Equality

Most American Indians on reservations earn less than $7,000 a year. At least 35% are unemployed, and those who do work tend to be found in low-wage jobs. Roughly two-thirds live off the reservation, where they often find themselves % unprepared for urban life. Native Americans constitute one of the poorest of minorities and are likely to be less educated, more prone to illness, and more resistant to assimilation into the mainstream than any other ethnic group, even though they have been here the longest.

The isolation of the Indian set adrift in his own land was in a sense built into the Constitution right alongside its ennobling visions of governance. The Founding Fathers viewed Indians as foreigners who shared the continent, not citizens whose rights required enumeration and protection. While women were disenfranchised by assumption, and blacks by infamously intricate calculation, Indians were excluded flat out. Tribal Indians were not to be counted when figuring the representation or the taxes required from each state. Article I empowered Congress to regulate commerce "with the Indian Tribes." The power proved to be all but unfettered. In almost 400 treaties with various tribes, the U.S. predatorily acquired nearly 1 billion acres of Indian land.

Despite some changes, federal authority is still extensive, and LaDonna Harris, a Comanche activist who was married to Oklahoma's former Democratic Senator Fred Harris, says the result has been a "long era of unilateral decision making by Euro-American 'experts' on the needs of Indian people." The Indians, whose civilization was based on consensual democracy, were pushed toward the contentiousness of majority rule, without most of the rights that go with it. In 1924 Congress granted citizenship and the vote to all Indians. But it was not until 1968 that Congress extended guarantees of free speech and due process to Indians on reservations, ensuring that tribal custom did not preclude constitutional rights. The Reagan Administration has been dealing with the tribes on a government-to-gover nment basis in a reaffirmation of Indian sovereignty. Despite recent moves toward greater economic development and self-government, in many respects the Indians remain an occupied nation. The suffering has merely slowed, not stopped.