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Ethnic Cleansing? We Have It Here Too!

"...the real aim of [the Dawes Act] is to get at the Indians land and open it up for resettlement."
- Senator Henry M. Teller, 1881

November 17, 2000 - The United States Government has been trying unsuccessfully to register Native American Indians for over a hundred years. The infamous Dawes Act of 1887 was the first such effort on a large-scale. The purported aim of the Act was to protect Indian property rights during the Oklahoma Land Rush. By registering, Indians were told, they would be allotted 160 acres of land per family in advance of the Land Rush and thus be restituted for 100 years of genocide against them.

The purpose of the Dawes Act, ostensibly to protect Indian welfare, was viewed with suspicion by many Indians hurt by government's clumsy relocation efforts of the past. Indians who had refused to submit to previous relocations refused to register on the Dawes Rolls for fear that they would be caught and punished.

To get on the Dawes Rolls, Native Americans had to "anglicize" their names. Rolling Thunder thus became Ron Thomas and so forth. This bit of "melting pot" chicanery allowed agents of the government, sent to the frontier to administer the Act, to slip the names of their relatives and friends onto the Dawes Rolls and thus reap millions of acres of land for their friends and cronys.

The abuses of the Dawes Act were revealed and set forth in the Miriam Report of 1928. A Group of 1001 Native Americans and prominent citizens were charged by Congress to look into widespread allegations of corruption and abuse of the Dawes Act. The 800 page report documented massive fraud and misappropriation by the very government agents sent to administer the Act. It was found in one state alone that Indian held land, which totaled 138 million acres in 1887 at the time the Dawes Act was signed into law, had been reduced to 47 million acres of land by 1934 when the Act was repealed.

The Miriam Report led to the repeal of the Dawes Act although repeal did not mean that land obtained thru fraud was restored. The Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, written specifically to indemnify Native Americans for the abuses of the Dawes Act simply "grandfathered in" the existing deeds and that was that.

As compensation, Indians were to benefit from a credit fund designed to encourage small businesses and self-sufficiency. The government stepped up efforts to recruit Natives into posts in the Bureau of Indian Affairs, set up an Indian Court system to deal with non-federal crimes, and established a mechanism for Indians to pool their land, purchase new parcels and own land as a corporate entity.

By 1954, it had become clear that the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 was failing. Implementation of the Act was plagued by the same incompetance and corruption created by the Dawes Act.

Ethnic Cleansing

The Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1954, therefore, initiated the ominous sounding "Termination and Relocation" phase of the Reorganization Act. Funding for the programs of the IRA of 1934 was abruptly cut off causing thousands of bankruptcies and painful dislocation among the tribes. In addition, this new law removed government recognition of 61 tribes leaving hundreds of thousands of Native Americans unqualified for government assistance. Whether this was an administrative convenience or a design to eliminate pesky tribal property claims, the net result was yet another arbitrary appropriation of property inflicted on Native Americans, many of whom are fighting in the courts to this day to get their rights back.
On February 20 President Clinton took a call on World News Tonight from a young Lumbee Indian girl who asked the President why she was still being denied her heritage. The President and Peter Jennings both looked dumbstruck. Both confessed to being unaware of the problem and the President promised to "look into it."

The Lumbee are a tribe of over 40,000 Indians located in North Carolina who were "erased" by the Termination and Relocation Act of 1954. "Sorry, the government says you no longer exist but, Have a Nice Day!"

The Indian Arts and Crafts Act of 1990

"Legislators consistently vote on legislation without understanding what is in it, especially when the final vote is taken." - Senator H.L. RichardsonWhat Makes You Think We Read The Bills?'
It is not commonly known that it was only in 1924 that the U.S. Congress generously extended citizenship to all Native American Indians, a priviledge, they had never enjoyed up until that point.

The Orwellian absurdity of government handling of Indian affairs has now reached a new height.

Public Law 101-644, the Indian Arts and Crafts Act of 1990, was passed on the hectic last day of the congressional session, a Saturday and signed by President Bush on November 29, 1990. The purpose of the law, in addition to attempting to rectify the mess created by 100 years of incompetant legislation, was to protect Native American craftsmen and women from the flood of counterfeit Native American arts & crafts from Taiwan and beyond.

This perfectly plausible objective was expanded beyond the realm of jewelry and other native crafts to include all art produced by those who are certifiably Indian. Under the 1990 Act, Indian Artisans may not use the words "Native American Artisan" to sell crafts they produce unless they are certified as genuine Indians by the Federal Government. The language of the 1990 Act defines an Indian as "any individual who is a member of an Indian tribe or is certified as an Indian artisan by an Indian tribe." Sounds harmless enough doesn't it?

The problems begin in the certification process. It's not enough that you were born to Indian parents. Nor is it enough for a Native American to trace his lineage back to the time of Christ. First of all, the applicant must be able to prove he was born in a tribe that is officially recognized by the U.S. Government. As I mentioned above, the 1954 Termination and Relocation Act of 1954 arbitrarily erased 61 tribes. Secondly, an applicant must prove he or she was born to officially recognized Indian parents. This also sounds simple enough, on the surface. The problem is that many Native Americans cannot obtain the necessary documents thanks to relocations going back to the early 1800s, the confusion created by the Dawes Act, the compounded confusion created by the Termination and Relocation Act, and the prevailing 3rd world conditions existing in the majority of tribal homelands.

