Current Event News item #2 Self-Government

While gambling is one of the major debates going on right now involving Native Americans, there are some other issues that are also central to Native Americans right now. All of the issues in some way are related to having self-government or not. This is because when deciding whether or not to have self-government tribes have to choose if they are economically able to. This ties into the income they get from casinos. Also, "death rates from alcoholism and tuberculosis among Native Americans are at least 650 percent higher than overall U.S. rates" and "Indian youths commit suicide at nearly triple the rate of young people in general" (Katel). Confronting these issues as at the forefront of many tribes agendas and in order to do this they need to have the proper assets, including money to confront these issues. So, some tribes simply are unable to have self-governmnet. According to Michael LaPointe, chief of staff to President Rodney Bordeaux of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe “when you have a lot of poverty and not a lot of economic activity to generate tribal resources to supplement the unfunded mandates, it becomes impossible" (Katel). He believes that tribes struggling with poverty cannot afford to choose self-government. This forces them to rely on the American government to delegate money and organize programs to these tribes, which sometimes is not very effective. It becomes somewhat of catch-22 in my mind as tribes who are struggling with issues such as suicide and alcoholism clearly need to change the form of their programs. However, to do this they need to be able to have self-government which allows them to "receive a single grant for a variety of services" from the U.S. Government (Katel). The issue is that tribes who are struggling with suicide and alcoholism may not be able to afford to self-govern themselves, so they are forced to continue receiving grants on a program by program basis from the U.S. Government which has not seemed to curb the problem. I think that overall self-government is a more succesful approach as tribal leaders can clearly see which programs work and which ones don't. So if the government could give struggling tribes larger single grants and then allow them to self-govern with this money it could be a succesful process. It would also allow tribes to feel more independent rather than having to rely on the U.S. government and have to continue asking for grants. This idea may be more expensive at the beginning for the U.S. government as they would have to give out a lot of money to a lot of tribes, but it would be a more succesful way of solving problems and then in the future the government would not have to give as much money to the Native American tribes. This may be impossible in the current economic climate, and people would be upset that we are giving all this money to the Native Americans, but in reality we have clearly taken more money from them than we have given back. For example, "the 1971 Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, which granted a total of $962 million to Alaska natives born on or before Dec. 18, 1971, in exchange for giving up their claims to millions of acres of land" (Katel). While $962 million seems like a huge amount of money, millions of acres of land filled with oil would be worth multiple billions of dollars, so America still profited from this act. We also stole huge amounts of land from the Native Americans during American expansion and we put them onto the worst and most unusable land that nobody wanted. After all the American Government has stolen from the Native Americans it seems only fair that they repay the Native American tribes in any way that they can.

Katel, P. (2006, April 28). American Indians. CQ Researcher, 16, 361-384. Retrieved February 10, 2010, from CQ Researcher Online, http://library.cqpress.com/cqresearcher/cqresrre2006042800.