While hardly large enough to constitute a politically significant interest group, several other young, educated Indians shared McNickle’s admiration for Collier and joined the commissioner’s team. Like the struggling young author from the Flathead, they had not been involved in the controversies of policy debates of the 1920s; they had lived away from their home communities and had had little or no previous contact with the new commissioner. Despite the fact that they had not been part of Collier’s epiphany at Taos, they shared his admiration for traditional Native culture. The Indians farthest removed from their Native traditions proved in many instances to be enthusiastic supporters of the commissioner. They viewed him as the champion of the old ways.
While Iroquois leaders remained cool to Collier, most Native activists in the 1930s welcomed the new commissioner’s promise to move away from the authoritarian policies of the past. His promotion of Indian causes seemed to open an arena where pragmatic tribal leaders like Yellowtail, critics like Jemison, and intellectuals like McNickle could interact with one another and find an audience for their views. Whether in support or opposition to the New Deal, however, Native activists like these three became increasingly vocal and visible during Collier’s twelve-year tenure in office.
COLLIER’S REFORMS
John Collier’s chief legislative achievement was the Indian Reorganization Act, which ended allotment and fostered the establishment of modern tribal governments. His original proposal, submitted in February 1934, was written by a government legal team headed by a twenty-four-year-old lawyer named Felix Cohen. The brilliant son of the philosopher Morris Cohen, Felix Cohen knew the Ivy League far better than the world of American Indians. He had earned his law degree at Columbia and a PhD in philosophy from Harvard. He and Collier believed the most effective method for protecting Native cultures was to emulate Great Britain’s imperial practice of ruling its overseas colonies “through the native chiefs.” The reorganization bill then sent to Congress proposed establishing federally sanctioned tribal governments on reservations that would consolidate individual landholdings into a single entity that would develop and manage cooperative enterprises.
When congressional leaders registered a lukewarm response to the commissioner’s bill, Collier tried to rally support for it by hurriedly organizing nine congresses of tribal leaders. However, these gatherings, held in March and April 1934, at agencies and government schools across the nation, generated more questions than enthusiasm. Nevertheless, Collier struggled to incorporate many of the Indian leaders’ concerns into a revised bill that he sent to the Indian affairs committees of Congress in late May. The legislators remained unmoved.
As summer approached, Collier finally sat down with the committee chairmen who oversaw Indian legislation, Montana Senator Burton Wheeler and Nebraska Congressman Edgar Howard. By early June these negotiations had produced a vastly revised bill that quickly came to a vote. One congressman commented later that his colleagues had changed “every provision [of Collier’s original bill] except the title.”26 The statute signed into law in June by President Roosevelt was written in Washington, D.C.; it contained nothing of what had been suggested by tribal leaders or Indian activists.
Throughout the negotiations Collier retained his basic commitment to ending allotment and creating federally recognized tribal councils that would empower native chiefs to govern their reservations. The commissioner made numerous concessions, but Wheeler and Howard continued to resist so dramatic a shift in policy. The negotiations with Collier received a crucial boost, however, when President Roosevelt (in a letter written at the behest of Interior Secretary Harold Ickes) pushed the parties to a resolution. The president warned that if there were no action, the nation would soon witness the “extinction of the race.” In the end it was this image of vanishing Indians, not the voices of living ones, that made the difference.
