They lied to Geronimo.
They massacred Sioux children.They starved the Navajos.
And they broke their treaties, one by one by one.
Past sins define the relationship between the federal government and American Indians - sins as numerous as the ghosts of Wound-ed Knee.
How to get past the sins, beyond the trail of broken promises and shatter generations of mistrust challenges every White House occupant.
As President Clinton is learning, it all adds up in Indian Country -from the U.S. Army distribution of blankets deliberately infected with smallpox a century ago to last year's construction of a beautiful Indian hospital in Shiprock that the government now says it cannot afford to staff.
Indian leaders are prepared to teach Clinton's Cabinet more about tribal issues and concerns during Thursday and Friday's National American Indian Listening Conference at the Albuquerque Convention Center. Attorney General Janet Reno, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt and Housing and Urban Development Secretary Henry Cisneros are scheduled to meet with leaders of 545 recognized tribes.
Actively courted by President Clinton during the 1992 campaign, Indians had hoped he would honor his election promises to establish a new era in American Indian policy.
That hope soured, however, when the administration proposed deep cuts in the Indian Health Service, cuts American Indians contended would "devastate" an agency already stretched to the breaking point.
Labeling the cuts a "promise about to be broken," Navajo Nation President Peterson Zah and other Indian leaders used last week's historic White House summit to urge Clinton to soften the blow.
Zah, head of the nation's largest tribe, says the federal government has kept only one promise it made to American Indians.
"They promised to take our lands, and they did it," he said, echoing a famous quote from Lakota Sioux Chief Red Cloud.
The Navajo Tribe plans to sue the federal government for breaking the 1868 Navajo Treaty if the health-care cuts are not restored.
"Our treaty said `henceforth,' " Zah said. "That means forever. It didn't say we will take care of you when we have the money.
"If they are willing to take back that promise, maybe we should take back the land."
In return for some 500 million acres of pristine wilderness, the federal government vowed over the past 200 years to provide American Indians with education, health care, housing and stewardship of their financial and natural resources. The agreements were reached through hundreds of negotiated treaties.
But the federal government's promises, as Zah and other American Indians can readily testify, were made only to be broken.
"You just need to thumb through those treaties to see that there isn't a single treaty that hasn't been broken in large or in small part," says Suzan Shown Harjo, national coordinator for the Morningstar Foundation in Washington, D.C., an Indian advocacy group.
"Conditions for Indians have not improve significantly over the past 173 years," said New Mexico Democratic Rep. Bill Richardson, chairman of the House Native Affairs subcommittee.
"Hence, in the wealthiest country in the world, the first Americans continue to occupy the lowest rung of the economic ladder."
Democratic Sen. Ben Night-horse Campbell of Colorado, the only American Indian in Congress, adds, "Unemployment, suicide, fetal alcohol syndrome; it's so bad that they're hanging by their fingernails."
While many tribal leaders insisted that it was federal bureaucrats, not Clinton himself, who were responsible for the proposed IHS cuts, they also said it reminded them about the folly of totally trusting their well-being to the federal government.
Year after year, in both Democratic and Republican administrations, grim reports are issued by private groups and the federal government itself showing the legacy of the government's broken promises among the nation's 1.8 million American Indians:
American Indians, as a group, have the poorest health in the nation. Indians have the highest rates of diabetes and tuberculosis in the nation, with Indian tuberculosis rates exceeding the rates of White Americans by 900 percent. Indians, particularly males, die younger than any other group. Teen suicide rates among American Indians are four times greater than any other ethnic group. The accidental death rate for Indians is 166 percent greater than the rate for the United States as a whole, and the alcohol-related death rate is several times greater than the national rate.
American Indians too often live in substandard housing. The Bureau of Indian Affairs says 93,000 Indians on reservations are homeless or underhoused. Among reservation homes, 20 percent don't have toilets, while half don't have telephones. A 1992 report by the National Commission on American Indian, Alaska Native and Hawaiian Native Housing estimated $15 billion in federal aid is needed to help provide housing for the nearly 100,000 Indian families on federal housing waiting lists.
Nearly half of all American Indians - 603,000 of 1.8 million, including 85,000 children - live below the poverty line. Reservation unemployment often exceeds 40 percent nationally and can be higher among some tribes.
While most American Indian children now attend public schools, the 11 percent - or 40,000 - who attend 181 Bureau of Indian Affairs schools frequently must put up with underpaid teachers, low quality education, and ill-equipped and sometimes dangerous buildings.