Introduction

Social movements, like the struggle for women’s rights, the unemployment workmen’s movement, the environmental movement, the Black Power movement, and others, ripen when a series of unpredictable forces coalesce, signaling that there is an opportunity for change. This need for change or, better yet, transformation is sometimes precipitated by a significant event—the death of a key person, the enactment of a particular law or court decision, or a natural catastrophe—that then combines with a mixture of forces that may be fed by anxiety, stress, ideology, excitement, or raw power imbalances.

Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, in their classic study Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail, emphasize that “the emergence of a protest movement entails a transformation both of consciousness and of behavior.”1 The transformation of consciousness, they argue, has three aspects. First, the established system is viewed as having lost legitimacy. Second, the members of the protest group, who had previously accepted the status quo, now begin to demand rights. And finally, the people come to believe that they have the power to change conditions for the better.2

The transformation in behavior is also remarkable and typically involves two features. First, “masses of people become defiant: they violate the traditions and law to which they ordinarily acquiesce, and they flout the authorities to whom they ordinarily defer. And second, their defiance is acted out collectively, as members of a group, and not as isolated individuals.”3

While social movements may have multiple causes, their goals often include multiple desired changes—incremental, reformative, and sometimes radical—that are designed to improve the lives, respect the rights, or protect and enhance the resources of a group’s members.

A critical element in nearly all effective social movements is leadership. For it is through smart, persistent, and authoritative leaders that a movement generates the appropriate concepts and language that capture the frustration, anger, or fear of the group’s members and places responsibility where it is warranted. The group’s leaders are also usually adept at clearly identifying the goals, desires, and aspirations of the members while being able to artfully explain to the majority group how they, too, may also benefit from the changes being sought by the disenchanted group. Finally, the leader is able to facilitate and manipulate the media in a way that augments the members needs. Imagine, for instance, the women’s rights movement without Elizabeth Cady Stanton or Gloria Steinem; or the Chicano movement without César Chávez; or the Black Power movement without two of its most distinctive leaders, Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X.

For the Native nations in the United States, still staggering economically in the recent wake of World War II, the early 1950s were a particularly volatile, depressing, and frustrating period. They were facing the horror of political and legal termination at the hands of the US Congress,4 the imposition by several states of criminal and civil jurisdiction via Public Law (P.L.) 83-280,5 and forced relocation into urban areas. Unlike women, African Americans, or Latinos, the established Native nations, numbering more than 560 and each with its own unique government and history and separate political relationship with the federal and state government, experienced a demographic diversity and political distinctiveness that made it implausible for any single Native leader to emerge who would have persuasive ability, substantive knowledge, or the necessary skills to transcend all or even most indigenous national ideologies.

Despite this enormous set of complicating factors, several Native leaders who would eventually gain a measure of national status did, in fact, rise to the occasion in the early 1960s; and by their principled actions, brilliant intellect, visionary leadership, powerful oratory, and remarkable writing skills, they were able to lead both an individual nation and international indigenous renaissance that continues to the present.

Various scholarly works6 have chronicled the emergence of and critical roles played by individuals such as Clyde Warrior (Ponca), Mel Thom (Walker River Paiute), Bruce Wilkie (Makah), Billy Frank Jr. (Nisqually), Vine Deloria Jr. (Standing Rock Sioux), Richard Oakes (Mohawk), Tillie Walker (Mandan-Hidatsa), Helen Peterson (Northern Cheyenne/Lakota), Robert K. Thomas (Cherokee), and Helen M. Scheirbeck (Lumbee). These individuals came of age in the 1950s and 1960s and fought tenaciously to resurrect and stabilize the sovereign status of both their individual nations and Native nations in general, and they focused their attention on addressing the issues both internal (education, poverty, housing) and external (lack of treaty enforcement, state taxation attempts, voting violations) that were bedeviling indigenous peoples at this decisive historical juncture.

Each of these individuals warrant serious attention for the distinctive voice and methods they employed—individually, organizationally, and collectively—in motivating their peoples and in challenging the institutional and perceptual status quo of the larger society. But there is another Native individual whose name must be added to this list of indigenous luminaries—that person is Henry “Hank” Lyle Adams, an Assiniboine-Sioux.

Hank Adams: “The Most Important Indian”

In August 1972, Vine Deloria Jr., already a widely recognized Native intellectual, was invited to give an address at Alfred University in New York. Deloria responded by saying he had other obligations and would not be able to participate, but he encouraged university officials to invite Hank Adams instead. Adams, Deloria said, had not received much notoriety because he was “slight of build, very quiet, and remains on the rivers fighting the game wardens.” But, Deloria went on to say, “in my mind histories written a generation from now will say that he was the only significant figure to emerge in the postwar period of Indian history.”7

Two years later, Deloria followed up these brief laudatory comments with a full-length article about Adams that he boldly titled “The Most Important Indian.”8 Why would Deloria, already the author of several best-selling books and numerous articles, a former director of the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI), and possessed of one of the most brilliant and incisive minds of anyone, credit Adams, and not himself, with being the most important Indian?

