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	Workers Vanguard No. 953	26 February 2010

Feds Let South Dakota Reservation Freeze

A fierce ice storm hit the impoverished Cheyenne River Reservation in South Dakota on January 20, cutting off electrical power for most of the 10,000 Native Americans there. The Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, its emergency fund of $175,000 already drained by earlier storms, was left virtually defenseless. Desperate families waited for days in the dark without food—some without water as well—before minimal relief finally began to arrive. With windchills reaching 20 degrees below zero, many were without power for up to several weeks. The tribe’s chairman, Joseph Brings Plenty, declared: “We could have had quite a few people perish in this.”

The plight of the South Dakota reservation has been particularly highlighted by MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann, whose appeal to his viewers raised some $250,000 in relief funds in 48 hours. For their part, government relief agencies doled out aid with an eyedropper, recalling the racist indifference shown the largely black and poor population of New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. On January 31, the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe declared a state of emergency and requested federal disaster relief funds, medical supplies and generators. The reservation was granted an insufficient number of emergency generators, forcing tribal leaders to beg for more. As for federal relief funds, what they mainly got was the runaround. A spokesman for the South Dakota Department of Public Safety announced—almost two weeks after the start of the crisis—that federal funds could not be allocated until the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) got around to surveying the situation. He stated, “It may be two or three weeks before FEMA can assess the damage.” Adding insult to injury, the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe was the first Native tribe to officially endorse Barack Obama for president.

This crisis highlights the wretched poverty of Native Americans living on reservations like Cheyenne River, for whom disaster can be just one storm away. The statistics tell a shameful story of discrimination and neglect. Unemployment at the Cheyenne River Reservation is a staggering 80 percent. At the neighboring Standing Rock Reservation, which was also severely hit by the storm, per capita income is about $7,730 a year. Standing Rock’s average male life expectancy of 47 years is just two and a half years better than in Afghanistan!

This is part of the legacy of racist American capitalism’s bloody origins. Take the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). The BIA Web site touts that its mission is to “enhance the quality of life, to promote economic opportunity, and to carry out the responsibility to protect and improve the trust assets of American Indians, Indian tribes, and Alaska Natives.” This sick lie has long been the target of humor and anger, including the line “B.I.A., I’m not your Indian anymore” in the late Floyd Red Crow Westerman song “B.I.A.,” a hit during the period of Native American activism in the late 1960s and early ’70s.

U.S. capitalism was born in the genocidal extermination of Native Americans and the enslavement of black Africans. As we wrote in “Genocide ‘Made in USA’” (WV No. 581, 30 July 1993):

“From the governor of New Netherlands, who introduced scalping to North America as a means by which Indian-hunting bounty seekers could claim their payments, to the 1838 ‘Trail of Tears,’ where thousands died as the entire 14,000-strong Cherokee nation was force-marched from their home in Georgia to the barren Oklahoma plains, to the final massacre at Wounded Knee, South Dakota in 1890 when the U.S. Army assassinated 300 unarmed men, women and children—the westward march of U.S. capitalism was guided by the spirit of General Sheridan’s notorious remark: ‘There are no good Indians but dead Indians’.”

We dealt in depth with the oppression of Native Americans in the three-part series “Marxism & the American Indian Question” (Young Spartacus Nos. 27, 28 and 31; December 1974, January and April 1975), where in the second part we wrote: “With the destruction of aboriginal tribal society, Indians became social refuse and wards of the state. Although the federal government finally granted citizenship rights to Indians in 1924, the state maintains an essentially custodial relationship to the reservations, holding the land ‘in trust.’ Until the New Deal’s Indian Reorganization Act (IRA) of 1934, the reservations were ruled autocratically by the agents of the Bureau of Indian Affairs.”

Under the IRA, the government introduced limited self-rule on the reservations, creating a layer of Native bureaucrats. Later, it attempted to “free” Native Americans by terminating tribal status and thereby ending the federal assistance programs and tax exemptions, the economic margin upon which many survived. Through this, the capitalist class sought to rid itself of the burden of either developing the reservations or integrating Native Americans into bourgeois society and the labor force.

We fight to build a Leninist workers party, a tribune of the people that champions the rights of Native Americans. As we concluded in Young Spartacus No. 28:

“Capitalism confronts the Indians, who are cynically termed the ‘Vanishing American,’ only with the prospects of either oppressive urban lumpenization or the abominable reservation, with its squalor, cultural deprivation, high infant mortality, chronic alcoholism and rampant teenage suicide. Only the destruction of capitalism through proletarian revolution and the inauguration of the era of socialist development can insure the all-sided voluntary integration of the American Indian into society on the basis of the fullest equality and meet the special needs created by well over a century of injustice and oppression.”