Tuesday 17 April 2012

Profit and Loss


I love fascinating discoveries, just as I love surprises. I was both fascinated and surprised to learn that the American constitution recognises three sovereign entities: the federal government, the individual states and – this is the surprise – the Indian tribes. Yes, the Indian nations are effectively that – nations.

Clearly these sovereignties are not equal. The Civil War showed that federal authority trumped that of states’ rights. The position with the Indians – I refuse to use the term ‘native American’ – seems to be more ambiguous. Their legal status rests on the various treaties signed in the past with the federal government, bargains which were often just made to be broken.

Though one-sided these deals, when they were not breached, allowed the Indians a certain amount of leeway. They could not raise armies or create a separate currency, but they enjoyed the kind of rights normally exercised by fully sovereign nations, including the right to issue passports.

The right to issue passports is one thing; having them recognised quite another. The Iroquois have their own passports but they have no international recognition, as their lacrosse team discovered when it was refused entry into Britain in 2010. But, my goodness, they take their national rights seriously, even separately declaring war on Germany in 1941, as did the Sioux and some other tribes.

It’s actually only in fairly recent times that the supposed rights of the various Indian nations carried any weight at all. The treaties concluded with the government in the nineteenth century were really ‘bad faith bargains’, ignored when it was convenient to ignore them, especially if it was discovered that the territories allotted to the tribes were subsequently discovered to have hidden value. It was not a relationship of equals. The treaties were most often a way of diminishing native rights by removing them into ever more marginal land, a policy of ghettoisation, which in some ways recalls the ‘homelands’ created by the old apartheid state of South Africa.

These ‘red ghettos’, as one Indian author described them, effectively became rural slums, noted more for poverty, unemployment, alcoholism and crime than the preservation of traditional values. These so-called sovereign nations were really no more than federal dependencies, overseen by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. A change of attitude came in 1934 when Congress endorsed a degree of self rule, though – amazingly – it wasn’t until the late 1970s that the persecution of traditional religious practices was ended with the passing of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act.

That same decade the bogus treaties of the past were given real legal substance with the adoption of the Indian Self-Determination Act, beginning the transfer of administrative authority from the Bureau of Indian Affairs to the various tribal governments. So what did this mean in practice, what innovations did it bring? Buffalo hunting may have been out but the hunting for punters was in! The business of America may be business but the business of the Indian nations is gambling.

There is another parallel here with the South African homelands, where supposedly independent entities made money through gaming, free of restrictions applied elsewhere. Indian independence, such as it is, has been built in the modern age on the roulette wheel and the slot machine. When early attempts at gaming on reservations came into conflict with state law the matter went as high as the Supreme Court, which in 1987 decided that the tribes, as sovereign entities, could not be barred from running casinos and other gambling facilities. This was followed by an act of Congress which specifically allowed Indian gambling, provided that the proceeds were used for “tribal economic development.”

Now, according to a report I read in the Economist, the various Indian gaming houses take up to 44% of America’s total gambling revenue. Almost half of the tribes across the land have taken advantage of the opportunity, not hunting bucks but making bucks. The key to success or failure here is location: the closer to major population centres the better things are. White settlers in the nineteenth century may not have been welcome; white gamblers in the twenty-first most definitely are.

According to David Wilkins, professor of American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota, gambling has become the biggest economic boost to the tribes since the fur trade in the nineteenth century. The results, though, seem to be mixed. There have been some positive benefits in “tribal economic development” when the proceeds are spent wisely, which, sad to say, is not always the case.

In some reservations profits, shared out as dividends, are little better than doles, reinforcing a culture of dependency. It has also led to a form of racial discrimination which would be shocking if practiced elsewhere in America. Some tribes have adopted ‘blood quantum’ laws, obliging an individual to prove his genetic antecedents. More than that, thousands have been disenrolled from tribal membership because of doubts over their ancestry. Gaming, or the profits of gaming, is clearly in the blood.

In times gone by the more braves the greater the power. In times present the fewer braves the bigger the pot. For those unfortunate enough to full victim to greed or simple spite the results are fairly dire. The loss of guaranteed revenue is bad enough but what makes it worse is the potential loss of tribal housing, education, welfare and other benefits. Beyond that it entails a compete loss of community and identity.

The whole thing seems quite invidious. But there are bigger questions over the true benefits that gaming has brought to the tribes. Unemployment on the reservations is still eye-wateringly high. Drug and alcohol abuse are both endemic problems, as is obesity and diabetes. Crime rates are twice the national average. For a great many of the people locked into these ‘sovereign nations’ life itself would seem to a game, one in which the odds are not very favourable.

16 comments:

  1. These are very complex issues and it depends how far into past history that you go? Like the "Britain's Greatest Enemy" survey, pick a convenient starting point or take into account the entire known history of North American Civilization. There is much in question that is not taught in school. It is all about commerce, invasion, population shifts, climate, competition for natural resources and dominant cultures imposing their ideologies etc. same repetitious cycles, just somewhat different details. For the most part, these welfare recipients need to get jobs and join society or perish from the face of the earth.