In part, Deloria’s title reflects his own inherent intellectual modesty. Deloria was well aware in 1974 that he, too, had acquired a significant measure of national attention because of his work with NCAI (he was executive director from 1964 to 1967) and his paradigm-shifting books Custer Died for Your Sins; We Talk, You Listen; and God Is Red. But as an intense, astute, and well-read student of indigenous/state affairs, treaty rights, and intercultural relations, Deloria understood more clearly than anyone at the time that Hank Adams had already accomplished much in just the first three decades of his life and that he was far too self-effacing an individual to ever trumpet his already considerable achievements as an indigenous political strategist.

A few choice quotes from Deloria’s honorific essay explain very clearly why he felt so strongly about Adams’s personality and talents and clarifies why Adams deserves our attention now.

Adams is best known for his work in the fishing rights struggle in the Pacific Northwest…but for the record he was not only present but handled most of the planning and press releases. If there was a clear message coming from the early fish-ins, it was because Adams was able to gather sufficient resources together to get the protests under way, and the relatively sparse information on his presence there testifies to his commitment to getting the job done rather than gathering headlines.9

Over the past decade, Adams has become the leading theoretician on the Indian side of the question and has never abandoned his original contentions about the scope of the Indian fishing right.10

When Hank came into the fishing rights struggle the Indians were disheartened, disorganized, and certainly demoralized. In the decade in which he has been active, the situation has completely reversed. The right to fish guaranteed in the 1854–1855 treaties has been upheld in the Supreme Court and lesser federal courts and the tribes now have a fishing commission, with Hank as the new fish commissioner, to supervise their recently reaffirmed right to fish.11

In less than a year, then, Hank Adams has been highly instrumental in resolving two major and bitter confrontations between Indians and the federal government [The 1972 occupation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), and the 1973 occupation of Wounded Knee on Pine Ridge Indian Reservation].12

Eventually Hank won his [legal] points at least with the experts on the Indian side, and while many of the people hated to admit it, they had to conclude that Hank, a layman with no legal training, knew more about Indian treaty law than almost any of the lawyers working in the field.13

Three decades after Deloria wrote his article, Indian Country Today (ICT), the leading national Native newspaper, bestowed its first American Indian Visionary Award, in 2004, on a close friend of Adams’s, Billy Frank Jr. (Nisqually). Frank is a dedicated warrior who battled local, state, and federal officials for years in a relentless effort to secure and exercise his and his nation’s treaty-reserved right to fish. The next two recipients of this prestigious annual award were, not coincidentally, Vine Deloria Jr. (2005) and Hank Adams (2006). This dynamic trio of men, in the words of Jerry Reynolds,

would be a triumvirate of titans, giants who walked the earth to set people an example for centuries to come. In the contemporary West, one could imagine a telling focused on organizational effectiveness and the skill sets, neatly divided into practical activist (that would be Frank), intellectual strategist (Deloria), and far-sighted visionary (enter Hank Adams), that are required to accomplish the most complex and difficult tasks.14

The descriptions self-effacing and far-sighted visionary are only rarely attributed to the same person, but in Hank Adams’s case they are symbiotic, nearly organic characterizations of this shy, reclusive man, a person described by one writer as “tireless, fiery, chain-smoking, lights-out brilliant, and soul-deep loyal to a sacred undertaking.”15

As part of the festivities associated with the award, a number of friends and associates wrote short articles lauding the newspaper’s choice of Adams as the recipient. The editors, for example, who decide the recipient, noted that while the award was given in recognition of Adams’s vision, courage, discipline, and commitment, it was his “quiet modesty or natural humility that was found most admirable.”16 And they concluded the column by noting that “Adams is universally credited by those in the know—among those who were there—with finding peaceful solutions that saved lives in dangerous confrontations, with rescuing important historical and legal documents under great stress, and with becoming perhaps the most trusted Indian activist-intellectual formulating strategies and policy during the formative and often dangerous period of the American Indian Movement for rights and resources.”17

Suzan Shown Harjo, another leading Native activist, who has known Adams for years, had this to say about him in her essay: “Adams, like Deloria, was an intellectual who never set himself above the people. Unlike Deloria, who was highly educated and credentialed, Adams has a high school diploma and is largely self-taught.”18 And she noted that one of Adams’s real strengths during the fishing rights wars was his ability “to explain to large and small audiences the similarities and differences between civil rights and treaty rights, and how the laudable goal of ‘equal rights’ for women and people of color was a catchphrase used against Indians by treaty abrogationists to candy coat their objective of ending Indian rights and resources.”19

