“Maybe if we were still getting water from an open well and going outside to two-hole outhouses and using human manure to fertilize our gardens, nobody would be paying any attention to us. Now, we are coming back to be leaders again. Now, there seems to be a problem.”

He is afraid of the Freedmen vote, just the same as Ross Swimmer was, because he has been so virulently racist against them, and so he wanted them excluded. His supporters on the council attempted to get a special election several times and we

The BIA assumed that their system of determining blood quantum was objective and rational. If it was unintelligible to Native people trying to pass the test they had set up, that wasn’t their concern. Lowery quotes from BIA officials’ reports, and notes how they ridiculed those who failed to grasp the definitions of blood quantum: A participant “had attended school only three months and presumably has small knowledge of what fractions mean.” Another “could not write his own name and the inconsistency [of his calculation] did not appear to impress him.”

lthough many Pamunkeys worked hard to assert their distinctness from African Americans because of efforts of those such as Plecker, unions between Blacks and Native people did exist. Additionally, unions between whites and Native people were also common, despite anti-miscegenation laws which made such unions illegal. 

dal, and the India n Bureau in Was~hingt on can't place all the blame on Congress. P eople a r e dying and t h e new generation of Navahos are being condemned to their p r imitive patterns of the p ast because t heir official guardian in Washington has never adequately fough t for their righ ts. The Indian Bureau has never requested enough money to make a vailable one school t eacher for every JO Navahos as was guarant eed by the t r eaty of 1868. The average Indian receives $ 124 a year in services from t h e Bure au; the Navaho $64. The Navahos, one- sixth of the Indian pop ulation. get only one-twelfth of the appropriation-an outrageous maldistribution of funds. . The Indian Bureau has not brought suit against Arizona and New Mexico to try to win for their

Nor iii It the fault of the Navabos that they of them have never had a chance to le.am ·to are poor. Living in a semid-rt area without read and write, or to speak Enall.sb-Since 1938, irrigation for farming, their principal occu-not a aing)e new clauroom bu been added to pation Ls sheep raising. Over the years, u their their school syatem-althou,h the po11ulatlon populatiol) increued and the henl.s of sheep bu increased by ten thouaand in that time. greatly increued, the land began to erode. Instead, they have 1~ many schools, cloied The top soil was washed off and wu swept and abandoned by the GoverninenL Most were down into the Colorado River,

treaty, the necessity of education is admitted, especially schOoI. . of such of them as may be settled on said agricultural parts of this reservation, and they therefore pledge themselves to compel their children, male and female, between the ages of six and sixteen years, to attend school; and it is hereby made toe duty of the agent for said Indians to see that this stipulation is strictly complied with; and the United States agrees that, for every thirty children between said ages who can be induced or compelled to attend school a house shall be . ' provided, and a teacher competent to teach the elementary branches of an English education shall be furnished, who will reside among said Indians, and faithfully discharge his or her duties as a teacher.

he tribe herein named, by their representatives, Reservation to be · J · k h . h . d 'b d permanent home ofparties tot ns treaty, agree to ma et e reservation erem escr1 e Indians. their permanent home, and they will not as a tribe make any perma­nent settlement elsewhere, reserving the right to hunt on the lands adjoining the said reservation formerly called theirs, subject to the modifications named in this treatv and the orders of the commander of the department in which saicl reservation may be for the time being· and it is further a1reed and understood bv the parties to this Penal~y for leaving' . • . . _, . reservation. treaty, that 1f any NavaJo nd1an or Indians shall leave the reservation herein described to settle elsewhere, he or they shall forfeit all the rights, privileges, and annuities conferred by the terms of this treaty;

The plaintiffs stressed that busing was a central issue, and framed it as a civil rights violation. By failing to provide schools in the southern portion of the district, they argued that the San Juan School District illegally discriminated against Navajo students on the basis of their race, because they had to ride busses far greater distances than those students in the northern part of the District. Negative repercussions of long-distance busing included higher dropout rates, barriers to excellence in school, and an intensified “Anglo/minority binary.” In addition to the discrimination they faced at school, busing to public schools also attacked Navajo sovereignty, because it jeopardized the connections between children and their home communities. The fact that Navajo students would stay the week with non-Native families was a major concern.

To start, Native activists and their AAIA advocates set out to find out how widespread the pattern was. They compiled statistics from state agencies and the BIA and came up with a shocking data set which showed that in states with large Native populations, an average of 25-35 percent of Native children had been removed from their tribal communities and families. In every state they found that Native children were vastly overrepresented in the child welfare system.

