Life on the Reservation

Over lunch, as is my habit, I always have some reading material. One particular day I was reading an article written by Michael McVicar titled “‘First Owyhee and Then the World’: The Early Ministry of R. J. Rushdoony” that was published in the November/December 2008 issue of Faith for All of Life, a publication of the Chalcedon Foundation. As the title indicates, it’s about the early life of Rushdoony’s ministry work.

In an April 15, 2011 Washington Times editorial titled “Obama’s Third World America,” this statement caught my attention: “On a campaign fundraising trip to Chicago, Mr. Obama quipped that under the proposed Republican budget plan, ‘we would be a nation of potholes, and our airports would be worse than places that we thought — that we used to call the Third World, but who are now investing in infrastructure.’ He failed to elaborate on which developing countries he thinks should be models for the United States, but his policies have secured America’s status as part of the declining world.” Do you want to see a microcosm of what Government intervention has done to a nation, then pay close attention to the words of Mr. Rushdoony.

Rushdoony served for eight and a half years as a missionary to the Shoshone and Paiute Indians on the Duck Valley Indian Reservation in a remote area of Nevada beginning in 1944. It was his time on the reservation where he deduced correctly that the state “is the giver of all things, the source power, of land, and (having built a reservoir for irrigation here) even of water. . . . The government hospital delivers the children, and the government army taketh them away, and blessed is the name of the government each Memorial Day and Fourth of July.”

The government’s “management” of the Indians ruined their lives. Rushdoony told about the impact of this process in a prescient article published in 1954 in Essays on Liberty, a publication of the Foundation for Economic Education. As you read it below, note how Rushdoony’s reservation experience has broadened in scope to include a majority of Americans who are now on a much larger reservation.

—Gary DeMar

By Rousas J. Rushdoony

The reservation Indian is becoming less self-sufficient and more dependent upon what he calls “the Great White Father in Washington.” Instead of freedom, the Indian has government-guaranteed “security.” Instead of individual responsibility, he has a government bureau to handle his personal affairs. There are special laws governing his right to own land and to spend tribal money. Under that system of bondage it would surprise no one to find that many thousands of Indians have remained uneducated, hungry, diseased, and mismanaged.

—FROM Wards of the Government

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