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The Long Trail to Apology

28 June 2004 - All manner of unusual things can happen in Washington in an election year, but few seem so refreshing as a proposed official apology from the federal government to American Indians — the first ever — for the "violence, maltreatment and neglect" inflicted upon the tribes for centuries. A resolution of formal apology for "a long history of official depradations and ill-conceived policies" has been quietly cleared for a Senate vote, with proponents predicting passage. Tribal leaders have been offering mixed reactions of wariness ("words on paper") and approval somewhat short of delight ("a good first step").

True, no federal reparations or claim settlements are at stake. But the rhetoric of the resolution pulls few punches about the genocidal wounds American Indians suffered in being uprooted for the New World. The Trail of Tears, the Long Walk, the Wounded Knee Massacre and other travails are specified in the resolution, which calls on President Bush to "bring healing to this land" by acknowledging the government's offensive history.

The apology would have been received as fighting words at the Capitol in the Indian war era, when the government pursued military domination and tribes fought back. But times change, albeit very slowly sometimes, and this time it is significant that the political clout of Native Americans has never been clearer. The parties are vying for support in key political arenas, with the narrowly divided Senate particularly in play. Native Americans' power is considerable in tribal bases like South Dakota, where their turnout was crucial in electing Senator Tim Johnson in 2002; in Alaska, where they are 16 percent of eligible voters; and in tight presidential states like Arizona, New Mexico and Nevada.

Severe health, education and economic troubles still bedevil the reservations, despite the casino riches of a minority. Accordingly, the tribes must aim for more than an apology as they pursue ambitious voter-enrollment programs. An official apology is indeed words on paper. But approval by Congress would be an acknowledgment of modern tribal power, especially if the president presented it this September at the opening ofthe National Museum of the American Indian in Washington.

Source: New York Times

Actions would speak louder than apology, tribes say

By Scott Canon, The Kansas City Star

31 May 2004 - After centuries of deal-breaking, land-taking and what many tribes consider genocide, some Washington politicians want the government to offer American Indians an apology.

U.S. Sen. Sam Brownback, a Kansas Republican, has sponsored a resolution apologizing “to all Native Peoples on behalf of the United States” as a way to smooth the often-rocky relations between the two.

“(But) before reconciliation,” Brownback said in remarks entered in the Congressional Record, “there must be recognition and repentance.”

To that end, his resolution lists a few reasons for an apology — things like the deadly Trail of Tears march of Cherokee from North Carolina to Oklahoma — and mentions broader federal policies, now seen as racist, that killed people and shattered cultures.

Finally, the resolution closes with a disclaimer: “Nothing in this Joint Resolution authorizes any claim against the United States or serves as a settlement of any claim against the United States.”

A sampling of tribal groups greeted the gesture warmly, but they didn't view it as a salve to thousands of ongoing disputes between Washington and the hundreds of tribes in the country.

“We appreciate it. … It's a recognition of the issue, of the past injustices,” said Steve Cadue, tribal chairman of the Kickapoo in Kansas.

But others note an array of ongoing disputes over land, water and money. The Indian groups point out that an apology underlined with a disclaimer doesn't help resolve those disagreements.

“An apology is just where you start,” said Deana Jackson, a spokeswoman for the Navajo Nation. “Now let's see you step to the plate and do what you promised you would do.”

She cited recent funding cuts to the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Indian Health Service, saying they essentially amounted to an abandonment of treaty obligations to provide for tribes' needs in return for concessions made over generations.

“Obligations to native nations are always ignored,” Jackson said.

Resolutions have been introduced to apologize for slavery, but have so far failed. President Clinton contemplated, but ultimately chose not to, unilaterally apologize for slavery.

The government paid reparations to Japanese-Americans held in camps during World War II. And Congress has passed resolutions to study reparations for slavery, but payments remain highly controversial.

