Will Multiculturalism Kill the Country?

Multiculturalism simply means, to its well-intentioned advocates, an effort to include in the mainstream of America all those groups who have been excluded in the past. It's a noble goal, but more and more of these efforts to include and equalize are, ironically, beginning to have the opposite effect. They are creating a destructive separatism or tribalism that threatens the fiber that has held our country together for over 200 years.

There are at least three current books, surprisingly two of them by noted liberals, which explore the problem. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., in The Disuniting of America, Reflections on a Multicultural Society, describes what happens when people of different ethnic origins, different languages and different religions settle in the same geography and try to live under the same political sovereignty. Unless some common purpose binds them together, he asserts, tribal hostilities will drive them apart.

We see it everywhere: Yugoslavia, India, South Africa, Lebanon, Somalia, etc. And most lately, Russia. We see conflicting ethnicity even in Canada, our near neighbor to the north. It is one of the five richest nations on earth, with land, water, timber and mineral resources we could only envy. Yet the country is on the brink of coming apart because of its ethnic conflicts: the French vs. the English-speaking, and the indigenous or "First Nation" population vs. everyone else.

Schlesinger contends that countries break up when they fail to give ethnically diverse peoples reasons to see themselves as part of the same nation. The United States has worked, thus far, because it has offered such reasons. From the beginning, in the absence of a common ethnic origin, perhaps America has survived 200 plus turbulent years simply because it has always been a multiethnic country.

Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, who emigrated from France to the American colonies in 1759 and married an American woman, marveled at the diversity of the settlers around him-"a mixture of English, Scotch, Irish, French, Dutch, Germans and Swedes" a "strange mixture of blood" that you could find in no other country he remarked. "Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men." he wrote. As Schlesinger points out, "The point of America was not to preserve old cultures, but to forge a new American culture."

We all know it hasn't been an idyllic process. Without doubt Anglo-American language, culture, religion and politics have dominated. And even among European immigrants, the newest arrivals were disliked by those who had preceded them. Germans and Scandinavians were considered clannish when they kept their old country customs and language. The Irish were considered shiftless and drunken and suspect because of their allegiance to the Roman papacy. That was still an issue for discussion when Kennedy declared his candidacy for President!

And any right-thinking citizen must admit the nation's record of racism for red, black and yellow Americans is one of the great national failures. Yet, as Schlesinger points out, "nonwhite Americans, miserably treated as they were, contributed to the formation of the national identity....and re-configured the British legacy and made the United States, as we all know, a very different country today from Britain."

Today, it seems, America has become a collection of self-interest groups (or "victims" to the courts) celebrating their cultural and ethnic differences and suing for their rights. There are some good things about "ethnic awareness". We are beginning to recognize the achievements of black Americans, Indians, Latinos, Asians, etc. But when we over-celebrate, and even legislate, our differences, assimilation becomes the victim. Democracy is the casualty. Nowhere is this more obvious than with government policy toward the Indian.

Before the turn of the century, the Government tried to espouse a Federal Indian Policy of assimilation with the 1887 Dawes Act, also called the General Allotment Act, which authorized the breaking up of tribal lands to be given to individuals. Non-Indians were allowed to buy reservation land from any Indian willing to sell his portion for a fair and mutually agreed on price. Both white and Indian appraisers were employed to set values.

As with any other ethnic components of our country, intermarriage made for fewer and fewer "pure-blood" Indians. (How many "pure" Irish or Italians or Germans do you know?) But our government quantified the process. Below an arbitrary percentage (25 was the BIA's benchmark) an Indian was no longer an Indian, which made him ineligible for the federal benefits program. Can you imagine a government program that awarded benefits based on the percentage of African, Asian, or Irish blood?

In 1934, the Wheeler-Howard (Indian Reorganization) Act reversed this policy of assimilation and restored tribal ownership of reservation lands. It also provided reservation Indians with self-government and partnership with the BIA.

In 1946, congress enacted the single, most important piece of Indian legislation since the passage of the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, the Indian Claims Commission Act. The commission was established to settle claims of Indian groups that could prove loss of lands due to government malfeasance, and to dispose of the Indian claims problem with finality.