Jim Adams, an ICT reporter, described in his column the breadth of Adams’s intellectual activism: his efforts as a teen protesting Washington State’s extension of jurisdiction on the Quinault Reservation under P.L. 280; his work on voting and fishing rights with the National Indian Youth Council in the 1960s–1970s; his critical role in 1972’s Trail of Broken Treaties; his efforts to return the confiscated BIA documents; his brilliant negotiating skills in mediating a peaceful end to the 1973 siege at Wounded Knee; his travels to Nicaragua in the 1980s to express solidarity with the Miskito people; his engagement with Congress to have established the Little Bighorn National Monument (1980s–1990s); and finally, his battles in the 1990s with Washington State over the gaming initiative he felt was not in the best interest of the Native nations.20 Adams has lived a spirited life that has benefitted countless thousands of people.

Adams: A Personal History

Adams, an Assiniboine-Sioux, was born on May 16, 1943, on the Fort Peck Reservation, in Poplar, Montana. Early in his youth, his family moved to the Quinault Reservation, in Washington State. Before and during his high school years (he graduated with honors from Moclips High School in 1961), Adams, never averse to hard work, labored a quarter of the year as a migrant laborer, mill worker, clam harvester, and salmon fisherman to supplement his large family’s meager income.

In 1957, at the tender age of fourteen, Adams was exposed to one of the most pressing political issues of the day, the federal government’s unilateral grant to Washington of criminal and some civil jurisdiction over Indian Country in the state, including the Quinault Reservation via P.L. 280. He attended a meeting where Quinault members bitterly complained about the joint federal and state action to impose state jurisdiction without tribal consent.21 This undemocratic affront to Quinault sovereignty compelled Adams to act, and it set him on the path to challenge many other indigenous indignities and violations that he would learn about as he matured.

After graduating from high school, Adams enrolled at the University of Washington, where he studied for nearly two years. But his intellectual fervor and need to feel socially, morally, and politically engaged in the multitude of issues confronting Native peoples obliged him to abandon collegiate studies so that he could, in his words, “work full time on Indian community problems and concerns, and their study, which seemed both more immediately compelling and challenging than continuation of college.”22

Adams continued to immerse himself in the treaty and statutory law of Native nations and the state and federal government as applied in the state of Washington, and he soon came to realize the need for lobbying, communication, and the development of position papers that outlined strategies he believed were required to confront the harsh conditions that were negatively impacting indigenous peoples. Soon, an unpredictable confluence of events would culminate in 1963 with Adams joining up with the recently established National Indian Youth Council (NIYC), under the leadership of Clyde Warrior and Melvin D. Thom. NIYC had been established in 1961 in the wake of the American Indian Chicago Conference. The organization consisted largely of Native college students, and it was designed to be a more vocal advocacy and service organization than the senior national Indian organization, the NCAI.23

Adams was hired as the special projects director and he undertook a number of assignments in several states, including his home state, focusing especially on treaty-based fishing rights and Native self-governance. Within the next two years, Adams also got involved with the NCAI, which was led by Vine Deloria Jr. from 1964 to 1967, for whom he worked as a research secretary from 1964 to 1965. He also served as a staff student assistant in 1965 for the Tillie Walker–led United Scholarship Service (USS), an organization that provided financial assistance to Native students.

It was during this hectic period that Adams would become familiar with yet another Native interest organization, the Survival of American Indians Association (SAIA), which organized a demonstration and march on the Washington State Capitol, in Olympia, in December 1963 to protest the harassment, violence, and treaty violations that Native fishermen were experiencing at the hands of local whites and state game officials.24

By the mid-1960s, Adams was deftly juggling multiple jobs. In March 1964, he, along with Clyde Warrior and Bruce Wilkie, led over two thousand protesters in another major demonstration in Olympia challenging that state’s frequent assaults on Native fishers. But Adams did more than organize the march. Using all his skills, he plotted out a brilliant legal, public relations, and communication strategy that set the tone for the next decade of fishing rights and other sovereignty-based initiatives.

He enticed Charles Kuralt to bring out his CBS show to cover the saga at Frank’s Landing. He brought in [Marlon] Brando. He instigated and facilitated three stirring film documentaries: In the Shadow of the Evil; Treaties Made, Treaties Broken; and, especially, Carol Burns’ As Long As the Rivers Run. He helped to conceive and to secure the funding for publication of Uncommon Controversy, a report sponsored by the AFSC [American Friends Service Committee] on the Washington fishing rights controversy.25

More importantly, Adams made what would be the first of many visits to Washington, DC, in an effort to convince bureaucrats and lawmakers of the need to introduce legislation and improve regulations to protect Native fishing rights, as well as raise other issues.26 In fact, he moved to DC in 1965 and spent most of his time there for the next three years.

