6

From the Great Depression to Alcatraz, 1929–1969

National Congress of American Indians, 1944

Katie Kirakosian

Chronology

1944		The NCAI is formed in November.
1946		The NCAI pushes to form the Indian Claims Commission.
1949		The NCAI urges President Harry Truman to veto the Navajo-Hopi Rehabilitation Bill because of the inclusion of a controversial Section 9. This would have created state jurisdiction on the Navajo and Hopi reservations. The bill is passed in 1950, but only after Section 9 is removed.
1950		The NCAI pushes to have an anti-reservation clause put into the Alaska statehood bill.
1954		In opposition to termination and assimilation policies earlier in the decade, the NCAI holds an emergency meeting.
1958		The NCAI sends a delegation to Puerto Rico to see Operation Bootstrap in action. This results in “Operation Bootstrap for the American Indian,” which is heard in Congress in 1960. Although it does not become law, it is a victory for those who oppose termination.
1961		NCAI members work with other organizations at the American Indian Chicago Conference in June 1961, which establishes the Declaration of Indian Purpose: The Voice of the American Indian.
1967		The NCAI intervenes over an unbalanced portrayal of George Armstrong Custer for an ABC television series. Under threat of FCC hearings, the series if quickly cancelled.
1968		The NCAI starts the Miss NCAI Scholarship Pageant.
1970		President Richard Nixon offers a Special Message on Indian Affairs, which essentially ends the federal government’s push for termination.
1975–1978		The NCAI helps advocate for the passage of key legislation, including the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act (1975), the Indian Health Care Improvement Act (1976), the American Indian Religious Freedom Act (1978), and the Indian Child Welfare Act (1978).
1977		NCAI Executive Director Charles Trimble (Oglala Sioux) steps down to head the United Effort Trust.
1988		The NCAI and other groups support the passage of the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, which promises economic stability for many tribal nations.
1990		The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act is passed, which establishes a process for museums and Federal agencies to return Native American human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony to federally recognized tribes.
1990		In response to the Supreme Court’s decision in Duro v. Reina, the Duro fix is passed. It confirms that recognized tribes do have jurisdiction over American Indians.
1994		President Bill Clinton issues a memorandum to all executive departments, explaining the government’s responsibility to consult with tribal nations.
1996		The NCAI and other groups push for passage of the Native American Housing Assistance and Self-Determination Act, which ensures control of housing-related funds and resources.
1996		President Bill Clinton signs Executive Order No. 13007, which is aimed at preserving and protecting Indian religious practices on federal lands by allowing the access and use of religious sites.
1997		The NCAI Youth Commission is founded.
2003		The NCAI works to start the Policy Research Center, which remains a key NCAI initiative.
2009		The NCAI works with other groups to ensure that the Embassy of tribal nations opens in Washington, D.C.
2009		The NCAI works with the Native American Rights Fund (NARF) to release Tribal Principles for Climate Change Legislation, which argues that climate-change legislation must consider tribal nations as sovereign partners.
2010		Through the support of the NCAI and other groups, the Tribal Law and Order Act and the Indian Health Care Improvement Act become law.
2010		President Barack Obama endorses the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, although the United States had initially voted against the Declaration in 2007.
2011		The NCAI makes keynote address at the National Congress of Australia’s First Peoples and co-hosts a board meeting with Canada’s Assembly of First Nations.
2013		The Violence against Women Act becomes law with added provisions to ensure that tribal governments protect Native women.
2015		The NCAI starts the First Kids 1st newsletter.

Introduction

The National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) is an intertribal, activist, non-profit organization that seeks to provide a space for its members to voice their concerns about, and offer solutions to, the complex issues in Indian country and, more broadly, faced by American Indians and Alaska Natives. Although not the first organization of its kind, today the NCAI is the “oldest, largest, and most representative American Indian and Alaska Native organization” (National Congress of American Indians). Since its founding in 1944, the NCAI’s mission has been focused on protecting treaties and sovereign rights, ensuring continued access to traditional culture for future generations, historicizing tribal governments and their right to nation-to-nation relations with other governments, and improving the overall quality of life for American Indians and Alaska Natives. Five key policy areas help structure the NCAI’s efforts: Community & Culture; Economic Development & Commerce; Education, Health, & Human Services; Land & Natural Resources; and Tribal Governance (National Congress of American Indians).

The 1940s

Cornell (1988) paints the 1940s and the decades that followed as a time when “Indians not only have demanded a voice in decision making but they have appropriated such a voice for themselves” (Cornell 1988, 5). The founding of the NCAI came at a crucial time because many politicians and Americans wanted full integration of American Indians and Alaska Natives. For example, in 1943 Congressman Karl Mundt questioned the need for an Indian Bureau at all, arguing that was “not more necessary than a bureau to handle problems for Italians, French, Irish, Negroes, or any other racial group” (Mundt 1943 as cited in Bernstein 1999, 114). Here the argument for American Indian integration into dominant society fueled others who felt tribal sovereignty was unnecessary and even contradictory.

Representatives of various tribes attending an organizational meeting of the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI), 1944. Their founding conference occurred in Denver, Colorado, due to its central location to the majority of reservations. It stood against federal termination and relocation policies that sought to end the legal status of all tribes. The NCAI remains active on various issues and is the oldest American Indian national organization in the United States. (nsf/Alamy Stock Photo)

Despite varied dissent, on November 15, 1944, nearly 80 delegates representing 50 tribes met at the Metropolitan Hotel in Denver, Colorado (National Congress of American Indians). This was an unprecedented gathering of intertribal leaders and included a diverse group of tribal councilors, religious leaders, and members of the BIA. By the time the group dispersed on November 18, 1944, the NCAI was officially formed.

Sidebar 1: The Road to the NCAI’s Founding

The founding of the NCAI must be contextualized within a wave of pan-Indianism or supratribalism that emerged in the 20th century, in “response to [the United States government’s] termination and assimilation policies” (National Congress of American Indians). In 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt tapped John Collier to serve as the commissioner for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, a position that he held until 1945. Collier was vehemently opposed to forced assimilation and set four new objectives for the BIA, which were “rebuilding Indian tribal societies, enlarging and rehabilitating Indian landholdings, fostering Indian self-government, and preserving and promoting Indian culture” (Blackman 2013, 54). He argued against boarding schools that took children away from their families and communities, which was also a concern noted in the Meriam Report. Instead, he pushed for local reservation-based schools that fostered traditional teachings and cultural pride. During his tenure as Indian Commissioner, Collier worked to ensure that the BIA’s monopoly on “Indian lives and affairs by the BIA was curbed, at least for a while, and the powers of the agents were checked; cultural preservation was encouraged and the suppression of indigenous religion reduced” (Cornell 1988, 93).

One key piece of legislation during Collier’s tenure that helped pave the way for the NCAI was the Indian Reorganization Act (IRA) of 1934. This act set a new course for American Indians and Alaska Natives (Cornell 1988), and the initiative was meant to facilitate Collier’s “dream of reviving Indian tribes and customs, thus restoring to Indians a sense of pride in their communities and themselves” (Taylor 1980, 17). Specifically, through this act, Collier and his staff worked to combat many of the devastating effects of colonization while also promoting self-governance, economic stability, and tribal rights. The spirit of the IRA led many to call Collier a communist, while he repeatedly had to dodge congressional attacks that relentlessly pushed for termination and assimilation following the IRA’s passage (Wilkinson 2006). None of this deterred Collier and his determination to see his vision realized, although he is still seen of as a controversial figure in Indian country today.

The founding of the NCAI was “a turning point in Indian affairs as Indians emerged as skilled political organizers and lobbyists for their interests at the national level” (Bernstein 1999, 112). Things like the Indian Reorganization Act “convinced a new generation of Indian that they could determine their own destiny” (Bernstein 1999, 112). While the NCAI changed the political landscape, concerns over tribal and BIA factionalism were a real threat during these early years.

Sidebar 2: A List of All NCAI Presidents and Executive Directors

Term		President
1944–1952		Napoleon B. Johnson (Cherokee)
1953–1959		Joseph R. Garry (Coeur D’Alene)
1960–1964		Walter Wetzel (Blackfeet)
1965–1966		Clarence Wesley (San Carlos Apache)
1967–1968		Wendell Chino (Mecalero Apache)
1969–1970		Earl Old Person (Blackfeet)
1971–1972		Leon F. Cook (Colville)
1973–1976		Mel Tonasket (Colville)
1977–1978		Veronica L. Murdock (Mohave)
1979–1980		Edward Driving Hawk (Sioux)
1981–1984		Joseph DeLaCruz (Quinault)
1985–1987		Reuben A. Snake, Jr. (Winnebago)
1988–1989		John Gonzales (San Ildefonso Pueblo)
1990–1991		Wayne L. Ducheneaux (Cheyenne River Sioux)
1992–1995		gaiashkibos (Lac Courte Oreilles)
1996–1999		W. Ron Allen (Jamestown S’Klallam)
2000–2001		Susan Masten (Yurok)
2002–2005		Tex Hall (Mandan/Hidatsa/Arikara)
2006–2009		Joe A. Garcia (Ohkay Owingeh)
2010–2013		Jefferson Keel (Chickasaw Nation)
2014–Present		Brian Cladoosby (Swinomish)
Term		Executive Director
1944–1948		Ruth Muskrat Bronson (Cherokee)
1949		Louis R. Bruce (Mohawk/Sioux) Edward Rogers (Chippewa)
1950		John C. Rainer (Taos Pueblo)
1951		Ruth Muskrat Bronson (Cherokee)
1952		Frank George (Colville)
1953–1959		Helen Peterson (Oglala Sioux)
1960–1963		Robert Burnett (Rosebud Sioux)
1964–1967		Vine Deloria, Jr. (Standing Rock Sioux)
1968		John Belindo (Navajo/Kiowa)
1969		Bruce Wilkie (Makah)
1970		Franklin Ducheneaux (Cheyenne River Sioux)
1971		Leo W. Vocu (Oglala Sioux)
1972–1977		Charles Trimble (Oglala Sioux)
1978		Andrew E. Ebona (Tlingit)
1979–1982		Ronald Andrade (Luiseno-Dieguneo)
1983		Silas Whitman (Nez Perce)
1984–1989		Susan Shown Harjo (Cheyenne)
1990–1991		A. Gay Klingman (Cheyenne River Sioux)
1992		Michael J. Anderson (Creek/Choctaw)
1993		Rachel A. Joseph (Shoshone/Paiute/Mono)
1994–2000		JoAnn K. Chase (Mandan/Hidatsa/Arikara)
2001–2014		Jacqueline Johnson Pata (Tlingit)

The NCAI accomplished a great deal by the close of the decade, such as establishing the Indian Claims Commission (ICC), working against termination legislation, and seeking an end to voting discrimination in states like Arizona and New Mexico (Cowger 2001). The NCAI also directly aided tribes under threat, like the Navajo and Hopi tribes in the late 1940s. To ensure solidarity over these and other issues, the theme of the 1948 convention was “One for All, All for One, United We Endure.” A document entitled “Treaty of Peace, Friendship, and Mutual Assistance” was meant to “erase past tribal differences and to unite the tribes in a common future” and was signed by all NCAI member tribes (Cowger 2001). Little did the NCAI know that they would need to be more united then ever on issues soon to come (Cowger 2001,74).

The 1950s

Although this decade was difficult for the NCAI, it did start with a decided victory. In 1950, the NCAI worked to add an anti-reservation clause in the Alaska Statehood bill, which allowed Alaska Natives to form reservations. However, a dire situation took hold of Indian country in this decade because of the efforts of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs from 1950 to 1953, Dillon S. Myer, who relocated and “integrated” thousands of American Indian adults from reservations to nearby cities (Fixico 2000). Myer had experience with relocations, as he was in charge of the War Relocation Authority (WRA), which oversaw the forced removal and relocation of Japanese Americans during World War II. In 1952, the federal government started the Urban Indian Relocation Program, which pushed for the assimilation of American Indians into dominant society. This initiative was continued by the next commissioner as well, Glenn Emmons (1953–1960). In 1953, Congress introduced House Concurrence Resolution 108 (HCR 108), which required that “the end of reservations and federal services and protections be completed ‘as rapidly as possible’ ” (Wilkinson 2006, 57). Coupled with this was Public Law 280, which gave states criminal jurisdiction in over half of the Indian reservations (Champagne and Goldberg 2012). The 1953 conference became a critical meeting for the NCAI. Yellowtail spoke at the convention, referring to termination as “a conspiracy.” He was clear that “The job of the Indians everywhere is to arrest and defeat these bills.… There is no time for bickering among tribal leaders; it is instead time for the united action against the common enemy” (Yellowtail as cited by Hoxie 2012). Also during this conference, the membership elected Joseph Garry (Coeur d’Alene) as the group’s third president. A master organizer and politician at heart, he worked tirelessly visiting numerous tribes across the country to explain what termination would mean for them (Fahey 2012). His efforts were also supported by the NCAI’s Executive Director, Helen Peterson (Oglala Sioux), who served alongside Garry. Together they worked to thwart federal assimilation and termination efforts and to ensure that self-determination was just that. Three things supported their vision for self-determination: honoring treaty rights, self-governance, and economic self-sufficiency (Tomblin 2009, 226).

In February 1954, Garry called an emergency conference in Washington, D.C., which was covered by thousands of media outlets (National Congress of American Indians). By the close of the conference, the group had proposed a Point IX program that argued for long-term self-sufficiency and had also approved a “Declaration of Indian Rights.” Although the Point IX program was never implemented, it proved that American Indians could advocate for themselves. Another victory later that year included voting down Public Law 280. Here Yellowtail’s words from the year before had come to fruition as the NCAI membership worked together, more united then ever before, to speak out against termination and relocation.

In 1958, the NCAI put together a 14-member delegation to visit Puerto Rico and learn more about “Operation Bootstrap” (Goldstein 2012). More specifically, they wanted to see how Puerto Rico had successfully positioned itself as “foreign in a domestic sense” while also ensuring “political autonomy” (Goldstein 2012,85). Upon their return, they helped put together a proposal entitled “Operation Bootstrap for the American Indian,” which resulted in congressional hearings starting in 1960 (U.S. Government Printing Office 1960). While this did not become law, the push for termination quieted somewhat.

The 1960s

According to Cowger (2001), the NCAI has always been seen as a moderate group. This was in extreme contrast to more militant groups like the National Indian Youth Council (NIYC) and the American Indian Movement (AIM), which were both founded in the 1960s and saw the NCAI as a “paper tiger.” While the moderate road forged by the NCAI may have led to its survival, it likely also led to some growing pains during this decade.

The NCAI worked off of the momentum of its earlier “Operation Bootstrap” initiative to write the “Declaration of Indian Purpose: The Voice of the American Indian” in 1961, which focused on the importance of tribal sovereignty and preserving American Indian and Alaska Native identity. Many elements of this declaration were later implemented in President Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” (National Congress of American Indians). Later in his administration, Johnson began the Office for Economic Opportunity (OEO), which was often at odds with the BIA, which they saw as “anti-Indian.” OEO’s efforts were focused on “not only economic development but expertise development,” which led to numerous reservations starting programs that were not dependent on the BIA (Tomblin 2009, 229).

This decade saw troubles in Indian country as well. As the executive director of the NCAI from 1964 to 1967, Deloria is credited with returning “the organization back to financial and organizational stability” (Cowger 2001, 4). Unfortunately, these were difficult years internally for the NCAI for other reasons, with issues still boiling over in regard to termination as well as the complex identities and histories of various reservation and urban American Indian groups, who had strong communities in Los Angeles, Oakland, Chicago, and Minneapolis, for example (Deloria, Jr. 2014). In 1964, the NCAI and the Affiliated tribes of Northwest Indians revoked membership from the Menominee Indians of Wisconsin over their internal push for termination, which the NCAI vehemently opposed. By 1968, however, tribal leadership had changed, and termination was off the table, leading the NCAI to reverse several membership decisions (Wilkinson 2006, 182).

As mentioned, early in the decade another Indian organization, the National Indian Youth Council (NIYC), was formed and had a rather different vision for American Indians’ future as well as methods to attain this vision. Many leaders in the NIYC had been born on reservations and represented a new group of Indian activists who were tired of the tactics of earlier generations. The NIYC supported various initiatives and protests in the decade, like the 1964 fish-ins in Washington State. The NCAI focused its efforts in different ways. For example, the first Miss NCAI Scholarship Pageant was held in 1968, which was intended to empower and celebrate young Native women for their many gifts. Also in 1968, the Indian Civil Rights Act (ICRA) was passed and was aimed at ensuring civil rights in Indian country. When applying the ICRA, the courts have ensured that tribal customs and traditions are considered and that federal courts are only involved after tribal processes and courts have been involved.

The 1970s

During this time, the NCAI continued its moderate path. This lies in contrast to three groups founded in the previous decade: the American Indian Movement (AIM), the Indians of All Tribes (IOAT), and the United Native Americans (UNA). These groups were more militant in focus and took part in numerous occupations throughout the country to bring attention to their cause. Instead, the NCAI focused its efforts on working within Washington to push for change. According to Charles Trimble (Oglala Sioux), who served as executive director from 1972 until 1977, the NCAI almost collapsed in 1970 due to financial mismanagement the year before.

This decade bore witness to many positive changes for American Indians and Alaska Natives. Although such policies had waned by this time, in 1970, President Nixon officially ended the federal government’s push for tribal termination. Instead, he endorsed self-determination, which was a huge victory supported by the NCAI. In part, Nixon and his staff argued, “We have concluded that the Indians will get better programs and that public monies will be more effectively expended if the people who are most affected by these programs are responsible for operating them” (Nixon 1970).

Congress passed several key pieces of legislation with the support of groups like the NCAI, including the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act (1975), the Indian Health Care Improvement Act (1976), and finally, the American Indian Religious Freedom Act and the Indian Child Welfare Act (1978). Ironically, this also came at a time when there was a “white backlash” from 1976 to 1977 that “saw the rise of state-level anti-tribal groups,” which sent over a dozen pieces of legislation to Congress “calling for reversing Indian hunting and fishing rights court victories, terminating federal-tribal relations, and abrogating the Indian treaties” (Trimble 2009). The NCAI was able to push through, with the help of other groups like the American Indian Law Center, NARF, AIM, and the NTCA under the name “United Effort Trust.”

The 1980s

The early 1980s were difficult years in terms of securing strong NCAI leadership. By 1984, Susan Shown Harjo (Cheyenne) became the executive director. Being well connected in Washington and around the country, Harjo ensured that the NCAI had a strong presence on Capitol Hill. She helped push for the Tribal Government Tax Status Act of 1983, various programs aimed at economic development, and the establishment of the National Museum of the American Indian.

In 1983, President Ronald Reagan issued a statement on Indian Policy, which pushed for local control of tribal affairs. Reagan was clear that he saw the federal government’s role with Indian nations as a government-to-government relationship. Partly in response to this, the NCAI published an extensive report that same year, entitled Tribal Governments at the Crossroads of History. Environmental protection, especially the impacts of nuclear waste, was an increasing concern that led to the 1988 publication of Environmental Protection in Indian Country: A Handbook for Tribal Leaders and Resource Managers. As with each earlier decade, the NCAI continued its work with other groups to ensure the passage of important legislation. The most important piece of legislation to come out of this was the passage of the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of 1988, which set the state for economic security for federally recognized tribal nations.

The 1990s

This decade began with the passage of two key pieces of legislation supported by many groups, including the NCAI. These were the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) and the Indian Arts and Crafts Act. Since that time, the NCAI has been critical of the actual achievements of both laws by the federal government. In 1990, the Supreme Court also heard Duro v. Reina and ruled that Indian tribes could not prosecute nonmember Indians on their lands. In other words, Indian tribes only have jurisdiction over their own tribal members. This came as a blow to American Indians and Alaska Natives, but it was soon corrected with the Congressional “Duro fix” the following year, which determined that due to the powers of self-government, Indian tribes indeed have jurisdiction over all Indians (both members and non-members). In 1994, President Bill Clinton issued a memorandum to all executive departments, explaining the government’s responsibility to consult with tribal nations. In 1996, Clinton also issued Executive Order 13007, which was aimed at protecting and preserving Indian religious practices and sacred sites located on federal lands. Finally, in 1996, the Native American Housing Assistance and Self-Determination Act was passed, which sought to address the housing crisis in Indian country. This bill has been amended and reauthorized numerous times since its initial passage. In 1997, the NCAI started the Youth Commission, which brings together youth aged 16 to 23 to consider issues facing their communities, and unique ways to met those challenges.

The New Millennium

The new millennium has seen many new NCAI initiatives and programs. In 2003, the Policy Research Center was formed, which is a “think tank” focused on unique issues faced by tribal communities across the United States. In 2009, the Embassy of tribal nations was opened in Washington, D.C. According to then NCAI president Jefferson Keel, “For the first time since settlement, tribal nations will have a permanent home in Washington, D.C., where they can more effectively assert their sovereign status and facilitate a much stronger nation-to-nation relationship with the federal government” (National Congress of American Indians). Since 2010, the NCAI has worked with other groups to support the passage of the Tribal Law & Order Act (2010), the Indian Health Care Improvement Act (2010), and the Violence Against Women Act (2013) with added provisions to ensure that tribal governments protect Native women.

The NCAI has also focused on larger global issues as well as making connections to other indigenous populations in the new millennium. For example, the NCAI partnered with the Native American Relief Fund (NARF), which now represents the NCAI on matters related to climate change. In 2009, the two groups proposed Tribal Principles for Climate Change legislation, which brought attention to the fact that American Indians and Alaska Natives are incredibly vulnerable when it comes to climate change and should, therefore, be closely consulted about climate change legislation. In 2010, President Barack Obama endorsed the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. This was a symbolic victory for indigenous groups, as the United States had initially voted against the declaration in 2007 (along with Australia, Canada, and New Zealand). In 2011, the NCAI was invited to give the keynote address at the National Congress of Australia’s First People, and they held the first-ever joint meeting with Canada’s Assembly of First Nations (National Congress of American Indians).

The NCAI has focused its energies on many new initiatives to involve Native youth. Successful programs include the NCAI’s National Native Youth Cabinet (NNYC), which was established to support the growth of tomorrow’s tribal leaders (aged 16 to 25). In 2012, it also formed an online community for Native youth called NDN Spark. The NCAI also offers internships and fellowship, including two specifically focused on tribal policy and governance and health disparities.

In his 2015 State of Indian Nations address, current NCAI president Brian Cladoosby (Swinomish) urged the NCAI to consider its part in a larger story “of pride and resilience book-ended by self-determination on either end” (Cladoosby 2015). Cladoosby is optimistic that today, American Indians and Alaska Natives are living in a time “that our ancestors prayed for” (Cladoosby 2015). If it were not for the determination of groups like the NCAI, the future of American Indians and Alaska Natives would be less certain. Over more than seven decades, the NCAI has served as a voice, although never the voice, for Indian country. The NCAI is keenly aware that its members come from an incredibly diverse group of nations, and it sees the value in bringing various perspectives together to consider issues that affect every corner of Indian country.

Biographies of Notable Figures

Joseph Garry (Coeur d’Alene) and Helen Peterson (Oglala Sioux)

One notable duo who can be credited with saving the NCAI as well as countless Indian nations are Joseph Garry (Coeur d’Alene) and Helen Peterson (Oglala Sioux), by working together to push against federal assimilation and termination efforts during their tenure. Garry was elected NCAI President in 1953, with Peterson named executive director that same year. They served together through the end of that tumultuous decade. As leaders and organizers, they were able to bring together diverse Native and non-Native groups around issues of mutual concern.

Garry was born in 1910 and grew up on the Coeur d’Alene reservation in Idaho. He served in the U.S. Marines in World War II and the Korean War and was elected to his tribal council. He was also the president of the Affiliated tribes of the Northwest Indians. Garry set his sights on becoming NCAI’s President in 1953 and, according to Peterson, “ran a very dignified and sophisticated campaign to become president” (Peterson as cited in Fahey 2012, 30). Garry ensured the support of many in that year’s elections, especially when Clarence Wesley officially nominated him. Peterson was born in 1915 on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. She grew up in Nebraska, in the house of her Cheyenne grandmother, who was Black Kettle’s niece (Varnell and Hanson 1999). She went to the NCAI after working in Denver’s Department of Health and Welfare, getting minority voters registered.

Upon being elected, Garry and Peterson inherited a troubling situation. They were faced with the impending demise of all tribal nations through a series of congressional bills, and the NCAI was nearly bankrupt. There were also a series of congressional committees at that time, focused on the effectiveness of tribal governance and law enforcement on reservations and possible land taxation. Congress also wanted to allow the sale of liquor and firearms to American Indians, explaining that their efforts were aimed at equal rights for all. Garry and Peterson, however, sensed ulterior motives (Fahey 2012). Together they traveled the country asking for donations and soliciting new members to help fund the NCAI’s much-needed presence in Washington, D.C. During that time, Arrow was of little help, although established as a fundraising arm for the NCAI. Garry and Peterson were unimpressed with Arrow’s efforts and urged the closure of its New York office. They also worked tirelessly against McCarthyism during that time, as the NCAI was at times labeled a Communist group.

