This Indian Country

by Frederick Hoxie

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  THE COINCIDENCES OF TIMING in Vine Deloria, Jr.’s early career were remarkable. He appeared at the 1964 NCAI convention at a moment of political paralysis and financial peril, but he came to Washington, D.C., just as new federal dollars were beginning to revitalize long-neglected reservation communities. His tenure as the organization’s executive director coincided with the height of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. (“The skies opened and the money poured down,” he later recalled.49) Equally fortuitous, Custer Died for Your Sins arrived in bookstores just as the public’s support for the Vietnam War was reaching a low point and only weeks before a group of Indian college students and relocated city dwellers occupied the former federal penitentiary on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay and demanded that the site be handed over to them for use as a Native American cultural center. The landing of the Indians of All Tribes on Alcatraz during the night of November 19, 1969, was a symbolic event that soon created a very real political confrontation. By occupying this famous former prison, just a short boat ride from a vibrant urban metropolis and international tourist destination, the college students and local activists who made up the Indians of All Tribes suddenly became global celebrities. While to many the occupation seemed little more than the latest act in a decadelong succession of guerrilla theater productions, to others, it confirmed the Sioux author’s declaration that “urban Indians have become the cutting edge of the new Indian nationalism. . . . [T]hey are asserting themselves as a power to be reckoned with.”50

  As Hollywood celebrities and the international press descended on Alcatraz, sales of Custer surged. A few days after the landing, a Thanksgiving feast drew hundreds of supporters to the island, where they celebrated its liberation with powwow drums and rock music.51 Though these events amplified his fame, Deloria grew skeptical. He admired the dedication of the urban activists, but he believed they were naive. Unlike the protesters at the Columbia River fish-ins, the Indians of All Tribes were unprepared for serious negotiations with federal officials. Their counterculture vibe and polyglot urban roots communicated a vague pan-Indian identity that threatened to shift attention away from reservations, treaties, and the tribes’ cultural traditions. Deloria worried that the rock bands and movie stars assembled at Alcatraz would trivialize the Indian cause. He told a Los Angeles reporter a few months into the occupation, for example, that while he supported the Alcatraz “militancy,” he also knew that “[i]f you’re out front shouting all the time, you can’t be in the background doing what has to be done to change policy.”52

  Six months after the initial landing, Deloria’s fears seemed to have been realized: negotiations with federal authorities reached a stalemate, the occupiers began fighting with one another, and the public’s attention shifted elsewhere. Despite the uncertain outcome of the Alcatraz takeover, a chain reaction of similar protests over the following year carried the protesters’ demands to communities across the United States. In March a group of local activists and Alcatraz veterans took control of Fort Lawton near Seattle, demanding the army base be transformed into an Indian arts center. Their success attracted wide attention in the Northwest and spurred similar actions in other cities as well as new support for the ongoing fish-ins. In subsequent months angry crowds occupied Bureau of Indian Affairs offices in Chicago, Cleveland, and Minneapolis, while Mohawks in New York claimed jurisdiction over islands in the St. Lawrence River and a new organization based in Minneapolis, the American Indian Movement, threatened to occupy Mount Rushmore and Plymouth Rock. The following year advocates for Chicago’s impoverished Indian community occupied a former Nike missile site on the city’s lakefront to dramatize their claims, while a group of college students took over another abandoned military post near Davis, California, and pledged to remain until the government turned it over to them for use as a Native American university. Everywhere, it seemed, the angry words in Custer Died for Your Sins were taking human form. As Edward Abbey had observed in his review of Deloria’s book, “Even the Indians are turning against us now. Red Power. All the chickens coming home to roost.”53

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  IN THE FALL OF 1972 a broad coalition of urban and reservation-based leaders called for a national protest in Washington, D.C. Called the Trail of Broken Treaties, the demonstration would consist of a collective journey to the U.S. capital, where a series of demands would be presented to the president on the eve of the presidential election. The operation was loosely organized and poorly funded. When the vanguard of the group reached the Bureau of Indian Affairs headquarters on November 2, they sought a hearing with federal officials as well as assistance with housing the hundreds of unexpected followers who were now crowding into the building. Ordered to leave by nervous security guards, the entire group suddenly barricaded the doors and declared the site a Native American embassy.54

  The occupation of the BIA lasted only a few days, but it catapulted to national fame the activists who took center stage during the crisis, leaders of the American Indian Movement, particularly Russell Means, an Oglala Sioux who had been raised in California, and Dennis Banks, an Ojibwe who had helped found the organization in Minneapolis. Three months later these telegenic men solidified their leadership when they led a group of AIM members and tribal elders into the village of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, on the Pine Ridge Reservation, and occupied it in the name of the Oglala Nation. Acting on behalf of traditionalists who had opposed the tribal leaders elected under the Indian Reorganization Act since the 1930s, the protesters declared themselves heirs to the Sioux tribe’s nineteenth-century chiefs. They pledged to remain in their freshly dug bunkers until the tribe’s elders and chiefs had been restored to power. After a nine-week standoff, during which two Native American protesters were killed and one FBI agent was severely wounded, negotiations involving Nixon administration officials, AIM leaders, and various intermediaries (including Deloria’s close friend Hank Adams) produced a face-saving agreement. The protesters agreed to disperse, and the White House promised to investigate complaints against the elected tribal government.

