It’s the Land

As new people take over in Washington, wealth is much in the news. I don’t know how many times I have heard that Elon Musk is the “world’s richest man,” and that he and another billionaire will take on a semi-governmental role in trimming national expenditures. The same news reports often include listing incoming president Donald Trump as another billionaire.

Big money talk is not new in Washington, but the dollar signs and the numbers of zeros seem to be getting greater—in politics, as well as in accounts of hightech sector earnings and professional baseball contracts. Gone are the days when Babe Ruth could boast that he got paid more than the president because “I had a better year than he did last year.” They are all—sports, industry, film, and many politicians—just unfathomably rich and counting zeros.

But—right now, as I think about the years I’ve spent relearning American history, talking with and making friends with American Indians, wealth has never been a topic of discussion with them.

We’ve talked about “land-back,” the process of regaining tribal lands, lands on reservations and lands in traditional territories, like Wallowa lands. I learned and have written about the 90 million Native acres lost during the Allotment Era. What’s not often said or understood by non-Indians is that allotment land was on treaty-established reservations. That after the allotments of lands to Indians who agreed to the terms, other reservation lands were deemed surplus, and sold to non-Indians. Some Native holdings on reservation lands dropped precipitously. I heard about a reservation where individual and tribal holdings fell to less than 20 %.

Tribal members who can are buying back reservation lands lost during the Allotment period, and Tribes themselves are acquiring ancestral lands via purchase, donation, and legal action. Tribes boast about casino profits fueling housing, education, and health programs. They are building colleges and archives on reservations, and promoting programs aimed at solving diabetes epidemics and addiction problems.

Deb Haaland, the most famous Indian in America, does not seek praise or glory in describing her rise from poverty. It’s the facts of her life, the work of study and hustle and entering politics for the Tribe—rising to be the first Native secretary of a cabinet department, and then using that position at Interior to help tribes across the country gain access to ancient lands, clean water, and revived fish runs. And most importantly, using her position to make public the devastating effects of the government and the department she works for in the assimilation period and their boarding schools. Generational trauma is being treated by words and actions, and not by throwing enormous sums of dollars at it.

It occurs to me now that the one recent instance where wealth and Native Americans occupied the same book paragraphs, news stories, and movie scenes was the Osage and Killers of the Flower Moon. The Osage were moved off of lands desired by white settlers to less-desirable lands—which just happened to have oil under them. Tribal members became rich and exploited; the white power men in town married Osage women and killed them for their lands and mineral rights. The fledgling FBI and its first director, J. Edgar Hoover, and a Texas Ranger came to town and it all ended up in a bestselling book and blockbuster movie.

In my learnings, wealth in Indian Country is measured in family, dance, music, regalia, foods, and in land. But not in the way that settlers did and the American experiment still measure land, in acres and private property rights, but in its relation to all of the above, to food and living spaces and ceremony.

My mentor, Alvin Josephy, said that reservations were terrible acts of restriction, but have been essential in providing ongoing connection of people and land. Land is not a commodity to be bought and sold, fed into economic equations. Land is living and part of all living, which we humans—and the fish and the four-leggeds—are also part of.

The jumble of tribes and tribal peoples created by treaties, wars, allotments, boarding schools and Relocation programs can be confusing, but I have been lucky to witness the connection of individual Indians to ancestral lands, and, looking out of my window at Chief Joseph Mountain, I am privileged to have a small inkling of this ancient kind of wealth.

# # #

photo: wikimedia commons