As his first year at the NCAI drew to a close, Deloria sensed that the pace of change was accelerating. He expected the organization to have ninety member tribes by year’s end, and he felt increasingly confident of the group’s ability to lead a unified campaign for federal support. “We are witnessing fantastic changes in this country,” he wrote in the NCAI’s fall 1965 newsletter. “There [have] been more major programs in this year than in the previous twenty.” The proliferation of Community Action Programs and the rise of grassroots activism seemed to the executive director to signal a confirmation of his view that policy should focus on developing tribal communities rather than simply looking for ways to extract money from the federal bureaucracy. In this new atmosphere, he wrote, “tribes need a great deal of help in forming programs [and] learning how to use existing government agencies. . . .”32 He was also increasingly determined that outsiders should not set the Indians’ policy agenda for them: “It is time that Indians . . . gave new directions to American social thought and development.”33
As he settled into his new position, Deloria also allowed his sense of humor to come forward. Satire and humorous jabs at his opponents connected him to his Indian constituents and allowed him to stress the human values and unique experiences that set Native people apart from other Americans. For decades most Indian activists had phrased their communications with non-Indians and one another in earnest, serious phrases. Irony and humor had appeared occasionally in public, but they had rarely been used in serious political discourse. That pattern was broken in November 1965, when the association’s newsletter (written entirely by the executive director) included “From the Archives,” a feature that reported that the diary of Chief Knock Knock had been discovered “deep in the NCAI files.” The diary revealed that Chief Knock Knock had received “some strange visitors” on October 12, 1492. “It was pretty hot,” Knock Knock wrote, “and we were all down at the beach swimming when this boat pulled up.” On October 17 he wrote: “They are still here.” The diary ended with this entry for November 24: “They finally left this morning. . . . I hated to see them go. They were so happy thinking they had found India and so delighted with the coffee and tobacco that they acted like children. But they were quite a pest on the other hand. They kept wanting us to try on clothes. . . . We are having a big Thanksgiving Day dinner now that they have departed.”34 Deloria probably dashed off these columns to relieve tension and fill the blank spaces in his newsletter, but the nature of his humor—poking fun at white icons (Custer was a regular target) and reversing conventional historical narratives (a Thanksgiving dinner to celebrate Columbus’s departure)—fitted neatly with his provocative political positions. The message of these columns was consistent and clear: Indians are not the same as other Americans.
A surge in memberships, a rise in federal funding for tribally sponsored projects, and Deloria’s tireless lobbying ensured his reappointment as executive director at the NCAI conventions in 1965 and 1966. The 1965 convention was a particular triumph. He had managed to pay off some of the organization’s debts and keep its Washington office open, but his greatest coup was securing the presence of the OEO director Sargent Shriver at the annual meeting. As the head of the agency responsible for Community Action Programs, Shriver received a hero’s welcome in the Scottsdale, Arizona, meeting hall. “By God, it took ten minutes to get on the podium,” Deloria later recalled. “All these people wanted to show him pictures of their [CAP] projects or talk to him. Everybody was just shaking hands with him.” When Shriver finally addressed the crowd, he told them exactly what they (and Deloria) wanted to hear. “The whole basis of the poverty program is self-determination,” Shriver declared, “the right of the people . . . to find their own way.”35 The NCAI’s embrace of Shriver’s new philosophy was made complete at the same meeting when the convention replaced Burnette’s ally and NCAI president Walter Wetzel with Wendell Chino, a Mescalero Apache leader who had risen to prominence by demanding tribal control over reservation timberland.
The NCAI continued to struggle financially for the remainder of Deloria’s tenure, but by the end of 1965 it had stabilized sufficiently to act on his 1964 proposal that the group “propose legislation we want.” At a meeting of the executive committee in El Paso, Texas, in March 1966, Deloria observed that traditionally the NCAI had confined itself to testifying on major bills that came before Congress, most of which had been proposed by the administration. Now, he noted, “the focus of activity has changed. . . . Since 1960 there have been major laws passed giving tribes eligibility for development programs. . . .” With the OEO’s philosophy of funding community projects independent of the Indian Office now spreading to other agencies, tribal governments and other local organizations had the opportunity to mount their own legislative agendas. Deloria believed the moment had arrived for a comprehensive set of suggestions to widen federal support for direct aid to community-based institutions. He argued that “the emphasis of the NCAI should be redirected to help with reservation community development programs. . . .”36
The executive committee welcomed Deloria’s recommendation, but the ambitious planning was suddenly interrupted by the news that while the NCAI’s leaders were meeting in El Paso, Secretary Udall had proposed that Congress transfer supervision of all Indian CAP programs from Shriver’s OEO to the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The Indian leaders were aghast, and their fear of Indian Office maneuvering was confirmed when they learned that the interior secretary had also announced that he would host an emergency closed-door planning conference in Santa Fe to flesh out his initiative. Deloria sprang into action. He called on all tribal leaders to gather in New Mexico at the same time as Udall’s conference and to demand to be heard. By the time Udall’s conference began a few weeks’ later, more than two hundred representatives from sixty-two tribes had gathered a few blocks from the meeting site.
