This Indian Country

by Frederick Hoxie

  Meanwhile, the relentless process of allotment had divided tribal lands, opened new tracts to real estate speculators, isolated struggling Indian farmers from one another, and gradually eliminated the barriers that had protected tribal enclaves from the destructive forces of the marketplace. Indians were losing their resources at an unprecedented rate. As a consequence, the New Republic’s Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant wrote in early 1924, poverty had become the single dominant factor in Indian life: “Our Indian ward, in spite of his vast land reservations, in spite of the gigantic and expensive bureaucracy, and the innumerable missions and welfare societies created on his behalf[,] is immensely and incredibly poor.”92 In this darkening climate, Sloan returned to his legal practice and to his work as a lobbyist and congressional investigator.

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  FOR THE REMAINDER of the 1920s and through most of the following decade, Sloan continued to argue on behalf of Indian citizenship and in opposition to government paternalism. He represented tribes and individuals that had been treated arbitrarily and unfairly by federal authorities. He filed cases in federal court and appeared frequently before congressional committees. “Every time there is a hearing,” the Indian Office’s veteran assistant commissioner Edgar Meritt complained, Sloan “comes up and knocks the Indian Bureau and everybody else.”93 On most occasions, the lawyer appeared before congressional committees as counsel for visiting tribal delegates. His constant enemy was unchecked federal power. As he explained to a Senate panel in 1923, he had always been “impressed by the legislation in the past” that promised Indians citizenship while recognizing their claims on tribal property, but he had witnessed “a tendency to get away from that in the Indian Bureau.”94

  From Sloan’s perspective, Commissioner Burke was a perfect illustration of the government’s habit of concentrating authority in its own hands. The former South Dakota congressman’s pliant response to the Interior Department scandals during the Harding administration, his manipulation of the Committee of One Hundred meetings, and his unbending public opposition to traditional native ceremonies and dances exemplified the worst aspects of Indian Office paternalism. Sloan believed not only that individual Indians deserved the right to question and appeal the government’s actions but also that as corporate entities tribes should be treated with respect. “I feel that since they have been a treaty making power and recognized as that in the first instance,” he told one congressional panel, “they ought to be fairly dealt with and be heard in everything that deals with and pertains to that tribe.”95

  Commissioner Burke’s consolidation of Indian Office authority in the 1920s gradually shifted the context for discussions of Indian citizenship. Few activists now imagined that extending U.S. citizenship to Indians would empower Native people. The implementation of the Dawes allotment law over the previous three decades had extended citizenship to more than half the American Indian population, but the recipients of this new status were so hampered by poverty and overawed by the power of their federal supervisors that their lives had changed very little. Few of them gained political influence beyond their tribes, and all who lived on reservations remained under the administrative control of the Indian Office. Individual Indians could be jailed without trial, barred from performing religious rituals, and removed from participating in the disposition of trust property assigned to them. The conditions Sloan had witnessed as a young man on the Omaha reserve had hardly changed.

  When a general citizenship bill was adopted in 1924, it stirred little interest. In January of that year the New York congressman Homer Snyder proposed that the secretary of the interior should issue a certificate of citizenship to any Native person who applied for one. Snyder’s proposal passed the House, but when it was submitted to the Senate, Sloan’s friends on the Indian Affairs Committee—particularly Wisconsin’s Progressive Party standard-bearer Robert La Follette and his ally Burton K. Wheeler of Montana—rewrote the measure, expanding it into a unilateral declaration. Their revision said simply that “all non-citizen Indians born within the territorial limits of the United States . . . are hereby declared citizens of the United States.” This revision formed the substance of the law both houses approved in May. The new measure stipulated that citizenship would not “impair” the right of anyone to share in tribal property, and Congressman Snyder assured his House colleagues on the eve of its passage that state restrictions on Indian voting, which remained on the books in Arizona, Utah, and New Mexico until after World War II, would be unaffected. The potential of the citizenship gun to transform the status and condition of Native Americans would remain unfulfilled.96

