Smithsonian Philatelic Achievement Award

Transcription

>> David Ferriero: Good afternoon. I'm David Ferriero, the archivist of the National Archives. And it is a pleasure to welcome you to the William G. McGowan Theater here at the National Archives and Records Administration this afternoon. Welcome to joining of us who are joining us on our YouTube channel. Today we take a look at the treaties between the United States and the American Indian nations, treaties that contain promises but in many cases brought betrayals. Our speakers this afternoon will discuss these treaties which are in the National Archives holdings. We are loaning them to the National Museum of the American Indian not far from here. The overall exhibit, "Nation to Nation: Treaties Between the United States and American Indian Nations runs through the fall of 2018. The Archives and the American Indian Museum have some permanent ties. Each of our New York City outposts share the same building in lower Manhattan, the Alexander Hamilton U.s. Custom house at One Bowling Green. I would like to tell you about two other programs coming of interest soon to this theater. Two weeks from today on December 4th at noon we will welcome Stanley Weintraub who will discuss his latest book, "Christmas, Far from Home." The book tells the dramatic story of the Christmas 1950 escape of thousands of American troops who have been surrounded by the enemy in Korea harsh terrain. A book signing will follow the program. On Friday, December 5th, we will present a Nixon legacy forum on Vietnam and the Paris Peace Accords. The panel will include former members of the National Security staff who will example the chronology, key players and impact of the Paris Peace Accords. The program is presented in partnership with the Richard Nixon Foundation. If you want to know more about these and all of our upcoming programs and exhibits, consult our monthly calendar of events. There are copies in the lobby as well as signup sheets where you can receive them by regular mail or email. And another way to get more involved in the National Archives is to become a member of the Foundation for the National Archives. The foundation supports all of our education and outreach activities. And there are applications for membership in the lobby also. Our guests today are Kevin Gover, director of the National Museum of the American Indian, and Suzan Shown Harjo, guest curator of the exhibit now at the museum. They will discuss the issues related by the exhibit and the book related to the exhibit and the book for the exhibit, a wonderful book which is available in our shop. And they will be available to sign at the end of the program. Kevin a citizen of a tribe of Oklahoma is a Princeton graduate who earned his law degree at the University of New Mexico. Although he was once an attorney in of Washington's power law firms, he returned to New Mexico and established a small Native American-owned law firm which grew into the largest law firm of its type in the country. In 1997, he was named assistant secretary of the Interior for Indian Affairs and served in 2001. He orchestrated the apology to American Indians. He is faculty at Arizona State University. Suzan Shown Harjo is president of the Morning Star Institute, a national Indian rights organization. She's a writer, curator, and policy advocacy who has helped Native American nations secure sacred lands. She is a poet and awardwinning columnist whose work appears in many publications. She received the Institute of American Indian Arts first honorary doctorate humanities awarded to a woman. She helped develop important Indian law including those dealing with protection and preservation of Indian culture. These a trustee of the National Museum of American Indian where she has been a guest curator of a number of projects. Her work will be recognized Monday at the White House when President Obama honors her as one of only 19 recipients of this year's Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor. Please welcome Kevin Gover and Suzan Shown Harjo. (applause). >> Kevin Gover: Good afternoon, everyone. And thanks for coming here this afternoon. I'm Kevin Gover. I'm the director at the National Museum of the American Indian. We recently on September 21st of this year opened an exhibition called "Nation to Nation: Treaties Between the United States and American Indian Nations." And this exhibition was marked something of a new direction for our museum. We have long been a true center, an international center, for living indigenous cultures, cultures from throughout the western hemisphere and Hawaii. And we're very focused on a couple of things, primarily the return of authority to Native communities for the presentation and interpretation of their histories and cultures. I have been at the museum for about seven years. It was a thriving enterprise when I arrived. So naturally I thought, well, we've just got to do something about this. And almost immediately we began thinking about turning toward more -- a greater emphasis on history in our presentations. Now, the treaty's exhibition was something that was already actually underway prior to my arrival, and Suzan had been working on it with our prior director Rick West. And it took us quite a while to sort out how to tell a very complicated, long story in a few thousand words in a museum gallery. But finally we were able to do so through Suzan's good scholarship and good humor. And so we did open the -- open the exhibition. And we're very pleased with it. And it really feels like a very solid first step for us into a greater emphasis on history. And so you'll be seeing more of this kind of thing from us going forward. But I think for today's purposes, we should really focus on the Nation to Nation exhibition and, of course, the book that accompanies that. So I'm going to ask Suzan to sort of say how this all came about and what it was we were trying to make sure people knew about this subject. Thank you. >> Suzan Shown Harjo: Hello, everyone. In 2003, I proposed -- well, actually first I asked Rick West who was the director if