The Real Affect of the Law

The point is, many genuine Indian artists cannot obtain certification under the Act. Their ancestral tribes may have been disolved long ago. No authority remains by which they can obtain certification even if they wanted to. Thousands of Kickapoos, Potawatamis, Cheyennes, Sioux, Arapahoes, Blackfeet, Lumbees and others have been legislated out of artistic existance.

Thousands of Indian families whose livelihoods depend on selling arts and crafts have just had those livelihoods arbitrarily confiscated, courtesy of the U.S. Government.

Indian artisans who defy the new law risk fines of up to $1,000,000, and up to 15 years in prison. Corporations or groups who defy the new regulations face up to $5,000,000 in fines.

Indian artisans are already being turned away from art competitions and trade meets. Jeanne Walker Rorex is a well known Oklahoma artist whose work has won all kinds of regional awards. She is descended from Cherokee sculptor Willard Stone whose sculptures are displayed in the Oklahoma Hall of Fame. Ms. Rorex was recently barred from participating in the major American Indian Heritage competition at the Philbrook Museum in Tulsa. She refuses to register because of the principle of the matter. The law implies that her family, relatives and ancestors were all frauds.

Apartheid in America

There is another element of this whole business that many Indian artisans find intolerable and that is registering themselves based on their ethnic heritage. The process smells too much of the bad old days in the South when the census counted mulattoes, quadroons and octaroons and doled out rights based on quantities of blood. Even the CDIB cards (Certification of Degree of Indian Blood) bear an eerie resemblance to the pass-books used to control non-whites in South Africa.

Indians are fed up with being registered, un-registered, administratively erased and so on by an incompetent and often corrupt bureaucracy. The very idea smacks of ethnic cleansing and divides Native Americans, certified vs. non-certified, against each other.

Civil Disobedience, An American Citizens' Responsibility

Numerous non-registered Native Americans are deliberately defying this latest piece of legislation by continuing to practice their ancestral arts. They are not doing this as American Indians but as American Citizens exercising their painfully earned constitutional rights. They are acting as American Citizens, not just Indians.

That the Indian Arts & Crafts Act of 1990 should be repealed goes without saying. An arts and crafts act should protect Native American Crafts, not disenfranchise ethnic individuals from their heritage.

Source: International Journal on World Peace

Native American Lands Sold under the Dawes Act

By 1871, the federal government stopped signing treaties with Native Americans and replaced the treaty system with a law giving individual Indians ownership of land that had been tribal property. This "Indian Homestead Act," official known as the Dawes Act, was a way for some Indians to become U.S. citizens.

There were two reasons why the treaty system was abondoned. First, white settlers needed more and more land, and the fact that tribes were treated as separate nations with separate citizens made it more difficult to take land from them and "assimilate" them into the general population. Assimilation had become the new ideal. The goal was to absorb the tribes into the European-American culture and make native people more like mainstream Americans. Second, the House of Representatives was angry that they did not have a voice in these policies. Under the constitution, treaties are ratified by the U.S. Senate, not the House, even though the House has to appropriate the money to pay for them. So the Congress passed a compromise bill in 1871 that, in effect, brought an end to the treaty system. The bill contained the following language buried in an appropriations law for the Yankton Indians --

"Provided, That hereafter no Indian nation or tribe within the territory of the United States shall be acknowledged or recognized as an independent nation, tribe , or power with whom the United States may contract by treaty..."

The end of the treaties meant the end of treating tribes as sovereign nations. Attempts were made to undermine the power of the tribal leaders and the tribal justice systems. Tribal bonds were viewed as an obstacle to federal attempts to assimilate the Indian into white society. Assimilation of the American Indians would become the basis for much of the government policy toward the Native American from the 1880s to the 1930s.

"It has become the settled policy of the Government to break up reservations, destroy tribal relations, settle Indians upon their own homesteads, incorporate them into the national life, and deal with them not as nations or tribes or bands, but as individual citizens."
-- Commissioner of Indian Affairs Thomas J. Morgan, 1890.

This set the stage for the passage by Congress of the General Allotment Act (the Dawes Severalty Act) of 1887.

Congressman Henry Dawes had great faith in the civilizing power of private property. He said that to be civilized was to "wear civilized clothes ... cultivate the ground, live in houses, ride in Studebaker wagons, send children to school, drink whiskey [and] own property." This act was designed to turn Indians into farmers, in the hopes they would become more like mainstream America.

The federal government divided communal tribal lands into 160-acre parcels -- known as allotments -- and gave them to individual tribal members. The U.S. Government would then hold the land allotted to individual Indians in trust for a period of 25 years, so that the Indian would not sell the land and return to the reservation and/or be swindled out of it by scheming white men. The Act went on to offer Indians the benefits of U.S. citizenship -- if they took an allotment, lived separate form the tribe and became "civilized."