Lyslo and Doss and others promoted “color-blindness” by encouraging non-Native, white parents to adopt Native children. In the process though, Native parents were represented as shadowy figures who had neglected their children. By utilizing the singular “forgotten child” to stand in for all Native children, Lyslo effectively denigrated all Native families as unloving and uncaring and all Native children as in potential need of new parents.

ThereservationsmadeinthesouthernportionoftheStateareundoubtedlycomposedofthemostbarrenandsterilelandstobefoundinCalifornia,andanychangemust,ofnecessity,beofadvantagetotheIndians.Thosepersonswhocomplainofthereservationsinthesouthhave,innoinstance,beenabletopointoutotherlocationslessobjectionableorvaluablethanthosealreadyselected,andIamdisposedtobelievethat,innocaseofreservationsunderthesetreaties,willthelandsreservedcomparefavorablywiththeagriculturalandvaluableportionsoftheState

Given that treaties were written by the Americans and ratified by Congress, one might think that Indigenous nations would have an easy time at convincing the federal government, not to mention the American people, of its obligations. Unfortunately, because of America’s borderline personality disorder, the treaty relations that Indigenous nations had striven to maintain had been anything but reliable.

Yet, as Deloria argued, this trend toward regarding Indians as “wards” or “incompetents” was in contradistinction to the equally important notion that tribes were, not only worthy allies, but necessary ones, capable of fulfilling their obligations as cosigners of the treaties into which they entered with the United State

Certainly, the reversal of the Indian Bureau’s historic efforts at suppressing Indigenous cultures enacted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s commissioner of Indian affairs John Collier and the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act, which acknowledged the Indians’ capacity for self-rule, not to mention direct support for the maintenance of traditional culture articulated in the 1935 Indian Arts and Crafts Act, were unequivocal evidence that the U.S. federal government recognized that Indians possessed cultures and societies that had as much of a right to exist as their own. All of which would be reinforced by the 1975 Indian Self- Determination and Education Assistance Act and the 1978 American Indian Religious Freedom Act.

Why in the heck as Indian people we’re defending a country that tried towipe us off the face of the earth. I still don’t get it.” Her father’s own militaryservice “wasn’t necessarily the best experience in the world for him as a tribalman, getting called ‘Chief’ and all of that, [but] he’ll still defend the flag andthe country.

Karen was not comfortable as an “Indian kid” herself. “Being the productof a white mother and an Indian father, there was that time I didn’t feel wor-thy or able to practice our customs, our traditions, our spiritual practices. I felt people were going to be saying, ‘She didn’t grow up like that, so whodoes she think she is, trying to be an Indian?

(Tribes have been restricted in their taxing authorities by some of the same laws which exclude federal or state authority. However, there are areas where taxing authorities might be used beneficially in the generation of revenues for financing government functions, services, and community insti- tutions.) (The Congress should remove any obstacles to the rights of Indian people to travel freely between Indian Nations without being blocked in movement, commerce, or trade, by barriers of borders, customs, duties, or tax.)

The Congress should enact measures fully in support of the doctrine that an Indian Nation has complete power to govern and control its own membership - but eradicating the extortive and coercive devices in federal policy and programming which have subverted and denied the natural human relationships and natural development of Indian communities, and committed countless injuries upon Indian families and individuals.

Our concern is, to refer our Indian people back to their original status of “tribal self-government” in the absence of dominance from another, in the SPIRIT and manner the ETERNAL CREATOR provided for all mankind…To declare an individual a citizen of a particular government against his wishes is one thing, but whether the individual will or will not accept such citizenship is entirely another matter. Therefore, such declaration will produce no effect, no more than if this government would presume to make a RUSSIAN a citizen of this government.”

“News reports created the heroes of confrontation for an imaginative white audience, while those dedicated to negotiations were ignored. Reporters have their own professional needs to discover and present adventurous characters and events. Banks, and other radical leaders, have become the warriors of headlines, but not the heart of the best stories that turn the remembered tribal world.”

The actual experience of assimilation was not just about changing a hairstyle or other cultural habits. As we can see from the passage from Zitkala-Sa’s memoir, it was often a traumatic experience that represented the forceful coercion/domination of Native children, who had been separated from their families and taught that everything they believed in had to be changed. 

Even Elk, who professed to have severed his relationship with his tribe, was not allowed to engage in the practices of American citizenship, because Congress had not deemed his particular tribe eligible or competent for citizenship. Furthermore, the Court understood Indians to be in a state of dependence on the federal government (“wards”). These conditions could only be adjusted by “the nation whose wards they are and whose citizens they seek to become, and not by each Indian for himself.” Thus, even though Elk had separated himself from his tribe individually, it was not his decision to make as to whether or not he could become a citizen. [6]

You have shot your last arrow. That means that you are no longer to live the life of an Indian. You are from this day forward to live the life of the white man. But you may keep that arrow, it will be to you a symbol of your noble race and of the pride you feel that you come from the first of all Americans.

. He wanted to ensure that those registrants who spoke only Cherokee knew exactly what they were signing" when they en- rolled.17 "Many Cherokee, however, di

he commodified Indian embodying Indian-made art offers neither w challenge nor impediment to the work of identification by roll, cer- N tificate, blood, or recognition. The Indian in the Indian-made co- u constitutes the exclusions, authenticities, and entitlements of particu- 66 s lar kinds of indigenous nations and citizens while simultaneously constituting indigenous people to live within those same relations and ? conditions of dispossession and empowerment. Some of the conse- z quences of these processes are found in the continued disenfranchise- _ ment of those who have been unable to maintain, never qualified for, or refused to adopt enrollment or recognition status as initially provided for under U.S. federal and state policy

The second was that only one tribal government could be constituted on a reservation, and that government had to conform to the electoral model provided by the BIA. This meant that things could get complicated for multiple tribes who had been relocated onto a single reservation (for example, the Cheyenne-Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma). The restriction meant that in order to determine leadership for their reservation, they had to alter customary systems of governance. Customary systems could include decision making by consensus, sometimes a lengthy and complicated process. [13]

The key was to catch them on film harassing and arresting Native people who were peacefully fishing.

More non-Native celebrities also lent their support to the cause, including Dick Gregory, a black comedian and candidate for mayor of Chicago. He came to fish the Nisqually River in February of 1966, at the invitation of the Survival of American Indians Association (SAIA), an organization which had been formed to spearhead fish-ins. Gregory lent valuable publicity to the fishers and organizers, but caused some controversy after issuing a statement which equated treaty rights with civil rights. He issued a statement where he compared Natives’ “plight” to the trademarks of southern blacks’ position of earlier years, stating “It’s about time the civil rights front shifted to this part of the country.”

Oklahoma’s answer only gets more surprising. The reason that the Creek’s lands are not a reservation, we’re told, is that the Creek Nation originally held fee title. Recall that the Indian Removal Act authorized the President not only to “solemnly . . . assure the tribe . . . that the United States [p. 30]will forever secure and guaranty to them . . . the country so exchanged with them,” but also, “if they prefer it, . . . the United States will cause a patent or grant to be made and executed to them for the same.”

The Creek were hardly exempt from the pressures of the allotment era. In 1893, Congress charged the Dawes Commission with negotiating changes to the Creek Reservation. Congress identified two goals: Either persuade the Creek to cede territory to the United States, as it had before, or agree to allot its lands to Tribe members. Act of Mar. 3, 1893, ch. 209, §16, 27 Stat. 645–646. A year later, the Commission reported back that the Tribe “would not, under any circumstances, agree to cede any portion of their lands.” S. Misc. Doc. No. 24, 53d Cong., 3d Sess., 7 (1894). At that time, before this Court’s decision in Lone Wolf, Congress may not have been entirely sure of its power to terminate an established reservation unilaterally. Perhaps for that reason, perhaps for others, the Commission and Congress took this report seriously and turned their attention to allotment rather than cession. [

The Creek Nation has joined Mr. McGirt as amicus curiae. Not because the Tribe is interested in shielding Mr. McGirt from responsibility for his crimes. Instead, the Creek Nation participates because Mr. McGirt’s personal interests wind up implicating the Tribe’s. No one disputes that Mr. McGirt’s crimes were committed on lands described as the Creek Reservation in an 1866 treaty and federal statute. But, in seeking to defend the state-court judgment below, Oklahoma has put aside whatever procedural defenses it might have and asked us to confirm that the land once given to the Creeks is no longer a reservation today. At another level, then, Mr. McGirt’s case winds up as a contest between State and Tribe.

