Tale of Tears

When the Bureau of Indian Affairs occupied the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, it was an old story with a modern twist.

Amy Sturgis from the March 1999 issue

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While the occupation no doubt intensified such feelings, it's worth pointing out that the BIA has inspired similar hostility among native Americans--and non-Indian critics--for most of its 175 years. The agency has long been criticized for running roughshod over the very people it is supposed to serve. In a 1953 Yale Law Journal article, for instance, Felix S. Cohen, the author of the standard Handbook of Federal Indian Law that is still used today, compared the BIA to an extortion racket and detailed how agency officials threatened American Indian communities with losing their oil and natural gas rights, hospitals, and schools if they did not support the agency and its agenda. More recently, in Stealing From Indians (1994), David L. Henry, a certified public accountant and former BIA employee, exposed multiple cases of agency theft, embezzlement, and fraud against a number of American Indian nations by BIA agents. Tribal losses, according to Henry, amounted to billions of dollars.

Such exposés have been matched by decades of official calls for reform. In 1948, the Hoover Commission, charged with evaluating the organization of the federal executive branch, suggested dismantling the BIA in favor of a more decentralized, state-based system. The "Declaration of Indian Purpose," the product of a meeting of more than 450 tribal leaders at the 1961 Voice of the American Indian Conference, called for an end to government "charity" and bureaucratic paternalism altogether in favor of complete self-determination. The 1966 Presidential Task Force Report on the American Indian advised a fundamental overhaul of the BIA, as did the 1969 report known as the Josephy Study. The 1975 Indian Self-Determination Act, which granted all tribes the right to manage programs and services formerly administered by the BIA, even apparently abolished the agency's raison d'être.

Somehow, though, 150 years after the removal era, the BIA manages to get along quite nicely. Its 1998 budget was $1.73 billion, up from $1.6 billion the previous year. As suggested by the lack of a federal investigation or reprimand after the CNO occupation, the agency continues to escape any real scrutiny and accountability. Questions about the BIA extend far beyond its police power: The agency has done little to address the new urban and technological realities of native American life. For instance, while Cherokees in Oklahoma and beyond have embraced Web-based entrepreneurship and designed software programs capable of transcribing traditional native languages, the BIA still focuses on early 20th-century concerns such as agricultural issues.

Indeed, even as the CNO struggles to move beyond the crisis in governing of the past few years, the status quo seems to be holding at the agency that played such a pivotal role. In late 1997, Kevin Gover, an attorney specializing in federal Indian law and a member of the Pawnee tribe, replaced Ada Deer as BIA director. But judging from Gover's address to the 55th Annual National Congress of American Indians last October, such change is cosmetic at best. In his speech, Gover did not talk about policing internal corruption or standardizing BIA procedures. Instead, he said his goal for the agency was "to rediscover and reinvigorate the Warrior spirit in each of us."

Beyond invoking bland platitudes, Gover criticized those who protested the BIA's legacy of capricious actions by warning that "adversaries in Congress" could use "the bureau's shortcomings as an excuse for the refusal to appropriate needed dollars." Gover appears to view the BIA's "shortcomings" merely as political threats to his agency's turf and budget. Such an attitude is all too consistent with the BIA's history and offers little reason for native Americans--and U.S. taxpayers--to cheer. In this country, we are often accused of ignoring the past and refusing to learn from it. Recent events in northeastern Oklahoma suggest that there is substantial truth to such a charge.