The New Indian Wars

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On December 9, twenty-five native and non-native people gathered near Amherst, South Dakota, to embark on a ceremonial journey.

The Dakota Prayer Ride and Water Walk & Run event would follow closely the path Dakota ancestors took when they fled the Dakota War of 1862. Seventeen days later, on December 26, more than one hundred participants converged in Mankato, Minnesota. Here on this date 155 years earlier, thirty-eight Dakota men were hung—the largest mass execution in U.S. history. Participants ran, walked, and rode horses the entire 325-mile route.

Their stop outside Amherst was the site of an oil spill that many of them saw as a harbinger. There, the Keystone XL pipeline had just ruptured, unleashing more than 200,000 gallons of oil upon the countryside. President Donald Trump had given Keystone a green light months earlier, reversing the Obama Administration’s rejection of the project that followed years of popular protest.

While the President’s move signaled a major blow to the tribes and their supporters, Paula Horne, a member of the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate, is quick to point out that this event was not an attempt to counter with a political response. “This was a spiritual event,” Horne says. “We know that they [Trump and the South Dakota state lawmakers] are just looking at the money. All we can do is pray for the people in our communities that they wake up. Hopefully it’s not too late.”

“We know that they are just looking at the money. All we can do is pray for the people in our communities that they wake up. Hopefully it’s not too late.”

The Dakota Prayer Ride and Water Walk & Run also focused on what Horne says is another environmental disaster happening in the backyards of both Indians and nonnatives. “CAFOs [Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations] are bigger than the fossil fuel industry,” Horne says. “Our state lawmakers invited these farms here ten years ago. Besides contaminating our water, CAFOs are draining our swamps. We’ve lost so much of our medicines.”

Horne calls the boom of CAFOs “an unstoppable silent killer” because the tribes lack the money and clout of the operators. “We’re becoming poorer and poorer because the riches of the land and water are disappearing.”

Appeals to protect land and water may be too esoteric for Trump to comprehend. The President has clearly signaled that corporate profits matter more to him than the environment. Appointing Scott Pruitt to head up the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency may be the clearest proof of Trump’s disdain for federal regulations aimed at keeping the environment safe. Pruitt spent a great deal of time as Oklahoma’s attorney general fighting the EPA. And a number of longtime staffers have left the agency because of Pruitt’s hostility to its mission.

Trump failed to consult the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe before approving another pipeline, the Dakota Access, evading a fundamental principle of federal treaty obligations. This was despite two years of intense protests at the Standing Rock Sioux reservation that earned national media attention and drew more than 10,000 people from around the world.

Trump once again turned his back on tribes and concerned environmentalists when he reduced the size of Bears Ears National Monument—named for the pair of rust red buttes that jut out of the surrounding Utah scrubland—by 85 percent. His decision caused deep offense within Indian Country, because it went deeper than politics or economics.

“Our sacred sites heal our people, provide resting places for our ancestors, and bring all people together,” says Jacqueline Pata, executive director of the National Congress of American Indians, an advocacy group based in Washington, D.C., made up of more than 250 tribes. “They provide us with shared human experiences and act as living histories that people from all walks of life enjoy. Importantly, these places are where native people practice their free exercise of religion.”

Donald Trump has had minimal interaction with tribes over the years. One of the few times he took an interest in Indians was in 1993, when he told a Congressional subcommittee that the Mafia was controlling tribal gaming operations. He went on to disparage the casino-wealthy Pequot tribes, saying its tribal members did not even look Indian.

That Trump would get caught up in the blur of Indian reality and stereotype is itself unremarkable. Many Americans invoke Indian stereotypes, and tribes have long had to fend off the notion that the Mafia controls their gaming operations. The truth is that Indian gaming is more regulated by the feds than gambling facilities in Atlantic City and Las Vegas.

