American Indian Self-Government: Fact, Fantasy and Prospects for the Future by Ward Churchill
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DOCUMENT: SELFGOVT.TXT
AMERICAN INDIAN SELF-GOVERNANCE:
FACT, FANTASY AND PROSPECTS FOR THE FUTURE
--Ward Churchill, Creek-Cherokee
Copyright 1989 Center For World Indigenous Studies
[Ed. Note: This article may be reproduced for electronic transfer and
posting on computer bulletin boards in part or full, provided that no
profit is made by such transfer and that full credit is given to the
author, the Center For World Indigenous Studies and The Fourth World
Documentation Project.]
The question of self-governance among American Indian nations
encapsulated within what is now the United States of America is
one of the more confused issues in modern politics. While there
is a general understanding that the indigenous nations of North
America once existed as fully self-governing entities, those
concerned with the matter have proven spectacularly unable to
arrive at even a common definition of what constitutes (or might
constitute) contemporary Indian self-governance, whether it
presently exists or, if it does not, how it might be achieved.
The present paper is an effort to examine both the proper meanings
(facts) of self-governance and misunderstandings (fantasies),
apply these observations to the situation in which Indian nations
presently find themselves vis a vis the U.S., and advance a
prospectus for Indian self-governance over the coming decades.
Insofar as the space allowed for pursuit of these themes is quite
limited, only the briefest overview will be possible.
FACT
The various American Indian peoples resident to the territory
now known as the United States are nations within even the
strictest legal definition. Further, they have been formally, and
in many cases repeatedly, recognized as such by the U.S.
government. Article I of the U.S. Constitution affirms quite
clearly that subordinate sovereignties such as states, counties,
municipalities and individuals or groups of individuals are
prohibited from entering into treaty agreements. Only the federal
government itself is allowed to engage in treaty-making, and then
only with other fully sovereign national entities (never with
states, counties, etc.). In advancing these principles within its
own domestic law, the U.S. was or is reflecting the terms,
understandings and requirements of international law, custom and
convention. Each of the 371 duly ratified treaties between the
federal government and an American Indian people thus represents
the de facto formal recognition by the U.S. of the fully sovereign
national status of that Indian people, in accordance with both the
laws of the United States and the laws of nations. From this, we
may readily discern that American Indian nations possess every
legal and moral right to conduct themselves as such, unless they
themselves have knowingly, willingly and formally given up such
rights.
Today, representatives of the federal government contend that
while all of this may be true in principle, and have actually been
true in practice in certain historical instances, the contemporary
circumstance is rather different. They point to a series of
federal court decisions and statutes holding that, rather than
comprising nations in the fullest sense of the term, American
Indian peoples constitute "domestic dependent nations" over which
the federal government exercises superior sovereign prerogatives
as well as a "trust responsibility" involving jurisdictional and
administrative control. Further, they argue, while American
Indians within the United States are acknowledged to still belong
to their various indigenous polities, they are also citizens of
the U.S. under provision of the 1887 General Allotment Act and the
1924 Indian Citizenship Act and are thus doubly subordinate to the
federal system. The bottom line, from the federal perspective is
therefore that American Indian nations enjoy a "limited
sovereignty." This is to say that they retain all of their
original national rights which have not been specifically usurped
by the government of the United States; the fact that there are
presently more than 5,000 federal statutes designed to effect
precisely this usurpation speaks amply to the latitude of national
self-governance with which Indians have been left by the 1980s.
Advocates of such a view purposefully neglect to mention that
each of the elements of "law" were unilaterally extended (imposed)
by the United States in direct contradiction to the treaty
understandings already (and still) in effect with Indian nations.
There is no record of American Indian nations having willingly
accepted the notion that they were either domestic to or
particularly dependent upon the U.S. To the contrary, these same
nations are documented as having spent the bulk of the 19th
century engaged in armed resistance and suffering truly horrendous
suffering in a concerted effort to avoid being accorded precisely
this status. Similarly, there has never been anyone, even a
federal bureaucrat, recorded as being brazen enough to suggest
that Indians were somehow mutual participants in bringing about
passage of the General Allotment and Citizen Acts, that requested
the extension of federal criminal and civil jurisdiction over
their homelands, or andy of the rest of the measures upon which
the idea of U.S. sovereign superiority rests. And yet, absent the
willing consent of the Indian nations to the diminishment of their
sovereign status, such measures on the part of the federal
government can only be viewed as abridgments (violations) of the
treaties into which it had entered with the Indians. The
implications of this are readily apparent in Article VI of the
U.S. Constitution, in which it is stated unequivocally that
treaties represent the "Supreme Law of the Land," on par with the
law embodied with the Constitution itself: the terms and
provisions of a ratified and unabrogated treaty cannot therefore
be legally contradicted or impugned by the passage of any
subordinate legislation.
