The Truth About Stories (15 page)

Hocus-pocus!

Indians. Now you see them. Now you don't.

If you're a scholar of Native history, you're probably
waiting for me to get to the U.S. Indian Reorganization Act of 1934. Sometimes called
the “Indian Magna Carta” (though I have no idea why), it marked a departure
from the general run of legislation that sought to appropriate the Indian estate and to
assimilate Indians.

In particular, the act guaranteed to Indians the right to practise
traditional religions. It ended the General Allotment Act and allowed that any remaining
surplus lands from that process should be returned to the appropriate tribes. It
re-established tribal governments. It promoted bilingual education. It even provided the
secretary of the interior with an annual appropriation of some two million dollars to
buy back portions of Indian land that had been lost, and, from 1934 to 1947, the Native
land base in the United States was actually increased by almost four million acres.

So why do I sound unhappy?

After all, the Indian Reorganization Act was a step in a different
direction than North American legislation had been taking. Or, more properly, it was a
stumble. For in spite of making its way through Congress and in spite of
having many of its ideas implemented, the Indian Reorganization
Act went against the national temper.

That's a polite way of saying that it annoyed too many people to be
successful or long lived. Politicians were opposed to it because it inhibited their free
run at Indian land. The clergy, wanting to maintain their religious monopolies, were
appalled that Indians could now choose between their traditional beliefs and
Christianity. Bureaucrats, afraid that the basic premise of the act suggested that they
had not done the job of advocating Indian interests, complained that the new rules and
regulations were difficult to administer and impossible to enforce. Even Indians argued
against it. After all, in every other instance when the government had come along with a
program that was going to make their lives better, things usually got worse.

In 1964, I caught a tramp steamer out of San Francisco and worked my
way to New Zealand. I don't know exactly why I went. Adventure, I suppose. That
must have been it.

New Zealand was a beautiful country, but it had a problem. Deer. Some
bright lad had decided to import deer so erstwhile hunters would have something bigger
to shoot than possums and trout, and because the deer had no natural enemies —
other than the aforementioned hunters — they multiplied and began eating up the
countryside. This caused a great deal of erosion in forests and a great deal of
consternation in the forest industry, and the government, in response to complaints from
their
lumber constituents, put together a band of merry men to roam
the woods and control the problem.

Deer cullers.

I needed a job, and deer culling, for reasons I can no longer remember,
sounded exciting, and before the week was out, I found myself heading into the woods
with the sun above me, a knapsack on my back, a rifle slung over my shoulder, a song in
my heart.

Follow the stream, the government man had told me when he dropped me off
at the trailhead. Eight miles in, start looking for the cabin.

Anyone who has ever gone hiking knows that eight miles along a stream in
the woods is not the same as eight miles walking a paved road. By the time the sun
disappeared, I wasn't sure I was any closer to the cabin than I had been when I
started.

Indian lost in the woods.

It's a little embarrassing to admit this. But there I was. Lost. In
the wilds of New Zealand, tripping over supplejack, wading through cold water, wondering
if this was how the country got rid of tourists on thirty-day visas who tried to work
illegally.

I was about to give up and find a cold spot to spend the night when I
heard a voice and saw a light coming through the trees.

Hey! the voice said, over the clatter of the water. You the Indian?

The Indian Reorganization Act had a thirteen-year lifespan. Some
scholars argue that World War II cut it short,
and this could be
true because by the time Americans came home from Europe and the dust of conflict and
nuclear bombs had settled, the Indian Reorganization Act was replaced by another piece
of legislation that did not share the
IRA'S
concern for the
cultural, social, or political life of Native people.

In 1953 the U.S. Congress passed House Concurrent Resolution 108, more
commonly known as the Termination Act. If anyone thought that the Indian Reorganization
Act was a shift in the winds of racism, then they would have been surprised to see
termination blow in from the west. But for those who knew that the
IRA
was just a lull in the storm, termination came as no surprise.

The goal of House Concurrent Resolution 108 was to abolish Indians. It
sought to accomplish this by terminating federal treaty obligations and special
concessions to all tribes, dismantling reservations and “liberating” Native
people from poverty and exclusion, and moving them to more urban centres where
assimilation would be quick and painless.

This effort was managed by the commissioner of Indian affairs, Dillon S.
Myer, who, ironically, had been the director of the War Relocation Authority, which had
imprisoned over one hundred thousand Japanese Americans during World War II, and by
Arthur Watkins, a senator from Utah whose dislike for Indians was legendary, as was his
insatiable appetite for Indian land and resources. Between 1954 and 1962, Congress
stripped sixty-one tribes of all federal services and protection.

Coyotes and Ducks.

Canada followed suit sixteen years later with its own termination plan,
the 1969 White Paper. Brought in under the Trudeau government with the able assistance
of then minister of Indian affairs Jean Chrétien, the 1969 White Paper, even though
it never became official government policy, was virtually a carbon copy of House
Concurrent Resolution 108. Both had a single goal. To get government out of the
“Indian business.”

Or, conversely, to get Indians out of the government's business.

They were sorry. Governments, that is. Sorry that they had promised
Indians anything. Sorry that they had made treaties with Native people. Sorry that they
had given First Nations the impression that they had any special rights under Canadian
or international law.

Sorry, sorry, sorry.

And while they were apologizing and complaining, governments were also
convincing themselves that they had given these things to Native people out of the
goodness of their hearts, that Native rights were something that had flowed from
governmental largesse, or, to restate the matter in the dubious phrasing of
philanthropic neologisms, that Native rights had been “gifted” to Native
people.

