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MR. GOVER: Thank you so much, Chief Fontaine, for that presentation. Our
third presentation this afternoon is about the Native American Apology Resolution that
is now pending in the United States Congress. As I indicated earlier, it passed the
Senate earlier this year and now rests in the House. When the Apology Resolution first
was introduced several years ago, one of the sponsors of that resolution was Senator Ben
Nighthorse Campbell. Senator Campbell is here with us this afternoon. He is a very special
friend of this museum. As it happened, he also sponsored the
legislation that established this museum. Please welcome Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell.
MR. BEN NIGHTHORSE CAMPBELL: Thank you, Kevin. I can say right from the start that I wish
every member of the House and the United States Senate could have heard our last two speakers
and could have seen the slide presentations that they
presented. It’s very clear to me that the nation of Canada is way ahead of us from the
standpoint of recognizing the past injustices and the things that we need to do to
become whole again. I was interested in the similarity, too, between what many of our
fathers and mothers and grandfathers and grandmothers went through in both the nation of Canada
and the United States, too. I think in Canada, churches ran most of the schools. Here, we
call them boarding schools and the federal government ran them, but the
experiences for the youngsters were pretty much the same. Cut your hair forcefully, wash
your mouth out if you spoke your own language or perhaps beat you, and the sign on the wall,
you know, “You have to kill the Indian to save the child,” that kind of thing. That
was very similar in Canada and here, and I know my dad was in an Indian boarding school
and the stories he tells about those days were not good days. But we’re making progress.
I’m going to skip around a little bit here because I know that we have sort of a mixed
group, and as I look around the audience, I see some of
my close friends from years and years. Vice Chairman Glynn Crooks of the Shakopee Mdewakanton
Sioux Community; Pablita Abeyta, who was my lead staffer when we wrote the language almost
a quarter century ago to build this magnificent structure; Dan Inouye, our good friend on
the Senate side. I was still in the House in those days. Dan was the
prime sponsor on the Senate side. Allison Binney who’s down here as the chief counsel
for Senator Dorgan, who is the chairman of the Indian Affairs committee in the US Senate--my
old committee--and is doing just a marvelous job trying to get his colleagues and my former
colleagues to recognize that we need to move forward on a lot of things, and I’m
going to touch on just a couple of those. But by the same token, I assume that there
are probably a few people in the audience who did not – maybe they’re here for the
first time just learning about something they’d heard
about in the Native American experience that most of us grew up with and recognize and
also recognize that it’s not over. There are still many, many bad things happening
to us. I think the misconception now is that you read in the paper once in a while about
how rich those Indians are becoming because some of them
have some natural resources or some of them have a casino. What those stories rarely talk
about is the other 90% or more of Indians who are still living in poverty, who still
have to eat government surplus food. MR. BEN NIGHTHORSE CAMPBELL:
Overcome those things too. And certainly as part of it we believe that the federal government
has a bigger responsibility than just what is called "trust responsibility." That trust
responsibility, for those of you who have not been in the Indian community, means the
obligation the federal government took on when they
took land forcefully away from Indian people. They accepted the responsibility of providing
certain things. Health care was one. Certain kinds of things--in those days it was based
on beef and blankets but now it's based on, frankly, unemployment and the things of that
nature--that they should be helping more with. But some people in the Congress have certainly
taken the lead. And my friend and colleague, Senator Brownback, certainly has by recognizing
that it's time that great nations are recognized as great peoples, that they should have a
certain degree of humility about them and fess up and own up to some of the mistakes
they've made. Senator Brownback could not be here tonight; he had another obligation.
I know I'm rather a poor substitute for him but I would like to read his letter that he
sent to me for you, if I can do this without my glasses:
Dear Friends, I regret that I am unable to be here today at the National Museum of the
American Indian for this important and inspiring symposium. As the primary sponsor for the
Native American Apology Resolution, I recognize how important it is for the museum to initiate
public forums such as this. For centuries relations between the United States
and the Native people of this land have been in disrepair. For too much of our history
federal-tribal relations have been marked by broken treaties, mistreatment, and
dishonorable dealings. Certainly, we cannot erase the record of our past. However, we
can acknowledge our past failures, express our sincere regrets, and work towards establishing
a brighter future for all Americans. To help achieve this goal, I introduced the Senate
Joint Resolution to extend a formal apology from the United States to tribal
governments and Native people nationwide. While this apology passed in the Senate earlier
this year as part of the Indian Health Care Improvement Act, both the apology and the
Indian health care bill have yet to be taken up by the House of Representatives. Even from
the earliest days of our Republic, there has existed a sentiment that
honorable dealings and peaceful coexistence were needed in our relations with our Native
neighbors. Indeed, our predecessors in Congress in 1787 stated in the Northwest
Ordinance, “The utmost good faith shall always be observed toward the Indians.”