this was the time to propose the treaties exhibit. And he said, well, yes, only if we go very slowly because the opening of the museum on the mall was 2003 -- 2004, so this is the time to plan and research but, remember, go slow. The other night I saw him at the museum and he said, I had no idea then that I was a prophet. (laughter). And that it would take so long and take so long it did. We did go slowly. We worked with, well, myself and Vine Delores Jr. who was the greatest intellectual and scholar of treaties was co-curating this with me. And he and I pulled together the leading experts that we knew on these treaties. And we talked about how we can present them, what was important to know, what would be the treaties that we had to have or if we didn't know the exact treaty, that we needed what was the group that we needed a treaty for. So we worked very -- in an improvisational way. We would talk about the treaties, what was important about them, what was important and what we wanted visitors to take away and what we wanted leaders to take away from the book. And that came down to this, that these just aren't the Indian treaties that a lot of people think. These are treaties between the United States and Native American nations, Indian nations and that the nonNative people have a stake in this, have a responsibility to these treaties, to uphold them in the same way that we do and it take them seriously, to understand them. And we wanted to return to America the gift of history, the gift of American history because if you don't know the history of Native people, you don't know American history. If you don't know the history of treaties, if you don't know the treaties, you don't know American history. You don't know how and why the states were shaped the way they are. You don't know why the United States is shaped the way it is, how some laws came about, why they came about, if they're still good and valid laws. A lot of people are surprised that treaties stand up. They stand up in court. They're litigated. In one case, in the Pacific Northwest, they're the reason that the salmon are returning. It's because of the treaties and that the United States and the Native nations in the northwest and in the Great Lakes area as well through follow-on litigation about their treaty, that these resources, the beings themselves, the salmon and sturgeon and so forth are coming back, and there is a salmon industry around them. And it has led to a lot of things: Rehabilitation of the habitat, rehabilitation of wetlands, for the spawning areas. It's led to some dam removal, things that were thought to be wonders in the '50s and '60s are now coming down along these streams because the fish can't get through. And by golly, when the dams come down and when you have the wetlands, you have the estuaries restored, here come the fish. They have that kind of cellular memory. They know where they came from and they go back there. So this is the treaties themselves that are the nexus, and without the treaties, the federal program wouldn't work. The state program wouldn't work because where are the Native people? They are right there in the spawning area. So an entire industry, the salmon industry in America, depends on treaties. And that's today. The court decisions were in the '70s and '80s but that's today. And some of these court cases are still going on today, especially on the environmental impact. So we wanted people to own the treaties. We wanted to restore history to people in the classroom, to people who are visiting on tours, to people who come in and say: What are these about? Why are they doing something about something that's dead, gone, forgotten? Well, they aren't. And that's why we're doing it because they're alive, they're vibrant. They are legally binding, and they're fascinating with how they came about and what they can do today and what they are doing today. So that's our goal. It really never changed. When Kevin came in to run the museum, he devoted an extraordinary amount of time to the treaties' exhibit and really hands-on time and we are used to working. We worked together a while back at the Frank Harish Schreiber Law Firm, and we worked on so many projects over the years that we know, we know how to work together. And Kevin -- unfortunately we lost our dear friend Vine Deloria, Jr., in 2005. And when Kevin came in, he restored our position in a way without ever saying anything. And there wasn't a co-curator, but Kevin really was that. He was an excellent curator and director and editor looking at the whole and lacking at very particular areas. So this has my stamp on it. It has Vine Deloria and Rick West and certainly Kevin Gover's as well as, oh, I would say about a thousand other people. (chuckles). So this has really been a project where the collective wisdom has dominated. And lots of people have come together and really goodwill and good spirit to create what we lovingly present to the world in this exhibit and the book. We hope you like all of it. >> Kevin Gover: Thanks, Suzan. Let me just mention that the National Archives were very generous with us and is providing a series of eight different original treaties that will be located in the gallery one at a time. And I know when we received the first of them, the Treaty of Canandaigua from 1794, it was really a very moving experience. We invited the leadership of the six nations to come to the museum to be there when the treaty was received and when it was installed in the gallery. We knew all this from typewritten versions of the treaty. But as you looked at it, it was really an important experience to see that, for example, both Corn Planter and Hanthem Lake were especially noted among the signatories from the six nations. And below that is the signature of George Washington. And just to ponder for a moment that those three people had laid hands on this document was really a very moving thing, and it was certainly very moving for the Haudenosaunee leadership that were there. I usually don't get deeply involved in the curation of exhibits at the museum. But I am a lawyer by treat. So