Indigenous Policy Current Issue

Articles:

William G. Archambeault, “Government Reductionism and Academic Bias in Criminal Justice Research on American Indian Crime and Justice Issues.”
Stephen Zunes, “The United States and Bolivia.”

“Government Reductionism and Academic Bias in Criminal Justice Research on American Indian Crime and Justice Issues.”

Government Reductionism refers to the wide range of intentional or accidental policies that reduce the number of Native Americans living in Indian Country in the United States. The end consequence of which is to remove American Indians from tribal lands held in Federal Trust and from entitlement to treaty compensations.

Bias in academic criminal justice refers to several different acts or conditions that discourage the acquisition of academic and evidence based knowledge about issues of crime and justice that impact American Indians both on Reservations as well as in the larger society. Academic bias refers to such actions as ignoring the existence of American Indians in “minority focused research,” denigrating the value of research concerning American Indians, and labeling other forms of knowledge about American Indian populations as unimportant in main stream criminal justice literature, discouraging faculty from pursuing research and academic study of American Indian populations, among other examples. Academic bias against knowledge and research on American Indian populations in Criminal Justice and Criminology, acts to reinforce the effects of governmental reductionism.

Evidence of academic bias against the study of American Indian crime and justice issues by main stream criminal justice and criminology was reinforced in 2002 in a paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Western Social Science Association. This paper examined the content of one hundred eighty-five “minority focused” criminal justice and criminology publications from main stream journals and research reports, published between January, 1995 and March 2002. Typical of the findings reported were these two: 1) 99% of minority focused research articles appearing in mainstream criminology or criminal justice academic journals either ignored American Indian populations completely or did not treat Native Peoples on par with other minorities; and 2) 87% of all government funded research on minorities’ focused crime and justice studies totally ignored or did not treat Native Peoples on par with other minorities.

This current paper examines research literature published from January 2002 through March 2008, and addresses similar questions. Reported are some interesting changes in academic bias, but the continuation of it.

INTRODUCTION

Government Reductionism refers to the wide range of intentional as well as accidental policies that reduce the number of Native Americans living in Indian Country in the United States. Historically, governmental reductionism began with Spanish and English colonization of the Americas during the 15^th through the17^th Centuries. It continued with the 18^th Century Western expansion of the United States and the 19^th Century policy of forcing Indians onto reservations and reserves and into the 20^th Century with various land allotment acts. All forms of governmental reductionism end in one or more of following four consequences:

4. To lessen political influence and self-sufficiency of First Nations People by reducing their numbers.

Some may also argue that government reductionism was behind the policies of the Indian boarding school era. While others argue that it continues today under the guise of multiculturalism which focuses many peoples from many different nations and cultures while ignoring the diversity which exists among American Indian cultures today.

Government Reductionism policies are aided in attaining intended objectives by academic bias: whether intentional or accidental. Academic bias against American Indians takes several forms, such as ignoring the existence of American Indians in minority focused research in urban US communities, excluding American Indian justice issues from multicultural policy analysis, and relegating research and scholarly publications that focus on Native American issues to status of lesser (or of insignificant) importance to literature on other minority groups. These biases are further reinforced by the editorial section policies of many criminal justice, criminology, sociology and social work journals. These biases are reinforced even more strongly by academic university department policies that devalue the worth of research or scholarly publications which focus on American Indian crime and justice issues, and promotion and tenure review policies that discourage or penalize faculty for engaging in such scholarly efforts. Finally, the government itself reinforces these biases by not setting grant funding standards that force so called “minorities focused research” to include American Indian crime and justice issues on par with other minorities.

Evidence of academic bias in mainstream criminal justice and criminology literature was supported in a paper presented at the 44^th Annual WSSA meeting in Albuquerque in 2002 by this author. Presented was the content analysis of two hundred eighty-five criminology and criminal justice publications, published between January 1995 and March 2002. One hundred ninety-eight journal articles from main stream criminology and criminal justice^¹ journals and eighty-seven federally funded research studies were examined^². ALL purported to be minority population studies dealing with different crime and justice issues. The results of this study revealed several significant findings. Some of the key finding are compared with those derived from the 2008 study.