Proponents of the government view also omit to (quite
willfully, it appears, insofar as such matters have been
repeatedly pointed out to them), that this unilateral reduction
of American Indian nations to federally subordinate or "quasi-
sovereign" status -- similar to that occupied by the states of
the union or, increasingly, to that of counties or municipalities,
subject to even state jurisdiction and control -- was and is quite
illegal in terms of the constitutional requirements pertaining to
the entities with which the U.S. government is authorized and
empowered to treat. This is no mere academic point. For the
federal government to hold that Indian peoples constitute less
than fully sovereign national entities is to simultaneously argue
that the entire treaty-making process undertaken by the government
with those peoples is and always was illegal. This, of course,
would serve to void the treaties en toto. In turn, insofar as the
treaties include the land cession clauses by which the U.S.
acquired what it contends is "legal title" to upwards of 70% of
its present domestic territoriality, the basis by which the United
States has always claimed a right to its own land-base would be
obliterated. The only fall-back position would then be resort to
the doctrine of the "right of conquest," no small problem for a
nation-state which has consistently disavowed this same doctrine
in the name of purported "moral superiority" (and which assumed a
leadership role in executing the nazi leadership for having
engaged in "aggressive war" while pursuing exactly the same
"right").
Federally oriented legal theorists and policy-makers are thus
forced to advance and insist upon the validity of a sheer logical
impossibility: that Indian nations are simultaneously fully
sovereign (in the abstract sense) for purposes treaty-
making/transferring land title to the U.S., and less than
sovereign (in the practical sense) for purposes of allowing
"legitimate" federal control ("exercise of trust") over Indian
land, water and other resources, regulation of trade and
diplomatic relations, form of governance, recognition of
citizenry, jurisprudence, and virtually anything else striking the
federal fancy. Such a convoluted and absurd "doctrine" must also
be maintained in order for the U.S. to be able to assert in the
international arena that it has always comported itself on the
basis of humane, treaty-anchored (i.e.: nation-to-nation)
understandings with "its" indigenous population(s) while at the
same time insisting that "Indian Affairs" are a purely "internal"
concern of the U.S., and are thereby not subject to international
consideration, scrutiny or intervention (as would be the case in
any true nation-to-nation relationship, under international law).
In a number of important ways, it is not difficult to
discover recent parallels to the U.S. attitude toward American
Indian nations. The French, for example, offered similar
arguments to explain and justify their relationship to Indochina
and Algeria during the 1950s. The Belgians advanced similar
rationales in an attempt to justify their hold upon the Congo
during the same decade. Portugal resorted to the same arguments
concerning Angola during the 1960s and '70s. And, of course, the
list could go on at great length. The point, however, is that the
common denominator of every example which could be mustered is
that the relationship is one of colonialism. American Indian
nations within the United States are held, then, as colonies --
internal colonies -- of the United States. Viewed in this light,
all of the apparent inconsistencies and contradictions of U.S.
"Indian policy" disappear; the policy is quite simply illegal
under international law, from top to bottom, side to side, and at
every step along the way; federal "Indian law" is not and was
never so much a matter of law as it is U.S. colonial domination
over every indigenous nation it encountered.
Many points can be made from this understanding, but what is
of primary importance for this paper is that, as is the case in
any colonial setting, the notion of "self-governance" among the
colonized -- while its illusion is often deliberately fostered as
a tactical expedient by the colonizer -- is a cruel hoax. Often,
in advanced colonial settings (such as that evidenced within U.S.)
the colonized are convinced to administer and impose upon
themselves the policies and regulations set forth by their
colonizers. This self-administration is what is so often
cynically touted by the colonizers and their puppets among the
colonized as being self-governance. In sum, it is both fair and
accurate to state that America Indian self-governance does not
exist within the United States at the present time, and that it in
fact cannot exist until such time as the fundamental structural
relationship between the U.S. and Indian nations is radically
altered. American Indian nations, if they are ever to exercise
self-governance, must confront the necessity of a decolonization
struggle in the truest sense of the term.