At a November ceremony honoring the remaining World War II Navajo code talkers, the President took the opportunity to attack Massachusetts Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren, one of his most vocal critics. He referred to Warren as “Pocahontas” because she purports to have Native American heritage. But Trump praised the code talkers for their bravery and service, calling them “very, very special people.”

In December, Trump even signed a law, the Indian Employment, Training, and Related Services Consolidation Act, in an effort to promote job growth throughout Indian Country. The disconnect is striking given Trump’s seeming contempt for Indian nationhood. But then again, Trump is not the first politician to roll his eyes at tribal sovereignty while more superficially celebrating Indian people.

During the 1970s through the early 2000s, then-Washington state Senator Slade Gorton, a Republican, earned his national reputation opposing Indian treaty rights. As Washington’s attorney general, he fought hard against Northwest Coastal tribes’ fishing rights based on treaties with the federal government. He took his fight all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court but lost.

Trump is not the first politician to roll his eyes at tribal sovereignty while more superficially celebrating Indian people.

But while Gorton was opposed to tribal sovereignty, he was also interested in improving the lives of Indians, notes Brian Hosmer, an associate professor of Western American history at the University of Tulsa. For instance, he urged putting more federal dollars into Indian education. “Gorton liked Indians so long as they didn’t ask for anything,” Hosmer says.

Trump, he assesses, is much worse. Like Gorton, he is “hostile to the idea of Indian nations operating as sovereigns, and locates tribal people in the past.” But unlike Gorton, Trump “has no appreciation for or knowledge of tribal culture, history, or arts.”

After Trump’s monument decision, five native tribes—the Hopi, Navajo, Ute Mountain, Pueblo, and Ute Indian—formed the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition in order to regain protection of Bears Ears, which covers more than one million acres.

Though Trump’s Secretary of the Department of Interior, Ryan Zinke, claimed the tribes were consulted about the decision to remove protection from the majority of Bears Ears, tribal leaders say otherwise. They issued a statement blasting his failure to show respect for Indian Country.

“President Trump’s illegal action is a shameful attack on tribes, and it will not stand,” stated Carleton Bowekaty, a Zuni councilman. “The President’s proposal is without legal authority and without respect for the Native Americans that worked for decades to protect these resources. His proposal is a strong statement to tribes across the nation that Native American values and interests are not important to the Trump Administration.”

The Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition has since filed a lawsuit seeking to reverse Trump’s executive order.

“Beginning with Theodore Roosevelt, Presidents have designated more than one hundred monuments throughout our country. However, no President has ever previously sought to abolish one,” the lawsuit says. “In attempting to, in effect, abolish the Bears Ears National Monument . . . the President has exceeded the limited authority delegated to his office, and violated the Antiquities Act and the separation of powers established in the Constitution.”

Trump held the event honoring the Navajo code talkers in front of a portrait of one of his favorite American Presidents—Andrew Jackson.

In 1830, Jackson signed into law the Indian Removal Act. In defiance of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that upheld the right of Southeastern tribes (mostly Cherokee) to remain in their homelands, Jackson ordered thousands of Indians to embark on a deadly thousand-mile trek to present-day Oklahoma, then seen by whites as a vast wasteland. Along what would become known as the Trail of Tears, around 6,000 Cherokee died from cold, sickness, and starvation. Their homelands were confiscated by white plantation owners.

Calls to get rid of the “Indian problem” during Jackson’s reign widely resonated among voters. Hosmer says a large part of Trump’s affection for Jackson has to do with his similar style of phony, racially charged populism. “Trump is trying to capture the resentment of working-class white people who feel diversity harms them.”

“Trump is trying to capture the resentment of working-class white people who feel diversity harms them.”

Since the days of Jackson’s Indian Removal Act, the federal government has sought ways to deal with tribes in an attempt to end Indian identity and nationhood. This includes the decision of Ulysses Grant to put in motion an illegal war with the Sioux nation, which led to the massacre of Lieutenant Colonel George Custer and the Seventh Cavalry at Little Bighorn in 1876.

