COOKSON HILLS CENTER

A National Disgrace’

American Indians are the poorest people in the United States.

The country’s 2.1 million Indians have the highest rates of poverty, unemployment and disease of any ethnic group in America. That might surprise Americans who have consumed countless cheery feature stories about the Indians making big bucks on casino gambling. Some tribes – like the Mashantucket Pequots of Connecticut, who own Foxwoods, the country’s largest casino – have indeed gotten very rich. But less than a quarter of America’s 557 Indian tribes own casinos and only 48 tribes earn more than $10 million a year on gambling. Far more typical than Foxwoods is Prairie Wind, the casino on the Pine Ridge reservation – a gambling hall made of three trailers, located far away from any urban market, earning barely $1 million a year for the Oglala Sioux.

It is impossible to generalize about 2 million people who belong to more than 500 different tribes, each with its own history, each living in different circumstances, as varied as the Navajo of the Southwestern desert and the Lummi of Puget Sound. But all Indian tribes do share one thing: a relationship with the United States government that is unique. They are "domestic dependent nations," as Chief Justice John Marshall termed them in a landmark Supreme Court decision in 1832 -- "distinct independent political communities retaining their original natural rights as the undisputed possessors of the soil." As such, they constitute the only minority group in America that has signed peace Treaties with the U. S. government. The only ethnic group with a government agency -- the Bureau of Indian Affairs -- specifically devoted to its well-being.

Of course, this special relationship has seldom worked out well for the Indians. Over the last 150 years, the government has tried a series of conflicting ways of dealing with the natives of this continent -- making war on them, making treaties with them, breaking treaties with them, sending them to Oklahoma, forcing them onto reservations, forcing them off reservations, permitting them to own land collectively, forcing them to divide the land into individual plots, dispatching their children to boarding schools hundreds of miles from home, closing the boarding schools and sending children home, outlawing the practice of their religion, legalizing practice of those religions, discriminating against them in employment with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, discriminating in favor of them in employment with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, permitting them to run gambling operations under certain circumstances, increasing funding for the BIA and, in fiscal 1996, cutting funding for the BIA by $160 million, or 9 percent.

Now Native Americans remain at the bottom in almost every measurable economic category. Indians earn only a little more than half as much money as the average American -- less money per capita than whites, blacks, Asian Americans and Hispanics. Nearly a third of Native Americans live in poverty, which is more than twice the rate for Americans in general. And Indians are far more liable to succumb to diseases associated with the poor -- four times as likely to die of alcoholism, three times as likely to die of tuberculosis, nearly twice as likely to die of diabetes.

"It's a national disgrace," says Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican the past Chairperson of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs. "Any observer would say that our treatment of Native Americans is a national disgrace."

Over the years, the government's policies have come and gone like fads, each billed as humanitarian reform, each accompanied by its own buzzwords -- "removal," "allotment," "termination," "relocation," "assimilation." Today the buzzword is "self-determination." Everyone -- tribal leaders, BIA officials, members of Congress -- talks about the need for an increased emphasis on decision making by Native Americans through enhanced "self-determination." For tribes this is translated as greater personal control of Indian country, less dependence on the BIA. Now in Indian Country and on Capital Hill, the debate is over exactly what "self-determination" is and what it could mean.

All the problems of urban ghettos are found in Indian Country, drug abuse, alcoholism, dropouts, suicide, teenage pregnancy. "Some of the kids have such low self-esteem that the only thing they think they can succeed at is having babies. There's a huge population explosion among the young kids.

In Indian Country, as elsewhere, teenage parenthood and a lack of jobs combine to create a cycle of welfare dependency. Indians don't want to be dependent, but when it's either that or starve, the choice is clear. "Most Indian people are very, very proud people. But they can't go back to the old way. It's gone. The buffalo are gone"