Counting Indians

I have given up trying to count the Indians in Cheboygan and Emmet counties. The Sault tribe has not responded to my written request for information, but I was able to find out some more about them on the internet. They have over 40,000 members, with about half of them living in the Upper Peninsula. The rest of them seem to be scattered all around the country. There are five counties in the U.P. that are more than 4% Native American: Mackinaw, which is right across the Bridge from us, has 17.3%, Chippewa has 15.8%, Schoolcraft has 8.8%, Luce has 5.0%, and Alger has 4.1%. The rest of the U.P counties, as well as the seven L.P counties that I looked up, each have less than 4%. I'm not sure why our local Indians seem to exert influence out of proportion to their numbers. It may be just a perception thing on my part, similar to the concern I have previously expressed about other minority groups "taking over" the country. Of course they are not really taking over, it just seems that way to my paranoid mind.

The Treaty of 1855 dissolved the tribes as legal entities, but many tribes stayed together on a social basis until the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 provided a means for them to regain their legal status as semi-sovereign nations. This act was controversial when it was passed and has survived several court challenges over the years. I'm not sure why, but it has been difficult for many tribes to acquire the necessary federal recognition. The Sault tribe got theirs in 1972, and the two Traverse Bay tribes got theirs in the 1980s, after having several previous applications denied.

Indian Reservations aren't what they used to be. Prior to 1934, there were sporadic attempts to break up the collective reservations and parcel the land out to individual Indians. Some of these parcels were subsequently sold to non-Indians, resulting in a pitch patch of reservation and non-reservation holdings. In Michigan, the Treaty of 1836 gave the Indians first crack at homesteading 40 and 60 acre tracts before the White settlers were allowed in. It was a good idea on paper, but it didn't work out the way it was supposed to. Many of the Indian homesteaders were screwed out of their holdings by various legal and illegal means. Some of these lands were eventually repurchased by subsequent generations of Indians and either held as private property or given to the federal government "in trust", which makes them part of the reservation system. More recently, the tribes themselves have been buying up tracts of land and adding them to the system in like manner.

I was thinking that we could learn something from the Indian experience that might help us in the Beaglesonian War on Poverty, but now I'm not so sure. Indians have historically experienced the same kinds of problems as other minority groups: discrimination, poverty, poor schools, crime, and substance abuse. Since the restoration of their tribal identities, they have made significant progress in overcoming these obstacles. The profits from the casinos have been invested in various social programs aimed at improving the quality of life and general well being of the tribal members. They sometimes even donate money to their White neighbors for similar efforts. Unfortunately, all modern tribes do not have casinos, and the ones that don't are not doing nearly as well. Furthermore, the other minority groups do not have anything like the cooperative tribal structure of the Native Americans. They do organize groups from time to time, but these groups don't seem to have the same effect on their members as the modern tribal organizations.

That casino thing kind of happened by accident. One tribe, I forget where, had a substantial Bingo operation which the state tried to shut down. Come to find out, there is no federal law against gambling and the states generally do not have jurisdiction on federal lands. From there it wasn't much of a stretch to tribal casinos. Here was a service for which there was a significant demand that was not being met. The tribes saw the opportunity and took advantage of it. If there is a lesson to be learned here, that's probably it.