treaties are something I have worked with throughout my career, litigating them, understanding their meaning, using them for advantage for my Indian tribal clients. In this unique circumstance I was actually qualified to add content to the exhibition and did so. But it was quite a fulsome exhibition without my input. And I really felt I was nibbling at the edges and sort of expanding upon ideas that were already there. We wanted to create a narrative arc that accomplished certain things. The first was there's no such thing as an American Indian treaty. It is not as though the treaty is made with the Indian nations are different than the treaties made with any other nation. And so the first section of the exhibition is really devoted to that proposition, to show that when the United States asked to enter into a treaty with certain Indian tribes, it was because they needed that treaty. They had their own diplomatic objectives that they sought to achieve, and, of course, the Indian nations came to the negotiation with objectives as well. And what we see is both sides acquitting themselves quite well and, in fact, achieving most, if not all of their objectives. Right there in the opening sequence, we have a quote from Chief Justice John Marshall saying the words "nations" and "treaties" are words of our own choosing. We have applied them to the Indians as we have to the other nations of the earth. They are to be applied in the same sense. It couldn't be more clear that a treaty is a treaty is a treaty. In fact, that a particular treaty was made with an American Indian nation did not distinguish it from the treaties that the United States was making with the other nations of the earth. The second major gallery is devoted to what happened when the United States departed from that principle and was no longer engaged in a bilateral negotiated relationship but instead was essentially dictating the terms of that relationship. It will come as no surprise that is what led to the massive dispossession of the nations and the consequences that are difficult to ponder because they were so broad and so tragic. And so we described only a few of the things that happened during that period but we think enough that the visitor really gets a sense because we all know even from a very limited understanding of American history that something happened there. The Indians were dispossessed. There is this broad sense that Indians were treated unfairly. And so we try to give, as I say, just a few examples to validate that point of view. But we didn't want to end there because that is not the end of the story. And the next part of the story is that against all odds, Indian nations continued to insist on the rights that were acknowledged in the treaties. Remember, the treaties were not a grant of rights to the Indians. They were in most respects an acknowledgment of rights that preexisted by virtue of the national sovereignty that Indians possessed in the first instance. Even when nobody else believed in that, even when the very point and the very objective of American policy was the deculturation of Indian people, their assimilation into the larger socioeconomic society of the United States, the United States set out really quite systematically to take away from them everything that made them Indian. And we see that with the land policies where Indian reservations were open up, open to non-Indian settlement and individual parcels were handed out to the Indians. We see it in the so-called civilization regulations of the late 19th and early 20th centuries where superintendents of the Bureau of Indian Affairs were permitted to suppress the cultural and political institutions that the tribes had developed. It was really quite an extraordinary thing. As a lawyer, I really did get curious, where did this authority come from? And what we find is it came from nowhere. The Secretary of the Interior was passing -- was making criminal laws and then establishing courts to -- establishing police forces to enforce those criminal laws, establishing courts to adjudicate violations of these criminal laws, establishing jails to punish offenders against these criminal laws. And there was no law passed by Congress that authorized any of that. Both the Congress and the courts were made aware of this and both just sat back and said: We're going to let this happen. You know, I ran the bureau of Indian affairs for a few years. I didn't so much as run it but watch it go by. One of the things I didn't realize was that the Bureau of Indian Affairs police force was only formalized by Congress in 1990 and yet it had been acting as a police force on the reservation for over a century. There is no other place in the United States where that sort of thing could have happened except on Indian reservations. All of it, of course, in violation of the treaties that the United States had made. So from this very dark period, even after all of that, the Indians kept saying: We have treaties. We are nations. We demand that you acknowledge these rights and respect them. And they just kept doing it. They just kept doing it. No matter what the government did to them: They said we are still Indians. We still have treaties, and we expect you to honor them. And then a breakthrough took place in the 1960s and '70s. Largely in response to sort of the latest outrage or indignity against tribal sovereignty which was a 1950s policy called "termination" where the United States would basically say: Indian tribe, you no longer exist. You individual Indians that used to an Indian tribe, you're now free to go be American but your tribe no longer exists. Isn't that an extraordinary thing to put forward? But it was policy. And fortunately it was at that moment that the tribes began to really coalesce politically in a way they never had before and resisted the policy, ultimately defeated the policy, and finally completely revolutionized Indian policy in the 1960s and '70s. And the policy that took hold at that time, I think the phrase "self-determination" was first coined by President Johnson but it was President Nixon who basically