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Storytellers series: Fencing the West, Buffalo to Barbed Wire
Once colonization was complete, racism settled in, and the combination resulted in economic disaster for the Indian people, he said. Abourezk was the first speaker in the Storytellers Series, part of the Journey's exhibit "Fencing the West: Buffalo to Barbed Wire." Abourezk outlined the four steps of the British mode of colonization, which was applied by European settlers in this country. "The first step was to dislocate traditional agriculture and food gathering, essentially to destroy people's traditional way of obtaining food and surviving off the land, and replace it with something that you could make the colonial subjects be dependent upon," Abourezk said. That dislocation was achieved by killing off buffalo herds and confining tribes to reservations, leaving tribes dependent on government commodities, he said.
"The government knew what it was doing," he said. "Teddy Roosevelt, who was then a congressman who was a proponent of the Allotment Act or the Dawes Act, got up on the floor of the Congress and called it ' mighty pulverizing.' The third step of colonization was establishing a Native "ruling elite," consisting of "paper chiefs" who got that title from the U.S. government rather than their own people, Abourezk said. That step put the appointed chiefs in a position to carry out government programs, diverting Natives' anger away from the government and toward their own people. That effort was assisted by the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, which got rid of traditional tribal government and installed federall y-sanctioned modes of government based on the U.S. Constitution. Abourezk said that interference led to confusion that still exists, in part because the new form of government didn't provide for separation of powers. As a result, tribal councils could fire judges who made unpopular decisions. The fourth step of colonization was to get Native people on board with white culture, he said, a goal of the U.S. government's relocation program in which Native people were given one-way tickets to large cities where they could get a job or an education. That move backfired, however, when the children of the relocated Natives "later became the Indian activists that we know about in the 1970s and '80s," he said. Abourezk said the colonizing of a nation within a purportedly democratic nation has led to illogical Indian law. "The government is trying to both adhere to its democratic and constitutional principles on the one hand, while at the other hand straining to try to achieve the goals of a colonizer," he said. "The vagaries of settler colonialism require that the logic of the law be bent and twisted to fit a certain result." After colonization had successfully dominated Native people and land, Abourezk said, racism continued to keep indigenous people in check. "We saw the machinery of colonization gradually replaced by the machinery of racial and cultural dominance," he said. "This system in modern times has come to be called racism, but before you flinch, I want to pull you back and look at it as the remnants of a colonial system, as well as a system which has sort of gained a life of its own." Abourezk said white people now criticize Indian people for being poor without recognizing that racism, born of colonialism, has caused their poverty. One part of the solution needs to be a change in federal policy to stimulate economies on reservations, to make possible what white people would be able to do if they were in the same circumstances, he said. "It has nothing to do with 'Indian' and everything to do with economics," Abourezk said. Economically speaking, South Dakota is a poor state when compared with certain other states, and Abourezk said that fact should unite us rather than divide us. "If we started to see our common ground, and how our stories merge and how our histories merge and how we're all one people now, I think the Indians and the ranchers and farmers and small businessmen of the state have a lot more in common than they do differences," he said.
Go to journeymuseum.org. for a full listing.
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