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Native American self- goverment vs. sovereignty and nationalism
AMERICAN INDIAN SELF-GOVERNANCE:
FACT, FANTASY AND PROSPECTS FOR THE FUTURE
--Ward Churchill, Creek-Cherokee
The question of self-governance among American Indian nations
encapsulated within what is now the United States of America is one
of the more confused issues in modern politics. While there is a
general understanding that the indigenous nations of North America
once existed as fully self-governing entities, those concerned with
the matter have proven spectacularly unable to arrive at even a
common definition of what constitutes (or might constitute)
contemporary Indian self-governance, whether it presently exists
or, if it does not, how it might be achieved. The present paper is
an effort to examine both the proper meanings (facts) of self-
governance and misunderstandings (fantasies), apply these
observations to the situation in which Indian nations presently
find themselves vis a vis the U.S., and advance a prospectus for
Indian self-governance over the coming decades. Insofar as the
space allowed for pursuit of these themes is quite limited, only
the briefest overview will be possible.
FACT
The various American Indian peoples resident to the territory now
known as the United Sates are nations within even the strictest
legal definition. Further, they have been formally, and in many
cases repeatedly, recognized as such by the U.S. government.
Article I of the U.S. Constitution affirms quite clearly that
subordinate sovereignties such as states, counties, municipalities
and individuals or groups of individuals are prohibited from
entering into treaty agreements. Only the federal government
itself is allowed to engage in treaty-making, and then only with
other fully sovereign national entities (never with states,
counties, etc.). In advancing these principles within its own
domestic law, the U.S. was or is reflecting the terms,
understandings and requirements of international law, custom and
convention. Each of the 371 duly ratified treaties between the
federal government and an American Indian people thus represents
the de facto formal recognition by the U.S. of the fully sovereign
national status of that Indian people, in accordance with both the
laws of the United States and the laws of nations. From this, we
may readily discern that American Indian nations possess every
legal and moral right to conduct themselves as such, unless they
themselves have knowingly, willingly and formally given up such
rights.
Today, representatives of the federal government contend that
while all of this may be true in principle, and have actually been
true in practice in certain historical instances, the contemporary
circumstance is rather different. They point to a series of
federal court decisions and statutes holding that, rather than
comprising nations in the fullest sense of the term, American
Indian peoples constitute "domestic dependent nations" over which
the federal government exercises superior sovereign prerogatives as
well as a "trust responsibility" involving jurisdictional and
administrative control. Further, they argue, while American
Indians within the United States are acknowledged to still belong
to their various indigenous polities, they are also citizens of the
U.S. under provision of the 1887 General Allotment Act and the 1924
Indian Citizenship Act and are thus doubly subordinate to the
federal system. The bottom line, from the federal perspective is
therefore that American Indian nations enjoy a "limited
sovereignty." This is to say that they retain all of their
original national rights which have not been specifically usurped
by the government of the United States; the fact that there are
presently more than 5,000 federal statutes designed to effect
precisely this usurpation speaks amply to the latitude of national
self-governance with which Indians have been left by the 1980s.
Advocates of such a view purposefully neglect to mention that
each of the elements of "law" were unilaterally extended (imposed)
by the United States in direct contradiction to the treaty
understandings already (and still) in effect with Indian nations.
There is no record of American Indian nations having willingly
accepted the notion that they were either domestic to or
particularly dependent upon the U.S. To the contrary, these same
nations are documented as having spent the bulk of the 19th century
engaged in armed resistance and suffering truly horrendous
suffering in a concerted effort to avoid being accorded precisely
this status. Similarly, there has never been anyone, even a
federal bureaucrat, recorded as being brazen enough to suggest
that Indians were somehow mutual participants in bringing about
passage of the General Allotment and Citizen Acts, that requested
the extension of federal criminal and civil jurisdiction over their
homelands, or andy of the rest of the measures upon which the idea
of U.S. sovereign superiority rests. And yet, absent the willing
consent of the Indian nations to the diminishment of their
sovereign status, such measures on the part of the federal
government can only be viewed as abridgments (violations) of the
treaties into which it had entered with the Indians. The
implications of this are readily apparent in Article VI of the
U.S. Constitution, in which it is stated unequivocally that
treaties represent the "Supreme Law of the Land," on par with the
law embodied with the Constitution itself: the terms and
provisions of a ratified and unabrogated treaty cannot therefore
be legally contradicted or impugned by the passage of any
subordinate legislation.
