This Indian Country

by Frederick Hoxie

  18. The final declaration and list of attendees were published as Declaration of Indian Purpose: The Voice of the American Indian (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1961).

  19. Lurie, “The Voice of the American Indian,” 497, 498.

  20. LaVerne Madigan to Oliver La Farge, June 29, 1961, PAAIA, File 59-7, American Indian Chicago Conference.

  21. See Cobb, Native Activism, 61–62, and George Pierre Castile, To Show Heart: Native American Self-determination and Federal Indian Policy, 1960–1975 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1998), 8–10. Bending to political pressure, the task force also noted that tribal development could lead to the termination of tribes, an outcome that could occur “with maximum benefit for all concerned.”

  22. “Notice of Meeting” and “Presentation,” Burnette Proposal, Box 54, NCAI Papers.

  23. “Presentation,” ibid. See also Thomas W. Cowger, The National Congress of American Indians: The Founding Years (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 141–44. Cowger notes that the Chicago conference “proved to be the downfall of [the] NCAI leadership that had boldly led [the] NCAI through termination,” 142.

  24. Clyde Warrior quoted in Cobb, Native Activism, 53–54.

  25. Deloria’s grandfather Philip (Tipi Sapa) had been an early member of the society. See Deloria, Singing for a Spirit, 71.

  26. See Castile, To Show Heart, 29–42; Cobb, Native Activism, 102–24. Three members of the OEO Indian Task Force were veterans of the 1961 Chicago Conference: Helen Maynor Schierbeck (Lumbee), Forest Gerrard (Blackfeet), and B. Frank Belvin (Choctaw).

  27. Vine Deloria, Jr., The Indian Affair (New York: Friendship Press, 1974), 32, 33, 34, 33. For an overview of the size and nature of CAP projects, see Francis Paul. Prucha, The Great Father, 1094, 1095.

  28. Vine Deloria, Jr., “This Country Was Better Off When the Indians Were Running It,” in Red Power: The American Indian’s Fight for Freedom, ed. Alvin M. Josephy, Joane Nagel, and Troy Johnson (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991, 1999), 30; originally published in the New York Times, March 8, 1970); quoted in Studs Terkel, American Dreams, Lost and Found (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 48.

  29. Deloria, Custer Died for Your Sins, 180, 179, 180.

  30. “Constitutional Rights of the American Indian,” Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights of the Committee on the Judiciary,” U.S. Senate, June 24, 1965, 194, 195, 199.

  31. Ibid., 196, 200, 201.

  32. NCAI Newsletter (November 1965), 10.

  33. Ibid. (Summer 1965), 2.

  34. Ibid. (November 1965), 11.

  35. Both quotations are in Cobb, Native Activism, 122.

  36. Program, 23rd Annual Convention of the National Congress of American Indians, “Executive Committee Meeting,” March 24–25, El Paso, Texas, 2. NCAI Papers, “NCAI Reports to 1966 Convention,” Executive Director, Box 14.

  37. “Indian Bureau Parley Rebuffs Tribes,” New York Times, April 14, 1966, 29; ibid., “Two Indian Demands Granted by Udall,” April 15, 1966, 20; “Indian Bureau Hails Udall Plan,” ibid., April 16, 1966, 81. For a summary of the Santa Fe confrontation, see Cobb, Native Activism, 130–33.

  38. NCAI Newsletter (Spring 1966), n.p. This issue also reported on another “lost document,” a supposed report from Minnesota Chippewas, dated 1516. They described having found “the tracks of a Green Giant” and disclosed that “the HoHoHoing has kept them awake for nights on end.”

  39. NCAI Newsletter, Convention Issue (1966), n.p.

  40. Deloria, Custer Died for Your Sins, 184, 270.

  41. Vine Deloria, Jr., We Talk, You Listen: New Tribes, New Turf (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007; originally published in 1970), 101, 100.

  42. Ibid., 112.

  43. Stan Steiner, The New Indians (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), ix; Deloria, We Talk, 113. Steiner’s quotation of Deloria was not dated, but from its context it was clearly a statement made between the emergence of Black Power in mid-1966 and the executive director’s departure from Washington, D.C., in 1967.

  44. Deloria, “The Country Was Better Off When the Indians Were Running It,” 36.

  45. Deloria, Custer Died for Your Sins, 9, 10. The promotion of Deloria’s book included the advance appearance of his scathing chapter on anthropologists in Playboy magazine.

  46. Ibid., 87, 88, 103. Significantly, Deloria singled out Oliver La Farge for special scorn. He described this well-connected “friend of the Indian,” who had supported John Collier and opposed the NCAI leadership’s involvement in the 1961 Chicago conference, as a “skillful manipulator of Indian people” who “dealt primarily with Uncle Tomahawks who would say anything to stay on the good side of him.” Ibid., 206.