In early 1954, Garry and Peterson called an emergency conference focused on these issues. In his press release, Garry explained that the meeting was to “develop constructive programs which will serve Indian values and serve the best interests of the nation by protecting its national honor” (Rosier, 175). Amazingly, they were able to organize this meeting in less than three weeks, given the urgency of the situation. In a letter from Peterson to Garry, Peterson was clear that “The convention this year may very well be the most critical for Indians in this century … There can be no doubt that the accumulated bills in the last session were the gravest threat to Indian property and rights since the Allotment Act of 1887 … To consolidate the gains of this year and to plan for the future may never be more important than now” (Peterson as cited in Fahey 2012). Garry and Peterson were careful to enlist the support of other groups as well, including the Association of American Indian Affairs. At the time, this meeting was the largest inter-tribal demonstration, with representatives from 42 tribes. The conference also included individuals from 19 non-Indian organizations who were equally concerned with the current situation (Fahey 2012). Garry and Peterson also worked to show that Indians could solve their own problems, as outlined by Congress.

By 1955, the threat of termination had lessened, as supportive Democrats gained control of Congress, with increased power in 1957 as well. The challenges experiences during these years helped strengthen the NCAI and also made American Indian and Alaska Natives more politically savvy. In 1956, the NCAI helped support a program called “Register, Inform Yourself and Vote.” Politicians took note of these important changes during this time as well and recognized Native Americans and Alaska Natives as viable constituents with unique needs and challenges (Cowger 2001). Peterson collaborated with McNickle to start a summer workshop series for Native American students at Colorado College, which began in 1956 and ended in 1970. These workshops set the stage for countless collegiate ethnic studies departments across the country. Peterson was the NCAI’s first female director, and when she left office, she had been the longest-serving executive director as well.

By the end of Garry’s and Peterson’s tenure, the NCAI “had become a sophisticated organization formulating policies reflecting the opinions and views of Indian Country, as well as organizing lobbying skills that battered the US government’s termination policy, protected Indian land rights and promoted Indian civil rights” (Ryser 2012, 58). Together, they are credited with getting the NCAI back on solid ground during one of the organization’s most challenging times.

Vine Deloria, Jr.

Another important figure in the NCAI in the 1960s was Vine Deloria, Jr. (Standing Rock Sioux). Born in 1933 and raised partly on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, he came of age during a crucial time in American Indian history. Deloria, Jr. came from a prominent family, with his great-grandfather a noted medicine man, his grandfather an Episcopal priest, his aunt an anthropologist and linguist, and his father also an Episcopal priest. After serving in the U.S. Marines, he earned a B.A from Iowa State University and a B.D. in theology from Augustana Lutheran Seminary in 1963. Shortly thereafter, he worked for a time in Denver in the United Scholarship Service, which helped American Indians get scholarships to attend college.

By the time he ran for executive director in 1964, Deloria, Jr. was utterly discouraged with the state of Indian activism. The NCAI had shrunk significantly and only represented 19 tribes, although, by the end of his tenure, membership had swelled to 156 tribes (Lawrence 2010). The group was also yet again in financial straights, which he corrected during his time as executive director. In that role, he often testified before Congress on civil rights and other issues related to American Indians. For example, he testified before the Senate Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights of the Committee on the Judiciary on a bill that later became the Indian Civil Rights Act of 1968 (Deloria and Wildcat 2006). In that testimony, he argued that tribes would need funding to train Indian trial judges. His suggestion is credited with leading to the establishment of the National American Indian Court Judges Association in 1969 (Deloria, Jr. and Wildcat 2006).

Deloria, Jr. found that American Indians themselves, who were very focused on internal squabbles, stymied many of his efforts. There were also many other American Indian groups forming at the time, and they had visions different from the more moderate NCAI, which required his attention as well. Deloria, Jr. was always careful to downplay the many occupations of key locations across the country by more militant American Indian groups as chance happenings, for fear that it would undue his and the NCAI’s hard work in Washington, D.C. In the end, his vision for activism was much different from that of many at the time. It was more in line with the NCAI’s in that he saw the need for change from within the federal government. He wrote about his NCAI experiences in part in Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (Deloria 1969).

Concerned about the general public’s understanding of Native American history, Deloria, Jr. and the NCAI worked during this period to ensure that American Indians and Alaska Natives were fairly portrayed and equally represented in the media. In 1967, for example, the NCAI learned that ABC was airing a television series on Custer. The group protested the series because of its unbalanced portrayal of Custer, and they sued for equal airtime. Although the general public was largely unaware of the struggles occurring behind the scenes over this series, the NCAI was able to have the series cancelled after only nine episodes when FCC hearings became imminent (Deloria, Jr. 2014).

His time in the NCAI had a profound effect on Deloria, Jr. Most directly, his time as NCAI’s executive director increased his national stature. As he recalls, he began writing during that time because “I wanted to give good briefings before Congress. I got to love old documents and learning how to root around in them” (Deloria, Jr. as cited in Lawrence 2010). Ultimately, Deloria, Jr.’s belief that there needed to be more trained Indian lawyers led to his resignation in 1967 and his enrollment in the University of Colorado Law School (Lawrence 2010). Deloria, Jr. still consulted with the NCAI during that time and also published many short columns in the Sentinel, the NCAI’s quarterly newsletter (Lawrence 2010). Deloria, Jr. was a prolific writer, publishing a book every few years—20 books throughout his life, many of which were bestsellers.

Deloria, Jr. worked to support fishing rights, starting in the 1960s. For most of the 1970s, he served as the chairman of the Institute for the Development of Indian Law and on the board for the National Museum of the American Indian. He also came to the assistance of the Iroquois Six Nations in their wampum belt recovery. In 1974, he was called as a witness for the defense in the Wounded Knee Trials, where he collaborated with attorney John Thorne. In the 1990s, he continued his activism and spoke out against federal acknowledgment. While testifying before Congress, he argued, “It is certainly unjust to require Indian nations to perform documentary acrobatics for a slothful bureaucracy.” For three decades (until his retirement in 2000), he taught at various universities, and he helped to establish a master’s program in American Indian studies at the University of Arizona.

Further Reading

Bernstein, Alison R. American Indians and World War II: Toward a New Era in Indian Affairs. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999.

Champagne, Duane and Carole E. Goldberg. Captured Justice: Native Nations and Public Law 280. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2012.

Cladoosby, Brian. State of Indian Nations address. http://www.ncai.org/about-ncai/state-of-indian-nations (accessed September 24, 2015).

Cornell, Stephen. The Return of the Native: American Indian Political Resurgence. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Cowger, Thomas W. The National Congress of American Indians: The Founding Years. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001.

Deloria, Vine, Jr. Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto. Norman: The University of Oklahoma Press, 2014 [1969].

Deloria, Vine, Jr. and Daniel R. Wildcat. Destroying Dogma: Vine Deloria, Jr. and His Influence on American Society. Golden, CO: Fulcrum Publishing, 2006.

Fahey, John. Saving the Reservation: Joe Garry and the Battle to Be Indian. Seattle: The University of Washington Press, 2012.

Fixico, Donald Lee. The Urban Indian Experience in America. Albuquerque: The University of New Mexico Press, 2000.

Goldstein, Alyosha. Poverty in Common: The Politics of Community Acton During the American Century. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 2012.

Hoxie, Frederick E. This Indian Country: American Indian Political Activists and the Place They Made. New York: The Penguin Press. 2012.

Lawrence, Michael Anthony. Radicals in their Own Time: Four Hundred Years of Struggle for Liberty and Equal Justice in America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2010.

National Congress of American Indians. www.ncai.org (accessed September 24, 2015).

Nixon, Richard. President Nixon, Special Message on Indian Affairs, July 8, 1970. http://www.ncai.org/resources/consultations/nixon-special-message-on-indian-affairs (accessed on September 25, 2015).

Ryser, Rudolph C. Indigenous Nations and Modern States: The Political Emergence of Nations Challenging State Power. New York: Routledge. 2012.

Tomblin, David C. Managing Boundaries, Healing the Homeland: Ecological Restoration and the Revitalization of the White Mountain Apache Tribe, 1933–2000. Dissertation, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. 2009.

Truman, Harry S. 233. Veto of Bill Establishing a Program in Aid of the Navajo and Hopi Indians. http://trumanlibrary.org/publicpapers/viewpapers.php?pid=1251 (accessed September 24, 2015).

Varnell, Jeanne and M.L. Hanson. Women of Consequence: The Colorado Women’s Hall of Fame. Boulder: Big Earth Publishing. 1999.

Wilkinson, Charles F. Blood Struggle: The Rise of Modern Indian Nations. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. 2006.

The Anti-Discrimination Act, Alaska Natives, 1945

Caskey Russell

Chronology

1741		The first recorded contact Europeans had with Tlingits comes on July 17, 1741, when Russian Captain Chirikov anchors his ship, the St. Paul, near Sitka. The St. Paul stayed over a week in Tlingit territory, during which time Chirikov sent two longboats with armed Russian sailors to shore in order to replenish fresh water casks. Neither longboat returned. Toward the end of their stay, the crew of the St. Paul saw Tlingits in canoes paddling close to shore and attempting to communicate with the Russians (of course, the Russians couldn’t understand Tlingit language), but the canoes did not come near the St. Paul, which departed without ever learning the fate of the missing sailors. European and Tlingit accounts of what happened to those Russian sailors differ greatly. The European version assumes the crews were killed by hostile Natives. The Tlingit oral account tells the local Tlingits welcomed the Russian sailors. The sailors had made known to the Tlingits that they feared the trip back to Russia in the coming winter, and wished to defect. The sailors eventually married Tlingit women and became prominent members of the Tlingit village of Klawock.
1830–1860		Smallpox epidemics. The first major smallpox epidemic struck Alaska in the 1830s. Tlingit villages across the southeast were devastated. Another smallpox epidemic would strike in the 1860s. That epidemic directly affected Roy Peratrovich: his grandmother was one of the few survivors of the destruction of the Kuiu Kwaan (village on Kuiu Island). She fled Kuiu and relocated to Klawock, where Roy’s mother would later be born.
1867		Sale of Alaska. The Treaty of Purchase between American and Russia stated that the Czar would sell to the United States the territory and dominion—on the continent and on islands—that he possessed at the time. Many Tlingit activists and scholars, along with historians both Native and non-Native, have pointed out that Russia “possessed” very little Tlingit territory at the time (a military stockade and a few small forts). The same situation applies with much of the Native territory in Alaska and thus calls into question what exactly was sold.
1885		William Paul is born.
1908		Roy Peratrovich is born.
1911		Elizabeth Wanamaker is born.
1912		Founding of the Alaskan Native Brotherhood (ANB).
1915		Founding of the Alaskan Native Sisterhood (ANS).
1920		William Paul is admitted to the Alaska Bar, becoming the first Alaskan Native lawyer.
1923		William Paul is elected to Alaskan Territorial Legislature, becoming the first Alaskan Native legislator.
1924		Indian Citizenship Act declares that all non-citizen Indians born within U.S. territory would be considered U.S. citizens.
1925		William Paul is re-elected to the Alaskan Territorial Legislature. Also in 1925, Alaska’s Territorial Legislature enacts a law requiring voters to be able to read and write English. Paul adds a provision to the law to allow anyone who had previously voted, to continue voting regardless of literacy in English, which enables many Alaskan Natives to keep voting in important elections.
1931		Roy Peratrovich marries Elizabeth Wanamaker in Bellingham, Washington, where both attend Western College of Education.
1935		U.S. Congress authorizes the U.S. Court of Claims to adjudicate lawsuits against the U.S. government brought by Tlingit and Haida tribes.
1937		The ANB organizes Tlingit and Haida Central Council in order to sue the U.S. government for land and property theft.
1940		Roy Peratrovich becomes Grand President of the ANB.
1941		Roy and Elizabeth Peratrovich move to Juneau, where they encounter firsthand the legalized segregation and discrimination that Alaskan Natives had faced for decades in cities across Alaska.
1943		Roy and Elizabeth’s first Alaska Anti-Discrimination Bill is introduced and subsequently defeated in the Alaskan Territorial Legislature.
1945		Roy and Elizabeth’s second Alaska Anti-Discrimination Bill is introduced in the Alaskan Territorial Legislature on February 8. It is passed after a two-hour debate. Elizabeth and Roy Peratrovich are the only Natives who speak on the floor of the Senate during the debate. The bill is signed into law on February 16, becoming the first comprehensive anti-discrimination legislation in America.
1958		Elizabeth Peratrovich dies.
1959		Alaska becomes the 49th state.
1977		William Paul dies.
1988		Alaska’s State Legislature establishes February 16 as Elizabeth Peratrovich Day—an official state holiday in memory of Elizabeth Peratrovich and her advocacy for civil rights.
1989		Roy Peratrovich dies.

Alaska Natives and the Fight against Discrimination

The gallant fight that Alaska Natives are waging today for the defense of their rights is a fight against racist principles that threaten all Americans. For the rights of each of us in a democracy can be no stronger that the rights of our weakest minority.

Felix Cohen, 1948

In Juneau, Alaska, on February 8, 1945, the Alaskan Territorial Legislature was in session debating a bill designed to put an end to legalized racial discrimination and segregation in Alaska’s public buildings and privately owned businesses. Sitting in the packed public gallery amid a host of Alaskan Natives during the 1945 legislative session were the architects of the anti-discrimination bill: Elizabeth and Roy Peratrovich, both Tlingit Indians. Roy and Elizabeth had introduced a similar anti-discrimination bill before the legislature two years earlier, in 1943, but it had been defeated, in part because of a clause that would have desegregated public schools. That clause had been removed when the bill came up again before the legislature in 1945. Desegregating public schools would have to wait.

Alaskan legislative procedure at the time allowed for the public to address the legislature during open debate, so both Roy and Elizabeth were able to speak directly to any legislators who opposed their bill. The bill passed the House by a large margin, but was held up in the Senate, culminating in a two-hour debate, where racist senators lashed out against the idea of legally prohibiting segregation. Senator Allen Shattuck represented the feelings of many non-Indians when he told Roy during the debate, “Mr. Peratrovich, as I mentioned to you before, this bill will aggravate, rather than allay, the little feeling that now exists. Our Native cultures have ten centuries of white civilization to encompass in a few decades” (Dauenhauer 1994, 537).

Roy replied, “Only an Indian can know how it feels to be discriminated against. Either you are for discrimination or you are against it, accordingly as you vote on this bill” (Dauenhauer 1994, 537). This was not the first time Senator Shattuck and Roy Peratrovich disputed the myth of white superiority. Several years earlier, in response to comments made by Shattuck regarding Indians’ low level of civilization, Roy had written, “I am wondering just what they [white people] call civilization. Looking over the court record in Alaska, one wonders if the white man is really civilized” (Dauenhauer 1994, 534).

Elizabeth Peratrovich’s debate with Senator Shattuck during the 1945 session is best remembered by history. Elizabeth sat calmly knitting during much of the debate. When her turn to speak came, Elizabeth stood before the all-white male Senate and ripped apart the pro-segregation senators. The following excerpt, taken from the Senate Record, is a small part of that confrontation:

Senator Shattuck: This legislation is wrong. Rather than being brought together, the races should be kept further apart. Who are these people, barely out of savagery, who want to associate with us whites, with 5,000 years of recorded civilization behind us?

Elizabeth Peratrovich: I would not have expected that I, who am barely out of savagery, would have to remind the gentlemen with 5,000 years of recorded history behind them of our Bill of Rights.…

Senator Shattuck: Will this law eliminate discrimination?

Elizabeth Peratrovich: Do your laws against larceny, rape and murder prevent those crimes? No law will eliminate crimes, but at least you, as legislators, can assert to the world that you recognize the evil of the present situation and speak of your intent to help us overcome discrimination.… This super race attitude is wrong and forces our fine Native People to be associated with less than desirable circumstances. (Dauenhauer 1994, 537–38)

After her speech, the gallery exploded with applause. The anti-discrimination bill passed the Senate, eleven to five. The bill became law on February 16, 1945. A famous picture from that day shows a smiling Elizabeth standing next to the Alaskan Territorial Governor Ernest Gruening as he signed the bill into law. Later that evening, Elizabeth and Roy danced the night away at the Baranof Hotel in downtown Juneau. The “No Natives” sign that once adorned the hotel had been taken down. February 16 is now an official state holiday in Alaska in honor of Elizabeth and her civil rights work—in particular, to the memory of her speech in support of her anti-discrimination bill.

To understand how this bill became law nearly 20 years before the civil rights movements of the 1960s and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it is helpful to examine the background of the Peratroviches, the Native political organizations to which they belonged, and the situation that Alaskan Natives found themselves in at the turn of the 20th century. Alaska in the 1800s and early 1900s was seen by non-Natives as a frontier of potential wealth. In American mythology, Alaska symbolized the Horatio Alger narrative writ large onto a new “frontier”: poor, white, American men could travel to the gold fields of the Alaskan interior or to the Alaskan shores and forests, which teemed with fish, furs, and timber, and with enough tenacity, masculinity, and a bit of luck they could become wealthy. In reality, the profits from the vast resources of Alaska, taken from lands, forests, and seas stolen from Alaskan Natives, usually ended up in the coffers of wealthy businessmen, mine owners, cannery owners, and lumber barons who often resided outside Alaska.

In both the mythology and the reality, Alaskan Native communities mattered little. For the Native People who had lived in Alaska from time immemorial, the late 1800s up through 1950s was a prolonged period of colonization, cultural loss and destruction, racism and segregation, and sustained erosion of tribal sovereignty. Jim Crow policies similar to those in the American South were common across Alaska during this era. If one were to walk through the major towns of early 20-century Alaska, one would find signs on restaurants, theaters, businesses, and public buildings that read, “All White Help,” “No Dogs, No Natives,” and “No Natives Allowed.” Alaskan Native families, to this day, share stories of family members of that era being forced out of businesses and buildings, or being refused housing, jobs, or school admission because they were Indian. “We don’t want you stinking siwashes in here,” one Alaskan drugstore owner yelled at the author’s great grandmother when she and young her daughter tried to enter his store in Ketchikan. At the time, the term “siwash, which was derived from the word for savage in Chinook Jargon, was the most opprobrious slur a non-Native could use against an Alaskan Native. Alaskan Native Elders still associate that word with virulent racism.

Alaskan Natives had no legal redress in the courts for such discrimination. The legal status of Alaskan Natives was tenuous. When Russia sold Alaska to the Unites States, Alaskan Natives were not considered American citizens. Moreover, in Alaska until the 1930s, “… with the exception of the Tsimshians on Annette Island, Congress had not formally recognized any tribes” (Metcalfe 2014, 1). Yet, Alaskan Natives were subject to state taxation (including the five-dollar yearly public school tax, even though they were banned from attending public schools), state laws, and, subsequently, the Alaskan criminal justice system. Robbed of their lands and resources, and lacking the legal standing needed for redress within the U.S. legal system, early Alaskan Native leaders focused their efforts on gaining citizenship and voting rights, which would provide the legal footing needed to fight for civil and political rights. Citizenship was conferred to all American Indians in 1924 with the passage of the Indian Citizenship Act, which also secured voting rights for American Indians. Shortly thereafter, in 1925, the Alaskan Territorial Legislature, in a blatant attempt to prevent Alaskan Natives from voting, passed a law making literacy in English a perquisite. This was Alaskan Native reality that Elizabeth and Roy were born into during the early 20th century.

After graduating from Chemawa, an Indian boarding school in Oregon, Roy attended Western College of Education (now Western Washington University). Elizabeth was attending the same college. Though Roy and Elizabeth had known each other before college, their relationship blossomed at Western, and the two married in Bellingham, Washington, in December 1931. Roy and Elizabeth eventually moved to the Tlingit village of Klawock on the west coast of the Prince of Wales Island in the early 1930s. Klawock was a natural choice: Roy had been born in Klawock, and Elizabeth had lived there for a short period of time in her youth. In Klawock, they involved themselves in local politics—Roy served as mayor of the village for four terms—and in the two main political organizations for Alaskan Natives that, at that time, were dedicated to political and social change in Alaska: the Alaskan Native Brotherhood (ANB) and the Alaskan Native Sisterhood (ANS).

When it was founded in 1912, the ANB encouraged Natives to become educated and assimilated, and to adopt Western customs in order that they might become active members of the larger Alaskan and American community. By the time the Peratroviches became leaders of the ANB in 1940, however, the ANB had become an activist organization involved in protecting Native lands, ending segregation, and pursuing legal action against the U.S. government. The ANB also became a watchdog group that kept an eye on the political machinations of non-Natives. According to Richard and Nora Dauenhauer:

When Indian school children were denied admission to the public school in Juneau, the ANB sued the district and forced the school to integrate. The ANB and ANS monitored federal legislation, assuring that Natives and all minority groups in the territory were treated equitably. (Daunehauer 1994, 532)

The ANB was also instrumental in electing the first Native Alaskan Territorial Legislator, William Paul, in 1923. Paul is one of the most important figures in 20th century Tlingit history. He attended Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania, graduated from Whitworth College in Washington State, and worked on a law degree through a correspondence/extension program at LaSalle University. By 1920, he had passed the Alaskan bar exam and become the first Native lawyer in Alaska and shortly thereafter was elected to the Alaskan Territorial Legislature. Paul had joined the ANB soon after its founding. He would become a major figure in the ANB throughout the early 20th century. Paul served as Grand President of the ANB five times between1920 and 1940. As a legislator and attorney familiar with the legal aspects of politics, his influence was immense. Paul must be given credit for turning the ANB into a politically active organization whose concern was protection of Alaskan Native rights and resources. He refocused the ANB toward issues of citizenship, property rights, ending school segregation, and redress for stolen tribal land and resources.

Sidebar 1: The Alaskan Native Brotherhood (ANB): From Assimilation to Activism

The ANB was founded in 1912 by a group of Russian Orthodox and Presbyterian Alaskan Natives who had been educated in western religious institutions. The ANB was derivative of certain groups, or “societies,” founded by Russian Orthodox priests in Alaska, all of whom were assimilationist in nature. Donald Mitchell, in his book Sold American, credits the initial idea of a Native political organization to Joseph McAfee, secretary of the Presbyterian Board of Missions, who suggested the idea after listening to Native grievances regarding turn-of-the-century U.S. policy in Alaska (194). As originally founded, the ANB had overtly assimilationist goals and attempted to promote “civilization” among Alaskan Natives. Two of the ANB’s tenets were an English-only requirement for membership, and a belief in Christian theology. The First Article of ANB’s constitution states, “The purpose of this organization shall be to assist and encourage the Native in his advancement from his Native state to his place among the cultivated races of the world” (Mitchell 1997, 274).

A basis in Christian theology was due to the fact that the ANB founders were all products of Native education programs based on religious models of education (such as missions or boarding schools). Regarding the English-only aims of the ANB, it has been pointed out that, at the founding of the ANB, the Tlingit language was in no apparent danger of being lost. Tlingit was still the first language for most tribal members. The Tlingit people themselves, however, were of a generation that remembered the danger of simply being Indian. At such times, survival is more important than any language concern.

Under the leadership of William Paul, beginning in the 1920s, the ANB became a political organization aimed at promoting voting rights, citizenship for Alaskan Natives, and desegregating public schools. With the leadership of William Paul, and later the Peratroviches (Roy, Elizabeth, and Frank), the ANB turned into an activist organization to attack segregation and discrimination.

In 1920, Paul pushed the ANB to adopt a resolution against school segregation in Alaskan public schools (Dauenhauer 1994, 508). Paul was also a strong advocate for Native suffrage. The Native voting presence in Alaska was considerable—roughly one-quarter of the population of Alaska—and elections could be lost if prospective candidates failed to court the Native vote. If one wanted the Native vote, one had to court the ANB, or more precisely, the leaders of the ANB who could rally Native People behind a candidate. Paul created an ingenious voting device to help Alaskan Natives who could not read English: cardboard templates that could be placed atop voting ballot sheets. Holes were cut out of the cardboard templates that allowed Natives to make a mark next to the ANB-supported candidate (Metcalfe 2014, 102). With Paul’s ability through the authority of the ANB to influence a large voting demographic, Alaskan Natives influenced the outcome of elections during the first half of the 20th century.

The Paul-controlled ANB era eventually came to an end when the Peratroviches wrested the reins of power in the late 1930s, which caused a division within ANB that was devastating and long-lasting. William Paul and the Peratroviches would remain enemies until the end of their lives. Yet, the ANB that the Peratroviches inherited from Paul had become a powerful organization in Alaskan politics with a history of fighting for progressive, pro-Indian causes. Paul’s role in the fight against segregation is often forgotten due to the growing political and tribal recognition of the Peratroviches—Elizabeth in particular. However, Paul should rightly be remembered as an advocate whose struggles on behalf of Alaskan Native rights set an example for the Peratroviches to follow.

In time, the Peratrovich family wielded immense power in Alaskan Native politics: Roy served as Grand President of the ANB; Elizabeth served as Grand President of the ANS; and, Frank Peratrovich, Roy’s older brother, served as an Alaskan Territorial Senator (he would eventually serve as president of the Alaska State Senate after statehood) and ANB Grand President. The ANB, under the Peratroviches, set its sights on land claims, rejecting the imposition of reservations in Alaska, and constant vigilance over the federal government’s various pushes toward termination, statehood, and extinction of aboriginal title. The Peratrovich-led ANB also set its sights on ending Jim Crow segregation in Alaska.