Adams, like many other young men at the time, received his draft notice for the army in 1964. He initially refused to be inducted, protesting the way the United States was violating Native treaty rights and declaring that “I owe and swear first allegiance to the sovereignty of my tribes and my people.”27 He later relented and honorably served from 1965 to 1967. While he was stationed at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, he served as the editor of the post newspaper, the Belvoir Castle, sharpening his already substantial writing and editorial skills. During his three-year military stint, besides his service duties, he also befriended Ralph Nader, made extensive contacts with key congressional committee members and their staffers with regards to indigenous issues, analyzed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act in an effort to see how this law could be amended to better serve the educational needs of Native youth in Indian Country, found time to serve as director of the Quileute Nation’s Community Action Program, and continued to provide leadership on the fishing rights struggle in Washington State.

In addition, he, along with others, carefully researched the status of Frank’s Landing, a six-acre tract of land in Washington State, proving that this important fishing site was a legally constituted part of the Nisqually Reservation. And he was a member of the National Indian Advisory Board and the Office of Economic Opportunity’s Upward Bound program.

Adams, SAIA, and Beyond

Nineteen sixty-eight was a watershed year for Adams. He returned to the West Coast and ratcheted up his involvement in local, regional, tribal, and national affairs. First, he became executive director of the SAIA, the nonprofit organization devoted to the development of Native community and broader public awareness of indigenous rights, particularly treaty rights. Second, he served as a consultant to the staff of Senator Robert F. Kennedy and the Senate’s Select Committee on Indian Education. Third, he was a member of the national steering committee for the Poor People’s Campaign, chaired first by Martin Luther King Jr., and then by Ralph D. Abernathy after King’s assassination.

When Adams was interviewed on July 3, 1968, about his and other Indians’ involvement in the Poor People’s Campaign, he said that while Natives had not achieved their immediate goals—passage of Senator George McGovern’s new Indian policy and an overhaul of the BIA—they had sparked a “responsible revolution” in the United States. He went on to say that a “committee of 10,000” had been formed to put pressure on federal officials to improve conditions for Native peoples. Adams, all of twenty-five years old, said that he was even considering running for Congress.28

In fact, he ran for Congress twice, in 1968 and 1972, as a Republican. He was defeated both times, but in the 1972 race, after having spent only one hundred dollars more than the filing fee, he garnered nearly 40 percent of the vote for the Republican nomination for US Representative in the third congressional district.29

But it was the US Supreme Court’s 1968 fishing rights decision, Puyallup Tribe v. Department of Game,30 that propelled Adams even further in his battle for treaty rights. In this case, the Court unanimously held that the state of Washington had jurisdiction over Nisqually and Puyallup fishers who had been convicted of exercising their rights to fish outside the reservation but at their “usual and accustomed places” in accordance with explicit treaty provisions.

Washington State had asserted that its prohibition of Native fishing outside the reservations had been spurred by conservation concerns, not because of racism or anti-treaty arguments. The state’s rationale, however, was not accepted by Adams or his colleagues in the struggle, Janet McCloud, Al and Maiselle Bridges, and others.31 In fact, the empirical evidence showed that while there were less than a thousand Native fishers in the entire state, there were more than 140,000 non-Indian fishers and more than 4,500 non-Indian commercial fishing enterprises. The commercial fishermen were taking about 80 percent of the salmon in Puget Sound and offshore before the meager number of Native fishermen even had a chance to fish.32

Adams, who was still residing in DC because of his part in the Poor People’s Campaign, led a large multiracial group of marchers toward the Supreme Court on May 29, 1968, to protest the Puyallup decision. When they were confronted by the Metropolitan Police Force, Adams was able to convince the officials to allow a small group of the protesters inside so they could deliver their petition to court personnel, requesting that the Court reconsider its ruling. The petition read, in part, “The fishing rights were not granted to the Tribes—they already possess them—but rather were retained by the Indians in their treaty agreements, and were guaranteed the protection of the US in their exercise.”33

After Robert Kennedy’s assassination, Adams returned to Washington State, where he fought valiantly to secure for Native nations their ancestral and treaty-based rights to fish. He was arrested and jailed numerous times, and in January 1971 he was shot in the stomach while maintaining vigilance over a set net for some friends.34 Adams said two white men had done the deed. The police, however, challenged his account. His assailants were never apprehended.