The Indian Claims Commission Act provided that when the Commission had filed it's final report on a case, the decision of the Commission shall have the same effect as a final judgment of the Court of Claims.

The United State Supreme Court has cited Indian Claims Commission payments in denying Indian claims in many recent rulings.

In yet another federal policy shift during the 1950's, Congress called for the termination of special federal programs and trust relationships with Indians, hoping this policy would hasten assimilation. For the Menominee of Wisconsin, the Klamath of Oregon and others, the termination took place too quickly and without the necessary preparation for independence, and there was economic disaster. So our government unofficially abandoned the termination policy. Richard Nixon denounced termination as contrary to the "immense moral and legal force" of U. S. treaties, and he asked congress to "renounce, repudiate and repeal" the 1953 resolution which had authorized the terminations. It never did.

Actually the Ford and Nixon administrations ended the policy de facto, along with notions of assimilation, with the Indian Self Determination and Education Assistance Act, which became law in 1975. Self-determination means the Indians themselves can determine their own criteria for membership. In some tribes blood quantum is not among the requirements for tribal membership. Others have fairly stringent requirements of half blood or greater. And still others have adhered to the old BIA 25% benchmark. The BIA doesn't require a quarter or more blood quantum for benefits anymore, with a couple of exceptions: government-funded scholarships and the free Indian Health Service, a division of the U.S. Public health service separate from the BIA.

So how did this country, a nation so vocal, so active in condemning South African apartheid, come to create a similar situation for millions of its own citizens? How do we come to have "sovereign nations" within our nation where laws that apply to the rest of us do not apply? Where taxes that apply to the rest of us cannot be collected? And where, in fact, the constitutional protections guaranteed all Americans by the Bill of Rights cannot be guaranteed, according to a 1978 Supreme Court decision?

Here's how. Those 19th Century treaties that put Indians on reservations had only one positive effect for the Indian. They recognized their "sovereignty" as nations. Actually, it is a special legal status called dependent sovereignty, but it meant that reservations were outside the jurisdiction of the states in which they were located. In other words, state laws don't apply. In a 1975 decision, the Supreme Court stated that Indian tribes are "unique aggregations possessing attributes of sovereignty over both their members and their territory."
    We fought a bloody Civil War to keep the Confederacy from seceding from the Union. But our courts have encouraged the Indians to do it without much noise.

Some of the good effects for Indians are pretty obvious. The Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of 1988 permitted casino gambling on reservation land (or land the BIA declares a federal Indian reserve). Now more than 50 tribes and bands operate more than 100 bingo halls and casinos in 19 states which take in more than $6 billion a year. It has alleviated some of the poverty so often in evidence on reservations. Sadly, the profits do not seem as widespread as they might be. The bands themselves decide who is entitled to this windfall, sometimes by the hated old BIA blood quantum method. So while some Indian lives are dramatically improved, others get no more than waiter or cafeteria cashier wages.

And finally, there are the resources. Whose are they? Who will protect and conserve them? Whose rules will apply? Whose wardens will enforce them? Once again, the decisions will be made by the same courts that created the problem. And the rulings administered by the same federal government whose policies have been referred to as somewhere between guilt and greed.

The BIA has been recently described by U. S. News & World report as "The worst federal agency". True, the financial system is in such disarray that they could not audit $3.2 billion of $4.4 billion in BIA assets. But at least it provides jobs for 10,700 Indians, (87% of BIA staff) and may be the only bureaucracy with even the intent of protecting Indian interests. With a 1994 budget of $1.8 billion for just over a million Indians who live on or near federally recognized reservations, U. S. News reports some bureau officials estimate that less than 20 cents of each dollar trickles down to the reservations.

The corrupt BIA is only part of the problem. An even bigger problem is the Federal Indian Policy that creates American apartheid in the name of multiculturalism and diversity. A policy that kills democracy by creating different classes of citizens under different constitutions and governed by different laws. Instead of "one nation, under God" Indians have become 544 nations under the Secretary of the Interior. Is there any chance the next Congress will do better?