Brownback timed the introduction of his resolution, which encourages the president to join in apologizing, to coincide with the September opening of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of the American Indian. The resolution's co-sponsors in the Senate are Democrat Daniel Inouye of Hawaii and Colorado Republican Ben Nighthorse Campbell, a member of the Northern Cheyenne Tribe and the only American Indian now serving in Congress.

According to U.S. Census figures, the American Indian, Eskimo and Aleut population is about 2.3 million, about 0.9 percent of the total U.S. population. Census figures predict a gradual climb in that group's percentage of the population.

Meanwhile, Republicans and Democrats have courted tribes increasingly in recent years as some — mostly those with land near densely populated areas on the coasts — have become wealthier by running casinos.

The National Journal reports that the Agua Caliente of California, the Louisiana Coushattas, the Mississippi Choctaws, and the Saginaw Chippewas of Michigan pay an average of $5 million a year to Washington lobbying firms and that those tribes have spent $2.6 million over the past six years on campaign contributions. About two-thirds of those donations went to Republicans.

Federal Election Commission reports for Brownback, however, show he has not received money from tribes in recent years. Rather, he has been at odds with the Wyandotte tribe, for instance, and its efforts to move graves from a Kansas City, Kan., cemetery and establish a casino there.

Brownback has said he has been surprised by the anger he encountered while visiting Indian reservations in Kansas. In offering his resolution, he said he hoped for healing after “choices our government sometimes made to disregard its solemn word.”

The apology “begins the effort of reconciliation by recognizing past wrongs and repenting for them,” Brownback said.

Dennis Hastings, a member of the Omaha tribe from Macy, Neb., found the idea of an apology odd and inadequate.

“In a way, you look at it as nice. But it's a little late and too far gone,” said Hastings, an anthropologist with Omaha Tribal Historical Research Project. “We want to resolve the issues before they put their sorry on the board. … I'd rather have them go home and read about our history and have their children read about our history, and then come and talk with us about it with a little meaning.”

Instead, said historian Fergus Bordewich, the resolution treats the complex clash between American Indians and the federal government in only the broadest of terms.

Almost without exception, he said, 85 percent to 90 percent of most tribes died from exposure to the diseases that Europeans brought to North America. But, said the author of Killing the White Man's Indian, that was not intentional and “no one is morally culpable for that.”

Some tribes suffered much more severely in their dealings with the government than others, he said. Sometimes treaties bullied tribes — that's how Hastings talks about an 1854 pact that he believes stole millions from the Omaha — and sometimes deals served the interests of both sides.

“Not everything happened in the same way in every place,” Bordewich said. “It's a very tragic history however you measure it. The government has a lot to be sorry about. But a blanket apology doesn't really recognize the complexity.”

Still, tribes and their advocates tend to welcome an apology as at least recognition of the damage done to Indian welfare and culture.

“These weren't just random or ad hoc actions of bad white people. These were the official actions of the United States government,” said Susan Harjo, who belongs to the Cheyenne and Muscogee and is president of the Morning Star Institute, a tribal advocacy group. “It's perfectly in order to apologize.”

She sees Brownback as sincere. “There's no percentage in him doing this. It's not something he's going to get great kudos for in his usual circles,” she said.

But Harjo said acts of good faith should follow — forcing the return of Indian burial remains from museums, for instance.

Even then, “no living native person has the right to accept” the apology, she said.

“It's too big,” she said. “Too much was done for too long, and too many people suffered.”

Source: The Kansas City Star

Journey toward reconciliation The past flows into the present

Nick Coleman

June 27, 2004 - WINONA, MINN.-- The big boats are coming back. But so are the people who were here before them. And for the first time, they will share the spotlight.

In an extraordinary confluence of troubled history and romantic myth, this city of 27,000 on the Mississippi River is preparing to welcome an anniversary flotilla of riverboats while at the same time attempting to find reconciliation with the Indian tribe that was displaced by the civilization that sent the original flotilla 150 years ago.