announced that we're going to do things very differently from now on. We're not going to terminate tribes. Federal assistance to tribes doesn't come with a price tag of the oppressive regulations that had been imposed on Indians for nearly an century. Sore this new policy of self-determination giving the tribes -- not giving them the authority but acknowledging the authority of the tribe and providing the resources for them to effectively exercise authority has been the policy for the last 40 years and hopefully for a long time in the future. So this -- the third major gallery is about that, saying the Indians simply never gave up. They kept making that same argument. There was litigation around the treaty that Suzan described in the northwest. Very brave judge in the State of Washington state the Indians are right, they can fish from state regulation and they have the right to half the catch each season. And, lo and behold, the Supreme Court affirmed the judge later. There was litigation around the Great Lakes fishing treaties with the same result. And suddenly these old treaty rights that no one really had given a lot of thought for the first half of the 20th century became decisive in some of the major conflicts taking place in the west. Water rights litigation is -- was and is happening all over the West and the treaties are at the center of that. There have been any number of cases both litigated and then later settled. And our final point in the exhibition is we're beginning to make treaties again because, for example, when tribes in Arizona were litigating their water rights, they entered into extensive negotiations with federal agencies and with the State of Arizona. Finally reached an agreement that settled the litigation and was presented to Congress. And Congress ratified the settlement. So it is not designated a treaty, and the Senate didn't ratify it but the entire Congress did. It was negotiated. And so it sure looks like a treaty to us. And so as policy returns to this negotiated bilateral relationship, we're seeing the American Indian nations begin to prosper again. And so there's little question in our minds at least that policy is headed in the right direction. There will be ongoing conflict about this because there is only so much land and so much water. What once seemed an endless supply is turning out to be not endless at all. And so competition for resources will be ongoing. And as our visitors leave the gallery, we leave them with that idea, that now we are the inheritors of this relationship that is as old as the nation itself. And we bear the responsibility for what this looks like going forward. And so that is the final idea we want to leave with the visitor, that we're now responsible. And so I as a citizen of the Pawnee Nation demanded that the United States honor its commitment to the Pawnee Nation but also as a citizen of the United States insist that it honor its commitments to the other Indian nations with whom it is engaged by treaties. We wanted to leave the visitor with the impression that things are on the upswing but because of the vagary of American politics, there is no certain end to all of this. There is no happy ending. We continue to write this story, all of us, day by day, week by week, year by year, election by election. And so hopefully the visitors come away with those ideas. Questions? We'd be happy to take any questions you might have. >> Suzan Shown Harjo: And, yes, go to the microphone so that you will be heard by the viewing audience outside the room. >> I visited the exhibit. I applaud you for doing something that chose a cohesive story. I realize as a white person, I typically see Indians and Indians and Indians see themselves as 6,000 individual tribes each with their own histories. But I personally appreciate having this type of thing. Typically as I understood it with a treaty, there would be two copies of a treaty. Each group would get one. What happened to the Indian copy of the treaty? >> Suzan Shown Harjo: Well, with the Canandaigua treaty, for example, there are three originals that we know of. One with the Archives, that's the only one with the ratification strip sewn on. And another at Tonowanda, Seneca, one of the signatories to the treaty itself. And another one with Ontario Historical Society at Canandaigua, New York. And that's brought out every year, that one, for the November 11 commemoration. That's the treaty signing date of treaty itself. And there's a belt that George Washington presented after the treaty was made to the Haudenosaunee people and a wampum belt. And non-indians made wampum belts. There are very good minutes, and they will say speaker presented a string of wampum or speaker presented a belt. And there was wampum being traded all the time as emphasis, as a way of remembering a particular section of the meeting as a way of understanding condolence, as a way of expressing concern for the things that the people had gone through. So the wampum was commissioned by George Washington, made by two Haudenosaunee people, women, and presented. And so we have a replica of that in the exhibit. And that's very exciting. We didn't have room for this, but we also have a newspaper of 1785, front page news: George Washington has signed the Treaty of Canandaigua of November 11, 1794. And then it carries the entire text. So as people were in their homes, this is how they were getting the news of the treaty. And to me that's really exciting -- well, it is wonderful to feel that old paper, the old rag paper, beautiful cloth that newspaper, the print was printed on. And it is just a wonderful presence. It is another wonderful presence that I wish we had room for. There were so many things that just broke our hearts to not be able to include this or that. But there are lots of ways of presenting the originals of treaties. And we're so grateful that the Archives refurbished and dressed up and made sure everything was perfect with the original -- in the Archives with the ratification strip and with the added header at the top of the treaties. So they're very clear, here's the