There is no doubt the impetus behind the Peratroviches’ anti-discrimination bill came from Roy and Elizabeth’s lived experiences of segregation and discrimination, which they shared with thousands of Alaskan Natives across the territory. Shortly after Roy became the ANB Grand President in 1940, he took a job with the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) in Juneau. Upon arrival, the Peratroviches were denied housing in what was considered the “white” part of Juneau. The move from the small, mostly Tlingit village of Klawock, to the large city exposed Roy and Elizabeth to other forms of blatant discrimination and racism:

Signs in businesses and stores read “No Natives Allowed”, “We Cater to white trade only”, or advertised “Meals at all hours—All white help.” Natives in Juneau could only buy a home in certain parts of town, could only attend Indian schools. (CCTHITA 1991, 13)

Faced with such discrimination, Elizabeth organized lobbying efforts with other Tlingit women to confront Alaskan senators about the realities of discrimination and racism in the lives of Alaskan Natives. As Grand Presidents of the ANB and ANS, in December of 1941, Roy and Elizabeth wrote a letter to Governor Gruening, in which they denounced the hypocrisy behind Alaska’s legalized segregation: “In the present emergency [WWII],” they wrote, “our Native boys are being called upon to defend our beloved country, just as White boys. There is no distinction being made there” (CCTHITA 1991, 16). Roy and Elizabeth also attacked the hypocrisy of whites who expressed concern over the Jewish situation in Europe while turning a blind eye to what was happening in their own backyards:

We were shocked when the Jews were discriminated against in Germany. Stories were told of public places having signs, “No Jews Allowed.” All freedom loving people in our country were horrified at these reports yet it is being practiced in our country. We as Indians consider this an outrage because we are the real Natives of Alaska by reason of our ancestors who have guarded these shores and woods for years past. We will still be here to guard our beloved country while hordes of uninterested whites will be fleeing South. (CCTHITA 1991, 16)

That last sentence is especially interesting in that it was written just days after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor. Roy and Elizabeth were insinuating that, should an Axis invasion of Alaska take place (as indeed it did when the Japanese captured islands in the Aleutian chain), Alaskan Natives would stay and fight for their country while, in their estimation, “hordes of whites” would make a mass exodus to the lower 48.

Roy and Elizabeth found in Governor Gruening a sympathetic listener who urged them to draft legislation prohibiting such discrimination in Alaska. With sample bills given them by Anthony Dimond (Alaska’s U.S. Congressman at the time), Roy and Elizabeth drafted their first anti-discrimination bill, which outlawed segregation and discrimination in public buildings, schools, housing, and private businesses. The bill was sent before the territorial legislature in 1943 and defeated by a vote of nine to seven after an intense and heated debate on the floor of the legislature. The dissenting legislators particularly disliked the fact that the bill would force local public schools to integrate.

Since the Alaskan Territorial Legislature met every two years, Roy and Elizabeth used the interim between 1943 and 1945 to garner support for their bill, both within and outside the Native community. On February 8, 1945, the anti-discrimination bill was once again before the legislature, but this time without the provision about public school integration. Governor Gruening had encouraged the Peratroviches to leave that out of the bill. He thought school integration too unrealistic a goal at the time and that it could come through later legislation.

Alaskan Natives won the day. The Peratroviches took on and defeated the pro-segregation contingent of senators and garnered enough votes to pass the bill. It became the first comprehensive anti-discrimination law of its kind in America. Governor Gruening would later reminisce, “Had it not been for that beautiful Tlingit woman, Elizabeth Peratrovich, being on hand every day in the hallways, it (the anti-discrimination bill) never would have passed” (CCTHITA 1991, 23). Governor Gruening signed the bill into law on February 16, 1945. Article One states:

All citizens within the jurisdiction of the Territory of Alaska shall be entitled to the full and equal enjoyment of accommodations, advantages, facilities and privileges of public inns, restaurants, eating houses, hotels, soda fountains, soft drink parlors, taverns, roadhouses, barber shops, beauty parlors, bathrooms, resthouses, theaters, skating rinks, cafes, ice cream parlors, transportation companies, and all other conveyances and amusements, subject only to the conditions and limitations established by law and applicable alike to all citizens.

Article Two of the bill delineates the punishment for those persons or businesses guilty of practicing or inciting discrimination and/or segregation.

In reality, there is large difference between the ideal of a law as expressed in a legal document, and the actual application of that law in everyday life. As Elizabeth stated in her debate with Senator Shattuck, having a law on the books never precludes the crime. Discrimination against Alaskan Natives remains a major problem. However, the anti-discrimination bill was an attempt to demand equality within American society that was not ready for complete equality; as such, the bill was ultimately ahead of its time.

As Alaskan Native leaders actively changing the status quo of Alaska and permanently altering the trajectory of Alaskan Native history, the Peratroviches were an integral part of American Indian history in the 20th century. The seeds of leadership were instilled in Peratroviches by previous Tlingit leaders, including grandmothers and grandfathers and clan leaders and warriors who had always been willing to organize in order to fight for their rights and properties. The Peratroviches, William Paul, and the ANB actively worked to change the future of Alaskan Natives and, in doing so, changed American history.

Biographies of Notable Figures

Elizabeth Peratrovich (née Wanamaker), whose Tlingit name was Kaaxgal.aat, was born on July 4, 1911, in Petersburg, Alaska. Elizabeth was a raven (the Tlingit tribe is divided into two halves or moieties—Raven and Eagle/Wolf—determined by matrilineal descent) of the Lukaax.adi clan. She was adopted when very young by Andrew Wanamaker and his wife Mary, both of whom were Tlingit. Wanamaker was a Presbyterian minister who worked across southeast Alaska. The village of Klawock was one of Andrew’s precincts, and thus the Wanamakers were familiar with the Peratrovich family. Elizabeth graduated from high school in Ketchikan, and attended Sheldon Jackson Junior College, a Native school in Alaska named after a minister who started the Alaskan Native education system. Eventually, Elizabeth would go on to attend Western College of Education (now Western Washington University) in Bellingham, Washington. She married Roy Peratrovich in 1931 and moved to Klawock, where she became actively involved in the Alaskan Native Sisterhood (ANS). Elizabeth would go on to become the Grand President of the ANS and to play an instrumental role in the passage of the 1945 Anti-Discrimination Act, which banned legal segregation in Alaska. Elizabeth also served as the ANB’s liaison to the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) in Washington, D.C. Elizabeth passed away on December 1, 1958, and was buried in Evergreen Cemetery in Juneau. In 1988, the Alaskan State Legislature established February 16 as Elizabeth Peratrovich Day, a state holiday in honor of her groundbreaking civil rights work.

Roy Peratrovich, whose Tlingit name was Lk’uteen, was born on May 1, 1908, in Klawock, Alaska. Klawock is a small Tlingit village located on the west side of Prince of Wales Island in Southeast Alaska. Roy was an Eagle whose ancestors were originally from Kuiu Kwaan. Roy had ties to the Flicker House (Kóon Hít) of the Naasteidi clan through his grandmother Kaatxweich (whose English name was Kitty Collins). Kaatxweich was a survivor of the 1860s smallpox epidemic. Originally hailing from Kuiu Island, as a young girl Kaatxweich escaped the utter devastation of her home village (Kuiu Kwaan) and made it to Klawock in one of several canoes laden with a small group of survivors who were mostly children. Eventually, Kaatxweich would become a powerful matriarch in Klawock and would live well beyond 100 years. Roy and his brothers and sisters learned much about leadership from Kaatxweich. Roy was sent to Chemawa Indian School in Oregon and attended Western College of Education (now Western Washington University) in Bellingham, Washington, where he married Elizabeth Wanamaker in 1931. Roy moved back to Klawock and served four terms as mayor of the village and five consecutive terms as Grand President of the Alaskan Native Brotherhood (ANB). He moved to Juneau in 1940 and spent the rest of his life actively involved in Alaskan Native politics. Roy passed away in 1989 and was buried next to Elizabeth in Evergreen Cemetery in Juneau.

William Paul, whose Tlingit name was Shgúndi, was born into the Teeyhittaan clan in 1885 in Tongass Village, Alaska. He was a Raven through his mother. His father disappeared during a canoe trip when he was one year old. William’s mother was left with two young boys (William and his brother Samuel) and pregnant with a third child. The Pauls eventually moved to Sitka, where William’s mother held a variety of jobs at the Sitka Industrial and Training School. When William was 14, he was sent to Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania. William graduated from Whitworth College, which at the time was a Presbyterian school in Tacoma, Washington. He attended seminary for a year in San Francisco and eventually settled on law for his graduate education. He took a correspondence course from Lesalle University of Philadelphia. He passed the bar exam in 1920, becoming the first Alaskan Native lawyer, and in 1923 he became the first Alaskan Native elected to the Alaska Territorial Legislature. William Paul was a key figure in the Alaskan Native Brotherhood; he was elected President of ANB, served as the organization’s attorney, and was instrumental in the getting the U.S. Court of Claims to hear a lawsuit brought by the Tlingit and Haida tribes against the United States government. After being pushed aside in preparation for that case, Paul took another lawsuit to the Court of Claims and, ultimately, to the U.S. Supreme Court (Tee-Hit-Ton Indians v. United States) in 1955. Though he lost, the case did establish the key fact that Alaskan Natives had aboriginal title to the land, which would give Alaska Natives a basis for later land claims. Alaskan Native land holding might be vastly less today if it had not been for Paul’s Tee-Hit-Ton case. In the 1950s and 1960s, Paul would become a legal and political advisor to younger Alaskan Native leaders. Paul passed away in 1977.

DOCUMENT EXCERPTS

Testimony in the Senate on the Alaska Anti-Discrimination Bill

The Testimony from the Senate floor during the February 8, 1945, debate on the Alaska Anti-Discrimination Bill. Roy and Elizabeth Peratrovich, the architects behind the bill, were the only Indians who spoke during the debate.

Senator Tolber Scott: Mixed breeds are the source of trouble. It is only they who wish to associate with the whites. It would have been better if the Eskimos had put up signs “No Whites Allowed.” This issue is simply an effort to create political capital for some legislators. Certainly white women have done their part in keeping the races distinct. If white men had done as well, there would be no racial feeling in Alaska.

Senator Grenold Collins: I’d like to speak in support of Senator Scott. The Eskimos of St. Lawrence Island have not suffered from the White Man’s evil, and they are well off. Eskimos are not an inferior race, but they are an individual race. The pure Eskimos are proud of their origin and are aware that harm comes to them from mixing with whites. It is the mixed breed who is not accepted by either race who causes trouble. I believe in racial pride and do not think this bill will do other than arouse bitterness. Why, we should prohibit the sale of liquor to these Natives—that’s the real root of our troubles.

Senator Frank Whaley: I am also against the Equal Rights Bill. I personally would prefer not to have to sit next to these Natives in a theater. Why, they smell bad. As a bush pilot, I believe from my experiences that this legislation is a lawyer’s dream and a “natural” in creating hard feelings between whites and Natives. However, I will vote for this bill if we amend it by striking Section II which reads: “any person who shall violate or aid or incite such violation shall be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor punishable by imprisonment in jail for not more than one month or fined not more than $50 or both.”

Senator O.D. Cochran: I am personally assailed by Senator Whaley’s remarks. I stand in support of the Equal Rights Bill. Discrimination does exist. In Nome, an Eskimo woman was forcibly removed from a theater when she dared sit in the “white section.” And I have a list of similar occurrences based solely on my own experiences that would occupy the full afternoon to relate.

Senator Walker: I too would like to state my support for the legislation. I know of no instance where a Native died of a broken heart, but I do know of situations where discrimination has forced Indian women into lives “worse than death.”

Roy Peratrovich: I would like to remind the legislature that the Honorable Ernest Gruening, in his report to the Secretary of the Interior, as well as his message to the legislature, has recognized the existence of discrimination. Even the plank adopted by the Democratic Party at its Fairbanks convention favors the Equal Rights Bill. In fact, members of that committee are present in this Senate body.

Senator Allen Shattuck: Mr. Peratrovich, as I mentioned to you before, this bill will aggravate, rather than allay the little feeling that now exists. Our Native cultures have ten centuries of white civilization to encompass in a few decades. I believe that considerable progress has already been made, particularly in the last fifty years, but still much progress needs to be made.

Roy Peratrovich: Only an Indian can know how it feels to be discriminated against. Either you are for discrimination or you are against it, accordingly as you vote on this bill.

Senator Allen Shattuck: This legislation is wrong. Rather than being brought together, the races should be kept further apart. Who are these people, barely out of savagery, who want to associate with us whites, with 5,000 years of recorded civilization behind us?

Elizabeth Peratrovich: I would not have expected that I, who am barely out of savagery, would have to remind the gentlemen with 5,000 years of recorded history behind them of our Bill of Rights. When my husband and I came to Juneau and sought a home in a nice neighborhood where our children could play happily with our neighbor’s children, we found such a house and arranged to lease it. When the owners learned that we were Indians, they said no. Would we be compelled to live in the slums?

Senator Shattuck: Will this law eliminate discrimination?

Elizabeth Peratrovich: Do your laws against larceny, rape and murder prevent those crimes? No law will eliminate crimes, but at least you, as legislators, can assert to the world that you recognize the evil of the present situation and speak of your intent to help us overcome discrimination. There are three kinds of persons who practice discrimination: First, the politician who wants to maintain an inferior minority group so that he can always promise them something; second, the “Mr. and Mrs. Jones” who aren’t quite sure of their social position, and who are nice to you on one occasion and can’t see you on others, depending whom they are with; and third, the great superman, who believes in the superiority of the white race. This super race attitude is wrong and forces our fine Native People to be associated with less than desirable circumstances.

Senator Joe Green: Thank you, Mrs. Peratrovich. You may be seated.

Senator Walker: I move to close debate.

Source: Congressional Record, February 8, 1945.

The Anti-Discrimination Bill

The 1945 Anti-Discrimination Bill drafted and written by Roy and Elizabeth Peratrovich. It passed on February 8 and signed into law on February 16.

An Act

To provide for full and equal accommodations, facilities and privileges to all citizens in places of public accommodation within the jurisdiction of the Territory of Alaska; to provide penalties to violations.

Be it enacted by the Legislature of the Territory of Alaska:

Section 1: All citizens within the jurisdiction of the Territory of Alaska shall be entitled to the full and equal enjoyment of accommodations, advantages, facilities and privileges of public inns, restaurants, eating houses, hotels, soda fountains, soft drink parlors, taverns, roadhouses, barber shops, beauty parlors, bathrooms, resthouses, theaters, skating rinks, cafes, ice cream parlors, transportation companies, and all other conveyances and amusements, subject only to the conditions and limitations established by law and applicable alike to all citizens.

Section 2: Any person who shall violate or aid or incite a violation of said full and equal enjoyment; or any person who shall display any printed or written sign indicating a discrimination on racial grounds of said full and equal enjoyment, for each day for which said sign is displayed shall be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor and upon conviction thereof shall be punished by imprisonment in jail for not more than thirty (30) days or fined no more than two hundred fifty ($250.00) dollars, or both. Approved February 16, 1945.

Source: Anti-Discrimination Act, House Bill 14. Session Laws of Alaska, 1945, 35–36.

Further Reading

CCTHITA. A Recollection of Civil Rights Leader Elizabeth Peratrovich, 1911–1958. Juneau: Central Council of Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska, 1991.

Cohen, Felix. “Alaska’s Nuremberg Laws/Congress Sanctions Racial Discrimination.” Commentary, 143, 1948.

Dauenhauer, Nora Marks and Richard Dauenhauer, eds. Haa Shuká, Our Ancestors: Tlingit Oral Narratives. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1987.

Dauenhauer, Nora Marks and Richard Dauenhauer. Haa Tuwuunaagu Yís, for Healing Our Spirit: Tlingit Oratory. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1990.

Dauenhauer, Nora Marks and Richard Dauenhauer. Haa Kusteeyí, Our Culture: Tlingit Life Stories. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994.

Dombrowski, Kirk. Against Culture: Development, Politics, and Religion in Indian Alaska. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001.

For the Rights of All: Ending Jim Crow in Alaska. Directed by Jeffry Silverman. Blueberry Productions, 2009 (DVD).

Haycox, Stephen. Alaska: An American Colony. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006.

Haycox, Stephen. “William Paul, Sr., and the Alaska Voters’ Literacy Act of 1925.” Alaska History 2:1 (Winter 1986/87): 17–38. Accessed 7/14/2015 http://www.alaskool.org/native_ed/articles/literacy_act/LiteracyTxt.html

Hope, Andrew and Thomas Thornton, eds. Will the Time Ever Come?: A Tlingit Source Book. Fairbanks: Alaskan Native Knowledge Network, 2000.

Kan, Sergei Symbolic Immortality: The Tlingit Potlatch of the Nineteenth Century. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998.

Laguna, Frederica de. Under Mt. St. Elias: The History and Culture of the Yakutat Tlingit. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1972.

Metcalfe, Peter. A Dangerous Idea: The Alaska Native Brotherhood and the Struggle for Indigenous Rights. Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 2014.

Mitchell, Donald. Sold American: The Story of Alaska Native and Their Land, 1867–1959. Hanover: University Press of New England, 1997.

Paul, Fred. Then Fight For It! The Largest Peaceful Redistribution of Wealth in the History of Mankind and the Creation of the North Slope Borough. Victoria, Canada: Trafford Publishing, 2003.

Skinner, Ramona Ellen. Alaska Native Policy in the Twentieth Century. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1997.

Williams, Mary Shaa Tlaa, ed. The Alaska Native Reader: History, Culture, Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009.

Termination Policy, Mid-1940s to Mid-1960s

Megan Tusler

Chronology

1934		The Indian Reorganization Act (“Indian New Deal”) allows tribes increased management of their own assets. Termination effectively reversed this policy.
1953		House Concurrent Resolution 108 calls for the termination of a number of tribes, some of which are designated by tribal affiliation, and others by the state in which the reservation is located.
1953		Public Law 280 extends criminal and civil jurisdiction to some states with respect to the Indian nations housed within their borders.
1954		Individual termination acts begin application. This ends the trust relationship between the federal government and 110 tribes and bands in eight states.
1962		The final termination act is passed.
1975		The passage of the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act (Public Law 93–638) ends termination policy by producing relationships between government agencies and tribes. These include the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare and the Department of the Interior.

The Termination of Federal Supervision and Control of American Indians

Termination, as a dynamic of federal American Indian policy, is generally referred to as the “termination era,” because the decisions to end federal trust relationships with American Indian nations spread out over a number of years. The primary act, however, was House Concurrent Resolution 108, passed in 1953. It reads, in part: “That it is declared to be the sense of Congress that, at the earliest possible time, all of the Indian tribes and the individual members thereof located within the states of California, Florida, New York, and Texas, and all of the following named Indian tribes and individual members thereof, should be freed from Federal supervision and control and from all disabilities and limitations specially applicable to Indians: The Flathead tribe of Montana, the Klamath tribe of Oregon, the Menominee tribe of Wisconsin, the Potowatamie tribe of Kansas and Nebraska, and those members of the Chippewa [Ojibwe] tribe who are on the Turtle Mountain Reservation, North Dakota.” “Freed from Federal supervision” is the telling phrase of this act. In practice, this “freedom” meant that the nations named were to be effectively unrecognized by the federal government and the institutions under it that served Indians, particularly the Department of the Interior and the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

In addition to the 1953 act, further policy decisions terminated or named other tribes for termination. In a memo dated January 21, 1954, the office of the secretary of the interior called for the termination of specific tribes that were previously named under the portion of HCR 108 that described members within the states of California, Florida, New York, and Texas. The Iroquois Confederation of New York was one of the groups chosen for termination in this memo; the tribes under the confederation are the Cayuga, Mohawk, Oneida, Onandaga, Seneca, and Tuscarora. The Texas nation under particular scrutiny was the Alabama-Coushatta nation; for Florida, the Seminole nation was targeted. An earlier act of law, Title 25 U.S. Code § 217a ch. 276, 54 Stat. 249 in Kansas (1940) had effectively terminated Indian relations because its effect was to enforce state law upon the nations that were fully or partially within the Kansas borders: the Sac and Fox, Kickapoo, Potawatomi, and Iowa. The termination of California tribes is one of the most complex elements of federal Indian policy because California frequently uses rancherias to define tribal location. In 1958, Public Law 85–671 was passed and affected California nations, a number of which have yet to be re-recognized as nations. This bill reads, in part, “Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That the lands, including minerals, water rights, and improvements located on the lands, and other assets of the following rancherias and reservations in the State of California shall be distributed in accordance with the provisions of this Act: Alexander Valley, Auburn, Big Sandy, Big Valley, Blue Lake, Buena Vista, Cache Creek, Chicken Ranch, Chico, Cloverdale, Cold Springs, Elk Valley, Guidiville, Graton, Greenville, Hopland, Indian Ranch, Lytton, Mark West, Middletown, Montgomery Creek, Mooretown, Nevada City, North Fork, Paskenta, Picayune, Finoleville, Potter Valley, Quartz Valley, Redding, Redwood Valley, Robinson, Rohnerville, Ruffeys, Scotts Valley, Smith River, Strawberry Valley, Table Bluff, Table Mountain, Upper Lake, Wilton.”

The nations terminated in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s have had a number of challenges toward their being re-recognized. A number of California tribes, again, are still not under federal recognition. Among the challenges that tribes have had to face in their efforts to be recognized under federal law is the instatement or reinstatement of formally organized tribal courts. The lack of tribal courts for the four nations of Kansas was seen as the reason for termination in 1940—the state wanted jurisdiction over tribal members who committed crimes that would fall under state law. In response, tribal nations have sometimes had to demonstrate the efficacy of tribal courts. In other cases, members of nations tagged for termination were able to halt the process through congressional testimony. The Turtle Mountain Chippewa were able to avoid termination because tribal chairman Patrick Gourneau and other tribal members traveled to Washington and argued that termination would have a profoundly negative affect on the tribe, which was still struggling to be economically self-sufficient and had so small a land base that development would prove difficult. They were successful in the efforts to end their termination. The Potowatomie were also able to persuade congress not to follow through with their termination.

Since the termination era, activists, tribal governments, and politicians have been mostly successful in having tribal governments and tribal enrollment criteria reinstated. Again, however, there continue to be nations whose recognition and tribal sovereignty the federal government denies.

Termination can be said to have a longer historical reach than the particular period called the “termination era.” Acts of the 18th and 19th centuries that forcibly relocated tribal members, such as the Trail of Tears, were intended as forms of “termination,” given that they had the effect of the mass deaths of tribal members. Treaty law has also been under constant revision since contact, and the recognition of nations (and the termination of that recognition) is contingent upon the extent to which treaties have been followed.

In the most direct sense, however, termination has its origins in the federal jurisprudence of the late 19th century, particularly the Dawes Act, also called the General Allotment Act: “An Act to Provide for the Allotment of Lands in Severalty to Indians on the Various Reservations, and to Extend the Protection of the Laws of the United States and the Territories over the Indians, and for Other Purposes. Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That in all cases where any tribe or band of Indians has been, or shall hereafter be, located upon any reservation created for their use, either by treaty stipulation or by virtue of an act of Congress or executive order setting apart the same for their use, the President of the United States be, and he hereby is, authorized, whenever in his opinion any reservation or any part thereof of such Indians is advantageous for agricultural and grazing purposes, to cause said reservation, or any part thereof, to be surveyed, or resurveyed if necessary, and to allot the lands in said reservation in severalty to any Indian located thereon.”

There were a small number of tribes considered exempt from allotment: Section 8 notes that “the provisions of this act shall not extend to the territory occupied by the Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Seminoles, and Osage, Miamies and Peorias, and Sacs and Foxes, in the Indian Territory, nor to any of the reservations of the Seneca Nation of New York Indians in the State of New York, nor to that strip of territory in the State of Nebraska adjoining the Sioux Nation on the south added by executive order.” The Dawes Act was intended to portion Indian lands into individual plots, which scholars agree was an effort to move away from collectively held lands to individually controlled lands, thus discouraging collective interests for tribes. Furthermore, when lands were redistributed to individuals, a great deal of “surplus” land was returned to the federal government, at which point it was often purchased by white individuals. Indians who received allotments were also frequently in the financial position where they had no choice but to sell the land for the small profit. These variables led to a significant loss of land for tribes; according to Sharon O’Brien, “of the ninety million acres lost after 1890, only three million have been restored to Indian ownership” (79).

Other legal decisions had major impacts on Indian sovereign status as well. The Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 declared American Indians to be United States citizens, a provision to which they had not been previously entitled. This act had the ameliorative effect of allowing Indian citizens to vote and participate in federal lawmaking, but it also reinforced the notion that the primary identity for the Native person was in his or her national (U.S.) citizenship and not his or her tribal citizenship.

The allotment process was to end in 1934, with the passage of the Indian Reorganization Act (IRA), sometimes called the “Indian New Deal.” This was intended to support the reinstatement of tribal governments, and supported the production of tribal constitutions. The IRA was one of the few legal actions in the first half of the 20th century that intended to extend and reinstate sovereignty; it was with the termination legislation beginning in the 1940s that this well-intentioned political act was effectively overturned.

In the state of Kansas in 1940, legislators passed the “Kansas Act,” 18 U.S. Code § 3243. This act allowed the state of Kansas jurisdiction over the four tribes that were fully or partially contained within its boundaries. It reads, “Jurisdiction is conferred on the State of Kansas over offenses committed by or against Indians on Indian reservations, including trust or restricted allotments, within the State of Kansas, to the same extent as its courts have jurisdiction over offenses committed elsewhere within the State in accordance with the laws of the State.

