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THE IRA’S DEFEAT in New York and on the Crow Reservation revealed that Indian leaders in the 1930s had hardly been dwelling in silence. Opposition to the law was evident across the nation, particularly on large reservations. The most dramatic rejection of the new law came one month after the Crow ballot, when despite an energetic Indian Office campaign, 51 percent of the voters in the nation’s largest tribe, the Navajos, voted against it. The largest Sioux reserves, Pine Ridge and Rosebud, voted narrowly to accept the new law in polling held in October 1934, but the opposition within those communities was so powerful that the adoption of new tribal constitutions was delayed for more than a year. The referendums on those documents, held in South Dakota at the end of 1935 and featuring campaign appearances by the commissioner himself, revealed that Collier’s opponents numbered at least 40 percent of the electorate. As a consequence, despite its approval of a new constitution, each community was dogged for decades by political divisions and resistance to the new law.46
In addition to claiming that the IRA would undermine the force of existing treaties, critics of the new law used the controversy to vent their opposition to a wide array of Indian Office programs. These included the campaign to reduce the size of sheep and goat herds on the Navajo Reservation, efforts to promote centralized leadership at several Sioux agencies, and various initiatives aimed at promoting large-scale commercial development through leasing and mineral development. While the sources of opposition varied, community leaders at every agency where the balloting was close seemed to share Robert Yellowtail’s dilemma: deciding between the promise of new federal subsidies and the fear of continuing Indian Office bullying and mismanagement. Every divided reservation contained political leaders who argued that existing councils and the promises embedded in treaties had more credibility than John Collier’s glowing promises of a “new day” in government policy. During the New Deal years the Indian Office sponsored a total of 258 referendums on the IRA. Two-thirds of those voted to accept the new law, but the heavy negative votes among larger tribes like the Navajos and the Sioux meant that of the total ballots cast in all these elections, 40 percent were marked no. Clearly, there was no national Native consensus about the value of the Indian Reorganization Act or how best to defend a tribe’s “rights.”47
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BECAUSE D’ARCY MCNICKLE had never been a tribal leader and no doubt also because by 1936 he had been living in New York City for nearly a decade, he shared few of the concerns voiced by IRA opponents at Crow or Pine Ridge. He had become deeply concerned about the future of tribal communities, but when he joined Collier’s staff that year, the young author had few settled opinions on questions of national policy. Collier must have been delighted to have the articulate thirty-two-year-old on board. The Montanan was to be the only Native American working closely with him in Washington, D.C., during his tenure as commissioner.
McNickle’s support for Collier’s reforms established an enduring bond between the two men. The young author, who appears in pictures from this period as a slim, intense figure with dark hair and a neatly trimmed mustache, was captivated by the energy of Washington, D.C., at the high tide of the New Deal. Collier assigned him initially to the bureau’s public relations department, where he wrote articles and reviews for the agency’s house organ, Indians at Work, but he soon migrated to the organization division, the group responsible for shepherding tribes through the reorganization process. Over the next five years the novelist became one of his agency’s principal representatives in the campaign to win ratification of the Indian Reorganization Act. At first, probably because of his inexperience, McNickle was sent to remote communities where Indians were poor, vulnerable, and eager for government assistance. He traveled to North Dakota to meet with the Mandans, Hidatsas, and Arikaras who shared the Fort Berthold reserve and to Montana, where he worked near Great Falls with landless Crees and Ojibwes who, like his grandparents, had been refugees from Canada. He traveled to Iowa to meet with the tiny Sac and Fox tribe and to Maine, where he discovered “a rather forlorn band of Algonquin-speaking Indians.”48
Wherever he traveled, McNickle presented himself as a loyal defender of Collier’s programs. Assigned to write an assessment of the IRA for Indians at Work in 1938, he betrayed no second thoughts. “In years past, the seasons came and went,” McNickle wrote, but “this year, for some Indians, there is a difference.” The difference, he declared, was the Indian Reorganization Act, under which “tribes have become organized . . . money has gone into tribal treasuries, land has been purchased, [and] students have secured loans to attend colleges.” He did not mention the challenges launched by Jemison and other critics or the divisive campaigns for approval of the act that had taken place among the Navajos and Crows. He focused instead on communities where the government’s efforts had met little organized resistance: Hopis, Blackfeet, Jicarilla Apaches, and his home community at Flathead, Montana. “Something has started,” he observed, “and here is the general direction in which it moves.” 49
But McNickle was not simply a cheerleader. While he supported Collier’s initiatives, his sudden immersion in the daily realities of tribal life quickly pushed him in a more practical direction. After little more than a year in Washington, he wrote a memo to his boss recommending that the Indian Office stop pressing tribes to accept the IRA and shift instead to technical assistance programs that would be implemented regardless of a reservation’s governmental structure. He reported that the Indian Office leadership seemed unaware of the difficulties tribes faced once they adopted the new law. After a referendum was held, he noted, Washington lost interest, leaving tribal leaders saddled with new tasks but no new resources. The result, he noted, was a feeling of being “cast into the outer darkness. In selling the idea of reorganization,” McNickle added, “we never did make clear enough that [the tribe] would be dealing with problems which . . . it must handle alone.”50
