America's own West Bank

Everyone over the age of ten is aware of the Middle East conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. Their individual level of attention or interest varies, but exposure to the basic facts of the situation is still there. And middle-age Americans of my generation also remember a time when South Africa was white majority-ruled, with its citizens legally classified by degree of color and black South Africans segregated into townships. And if you were paying attention to politics at the time, you can also remember the excuses and phony communist-baiting offered by the Reagan administration as justification for the US policy of supporting the white government. (I can remember the college protests and the calls for institutional divestiture at the University of Washington; those were good days to be a progressive). Anyhow, this all climaxed with egg on America's face when white minority rule in South Africa changed to one-man, one-vote democracy.

But what most people don't realize is that the United States has its own West Bank, its own townships: the native Americans.

The average person is aware that many Indians died during the American colonization and expansion westward to the Pacific. But to be fair to history, many (if not the majority) of native Americans died not from muskets but from disease. This is not to downplay the dishonesty of the American government in its dealings with native Americans during the past three centuries, nor does it excuse the actions of so-called Christian Europeans. I note this merely to put things into proper perspective. In his recent masterpiece, Guns, Germs and Steel: the Fate of Human Societies, Jared Diamond discusses the reasons why European society grew up around such diseases (domesticated animals); how they survived the diseases (resistance gained through natural selection), and the unintended but yet devastating consequences of first contact between Europeans and people of the New World. So when the English Pilgrims met the native American delegation of Wampanoags headed by their chief, Massasoit, near modern day Providence, the damage had already been done. The English had no way of knowing that Massasoit's tribe had recently been reduced by disease from 1,000 indidividuals to barely 60. The culprit? Most probably an outbreak of food-borne viral hepatitis.

The modern day issue concerns not death, but intentional poverty. The US government has been complicit in a particularly heinous act that keeps native Americans in a state of poverty; namely, failure to properly manage and account for fees and rents on Indian land:

The accounts hold money that belongs to individual Indians who have earned it from such sources as oil and gas production, grazing leases, coal production and timber sales on their allotted lands. Most of the account holders are so poor that they need their money just for basic subsistence. Revenues are held in more than 387,000 Individual Indian Money (IIM) accounts managed - rather, mismanaged - by the BIA. "The BIA has spent more than 100 years mismanaging, diverting and losing money that belongs to Indians," Echohawk says. "They have no idea how much has been collected and are unable to provide even a basic, regular statement to Indian account holders."

The United States has recognized the special and sovereign relationship it has with Indian tribes since the time of the US Constitution. But in this particular situation, the United States decided not to allow the Indians to run their own affairs. The US government insisted on setting up these accounts on behalf of the Indians. So the federal government did not have its arm twisted in any way, shape or form. But this issue is not merely about the law. Collection and payment from these accounts especially impacts tribes in the Midwest and the West. Which, predictably, means that it also runs afoul of the historical triumvirate of powerful Western political constituencies: timber companies, mining corporations, and ranchers. In addition, resolving this issue would require an admission by the federal government that it was corrupt and incompetent. And therein lies the resistance to doing the obvious and the right thing: the federal government simply didn't realize how lucrative these accounts were going to become, and how "useful" that money could be, if it could be creatively managed for other non-Indian purposes.

The Quakers, a Christian denomination that I have tremendous respect for, has also taken up the cause of these native Americans:

For the past century, the federal government has held hundreds of thousands of acres of Indian land (some with valuable mineral and other resources) “in trust” for the land’s Native American owners. The government was supposed to collect the land-use money for individual Indian property owners and turn it over to them. It appears that it usually did the first half okay but often failed to do the second. Congress scrutinized the situation and passed corrective legislation. When that still did not solve the problem, Native Americans went to court, and the Cobell v. Norton case (also known as the Indian Trust Fund scandal case) is still not resolved. Now members of Congress are threatening to take the matter into their own hands because billions of dollars are involved. Even though the trust funds were never taxpayer dollars, the replacement funds would probably have to come from taxpayers.

This is a basic issue of fairness: the government is simply not doing its job. What is worse, the shame of poverty that many native Americans feel could be solved if the government would simply keep its word:

6. If we hadn’t taken their land in the first place, they would not need to rely on the federal government to manage their funds for them, and instead they would be getting paid directly by the companies involved. These Individual Indian Money accounts were created by U.S. governmental policy that was in place under the Dawes Act between 1887 and 1934. Known as the General Allotment Act, the policy compelled the breakup of a great deal of Indian territory into small parcels placed in the name of individual owners, and simultaneously made the “surplus land” available for settlement by non-Indian farmers and ranchers. That policy preserved for the federal government the right to manage the sale of the natural resources located on the land. Ironically, the government had put the land in trust to protect “ignorant savages.”

Lest anyone think I selected this issue in order to bash Republicans, I would like to point out -- as the Quakers also do -- that this is not a conservative vs progressive issue. The lawsuit in question was originally filed against Clinton's own Secretary of the Interior, Bruce Babbitt.

7. This is not a partisan issue in any way. American Indian plaintiffs first filed suit during the Clinton administration. Interior Department officials at the time were just as recalcitrant in responding as officials in the Bush administration have been. In 1999 a U.S. district court judge held Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt and Secretary of the Treasury Robert Rubin in contempt for failing to follow court orders. He entered similar findings against the current Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton in 2002 and again in 2004. The judge was a Reagan appointee.

But instead of admitting its error, the federal government filed motion after motion for dismissal and continuance, trying its best to wear down the plaintiffs. But Indians have been waiting for generations; in a waiting game, they have more practice.