Proponents of the government view also omit to (quite willfully,
it appears, insofar as such matters have been repeatedly pointed
out to them), that this unilateral reduction of American Indian
nations to federally subordinate or "quasi-sovereign" status --
similar to that occupied by the states of the union or,
increasingly, to that of counties or municipalities, subject to
even state jurisdiction and control -- was and is quite illegal in
terms of the constitutional requirements pertaining to the entities
with which the U.S. government is authorized and empowered to
treat. This is no mere academic point. For the federal government
to hold that Indian peoples constitute less than fully sovereign
national entities is to simultaneously argue that the entire
treaty-making process undertaken by the government with those
peoples is and always was illegal. This, of course, would serve to
void the treaties en toto. In turn, insofar as the treaties
include the land cession clauses by which the U.S. acquired what it
contends is "legal title" to upwards of 70% of its present domestic
territoriality, the basis by which the United States has always
claimed a right to its own land-base would be obliterated. The
only fall-back position would then be resort to the doctrine of the
"right of conquest," no small problem for a nation-state which has
consistently disavowed this same doctrine in the name of purported
"moral superiority" (and which assumed a leadership role in
executing the nazi leadership for having engaged in "aggressive
war" while pursuing exactly the same "right").
Federally oriented legal theorists and policy-makers are thus
forced to advance and insist upon the validity of a sheer logical
impossibility: that Indian nations are simultaneously fully
sovereign (in the abstract sense) for purposes treaty-
making/transferring land title to the U.S., and less than sovereign
(in the practical sense) for purposes of allowing "legitimate"
federal control ("exercise of trust") over Indian land, water and
other resources, regulation of trade and diplomatic relations, form
of governance, recognition of citizenry, jurisprudence, and
virtually anything else striking the federal fancy. Such a
convoluted and absurd "doctrine" must also be maintained in order
for the U.S. to be able to assert in the international arena that
it has always comported itself on the basis of humane, treaty-
anchored (i.e.: nation-to-nation) understandings with "its"
indigenous population(s) while at the same time insisting that
"Indian Affairs" are a purely "internal" concern of the U.S., and
are thereby not subject to international consideration, scrutiny or
intervention (as would be the case in any true nation-to-nation
relationship, under international law).
In a number of important ways, it is not difficult to discover
recent parallels to the U.S. attitude toward American Indian
nations. The French, for example, offered similar arguments to
explain and justify their relationship to Indochina and Algeria
during the 1950s. The Belgians advanced similar rationales in an
attempt to justify their hold upon the Congo during the same
decade. Portugal resorted to the same arguments concerning Angola
during the 1960s and '70s. And, of course, the list could go on at
great length. The point, however, is that the common denominator
of every example which could be mustered is that the relationship
is one of colonialism. American Indian nations within the United
States are held, then, as colonies -- internal colonies -- of the
United States. Viewed in this light, all of the apparent
inconsistencies and contradictions of U.S. "Indian policy"
disappear; the policy is quite simply illegal under international
law, from top to bottom, side to side, and at every step along the
way; federal "Indian law" is not and was never so much a matter of
law as it is U.S. colonial domination over every indigenous nation
it encountered.
Many points can be made from this understanding, but what is of
primary importance for this paper is that, as is the case in any
colonial setting, the notion of "self-governance" among the
colonized -- while its illusion is often deliberately fostered as
a tactical expedient by the colonizer -- is a cruel hoax. Often,
in advanced colonial settings (such as that evidenced within U.S.)
the colonized are convinced to administer and impose upon
themselves the policies and regulations set forth by their
colonizers. This self-administration is what is so often cynically
touted by the colonizers and their puppets among the colonized as
being self-governance. In sum, it is both fair and accurate to
state that America Indian self-governance does not exist within the
United States at the present time, and that it in fact cannot
exist until such time as the fundamental structural relationship
between the U.S. and Indian nations is radically altered. American
Indian nations, if they are ever to exercise self-governance, must
confront the necessity of a decolonization struggle in the truest
sense of the term.