Udall and his aides first refused to admit the tribal leaders to their meeting, but after the New York Times and other national newspapers reported the contradictions in their position, they were forced to relent. As Deloria told one reporter on the scene, it was ironic that “the people whose future they’re planning” had been shut out. Badly outmaneuvered, the secretary agreed to allow the NCAI to send observers to his conference and to submit its recommendations to a committee of tribal leaders before sending them on to Congress. The New York Times noted that while Deloria welcomed Udall’s concessions, he had not retreated from his position that any new programs “should be administered by the Indians themselves. . . .” “We want the right to plan and program for ourselves,” Deloria declared the next day, adding, “If we start seeing the old bureaucrats show up on the reservations again . . . no dice.”37
Deloria’s confrontation with Secretary Udall did not resolve the tension between tribal leaders and the federal bureaucracy, but it did put government officials on notice that the politics of policy making had changed. Not only were the tribes largely united in their determination to set their own priorities, but the non-Indian missionary and reform groups that had been so influential in the past were no longer in the government’s corner. A few weeks after his return from New Mexico, Deloria wrote that “one cannot help but recognize in the events of Santa Fe . . . a real turning point in the relations of tribes, the NCAI and non-Indian interest groups.” He noted that the reform organizations typically involved in Indian affairs—the churches, the Indian Rights Association, and the American Friends Service Committee—had refused Udall’s invitation to be observers at the conference so long as the NCAI leadership was barred. “Human relations are now coming full circle,” Deloria wrote. “In the last century it was a favorite government practice to send in the missionaries to soften up the tribes with religion before treaties were signed.” At Santa Fe, he added, “we saw for the first time . . . a total rejection of this role.” Instead, “the principle of self-determination . . . became the guideline for the friends of the Indians and the role of the w
ise protector of the ‘little red children’ became a thing of the past.”38
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IN HIS REMAINING TIME in Washington, D.C., Deloria pressed this theme with the tribes as well as with the Indian Office. At the fall 1966 NCAI convention, for example, he reminded the assembled delegates that if they agreed that self-government required more than mere consultation by federal officials, they should be prepared to assume the burden of reclaiming their independent status. “The time is now here when Indians will have to put up or shut up about the right to self-government,” he declared. “Many tribes are afraid of the Bureau,” he wrote. “They don’t take any initiative . . . and they let the Bureau do things to them rather than speak up.” Tribes must be willing to act independently and “compete with corporations in the business and social world. . . . The reason we have anything,” he reminded the membership, “is that one hundred years ago we had people who would at least stand up for themselves and on occasion stood together.” At present, he argued, there were only two choices: “stand up and be responsible or—form a National Congress of FORMER American Indians.”39
Deloria’s sharper tone and his insistence that Native leaders “put up or shut up” were not solely the product of his successful confrontation with Udall. Despite his official position as the administrator of a mainstream organization largely made up of recognized tribal governments, the young activist had developed a close relationship with the leaders of the National Indian Youth Council, the organization of disaffected young activists that had formed in the wake of the 1961 Chicago conference. His closest friendship was with Clyde Warrior, one of the group’s founders, who had grown increasingly impatient with NIYC’s focus on education and community organization. Soon after taking office in the fall of 1964, Deloria had invited Warrior to advise him on policy matters. During 1965 the young Ponca joined Hank Adams and other Native activists in Washington State to organize fish-ins to challenge the local authorities, claim that they, not the tribes, had the authority to regulate fishing in the Columbia River. The local tribes argued that the nineteenth-century treaties guaranteeing their right to fish in their “usual and customary places” preceded the creation of the state and continued in force. (Modeled on civil disobedience protests in the South, fish-ins featured tribal members intentionally violating state fish and game laws and then challenging their arrests in federal court.) By 1966 Warrior, Adams, and their young colleagues were insisting that tribes move toward greater autonomy by developing programs with local resources rather than government antipoverty funds. These activists “attempted to use shock treatment to get people to stand up for themselves,” Deloria later wrote.40
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EVENTS TAKING PLACE simultaneously within the African American activist community strengthened Warrior’s influence and sharpened Deloria’s vision. When the civil rights leader Stokely Carmichael issued his famous call for greater Black Power in the summer of 1966, the NCAI executive director saw the potential of this slogan for Indian politics. He wrote in 1970 that Black Power “never received the careful and impartial reading it deserved.” He insisted Carmichael’s appeal was not a call for racial violence. Instead, the African American leader “spoke to a longing within other racial minorities to express the dignity and sovereignty of their own communities.” The slogan encapsulated Deloria’s disdain for leaders who cowered before powerful legislators or the White House, accepting paternalistic treatment so long as it came wrapped in federal dollars.41
