Earlier this winter, Republican state Senator Keith Regier introduced a resolution that, if adopted, would urge the Republican-controlled U.S. Congress to examine the more than century-old reservation system and, eventually, push previously sovereign tribes and the lands they control to assimilate with the United States.
The two-page resolution claims the Indian reservation system was “created in a different time and place and under circumstances that no longer exist,” establishing a race-based dichotomy between Indigenous tribes and U.S. citizens that has led to rampant levels of “drug abuse, alcoholism, domestic violence, welfare dependence, poverty, and substandard educational achievements.”
That dynamic, the resolution claims, has resulted in a “lack of opportunity for their future well-being and happiness.”
“We believe the investigation of alternative ways of approaching the reservation system can and will produce a new system that will enhance the lives, the happiness, and the opportunities for our Indian citizens while at the same time promoting peace, harmony, and stability for all,” the resolution reads.
It’s unlikely it will ever pass. However, the resolution, many were quick to note, was problematic for a number of reasons.
While reservations do have a number of socioeconomic problems, they vary little from issues facing the rest of rural Montana, a state which ranks in the bottom half of metrics like education outcomes, crime and opportunity, according to U.S. News and World Report.
It was also drafted by a non-native lawmaker, a sign the intentions of the bill were not crafted in the best interest of the communities it would impact the most.
Though Regier is a Republican, many members of the Montana Legislature, critics of the resolution note, do not share his views. Several members of the Legislature’s Indian Caucus belong to the GOP.
Regier, however, hails from Kalispell, a community bordering Glacier National Park a short distance from the Blackfeet Indian Reservation, a place that some say attracted new scrutiny from the region’s white population for public health measures its government enacted amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
Tribal leaders took the pandemic “a lot more serious,” said Barbara Bessette, an enrolled member of the Chippewa Cree Tribe and a former Montana state lawmaker who works as a tribal public health specialist. “They shut down their tribes longer, they wore masks longer.
“When you’re out in public, you’re more likely to actually see natives wear masks versus anyone else. It’s just like part of the community, you’re protecting your elders. I don’t know if that just became like another ‘other.’ That could have been a contributing factor.”
Newsweek has contacted Regier for comment.
There have been visible examples of this trend, lawmakers note. In December, the Montana Free Press reported a Republican Statehouse staffer with political aspirations suggested Indigenous people living on reservations should not be allowed to vote during a meeting of the Lewis and Clark County Republican Central Committee.
Others have run legislation seeking to restrict the Indigenous population from water and hunting rights established under treaties dating back to the days of the United States’ westward expansion into native land. Oftentimes, critics say those actions are not denounced, leaving native members of the Legislature on their own to speak out.
Meanwhile, tensions have risen between Indigenous tribes and governments across the western U.S. over several landmark federal lands cases in Glacier National Park and the Bighorn National Forest in Wyoming, where tribal members have fought hunting regulations they say infringe on their rights as a sovereign people.
Regier’s resolution specifically claims previous judicial decisions relative to the reservation system have “produced confusion, acrimony, and animosity among the general population in the past and at present, and will undoubtedly continue to do so in the foreseeable future.”
“People are just more emboldened,” said Bessette. “You’re seeing it more. Like, people feel they have permission to actually be able to say and do these things. And when Senator Regier does something like this, there are no political consequences.”
The resolution’s critics say language like that only seeks to exacerbate that tension while erasing the legacy of genocide perpetrated generations earlier.
But it also serves as a distraction for members who are seeking to preserve their culture through legislation encouraging efforts to improve knowledge of Indigenous languages and heritage, or to direct resources to tribes in an effort to counter the socioeconomic issues that exist there.
“This is intended to be hurtful,” Shane Morigeau, a Montana state senator and a member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Nation, told Newsweek in an interview.
“The reservations aren’t systems. They were formed as a negotiated agreement where, oftentimes, tribes really had no choice. Reservation areas exist because Indian people gave up a lot of territory in lands they lived on for thousands of years so that homesteaders and business developers could come in and make money off of them,” Morigeau said.
The lands they were left to live on, he added, “were guaranteed to be a place for us to make our homeland in perpetuity, to have the resources to have water and wildlife for us to be able to sustain our souls and our people forever.”
Any attempt to renege on that, he said, only continues the legacy of Americans’ erasure of native culture, whether via boarding schools for Indigenous children or acts of violence.
Symbolically, it’s a significant step back for a state that recently set a record for the number of Indigenous people serving in office, according to the Great Falls Tribune.
The U.S. Congress now has five Native American members, while Deb Haaland, a former congresswoman from New Mexico, recently became the first Native American member of a presidential cabinet when she was appointed by President Joe Biden to helm the Department of the Interior.
Meanwhile, the Cherokee Nation recently received a congressional hearing on getting its own delegate to the U.S. Congress—beginning the process of fulfilling a promise first outlined in the 1835 Treaty of New Echota.
Regier’s resolution, Morigeau said, only seeks to undo that progress.
“What he’s basically suggesting is that we should assimilate again, that we should disappear,” said Morigeau. “[The government] have tried to kill Indians. It’s just made things worse. It’s made poverty worse.
“These ideas and concepts aren’t new. When they’ve happened, they failed, and we’re still rebuilding and healing from those things. A lot of tribes in Montana have very few fluent speakers anymore because of these sorts of policies.”
But Morigeau—along with the rest of Montana’s Native Caucus—says they plan to fight back with kindness.
On Wednesday, Morigeau announced he would be sponsoring his own resolution requiring Indian education for all lawmakers in what he called an effort to build a stronger understanding of the issues facing tribal communities, and refocus lawmakers on solutions to Montana’s problems that go beyond racial scapegoating.
“I think there are people who lack education. Then there are some people I’m not going to give a pass,” he said. “I think some people don’t care. They choose to be hateful and mean-spirited. What we will continue to do in this building is to kill people with kindness and educate them in a good way, because I want them to ask me questions.
“I don’t want them to feel like I’m upset with them and that they can’t ask me a question about my people. Especially if it’s a stereotype that can be easily addressed through a short conversation.”
Update 1/6/2023, 2:20 p.m. ET: This article was updated with comments from Barbara Bessette.
