EchoHawk vows end to Indian mistreatment

As a child in public schools in the 1950s and '60s, Larry EchoHawk heard teachers talk about his fellow American Indians as "savages," "bloodthirsty," "renegades" and "heathens." He said his sister was sent home from school for having the wrong color of skin.

He outlined Friday for the annual Utah State History Conference a long history of how other Americans often were actually the savages, often ignoring or twisting laws to rob Indians of their land and property.

But as America's current top official for Indian affairs, he vowed a long-overdue end to mistreatment. "This must be a land of promise for all people — for all people. But in my heart, I feel it must be a land of promise for First Americans."

EchoHawk, the Utahn who is assistant Interior secretary for Indian Affairs, added, "I will not be a party to any future actions that would follow in that vein of the past. I desire only to do what is right and just for Native Americans to uphold treaty rights and to try to make up some ground of those dark chapters in American history."

EchoHawk, a former Idaho attorney general who also taught law at Brigham Young University, presented a history of how U.S. laws were often twisted or ignored as Native Americans were pushed off lands and their tribal governments ignored or pushed aside.

It began, he said, when Europeans arrived in America and declared it their own, despite the millions of natives already living on the land.

Treaties were used to persuade Indians to cede some land for promises of peace in remaining areas "as long as the rivers flow and the grass grows," he said. But treaties would be broken, followed by later treaties and more broken promises.

EchoHawk said even when the U.S. Supreme Court would side with Indians — as it did in an 1830s case recognizing sovereignty of Cherokees in Georgia — the resulting law was ignored and not enforced.

"The Cherokee people were removed in what we know as the Trail of Tears, where 25 percent of their people never made it to the land distant from their homes that they were forced to go to, known as the Oklahoma Indian Territory," he said.

Instead of recognizing tribes as foreign nations, he said courts ruled that treaties had made them wards of the federal government, which it said was their guardian.

In response, he said Congress passed laws moving tribes — as their guardian — off their ancestral lands into reservations. He said such laws "between 1887 and 1934 would take 90 million acres of land from native people. Nice guardian."