From the Magazine: After hundreds of years of cruelty and indifference, is there anything a 2020 candidate could say that would allow Native Americans to suspend their disbelief?
Storms hit hard on the Rosebud Sioux reservation, but these reports sounded especially dire: A torrent of floodwater was cascading over the top of He Dog Dam; Cut Meat Creek was threatening the only road into a neighborhood. Across the homeland of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe in South Dakota, sensors on a half-dozen dams and creeks pinged red alerts of high water to the cellphones of tribal emergency responders.
Now the cycle is beginning again. As the field of presidential contenders seems to grow larger each week, Indian Country is wearily anticipating another round of genuflections to the “sovereignty of tribes” and the “special government-to-government relationship” between the United States and this land’s First Nations. If campaign history is any guide, those lofty principles will trip off candidates’ tongues.
Even an attempt by Trump to honor Native Americans went awry: In 2017, he assembled Navajo code talkers, who helped the United States win World War II, beneath a White House portrait of Andrew Jackson, who presided over the forced relocation of the Choctaw and other tribes, known as the Trail of Tears. Then Trump riffed to the code talkers about his nickname for Warren, which seemed to perplex the veterans.
When I called Trahant, he reminded me that Article VI of the Constitution classifies treaties as “the supreme law of the land.” “I’m just sometimes stunned by how folks will say over and over that they love the Constitution,” he said. “Yet when it comes to something as fundamental as funding [Indian] health or salmon restoration, the money’s not there.
Espinosa, for his part, recalled how, several years ago when he was in the IHS hospital with pneumonia, he rejected an offer to sign up for an insurance plan. It would have made it easier to get treatment outside the Indian Health Service, but “to me, it felt like a treaty violation,” Espinosa said. “Trying to get me to sign up for what should already be provided by the IHS.”
Later, the general idea that the U.S. government should be responsible for Native American health care became a specific promise to all American Indians — enshrined in federal law — “to ensure the highest possible health status for Indians and urban Indians and to provide all resources necessary to effect that policy.” Toward that end, the IHS was set up in 1955. Today it provides health care to 2.6 million Native Americans living on or near reservations.
Hoksila Running, 17, gets help with his geometry homework from tutor Chris Horvath. A sign in He Dog, S.D., warns against using meth. Native Americans are more likely than Americans, as a whole, to die of drug overdoses, according to the IHS. From left: Hoksila Running, 17, gets help with his geometry homework from tutor Chris Horvath; a sign in He Dog, S.D., warns against using meth. Native Americans are more likely than Americans, as a whole, to die of drug overdoses, according to the IHS.
Because Rosebud is so remote, the hospital’s biggest challenge is attracting and retaining staff, says Jon Schuchardt, a captain in the U.S. Public Health Service and the Rosebud hospital’s acting CEO. “It’s a hundred miles from the nearest Walmart,” he notes. The hospital has 43 vacancies, including for 12 doctors, 12 nurses, two dentists and two pharmacists, according to the IHS’s Web page for job listings. Schuchardt says the hospital relies on contractors to fill most of those positions.
I asked Schuchardt if he thinks the IHS is living up to the spirit of the treaty and providing the best possible care. “Given the resources we have,” he said, “we are providing the best possible care. You know, I mean, a definition of ‘best possible care’? I mean, are we ever going to be a tertiary Level I trauma center? That’s probably unrealistic. But if that’s the way you define that through the language in the treaty, then obviously that’s not where we’re at.
Kennedy’s short 1968 run set a standard for engagement with Native America by a presidential campaign. In the years since, candidates have tried to match the authenticity of his outreach to tribes with varying success. It’s not enough to tuck tribal concerns into a speech or simply visit a reservation. “They have to understand what treaties are and how they play into that history,” Bo Bearshield, a tribal prosecutor at Rosebud, told me.
I contacted the campaigns of the seven Democratic candidates with the highest poll numbers as of late April, and two agreed to interviews. “The plight of Native Americans is not well known in this country, but you have a people who are suffering,” Sanders told me. “People who in many cases are seeing life expectancy the equivalent of a Third World developing country, a people where health care is extremely inadequate, educational opportunities are limited.
Born nearly two decades after Bobby Kennedy’s visit, Julian Bear Runner has fewer illusions about candidates than the Lakota perhaps harbored on that occasion in 1968. “I’m hoping that I can relate to one of these new candidates so that I can, I guess, endorse them as the Oglala Sioux Tribe,” he said. But, he added: “Look at how many times we have gone to Washington. It’s always the same song and dance. Our needs aren’t really met. … There’s no really great improvement here in Indian Country.
Nez wrestles with the necessity of constantly having to remind candidates and elected officials of the federal responsibility inherent in the treaties. It puts proud people in the position of always having to ask, plead, cajole. Even “beg,” he said. So Nez has developed a new way to talk about treaties and a new pitch to make to candidates, which goes like this: Treaties never were conceived of as charity but as a trade — land for aid and legal rights, peace for peace.
A look at the numbers suggests the United States is no more serious about fixing the roads and other infrastructure in Native America than it is about funding health care. The federal Bureau of Indian Affairs budget for road maintenance on all reservations is $36 million this year, compared with a maintenance backlog of $300 million to $400 million, according to the bureau.
When Nez finished, residents and local officials proceeded to unload on him about the poor quality of roads, especially a 15-mile dirt loop where several hundred people live. One of the most passionate speakers was Linda Curley, a public health nurse whose job involves bringing medication to patients’ homes.
“I like to mud-ball,” Anita Yazzie, one of the bus drivers, said with a grin. “I’m the reverse,” said Ralph Henry, another driver. “I don’t like mud, but I like snow and ice.” He drives about 175 miles a day, all but 30 miles on dirt. “If it’s muddy, you’re lucky to drop off the kids on the first try,” he explained. “A lot of times we have to come back out to get somebody to help us go in there again.
Maj. Gen. Nelson A. Miles — the overall commander, though he was not on the scene that day — was blunt about what happened in a letter the following year, as quoted in the magazine Nebraska History: “I have never heard of a more brutal, cold-blooded massacre than that at Wounded Knee.
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