FANTASY
The origin of what is typically passed off as being the "model of
modern American Indian self-governance" can probably be dated from
1921, when Standard Oil sent a group of geologists to the northern
portion of the Navajo Reservation to investigate the possibility
that there were petroleum deposits in the area. The explorers'
reports being highly favorable, Standard next dispatched a group of
representatives to negotiate -- in cooperation with the Bureau of
Indian Affairs -- a leasing arrangement by which the corporation
could begin drilling and extraction operations. By provision of
the 1868 treaty between the Navajo and the U.S., it was necessary
that Standard secure both agreement from the Navajo government and
approval of the Secretary of Interior in order for any such
contract to be legal and binding. As it turned out, secretarial
approval posed no problem, but the traditional Navajo Council of
Elders voted unanimously to reject the idea of allowing the
corporation to exploit their land and resources.
Such and outcome was obviously unacceptable to Standard, and to
the U.S. Department of Interior (under which virtually all
"internal" development of lands and resources was lodged at the
time). Consequently, in 1923, the federal government unilaterally
appointed what it called "The Navajo Grand Council," a small group
of hand-picked and "educated" (i.e.: indoctrinated in the values
and mores of Euroamerica) Indians, from which representatives of
the traditional Navajo government (with which the U.S. had entered
into a solemn treaty) were entirely excluded. Washington then
announced that this new council, devoid as it was of any sort of
Navajo support, would henceforth be recognized as the sole
"legitimate" governmental representative body of the Navajo Nation;
the traditional Navajo form of governance was, at the stroke of the
federal pen and with no popular Din_ (Navajo) agreement whatsoever,
was totally disenfranchised and supplanted. And, of course, one of
the very first acts of the Washington-appointed replacement entity
was to sign the federally/corporately desired leasing instruments,
setting in motion and "legitimizing" a sustained process of mineral
expropriation on Navajo which has profited a range of non-Dine
businesses and individuals quite mightily while leaving the Navajo
people in truly abject poverty, their traditional subsistence
economy ruined, and their land-base destroyed to the extent that it
has been seriously considered for official designation as a U.S.
"National Sacrifice Area."
Throughout the entire period since 1923, the forms of democratic
governance at Navajo -- the inculcation of voting rather than
consensus as a means of governmental selection, subdivision of the
reservation into electoral districts, expansion of the council to
include representatives from each district, the hypothetical
division of governmental structure into executive, legislative and
judicial spheres, and so on -- have been carefully installed and
polished at Navajo. And the rhetoric of self-governance --
supposedly evidenced in the fact that leaders of the tribal council
always affix their signatures to business agreements made "in
behalf of" their people, that a Navajo lobbying office is
maintained in Washington, and the like -- has been consistently
advanced by Navajo and federal politicos alike. It is even
possible that at least some of the actors on both sides of the
equation actually believe what they are saying.
But reality is dramatically different from rhetoric. During the
entire half-century in which the Navajo council has been
functioning in its mature form, it has never been allowed to
negotiate a single business agreement on its own initiative. It
has continued to be totally restricted from entering into any
agreement with any "foreign government" other than the that of the
United States, whether for purposes of trade or for any other
reason. Consequently, it has never been able to negotiate mineral
extraction royalty rates on anything resembling favorable terms,
to establish or enforce even minimal standards of cleanup and land
reclamation upon transient extractive corporations doing business
upon its land, or even to determine the number of livestock which
can be grazed within its borders. For that matter, the Navajo
council has never -- as the ongoing "Navajo-Hopi Land Disputes" in
the 1882 Executive Order and so-called Bennett Freeze areas of the
reservation readily attest -- been able to exert any particular
influence in the determination of exactly what the borders of the
Navajo Nation actually are. Even the citizenry of the Navajo
Nation has been defined by the federal government, through
imposition of a formal eugenics code termed "blood quantum" and
nearly a century of direct control over tribal rolls; these
federal "methods" of manipulating and arithmetically constricting
the indigenous population have become so embedded in the Indian
consciousness and psyche that Washington can rely upon the "self-
governance" mechanisms of Native America to abandon their own
traditions and concern with sovereignty, adhering to federal
definitions of Indian identity, thus imposing the burden of stark
racism upon themselves.
