Yellowtail was representative of the Indian leaders who had been pressured for decades to sell off tribal grazing land and open other resources up to outsiders. Following in the footsteps of William Potter Ross, the young Crow leader argued that reservations should be viewed as autonomous enclaves that deserved federal protection. This outlook emerged not from a mystical faith in community but from practical experience and was shared by other leaders who had followed similar paths. Despite Yellowtail’s correspondence with John Collier, he exhibited little interest in the reformer’s vision of Indian contributions to “the Race of Man.” Instead, Yellowtail proposed that the major parties adopt identical platforms endorsing the proposition that the “principles of representative government” should apply to “all of the inhabitants of the United States, including the many Indian tribes now denominated as ‘wards.’”9 He believed tribes should organize their own governments, review federal budgets, and oversee the appointment of Indian Office personnel at their agencies.
Robert Yellowtail reasoned in broad strokes. He believed, for example, that individual Indians like him should seek elective office in county and state governments and be engaged in the local economy, even while he called on the Indian Office to protect his tribe’s special tax exemptions and federal subsidies. He encouraged the national government to support the Crows financially, but he rejected outside interference in tribal affairs. In short, he supported goals that seemed often to contradict one another: citizenship, individual rights, treaty rights for Indian groups, federal assistance, individual entrepreneurship, and tribal autonomy. In 1932 neither Yellowtail nor his fellow tribal leaders worried much over these conflicts. His philosophy was pragmatic: press for whatever seemed attainable, and manage the choices that arose. As he wrote in a circular to Montana tribal leaders in the spring of 1932, “The game in the final analysis is played politically: we . . . should play it . . . to get results.” 10
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YELLOWTAIL REPRESENTED only one set of Native activists whose concerns did not conform to the new commissioner’s romantic vision. Another group, represented by the Seneca activist Alice Jemison, were the heirs of Carlos Montezuma’s campaign to abolish the Indian Office, an institution they believed was hopelessly committed to paternalism. In 1933, a decade after Montezuma’s death, a number of his former colleagues carried on his fight. Thomas Sloan, now relocated to California, was one of them. The Omaha attorney’s most prominent clients during the New Deal were Coahuilla band members in the burgeoning resort town of Palm Springs, California, who petitioned federal authorities to grant them clear titles to their increasingly valuable real estate. They believed the government’s protections were preventing them from enjoying the full benefit of their properties.11 This link of opposition to Indian Office paternalism with support for land rights was also evident among the New York Senecas and other Iroquois groups whose long-standing call for the enforcement of their treaties often erupted into public view.
The six Iroquois tribes that lived in New York State and the province of Ontario occupied several scattered reserves, most created in the aftermath of the American Revolution. Consequently, disputes over land titles and treaty rights had a long and complex history. By the early twentieth century these local disputes had begun to emerge on the regional stage. In 1920 a New York State federal appeals court ruled in U.S. v. Boylan, a case surrounding the sale of land held by a group of Oneidas. The court declared that the sale could be reviewed by the federal courts because the area remained part of “Indian country.” It ruled that the Oneidas, one of the six Iroquois communities in New York, “exist as a separate band or tribe,” despite the fact that their official tribal government had long since moved west to Wisconsin. They deserved protection as “a separate nation.”12
The verdict in U.S. v. Boylan vindicated the activists who had first brought the suit to court and coincided with the work of a special commission established by the state legislature to review the entire subject of Iroquois land titles. In 1922 the Everett Commission issued its report, which confirmed the charges tribal leaders had been making for decades about New York’s illegal role in the loss of tribal land. The state legislature ignored Everett’s recommendations, but the commission’s findings encouraged local Native leaders and their white allies to continue to press their claims in federal court.13