  47. Ibid., 240, 260.

  48. John Greenway, “Books This Week,” Chicago Tribune, October 7, 1969, 18; Edward Abbey, “Custer Died for Your Sins,” New York Times, November 9, 1969, Book Review, 46; John Leonard, “Red Powerlessness,” New York Times, November 18, 1969, 45. See also “Authors and Editors,” Publishers Weekly, v. 196, n. 22 (December 1, 1969), 7. Abbey was probably referring to Arthur Kopit’s Indians, a controversial play (which compared U.S. Indian policy to the war in Vietnam) that had recently opened in New York. Interestingly, one of Stewart Udall’s anthropologist aides, James Officer, called Custer a “significant statement” despite its “invective.” See Arizona and the West, v. 12, n. 3 (Autumn 1970), 292, 293.

  49. Deloria, Custer Died for Your Sins, 209.

  50. For a summary of the Alcatraz occupation, see Castile, To Show Heart, 112–15; Deloria, Custer Died for Your Sins, 243–44. The definitive study of Alcatraz and its aftermath is Paul Chaat Smith and Robert Allen Warrior, Like a Hurricane: The Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee (New York: New Press, 1996).

  51. Smith and Warrior, Like a Hurricane, 22–23.

  52. “Arrows for the White Man Fill Sioux Author’s Quiver,” Los Angeles Times, March 12, 1970, H1, 16.

  53. New York Times, November 9, 1969, Book Review, 46. For a summary of protests and occupation in the wake of the Alcatraz takeover, see Smith and Warrior, Like a Hurricane, 87–93. For Chicago, see James LaGrand, Indian Metropolis: Native Americans in Chicago, 1945–1975 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 240–43. Kevin Bruyneel places Custer in the context of anticolonialism and postcolonial theory in The Third Space of Sovereignty: The Post-colonial Politics of U.S.-Indigenous Relations (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 134–69.

  54. This necessarily brief summary of the 1972 occupation focuses on Deloria’s reaction to the crisis and says little about the important role many leaders played. For a fuller description, see Smith and Warrior, Like a Hurricane, 149–78.

  55. Vine Deloria, Jr., “The New Exodus,” Civil Rights Digest, v. 4, n. 2 (Spring 1971), 39, 44. This essay was a written version of his address at the Smithsonian Institution on November 18, 1970. See Washington Post, November 17, 1970, B1.

  56. Deloria, We Talk, 105, 145–46, 208–9.

  57. Deloria made the comments in an interview published in the tribal newspaper Akwesasne Notes (Early Winter 1973), 43.

  58. Vine Deloria, Jr., Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties: An Indian Declaration of Independence (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985; originally published in 1974), 39, 54; Vine Deloria, Jr., “The Indian World Today,” American Indian Culture Center Journal, UCLA (Winter 1973), 4; Vine Deloria, Jr., “Bury Our Hopes at Wounded Knee,” Los Angeles Times, April 1, 1973, VI, 1. Deloria also criticized the AIM leaders at Wounded Knee for having failed to provide a coherent strategy for their followers. See Los Angeles Times, May 5, 1973, A1, 18. He declared, “One of AIM’s problems is they come and stay too long.”

  59. Deloria, “The Country Was a Lot Better Off,” 31.

  60. “Russell Means: A New Indian Hope,” quoted in Sm
ith and Warrior, Like a Hurricane, 273.

  61. Deloria, “Bury Our Hopes at Wounded Knee,” VI, 1, 7.

  62. Ibid., 7.

  63. Actress Maria Cruz, dressed as an Apache named Sacheen Littlefeather, accepted Marlon Brando’s Best Actor award and made a brief statement in support of the Wounded Knee protesters. See Smith and Warrior, Like a Hurricane, 235–36.

  64. Vine Deloria, Jr., Integrated Education, v. 12, n. 3 (May–June 1974), 25.

  65. Vine Deloria, Jr., ed., Of Utmost Good Faith (San Francisco: Straight Arrow Books, 1971), 4.

  66. Vine Deloria, Jr., “It’s a Good Day to Die,” Katallagete: Be Reconciled, v. 4, n. 2, 3 (Fall–Winter 1972), 63–64.

  67. Ibid., 64, 65.

  68. Ibid., 65.

  69. Vine Deloria, Jr., God Is Red (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1973). Journalist Stan Steiner was the first to report Deloria’s using the slogan in Steiner, The New Indians, 108.