For Deloria, “The concept of power meant that the group could demand recognition in society as a group.” Still smarting from Secretary Udall’s attempt to exclude him from the Santa Fe conference, Deloria observed that “so long as groups are visible and vocal but have no status . . . within the political system, there is no conceivable way that the present system can be relevant to them.” The Indians’ special status, he believed, derived from their indigenous cultural traditions and their unique treaty relationship with the federal government.42 So long as Indians retained their cultures and their treaties, he argued, “Red Power will win. . . . We are no longer fighting for physical survival,” he declared at the end of his time in Washington. “We are fighting for ideological survival.” In the years to come he turned repeatedly to this theme, reminding his readers that Indian cultures and the tribes’ special relationship with the federal government were essential elements of their “basic sovereignty.”43
DELORIA AND THE RISE OF RED POWER
Deloria resigned from the NCAI in the fall of 1967 and entered law school at the University of Colorado. “It was apparent to me,” he wrote a few years later, “that the Indian revolution was well underway and that someone had better get a legal education so that we could have our own program for defense of Indian treaty rights.”44 While this statement is plausible, the executive director was no doubt also aware of the Johnson administration’s rapidly declining political fortunes as well as of shifts in his own views. A few years after leaving the NCAI, Deloria wrote that in his final months in office he had undergone a “radical change in thinking.” Washington was no longer attractive to him; non-Indian experts had “wormed their way back into power” at government agencies and universities, he reported. Meanwhile “reservation people . . . were making steady progress. . . . [Y]ounger Indian leaders . . . began working at the local level to build community movements from the ground up.” For Deloria, no doubt influenced by NIYC activists such as Clyde Warrior and Hank Adams, “the Indian revolution” suggested he turn away from Washington lobbying and join the effort to revive the fortunes, both cultural and legal, of Indian communities.
Possessed of enormous energy and creative talent, Deloria did not let law school interfere with his activism. He spent much of 1967 and 1968 assembling a series of commentaries on Indian affairs, which Macmillan and Company published with significant fanfare in October 1969 as Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto. Drawing heavily on experiences in Washington, D.C., Deloria treated readers to chapters on racial stereotypes, treaties, missionaries, anthropologists, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs. “Indians are like the weather,” Deloria wrote in the book’s opening paragraph, “everyone knows all about the weather but none can change it.” Biting wit drove home a serious argument: that what America’s majority population knew about Indian life was not only wrong but invented and phony. “One of the finest things about being an Indian,” Deloria wrote in the opening chapter, “is that people are always interested in you and your ‘plight.’ Other groups have difficulties,” he added; “we Indians have had a plight.” The reason for this habit was the imaginary Native world created by scholars, artists, and politicians. “Experts paint us as they would like us to be,” he observed, adding, “To be an Indian in modern American society is in a very real sense to be unreal and ahistorical.”45
Deloria called on his readers to reject the long-standing popular belief that Indians were essentially backward and incompetent and to replace their romantic images with a hard-eyed look at the reality of modern Native life. He argued that even anthropologists, long the self-proclaimed champions of Native culture, were too preoccupied with their own abstract theories to understand real Indians. As a consequence, they taught that “Indians are a folk people, whites are an urban people, and never the twain shall meet.” The result of this fiction, the former executive director wrote, were habits of mind that produced “intellectual stagnation.” By expecting that real Indians should conform to a specific list of backward traits and live as “folk people,” anthropologists, and their missionary colleagues, convinced themselves that helping Indians required changing or even eradicating their cultures. As a consequence, Deloria declared, the Indians’ friends were really “forerunners of destruction.”46
By contrast, the tribal revitalization movement that began in the 1960s rested on a rejection of the assumption that Native culture was destined to disappear. The eagerness of Native groups to organize under the Off
ice of Economic Opportunity, the rise of a new generation of leaders on reservations as well as in cities, and the forgotten tribal homelands of the eastern United States were evidence, Deloria argued, that “[t]he famed melting pot, that great sociological theory devised to explain the dispersion of the European immigrant into American society, had cracks in it.” Deloria’s book celebrated those cracks and called on readers to support the “retribalizing” process. That effort, Deloria wrote, would nurture tribal groups that were “stronger and more democratic.” While criticizing the romanticism of others, Deloria showed that he was not immune to idealistic optimism. Referring to the cultural revivals going on among Indians across the nation, he observed, “The potential for development is unlimited. . . .”47
Custer Died for Your Sins stirred strong emotions among both reviewers and the public when it appeared in the fall of 1969. John Greenway, a senior anthropologist at the University of Colorado, angrily dismissed Deloria’s book as a “meaningless bleat” whose title had been “lifted from the men’s room in the New York subway.” At the other extreme, the popular environmental writer Edward Abbey announced in the New York Times that Deloria had presented a compelling case for American Indians “with much humor. . . . Genocide is used a little too easily and carelessly these days,” Abbey wrote, “but in the case of the American Indians . . . the term may not be inapplicable.” The Times’s chief cultural critic, John Leonard, devoted a second column to Deloria, declaring that his book’s clever blend of “ghastly facts” and engaging personal style was impossible to dismiss. The author’s words, Leonard added, “frighten therapeutically.”48
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