FANTASY
The origin of what is typically passed off as being the
"model of modern American Indian self-governance" can probably be
dated from 1921, when Standard Oil sent a group of geologists to
the northern portion of the Navajo Reservation to investigate the
possibility that there were petroleum deposits in the area. The
explorers' reports being highly favorable, Standard next
dispatched a group of representatives to negotiate -- in
cooperation with the Bureau of Indian Affairs -- a leasing
arrangement by which the corporation could begin drilling and
extraction operations. By provision of the 1868 treaty between
the Navajo and the U.S., it was necessary that Standard secure
both agreement from the Navajo government and approval of the
Secretary of Interior in order for any such contract to be legal
and binding. As it turned out, secretarial approval posed no
problem, but the traditional Navajo Council of Elders voted
unanimously to reject the idea of allowing the corporation to
exploit their land and resources.
Such and outcome was obviously unacceptable to Standard, and
to the U.S. Department of Interior (under which virtually all
"internal" development of lands and resources was lodged at the
time). Consequently, in 1923, the federal government unilaterally
appointed what it called "The Navajo Grand Council," a small group
of hand-picked and "educated" (i.e.: indoctrinated in the values
and mores of Euroamerica) Indians, from which representatives of
the traditional Navajo government (with which the U.S. had entered
into a solemn treaty) were entirely excluded. Washington then
announced that this new council, devoid as it was of any sort of
Navajo support, would henceforth be recognized as the sole
"legitimate" governmental representative body of the Navajo
Nation; the traditional Navajo form of governance was, at the
stroke of the federal pen and with no popular Din_ (Navajo)
agreement whatsoever, was totally disenfranchised and supplanted.
And, of course, one of the very first acts of the Washington-
appointed replacement entity was to sign the federally/corporately
desired leasing instruments, setting in motion and "legitimizing"
a sustained process of mineral expropriation on Navajo which has
profited a range of non-Dine businesses and individuals quite
mightily while leaving the Navajo people in truly abject poverty,
their traditional subsistence economy ruined, and their land-base
destroyed to the extent that it has been seriously considered for
official designation as a U.S. "National Sacrifice Area."
Throughout the entire period since 1923, the forms of
democratic governance at Navajo -- the inculcation of voting
rather than consensus as a means of governmental selection,
subdivision of the reservation into electoral districts, expansion
of the council to include representatives from each district, the
hypothetical division of governmental structure into executive,
legislative and judicial spheres, and so on -- have been carefully
installed and polished at Navajo. And the rhetoric of self-
governance -- supposedly evidenced in the fact that leaders of the
tribal council always affix their signatures to business
agreements made "in behalf of" their people, that a Navajo
lobbying office is maintained in Washington, and the like -- has
been consistently advanced by Navajo and federal politicos alike.
It is even possible that at least some of the actors on both sides
of the equation actually believe what they are saying.
But reality is dramatically different from rhetoric. During
the entire half-century in which the Navajo council has been
functioning in its mature form, it has never been allowed to
negotiate a single business agreement on its own initiative. It
has continued to be totally restricted from entering into any
agreement with any "foreign government" other than the that of the
United States, whether for purposes of trade or for any other
reason. Consequently, it has never been able to negotiate mineral
extraction royalty rates on anything resembling favorable terms,
to establish or enforce even minimal standards of cleanup and land
reclamation upon transient extractive corporations doing business
upon its land, or even to determine the number of livestock which
can be grazed within its borders. For that matter, the Navajo
council has never -- as the ongoing "Navajo-Hopi Land Disputes" in
the 1882 Executive Order and so-called Bennett Freeze areas of the
reservation readily attest -- been able to exert any particular
influence in the determination of exactly what the borders of the
Navajo Nation actually are. Even the citizenry of the Navajo
Nation has been defined by the federal government, through
imposition of a formal eugenics code termed "blood quantum" and
nearly a century of direct control over tribal rolls; these
federal "methods" of manipulating and arithmetically constricting
the indigenous population have become so embedded in the Indian
consciousness and psyche that Washington can rely upon the "self-
governance" mechanisms of Native America to abandon their own
traditions and concern with sovereignty, adhering to federal
definitions of Indian identity, thus imposing the burden of stark
racism upon themselves.
Council members like to point out that they have a court
system, police force and jails operating on the reservation, and
submit that this is evidence of self-governance, but the fact of
the matter is that Navajo possesses no jurisdictional authority at
all over non-Navajos committing crimes within the Navajo Nation.
