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The downsizing of the BIA's bureaucracy bothers Indian advocates far less than the cuts in money earmarked for tribal governments. Tribes' abilities to fight crime, provide sanitation, repair roads and administer dozens of other basic services would be endangered. The federal housing program that might have helped the Little Boy family would be cut 67%. The Agriculture Department's food program for Indians is scheduled to be folded into the food-stamp system, to the Indians' disadvantage. The advocates fear that the cuts will not just shatter the dreams of individual Native Americans like Little Boy but also cripple Washington's efforts over the past 20 years to encourage tribal self-reliance and send Indians spinning into a void of isolation and poverty. "We are forgotten people," says Little Boy. "They are going to hurt us, but they don't care."
Defenders of the cuts argue, with some passion, that under Congress's new balanced-budget dispensation, all of government must become smaller, and Native Americans must sacrifice like other Americans. Says Senator Gorton, who as chairman of the Senate appropriations subcommittee overseeing Interior Department funding wrote some of the most drastic legislation: "To give more to the BIA would, bluntly, have required us to give less to the national parks and cultural institutions which are our national heritage for everyone." This he refuses to do.
Yet the argument for equal distribution of pain may be seriously misguided in this case, for several reasons. The first is that the BIA, which makes up 26% of the Interior Department's budget, would absorb 45% of the department's overall reductions. The second has to do with the Indians' abject destitution. Despite the arrival of gambling facilities on reservations, which has enriched a handful of tribes and made a few dozen more comfortable, a third of the country's 2 million Native Americans live below the poverty line. On the reservations, where per capita income averages $4,500, half of all children under age six live below the line; 1 out of every 5 Indian homes lacks both a telephone and an indoor toilet. Federal expenditures that reach the tribes are low enough as it is: according to Stearns, the government spends $2,600 a year for the average American's health, but the average for Indians' is only $1,300.
The cuts may also be illegal, in a profound and historic way. When Indian advocates invoke the "special relationship" between the government and members of Indian tribes, it may disturb citizens who believe all Americans to be equal under law. But few other American groups have warred as sovereign nations against the U.S. government; and none, in return for laying down its arms and accepting life on reservations, has received explicit guarantees of its well-being. The 800 or more treaties signed with various tribes, sporadically upheld by the Supreme Court under a loose philosophy of "trusteeship," obligate the government to maintain a reasonable level of education and health among tribal members and to protect their resources.