During his eleven-year tenure as agency superintendent Robert Yellowtail devoted almost as much attention to cultural activities as he did to economic enterprise. He ended the agency’s opposition to peyote use and tolerated the reintroduction of the Sun Dance among the tribe. He also persuaded the National Park Service to donate excess buffalo from Yellowstone Park to the Crow tribe so they could reestablish a tribal herd in the Bighorn Mountains. The superintendent’s tribesmen were thrilled that after nearly fifty years the shaggy beasts so important to their history and to their identity as plains hunters were back in Crow country. Most enduringly, Yellowtail transformed the annual agricultural fair that the Indian Office previously had insisted upon into a celebration of traditional Crow ways of life. Under Yellowtail, the Crow Fair took place in tourist season, August, instead of after the fall harvest, and it was widely promoted as a prominent stop on the region’s powwow circuit. Each year hundreds of white tourists and Indian visitors crowded into the tribal campground on the banks of the Little Bighorn for a week of horse racing, dancing, and celebration. After the 1937 fair one local travel magazine reported that “the most spectacular event of each day was the parade led by ‘Bobby’ Yellowtail. . . . They proceeded in a single file,” the magazine noted, “hundreds of Indians, each dressed differently, in a most magnificent array reminiscent of former days.”63
By the end of Yellowtail’s term of office in 1945 the question of which tribes had adopted the IRA and which had turned it down had become largely irrelevant. There emerged in every corner of the nation tribal members who, while not always as flamboyant and successful as Yellowtail, cast themselves as reservation leaders whom policy makers in Washington could neither patronize nor ignore. Despite their rejection of the Reorganization Act, the Crows prospered. Similarly, Collier’s enemies on the Navajo Reservation became leaders of an active tribal council taken seriously by government and business leaders in both the Southwest and Washington, D.C. Where the new law was popular, such as among the Mescalero Apaches or the Montana Blackfeet, there emerged councils that commanded comparable influence. Even Jemison’s Senecas, who had voted overwhelmingly against the IRA, gained strength and public prominence through a variety of New Deal community development efforts aimed at restoring tribal culture and daily life on New York’s reservations.64 Leaders there, as elsewhere in the country, had learned to separate their view of John Collier from their desire to participate in the next phase of Indian policy reform.
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PROBABLY NO ONE GAVE this next phase more thought than Collier’s ally D’Arcy McNickle. As the excitement surrounding the passage of the IRA faded and his own knowledge of the national scene deepened, McNickle understood that future discussions of Indian affairs would hardly be affected by whether or not a tribe had adopted the IRA and embraced the commissioner’s personal vision of the Indians’ deep community. He also understood that for Indians, as for most Americans, the national effort to win World War II had created a new spirit of common purpose. During the war years more than forty thousand Native civilians had moved from reservations to cities and towns to work in war industries, while another twenty thousand men and women had served in integrated units in the armed forces.65 “[F]oreign experience, the chance to observe other societies, the sharing of a comrade-in-arm relationship with servicemen and wage-earners of other ethnic and cultural origins, had an awakening effect,” McNickle later wrote. “The anger which often followed upon the awakening was not directed at the reservation world . . . but at the institutions, the laws and regulations which impoverished Indian life.”66
McNickle first noted this awakening in 1944, when on an official trip through the Southwest, he “held evening meetings with returned students and council members in the Hopi country, with the Navajos, the White River Apaches, and at Papago.” At Papago (now Tohono O’odham), McNickle reported that the agency superintendent was so taken with the idea of bringing Indians together to discuss the postwar future that he “vacated his office and allowed us to conduct a meeting of Indian employees and any other Indians we could reach on short notice.” When McNickle returned to headquarters, he discovered that many of his Native American coworkers in the Indian Office had been discussing the idea of creating an all-Indian group to advocate for Indian interests once the war ended. “Many people wanted an organization,” he wrote in 1959, “but most were reluctant to start anything. They feared failure; they thought they might be criticized; it seemed too ambitious.”67