Wheeler, the Indian Affairs Committee chairman in the Senate, assured the president that “something can be worked out,” and over the next few weeks he and his colleagues produced the final bill. As passed, the Indian Reorganization Act was less than half the length of the commissioner’s original draft. It ended allotment and accepted home rule for tribes by establishing procedures for organizing tribal governments and chartered business corporations. Wheeler and Howard rejected Collier’s suggestion that the new councils have the power to acquire individual allotments for community use, and they eliminated a series of clauses that declared federal support for tribal cultures. The new law also would not apply to Native communities in Alaska and Oklahoma.27
The Indian Reorganization Act (IRA) fell far short of Collier’s original vision. While it ended allotment, it made no provision for restoring any of the millions of acres of Indian land that had passed to whites because of this policy over the previous half century. The law empowered tribes to manage their remaining common lands but did almost nothing to reduce the power of the Indian Office over reservation life. Officials in Washington, D.C., continued to manage tribal schools, hospitals, and other community institutions. Despite its limitations, however, the IRA created an unprecedented platform for tribal leaders. The elected heads of reservation governments were no longer viewed as backward enemies of progress; they were now legitimate local officials. As such, tribal leaders could expect to be consulted over policy initiatives and to be involved in government programs affecting their homelands. When special programs within the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Progress Administration were organized to benefit Indians, for example, tribal officials had the opportunity to help distribute new jobs to their constituents. When other agencies provided funding for reservation schools, medical facilities, and roads, community leaders were present to coordinate their efforts. As federal spending rose on reservations during the New Deal (the Indian Office budget increased 30 percent), the prominence and prestige of community leaders rose along with it.
THE INDIAN DEBATE
Collier once wrote that during his term in office he “told the Indians: you are of the world. . . . Draw now on your own deep powers; come out of your silence.” He believed that the Indian Reorganization Act and other New Deal initiatives brought the nation’s Native people to “a rediscovered realization of their place in human history.”28 An appealing image, but of course the Indians had never been silent. Alice Jemison, for example, was among the most vocal Native leaders during Collier’s first months in office as she moved from attacks on the new commissioner to criticism of his new reorganization act. She and the Seneca leadership resented Collier’s presentation of himself as the Indians’ spokesman. “We consider that we are in a better position than anyone else to know what we need,” she wrote. “We have an equal right . . . to voice our desire.”29
When Jemison first read the proposed reorganization bill, she declared, “We are tired of experiments. Try this out on someone else.”30 From her Seneca perspective, Collier was simply the latest self-appointed friend of the Indian who, while claiming to end the group’s “silence,” insisted on speaking loudly for it. The new commissioner was a man who spent his time “soliciting money at the expense of Indians,” Jemison testified before a congressional committee in 1935, “spreading propaganda to the effect that these Indians should be kept as wards, poor savages that they are.”31
Because Jemison equated federal guardianship with inferiority, she saw no value in programs that would extend the Indian Office’s authority over Native communities. She preferred to base her tribe’s relationship with the United States on treaties. “Our situation in New York State is entirely different from any other Indians in the United States,” she argued. The Iroquois Confederacy’s visible presence during the American Revolution, together with the fact that no provision was made for them in the Treaty of Paris ending the conflict, prompted the United States to sign a treaty with the Senecas in 1794 that secured their land titles and guaranteed their free passage across the international border. Despi
te their having lost much of their land in the ensuing 140 years, Jemison argued, “We have been free and have made progress because we have been a self-governing people. . . .”32
For Jemison and the Seneca leadership, the Indian Reorganization Act’s strategy of “ruling through native chiefs” made little sense. Many tribes agreed. Not only did the new law seem redundant—the Senecas, Crows, and many other tribes already had reservation governments—but it had been written by legislators who had not consulted the Indians of New York State. “Before you take our vested rights and liberties away by law,” the tribe’s president wrote to Senator Wheeler in April 1934, “we are entitled to a hearing.” Using phrases that likely were drafted for him by his young aide, the Seneca president Ray Jimerson added: “It is un-American to do otherwise. We rely on the principles of government by the governed, and equality before the law the same as other Americans.”33
Once the IRA went into effect, Jemison repeated this charge whenever she found a congressional forum that would hear her. In the spring of 1935, for example, she declared her tribe was “fighting for the sacred right of freedom. . . . Indians that are suffering under that [Indian] Bureau,” she added, “are our brothers, and we are here to assist them.”34 Despite his benign image, she observed, Collier was simply reinforcing the authority of Indian Office bureaucrats. She dismissed the Indian Reorganization Act as “a very devastating step toward reviving the life of an already overdeveloped, antiquated, autocratic, un-American bureaucracy.”35
