The New Trail of Tears. Naomi Schaefer Riley
years, for each step to be approved. Just to dig a hole, he says, requires a $6,500 up-front payment for an application for a permit to drill (APD).
Compare that, Stewart says, to the process just off the reservation, which requires about $125 and 15 minutes for the APD and then a mere five-step process for the permit to be approved. Stewart explains that although the tribe has had a coal mine since 1973, little progress has been made in getting resources out of the ground. The mine is the second largest in the nation, with 3 percent of the world’s coal reserves, but it extracts only 5 million tons a year. A few miles off the reservation at Powder River, the yearly extraction is close to 120 million tons a year.
It’s true that not every reservation is enthusiastic about the idea of natural resource development. The Northern Cheyenne are conducting a referendum on the issue, and though Ivan Small believes most tribe members would be in favor of it, he suggests that the tribal government is overly influenced by people concerned about the environmental impact. Winfield Russell, of the Northern Cheyenne tribal council, says he worries that development of the land “will undermine or destroy Native culture.” Russell says he’s not taking a position on the issue, but he sees a strong connection between the untouched land and the tribe’s spiritual values. Unlike many other tribes, he says, “we’re still strong here as far as our ceremonial culture and spirit on the reservation. We still have our covenant here.”
Northern Cheyenne lands are almost entirely held in tribal trust, which means that no economic development on the reservation can happen without a vote of tribe members (in addition to all those bureaucratic steps at the federal level). This is why, for instance, the tribal two-year school, Chief Dull Knife College, can’t expand its facility, even though enrollment has skyrocketed. “They will have to build up, not out,” says Russell. “The college borders on a cemetery, and there is other land we can’t go onto.” The absurdity of adding additional stories to a building – this isn’t New York City – on a reservation with hundreds of thousands of empty acres doesn’t seem to strike anyone.
The Northern Cheyenne could sure use the money and jobs a coal mine like the Crows’ would bring. The unemployment rate for the 8,000 tribe members who live on the reservation is more than 80 percent. And when I ask Russell how those members are employed, he offers the following list: “Tribal Health Services, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, reservation schools, the roads department, the tribal court, tribal prosecution, our recovery center, and our tribal college.”
That’s it. He mentions not a single private enterprise. Russell laments that the most talented people on the reservation tend to leave. “On the outside, they have more pay, better benefits – that is where a person will go. That’s what usually happens.”
When I ask him what could be done to improve economic opportunity on the reservation, he tells me “more assistance from the federal government, helping the tribal government and financially assisting them and getting grants to the tribes.” He also suggests the need for reforms at the Bureau of Indian Affairs. But nothing Russell suggests would do anything to encourage private enterprise. It would merely continue the same kind of dependent relationship the tribe has with the federal government right now.
To make matters worse, the federal government isn’t even legally bound to deliver subsidies to Indians. In Cherokee Nation v. Hitchcock (1902) and Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock (1903), the Supreme Court ruled that treaties signed with Indians could be modified or terminated without Indians’ consent. Indian leaders continue to cite the U.S. government’s treaty obligations when explaining the need for the government to provide funding for education or health care. But the Snyder Act of 1921 allows the federal government to treat all tribes the same, regardless of the treaties those tribes signed. And as the Cato report notes, the Snyder Act “made Indian social programs subject to the same congressional spending adjustments as other programs.”32 Sadly, it seems that these spending adjustments are always going in one direction – up – and there’s a general assumption that these programs will simply be permanent. But there’s no guarantee.
To know just how much the economy on the reservation depends on public funds, one need only learn the effects that the federal government shutdown in the fall of 2013 had on Indian reservations. Take the Crow tribe. Some 364 Crow members, more than a third of the tribe’s workforce, were furloughed. A bus service, the only way some Crows are able to travel across their 2.3-million-acre reservation, was shuttered. A home health care program for sick tribal members was suspended.33
The Yurok tribe in Northern California relies almost solely on federal financing to operate. Its reservation has an 80 percent unemployment rate. As a result of the shutdown, the tribe furloughed 60 of its 310 employees, closed its child care center, and halted emergency financial assistance to low-income and older members. Financing for a program that ensures clean drinking water on the reservation ran low.34
These tribes are so dependent on the federal government that without money from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, their economic activity comes to a complete halt and their members may not have access to clean drinking water.
Despite the vast amount of federal money that does usually flow to these communities, there’s little accountability. Though there were some reforms in the 1970s, many tribal governments are rife with corruption. And the lack of a private economy makes things worse. If all jobs are government jobs, then they become all the more important as prizes to be given to supporters or simply to extended family.
Still, in every community I visited, a few people like Ivan Small understood that no amount of federal funds was going to stop the poverty and dysfunction. What they longed for wasn’t more money. They didn’t care for more apologies or hand-wringing from white folks in Washington. What they wanted was what Senator Dawes once promised their people – emancipation.
The problem is the same in Canada, says Manny Jules, one of the leaders of the Kamloops band in the province of British Columbia: First Nations (as Canadian Aboriginals are called) don’t have real property rights. And property rights, he says, “are human rights.” Of course, the notion that Indians believe in property rights is contrary to everything that you hear about Aboriginal Peoples, he notes.
A small, gray-haired man with a warm smile, Jules went to art school when he was younger, hoping to become a sculptor. But he put that pursuit aside to assume a leadership role, first as a councilor of the Kamloops band, then as its chief and one of the cofounders of the Shuswap tribal council, of which the Kamloops band is a part.
The city of Kamloops (2011 population: 85,678) enjoys a gorgeous setting. In the same hotel I stay at are hikers, mountain bikers, and nature lovers. In the heart of Kamloops is the confluence of the North and South Thompson Rivers – the former flowing from the Thompson Glacier at the foot of the Caribou Mountains, the latter coming from Little Shuswap Lake (which, at 7 miles long and 5 miles wide, is not so little). In the summer, Canadian and international travelers eager to experience the region’s natural beauty come in busloads. The days are hot and dry, but in the evenings, when the temperature cools down, families gather at the well-kept public beaches and parks along the rivers.
There are a few expensive restaurants in Kamloops whose menus emphasize “local ingredients,” but mostly the city has the feel of a middle-class oasis where people have found the right balance of work and play. Railway lines meet here, so the region is a hub of economic activity. There are coal mines and copper mines. Natural resources are plentiful.
But if you want to see how the land question affects members of First Nations, drive at night to the top of one of the peaks overlooking the city. On one side of the river, there are lights everywhere – apartment buildings, homes, businesses, and hotels. On the other side – the land held by Jules’s band – there’s mostly darkness. It’s not quite as stark as the difference between North and South Korea in satellite images, but it comes remarkably close.
The first thing you notice when you drive to the other side of the river is the waterfront. Right on the edge of the rivers is a trailer park with hundreds of homes so close together they might as well be on top of one another. A little ways back from that are some lumberyards and car dealerships interspersed with small homes, many of which are badly in need of