This Indian Country
Page 34
Despite these criticisms, McNickle and Tax remained committed to their inclusive approach. In February 1961 Tax announced the formation of an all-Indian conference steering committee. McNickle chaired the group. It included Helen Peterson, NCAI President Wesley, and a diverse group of Native leaders such as Judge Lacey Maynor, from the North Carolina Lumbees, and William Rickard, an outspoken Tuscarora activist from New York who was the son of Alice Jemison’s first mentor, Clinton Rickard.16 Using a mailing list that contained nearly five thousand names of individuals and Native organizations, the steering committee circulated a draft declaration of purpose to be discussed once the group assembled in Chicago in June. La Farge warned Tax that such freewheeling methods would enable radicals to take over and exploit the gathering, but the professor dismissed him with a curt note: “Why should we suppose that Indians will be tempted to bad rather than good ideas?”17
In June 467 delegates from 90 tribes and bands registered at the Chicago conference. Dozens, perhaps hundreds more Indians from the surrounding region crowded into the meeting hall to visit with friends and observe the proceedings. The presence of representatives from every region of the country alone made the meeting unprecedented, but the gathering also broke new ground in that it brought together a broad cross section of Native people: elected leaders of major federally recognized tribes, traditional community elders, urban Indians from organizations with mixed, multitribal memberships, and, perhaps most unexpected, two dozen American Indian college students who attended the conference as part of an NCAI-sponsored summer leadership workshop. Tax’s critics—W. W. Keeler, the Rosebud leader Robert Burnette, and others—were also present, but despite their criticisms, the conference managed to maintain an air of unity. At its final session the group adopted a Declaration of Indian Purpose, an amended version of the document first circulated by the steering committee six months earlier.18
A forty-nine-page statement later published as a separate booklet, the declaration included recommendations for new approaches to economic development, health, education, housing, and the law. Thanks largely to Keeler and his Oklahoma allies, the statement opened with an “American Indian Pledge” that, among other things, denounced all “promoters of any alien form of government.” After this nod to the loyalty of “Indian Americans,” the document’s tone shifted. The policy proposals were detailed and substantive, and contained specific recommendations that emphasized the need not only for greater federal assistance but also for greater tribal control over community institutions.
Despite the thoroughness of the Chicago declaration, its deeper significance lay in its tone and ambition. The document’s concluding section ignored the language of assimilation and Indian uplift and offered instead a vision of tribal nationhood that had been absent in national policy discussions for nearly a century. “In the beginning,” the statement read, “the people of the New World . . . were possessed of a continent and a way of life.” Following the arrival of Europeans, it added, “every basic aspect of life has been transformed.” As a consequence, it was essential that Native Americans preserve what remained: “With that continent gone, except for the few poor parcels they still retain, the basis of life is precariously held, but [Indians] mean to hold the scraps and parcels as earnestly as any small nation or ethnic group was ever determined to hold to identity and survival. . . . In short the Indians ask for assistance, technical and financial, for the time needed, however long that may be, to regain in the America of the space age some measure of the adjustment they enjoyed as the original possessors of their native land.”19 The Chicago declaration suggested that technical assistance and federal aid should be viewed from the perspective of “a small nation,” rather than as charity designed to bring American Indians into the national mainstream. Instead of a pragmatic program of uplift and assimilation, the statement envisioned the wholesale rehabilitation of Native communities to a status appropriate to the “original possessors of their native land.”
La Verne Madigan, the Association on American Indian Affairs executive director, seemed to grasp this important shift when she debriefed La Farge at the close of the conference. Madigan believed the declaration was impractical and divisive, and she reported that she had pleaded with an editorial writer at the New York Times to downplay its anticolonial rhetoric. She told her boss that she had insisted that “it would be a disservice” if the Chicago statement were to win the newspaper’s endorsement. Alas, the reporter had ignored her appeal, and his paper had run an editorial praising the gathering and its manifesto. Madigan closed her letter with a one-word declaration of her own: “Damn.”20
Promoted as a platform for Indian unity, the Chicago conference widened the divide Deloria later identified in his 1964 interview with the NCAI. Critics of Tax’s gathering encouraged federal support for the development of Native communities but said nothing about the formal status or historical significance of tribal governments. They avoided any discussion of cultural traditions or the history of colonial exploitation. Barely a month after the conference, for example, Secretary Udall released “A New Trail,” a report written by an American Indian task force appointed earlier in the year. The group’s recommendations echoed the Fund for the Republic report released six months earlier (perhaps in part because both groups recruited W. W. Keeler as their senior Native American adviser). Like the “Program for Indian Citizens,” “A New Trail” promised that federal assistance would ensure that American Indians ultimately enjoyed “equal citizenship, maximum self-sufficiency, and full participation in American life.”21
