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Chapter 7. Forget about It
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Inconvenient Indian, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
History and Mythology
Racism and Systemic Oppression
Land
Sovereignty
Summary
Analysis
King attests that “What Indians Want” is “a future.” However, whatever future Indians can have “will be predicated, in large part, on sovereignty.” The definition of sovereignty is “supreme and unrestricted authority.” In practice, sovereignty is more complex, and rarely “absolute.” Aboriginal sovereignty is legally recognized in treaties, in both the Canadian and American constitutions, and in the Indian Act. In practice, however, it remains a controversial subject.
King has referenced the controversial subject of tribal sovereignty throughout the book, but he finally addresses it directly in Chapter 8. Chapter 8 marks a shift in focus, since it concerns the future of Indian-White relations as opposed to the past, which has been the primary focus of the book thus far.
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In a Globe and Mail article from August 2009, Canadian columnist Jeffrey Simpson takes issue with the practicality of a sovereign nation that consists of only a few hundred people being wholly sovereign. King challenges Simpson’s take by citing the Navajo nation in the Southwest, or the Blackfoot of Alberta, who have been sovereign nations for many years and control on-reserve services in the areas of health, education, and housing.
King implicitly evokes the concept of the Live Indian’s invisibility in this passage, revealing how Simpson’s argument against sovereignty blatantly ignores the successful sovereign Native Nations that exist in present day. In this way, King insinuates that opposition to sovereignty is rooted in its failures in the past rather than its possibility of providing Native tribes with a prosperous future.
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However, complications persist, and Ottawa and Washington, D.C. manage budgets for sovereign indigenous nations while simultaneously remaining uninvolved in other liabilities. For example, in 2010, the Iroquois Nationals lacrosse team was unable to enter England to compete in the International Lacrosse Championships because their Iroquois passports were deemed invalid.
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American historian David Wilkins argues that the U.S. federal government and indigenous tribes are engaged in “an ongoing contest over sovereignty.” Regardless of who is winning that contest, King adds, history has made it clear that neither the Canadian nor U.S. governments have much interest in granting tribes the sovereignty to which either country’s constitution supposedly entitles them. In fact, the federal governments seem expressly interested in minimizing the power of agency tribes have to self-govern.
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King takes issue with the contemporary mainstream belief that North America’s Native population needs to be “rescued from reserves and reservations,” and from pieces of legislation, such as the Indian Act, that give tribes authority. The logic goes that tribes are “obsolete” and broken systems, and that Native peoples need to be free to participate in western capitalism. It follows that treaties actually inhibit “Native-non-Native rapprochement.” Washington State politician Slade Gorton supported this position and made a career out of attacking tribal sovereignty. He sponsored a 1998 Senate bill called “The American Indian Equal Justice Act” which attacked tribal sovereignty on the grounds that it encouraged “social tensions” and was antithetical to “social peace.”
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Gorton’s position is far from unpopular. In 1983, for example, Washington State Senator Jack Metcalf called on Congress to terminate existing treaties with tribes. A major voice in Canada’s neo-termination movement is Thomas Flanagan, a political science professor at the University of Calgary strongly in favor of assimilation. The main points underlying Flanagan’s position are that Aboriginal peoples are not entitled to sovereignty and should not receive federal funding or tax exemptions. Furthermore, closing the Department of Indian Affairs and the Bureau of Indian Affairs would save billions of tax dollars annually. Finally, the dissolution of tribal sovereignty would return treaty-protected lands to the market.
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King shifts his focus away from the theoretical and toward the practical application of sovereignty, specifically the issues of tribal membership and resource development, which he believes are the most important challenges facing contemporary Native peoples. Currently, tribal membership in an Aboriginal Nation is determined by federal law, blood quantum, and tribal regulations. In Canada, the Indian Act and other treaties set the terms required for band membership. In the U.S., membership depends on federal tribal recognition.
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The legality of tribe membership poses challenging questions about Native identity in North America. Presently, most tribes or bands control membership. Specific rules vary among tribes and bands, but the basic requirement is a blood relationship between a registered Indian or ancestor and the Indian requesting membership. Some tribes have additional blood quantum requirement. For example, the Comanche in Oklahoma require a minimum blood quantum of one-quarter. The Cherokee require that a person’s ancestors’ names appear on the 1924 Baker rolls or the 1898-1914 Dawes-Gaion-Miller rolls. Presently, tribes across North America are trying to limit membership due to limited land and other resources. As Native populations grow, there is a call to restrict access of tribal assets to “authentic” Indians. King sees the difficult question of authenticity as simultaneously “self-serving and self-defeating.”
