Tribal Contracts
By 
Still from The Exiles, Kent MacKenzie’s 1961 film about Native Americans leaving their reservations and moving to Los Angeles.
The Interior Department announced the proposed $940 million agreement in Albuquerque on Thursday along with leaders from the Oglala Sioux Tribe, Zuni Pueblo and Ramah Chapter of the Navajo Nation. They were among the lead plaintiffs in a contract-dispute lawsuit filed on behalf of more than 600 tribes and tribal agencies. They brought the case in 2012 before the U.S. Supreme Court, where justices ruled for the tribes.
They had argued underfunded federal contracts dating as far back as the 1970s often left them to face shortfalls as they tried to meet critical needs in their communities, ranging from health services to housing.
The settlement still must be approved in federal district court.
“Deep and painful cuts were made every year,” said Val Panteah, governor of Zuni Pueblo, resulting in what he described as “a financial death spiral” for his community in eastern New Mexico. He said poverty, inadequate health care and education present major challenges for the pueblo.
Oglala President John Yellow Bird Steele said the $940 million negotiated with the government was a fair settlement for tribes.
The Interior’s proposed payout would represent the latest in a series of recent major settlements addressing years of legal disputes between tribes and the federal government.
While there’s not a single administration in U.S. history that has dealt with Native American issues to the extent they deserve, the Obama administration has done a good job of trying to settle long-standing issue and give the tribes a fair shake. What’s more important though is that we usually think of modern racial issues in terms of black and white or Latino and white, with Native American exploitation being something that happened a long time ago. But it isn’t. Native Americans remain the poorest group of people in this nation today, with enormous unemployment, drug, and suicide rates, not to mention suffering from police brutality (which was the actual issue that led to the creation of the American Indian Movement in the 1960s). And the federal government has continued to break treaties and underfund promised contracts to the present, or nearly so.
This is an important issue and we need to spend more time talking about it. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, Native American issues get next to no attention on most progressive websites, not to mention in the media at large. Speaking of such things, it would be nice if the writers of articles on Native Americans bothered to look at a map, because Zuni Pueblo is west of Albuquerque, near the Arizona border, not eastern New Mexico.