A friend told me Browning was buzzing like a beehive on the day of the recent primary election for tribal council. Normally it’s as though a glass wall separated the rez from the rest of the state, but not right now. The issues involve us all. Eloise Cobell’s lawsuit. Water. The rediscovery of oil. Shared law enforcement. Rewrite of the tribe’s constitution. And the nature of “reservations,” sovereignty and tribes themselves. Things that used to seem “facts” and true realities are up for grabs -- okay, call that up-for-reaching-out-for-new-solutions.
Reservations have been felt and meant as everything from protected lands so that the original old-time people could live as they always had, to prison camps with a fence around the perimeter. But that fence was also meant to keep ranchers’ cattle out, but some said the fence was to keep the Indians from eating the cattle, and others said if promised commodities didn’t arrive, you had to eat what you could. In short, the attitudes come first and then the realities are interpreted to serve them. A fence is simply a fence. After a while it was so much trouble that the posts and wire were removed and sold. The money was needed more.
The classic comparison is between the US system of reservations and the Canadian system of “reserves.” In the terms of the Blackfoot Nation complex, the pre-existing tribe ended up on both sides. The US pushed their indigenous populations ever more West, allotting them everything west of this river, then that river, designating Oklahoma as “Indian territory,” then opening it to settlement, and so on. The Blackfeet “reservation” was once the top half of Montana but the sequence of agency headquarters describe the shrinkage towards the north: Fort Benton, Choteau, Old Agency, Browning. At least the end product was big and they got to stay on their old homeland. Then the rez, while still defined, assigned internal individual ownership of land, which meant they could be sold to outsiders and used as collateral for debt. Some say as little as half the land is now unencumbered. Most of the pressures came from adjoining and invading ranchers wanting grass and timber, with extraordinary entitlement alloted to the railroad and then the separation of Glacier National Park.
Just to the north, “Rupert’s Land” was more Hudson’s Bay Company than Canadian nation, subsidiary of the British Empire, long-used to managing colonies for profit. They also set aside lands for tribal people, but with the frank paternalistic (or maternalistic) goal of protecting them and keeping them communal. Without permission Indians could not come out, but also whites could not go in. This meant that the people kept their languages and ceremonies longer but did not move into the future as quickly. The communal system has its own difficulties.
Relations and definitions have been dynamic from the first time Euros hit the east coast in the fifteenth century. As white populations -- and black populations -- moved across the continent, everything kept changing, partly because the nature of the tribes in the east was different, partly because in the beginning there were only tiny weak colonies which expanded radically over the next centuries as they moved deeper into the land, partly because the planetary economies changed, and partly because the Euros carried contagious disease. The indigenous peoples fell before them. The balance of power shifted radically: well-organized strong tribes in the East, who had systems of governance and much skill at war, could act as nations at the time the revolutionary wars began. They contributed much to ideas of how to manage in the New World (which was their Old World) as well as their energy and wealth. The new nation courted them, and so did the European countries. They could change outcomes.
By 1850 when the US had begun to split north/south and the prairie “tribes” were much looser groups of nomads, now on horseback, the indigenous people did not have a formal consensus among themselves about structures of governance and were entirely organized around buffalo. By the time the US, barely maintaining their own governance, had a rabble of soldiers after the Civil War looking for something to do, the obvious was to use them to confine Indians to reservations. The preoccupation of the time was maps and boundaries and treaties. Surveyors were busy people, just as they are now with what amount to micro-boundaries everywhere. Of course, meant to prevent wars over territory, they also functioned as allocations of wealth. This is true of reservations. And nations.
A two-fold problem has remained: who sets the function of the boundary -- the original definer of it working from the outside or the occupier of it, for whom it exists, from the inside? That’s the first problem, the sovereignty problem. The second is whether the people who live there are to act as a group or as individuals. These forces create a three-handed game which malfunctions by rewarding those who subvert the system for their own reasons. The tribe cannot function without the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which is supposed to be putting itself out of business; the Bureau of Indian Affairs can only function with the cooperation of the people (though it must defend itself to the United States government); and the people soon find that it is easy to play the two entities off against each other. Economic coyotes like that.
Over the recent years it has not been so common that the boundaries of the territory have changed (though we are plagued with ambiguity over the original limits), but the rules of what happens to land ownership and development within that boundary have gone every which way -- quite aside from the motivation to actually enforce and perform functions. Someone has a bright idea based on assumptions made back east (often urban) about life (entirely different) on the great reaches of the prairie, passes a law, and everyone ignores it because it doesn’t work or it works unjustly or it works all too well! Indian preference for BIA hiring is a good example, sweeping out much of the white population of the reservation while not changing the goals and practices of the Bureau. Changing blood quantum requirements is another good example.
The simple passage of time means that the United States with its interacting wars and economic patterns has given and taken away from reservations. Military service has trained many people. Big box stores have destroyed main street. “Reforms,” which may not seem like reform to some people, tend to focus on one aspect of life, like the availability of liquor or the quality of schools, instead of looking at the whole ecology of both land and people within the rez and outside across the continent and planet.
To design tribal systems that really work means deep experience with the actual people, weather, crops, and businesses of the place while resisting the impulse to think of the reservation as an independent bubble. And yet, in the hearts of the people who grew up there, no other place can be homeland.
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