But the most dramatic event related to Iroquois treaty rights during the 1920s originated across the border in Ontario, when the traditional leadership at the Six Nations reserve, originally established by the British crown as a home for Joseph Brant and his followers, sent a tribal representative, Levi General, to the League of Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, to protest its treatment by the Canadian government. Accompanied by George Palmer Decker, a Buffalo lawyer active in the land claims litigation taking place on the American side of the border, General charged that Ottawa’s attempt to impose an elected council at Six Nations violated formal commitments made to Brant and other Indian allies more than a century earlier. After being rebuffed by the League, General turned for help to the Iroquois communities in New York. There he enlisted Clinton Rickard, a young Tuscarora activist, and representatives from other Iroquois communities to support him. Levi General’s international campaign awakened broad interest in Iroquois treaty rights, inspiring Rickard and his allies to redouble their efforts.14
Rickard formed the Indian Defense League of America in 1926 to rally supporters of treaty rights. He encouraged other Iroquois leaders to expand his campaign against state intrusion into their communities.15 Soon a new and younger party of Seneca activists came to power at the Seneca reserve at Cattaraugus, near Buffalo. Reflecting the same aggressiveness as Levi General and Clinton Rickard, these activists launched a court case that by 1931 had affirmed the tribe’s right to resolve heirship disputes on tribal land. Their attorney was George Decker, the man who had accompanied General to Geneva.16
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IT WAS OUT OF THIS heady mix of litigation and renewed political activism that Alice Lee Jemison emerged into the arena of Seneca politics. While still in her twenties, Jemison became the personal secretary to the Senecas’ elected leader, Raymond Jimerson. She served as the leadership’s interpreter, speechwriter, public relations coordinator, and legal adviser, playing a role similar to Robert Yellowtail’s with Crow elders in Montana. Like that of Yellowtail, Jemison’s facility with English and her ready grasp of the link between local issues and national Indian policy debates soon propelled her onto the national stage.
Jemison was born in 1901 at Silver Creek, New York, near the Cattauraugus Seneca reserve. Both her parents had attended Hampton Institute at about the same time as Thomas Sloan. Her father, Daniel Lee, was a cabinetmaker from the Eastern Cherokee community in North Carolina, and her mother, Elnora Seneca, was a member of a local family prominent in tribal affairs. The Senecas traced family affiliations through female ancestors, so Alice’s community recognized her as a member of her mother’s Seneca clan.
Alice excelled at writing and debate and dreamed of becoming a lawyer, but she married soon after graduating from Silver Creek High School and quickly had two children. Soon after, Alice’s marriage to La Verne Jemison foundered, and she spent most of the 1920s working at a variety of short-term jobs in Silver Creek and nearby Buffalo. By 1930 she had been a nurse, a factory worker, a clerk, a peddler, a dressmaker, and a secretary.17
Alice Jemison’s personal struggles coincided with both Levi General’s appeal to the League of Nations and Clinton Rickard’s decision to found the Indian Defense League. Through her family’s position at Cattaraugus she also witnessed rising tension between Seneca tribal leaders and local politicians in Buffalo and Albany. She became familiar with George Decker and other lawyers who were willing to support the tribe’s claims to land as well as to legal jurisdiction over its territories. During the 1920s Jemison also met Joseph W. Latimer, an attorney who had worked closely with Carlos Mont
ezuma in Chicago in the early years of the century. Latimer had moved his law practice to New York in 1918, but he continued to publicize Montezuma’s positions, although like the man himself, he became less an enemy of tribal governments than of the Indian Office. During the 1920s Latimer served as an adviser to tribal leaders in Arizona, Montana, and Oregon, and he advertised his views in a series of self-published essays and newsletters. His polemical pamphlet Our Indian Bureau System, which appeared in 1923, accused federal authorities of maintaining an “autocratic dominance” over “the Indian’s entire existence.” So long as this control remained, he argued, “Indian citizenship is a name only.”18 Jemison, an avid reader of Latimer’s pamphlets, quickly adapted his attacks on Washington to her defense of the Seneca tribe and its treaties.