On Saturday, the mayor of Winona, the Roman Catholic bishop and several other representatives of government and church groups apologized during an outdoor "truth and reconciliation" ceremony to members of the Dakota (Sioux) tribe, including direct descendants of the hereditary Dakota chiefs known as Wapasha, or Wabasha, whose Mdewakanton band of Dakota lived for generations beneath the Winona bluffs.

"I am hurt and I am truly ashamed of the injustices inflicted on the Dakota nation," Mayor Jerry Miller told a gathering of several hundred people who listened to two hours' worth of testimony from tribal members who recounted family stories of suffering during more than a century of war, removal and racism. Miller, saying he was speaking on behalf of Winonans past and present, offered "our sincere, heartfelt apology for what happened" and said Winona wants to welcome the Dakota back home.

Old Millard Fillmore would never have guessed he'd see the day.

Fillmore was the unremarkable ex-president who led the 1854 "Grand Excursion," an elite steamboat flotilla that brought wealthy Easterners to view the Upper Mississippi Valley shortly after it had been nearly cleared of its original inhabitants.

This week, a re-creation of Fillmore's flotilla will bring another armada of riverboats up river, through Winona and on to St. Paul.

Like the original flotilla, which was conducted in the belief that God had finally made the valley fit for its rightful heirs, the recreation seems likely to bypass the rich history of relations between whites and Indians.

But that history was painfully confronted Saturday, in a park below the jagged bluff known locally as Sugar Loaf but which was once called "Wapasha's Cap" and stood above a village whose succession of chiefs resisted the steady incursion of whites.

After deceptive treaties wrested most of Minnesota away from the Dakota, the Indians were rounded up and removed to a small reservation on the Minnesota River. The money and supplies promised under the treaties never arrived, starvation stalked the tribe and, in 1862, a war led to the deaths of hundreds along the frontier, the execution of 38 warriors, the dispersal of Dakota bands to prison-like reservations and a declaration by Gov. Alexander Ramsey that the Dakota must be banished or face extermination.

Old Millard Fillmore had presided over changes to the treaties that were made in the Senate and forced on the Indians -- changes that led to war and caused Chief Wabasha III to say there was just one more thing the "Great Father" could do to the Dakota: "Gather us all together on the prairie and surround us with soldiers and shoot us down."

By the time of the executions and extermination efforts, more than eight years after Fillmore's "excursion," all that was left as reminders of the Upper Mississippi's original inhabitants were the place names that were appropriated by the newcomers and romanticized for the tourist trade.

"It was an ethnic cleansing," says St. Olaf College Prof. Carolyn Anderson, who has researched Dakota history. "Except they didn't really go away. They're still here."

Still here, but still overlooked and invisible, just as they were when Fillmore's flotilla arrived to enjoy the pristine beauties of the river valley.

"We never were 'together,' so how can we reconcile?" asked David Larsen, a former tribal chairman on the Lower Sioux Reservation near Morton, Minn. "We can't tap-dance around the truth anymore. We have to really get to know each other in a really honest way, and let go of the anger and let go of the pain."

A local volunteer committee, working with tribal representatives and the Diversity Foundation, helped organize the "Dakota Homecoming" or "hdihunipi" a Dakota word meaning "they are returning back home." Saturday's speakers included staff representatives of Sens. Norm Coleman and Mark Dayton as well as federal judge Joan Erickson, who asked those in attendance if they had heard the stories of the Dakota and had believed them to stand and render their verdict.

Every person stood, despite the fact that, as in many homecomings, reconciliation can produce some painfully awkward moments. Such as the one Saturday when Dakota spiritual leader Ambrose Littleghost, 72, told the gathering -- which included Winona Bishop Bernard Harrington -- how he was beaten in Catholic schools as a child, disciplined for not speaking English.

"Every little mistake we made, we got a whupping," Littleghost said, standing just 15 feet away from Bishop Harrington. "Sometimes when I see a priest, I still want to go out and punch him in the nose."