For that matter, they have equally little jurisdiction over their
own citizenry when it comes to felony and serious misdemeanor
crimes, as well as in a number of important civil areas. In order
to resolve issues between themselves and any of their corporate
lessees, they have no recourse but to pursue matters in U.S.
courts rather than their own. In order to resolve issues with the
federal government, they must secure permission from that same
government to litigate in that government's own courts. In order
even to impose a severance tax upon their own mineral resources as
these are extracted by trans-national corporations -- the
uncontested right of every state of the union -- they must secure
permission from the federal government to seek (and in limited way
secure) a federal court opinion allowing them to do so. Things
are at this point so confused that one can hear Navajo Tribal
Chairman Peter McDonald, in all apparent seriousness and in the
context of the same speech, spout the rhetoric of being head of a
"sovereign, self-governing nation," and propose that the Navajo
Nation be elevated to the status of a state within the United
States.
This is national self-governance? The fact is that,
fantasies to the contrary, the Navajo council and its chair have
exactly zero control over any aspect of Navajo affairs. Every
shred of their policy is and always has been utterly contingent
upon the approval of the U.S. Interior Secretary, the federal
courts, and often enough corporate leaders and the governments of
the three states within which the Navajo Reservation technically
lies. Beyond this it is true that -- with a minuscule number of
exceptions -- the same situation presently prevails in every
reservation area of the country. The reason for this is that the
Navajo Grand Council model had, by the early 1930s, proven itself
so successful in simultaneously serving U.S. interests while
offering illusions to the contrary that it was imposed across
the face of Indian Country through 1934 Indian Reorganization Act
(I.R.A.). Imposed is the correct word because, although each
American Indian nation which was "reorganized" under the
statute -- having its traditional governmental structure usurped
and replaced by a council directly patterned after a corporate
board -- supposedly voted affirmatively in a referendum to undergo
the process, the reality is (as always, in these things) rather
different. At the Pine Ridge Reservation (Oglala Lakota Nation),
for example, a number of dead people somehow managed to crawl out
of their graves to vote for reorganization; even after this was
documented as being the case, the referendum results were allowed
to stand and reorganization to proceed. At Hopi, to another
example, more than 85% of all eligible voters (federally defined)
opposed and actively boycotted the referendum; their abstentions
were counted as "aye" votes by the Bureau of Indian Affairs and
reorganization proceeded. The list of such examples can be
extended, in one or another degree of virulence, to every Indian
nation which was reorganized in accordance with the federal
prescription.
All fantasies of self-governing characteristics aside, the
absolute predicate of any I.R.A. government is its acceptance --
indeed, reinforcement -- of the emphatically sub-national status
accorded American Indian nations by the U.S., to legitimize their
peoples' subordination through their public endorsement of it, to
toe the line of limitations decreed by the federal government and
ultimately barter the genuine interests of their people in
exchange for the petty position and essentially minor material
compensation which serving as puppets of a foreign power affords
them. This is advanced colonial administration in its very purest
form, whether one wishes to draw one's parallel to the leadership
of Vichy France or the Thieu regime in what was once called the
Republic of South Vietnam.
Self-evidently, such governments will not, and in fact
structurally cannot, pursue actual self-determination, self-
governance and sovereignty. They will never and can never attempt
to consolidate real control over their remaining land-bases,
physically recover lands illegally taken from their people, throw
the federal bureaucrats and supporting police off their
reservations, try to physically bar the corporate rape of their
territories, or enter into diplomatic and trade relations with
other nations. They will not and they cannot, because in the
final analysis they owe their fealty and their allegiance not to
their won people (or even themselves) but to their colonizers. It
is the colonizer, after all, not their people, who provides the
positions they occupy, whatever claim to legitimacy it really
carries, the means for its continuation. The relationship is one
of symbiosis and mutual perpetuation in an unbalanced sort of way.