It is my hope that this apology will be the foundation for a new area of positive relations
between tribal governments and the United States. Soon after becoming a member of the
United States House of Representatives and then in the Senate, I started traveling around
Kansas [that’s Senator Brownback’s home state] and introducing myself. I noticed particularly
when I went to the Native American areas and tribes in our state, that there was real anger
there, and it was palpable. I started to ask the question, Why is this? Why has your American
experience led to this sort of feeling? Then people would start
talking about their stories and their heritage. It is most appropriate then that Senator Ben
Nighthorse Campbell will be speaking to you today about the Native American
Apology Resolution. He didn't need to put that in here, I was going to read the letter
anyway. But he goes on to say when we used to be on the House together we would often
sit at the floor between votes and he would ask me a lot of questions about the Native
American experience from my perspective, and I think perhaps he gained a little bit more
insight, at least I hope so. But he does credit me and
he didn't need to do that, but he’s a great friend. What this apology would do is recognize
and honor the importance of Native Americans to this land and our nation in the past and
today. It offers this apology to the Native peoples for the poor and painful choices our
government sometimes made in disregard to its solemn word. And as a United
States Senator, although I cannot apologize for all of my colleagues, I sincerely apologize
on behalf of myself for all the past wrongs committed to Native Americans of this
great land. Hopefully this apology will someday soon be passed through Congress and signed
by the president. And it may then help restore the relationship between the federal government
and Native Americans. Thank you again and please accept my warm wishes for a memorable
Harvest of Hope Symposium. Senator Brownback is just a wonderful human
being. And if you ever have a chance to meet him, I’m sure you will recognize it too.
When we used to talk, we used to also think perhaps an apology would be the catalyst for
more information. You know, my dad left the reservation years and years ago by going in
the Army. It was his literally only hope to get
out and find a job. And I used to ask him why he left, and he would simply say because
I got tired of being hungry. Things are not good now on many reservations, but they
must have been really bad when he left the reservation in 1914 to go in the army. I think
that this whole apology is part of a bigger fabric and part of that big fabric too is
the fact that in our experience, in our fathers’ and grandfathers’ experience, we were never
allowed to define ourselves. We didn't have a written language for one thing. And
the majority of population, the dominant population in America did have a written language. And
so through the years and years, we saw things develop like the old Police Gazette pictures
that you saw in the late 1800s or perhaps the dime novels where Indians were described
as pillaging, heathen, raping savages. Or perhaps the old 1930s movies where
everybody except an Indian got a movie part as playing Indians and it was usually done
in sort of a negative fashion--negative stereotyping I think is the general
word for it. When you have children raised with decade after decade after decade of being
surrounded by those kinds of images, you can imagine why even now today we have as high
a suicide rate as there is I think in the world. On some reservations one out of every
two teenage girls tries suicide and one out of every teenage boys tries it. I don't know
of any other culture that has that kind of a problem.
And to my way of thinking that’s got to come from the kind of a dead-end existence
sometimes these youngsters are raised with where they hear the old stories about how
bad they are and not enough stories about how wonderful they are and how good they are.
So many of us think something has got to come from the
top. And certainly we know that an apology resolution from the United States government,
is not going to fix all the problems we have. There are many. We’re making progress,
however. And what we do think, perhaps it will lead to a better understanding and education
of the Native people of this nation who went, as you know, from something like 100 million
before 1492 to just under 200,000 by 1900. Many people don't know, although it’s common
knowledge here at the Smithsonian, the leading, you might say flagship, institution of research
in America, that over 50% of all foodstuffs now eaten in Europe started here. And many
of the medicines, including quinine and many others, started here. They were Native American
plants before they ever went to Europe. Rather ironic that the potato, as an example, was
taken to Ireland and the people of Ireland became so dependent on the
potato that when the potato blight came, thousands and thousands starved and created almost a
mass exodus of Irish people to this nation. That’s how dependent they got on a Native
American food. Well anyway, let me talk a little bit about the process of passing legislation.