It has been six years since this paper was presented. Has anything changed? Are there indications that American Indian crime and justice issues are treated more equitably? How do the specific findings reported in the 2002 study compare to those found in 2008?

To answer these questions, the procedures followed in the 2002 study were replicated. Using the cross indexing of the National Criminal Justice Reference Service, a total of forty-two (42) criminal justice/criminology “minority focused” publications, published from January 2002 through March 2008, were located and subjected to content analysis. These included: journal articles (research, policy analysis and other scholarly works), research monographs, books and book chapters. The bibliography is found at the end of this paper.

A comparison of specific findings of the respective 2002 and 2008 studies are presented below.

Only THREE (3) or slightly more than 1% of analyzed publications focused exclusively on American Indian populations or issues. All three were government studies. Not one was found in the academic journals reviewed.

Of the forty-two publications examined, sixteen (16) or 38.1% focused exclusively on Native American Crime and Justice Issues. Of these,

It is evident that some changes have taken place when the findings of the 2008 study are compared to those of the 2002 study. There were four conclusions justified by these data.

First, both numerically and proportionately there is an important increase in the number of research and scholarly publications that deal exclusively with American Indians reported in the 2008 study as compared to the 2002 study. While exclusive focus on Native American populations accounted for over thirty-eight percent (38%) of all publication in the 2008 study, it accounted for only slightly more than 1% in the 2002 study. These numbers show that an important increase in the academic and research interest in American Indian crime and justice issues.

Second, while these increases are indicators of changing attitudes toward American Indian issues, there are both equally positive and ominous sides to these data as well. On the positive side, crime and justice problems of American Indians living in Indian Country, meaning federally recognized reservations in the US, appear to be receiving much more attention today as compared to years past. This finding is further reinforced by large numbers of substantial grants that have been given to reservations to study and develop programs aimed at reducing family violence, spousal and child abuse, combating substance abuse, improving education, among other programs.

The downside to these data and the increased attention given reservation issues is twofold. First, no improvement is shown in the number or proportion of research studies that treat American Indians as an important minority in Urban, Suburban and other non-reservations settings. Despite the fact that census data show that an estimated three out of every four tribally enrolled American Indians live in urban, suburban or off reservation environments. The lack of research on these non-reservation Native Americans make their crime and justice issues virtually invisible to criminal justice, criminology and urban policy researchers and analysts. Existing criminal justice and criminological research studies create the false impression that outside of reservations, Indians do not face any significant crime or justice problems. Nor do they suffer racial and ethnic bias similar to that experienced by other minorities. To the contrary, the reality of Native American life, in non-reservation settings in the US, closely parallels that faced by African-Americans, Hispanic/Latinos, Asians and other minority groups in dealing with the dominant culture.

The second downside to these data is that there is no indication of an increase in research or scholarly interest in the crime and justice issues of non-federally enrolled mixed or full blood Indian Peoples who also live in urban, suburban and other non-reservation settings. In fact, there is very little scholarly interest at all on a wide range of non-reservation, non-federally enrolled Native Peoples whose numbers are estimated in the millions. Included in this group are Native Peoples who:

Third, criminal justice, criminology and policy analysts continue to regard American Indian crime and justice issues as being less important than those of other more vocal and politically active minorities, such as those of the African-American, Hispanic, and Asian communities. This conclusion is supported by the fact that nearly fifty-five (54.8%) percent of publications reviewed ignored American Indians, while focusing on issues of the respective African-Americans, Hispanic or Asian communities.

Defenders of the status quo in academic criminology and criminal justice and policy analysis research continue to argue that American Indians account for slightly more than 1% of the population and their involvement in the American Criminal Justice system is roughly proportional to their population. What these defenders of the status quo fail to consider is that in the Federal Justice System and in many states American Indians account for 7 to 12% of offender populations and are crime victims at many times the national average. Included are states such as California, Montana, Idaho, the Dakotas, Minnesota, Wyoming, Oklahoma, New York, among other states. Further, if the number of Native Peoples who are not members of federally recognized tribes were added to the count of those who were, the proportion of American Indians nationwide would triple or quadruple. Furthermore, when focus is put on county and municipal jails and detention centers in states with high Indian populations or on community correctional efforts in this same states, the proportion of Native American offenders under institutional control often exceeds half or more of the jail population and similar ratios are found in community correctional efforts.