"And every Indian born within the territorial limits of the United States to whom allotments shall have been made under the provisions of this act, or under any law or treaty, and every Indian born within the territorial limits of the United States who has voluntarily taken up, within said limits, his residence separate and apart from any tribe of Indians therein, and has adopted the habits of civilized life, is hereby declared to be a citizen of the United States, and is entitled to all the rights, privileges and immunities of such citizens..."
-- Language from the Dawes Act.

The Dawes Act would be the most important method of acquiring citizenship for the Indians prior to 1924. The Dawes Act tied Indian citizenship to the ultimate proof of civilization -- individual ownership of property. The American Indian became an American citizen as soon as he received his allotment. The Act also declared that Indians could become citizens if they had separated from their tribes and adopted the ways of civilized life, without ending their rights to tribal or other property. In a sense, the American Indian could maintain dual citizenship -- tribal and American.

President Theodore Roosevelt described this important law in his message to Congress of December 3, 1901 as "a mighty pulverizing engine to break up the tribal mass."

The supporters of the Dawes Act not only wanted to destroy the Indian tribal loyalties and the reservation system but also to open up the reservation lands to white settlement. Hundreds of thousands of acres of land remained after the individual 160-acre allotments had been made. These parcels were then sold at bargain prices to land-hungry whites.

Funds from the sale of so-called surplus land were used to establish Indian schools. The idea was that Indian children could be educated and taught the social habits of white Americans, thus completing the process of assimilation.

The allotment system turned out to be a monumental disaster for the Indians. In addition to losing their "surplus" tribal land, many Native American families also lost their allotted land despite the government's 24-year period of trusteeship. The poorest of the poor were landless and the majority of Indians still resisted assimilation. Native Americans reached their lowest population numbers shortly after the turn of the 20th Century.

By 1932, the sale of unclaimed land and allotted land resulted in the loss of two-thirds of the more than 100-million acres Native Americans had held prior to the Dawes Act.

Because special treaties guaranteed them self-government, the tribes in the Indian Territory had been excluded from the Dawes Act. But, the pressures of white settlers and railroads wanting to acquire Indian land soon resulted in President Harrison declaring in 1889 that lands in the Oklahoma area were open to settlement. The various tribes in the Indian Territory were pressured into signing agreements to allot their lands. By 1901, the Native Americans of the Indian Territory were declared U.S. citizens. In 1907, Oklahoma became a State in the Union, and the tribes of Oklahoma had lost their sovereignty and their lands.

Source: nebraskastudies.org

The Dawes Act
February 8, 1887
(U. S. Statutes at Large, Vol. XXIV, p. 388 ff.)

[Congressman Henry Dawes, author of the act, once expressed his faith in the civilizing power of private property with the claim that to be civilized was to "wear civilized clothes...cultivate the ground, live in houses, ride in Studebaker wagons, send children to school, drink whiskey [and] own property."]An act to provide for the allotment of lands in severalty to Indians on the various reservations, and to extend the protection of the laws of the United States and the Territories over the Indians, and for other purposes.

Be it enacted, That in all cases where any tribe or band of Indians has been, or shall hereafter be, located upon any reservation created for their use, either by treaty stipulation or by virtue of an act of Congress or executive order setting apart the same for their use, the President of the United States be, and he hereby is, authorized, whenever in his opinion any reservation or any part thereof of such Indians is advantageous for agricultural and grazing purposes to cause said reservation, or any part thereof, to be surveyed, or resurveyed if necessary, and to allot the lands in said reservations in severalty to any Indian located thereon in quantities as follows:

• To each head of a family, one-quarter of a section;
• To each single person over eighteen years of age, one-eighth of a section;
• To each orphan child under eighteen years of age, one-eighth of a section; and,
• To each other single person under eighteen years now living, or who may be born prior to the date of the order of the President directing an allotment of the lands embraced in any reservation, one-sixteenth of a section;...

SEC. 5. That upon the approval of the allotments provided for in this act by the Secretary of the Interior, he shall . . . declare that the United States does and will hold the land thus allotted, for the period of twenty-five years, in trust for the sole use and benefit of the Indian to whom such allotment shall have been made, . . . and that at the expiration of said period the United States will convey the same by patent to said Indian, or his heirs as aforesaid, in fee, discharged of such trust and free of all charge or encumbrance whatsoever: . . .

SEC. 6. That upon the completion of said allotments and the patenting of the lands to said allottees, each and every member of the respective bands or tribes of Indians to whom allotments have been made shall have the benefit of and be subject to the laws, both civil and criminal, of the State or Territory in which they may reside; . . .And every Indian born within the territorial limits of the United States to whom allotments shall have been made under the provisions of this act, or under any law or treaty, and every Indian born within the territorial limits of the United States who has voluntarily taken up, within said limits, his residence separate and apart from any tribe of Indians therein, and has adopted the habits of civilized life, is hereby declared to be a citizen of the United States, and is entitled to all the rights, privileges, and immunities of such citizens, whether said Indian has been or not, by birth or otherwise, a member of any tribe of Indians within the territorial limits of the United States without in any manner impairing or otherwise affecting the right of any such Indian to tribal or other property. . . .

Source: PBS

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