Politics & Power Quote by Russell Means

Means is doing something sly here: he takes a phrase that usually gets lobbed at Native communities - "dependency" - and flips it back onto the country that invented the accusation. The line is structured like an indictment, not a lament. "Institutionalized" signals that what’s being discussed isn’t a series of bad decisions but a durable system: agencies, laws, contracts, schools, policing, welfare rules, corporate partnerships. Indian policy, in Means’s framing, isn’t a niche bureaucratic file; it’s a template for how the modern U.S. learned to manage people.

The subtext is that paternalism is portable. The federal government’s long history of governing Native nations through rations, boarding schools, and forced economic arrangements didn’t just produce harm on reservations; it normalized a political imagination where survival is mediated by institutions. When Means says "the American people", he’s widening the charge: the same machinery that made Native life contingent on federal approval now trains everyone to accept a life contingent on government forms and corporate gatekeepers.

He also refuses the easy left-right binary. Dependency isn’t blamed solely on "big government" or solely on "big business"; it’s the duet. Corporations don’t replace the state so much as partner with it, feeding off regulation, subsidies, procurement, and the authority to define what counts as development. Historically, Means is speaking from the Red Power era into the late-20th-century moment when tribal sovereignty battles, resource extraction, and federal funding were colliding. The sting is moral: a nation that castigates Indigenous dependency has quietly built an economy and culture that can’t imagine freedom outside institutional permission.