Finally, these results justify placing more emphasis on getting information about American Indian Crime and Justice Issues before the public as well as the Academy. Public awareness meetings are common on reservations today, but are less evident in urban neighborhood communities. The vast majority of Indian people work in non-reservation communities and most spend their money in these cities and suburban areas. It is time that Indian people learn the power of purchasing power that other minorities have already demonstrated, and use this economic power to create more political power and awareness of issues that confront Native Peoples. Many Native Peoples are highly politically active on reservations, but much less so in general American communities outside the reservations. For American Indian crime and justice issues to receive more attention from the grant driven criminal justice, criminology and policy research areas of academia, American Indian people must make themselves and their concerns more politically visible to the American public.

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French, Lawrence A. (2003). Wounded Knee II and the Indian Prison Reform Movement. Prison Journal. (83,1, March) 26-37. (NIJ: 199301).

French, Lawrence A. (2005). Law Enforcement in Indian Country. Criminal Justice Studies: A Critical Journal of Crime, Law and Society. (18,1, March) 69-80. (NCJ: 209864).

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Leonardson, Gary. (2006). Native American Crime in the Northwest: 2004-2005 --- BIA Information from Alaska, Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, Oregon and Washington. (NCJ: 218937).

Perry, Steven. (2007). Improving Criminal History Records in Indian Country, 2004-2006. (NCJ: 218913).

Rivers, Mary J. (2005). Navajo Women and Abuse: The Context for their Troubled Relationships. Journal of Family Violence. (20,2, April) 83-89. (NIJ:210057).

Savin, Daniel, Mark T. Gary, et.al. (2006). Telepsychiatry for Treating Rural American Indian Youth. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. (45.4, April).484-488.

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Spence, Deborah and Barbara Webster. (2006). Guidelines for Starting and Operating A New Police Department. (NCJ: 215200).

Tribal Court Association. (2007). Tribal Courts Assistance Program Fact Sheet. (NIJ: 217994).

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*William G. Archambeault, is Professor and Chair of the Department of Criminal Justice, Minot State University, Minot, North Dakota. He may be reached at: w.archambeault@minotstateu.edu.

Reprinted with author’s permission from Foreign Policy In Focus, www.fpif.org.

The alleged support by the United States of wealthy landowners, business leaders, and their organizations tied to the violent uprising in eastern Bolivia has led U.S. Ambassador Philip Goldberg's expulsion from La Paz and the South American government's demands that the United States stop backing the illegitimate rebellion. Goldberg had met with some of these right-wing oppositionist leaders just a week before the most recent outbreak of violence against the democratically elected government of Evo Morales, who won a recall referendum in August with over 67% of the popular vote.

U.S. subversion has assumed several forms since the leftist indigenous leader became president in 2005. For example, the U.S. embassy — in violation of American law — repeatedly asked Peace Corps volunteers, as well as an American Fulbright scholar, to engage in espionage, according to news reports.

Bolivia gets approximately $120 million in aid annually from the United States. It's an important supplement for a country of nine million people with an annual per capita income of barely $1,000. Presidential Minister Juan Ramón Quintana has accused the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) of using some of this money to support a number of prominent conservative opposition leaders as part of a "democracy initiative" through the consulting firm Chemonics International. A cable from the U.S. Embassy in Bolivia last year revealed a USAID-sponsored "political party reform project" to "help build moderate, pro-democracy political parties that can serve as a counterweight to the radical MAS or its successors" (MAS stands for Movimiento al Socialismo, the party to which Morales belongs.). Despite numerous requests filed under the Freedom of Information Act, the Bush administration refuses to release a list of all the recipient organizations of USAID funds.

The history of U.S. intervention in support for rightist elements in Bolivia is long. The United States was the major foreign backer of the dictatorial regime of René Barrientos, who seized power in a 1964 military coup. The CIA and U.S. Special Forces played a key role in suppressing a leftist peasant uprising that followed, including the 1967 murder of Ernesto "Che" Guevara, a key leader in the movement.

