The IHS and the Ongoing War Against Native Americans

In the face of extreme violence Native people are still here and still fighting (for all of us)  Source

Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired

"Could it not be contrived to send the small pox among the disaffected tribes of Indians? We must on this occasion use every stratagem in our power to reduce them."

The words above, were written by a fine, cultured English gentleman, a prominent member of the English upper class named Jeffrey Amherst. Amherst was a veteran of the colonial wars fought for Britain on the North American continent and there are place names and streets named after him, including Amherst College in Massachusetts. Native Americans are forced to live in a society that reminds them of centuries of colonial history and the genocidal war against them that began with the European invasions.

Picture if you can, a scene at the doctor’s office and her diploma was earned at the Adolph Hitler School of Medicine, or was bestowed on him by the Joseph Mengele Institute?  Unimaginable isn’t it. Not for Native American’s it isn’t. What is it like for them having to pass by, or see pictures of that mountain in South Dakota that has the faces of heroes of the continent’s colonization, carved in to it as large as life? It’s staggering when we think about it. And saying that this view of US history is just “someone else’s point of view” isn’t sufficient. A point of view is not valid simply because it’s a point of view. What makes it valid is whether it corresponds to objective reality or in this instance historical accuracy.

I have wanted to write something along these lines for the last month and just couldn’t get it done. I was motivated initially by numerous articles in the Wall Street Journal describing the disgraceful state of affairs at the Indian Health Service (IHS), the federal agency that provides health care to 2.6 million Native Americans. Then I tried again after reading the back and forth accusations of genocide between the U.S. and Turkey. I will share this regardless, as I read what I think is the final piece on this subject.

Native people have repeatedly complained about the conditions in the hospitals that are supposed to serve them, and also the treatment or lack of it, including the shortage of doctors. The reality for me is that the genocidal war that was waged against the Native population at the onset and throughout colonization, including germ warfare as the quote by Amherst confirms, is continuing against the survivors of that genocide and the state of the Indian Health Service is confirms this.

One article highlighted the use of doctors whose record was less than stellar and these were not isolated cases. The Wall Street Journal points out that, “Since 2006, the U.S. government has paid out about $55 million in settlements in 163 malpractice cases at Indian Health Service hospitals.”  The Journal claims that doctors with numerous malpractice cases under their belt are given a “second chance” at the Indian Health Service. One of them, a Dr. Henry Stachura who retired in August 2019, had numerous allegations directed at him due to his care at the IHS that cost the US government (the taxpayer), $1.8 million in malpractice payments. Three of those patients died according to the Wall Street Journal. “Our tribal members are at the mercy of these federal health facilities….”, Tori Kitcheyan, a Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska council member, tells the WSJ, “There is no other choice.”.

One doctor at a hospital in Claremore Oklahoma cost the taxpayer over a million dollars in malpractice settlements for spilling fecal matter under a patient’s skin and botching a hernia repair according to the Journal

Doctors at the IHS are in a unique situation in that the US government covers the malpractice claims and they pay nothing. The Wall Street Journal cites a survey by a doctor recruitment firm that claimed this was considered a “top perk of the job”.  It would certainly be a top perk for a doctor who had a long list of malpractice claims with dead or injured patients on it.

In the US, where medical care is big business and quality of care is dependent on what you can pay for, the poor get what they deserve, (It’s called freedom here).  In the case of the Native People, those that have survived the genocidal war against them will be at the bottom of the heap.

In the latest Wall Street Journal, titled, A Tragic Journey Through The Indian Health Service,  we read about the case of Kate Miner, a Lakota woman and single mother who raised four children on her own. She went through more than a year of excruciating pain and unnecessary stress being misdiagnosed and generally ill treated by the system. Dr. Robert Martin Jr. one of the numerous physicians who saw Ms. Miner one night worked at an HIS facility. He is one is of many examples, the WSJ gives of doctors with poor records ending up working at the HIS. The Journal reports:

“In 2015, Dr. Martin’s medical license in Arkansas was suspended, then restricted, after he allegedly prescribed painkillers to two patients with whom he was sexually involved, according to that state’s medical board. The women were prostitutes at a Nevada brothel, board records show, and appeared on the HBO show “Cat House: The Series.” Dr. Martin also allegedly prescribed steroids to himself, the records show.

As part of the sanctions, he offered to practice only on Indian reservations or at Department of Veterans Affairs hospitals, Arkansas medical-board records show. Eight months after his suspension, the disciplinary order was dismissed, and the restrictions were lifted.” WSJ 12-24-19

Native people, the original inhabitants of this land but driven from it, along with veterans who we are told protect the rest of us and our freedoms, get the bottom of the barrel when it comes to medical care. If that doesn’t convince you that this parade of military veterans at sports events and talk of them as heroes is sheer hypocrisy and lies nothing will.

 “The IHS’s network of hospitals and clinics treats some of America’s poorest communities, beset by high rates of diabetes, alcohol-related deaths and other chronic diseases.”, the Journal adds. 

Billings MO March for Murdered and Missing Native Women

Other issues that have caught my attention recently through social media and American Indian websites and outlets, is the murder, rape and trafficking of Native women and girls. In Montana, Native Americans are just 6.7 percent of the total population, but make up 26 percent of missing persons cases.  I posted a piece on this blog from a Native American brother recently, something he posted to his Facebook page.  This is an issue in the US and Canada.

That said, we had a civil war here over the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline that was met with extreme violence by the state but it showed that the resistance on the part of the Native population is far from over. Naturally, the present leaders of the building trades unions of the AFL-CIO supported the state. The leadership of the unions with their myopic view of the world want to ensure their members have jobs at all costs to keep the dues money coming in. Some of them will support capitalism’s destruction of the environment until every tree is cut down and every stream and ocean polluted. 

I am no expert on what is or is not genocide but though the source is nothing to boast about, Turkey’s Erdogan recognizing the U.S. treatment of Native Americans as genocide is spot on.  That Erdogan made this decision in response to the US government recognizing Turkey’s massacre of Armenians in 1915 as genocide doesn’t alter that. US capitalism has a lot of blood on its hands and has little credibility when it accuses Turkey, China, Myanmar or any other country of human rights abuses.

 

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If we look at the historical record. the US government’s policy toward the Native population, has clearly been to annihilate another ethnic group. Not simply removing them from their lands, but consciously attempting to eradicate their language which is what any colonial power will do, (the British in Ireland for example) and the eradication of their culture, their art, their presence in general.

They were then shoved in to Bantustans basically. The US government policy against Native Americans included starving the population and the way to do that was to kill all the Buffalo. The US government also poisoned the food supply of the Vietnamese people spraying dioxin (contained in the herbicide Agent Orange) on the land, the people, and even their own troops. There is no way that these policies of the US ruling class are not genocidal and surely a policy directed against an ethnic group can be genocide even though it fails to wipe them out entirely.

In the United States, it’s quite obvious simply from the comments made by Amherst above, that the goal was to take the land, remove the indigenous inhabitants from it by one way or another and dispense with them.  As part of the exchange with one of his officers quoted above, Amherst continued, "P.S. You will Do well to try to Innoculate [sic] the Indians by means of Blankets, as well as to try Every other method that can serve to Extirpate this Execrable Race.”,  Wikipedia, Jeffrey Amherst. 

To save some readers time, extirpate means to exterminate, and my dictionary has execrable as utterly “detestable; abominable; abhorrent.”.

Here is a previous WSJ article on the subject of the Indian Health Service  In the print edition of the Journal it was titled “Wanted: Leader To Fix Sickly US Health Agency”.  But what we have to grasp is that it is not possible to fix the IHS. We only need consider that the life expectancy of whites, a so-called privileged group in US society, is declining and there is massive poverty among the white population with millions of them also lacking health care, so there’s no likelihood of the US government rectifying the problems facing the health of 2 million Indians. It makes perfect sense that the ruling class of a social system whose goal it was from the beginning was the eradication of what they considered an “execrable” or abhorrent race of people, that conditions among this section of US society are what they are; these people were supposed to go away. 

Interestingly enough there was a recent article in the U.S guardian on the crisis facing indigenous women and girls and the disgraceful response to it by the state. In the article the author writes:

“Sex trafficking of contemporary indigenous women is “almost indistinguishable from the colonial tactics of enslavement, exploitation, exportation and relocation”.

In sharing these reports I am not condemning the entire workforce of the IHS. As in all cases like these, there are likely many, many doctors, nurses and health care workers who are dedicated to serving a community desperately need of some help. But as with all public services, the private sector and its state will ensure that they do not resolve the social crisis they are supposed to address, this would undermine the so-called supremacy of the market.

Part of transforming society and taking the road to genuine freedom has to be telling the truth about history. The ruling class will never do this in a serious way. Every ruling class falsifies the history of the oppressed if it recognizes it at all. As far as addressing the conditions that persist among the Native population is concerned, a starting point must be the recognition that their history is a heroic struggle against genocide and the current state of a crucial social service that is designed to fail is a continuation of that process.