American Indian Culture and Research Journal

The self-determination of American Indian communities has been federal Indian policy since 1975, when Congress enacted the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act, Public Law 93-638. In sections two and three of the act, Congress stated its finding that federal domination of Indian affairs had deprived American Indians of leadership skills and had denied Indians an effective voice in planning and implementing programs. “True self-determination,’’ the Congress concluded, would depend upon an “educational process” which the act was intended to initiate. In initiating a new policy in Indian affairs, Congress stated its commitment to maintain the unique relationship which the United States has with Indian people, often expressed as the trust relationship. Title I of the act, which was denoted the Indian Self-Determination Act, directed the Secretaries of the Interior and of Health, Education, and Welfare (now Health and Human Services) to contract with Indian tribes, at the tribes’ request, to plan, conduct, and administer programs provided to tribal members under the authority of the Snyder Act of 1921, the Wheeler-Howard Act of 1934, and the Transfer Act of 1954.2 In addition, Title I authorized grants for strengthening tribal government, for training personnel, and for planning.

The years between 1870 and 1920 were formative for North Dakota's Turtle Mountain band of Chippewa Indians. During this era of Indian policy reform, this northern Plains tribe experienced a familiar pattern of land loss, poverty, and despair. The manner in which the allotment of land in severalty was implemented, however, was unusual. Instead of taking allotments on the reservation, the Turtle Mountain band was forced to take them on the public domain. Moreover, the public domain allotments were often far from the reservation. This resulted in a de facto removal of a considerable portion of the tribe to areas as distant as Montana and South Dakota. The impact of that policy, including the "Ten Cent Treaty,"' on the Turtle Mountain band is the focus of this study. Because so much of the Turtle Mountain Chippewa identity was and is tied to the region, it is appropriate that we begin there. The Turtle Mountains lie in north-central North Dakota along the Manitoba border. They stand like an island of forest and lakes in the midst of a vast prairie ocean. More properly called hills, they occupy approximately eight townships in what today are Rolette and Bottineau counties, North Dakota, as well as several hundred square miles of southern Manitoba. Many lakes dot these wooded hills, giving the area an appearance not unlike the Chippewa’s original Minnesota home. Over two hundred lakes are identified on contemporary maps, with many more small sloughs scattered throughout the area, For people and animals alike, these hills were a land of plenty for centuries, containing a varied stock of nuts and berries. Before and after the arrival of whites in the eighteenth century, buffalo and deer could be found in and around the mountains in great numbers; so, too, with a great many different types of fowl. The Indians in the area, at first Sioux, but later Crees, Assiniboines, and Chippewas, visited and hunted in the Turtle Mountain country. Understandably, this land soon became a place of conflict. To whites, who arrived later as explorers, trappers, and traders, it was a veritable oasis on the prairie.

INTRODUCTION Northern Canada is a complex and fragile homeland blessed with physical and natural resources which are now subject to modern land claims agreements. An important public policy issue that receives little attention in the academic literature relates to the various models of governance that will be established once aboriginal claims are settled in Canada's north. For northerners, however, claims settlements represent the single largest item on the public policy agenda. Most of the research on native claims focuses upon the normative foundations for the claims, the unique cultural and environmental dimensions, and the quantification of actual entitlements in the form of cash and land transfers. This paper transcends the debate over entitlements and seeks to refocus the dialogue around those issues relating to post-claims governance. Admittedly, this paper is a polemic. My objective is to generate discussion and, hopefully, further research concerning what might be termed the implementation phase of the claims process. This is particularly important for the Dene/métis of the Mackenzie region of the Northwest Territories, the Inuit of the eastern Arctic, and the Council for Yukon Indians in the Yukon.

For forty years, D’Arcy McNickle wrote about Indians. His novel, The Surrounded, published in 1936, was the first of a variety of publications that marked his distinguished career in Indian affairs. Two more novels, several short stories, a biography, three historical monographs, and numerous articles and book reviews all reveal the extent of his concerns. He is best known today for his novels, but his other articles, examined in the context of his life, provide a more immediate and intimate insight into the development of his thinking. D’Arcy McNickle (1904-1977) was one of a handful of people employed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) under John Collier who continued to work for and write about Indian affairs for decades after the ”Indian New Deal” of the 1930s and 1940s. McNickle, an enrolled member of the Flathead tribe of northwestern Montana, was hired under Collier’s “Indian Civil Service” policy in 1936. At the time of his resignation from the bureau in 1952, he was head of the Tribal Organization Division. By that time, he had written his first historical monograph and a number of articles for the BIA’s house organ, Indians at Work, and other articles as well.

In 1643, John Eliot (1604-1690), the Roxbury, Massachusetts minister and millenarian better known as the “Apostle to the Indians,” began to learn an Algonquian dialect in preparation for missionary work. After three years of study, he started to preach to the Indians in Massachusetts Bay, and he continued to work among them until the late 1680s, when his advanced age no longer permitted him to leave Roxbury. Over the course of these forty years he attracted some eleven hundred Indians, primarily members of the Massachusett and Nipmuck tribes, to the Christian religion; established fourteen reservations (”praying towns”) for his converts; and produced for the Indians’ use a number of Algonquian language works, including a translation of the Bible. During the past twenty-five years, Eliot’s missionary career has received considerable critical attention from historians, anthropologists, religionists, and literary critics. Since 1965, substantial portions of eighteen articles, chapters in nine books, and a biography have been devoted to him, and a modern critical edition of his Indian Dialogues has appeared, as well as an anthology which generously represents him. Three major reasons for this multidisciplinary interest in Eliot can be identified. First, in the 1960s students of American Puritanism began to look for topics left unexamined by Perry Miller, whose interpretive agenda had dominated the field since the 1930s. Miller did not explore Puritan-Indian relations, and he rarely mentioned Eliot in his writings. A second reason is the academic interest in American Indians and other neglected subjects of investigation that was inspired by the protest movements of the 1960s and 1970s and also by the Annales school of historiography. This interest has extended not only to the missions of Eliot and other Europeans, but also to trade, law, demography, land, military history, archeology, diplomacy, and other aspects of pre- and postcontact Indian life in early America. A third reason is the growing scholarly concern with late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English Protestant (especially Puritan) millenarianism. No fewer than fourteen monographs devoted in whole or large part to the subject have appeared since 1969.