Gabe Galanda: Republicans taking us back to the termination era

On April 22, 2015, the Republican-controlled House Natural Resource Subcommittee on Indian, Insular and Alaska Native Affairs, threw down the gauntlet by holding a meeting that the Subcommittee’s Chairman personally titled “The Obama Administration’s Part 83 Revisions and How They May Allow the Interior Department to Create Tribes, not Recognize Them.”

At that hearing, a witness invited by the House Subcommittee testified that all tribes recognized by the U.S. Department of the Interior Secretary “should be stripped of federal recognition as their recognized status lack any legal merit.”

If that weren’t bad enough, House Subcommittee staff issued a Memorandum describing the Dawes/General Allotment Act as “humane.” The law that allowed the taking of 96 million acres of tribal trust land in the period between 1887 and 1934 and rendered generations of Indians homeless and landless was hardly humane.

“A mighty pulverizing engine,” as President Theodore Roosevelt accurately described the General Allotment Act in 1901, is more historically accurate; as is the fact that federal allotment policy was thoroughly repudiated, both by the Meriam Report in 1928 and by Congress in 1934 when it enacted the Indian Reorganization Act (IRA).

The historical record is abundantly clear about the intent of the United States’ allotment laws and policies, and their epic failure. Senior staff of the Subcommittee on Indian, Insular and Alaska Native Affairs should be directed by a consensus of Subcommittee leadership to withdraw their falsely premised Memorandum.