You’ve heard it sometimes defined as watching pork sausage being made. It is somewhat complicated.
Those of you who are on the Hill a lot know how complicated it can be. But if I can just
try and narrow it down to something in a nutshell, I’ll try and do that.
Sometimes I think it’s a little bit like unrolling flypaper. You’re apt to catch
anything that goes by with it. Some good things and some bad things. And the way the House
and Senate work, as you probably know, there are many more bills introduced than can ever
get passed in a two-year cycle. And everything works in two-year cycles.
If it’s not done in two years, it has to start over right from the beginning in the
following two years. And so just winding down this Congress, everything that has not
finished this Congress will have to be reintroduced next year. And so sometimes bills will take
15 or 20 years to get through. A long time. Indians have been waiting a long time for
this though, and they’re patient. And I’m sure that if they see the light at the end
of the tunnel, they’re willing to wait just a little bit longer. But because there are
so many bills that are due, sometimes, particularly
near the end of the congressional section, things are attached to other things. All you
have to have really is a title. So if you have a bill that has the word “Indian”
in it, literally anything to do with Indians can be stuck on that just like flypaper. And
some of the amendments may be good. Unfortunately, some of the amendments may
be what we sometimes call the poison pill, in which somebody who might have been a sponsor
or a big supporter at least of the original bill, when that addendum is put on, that very
unpopular one, at least to the original person’s liking, goes on as an amendment, you lose
some of the people that would have supported it otherwise. And that’s why it becomes
very, very complicated to get something through. And it’s also why sometimes your congress
persons or senators can be recorded as being for
a bill and against the same bill. How do you do that? Well, it goes through a changing
process. They may be for it in committee until some amendment was added on that they can't
live with and so they vote against it at the next level, maybe on the floor, and maybe
it’s carved out after it goes to conference committee, which is the resolving committee
between the House and the Senate. And maybe he can
then support it again. So those of you who are voting for or against somebody—remember
a lot of those ads you see on TV, they take the worst that can possibly be said about
a candidate and make it look like—look at that son of a gun, he voted against this wonderful
bill. But he also may have voted for it too. You just have to track it a little more carefully.
I think the people that frame up those negative campaigns often feel that most people won't
bother tracking, they’ll just rely on some ten-second commercial and the 5 o’clock
news about it. In any event, in the case of Senator Brownback’s very commendable language,
it’s gone through three different Congresses now. But in this last term this year, it couldn’t
get through the Senate as a self-standing bill. So people decided to attach that to
something else. And the thing that they attached it to was called the Indian Health Care Improvement
Act. Those is you who are, you might say in the red circle, understand the difficulty
we’ve had in getting that reauthorized. It’s been
almost 14 years since the Indian Health Care Improvement Act was authorized. Because it
hasn’t been reauthorized, there are many new breakthroughs in technology and medicine.
Well think of yourself, what’s happened in the last 14 years in terms of all the new
wonder drugs and all the new kinds of things people can avail themselves of in the form
of everything from transplants to fixing the common cold. But Indian people are sort of
in a 14-year time warp because the health services come through a federal agency, the
bill has to be reauthorized to let them come up to the modern-day standards. It has not
been for 14 years, when the average for reauthorizing a bill in Congress is usually 3 to 4 years.
So here we are fighting this other battle that has nothing to do with the
resolution, but somebody decided to go ahead and put the Indian apology on the healthcare
bill, which is okay. The only downside, it would not come out under the original sponsor’s
name. It would come out under whoever was the sponsor for the Indian Health Care Improvement
Act. That’s all right, as long as it’s supportive. I know many of my
colleagues and certainly Senator Brownback, he’s not turf conscious. He’s fought very
hard for this Indian resolution. But as long as it gets done, I’m sure he wouldn’t
make a big thing out of the fact it comes our under some other bill. But guess what?
They couldn’t get it past the Senate, the Indian Health Care Improvement Act, because
some people have a very, very strong belief about life.