“This section shall not deprive the courts of the United States of jurisdiction over offenses defined by the laws of the United States committed by or against Indians on Indian reservations.”

This is a highly significant provision because it set a major precedent for the later acts of termination. Where the state of Kansas is capable of exercising jurisdiction over the Indian nations contained within it, it radically changes the way that tribal sovereignty functions within state borders. Previously, and particularly as a result of the IRA, tribal nations dealt with criminal matters that would otherwise be under state jurisdiction; after the Kansas Act, Native individuals were to be held responsible by tribal, state, and federal government.

In 1946, the Indian Claims Commission (ICC) was established. According to Thomas Clarkin, this allowed Native People to make claims upon the federal government and receive settlements. On its face, this seems like an effort to ameliorate Native poverty and to serve as a kind of very small reparation. In practice, however, the ICC was intended to give individual Indian people—not tribes—enough money that they might “assimilate” into “mainstream” American culture (Clarkin 7).

As mentioned, the 1953 passage of HCR 108 was the most striking legislation of the termination era. Each of the nations selected for termination had its own methods for coping with the end of federal recognition. Furthermore, states had their own notions of what to do about the “Indian problem.”

Called the “Flathead tribe” in the text of HCR 108, The Confederated Salish and Kootenai tribes, in fact, comprise the Bitterroot Salish, the Pend d’Oreille, and the Kootenai tribes. Many of the tribal members reside on the Flathead reservation in Montana. The Flathead reservation is one of many reservation spaces on which there are more non-Indian residents than Indian residents; it was profoundly affected by the Dawes Act and as such is “checkerboarded” with white landholdings. The federal legislators perceived this “mixing” as one of the reasons for termination, given that the reservation was not wholly “Indian” in the first place and that intermarriage was common. Furthermore, the Salish-Kootenai had some degree of economic security in the 1950s because of a successful timber program (Confederated Salish and Kootenai tribes 2015). Termination would make Indian residents subject to state taxes and would end the federal trust relationship as well as voiding any treaties that would entitle them to particular land rights. The Confederated tribes successfully fought termination. According to Little Shell tribe history, “Flathead leaders confronted their termination bill, which the Bureau of Indian Affairs had hurriedly drafted. On February 27, 1954, Flathead spokesperson Stephen DeMers testified before a joint congressional hearing that the tribe would ‘need a minimum period of ten years in which to fully prepare its people to take over full management responsibility, including a complete analysis and survey of all assets.’ That spring the combined opposition of Mansfield and Metcalf, the Montana Inter-tribal Policy board, and other vocal non-Indian citizens forced committee leaders to drop the proposed legislation” (Bishop 1993).

The Klamath tribe of Oregon was selected very early for termination, as it was in the unusual position of being quite self-sufficient by the early 1950s. The termination was suggested by Senator Arthur Watkins (R-Utah) and Congressman Ellis Berry (R-South Dakota). According to the Klamath tribe’s history of termination, “termination came by pronouncement from Sen. Watkins. The tribe never requested it and when speaking through elected tribal official consistently opposed it. The majority of the tribal members did not want termination.” Furthermore, at the time of the termination legislation, the Klamath tribe had filed suit against the U.S. government for reappropriation of moneys for the taking of tribal lands. Again, according to their own history, “when the elected representatives of the tribes traveled to Washington, D.C. to seek appropriations legislation to pay the tribes the debt owed by the United States, Sen. Watkins treated the representatives of the tribes with great disdain, seizing on the opportunity to withhold approval of the payment until the elected leaders agreed to termination. Intimidated by their surroundings and sensitive to the need to obtain the goals they had been sent to Washington to accomplish, they nonetheless refused to support termination” (Klamath tribes 2012).

Termination was particularly devastating for the Klamaths, because the action broke the practice of collective holding of land and resources. The tribal estate was broken up, and 1,659 tribal members were given individual checks of $43,000. This practice had a major negative impact on the tribal economy—because they no longer held previously treaty-protected lands, tribal members were no longer able to sustain their lumber economy. The tribal profile changed dramatically—termination had severe negative effects on livelihood, lifespan, and use of federal welfare programs. It was only after the tireless work of tribal members to restore protection to their nation that they were finally reinstated as a tribe: the Klamath Restoration Act was signed into law in 1986.

The Menominees, like the Klamaths, had had a relative degree of economic independence in the first half of the 20th century. They, too, were picked for relocation by Senator Watkins, and also argued vociferously against their termination. The federal government “set 1958 as the year the Menominee would be terminated. In the intervening four years, the tribe had to address a spate of issues such as what to do with its tribal assets and federally protected reservation lands. They drew up a plan for termination, but when it became clear that four years was insufficient preparation, the federal government gave the tribe a year’s extension. Termination proved to be such a huge task that the Menominee eventually requested two additional one-year extensions. All tribal property was transferred to a corporation, Menominee Enterprises, Inc. (MEI), and the reservation became a new Wisconsin county, Menominee County” (Milwaukee Public Museum website). The tribe was “terminated” in 1961. As in the case of other tribes, the Menominees were considered “shareholders” in the MEI, and this individuation of tribal assets had a poor outcome. Again, according to the Milwaukee Public Museum, “When Congress passed the Menominee termination act in 1954, the tribe’s cash assets had been valued at over $10 million. The pressing needs that followed termination in 1961 drained this sum to $300,000 by 1964.”

The tribe eventually organized to respond to termination. Members James White and Ada Deer founded the Determination of Rights and Unity for Menominee Stockholders (DRUMS) in 1970. DRUMS fought to reverse termination and to regain federal recognition. Tribal members appealed to Congress, and the restoration of their tribal status was signed by then-president Richard M. Nixon on December 22, 1973.

The California passage of Public Law 85–671 in 1958 affected a great number of tribes and their reservations and rancherias. Section 9 reads, “Prior to the termination of the Federal trust relationship in accordance with the provisions of this Act, the Secretary of the Interior is authorized to undertake, within the limits of available appropriations, a special program of education and training designed to help the Indians to earn a livelihood, to conduct their own affairs, and to assume their responsibilities as citizens without special services because of their status as Indians.… For the purposes of such program, the Secretary is authorized to enter into contracts or agreements with any Federal, State, or local governmental agency, corporation, association, or person. Nothing in this section shall preclude any Federal agency from undertaking any other program for the education and training of Indians with funds appropriated to it” (Indian Affairs Laws and Treaties, okstate.edu). This section introduces into legal language significant terms and phrases. The use of the word “termination” is significant, as it had generally been avoided in previous legal provisions. The act does, however, go on to frame its efforts as being intended to train Indians as “citizens,” such that they could “assume their responsibilities.” This is the language that characterized termination more generally, in that it was consistently framed as a matter of ending a “dependency” relationship when, in fact, it was an effort to renege on treaties and to terminate federal trust laws.

Biographies

U.S. Senator Arthur Vivian Watkins (R-Utah)

Senator Arthur Vivian Watkins was a Republican U.S. senator from Utah who orchestrated much of termination policy. Watkins was born in Midway, Utah, in 1886. His training was primarily in the law, having studied first at New York University and then at Columbia University, from which he earned an LL.B. in 1912. He returned to his Native Utah, taking up residence in Vernal, where he joined a colleague in a law practice. The town was not significant enough to support their practice, so Watkins took up an interest in political office, which was to characterize the rest of his life (American National Biography). He first ran for county attorney, an election which he was to lose, although he was later named assistant county attorney of Salt Lake City, where he also launched a private practice before moving to Centerville in 1916. “In the early 1920s he resumed law practice in American Fork and then in 1925 went on to practice in Orem, where he also leased a fruit farm, and in Provo. With other berry growers Watkins organized in the late 1920s the Utah Coldpack Fruit Corporation, but the depression hampered the enterprise. In 1928 Watkins was elected a judge of the Fourth Judicial District. The judicial salary proved more dependable than his law practice, to which he returned after the Republicans’ 1932 election defeat. He unsuccessfully ran for Congress in 1936” (American National Biography).

After leaving law practice, Watkins took on more bureaucratic and civic roles, serving in the Mormon church as president of the newly created Sharon Stake, a geographic subdivision of the church that included the city of Provo. He had been raised in the church, completing his mission before going to college, and retained his faith through his life. Much of the literature on Watkins emphasizes this Mormon upbringing and faith. Contemporaneous with the termination policy of which he was an advocate, Watkins also served on the Select Committee to Study Censure Charges Against the Senator from Wisconsin, Mr. McCarthy (King and King 41). The Journal of Mormon History recalls this action as one that exemplifies Watkins’s religiously inflected “courage,” characterized by standing against what he saw as McCarthy’s excessiveness.

King and King quote McCarthy’s biographer: “A leader in the Mormon Church, [Watkins] was respected for his scrupulous ethics, cold objectivity, and personal courage.’ Another described Watkins as ‘a thin and ascetic Mormon from Utah with an unbending devotion to order and propriety.’ … Watkins thus played a critical role in ending McCarthy’s anti-communist excesses and gross violation of civil liberties.” Further, the American National Biography describes his role in the McCarthy Affair: “One wit likened the pitting of McCarthy against Watkins and five colleagues, most of them lightly regarded, to ‘throwing a lion into a den of lambs.’ Yet meet the challenge they did. Holding McCarthy to strict rules and tight standards of relevance, Watkins gaveled down his outbursts. The committee recommended censure, and Watkins withstood McCarthy and his allies’ pummeling. The frail-looking Watkins showed what one observer termed ‘steel under [his] almost parsonical mien.’ Braving recurrent stomach pain as he spoke, Watkins challenged fellow Republicans to uphold senatorial dignity, moving some listeners to tears. McCarthy was censured not for anticommunist excesses but for behavior contemptuous of the Senate and abusive of colleagues. He soon vanished from the public eye.”

Watkins’s term in the Senate began in 1946, and he was re-elected in 1952. He was an Eisenhower-supporting Republican, anti-New Deal, and conservative with respect to domestic policy. However, he supported civil rights legislation, and despite termination as a misguided and unsuccessful endeavor, Watkins and others like him considered it an effort at American Indian assimilation (and, therefore, an end to the domestic dependent relationship.) Among his domestic policy endeavors were the aforementioned committee investigating Joseph McCarthy, water policy, the Refugee Act of 1953, and the civil rights legislation of the mid-1950s. Among his water policy actions were sponsorships of both the $760 million Colorado River Storage Act and the $70 million Weber Basin Project Act (“Utah History to go,” Utah.gov).

Watkins’s support for the Termination Act was in part because of his previous work on Indian affairs. He was the co-chairman of the Joint Committee on Navaho-Hopi Indian Administration (Eighty-Third Congress) and the Joint Committee on Immigration and Naturalization Policy (Eighty-Third Congress) and a member of the Indian Claims Commission, Washington, D.C., from August 1959, until his retirement in September 1967 (“Biographical Directory of the United States Congress: Arthur Vivian Watkins,” Congress.gov). Senators from the American west were more likely than others to support termination, in part because of the ongoing resource battles over land, timber, and water between state and Indian governments, but also because of the large land mass that reservations took up in the mountain, plains, and western states. According to David Gene Lewis and R. Warren Metcalf, Watkins’s own family had expanded their farm by purchasing surplus reservation lands. Watkins’s interest was initially local, again because western states had larger reservation bodies, but also because those, like Watkins, whose families had “bought” land from tribes, felt that in some cases tribes were not taking full advantage of their resources such as land, timber, oil, and water.

In 1958, he was defeated for re-election and succeeded by Democrat Frank Moss. According to the American National Biography, “After his defeat Watkins served briefly as a consultant to the secretary of the interior. He was named to the Indian Claims Commission in 1959, becoming its chair in 1960. Watkins retired from the commission in 1967 and moved back to Salt Lake City. His wife died in 1971, and in 1972 he married Dorothy Watkins (no relation). He died in Orem, Utah.”

DOCUMENT EXCERPTS

Of the many legal developments that impacted the termination and relocation era, Public Law (PL) 280 is one that is still in effect. As of 2016, PL 280 is operative in Alaska, Arizona, California, Florida, Idaho, Iowa, Minnesota (except for the Red Lake Nation), Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, Oregon (except the Warm Springs Reservation), North Dakota, South Dakota, Utah, Washington, and Wisconsin (except for the Menominee Reservation). It is significant because the transfer of state jurisdiction to include tribal members is one of the many steps undertaken to reframe Native People as “citizens” and “tribal members,” and as such subject to the same state, tribal, and federal laws as non-tribal members. The final selection from the act allows for revision of tribal law by Indian vote.

Public Law 83–280

18 U.S.C. § 1162. State Jurisdiction over offenses committed by or against Indians in the Indian country

1. (a)  Each of the States or Territories listed in the following table shall have jurisdiction over offenses committed by or against Indians in the areas of Indian country listed opposite the name of the State or Territory to the same extent that such State or Territory has jurisdiction over offenses committed elsewhere within the State or Territory, and the criminal laws of such State or Territory shall have the same force and effect within such Indian country as they have elsewhere within the State or Territory:

State of		Indian Country Affected
Alaska		All Indian country within the State, except that on Annette Islands, the Metlakatla Indian community may exercise jurisdiction over offenses committed by Indians in the same manner in which such jurisdiction may be exercised by Indian tribes in Indian country over which State jurisdiction has not been extended.
California		All Indian country within the State.
Minnesota		All Indian country within the State, except the Red Lake Reservation.
Nebraska		All Indian country within the State.
Oregon		All Indian country within the State, except the Warm Springs Reservation.
Wisconsin		All Indian country within the State.

1. (b)  Nothing in this section shall authorize the alienation, encumbrance, or taxation of any real or personal property, including water rights, belonging to any Indian or any Indian tribe, band, or community that is held in trust by the United States or is subject to a restriction against alienation imposed by the United States; or shall authorize regulation of the use of such property in a manner inconsistent with any Federal treaty, agreement, or statute or with any regulation made pursuant thereto; or shall deprive any Indian or any Indian tribe, band, or community of any right, privilege, or immunity afforded under Federal treaty, agreement, or statute with respect to hunting, trapping, or fishing or the control, licensing, or regulation thereof.
2. (c)  The provisions of sections 1152 and 1153 of this chapter shall not be applicable within the areas of Indian country listed in subsection (a) of this section as areas over which the several States have exclusive jurisdiction.

28 U.S.C. § 1360. State civil jurisdiction in actions to which Indians are parties

1. (a)  Each of the States listed in the following table shall have jurisdiction over civil causes of action between Indians or to which Indians are parties which arise in the areas of Indian country listed opposite the name of the State to the same extent that such State has jurisdiction over other civil causes of action, and those civil laws of such State that are of general application to private persons or private property shall have the same force and effect within such Indian country as they have elsewhere within the State:

[Same as above, except for Alaska, where the law affects all Indian country within the State.]

1. (b)  Nothing in this section shall authorize the alienation, encumbrance, or taxation of any real or personal property, including water rights, belonging to any Indian or any Indian tribe, band, or community that is held in trust by the United States or is subject to a restriction against alienation imposed by the United States; or shall authorize regulation of the use of such property in a manner inconsistent with any Federal treaty, agreement, or statute or with any regulation made pursuant thereto; or shall confer jurisdiction upon the State to adjudicate, in probate proceedings or otherwise, the ownership or right to possession of such property or any interest therein.
2. (c)  Any tribal ordinance or custom heretofore or hereafter adopted by an Indian tribe, band, or community in the exercise of any authority which it may possess shall, if not inconsistent with any applicable civil law of the State, be given full force and effect in the determination of civil causes of action pursuant to this section.

25 U.S.C. § 1321. Assumption by State of criminal jurisdiction

1. (a)  Consent of United States; force and effect of criminal laws

The consent of the United States is hereby given to any State not having jurisdiction over criminal offenses committed by or against Indians in the areas of Indian country situated within such State to assume, with the consent of the Indian tribe occupying the particular Indian country or part thereof which could be affected by such assumption, such measure of jurisdiction over any or all of such offenses committed within such Indian country or any part thereof as may be determined by such State to the same extent that such State has jurisdiction over any such offense committed elsewhere within the State, and the criminal laws of such State shall have the same force and effect within such Indian country or part thereof as they have elsewhere within that State.

1. (b)  Alienation, encumbrance, taxation, and use of property; hunting, trapping, or fishing

Nothing in this section shall authorize the alienation, encumbrance, or taxation of any real or personal property, including water rights, belonging to any Indian or any Indian tribe, band, or community that is held in trust by the United States or is subject to a restriction against alienation imposed by the United States; or shall authorize regulation of the use of such property in a manner inconsistent with any Federal treaty, agreement, or statute or with any regulation made pursuant thereto; or shall deprive any Indian or any Indian tribe, band, or community of any right, privilege, or immunity afforded under Federal treaty, agreement, or statute with respect to hunting, trapping, or fishing or the control, licensing, or regulation thereof.

25 U.S.C. § 1322. Assumption by State of civil jurisdiction

1. (a)  Consent of United States; force and effect of civil laws

The consent of the United States is hereby given to any State not having jurisdiction over civil causes of action between Indians or to which Indians are parties which arise in the areas of Indian country situated within such State to assume, with the consent of the tribe occupying the particular Indian country or part thereof which would be affected by such assumption, such measure of jurisdiction over any or all such civil causes of action arising within such Indian country or any part thereof as may be determined by such State to the same extent that such State has jurisdiction over other civil causes of action, and those civil laws of such State that are of general application to private persons or private property shall have the same force and effect within such Indian country or part thereof as they have elsewhere within that State.

1. (b)  Alienation, encumbrance, taxation, use, and probate of property

Nothing in this section shall authorize the alienation, encumbrance, or taxation of any real or personal property, including water rights, belonging to any Indian or any Indian tribe, band, or community that is held in trust by the United States or is subject to a restriction against alienation imposed by the United States; or shall authorize regulation of the use of such property in a manner inconsistent with any Federal treaty, agreement, or statute, or with any regulation made pursuant thereto; or shall confer jurisdiction upon the State to adjudicate, in probate proceedings or otherwise, the ownership or right to possession of such property or any interest therein.

1. (c)  Force and effect of tribal ordinances or customs

Any tribal ordinance or custom heretofore or hereafter adopted by an Indian tribe, band, or community in the exercise of any authority which it may possess shall, if not inconsistent with any applicable civil law of the State, be given full force and effect in the determination of civil causes of action pursuant to this section.

25 U.S.C. § 1323. Retrocession of jurisdiction by State

1. (a)  Acceptance by United States

The United States is authorized to accept a retrocession by any State of all or any measure of the criminal or civil jurisdiction, or both, acquired by such State pursuant to the provisions of section 1162 of title 18, section 1360 of title 28, or section 7 of the Act of August 15, 1953 (67 Stat. 588), as it was in effect prior to its repeal by subsection (b) of this section.

1. (b)  Repeal of statutory provisions

Section 7 of the Act of August 15, 1953 (67 Stat. 588), is hereby repealed, but such repeal shall not affect any cession of jurisdiction made pursuant to such section prior to its repeal.

25 U.S.C. § 1324. Amendment of State constitutions or statutes to remove legal impediment; effective date

Notwithstanding the provisions of any enabling Act for the admission of a State, the consent of the United States is hereby given to the people of any State to amend, where necessary, their State constitution or existing statutes, as the case may be, to remove any legal impediment to the assumption of civil or criminal jurisdiction in accordance with the provisions of this subchapter. The provisions of this subchapter shall not become effective with respect to such assumption of jurisdiction by any such State until the people thereof have appropriately amended their State constitution or statutes, as the case may be.

25 U.S.C. § 1325. Abatement of actions

1. (a)  Pending actions or proceedings; effect of cession

No action or proceeding pending before any court or agency of the United States immediately prior to any cession of jurisdiction by the United States pursuant to this subchapter shall abate by reason of that cession. For the purposes of any such action or proceeding, such cession shall take effect on the day following the date of final determination of such action or proceeding.

1. (b)  Criminal actions; effect of cession

No cession made by the United States under this subchapter shall deprive any court of the United States of jurisdiction to hear, determine, render judgment, or impose sentence in any criminal action instituted against any person for any offense committed before the effective date of such cession, if the offense charged in such action was cognizable under any law of the United States at the time of the commission of such offense. For the purposes of any such criminal action, such cession shall take effect on the day following the date of final determination of such action.

Source: 18 U.S.C. § 1162, 28 U.S.C. § 1360.

See also: Meriam Report

Further Reading

Bishop, Joan. “From Hill 57 to Capitol Hill: ‘Making the Sparks Fly’,” Montana The Magazine of Western History. Vol. 43 (Summer Issue-3) 1993: pp. 16–29.

Brookings Institution. The problem of Indian administration report of a survey made at the request of Hubert Work, Secretary of the Interior, and submitted to him, February 21, 1928 / survey staff: Lewis Meriam et al. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1928, and Buffalo, NY: William S. Hein & Co., 2012. Accessed via HeinOnline American Indian Law Collection April 29, 2015.

Clarkin, Thomas. Federal Indian Policy in the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations, 1961–1969. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2001.

“Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes.” 2015. Montana Governor’s Office of Indian Affairs. http://tribalnations.mt.gov/cskt Accessed April 29th, 2015.

Fixico, Donald L. Termination and Relocation: Federal Indian Policy, 1945–1960. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1990.

King, Robert R. and Kay Atkinson King. “Mormons in Congress, 1851–2000.” Journal of Mormon History Vol. 26, No. 2 (Fall 2000), pp. 1–50.

“Klamath tribes History.” 2012. http://klamathtribes.org/tribal-court Accessed April 29, 2015.

O’Brien, Sharon. American Indian Tribal Governments. Tulsa: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993.

Oklahoma State University archive of tribal laws and treaties. http://digital.library.okstate.edu/kappler/Vol6/html_files/v6p0614.html

Philp, Kenneth R. “Termination: A Legacy of the Indian New Deal.” The Western Historical Quarterly Vol. 14, No. 2 (April 1983), pp. 165–80.

Walch, Michael C. “Terminating the Indian Termination Policy.” Stanford Law Review Vol. 35, No. 6 (July 1983), pp. 1181–15.

Election of Annie Dodge Wauneka to Navajo Tribal Council, 1951

Claudia J. Ford

Chronology

1910		Annie Dodge born April 10, 1910, in Arizona to parents K’eehabah, the third wife of Henry Chee Dodge, of the Navajo Tse Níjikíní Clan. Her childhood is spent at her father’s house in Crystal, New Mexico, with five brothers and one sister.
1917–1927		Annie attends Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding schools in Ft. Defiance, Arizona, and Albuquerque, New Mexico.
1921		The U.S. government creates the Navajo Tribal Council to make it easier to negotiate leases and mineral rights on Navajo land.
1927		The chapter system of governance is established on the Navajo reservation as a locus of community life. Later in life, Annie serves important roles in chapter governance before being elected to the Tribal Council.
1923–1928		Henry Chee Dodge is elected to his first term as the first Navajo Tribal Chairman of the Navajo Tribal Council.
1929		Annie marries George Wauneka in a traditional Navajo ceremony.
1933		The U.S. government Commissioner of Indian Affairs, John Collier, advocates a system of livestock reductions for the Navajo, in order to alleviate soil erosion and overgrazing on the reservation.
1934		The Indian Reorganization Act, or Wheeler-Howard Act, is rejected by the Navajo.
1940–1942		Wauneka is elected chair of the chapter Grazing Committee and eventually chapter Secretary.
1944–1947		Henry Chee Dodge elected and serves second term as Tribal Chairman.
1947		Henry Chee Dodge dies January 7, 1947.
1951		Wauneka is elected, the second woman to win a council delegate seat, to the Navajo Tribal Council from District 17 of the Klagetoh and Wide Ruins Precincts, and serves on the Council Health and Welfare Committee. This begins 27 years of Wauneka’s continuous service to the Navajo Tribal Council, usually as the only woman delegate.
1954–1978		Wauneka is re-elected to the Navajo Tribal Council.
1956		Wauneka advocates for the education of Navajo attorneys and the establishment of legal aid services to protect the reservation from corporate leases for gas, oil, and mineral exploitation.
1956		Wauneka becomes a member of the government Advisory Committee on Indian Health at the invitation of the Surgeon General of the United States.
1958–1960		Wauneka receives numerous medals and awards: the Arizona Woman of Achievement for the Year, the Josephine B. Hughes Memorial Award, the All Arizona All Indian Basketball Organization Award, the Public Health Educators Will Ross Medal, and the prestigious Indian Council Fire Annual Indian Achievement Award—previously received by her father in 1945.
1960		Wauneka serves on New Mexico Governor’s Committee on the Aging.
1960		Wauneka hosts a daily Navajo language radio show on KGAK in Gallup, New Mexico, covering general and health issues.
1961		Wauneka testifies in Washington, D.C., before the Indian Claims Committee on behalf of the Navajo Nation.
1963		President John F. Kennedy nominates Wauneka for the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which is awarded to her after his assassination on December 6, 1963, by President Lyndon B. Johnson.
1968		Wauneka testifies before the Senate Subcommittee on Indian Education at the request of Robert F. Kennedy.
1974		Wauneka receives the Navajo Nation Medal of Honor.
1976		Wauneka receives an honorary doctorate in public health from the University of Arizona.
1984		The Navajo Tribal Council honors Wauneka as Legendary Mother of the Navajo people.
1996		Wauneka receives an honorary Doctor of Law from the University of Arizona.
1997		Annie Dodge Wauneka dies, November 10, 1997, at 87 years old.

