19
Moses Cleaveland
My brother Ted had come to the sun dance, but like almost everyone else, he just partied. In fact, he drank right through Sunday and passed out in the backseat of my Buick. I could have awakened him or dragged him out, but I had a better idea. The only job he had been able to find was working for the BIA, and just before the sun dance, I had seen him putting fertilizer on a Rosebud Reservation ball field. I thought, how unfortunate for my brother, but spreading shit around is the ultimate statement about the BIA. I had told Ted then, “I’ve got to get you out of here.” When I found him unconscious in my car, I drove him back to Cleveland. He didn’t know he had been shanghaied until early Monday. He woke up as we passed under a huge green sign on the interstate at the Sioux City cutoff.
I made Ted director of manpower at the Cleveland American Indian Center. Months later, my sister Madonna, her husband Sylvester Smells, a Montana Crow, and her two children, who had been living in Minneapolis, moved to Cleveland. Madonna and Sylvester also went to work for me.
Everything we tried to do to help our people, not only in Cleveland but throughout Indian country, was undercut or made more difficult by the BIA. When Richard Nixon appointed Louis Bruce—half Seneca, half Dakota, but raised Seneca—as the new commissioner of Indian affairs, we thought things would change for the better. They got worse. The reason, we discovered, was an assistant commissioner named John O. Crow, who undercut whatever Bruce tried to do. I called for an AIM action in Washington. We wanted to put Crow under citizen’s arrest.
I took Dennis Bowen and a few other guys from Cleveland AIM, and the week before Thanksgiving, we went to Washington to join Indians from all over the country. About thirty or forty men and women walked down to the BIA building. In those days, we always announced in advance the date and time of our protests. The press showed up to greet us, along with the General Services Administration police. The fight was on! Reinforcements rushed in from everywhere to overwhelm and arrest about two dozen of us. We ended up in the D.C. lockup.
When we got to court, the BIA was represented by Ernie Stevens, a great guy and one of the young lions Commissioner Bruce brought in to turn the BIA around. Ernie refused to press charges, and when he asked the judge to let us go, he did. Even if we hadn’t dragged John O. Crow out of his office, we accomplished what we had wanted: We called attention to his hidden agenda. Within months, he was forced to retire.
Back in Cleveland, most of the city was getting ready for the biggest birthday party in its history, the 175th anniversary of the city’s founding by Moses Cleaveland, who had surveyed the land next to Lake Erie and laid out its first town plan. Nearly everyone in town got excited when it was announced that Bob Hope, who had spent his youth in Cleveland, would make a speech and serve as grand marshal of a parade. It would begin at the edge of the Cuyahoga River and end at the park-like town square.
By then, the Cleveland American Indian Center was well known around the city, and we expected an invitation to the Indian community to participate in the festivities. We never got one. We weren’t about to ask to participate, but we felt very insulted at being left out. Finally, late on the afternoon before the celebration, somebody on the anniversary commission realized that their scheduled re-creation of the arrival of Moses Cleaveland, which featured a civic leader wearing a period costume and sailing up the Cuyahoga River to come ashore and read a proclamation, needed one more thing—Indians to meet, greet, and dance for him. At four in the afternoon, someone at the commission telephoned Dennis Bowen. Bowen and I shared an office. When he got that call, he put his hand over the mouthpiece and said, “You’re not going to believe this, but they want to know if we’ll come down to where ‘Moses Cleaveland’ is going to land and dance for them tomorrow.” I said, “Tell them we’ll be there.”
We would be there, all right!
Bowen and I, the rest of the center’s staff, and much of Cleveland’s Indian youth group stayed up most of the night, painting signs and strategizing. In the morning, Bowen and his teens turned out in red berets. We assembled along the river, keeping our signs under cover until the boat carrying “Cleaveland” was about to dock. Then we pulled the signs out: “Go Home, Illegal Immigrant,” “Liar!,” “Polluter!,” “Stay Away, We Don’t Want Your Disease,” “White Men Don’t Keep Treaties,” and many others. Every time that boat came in, Bowen and I shoved it back into the river. We shouted, “We might be 175 years late, but this time he ain’t landing!” The police were there, but they didn’t know what to do. The shore was lined with news reporters, photographers, and television camera crews. They went wild. As the word spread, other reporters came running. The city wanted to get on with its celebration, so several officials begged us to let the boat land. “What do you want?” they said.
I said, “We want to be the first three speakers after the parade.” They were desperate to get on with the celebration, so the commissioners said, “Okay, but please, just let the boat land.” When the guy playing Cleaveland finally got off the boat in his colonial-style hat, he unrolled an old parchment scroll with a proclamation and began to read a flowery, benevolent speech addressed to the Indians. When he said, “We come in peace and we want to deal fairly and justly with you,” Bowen lost it. About twenty-five years old then, well over six feet tall, and built like a fullback, he ran up and, with both hands, grabbed the tall, skinny, red-faced, elderly white guy by the neck and started to throttle him, shouting, “You liar! You never keep your treaties!” That poor guy—he’d probably never seen an Indian before. I know he really wanted to be sincere; that was his role. As Bowen shook him, the three-cornered hat danced all over his head, an event captured by a CBS News camera. The story also made the front page of the Wall Street Journal.
Then we marched to where the parade was scheduled to end, at a big band shell in the middle of the town square. Bob Hope refused to come there, much less speak. The Indians had upstaged him, so he just left town. A crowd of more than five thousand people had gathered. I spoke first for about fifteen minutes. Sarge Old Horn went another fifteen. When Dennis Bowen started in, he didn’t quit for an hour and a half. Our speeches were very well received, in part because the white Establishment had no answer for us when we said we hadn’t been invited to participate in the celebration until the last minute, and then were asked arrogantly to come and dance for them. The blacks in the audience loved it. It was only a few years after the riots in East Cleveland, so in a way, we were speaking for them, too. The local press lapped up all this because the only other speaker who stuck around was Mayor Carl Stokes. By the time he started in, most of the crowd had gone home.