After a series of meetings that stretched through the summer of 1944 and into the fall, McNickle’s planning group decided to issue a call for a national organizing convention, to be held in Denver in mid-November.68 The invitation, sent to tribal councils across the country, declared: “Indians are not charity patients of the Nation.” It added: “Indians long ago bestowed great favors on the people of this Nation; these things need to be said over and over, and they need to be said by the Indian people speaking through their organization and their spokesmen.”69
McNickle later recalled that he and his fellow organizer Charles Heacock, an Indian Office employee from the Rosebud reserve, arrived at the Cosmopolitan Hotel in Denver a day before the November convention was to begin. “[We] sat around that night and into the next morning,” he later wrote, “wondering whether we should duck out of town.”70 Eighty-one delegates attended the convention. They included seven Indian Office employees from Chicago and Washington, eighteen other participants who identified themselves as Dakota or Lakota Sioux, and nineteen from Oklahoma tribes (most of whom, McNickle reported, had traveled together in the same reserved rail car). The remaining three dozen founders were from the Southwest, Utah, and the Great Lakes; no one appeared from the Navajo Reservation or the northwest coast.71
Despite its uneven turnout, the Denver meeting was a success. The delegates formally established the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI). The group would strive to become, as McNickle had hoped, the Indians’ organization and spokesman. The Denver meeting also passed a series of resolutions establishing the organization’s goal of becoming the political representative of all Native Americans. At the close of the gathering, the group elected officers. Napoleon Johnson, an Oklahoma Cherokee and a state judge, was named president. With an eye to broadening its membership and preventing too close an association with the Indian Office, the founders also elected an executive council that included McNickle and Archie Phinney, a Nez Perce Indian Office employee, as well as reservation-based members from Montana, the Dakotas, and the Navajo Reservation. They also pledged to hold a convention each fall.72
A NEW DEBATE TAKES SHAPE
The NCAI’s founding in November 1944 occurred on the eve of a series of momentous events. John Collier resigned from the Indian Office only a few weeks after the group’s first convention. After his departure no comparable national figure emerged to assume the place of expert on Indian affairs. He left a space that could now be filled with new—Native—voices. Between the founding meeting and the second NCAI convention in late 1945, World War II ended, and the mass return of servicemen and defense workers envisioned by McNickle and other organizers began. Eager to assert themselves, many of these returning workers and veterans quickly joined the leadership of their reservation governments and embraced the goals of the NCAI.
On the eve of the group’s third convention in Oklahoma City at the end of 1946, the Republican Party took control of Congress on a platform of reversing the policies of the New Deal. That event both marked a general repudiation of fourteen years of Democratic control (the GOP slogan that year was “Had Enough?”) and created an occasion for John Collier’s congressional critics to force a shift in national policy. The NCAI’s leadership was eager to participate in the debates ahead. “[I]n moments of crisis Indian tribes and the Indian people are left without an effective champion,” the NCAI president Napoleon Johnson wrote on the eve of the 1946 convention. “Indian leadership should cont
ribute to the formulation of federal policy. It should take the leading part in inquiring into the needs of Indians and of making those needs vocal.”73
By 1947 the formulation of federal policy had become a congressional preoccupation. Driving this process was a group of outspoken New Deal critics, many of whom had provided the congressional audiences for Alice Jemison’s attacks on the IRA a decade earlier. Others were new arrivals who had been carried into Washington on a tide of anti–New Deal sentiment. These conservative activists included Burton K. Wheeler, one of the IRA’s original sponsors, who had been advocating repeal of the Reorganization Act since 1937, and Elmer Thomas, an Oklahoma Democrat who had succeeded Wheeler as the chairman of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee and who, in 1943, had proposed the abolition of the Indian Office. They were joined in 1940 by a newcomer, Hugh Butler from Nebraska, an outspoken enemy of Washington bureaucrats, and in 1946 by Arthur Watkins, a former judge and newspaperman from Utah.
