t that Native Americans as a group have historically been funneled through any of a variety of federally sponsored "systems" and have been subjected to public-policy protocols peculiar to everything from the legal system to the social-welfare system appears to have fostered their suspicion of most official bureaucracies. Thus public-service modalities that smack of having a subject "acted on" rather than "active" would obviously be problematic. The whole matter is further complicated by the fact that, even in the modern period, which should benefit from careful attention to history, the federal government has been inclined toward self-congratulatory obtuseness with regard to its management of Indian affairs.
[W]e set up these reservations so they could, and we have a Bureau of Indian Affairs to help take care of them. At the same time, we provided education for them--schools on the reservations. And . . . some of them became very wealthy because some of those reservations were overlaying great pools of oil, and you can get very rich pumping oil. And so I don
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