Opinion

SO HARD TO SAY WE’RE SORRY

This week, Australia’s Prime Minister Kevin Rudd issued a formal apology to Australia’s Indigenous people for the government’s atrocious record of laws and policies that “inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss on these our fellow Australians.” For many Indigenous Australians, the long-awaited apology will not atone for a history of stolen lands, stolen children and stolen opportunities, but it will go a long way toward presenting a new face of government as it charts a better path in Indigenous policy.

In considering these developments from Down Under, I wondered which American president was the last to announce a national policy on American Indian affairs that carried such significance and promise. Unlike Australia, US federal law has long recognized Indian tribes as distinct governments with rights of self-determination. Like Australia, however, US policy has often worked in opposition to those rights, with the consequence that American Indians, like many Australian Aboriginals, are often on the lowest rung of the socio-economic ladder, with disproportionately higher rates of unemployment and lower rates of educational achievement. The significant economic gains from casino gambling revenues are heavily concentrated amongst a handful of tribes with the fortuity of having lands close to major population centers.

So which American president was the last to chart a fundamentally new and positive national policy in Indian affairs? It was Richard Nixon, who, in his July 1970 Message to Congress, announced a federal policy of self-determination for Indian tribes. President Nixon said that “as a matter of justice and as a matter of enlightened social policy, we must begin to act on the basis of what the Indians themselves have long been telling us. The time has come to break decisively with the past and to create the conditions for a new era in which the Indian future is determined by Indian acts and Indian decisions. This . . . must be the goal of any new national policy toward the Indian people: to strengthen the Indian’s sense of autonomy without threatening his sense of community.”

Every US president since Nixon has reaffirmed this national commitment to tribal self-determination. Each has worked with varying degrees of interest and success in supporting tribes to overcome the legacies of past federal policies – but none of them announced or declared policies that could be described as path-breaking.

Consistency may be a good thing, especially when we remember what some of those other path-breaking policies accomplished. They included the forced removal of tribes in the 19th century from their ancestral lands to western territorial lands (now Oklahoma), the “allotment” policy of the late 19th and early 20th century that led to the loss of two-thirds of the total land base held by or on behalf of Indian tribes, and the forced “termination” policies after WWII where the federal government unilaterally abandoned its trust obligations to a number of tribes and effectively doused the flames of tribal sovereignty. In addition to being path-breaking, these policies also proved to be “spirit-breaking” for Indian people.

In ushering in the era of tribal self-determination, President Nixon flatly declared the prior policy of forced termination to be “wrong.” That wasn’t an apology per se but a pretty clear acknowledgment by the nation’s chief executive that the federal government had erred in managing relations with tribes. Since then, the federal government has issued an apology in 1993 to Native Hawaiians for the unlawful overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom in the 19th century.

Annually since 2004, a bipartisan group in Congress has offered up a joint resolution known as the “apology bill” to acknowledge “a long history of official depredations and ill-conceived policies of the United States Government regarding Indian tribes and offer an apology to all Native Peoples on behalf of the United States.” Among the actions acknowledged as ill-conceived are the federal policies of “extermination, termination, forced removal and relocation, the outlawing of traditional religions, and the destruction of sacred places,” the forced removal of Indian children to distant boarding schools, the outlawing of Native languages, and the “theft of tribal resources and assets from recognized tribal land.”

Like the recent Australian apology, the American apology bill does not authorize or support any legal claims against the government. In a similar vein, Canada issued an apology to its First Nations in 1998. Interestingly, these three nations (and New Zealand) were the only nations to vote against the recently adopted UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, though the Rudd administration has signaled its willingness to change course on that as well. The US apology bill was placed on the Senate’s calendar of business this session but there’s been no substantive action on it since June of last year.

Of this year’s crop of presidential aspirants, the candidate who held out the most promise to shake things up positively in Indian affairs is no longer in the race. New Mexico’s Bill Richardson was among the first major candidates to announce his plans for a national Indian policy and they included, most notably, the creation of a cabinet-level position in Indian affairs. Currently, Indian affairs operate from within the Department of the Interior, which also oversees the National Parks Service, Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Minerals Management Agency. Over the years, tribal leaders have noted the indignity of being managed as another “natural resource,” and with characteristic humor, acknowledge that this is only a slight improvement from the days (until 1849) when Indian affairs operated under the Department of War.

The proposed apology bill pending in Congress is a symbolic, but nonetheless significant act that acknowledges the government’s responsibilities for past acts that continue to have contemporary effects and that serve to thwart tribal efforts to thrive as self-determining governments. The president and all candidates seeking to succeed him should call upon the Congress to pass this resolution. After all, as Justice Hugo Black once noted in a case involving American Indians, “Great nations, like great men [and women], should keep their word.”

N. Bruce Duthu is the author of “American Indians and the Law” (Viking) and a member of the Houma Tribe of Louisiana.