Council members like to point out that they have a court system,
police force and jails operating on the reservation, and submit
that this is evidence of self-governance, but the fact of the
matter is that Navajo possesses no jurisdictional authority at all
over non-Navajos committing crimes within the Navajo Nation. For
that matter, they have equally little jurisdiction over their own
citizenry when it comes to felony and serious misdemeanor crimes,
as well as in a number of important civil areas. In order to
resolve issues between themselves and any of their corporate
lessees, they have no recourse but to pursue matters in U.S. courts
rather than their own. In order to resolve issues with the federal
government, they must secure permission from that same government
to litigate in that government's own courts. In order even to
impose a severance tax upon their own mineral resources as these
are extracted by trans-national corporations -- the uncontested
right of every state of the union -- they must secure permission
from the federal government to seek (and in limited way secure) a
federal court opinion allowing them to do so. Things are at this
point so confused that one can hear Navajo Tribal Chairman Peter
McDonald, in all apparent seriousness and in the context of the
same speech, spout the rhetoric of being head of a "sovereign,
self-governing nation," and propose that the Navajo Nation be
elevated to the status of a state within the United States.
This is national self-governance? The fact is that, fantasies to
the contrary, the Navajo council and its chair have exactly zero
control over any aspect of Navajo affairs. Every shred of their
policy is and always has been utterly contingent upon the approval
of the U.S. Interior Secretary, the federal courts, and often
enough corporate leaders and the governments of the three states
within which the Navajo Reservation technically lies. Beyond this
it is true that -- with a minuscule number of exceptions -- the
same situation presently prevails in every reservation area of the
country. The reason for this is that the Navajo Grand Council
model had, by the early 1930s, proven itself so successful in
simultaneously serving U.S. interests while offering illusions to
the contrary that it was imposed across the face of Indian Country
through 1934 Indian Reorganization Act (I.R.A.). Imposed is the
correct word because, although each American Indian nation which
was "reorganized" under the statute -- having its traditional
governmental structure usurped and replaced by a council directly
patterned after a corporate board -- supposedly voted affirmatively
in a referendum to undergo the process, the reality is (as always,
in these things) rather different. At the Pine Ridge Reservation
(Oglala Lakota Nation), for example, a number of dead people
somehow managed to crawl out of their graves to vote for
reorganization; even after this was documented as being the case,
the referendum results were allowed to stand and reorganization to
proceed. At Hopi, to another example, more than 85% of all
eligible voters (federally defined) opposed and actively boycotted
the referendum; their abstentions were counted as "aye" votes by
the Bureau of Indian Affairs and reorganization proceeded. The
list of such examples can be extended, in one or another degree of
virulence, to every Indian nation which was reorganized in
accordance with the federal prescription.
All fantasies of self-governing characteristics aside, the
absolute predicate of any I.R.A. government is its acceptance --
indeed, reinforcement -- of the emphatically sub-national status
accorded American Indian nations by the U.S., to legitimize their
peoples' subordination through their public endorsement of it, to
toe the line of limitations decreed by the federal government and
ultimately barter the genuine interests of their people in exchange
for the petty position and essentially minor material compensation
which serving as puppets of a foreign power affords them. This is
advanced colonial administration in its very purest form, whether
one wishes to draw one's parallel to the leadership of Vichy
France or the Thieu regime in what was once called the Republic of
South Vietnam.
Self-evidently, such governments will not, and in fact
structurally cannot, pursue actual self-determination, self-
governance and sovereignty. They will never and can never attempt
to consolidate real control over their remaining land-bases,
physically recover lands illegally taken from their people, throw
the federal bureaucrats and supporting police off their
reservations, try to physically bar the corporate rape of their
territories, or enter into diplomatic and trade relations with
other nations. They will not and they cannot, because in the final
analysis they owe their fealty and their allegiance not to their
won people (or even themselves) but to their colonizers. It is the
colonizer, after all, not their people, who provides the positions
they occupy, whatever claim to legitimacy it really carries, the
means for its continuation. The relationship is one of symbiosis
and mutual perpetuation in an unbalanced sort of way.
From here it is but a short step to viewing I.R.A. governments,
not as champions of American Indian self-governance, but as literal
barriers to it. This is true in the mere fact of the existence of
such entities, and the confusion this inherently engenders
concerning "who are the real representatives of Indian people."