original, here's this, here's this. Very clear when you see it, what it is and what was done in time. So this is an original. That's an original. What all of these things are, evidence. They're the evidence of our ancient cultural continuum and that we just keep on going, that this is what we did then and this is what we're continuing to honor. So all of that to me is very exciting to see it come together and to think about it as coming together and these are as original as you can get. They're that moment in time or that moment -- we don't know who touched that newspaper or who all touched the treaty belt. We know people who touched this original in the Archives noun on loan at National Museum of the American Indian, their DNA is on it. They touched it. They put their name to it. They looked at it. They breathed on it. So all of this is very present. When you think of it that way, then it is not just an old dusty paper. It is immediate. >> What sort of continuities and discontinuities are there between treaties between the United States and Native nations and agreements made by the colonial authorities, the British and the French, maybe the Spanish for that matter? And when the United States was formed, did they make any statements about whether they recognized these prior agreements or did they say, well, that was then, this is now, we're starting all over from scratch? >> Kevin Gover: That's a good question. The treaties that had been entered into by the colonial powers were generally honored for the simple reason that that's how the colonial powers acquired lands from the tribes. They didn't just come in and say: It is ours now. Far from it. They negotiated piece by piece and said we'd like to purchase this. The Indians were absolutely the acknowledged owners of the land. And so the British, the Dutch, not so much the Spanish, they were more aggressive. But in North America for the most part, there was a well-established procedure for acquiring land from the tribes. So the United States obviously was in favor of honoring those old agreements and wasn't about to undo them. The United States then continued this practice of dealing with the Indian nations by treaty. So they were really following an embedded process for working with the Indian tribes. So far from for swearing the colonial treaty, the United States continued to abide by them and began to make treaties of their own. >> I recently read that President Obama is being credited for having to do more Indian rights than any other President in recent memory. Sorry. I hope you all got it. >> Kevin Gover: Please say it again. >> Sorry. I read recently that President Obama is being credited with having done more for Indian rights than almost any other President in recent memory. I want to know if that is correct. And if it is correct, could you say in what sense? If it is not correct, please correct it. >> Kevin Gover: You just poked a stick in our cage. >> Suzan Shown Harjo: It's correct. I think it's correct, although every President in the recent times, that is, from, oh, I would say, Franklin Roosevelt forward has done something major and important or many major and important things for the relationship of Native nations to the United States or for Native peoples in the Nations and its individuals. You could throw out the name of a President and we could make a case that that President had done this and this and this and made important contributions. This President has done extraordinary things, including the first return of jurisdiction to Native nations since the 1970s when a court case we think misguided removed jurisdiction. And this was returned in the area of domestic violence against women and children. So now the tribes and courts and tribal jails and uniforms have the jurisdiction, whereas their hands were tied for a while. And it created a situation where perpetrators were committing offenses, violent offenses, horrible offenses, in Indian country and no one could touch them if they were nonNative. So that's a huge thing that has been done. And lots of water rights settlements and land settlements. As I said, you could make a good case for every President having done just amazing and remarkable things. Kevin could extol the virtues of President Clinton and other people he has known close up. And I could do the same with President Carter. But we could go beyond that and say, Nixon did this and it was righteous what he did and Johnson and President Reagan. And President Bush, the first President Bush, was the one who signed into law the legislation creating the National Museum of the American Indian and providing the repatriation laws returning our facility. We had a process for the return of our relatives and sacred objects and cultural patrimony from museums and other holding repositories. So every President has done something that we look to with great respect. >> Kevin Gover: Yeah, that's right. Going back as far back as President Kennedy, Kennedy and Johnson empowered tribal governments in a way that had not been done before. Nixon as we talked about did the self-determination policy. Ford wasn't in office long, but he did nothing to undo what had happened. President Carter was particularly happen in the area of religious freedom under Suzan's guidance, actually. But religious and cultural values, Indians welfare were major breakthrough in the Carter administration. President Reagan coined the phrase "government-to-government" as a description of the relationship between the tribes and the United States. He also signed into law the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act and a number of major land and water settlements. President George H.W. Bush we just heard about. President Clinton really expanded an awareness in the federal government of its responsibilities, the responsibilities of each agency, to engage Indian tribes as constituent governments, not as individuals. And every President since has built upon that. Right up to President Obama. President Obama has done something very important that no one had done before, and that is he meets annually with