LITMIR.BIZ

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our Grandmother, who provides us with everything we need to survive. How can you own your grandmother? How can you sell her? How does a piece of paper that you probably can’t read prove ownership of something that can’t be owned?”[15]

      The clash of traditional economies and the new American economy marks a definitive ideological shift in North American history. In the new American economy, all aspects of the environment were segmented and assigned various worths in terms of dollars, thus transmogrifying land into property, and laying the foundation for today’s U.S. real-estate market system. As Means describes above, the indigenous were surprised by this notion of private property: The primary economic institutions of the Six Nations of the Iroquois, for example, were longhouses in which all the tribe’s goods were stockpiled and doled out by women’s councils.[16] Collective ownership models defeated the idea of owning altogether, as value was based on use, and use was based on need. Since these practices applied similarly to land use, the implementation of Anglo-European ideas about private property were disruptive and disorienting to tribes, making the Allotment Era one of the most destructive periods economically, as well as culturally, for Indians. By permitting natives to maintain their land only in the form of an individual parcel, the U.S. government isolated Indians from their extended families and communities, while simultaneously dismantling the tribes’ custom of land sharing.

White custom, which had migrated to North America, now rapidly proliferated its individualist paradigms. By implementing arbitrary legal statutes, the U.S. government succeeded in compartmentalizing nearly every aspect of American life. By way of the Dawes Act, what was known as “Indian Country” was actually an acreage of land that, while often populated by some Indians, ironically also contained parcels owned in fee simple by non-Indians.[a] Some white men even extended their land holdings by marrying impoverished and often illiterate Indian women, then forcing them to work their own land.[17]

      The indigenous land base was further torn apart along lines perforated by surveyors when Indians were forced to buy the plots they already lived on. Any Indian who resisted this movement toward cultural isolation and Anglo-Americanization was branded as an “irreconcilable” and subject to arrest, incarceration, or forced appointment of land.[18] According to Duthu, “The allotment policy was the key plank in the government’s assimilation efforts of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries designed to bring an end to the distinct cultural and political existence of Indian tribes.”[19]

      Divesting natives of their right to determine who lived on their land further deprived them of their agency to define the character of the place where they lived—which still further smothered their cultural birthright. When Congress ended the allotment system in 1934, Indian land had dwindled to about 48 million acres, down from 138 million acres in 1887. At the end of the Allotment Era, Native Americans had the right of ­occupation on less than .02 percent of the land in the United States.[20]

      In 1955, the Supreme Court heard the case of Tee-Hit-Ton Indians v. United States, in which the Tee-Hit-Ton Indians sought compensation for lumber taken from their lands. The resolution of the Johnson case from 123 years earlier figured heavily into the deliberation in Tee-Hit-Ton. This case was significant because it was the first time that the court distinguished Indian title from “recognized” title and, in Duthu’s words,

      concluded that since the former was not “property” under the Constitution, Congress could extinguish the Indian title without making just compensation to the tribes. This holding effectively created a different class of property rights for certain Indian land claims to avoid triggering the legal obligation imposed on government by the Constitution’s Fifth Amendment, which states, in pertinent part: “Nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.”[21]

      Here, Duthu is referring to eminent domain—the government’s prerogative to seize privately owned land in exchange for just compensation. But because the Supreme Court in 1823 deemed Indian peoples non-nations and earmarked their lands as non-property, it was ambiguous whether Congress should act under its eminent domain powers or under its trustee powers. If eminent domain was not applicable due to the status of Indian land, then just compensation need not be made.[22]

The Tee-Hit-Ton decision came about during the so-called Termination Era of the 1950s and ’60s. The Termination Era—just as it sounds—was a time during which the government committed to terminating Native Americans as a distinct people.[b] The cornerstone of this era was the highly destructive Urban Relocation Program. The program strategically moved indigenous individuals to selected urban centers around the country (including, but not limited to, Los Angeles, Dallas, Denver, Salt Lake City, Cleveland, Phoenix, and San Francisco), getting them off reservations and assimilating them into mainstream culture. As a result of this unanimous “House Concurrent Resolution 108” in August 1953, approximately 109 tribes were eliminated and 1,262,155 acres of land were affected.[23]

The stated goal of the Relocation Program was to provide an escape for Indians from the extreme poverty of life on the reservation,[c] but it was a gambit on the part of the government, who stood to gain additional ­federal land from natives, as well as the bonus of Indian assimilation.

      Having been transplanted from the lives they knew to the hustle and bustle of the city, many indigenous people found the urban environment disorienting. For the first time in their lives, they had to budget money and practice fiscal responsibility—foreign concepts to members of tribes that shared nearly everything. And general planning for the future seemed wasteful to peoples accustomed to living in the present.[24] Their accommodations in the poorest parts of town and their jobs often unskilled labor (if they found work at all), these relocated natives entered into a poverty cycle that precluded them from ever moving ahead ­economically—despite the stated mission of the program.

      Socially, Indians were subjected to racist attacks from people in every sector of society, from police officers to school teachers. In schools, young Indians were barred from speaking their traditional languages, from wearing their traditional clothes or hairstyles, and from practicing their traditional religions. On the streets, police harassed, beat, and arrested natives systematically.[25] Many whites, having never seen indigenous people before, acted in xenophobic outbursts, exemplified in U.S. Army captain Richard H. Pratt’s statement that “the only good Indian is a dead one…. All the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him and save the man.”[26]

      This degradation of community reinforced assimilation and the abandonment of natives’ cultural identities. According to Troy R. Johnson, “Cultural destruction and alienation were inevitable. With their familiar culture lost to them, Indians thus found themselves caught between two conflicting impulses: the economic necessity that caused them to leave the reservation and the cultural and emotional ties that made them want to return to the reservation.”[27]

The Urban Relocation Program persisted into the late ’60s, but it should not be understood that indigenous peoples showed no resistance to their cultural genocide during that time. Perhaps the most famous, and certainly the most notable, instance of native resistance came in the form of the Alcatraz occupation. Fed up with the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA),[d] a group of San Francisco Indians unknowingly started a movement with their Alcatraz takeover, one that inspired a domino chain of demonstrations by indigenous people across the country.

Following the fire that destroyed the San Francisco American Indian Center on October 28, 1969, a group of fourteen Indian youths—mostly college students—decided to occupy the abandoned Alcatraz Island as a gesture of self-determination. The U.S. government had closed the island’s prison facility in 1963, hoisting the responsibility of its maintenance onto the General Services Administration (GSA) at a cost of $100,000 annually. The island sat abandoned but guarded by lonely caretakers until this group of natives (who came to call themselves the Indians of All Tribes[e]) recalled an action that

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