Settlers - San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center

IX. NEO-COLONIAL
PACIFICATION IN THE U.S.
Forcing
Native Arnerikans
We don't have to look across the world to confront
neo-colonialism, since some of the most
sophisticated examples are right here. The New Deal
reforms on the Native Amerikan reservations during the
1930s are a classic case of neo-colonial strategy. The U.S.
Empire has always had a special problem with the Indian
nations, in that their varied ways of life were often communistic.
As the U.S. Commissioner of Indian Affairs said
in 1838: "Common property and civilization cannot coexist."
(1) The U.S. Government enacted a genocidal campaign
to erase Indian culture - including prison schools
for Indian children, suppression of Indian institutions,
economy and religion. And still the Indian nations and
peoples survived,, resisted, endured. An A.I.M. comrade
has pointed out:
"The Founding Fathers of the United States
equated capitalism with civilization. They had to, given
their mentality; to them civilization meant their society,
which was a capitalist society. Therefore, from the earliest
times the wars against Indians were not only to take over
the land but also to squash the threatening example of Indian
communism. Jefferson was not the only man of his
time to advocate imposing a capitalistic and possessive
society on Indians as a way to civilize them. The 'bad example'
was a real threat; the reason the Eastern Indian Nations
from Florida to New York State and from the Atlantic
to Ohio and Louisiana are today so racially mixed is
because indentured servants, landless poor whites, escaped
black slaves, chose our societies over the white society that
oppressed them.
"Beginning in the 1890s we have been 'red-baited'
and branded as 'commies' in Congress (see the Congressional
Record) and in the executive boards of churches.
That was a very strong weapon in the 1920's and 1930's,
and in the Oklahoma area any Indian 'traditional' who
was an organizer was called a communist or even a 'Wobbly'.
"So we have always defined our struggle not only
as a struggle for land but also a struggle to retain our
cultural values. Those values are communistic values. Our
societies were and are communistic societies. The U.S.
Government has always understood that very well. It has
not branded us all these years as communists because we
try to form labor unions or because we hung out with the
IWW or the Communist Party, but because the U.S.
Government correctly identified our political system. It did
not make that a public issue because that would have been
dangerous, and because it has been far more efficient to
say that we are savages and primitive." (2)
Not only did the Indian nations resist, but this
resistance included the determined refusal of many Indians
to give up their collective land. This rejection of capitalism
was a hindrance for the oil corporations, the mineral interests,
and the ranchers. Characteristically, the New Deal
decided, in the words of the U.S. Commissioner of Indian
Affairs, that: "...the Indian if given the right opportunities
could do what the government had failed to do: He
could arrange a place for himself and his customs in this
modern America. " (3)
The New Deal pacification program for the reservations
was to give Indians capitalistic "democracy" and
"self-government." Under the direction of the U.S.
Government, bourgeois democratic (i.e. undemocratic)
"tribal governments" were set up, with settleristic "tribal
constitutions," paid elected officials and new layers of Indian
civil servants. In other words, Indians would be given
their own capitalistic reservation governments to do from
within what the settler conquests had been unable to completely
succeed at from the outside.
This neo-colonial strategy was led by a young,
liberal anthropologist, John Collier, who had been appointed
U.S. Commissioner of Indian Affairs in 1933 to
reform the reservation system. Unlike the openly hostile
and repressive pronouncements of his predecessors, Collier
spoke sweetly of how much he respected Indian culture
and how much Indians should be "freed" to change
themselves. Honeyed words, indeed, covering up for a new
assault:
"In the past, the government tried to encourage
economic independence and initiative by the allotment
system, giving each Indian a portion of land and the right
to dispose of it. As a result, of the 138,000 acres which Indians
possessed in 1887 they have lost all but 47,000 acres,
and the lost area includes the land that was most valuable.
Further, the government sought to give the Indian the
schooling of whites, teaching him to despise his old
customs and habits as barbaric ...
"We have proposed in opposition to such a policy
to recognize and respect the Indian as he is. We think he
must be so accepted before he can be assisted to become
something else.. . " (4)
There is the smooth talk of the welfare administrator
and the colonial official in those words. Notice
that the old law gave Indians only one "right" - the right
99 to sell their land to the settlers. Having worked that