Annie Dodge Wauneka’s Election to the Navajo Tribal Council

Annie Dodge Wauneka (1910–1997) was the second woman to be elected as a delegate to the Navajo Tribal Council. In this historic achievement, Wauneka was preceded on the Council by Lilly J. Neil, who had served for four years before Wauneka’s first term. During nearly three decades on the Council, Wauneka was known as an outspoken politician and cultural leader who worked to connect the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), which controlled the council during her tenure, with the pressing health and social needs of the Navajo community.

Annie Dodge was born in Arizona on April 10, 1910, to parents K’eehabah and Henry Chee Dodge of the Navajo Tse Níjikíní Clan. Anna was the youngest of Chee Dodge’s children. K’eehabah lived in relative poverty, and Anna was born in a traditional Navajo hogan. Henry Chee Dodge was an influential member of the community and a wealthy rancher and businessman. Anna spent her childhood at her father’s house in Crystal, New Mexico, where she was raised by her father’s first wives and her aunts, alongside his other children. On her father’s ranch she learned the skills and business of livestock herding. Anna was educated in government boarding schools in Arizona and New Mexico, beginning at the Ft. Defiance Indian School as a boarder at age eight. During her first year at the school, there was a serious outbreak of tuberculosis, and Anna became known for offering her assistance to the school nurses to take care of her sick classmates. She attended secondary school at the Indian School in Albuquerque, where she met her husband, George Wauneka. In October 1929, Annie Dodge married George Wauneka in a traditional Navajo ceremony. Between 1929 and 1950, Wauneka gave birth to nine children. Due to poor maternal health services in the remote areas in which Wauneka lived, several of her children were born with significant birth trauma, resulting in long-term disabilities. Wauneka and her husband cared for some of their children at home through adulthood. In the 1950s, Wauneka earned a BA in Public Health from the University of Arizona, Tucson, and eventually was awarded two honorary doctorates from her alma mater.

Native American activist and educator Annie Dodge Wauneka (1910–1997) holds up a Zuni doll that she presented to President Kennedy’s daughter Caroline,1963. She was an influential member of the Navajo Nation Council for 27 years beginning in 195l, awarded the Navajo Medal of Honor, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1963 by Lyndon Johnson. (Carl Iwasaki/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images)

Wauneka was heavily influenced in her career as a politician and community advocate by her powerful father, who took a singular interest in her development as an activist. Chee Dodge was a role model for Wauneka, and she would often accompany him to his council meetings or community visits, bringing her children with her. Wauneka’s father tutored her in the cultural and political issues facing the Navajo community, and Wauneka honed her skills in public service and community development through observation of her father’s authority and example. Through her father’s influence, and with well-developed bilingual Navajo and English language fluency, Wauneka understood the importance of serving as a bridge between the dominant culture and the Diné community.

Since 1824, white male government caretakers from the Bureau of Indian Affairs directed the transactions of the Navajo community, as with all Native reservations, resulting in complex and often contentious tribal politics. However, the Navajo Tribal Councils were convened by, and presided over, by Diné men, and the chapter system and council eventually established strong governance structures for the Navajo. While the custom of women’s leadership had always been part of matrilineal Diné history and tradition, increasingly Western and patriarchal models of governance were imposed on the Diné community by the U.S. government, beginning in the early 1800s. These models of community leadership were influential in the establishment of the Council, and largely relegated Navajo women to roles in the domestic sphere. Wauneka’s election to the Navajo Tribal Council in 1951 was, therefore, a significant event. Following in her father’s legacy of service, Wauneka worked tirelessly within Navajo governance structures and found a way to fit into the male culture of the Navajo Tribal Council.

Wauneka was installed on the Navajo Tribal Council on March 20, 1951, two weeks after the elections. Lilakai Neil, the first woman delegate, who served on the Navajo Tribal Council from 1948 to 1950, had just begun a new term in 1951, when she was involved in a very serious car accident that left her in a coma for more than a month, and with long-term disabilities. Because Neil was no longer able to serve, Wauneka was at that time the only woman on the council. Two of her brothers, Ben Dodge and Justin Shirley, were elected and sworn in with Wauneka in 1951.

One of the first public issues that Wauneka tackled, as a member of her local Grazing Committee, was the protection of Navajo land and herding rights. In the 1930s, the traditional herding and pastoral lifestyle of the Diné was threatened by forced, drastic reductions of livestock numbers. Overgrazing was a longstanding issue on the reservation, intensified by increasing population pressures, significant migration of non-Indians into the reservation areas, and an extended period of drought. “Long before John Collier became commissioner in 1933 … the Diné were being scolded for having too many sheep, too many horses, too many goats, and too many cattle” (Iverson 2002, 101). Wauneka’s father was a successful rancher, and so the government policies equally affected her family through reductions in grazing areas and imposed livestock rules. In a seven-year period, from 1937 to 1944, the Dodge family’s sheep herd was reduced by 3,295 animals. On one morning, government agents shot 1,000 head of Chee Dodge’s cattle and let their carcasses rot in the fields (Niethammer 2001). These stock-reduction regulations were particularly difficult for the Diné community, as they went against deeply held cultural traditions around the size and worth of a family’s livestock, and forced the Navajo out of herding and into the wage economy. Smaller herds meant that Diné families could no longer maintain themselves on a lifestyle of subsistence pastoralism. For more than a decade before and after she was elected to the Navajo Tribal Council, Wauneka worked on this issue alongside her father, as a language and cultural interpreter of the regulations of the government and on behalf of the needs of her community.

Sidebar 1: Navajo Culture and Governance

Diné clan life is matrilineal, starting with the original Mother, Changing Woman, who formed the first four clans and from whom all Diné are descended. Clan names reflect the abiding relationship that the Diné have with their natural environment. Clans are often named after places of significant migration, trading posts, or gathering spots where communal labor was traditionally organized among the semi-nomadic Diné. The clan remains the locus of relationships of kinship and marriage. By 1920, there were 64 clans among the Navajos.

The Diné Bikeyah are the traditional lands of the Navajo. Currently, the Diné live on the largest Indian reservation in the United States, comprising 17.5 million acres of arid, mostly desert land in the Four Corners region of Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado. Ranging in elevation from four to 10,000 feet, this location is the spiritual and physical homeland of the Diné, given to them by Changing Woman and protected by the four sacred mountains. The Diné culture is marked by devotion to the Diné language, storytelling and sacred singing, and attentiveness to traditional ceremonies and medicines. The Diné, especially women, are renowned weavers and silversmiths. The traditional Navajo home is called a “hogan” and is made in a conical shape from wooden poles covered by tree bark and mud. The Diné come from a custom of surviving as semi-nomadic pastoralists. The relationship of the Diné to livestock is one of caretaker, with women being the primary owners of the herds. The Diné are sheepherders but also own goats, cattle, and horses. Livestock is wealth in Diné culture, and the herds are used for transportation, food, fiber, and ceremony.

An important part of Diné history is The Navajo Long Walk, which took place between 1864 and 1868, when more than 8,500 Diné men, women, and children were forced off their traditional lands and marched at gunpoint in the middle of winter into a barren and desolate camp in eastern New Mexico at Bosque Redondo, Ft. Sumner. This brutal relocation was imposed to allow non-Indian Americans to expand their land holdings in Navajo areas. As a result of the failure and suffering of The Long Walk, as it was called, the U.S. government was persuaded to sign an 1868 treaty that established the Navajos as a sovereign nation.

Wauneka called for accountability in the issuing of long-term land leases to non-Navajo corporations and ranchers as there was increasing pressure on the Navajo to open their land to the exploration and exploitation of natural resources including gas, oil, coal, minerals, and timber. Wauneka opposed these land grabs and exposed the duplicitous tactics of corporations, developers, and attorneys. “One of the most important voices for Navajo rights belonged to Annie Wauneka. She played a central role in the campaign for improved health care, tirelessly toiling for this vital cause. But her interests were not limited to this one issue. The tribal council delegate from Klagetoh spoke out, again and again, about the need for Navajos to be vigilant in safeguarding and demanding their rights” (Iverson 2002b, 121).

Wauneka was especially well known as a public health activist for the Navajo community, where she was considered a compassionate patient advocate and ran numerous effective community health education promotions. She served as the Chair of the Health and Welfare Committee of the Navajo Tribal Council and could be found going door-to-door in Navajo communities to educate families and, if needed, offer transport to Indian Health Service facilities. Wauneka designed and managed critical, successful preventative health programs for tuberculosis, polio, alcoholism, nutrition, water and sanitation, and maternal and child health. She produced public health films in the Navajo language on childcare, diarrhea prevention, and the treatment and prevention of tuberculosis. Wauneka created the first Navajo–English medical dictionary. Wauneka advocated for better health services and more doctors, nurses, and dentists to be brought to the reservation as promised by government treaties. Improvements in health outcomes in the Diné community could be directly attributed to Wauneka’s advocacy and educational campaigns. “Wauneka sought to continue the work of her father and her brother, both of whom had pushed the Tribal Council to become more involved in the attempt to gain better health care for the Diné” (Iverson 2002a, 208). Wauneka also worked on issues of education, land and livestock rights, women’s rights, and language and cultural preservation. In her service as a delegate to the Navajo Tribal Council, Wauneka travelled widely and was often found lobbying for her community in state capitols, and she was well known in Washington, D.C. In 1956, Wauneka was honored to become a member of the government Advisory Committee on Indian Health at the invitation of the Surgeon General of the United States.

As an elected delegate to the Navajo Tribal Council, Wauneka was a persuasive and passionate speaker who used her considerable energy and skill to serve as a bridge between dominant institutions in health and education and the needs and cultural traditions of her community. Wauneka’s tireless contributions to the fields of Navajo and Indian health and education created tangible improvements in the lives of her community members. Wauneka earned well-deserved recognition for continuing her family’s legacy of public service. In addition to many other awards, medals, and two honorary doctorates, Wauneka was awarded the Indian Council Fire Achievement Award in 1959 and the Navajo Nation Medal of Honor in 1974. In recognition of the importance of her work and the quality of her service to the Diné community Wauneka, was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Lyndon Johnson, on behalf of President John Kennedy, on December 6, 1963.

When Annie Dodge Wauneka died in November 1997, 87 years old, she was ceremonially recognized as a strong willed, confident, and intelligent champion for Native rights and community development, an honored and Legendary Mother, especially for the Diné people.

Biographies of Notable Figures

Henry Chee Dodge (185?–1947)

Chee Dodge was born in Ft. Defiance, Arizona. His father was Juan Cocinas, a Mexican translator for Army Captain Henry Linn Dodge who was related to Senator Dodge of Wisconsin. His mother was Bisnayanchi, a member of the Coyote Pass clan. Juan Cocinas died when Chee Dodge was only a few months old, and his mother disappeared during the beginning of the Navajo Long Walk, leaving Chee Dodge an orphan by the age of four or five. Chee Dodge was taken in by strangers and became caught up in the 1864 Navajo Long Walk. As a young child, Chee Dodge walked over 300 miles to Bosque Redondo and only returned to his homeland in 1868, when the Ft. Sumner internment camp was disbanded. Upon his return to Ft. Defiance, Chee Dodge moved in with an aunt and her white husband, Perry Williams. He went to the Ft. Defiance Indian School and learned to read and write in English, with exposure to the language and customs of white Americans in his new home. Chee Dodge quickly put his skills in Navajo–English translation to use between the Navajo community and government officials. It is understood that both U.S. government officials and Navajo leaders identified Chee Dodge as an intelligent and clever young man, and he was provided with additional schooling. It also seemed possible that he could be the half-Navajo offspring of the famous American Army Captain Henry Linn Dodge, who was known to have a Navajo wife, and for whom Chee Dodge had been named.

Because Chee Dodge was identified by the government as a promising candidate for education and had an early immersion in English language in school and at home, his skills gave him prominence, influence, and reach within the tribe and the American government. Chee Dodge’s Diné name is Hastiin Adiits’a’ti, which means “Man Who Interprets” or “Man Who Understands Languages” (Iverson 2002a). It was his role as translator and interpreter between white and Navajo cultures that earned Chee Dodge his reputation as a cunning politician.

Chee Dodge was also very good with money and became a successful rancher and a wealthy member of his clan and Navajo society. In 1921, Chee Dodge was made chair of the business council that was authorized to sign leases and provide mineral exploration rights. This business council eventually became the Navajo Tribal Council, with Chee Dodge as its first Chairman. The U.S. government originally established the Navajo Tribal Council to provide a legal entity with which U.S. corporations could negotiate long-term leases and the rights to explore and exploit minerals, especially oil, on Navajo land. The Navajo Tribal Council was set up to have a delegate and alternate from each of six districts, plus an elected chair and vice-chair. Chee Dodge served as Tribal Council chair from 1923 to 1928 and was re-elected for another term from 1942 to 1946. Two of Chee Dodge’s children—Ben and Anna—went into tribal politics, undoubtedly influenced by his masterful style and intercultural practices.

Chee Dodge held multiple positions in Navajo public service. In 1884, he was selected as head of the Navajo Police force. He was named Navajo head chief even though the Navajo had no tradition of a chieftaincy. Chee Dodge opened a trading post in Round Rock, Arizona, and was known as a powerful, skilled, perceptive, and financially prudent businessperson and rancher. In some ways, the story of Chee Dodge was an iconic American rags-to-riches narrative. His power and influence were legendary. “By the 1930s, Chee Dodge and the other Navajos had been back in their homeland for sixty-five years. Chee, a homeless orphan when he returned, had become the richest Navajo ever and the leader of his tribe. His livestock numbered in the thousands—sheep, cattle, horses” (Niethammer 2001, 46). Chee Dodge was a shrewd businessperson who enjoyed the perks of his wealth and influence. It is reported that he had a love of alcohol, cars, diamonds, and beautiful women, and Chee Dodge had eight wives, as was customary in earlier times in traditional Navajo culture.

Chee Dodge died from pneumonia on January 7, 1947, approximately 90 years old. His legacy of service was matched only by that of his youngest daughter, Annie Dodge Wauneka.

Lilakai (Lilly) Julian Neil (1900–)

Lilly Neil was born on January 1, 1900, near Crown Point, New Mexico. Little is known about her childhood, which was spent in the Farmington/Nageezi area of New Mexico. Neil was the first Diné woman to serve on the Navajo Tribal Council. He served on the Navajo Tribal Council from 1948 to 1950 as the delegate from District 19. She had just begun a new term in 1951 when she was involved in a serious car accident on her way to a council meeting that left her in a coma for more than a month, and with long-term disabilities. During her time on the Council, Neil advocated for better educational facilities and social services for Indian children and families. Neil served on the council during the immediate post-WWII period, and she reproached the U.S. government for spending considerable money and resources helping European and Asian countries through the Marshall Plan while Native nations, like the Navajo, continued to suffer critical levels of poverty and neglect. Neil pointed out that the active role of Navajo men and women veterans in WWII made the government neglect more intolerable (Iverson 2002b). Neil was also active in her church community and a cofounder of the La Vida Mission in Farmington, New Mexico. While it is believed that Lilly Neil is about to turn 116 years at the time of writing, as her death has not been reported, there is no definitive information on her current health or her living situation.

DOCUMENT EXCERPTS

Excerpts from Letter from Chee Dodge to Commissioner to the Navajo Tribe, H. J. Hagerman, April 1925

Chee Dodge was a persuasive writer and speaker. In this letter, he advocates for the educational services that were promised to the Navajos in the 1868 treaty. The important issue of mineral rights is briefly raised.

April 20, 1925

My dear Mr. Hagerman:

As I understand superintendents of various agencies among our tribe have orders from the Indian Office to use force in putting children into some Indian Schools, not only on but also off the reservation. The reservation schools are practically all filled and therefore this refers to taking children away from the reservation particularly. Attempts are being made to take children of all ages even up to 20 years to school, but I am afraid this idea of forcing children will not work out satisfactorily. You know well enough how many children have run away from Ft. Apache in the past and further I believe you will realize that by taking these older children the sheep industry of the Navajos will suffer greatly. I therefore think it is very wrong for the government to deprive the Indians of the help of their older children who would not do well in school anyway.

Regarding the forcing of younger children, why not have the children put in the Fort Wingate school where they are not so far away from home and relatives? I am not opposing the education of our children; our tribe has always responded when called upon to send children to reservation schools, but it appears that the government is never satisfied … By our treaty of 1868 we promised and kept the promise to put all our children in schools, but the government has failed to keep its side of the agreement by not providing schools on the reserve as specified in said treaty. I am of the impression that the government is playing up a game on us by which they might eventually take our oil interest away from us, if we should happen to make any kind of a bad break …

Very sincerely yours, Chee Dodge

Source: Peter Iverson and Monty Roessel, ed. For Our Navajo People: Diné Letters, Speeches, and Petitions, 1900-1960. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002, 90–91. Copyright © 2002 University of New Mexico Press. Used by permission.

Excerpts from Reports Written by Annie Wauneka to the Navajo Tribal Council, 1953–1955

It appears that Annie Dodge Wauneka inherited her father’s persuasiveness as a writer and speaker. In these reports, Wauneka is clearly advocating for promised medical care, providing examples of the ways that the BIA controlled health services were failing the Navajo community. Wauneka’s calling as a health educator is compelling, as she uses the opportunity of the report to the Council to provide critical health education information.

November 2, 1953: Our people are not getting the kind of medical service we were promised under the Long Range Program. We have less health services now than we had four years ago … we were promised health centers, field clinics, traveling doctors, nurses, dentists and a large number of public health nurses. Instead of giving us more and better medical service, we see the Fort Defiance hospital almost closed. Every day, sick Navajos are turned away because the hospital people cannot take care of them. We do not understand how a new two million dollar hospital can be built and operated at Tuba City when the Fort Defiance Hospital is almost out of business for lack of money. We approve most of the Public Health doctors who have been loaned to use, but we have reports from Winslow and other places that people have died on the operating table because certain doctors do not know their business. We have reports that many more babies are dying in the hospitals due to poor care. We see that there is a shortage of nurses, but why can’t our Navajo girls be trained to be practical nurses? Why must we suffer because registered nurses will not come to the reservation? We see these and many other things that are wrong, but we are not experts, so we must depend on the white leaders. We think that there is no real health program. It there is, we haven’t heard about it or seen it. And our sick people are paying for it.

October 12, 1955: Another point I would like to present here on which I would like to ask specifically that the Councilmen participate more. We have three films which we have made. One is on child care, diarrhea prevention, and it is given as it should take place. There is another one on Tuberculosis. One part of this same picture is on treatment of out-patients who have been afflicted with T.B., and the last film is on sanitation which the Doctor presented to you as a preventative measure, how to maintain yourself to prevent disease. These films are available and we would like the backing of every Councilman in getting these films out and getting an understanding on why these films are made—to teach, to train the Navajos to take care of their health. That is why we need your help. It is true that what you do at home in taking preventative measures to maintain your health, is the first step toward prevention from taking an illness which will cause you to go to a hospital. Previous to the transfer of the Indian health service, a Navajo who got sick went to a hospital, got treatment, and went home. That is as far as the health services went. You get your training at home, in your community, how to take that work home and what to do so that your children and you will not get contagious disease and come down with it and be admitted to a hospital. We have an immunization program by use of vaccines. If the Navajo knows how to take advantage of that program they will not have to be subject to any of these contagious diseases. That is your prevention, the preservation of your health.

Source: Peter Iverson and Monty Roessel, ed. For Our Navajo People: Diné Letters, Speeches, and Petitions, 1900–1960. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002, 152–54. Copyright © 2002 University of New Mexico Press. Used by permission.

Excerpts from Annie Wauneka’s Speech on Legal Services and Mineral Leases

In this speech about mineral rights on the reservation, Wauneka is clearly advocating for the training of Navajo attorneys while she is also cautioning the Council on the intentions behind the 99-year leases.

We all have opinions regarding different subjects of course, but, under this 99 year lease authority you are requesting, I have my opinion. If Congress gives us the power to give 99 year leases, it means in my thinking that we are opening up the whole Navajo area, the whole Reservation, to anyone who might have other intentions than those which might be best for the tribe.… There are many people who are interested in opening up the Reservation in the first place. If we give them one chance to get their foot in, we are through as far as the Reservation is concerned.… Now, I would like to come to the tribal attorney.… Our attorney is a white man. If we have an attorney from our own tribe to tell us these things which we have had told us by this white man, we would give it our hearty support but there is a doubt about the present attorney’s ability, or lack of it, to help us.… In the last Council session we agreed with two men to do prospecting for oil and minerals over the Reservation. Without them telling us about what they had found, they turned around and gave it to another group and this group comes before us asking for an agreement with time to develop the oil and gas on the Reservation.… The fact is that 99 years is a long time and I would like you to keep that in mind. That is a lot of time and here we are, just getting our children started off in schools. Why cannot we defer this matter until such time as we can get help from our own members of the tribe?

Source: Peter Iverson and Monty Roessel, ed. For Our Navajo People: Diné Letters, Speeches, and Petitions, 1900–1960. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002, 200–201. Copyright © 2002 University of New Mexico Press. Used by permission.

Further Reading

Brugge, David M. “Henry Chee Dodge: From the Long Walk to Self-Determination.” In Indian lives: Essays on Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Native American Leaders, edited by L.G. Moses and Raymond Wilson, 91–112. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1985.

Caravantes, Peggy. Daughters of Two Nations. Missoula, MT: Mountain Press Publishing Company, 2013.

Denetdale, Jennifer Nez. “Chairmen, Presidents, and Princesses: The Navajo Nation, Gender, and the Politics of Tradition.” Wicazo Sa Review 21, No. 1 (2006): 9–28.

Frisbie, Charlotte J. “Traditional Navajo Women: Ethnographic and Life History Portrayals.” American Indian Quarterly 6, No. 1/2 (1982): 11–33.

Iverson, Peter. Diné: A History of the Navajos. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002a.

Iverson, Peter, ed. For Our Navajo People: Diné Letters, Speeches, and Petitions, 1900–1960. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002b.

Lee, Lloyd L. “Reclaiming Indigenous Intellectual, Political, and Geographic Space: A Path for Navajo Nationhood.” American Indian Quarterly 32, No. 1 (2008): 96–110.

Lee, Lloyd Lance, ed. Diné Perspectives: Revitalizing and Reclaiming Navajo Thought. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2014.

McPherson, Robert S. Dinéjí Na’nitin: Navajo Traditional Teachings and History. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2012.

Niethammer, Carolyn. I’ll Go and Do More: Annie Dodge Wauneka, Navajo Leader and Activist. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001.

Niethammer, Carolyn. Keeping the Rope Straight: Annie Dodge Wauneka’s Life of Service to the Navajo. Flagstaff, AZ: Salina Bookshelf, Inc., 2006.

Shepardson, Mary. “The Status of Navajo Women.” American Indian Quarterly 6, no. 1/2 (1982): 149–169.

Weisiger, Marsha. Dreaming of Sheep in Navajo Country. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2011.

Witt, Shirley Hill. “An Interview with Dr. Annie Dodge Wauneka.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies 6, No. 3 (1981): 64–67.

Bureau of Indian Affairs American Indian Relocation, 1952

Megan Tusler

Chronology

1947		Secretary of the Interior Julius King proposes an American Indian “betterment plan.”
1951		The BIA begins moving agents to relocation centers on reservations and in cities.
1952		Relocation officially begins.
1957		Public Law 959, also called the “Indian Relocation Act,” provides $3.5 million to the BIA to aid in the relocation process.

Federal Funds for American Indians to Relocate

American Indian relocation was the result of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) passing a series of laws that provided funds for moving Native individuals and families from rural reservations to urban centers. Relocation offices were set up in Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Jose, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Cleveland, and Dallas; there were also relocation centers on reservations themselves that encouraged families and single adults to move for perceived increased opportunity. A set of political and legal changes spurred relocation—in 1947, Secretary of the Interior Julius Krug proposed a ten-year plan for aiding Native People in “bettering” themselves. In 1951, the Bureau of Indian Affairs assigned agents to work on reservations and in urban relocation centers with the hope of encouraging Native People to move. The relocation program itself began in 1952.

According to Donald L. Fixico, by 1954, 6,200 Native People had been relocated from reservations to cities (“Dislocated,” in Philip Weeks 196). The “relocatees,” as they were called, were encouraged to work in factories and at other kinds of industrial labor. They were moved into living quarters that denoted a sense of typical urban living, such as small apartments in neighborhoods like Chicago’s Uptown. In general, members of one tribe were physically placed apart from each other in the interest of encouraging assimilation. Inter-tribal friendships, however, were common, with Navajo and Hopi tribal members (for example) placed in proximity in Los Angeles. In 1956, the federal government passed a funding initiative, Public Law 959, that provided $3.5 million to the Bureau of Indian Affairs to aid in the process. The law reads, in part:

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That in order to help adult Indians who reside on or near Indian reservations to obtain reasonable and satisfactory employment, the Secretary of the Interior is authorized to undertake a program of vocational training that provides for vocational counseling or guidance, institutional training in any recognized vocation or trade, apprenticeship, and on the job training, for periods that do not exceed twenty-four months, transportation to the place of training, and subsistence during the course of training. (Accessed via Oklahoma State University Library)

This law had the effect of the BIA opening training centers both on reservations and in cities. The jobs open to Native People tended to be gender-selective—women were trained for secretarial work, while men trained for factory or mechanical jobs. Furthermore, this legislative decision provided for training at the secondary educational level—vocational schools were opened on reservations that provided technical training. There was, for example, a training program at Taos Pueblo Junior High that taught boys industrial labor.