Jemison first became personally involved in a major controversy in 1930, when two Seneca women were accused of murdering Clothilde Marchand, the wife of a prominent Buffalo artist and museum designer. The case unleashed a torrent of anti-Indian rhetoric in the city. Jemison soon moved to Buffalo to serve as spokesperson for tribal leaders. She protested the lurid portrayals of the two women that appeared in the local press and called on federal officials to intervene on their behalf. She wrote letters and press releases on behalf of the accused. While her appeals were not successful—the two women were found guilty—her columns won her the attention of the local press as well as the admiration of the Seneca community. At the end of the case the Buffalo Evening News invited Jemison to write a column on Indian affairs. Both the Seneca leadership and the attorneys who represented the accused women urged her to accept; they had come to rely on her ready pen and her ability to link local disputes to the cause of tribal autonomy and Indian rights.
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JEMISON’S COLUMN WAS SOON syndicated to a national audience by the National Newspaper Alliance, and she used her newfound influence to comment on important issues facing the Indian community. Following Franklin Roosevelt’s election to the presidency, Iroquois leaders from across New York decided to nominate Joseph Latimer to be commissioner of Indian affairs. Jemison made the case for the lawyer’s appointment in her column. She insisted that the Indian Office had failed the state’s indigenous people. Conditions among New York’s Indians were terrible. Tuberculosis was rampant, tribal schools were almost completely unfunded, and unemployment in the third year of the Depression was worse than even in nearby industrial cities. The Indian Office, she argued, rested on principles of “slavery, greed and oppression.” Missionaries and other well-intentioned outsiders did nothing more than “work hand in hand” with federal authorities.19 “We are weary unto death of the propaganda for a continuance of the bureau to further ‘protect’ the Indian,” she wrote. Calls for action from groups like John Collier’s American Indian Defense Association were “sponsored by wealthy people . . . many of whom have never seen an Indian . . . [but] who think they know what is best for the Indians.” Jemison argued that Latimer was not a romantic; he was “a man who will give an understanding ear to our expressions, and who, having heard, can and will sponsor legislation to promote our welfare, not as wards but as free men and women.”20
Jemison, like Robert Yellowtail, was immersed in local politics. Not surprisingly, when the administration announced Collier’s appointment in April 1933, the Senecas were deeply disappointed. How, Jemison wondered, could the president claim to represent a new deal? No one in the incoming administration had consulted tribal leaders. The appointment, she wrote in a letter to the New York Times, was simply another sad chapter in the tired tale of “government by a bureau in which Indians have no voice. We . . . dared to raise our voice regarding the man whom we considered best qualified to be our guardian,” she added, but to no avail. “An open council of all Indians might easily have been called and everyone given an opportunity to speak.” Instead, she noted, “Mr. Collier and the new administration have placed themselves in the same position occupied by the officials of the bureau since its inception 100 years ago, the position of totally ignoring the Indians and their wishes regarding their own affairs.”21
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A THIRD GROUP of Indians that emerged in the 1930s was made up of men and women who, like Thomas Sloan and many early members of the Society of American Indians, had chosen to pursue careers away from their traditional homelands. They were ambitious to succeed in the larger society, but they harbored mixed feelings about leaving their Native traditions behind. They included educators, writers, church workers of various kinds, and independent businesspeople. Representative of this group was an aspiring young author writing fiction about the American West from an unlikely address on West Fourth Street in Greenwich Village. Three years younger than Alice Jemison, D’Arcy Dahlberg had grown up on Montana’s Flathead Reservation. His mother, Philomene Parenteau, had come to Montana as a child with her parents, Isidore and Judith, Canadian Métis/Cree Indians and followers of Louis Riel, the Métis visionary who in 1885 had attempted an overthrow of Ottawa’s authority on the western plains. Following Riel’s capture and execution, the Parenteaus fled south to Montana, where they were offered refuge by the Salish community living on the Flathead reserve in the northwestern corner of the state. Dahlberg’s father was William McNickle, an Irish American handyman who came to the Mission Valley at about the same time as the Parenteaus. William McNickle married Philomene in 1899; D’Arcy, their third child, was born in 1904.22
