THE OTHER
AMERICANS
He blamed himself for the indiscretions of his youth: dropping out of
school, drinking heavily, fighting
and spending time in prison.
But he also said that despite
his efforts at reform—he no longer drinks, he earned his GED, and
he has become a something of a
spokesman for the poorest and
most remote residents on the reservation—he has a hard time identifying opportunities that might
better his lot in life, and that of his
wife and children.
“I often say it in a joking way, that
La Plant is like a retirement home:
You come here to die,” he tells me.
“There’s just nothing to do.”
It’s easy to dismiss Bowker’s
lot as self-inflicted, and there’s
little question that, had he followed a different path early in
life, he might have found better fortunes. But as with African
Americans, it’s also fair to say
that a great deal more wealth—
transformational wealth—would
have been coursing through La
Plant, and Cheyenne River, and
among many other tribes of the
Great Plains, had it not been for
decades of discriminatory policy.
This, too, would likely have made
a difference in Bowker’s trajectory.
Consider the trust system set up
HUFFINGTON
10.21.12
by the U.S. government under the
Dawes Act of 1877, which essentially broke up tribal lands and assigned parcels, ranging in size from
40 to 160 acres, to individual tribal
members as a way of assimilating
Native Americans into the economy
through land ownership. But rather
than grant the parcels outright, the
government held the land in trust—
at first temporarily, but in the end,
in perpetuity—and in many cases,
it was leased for exploitation to the
timber industry, miners and oil and
gas companies.
Presumably, the tribal owners of
each parcel would profit from such
leasing, but the royalties collected
from industries active on trust land
was wildly mismanaged by the Department of the Interior. A lawsuit
filed by a tribal member in 1996
seeking to find out the extent of the
mismanagement discovered that
the department had also failed to
keep track of the heirs to the original allotments. And as had happened with black landowners, nominal ownership of intestate tribal
allotments had multiplied exponentially over the generations.
In his 2004 testimony before
Congress, Ross Swimmer, the former special trustee for American
Indians at the Interior Department, noted that there are now
tribal properties “with ownership interests that are less than