Although there are some grounds upon which to compare the contradictions of US Indian Policy with the many issues addressed in the Draft Declaration, to conflate the two institutions would be greatly mistaken, due to fundamental differences of approach to the question of indigenous rights. The essence of US Indian Policy is the emulation and perpetuation of British-style "indirect colonial rule," in contradiction to the essence of the Draft Declaration, which is to advance the principles of decolonization and liberation of indigenous peoples from all forms of colonial rule. But State's grasp of the US Indian Policy that it pretends to represent truthfully is tenuous at best. The State Department understands neither the way Indian Policy is administered nor the way that administration is considered "colonialist" by the peoples who are subjected to it. Such misinterpretation is due in large part to the fact this it has not been the responsibility of the State Department to deal with US Indian Policy since the days when its predecessor War Department was committing acts that now would be cause for invoking the Genocide Convention within the United States. Today, however, State must represent Indian Policy in discussions concerning the US position on the Draft Declaration, and so it is making a frantic attempt to learn the policy so that it can be articulated to the rest of the world in some way that is least tangentially related to the Draft Declaration.

State's desperate attempt to catch up with Indian Policy is the more ludicrous, since there is no one "Indian Policy" for State to present to the rest of the world as "United States Indigenous Policy," despite the "nutshell" approach that State offers in its position statements. All Indian Policy may be Indigenous Policy, but the reverse is not true. If there were any singular policy meant to pertain to the affairs of all indigenous people(s) ruled by the United States, that policy would have several distinct and sometimes opposing facets that apply in very particular ways to: (1) the "Indian" nations, mostly west of the Mississippi River, that have treaties with the US Government and reservation lands that are proclaimed and (presumably) protected by those treaties; (2) the numerous "Indian" nations east of the Mississippi, where treaties were made with either the French or British or Spanish colonial governments, or with the original thirteen states, before the United States was founded, and where many of the indigenous peoples of the region have been almost totally dispossessed of their landbases (or reservations) due to ethnocidal effects of all the colonialist policy which they have endured since the days of the Jamestown Colony; (3)the "natives" of Hawai'i, the formerly sovereign monarchy seized and colonized by force, in 1893 - where "Indian policy" does not apply at all; (4) the "natives" of Alaska, that vast expanse of territory illegally acquired through a specious "purchase" from Russia, inhabited by Inuit, Aleut and Indian nations, many of whom are not the objects of "Indian policy" (as explained by State) either, especially since many were transformed by policy into "corporations," after 1971; (5) and the "natives" of other island territories (including Guam, Samoa, Saipan, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands) "possessed" and ruled by the United States, and where "Indian policy" does not apply at all, either.

As State sets out to proclaim its "nutshell" of "US Indian policy" as an example for winning international approval and emulation by other states, it refers specifically to the indigenous nations in the "lower 48," mostly west of the Mississippi. Within any version of the general policy toward just this category of Indians are Byzantine convolutions and contradictions that are likely to defy all attempts to over-simplify it in the kind of "nutshell" that State wants to foist on those who are not prepared to challenge it. "Indian policy" in the lower 48, west of the Mississippi, generally (although with many very particular variations) has followed a schizophrenic pattern that alternates duplicitous recognition and protection of Indians with policies clearly designed to bring about their destruction. State is ill-prepared to defend the oscillations of Indian Policy that have progressed through such notable institutions as the Major Crimes Act of 1885, the Dawes Act of 1887, the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, the Indian Claims Commission of 1946, the Termination Acts of 1951, and the (Orwellian) Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act of 1975, which State has had the affrontery to use as it primary evidence of what the United States means by "self-determination" for indigenous peoples. The BIA was not directly responsible for formulating any of these policies, since all came through Congress. Thus, again unfortunately, State is unlikely to acquire the education it seeks from the BIA.

For Indians in the lower 48, west of the Mississippi, US policy almost invariably (though with notable exceptions, like the Hopi) draws from the institution of the treaty, which is a primary wellspring for much of the American Indian nationalism that confronts US policy. Following the conclusion of some 800 treaties (about 400 of which were ratified and therefore became international law comparable to treaties concluded between any sovereigns), Congress unilaterally discontinued treaty-making in 1871. The treaties were rarely respected by the US Government, in any case (although a current Interior brochure asserts that the agency's "duty" to "fulfill all treaty obligations" 1 ). Violation of the treaties was policy while Congress and various presidents simply stood aside as the War Department set about destroying the indigenous nations of the mainland through outright genocidal wars that continued into the 1890s. After that, the ethnocidal Dawes Act of 1887 took over, ordering the dispossession and "privatization" of Indian communal lands (most established by treaties) for the explicit purpose of breaking down indigenous national identity. The Dawes Act was so successful that the infamous Meriam Report of 1924 gave testimony to a broad understanding that Indians were at the point of disappearing as distinct peoples at the beginning of the present century.

Due to efforts, during the 1920s and 30s, of liberal activists led by John Collier, the Dawes Act was repealed in 1934 through the enactment of the Indian Reorganization Act (IRA), which ostensibly sought to re-establish Indian communal life. The IRA has served to the present as the fundamental organizing institution in the lives of most Indians and Indian nations. It has not been superceded by any other legal instrument, including the 1975 Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act ( to which the State Department attaches itself), which simply serves to concretize the organizational structure that the IRA established (while apparently reversing some of the ethnocidal effects of the Termination legislation of the 1950s). The IRA thus deserves a few special words of explanation.