It's a lovely sentiment, isn't it. Gifts. The Great White
Mother and Father and their Red Children sitting around a Christmas tree, enjoying the
holidays, the Indians eager to see what presents their parents have bought for them.

A Currier and Ives moment.

And if you point out that all of these so-called
gifts were paid for by Native people, sometimes more than once, and that treaties are
legal, binding documents that cannot be dispensed with just because one party suddenly
finds them inconvenient, bureaucrats, politicians, and an uninformed public roll their
collective eyes and mumble platitudes about the “need to move ahead” or the
danger of “living in the past” or the fact that “times
change.”

Deer cullers worked in pairs. Two men in a small log cabin with a
fireplace. No amenities unless you wanted to count silence. The guy who found me in the
river trying to look, well, not lost was an ex-Australian named Paul Gibson and he was,
by and large, an interesting guy. Most cullers saw the job as a temporary thing. Paul
saw it as a career. Living simply in the woods, living off the land, culling deer until
all the deer in the country had been culled.

There are things that have value, Paul told me that first night as we
drank tea in the cabin, and there are things that don't, and the trick to
happiness is knowing which one you are. Deer and sheep both eat the vegetation and can
cause erosion that will ruin the forest industry, but sheep have value and deer
don't, so that's why we shoot them.

It was an intriguing philosophy, one with a certain amount of merit.

Take me, for instance, he said. I don't have no value. That's
why I stay here and hunt the deer. What about you?

I told him I thought I had some value.

No sense kidding yourself, he said. Guy like you runs away and comes to
New Zealand to live in the woods with a guy like me and hunt deer. You see what I
mean?

I told him I wasn't planning on staying forever, that I just needed
some money to get started.

Indians, he said. They're pretty much like Maoris, aren't
they?

More or less, I told him.

Then you and the deer should get along just fine.

Okay. Let's forget about the past for a moment.

After all, everything I've mentioned so far is at least thirty years
old, most of it over a hundred. So let's look at the present, and, in particular,
at the U.S. Indian Arts and Crafts Act and the Canadian Bill
C-31
.

Both are “termination” legislation (if you're American)
or “enfranchisement” legislation (if you're Canadian), and unlike
earlier legislation that implicitly asked the question “Who is an Indian?”
these newer offerings ask the more modern question, “Whom will we allow to be an
Indian?”

In the United States, the Indian Arts and Crafts Act was enacted to keep
cheap reproductions of Native arts and crafts off the market and to ensure that, if
something said “Made by an Indian,” it was. Within the legislation were
fines for fraudulent representation, but, more importantly, there were also rules and
regulations that described who could be an Indian and who could not.

According to the act, an Indian tribe is any tribe, band, nation, Alaskan
Native village, or other organized group
or community that is
recognized as eligible for the special programs and services provided by the United
States to Indians because of their status as Indians, or any Indian group that has been
formally recognized as an Indian tribe by a state legislature or a state commission or
similar organization legislatively vested with state tribal recognition authority.

The term “Indian” means any individual who is a member of an
Indian tribe or, for the purposes of the act, is certified as an Indian artisan by an
Indian tribe.

It's a well-meaning law that was aimed at unscrupulous businesses
and individuals selling arts and crafts as “Indian made” when in fact they
were not, and it allows members of the public to feel secure in their purchases. And the
act has hefty punishments for violations. Individuals who violate the law can be fined
up to $250,000 and sent to prison for five years, or both. Businesses that violate the
act can face civil penalties and fines up to $1 million.

The only problem is that there are Indian tribes that are not federally or
state recognized, and there are individual Indians who, for one reason or another,
aren't federally recognized and don't have tribal status.

Shadow Indians.

Grey Indians.

Not really Indians at all.

And if these Shadow Indians produce any arts and crafts for sale, they may
not refer to themselves as “Indian artists” or by a tribal designation. No
matter what their ancestry, community, or background. Just how big is this
problem? How many Shadow Indians does this law affect? Does the
value of the law outweigh the problems it might cause for a few individuals?

Well, those really aren't the questions, are they?

In the case of Canada's Bill
C-31
, you have a similar but different
conundrum. In 1985, Bill
C-31
amended the Indian Act, in part to redress the
discrimination against Native women. Prior to
C-31
any Indian woman who married a
non-Indian or a non-status Indian automatically lost her status, as did any children.
The same was not true for Indian men. If they married a non-Indian or a non-status
Indian, the woman gained status, as did her children.

Bill
C-31
allowed Native women who had lost status because of the Indian
Act to regain status, along with their children. And in that respect, the bill was a
great success.

Since the act was amended in 1985, some hundred thousand Native people who
were non-status because of the discriminatory provisions of the Indian Act have been
able to regain their status. And if we look at that figure alone, it would appear that
Bill
C-31
is about the business of creating new Indians (as it were) rather than
legislating us out of existence.

So before Bill
C-31
, you could gain status or lose status through marriage
depending on gender. After Bill
C-31
, no one could gain or lose status through marriage.
You would suppose then that status is safe, protected by legislation, approved by the
government, available to every treaty Indian in Canada.

Did I mention about appearances being deceiving?
Status, as it is currently defined, is safe only as long as status Indians marry status
Indians and their children marry status Indians. The minute a status Indian marries out
of status, their children and their children's children are at risk.

Because, as it turns out, while you can't gain or lose status
through marriage, your children can.

And here's how it works.

A status Indian marries a status Indian. They have two children, both of
whom are status. One child marries a status person and the other child marries a
non-status person. The children produced by the status/status couple are status. The
children produced by the status/non-status couple are status.