Indian Reservations: A Reversal of America’s Ideals
Part I of a Series by Darrel Smith

    More than in any other country, what it means to be an American has been based not on things like race, ancestry or geography but by our mutual acceptance of certain ideals. If I lived in France, Egypt, Japan or China, and I became a citizen, I would never be French, Egyptian, Japanese or Chinese. In contrast, it is possible for citizens from most countries to come here and become Americans because we have defined ourselves primarily by our shared values.
    Unfortunately, our ideals are often different from our realities. America has, and continues to live far from many of our ideals. Nevertheless, our ideals are powerful and our progress toward them has often been impressive. Perhaps none of these ideals is more important or has caused more struggles, sacrifices, and been more elusive, than the ideal that "We the People" are One People. We only have to consider the history of various immigrant groups such as the Irish, Chinese or Japanese to demonstrate how far we have been from this ideal. Originally, neither African slaves nor Native American Indians were even included within the meaning of "We the People."
    And yet the ideal has remained, prodding and pushing us even when we wanted to ignore it. The ideal was clear in the Declaration of Independence in the words "one people" and "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal." Our very name United States expresses the ideal of unity. The Constitution prohibits the class differences the colonists had experienced in Europe. Our national motto "E PLURIBUS UNUM" - "from many; one," as well as our Pledge - "one nation under God, indivisible," all express the importance of our ideal that Americans are One People.
    Nor was this ideal an empty platitude. While many of our immigrant ancestors originally lived under terrible oppression most of us no longer experience the same oppression, and in fact, most of us have lost any personal memory of it. We must be taught the struggles of our ancestors. We only need to contemplate the cost of the Civil War and the more recent civil rights struggles to appreciate the power of this ideal and the cost of our progress. After the War, the Civil War amendments were passed and black slavery was over, yet even though Indians became citizens by 1924, Indians on reservations still aren’t legally an equal part of "We the People."
    Americans who understand our values and the sacrifices we have made for the ideal of "One People" recoil in shocked amazement when they compare them with the modern Indian policy of balkanizing America. Primarily since 1970, we have been busy carving our one nation into literally hundreds of separate "sovereign nations." Integration, assimilation, the melting pot, and Martin Luther King’s dream of racial equality and a color blind society are derided as racist cultural genocide. Apartheid homelands, based on race and ancestry, resembling Louis Farrakhan’s vision of Black homelands are being established. This reversal of our ideals on reservations has happened mainly because most reservations are in isolated rural areas and affect only a limited number of relatively powerless people. What will happen to our country if Black nationalists and other ethnic groups aggressively, even violently, demand similar "sovereign nation" status? We should not assume that we are immune to the ethnic balkanization that threatens much of the world.
    The trashing of our basic ideals has not been fairly and knowledgeably debated. It is being quietly accomplished primarily by deception, a massive public relations campaign, and cooperation between radical Indian governments and the federal government. CERA believes it is time to reevaluate where Federal Indian Policy is taking our country.