Say Anything Blog

The Indian reservations were our government’s solution to a conflict between Americans intent on expanding westward and the natives who were already living there.  Those indigenous people considered the land theirs as it was where they’d lived, hunted, married, procreated and died since time out of mind. The Americans moving westward considered the land wide open for populating and failed to understand why this expansion of their society should be held up by tribes of people who hadn’t developed much beyond the hunter/gatherer stages of societal evolution.

Which of these groups was right?  That’s been a question at the heart of much emotional debate over the years, but for the purposes of this column let’s set it aside and focus on the here and now.  Most of us with a modicum of knowledge about the history of Indian relations are aware of the conflicts between western pioneers and the Indians as well as the humanitarian atrocities (most of them perpetrated upon the Indians) that arose from that conflict.  Suffice it to say that in order to stave off these conflicts the American government herded the Indians onto various reservations around our country, getting them to stay there with promises of things like food, equipment and (later) things like housing, medical care, schools and social entitlements. 

Once the Indians were segregated in this manner they were subjected to cruelty and humiliation at the hands of people like Christian missionaries, who sought to forcefully convert them to their religion, and others who seemed more interested in exploiting the resources of Indian lands than helping the Indians themselves.

But again, this is the past.  What I want to focus on is the here and now, and what Indian reservations are today which are islands of poverty, crime, substance abuse and near total government dependency that would be an embarrassment to the proud tribal leaders of generations past.  Granted, not all Indians live that way today.  Many are quite successful having achieved very high levels of education and success both on and off the reservations, but on the flip side of that many Indians are living on the reservations in filth and abject poverty.

And there are far too many of the latter for us to ignore.

Months ago I wrote a column for this publication called “The Appalling State Of Our Indian Reservations” describing (rather bluntly, I’ll admit) the decrepit, humiliating conditions in which many Indians live on the reservations.  This column caused no small amount of controversy among North Dakota’s Indian population, not the least of which has been threats of lawsuits and banning from the reservations along with personal threats directed at myself and accusations of racism.  But what’s interesting is how so many in the Indian population have become upset at criticism of the reservation system which was invented as a way to essentially put them “out of sight out of mind.”

I don’t think anyone would argue that the American government created the reservation system to benefit the Indians, and given the conditions many Indians live in on the reservations, it’s astounding to me that any Indians would try to defend it.  The reservations are, without a doubt, a form of racial segregation.  They were created to keep people of a certain race, and their descendants, away from the rest of the population.

It’s segregation that has continued through the years, decades after even the Jim Crow racial segregation laws that divided the south were done away with.  And yet while everyone who is not a blinkered racist twit can agree that the racial segregation in the south was inherently racist, many of the Indians segregated onto America’s reservations consider it racist to criticize those reservations or even suggest that they might not be good for their people.

Which is something I attribute to the fact that many Indians have been so thoroughly marginalized and made so completely dependent upon the government that the idea of ending the “welfare state” of the Indian reservations sounds all but obscene.

Yet what is truly obscene are the conditions some on the reservations are living in.

Nobody wants the reservations to be the poverty, crime and drug addled communities they are now, but regardless of what people want that is what they are, and what has made them that way are big-government, welfare-heavy policies that have made many of the Indians dependent upon the government rather than dependent upon themselves.

To be blunt, the failure of the “the government will take care of you” policies on the Indian reservations speaks to the fallacies in all socialist and liberal thinking.  Throughout history whenever a given population has been made too beholden to the government it has resulted in rampant poverty, crime and suffering.  And if you don’t believe me, look at some of the socialist nations of history.  Cuba?  The Soviet Union?  North Korea?  Vietnam?  All socialist countries where the citizenry is/was dependent upon the government and all places where the citizens suffer for it.

The best thing for the Indians would be to end the mean charade of the reservation system so that they weren’t beholden to it and could feel free to travel, as the full-fledged Americans they are, to other places where they could be more successful.  Free economies like the one in America are successful because citizens are free to go to where the jobs and prosperity are, but the Indians don’t enjoy that freedom the same way the rest of us do.  Certainly nobody is stopping them from coming off the reservations, but nobody is encouraging that either. 

And we should be.