Latest Articles by Judith Shapiro

Facing America’s demons (1)

Judith Shapiro — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 17:51:00 +0000

The treatment of indigenous peoples in the United States has left a stain on the past that China should not ignore, argues Judith Shapiro.

In its current phase of rapid development, China often looks to the experience of western countries for inspiration. The development and nature-conquest of the western United States is sometimes seen as a model for China’s “Develop the West” campaign. The environmental clean-up that occurred after the western industrial revolution is often mentioned to defend China’s environmental crisis, in the hope that the emerging Chinese middle class will press for an “environmental Kuznets curve”.

However, using the west as a model for economic development and environmental restoration can be a grave mistake. In the United States, such development came at great cost for indigenous peoples and for the environment, damage that cannot be undone. The great wealth of the United States rests on an “original sin” of the theft of lands and resources of the millions of Native Americans who lived in America when white settlers arrived.

Today, legal challenges to that theft are still being contested in the courts, while the social and economic problems of the Indians who have been so profoundly victimised over the last two centuries remain an enduring stain on US honour and integrity and are a heavy and painful historical legacy. These injustices haunt our nation and cannot easily be rectified. Emerging economies aspiring to join a global community of civilised nations should learn from America’s errors.

A core theme of US experience in developing the west is the forcible relocation of Native Americans through atrocities such as the 1831 “Trail of Tears”, during which the Choctaw, Cherokee, Seminole and other nations were moved from the south-eastern part of the United States to what is today’s Oklahoma, thousands of Indians dying from disease and starvation along the way.

During the nineteenth century and early-twentieth century, the systematic effort to weaken and destroy Native Americans was official national policy. In the mid-nineteenth century, battles wiped out entire populations, including women and children, while “bounty hunters” were rewarded for each Indian scalp they produced. Other strategies involved eradication of traditional food animals such as the buffalo, theft and slaughter of horses (the Indians’ transportation for hunting and defence), and the deliberate introduction of smallpox.

Later, after the defeated Indians were squeezed into reservations, Native American children were forced into boarding schools where they were forbidden to practice their own cultural traditions or speak their native languages. The natives were gradually relocated into smaller and smaller plots of inferior land until the territory that they retained was only a tiny fraction of their former empires. The story is long, painful and twisted. Many promises were made and broken, many treaties signed and abrogated. As the Sioux leader Red Cloud said, famously, “They made us many promises, more than I can remember, but they never kept but one: they promised to take our land and they took it.”

This is a classic story of colonisation and imperial expansion. Political scientists say that states expand their territories in order to capture access to resources, to gain territory for excess populations, and to secure markets for trade. The story of the Lakota Sioux is just that, a struggle over land and resources that changed as new resources such as gold and uranium were discovered on lands formerly conceded to the Indians.

A huge population wave of white settlers travelling from the east in search of new lives ultimately doomed the Indians, leaving Red Cloud to comment in 1870, “The white children have surrounded me and left nothing but an island. When we first had this land we were strong, but now are melting like snow on a hillside, while you are grown like spring grass.” He further begged, futilely, “I have two mountains, Paha Sapa (Black Hills) and the Big Horn Mountains. I want the father (president) to make no roads through them.”

This is also a story of cultural genocide as white people, who claimed that they knew what was best for the “uncivilised” and “savage” nomadic peoples, forced the Indians into reservations, where they were made to give up their hunting culture. Above all it is a story which has resulted in six generations of complete dependency on the US government, decimation of tradition and identity and deep problems of unemployment, alcoholism, gangs, depression, factionalised tribal leadership and unfulfilled longing for justice and a return to former glory.

While I may seem critical or even biased, the US Supreme Court validated these criticisms in its 1980 decision on restitution for the illegal taking of the Black Hills, and the broad outlines of this history are commonly accepted. Unfortunately, many young Americans are not taught this history in their schools and many Indians today feel as if they are forgotten or invisible.

The Lakota Sioux were moved to reservations in South Dakota, in the mid-western United States, after lengthy struggles of resistance. I spent a week on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in May 2009 with a group of American University students seeking to understand efforts to improve the lives of the local people. The 13,000 square-kilometre reservation was created in 1889, and is the second largest Indian reservation in the United States. Pine Ridge is larger than the state of Connecticut, in the east of the country, and has a population estimated at more than 30,000, though the official figure is only 19,000 because many are homeless or avoid the census-taker.

The reservation is today one of the poorest places in the country, with an average annual income of only about US$3,000 (20,500 yuan) per capita, and its people are faced with social and economic problems as profound as any to be found in the developing world.