From here it is but a short step to viewing I.R.A.
governments, not as champions of American Indian self-governance,
but as literal barriers to it. This is true in the mere fact of
the existence of such entities, and the confusion this inherently
engenders concerning "who are the real representatives of Indian
people." But, more, it has become true in the sense that these
self-proclaimed and federally validated "responsible (To Whom? To
what?) representatives" of Native America have increasingly taken
to lending their energies and their voices to discrediting any
Indian or group of Indians audacious enough to address the
questions attending true resumption of national prerogatives by
American Indian peoples. We see this classically in example of
former Rosebud Sioux Tribal Chairman Webster Two Hawk, wandering
around on the federal dole like a clown, wearing a crew cut and
"war bonnet," parroting the views of the Nixon administration vis
a vis the American Indian Movement's finally (in 1972) calling the
Bureau of Indian Affairs to account for its colonial arrogance and
at least a few of its more blatant transgressions at the expense
of Indian people. More grimly, we see former Pine Ridge Tribal
Chairman Dick Wilson forming a cabal of gun-thugs known as the
GOONs to act as surrogates for the FBI, engaging in outright mass
murder to prevent an insurgent grassroots movement of traditional
Oglalas pursuing their rights under the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty
from "spoiling" a planned secret expropriation of uranium deposits
in the northwest quadrant of the reservation. And again, more
immediately, we observe the same phenomenon -- somewhat less
sharply defined -- in Navajo Tribal Chairman McDonald's sending of
his gun-thugs (this time called "tribal police") to evict the
staff of the Navajo Times newspaper from their offices for the
offense of having publicly criticized and exposed certain of his
federal/corporate relationships. And, as should be a sad refrain
by now, this list of such examples could be extended at length.
PROSPECTS FOR THE FUTURE
Native America is at a crossroads. If the present hegemony
of I.R.A.-style governance is maintained and allowed to continue
its give-away program in terms of American Indian national rights,
the future looks bleak indeed. Remaining on the course sketched
above can result only in the permanent reduction of American
Indian sovereignty and self-governance to, at best, the level of
very minor components within the overall U.S. governmental/
political apparatus. In the case of many (or even most) of the
smaller Indian nations, eventual termination -- "auto-termination"
may be a better term -- and absorption directly into the "melting
pot" seems the most likely outcome. In other words, the final
liquidation of Native America is a distinct possibility over the
next half-century or less.
Fortunately, alternatives have emerged since 1970. These
have related a considerable degree to the momentum created by the
actions and activities of the American Indian Movement and related
"militant" organizations, particularly during the period 1972-78.
In retrospect, there can be no serious question that the 1972
Trail of Broken Treaties occupation of the Bureau of Indian
Affairs Building in Washington, for example, did more to bring
Indians into the BIA than all the petitions and letters of "more
responsible" and "legitimate" tribal officials over the preceding
50 years. And the so-called Twenty Points advanced by Trail
participants as a cohesive American Indian socio-political agenda
still represent a benchmark expression of indigenous sovereignty.
Ironically, those indians hired as a result -- during the major
BIA "integration" period lasting from 1976-77 -- seemed to take it
as a matter of faith that they should comport themselves in a
manner which can only be described as anti-AIM.
Similarly, AIM's actions at Gordeon, Nebraska in 1972, and
Custer, South Dakota in 1973, yielded an incalculable impact upon
the concept of indian rights and the value of Indian life among
reservation-adjacent non-Indians throughout the United States. In
a tangible way, these AIM undertakings brought to a screeching
halt a nation-wide rash of ritual or thrill killings of Indian
people which had been mounting for some time. By any estimation,
this was vastly more than had been accomplished by more than a
decade of "polite" discussions about the "problem" by the
federally-approved Indian leadership with state, local and
national U.S. law enforcement officials. Yet, predictably,
"official" Native America did little in response but criticize and
condemn AIM's "violent tactics" (One is forced to ask here exactly
how diminishing a wave of homicides through utilization of methods
involving no loss of life could ever have been reasonably
construed as "violence").
Again, AIM's stand on the Pine Ridge Reservation from 1973-
76, refusing to swerve from its support of Oglala national rights
under terms of the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty -- in the face of a
hideously lethal federal repression -- can only be viewed as a
tremendously important point of departure for the general rebirth
of American Indian pride in the U.S., and an increasing Indian
willingness to stand and attempt to (re)assert their broader
rights to genuine self-determination. As always, "duly elected"
tribal officials tended overwhelmingly to attack AIM while
defending the federal "right" to maintain "order" on the
reservation, regardless of the cost and consequences of such order
to Indians. It is now a sublime paradox that many tribal council
members have themselves begun to mimic AIM viewpoints and AIM
pronouncements of a decade hence, never having abandoned their
clever description of those who showed them the way as being
"Assholes In Moccasins."