  The proliferation of these occupations and protests left Deloria in a quandary. On the one hand, they thrust him more firmly into the public eye. The former executive director was quick to use the many platforms now available to him to underscore the unique and compelling nature of the Indians’ demands. “Every tool we have for gathering information and finding our way has been designed for a world of assimilation and integration,” he told a group of scholars at the Smithsonian Institution in 1970. On the other hand, the Indian protests demonstrated that Americans “have left the comfortable land of assimilation and been thrust into the outer darkness of ethnicity.” Deloria explained that these events proved that the integrationist dreams outlined a decade earlier in documents like the Fund for the Republic’s “Blueprint for Indian Citizens” had been illusory. He urged his audiences to face this new reality. “We can use the American political arena to allow one group to oppress another,” he declared, “or we can use it as a forum, an arena in which the problems of our society and perhaps the world can finally be resolved.”55 What this resolution would look like, however, Deloria could not yet say.

  As he traveled the country in 1970 and 1971, Deloria pointed out the many connections he saw between the Indians’ quest for peoplehood and the black nationalist and Mexican American desire to “build viable communities with political and economic power.” In We Talk, You Listen, a collection of essays published in late 1970, the young lawyer insisted that recent protests mounted by all three groups revealed a common longing for solidarity and the recognition of their collective rights. Referring to blacks, Mexican Americans, and Indians, he wrote, using capital letters to emphasize his point, that the public should realize “that IN NO CASE DID THESE GROUPS ENTER THE CONSTITUTIONAL FRAMEWORK AS INDIVIDUALS. . . . We have seen over the past century,” he added, “the utter inability of American society to absorb these groups.”56

&
nbsp; But even as he praised the militant protesters for demonstrating that “white society is breaking down all around us,” Deloria grew critical of their leaders and their tactics.57 For example, while he admired Richard Oakes, the charismatic young Mohawk who had initiated the Alcatraz occupation, Deloria wrote that the former college student “overestimate[d] his impact” and “failed to recognize the necessity of prolonged negotiations” in any serious confrontation with federal officials. Similarly, Deloria argued that the Trail of Broken Treaties organizers “wasted their time enhancing their images as glamorous Indian leaders” instead of attending to the tedious details associated with housing and feeding the hundreds of men, women, and children who had followed them to the capital. The chaos of the BIA sit-in, together with the destruction of furniture, office files, and artwork that had occurred there, had been a public relations disaster. “Until the ‘occupation’ of the BIA,” Deloria wrote, “we had an almost perfect media image.” Similarly, he pronounced the scene of swarming television crews at Wounded Knee a “high tragedy and . . . grotesque comedy.” He noted that the Pine Ridge occupation had brought forward a “bizarre parade of characters: Ralph Abernathy, the National Council of Churches, Angela Davis and assorted hippies and well-wishers who have made a valiant effort to turn the confrontation into the last rock festival and clan gathering of the New Left.” Watching these events, he complained, had been “torture.”58

  The Wounded Knee occupation was especially painful for Deloria because he knew the blood-soaked prairie surrounding Wounded Knee village well; visiting it as a boy, he wrote, had been “the most memorable event of my early childhood. . . . Many times over the years,” he recalled, “my father would point out survivors of the massacre, and people on the reservation always went out of their way to help them.”59 He was also moved by the Sioux traditionalists whose complaints against the Indian Reorganization Act government on the reservation had inspired the takeover. He believed their demand that the United States live up to its treaties was completely justified. “The courts,” he wrote, “have done a veritable St. Vitus dance to keep from enforcing [the treaty’s] provisions. . . .” He also wrote approvingly of the occupation’s charismatic leader, Russell Means, saying at one point that he “may be the greatest Lakota of this century.”60 But Deloria rejected the occupiers’ spontaneous, sometimes violent tactics, and he despaired over how exactly they would govern the reservation with a group of aging elders. He urged his friend Hank Adams and other intermediaries to negotiate a quick solution to the armed standoff and called on government officials to hold hearings to air the group’s complaints. But even these modest pleas fell on dead ears, and Deloria grew deeply discouraged. “How do we believe in the system any longer?” he wrote in the midst of the crisis. “What does this nation want us to do?” His answer: “You live in trembling rage and burn your emotional batteries down.”61

  The crisis confronted Deloria with the realization that despite his lectures, skillful lobbying, and bestselling books, the problem he had identified four years earlier remained: contemporary Indians were invisible to the American public unless they struck a familiar pose as bare-chested warriors or glassy-eyed mystics. “American Indians,” he wrote, “are prohibited from having a modern identity.” Protesters in braids and dark glasses attracted the attention of Ralph Abernathy and received visits from White House emissaries, while serious leaders were ignored in favor of non-Indian experts and Hollywood celebrities. Deloria had had it: “We seek responsible spokesmen and the first movie star that comes along gets prime television time to expound his or her theories on how bad things are with the Indians. . . . [Y]ou gag halfway through the show,” he complained, “and search for a late movie.”62

  Deloria avoided confessional writing; he attacked his enemies rather than reflecting on his private feelings. But as the surreal events of the early 1970s multiplied—from the angry, spontaneous takeovers of parks and monuments to bizarre incidents like the appearance of an actress, in buckskin, who claimed Apache heritage at the 1973 Oscar ceremony—they prompted Deloria to question his commitment to activism and writing.63 He had completed law school but was as uninterested in a conventional legal career as he had been in the mainstream ministry. He tried teaching but found the experience “unsatisfying.”64 He had no interest in returning to Washington, D.C. He had a growing family to support and was about to turn forty.