the tribes. Now, you know, a meeting with the President isn't exactly like you sit around chatting. But every November or December the President has met with the tribes during the administration and will do so again on December 3rd, I believe. It will be his fifth meeting with the leadership of the Indian tribes. And that really is an extraordinary commitment that he made during his campaign and he has fulfilled it. I think there are probably a record number of Native American people working in political positions in the Obama administration. President Obama appointed and saw confirmed the first Native American judge -- found out he wasn't the first, Mike Birge was the first. The first women Native American judge, from Hopi, the first citizen of a federally recognized tribe to be appointed to a position of the State Department of ambassadorial rank, Keith Harper. There have been a number of breakthroughs in this administration as well. But what we see is each President building on what the previous one did. And with occasional slow-downs or even backsteps, but for the most part just continuing progress on this idea of self-determination. Yes, sir? >> Thank you. Suzan mentioned the wampum that was being produced by non-Natives. I would like to know who they were. And the second was, Mr. Gover, you mentioned there were six nations. I often hear people talk about the five civilized tribes. I would like to know what is the distinction between the tribes that have not been mentioned and not included in these treaties. >> Suzan Shown Harjo: Well, wampum was made by Native and non-Native people for the treaty negotiations and for meetings that were of a kind that Kevin just mentioned that President Obama has with the leaders every year. Why that's important is because of something that's back in Haudenosaunee and founding fathers oratory, and that's about the covenant chain and how important it is for the covenant chain that binds the Native people and the American people, that that is symbolically made of three links: Peace, friendship, forever. And that those three links of the covenant chain get tarnished and discolor and dull after a period of time. And they need to be shined. They need to be brightened up. They need to be polished every so often. And it is a renewal of friendship. It is a renewal of commitment. It is an acknowledgment that maybe we haven't seen each other for many seasons but here we are, again, seeing each other and renewing our relationship because these treaties really mark -- are marking points in that long relationship that we have. And it is the relationship that's important as well as the treaties themselves and the laws that we all develop ourselves with each other. But it is that polishing of the covenant chain that's so important. >> Kevin Gover: And the six nations I referred to are also the Haudenosaunee, but they're the -- it is the Iroquois confederacy that made the Treaty of Canandaigua. The five civilized tribes were, of course, in the southeastern of the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Cherokees, Muscogees and Seminoles. Most of them were removed to Oklahoma in the 1830s and 1840s, so it is two separate groups. >> Could you comment on the proliferation of gaming casinos and Indian lands? >> Kevin Gover: Well, it is relevant, of course, because a key function of the treaties was the acknowledgment of American Indian nations as sovereign governments with the right to determine what would take place on their lands. Now, that had been a much abused proposition over the course of more than a century. But the basic proposition remained even in the 1970s and 1980s when gambling first emerged as a means of revenue, not just for tribal governments, the state lotteries played as much of a role as any with Indian gaming because they opened the door to gambling as a source of governmental revenue. The tribes began to offer first only high-stakes bingo and it was incredibly successful. States challenged tribal authority to do that. The Supreme Court ruled that the tribes did, in fact, have the authority to do that free from state law. The Congress then intervened and said, well, wait a minute, notwithstanding tribal sovereignty, the states do have an interest in this because it is taking place within their borders and impacts the state citizens, not just tribal citizens. And so they created an arrangement where tribes and states would negotiate the conditions under which tribes could offer casino gambling. And another form of treaty, by the way, between the states and tribes that is then reviewed and approved by the Interior Department. I signed well over 200 tribal state gaming contracts between 1997 and 2001, all negotiated between the states and tribes. I'm sorry. >> Yeah. I'm from the Caribbean. And, you know, one of the issues that you started to talk about is the issue of the deculturation of the Native Americans. And when I was in California, I had a chance once to go to some reservations and Arizona and New Mexico. And I was absolutely shocked about what I saw there, the ongoing effects of this deculturation process. So I was wondering -- I haven't been there lately. But I was wondering how -- you know, what has happened since then to try to do something against this ongoing Americanization of the group and to try to refine some type of original kind of cultural foundation within the organization. That's the first question. The second question is would these treaties now Native Americans are being afforded the ability to run the territories. But I have heard problems with negotiating deals with companies regarding resources and stuff like that, that this has become quite controversial within the organization. So I was wondering what was going on there. And the third question would be the issue of, you know, aboriginals also face this massive deculturation process, this civilization process in Australia. I wonder if you have reached out to talk with them about a comparison and contrast between the two indigenous groups and various societies. Thank you. >> Suzan Shown Harjo: Kevin and I both worked