The debate about Indian sovereignty is part of a continuing debate
about the proper balance between individual freedom and the power of government. The vast
majority of early American cultures exhibited high levels of individual freedom before
Europeans intervened in their cultures. A similar desire for individual liberty was a
primary reason for the American revolution and the birth of the United States. Our
Founders used written constitutions, the separation of powers, federalism and a free
economy to restrain the natural tendency of governments to encroach on individual liberty.
In this century, the success of centrally planned war projects during
World War I, the establishment of communism in the Soviet Union, the excesses of the
twenties and the devastation of the Great Depression worked together to shatter the
confidence of many Americans in our system of limited government. In 1934, this
environment created modern federal Indian policy. The head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs
at the time was a man named John Collier. He would later write a book of memoirs, From
Every Zenith, praising communism in China. Contrary to both Native American traditions
and Constitutional principles of limited government, Collier convinced Congress to set up
strong centralized tribal governments in control of reservation laws, courts and communal
economies.
Collier envisioned hundreds of reservations scattered around our
country serving as models and demonstrating the glories of socialism to the rest of us.
Collier and his reformers dreamed of making reservations "a model of community that
all Americans might in some ways follow. . . . he wanted Indians to offer an alternative
way of living for individualistic-oriented white America" (Sovereign Nations or
Reservations; Anderson; 1995; p. 139). In 1939, Collier gave a speech extolling what
his reforms had accomplished with these words, "No, the task is not finished. It is
only begun. But one part of the task is finished, and it marks and makes an epoch. The
repressions which crushed the Indian spirit have been lifted away. From out of the dark
prison house the living Indian has burst into the light, into the living sunlight and the
future. All his age-tempered powers and his age-tried discipline are still there. He knows
the future is his; and that the century of dishonor, for him is ended." (American’s
Behind the Buckskin Curtain; Scofield; p.21).
Along with similar political experiments around the world, reservations
certainly have been excellent models, but instead of the glories, they have clearly
demonstrated the social and economic destruction of socialism. Corruption, poverty,
Drug/Alcohol abuse, and suicide are just some of the more obvious problems on Indian
reservations. Most of the other socialistic experiments around the world have collapsed.
The reservation system survives in this country only because of the support of the Federal
Government and the annual transfusions of billions of tax dollars that it provides.
Fortunately, many solutions for reservation residents are both readily
available and relatively simple. We can easily provide American citizens living on
reservations with the same protections for individual liberty that the rest of us
treasure. This would apply the Golden Rule to our relationships with Indians. For example,
why shouldn’t reservation citizens be protected by the Fourteenth Amendment’s
equal protection of the laws and the protections of the Bill of Rights just like the rest
of our country?