Meanwhile, the federal government had finally intervened as coplaintiff in the fishing rights battle with the state of Washington in September 1970 when it filed United States v. Washington on behalf of what would eventually be fourteen tribal coplaintiffs. But the tribes initially had little confidence in the lawsuit and worried that they might possibly lose all their treaty rights. Their fears seemed justified when George H. Boldt, a conservative Tacoma US district court judge, was assigned the case. Alvin Ziontz, one of the tribes’ attorneys, says that Adams was so concerned about the case that he went to Washington, DC, “to ask the government to drop the lawsuit, believing it did not represent the best interests of the Indians.”35

In an address to the Young Lawyers Section of the Bar Association on November 2, 1971, Adams identified several specific concerns about the way the federal government was handling the case. He said, for instance, that one of the government’s lawyers, within a month after the case had been filed in September of 1970, had filed motions for intervention on behalf of several tribes “who he had never before met with, and with whom he has since refused to meet to discuss that action or other actions where the tribes could use legal assistance.” He also said that the United States was refusing to “defend the tribes’ rights to regulate their fishing activities off the reservations, except within the limits allowed by the state,” something it had done previously.36

Despite Adams’s initial concerns, it was clear as the case developed that the Native nations and the United States had a powerful legal, moral, and strategic position vis-à-vis the state. Besides having Adams, who, even without a law degree, was granted legal representative status to appear on behalf of individual Nisqually Indians, the federal government also enlisted the expert witness help of Dr. Barbara Lane, an anthropologist. She was already widely recognized as one of the leading authorities on the Native nations of the Pacific Northwest and on indigenous treaty rights in general.37

This combination of talented individuals, buttressed by overwhelming historical and legal evidence, won the day for the nations, although the decision enraged thousands of non-Indian fishers and the state of Washington: the 1974 landmark ruling held that treaty Indians were entitled to 50 percent of the commercially harvested catch in Washington State.38 Once the Boldt decision had been delivered, Adams then easily segued into the equally difficult task of setting up the administrative network necessary to implement the decision. He served as interim coordinator in 1974 of the intertribal Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission (NIFC), which provided the staff and resources for the five treaty areas and the twenty tribes involved in the daily comanagement of the fisheries throughout western Washington. And he also served as the fisheries management coordinator for the Puyallup Tribe from 1974 to 1975. In that capacity he sought technical assistance and federal funding for the tribe’s fishery programs. He also “envisioned a corps of Native American fishery biologists and enforcement officers to regulate the fisheries.”39

Despite his lack of formal legal training, Adams already had nearly a decade of experience in legal research and judicial proceedings involving Indian tribal and individual treaty, statutory, constitutional, and other legal matters. He had represented himself and other Indian parties (including Native governments) in several state and federal courts on civil, criminal, and treaty matters.

As one example, in 1968 he had been arrested and appeared in Thurston County Superior Court as a result of activities during a series of demonstrations in support of Indian fishing rights, allegedly in violation of state regulatory salmon-fishing statutes. During the trial, Adams appeared pro se (for himself), waived jury trial, and was found guilty by the court. He appealed the judgment to the Court of Appeals in 1971. In State v. Adams40 he admitted to using a set net, but declared that his “only purpose was to demonstrate the irrationality of the statutes prohibiting the use of set nets,” and he therefore contended “that his action was ‘symbolic speech’ protected by the First Amendment to the US Constitution.”41 The court, however, was not swayed by Adams’s arguments and upheld his conviction.

Also in 1971, Adams was invited by an agency within the North Vietnamese government to lead a five-person indigenous delegation to Hanoi. Adams wrote that “we go to Vietnam as ‘pro-American’ Indian people, holding, however, a judgment that America has been predominantly wrong in its roles in Vietnam.”42 The trip did not take place, however, because of local developments in Washington State and the war’s prosecution. Adams continued to work privately with the families of several Americans held in Vietnam as prisoners of war or who were missing in action.

Like his good friend Vine Deloria Jr., Adams was also convinced that churches needed to be actively involved in correcting and adjusting their own policies and attitudes with regard to Native peoples. Between 1968 and1971, he served as a member of the Presiding Bishops Ad hoc Committee on More Indian Involvement for the National Episcopal Church, and he served on the Screening and Review Committee for the Episcopal Church, which reviewed grant applications to its General Convention Special Programs and its Northwest Region General Convention youth program.

In 1971, Adams chaired an ad hoc committee for new Indian politics and in his capacity developed a fifteen-point program for what the group was calling a New National Indian Policy that would “remove the human needs and aspirations of Indian tribes and Indian peoples from the workings of the general American political system and…reinstate a system of bilateral relationships between Indian tribes and the federal government.”43 This brilliant proposal, reprinted on page 89 of this volume, called for renewed treaty making, a constitutional amendment devoted to Native rights, and a permanent indigenous land base of 105 million acres. The gist of this proposal was reprised the next year during the Trail of Broken Treaties, when Adams masterfully crafted what has since become known simply as the Twenty-Point Proposal.