Butler and Watkins quickly emerged as the Republican Party’s principal spokesmen on Indian affairs. They proposed a program of termination that would involve both abandoning Collier’s agenda of fostering tribal development and eventually severing all ties between tribes and the U.S. government. Advocates of termination called for state jurisdiction over tribes as well as the eventual dissolution of both reservations and the Indian Office. Terminationists did not call for a return to allotment or a new campaign to bring civilization to the tribes, but they shared the nineteenth-century reformers’ vision of a future in which Indians would disappear as a distinctive group within the United States. In their view, Indians should cast aside tribalism in favor of freedom. In language that echoed the rhetoric of Henry Dawes and other Victorian reformers, they insisted that terminating the government’s ties to tribes and treaties was necessary to set Native people free from federal authority. Watkins declared that “freeing” the Indians from the bureaucracy was “an ideal or universal truth, to which all men subscribe.” In a widely circulated essay written in the 1950s he aligned himself with Abraham Lincoln’s struggle to free the slaves. Without noting that Indians were eager to retain their treaties or that Native people were still barred from voting in his home state of Utah, the senator declared: “I see the following words emblazoned in letters of fire above the heads of the Indians—THESE PEOPLE SHALL BE FREE!”74
As had been the case in the 1930s, many Indians shared the Republican senators’ low opinion of the Indian Office even though they were suspicious of the conservative politicians’ motives and uncomfortable with their determination to end all federal protections for tribes. Jemison and many others endorsed the new call for integration. Napoleon Johnson, for example, told the NCAI’s 1946 Oklahoma City convention: “We advocate the assimilation of the Indians into the general citizenship wherever and whenever such course is feasible.” He added that the time had arrived “for the establishment of a planned program for the progressive liquidation of the United States Indian Service.” Even Robert Yellowtail, the former agency superintendent, who had joined the NCAI in 1945, was sympathetic. Writing to a fellow NCAI member, the Choctaw attorney Ben Dwight, in the fall of 1946, Yellowtail warned darkly: “The Indian Bureau and its employees are not your friends. Mark that down. Their monthly checks are their chief concern. . . . Where,” he asked of the recently retired officials, are “Collier and Ickes? Why don’t they raise their voices for the Indian since their pay has stopped? I know them all,” he added. “They are not our friends. The Indian Bureau should be abolished at the earliest date possible.”75
Despite this rhetoric, none of the leaders who endorsed integration imagined a future without Indian tribes and Native organizations. They did not become terminationists. Yellowtail remained a fierce advocate of Indian unity: “[T]hings are done politically,” he wrote in his letter to Dwight. He also argued that “it is necessary that the Indians become active and a potent factor in the politics of their respective homes and states.”76 Yellowtail, like Jemison, believed that treaties were the basis of the Indians’ strongest claims on the federal government and could not be abandoned. As he explained in a speech to the NCAI’s 1953 convention, “the United States by treaty . . . and [the] public pronouncements of its leaders and presidents have legally and morally committed their nation to a scrupulous respect of the rights, both legal and moral of the Indians. . . .”77 He could not imagine that this commitment would be reversed. As the terminationists’ assault on the New Deal gained strength, leaders as diverse as Yellowtail and Jemison resisted by defending a set of common principles: the enduring nature of treaty rights, the value of tribal autonomy for community well-being, and the importance of defending the rights of Indian citizens.