When leftist army officer Juan José Torres came to power in October of 1970, the Nixon administration called for his ouster. When an attempted coup by rightist general Hugo Bánzer Suárez was threatened by a breakdown in the plotters' radio communications, the U.S. Air Force made their radio communications available to them. Though this first attempted takeover was crushed, Bánzer was able to seize power by August of the following year in a bloody uprising, also with apparent U.S. support. Thousands of suspected leftists were executed in subsequent years.

The United States largely supported Bánzer and subsequent dictators in the face of a series of protests, general strikes and other largely nonviolent pro-democracy uprisings, which eventually led to the end of military rule by 1982 and the coming to office of the left-leaning president Hernán Siles Zuazo. The United States refused to resume economic aid, however, until the government enacted strict neoliberal austerity measures.

A series of center-left and rightist civilian governments ruled the country over the next 20 years, most of which were corrupt and inept and none of which could come close to meeting the basic needs ordinary Bolivians, who —with the exception of the Haitians —are the poorest in the Western hemisphere. Despite the restoration of democracy, the strict austerity programs pushed by the United States and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) resulted in the Bolivian people, more than two-thirds of whom live in poverty, having little say in the decisions that most impacted their lives. Furthermore, even though the majority of the population is indigenous, the country's leaders continued to be white or mestizo (of mixed-race heritage).

The 2005 election of Evo Morales, a left-wing activist and the first indigenous leader in the nearly 500 years since the Spanish conquest, marked a major shift in Bolivia's politics. His commitment to a radical reform of the country's inequitable social and economic system has proven to be even more critical than his racial and cultural identity.

To understand Bolivian sensitivities to U.S. aid and its conditions, as well as concerns regarding U.S. intervention, it is important to look what happened to Bolivia's first leftist government, which governed back in the 1950s.

In 1952, a popular uprising against a rightist military regime led to the left-leaning nationalists of the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (MNR) coming to power promising political freedom and radical economic reform. As with Morales and MAS, his political party, that revolutionary government had strong support from militant worker and peasant political movements. And, also like today, the new government's policies were strongly nationalistic, particularly in regard to the country's natural resources, in which U.S. investors had substantial interests.

It wasn't long, however, before the United States forced a dramatic shift in the regime's priorities.

With its landlocked location, dissipated gold reserves, increased costs of production and imports, and huge trade deficits, Bolivia's revolutionary regime couldn't counter the economic power of the United States. U.S. aid wasn't enough to improve the standard of living in Bolivia, but it did manage to make the country more dependent. The Bolivian Planning Board noted that "rather than an impulse to improvement, the aid has represented a means only of preventing worse deterioration in the situation as it existed."

The ruling MNR recognized that it couldn't afford to anger Washington. Their fear stemmed not just from the threat of direct intervention (like what took place in Guatemala against the nationalist Arbenz government less than two years later), but also from the fear of economic retaliation, not an unimportant concern given Bolivia's dependence on the U.S. to process its tin ore and provide needed imports.

Indeed, it was clear from an early stage of the revolution that the economic weakness of Bolivia, combined with the economic power of the United States, allowed the U.S. to establish clear parameters for the revolution. For example, the United States forced Bolivia to pay full compensation to the wealthy foreign owners of recently nationalized tin mines rather than use the funds for economic development. The Petroleum Code of 1955, written by U.S. officials and enacted without any public debate or alterations by Bolivian authorities, forced the Bolivian government to forego its oil monopoly. Bolivia was then forced to sign an agreement to further encourage U.S. investment in the country. It was due only to this desperate need for an additional source of foreign exchange and pressure from the U.S. government that the once strongly nationalistic MNR agreed to these concessions.

The following year, the U.S. took more direct authority over Bolivia's economy by imposing an economic stabilization program, which the Bolivian government agreed to, according to U.S. officials, "virtually under duress, and with repeated hints of curtailment of U.S. aid" (This quote is from Inflation and Development in Latin America: A Case History of Inflation and Stabilization in Bolivia, a book by George Jackson Eder.). The program, which bore striking resemblance to the structural adjustment programs which have since been imposed on dozens of debt-ridden countries in Latin America and elsewhere, consisted of the devaluation of the boliviano; an end to export/import controls, price controls and government subsidies on consumer goods; the freezing of wages and salaries; major cutbacks in spending for education and social welfare; and an end to efforts at industrial diversification.