Jemison moved to Washington, D.C., to lobby full-time for the tribe. She took up residence at the E Street branch of the YWCA just as the IRA was moving toward final approval. As she voiced the concerns of Seneca leaders, Jemison found allies among other tribal leaders: representatives of several Oklahoma tribes, members of the Mission Indian Federation from California, and the Black Hills Treaty Council, representing tribes in North and South Dakota. Each group had its own set of complaints, but all agreed that the IRA ignored existing treaties and dangerously elevated the authority of the Indian Office. After it failed to stop the passage of the new law, this loose coalition, buttressed by delegates from the nearby Navajo Reservation, met in Gallup, New Mexico, the following August to organize the American Indian Federation. They declared that this new national organization was being formed “to secure . . . the rights, privileges and responsibilities of free-born citizens and to maintain existing protections.” One of the federation’s first actions was to adopt a resolution calling on Congress to repeal the Indian Reorganization Act.36
Under its original provisions, the IRA applied to a reservation unless a majority of members voted to reject it in a special referendum. A small group voting yes in a community where most members abstained could therefore produce an official ratification. When the Indian Office scheduled the vote at New York’s six federally recognized reservations for June 1935, Jemison and her allies swung into action, focusing particularly on this undemocratic provision. The Iroquois leadership cast the new law as an attempt to impose alien, government-approved tribal councils on their communities. She reminded Iroquois groups of Levi General’s campaign against similar reforms in Canada a decade earlier, and she pointed out that a great many Cayugas, Oneidas, and Mohawks lived on the three Seneca reservations. If a new reservation-based government were voted in, she warned, non-Senecas could dominate their communities, diluting the authority of tribal members and undermining the power of traditional clan leaders. “If that is done,” she declared, “our Seneca Nation will be entirely destroyed.”37
Jemison and her allies condemned the impending “farce elections” on New York’s reservations because they were being conducted by the Indian Office’s authoritarian staff. “I ask you to keep in mind,” she told the House Indian Affairs Committee in March 1935, “that when you speak of the Indians you are speaking of a subject people. . . .” She also pointed out that a recent attack on the “so-called American Indian Federation” published in the Indian Office’s newsletter, Indians at Work, was nothing more than an official effort to silence Collier’s critics. She rejected the article’s claim that the new organization wanted nothing more than to remove “the federal bars that now safeguard Indian funds and lands from hungry whites.” She charged that “Collier is pursuing the same old Bureau methods” of attacking his critics personally rather than engage them as equals. “Gentlemen, this is not a personal matter with any of us,” she declared. “We are fighting for the constitutional rights of a whole race of people.” Referring to the legislators sitting before her, Jemison added, “[T]his is the only tribunal where we can present our case and ask for relief.”38
Jemison campaigned tirelessly to defeat the IRA in New York. Beginning in February 1935, she held strategy sessions in Buffalo and corresponded actively with allies across the region. She coordinated efforts on several reservations, organizing transportation to the polls and ensuring a strong turnout of elderly and traditional members of their communities. Collier responded by dispatching the anthropologist William Fenton and the Winnebago educator Henry Roe Cloud to New York to campaign on the law’s behalf, but their efforts had little impact. Fenton (who had taken a job with the Indian Office to support his anthropology PhD field research) and his partner held meetings with Native people in several communities, but when the June vote was in, only 249 of the more than 3,000 eligible voters on the state’s six reserves had voted in favor of adopting the new law; more than 1,500 had voted no. The rest stayed home.39
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THE VOTE ON MONTANA’S Crow Reservation followed a similar script except Collier had hoped that there his decadelong friendship with Robert Yellowtail would tip the scales in his favor. Although he was a lifelong Republican, Yellowtail had supported Roosevelt in the 1932 presidential election and urged the Crow superintendent to send a tribal delegation to the new president’s inauguration the following March. When the superintendent refused, Yellowtail and two friends set off for Washington, D.C., by car. Yellowtail had met Collier when both had served on the 1923 Committee of One Hundred; he liked the man’s brash style and hoped his reforms would buttress his own effort to expand the power of the Crow tribal council. Yellowtail and his friends were therefore pleased with Collier’s appointment and were encouraged further a few months later, when the new administration acceded to their request and transferred their reservation superintendent, a crusty career man named James Hyde, to a post in South Dakota.40
But nothing prepared Yellowtail and his kinsmen for the news that arrived from Washington the following July: Commissioner Collier announced his intention to appoint the Crow troublemaker to the post of agency superintendent. “This is something I never dreamed of,” the interim superintendent, Warren O’Hara, told the local press.41 Several of Yellowtail’s local political rivals expressed reservations. They were suspicious of the Indian Office’s reasons for placing one of their own in such an important post. Collier responded to these protests by ordering a tribal referendum on the appointment, a vote that his appointee won by a wide margin. Yellowtail decided to ratify his standing by holding an elaborate inauguration ceremony at the agency headquarters. This unprecedented event took place on August 3, 1934, before a crowd of three thousand tribal members and local onlookers. Following a traditional parade featuring aging scouts, clan leaders, and the local high school band, Yellowtail delivered an inaugural address.