  Despite his frustration with the federally sanctioned limits on Indian citizenship that had become commonplace in the 1920s, Thomas Sloan continued to work for an expanded understanding of Indian rights as he represented his clients in court and before Congress.97 He never retreated from his opposition to the Indian Office. He opposed the federal government’s effort to reorganize tribal governments during the 1930s, telling one congressional committee that the reformer John Collier’s New Deal policies were simply another exercise in paternalism. “Is it necessary for [Indians] to give up their individuality as men,” he asked, “to be segregated back into a condition out of which they were induced to make an effort to overcome?”98

  “I am anxious to succeed and keep on with my work,” Sloan wrote the Indian Rights Association in 1940, shortly before his death. He added, “I am not giving up, but I may be overcome . . . my clients . . . are harassed and threatened.”99 As he prepared an appeal to the Supreme Court on behalf of a group of California Indian allottees, the attorney must have been aware that his lifelong legal campaign had failed. While continuing to labor on behalf of the rights of Indian citizens, Sloan could see that without a shift in public attitudes and political climate, the judges and legislators hearing his appeals would not be sympathetic.

  For activists like Sloan, the good citizenship gun had been an empowering idea. It promised legal equality and access to political power. The response of his adversaries in the Indian Office and elsewhere—that Indians are hopelessly backward and incompetent—had scuttled his efforts. The rising tide of Indian poverty only reinforced those racist views. Native people, many believed, were simply destined to suffer. Success would not come to activists like Sloan until such assumptions had been challenged and the concept of general racial equality had gained broad support. Only then could Native activists achieve the status that had been promised to Thomas Sloan and his colleagues in the boarding schools, churches, and meeting halls of their youth. For the moment the good citizenship gun lay dormant.

  In 1968, more than forty years after Congress had extended citizenship to Native Americans, President Lyndon Johnson signed the American Indian Civil Rights Act, which, for the first time, spelled out what some of the rights of Indian people should be. Enacted after extensive hearings, in which Native witnesses described daily life in reservation communities, the law placed clear limits on the power of both tribal and federal authorities. The new law assured tribes and their members that they would be free from arbitrary authority and would have ready access to the courts. It is significant that the new law was passed in a different era and a generation after Thomas Sloan’s death, for it reflected the transformation in racial attitudes that was occurring in the United States at the time of its adoption. In the end it was those racial attitudes, not the law, that had defeated the Omaha lawyer.100

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THREE INDIANS WHO DIDN’T LIVE AT TAOS

  Robert Yellowtail, Crow Alice Jemison, Seneca and D’Arcy McNickle, Salish

  During the 1930s and 1940s Franklin Roosevelt introduced an unprecedented set of initiatives that saved the economy from economic catastrophe, united the nation in a global struggle against fascism, and in the process remade the relationship between the American people and their government. Empowered by the desperation born of multiple crises, his New Deal adm
inistration devised revolutionary new programs to regulate business, deliver assistance to impoverished citizens, and organize national resources for the common good. These efforts not only brought the federal government into the daily lives of Americans (in the form of Social Security payments, agricultural subsidies, and minimum wage laws) but also allowed the public to imagine for a time that its government could be a guarantor of prosperity, peace, and social progress.

  The Indian New Deal was a significant feature of the Roosevelt Revolution that swept through Washington, D.C. Between 1933 and 1945 Congress and the Indian Office collaborated to end the devastating policy of land allotment, enable the creation of modern tribal governments, improve Native education, and reverse the federal government’s century-long campaign to replace tribal cultures and religious traditions with civilization. If James McDonald and William Potter Ross had miraculously reappeared in the national capital at the end of World War II, they would have found the official atmosphere completely unrecognizable. The United States seemed no longer dedicated to the Indians’ disappearance from the American political landscape, and Indians were speaking out in unprecedented numbers.

