church to date has no word as to any prosecution. The How can city or county government function when a segment of its residents are not subject to its laws because of their tribal immunity? Economic prosperity requires certain conditions and is difficult in rural areas in the best of circumstances. These added problems and uncertainties devastate the economies of many reservations, negatively affecting everyone. It is no accident that my county is one of the poorest in the country. In addition, many potential purchasers of reservation assets are simply not interested when they find out they will be confronted with these problems. When purchasers can be found, asset prices are regularly discounted about twenty-five percent. These facts make it difficult for non-Indians to either stay or leave. I have a beautiful ranch that is close to town and has miles of shoreline along Lake Oahe, but I have considered selling it just to avoid continuing problems for myself and my children. I heard about a potential ranch purchaser that was looking for a ranch like mine. When I contacted the realtor involved, he said that the "word was out about reservations" and that he didn't feel it would be ethical to even talk to this potential purchaser about my ranch. I estimate that if my ranch were sold, I would have to discount it at least four hundred thousand dollars, making it very difficult to replace it somewhere else. Non-Indians on reservations are treated very much like unwanted illegitimate children. Our rights are being denied and our very existence appears to be embarrassing and inconvenient. This treatment appears to be having a dramatic impact on our choices. According to the last census, over forty-five percent of those on reservations are non-Indians. There is a vast difference between the average age of Indians and non-Indians however. The average age of Indians is very young often under nineteen. The average age of non-Indians is much older indicating that many young non-Indians are leaving reservations and not returning. Non-Members are being forced to pay taxes and obey regulations of a government that they are excluded from, while tribal Members can participate in local governments that they may not have to support or obey. This effectively puts a slowly tightening legal noose around the necks of non-Indians. Current policies are moving reservations toward more racially segregated and isolated entities. Such a trend in the face of coordinated legal discrimination smacks of genocide. What if the position of Indians and non-Indians were exactly reversed on reservations. Suppose tribes were governed exclusively by Whites. Imagine that they excluded non-Whites from participation often discriminately. Suppose these same Whites could participate in local government, while being excluded from many of the taxes and ordinances of that same government. If this were the case, how long would you tolerate the situation? Sometimes basic, subtle, symbolic words can teach us much. You have invited me to present testimony about how tribal sovereignty impacts non-Indians. In presenting my testimony I have used that same term - non-Indians. It speaks volumes about our position on reservations. How would others like to be classified as non-Whites? The use of the term non-Indians accurately describes me as nonsomebody, as non-person, and that is how I am treated on the reservation. As a "non-Indian" I thank you for finally allowing my voice to, at least, be heard. REVOLUTION BY FERGUS M. BORDEWICH ICKI'S CAFE IS, IN ITS MODEST WAY, A M To Micki Hutchinson, the problem in the winter of 1991 seemed as plain as the grid of streets that white homesteaders had optimistically laid out in 1910, on the naked South Dakota prairie, to create the town of Isabel in the middle of what they were told was no longer the reservation of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe. It was not difficult for Hutchinson to decide what to do when the leaders of the tribal government ordered her to purchase a $250 tribal liquor license: She ignored them. "They have no right to tell me what to do. I'm not Indian!" Hutchinson told me a year and a half later. She and other white businesspeople had by then challenged the tribe's right to tax them in both tribal court and federal district court and had lost. The marks of prolonged tension showed on her tanned, angular, wary face. "If this were Indian land, it would make sense. But we're a non-Indian town. This is all homestead land, and the tribe was paid for it. I can't vote in tribal elections or on anything else that happens on the reservation. What they're talking about is taxation without representation." When I visited, everyone in Isabel still remembered the screech of the warning siren that someone had set off on the morning of March 27, 1991, when the tribal police reached the edge of town, as if their arrival were some kind of natural disaster, like a tornado or fire. The convoy of gold-painted prowl cars rolled in from the prairie and then, when they came abreast of the café, swung sideways across the road. Thirtyeight tribal policemen surrounded the yellow brick build in Illustrated by BARRON STOREY ARGENTURIES OF CONFLICT OVER THEIR RIGHTS AND POWERS, Indian tribes now increasingly make and enforce their own laws, often answerable to no one in the United States wernment. Is this the rebirth of their ancient independence or a new kind of legalized segregation? INDIAN COUNTRY ing. The tribe's police chief, Marvin LeCompte, told Hutchinson that she was in contempt of tribal court. Or ficers ordered the morning