The young boy’s life took an unexpected turn in 1913, when in the aftermath of his parents’ bitter divorce the reservation agent ordered him enrolled in a federal boarding school for Indians in Chemawa, Oregon. There he witnessed the regimentation and discipline of the Indian Office’s assimilation policy firsthand. Nine-year-old McNickle wore a stiff wool uniform, slept in a large dormitory with dozens of other children, and absorbed a curriculum that mixed basic skills and vocational training. He remained in Oregon for three years and returned to his mother’s home only after her marriage to a laborer named Gus Dahlberg. Despite this traumatic separation from his family, young D’Arcy (like Yellowtail, Sloan, and others) took comfort in his studies. He loved to read and to imagine the world beyond Montana. He dreamed of becoming a writer. “It was a strange business, this going to school,” one of his fictional characters muses in a short story Dahlberg published at the end of the 1920s. “He sat in his classroom and swallowed everything greedily. His head was full of things that had happened thousands of miles away and hundreds of years ago. But he knew better than to talk about them when he got home.”23 Back in the Mission Valley, Dahlberg attended the local high school, then enrolled at the University of Montana in nearby Missoula.
In 1925, D’Arcy Dahlberg left Montana without graduating from college in order to travel and study in Europe. He later settled in New York, where he enrolled in night classes and supported himself with freelance writing and short-term editorial jobs. He labored over his first novel, an upbeat story of an Indian schoolboy’s successful return to his reservation, which darkened and grew more pessimistic as he revised. By 1932 Dahlberg had come to realize that his unique upbringing and Native heritage had left an indelible mark on him. He reclaimed his boyhood name, McNickle, and reflected in his writing on the lessons he had absorbed as a child from his grandfather Isidore. By the time his novel was published as The Surrounded in 1935, McNickle’s tale had evolved into a portrait of the cramped lives young Indians faced as they struggled to make their way in a hostile and racist society.
McNickle’s years in New York had given him perspective on his boarding school education. He came to see American society as obsessed with material wealth and willfully ignorant of its frontier past. His rethinking of frontier encounters and American expansion was revealed in “Meat for God,” a short story published in Esquire magazine in 1935. The story is narrated by an ancient French fur trader who settled years earlier with the Salish Indians in northern Montana. He condemns the ignorance of modern white settlers—“fence-d
iggers, land-plowers, and house-builders”—and despairs over the popular belief that “the old ways were completely gone.” After impulsively killing a deer out of season, the old hunter (speaking perhaps in the voice of McNickle’s grandfather) realizes that he has broken the white man’s law. “They would all come after him,” the old man concedes, “the sheriff, the judge, the soldiers.” The aging trapper eludes their judgment by destroying the animal carcass in an immense bonfire. “That night there was no meat for supper,” McNickle wrote at the story’s end. “But that was nothing new.”24
In 1934 McNickle’s precarious circumstances and deepening engagement with the reality of American Indian poverty and despair prompted him to write to John Collier. He hoped to join the reformer’s staff in Washington, D.C. In his application letter the struggling author described himself as someone “interested in writing about the West, not in the romantic vein in which it has been dealt with in the past, but with the object of revealing in fiction . . . the character which was formed by the impact of the Frontier upon the lives of the people who settled it. . . . [A]t the risk of appearing to court your interest,” he added, “it would be a real privilege to take part in the work of reconstruction you are carrying forward.”25 Collier replied positively, but nothing came of the exchange until a year later. In late 1935 the commissioner apparently decided he could use the help of an articulate Native American who shared his enthusiasm for reconstructing Indian life. He invited the young author to become an administrative assistant in his office.
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