  Most accounts of this social and political transformation have logically focused on one man, John Collier, Roosevelt’s commissioner of Indian affairs, who served for the entire twelve years of FDR’s presidency and initiated most of the era’s policy reforms. A former New York City social worker, Collier was (and remains) the longest-serving head of the Indian Office. Arriving on the scene at a moment when starvation and despair had infected tribal communities in every region, Collier worked furiously to send aid dollars to needy reservations while he created opportunities for Native Americans to participate in every new form of federal assistance, from highway construction subsidies to vocational training and conservation projects.

  But measuring the achievements of the New Deal era through the career of John Collier would be a mistake. Not only was he given to overstating his personal contributions to the changes that occurred on his watch, but also focusing on legal and policy reforms obscures the period’s most powerful event: the sudden emergence of an extraordinary generation of Native activists who seized the opportunities provided by the New Deal reforms to create a national leadership that by the 1950s was able to wield unprecedented influence over public discussions of the American Indian future. While this new generation of leaders appeared among many tribes and articulated a variety of concerns, three individuals can provide a shorthand summary of its origins and the diversity of viewpoints contained within it. Robert Yellowtail, a reservation leader from Montana, Alice Jemison, a Seneca activist from New York, and D’Arcy McNickle, a young writer who served the Indian Office in Washington, D.C., had different opinions of the New Deal, but they all jumped into the national political arena during those years of reform.

  John Collier played an important role in creating the conditions for these individuals’ rise to positions of influence, but despite his claims to the contrary, he neither created the three leaders nor shaped their—or their contemporaries’—political manifestos. McDonald and Ross might have been amazed by the scale of American Indian political activity in 1945 but they would not have been surprised by the positions Native activists were taking.

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  AT THE TIME of his appointment in 1933, John Collier was among the best-known Indian policy experts in the United States. He had spent most of the previous decade as the leader of the American Indian Defense Association rallying environmentalists, social reformers, and progressive politicians to the cause of protecting Indians from government corruption and abuse. His correspondents and supporters included the popular southwestern author Mary Austin; Roger Baldwin, the founder of the American Civil Liberties Union; the progressive reformers Arthur Morgan, Robert Ely, and Harold Ickes; and the Progressive political insurgents Robert La Follette and William Borah. Collier’s activities were generously supported by the General Federation of Women’s Clubs and wealthy patrons in California and New York.1 Significantly, the new commissioner had few ties to Native American activists outside the Southwest, where he had concentrated his efforts. As the Crow politician Robert Yellowtail wrote him from Montana in 1932, “At present your [sic] not known here.”2

  The major reason that John Collier was unknown to activists outside the Southwest was that his chief attachment was not to the reality of American Indians but to their image. The new commissioner was convinced that American Indians were modern embodiments of an ancient continental civilization. This idea first occurred to him in December 1920, but it remained with him for the rest of his life. The experience, which he called his “earth shaking discovery of American Indians,” took place during a Christmas visit to New Mexico’s Taos Pueblo.3 Collier later recalled that as the costumed Native dancers emerged onto the Taos plaza, they “entered into myself and each one of my family as a new direction in life.” They signaled, he added, “a new, even wildly new hope for the Race of Man.” For him, these dancing Indians represented “face to face, primary social groups”; they were living proof that “deep community yet lived on in the embattled Red Indians.” He decided on the spot that the campaign to protect the Indians “must not fail.”4

  These were powerful words, but they did not acknowledge that in 1920 most Indians did not live at Taos, and few shared Collier’s romantic view of Native culture. He believed from that year onward that the nation’s indigenous communities had become stagnant in the twentieth century and were waiting to be saved. That faith inspired him to bring Indian issues to national attention, but it also blinded him to the efforts and perspectives of the Native activists who rallied to his side during the New Deal. Collier believed to the end of his life that he had reawakened the Indians during his years of activism, but the tribal advocates who emerged during the New Deal and carried the Indian cause forward into the 1950s were not his creations; they were the heirs of decades of advocacy by predecessors in every corner of the nation. The modern tribal activists’ demands—that Native cultures be respected, that treaties be enforced, and that the Indians’ citizenship rights be respected—were not initiated by John Collier or Franklin Roosevelt. These national figures did, however, create dozens of new avenues that enabled Natives to bring their demands before the public and hundreds of new forums where those demands could be heard and amplified.