But, more, it has become true in the sense that these self-
proclaimed and federally validated "responsible (To Whom? To what?)
representatives" of Native America have increasingly taken to
lending their energies and their voices to discrediting any Indian
or group of Indians audacious enough to address the questions
attending true resumption of national prerogatives by American
Indian peoples. We see this classically in example of former
Rosebud Sioux Tribal Chairman Webster Two Hawk, wandering around on
the federal dole like a clown, wearing a crew cut and "war bonnet,"
parroting the views of the Nixon administration vis a vis the
American Indian Movement's finally (in 1972) calling the Bureau of
Indian Affairs to account for its colonial arrogance and at least
a few of its more blatant transgressions at the expense of Indian
people. More grimly, we see former Pine Ridge Tribal Chairman
Dick Wilson forming a cabal of gun-thugs known as the GOONs to act
as surrogates for the FBI, engaging in outright mass murder to
prevent an insurgent grassroots movement of traditional Oglalas
pursuing their rights under the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty from
"spoiling" a planned secret expropriation of uranium deposits in
the northwest quadrant of the reservation. And again, more
immediately, we observe the same phenomenon -- somewhat less
sharply defined -- in Navajo Tribal Chairman McDonald's sending of
his gun-thugs (this time called "tribal police") to evict the staff
of the Navajo Times newspaper from their offices for the offense of
having publicly criticized and exposed certain of his
federal/corporate relationships. And, as should be a sad refrain
by now, this list of such examples could be extended at length.
PROSPECTS FOR THE FUTURE
Native America is at a crossroads. If the present hegemony of
I.R.A.-style governance is maintained and allowed to continue its
give-away program in terms of American Indian national rights, the
future looks bleak indeed. Remaining on the course sketched above
can result only in the permanent reduction of American Indian
sovereignty and self-governance to, at best, the level of very
minor components within the overall U.S. governmental/ political
apparatus. In the case of many (or even most) of the smaller
Indian nations, eventual termination -- "auto-termination" may be
a better term -- and absorption directly into the "melting pot"
seems the most likely outcome. In other words, the final
liquidation of Native America is a distinct possibility over the
next half-century or less.
Fortunately, alternatives have emerged since 1970. These have
related a considerable degree to the momentum created by the
actions and activities of the American Indian Movement and related
"militant" organizations, particularly during the period 1972-78.
In retrospect, there can be no serious question that the 1972
Trail of Broken Treaties occupation of the Bureau of Indian
Affairs Building in Washington, for example, did more to bring
Indians into the BIA than all the petitions and letters of "more
responsible" and "legitimate" tribal officials over the preceding
50 years. And the so-called Twenty Points advanced by Trail
participants as a cohesive American Indian socio-political agenda
still represent a benchmark expression of indigenous sovereignty.
Ironically, those indians hired as a result -- during the major
BIA "integration" period lasting from 1976-77 -- seemed to take it
as a matter of faith that they should comport themselves in a
manner which can only be described as anti-AIM.
Similarly, AIM's actions at Gordeon, Nebraska in 1972, and
Custer, South Dakota in 1973, yielded an incalculable impact upon
the concept of indian rights and the value of Indian life among
reservation-adjacent non-Indians throughout the United States. In
a tangible way, these AIM undertakings brought to a screeching halt
a nation-wide rash of ritual or thrill killings of Indian people
which had been mounting for some time. By any estimation, this was
vastly more than had been accomplished by more than a decade of
"polite" discussions about the "problem" by the federally-approved
Indian leadership with state, local and national U.S. law
enforcement officials. Yet, predictably, "official" Native America
did little in response but criticize and condemn AIM's "violent
tactics" (One is forced to ask here exactly how diminishing a wave
of homicides through utilization of methods involving no loss of
life could ever have been reasonably construed as "violence").
Again, AIM's stand on the Pine Ridge Reservation from 1973-76,
refusing to swerve from its support of Oglala national rights under
terms of the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty -- in the face of a hideously
lethal federal repression -- can only be viewed as a tremendously
important point of departure for the general rebirth of American
Indian pride in the U.S., and an increasing Indian willingness to
stand and attempt to (re)assert their broader rights to genuine
self-determination. As always, "duly elected" tribal officials
tended overwhelmingly to attack AIM while defending the federal
"right" to maintain "order" on the reservation, regardless of the
cost and consequences of such order to Indians. It is now a
sublime paradox that many tribal council members have themselves
begun to mimic AIM viewpoints and AIM pronouncements of a decade
hence, never having abandoned their clever description of those who
showed them the way as being "Assholes In Moccasins."