Finally, in May 1971, Adams was chosen by the National Indian Education Associaton (NIEA) to receive one of the organization’s Abraham Lincoln Awards for his “courageous action in pursuit of equal opportunities.” Adams was touted for his work with SAIA and his decadelong battle to have Native treaty rights upheld and tribal sovereignty recognized and supported.44

Broken Treaties, Wounded Knees, and Other Infirmities

By 1972, Adams was well known in Native circles as a gifted political, legal, and media strategist, as well as a savvy mediator. And he had amassed a wealth of experience and expertise on a number of hot-button topics: treaty-based fishing rights, criminal and civil jurisdiction, taxation matters, tribal sovereignty, and Indian land tenure, among others. Thus it came as no surprise that he would play a leading, if underappreciated, role in two of the major events in 1972–1973, the Trail of Broken Treaties Caravan/BIA takeover and the occupation of Wounded Knee.

The Trail of Broken Treaties Caravan, organized during the summer of 1972, started simultaneously in three cities: Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle. The activists, fueled by deep frustration and anger over ongoing treaty violations, the murders of Native individuals like Raymond Yellow Thunder, Leroy Shenandoah, and Wesley Bad Heart Bull, and a sense of betrayal by both tribal governments and federal officials, motored their separate automobile caravans on a meandering course across the country. The plan was to rendezvous in St. Paul, Minnesota, where they would finalize their strategy and develop specific goals before heading on to Washington, DC, where they planned to arrive on the eve of the national election in the hopes of securing the attention of the nation and the presidential candidates, President Richard Nixon and Senator George McGovern.

When the three groups converged in St. Paul, numbering more than three hundred individuals, they divided into small working groups to draft out their major concerns. Topics that surfaced included a call for treaty renewal, closer scrutiny of tribal government officials, and the role of the federal courts, as well as land rights, international law, hunting and fishing rights, and more. Once the groups had completed their assignments, all the data was delivered to Adams, who then isolated himself in a hotel room. In the course of the next forty-eight hours, he drafted one of the most comprehensive indigenous policy proposals ever devised, titled simply “The Twenty Points.” The proposal, building upon the fifteen-point one he had drafted the year before, “emphasized a return to bilateral treaty relations, restoration of 100 million acres of land, full tribal control of the reservation, religious and cultural freedom, and abolition of the BIA.”45

The Twenty-Point Proposal was so far-reaching in its scope that the existing structures and personnel of both tribal governments and the United States had profound difficulty comprehending its meaning. Russell Means notes in his autobiography that he learned at that time that Adams was “a genius at analyzing problems and interpreting the Indian outlook vis-à-vis the Eurocentric male worldview.”46

The story of what unfolded over the next several months once the caravan participants arrived in Washington, DC, including their eventual six-day takeover of the BIA, have been chronicled by a number of commentators.47 Adams had not been in the BIA at the critical takeover moment, but once the standoff began and federal marshals began to threaten the Indian occupants, he offered his services as mediator “in hopes of preventing bloodshed and violence.”48 For three days, he patiently and carefully negotiated a truce with the White House Task Force. As a result, the occupation ended without bloodshed, with the federal government offering travel money, some $66,650, to the demonstrators and declaring that they would study the activists’ Twenty-Point Proposal.

But when the Indians left the bureau, some of them were ferrying out hundreds of thousands of documents taken from the bureau’s files, some of which were classified. When the federal government realized what had transpired, they began a nationwide search in an effort to recover the documents. Once again, Adams stepped up and offered his services to help recover the documents. He was convinced that the capture of the papers by the Indians was undermining their cause.49

At Adams’s insistence, the documents began to be returned sporadically to his apartment in Washington, DC. When he would receive a batch, he would contact the FBI and have them picked up. By this time, Adams, who had forged a close bond with Jack Anderson and Les Whitten, two well-known investigative reporters, had contacted Whitten about the latest set of documents that had been returned, and together they planned to deliver three boxes of documents to the FBI on January 31, 1973. But as they and Anita Collins, a Paiute, were loading the boxes into Whitten’s car, a team of FBI agents surprised them and quickly arrested the three individuals. They were separately charged with having unlawfully received and concealed the documents “with intent to convert the said property to [their] own use and gain,” despite the fact that it was Adams who had been dutifully returning the documents to the FBI. Adams, Whitten, and Collins pled not guilty. The charges against them were serious: they each faced up to ten years in prison and a $10,000 fine.50

The government’s case against the three quickly fell apart, however, when BIA officials had to admit that Adams had scheduled an appointment with them the same morning they were arrested, and Adams’s lawyer brought forth a receipt for documents from Adams that was signed by the very FBI agent whose name and number were inscribed on the latest boxes of BIA papers—verifying that Adams had already returned some documents to the government.