Speaking six weeks after the adoption of the Indian Reorganization Act and flanked by the tribe’s local attorneys, Yellowtail concentrated on the community’s rights as Crows. “Friends,” he began, “this is our home, this is our domain and this is our country. . . .” He observed the tribe had lived as “serfs” in recent years and that its “constitutional rights and other liberties were trampled under foot.” Tribal leaders had combated this trend and fended off “bureaucratic dictatorship,” he declared, but the community’s future remained in doubt. He acknowledged that “a new deal has dawned for the Am
erican Indian,” but he did not mention the IRA in his speech. Instead, he pledged to “add another flame to the torch of progress for the Crows” and to stand equally vigilant against disruptions from local whites and “reforms” dictated by officials in Washington, D.C. “This is your domain and therefore your business,” he told his constituents. “You should be heard at all times on any and all phases of its administration.”42
Yellowtail’s unlikely appointment as agency superintendent did not alter the tribe’s (or his own) skepticism regarding federal intentions. Despite his personal popularity and his grudging acceptance of the new law, the new Crow superintendent was unable to persuade his constituents to adopt the commissioner’s program. As had been the case in New York, no amount of political patronage or idealistic rhetoric could budge the tribe from its faith in their treaties or its support for the tribal council it had established on its own domain.
The tribe’s initial encounter with Collier had come in March 1934 at the Plains Indian Congress, called by the Indian Office to gauge support for Collier’s reorganization proposal. After hearing the commissioner’s presentation, the Crow delegation asked to be excluded from the law. Speaking on behalf of his colleagues, councilman Max Big Man told the Rapid City, South Dakota, assembly that the bill “takes away from us the spirit of independence so essential and so badly needed by the members of the Indian race.” He added that he hoped the commissioner would “excuse us when we refuse.”43 While Big Man and the other Crows did not share Jemison’s intense personal hostility to Collier and his administration, they agreed with her that the rights embedded in their treaties and the local councils they had devised in recent decades were a better source of political stability than the tribal body envisioned in the new law. The Indian Office scheduled the Crow referendum for May 18, 1935, nine months after Yellowtail’s inauguration. In the campaign leading up to the vote, opponents of the new law repeated the arguments the tribal delegation had made first in Rapid City. Yellowtail campaigned on behalf of the bill, but his stump speeches focused on the economic benefits that would flow from future land acquisitions made possible by the new law rather than on the advantages to be gained from a reorganized tribal council. “We have demonstrated the fact that we have not been able to hang onto our lands,” he told one rally. Adopting Collier’s new program, he suggested, would empower the tribe to fix the problem.44 His audiences remained skeptical. They were suspicious of any Indian Office reform and unconvinced that they needed a new council. This view was expressed most candidly by James Carpenter, one of Yellowtail’s traveling companions to FDR’s inauguration two years earlier, who called the new measure “the worst kind of law” because it “takes all [the Crows’] rights away giving them to the dictatorship of [the commissioner’s] office.” On the eve of the May 18 election, Yellowtail cabled his boss with a prediction of defeat: “Sentiment was crystallized beyond human endeavor to break. . . .” The next day, when 801 reservation ballots were counted, only 113 were marked in favor of accepting Collier’s “reorganization.”45
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