The “success” or “failure” of the relocation process is the subject of debate among scholars of American Indian history. Given that a significant number of the original relocatees moved back to reservations, the program might be considered a failure. For others, the fact that many Native People considered the city their permanent home might also be considered a major issue as it implies ongoing culture loss and increasing assimilation. For yet others, the fact that intertribal coalitions were forged as a result of relocation suggests that the program was a success in some ways and a failure in others. In Chicago, the American Indian Center was founded in 1953; members of the Oneida, Ojibwa, Menominee, Sac and Fox, and other nations were represented among the original participants in this intertribal organization. In Oakland, California the Intertribal Friendship House was established in 1955 as a community center and evolved into a social service provider as well. The American Indian Movement (AIM) began its political action in an urban center as well—among its first actions was the creation of the Minneapolis AIM Patrol to combat police brutality against American Indian people in that urban center. In this sense, and for this third category of scholars, relocation had severe effects—it removed reservation dwellers from their traditional homelands and repositioned them in urban locations, where they continued to be ill-served by the United States government. It also had some unexpected positive consequences—when Native People were relocated to urban centers, it facilitated intertribal organizing and the creation of coalitions that persist to this day.

Relocation can be seen to have its origins in the Indian Reorganization Act, or what is called the “Indian New Deal.” After the Meriam report of 1928 found Native reservation dwellers to be disproportionately impoverished and living in substandard circumstances, the Director of the BIA, John Collier, proposed legislation that would allow tribes more economic and governmental independence. The IRA slowed the allotment practice that had been breaking reservation lands into individual holdings since the General Allotment Act of 1887. Furthermore, it encouraged tribal governments to enact constitutions, a practice that would encourage tribal sovereignty and independence.

After Collier left the Bureau of Indian Affairs, other “reformers” added to the IRA. In 1954, the Indian Reorganization Act was amended to exclude certain tribes from exercising their rights of sovereignty; while this is not necessarily obvious from the act itself, the removal of sovereign status from such nations as the Klamath of Oregon effectively “terminated” that tribe. The early 1950s are considered among scholars of Indian history to be the “relocation and termination era”—the two governmental practices should be thought of as conjoined. When the government began to terminate sovereign nations, it simultaneously began its program of relocating Native People in an effort to “desegregate” Indian populations and encourage assimilation.

Dillon Myer was the Commissioner of Indian Affairs from 1950 to 1953 and coined the term “relocation” to refer to the practice of moving Native People from reservations to cities. Scholars such as Stan Steiner have noted that the term “relocation” is a loaded one in the context of Dillon Myer; prior to his appointment at the BIA, he led the War Relocation Authority from 1942 to 1946. The War Relocation Authority was responsible, during the Second World War, for the incarceration of Japanese and Japanese Americans in “relocation” camps. It was under his leadership as well as a number of senators and other lawmakers that House Concurrent Resolution 108 was passed in 1953. It reads, in part,

Whereas it is the policy of Congress, as rapidly as possible, to make the Indians within the territorial limits of the United States subject to the same laws and entitled to the same privileges and responsibilities as are applicable to other citizens of the United States, to end their status as wards of the United States, and to grant them all of the rights and prerogatives pertaining to American citizenship; and Whereas the Indians within the territorial limits of the United States should assume their full responsibilities as American citizens.

This coded language, which implies that “full citizenship” should be extended to Native Peoples, had the effect of spurring both termination and relocation policies. When Indians are asked to “assume their full responsibilities as American citizens,” the act attempts to end the special “domestic dependent” relationship that tribes have had with the United States government since the Marshall Trilogy of the 1820s and 1830s.

After HCR 108, agents from the Bureau of Indian Affairs began the process of building relocation centers on reservations and in major cities. They used a number of methods for encouraging Native People to relocate: promises of steady work; opportunities for city living that were assumed to be particularly exciting for the young and single; demonstrations of apparent “equal economic opportunity.” To do this, the agents produced bulletins, posters, and scrapbooks that they showed reservation-dwellers to encourage them to move. The agents produced small studies to demonstrate to the Bureau that their efforts were effective and could be more effective: an agent at the Sisseton branch constructed a pie chart showing that, of the 464 people he had interviewed on the reservation, 312 were “fully employable,” 35 were “unemployable,” and 117 were “handicapped” (United States, Bureau of Indian Affairs. Bureau of Indian Affairs Indian relocation records [manuscript] 1936–1975). They also took a massive archive of photographs, the prints of which are now housed in various institutions, such as the Newberry Library in Chicago.

As mentioned, 1956 saw the passage of Public Law 959, which earmarked $3.5 million for employing and relocating reservation dwellers. The finding guide for the Newberry Library’s archive demonstrates that PL 959 stepped up the relocation effort. “Participants, mostly between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five, received two years of benefits for either on-the-job experience or vocational classes. Typically, Indians working in factories on the reservation received apprenticeship provisions, and relocated individuals received vocational training. The 1956 legislation also increased counseling services” (Newberry finding guide: http://mms.newberry.org/xml/xml_files/relocation.xml). The Bureau of Indian Affairs worked with factories, corporations, and private offices to encourage the hiring of tribal members. Brief narratives of relocatees’ journeys are included in the archive: a photograph of a young Winnebago woman and her white supervisor bears the caption, “Miss Irene Snowball, Winnebago, from Black River Falls, Wisconsin, came to Chicago, April 19, 1955. Irene is working for Nelson-Eismann as a typist at $60.00 a week. There are many schools for typing, stenography and business machine operation. Girls can go to these schools while working on a job to earn living” [sic]. Another picture, of an Ojibwe man, has this text attached: “Mr. LaRoy Miller, Jr., Chippewa, from Shawano, Wisconsin. He came to Chicago April 18, 1955. He is working at the Teletype Corporation as a machine operator trainee at $1.72 an hour [about $610.00 a week U.S. 2016]. LaRoy came to Chicago upon the advice of his brother, Roger” (United States, Bureau of Indian Affairs. Bureau of Indian Affairs Indian relocation records [manuscript] 1936–1975).

The bulletins and letters that circulated between relocation officers show the importance of the industrial work that greets Indians in their new city homes; the following is excerpted from a letter between Jack Womeldorf, the relocation officer at Intermountain School, and Rudolph Russell, a Chicago relocation agent in Joliet. Intermountain School in Brigham City, Utah, was a boarding/vocational school primarily for Navajo (Diné) children.

Intermountain School is the largest off-reservation school operated by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Under separate cover we are mailing you an information album to better acquaint you with our program. Since the first graduating class four years ago [1953], approximately 714 young men and women have been placed in employment off the reservation.…

Because of the limited time these young people are in school it becomes necessary to give them specialized training. This, in simple language, means to train them to do one job (or trade) rather than a general course of doing many things. We find that our most successful graduates are those who have been placed in jobs for which they have been trained.

We will have approximately 57 boys this year seeking employment and a start through Relocation Services. If it is at all possible, I would like to see each one of them have an opportunity to work in his field of training … (United States, Bureau of Indian Affairs. Bureau of Indian Affairs Indian relocation records [manuscript], 1936–1975)

When Womeldorf repeatedly requests that the Native students be placed in their “fields of training,” he is referring to the exclusively industrial trades in which Intermountain School provided training, including driving (trucks and other manufacturing vehicles), equipment maintenance, cabinet and millwork, electrical engineering, etc. Intermountain strongly emphasized the importance of off-reservation employment; at an assembly in 1959 four students stand on a stage holding a massive banner that reads “Remember our words: Finish your education! Be on the bus next August!” (Utah State University, Merrill-Cazier Library, Special Collections and Archives, Compton Photograph Collection).

Once Native People arrived in their new urban homes, they pursued not just industrial labor but also connections with other Indian people. It is in part as a result of the desire for tribal and intertribal connection that institutions like the American Indian Center in Chicago and Intertribal Friendship House in Oakland were founded. Again, as a result of these connections, urban Indians redrew the lines of “cultural belonging,” arguing in favor of an intertribal community in addition to the tribal communities that theretofore had been located on reservations. A great number of relocatees became more involved in organized social movements after relocation. Indian relocatees did not simply move from reservations and passively accept the demands of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, as demonstrated in interviews with relocatees. In the series of interviews conducted by the Chicago American Indian Oral History Project, transcripts of which are also owned by the Newberry, a number of commentators describe their early efforts at meeting other Native People. Phyllis Fastwolf notes that when she moved to Chicago in the 1950s with her family, “at the time we met at the Two Crow [a bar frequented by relocatees], there were quite a few families that were here on relocation. There were some from South Dakota. We had met a lot of families. It didn’t take that long. In fact, we met quite a few Indians.” The unidentified manuscript author describes the intertribal alliance that formed: “The relocation program attempted to scatter the Indian relocatees throughout the city, but as soon as families learned about the various neighborhoods and could afford to move, they sought to rent apartments close together to form their own ethnic enclave. Uptown became a popular Indian neighborhood, where the Indian population has gravitated” (88). Indeed, Inez Running Bear Dennison, an early relocatee, notes the intertribal connections, and shows how belonging could be about racial solidarity and not tribal status alone: “I don’t think I’d ever want to move out of Uptown because that is where the Indians are. I said I don’t care what tribe they are, if they are Indian—they are Indians. I love all Indians” (14).

Additionally, the reliance of some Natives on social services (a lifestyle shared with many other members of the working class) exposed many of the problems between the institutions of federal aid and the people enjoined to take advantage of that aid. For example, the House Subcommittee on Indian Affairs’ Indian Relocation and Industrial Development Programs noted that in Los Angeles, “Relocatees are advised that the relocation office cannot be used as a crutch indefinitely and that they must learn to utilize the same community resources as do other residents of the city” (Quoted in Neils 61), despite the fact that social services were being cut for all poor urbanites during the 1950s and 1960s. This push to cut Indian “reliance” shows the particular concern with the federal government on purported Indian “dependence.”

Although Native People were often able to adapt—if not “assimilate”—to their urban surroundings, it is important to note that the campaign to “desegregate” Indian people into industrial labor was in some ways based on a faulty premise: that American industrial might was growing. In her article “Historical Background” from The American Indian Today, Nancy Oestrich Lurie accounts for many of the complicated outcomes of relocation and termination:

Because Indian people showed a marked aptitude for industrial work during the war, and it was obvious they would not succeed as farmers, the solution was simple. Relocate them in urban centers, preferably in each case as far from the home reservation as possible, and legislate the reservation out of existence so that Indian people could not run home when things got tough or share their good fortune periodically with kinsmen who lacked the gumption to get out on their own.

Like the grand scheme of 1887 to solve the Indians’ problems by the simple expedient of allotment in severality [she refers to the Dawes Act, which in many cases carved reservation land into individual “allotments” with the hope of turning communally-held land into family plots], the relocation-reservation termination plan of the 1950s was out of date for its time in terms of national social and economic trends. If the ideal of the Allotment Act [Dawes Act] was to ensconce Indian people in a kind of average, small farm middle-class, which was actually disappearing, the ideal of the policy of the 1950s was primarily to get the government out of the Indian business and scant attention was paid to where Indian people might be able to fit in American life.…

At the very time that suburbs were burgeoning, commuting was a way of life for much of the nation, and far-sighted people were anticipating greater segmentation of industrial operations and dispersing them to where the people live, Indian policy was based on models of concentrating population in large urban centers.

Lurie notes that one of the problems with relocation was the way that it deposited Indian people into an urban environment that had already demonstrated the beginning of its collapse from a 19th century ideal. Scholars of urban history have argued since the 1980s that the “urban crisis” of the 1970s was a problem that actually had its origins in the late 1940s and 1950s, with the increase in the United States’ global hegemony. As a result of this decline in industrial power, relocation makes it difficult for Native People to assimilate in the way the Bureau assumes they will—into being particular kinds of workers.

As a result of the relocation and termination policies, governmental and nonprofit organizations issued reports on the “success” of the policy. The Commission on the Rights, Liberties, and Responsibilities of the American Indian issued A Program for Indian Citizens: A Summary Report, which eventually became the 1966 book The Indian, America’s Unfinished Business, by William A. Brophy and Sophie D. Aberle. By that point, mainstream scholars of American Indians had taken a new tack, arguing that Native persons with “a foot in both worlds” were the most beneficial to society at large.

The Indian himself should be the focus of all public policy affecting him. Money, land, education, and technical assistance should be considered as only means to an end—making the Indian a self-respecting and useful American citizen. This policy involves restoring his pride of origin and faith in himself after years of crippling dependence on the federal government and arousing his desire to share in the advantages of modern civilization. These are deeply human considerations. If disregarded, they will defeat the best-intentioned government plans.

To encourage pride in Indianness is not to turn back the clock. On the contrary, it is to recognize that the United States policy has hitherto neglected this vital factor as a force for assimilation, with a corresponding loss to our national culture. As a result, Indians who have already entered our greater society have tended to disdain their historical background, drawing away from it as though ashamed. Instead of seeing it as a bridge to enable others to follow in their footsteps, they have too often misinterpreted their heritage to the dominant race and misrepresented their adopted culture to their own people. Yet men who have a foot in each world with an appreciation of both can effectively lessen the gap that divides the two and thus cross-fertilize both. (3)

This line of argumentation demonstrates that the program of relocation intended a version of assimilation that is congruent with the dominant political and cultural mode of the 1950s. For example, that the transition to “useful American citizenship” is characterized as a “deeply human consideration” outlines the purported universality of the desegregation project. Aligned here is also the problem of how to produce productive citizens while enabling Indians in particular to retain something like cultural pride; the authors insist that the U.S. government must encourage, simultaneously, “pride of origin” and an end to “crippling dependence.” As most of the commentary on the “unfinished business” of “The Indian” notes in the midcentury, the loss of “cultural pride” or “pride of origin” is considered a fundamentally national problem. The authors do not refer to a nuanced vision of the nation that might accommodate Indian nations or nationalisms; when they assert that a loss of Indian “pride of origin” is a loss to “our national culture,” they are asserting that “the Indian” is a fundamentally—and irrevocably—American construction.

For relocatees themselves, the program had a multitude of effects, some positive and some negative. American Indian urban communities have benefitted greatly from intertribal organizations and a renewed pan-Indian collectivism that grew out of the urban communities. However, the drive for assimilation removed many Native People from their reservation homes, producing increased reservation isolation.

Biographies of Notable Figures

John Collier, 1884–1968

John Collier, who was the commissioner of Indian Affairs from 1933 to 1945, was educated as a sociologist and taught in the discipline before his work in Indian country. His work with Indian communities was inspired by field work, in which he watched traditional dances. During the 1920s, the study of sociology and anthropology were dominated by an ethnographic method that had been pioneered by figures such as Franz Boas, and Collier’s interest in preserving traditional Native ways of life while simultaneously expanding Indian integration was in keeping with the perspectives of early 20th-century social scientists. “After teaching sociology at San Francisco State College in 1921–1922, he was appointed research agent for the Indian Welfare Committee of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs. He gained national recognition as an Indian reformer by blocking the U.S. Senate Bursum Bill, which would have ended Pueblo land and water rights without adequate compensation” (American National Biography 2004).

Before his work on the Indian Reorganization Act, Collier worked primarily with the American Indian Defense Association. Legal scholar Jay Daniels notes, “He had intended to reverse some of the worst government policies and provide ways for American Indians to re-establish sovereignty and self-government, to reduce the losses of reservation lands, and establish ways for Indians to build economic self-sufficiency” (Daniels 2013). For Collier, Indian self-governance was a value that should be preserved in national policy, and he worked on such issues as religious freedom, water rights, and land preservation. He published his own bulletin, American Indian Life, which documented many of the failures of the Indian Bureau to fully provide for the people to whom it should have been accountable. Furthermore, he lobbied for the Indian Oil Act of 1927, which was intended to shift policy such that tribal members were able to receive royalties from oil and mineral deposits that had recently been found on some reservations.

In part due to Collier’s continuing objections to Indian policy, the Department of the Interior commissioned an intensive study of the Native population. In 1928, the Meriam Report detailed the quality of life for Native People in the United States. “The Brookings Institution published the results of this review in The Problem of Indian Administration, which advocated increased federal appropriations for Indians, limited tribal self-rule, and the end of land allotment. Between 1929 and 1932, Collier constantly criticized federal officials for not following the Brookings recommendations; he also joined members of the Senate Indian Investigating Committee who traveled the country to publicize substandard living conditions on western reservations” (American National Biography).

To quote the report itself, it was:

A survey of the economic and social conditions of the American Indians during the 1920s. Data was collected by field work for approximately 7 months. One or more members of the investigating staff visited 95 different jurisdictions, either reservations, Indian agencies, hospitals, or schools and also communities where Indians have migrated. Practically all western states with any considerable Indian population were included in the field work. Because of the diversity and complexity of Indian affairs this document is necessarily voluminous. The detailed report contains the following sections: (1) a general policy for Indian Affairs, (2) health, (3) education, (4) general economic conditions, (5) family and community life and the activities of women, (6) migrated Indians, (7) legal aspects of the Indian problem, and (8) missionary activities among Indians. Findings and recommendations are listed in detail in the front of this report. Findings cover such areas as health, living conditions, the causes of poverty, and the work of the government in behalf of the Indians. Recommendations include adequate statistics and records, better living and working conditions, and improving general economic conditions. (Wisconsin Historical Society records http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED087573.pdf)

In part due to his unflagging support of the Brookings Institute (Meriam) report and his advocacy in Indian country, Collier was made Commissioner of Indian Affairs in 1933, appointed by Franklin D. Roosevelt. Among his significant policy decisions was the Indian Reorganization Act (IRA, also called the “Indian New Deal”). It was passed by Congress in 1934. “This legislation authorized tribal self-rule under federal supervision, discontinued land allotment, and permitted the consolidation, restoration, and purchase of tribal land for Indian reservations. The act set up a federal revolving credit fund to stimulate reservation economic development, and it provided tuition and scholarships to encourage Indian education” (American National Biography).

Despite the good intentions of the IRA, its policies proved difficult to fund and maintain. Collier found it consistently difficult to get Congress to allocate enough funds to continue the programs that the Meriam report advocated. He also raised a number of suggestions for Indian “self-betterment” that proved challenging to institute in practice. For example, “in 1940 Secretary of War Henry Stimson rejected his suggestion that the government form separate Indian military units. Instead, Stimson endorsed compulsory integrated military service, which rapidly accelerated the process of tribal assimilation” (American National Biography). The war years were generally difficult for those who advocated domestic policy funds allocation, in no small part because of the need for war funding.

Collier resigned as commissioner in 1945, although his work continued on the part of subaltern peoples. He worked for the Institute of Ethnic Affairs and advocated for improved livelihoods for people under colonial control in Southeast Asia and Micronesia. He eventually took up a teaching position at the City College of New York. “For the next six years he taught classes, published research on Indian life in the New World, and worked at the Institute of Ethnic Affairs. After his retirement in 1954, he taught classes for one semester at Columbia University and a summer seminar at the Merrill-Palmer School for social workers in Detroit” (American National Biography). He died in 1968.

Dillon S. Myer, 1891–1982

Dillon S. Myer was Commissioner of Indian Affairs from 1950 to 1953. In this role, he was the architect of relocation, and has been widely criticized by those like John Collier and other policy-makers active in the passage of the IRA (Indian Reorganization Act). Furthermore, Myer’s work during the war years with Japanese and Japanese-American internment contributes to the criticism that continues to surround his actions.

Myer’s political career began in the Agricultural Adjustment Administration in 1934. It continued in a number of domestic policy departments, including the War Relocation Authority and the Public Housing Authority. Myer’s government tenure, however, is primarily remembered in relation to his supervision of the internment of Japanese and Japanese Americans during the Second World War. According to his obituary, published October 25, 1982, in the New York Times,

In 1942, Mr. Myer was appointed director of the War Relocation Authority and put in charge of Japanese aliens and Japanese-Americans who were ordered from their West Coast homes because of fears of an invasion by the Japanese after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Ten austere evacuation centers, patterned after army camps, were established around the country.

Before the war ended, Mr. Myer began to move individuals and families from the centers to jobs and homes outside the exclusion area, an effort that, he said, encountered resistance and racial prejudice in some areas. When the war in the Pacific ended, the exclusion order was revoked, and Mr. Myer began a major drive to empty the relocation centers.

Mr. Myer remained in charge of the agency until it was dissolved in 1946. He said he considered the evacuation order a regrettable mistake, but felt that the relocation effort had done something to correct it. (“Dillon S. Myer, Who Headed War Relocation Agency, Dies,” accessed via nytimes.com.)

Despite Myer’s ambivalence about the effects of internment and “relocation,” he designed American Indian relocation in some ways based on the model of the relocation of Japanese and Japanese Americans after the end of internment. Relocation is contemporaneous with, and in many ways dependent upon, the federal termination policy for which Myer was also responsible. “Termination” refers to a group of policies that intended to end the federal trust relationship between tribes and the United States government. Donald L. Fixico points to how Myer, unlike his predecessor John Collier, advocated an assimilationist policy that would end the federal trust relationship by ending the federal recognition of some tribes (Fixico in Weeks 198).

Myer’s assimilationist policies were, however, in keeping with much popular opinion toward American Indians. Eleanor Roosevelt voiced her support for ending the “paternalistic” relationship between Native People and the federal government (Philp 45). The rhetoric that Myer used that was taken up by other policy-makers emphasized an end to “dependence,” “paternalism,” and “reliance” on federal programs. Furthermore, Myer’s emphasis on assimilation opened the possibility for increased Indian citizenship participation: seeing the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act as an opportunity for better Indian education, Myer reallocated funds to emphasize better schooling for Indian children (Philp 48).

Among Indian scholars as well as policy-makers like Myer, education policies are often viewed as efforts at assimilation. The distinction between these positions is how they are viewed as aspirational—for indigenous scholars, increased education is potentially both positive and negative, whereas for bureaucrats like Myer it was seen as unilaterally positive. These different points of view demonstrate the ongoing problem of how the federal government relates to its Indian citizens—the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which Myer hoped would quickly become unnecessary as Indian people assimilated to the “mainstream,” continues to encounter problems with the relationship between the tribal-national trust arrangement and the state form of U.S. governance.

Myer’s legacy is still controversial. This is because of his domestic actions with internment and Indian policy but also because of the way he responded to critique over his political life. According to the American National Biography, “In the last months of his life he was again involved in public controversy. The establishment of the Commission on the Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC) in late 1980 refocused public attention on the wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans. Too ill to appear at the CWRIC’s Washington hearings, he authorized the commission’s most vociferous critic, Lillian Baker, to read a statement opposing the idea of an apology. He died in Silver Spring, Maryland, just months before the CWRIC’s report denounced both the decision to incarcerate and the process by which the WRA kept Japanese Americans imprisoned” (American National Biography online.) This opposition to apology will continue to make Myer a notorious figure in the history of the 20th century.

DOCUMENT EXCERPTS

An archive of images collected by the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the 1950s is housed at the Newberry Library, having been collected from the Chicago office of the BIA. The collection houses several hundred images taken between 1953 and 1958, many taken from scrapbooks curated by BIA agents, others taken by anonymous agents in order to convince reservation-dwellers to relocate to Chicago, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Seattle, or another major American city with a BIA office. According to the government office website for the Department of the Interior, “Indian Affairs (IA) is the oldest bureau of the United States Department of the Interior. Established in 1824, IA currently provides services (directly or through contracts, grants, or compacts) to approximately 1.9 million American Indians and Alaska Natives. There are 566 federally recognized American Indian tribes and Alaska Natives in the United States. Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) is responsible for the administration and management of 55 million surface acres and 57 million acres of subsurface minerals estates held in trust by the United States for American Indian, Indian tribes, and Alaska Natives. “The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) mission is to: ‘… enhance the quality of life, to promote economic opportunity, and to carry out the responsibility to protect and improve the trust assets of American Indians, Indian tribes, and Alaska Natives’ ” (BIA website, accessed 27 January 2015).

The archive records a major moment in American Indian history and in the cultural and aesthetic history of American urbanization more generally. The Newberry Library’s archive provides a primary textual way to see images of Native People in relocation as well as documents that speak to the motives of the project.

Dated February 8, 1957, the letter presents an introduction to the “Menominee people.”

To our friends and co-workers in relocation:

It is a pleasure to present this little picture study of the Menominee people and their reservation. We trust it will give you an insight into out problems and help you when our people come to your office for assistance.

Due to limited time and the season we were unable to get a number of pictures we would like for you to see. We expect to supplement this little book from time to time and eventually give you a complete picture of these people.

Sincerely yours,

C.W. McCall

Agency Relocation Officer

Further documents record some of the resources that the reservation holds. For the Menominee at the time, this was primarily in the form of timberland. The following document advertises “the many things” that relocation can be.

Yes, Relocation is many things!

In the first place, no one wants to move unless he can benefit by it.

If a person has a good job and a place to live, he probably would not profit by the services of the Relocation Program.

On the other hand, if an individual or family needs employment, and desires to move to a distant city where he can get steady work, this program can give assistance.

To start the Relocation procedures you must file an application with the Relocation Officer at the agency Headquarters. These papers are then sent to the Field Relocation Office of your choice. The people in the Field Offices are able to assist applicants in the location of jobs, housing and in making the many adjustments that always come up when a person moves from one locality to another.

Financial assistance is also available for those who can not pay their own expenses involved in making the move to their new location.