Nothing came of this early memo, but McNickle returned to the idea of technical support for tribes the following year in the public assessment of the IRA he wrote for Indians at Work. “What has been done,” he argued, “is only a fragment of the task remaining.” The program “is not a simple matter of organizing tribes and lending money to them. They will need, for several years, as much encouragement and assistance as can be given them.” He cited the need for housing, education, and subsidies for tribal operations as well as money for land purchases, police departments, and tribal courts. In his view, even if the new law could uncover a tribe’s deep community, the immense task of repairing the effects of past assaults on tribal life and tribal resources remained unaddressed.51 McNickle’s growing doubts over Collier’s highly publicized “renaissance of the Indians” were likely related to his personal struggles over the previous decade. While sharing enough of the commissioner’s mind-set to write once that “the Indian has the quality of belonging to the earth,” he had no illusions about the damage tribal governments had suffered at the hands of powerful economic interests and willful representatives and senators.52 Having seen how completely historians and artists in the West had ignored or belittled the Indian presence, McNickle was attuned to the patronizing racial attitudes that pervaded Washington. He later recalled, “If one sees Indians as savages, or the often used euphemism ‘children,’ perhaps no other view and no other course of action are possible than to work for their extermination. . . . At the very heart of the Indian problem,” he added, was “the need for land and [financial] credit.” Outsiders who did not understand this, even those who rhapsodized over the beauty of Indian lifeways, condemned the tribes to a future of picturesque powerlessness—or worse.53 Thus even D’Arcy McNickle, the one Indian John Collier could claim he had empowered to speak during the 1930s, imagined needs far beyond what the New Deal reformers had envisioned.54
Plucked from obscurity, McNickle soon became a national figure in Indian affairs despite the fact that he had no tribal
constituents or previous links to traditional Native culture. He was a creature of Washington, D.C., and a protégé of John Collier’s, but his rapid exposure to tribal communities in every part of the country quickly transformed him into a savvy expert, skilled at linking the needs of different communities and finding ways to obtain federal dollars for their needs. Thanks to the New Deal reforms that were bringing young men and women like him to prominence, McNickle did not serve briefly and disappear. Unlike Ely Parker, who lived out his days in the obscure offices of the New York Police Department, the former freelance writer continued in the Indian Office into the 1950s and remained a national figure for decades afterward. McNickle had seen the possibilities embedded in John Collier’s reforms, and he set himself the task of building new tribal communities on the foundations of his boss’s romantic vision.
ACTIVISTS DEBATE THE INDIAN FUTURE
The Collier era created a fundamental shift in the political atmosphere surrounding national Indian policy. By recognizing the authority of tribal governments, however limited their powers and resources, and shifting the United States’s objective from civilizing Indians to developing their communities and resources, the New Deal Indian Office created an arena where the voices of new Indian activists would be heard. Now that tribes had governments, and government officials no longer blamed reservation poverty solely on Native backwardness, politicians could no longer dismiss Indian activists as irrelevant.
During the early years of the New Deal these activists were preoccupied with discussions of Washington’s reforms, but as the Roosevelt administration drew to a close, a rising generation of Native leaders began to forge their own agenda. By the time Collier resigned from the Indian Office in January 1945, these leaders were prepared to articulate and sustain a national campaign on behalf of Indian participation in postwar discussions of the American Indian future.
In the late 1930s Alice Jemison was one of Native America’s most outspoken voices. A relentless critic of Collier and the New Deal, the Seneca activist appeared regularly before congressional committees. She made her case to audiences beyond the capital through the First American, a national newsletter distributed first by the American Indian Federation and later, following her resignation from that group in 1939, by Jemison herself. Because she believed the IRA would reduce tribal governments to the status of Indian Office puppets, Jemison cast herself as an enemy of federal oppression and a defender of self-determination. Her campaign attracted support, not only from the American Indian Federation but also from other of the commissioner’s Indian critics. These included the Sioux leadership of the Black Hills Treaty Council and dissident traditionalists who had opposed the IRA at Dakota agencies such as Pine Ridge and Standing Rock as well as Indian Office critics at the Klamath reserve in Oregon and the Eastern Cherokee agency in North Carolina.55 “The Wheeler-Howard Act provides only one form of government,” Jemison told a gathering of the Black Hills Council in South Dakota in 1938, adding, “If [the commissioner] was going to give us self-government, he would let us set up a form of government we wanted to live under. He would give us the right to continue to live under our old tribal customs if we wanted to.”56
As the years wore on and the New Deal continued, Jemison’s protests grew more strident; she moved from challenging Collier’s credentials and ideas to charging that he and his big-government supporters were un-American. Like many New Deal critics, she began to identify the Roosevelt administration as socialistic and anti-Christian. In the August 1937 issue of the First American, for example, Jemison charged that Collier had relied on “a constant, seditious stream of vituperation against the government of the United States, the courts and the white race. . . . Such appeals to the under privileged,” she added, “are the tactics of communists who thrive and grow powerful, who capitalize on human misery. . . .”57 Jemison seized on any evidence she believed supported her claims. She singled out the American Civil Liberties Union, for example, an organization Collier and several of his Indian Office colleagues supported, as notoriously soft on communism.