The teen suicide rate is among the highest in the nation, twice the national average; infant mortality is 300 times the national average; diabetes and tuberculosis rates are eight times the national average; alcoholism is rampant despite the ban on liquor within reservation boundaries, and unemployment is at 85%. Life expectancy for a male living on the reservation is only 46 years and for a female it is 49. Many homes have no running water or electricity, and racist violence is routine in neighboring towns and in Rapid City, the nearest large town. Although the tribal government is supposed to be “autonomous”, major decisions are controlled by the federal government’s Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA).

Dislocations from native lands and transformations of familiar landscapes were important ingredients in creating the deep social problems that the reserve faces today.

Judith Shapiro is director of the Natural Resources and Sustainable Development MA Program at the School of International Service, American University, Washington DC.

NEXT: The consequences of displacement.

Homepage image by Sage shows a reservation flag.

Facing America’s demons (2)

Judith Shapiro — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 14:50:00 +0000

White settlers in America uprooted indigenous people from their lands, causing untold environmental and cultural destruction. In the second segment of a three-part article, Judith Shapiro tells the story of one tribe.

The Lakota, a division of other Sioux nations including Dakota and Nakota, were once a nomadic people who roamed prairies and plains, hunting buffalo over a vast area stretching from Wisconsin to the Bighorn Mountains of Wyoming, north into Canada, and south to Kansas.

Tribal legends traced their origins to the Black Hills of today’s South Dakota, and these mountains, where white people eventually carved the images of four US presidents into Mount Rushmore, are among the seized territories that are most profoundly regretted and contested in the US court system today.

The Lakota, the largest group of Sioux, were further subdivided into bands including the Oglala, Hunkpapa, and five others. When the reservations were established, all Indians had to “enroll” in a tribe, and today the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation is the home to the Oglala Sioux.

The traditional diet consisted of buffalo, a lean, high-protein food, supplemented by wild turnips, chokecherries, and a few domesticated vegetables, such as corn and squash, acquired through trade with other tribes. Early contact with white people rested primarily on the fur trade; Fort Laramie was built in 1834 to facilitate the trade in buffalo hides after the beaver had been trapped-out. French-descended fur traders intermarried with the Indians and produced “half-breed” children, who served as interpreters and facilitated further fruitful contacts between whites and the Sioux.

By the mid-nineteenth century, however, buffalo began to disappear as whites armed with guns slaughtered them en masse in order to harvest their tongues, which were considered a delicacy. This deeply offended the Indians, who used every bit of the animal for food, shelter, clothing, and religious ritual. The Oregon Trail toward the Pacific Northwest passed through Fort Laramie and the influx of whites threatened Lakota sovereignty and livelihood.

A series of battles ended with the famous treaty of 1868, in which the United States recognised the entire western half of South Dakota (which included the Black Hills) as the Great Sioux Reservation as well as eastern Wyoming as “unceded Indian territory.” No Americans were to be allowed into these areas except to trade and conduct government business. Importantly, no changes were to be permitted to the treaty unless three-quarters of all adult Indian males signed and, today, court challenges to subsequent US seizures of Indian lands rest on this provision, since the signatures on documents that subsequently modified the treaty were incomplete.

As more gold was confirmed through General George Armstrong Custer’s famous 1874 expedition, the United States tried to purchase the Black Hills, and an enormous gold rush began. The Indians refused to sell, for they had no concept of land ownership; the leader Black Hawk commented, for example, “My reason teaches me that land cannot be sold. The Great Spirit gave it to his children to live upon. So long as they occupy and cultivate it, they have a right to the soil. Nothing can be sold but such things as can be carried away.”

The Indians were pressured to relocate. Many of them did so, as the buffalo were nearly gone and there was little hunting. The US Army then ordered all Indians to go to their “agencies” or reservation centres, and those who refused were labelled as “hostile”. A series of “Powder River” skirmishes culminated in the 1876 Battle of Little Big Horn against General Custer, which made leaders such as Crazy Horse famous. This was the last major victory for the Indians and the beginning of a precipitous decline in their fortunes.

In 1877, the Indians were forced, through starvation induced by the withholding of rations, to give up the Black Hills. Even then, most refused to sign the new treaty, and only one-tenth of the signatures were obtained, not the required three-quarters. By 1878, Pine Ridge and other reservations were well established, and later agreements forced upon the Indians permitted immigrant farmers and miners to colonise other parts of Indian lands.

The remaining patchwork of Indian reservations is but a shadow of the territory originally promised in the peace treaty of 1868. The buffalo have been decimated, the tall-grass prairies that once stood as high as a man’s shoulders has gone to desert through overgrazing and farming, the last of the passenger pigeons, which once darkened the skies for days through their great migrations, died in 1914 in a zoo. In the name of modernisation and the founding of a “New World” based on what were believed to be limitless resources, the ecosystems of the great American plains were utterly and irretrievably transformed.