What the AIM "radicals" were, and in many cases still are,
demonstrating is that in order for Indians to make gains, to self-
determine and self-govern, it is absolutely essential to proceed
by something other than the self-serving "rules of the game" laid
down by the U.S. government. Put another way, those who would
claim sovereignty must endeavor to exercise it, to rely upon their
own sense of legality and morality, and to act accordingly. By
the 1980s, this dynamic had become clearly consolidated in the
occupation of Yellow Thunder Camp near Rapid City, in the Black
Hills, part of an overt program of reclaiming Lakota territory
guaranteed under the Fort Laramie Treaty, but illegally taken
during the 1870s by the U.S. The same may be said of the ongoing
resistance to federally imposed relocation of traditional Din_
from their land in the Big Mountain area of the Navajo and Hopi
reservations in northeastern Arizona, and there are many other
examples, ranging from the continuing fishing rights struggles in
the Pacific Northwest to the stands taken by the Six Nations
Iroquois Confederacy along the U.S.-Canadian border in the
Northeast, to similar positions adopted by the O'Otam (Papago)
along the U.S.-Mexican border in the Southwest, to the refusal of
nearly half of all the Seminole people of Florida to accept
federal recognition as a *validation* of their personal and
national existence. Again, one might view the emergence of an
American Indian presence in the international arena, through the
United Nations Working Group on Indigenous Populations (a sub-part
of the U.N. Commission on Human Rights) to have come from the same
impetus and to be following the same general trajectory.
Perhaps the purest articulation of the AIM alternative to
I.R.A. colonialism bay be found in the platform assembled under
the title TREATY for use by Russell Means in his candidacy for the
Pine Ridge tribal presidency in 1984. Here for the first time (at
least in terms of the 20th Century) was offered a truly
comprehensive program by which a given American Indian nation
could undertake to recover control over its own affairs,
abolishing the I.R.A. system and restoring political power to the
traditional Councils of Elders, opening up diplomatic and trade
relations with other nations than the U.S., begin a systematic
effort at restoring its own land-base and revitalizing a
traditionally oriented economy thereon, asserting jurisdictional
prerogatives and control over the definition of its own
membership/citizenry, and converting the educational system to its
own rather than its opponents uses. All of this was conceived by
way of using the I.R.A. structure against itself in a sort of
exercise in political ju jitsu.
So effective and threatening was the TREATY concept seen by
federal authorities and those Indians on Pine Ridge who owe their
allegiance to that government rather than to their own ostensible
constituents, that they conspired to disqualify Means from the
reservation ballot, not on the basis of any alleged offense
against the Lakota people or Lakota law, but because he had been
convicted of expressing contempt toward an alien South Dakota
court some years previously. Despite the fact that it was never
actualized on Pine Ridge, the point should be made insofar as the
I.R.A. establishment was prepared to go to such lengths to
suppress the TREATY, it obviously bears extensive study,
adaptation and implementation by other Indians, in other places.
And, indeed, this appears to be occurring, either in literal
or more diffused fashion. The Haida Draft Constitution, generated
by a people whose territory is split between the U.S. and Canada
in the Alaska region, embodies many of the same elements embodied
in the TREATY Platform. Many of the gains posted by Pacific
Northwest nations such as Quinault and Lummi in recent years also
proceed in accordance with many of the same liberatory principles
expressed in TREATY. And, to a certain extent at least, many of
the ideas concerning Lakota land recovery and self-governance
contained in the present S 705 "Bradley Bill" are drawn from the
TREATY framework. These are all encouraging signs, and there are
a number of others which might be cited.
It is time, if American Indian self-governance in any real
sense -- as nations rather than as integral components of
Euroamerican empire -- is to once again become a functioning
reality, to begin to consciously destroy the I.R.A. system, to
discard "leaders" who profess fealty to it, to renounce the
"federal trust relationship" and reject all interaction with the
BIA, and to begin to assert actual Indian alternatives. It will
not be a quick or pleasant process. There will no doubt be severe
costs and consequences associated with such a line of action and
development. But the fact is that the costs and consequences
attending subordination to the federal will are, and have always
been, far higher. The choice is really between extinction and
resurgence. And viewed in this way, there is simply no real
choice at all.
*******
Taken from _Indian Self-Governance: Perspectives on the Political
Status of Indian Nations in the United States of America_, Ed. by
Dr. Carol J. Minugh, Prof. Glen T. Morris, Rudolph C. Ryser,
Center For World Indigenous Studies, 1989.
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