No economist am I – my fields of study are politics, law and history – but the present state of profound economic disrepair across Native nations, the United States and the global community, calls for each of us to put on our thinking caps and ponder what we have experienced and what the next steps might be.
The current depression has erupted at a particularly inauspicious moment in world history. It is a time when frightening environmental conditions – global warming, desertification, rising seas, species decimation, pollution of every kind – are simultaneously wreaking havoc across the planet.
The majority of these debilitating developments have been caused or dramatically exacerbated by human actions – actions fueled by attitudes, ideologies, economic systems and values that for far too many generations emphasized a human-centric approach that rejected or denied the legitimacy and integrity of other beings.
Historically, Native peoples worldwide generally operated spiritually-centered and kin-based political, economic and social systems that respected personal and collective autonomy and sought to manage and positively relate to environments in a sustainable and respectful fashion.
Close encounters of the European and Euro-American kind dramatically transformed Native communities in every respect, including systematic colonialistic efforts to economically incorporate indigenous nations and their economic systems into the ever-expanding worldwide capitalist system.
By the time the Great Depression was seared into the minds, bodies and souls of millions with the catastrophic collapse of the stock market in October 1929, the vast majority of Native peoples had already been economically dependent for several decades. In fact, the 1928 Meriam Report, a comprehensive two-year federal study of Indian communities, had stated that “an overwhelming majority of the Indians are poor, even extremely poor.”
Ironically, over the next decade, as the depression deepened, exacerbated by the Dust Bowl that enveloped great swaths of the country, Native experiences in the United States ran the gamut from sheer depression to relative calm security.
Interestingly, while most federal Indian policy eras have received the attention of numerous scholars, the status of Native nations during the Great Depression has, to my knowledge, not been systematically chronicled. That silence, in itself, is pregnant with meaning, and needs to be explored through critical case studies of the impact of that transformative economic event on Native peoples.
But the anecdotal evidence points to the early 20th century Great Depression as being a most fascinating and complex era for Natives.
For example, John Collier, the commissioner of Indians affairs, in his 1939 annual report, noted that the 1928 Meriam Report had starkly described how pervasive poverty was throughout Indian country. “Today, Indians are still poor, and many of them live just above the minimum of subsistence. A very few are wealthy; many are in great poverty.” This statement suggests a degree of economic improvement among Native nations during, arguably, the most difficult financial crisis of the 20th century.
Of course, some tribal communities suffered profoundly during the 1930s. The Navajo Nation, for instance, as a result of the federally imposed livestock reduction program and low market prices for livestock and woven blankets, were dealt a crippling economic blow and it would take another three decades before they began to stabilize.
For many other tribal nations, however, the Great Depression was anything but that. First, while the Dust Bowl had devastating consequences for much of the nation, for Indian country it actually enabled some tribal governments to regain portions of their lands because many white farmers and ranchers who had owned or leased tribal territory were forced to sell and vacated the reservations.
Second, the Great Depression also shattered, at least for a time, the view that limitless “progress” and “rugged individualism” were ideal features of American life and the American people. The ways of Native peoples, many of whom still adhered to communal lifestyles and remained close to their homelands, appealed to larger society’s members, who were seeking more meaningful and sustainable ways of living.
Third, a number of the Indian New Deal “stimulus”-type programs – the Civilian Conservation Corp (which employed thousands of Indians on road construction, communication lines, forest fire suppression, fence construction, etc.), and the Revolving Credit Fund (established under the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act and used to fund cooperative associations of many kinds – lumber mills, livestock associations, fisheries, tourist cabins, community dairy farms and hay production), created a variety of jobs and programs that had enormously beneficial consequences for many reservations.
One review of a well-done study by Byron Nelson Jr. on the Hupa people of California, determined that this nation emerged in the late 1930s “culturally intact, reasonably prosperous and politically autonomous. …”
Of course, every economic depression is different. The current depression is not and will not be as traumatic as that of the 1929-1939 one. And Native nations today are certainly not economically situated the same way they were 80 years ago – Indian gambling operations, a more educated tribal citizenry and maturing governing institutions have altered the economic and political landscape in profound ways.
The $5.2 billion for tribal governments included in the stimulus law will be an important infusion of needed capital in tribal economies. But equally important, tribal leaders and others in the community need to visit with any remaining community elders who remember the previous depression to get a sense of what actually transpired within their lands.
Besides the interviews a detailed review of historical and archival records should be conducted to see what can be gleaned about each tribe’s path through the Great Depression. We may well pick up some ideas that can hold us in good stead through this current economic debacle.
This kind of history, Arthur Schlesinger once wrote, has many uses because, “History is to the nation as memory is to the individual. As persons deprived of memory become disoriented and lost, not knowing where they have been and where they are going, so a nation denied a conception of the past will be disabled in dealing with its present and its future.”
David E. Wilkins, Lumbee, is professor of American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota.