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The image of the Indian as “noble savage” thus
came to occupy a prominent role in the
American popular consciousness (Berkhofer 1979;
Deloria 1998). So unlike South Africa’s system
of
direct and constant control of indigenous
peoples, early U.S. policy was characterized by
a policy of
sequestering and neglect.
As in South Africa, various forms of “vice” have
played a role in American white-native
relations. Early colonists gave liquor to
Indians as both a form of payment for land and
goods, and as a
mechanism for encouraging dependence and
passivity (Westermeyer 1996). And as government
policy
towards tribes shifted during the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries from one of neglect to
assimilation (codified first in the 1887 Dawes
Act and later in the 1947 policy of Termination
[Jorgensen
1998, Deloria 1985]), the physical, moral and
social “health” of Indians has become the object
of
governmental attention—for instance, in 1832
Congress prohibited the sale of alcohol to
Indians
(Beauvais 1998). Though alcoholism, drug use and
gambling among Indians have surely represented
crucial sites of intervention for government
officials engaged in the project of the
normalizing and
acculturating indigenous peoples, little
documentation of this process exists. In sum,
Indians in America
have never represented a significant source of
labor power to capital; government policies of
warfare and
seclusion in reservations initially served the
end of expropriating their land. Subsequent
policy towards
Indians followed a statist, rather than
corporate, logic of acculturation and
assimilation (Vinje 1996).
“Self -Determination,” Development and Gambling
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