of the federal government, Indian space has been, simply, Indian country since 1790 when the phrase was invented.29 A federal statute imag-ines this space as follows:“Indian country” . . . means (a) all land within the limits of any Indian reservation under the jurisdiction of the United States government, notwithstanding the issuance of any patent, and including rights-of-way running through the reservation, (b) all dependent Indian communities within the borders of the United States whether within the original or subsequently acquired territory thereof, and whether within or without the limits of a state, and (c) all Indian allotments, the Indian titles to which have not been

My grandparents never gave enough credit to those young people who fought racism and injustice to make a better Indian world, even though it is also true that the Red Power movement had contradictions that should not be overlooked. Although they were too busy to get involved, my father and uncles benefited from Red Power too, my dad in the form of education funding, and my uncle through a career made possible by increased federal funding for tribes. Red Power benefited me as well, not only thanks to the new educational opportunities it engendered, but also for the way it brought me to a traditional culture I did not know before

We’re left to wonder, how can a tribe respond to something like a violent— I should clarify that all rape is violent, whether there is physical force, or coer-cion, or a drug- or alcohol- induced sexual assault— what can the tribe do? And we’re really struggling with this question. We don’t want to replicate the system that has been imposed on us, because it hasn’t worked well. The challenge is, how do we hold people accountable under tribal law, or tribal tradition, with-out replicating Western law and order?

What I have heard is that there are tribes that have enacted banishment laws to remove perpetrators from their communities. Zero tolerance is one example: we’re not going to allow sexual violence in our community, and if you commit it you are no longer welcome here. Another that has been very common throughout the century is to not allow people that have a background of sexual violence to hold leadership positions in the community. They’re banned from running for office or from serving in any kind of capacity as a leader, whether that be as a spiritual leader or a political leader. Their history of perpetration against women and children is constantly acknowledged, such that that particular individual can’t engage at the leadership level. I don’t think that’s enough, personally.

here was a Supreme Court decision called Oliphant v. Suquamish Indian Tribe, and essentially what that Supreme Court did was take away from tribal governments the ability to criminally prosecute a non- Indian: a person who is not enrolled in a federally recognized tribe cannot be brought before a tribal court and prosecuted. So, that has been a deep concern for tribal governments since 1978, and there have been a number of strategies that have tried to potentially address that and even get a congressional bill that would overturn that Supreme Court decision

Cobell started bringing hercomplaints to Washington. In the late 1980s, she testified in congressional hearings aboutthe trust accounts. In the resulting 1992 report, “A Misplaced Trust,” Congress declared, “It is apparent that top officials at the Bureau of Indian Affairs have utterly failed to grasp the human impact of its financial management of the Indian trust fund. The Indian trust fund is more than balance sheets and accounting procedures. These moneys are crucial to the daily operations of native American tribes and a source of income to tens of thousands of native Americans.”

Cherokee Nation’s delineation of Indian tribes’ “domestic dependent nation” status and of the guardian- ward relationship makes it, along with Johnson, one of the most important decisions ever issued by the Supreme Court on Indian rights. The Court’s ruling that Indian tribes could not be regarded as “foreign” nations under the Constitution meant that the Cherokees, in Marshall’s words, “cannot maintain an action in the courts of the United States.” Though Georgia’s laws, as pleaded by the tribe, sought “directly to annihilate the Cherokees as a politi-cal society, and to seize, for the use of Georgia, the lands of the nation which have been assured to them by the United States in solemn treaties repeatedly made and still in force,”42 the Constitution, according to the holding of Cherokee Nation and the Marshall Model of Indian Rig

Second, the doctrine of discovery functioned under the European Law of Nations as part of a transnational legal discourse, considered authoritative, for regulating the claims of European racial superiority over the Indian tribes of the New World. According to the Marshall Model of Indian Rights, under this principle of white racial superiority, the rights of conquest and colonization belonging to Great Britain as fi rst European discoverer of the tribes of North America and the lands they occupied had devolved to the United States when it won the Revolutionary War. Under the doctrine of discovery, the United States possessed the “exclusive right to extinguis

Firm in this belief, and stressing the importance of stare decisis, they keep telling us, in their legal briefs, treatises, and law review articles, that the Supreme Court must continue to abide by the correct interpretation of the legal principles laid out in the Marshall Model of Indian Rights. In this sense, to borrow from the postcolonial theorist Homi K. Bhabha, these three opinions by Marshall, which initiated this revered early-nineteenth- century judicial model of diminished Indian rights in the Su-preme Court’s Indian law, function as “signs taken for wonders.”

