American Indian Culture and Research Journal

There are whole disciplines, institutions, rubrics in our culture which serve as categories of denial. -Susan Griffin A Chorus of Stones In 1903, the United States Supreme Court opined that, as a racial group, we American Indians, like minor children and those deemed mentally deficient or deranged, should be viewed as legally incompetent to manage our own assets and affairs. Indians, the high Court held, were to be understood as perpetual wards of the federal government that, according to the Court, would act as a permanent trustee. With a deft circularity of reasoning, the justices then proceeded to assert that, since Indians are intrinsically incompetent, we should have no authority to challenge trustees’ authority over us. Thus did the United States formally and unilaterally assign itself plenary-that is, absolute and imperious-power over all Native lands, lives, and natural resources within the forty-eight contiguous states of North America, as well as Alaska, Hawai’i, and other external possessions such as Guam and “American” Samoa. The only curb placed upon the imagined prerogatives of the United States in this regard was and is an equally self-appointed fiduciary responsibility to act, or at least claim to act, in the best interests of those it has subjugated both physically and juridically. Although the basic proposition at issue has undergone almost continuous modification over the years, it remains very much in effect at present.