William Perry Pendley Would Also Bring 40 Years Of Red White & Blue Racism To Federal Lands Position
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In his 2006 book “Warriors for the West,” for example, Pendley suggested that Native people may soon cease to exist. “The day may soon come when Congress and the Supreme Court will be asked to take a serious and very hard look at whether there remains a need for the federal government’s policy of paternalistic protection,” Pendley wrote, apparently referring to the U.S. government’s legal obligation to fulfill treaty commitments, known as its “trust responsibility.” The statement continued, chillingly, “The day may come sooner than many expect given that, with ever-declining blood quantum per tribal member, recognized tribes may soon be little more than associations of financial convenience.” Pendley’s views on Indigenous people have engendered fierce opposition to his nomination to lead BLM — with his positions on “blood quantum” being only the latest to come under scrutiny.
Jill Doerfler, a first-degree descendant of the White Earth Nation and professor of American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota Duluth, has written extensively about “blood quantum,” a term meant to describe the proportion of “Indian blood” a person carries, used by some tribes as a prerequisite for citizenship. Doerfler’s scholarship shows that blood quantum was imposed by European Americans attempting to diminish the number of tribal citizens able to access land. “This seems like a long, old argument going back to the reason the federal government ever tried to push blood quantum as a way to identify American Indians. That has always been done as a way to access resources,” she said. She added that the blood quantum has always been used “to diminish the number of people that have that legal and political status as American Indians.”
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Pendley, who has lately come under fire for his views on racial justice, worked for the Interior Department in the 1980s as well, and his record there provides further evidence that he could prioritize private development over treaty rights. As acting assistant secretary for energy and minerals under President Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s, Pendley sought to delay oil and gas industry royalty payments owed to Indigenous people, according to documents shared with The Intercept by the Western Values Project, a public lands and accountability nonprofit.
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In “Warriors for the West,” Pendley offers his version of the history of the European invasion of Indigenous lands. “In the nation’s early days, the United States sought to balance its ‘Manifest Destiny’ — to settle, colonize, and utilize the resources of the land — with the desires of the independent and diverse indigenous peoples who inhabited that land and used its resources and who wanted to keep both,” Pendley wrote. “The history of the federal government’s treatment of American Indians has not involved overt, intentional racial hatred, but instead an attempt to achieve a Jeffersonian ideal of a United States of America in which all adopted the English language, Christian religion, and Anglo/American culture and lived side by side.” Pendley was omitting some details. “In the mid-1800s to the early 1900s, our children were kidnapped and forced into mandatory military and religious run boarding schools — against their parents’ will,” said Angelique EagleWoman, co-director of the Indian Law Program at the Mitchell Hamline School of Law and a member of the Sisseton-Wahpeton (Dakota) Oyate. “They were sexually, emotionally, and physically abused. If that isn’t overt, intentional racism, I’m not sure what is. We have never fully received reparations or acknowledgement of that history.”
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https://theintercept.com/2020/08/01/william-perry-pendley-blm-native-americans/