Alice Jemison had the opportunity to voice her opposition to termination in 1948, when Senators Butler and Watkins conducted a hearing on the Seneca reserve to gather comments on their proposal to extend New York State’s legal jurisdiction over reservation communities, thereby abrogating the 1794 Canandaigua treaty between the United States and the Iroquois. As she had done a decade earlier in her testimony opposing Collier, Jemison devoted a large part of her allotted time to recounting the history of Iroquois treaty making. George Washington, she declared, “recognized us as human beings.” By contrast, she argued, Butler’s proposals “would violate every provision of our treaty for self-government. No Indian asked for the introduction of these bills,” she added, referring to the senators’ proposals. “We have kept our shares of the treaties, and we are here to ask that you keep yours.” In the ensuing exchange Butler patronizingly noted that Jemison should “be proud of your lineage.” She shot back: “Senator, all white people tell us that, but when it comes to helping us, listening to what we have to say, then they say, ‘Well we will do what we please about it. We know better than you do.’”78 Jemison tried to get Butler to promise not to pass any bills over Iroquois objections, but he demurred. “I can’t give any assurances for the whole committee,” he said.79 Outspoken tribal opposition delayed Senate action on the bills for two years, but Butler and Watkins were finally successful in extending state jurisdiction over New York Indian reservations in 1950.
As Watkins and Butler gained the upper hand in the termination campaign, debate intensified among Native Americans about how to define a common position on the future place of tribes and indigenous people in the United States. Tribal leaders like Robert Yellowtail called for greater tribal autonomy within a framework of federal guardianship even as he joined Jemison and Napoleon Johnson in criticizing the embattled Indian Office. Like them, he attacked Washington’s paternalism, but he insisted that the hostility of local county and state governments and the weakness of reservation economies necessitated a continuation of federal guardianship for tribes. At the same time, supporters of the administration, like D’Arcy McNickle and many of his bureau colleagues, searched for a way to define the bureaucracy’s mission without appearing simply to be worrying over their own paychecks.
In 1948 the NCAI leaders who supported the gradual elimination of the Indian Office proposed the “Indian Plan” at the group’s annual convention. While the plan conceded that its “final objective” was for the Indian to assume “his place in American society,” it declared that the “withdrawal of the Indian Service must be determined locally as it cannot be fixed nationally.”80 In fact the Indian Plan was quite consistent with McNickle’s 1937 proposal that the Indian Office concentrate on providing technical assistance to tribes. The plan’s emphasis on economic development and federal partnerships with tribal governments also reflected a wider national discussion that had recently erupted following sensational reports of poverty on the Navajo reserve. NCAI leaders assisted by Representative Will Rogers, Jr., a California congressman and the son of the Cherokee humorist, urged Congress to adopt a long-range development program for the vast southwestern reservation. Rogers also criticized Arizona and New Mexico for not letting tribal members vote in state elections or
claim Social Security benefits. As part of this effort, Rogers wrote an article for Look magazine entitled “Starvation Without Representation.”81
Tribal leaders also spelled out their view of how and when the final elimination of the Indian Office might occur through the Governors Interstate Indian Council, a group organized in 1950 in response to congressional demands that states plan for the integration of tribal communities into their general populations. The interstate council operated on the assumption that reservations would eventually be incorporated into the surrounding states, but like the Indian Plan, it focused first on local development projects and argued that federal support must continue for an extended period. Several NCAI leaders, including President Napoleon Johnson and the Ojibwe attorney Edwin Rogers, participated in the council. They helped organize committees on law enforcement and other topics, but the gap between state and tribal expectations was soon tested by the conflicting timetables of tribal leaders and non-Indian officials. Congressional Republicans and their supporters opposed any commitment to extended federal assistance, while Indian advocates argued that programs such as the NCAI’s Indian Plan could not succeed without it. As Ruth Muskrat Bronson, a longtime Indian Office social worker who had volunteered to act as the NCAI’s executive director, observed in the fall of 1950, the tribes “need to be fed with the vitamins of a few successful experiences in self-determination. . . .”82 From her perspective, self-determination was desirable, but a rapid cutoff of federal assistance was not. Johnson agreed. He told the group’s 1951 gathering that the termination of federal services “cannot be done overnight”; it would only come “state by state and area by area.”83
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