breaktast crowd away from their tried eggs and coffee. Then they went back into the pine-paneled bar and confiscated Hutchinson's stock of beer and aquor-contraband," as LeCompte described itand drove off with it to the tribai government's offices at Eagle Butte A few days before I met Hutchinson, I had interviewed Gregg J Bourland, the vouthrui chairman of the Chevenne River Sioux Tribe. Bourland is widely reckoned to be one of the most ettective tribal chairmen in the region and, with a degree in business from the state college in Spearfish, also one of the best educated. "Let them talk about taxanon without representation," Bourland told me dismissively. "We're not a state. We're a separate nation, and the only way you can be represented in it is to be a member of the tribe. And they can't do that. They're not Indians. These folks are trespassers. They are within reservation boundaries, and they will follow reservation law. They've now had one hundred years with no tribal authority over them out here. Well, that's over." More than Micki Hutchinson or than any of the other angry whites in their declining prairie hamlets, it was Bourland who understood that what was at stake was much more than small-town politics. The tax, the ostentatious convoy, and the lawsuit were part of a much larger political drama that was unfolding across the inland archipelago of reservations that make up modern Indian Country. They symbolized the reshaping of the American West, indeed of the United States itself. By the 1990s, almost unnoticed by the American public or media, a generation of legislation and court actions had profoundly remade Indian Country, canonizing ideas about tribal autonomy that would have shocked the lawmakers who a century before had seen the destruction of the reservations as the salvation of the American Indian. If Bourland was right, Micki Hutchinson and the white residents of Isabel were living in a sovereign tribal state. They were tolerated guests with an uncertain future. Until the 1870s, reser ICKI HUTCHINSON and her white neighbors vations were established were told they were living throughout the Dakota The means of the Indian's salvation was to be the family farm, which most people of the time had been taught to regard as the ultimate repository of American individualism and the democratic spirit. Each Indian allottee would receive 160 acres of land and eventual United States citizenship, along with money for seed, tools, and livestock. The "excess," or leftover, land would be offered for sale to white settlers, who would be free to form their own municipal governments. The promise of the allotment policy was twofold: that the nation would integrate Indians into white society and that non-Indian settlers would never be subject to tribal regimes. At the time, the Commissioner of Indian Affairs dismissed notions of separate Indian nationality as mere sentimentality: "It is perfectly clear to my mind that the treaties never contemplated the un-American and absurd idea of a separate nationality in our midst, with power as they may Territory and other parts in a tribal state, guests with choose to organize a government of of the West with the promise that they would an uncertain future. be reserved in perpetuity for the Indians' exclusive use. Those promises were broken almost everywhere when reservations were opened to homesteading at the end of the century, usually with only perfunctory consultation with the tribes or none at all. As I listened to Gregg Bourland, it was easy to sympathize with the tribe's striving for some kind of control over forces that were felt to have invaded their land and undermined their culture. Bourland justified the tax as a means both to raise revenue for the tribe and to control alcohol consumption on a reservation where more than 60 percent of the adults were unemployed and 53 percent were active alcoholics. But promises that had been made a century ago to the ancestors of settlers like Micki Hutchinson were now being broken too. From the 1880s until the 1930s, the cornerstone of federal Indian policy had been the popular program known as allotment, the systematic breaking up of most of the nation's reservations into private holdings. In its day allotment seemed the perfect panacea to resolve at a single stroke the perennial problems of white settlers' insatiable desire for new land and Indians' growing dependency on the federal government. Sen. Henry L. Dawes, the idealistic architect of the Allotment Act of 1881, which set the pattern for a generation of similar legislation, ring ingly proclaimed that as a result of allotment, the Indian "shall be one of us, contributing his share to all that goes to make up the strength and glory of citizenship in the United States." their own." To maintain such a view, the commissioner added, was to acknowledge a foreign sovereignty upon American soil, "a theory utterly repugnant to the spirit and genius of our laws, and wholly unwarranted by the Constitution of the United States." As I LEFT ISABEL, I WONDERED WHO really was the victim here and who the victimizer. Behind that nagging question lurked still more difficult ones that occupied me for many months, from one end of the United States to the other, in the course of researching what was to become Killing the White Man's Indian, an investigation into the political and cultural transformation of modern Indian Country. Are Native Americans so fundamentally dif ferent from other Americans that they occupy a special category to which conventional American values and laws should not apply? Or are they simply |