Reply #23: Here's How Reagan Regarded Native People

[mikekohr]

http://www.brotherhooddays.com/HEROES.html#RONALD REAGAN:

RONALD REAGAN: The Great Communicator:

While campaigning in South Dakota during the 1980 presidential campaign, candidate Reagan promised to uphold treaty law and to fulfill America's obligation to Native People. Reagan quickly broke these promises upon becoming President. As president, Reagan cut funding to Indian programs in unprecedented proportions.
Indian Appropriations accounted for .04% of the federal budget when Reagan took office In 1982 2.5% of all federal budget cuts came entirely from that meager .04% of the Federal budget. 77).

Reagan's Secretary of the Interior, James Watt, called Indians "social misfits" whose homelands were "examples of the failure of socialism." 31).

While visiting Russia, Reagan was questioned about the status of Native Americans. Reagan responded with the following paternalistic, insulting, and indefensible, display of ignorance and confusion:
"Let me tell you just a little something about the American Indian in our land. We have provided millions of acres for what are called preservations, or the reservations I should say. They from the beginning, announced that they wanted to maintain their way of life as they had always lived, there in the desert and the plains and so forth, and we set up these reservations so they could and had a Bureau of Indian Affairs to help take care of them, at the same time we provide education for them, schools on the reservations, and they are free, also, to leave the reservations and be American citizens among the rest of us, and many do. Some still prefer, however, that early way of life and we've done everything we can to meet their demands on how they want to live. Maybe we made a mistake. Maybe we should not have humored them in that wanting to stay in that kind of primitive lifestyle. Maybe we should have said, 'No, come join us, be citizens. "31).

In all fairness, Reagan was probably unaware of the level of understanding and concern for Native Americans by people outside our country's borders. He was obviously caught off-guard and un-prepared, which explains in part, the nearly incoherent syntax and bewildering logic of his answer. However, his lack of understanding of history, his insensitivity, his Euro-centric sense of superiority, his disdain for Native culture and Native People, was to our collective shame, a fair representation of the nation and the people he served as president