  70. Anthropologist Raymond DeMallie presented a similar view of Deloria’s two-sided approach to Indian affairs in an obituary published in the American Anthropologist after the Sioux activist’s death. See Raymond J. DeMallie, “Vine Deloria, Jr. (1933–2005),” American Anthropologist, v. 108, n. 4 (2006), 932–35.

  71. Deloria, God Is Red, 38, 50, 53, 56. God Is Red seems to have gone to press while the Wounded Knee occupation was still taking place.

  72. Ibid., 64, 65, 73, 67. The linkage between Deloria’s view of sacred lands and his childhood experiences in South Dakota was made plain in his introduction to the 1994 edition of God Is Red. There he wrote that the stories his father told him about the sacred landscape of Sioux country taught him that “the Sioux people cherished their lands and treated them as if they were people who shared a common history with humans.” See God Is Red (Golden, Colo.: Fulcrum, 1994), 1.

  73. Ibid., 75, 76, 77, 80, 83.

  74. Ibid., 301, 300. Deloria devoted several pages in God Is Red to a defense of the astronomer Immanuel Velikovsky, who argued that both Venus and Mars had passed close to Earth in ancient times, causing worldwide catastrophes. Deloria drew on Velikovsky’s arguments to defend the historical accuracy of ancient myths and legends. Writing just as Velikovsky was being discredited by Carl Sagan and other luminaries, Deloria no doubt hurt his case by relying on the controversial scientist. He was drawn to controversial scientific ideas throughout his career. He always enjoyed provoking self-important scholars and challenging their most precious assumptions.

  75. Deloria, Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties, x.

  76. Ibid., 75, 80, 81; Guy Dull Knife, Jr., quoted in Rosier, Serving Their Country, 265.

  77. Deloria, Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties, 172, 255. Deloria invoked San Marino several times in his discussion of small states; see ibid., 163–86.

  78. Deloria, ibid., 247, 183, 252.

  79. Vine Deloria, Jr., “The Next Three Years: A Time for Change,” Indian Historian, v. 7, n. 2 (Spring 1974), 27. In addition to publishing Custer Died for Your Sins; We Talk, You Listen; God Is Red; and Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties, Deloria wrote The Indian Affair (New York: Friendship Press, 1974), an overview of Indian issues, for Friendship Press, an arm of the National Council of Churches.

  80. For an overview of these events, see R. David Edmunds, Frederick E. Hoxie, and Neal Salisbury, The People: A History of Native America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007), 435–44.

  81. Vine Deloria, Jr., Indians of the Pacific Northwest (New York: Doubleday, 1977), The Metaphysics of Modern Existence (New York: Harper & Row, 1979).

  82. Donald Worcester, “God Is Red,” American Indian Quarterly, v. 1, n. 1 (Spring 1974), 87–88.

  83. See Spintz Stiles Harrison, “Everything You Wanted to Know About American Indian Studies but Were Afraid to Ask: Assessing Indian Studies as an Academic Discipline” (PhD dissertation, University of Arizona, 2006), 63–65.

  84. Vine Deloria, Jr., “Activism, 1950–1980,” in Handbook of North American Indians: Indians in Contemporary Society, ed. Garrick Bailey (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 2008 ), v. 2, 44.

  85. Vine Deloria, Jr., “Legislation and Litigation Concerning American Indians,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, v. 436, n. 1 (March 1978), 96.

  86. Following his move to Arizona, Deloria also began a collaboration with Clifford Lytle, a constitutional scholar who was a colleague in the political science department. Lytle and Deloria published two major monographs, American Indians, American Justice (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983) and The Nations Within: The Past and Future of American Indian Sovereignty (New York: Pantheon, 1983). During his early years at Arizona, Deloria also organized the publication of two volumes of essays on federal Indian policy: Sandra L. Cadwalader and Vine Deloria, Jr., eds., The Aggressions of Civilization: Federal Indian Policy Since the 1880s (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984) and Vine Deloria, Jr., ed., American Indian Policy in the Twentieth Century (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985). Finally, he spent considerable time on a book exploring the relationship between the psychology of C. G. Jung and the traditions of the Sioux. Unfinished at the time of Deloria’s death, the book was eventually published as C. G. Jung and the Sioux Traditions: Dreams, Visions, Nature and the Primitive, ed. Jerome S. Bernstein and Philip J. Deloria (New Orleans: Spring Journal, 2009).

  87. Vine Deloria, Jr., “Minorities and the Social Contract,” Georgia Law Review, v. 20, n. 4 (Summer 1986), 925, 919.

  88. Testimony reprinted in Northeast Indian Quarterly, v. 4, n. 4 (Winter 1987), 59. Original testimony in “Hearings Before the Select Committee on Indian Affairs on S. Con. Res. 76,” 100th Congress, 1st Session, December 2, 1987, 22–27.

