http://www.economist.com/node/21552208
MEETING Ronnie Lupe, the chairman of the White Mountain Apache tribe,
is rather like an audience with the chieftain he would once have been.
At 82 he has a sage’s bearing, takes his time speaking and does not
allow himself to be interrupted. He has ears as long as those on statues
of the Buddha. He sits surrounded by Apache flags, insignia and the
tribal seal, which he says he co-designed with a medicine man long ago.
His office commands a view in one of the sacred directions of the
Apache, across a reservation in remote Arizona that is roughly the size
of Delaware but home to only about 12,000 tribal members.
Born in a
wikiup, a traditional Apache brush
wigwam, and brought up on stories of bloodshed between his forebears and
the white man, Mr Lupe has been in tribal government, off and on, since
1964. His career thus spans several historic changes for Indian tribes,
each of which affirmed and increased their sovereignty. “When I was
first elected, I received no financial reports, no letters, they all
went over there,” he recalls, pointing across the street to a branch of
the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), the federal agency that handles
relations with tribes. “Over the years I took their power away.” Then he
flips his middle finger in the BIA’s direction. “I’m not responsible to
you, I’m a sovereign nation.”
That sovereignty is still a topic of discussion at all should be
surprising. America’s constitution names three sovereigns: the federal
government, states and tribes. The “treaties” America signed with tribes
in the 18th and 19th centuries also implied sovereign parties. Tribes
could not keep armies or devise a currency, but they could issue their
own passports, as the Iroquois have famously done (which made their
lacrosse team miss a tournament in 2010, after Britain refused to
recognise the documents). The Iroquois, the Sioux and the Ojibwe
(Chippewa), even separately declared war on Germany in 1941.
But sovereignty has at least three pieces, says Manley Begay at the
Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, a research
group. First, there is “inherent” sovereignty. Mr Begay’s Navajo, for
example, consider their sovereignty a sacred gift from their Holy
People. But there are also legal and de facto sovereignty, and the
federal government, for most of American history, honoured neither. It
considered treaties merely a tool to take land from the tribes. Its real
policy towards Indians before 1851 was to remove them. After 1851, when
the first modern Indian reservations were created, the policy was to
contain them in what one Indian author has called “red ghettos” for
their widespread poverty, unemployment, alcoholism and crime.
In theory, this changed in 1934 with an act of Congress nicknamed the
Indian New Deal. It endorsed a degree of self-rule for Indian tribes,
while urging them to form tribal constitutions similar to America’s own,
with elections, courts and so forth. But in practice federal
paternalism continued. Native American religions, for example, were
persecuted until the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978 at
last put a stop to it. Above all, the BIA (originally part of the War
Department but nowadays part of Interior) made all decisions of economic
consequence.
Those memories still get a rise out of Mr Lupe. Ultimately,
sovereignty is power over land, he says. To the white man, he thinks,
land is just “real estate”. But in Apache the word for land is also the
one for mind: “So I point to my mind, I also point to my land,” he says,
as his index finger moves from his forehead to the ground. It so
happens that his tribe’s land is exceptional: the Salt River Canyon is
as beautiful as the Grand Canyon, but without the tourists, and above it
stretch endless forests of ponderosa pines. The right to fish, hunt,
log and do whatever else they please there is what Mr Lupe and his
ancestors have fought for. The only difference, he says, is that “We now
go to war with pens, not bows and arrows.”
A roll of the dice
The biggest step towards de facto sovereignty came in 1975, with the
Indian Self-Determination Act. It began the transfer of administration
from the BIA to the tribal governments. Mr Begay calls the act “up there
with the Iron Curtain falling down, with apartheid falling apart” in
its importance. It also made possible the biggest economic change of the
past century, the entry of tribes into the gaming business.
This began with the Seminole tribe in Florida and the Cabazon Mission
Band of Indians, a tiny tribe in southern California. The Seminole took
their case for running a bingo parlour to a federal appeals court, and
won it in 1981. Around the same time the Cabazon Band opened poker and
bingo rooms on their reservation, illegal under state law. The police
raided the reservation, and a legal case began that wound its way as far
as the Supreme Court. In 1987 the court decided that tribes, being
sovereign, could not be barred from running casinos. The next year
Congress wrote a law that explicitly allowed Indian gambling, as long as
the proceeds were used to promote “tribal economic development”.
Soon tribes all over the country built casinos. Mr Lupe’s Apache
opened theirs in 1993. Called Hon-Dah (“Welcome” in Apache), it is, like
most casinos in America, a somewhat depressing place, with people in
track suits yanking on slot machines in clouds of cigarette smoke.
In 2010, estimates Alan Meister, an economist, Indian casinos took in
$26.7 billion, about 44% of America’s total casino revenue. Almost half
of the tribes—239 out of the 565—are now at it. A few, including the
Cabazon Band, are rolling in money, whereas others make hardly anything.
