 8, 1970.
A few days ago, a story appeared on Source New Mexico, shared with permission from the original article by journalist Pauly Denetclaw in Indian Country Today (ICT).
Interior Secretary Deb Haaland and Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs Bryan Newland recently visited the homelands of the White Mountain Apache nation located in what is now known as Arizona… though the culture and language they experienced that day predate this country and the federal government they now represent.
“To think that a hundred years ago, this same government agency that the Secretary leads, and that I lead, were actively harming kids, inflicting trauma on kids, for doing the same things we were there to celebrate,” Newland told ICT. “It’s complex, but it felt really good that we’re at a place now where a Cabinet Secretary, on behalf of the president, can sit there, and celebrate these young Native kids speaking their language, wearing their clothes, singing their songs, dancing their dances, serving their traditional foods.
“It’s inspiring…”
If instead of a hundred years, we wanted to go back two hundred years — to 1824 — we would find the roots of the Bureau of Indian Affairs planted in the War Department, when federal policy was focused mainly on exterminating, or at the very least, displacing, the Indian nations. The Bureau saw its second centennial on March 11.
It became rooted permanently within the Department of the Interior in 1849.
From Ms. Denetclaw’s article:
“Something that I’ve been taught over, and over again, is this concept that a tree grows from its roots in the soil in which it is planted,” Newland said.
The history, violent legacy and repugnant policies of this agency are well documented. But its branches have grown well beyond the roots, and change has come, albeit slowly. In the next hundred years, tribal leaders and advocates see a whole host of possibilities, a U.S. Department of Native American Affairs, substantial reforms for grant funding that would ease the burden on tribal governments, and strengthening tribal sovereignty beyond what seems possible today.
Newland — a member of the Bay Mills Indian Community — doesn’t gloss over the history of the bureau he now oversees.
“I think it’s important to acknowledge that… So we’re not perpetuating some of the things that were inherent at the beginning of the Bureau of Indian Affairs creation, in the work we do today.”
I had never heard of the BIA until I moved from California to the city of Juneau, Alaska, where a significant portion of the population claimed their Alaskan Native heritage. I arrived in the fall of 1971, a couple of months before the U.S. Congress passed the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act — ANCSA — the largest cession of land to a group of Native Americans in the history of the United States.
ANCSA put about one-twelfth of Alaska into the hands of the Alaska Native corporations — an administrative device unique in the annals of solutions to aboriginal land claims. This transfer of jurisdiction from federal to Native hands — 95 percent of Alaska belonged to Uncle Sam — began in early 1974.
Although Alaska is the U.S. largest state in the Union, and although the amount of land — 44 million acres — returned to the Native tribes was approximately equal to the size of Missouri, most of the people living in the ‘Lower 48’ felt very little impact from ANCSA.
The impact would be felt later. And is still being felt.
One of the issues driving the passage of ANCSA was the discovery of oil along Alaska’s northern coastline. The proposed method for getting the oil to refineries and customers in the Lower 48 would be the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System, one of the longest oil pipelines in the world, stretching 800 miles from Prudhoe Bay, south to Valdez, on the shores of Prince William Sound.
The ongoing negotiations over Native land ownership were put on the fast track, because America was hungry for Prudhoe Bay oil, and our Congress and our oil company CEOs knew that a lengthy series of lawsuits over land ownership might stymie the pipeline construction.
A billion dollars and 44,000 square miles (148 million acres) of Native compensation later, a consortium of oil companies began work on the pipeline.
But the impact may have been bigger than $1 billion and 148 million acres. After 200 years of taking lands away from American Indian tribes, the U.S. government, in 1971, agreed that the indigenous occupants of North America had rightful claims to the lands they occupied before the Europeans arrived.
Change is sometimes slow. Sometimes, it takes a nation 200 years to acknowledge the rights of its original inhabitants.
Deb Haaland — a member of the Laguna Pueblo — is the first American Indian to serve as Secretary of the Interior, and thus, to oversee the Bureau of Indian Affairs. She grew up going to ceremony, and being active in her pueblo in New Mexico. She was confirmed by the United States Senate on March 15, 2021. A month later, Secretary Haaland announced a new unit within BIA charged with tackling the decades-long crisis of missing and murdered Native Americans, saying, “We are fully committed to assisting Tribal communities with these investigations, and the [Missing and Murdered Unit] will leverage every resource available to be a force-multiplier in preventing these cases from becoming cold case investigations.”
A dramatic shift took place during the Nixon administration, when a special message to Congress detailed Nixon’s plans to end forced termination and to reform nearly every Native American-specific agency so it could fulfill treaty obligations.
“The time has come to break decisively with the past and to create the conditions for a new era in which the Indian future is determined by Indian acts and Indian decisions,” Nixon stated in his special address in 1970.
We are now in an era when Tribal self-determination seems to be embraced by most American politicians.
From Ms. Denetclaw’s article:
“The first way to improve BIA is to get rid of BIA in the Department of the Interior,” said Shannon O’Loughlin, chief executive for the Association on American Indian Affairs. “I think the best way to improve how Indian affairs are represented in the government is for it to be its own agency and to be separate from a department whose main goals are land and land management. So, my first recommendation would be to create a separate division and cabinet leader for Indian Affairs…”
A whole department and cabinet seat might not fix everything, but it could be a starting point for change.
“Having its own agency would probably be ideal, so that it is dealing with tribes directly with the White House and Congress,” said Larry Wright, executive director for the National Congress of American Indians. “Is that the answer for it all? I don’t know. But definitely having tribes at the table so that we aren’t forgotten continues to be important…”