  89. Vine Deloria, Jr., “Reflections on Federal Indian Law,” Arizona Law Review, v. 31 (1989), 203, 204, 205, 213, 219–20.

  90. Ibid., 215, 217, 219.

  91. Vine Deloria, Jr., “Out of Chaos,” Parabola, v. 10, n. 2 (May 1985), 15, 17, 20–21.

  92. Deloria and Lytle, The Nations Within, 243, 264; Robert Allen Warrior, “Vine Deloria Jr.,” Progressive, v. 54 (April,1990), 27.

  93. Vine Deloria, Jr., “American Indians and the Moral Community” and “Law and Theology III: The Theme,” Church and Society v. 79, n. 1 (September–October 1988), 29, 30, 13.

  94. Deloria’s single-author books from his years at Colorado were Red Earth, White Lies: Native Americans and the Myth of Scientific Fact (New York: Scribner, 1995); Evolution, Creationism and Other Modern Myths (Golden, Colo.: Fulcrum, 2002), and The World We Used to Live In: Remembering the Powers of the Medicine Men (Golden, Colo.: Fulcrum, 2006). Deloria also cowrote one book with his former student David Wilkins, Tribes, Treaties and Constitutional Tribulations (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999), and edited three others. The first of these was a reissue of Sarah Olden’s The People of Tipi Sapa, a religious book about his grandfather published first in 1918: Singing for a Spirit: A Portrait of the Dakota Sioux (Santa Fe: Clearlight, 1999). The second was Exiled in the Land of the Free: Democracy, Indian Nations and the U.S. Constitution (Santa Fe: Clearlight, 1992), a collaboration with several Iroquois experts and scholars. The third was the record of John Collier’s Indian congresses, held in 1934, prior to the passage of the Indian Reorganization Act: The Indian Reorganization Act: Congresses and Bills (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002). A final edited collection was coedited with the anthropologist Raymond J. DeMallie, Documents of American Indian Diplomacy: Treaties, Agreements and Conventions, 1775–1979 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999).

  95. Vine Deloria, Jr., “Thinking in Public,” American Literary History, v. 10, n. 1 (Spring 1998), 24.

  96. Deloria, Red Earth, White Lies, 13; Deloria, The World We Used to Live In, xvii.

  97. Vine Deloria, Jr., “Intellectual Self Determination and Sovereignty: Looking at the Windmi
lls in Our Minds,” Wicazo Sa Review, v. 13, n. 1 (Spring 1998), 27; Deloria, and Wilkins, Tribes, Treaties, ix.

  98. Deloria, “Intellectual Self-determination,” 31.

  99. Deloria, The World We Used to Live In, xxiii; Vine Deloria, Jr., “Is Religion Possible? An Evaluation of Present Efforts to Revive Traditional Tribal Religions,” Wicazo Sa Review, v. 8, n. 1 (Spring 1992), 39. In this 1992 essay Deloria also described a project that preoccupied him for much of his time at the University of Colorado, gathering tribal elders together to hear their stories and their teachings for contemporary Indians. See ibid., 38.

  100. Vine Deloria, Jr., “Response to David Brumble,” American Literary History, v. 10, n. 2 (Summer 1998), 349.

  101. For a summary of how extensively Deloria’s ideas were incorporated into Indian policy and academic discourse, see David Wilkins, “Forging a Political, Educational and Cultural Agenda for Indian Country,” in Destroying Dogma: Vine Deloria, Jr. and His Influence on American Society, ed. Steve Pavlik and David R. Wildcat (Golden, Colo.: Fulcrum, 2006), 157–96.

  102. Deloria, The World We Used to Live In, 214.

  AFTERWORD

  1. The Republican and Democratic platforms are available at the American Presidency Project, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/showplatforms.php.

  2. “Bush Pledges to Uphold Sovereignty,” Indian Country Today (August 30, 2000); see also Valerie Tailman, “Politics and Indian Country in 2000,” Indian Country Today (October 11, 2000).

  3. United States v. Sandoval, 231 U.S. 28 (1913).

  PHOTOGRAPH CREDITS

  1 National Gallery of Canada

  2 Courtesy of The Newberry Library, Chicago (N.P. Willis, American Scenery, G83 976)

  3 Courtesy of The Newberry Library, Chicago (“Vista de panzacola y su baia, tomado por los Espanoles ano de 1781,” Ayer 133.V834 1781)

  4 Copy after Charles Bird King, Smithsonian American Art Museum

  5 Courtesy of the Newberry Library, Chicago (James Parton, The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin, E5/F857)