As dreams go, Michael Little Boy Sr.'s is a modest one. He would like to move. Not into a mansion. But into someplace better than where he lives now. Little Boy, 41, lives in a one-room shack. Along with him live his wife, five children and two nieces: nine people jammed into a space that measures 20 ft. by 20 ft. The house, on the Pine Ridge Oglala Sioux reservation in South Dakota, has one tiny window with a plastic pane. It is made of Sheetrock and cheap wood siding. In winter the frigid South Dakota wind tears through it like a knife. When it rains, its dirt and sawdust floor becomes a swamp. Now, in a sweltering late summer, flies swarm in and out with impunity.
Little Boy does not have a job. He was a janitor once, and a tribal policeman for a while when his uncle was police commissioner. But jobs on the Sioux's Pine Ridge reservation are so scarce that only 1 out of every 3 adults has one. In fact, as in hundreds of other reservations where Third World conditions prevail, there is only one real source of income, only one source of medical services and of food. There is only one real source of hope that someday Little Boy's family will be able to move out of squalor: the Federal Government. But the Federal Government is about to pull the plug.
"This amounts to cultural and economic genocide," says Ada Deer, Assistant Secretary of the Interior and head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. A ferocious appropriations bill passed last month by the Senate, outdoing an only slightly less severe offering by the House, slashes the bureau's $1.7 billion budget a third. Deer has announced that the BIA may lay off up to 4,000 of its 12,000 employees by month's end, the most drastic personnel cut currently being contemplated by any federal agency. Just as important, the Senate bill targets moneys that bulwark greater tribal autonomy. Says Kurt Russo, coordinator of the Treaty Task Force of Washington State's Lummi Nation: "What you're seeing is a smart bomb going straight to the heart of the function of tribal governments."
Language of genocide is overused in American ethnic politics, but in this case, the rhetoric of Deer and Russo was echoed by that of Senator John McCain. The Senator is a longtime supporter of Native Americans but also a card-carrying conservative Republican. Says he: "The Indians are taking it in the neck." This week representatives of more than 200 tribes will flood the nation's capital in a last-ditch attempt to influence the conference that will reconcile the House and Senate versions of the cuts. But unless they provoke a huge public outcry, most of the cuts will probably stand, and the fortunes of an already unfortunate people may take another drastic downturn.
For most of the decade, legislators have maintained the budget affecting America's 555 recognized Indian tribes at a constant level. Deploring the inefficiency of the BIA, through which most Indian-earmarked money flows, Congress has attempted to funnel more money directly through it to the tribes. This year, however, fueled partly by Republican budget-cutting fervor and partly by what some call a longstanding antipathy toward tribal rights on the part of a powerful Senator, Washington's Slade Gorton, it ripped up the playbook. "We've never seen cuts like these," says Christopher Stearns, Democratic counsel to the House Subcommittee on Native American Affairs, which allocates money to tribes.