  Deloria had a perceptive take on the events he witnessed during his years in law school, but he was uncertain about which group to support or what path to pursue. Native leaders needed “a philosophy of Indian affairs,” he noted in 1971; “no real progress has been made in developing new concepts since the Indian Reorganization Act.”65 In a remarkably revealing essay published in an obscure religious journal at the end of 1972, Deloria sketched out his response to the personal and professional uncertainty he felt at the beginning of the 1970s. Katallagete: Be Reconciled was a religious journal published by a group of liberal southerners that included James Holloway of Berea College and the novelist Walker Percy. Deloria’s reflections appeared in an issue devoted to vocations. He described his own search for meaningful work. He recalled that he had entered the seminary searching for a calling that would enable him to guide others through life but had soon discovered that church doctrines were “virtually useless” for that purpose. The intellectual atmosphere had “provided an incredible variety of food for thought,” but theology, he concluded, was “at once too general to be useful and too specific to be meaningful in the novel events of the 1960s and beyond.” Looking elsewhere, he had discovered the law, hoping that statutes and judicial decisions would provide “answers to immediate problems and a . . . sense of orientation in the situation man finds himself in. . . .” That system also fell short. “Law was even less related to life than theology,” he wrote. The seminary offered a broad framework for living but little in the way of daily guidance. Alternatively, the law simply offered a means of “balancing of relative powers,” nothing more.66

  Deloria proposed that even though religion and the law originated from separate needs—on the one hand, to articulate basic beliefs, and on the other, to regulate human behavior—each should be “experiential” if it was to remain relevant to human experience. He had long dismissed rigid theologies that sought to eradicate Indian paganism or politicians who insisted that Native people conform to civilized rules and standards. Ideally, he wrote, religion and the law should avoid such rigidity and be complementary “components of a constantly shifting value scheme of both individuals and societies.” Deloria presented himself as the embodiment of this pragmatic experimental framework, someone who could combine American Indian cultural values with a coherent agenda to inspire his daily actions. He could speak for culture and common sense. In short, he concluded, meaningful work for him was a “desperate balancing act of a sense of justice . . . and a continual confrontation of the immediate situation. . . .”67

  This existential pose perfectly matched the Sioux author’s growing unease with both government policy and the rhetorical appeal of Red Power. At the end of the Katallagete essay, he described himself as a participant in “an Indian tribal situation that fluctuates between memories of an exotic past and a precarious future defined in derogation of that past.” Deloria added that maintaining his Indian identity “involve[d] a certain tension between a willingness to share its happiness and grief and the personal demand to be its severest critic and most disloyal member.” This was a tall order, he conceded, but he reminded his readers that Indians had always believed that “living cannot be postponed.” Crazy Horse, he noted, had embodied that self-confident view when he rode into battle shouting, “It is a good day to die.” Calling on that warrior’s legacy, Deloria concluded that the “question of man’s life and identity is to let the bastards know you’ve been there and that it is always a good day to die. We are therefore able to live.”68

  TWO FOUNDATIONAL TEXTS

 
In the wake of his confessional Katallegete essay, Deloria published two books, one that spelled out the spiritual beliefs that underlay the Native traditions of the continent and another that sketched the outlines of practical reforms that would resolve the Indians’ two-century-long political struggle with the United States. The first, God Is Red, published in the fall of 1973, described his view of the fundamental values that united American Indians and separated them from other citizens.69 The second, Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties, which appeared ten months later, summarized Deloria’s view of the Red Power phenomenon and outlined the principal political adjustments that could ensure the long-term viability of the nation’s tribes.70 The two books distilled the Sioux activist’s thinking at this pivotal moment in his life. They also reflected his growing involvement in the world of ideas and announced his new persona as a Native philosopher, critic, and guide.

  God Is Red contained much of the humor and general commentary that had characterized Deloria’s earlier writing. Its opening chapters reviewed the proliferation of Indian protests during the previous few years and repeated Deloria’s dismay at their poor leadership and disappointing achievements. He argued, for example, that the BIA takeover had brought attention to little more than “broken treaties and broken urinals,” while the public’s rising interest in Native issues (an interest that had fueled sales of his own books) only demonstrated “that there exists in the minds of non-Indian Americans a vision of what they would like Indians to be.” While “anthologies blossom like weeds in an untended garden,” he wrote, looters continued to desecrate Indian burial grounds and federal courts continued to ignore tribal fishing rights. “The impasse seems to be constant,” he observed; “Indians are unable to get non-Indians to accept them as contemporary beings.”71