"It's time to get rid of the BIA and all the fat cats - American Indians or otherwise - who work there and distribute its $2 billion budget to Indian tribes, based on tribal enrollment. The tribes can take that money and do with it as they wish - after all, are not the tribes big boys now who have been taught well by their Great White Father?

I know firsthand of the money wasted by the bureau. I went to visit a friend of mine years ago at the BIA in Muskogee, Okla. He made a lot of money and sponsored our fast-pitch softball team. After making it up to his sixth-floor office, I found him snoring head down on his draftsman's table. I hated to wake him up, he looked so peaceful.

Before we went out for lunch, he showed me the little bridge he had been planning for months on some dirt road in New Mexico - a bunch of lines and arcs on onionskin. After lunch he called it a day, and we went to the lake."

Get the Story:
Indian Eddie: R.I.P., BIA (The Albuquerque Tribune 2/9)

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