Following failed military engagements with tribes, the U.S. government tried to subdivide tribal land into individual parcels with the hope of stealing that land for whites. They tried boarding schools as a means to “kill the Indian, and save the man.” They banned tribal religions and languages.

But the closest the federal government came to winning the long Indian Wars came in the devastating policy of termination. This consisted of dismantling reservation systems and relocating Indians to urban centers with the purported intent of integrating native peoples with the greater nation.

The grand plan of termination began in the 1940s with a series of laws that gave states increased criminal jurisdiction over tribes. By 1953, greater authority over tribes led to President Eisenhower signing the policy of tribal termination into law (HCR-108). The federal government no longer had to recognize and relate to tribes as sovereign nations.

In 1957, Ada Deer, a member of the Menominee Nation, became the nation’s first licensed American Indian social worker. While working at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point in the late 1960s, she became aware of protests happening on her reservation in the nearby town of Keshena. That led to the birth of a new Indian activist movement. It was called DRUMS,  which stood for a Determination of Rights and Unity for Menominee Shareholders.

A number of Menominee members began demanding that the federal government return nationhood to their tribe. For nearly two decades, the Menominee and around 100 other tribes did not exist as sovereign nations because of tribal termination.

“Termination meant we were no longer a race of Indians,” Deer says. “Our hospital was shut down. Our lumber mill was run by white people who refused to hire our people. You couldn’t get financial aid for college because you were no longer Indian. Many of us left and never came back.”

Deer joined the protests and quickly became a leading crusader. “It became clear to us that the true intent of termination was for the country to get on with the great American act of progress,” Deer says. “And Indians were standing in the way of that progress.”

“Termination meant we were no longer a race of Indians... Many of us left and never came back.”

Deer moved to Washington, D.C., where she helped draft the Menominee Restoration Act, which President Nixon signed into law in 1973. Following restoration she was elected as her tribe’s first woman chair. In the early days of President Clinton’s first term, Deer was appointed assistant secretary of Interior and became head of the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs. She served from 1993 to 1997. As head of the BIA, she helped organize and bring numerous tribal leaders to the White House.

Deer doubts whether Trump would ever consider doing something similar. “Why would he?” she asks. “Trump has no respect for tribes. He just doesn’t care.”

And Deer, like many others, is convinced that if Trump could sign into law a new plan to resurrect tribal termination, he would, because it would mean making America great again, keeping tribes from impeding the great American progress.

Other Native Americans also offer bleak assessments of the current President.

“Trump’s administration, so far, is not as bad as the worst of the worst Presidents like Jackson, Grant, and others,” says Matthew Fletcher, professor of law and director of the Indigenous Law and Policy Center at Michigan State University. “But it aims to be. Talk of privatizing trust lands, opening up sacred sites like Bears Ears, and the overall program of gutting the federal government from the inside out by appointing incompetent and ethically challenged people to key positions, is just the beginning.”

“Trump’s administration, so far, is not as bad as the worst of the worst...But it aims to be." 

Fletcher, a member of the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians, concedes that the Trump Administration has so far not exhibited the “competence to do major damage to Indian affairs.” But while there are a couple dozen or so tribes willing to exploit their natural resources, he says, the majority of Indian Country “can’t wait until 2020.”

Hosmer believes the tribes are well positioned to oppose the President because they now have the resources of tribal gaming and a growing base of support from nonnatives. In addition to outrage over ongoing injustices against Indians, non-native people are recognizing that the corporate-driven raping of tribal lands will lead to more destruction.

While Paula Horne admits waging spiritual warfare against the greed of farm and oil multinationals is an uphill struggle, she is comforted by the words she once heard from a Sioux elder. “Mother Earth is the source of life, not a resource.” 

Mark Anthony Rolo is a member of the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians and author of the memoir My Mother Is Now Earth.