Native Americans Want Apology - As A First Step

by Marty Logan

(IPS) -- Chief Brian Buchanan boarded a plane July 13 in search of international advice on how to end a century-old dispute between his Native American tribe and the U.S. government, but he says he would welcome a proposed apology from Washington for the way it has treated Native people.

An apology would be "the highest mark in history for Native Americans," said Buchanan from the northern state of Michigan.

"As you know, we take the spoken word very, very seriously. When we're lied to it's probably one of the worst things on earth. You take what someone says and you trust, but when you get burnt over and over again an apology like that does mean a lot."

Many of the country's four million Native people say the government never lived up to the promises it made in hundreds of treaties it made with their ancestors as it colonized the territory that became the United States.

In those agreements the government pledged to provide programs and services in exchange for the land and natural resources owned by Native Indians.

A proposed U.S. government apology for those broken promises and other ill treatment of the nation's first peoples was introduced in Congress by three senators from both the governing Republican and Democratic parties in May.

It begins, "To acknowledge a long history of official depredations and ill-conceived policies by the United States Government regarding Indian tribes, and offer an apology to all native peoples on behalf of the United States."

"This nation should address the broken treaties and many of the more ill-conceived federal policies that followed, such as extermination, termination, forced removal and relocation, the outlawing of traditional religions and the destruction of sacred places," adds the resolution, S.J. Res. 37.

It "urges the president to acknowledge the offences of the United States against Indian tribes in the history of the United States in order to bring healing to this land by providing a proper foundation for reconciliation between the United States and Indian tribes."

The bill has been approved by the Senate but is awaiting passage in the House of Representatives.

According to Buchanan, passage of the apology and acceptance of his tribe's claim for federal government recognition would both help to restore dignity to the group's members, particularly the elders. "Our tribe is all about respect, about respect of our elders and our ancestors," he said.

Buchanan's Miami Nation of Indiana was stripped of its federal status in 1897, after government officials removed some members to what is now neighboring Oklahoma State. The decision to remove tribal status was based solely on the decision of one U.S. Government bureaucrat, the chief told IPS on Monday, the day before his trip to Geneva to participate in the United Nations Working Group on Indigenous Populations.

The recognition "was illegally taken and we've been fighting to take it back," he adds.

The Miami tribe, one of hundreds in the United States striving for federal status -- 562 tribes are now recognized -- numbers about 5,500 people, about one-half of whom still live in the state.

In 2001, the Supreme Court denied the tribe's claim for recognition. The following year the state's representatives in Congress told the group's leaders that if they renounced their rights to open a casino, federal recognition would soon follow. In 2002, 330 Indian tribes earned more than $14.5 billion from casinos, according to the federal National Indian Gaming Commission.

The tribe took the politicians' advice -- and is still waiting for the status, Buchanan says. The official designation, which is generally made only after a tribe can prove that it has continuously operated for decades as a coherent unit and is not simply a splinter group of another tribe, is important because it would give the Miamis a say in how artifacts and bones found on their territory are dealt with, and also make tribe members eligible for government services, including education programs and health care for the tribe's elders.

But most important is the dignity such status would return to the tribe, says Buchanan. "We've done everything that the white culture has asked of us to be able to get our dignity restored -- from the beginning of treaty time to doing what the politicians asked as far as casinos. And flat out, it doesn't matter what they tell us to do, they're not going to honour it," Buchanan says.

Still, the chief feels that an apology from Washington would demonstrate Congress' ability "to correct the wrongdoing to the Miami."

But other Native people argue the apology would not change how Washington treats American Indians.

It would be "a first step, but it's not that substantial," says Andrea Smith, a professor, Native activist and a force behind the Boarding School Healing Project, which aims to help the tens of thousands of Indians, and their relatives, taken from their families and sent to English-speaking, Christian residential schools in the 19th and 20th centuries.

It is estimated that U.S. officials sent 100,000 Native American children to the schools, with a goal of assimilating them into white society -- "to kill the Indian and keep the man" was the stated policy.

Smith told IPS on Monday that her group is now drafting a resolution to be introduced in Congress that would demand compensation on behalf of the victims of the residential school system. She suggested that an official government apology could spur the government to compensate for past wrongs done to Native people "but it won't in and of itself do anything."

One group that represents American Indians says most tribal leaders support the concept of an apology but want to ensure that having delivered it, Washington would not stop delivering programs to native people, or otherwise treat them unfairly.

The Bureau of Indian Affairs alone will spend nearly two billion dollars in 2004 to administer lands held in trust status for native peoples, maintain infrastructure, provide economic development and to educate Native students.

"As one tribal leader said, 'it's kind of like apologizing for stepping on your foot but still not removing your foot,'" said Jacqueline Johnson, executive director of the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI), which counts 250 Indian tribes as members.

"They feel that these programs and services provided by Washington to tribes are treaty obligations, and they don't want this apology in any way not to reflect the ongoing treaty responsibilities and obligations of Congress and the government," she added in an interview Tuesday.

Johnson said the bill's supporters aim to have it become law before September's opening of the new National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC.

Native leaders, she added, are stressing that the apology must recognise contemporary and not just historical problems in Indian-government relations.

Today's issues include the disparity in government funding for health and education programs in "Indian country" versus the wider society and Washington's mismanagement of billions of dollars of Indian-earned money that the government holds in trust funds. Yet introduction of the apology has stirred up many long-buried emotions, Johnson adds.

"I support the sponsor, Senator Sam Brownback for feeling that this country can't begin a healing process if it doesn't start healing with its first Americans ... but it has also brought up all of those bad feelings of issues that have gone unnoticed and uninvolved in tribal communities for a long time."