CHAPTER 4

Mental Health Care for American Indians and Alaska Natives

Historical Context

American Indians

As members of federally recognized sovereign nations that exist within another country, American Indians are unique among minority groups in the United States. Ever since the European “discovery” and colonization of North America, the history of American Indians has been tied intimately to the influence of European settlers and to the policies of the U.S. Government.

Early European contact in the 17th century exposed Native people to infectious diseases from which their natural immunity could not protect them, and the population of American Indians plummeted. In 1820, as European settlers pushed westward, Congress passed the Indian Removal Act to force Native Americans west of the Mississippi River. Brutal marches of Native people, sometimes in the dead of winter, ensued. Later, as colonists moved farther westward to the Great Plains and beyond, the U.S. Government sent many tribes to live on reservations of marginal land where they had little chance of prospering. Treaties between the tribes and the U.S. Government were signed, then broken, and struggles for territory followed. The Plains Indian Wars raged until the end of the 19th century, punctuated by whole-sale slaughter of American Indian men, women, and children. As the settlers migrated toward the Pacific Ocean, the U.S. Congress passed legislation that effectively made Native Americans wards of the state.

Even as American Indians were being killed or forced onto reservations, some Americans protested the destruction of entire Indian “nations” (tribes and tribal confederacies). In 1887, after the bloodiest of the Indian Wars ended, Congress passed the Dawes Severalty Act, which allotted portions of reservation land to Indian families and individuals. The government then sold the leftover reservation land at bargain prices. This Act, which intended to integrate American Indians into the rest of U.S. society, had disastrous consequences. In addition to losing surplus tribal lands, many Natives lost their allotted lands as well and had little left for survival. By the early 1900s, the population of American Indians reached its lowest point, an incredible 5 percent of the original population estimated at first European contact (Thornton, 1987).

The Federal Indian Boarding School Movement began in earnest in 1875. By 1899, there were 26 off-reservation schools scattered across 15 states. The emphasis within the Indian educational system later shifted to reservation schools and public schools, but boarding schools continued to have a major impact into the next century because they were perceived as “civilizing” influences on American Indians. During the 1930s and 1940s, nearly half of all Indian people who received formal education attended such schools.

American Indians experienced both setbacks and progress during the 20th century. In June 1924, Congress granted American Indians U.S. citizenship. The Indian Citizenship Act later was amended to include Alaska Natives (Deloria, 1985; Thornton, 1987). The subsequent passage of the Indian Reorganization Act (1934) placed great emphasis on civilizing Native people and teaching them Christianity. To this end, many more Native American children were sent to learn “American ways” at government- or church-run boarding schools that were often thousands of miles from the “detrimental influences” of their home reservations.

The era of American Indian educational reform began in the 1920s. Public criticism of Indian Bureau policies and practices culminated in an in-depth investigation of Indian affairs by the Brookings Institution in 1926. Its report, The Problem of Indian Administration, concluded:

The first and foremost need in Indian education is a change in point of view. Whatever may have been the official government attitude, education for the Indian in the past has proceeded on the theory that it is necessary to remove the Indian child as far as possible from his home environment; whereas the modern point of view in education and social work lays stress on upbringing in the natural setting of home and family life. Although some children did well in these settings, other did not. Reports of harsh discipline were widespread (Brookings, 1971).

Even worse, the National Resource Center on Child Sexual Abuse (1990) cites evidence that many Native American children were sexually abused while attending boarding schools (Horejsi et al., 1992).

One positive result of the collective experience of boarding school students is that it gave rise to a shared social consciousness across previously disparate tribes, thereby fueling political change. One lesson from the boarding school era is that tribal peoples have encountered tremendous adversity yet survived—politically, culturally, linguistically, and spiritually (Hamley, 1994).

Near the end of World War II, Congress began to withdraw Federal support and to abdicate responsibility for American Indian affairs. Whereas earlier assimilationists had envisioned a time when tribes and reservations would vanish as Native Americans became integrated into U.S. society, the proponents of “termination” decided to legislate such entities out of existence. As a consequence, over the following two decades, many Federal services were withdrawn, and Federal trust protection was removed from tribal lands.

One policy from this era was an attempt by the U.S. Government to extinguish Native spiritual practices. A government prohibition on participation in traditional spiritual ceremonies continued until the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of (1978). Despite the prohibitions and the Christianizing efforts by various churches, indigenous culture and spirituality have survived and are widely practiced (Bryde, 1971). Even in areas where many Native people practice Christianity, traditional cultural views still heavily influence the way in which Native people understand life, health, illness, and healing (Todd-Bazemore, 1999).

In the 1970s, American Indians and Alaska Natives began to demand greater authority over their own lives and communities, encouraged by the 1969 publication of the report of the Congressional Committee on Labor and Public Welfare: Indian Education: A National Tragedy— A National Challenge. Current Federal policy encourages tribal administration of the government’s health, education, welfare, law enforcement, and housing pro-grams for Native Americans. Local communities have responded to this in a variety of ways that reflect the continuing diversity of their experiences and perspectives.

Alaska Natives

The history of Alaska Natives is similar to the history of their American Indian cousins to the south, yet differs in some important ways. Similar to American Indians, Alaska Natives are culturally diverse. Inupiats settled the Arctic coasts from the Chukchi Sea as far east as Greenland. In interior Alaska, along the Yukon and Tanana rivers, live Athabascan Indians; their link to the Navajo and Apache of Arizona and New Mexico is evident in the similarity of their languages. In southeast Alaska, Tlingit, Haida, Tsimshian, and Eyak Indians live by the sea; their arts and crafts have been well known for over 200 years. The coast of northeast Alaska and the deltas of the Yukon and Kuskokwim rivers are home to some 20,000 Yup’ik and Cup’ik Eskimos, the greatest concentration of Eskimos in the world. They still depend on hunting, fishing, and gathering. On the Pribilof Islands and the Aleutian chain, the Aleuts, kin to the Yup’ik, maintain their cultural identity even though decimated by a century and a half of Russian occupation (Berger, 1985). The Aleuts share with American Indians a history of devastation as a result of diseases introduced by white men. Their peak population, estimated at 80,000 just prior to European contact, dwindled to 25,000 by 1909. The early Russian invaders took control of the native Aleut and Inuit people and forced them to hunt for furs. In 1867, the United States bought Alaska from Russia, and the Treaty of Cession stated that the “uncivilized [Native] tribes will be subject to such laws and regulations as the United States may, from time to time, adopt in regard to aboriginal tribes of that country” (Treaty of Cession, Article III). Although the U.S. Government had legal control over Alaskan land from that point on, Alaska Natives were not forced to move to reservations. In fact, the Federal Government did not create reservations in Alaska until 1891, and, even then, it established only a few for a small percentage of the Alaska Native population.

In 1971, upon the discovery of huge oil deposits on Alaska’s North Slope and the wish to clear the area for construction of the Alaska Pipeline, Congress passed the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA). This Act organized Alaska Natives into regional and village corporations and gave them control over more than 44 million acres of land and almost $1 billion. In exchange, Alaska Natives waived all claims to many of their original lands.

In the 1970s, more and more Alaska Natives petitioned for the right to self-government, and traditional institutions such as tribal courts and councils re-emerged. The U.S. Census Bureau now recognizes 200 Native communities in Alaska; more than half have state-chartered municipal governments, and 69 have elected Native Councils (Douglas K. Mertz, personal communication). The sheer number of these governments and councils reflects a rich and diverse Alaskan heritage (Berger, 1985).