Field Relocation services are available only in St. Louis, Missouri, Denver, Colorado, Los Angeles, San Francisco and San Jose in California and Chicago, Illinois.

The pie chart that poses the benefits of the program asserts that relocation is: job benefits (skills, security, promotions, company programs), job, housing (temporary, permanent, home ownership), financial aid (travel subsistence en-route and at destination), sound planning, sincerity, community adjustment, and desire to do better. Finally, among the photographs in the “picture study” are primarily pictures of local reservation buildings.

The relocation agents underscore not just the financial benefits to relocatees, they also pose a very particular 1950s ambition for housing, particularly in the form of “home ownership,” as well as for “sound planning.” These materials also demonstrate that propagandistic forms were deemed necessary to persuade Native reservation dwellers to relocate. It seems that the Bureau of Indian Affairs went to some lengths to convince Indians that they would be “better off” in urban environments—particularly because it was assumed that reservations themselves were not places in which Native People could find good jobs and high-quality housing.

Source: Bureau of Indian Affairs Indian Relocation Records, The Newberry Library, Chicago.

Further Reading

American National Biography 2004.

Bureau of Indian Affairs Indian Relocation Records, The Newberry Library, Chicago. Finding guide: http://mms.newberry.org/xml/xml_files/relocation.xml

Burt, Larry W. “Roots of the Native American Urban Experience: Relocation Policy in the 1950s.” American Indian Quarterly Vol. 10, No. 2 (Spring, 1986): pp. 85–99.

Daniels, Jay. Why Justice Scalia is Blind to History, July 12, 2013. Indian Country Today Media Network. http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2013/07/12/why-justice-scalia-blind-history)

Fixico, Donald L. Termination and Relocation: Federal Indian Policy, 1945–1960. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1990.

Hoover, Herbert T. and Miller, David Reed Miller, eds. Chicago American Indian oral history project records, manuscript.

Neils, Elaine M. “The Urbanization of the American Indian and the Federal Program of Relocation Assistance.” Dissertation. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1969.

Oklahoma State University Archive of Tribal Laws and Treaties. http://digital.library.okstate.edu/kappler/Vol6/html_files/v6p0614.html

Philip, Kenneth. Dillon S. Meyer and the Advent of Termination: 1950–53. Western Historical Quarterly. Vol. 19, No. 1 (Jan., 1888): pp. 37–59.

Utah State University, Merrill-Cazier Library, Special Collections and Archives, Compton Photograph Collection, PO313, 1959.

Iroquois Tax and Reservoir Protests, 1957

Nikki Dragone

Chronology

1908		A series of dams are proposed as a means of protecting Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, from floods and pollution, and to provide the region with electric power.
1927		The Seneca Nation of Indians (SNI) begin protesting calls for a dam that would flood their lands.
1936, 1939, and 1941		Congress first approves the Kinzua and Onondaga Creek Dam projects in three successive Flood Control Acts. However, no funds are appropriated, and no real action is taken until the 1950s.
1941		President Roosevelt bypasses Congress to negotiate an agreement with Canada to construct the St. Lawrence Seaway.
1943		New York State attorney general declares that the state has the right to levy income taxes against the Indians. The State chooses to maintain an unofficial policy of not levying income tax so long as New York Indians earn their living solely from subsistence activities.
1948		Congress passes 25 U.S.C. §232, transferring criminal jurisdiction over Indians to New York State.
1949		The Onondaga Flood Control dam and reservoir are constructed on Onondaga Nation lands.
1950		Congress passes 25 U.S.C. §233, transferring civil jurisdiction over Indians to New York State.
1954–1961		Construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway.
1956 to 1961		Construction of the Niagara Dam and reservoir.
1956		Canadian Superior Court rejects the Kahnawá:ke Mohawks’ suit over the expropriation of land.
1956		In June, series of gigantic rock falls causes two-thirds of the Schoellkopf Power Plant to tumble into Niagara Gorge, resulting in massive power outages and providing the justification for the construction of the Niagara Power Project.
1956		SNI contracts renowned engineer and former head of the Tennessee Valley Authority, Arthur Morgan, to study the possibility of alternate sites for proposed dam.
1956–1961		SNI engages in intense lobbying of federal and state officials and a letter-writing campaign, which results in support from a wide variety of Native and non-Native sources, including the ACLU, the National Congress of the American Indian, the Quakers, the Cherokee Nation, and even New York State governor, Averell Harriman.
1957		In January, the U.S. District Court for the Western District of New York holds that the Army Corps were within their legal rights to initiate the condemnation and taking of SNI lands.
1957		Congress passes Public Law 85–159, granting directing the Federal Power Commission (FPC) to grant New York’s SPA the license to construct and operate a power plant on the Niagara River.
1957–1958		Mohawk chief Frank Thomas (Standing Arrow) leads a group of Mohawks dispossessed by the construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway in the occupation of lands in original Mohawk territories along the Schoharie Creek, near Fort Hunter, New York.
1958		The Tuscarora begin active protest. Tuscarora Resistance Committee posts signs at reservation entries warning the SPA workers to stay out. Survey stakes are pulled up. The people face off against the surveyors and a large police force. Resistance continues until the U.S. Supreme Court decision is rendered in 1960.
1958		New York State levies taxes on Akwesasne Mohawks employed in the construction of the Seaway. Eventually, the Franklin County Court determines that New York State was within its rights to tax income earned and to seek remedies for non-payment of taxes.
1958		In St. Regis tribe v. New York State, the Court of Appeals affirms a decision against the Mohawks’ suit for compensation of their loss of Barnhart Island to the Seaway.
1959		On the grounds that it violated Haudenosaunee sovereignty and treaty rights, Mohawks demonstrate opposition to New York State income tax on January 29th in Massena.
1959		In February, the FPC rules the Tuscarora Nation could not be compelled to sell its lands, and the government could not exercise eminent domain as this would be “inconsistent for the purpose for which the reservation was created or acquired” (Hauptman 151–.73).
1959		The U.S. Supreme Court denies certiorari to the SNI; their legal battle ends.
1960		In March 1960, the U.S. Supreme Court rules that Tuscarora lands were subject to eminent domain because the land was held in fee simple title rather than Indian title and therefore did not fit the federal definition of a “reservation” (Hauptman 1986, 172–73).
1960		U.S. Supreme Court denies the Akwesasne Mohawks’ appeal in St. Regis v. New York State.
1960		In September, Kahnawa:ke’s Grand Chief, Matthew Lazore, petitions the UN Human Rights Commission for protection against Canada’s infringement of Mohawk land and sovereignty.
1961		SNI petitions President John F. Kennedy to once again investigate Morgan’s alternate suggestions regarding locations for the dam. Pointing to the Supreme Court’s decision, JFK says the dam would continue.
1961–1964		Construction of the Kinzua Dam.

Introduction

The Iroquois Tax and Reservoir protests of the 1950s, which occurred between the advent of the Great Depression in 1929 and the occupation of Alcatraz by the Indians of All Tribes in 1969, resulted from actions that New York State took in extending its jurisdiction over Iroquois lands and peoples during that era. Specifically, after the federal government granted New York State civil jurisdiction over Indians residing within its boundaries, the state sought to levy personal income tax on Iroquois wage workers and to the construction of a series of dams/reservoirs on Iroquois reservations. This chapter focuses less on the injustices perpetrated and more on the continued relevance of Iroquois protests against imposition of New York State income tax and the construction of reservoirs on their lands—the Onondaga Creek Dam (1947–49); the St. Lawrence Seaway (1954–1959); the New York State Thruway (1951–1960); the Kinzua Dam (1957–1964); and the Niagara Dam (1956–1961)—to the development of North American Indian activism in the 1960s and the birth of the Indigenous Rights Movement in the 1970s.

The Iroquois Confederacy

Before exploring the continuing impact of Iroquois protests on American Indian activism and indigenous rights, it is critically important to know where the Iroquois are located. While the people of the Iroquois Confederacy are also popularly known as Six Nations Confederacy, they call themselves the Haudenosaunee, or the People of the Longhouse. They consist of the following North American Indian nations: Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and Tuscarora. In the pre-conquest era, their traditional territories stretched from the Mohawk River Valley in New York State westward into present-day Ohio, and from Southern Ontario and Quebec southward into Pennsylvania. Today, the majority of their reservation territories are found in upstate New York, Southern Ontario, and Southern Quebec. However, there is also one reservation in Wisconsin and one in Oklahoma. The five Haudenosaunee reservations that are the focus of this discussion are the Onondaga Nation (located near Syracuse, New York); the Kahnawá:ke Mohawk (located near Montreal, Quebec); the Akwesasne/St. Regis Mohawk (straddling the borders of New York State and the provinces of Ontario and Quebec); the Tuscarora Nation (located near Lewiston, New York); and, the Allegany Seneca (located in the southwest corner of New York state, along the Allegheny River).

Federal and New York State Policies Influencing Iroquois Protests (1948–1968)

In post-World War II America, the Truman and Eisenhower administrations sought ways to cut federal government spending, in part by getting out of the “Indian business.” Federal termination legislation provided the means to accomplish this goal by abruptly terminating an Indian nation’s federally recognized status as a separate and sovereign, albeit dependent, nation to whom the federal government had treaty-based obligations to provide funds and services, including health and education services. The New York State Haudenosaunee reservations were included on Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) lists identifying Indian nations that were “ready for termination” and/or would be termination ready within ten years. While no direct action was taken to terminate New York State–based Iroquois, the construction of the Kinzua Dam resulted in the passage of legislation intended, in part, to terminate the Seneca Nation of Indians (SNI). Located in southwestern New York State on the Cattaraugus and Allegheny reservations, the SNI found itself in a protracted battle to prevent more than 8,000 acres of SNI lands from being submerged underneath the Kinzua Dam’s reservoir. When the Kinzua became a fait accompli, the federal government passed the Seneca Nation Compensation Act (Public Law 88–533). Section 18 of this law required the SNI to submit a plan for its termination to the federal government within a specific period of time. Due to Seneca protests, which took the form of intense lobbying efforts, Section 18 was never implemented (Bilharz 1998, 72).

While Iroquois protests protected the SNI from termination, no amount of protests prevented the federal government from transferring federal criminal and civil jurisdiction over Indians to New York State. Promulgated in 1950, the transfer of civil jurisdiction was subject to the following limitations: New York State did not have the authority to tax Indians lands and property; it could not authorize the taking of Indian lands or property for failure of the Indians to pay debts; and the Indians retained the rights to regulate hunting and fishing within their territories. 25 U.S.C. §233 would become one of the focal points of tax protests by the Akwesasne Mohawks in 1958 and 1959.

Tax Protests

It should come as no surprise to the reader that within a decade of assuming civil jurisdiction over the Iroquois, New York State attempted to impose state and local income taxes on the Haudenosaunee. According to an August 11, 1958, article in The Massena Observer, the state attorney general “held in 1943 that the state had the right to levy taxes against the Indians” (“Indians Plan Rally …” 1958, 12). However, New York State chose to maintain an unofficial policy of not levying taxes on Haudenosaunee people so long as they earned their living as subsistence farmers. In the 1950s, when the construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway soon provided Akwesasne Mohawks with the opportunity to become “substantial wage earners,” New York State chose to levy income tax on these Mohawk wage earners and to subpoena them for non-payment of back taxes (“Indians are not Exempt.…” 1958, 28).

Arthur Hart, the Mohawk’s attorney, said that because the “power to tax is the power to destroy,” the Mohawks considered the state’s attempt to collect back taxes as an attempt to destroy the Akwesasne reservation (“Indians Plan Rally …” 1958, 12). A few months later, in Franklin County Court, Hart argued that the because the Mohawks were residing in their original territory on treaty-protected lands, and because this same treaty made the Mohawks as wards to the government, “like infants,” the Mohawks could not be taxed unless the federal government were to pass special legislation granting New York State the power to tax them. In response to Hart’s oral arguments, Judge Lawrence ruled that even the income of New York State’s infant residents is taxable. Consequently, as the Mohawks reside on a reservation within the boundaries of New York State, they are liable to pay income tax, and New York State is within its right to seek remedies for non-payment of said taxes [State Tax Commissioner v. Barnes, 14 Misc.2d 311 (N.Y. Misc. 1958)].

After the Mohawks appealed this decision and tore up the legal “Notices to Appear” before the State Tax Commission, New York State offered to waive the penalties, reduce the interest due on their unpaid taxes, and help them file their returns. On January 29, 1959, under the leadership of Tuscarora activist Wallace “Mad Bear” Anderson, and Seneca/Grand Council chief Corbett Sundown, nearly 200 Mohawks descended on Massena Town Hall. Acting as their spokesmen, Anderson and Sundown again voiced Mohawk opposition to New York State income tax on the grounds that it violated Haudenosaunee sovereignty, the U.S. Constitution, and international and treaty law (“Indians Continue to Battle …” 1959, 29). The Mohawks’ income tax protest spread to other reservations and continued unabated until New York State’s favorable ruling in the Matter of Powless v. State Tax Commission was affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court’s refusal to review the case on appeal in 1965.

Onondaga Flood Control Dam, 1949

The Onondaga Nation’s reservation is located five miles south of Syracuse, New York. Onondaga Creek flows northward through the Onondaga Nation’s territory and into Syracuse, where it empties into Onondaga Lake. As Syracuse was prone to flooding throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, Onondaga Creek was included in the federal Flood Control Acts of 1936, 1939, and 1941. Little has been written about the nature of the Onondaga Nation’s protests. However, as Onondaga is the seat of the Confederacy’s Grand Council and home to the Tadodaho, their spiritual leader, it is important to point out that in 1949, the Onondaga Flood Control Dam and reservoir were constructed on Onondaga Nation lands despite the protests of the Onondaga Nation (OIE).

The Seneca Nation of Indians (SNI) Protests the Kinzua Dam

The Kinzua Dam was proposed in 1908 as a means of protecting Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, from floods and pollution, and to provide the region with electric power (Hauptman 1986, 90). While no funds were appropriated, and no real action was taken until the 1950s, Congress first approved the Kinzua Damp project in its 1936, 1939, and 1941 Flood Control Acts (Bilharz 1998, 49; Hauptman 1986, 92–93). As early as 1927, the Seneca Nation of Indians (SNI) began protesting.

By the time construction of the dam was initiated in 1961, SNI protests had already assumed many forms, from legal action and the commissioning the study of alternate sites to letter-writing campaigns and intense lobbying of federal and state officials, which resulted in support from a wide variety of Native and non-Native sources, including the ACLU, the National Congress of the American Indian, the Quakers, the Cherokee Nation, and even New York State’s governor, Averell Harriman (Hauptman 1986, 113–15). In addition, the SNI contracted renowned engineer and former head of the Tennessee Valley Authority, Arthur Morgan, to study the possibility of alternate sites for proposed dam. Morgan did, indeed, provide Congress with a viable alternate site; however, his plan was ultimately rejected in favor of the dam’s current location. Additionally, the SNI pursued legal avenues against the takings of their federal treaty-protected lands by initiating a suit to prevent the Army Corps of Engineers from entering their lands on the grounds that it violated their sovereignty and their treaty rights and would adversely impact their cultural and spiritual life as the Cold Spring Longhouse was located within the proposed take area. Despite their strong legal arguments, in January 1957, after a protracted legal battle, the U.S. District Court for the Western District of New York held that—the 1794 Canandaigua Treaty notwithstanding—the Corps were within their legal rights to initiate the condemnation and take SNI lands. In 1959, when the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the case, the SNI’s legal battle ended (Hauptman 1986, 105–22; Bilharz 1998, 53).

Despite the failure of the SNI’s protests against the taking of Seneca lands, the removal and relocation of Seneca families, and the building of the Kinzua, their resistance went a long way toward creating a new, more unified SNI. Noted historian Laurence Hauptman interprets the SNI’s resistance to the Kinzua Dam as helping to instill a “new sense of nationalism, uniting the people of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy across reservation lines, incorporating in even the Indians living off-reservation in urban communities” (Hauptman 1986, 122).

The Tuscarora Nation Protests the Niagara Power Project

After a series of gigantic rock falls caused the Schoellkopf Power Plant to tumble into Niagara Gorge, and in turn the massive power outages of June 1956, Robert Moses, the chair of New York’s State Power Authority (SPA), met with a large group of corporate and utility executives in Massena, New York. Though it was still under construction, Moses successfully used the tour of the St. Lawrence Seaway, together with the loss of the Schoellkopf Power Plant, to unite the meeting participants over the issue of building a massive power plant along the banks of the Niagara River (Hauptman 1986, 153). For the Tuscarora Nation, this unanimity would be but the first step toward the taking of Tuscarora Nation lands to build the Lewiston dam and reservoir. The following year, Congress passed Public Law 85–159, granting directing the Federal Power Commission (FPC) to grant New York’s SPA the license to construct and operate a power plant on the Niagara River.

When the license was granted, the FPC failed to issue a decision about whether or not the SPA could exercise eminent domain over Tuscarora Nation lands. This became the lynch pin of the Tuscarora Nation’s legal suit against the SPA. Did the SPA have the authority to take Tuscarora lands for the purposes of constructing a reservoir on their lands? Initially, the FPC held a series of hearings in Washington, D.C., and Rochester, New York, to try to determine the answer to this question. Tuscarora representatives from both the Chief’s and the People’s Councils participated in these hearings. In the FPC’s February 1959 ruling, neither could the Tuscarora Nation be compelled to sell its lands, nor could their land be taken through the government’s powers of eminent domain because such a taking would be “inconsistent for the purpose for which the reservation was created or acquired” (Hauptman 1986, 153–71). This ruling was a short-lived victory for the Tuscarora as the FPC asked the federal courts to review the decision. In March 1960, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against the Tuscaroras on the grounds that the lands subject to eminent domain in this case were held by the Tuscaroras in fee simple title, rather than Indian title, and as such did not fit the federal definition of a “reservation” (Hauptman 1986, 172–73).

While their legal battle was being fought in the courts, the people of the Tuscarora Nation engaged in a more confrontational method of protest. During the FPC hearings, the Tuscarora received word that the SPA planned to enter the reservation and survey lands. It was at this point that the young “warriors,”, members of the Tuscarora Resistance Committee, joined the fight by placing notices at the all the entrances to the reservation, warning the SPA’s surveyors off. In April 1958, the Tuscarora people stood against the Niagara County sheriff’s deputies and New York State troopers who had come with the surveyors. Arrests were made, but the charges were eventually dropped. Over the next several months, the Tuscarora Resistance Committee pulled up survey stakes. One woman lay down in the path of the construction vehicles to prevent them from entering her land. Resistance efforts continued until the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against the Tuscarora Nation in March 1960 (Rickard 1973, 138–52; Hauptman 1986, 151–78).

Akwesasne and Kahnawá:ke Mohawks Protest the St. Lawrence Seaway

In 1941, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt bypassed Congress to negotiate an agreement with Canada to make the St. Lawrence River—which extends from the Atlantic Ocean to Lake Ontario, and which acts as a natural boundary between the United States and Canada—completely navigable by big ocean-going vessels. Construction of what would become the St. Lawrence Seaway began in 1954 and concluded in 1961. To facilitate construction, both the United States and Canada exercised their rights of eminent domain to condemn and take Mohawk lands from the Akwesasne and Kahnawá:ke Mohawk reservations. In response to this loss of land, the Mohawks of both reservations initiated court actions—the Akwesasne Mohawks for the loss of Barnhart Island, and the Kahnawá:ke Mohawks for the loss of their riverfront. Both lost their court battles (Hauptman 1986, 123–50; Bonaparte 2010).

Cargo ship passing through the Iroquois Lock beside the Iroquois Dam, on the St. Lawrence Seaway, 1955. Tribal lands were routinely confiscated for the construction of dams that flooded ancient burial grounds and the towns of Indian communities. (Pictorial Parade/Archive Photos/Getty Images)

Perhaps more important than their court battles was the stand taken during this time by two Mohawk chiefs: Matthew Lazore and Frank “Standing Arrow” Thomas. Thomas was a condoled chief; as such, he was responsible both to the Mohawk people and to the Haudenosaunee Grand Council. His decision to protest the displacement of Mohawks at Kahnawá:ke by occupying lands in the Mohawks’ original homelands in New York State’s Mohawk Valley was not taken lightly. In fact, his decision resulted in several meetings of the Grand Council—at both Onondaga and Fort Hunter, the site of the Mohawks’ occupation. The occupation lasted from spring 1957 through their eviction in February 1958. During that time, the Mohawks built an “Indian village,” complete with a longhouse, and established relationships with surrounding non-Native communities. In addition, Thomas was adept at engaging the local, national, and international media in a way that made Mohawk resistance to the Seaway visible to the public and garnered sympathy and support (Doran 2014, 120–57). Perhaps realizing that all domestic remedies to protect Haudenosaunee lands on both sides of the U.S.-Canadian border were quickly being denied by the federal, state, and provincial governments of Canada and the United States, on July 1, 1957, Thomas told reporters that if these two nations were to continue to ignore Haudenosaunee rights to land and sovereignty, the Mohawk people would be prepared to go to the United Nations (UN) for help (Doran 2014, 137). It is not clear whether Thomas reached out to the UN; however, in his September 27, 1960, letter to the UN Human Rights Commission, Kahnawa:ke’s Grand Chief, Matthew Lazore, asked for UN protection against Canada’s continued infringement of Mohawk land, sovereignty, and self-governance rights (Simpson 2014).

The Continued Relevance of the Iroquois Tax and Reservoir Protests of the 1950s

While the Iroquois’ protests over New York State income tax ended in 1965, they both influenced and were influenced by the Haudenosaunees’ protests against reservoirs being constructed in Onondaga, Seneca, Tuscarora, and Mohawk territories between 1949 and 1966. In his ruling against the Akwesasne Mohawks, Judge Lawrence recognized the influence of the reservoir issue when he referred to the rulings of both the Mohawk’s Barnhart Island case and the Tuscaroras’ suit against the State Power Authority. Note that the unfortunate Akwesasne Mohawks who found themselves subject to New York State income tax are the same Mohawks subjected to New York State income tax because they became wage earners in the construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway. It is also important to point out that the participation of Haudenosaunee Confederacy Council Chiefs in these protests—Corbett Sundown (Seneca) and Irving Powless (Onondaga), who both protested New York State levying income taxes on Iroquois people, and Frank Thomas (Mohawk), who initiated the occupation of Fort Hunter—with Mad Bear Anderson (Tuscarora), Ray Fadden (Mohawk), Ernie Benedict (Mohawk), and scores of other Haudenosaunee people indicates the resurgence of Haudenosaunee nationalism and leadership in American Indian activism on a national and international level. In fact, many of these leaders would work together to establish the Unity Caravans, which crisscrossed North American teaching about the importance of American Indian spiritual, cultural, and political survival in a way that seeded the Red Power Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, the Indigenous Rights Movement, and, one could argue, even the Idle No More Movement. What proof is there of this? Taken together, Standing Arrow’s occupation of Fort Hunter, the Tuscaroras’ attention-getting protests against SPA surveyors, the SNI’s protracted historical battle against the Kinzua Dam, the Onondaga Nation’s quieter protests against the damming of Onondaga Creek, and income tax protests in 1958 and 1959 presaged the Puget Sound Fish-ins (1964), the occupations of Alcatraz (1964, 1969–1971), the birth of the American Indian Movement (1969), and the many protests and occupations that followed from the takeover of the BIA (1972) to the occupation of Caledonia (2006), from the occupation of Wounded Knee (1973) to the birth of Idle No More (2012). Likewise, while Chief Lazore’s 1960 letter to the UN is not the first time the Haudenosaunee and other indigenous peoples reached out the UN for help, it is clear that by writing to the UN, the Kahnawá:ke Mohawks, and by extension the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, contributed to what has become an International Indigenous Rights Movement culminating in the adoption of the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples on September 13, 2007.

Biographies of Notable Figures

William Rickard (1917–1964)

Though William Rickard died when he was only 47 years old, he is well remembered for his stand against the New York State Power Authority’s taking of Tuscarora Nation lands to construct the Niagara dam and reservoir in the 1950s. Rickard was born in 1917 to Clinton and Elizabeth Rickard. Like his mother, he was born into the Tuscarora Nation and the Bear Clan. As such, he was a citizen of both the Tuscarora Nation and the Haudenosaunee Confederacy (the Iroquois Confederacy). Rickard was raised a Tuscarora on his parents’ farm. His paternal grandmother was a clan mother, and his father a condoled chief of the Beaver Clan. Rickard’s father was well known as the founder of Indian Defense League of America (IDLA), an organization dedicated to protecting the Jay Treaty defined rights of the Haudenosaunee and other Native North Americans to freely cross the U.S.-Canadian Border. With Clinton Rickard as his example, William Rickard became one of the most influential leaders in Indian country in the decade just preceding his untimely death.

Rickard’s rise as a nationally known leader in the fight for indigenous sovereignty and self-determination began slowly when he and other Haudenosaunee delegates were sent to Washington, D.C., to testify before Congress about the deleterious effects of pending termination-era legislation. Held in 1948 and 1950, these hearings centered on legislation that ultimately transferred civil and criminal jurisdiction over the Indians of New York State from the federal government to the state. Rickard’s participation in these hearings, as well as his work as the secretary of IDLA, likely resulted in his election as the president of the Niagara chapter of IDLA.

