Drums on the Potomac

Until Nov. 2 most people outside the Bureau of Indian Affairs--including many of the Indians it was created to serve--took little notice of its operation. On that day, however, the bureau achieved national notoriety when 600 urban-oriented young Indians, who called their mission "the Trail of Broken Treaties," began a seven-day occupation of the building. They were protesting the bureau's inefficiency and its indifference to the pyramiding problems faced by Indians, especially in the cities. Uncertain how to handle the militants and anxious to minimize the pre-election publicity that accompanied their trashing of the building, the Administration bought its way out of the mess by giving the Indians $66,650 in "travel expenses" to clear the area.

The Broken Treaties episode was merely the most publicized aspect of a genuine Indian uprising, which has turned the BIA into a shambles. While most Americans were settling down to Thanksgiving turkey, bands of Indians staged protests in Gallup, N.M., at Fort Robinson in Nebraska, and on Mayflower II in Massachusetts, where Indians scaled the rigging, hauled down the Union Jack and burned it on Plymouth Rock. Meanwhile the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco revealed a stunning decision, a ruling that the Government is obliged to perform the same services for urban Indians--nearly one-half of all American Indians--as it does for reservation dwellers. That decision, binding only in the West, where most Indians still live, could be the stimulus for a spate of demands by Indians across the country.

Bickering. At present the BIA is ill-equipped to handle such challenges. Apparently fed up with the bureau's internal bickering, Interior Secretary Rogers Morton last week fired Commissioner Louis Bruce, Deputy Commissioner John Crow and Harrison Loesch, Assistant Secretary for Public Land Management. As an interim measure, Morton named an assistant, Richard Bodman, to take command of the BIA.

LaDonna Harris, wife of Oklahoma Senator Fred Harris and herself part Comanche, believes the root of the BIA's problem is the Government's paternalistic attitude toward all Indians. Says she: "We are treated like children. We are not allowed to make our own mistakes." Further, she declares, "there are no goals in the bureau, no policy."

Nor, she might well add, is there a clear idea of its jurisdiction. Is it responsible only for Indians on the reservation, or also for the growing number of Indians who are trying to carve a career for themselves beyond its confines? Before the bureau can answer even that basic question, it will have to figure out how to streamline its own internal, paper-choked operation.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.