Largely indifferent to Indian issues but eager to embarrass the Roosevelt administration, the president’s most virulent right-wing enemies quickly rallied behind Jemison. William Dudley Pelley, for example, the leader of the Silver Shirts of America, and John B. Trevor, the anti-Semitic founder of the American Coalition of Patriotic Societies, endorsed the American Indian Federation’s anti-Collier platform and sought to enlist Jemison and her colleagues in their cause. In 1939 Trevor organized a conference to which Jemison submitted a long report, reprinted in the First American, detailing the federation’s efforts to counter “the program of communism which is being promoted among the Indians by officials of the Indian Bureau.”58 Trevor’s followers soon won the attention and support of American Nazi sympathizers. Jemison also accepted financial assistance from the anti-Semitic author James True, though she later claimed she did so only because the Indian Office had scared off her financial supporters, leaving her desperately short of cash.59 Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes and Collier made sure the press was aware of Jemison’s right-wing connections. According to the secretary, the Seneca activist was “a dangerous agitator” who “constantly attacked the Indian Service.” Collier presented an extended critique of Jemison in 1940 at a Senate hearing at which he charged that despite the fact that she had resigned from the American Indian Federation because of its extreme views, she was a fifth-column Nazi sympathizer.60
Jemison’s ill-tempered attacks and extremist allies have prompted many to follow Ickes’s and Collier’s lead and dismiss her as a subversive crackpot. Her deep ties to the Seneca and Iroquois communities and her clear personal and philosophical connection to the legacy of Carlos Montezuma (together with the fact that she was later judged qualified for federal employment during World War II) argue against this simplistic view. A great many Indian activists shared Jemison’s opposition to Collier’s policies. They shared her determination to have treaties and traditional leaders, not federal guardians, define the relationship between Indian tribes and the United States. Her determination to defend the right of American Indian citizens to participate in tribal governments—whether they were organized in the Black Hills, Southern California, or New York State—was also consistent with the arguments of her friend and fellow Collier critic Thomas Sloan. Jemison’s choice of non-Indian allies reflected very poor judgment, but her central concern for Indian rights (whether defined by treaties or by the rights of U.S. citizens) was the motivation for her activism throughout her career.
Jemison’s primary focus remained on Indian issues. For example, in the summer of 1939 she devoted the bulk of the First American to an essay demanding the removal of Horatio Greenough’s statue The Rescue from the east entrance of the U.S. Capitol. Her attack made no mention of the New Deal or John Collier. She wrote simply that the statue’s depiction of the murder of a helpless young white woman by a muscular Native warrior was “most unjust to the Indian race. . . . It is conceded that Indians killed white men,” Jemison added, “but where the Indians killed hundreds, the white men killed thousands. . . . Nor can the fact be overlooked that the white race were the invaders and the red race the defenders of their homelands which were being snatched from them.”61 These comments demonstrate the Seneca activist’s fierce desire to bring Indian perspectives before the public. Her activism was not confined by the New Deal, and her agenda—protecting the autonomy and integrity of tribal governments—reached beyond John Collier and his reforms.
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ROBERT YELLOWTAIL DID NOT join Jemison’s attacks on John Collier, but his tenure as the superintendent of the Crow Reservation was also marked by a preoccupation with local community development and a growing dissatisfaction with the Indian Office. He embraced the possibilities offered by federal New Deal programs, but from his perspective, the test of each new venture would be the scale of benefits it would bring to his home reservation. During t
he Collier years Yellowtail presided over several federally funded projects: the construction of his reservation’s first hospital, the acquisition of forty thousand acres of tribal grazing land, and stock purchases to build the herds of Crow ranchers. By the start of World War II the Crow tribe had expanded the size of the grazing territory it controlled sixfold. Beyond these economic development projects, scores of tribal members went to work on local construction projects funded by the Works Progress Administration and the special Indian Division of the Civilian Conservation Corps. Crow laborers built roads and reservoirs and participated in tribal logging and fire crews. Government dollars even supported the creation of a new dance hall and an Indian sewing cooperative.62
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