The result, according to U.S. officials which forced its implementation, "meant the repudiation, at least tacitly, of virtually everything that the Revolutionary Government had done over the previous four years." It not only redirected the economic priorities of the revolution, particularly its efforts at economic diversification, but altered the revolution's political structure by effectively curbing the power of the trade unions and displacing socialist-leaning leaders of the MNR.

In the end, the United States was able to overthrow the Bolivian revolution without having to overthrow the government.

In many respects, U.S. policy towards Bolivia proved to be a harbinger for future U.S. domination of Latin America in this age of globalization, where the so-called "Washington consensus," backed by U.S.-supported international financial institutions, created a situation where even wealthier Latin American countries had as few choices in choosing their economic policies as did impoverished Bolivia during the 1950s.

This has begun to change, however. Thanks in part to Venezuela's oil wealth and the willingness of Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, in the name of Latin American solidarity, to help its poorer and financially-strapped neighbors, a number of Latin American governments have had their debts reduced or eliminated. The strengthening of regional trade blocs and increased trade with Europe and China has also made it easier for South American nations to wean themselves from dependency on the United States.

Under Morales, Bolivia has attempted to strengthen the Andean Community of Nations and the signing last year of a "People's Trade Treaty" with Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba is indicative of the desire to strengthen working economic and political alliances outside of direct U.S. influence in order to be better able to stand up to Washington.

As a result, Morales and the MAS seem better positioned to withstand economic pressure from the United States. Unlike the MNR in the 1950s, Morales comes out of a popular mass movement of the country's poor and indigenous majority, which is very different than the predominantly white middle-class leadership of reformist officers under the previous government. Combined with economic support from oil-rich Venezuela and Morales' efforts at strengthening its economic relationships with Bolivia's Latin American neighbors, MAS has made it possible for the Bolivians to resist buckling under the kind of pressure imposed by the United States a half-century earlier.

qIt's this very ability to better withstand the kind of economic pressures the United States had until recently been able to exert, either directly or through international financial institutions, which has led to recent violence in Santa Cruz and elsewhere in the wealthier white and mestizo-dominated eastern sectors of the country. As a result of the reduced leverage of their friends in Washington, which had previously enabled them to rule the country, certain elite elements now appear willing to violently separate themselves and the four eastern provinces in which they are concentrated.

With much of Bolivia's natural gas wealth located in the east, and taking advantage of the endemic racism of its largely white and mestizo population against the country's indigenous majority, now in positions of political power for the first time, these right-wing forces appear ready to either bring down Morales or secede from the country. Earlier this year they sacked and burned government buildings, murdered government officials and supporters, attacked journalists, sabotaged a key natural gas pipeline, and renounced any allegiance to Bolivia's democratically elected government.

While the leadership of the Organization of American States and virtually every Latin American president has condemned the uprising the U.S. government has not, adding to concerns that United States may indeed have a hand in the violence.

The apparent triumph of the neoliberal model of globalization in the early 1990s and the resulting hegemonic domination by the United States over poorer countries — for which Bolivia served as the prototype 40 years earlier — made it appear as if the days of cruder forms of U.S. interventionism in Latin America were a thing of the past.

Recent events in Bolivia, however, may be a frightening indication that this is no longer the case.

Stephen Zunes is a professor of Politics at the University of San Francisco and a Foreign Policy In Focus senior analyst. He wrote a longer version, with citations, of the segment on U.S. policy toward Bolivia for the Center for International Policy's Americas Program last year. . If you are interested in seeing a more detailed analysis of U.S. policy toward the Bolivian Revolution of the 1950s by the author, you can find that at: http://americas.irc-online.org/am/4701. Many of his other articles are on his website at: www.stephenzunes.org.

1 . The academic journal articles that were reviewed included were drawn from four publications: Crime and Delinquency, Justice Quarterly, Criminology, and The Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency. These journals were all highly respected research oriented academic journals. All studies and articles purported to be multi-racial or ethnic studies.

2 The government research reports were cross listed on the National Criminal Justice Reference Web Site, primarily funded grants from the National Institute of Justice, the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the National Institute of Corrections, the National Institute of Juvenile Justice or the National Institute of Health.