How was the US willing to grant one tribe statehood and then state as unquestionable “fact” that all Natives were uncivilized?

If they couldn’t be assimilated, what would happen to Native people who sold their land to whites? Southern states pushed one answer to this question: they would be expelled.

TULSA LAW REVIEWother tribes to demand recognition of continued tribal autonomy.In the end, the demographics of the State of Sequoyah would have likely mirroredpresent day Oklahoma, leaving former tribal citizens in a weak political position. Today,American Indians represent only eleven percent of the state's total population.6 4 IfIndians in Oklahoma exercised only the political rights of individual citizens within thestate, they would have very little political power and they would have been relegated to aminority group,6 5

bes were saved from political extinction on paper, but they were still under conditions thatleft the Five Tribes, for many years, as functional "paper" governments. For instance, free elections topopularly elect tribal officials remained suspended under federal law, not to be "allowed" by the federalgovernment until the passage of the Principal Chiefs Act of 1970. Pub. L. No. 91-495, 84 Stat. 1091 (1970).During the time from 1906-1970, the federal government appointed the principal chiefs of the Five Tribes,largely for the purpose of signing leases to tribal lands.

The attempts by tribal leaders, in the shadow of impending Oklahomastatehood, to gain congressional support for the State of Sequoyah seemed an exercise infutility that would leave the Five Tribes without collective power or political influencewithin the new state

Mr. Mcintosh speaks very plausibly, but t judge the future by the past. The treaties and relations with the United States Government, from the first treaty made with an Indian tribe, have they ever been fulfilled to the last letter of the law ? They generally lack somewhere, and some one suffers in consequence. He tries to make us believe that we are able to cope with the United States, that we are ready to cope with the l

I will give the talk of my brothers to all of my peo-ple and children for them to remember and not to for-get. If I die my children will remember the talk. I think the talk will do good Plant corn, raise chil-dren, no more war. I want somebody to learn me to plant corn, and I will know how to do so. White men steal our horses on the Chisolm trail. They are frequently passing

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall have a speedy trial by an impartial jury of the district wherein the crime shall have been committed; the right of demanding the nature and cause of the accusation ; of having the witnesses to testify in his presence; of having compulsory process to procure witnesses in his favor; of having the right to be heard by himself and counsel; of not being compelled to testify against himself, nor to be held to answer to any criminal charge but on information

The principal chief of the Muscogee Nation has spoken to you. What I urge you to do is to take it in your heart, and take it to your people, and tell them what the Creek chief has told you. Tell the talk you heard from the chief to the young men, and when they meet one another from the different por-tions of the Territory, they will know they are broth-ers and will take each other by the hand. This is my talk to you, to urge you to remember the speech of the Creek chief, and t

Wherewas the danger? Did it threaten the Indians themselves?If we could suppose for a moment that the guardian wasso solicious for the welfare of the ward as to apprehenddanger to the latter from his own acts, then we wouldeither have to consider the guardian as a paragon o

ould be allowed toprepare themselves for the change in their relations withthe United States, without having it thurst upon themwholly regardless of their wishes, in the shape of som

but indispensably necessary, that the aforesaid Nation be supplied with such articles from time to time, as far as the United States may have it in their power, by a well-regulated trade

The Sequoyah Constitution was ratified by a majority of eligible voters (Native, Black, and white citizens of Indian Territory). A bill providing for the admission of Sequoyah into the union as the 46th state was introduced into Congress in December 1905. As Stacy Leeds writes in your reading for this week, after President Theodore Roosevelt stated that he preferred that Oklahoma and Indian Territory be admitted as one state, the Sequoyah movement was defeated.

The Okmulgee Constitution was patterned after the US Constitution. The consolidated government would consist of three branches of government, a popularly elected governor, tribal courts, and a General Assembly proportioned along the lines of the House of Representatives and the Senate, with one by population and the other equal representation. [19]

That efficiency came at a huge cost, though, he noticed:  Kids were stressed out and also preferred to avoid intellectual risks.  “They’ll take an easier assignment that will guarantee the A.”

“If it’s not worth teaching, it’s not worth teaching well,” as Eliot Eisner (2001, p. 370) likes to say.  Nor, we might add, is it worth assessing accurately.

In one experiment, students told they’d be graded on how well they learned a social studies lesson had more trouble understanding the main point of the text than did students who were told that no grades would be involved.  Even on a measure of rote recall, the graded group remembered fewer facts a week later (Grolnick and Ryan, 1987).