American Indian Culture and Research Journal

The Wasichus have put us in these square boxes. Our power is gone and we are dying. For the power is not in us any more. You can look at our boys and see how it is with us. When we were living by the power of the circle in the way we should, boys were men at twelve or thirteen. But now it takes them very much longer to mature. Hehaka Sapa (Black Elk) I. Forced into a situation of total dependence by the destruction of their traditional economic bases during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Native Americans on reservations abandoned their houses and traditional building technology as they tried to "assimilate." The existing housing deteriorated. Unable to afford anything resembling conventional market housing in the twentieth century. reservation Indians have been compelled to rely almost entirely upon the federal government, with what most observers concur has been a poor-to-indifferent response. In 1969, three major designated agencies met to examine needs, and to determine future responsibility, for housing production. In the tri-agency agreement thus reached among the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Indian Health Service, and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, HUD committed itself to producing 30,000 new Indian housing units during fiscal years 1970-74 but fell short of reaching this goal by nearly 50%. The glaring gap sparked Thomas Stanton, Director of the Housing Research Group of the Center for the Study of Responsive Law, to write an assessment of this and other failures in HUD's Indian Housing programs. The main findings of this report are worth reiterating, and are summarized in the following paragraphs.