Two weeks after the arrests, a federal grand jury refused to indict the three and concluded that far from receiving and possessing stolen property for their own use, Adams and Collins had “recovered the documents as a public service and were in the act of returning them to the government when arrested, while Whitten was merely covering the news event as a reporter.”51 The government quickly dropped all charges.52

Jack Anderson, who wrote a widely syndicated column at the time, had these laudatory, if slightly romanticized, things to say about Adams during this troubling episode: “Hank has a quiet dignity not at once apparent in his rumpled, careless appearance. He could fade into a casual crowd as easily as his forbears faded into the rolling prairie. He speaks as softly, too, as the Sioux once trod…His gentle manner, nonetheless, was but the moss on a character of granite. There is a nobility in his character that is missing in his features.”53

As the Trail of Broken Treaties Caravan members made their way home, a complicated confluence of events—interpretations of the 1868 Lakota-US treaty, tribal government corruption, police brutality, a conflict between Russell Means and Pine Ridge’s tribal chairman, Dick Wilson, and substantial land-leasing problems—were mushrooming on the Pine Ridge Reservation, in South Dakota, that would culminate in a seventy-two-day occupation, popularly known as Wounded Knee II. Once again, Hank Adams played the pivotal role as the crucial liaison who negotiated a peaceful resolution of this nationally known event. Adams served at the request of Leonard Garment, counsel to President Nixon, and at the request of the Oglala people. According to Deloria, “the major point of contention in the settlement was the promise of the White House to send out a team of negotiators to meet with the traditional chiefs and medicine man of the Oglala Sioux on the treaty of 1868.”54

The indigenous resurgence occurring throughout the nation compelled some in the US Congress, at tribal insistence, to consider the creation of a bipartisan commission to closely examine Native issues and intergovernmental relations. Adams, not surprisingly, was also involved in these discussions, and once the American Indian Policy Review Commission was established in 1975, he was charged with leading the task force on Indian treaties and the trust relationship.

Although Adams’s national profile became less visible after the late 1970s, he continued to be involved in a number of domestic and international affairs. At the national level, he remained active in the fishing rights affairs of the Northwest Native nations. He has also been involved in negotiating water rights accords between some Northwest Native peoples and non-Indian governments. He also fought to get the federal government to authorize, fund, and construct the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument Indian Memorial.55

In the mid-1980s, Adams, along with Russell Means and Glenn Morris, went on a monthlong fact-finding mission to Nicaragua to express their solidarity with the Miskito people of that state, who were in rebellion against the Sandinista government.56

While those familiar with Adams will recall his considerable work on fishing rights and major social movement events like the Trail of Broken Treaties, the scholarship and documents in this volume reveal a man with far greater interests and concerns than just those two important topics. Adams’s brilliance is evident in the bevy of writings, speeches, and testimonies on topics that also include civil rights, media and literature, trust and land issues, the American Indian Policy Review Commission, and taxation and economic concerns, as well as in his incisive critiques of federal, state, and indigenous agencies. But the sheer number of Adams’s works necessarily meant that I had to be selective in choosing which of his many writings to include, which to elide, and which to print in full. Space constraints required omitting a majority of the documents, but several of his particularly incisive and path-breaking works in fishing rights, the Trail of Broken Treaties, and several other areas are printed in full so readers can grasp the full weight and force of his intellect.

Adams has shown a nearly inexhaustible desire, leavened with an equal amount of sheer talent—five decades’ worth and counting—in an unrelenting effort to stabilize, strengthen, and improve the standing of indigenous peoples, minority groups, and the larger society as well. He is an exemplary Native activist, indeed.