And they’re just totally against abortions. You probably know that, it’s a big dividing
issue in our country in many elections. There was also an amendment put on the Indian Health
Care Improvement Act that dealt with abortions. Once that was attached to it and it passed
the Senate and it went to the House, it ran into that backlash I talked about, the flypaper
effect, where some people who would have supported it beforehand, who happened to be very pro-choice,
would not support that bill now because of that amendment. So
here we are, bogged down, with something that’s totally unrelated to an Indian apology and
we haven't been able to get that amendment off and we can't get it passed with it, so
we’re just sort of stuck with it. They may be going back in session next week. I have
a hunch they’ll be dealing much more with the fiscal problems that we all face
as Americans now. But there’s still a slim, a very slim, chance that the Indian Health
Care Improvement Act will pass. And if it does, the apology resolution will go through
too. But even before it got that far, since we began to talk about this in the 108th Congress,
introduced it in the 109th. It got past committee in the 109th, and we couldn’t get it past
the floor. It got past the Senate—excuse me, the 108th. In the 109th it got past the
floor of the Senate. We’re kind of back to square one. If we don't get it passed
this year we’ll have to go back to reintroducing the whole thing again in the next term, which
is the 110th, if my numbers are correct, the 110th and try for two more years. But I know,
because I was involved in trying to help Senator Brownback, because at the time I was the chairman
of the Indian Affairs Committee, that some of our colleagues that
we were trying to educate about the importance of this resolution, the importance of this
apology, were concerned about what they called the domino effect. It’s already
been mentioned some years ago. We did pass a resolution to apologize to Japanese Americans
who suffered, you know, somewhat of the same indignity that American Indians did long before
World War II. I was a young boy in California, just in elementary school, a youngster in
California, but I still remember what happened to some of my Japanese American friends.
When they were forced—they were given two days to sell all their property and herded
on busses and sent to what are called relocation camps where I think it was basically they
were imprisoned. Not because they did anything wrong, many of them were patriotic, loyal
Americans and in fact the most decorated battalion of World War II was called
the 442nd Nisei Battalion. Dan Inouye, my Senate colleague and friend who has been such
a supporter of Indian issues, lost his arm as a
member of the 442nd Nisei Battalion. But this is while many of his own family were interned
in literally a prison camp called a relocation camp. So they were learning that greed and
prejudice reared its ugly head in World War II towards good patriotic Japanese Americans
just as it had done to get many good Native Americans before that and they had
their rights literally stripped away. But in that apology resolution with the Japanese
Americans, it was mentioned there was a payment to be made, a $20,000 payment to every Japanese
American family and it was made. I was on the House side in those days and I remember
supporting that and speaking to it too on the floor. The problem with some of our
senators believe it would start a domino effect. That if we did that with the Japanese Americans
and now we created a situation where we would have to make some kind of cash
payment to every American Indian family for what they lost, what would it mean next? Would
the African American community all need to have some kind of a repayment? You know as
well as I do in the history of America there have been many people who have been discriminated
against, who have had it tough, including the Irish in New York, including Hispanic
Americans in part of the United States, and certainly the African Americans too. So that
kind of a fear of a domino effect is what they weren’t saying out loud and didn't
really I think want to put into writing, but I know in talking to some of them personally
that was one of their big concerns. There was no, you know, repayment of any sort in
the apology resolution, but they—what they sometimes call on the Hill “wait until the
other shoe drops,” which means you get something now, you come back three years later and
say well wait a minute, what about us, we got left out and why can't we change this
and have sort of a nibbling effect. And some of them were a little bit afraid of that nibbling
effect. In any event, many of us thought it was really important. We recognize that even
though it may be somewhat symbolic and doesn’t actually put food on the
table, if we recognize that if you look at the history of this great nation, and you
think of what symbolism is all about, what the American flag is about or what the Statue
of Liberty is about, or what the Liberty Bell is about. They’re symbols that bind a nation
and remind us of the good, the bad and the ugly that’s taken place in our history.
Even though it may not, you know, do anything right now for an immediate effect of helping
to get supper on the table, it certainly binds you together as a nation and inspires a
nation, too. So if it was only symbolic, it seems to me that it was an important symbol
to do that. Senator Brownback, though, I know him well and believe me, he’s not going
to give it up. He’s going to continue on. If we don't get it passed this year, he will
next year. Let me maybe stop there because I know we have some limited time. But
just let me also leave you with one thing, as I mentioned earlier. We believe we’ve
come a long way compared to how far our ancestors had to go. But if you leave here with anything
on your mind, if you’re not familiar with Indian Country, it’s just this thing, “It
ain’t over.” We still have a long way to go, and we still have a lot of children
that need help. And we still have a lot of education
to do, too. But thank you, and thank you for your attendance.
[Applause]