By the late-nineteenth century, then, the Sioux Indians had lost all trace of their traditional hunting lifestyle. Their livelihood was gone, they were forbidden to pursue nomadic ways, and they were forced into complete dependency on the government for food, as legal wards of the state.

In the last years of the century, in what was perhaps a symptom of the profundity of the cultural depression, a prophetic mystical movement spread all over Indian lands, sparked by a visionary named Wovoka, a Paiute Indian. His vision was that Indians should dance a “Ghost Dance” that would revive their dead ancestors, bring back the buffalo, and remove the whites from America. The Oglala Lakota Sioux adopted this vision with fervour and added the idea that wearing a special “Ghost Shirt” would protect the wearer from white people’s bullets.

By 1890, hundreds of Indians were dancing. The whites panicked and tried to ban the dance, and the famous spiritual leader Sitting Bull, a supporter of the dance was killed. Tensions mounted, leaving some Indians to move into the badlands, where they were stopped by members of the 7th US Cavalry. Eventually, Chief Big Foot surrendered, and the group was escorted back toward Pine Ridge Reservation. As they camped at Wounded Knee Creek, shots were fired. Believing that the ghost shirts would protect them, the Indians failed to protect themselves and a great massacre of hundreds of Indian men, women and children took place. The December 29, 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee is considered the end of Indian efforts to resist the white man, and the beginning of more than a century of grief and loss of cultural identity.

Americanisation and forcible assimilation followed. Well-meaning missionaries from different Christian sects were assigned Indian reservations so they would not need to compete with each other; the Episcopal Church received rights to Pine Ridge when president Ulysses S Grant installed religious clergymen as government agents (thus departing from the principle of separation of church and state). Believing that they were doing the right thing for the poor heathens, they taught that their religion was best and the Indians were ignorant devil worshippers. They took Indian children out of the reservation to faraway boarding schools, where their long braids were cut and they were taught that their parents were savages. Children were forbidden to speak Lakota language in school. Eventually, many Indians internalised the message that their culture was inferior and developed a profound self-loathing that psychologists recognize as a form of massive cultural trauma.

Traditional government was replaced by that of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), which hired cooperative Oglala to enforce white people’s laws. Although land was supposed to be assigned to Indians, the Indians, as noted above, did not have a concept of land ownership and much of the land was tricked away from them. Subsequent generational claims made land-tenure rights impossibly complicated.

There were further twists in the history when, in 1934, the Indian Reorganization Act allowed tribes to write constitutions and the BIA stopped suppressing local culture. This policy changed once again in the 1950s, when the US government temporarily pursued a policy of “termination” or ending tribal life and encouraging relocation out of the reservation to other cities in the United States. Few Indians were equipped with the skills necessary to make it and most eventually returned to “the rez”.

Today, Indian males have little function as they are completely dependent on the government. Families have no tradition of going to work and holding jobs. The lands that they have been given are relatively unfertile and lacking in natural resources; the Black Hills lands, rich in minerals, were seized and in any case traditional Sioux beliefs would have forbidden digging into the earth. Tribal governments do not hold real power, but they are nonetheless factionalised and corrupt. In the 1960s, a militant group called the American Indian Movement embarked on a struggle against corrupt conservatives who were running the reservation. They marched to Washington and took over the BIA for several days; when they returned to the reservation, violent skirmishes among factions ended in a 1973 four-month standoff against Federal marshals on the site of the old Wounded Knee Massacre. Bitterness over these events lingers even today.

In 1975, the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act allowed for greater self-government, including the right of Indians to run their own police force and to control the schools. Meanwhile, lawsuits pursuing land claims under the treaty of 1868 made their way all the way to the US Supreme Court, which ruled in 1980 that the Indians were entitled to compensation for the theft of their land, plus interest. They handed down a monetary judgment for the US$17 million (116 million yuan) initial offering price, plus interest, which today amounts to more than US$400 million.(2.7 billion yuan).

However, the Sioux have refused to accept the money, arguing that their land is not for sale and that they were not properly represented by their attorneys. To this day, many Lakota argue for the return of the Black Hills under the terms of the treaty of 1868 and continue to pursue legal and diplomatic avenues to get back their lands.

Judith Shapiro is director of the Natural Resources and Sustainable Development MA Program at the School of International Service, American University, Washington DC.

NEXT: A lesson for China?

Homepage image from Wikipedia shows the Battle of Little Big Horn.

Facing America’s demons (3)

Judith Shapiro — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 11:26:00 +0000

In the conclusion of a three-part article on American Indians, Judith Shapiro urges China to heed the grievous mistakes of the United States in the development of its lands.

The history of the forced removal of the Lakota Sioux from their lands, while it seems to have happened long ago, is vibrantly alive for the Indians living on the reservation today. Many of them can tell stories of how their parents were sent to faraway boarding schools and taught that their culture was inferior. The ban on Lakota culture and language was lifted only in 1971, well within the memory of many living adults.