Notes

1. Francis Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 3.
2. Ibid., 3–4.
3. Ibid., 4.
4. House Concurrent Resolution 108 (August 1, 1953), the infamous termination resolution, also euphemistically called the Indian Emancipation Proclamation, was the federal government’s official policy from 1953 until the mid-1960s. “Termination” entailed the legislative severing of federal benefits and support services to a number of Native nations, including the Menominee and Klamath.
5. P.L. 83-280 (August 15, 1953) delegated to five states—Washington, Oregon, Minnesota, California, and Nebraska (with a few reservation exemptions)—full criminal and some civil jurisdiction over Indian reservations and their residents within their borders and allowed other states to assume such jurisdiction if they chose to do so and fulfilled certain constitutional requirements.
6. See, e.g., Vine Deloria Jr., Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto, rpt. ed. (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1988) and Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties: An Indian Declaration of Independence, rpt. ed. (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1985); Alvin Josephy Jr., Red Power: The American Indians’ Fight for Freedom (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1971); Stan Steiner, The New Indians (New York: Delta Books, 1968); Adam Fortunate Eagle, Heart of the Rock: The Indian Invasion of Alcatraz (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 2002); and Daniel M. Cobb, Native Activism in Cold War America: The Struggle for Sovereignty (Lawrence: Univ. Press of Kansas, 2008).
7. Vine Deloria Jr., letter to Gary S. Horowitz of Alfred University, September 7, 1972.
8. Vine Deloria Jr., “The Most Important Indian,” Race Relations Reporter 5, no. 21 (November 1974): 26–28.
9. Ibid., 26.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid., 27.
12. Ibid., 28.
13. Ibid., 27.
14. Jerry Reynolds, “Honoring Hank Adams,” Indian Country Today (January 6, 2006).
15. Charles Wilkinson, Messages from Frank’s Landing: A Story of Salmon, Treaties, and the Indian Way (Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press, 2000), 44.
16. Editor’s Report, “Hank Adams: 2006 American Indian Visionary,” Indian Country Today (January 6, 2006).
17. Ibid.
18. Suzan Shown Harjo, “Hank Adams: An Unassuming Visionary,” Indian Country Today (January 6, 2006).
19. Ibid.
20. Jim Adams, “Hank Adams: American Indian Visionary 2006,” Indian Country Today (January 6, 2006).
21. Charles Wilkinson, Blood Struggle: The Rise of Modern Indian Nations (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2005), 110.
22. Hank Adams, “Personal Vitae,” author’s possession.
23. S. James Anaya, “NIYC,” in Native America in the Twentieth Century: An Encyclopedia, ed. Mary B. Davis, 373–374 (New York: Garland, 1996).
24. Fay G. Cohen, Treaties on Trial: The Continuing Controversy over Northwest Indian Fishing Rights (Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press, 1986), 69.
25. Wilkinson, Messages from Frank’s Landing, 44.
26. Vine Deloria Jr., Indians of the Pacific Northwest: From the Coming of the White Man to the Present Day (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1977), 162.
27. “Won’t Answer If Drafted, Says Adams,” Aberdeen World (Aberdeen, WA), March 18, 1964 .
28. “March of the Poor Held Failure for Indians,” The New York Times, July 4, 1968. Adams did run for Congress twice—in 1968 and 1972. He was defeated each time, although in the 1972 Republican primary he won more votes than his competitor in the largest counties.
29. “Indians Love Election Bids in Washington State Primary,” Frederick T. Haley Papers, Box 81, Folder 1, 1. (hereafter, Haley Papers).
30. 391 U.S. 392 (1968).
31. Cobb, Native Activism, 178–179.
32. Deloria, Indians of the Pacific Northwest, 165.
33. Cobb, Native Activism, 181.
34. Cohen, Treaties on Trial, 81. And see Deloria, Indians of the Pacific Northwest, 193–194.
35. Alvin J. Ziontz, A Lawyer in Indian Country: A Memoir (Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press, 2009), 95.
36. Haley Papers, Box 81, Folder 10, 3–4.
37. Deloria, Indians of the Pacific Northwest, 166.
38. 384 F. Supp. 312.
39. Sharon Malinowski, “Hank Adams,” in Notable Native Americans, ed. Sharon Malinowski and George H. J. Abrams, 3 (New York: Gale, 1995).
40. 3 Wash. App. 849 (1971).
41. Ibid., 850.
42. Haley Papers, Box 80, Folder 8, 1.
43. Alvin Josephy, “What the Indians Want: Wounded Knee and All That,” The New York Times, March 18, 1973.
44. Haley Papers, Box 81, Folder 2, 1.
45. Wilkinson, Blood Struggle, 141.
46. Russell Means with Marvin J. Wolf, Where White Men Fear to Tread: The Autobiography of Russell Means (New York: St. Martin’s, 1995), 227.
47. See, e.g., Deloria’s Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties and Joane Nagel’s American Indian Ethnic Renewal: Red Power and the Resurgence of Identity and Culture (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996).
48. Vine Deloria Jr., “Old Indian Refrain: Treachery on the Potomac,” The New York Times, February 8, 1973.
49. Mark Feldstein, “The Jailing of a Journalist: Prosecuting the Press for Receiving Stolen Documents,” Commonwealth Law and Policy 10 (Spring 2005): 147.
50. Feldstein, “The Jailing,” 148.
51. Jack Anderson, The Anderson Papers (New York: Random House, 1973), 173.
52. “Reporter Freed in Indian-Data Case,” The New York Times, February 16, 1973.
53. Anderson, The Anderson Papers, 179.
54. Deloria, Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties, 79.
55. Adams, “Hank Adams: American Indian Visionary 2006.”
56. Stephen Kinzer, “US Indians Enlist in the Miskito Cause,” The New York Times, November 11, 1985.