a couple of centuries back to clean up things that were made a mess a long time ago. And we tried to work to craft or suggest or support solutions that provide some sort of measure of justice in the modern era. And that's the reason that we've worked on all of the cultural rights laws that we have and the economic laws, you have to have money to do certain things. And you have to have your cultural foundation in order to do certain things. So because the American government chose to try to wipe out every aspect of cultural existence in Indian country, to try to break the spirit of the people by saying you can't practice your religion, you can't wear long hair, you can't do this, everything was no, no, no, everything that made the person a Native person was outlawed, was criminalized. So you had to have something like the American Indian Religious Freedom Act which said counter to the civilization regulation, it is the policy of the United States to preserve and protect the traditional religions of the Native peoples. That's a huge thing, that policy statement alone. And then you have lots of follow-on legislation like the repatriation legislation, like the legislation creating the Indian museum, like the American Indian Languages Act and their amendment, those things are necessary because the civilization regulations drove all of the Native religions underground and drove eventually through the boarding school process and themselves by drawing the religions underground. It throws the languages underground. And a lot of them never reemerged. They're gone. Many of them have reemerged and need bolstering laws and legislation, and that's the kind of thing that you find in the American Indian Languages Act and the other act that I mentioned. So we're talking about a pretty recent process in the overall scheme of things, that the civilization regulations were in force and effect from the 1880s to the 1930s. 1930s, imagine. So over 50 years there was this religious suppression, cultural oppression, all of that, and the effort to obliterate the cultures of the Native people. Just systematically to do it and through starvation, through locking people up, through eventually just killing people. And we lost many of our finest, wisest, most knowledgeable people through that process and over that period of time. So it is only since the Roosevelt New Deal administration where there was a New Deal for Indians, too, and part of that was to remove the civilization regulation. So it has only been since the mid '30s that that burden has been lifted. But the behaviors stayed the same for a long time because no one trusted that you could now go out and do what you used be killed for doing or you could -- something as simple as having a funeral and having a give-away at the funeral to honor the deceased, there was part of the civilization regulation that says the excuse that a person was a mourner is no defense under the law. As Kevin pointed out, what law? But the regulations themselves became the law and the heavy hand of the law. So the fact that there was no originating law and that everything was done illegally didn't matter to people who were being affected in that way. So part of what I've devoted my life to is that area where we're doing cultural reclamation and trying to bolster our rights with enough evidence of law, of support, statements, by Presidents and other people in high places, that the people feel comfortable doing things that they have a right to do and should have a right to do. So I'll let Kevin answer the other parts of the question. I won't elaborate on that. >> Kevin Gover: Concerning the question about the indigenous people in Australia, I've not personally reached out to them. But there was a lot of engagement at the international level among indigenous people. And it has been going on I would say 40, 50 years, that indigenous people from around the world saw they had some common experiences that brought them together. But it really bore fruit just a few years ago when the United Nations adopted a declaration of the rights of indigenous peoples. Interestingly enough the only poor countries that did not sign on to the declaration were the United States, Canada, New Zealand and Australia, which were where the indigenous people are in many respects the most visible. Throughout Central and South America, there are probably about 40 million indigenous people living in those countries. All those countries signed onto the declaration. There is not a lot of evidence that their policy toward Native Americans is any more enlightened than the others. So to a certain extent who signed and who didn't is not particularly meaningful. President Obama did later, although not actually signing the declaration or doing whatever you do to join in a declaration endorsed it and said, you know, to the extent that particular provisions do not conflict directly with American law, we will abide by the United Nations declaration. So we're not particularly discouraged by that. That is very much a work in progress and the fact that at the international level, indigenous people are being seen as a particular kind of constituency that presents unique problems and opportunities for the nation-states of the world is progress. And there is a growing awareness of indigenous rights. And as it -- one of the things we should acknowledge is that in no small part because of the treaty, the United States has one of the more enlightened policies toward its indigenous people. That's not to say it's always been a smooth ride, far from it. But certainly in this day and age, how the United States chooses to engage the Native nations puts it far, far ahead of almost every country in the world. And we're grateful for that even as we say we have a long way to go. (applause). >> Suzan Shown Harjo:I should say, too, that there is a treaty that Native nations of Canada and the United States have made with the Native peoples with the Maori of New Zealand and with the aboriginal people of Australia. And that was first signed in 2007. And it is an ongoing treaty and indigenous people