I think when a lot of people drive through an Indian reservation they see the sign that says 'entering such and such tribe's reservation' and they look around and a lot of them are non-Indians who obviously live on these reservations, and wondering what is going on here; what is really the case? I think to understand the current reality and the current situation you have to have a little bit of history. I'll try to make it quick but informative.

The initial land transfers, as we talked about earlier with the treaties where the tribes ceded some of their territories, often great portions of their territories in reserve land unto themselves for their nations, for the nation's government and homeland, worked for awhile. But they couldn't really withstand the reality of the continual migration east to west of very land hungry settlers, also the discovery of precious metals, particularly in the west, gold, silver, etc. Even though the Nez Perce tribe, for example, had a treaty that said that no white, no non-Indian person will even be on your reservation without your consent, all they had to do was look up the Clearwater River to see the Orofino community get settled and Lewiston down river become a thriving little 19th century metropolis essentially right on their reservation to know that those treaty promises were broken. The same thing happened here and the same thing happened all across the country, particularly in the west where reservations were set up before the settlement really hit.

It is different in the east, but as far as we are concerned for the northwest, we had reservations set up, the tribes did, supposedly protected by the federal government's promises not to allow non-Indians on them and those promises were broken. In response to that, and I sometimes think that law follows reality sometimes a lot later than it should, the congress looked around and said we have all these non-Indian communities and people on our reservations, on the tribal reservations; this is clearly in violation of the law, what are we going to do about it? So they came up in 1887, which was known as the Dawes Act or the Allotment Act.

The Allotment Act was sold to the congress and I think a lot of people really believed this as something that would be good for Indians because it would turn them into farmers. Farming and the agricultural economy was seen as a way for people to prosper and become good citizens, etc., etc. But also involved in the Allotment Act was a monumental land grab. I think tribes across the country lost about 9 million acres of their reservation lands to non-Indian settlement as a result of the Dawes Act. Now the idea that Indians needed 160 acres to be farmers, the fallacy of the good intentions of the Dawes Act is probably no more clear than on the Coeur d'Alene reservation where prior to the Dawes Act we had very, very successful Indian farmers who had thousands of acres under cultivation. They knew how to farm. They knew how to participate in the non-Indian agricultural economy and they were doing very, very well.