What the AIM "radicals" were, and in many cases still are,
demonstrating is that in order for Indians to make gains, to self-
determine and self-govern, it is absolutely essential to proceed
by something other than the self-serving "rules of the game" laid
down by the U.S. government. Put another way, those who would
claim sovereignty must endeavor to exercise it, to rely upon their
own sense of legality and morality, and to act accordingly. By the
1980s, this dynamic had become clearly consolidated in the
occupation of Yellow Thunder Camp near Rapid City, in the Black
Hills, part of an overt program of reclaiming Lakota territory
guaranteed under the Fort Laramie Treaty, but illegally taken
during the 1870s by the U.S. The same may be said of the ongoing
resistance to federally imposed relocation of traditional Din_ from
their land in the Big Mountain area of the Navajo and Hopi
reservations in northeastern Arizona, and there are many other
examples, ranging from the continuing fishing rights struggles in
the Pacific Northwest to the stands taken by the Six Nations
Iroquois Confederacy along the U.S.-Canadian border in the
Northeast, to similar positions adopted by the O'Otam (Papago)
along the U.S.-Mexican border in the Southwest, to the refusal of
nearly half of all the Seminole people of Florida to accept
federal recognition as a *validation* of their personal and
national existence. Again, one might view the emergence of an
American Indian presence in the international arena, through the
United Nations Working Group on Indigenous Populations (a sub-part
of the U.N. Commission on Human Rights) to have come from the same
impetus and to be following the same general trajectory.
Perhaps the purest articulation of the AIM alternative to I.R.A.
colonialism bay be found in the platform assembled under the title
TREATY for use by Russell Means in his candidacy for the Pine
Ridge tribal presidency in 1984. Here for the first time (at
least in terms of the 20th Century) was offered a truly
comprehensive program by which a given American Indian nation could
undertake to recover control over its own affairs, abolishing the
I.R.A. system and restoring political power to the traditional
Councils of Elders, opening up diplomatic and trade relations with
other nations than the U.S., begin a systematic effort at restoring
its own land-base and revitalizing a traditionally oriented economy
thereon, asserting jurisdictional prerogatives and control over the
definition of its own membership/citizenry, and converting the
educational system to its own rather than its opponents uses. All
of this was conceived by way of using the I.R.A. structure against
itself in a sort of exercise in political ju jitsu.
So effective and threatening was the TREATY concept seen by
federal authorities and those Indians on Pine Ridge who owe their
allegiance to that government rather than to their own ostensible
constituents, that they conspired to disqualify Means from the
reservation ballot, not on the basis of any alleged offense against
the Lakota people or Lakota law, but because he had been convicted
of expressing contempt toward an alien South Dakota court some
years previously. Despite the fact that it was never actualized on
Pine Ridge, the point should be made insofar as the I.R.A.
establishment was prepared to go to such lengths to suppress the
TREATY, it obviously bears extensive study, adaptation and
implementation by other Indians, in other places.
And, indeed, this appears to be occurring, either in literal or
more diffused fashion. The Haida Draft Constitution, generated by
a people whose territory is split between the U.S. and Canada in
the Alaska region, embodies many of the same elements embodied in
the TREATY Platform. Many of the gains posted by Pacific Northwest
nations such as Quinault and Lummi in recent years also proceed in
accordance with many of the same liberatory principles expressed
in TREATY. And, to a certain extent at least, many of the ideas
concerning Lakota land recovery and self-governance contained in
the present S 705 "Bradley Bill" are drawn from the TREATY
framework. These are all encouraging signs, and there are a
number of others which might be cited.
It is time, if American Indian self-governance in any real
sense -- as nations rather than as integral components of
Euroamerican empire -- is to once again become a functioning
reality, to begin to consciously destroy the I.R.A. system, to
discard "leaders" who profess fealty to it, to renounce the
"federal trust relationship" and reject all interaction with the
BIA, and to begin to assert actual Indian alternatives. It will
not be a quick or pleasant process. There will no doubt be severe
costs and consequences associated with such a line of action and
development. But the fact is that the costs and consequences
attending subordination to the federal will are, and have always
been, far higher. The choice is really between extinction and
resurgence. And viewed in this way, there is simply no real
choice at all.
======================================================================
Taken from _Indian Self-Governance: Perspectives on the Political
Status of Indian Nations in the United States of America_, Ed. by
Dr. Carol J. Minugh, Prof. Glen T. Morris, Rudolph C. Ryser, Center
For World Indigenous Studies, 1989.
For More Information Write To:
Rudolph C. Ryser
Center For World Indigenous Studies
P.O. Box 82038
Kenmore, Washington 98028
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