Historians have dubbed it the “department of everything else,” a genuinely apt metaphor for the U.S. Department of the Interior. Not only does it draw together the diverse portfolios of the National Park Service; the bureaus of Indian Affairs, Land Management and Reclamation, and all sorts of mineral programs, Interior has been a hodgepodge of controversy throughout its long history.
The current Interior secretary, Ryan Zinke, is caught in a whirl of ethical questions. He is being investigated over questionable expenditures, from private helicopter jaunts to commemorative coins bearing his name, and he is facing broad criticism for an opaque and apparently one-sided review of national monuments. But how far from the norm is Zinke’s behavior? Not far, in fact, as the history of the department shows.
The relationship between the department and the West goes back to 1849, when Interior joined the federal apparatus as a Cabinet-level department to administer land, tribes and more. The West’s value rested in its real estate, and Interior’s involvement in the business of land encouraged rampant fraud.
The department disposed of the United States’ conquered land through the General Land Office (which would later merge with the U.S. Grazing Service to become the Bureau of Land Management) and reduced Native land holdings by two-thirds with the Dawes Act of 1887. Interior’s bureaucrats accepted bribes, enforced few regulations, and withheld cash and supplies from tribal nations. As the 19th century wound down, Sarah Winnemucca, a Northern Paiute writer and activist, railed against the corrupt Bureau of Indian Affairs. Reservation conditions would not improve, she wrote, “if you (in the department) keep on sending us such agents as have been sent to us year after year, who do nothing but fill their pockets, and the pockets of their wives and sisters.”