treaties before the ink on the Indian's X was dry" (Sandoz, 1966, 173). Canny explains (1973) that the violence of internal colonization of indigenous peoples increased in postcolonial America. The concept of "captive nations" redefined tribal sovereignty and enforced the redefinition administratively, judicially, legislatively, and militarily (Snipp, 1986).
From the Dawes Act of 1881, which ostensibly reallotted Indian lands to enable them to own private property but in fact enabled whites to purchase such property, to the Reorganization Act of 1934, which terminated or conflated various tribes and which obliged the Indians to ratify the Act or lose all New Deal benefits, Indian affairs were under jurisdiction of the federal bureaucracy. That bureaucracy developed a life of its own and was demonstratively unresponsive attitude to the persistent problems faced by Indians. Ortiz argues that Native American experience is identical to the experience of the population masses of Third World countries.
The Indian populations . . . suffer persecution, discrimination, racism, genocide, exploitation, dependence, margination, isolation, deculturation and, above all, overwhelming poverty and its social effects (Ortiz, 1984, p. 23).
Ortiz's thesis is that such oppression is an everyday reality based on "a racialist ideology and Anglo-American cultural and economic superiority which provide public support for governmental expropriation of Indian territories and historical rights" (Ortiz, 1984, p. 128). Ortiz sees the government's policies as leading-edge racism, supported by mainstream cultural attitudes. No less significant is that Indians "are at the lowest, marginal level of the economy. They experience the highest unemployment (40-80% in the reservations), the lowest wages, the lowest life expectancy, the highest infant mortality rates . . . All these indices parallel those of less developed countries" (Ortiz, 1984, p. 128).
The fac...