The key, not surprisingly, is location. Casinos on reservations near
cities (the Cabazon are near Palm Springs) get many customers, whereas
those in the middle of nowhere (the majority, like Hon-Dah) get few.
For the tribes with lucrative casinos, gambling has become the
biggest thing since the fur trade of the 19th century, says David
Wilkins, a Lumbee and professor of American-Indian studies at the
University of Minnesota. When the proceeds are used wisely—to build
schools, provide health care, and so forth—gambling can indeed help with
tribal nation-building, he says.
But casinos also bring problems. Some tribes consider gambling a
vice. This is why the Hopi, for instance, have rejected gambling, and
why the Navajo repeatedly voted against it in referendums before
grudgingly accepting it for the revenues it brought in. In other cases,
gambling income perversely reinforces a culture of dependency, as some
tribal members wait passively for their profit share.
Indirectly the casinos have also highlighted some bizarre, sometimes
unsavoury, aspects of tribal sovereignty. One of the biggest problems
has always been deciding who is or is not a member. Most tribes do this
with blood-quantum laws. An individual must prove that, say, a quarter,
an eighth, or a sixteenth of his “blood” is from a given tribe.
Casino money has brought out the perversity in these rules. In
California alone more than 2,500 Indians have been “dis-enrolled”—ie,
cast out—from their tribes because political enemies or greedy
administrators have suddenly discovered doubts about distant bloodlines.
The motive is to share gambling revenues among fewer members. For the
outcasts, this can mean losing tribal housing, education, welfare and
sometimes cash payments, not to mention identity and community.
Pain and progress
The bigger question is whether sovereignty in general and gambling in
particular have, on balance, improved the lot of tribes. Unfortunately,
any progress is patchy and slow. In the 2010 census 28% of American
Indians were poor, compared with 15% of the whole American population.
Their median household income was $35,062, compared with $50,046 for all
Americans. They are, on average, less educated and less likely to have
health insurance. Most of the 2.9m American Indians now live in cities,
including many of those who are better off. So poverty on the 334
reservations (not all tribes have one) is worse than these numbers
suggest.
Unemployment is astronomically high. Mr Lupe estimates that it is 80%
for the White Mountain Apache (others estimate it at nearer 65% on that
reservation). Alcohol and drug abuse are endemic, as are obesity and
diabetes. Violent-crime rates on reservations are twice the national
average, according to the Justice Department. American-Indian women are
four times as likely to be raped and ten times as likely to be murdered
as white American women.
Nonetheless, some tribes have clearly made progress since 1975. The
biggest factor, says Mr Begay, is the government institutions tribes
have chosen to build since then. Is their administration efficient? Are
the courts clean, fair and strong? He compares tribes to eastern
European countries since the end of the cold war: some have prospered
under good government, others have not. Generally speaking, the
Winnebago of Nebraska, the Choctaw of Mississippi and the Navajo of the
south-west are doing well; the Oglala Sioux of South Dakota are not.
When it comes to governance, American Indians are still all too
likely to make news of the wrong sort. The Chukchansi of California,
near Yosemite, spent the first part of this year brawling over control
of their tribal council, with one side cracking the locks and smashing
the windows of the government building to break in, while the other side
cut the building’s electricity and fumigated it with bear spray. (As it
happens, the tribe runs a successful casino, and the dispute had
started over dis-enrolments of members.)
Even Mr Lupe has been involved in antics of this sort. Last December
the tribe’s council (including two of Mr Lupe’s cousins and one nephew)
voted to suspend Mr Lupe as chairman, alleging corruption and
megalomania. Mr Lupe ignored the motion vote, suggesting that corruption
is instead to be found among the council members, and that the Apache
constitution has no concept of suspension. A judge was fired. The police
chief who had been instructed to evict Mr Lupe thought better of it. Mr
Lupe remains well ensconced. A tribal lawyer says that Apache
government does not have distinct branches as America’s does, but values
consensus.
So the record is far from clear. Mr Lupe’s Apache (there are other
Apache tribes nearby) have their casino, some timber logging and a
decent ski resort to boot. And they are surrounded by stunning natural
beauty. But they are still quite poor.
They are also more sovereign now than they have been since Geronimo’s
day. And yet, laments Mr Lupe, Apache culture is still under threat.
Over half of the older members speak Apache, he says, but fewer than 10%
of the young do. Indeed, of hundreds of American-Indian languages
spoken when Europeans arrived, only about 150 survive, and only three
(Dakota, Dene and Ojibwe) have viable communities of speakers.
Dissolution into the American mainstream, of course, has always been a
spectre, even if it is no longer federal policy. And yet, as David
Treuer, an Ojibwe and the author of “Rez Life”, puts it with pride, “We
stubbornly continue to exist.”