The divide deepened when just days after the release of Udall’s task force report the Rosebud Sioux chairman Robert Burnette issued a general call for a special conference to be held in early August with the goal of “reorganizing the National Congress of American Indians.” Few beyond Burnette’s circle of allies attended the August meeting, but the energetic Sioux politician insisted that tribal leaders set aside the grandiose language of the Chicago declaration and focus instead on extracting larger appropriations from their friends in Congress. “We are in an era when the President created a favorable climate towards us as Indians,” he wrote later in 1961. “Indian people have millions of friends who are waiting for us to tell them how they can best help. . . . We must select the best possible people to operate our National Organization [sic].” Burnette’s appeal fueled a new campaign to unseat the NCAI leaders who had participated in planning the Chicago event. In an obvious swipe at McNickle and other leaders of mixed heritage, he declared that the Indians’ representatives “must look Indian, act Indian and be Indian and still be able to contact and hold the attention of our friends.” He added, “[T]he more one looks like an Indian the greater the chances are for success.”22 This divisive theme and Burnette’s insistence that Indian leaders should “get something” for their communities resonated with other western leaders and carried Burnette and his allies to victory at the annual NCAI meeting later that year.23
Other divisions surfaced in the wake of the Chicago conference when a group of Native college students and recent college graduates gathered in Gallup, New Mexico. They were less interested in cultivating Burnette’s “millions of friends” than in building what one of their leaders called “a greater Indian America.” Most had attended both the Chicago gathering and the NCAI’s summer leadership workshop in Colorado immediately following that event, and they were still angry at the Rosebud chairman and Keeler for leading the effort to water down the conference declaration and tack a pledge of loyalty to the United States onto its opening pages. As Clyde Warrior, a young Ponca from Oklahoma, later recalled, “It was sickening to see American Indians get up and just tell obvious lies about how well the federal government was treating them.”24 After three days of meetings the group established a new organization, the National Indian Youth Council (NIYC). Among the first targets of NIYC attacks was Secretary Udall’s “A New Trail.”
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With his thick glasses and biting wit, the NCAI’s new executive director seemed far better prepared for an academic symposium than for legislative hearings or courtroom confrontations. He was inexperienced in the ways of government and knew little of Indian politics beyond what his father and friends had told him. He shared the genteel background of the sophisticated founders of the Society of American Indians and the NCAI, groups that included his missionary grandfather and father. Like most of those earlier activists, Deloria sought to look beyond the demands of any one particular tribe or region.25 Nevertheless, he demonstrated in his few minutes with the executive committee an uncanny ability to identify the central issues confronting (and dividing) Native activists and to propose a future course of action.
MR. DELORIA GOES TO WASHINGTON
Vine Deloria, Jr., went to Washington, D.C., at an extraordinary moment. Within weeks of his arrival Lyndon Johnson defeated Barry Goldwater in a landslide presidential election that placed Congress firmly in the hands of Democratic Party liberals. Johnson’s followers quickly moved to pass a series of domestic reforms as a memorial to John F. Kennedy. Running in tandem with this rising political tide was a corresponding shift in public mood. In the same month that Deloria took up his new post, the Nobel Prize Committee announced that the 1964 Peace Prize would go to Martin Luther King, Jr., an African American whom southern segregationists had long demonized as a Communist rabble-rouser. As Deloria scrambled to pay the NCAI’s bills and organize his legislative agenda, the newly reelected president announced that his administration was committed to ending poverty and racial discrimination in America through the creation of a Great Society.
Deloria quickly grasped the shifting contours of power in Lyndon Johnson’s Washington. While generally aware, as Bob Burnette and other NCAI critics had argued, that Indians had many friends in the capital, he recognized a new opportunity within the federal bureaucracy. In August 1964 Congress had responded to President Johnson’s call for a War on Poverty by creating the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), which in turn authorized a series of Community Action Programs (CAPs) to be initiated by grassroots leaders in poor communities across the nation. The CAPs were expected to cut through the federal bureaucracy by involving local aid recipients directly in government projects. Just as Deloria arrived in Washington, the OEO established an Indian Task Force and charged it with developing CAP projects on reservations across the country. Their efforts presented the NCAI’s new executive director with an opportunity that had been unavailable since the end of treaty making a century earlier: tribes could acquire federal funds without first gaining the approval of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. In the spring of 1965 the OEO established an administrative Indian desk to manage its first initiatives and to develop new programs. Its director, a Lakota educator named Jim Wilson, quickly became one of Deloria’s closest allies.26