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    1. Complex indeed, Anthony. It's obvious that the Indians were on the losing side of history; they were almost as soon as the Pilgrim Fathers established a final foothold. It's a great pity, though, that they were not allowed to lose with a little more grace.

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  2. (sigh) I was rooting for the Native Americans the whole time. But it was guns vs. arrows and the white man just kept coming.

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    1. Ah, CC, it's impossible to stand against the tides of time. :-)

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  3. Until I retired last year, part of my job involved me in sovereign to sovereign negotiations between the tribes and a U.S. government agency. I met a lot of indian politicians and legal experts from both sides. It was very enlightening. History casts shadows that cannot be ignored.

    It is an interesting aspect of Americana most Americans are completely oblivious to. Some of our local tribes are still technically 'at war' with the U.S.; active hostilities simply ceased without any formal agreements.

    Even more arcane than U.S. government to sovereign tribe politics are inter- and intra-tribal politics. Those wranglings make mid-East diplomacy seem very straightforward.

    I think we shall see some interesting changes when the new expansion of natural gas and oil exploitation move forward. Tribes of different traditions have very different ideas from one another, and from Americans of non-indian cultural backgrounds.

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    1. Calvin, I have nowhere near your level of direct experience but I did once meet and talk with a Comanche chief. It was at the end of a Wild West show in Orlando, Florida. We chatted away, with him telling me of a visit his dance troop once made to the Edinburgh Festival in Scotland. He was so nice to me. I was six years old at the time. :-)

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  4. Ana to what extent do you think the collective situation reveals a link betwen addiction and displacement? I am sure there are other historical examples.

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    1. Richard, I think there is a very high correlation here. Yes, the aborigine in Australia is an obvious one.

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  5. Hi Ana, you may not have come across this t shirt in whatever tony corner of the UK where you and your homies hang, so here's an image: http://www.coyotescorner.com/tshirts-hs6.htm There's another one I bought for my sons on Union Square in New York, which I couldn't find on-line, with a photo of the tragic Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce tribe which says: Sure you can trust the government--just ask an indian!

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    1. Fighting terrorism since 1492! Very good. :-)) Chief Joseph is a tragic case indeed, Chris.

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  6. Ana, you might find this book of interest:

    http://www.amazon.com/Mans-Rise-Civilization-Cultural-Indians/dp/0140153233/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1334800954&sr=8-1

    It was the first comprehensive survey of North American indian culture to recognize its range of complexity across the continent, with groups living simultaneously in every state of social organization from the most primitive family groups of hunter gatherers, up to the city states of the Aztecs and Maya and the Inca's military empire.

    Since the book was published, much more evidence has come to light about the web of connections between different groups of indians, and how relations between them were affected by the arrival of european settlers. There is much more to discover and many old assumptions and misconceptions to be discarded. For example, some authorities now suspect that disease had already vastly depleted the native populace in parts of North and South America long before the arrival of Christopher Columbus, giving rise to the idea that his expedition followed much earlier, undocumented contacts with the New World.

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    1. Now that's a fascinating piece of information, Calvin. Our understanding here in Europe is still conditioned by a rather monolithic notion of a clash of two cultures. The complexity of pre-Columbian tribal politics and dynamics is still not fully understood. I'll add that book to my Amazon list. Many thanks.

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  7. Ana, another term for The People are "Indigenous [Americans]" or its conjunction, "Amerind". In my own case, there is a very small amount of Pamunkey [Indian] blood flowing through my veins (a great-great grandmother on Father's side of the house was a fullblood). Early on, our tribe could see how things were going to turn out:

    From VirginiaMemory [dot] com:
    "Cockacoeske, the weroansqua, or chief, of the Pamunkey, signed the Treaty of Middle Plantation, which recognized the authority of the colonial government, but also acknowledged property, land use, and hunting rights of the Indians. More than 300 years later, those treaties continue to shape and govern the relationship between the commonwealth and the eight state-recognized Indian tribes—the Mattaponi, the Pamunkey, the Monacans, the Nansemond, the Chickahominy, the Upper Mattaponi, the Eastern Chickahominy, and the Rappahannock. The Mattaponi and Pamunkey, representing the original treaty signers, also continue to pay tribute to the commonwealth's government."

    So, since 1677, all the Weroansqua (chief) has ever had to do is give the Guv a deer or a couple of turkeys, and the "tosh shonte" (englishmen) would leave us alone for another year :-P

    I've never quite understood why the Virginians and the local tribes have co-existed so peacefully through the centuries, but the tribes outside of the state have lived so miserably.

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    1. CB, what a fascinating person you are, with such a rich heritage. :-)

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  8. I once entertained the fantasy that every Western ever made was edited to replace "Indian" with "Native American". Maybe, in today's increasingly Orwellian world, this will happen.

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    1. David, just imagine all of the alterations that would have to be made. For example, the Seven Years War, which is known in North America as the French and Indian War, would have to become the French and Native American War!

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