The profound cultural trauma that these people have experienced has left many of them deeply hopeless and without a clear sense of their own future or destiny as a nation. Everywhere I went during a week I spent on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, I heard again the stories of the treaty of 1868, of the massacre at Wounded Knee, and of the theft of the sacred Black Hills which are held to be the origin of the Lakota people. I experienced the profound mistrust of outsiders, particularly white people. And I witnessed among some residents a sense of defeat far more profound than any I have observed in all my travels in less developed countries throughout the world.

On the reservation today, the only truly successful business is a gambling casino called Prairie Winds (Native Americans are exempt from state prohibitions on organised gambling). Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, many of those who lose money are themselves Native Americans. There is talk of developing wind power; so far these conversations have not led to substantial results. While there is also talk of oil and mineral resources, the Indians will not permit the sacred lands to be scarred with mines, and in a case of “environmental injustice”, new uranium mines off the reservation threaten to taint downstream Indian rivers with radioactive materials.

There are signs of hope, but these are few: two Native American brothers have been appointed to lead the Badlands National Park and Mount Rushmore. An image of the great Indian warrior Crazy Horse is being carved a few miles away from the images of the US presidents. A sacred Black Hills mountain, Bear Butte, is being closed to non-Indians during times when rituals are most important, although its peace is also gravely threatened by the opening of a nearby rifle range, and the bars, campgrounds, and concert venues have greatly offended the local tribes.

A college, the Oglala Lakota College, has been opened on the reservation, where it offers advanced degrees in Lakota studies, nursing, business, information science, social work and other relevant fields. A “Lakotafund” has been created to extend micro-credit to small businesses such as beadwork and other traditional handicrafts. Some who have left the reservation to pursue advanced degrees and learn skills in other parts of the country have returned to try to make a contribution back home.

Meanwhile, in Washington, DC, the National Museum of the American Indian, established in 1989 by an act of Congress in an effort to acknowledge the great wrong of our history, is managed by Native Americans, whose greatest desire is to convey the message that “we’re still here”. Whether the US president, Barack Obama, will encourage Congress to revisit the great question of ownership of the Black Hills, and whether there are symbolic measures that could be taken to help move the Sioux nation toward healing, remains to be seen.

What, then, are we to take as lessons from this horrific story, and what might be relevant for Chinese policy makers today? First, it is worth reflecting on the relationship between resources, land, nation-building, and power – and reflecting seriously on the question of how to build a strong, prosperous nation while safeguarding justice for all citizens. Sometimes rigorous introspection and honesty may be required to discover whether one is using cultural superiority and stereotyping as a way to rationalise the seizure of other people’s land. In this case, resource extraction was a primary motivation for seizing Indians’ land, but it was often cloaked in rhetoric about doing what was best for the Indians.

Second, good intentions can sometimes be highly destructive. The American missionaries and civilisers truly believed that in forbidding the use of Lakota language and the practice of Lakota customs they were doing the right thing – even, perhaps, saving the Indians’ “souls” and allowing them to find a place in heaven by converting them to Christianity. However, the deprivation of identity and pride has turned out to be devastating for the native people, who are now trying to recover some of their traditions by reviving rituals such as the Sun Dance and to re-learn their language in native-run schools.

Third, modern technologies such as the gun, the road and the railroad, and foreign diseases such as smallpox, were highly destructive to the native peoples, and created an “uneven playing field” such that the native peoples had little chance of preserving their way of life. As environmental historians such as Jared Diamond and Alfred Crosby teach us, the outcome of this sort of clash of cultures can be determined as much by technology, disease and introduced species as by more conventional measures of military superiority.

Fourth, one of the high prices of civilisation and resource extraction is often environmental degradation and ecosystem transformation. Instead of the buffalo, passenger pigeon and tall grass prairie, the central United States saw desertification and dust storms, especially in the 1920s, a heavy and enduring price to pay for our overly enthusiastic grazing and farming practices.

Finally, indigenous peoples’ knowledge, while often not expressed in ways that modern “science” can hear and respect, nonetheless often can point the way toward more sustainable relationships with the land. Although some have warned against romanticising Native American wisdom and called “the ecological Indian” a myth, it is undeniable that the Sioux elders predicted that in the wasteful and over-consuming way of the white man lay ecological disaster.

I hope that this cautionary tale of the Pine Ridge Sioux provides fruit for reflection and discussion. Although there are obviously great historical differences between the United States and China, we have much to learn from each other, especially at this time when the gaps in our economic and social development are decreasing and we are coming more and more to resemble each other.

Judith Shapiro is director of the Natural Resources and Sustainable Development MA Program at the School of International Service, American University, Washington DC.

Homepage image by Serge Van Cauwenbergh