By Kasey Keeler / Bloomberg Opinion
In recent years, land-acknowledgement statements have mushroomed. In Madison, Wis., the place I call home, you hear them at flag raisings, school concerts, sports events and public talks. Though well-intentioned, these public declarations that provide historical context for centuries of Indigenous dispossession ring hollow when lined up against the acute crisis of homeownership faced by American Indian people.
While Columbus Day has been rightfully scrutinized, we can use its observance alongside Indigenous Peoples’ Day to truly acknowledge historical wrongs and make property and land purchases more accessible for American Indian people.
A long history of discriminatory programs — hinging on citizenship and later race — have kept American Indians from enjoying the level of homeownership opportunities that white Americans have long benefited from.
The gravity of the situation took shape during the 19th century, when the federal government negotiated hundreds of treaties with tribal nations. These legally binding agreements, while recognizing and affirming the inherent sovereignty of tribal nations, also stripped them of their land. In exchange, it was generally stipulated that the federal government would provide annuity payments, goods and services to tribal nations, including housing provisions. Yet, payments were often late, missing or stopped after only a few years.
It was not long before treaty-making gave way to the Indian Removal Act in the 1830s. The law forced many tribal nations whose homelands were east of the Mississippi River to its west, often to Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma). Here, they had to rebuild their communities, coexist with western tribes, and learn how to grow new crops that could thrive in an unfamiliar climate and soil. The reservation system soon followed, created to contain American Indian people to even smaller tracts of land. And because much — 56 million acres — of these territories are held in trusts by the federal government and not owned by tribal nations or individual American Indians, they cannot be bought, sold or serve as collateral for mortgages.
By design, homeownership on reservations remains a complex arena. Tribal citizens were never envisioned as potential participants of this slice of the American Dream.
Policies for American Indians were constructed in deliberate contrast to the programs offered to (white) U.S. citizens. Although tribal nations exist as sovereign political entities, the Indigenous people of this land were not considered citizens until 1924’s Indian Citizenship Act.
Laws such as 1862’s Homestead Act, which wasn’t repealed until the 1970s, opened the land that American Indians had been dispossessed of to non-Native settlers at bare-bones prices. American Indians were also excluded from many Federal Housing Administration lending programs, primarily because of limits around U.S. citizenship and, later, discrimination.
Even after getting U.S. citizenship, Indigenous people’s access to private property through mainstream and federally backed lenders was limited. For example, servicemen and women were regularly denied the home loan benefit of the post-WWII-era GI Bill and encouraged to participate in the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ relocation program, which moved them to short-term rental units in urban areas instead of providing opportunities to become homeowners. Those who relocated faced low-end jobs and discrimination while dealing with a loss of traditional cultural support in these metropolises.
But dispossession is far from a thing of the past. Many American Indians remain unable to access their homelands today because non-Natives have populated the continent through settler colonialism.
The metropolitan areas we recognize today as housing market hot spots — New York, Chicago, Minneapolis, Denver, Seattle, the Bay Area and Los Angeles — remain places American Indians are priced out of due to spiraling land values, increasing home costs and a highly competitive marketplace. This is the very land their ancestors were stripped of only a few generations ago.
Despite the many ways Indigenous people have been barred from homeownership — one of the proven ways to create generational wealth — we continue to see a wave of communities and individuals using shortsighted land acknowledgment statements as a way to seemingly account for these histories.
What is absent from these pronouncements are the ways these same lands continue to remain off limits to American Indian people and an actionable plan at the national and local levels to support Indigenous people, build relationships and enact reparations.
To ensure equal access to homeownership, we must see expanded and targeted lending programs built upon the Section 184 American Indian Home Loan Program and increased federal funding to off-reservation tribal members. Housing programs can and should provide additional financial resources (for example, down payment assistance grants and guaranteed low-interest rates) to would-be American Indian homeowners to acknowledge and address historical wrongs; a form of reparations.
Federal policy change must be accompanied by local efforts to return land; at the individual, institutional and corporate levels. It is one thing to acknowledge land or even give money and quite another to give land back. There are a growing number of models across the country that demonstrate what giving land back can look like, but these dual efforts — housing and land — must come together. Without intentional and meaningful change at multiple levels, the status quo will be nearly impossible to change.
It is well past time to move beyond land acknowledgments and to return land to those who were forcibly dispossessed, past and present.
Kasey Keeler is an author and assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin. She is an enrolled citizen of the Tuolumne Band of Me-Wuk Indians and descendant of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation.
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