From the outset the NCAI’s new leader understood that the War on Poverty offered tribes more than federal dollars. In a 1974 essay, Deloria observed that while the Community Action Programs “did not solve the problem of poverty,” they were “major factors in the development of the contemporary Indian scene.” The new OEO enticed young, educated Indians to return to their tribes from cities and college campuses, triggering what Deloria called “a process of re-tribalization.” He explained that the returnees were eager to link CAP programs to community traditions but were largely ignorant of their languages and customs. As he recalled, these young activists “made it a point to learn everything [they] could about the old tribal ways.” At the same time, they “refused to accept the Bureau of Indian Affairs [practice of] continuing to make the decisions regarding the reservations.” Deloria understood that the sixty-odd Community Action Programs that suddenly appeared in 1965 represented only a fraction of total federal spending in Indian communities, but he detected that the projects’ direct connection to local people (and their independence from the Indian Office) had created a “serious generation gap” in communities, where entrepreneurial young Native activists were increasingly alienated from tribal politicians who had spent their lives working through the agency superintendent and other bureau officials.27
Deloria’s sensitivity to the social and cultural dimensions of the policy changes taking place around him was not surprising. While he had not gone into detail in his interview with the executive committee in 1964, there was a firm basis for his claim that the NCAI should advocate for American Indians rather than for Indian Americans. Not only had his father and grandfather been deeply immersed in Sioux community life, but his father’s sister Ella Deloria, often a member of his household while he was growing up, was an anthropologist who had devoted her life to the preservation of her tribe’s language and traditions. He grew up a Christian missionary’s son in a town on the border of the Pine Ridge Reservation, but the most compelling experiences of his youth had been his encounters with old tribal ways. “My earliest memories,” he wrote in 1971, “are trips along dusty roads to . . . a small settlement in the heart of the reservation to attend dances. Ancient men . . . brought their costumes out of hiding and walked about the grounds gathering the honors they had earned half a century before.” Throughout his career Deloria returned to these memories and the connection they represented between his modern persona and the traditions of his tribe. As he told an interviewer in 1980, “Maybe my generation is the last one that was affected by Indian values.” 28
Throughout his three-year tenure at NCAI, a time when CAPs were proliferating and the Indian Office seemed poised to support the development of tribal institutions, Deloria remained critical of programs that lumped Indians together with African Americans and other racial minorities because as he wrote in 1969, the equality demanded by civil rights advocates was too often “confused with sameness.” This assumption, he explained, reflected the white majority’s view that “legal equality and cultural conformity were identical.” Insisting that Native communities needed land and political autonomy, Deloria rejected that proposition. “No movement can sustain itself, no people can continue, no government can function, and no religion can become a reality,” he declared, “except it be bound to a land area of its own. . . . Peoplehood,” he added, “is impossible without cultural independence.”29
Deloria highlighted the distance between his view of Indian peoplehood and the attitudes of Keeler, Burnette, and other reservation politicians in testimony before the Senate Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights in the summer of 1965. Chaired by North Carolina’s Sam Ervin, the committee was considering proposals to ensure that tribal governments followed constitutional principles and to protect Indian tribes from state encroachments on their authority. Despite his loyalty to the cause of segregation in the South, Ervin seemed genuinely interested in extending the constitutional protections in the Bill of Rights to Indians. When the senator called Deloria to testify, he might have expected the Indian leader to offer praise for his efforts. Instead, he heard a forceful critique and an extended lecture on the singular features of the Native Americans’ legal status.
Speaking at the precise moment the Senate was moving toward final passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, a law that would soon enfranchise milli
ons of African Americans in the segregated South, Deloria began by noting that he was testifying at a time when “this country is . . . groping for new forms of social understanding and participation.” While sympathetic to the changes occurring around him, the NCAI executive director rejected the idea of viewing Indians through the lens of the civil rights movement. He dismissed Senator Ervin’s suggestion that Congress adopt a uniform criminal code for Indian tribes, pointing out that tribal governments were not backward institutions that federal administrators should reorganize or supervise. The point, he declared, was that tribes were not just another jurisdictional unit like a city or a rural county. They were something different; they had existed for centuries, and they were not going to disappear. “Tribes are not vestiges of the past,” he declared, “but laboratories of the future.” For this reason, he added, “we feel impelled to suggest that tribes be allowed maximum flexibility in developing their own economic, political, and human resources. . . .” Tribes should be able to train and develop their own lawyers and judges, for example, and to develop their own case law. He told Ervin, “I do not see ever any reason for assuming the disappearance of Indian tribes.”30
Because tribal governments would continue into the future, Deloria argued, it was essential that Ervin’s committee guarantee that state governments would be barred from extending their authority onto Indian land. The old terminationist approach, embodied in 1953’s Public Law 280, was punitive and insulting, Deloria declared. Ideally, he added, “laws are passed to help us fulfill what we should be, not to punish us or regulate us.” Reminding Ervin of the American Indian’s long experience with exclusion and arbitrary rule, he declared: “All we basically ask is justice, the consent of the governed, [and] time to develop what we think should be developed in our own way. You cannot get a contribution to this society from Indians if you try to turn an Indian into a white man or anything else.” The goal of federal policy, Deloria insisted, should not be uniformity but “an intersection of culture, societies, and judicial systems.”31