Harrington, wearing a black cassock to recall the days when Catholic missionaries were called "black robes" by the Indians, took it in stride, offering an apology on behalf of the church and noting that he, too, experienced corporal punishment as a Catholic schoolboy.

"We do see your pain, and feel your pain and understand your pain," Harrington told the gathering, seated in a circle of chairs near a smoldering wood fire and an encampment of tepees marked by eagle-feather staffs. "We apologize."

Littleghost and other speakers, some from as far away as Canada, recounted a litany of hurts known everywhere among the Dakota diaspora: There were tearful stories of starving Indian women forced to prostitute themselves to soldiers in order to obtain food for their children. Stories of relatives imprisoned for defending their farms against white encroachment, of grandmothers picking undigested corn out of animal droppings to boil for soup, of the skulls and bones of ancestors kept as souvenirs or museum pieces.

"The Holocaust started in THIS country," Littleghost said, pointing emphatically at the ground. "If somebody hurts you -- again and again -- you can't forget. We want to hear, 'Sorry; forgive us.' "

The ceremonies, modeled on international truth and justice commissions that have helped heal the wounds of conflicts in countries such as South Africa, continue today with a 9 a.m. reconciliation session and an ecumenical church service in Winona's Lake Park. But organizers hope this weekend's Dakota Homecoming will be just the first in an annual series of meetings.

Ernest Wabasha, the great-great-grandson of the chief who defended his people during Millard Fillmore's time, was on hand to signal his approval Saturday, along with his wife, Vernell, and their son, Leonard Wabasha, the eighth in a family line whose leaders still are honored by many Dakota as chiefs of the tribe.

"It's starting to feel like we can get along," said Ernest Wabasha, 75, of Lower Sioux, who was making only the second visit in his life to the home of his ancestors. "I don't know if you can say that things are smoothed over, but they're in the past, and maybe we can get along better now."

His wife, Vernell, was not as hopeful. She noted that the late Gov. Rudy Perpich proclaimed 1987, the 125th anniversary of the Dakota war, as a "Year of Reconciliation," but that Indians still suffer from incidents of ignorance and outright racism.

"The attitudes of some of the people are still the same," she said. "And you can tell that just by looking at some of the legislation they try to pass in St. Paul."

Many Indians yesterday mentioned Gov. Tim Pawlenty's attempt to take away tribal exclusivity on gaming, but others also were upset by this week's scheduled closing of the Minnesota Historical Society's small museum on the Lower Sioux Reservation that tells the story of the 1862 conflict and the suffering of the Dakota. The historical society, pressured by financial cuts, has offered to give the unique museum to the tribe, which has agreed to operate it. But local non-Indian governments have refused to approve the plan, balking at the idea of Indian sovereignty over the museum and the 220-acre site.

The museum is set to close Wednesday, the same day the boats of the recreated Fillmore flotilla are scheduled to reach Winona and the ancient home of the Dakota.

So once again, the big boats will come up the river. And once again, Minnesota's first people will be overlooked. But in Winona this weekend, a small start has been made to change hearts and to open the possibility of a future that may be better than the past.

Today, on Wabasha's Prairie, the last word should go to Ernest Wabasha:

"It is good."

Source: Minneapolis Star Tribune

related links:

• Indian Affairs Head Makes Apology
  Oct. 2000 - AP -The head of the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs apologized Friday for the agency's ``legacy of racism and inhumanity'' that included massacres, forced relocations of tribes and attempts to wipe out Indian languages and cultures. "By accepting this legacy, we accept also the moral responsibility of putting things right," Kevin Gover, a Pawnee Indian, said in an emotional speech marking the agency's 175th anniversary. Gover said he was apologizing on behalf of the BIA, not the federal government as a whole. Still, he is the highest-ranking U.S. official ever to make such a statement regarding the treatment of American Indians.

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