Just One More Tribal Tale of Abuse

On long winter nights beside the Knife and Little Big Horn rivers in Montana, tribal elders sit around story fires and tell their grandchildren legends to help them make sense of the world. It’s a time-worn custom, as old as silence.

A black man, a white man and an Indian arrived at the Pearly Gates, begins one of their favorite tales. After welcoming them to heaven, St. Peter invites each man to pick the afterlife of his dreams. The black man asks for great music and lots of friends. St. Peter grants his wish and sends him on his way. Up steps the Indian, who asks for beautiful mountain streams, deep forests and plenty of food. “Say no more, chief,” says St. Peter, sending him off. Lastly, he turns to the white man and asks, “What do you want heaven to look like?” And the white man says, “Where did that Indian go?”

Ever since Columbus waded ashore, say the elders beside the Knife and the Little Big Horn, white men in funny hats have been asking, “Where did that Indian go?” In this context, the latest scandal -- involving Jack Abramoff and Michael Scanlon, the Republican operatives who allegedly fleeced six casino tribes out of $80 million by promising them, well, a little slice of heaven in Washington -- is an old story come full circle.

Sure, editorial boards at the New York Times and the Washington Post, among others, are right to call for their heads. The practice of mocking tribal leaders as “morons” and “monkeys” while allegedly stealing them blind gives off a foul odor, even in the nation’s capital.

Tribes have grown so accustomed to this sort of treatment from Bible-thumping politicians in “the party of values,” though, that when the Scanlon/Abramoff story broke, it didn’t prompt enough reaction in Shiprock or Lame Deer to bump the girls basketball team off Page 1. Out there in the Big Empty, where silence has always been as bold a statement as any, the Republican Party’s stone-faced vigil amid mounting outrage is as clear an indictment as any headline.

Tribal leaders’ collective shrug over the scandal is their way of asking: Where was your outrage when Mike Whalen, then assistant attorney general for the state of South Dakota, declared in the ‘90s: “The Native American culture is a culture of hopelessness, godlessness, joblessness and lawlessness, a mongrelized people living on the outskirts of Western civilization”? Where, they ask, was your outrage in August 2000, when delegates to the Republican Party’s convention in Washington state asked the federal government to expel native people from their homelands and declare all Indian treaties null and void?

Eighty million dollars? Heck, that’s chump change, say tribal attorneys. What about the billions of dollars in mineral royalties owed to native people that went missing over the last century?

That’s the Cobell case, they say, the one that U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth called “a national disgrace” when he described the Department of Interior as “a blight on the government of the United States.” New chapters to a very old story, say the ancient ones.

Naturally, after the crime is exposed and mug shots have run in newspapers from sea to shining sea, we white folks fall back on the hope that our outrage over these disgraceful abuses will miraculously sanitize our “story” vis-a-vis the native people of this land. But with folks like Scanlon and Abramoff representing our collective values, plucking our conscience out of the pawnshop of history is a vain hope.

Because somewhere along the way, observed the great political theorist Michel Foucault, our leaders were obliged to adopt a “language of madness” in order to explain away the state’s conscious refusal to enforce the very values it claimed as its birthright. Example: an egalitarian, pluralistic society as a secular nation-state erected on the principle of “liberty and justice for all.” This is a revolutionary idea, the Big One that we have repeatedly tested at places like Gettysburg, Wounded Knee and Montgomery, Ala., the one we have failed to redeem.

Native leaders have understood this paradox for a long time. A century ago, Chief Plenty Coups of the Crow told Gen. William Harney: “We saw that the white man did not take his religion any more seriously than he did his laws, that he keeps both of them just behind him, like helpers, to use when they might do him good. These are not our ways. We keep the laws we make, and we live our religion. We have never understood the white man, who fools no one but himself.”

Around winter fires on the Powder and the Knife, the Flathead and Little Big Horn, the storytellers know that Scanlon and Abramoff are only guilty of imitating their masters, the Great White Fathers in a distant city who for centuries have yammered a kind of mad language that asks, from one generation to the next, “Where did that Indian go?”