continue to add their names to. That's promising economic cooperation, trade, promising cultural exchange and reinforcement of each other's cultural rights and social rights and obligation to each other. So who knows where that will go. Just yesterday at the national museum of the American Indian, the repatriation symposium on return of ancestors and things to Native peoples, the Ambassador Beasley of Australia was there and reporting on what his government was doing in this area and the cooperative agreements that had been reached with France and other countries to return the Native people and Australia's people. >> Kevin Gover: Yes, sir? >> Hi. I'm from Russia. And, first of all, I would like to thank you for the presentation and for the exhibition at the museum you organized. I really enjoyed it. In Russia, we have a big interest to these issues. And I have three questions to you. So do all federal recognized tribes have such treaties with the U.S. government? The second question, do you consider these treaties as international treaties? And if yes so, can you use them in the U.N. system, judicial system mechanisms? And the last question is about the status of American Indians. So as you said, it used to be -- American Indians used to a subject of international law. So they could declare war. They could sign peace treaties Until 1871. And I know in 1924, they became citizens of the United States. So the status changed. And the question is: How the provisions of these treaties meet the contemporary status of American Indians? Thank you. >> Kevin Gover: Well, those are very complicated questions. First, not every tribe, not every federally recognized tribe as a treaty. Almost all of them have some sort of organic document or legislation, for example, a number of reservations were established by executive order from the President pursuant to authority granted by Congress. But even those executive orders most often involve some sort of negotiation and tribal involvement in the creation of the reservations. Others were established by legislation. And so it took a number of different forms but strictly speaking, no, not all 566 tribes have treaty. The status of treaties under international law, I think it's very difficult to give you a direct answer. They are treaties. When the United States makes a treaty, whether it is then subject to, for example, U.N. processes is not at all clear, nor are the consequences for a breach. What can the U.N. really do if United States decided it wanted to breach a treaty with the Pawnee nation? There are consequences to be sure. But I'm not sure they're actually legal consequences in the sense of being subject to some international forum. And now I can't remember the third part of the question. >> (speaker off microphone.) >> Kevin Gover: Well, first of all, let's talk about citizenship. Citizenship was extended to all Native Americans in 1924. Other Indians had become citizens by other means prior to that. But interestingly enough, citizenship was involuntary. So a good many Indians at the time said we don't really care to be citizens of the United States. We are citizens of our Indian nation. It didn't matter, they were still citizens. And if they chose to exercise the rights of citizens, they could. I think it is fair to characterize the contemporary situation as us being dual citizens. We are citizens both of our tribal nations and citizens of the United States. And we don't find that to be particularly ambiguous or troubling. We have the civil rights that every citizen of the United States does. We also have these group rights, the rights that are -- that belong to us by virtue of our citizenship in an Indian nation. Most of those are not things that are visible. The Pawnee Nation negotiated for an annuity of $30,000 a year. This was 160 years ago and $30,000 was a lot of money. Now it comes to about $12 per Pawnee per year but we still get that check every year. And so its value is more symbolic than real. But it is there. The treaties are still constantly being litigated. Treaty provisions are in the courts and quite often in the news. So they remain in effect to the extent they have not been very explicitly overwritten by Congress. And so you will continue to see this, any time you read about a jurisdictional dispute, a dispute over the status of a particular area of a reservation land or not, even matters of criminal jurisdiction where an individual should be tried, in state court, federal court, tribal court, all of these matters are quite often governed by treaty. And so even though they were made a very long time ago, they remain law in the federal system and not just in the federal system, in the United States. So we will -- we will continue as Suzan suggested polishing the covenant chain indefinitely. >> Suzan Shown Harjo: One other point, the treaties themselves -- well, I do want to say that we had hoped at one point to bring in more of the colonial treaties, including a treaty that Russia had with Native peoples on the West Coast. And that whole area is fascinating, and I hope that one day we can shine a lot or that others will shine a light on that particular history because it is fascinating and kind of bringing that relationship up to date. The other point I wanted to make about something you said was that the late 1800s laws stopped Indian treaties from being signed. It only stopped the Senate making treaties. Treaties were continued to be made in the 1900s but they were made with both houses, the House and the Senate, approving rather than just the Senate ratifying. And sometimes they were called treaties and sometimes not. As Kevin has described, we really have looked at this as treaty-making in the modern time and what that means it has all of the elements of the treaty, then we're calling it a treaty, a modern treaty. Even though it may be made in a slightly different way. If it is a negotiated agreement, if it is done with the informed consent of both parties, then we feel that says a treaty. So with that caveat, I really appreciate your question. (applause). >> Kevin Gover: Thank you all.