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Sovereignty is important because it enables bands and tribes to have more control over tribal membership, whether that means raising or lowering requirements. In Canada, authenticity is defined by the Indian Act, and there is no alternate way to create new Status Indians outside of birth. While bands may award membership to non-Status Indians or non-Indians, granting them the opportunity to vote in band elections, they would not be eligible to receive benefits allotted to Status Indians in the Indian Act.
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Another reason sovereignty is important to Native peoples is its role in the creation of strong economic systems for reserves and reservations. While reservations with more land have more opportunities for economic growth than reservations with less land, as a whole, they are still considerably limited. One ghastly option King cites as an example available to reservations is to lease portions of their land to waste management companies to be used as garbage dumps. In the 1980s and 1990s, waste management companies sought to convince tribal leaders to allot parts of reservations for dumping sites, since the legal status of reservations enabled companies to forgo many of the environmental regulations enforced by the federal government. Many reservations were so impoverished that such an arrangement appealed to tribal leaders.
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The Navajo face an ongoing battle between economic development and land protection, though so far, economic development has been their priority. The Navajo have engaged in resource mining since the mid-20th century, since much of Navajo country boasts significant quantities of uranium and coal. In 1948, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission launched a mining boom when it promised to buy uranium ore at a set price. While the mining boom created a wealth of jobs for the Navajo, they were ill-informed on the health hazards of uranium and radon gas, or the environmental ramifications of resource mining. In July 1976, the collapse of a dam at the Church Rock nuclear facility at the edge of the Navajo reservation led to the permanent contamination of the Puerco River with radioactive waste. The Navajo ultimately banned uranium mining in 2005.
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Coal mining has also created ecological disasters on Navajo land. The Four Corners power plant, which was created in 1963, for example, emits over 15 million tons of toxic gases each year, including 600 pounds of mercury, far exceeding any power plant in the U.S. Today, air quality on the Navajo and Hopi reservations is far worse than a major city like Los Angeles.
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There have been discussions about launching renewable energy projects on tribal land, and several tribes are already involved in such projects, including the Blackfeet in Browning, Montana, and the Spirit Lake Sioux at Fort Totten, North Dakota.
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Indian Gaming is another major source of economic growth for tribes and bands of North America and comes at a far lesser cost to the environment than resource mining. While it’s true that gaming also comes with an increase in alcohol, drugs, prostitution, and gambling addiction, its profits allow tribes to buy additional land parcels. For example, the Oneida Nation in upstate New York used profits from its Turning Stone Resort and Casino to buy 17,000 acres of land. Furthermore, rather than using this land to contribute to personal wealth (the White American way), tribes have requested that land be combined with their existing reservations and awarded trust status, thus perpetuating the custom of communal living they enjoyed in the past.
But Indian Gaming is not without its critics. After the Tohono O’odham Nation purchased a parcel of land in Glendale, Arizona and announced their plans to build a $600 million casino there, Glendale’s city attorney Craig Tindall expressed his concern about having to deal with “people step[ping] off that land onto [Glendale] jurisdiction,” implicitly perpetuating a negative stereotype of “wild and uncontrolled Indians,” suggests King. Furthermore, the city of Glendale sued the federal government in 2010, claiming that the 1986 federal law that allowed the Tohono O’odham to purchase new land was unconstitutional.
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King connects Glendale’s disapproval of the Tohono O’odham’s land purchase back to words spoken 150 years ago by Secretary of the Interior Carl Schurz, who lamented how the land the U.S. government allotted for reservations ended up being more valuable than the government had originally thought and would be wasted by Indians, who didn’t know how to effectively cultivate it and take advantage of its resources. King sees Schurz’s criticism imbedded in Glendale’s opposition to the Tohono O’odham casino: both complaints stem from a fear that Indians will take away land from Whites. King notes the irony of this situation: for centuries, Whites believed that private land ownership would force Indians to assimilate into Western society, yet Native peoples have learned that purchasing land can actually enable them to uphold their cultural traditions.
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