  THREE ACTIVISTS

  If John Collier had sought out Indian leaders beyond the plaza at Taos in 1920, he would have discovered that the vast majority of the prominent Native men and women was preoccupied with practical needs; they had little interest in saving the “Race of Man.” They understood that the violence and dislocation visited on their people during the previous half century had divided, not united, their communities. While drawn to Collier’s idealism, they were more likely to be skeptical that the omnipotent spirit he had sensed at Taos would come to them through the revival of deep community. Three individuals—Robert Yellowtail, Alice Jemison, and D’Arcy McNickle—typified the young leaders Collier overlooked.

  Collier’s Montana correspondent Robert Yellowtail was a remarkable tribal politician.5 He was born in 1889 on the Montana reservation that had been carved out of the Crows’ ancestral hunting grounds in the shadow of the Bighorn Mountains. Despite the trauma of being forcibly removed from his family at the age of four and confined to the local agency boarding school, Yellowtail had been an eager and accomplished student—so eager, in fact, that as a teenager he asked the local authorities to send him to Sherman Institute in Southern California to further his education. He excelled there. He even dreamed of becoming a lawyer. He returned to the reservation in the first decade of the new century. While dismissed by the local agent as “nervous, high-strung [and] bad tempered,” he became active in tribal affairs.6

  Reservation leaders—men who had hunted buffalo as young men—quickly recruited the articulate young Yellowtail to serve as their translator and adviser
. He helped the chiefs negotiate grazing leases with local cattlemen and accompanied a group of them to New York and Washington, D.C., in 1913. But his potential was not made plain until two years later, when he appeared before a special tribal council meeting to discuss the opening of the reservation to white homesteaders. The Montana senator Henry Myers and Wyoming governor Benjamin Kendrick chaired the gathering, but the local Hardin Herald noted that Robert Yellowtail delivered “an extended speech” that attacked the sale of tribal land to outsiders. At the time Yellowtail held no position in the tribe, but his speech garnered enthusiastic praise from the audience. Montana papers were usually dismissive of local tribal leaders, but the Herald reporter noted that this young man was “quite an orator.”7

  Yellowtail quickly became a fixture on the reservation, serving as a confidant of tribal elders, an elected council member, and, increasingly, an advocate for tribal rights. He learned to defer to aging warriors such as Chief Plenty Coups and to support their claims with incisive modern arguments. In 1919 his stirring use of Woodrow Wilson’s language of self-determination at one congressional hearing turned heads in Congress and among other tribal leaders. The senators sat in silence as Yellowtail quoted the president’s call for self-determination and exclaimed that “our lands . . . were, to begin with, ours . . . not given to us by anybody.”8

  During the 1920s Yellowtail took up the role of a political boss. He assembled majorities in tribal council meetings and made life difficult for local ranchers and farmers during negotiations over the leasing of tribal land and resources. He was unafraid to call for the removal of unresponsive federal agents, and in 1926 he jumped eagerly into the effort to win approval for a jurisdictional act that opened the way for the tribe to file a suit in the U.S. Court of Claims. Yellowtail’s activism won him an invitation to participate in the Committee of One Hundred, assembled in 1923 by the Interior Department and where he likely met both Thomas Sloan and John Collier. A lifelong Teddy Roosevelt Republican, the Crow politician attended the national GOP convention in 1928 and announced a plan to run for state senator in 1932.