John Collier, Franklin Roosevelt's Commissioner of Indian Affairs in the 1930s was responsible for authoring the embodiment of the "Indian New Deal." Collier himself explained the intent of the IRA explicitly in terms of the British colonial practice of "indirect rule," which he explicitly sought to emulate. 2 British colonialism had reached its greatest expanse by the 1930s, when virtually every colony was subjected to one version or the next of indirect rule. In both the British and American versions of indirect rule, colonial administrators identified local strong-men whom they could corrupt with the power of money, guns and political authority, and whom they could then prop up as the "leaders" of the peoples whose lands and resources the colonizers coveted.

Indirect rule has always had insidious effects, since it works by conveying the appearance that people have their own leaders who just happen to be allies or obedient servants of the colonizing power. In fact, these leaders are controlled by their colonial masters. Since they are delegated control over local policy, and since their control of armed force is legitimized by the colonizers, they have immense control over the lives of their own people. To the degree that the people have no viable options other than to submit to that local control, the image of institutional legitimacy is established. At the very least, the practice contributes mightily to the colonizer's objective of "divide and rule," since resistance factions are often easily marginalized politically or defeated militarily (if necessary), by pointing at their lack of "official recognition as legitimate representatives." On occasion, however, the puppets take the language of "self-government" or "self-management" (not to be confused with "self-determination," although in the United States, that terminology is employed deceitfully) more seriously than the colonizer intends, and they become rebellious nationalists. As is often the case in such situations, these leaders wear thin forbearance of their masters and necessitate neutralization through rigged elections to get them out of office, or other strategies like false imprisonment or assassination to get rid of them. Current US Indian Policy is replete with examples of how "self-determination" is exercised through this kind of coercion.

Such is the way that John Collier's IRA has taken over the lives of Indians of the United States, and the examples are legion of how destructive the practice has been. It has become a bad joke how "apples," who win tribal elections or otherwise take employment with the government that uses them as agents through which to rule their own people, cannot be trusted to speak with authority as representatives of Indians. "True representatives," on the other hand, are usually much more difficult to identify, due in large part to the fact that they do not have "official recognition" government, which has every reason to keep them from acquiring legitimacy.

While there is no iron-clad rule that the "Indian tribal governments" ordained through the IRA are always simple puppets of the US Government, neither is it often clear exactly what to expect of Indians that do work for the government as tribal officials or in other capacities. Today, the typical BIA employee is likely to be an Indian, while "tribal council" chairmen often seem to find wonderful reasons, including making big profits, for doing dangerous things to their people and their land (like leasing it strip-miners or utility companies for storage of nuclear waste or to cities for burial of municipal garbage) that primarily serve the interests of the US Government and/or its sub-agencies. While former Principal Cherokee Chief Wilma Mankiller serves as an excellent example that makes prejudicial stereotyping of tribal government officials difficult, in the end there is still no real argument to the effect that indirect rule doesn't work.Once in awhile, when Indian nationalists in the role of tribal government officials do stand up in righteous indignation over the reality that colonialism is still the bottom, the IRA makes it very difficult to resist colonial policy. Ultimately, indirect rule rests on the flow of money and the monopoly of legitimized violence in the hands of those who are the most dutiful servant of the colonial master. In Kenya, during the 1950s, it took the bloody "Mau-Mau" movement to break the back of a similar policy.

Colonialism on Indian reservations of the lower 48, west of the Mississippi, is primarily about the rape of natural resources. North American Indians were never easily exploitable as a cheap labor source (unlike the cases, say, in Kenya, Mexico or Guatemala), and their small numbers and generic poverty make them totally useless as an external market. But these Indians do inhabit lands on which are trillions of dollars worth of coal, oil, gas, gold, uranium, and other valuable minerals, as well as huge expanses of agricultural land, heavily timbered forests, major water sources, and suddenly very valuable wastelands. For the United States to have access to this wealth required that treaty provisions be violated - nothing unusual in colonial policy. The IRA made this form of "internal colonialism" possible. True, some Indians have become very rich through the sale of their resources (the same is true for some indigenous people in other current resource colonies of the West, like Russia and Mexico), but most Indians live in conditions of the lowest quality of life of all sectors of the entire population represented by the United States. In fact, the quality of life on western Indian reservations rightfully should be compared to the lot of colonized populations at any time anywhere on earth. The very thought that the State Department would tout the wonderful lives of American Indians the world to seek its approval, with the apparent conviction that no one would challenge that assessment, is a marvel of audacity in its own right.

Endnotes

1. See Department Manual, entitled "Departmental Responsibilities for Indian Trust Resources," Part 512, Chapter 2, which says "Interior, as trustee for the tribes, has an affirmative duty to ... fulfill all treaty and statutory obligations and to excise utmost good faith in all dealings with the tribes." Office of American Indian Trust, Department of the Interior, Washington, DC.

2. See Kenneth R Philip, 1977, John Collier's Crusade for Indian Reform, 1920-1954, Tucson: University of Arizona Press.