TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/011491/0114104.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 9.1 KB | 185 lines

                'Ω╠M                                                        NATION, Page 18

This Land Is Their Land


After a century of struggle, Native Americans are retrieving
their rights and their heritage to preserve an ancient culture
from extinction

By NANCY GIBBS -- Reported by Nancy Harbert/Albuquerque and
Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles


    The temperature was 21 degrees below zero, not counting the
20-m.p.h. winds blowing across the hilltop cemetery, as
mourners gathered to remember a gruesome massacre. A century
ago, on Dec. 29, 1890, soldiers of the 7th Cavalry slaughtered
hundreds of Sioux men, women and children who had sought refuge
under a white flag at a place called Wounded Knee. To mark the
anniversary, descendants of the survivors came on foot and on
horseback, some from hundreds of miles across the plains. They
circled the chain-link fence around the grave site, saying
their prayers in silence and burning sage for purification.
South Dakota Governor George Mickelson offered words of sorrow
and apology, the culmination of a "Year of Reconciliation"
between whites and Indians in South Dakota. The journey to the
grave site, he said, "has been a prayer and a sacrifice, a
wiping away of tears."

    Each week brings a new installment in the fight for the
survival of an ancient culture in a modern age and for dominion
over lands lost a century ago. Above all, Native Americans wish
to preserve the right to practice their religion, enforce their
laws and educate their children without interference. Says
Scott Borg, an Albuquerque attorney who regularly represents
Native Americans: "The U.S. government has no more right
telling the Pueblos how to run their internal affairs than does
a country like Iraq to tell Kuwait how to run its internal
affairs."

    The vehicle, and the obstacle, to Indian autonomy is the
immense, inert Bureau of Indian Affairs. The 167-year-old
agency, which is in charge of everything from tribal courts and
schools to social services and law enforcement on the
reservations, has a sorry record of waste, corruption and
choking red tape. A recent survey of government executives
ranked it the least respected of 90 federal agencies, with the
Indian Health Service close behind. An effort to restructure
the bureau was halted by Congress until a task force of Native
Americans could be assembled for consultation. But hope for
progress runs thin: "Restructuring the BIA," one tribal leader
noted, "is like rotating four worn-out tires."

    Most Native Americans can no longer afford to wait for the
government to take action. The crusade for greater
self-determination reflects the desperate poverty and social
pain that marks daily life on many reservations. "Indians are
the most regulated people in the world," says Dale Riesling,
chairman of the 2,000-member Hoopa Valley tribe in Northern
California. "Self-determination means that we are completely
free to set our own direction and goals, basically our own
destiny." That destiny is in dire need of reshaping: life
expectancy in some tribes is 45 years, the leading cause of
death is alcoholism, and Indians have the lowest per capita
income of any ethnic group in the U.S. A weak school system has
made it nearly impossible for Native Americans to succeed in
competitive jobs off the reservations. Without the resources
to address these problems, tribal leaders fear that poverty and
aimlessness will destroy whatever remains of traditional Indian
culture.

    Back around the turn of the century, the Federal
Government's "progressive" policy toward Native Americans
amounted to forced assimilation. The BIA shipped Indian
children off to boarding schools, gave them Anglo names and
banned their Native tongues and religious rituals. Each
generation moved further from tribal tradition, to the point
where languages, which were entirely oral, and skills, such as
basketmaking, were in danger of disappearing. After decades of
drift, tribes that have begun to focus on preserving their
heritage for the next generation have also reduced their rates
of teen suicide, illiteracy, addiction and despair.

    But protecting an ancient culture also means fighting for
rights that are blithely violated by neighboring communities.
In last year's most celebrated confrontation, Mohawks faced
down Quebec police and army troops 18 miles west of Montreal
in a battle to prevent weekend golfers from putting into their
ancestral graves. At the same time, Chippewa Indians, in
northern Wisconsin, fought what has become an annual battle on
the shores of Lake Minocqua. Their adversaries, local fishermen
armed with rocks and insults, fear that the Indians'
spearfishing will deplete the supply of walleyed pike and drive
away sport fishermen. Though the Chippewa have voluntarily
limited the size of their annual catch, they resent the fact
that their ancestral claims are begrudged as concessions rather
than viewed as legal rights.

    Such confrontations are the flash points of a struggle
heating up in courtrooms across the country. Heeding the
lessons of the civil rights movement, the country's 700 Native
American lawyers are using the judicial system. "There has been
more Indian litigation in the past 20 years," says John
Echohawk, executive director of the Native American Rights
Fund, "than in the previous 200."

    Most of the conflicts, in one way or another, grow out of
a commitment to the land. Despite anthropologists' evidence
that they came to this country across the Bering Strait land
bridge, many tribes believe their ancestors emerged from an
underworld through a hole in the earth known as the sipapu.
Their religion, their art and their well-being are tied to the
land they have guarded and revered. Now, many generations after
white settlers bribed, swindled and threatened thousands of
Native Americans out of millions of acres, they are determined
to seek restitution.

    In the Black Hills of Wyoming, 15 tribes from Wyoming,
Montana and the Dakotas are fighting off an effort by the
Forest Service to turn their sacred site of Medicine Wheel into
a tourist attraction. The 4,000-member Northern Cheyenne tribe
of Lame Deer, Mont., is battling coal miners and railroad
developers on its lands. Tribe members are afraid that
development would bring tourists flooding into the middle of
their religious ceremonies and disturb areas rich in medicinal
plants and yellow ocher earth paint needed for those rituals.
"How would you like it if I took my picnic basket, my family
and dog into your church while you were praying?" asks Bill
TallBull, tribal elder of the Northern Cheyenne.

    Many tribes are trapped between ancient environmental
principles and modern economic pressures. One Alaskan tribe in
dire need of funds is reluctantly trying to decide whether to
sign away logging rights around Prince William Sound, permit
oil drilling in a delicate wildlife area or allow an airfield
to be built in the midst of a vast habitat for Kodiak bears.
Other tribes have allowed waste-management companies to use
reservation land for dumps and disposal sites, then suffered
from the contamination of their land and water as a result.
Across the vast Arizona tracts of the Navajo Nation,
high-voltage wires run like silver threads to the Pacific
Ocean, carrying electricity all the way to to California -- but
not to the 200,000 Navajo who live beneath them.

    A central controversy shared by Native Americans of many
tribes is the crusade to have relics and remains of Indian
ancestors removed from museums and returned to the tribes for
burial. Some tribes believe the soul cannot rest until the body
is returned to nature, by burial or cremation. Hundreds of
thousands of Indian corpses were dug from their graves and
carted away for display. "Grave robbing was so widespread that
virtually every tribe in the country has been victimized," says
Pawnee Indian Walter Echo-Hawk, staff attorney at the Native
American Rights Fund.

    In a landmark accord with Indian leaders last year, the
Smithsonian Institution agreed to sort through its collection
of 18,500 remains and to return for burial all those that were
clearly identifiable as belonging to a certain tribe. Stanford
University then pledged to give back its entire collection of
remains of the Ohlone tribe. Other museums and collectors
followed suit, and in November President Bush signed a bill to
protect Indian grave sites in the U.S. and to return remains
to the tribes. In some instances, however, tribes have asked
a museum to retain permanent control of the objects so they
could be properly conserved.

    In all areas of conflict, over land or tradition or
scientific collections, years of litigation lie ahead. The
Bureau of Indian Affairs will have an uphill battle persuading
Native Americans that it is prepared to protect their interests
rather than confound them. Given the U.S. government's track
record in dealing with this continent's original owners, the
task of rebuilding trust will take considerable will and faith
on both sides.