A Page 1 headline in a Seattle newspaper recently read: “As tribes prosper, they need lawyers.” I can say from experience that, if there is anything the tribes don’t need for the good of all native Indians, it’s more lawyers, and I can back up that statement with personal experience.

When I served as chief policy adviser to the late Gov. Dixy Lee Ray of Washington State from 1977 to 1980, one of my many duties in her cabinet was the position of her liaison with all Indian tribes of the state. I met frequently with leaders of the various tribes from time to time, and we got along very well. They were responsive to me, because I informed them that the Governor had their interests at heart and was ready to cooperate with them and address any and all problems they had.

Those problems included the rights to mineral resources on all Indian lands, the custody of Indian children who had lost their parents, the policing of the reservations, and many other issues. After more than six months of meetings with them, I informed the Governor of the progress that we had made.

The Governor suggested that I bring in representatives of all the tribes to a meeting in her office so that we might decide how to put into practice all the new programs both sides had agreed upon. The tribal leaders were delighted, and so was the Governor — and, of course, so was I, who had arranged the meeting of minds.

All went well, until — and this was the saddest experience I had in state government — the tribal leaders arrived at the Governor’s office with several of their lawyers.  In no time, the lawyers tore apart all the proposed agreements I had made with the tribesmen, and they proceeded to make a series of demands of the state (and the federal government) that were impossible to consider and would have made a laughing stock of the Governor and me and would have created a storm of protest from the public.

Thanks to the tribes’ lawyers, our proposed state cooperation with the reservation dwellers went out the window. The Governor, who had always been a good friend to the tribes, as I had, was speechless when she heard the lawyers’ demands. She left the meeting early, and I called it to a halt, thanked the tribal leaders for coming, and gave the lawyers the deepest frown I could manage.

Although I tried later, I could not recapture the smooth, uplifting relationship I had worked so hard to create with the Indians. Cooperation had become impossible — thanks to the presence and obstinacy of the tribes’ lawyers, who were not Indians themselves.

It was then that I became a strong advocate of scrapping all Indian treaties in America, granting individual Indians ownership of their property, and putting an end to the Indians’ dual citizenship, which should be made a part of the U.S. Constitution. No one in this nation should have dual citizenship, regardless of the fact that several nations permit it.

The treaties should be tossed into the ashcan, and all Indians should be made first-class citizens, not dual citizens who rely upon federal government largesse and state governments for endless favors. It’s long past time that Indians join mainstream America and get off the “Indian dole.”