Throughout 1957 and 1958, the Tuscaroras waged a pitched battle against New York’s State Power Authority (SPA) and to assert the government’s right of eminent domain to take up to one-fifth of Tuscarora Nation’s lands to harness Niagara Falls for a hydroelectric power project. As a member of the People’s Council, William Rickard traveled to Washington, D.C., and to Rochester and Buffalo, New York, to testify at a series of the Federal Power Commission (FPC) hearings on the matter. He also worked with the Tuscarora Resistance Committee to prevent the SPA’s surveyors and workers from entering the reservation. The Tuscaroras posted “No trespassing” signs, shot out the SPA night surveyors’ lights, and used their cars to block access to the reservation. Tuscarora women used their bodies to block the surveyors’ equipment. In addition, they pulled out surveying stakes used to mark condemned lands. In April 1958, after the FPC granted the New York SPA the license necessary to take land for the power project, Rickard was on the front lines of the more than 150 Tuscaroras who faced off against the SPA’s surveyors and workmen, and the state and local law enforcement armed with riot gear, tear gas, rifles, and submachine guns. During the face-off, the police arrested Rickard and two other Tuscarora men for disorderly conduct or unlawful assembly. With national and international media attention focused on Tuscaroras’ protests, their cases were dismissed. While their protests have been described as some of the most dramatic protests of state power during this era, ultimately, despite their protracted legal battle, media campaigns, and opposition, the Tuscaroras lost 550 acres to the Niagara Power Project (Rosier 2009, 211–12).

In the wake of these protests, William Rickard became one of the most influential men in Indian country. From January to June of 1961, Rickard participated in organizing the American Indian Chicago Conference. He exerted his influence to ensure that the delegates attending the June conference would be representative of all Indian peoples; consequently, the more than 400 delegates came from not just federally recognized tribes, but also non-federally recognized tribes and urban Indian communities. He also made sure the delegates included traditional and spiritual leaders of Indian communities. At the conference, Rickard emerged as a strong supporter of Indian sovereignty and self-determination.

Also in 1961, William Rickard became the president of the League of North American Indians (LONAI), a pan-Indian organization founded 26 years earlier by Lawrence Two Axe (Kahnawá:ke Mohawk). LONAI intended to unite Indian peoples of North America politically and to protect and preserve Indian rights and sovereignty. In June 1963, under Rickard’s leadership, LONAI organized and hosted the Grand Spiritual and Temporal Council. Over 500 people from 35 Indian nations attended. This Council drew on Rickard’s experiences attending the Meetings of Religious People organized by the Hopi of Hotavella. The first of these meetings had been held nearly a decade earlier, in 1956, and was extremely influential in Rickard’s life. Raised as a Christian, after attending the first of the Meetings of Religious People, Rickard became a Longhouse adherent and supporter of traditional Haudensaunee cultural practices. Rickard’s close relations with the Hopis led to strong relations between the Haudenosaunee and Hopi peoples.

By 1964, the emphysema and bronchiectasis resulting from a childhood injury had progressed to the point that Rickard’s health was failing quickly. Rickard passed away in 1964. On September 18 of that year, William “Fighting Bear” Rickard passed away of acute pulmonary edema. By the end of the 1960s, Haudenosaunee and Hopi activists and spiritual leaders, including Beeman Logan (Seneca), Mad Bear Anderson (Tuscarora), and Thomas Banyacya (Hopi), worked together to organize what became known as the Unity Caravans and Conventions. These conventions, and the caravans that followed, reinvigorated the cultural life of indigenous communities throughout North America. In this way, Rickard’s influence was felt long after his passing.

DOCUMENT EXCERPTS

“The Drums Go Bang, Seaway Ugh, Mohawks Plan Move” (1957)

The excerpt below is from a newspaper article authored by Clayton Sinclair and published in the Montreal Gazette on August 21, 1957. It clearly identifies the 1957 construction of the Mohawk settlement in Fort Hunter, New York, as a civil protest against the taking of Mohawk lands for the construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway.

The drums are beating again along the Mohawk and in Caughnawaga the first Indian families are heading the call.

If plans go ahead, more than 2000 Indians at Caughnawaga and the reservations at Oka and St. Regis, Que. will pick up stakes and head for a new home in New York State.

Mohawks here, who constitute a good portion of the Indians populating the reservations, say they are moving because the St. Lawrence Seaway interferes with their homes.

Another reason has been found in the fact that New York State Mohawks have decided to claim land on Schoharie Creek, where the stream flows into the Mohawk River, as their own.

Four hundred Mohawks are now settled on the banks of the creek, but New York State leader of the tribe, short muscular Chief Standing Arrow, a 24-year old Indian who spent a term with the United Stats Navy, says that 4000 will be living there by next summer.

Most are expected to come from Canadian reservations, the Chief said here yesterday …

The groups settled near the creek and they have no intention of discussing it with the farmer, who thinks he owns some of the land or with the New York Thruway Authority, which thinks it owns the rest. They won’t even talk to the sheriff about it, or even the state legislature at Albany.

The Mohawks are a nation they say, and any dealings will have to be carried through Washington, and presumably through John Foster Dulles, secretary of state. In their view, the land is rightfully theirs as is, for that matter, much of the rest of the state of New York.

The white men in New York are somewhat worried. It seems the Indians might have a case.

The settlement at present is a modest, but neat and clean presentation of shacks, tents and teepees just where the Schoharie passes under the thruway.

Chief Standing Arrow was in Caughnawaga yesterday to confer with six Longhouse chiefs on the reservation and to invite them to a Grand Consulate meeting of the Indians’ Confederacy of Six Nations. This is scheduled to be held in Fort Hunter, New York on Sunday and will be the first meeting of its scale to be held in the Mohawk Valley in 163 years. Out of it is likely to come a decision of the Indians whether to remain there. If affirmative, the Indians may call for a large scale migration from the reservations.

Claim Pressure from Government

“Quite a few” of the Indians who now live in the valley are those who formerly lived in Canada. “The reason we have settled there is because of political pressure from the Canadian government.”

“It has been unfair and has no right to interfere with the sovereignty of the tribe,” Chief Standing Arrow said of the St. Lawrence Seaway Authority’s decision to send the Seaway through the Caughnawaga reservation.

The Indians will benefit by moving to New York state he said, because “it is their original homeland and by treaty, the Indian has every right to live there. In Canada, he lives under three laws, the British, French and Canadian.” The Indians here have treaties with all three nations.

It is only right, he says, that the United States give them some land. All they want is an area eight miles deep by seven miles wide, stretching along the Schoharie south of the Mohawk.

Chief Standing Arrow contends that his tribe […] is entitled to a great deal more.

The chief has a lot of photostats of old treaties. The most important, he says, was signed on October 22, 1784. It was between the American government and the assembled chiefs of the Six Nations Confederacy.

Under the treaty, the Confederacy—composed of the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca and Tuscarora Indians—agreed to let the white man roam over the Ohio River Valley. In exchange they got the rights to an area about 30 miles wide from each bank of the Tonawanda, Seneca and Mohawk rivers—a 60-mile wide strip of land stretching through the heart of the state virtually from Buffalo to Albany …

Source: Clayton Sinclair, “The Drums Go Bang, Seaway Ugh, Mohawks Plan Move.” Montreal Gazette, August 21, 1957. Used by permission.

Sidebar 1: Reservoirs and Taxes

Case Law & Legislation on Reservoirs and Taxes

25 U.S.C. § 233 (1950)

Federal legislation granting New York State (New York States) civil jurisdiction over the Indians within its state borders subject to limitations. New York Stats cannot levy taxes against reservation lands and properties.

Public Law 85–159 (1957)

Congress passed this law directing the Federal Power Commission to grant New York State’s Power Authority the license to construct and operate a power plant on the Niagara River.

State Tax Commission v. Barnes, 14 Misc. 2d 311 (Sup. Ct. Frank. Cty. 1958). During the 1950s, a large number of St. Regis Mohawk people earned “significant” wages while employed in the construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway. Consequently, New York State chose to levy income taxes on them. This decision is the result of their refusal to pay New York State income tax. The Franklin County Court held that the New York State Tax Commission was within its rights to require payment of income tax by the St. Regis Mohawks and to seek remedies for their failure to file their taxes.

St. Regis Tribe v. State of New York, 5 N.Y.2d 24 (N.Y. 1958)

This case upheld New York State’s right to use Barnhart Island for the construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway, despite the St. Regis Mohawks’ claims to the island.

Tuscarora Nation of Indians v. State Power Authority, 257 F.2d 885 (1958)

This case upheld the right of the State Power Authority (SPA) to enter the Tuscarora Nation’s lands and to exercise eminent domain to take the lands necessary to construct the Lewistown Reservoir.

Seneca Nation of Indians v. Wilbur M. Brucker et al. 360 U.S. 909 (1959).

This case held that the 1794 Canandaigua Treaty notwithstanding, the Army Corps were within their legal rights to initiate the condemnation proceedings to gain access to SNI lands for survey purposes. In 1958, the U.S. Court of Appeals and U.S. Supreme Court affirmed this decision.

Matter of Powless v. State Tax Commission, 22 A.D.2d 746, (NY 1964), affd. 16 N.Y.2d 946, (1965), cert. den. 383 U.S. 911 (1965).

Chief Irving Powless (Onondaga) sought relief from New York State’s imposition of federal income tax. The holding in the case affirms the holding in State Tax Commission v. Barnes.

Public Law 88–533 (1964)

Also known as the Seneca Nation Compensation Act, this federal law provides for the compensation of lands lost by the Seneca Nation and its citizens as a result of the construction of the Kinzua Dam.

Pierce v. State Tax Commission, 52 Misc. 10 (Sup. Ct., Onon. Co. 1968); affirmed 29 AD 2d 124 (4th Dept. 1968). The New York State Tax Department tried to collect taxes on a store located on the Onondaga Nation. The Court ruled that the tax department’s actions were illegal, invalid, and unconstitutional as applied to the Onondagas.

Further Reading

Bilharz, Joy A. The Allegany Senecas and Kinzua Dam: Forced Relocation Through Two Generations. Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press, 1998.

Doran, Kwinn H. 2014. The Cradle of Globalization: The Iroquois, Eisenhower, and Conflicts over New York state Infrastructure Development During the 1950s (Order No. 3619628). Available from ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Full Text. (1534382894). Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/1534382894?accountid=9609

Hauptman, Laurence M. The Iroquois Struggle for Survival: World War II to Red Power. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1986.

Hauptman, Laurence M. Seven Generations of Iroquois Leadership: The Six Nations Since 1800. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2008.

Hauptman, Laurence M. In the Shadow of Kinzua: The Seneca Nation of Indians Since World War II. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2014.

“Indians Are Not Exempt from State Income Tax Judge Lawrence Rules.” The Massena Observer, October 23, 1958.

“Indians Continue to Battle Against State Income Tax, Tear up Summonses.” The Massena Observer, January 29, 1959.

“Indians Plan Rally Tonight on Tax Fight.” The Massena Observer, August 11, 1958.

OIE | Onondaga Environmental Institute. “Onondaga Creek Fact Sheet, Geography.” Onondaga Nation, the People of the Hills. Accessed May 28, 2015. http://www.onondaganation.org/mediafiles/pdfs/onondaga_watershed.pdf

Rickard, Clinton and Barbara Graymont. Fighting Tuscarora: The Autobiography of Chief Clinton Rickard. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1973.

Rosier, Paul C. Serving Their Country: American Indian Politics and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009.

Simpson, Audra. Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014.

State Tax Commissioner v. Barnes, 14 Misc.2d 311 (N.Y. Misc. 1958). Accessed May 30, 2015. https://casetext.com/case/state-tax-comm-v-barnes

Tuscarora Dispossession and Strategies for Renewal, 1957–Present

Anne A. Garner

Chronology

Pre-contact		The Tuscarora Nation is located in North Carolina. By 1520, they have contact with European settlers.
1711–1713		Tuscarora Wars in North Carolina over settler land theft and kidnapping of Tuscarora women and children for sale into slavery. Tuscarora begin to migrate out of North Carolina and request protection from the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy.
1722–23		The Tuscarora Nation is adopted into the Haudenosaunee Confederacy as the Sixth Nation. From 1714 to 1777, they reside with the Oneida. By 1780, they are settled on Seneca lands near Niagara Falls in their current location.
1794		The Treaty of Canandaigua affirms Tuscarora Nation rights to the lands they occupy.
1797		Tuscarora Nation acquires three-square-mile reservation from Holland Land Company per agreement with Seneca.
1804		Tuscarora Nation purchases an additional nine acres (the Dearborn tract) to add to their reservation near Lewiston, New York
1931		The New York State Power Authority (SPA) is established to develop the St. Lawrence River and Niagara region as a source of hydroelectric power.
1950		The International Niagara River Treaty is signed by the United States and Canada, with the purpose of developing hydroelectric energy in the Niagara River region and promoting conservation of the environs of Niagara Falls as a parkland.
June 7, 1956		The Schoellkopf Power Station at Niagara Falls collapses into the Niagara River gorge resulting in an energy crisis.
1957		Robert Moses requests 960 acres of Tuscarora Nation land as part of a proposed 2,400-acre reservoir. Tuscarora Nation sends objections to President Dwight Eisenhower, citing treaty protections.
March 1957		SPA’s request to survey Tuscarora Nation reservation is denied.
August 1957		Congress passes Public Law 89–159 or Ives-Javits-Miller Bill, authorizing the Federal Power Commission to grant a license to the State Power Authority to develop hydroelectric resources in the Niagara Region.
Jan. 30, 1958		SPA receives license to build reservoir from FPC and requests 1,383 acres (–20 percent of the Tuscarora Nation’s reservation).
April 15, 1958		SPA begins expropriation proceedings.
April 16, 1958		The Tuscarora Nation denies Robert Moses’s second request to survey the reservation. Moses filed a survey map with the Niagara County Clerk in Lockport and offers the Tuscarora Nation $1,000 per acre.
April 16, 1958		The Tuscarora Nation begins non-violent demonstrations, blocking surveyors and armed police. They hire Arthur Lazarus, Jr. and Richard Schifter to file an injunction to stop the SPA from seizing their land for a reservoir.
April 19, 1958		Arthur Lazarus, Esq. brings suit in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, requesting a permanent injunction against taking Tuscarora Nation lands without the express consent of the federal government and the Tuscarora Nation (Tuscarora Nation v. State Power Authority, 164 F.Supp. 107). A temporary restraining order is granted. The case is transferred to the U.S. District Court for Western District, where it is dismissed.
May, 1958		Lazarus brings a lawsuit against FPC, questioning the legality of the license granted to the SPA claiming protection under the Federal Power Act. The Court of Appeals agrees and remands the issue of the license back to the Federal Power Commission to determine whether license can be issued for building on tribal lands. The Tuscarora Nation claim is transferred to the United States District Court, where it was subsequently dismissed (Tuscarora Nation v. FPC, 164 F. Supp. 107).
July 24, 1958		Decision that SPA does not have authority to condemn Tuscarora Nation land.
Nov. 14, 1958		The United States Court of Appeals rules that FPC must submit to the Federal Power Act and its definition of a reservation. The Court of Appeals overturns the SPA seizure of land for monetary compensation.
Feb. 1959		Decision that Tuscarora Nation lands are protected by the Federal Power Act, and the tribe cannot be forced to sell the land. SPA develops new plans to build the reservoir in the town of Lewiston.
March, 1959		The United States Court of Appeals grants permission to the U.S. Department of Justice to intervene on behalf of the FPC (Federal Power Commission v. Tuscarora Indian Nation, 362 U.S. 99, 1960).
March 1959		Haudenosaunee delegates seek audience with President Eisenhower to protest Indian policies and violation of treaties of Fort Stanwix and Canandaigua.
March 7, 1960		The United States Supreme Court rules against the Tuscarora Nation in a 4–3 decision, ruling that there was no treaty obligation to protect their reservation lands, since the lands required for the reservoir (the Dearborn tract) were not acquired by treaty but purchased in fee simple, and ruling that their land could be seized by eminent domain.
March 7, 1960		The United States Supreme Court denies the Tuscarora Nation’s request for a rehearing.

The Dispossession of the Tuscarora Nation and Their Strategies for Renewal

The appropriation of indigenous lands for profit by industrial nations has been, according to many, an ongoing global strategy of dispossession that threatens the relationship between indigenous communities and their homelands. As a result, many of the original inhabitants of the land who are referred to as indigenous, Native, or aboriginal, lose many of the critical resources that are necessary to function as distinct societies. Fuelled by ideologies of progress through material accumulation, European merchant “discoverers” in pursuit of natural resources and external markets seized indigenous lands throughout the world and justified their actions by the so-called Doctrine of Discovery, a non-legal concept used by colonizing powers to claim ownership of lands where the indigenous inhabitants did not have a European Christian monarch. In North America, European colonization engulfed the continent and, by the 19th century, land was primarily defined as a commodity in the service of industrialization rather than as a source of survival and community well-being. To the present day, the continued seizure of indigenous lands for industrial progress threatens the survival of millions of people, their communities, their cultures, and their languages.

A 4-year-old Tuscarora boy is shown on the picket line as the Tuscarora people block a state survey of their reservation in Niagara Falls, New York, 1958. The Tuscarora land was seized by the state for a power project. Tribal lands were confiscated for the national parks, dams, and other construction projects without community input or compensation. (AP Photo/Paul E. Thomson)

To accommodate to the economic needs of emerging industrial nations, waterways worldwide were appropriated and redirected for the purpose of developing inexpensive hydro-electric energy sources that promised to increase industrial profits and provide energy for modern domestic use, such as power for refrigerators and televisions. In the twentieth century, hydroelectric power plants such as the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Aswan High Dam in Egypt, the Three Gorges Dam in China, and the Kinzua Dam in New York State were developed ostensibly for the public good while displacing vast indigenous populations from their homelands. Currently, a worldwide movement of indigenous nations has emerged to regain sovereignty and reclaim their ancestral lands (Wallace 2012, 131).

The 20th century witnessed the seizure of indigenous land in one of the largest power projects in the world at the time, the St. Lawrence Seaway and the Niagara Power Project, both of which required the appropriation of significant portions of Mohawk and Tuscarora reservation lands in New York State. Robert Moses, then director of the New York State Power Authority (SPA), claimed that the current supply of water in New York State “was not sufficient to promote growth in industrial production and power use without interruption and curtailment” (Hauptman 1986, 152), and further stated that by 1965 the production of some 3.8 million kilowatts was necessary for the well-being of the nation.

Sidebar 1: What Is an Indigenous Nation?

According to the World Council of Indigenous Peoples (WCIP), indigenous nations are “people living in countries which have populations composed of different ethnic or racial groups who are descendants of the earliest populations which survive in the area, and who do not, as a group, control the national government of the countries within which they live” (Bodley 1999, 146; WCIP information leaflet). One common value among indigenous nations is their respect for the land and the belief that it is intended to provide sustenance for everyone rather than profit for the few. Therefore, the land cannot be bought or sold but is shared for the well-being of the community. They are opposed to technologies that destroy the land and create environmental degradation, since this will threaten future survival. As community-based social structures, indigenous societies are considered more egalitarian that the highly structured industrial social hierarchies (Bodley 1999, 146–47). In 2007, the United Nations adopted the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/unpfii/documents/DRIPS_en.pdf). It was endorsed by 144 nations in 2007, followed by Australia (2009), the United States (2010), New Zealand (2009), and Canada (2010).

In 1931, the New York State Power Authority (SPA) was established to specifically address the St. Lawrence River and Niagara River regions as sources of less expensive hydroelectric power that would provide energy to support local and national industrial growth. From 1954 to 1959, the St. Lawrence Seaway, the Moses-Saunders Power House, the Long Sault Spillway Dam, and related canals, locks and dikes were constructed. On April 25, 1959, the Seaway opened to ocean-going vessels, attracting industry with an inexpensive power source and bringing prosperity to non-Indian communities at the expense of some 9,000 Mohawk people who were devastated by the flooding of 40,000 acres of their land, forced relocation, environmental degradation, and related social costs (Johansen and Mann 2000, 261).

To Robert Moses, director of the State Power Authority, the St. Lawrence Seaway and the Niagara Power Project were inextricably linked in his grand plan for an international seaway, inexpensive power, industrial development, and recreational parkland in the region. In 1950, New York State and Canada signed the International Niagara River Treaty (1 U.S. T.694) to promote hydroelectric energy of the Niagara River and to address the conservation of Niagara Falls and its environs as a recreational area. In this treaty, it was agreed that both Canada and the United States would share equally in the water surplus generated by the project. Due to congressional delays, however, the Niagara Power Project did not move forward until, on June 7, 1956, the existing Schoellkopf Power Station collapsed into the Niagara Gorge, resulting in power outages, a loss of some 400,000 kilowatts of power, and damage to six generators. The Schoellkopf power disaster generated widespread support and lobbying for Moses’ Niagara Power Project, and the New York Times reported the crash as a crisis that required the immediate construction of a new power plant.

Moses’ Niagara Power Project required the expropriation of some 960 acres of Tuscarora Nation reservation land near Lewiston, New York to construct a holding reservoir. It was clear from the beginning that the Tuscarora Nation did not intend to give up any part of their small reservation for Moses’ Niagara Power Project. They had occupied their reservation since 1777 and, by additional purchases in 1804, it was expanded to 6,249 acres. The Tuscarora had struggled to keep their nation together after experiencing three centuries of settler oppression in North Carolina. From 1711 to 1713, they were at war with European settlers over blatant land theft and the kidnapping of Tuscarora Nation women and children for sale into slavery. Turning to the Haudenosaunee Confederacy for protection, the Tuscarora refugees were welcomed into Oneida and Seneca lands and, in 1722, they were adopted into the Haudenosaunee Confederacy as the Sixth Nation. Finally, they again had a homeland, and their sense of sovereignty and place was reinforced by assurances of their land rights in the Treaty of Fort Stanwix (1784) and the Treaty of Canandaigua (1794). Eventually, with the inclusion of more refugees from war-torn North Carolina, the Tuscarora Nation was reunited in the Niagara region, where they established a thriving, stable community and participated in the settler market economy. Given the very small scale of their reservation, they did not agree to contribute land to the SPA power project. Their reservation was a place of identity and, according to their worldview, a sacred charge.

In January 1957, the Tuscarora General Council denied SPA surveyor William Latham’s request to begin a survey on Tuscarora land to determine the depth of the soil in relation to the bedrock on the reservation as a preliminary procedure to planning construction on the reservoir. On August 21, 1957, Congress passed Public Law 89–159, known as the Ives-Javits-Miller Bill, authorizing the Federal Power Commission (FPC) to grant a license to the State Power Authority (SPA) “for the construction and operation of a power project with a capacity to utilize all of the United States’ share of the water of the Niagara River permitted by international agreement” (Hauptman 1986, 153). Moses increased his demand for Tuscarora land from 960 acres to 1,220 acres for the planned 2,400 acre reservoir.

On November 9, 1957, public hearings were held before the Federal Power Commission in Washington, D.C., and Buffalo, New York, over the proposed Niagara Power Project. Testimony was taken from the Tuscarora representatives Chief Elton Greene and Chief Harry Patterson, Sr., who cited treaty protections with the federal government that prohibited seizure of reservation land. William Rickard, son of activist Tuscarora leader Clinton Rickard, testified that the intrusion of the reservoir violated Tuscarora spiritual values, stating, “… we do not feel that we own the land. It is only loaned to us to be saved for the ‘ever coming faces’ of the next generation of the Tuscarora. It is not ours to dispose of. We are only its custodians” (Hauptman 1986, 162). Residents from the Town of Lewiston testified that building the reservoir in Lewiston would result in a loss of taxable land. Over the objections of William Rickard, Elton Green, and Harry Patterson, Sr. of the Tuscarora Chiefs’ Council, the Federal Power Commission recommended that it was more logical to locate the reservoir on non-taxable Indian land. On January 30, 1958, the Federal Power Commission granted the SPA a license to build the reservoir. Immediately, Moses announced that part of the reservoir would be located on the Tuscarora reservation since, in his erroneous assessment, the Tuscarora Nation had “uncultivated and unused land” (Chevrier 1959, 5), even although the acreage he demanded was in active agricultural use and housed some fifteen families. Moses again increased his demand for Tuscarora land to 1,383 acres, filed a survey map with the Niagara county clerk in Lockport, New York, and offered payment to the Tuscarora of up to one thousand dollars per acre. For the next two years, the Tuscarora Nation resisted Moses’s expropriation of their land with non-violent resistance, public demonstrations, and litigation in state and federal courts, initiating the strategies of Red Power protest that emerged in the United States throughout the 1960s and 1970s, such as in the occupation of Alcatraz island, fishing rights demonstrations, and the activism of the American Indian Movement (Deloria 195, 20–21).

Three members of the Tuscarora tribe stake up a notice making it plain they want no part of the Niagara Power Project on their reservation in Niagara County, New York, 1958. (AP Photo)

On April 16, 1958, Moses attempted to conduct a second survey, resulting in a confrontation with Tuscarora Nation demonstrators led by activists William Rickard and Wallace “Mad Bear” Anderson. The next day, 150 unarmed demonstrators confronted New York State troopers, sheriffs, and workmen, who were armed with tear gas, pistols, and submachine guns. Tuscarora clan mothers blocked the surveyors’ sighting equipment, removed markers, and demonstrated with placards stating, “Warning. No Trespassing. Indian Reserve,” “Must You Take Everything the Indians Own?” and “United States Help Us. We Helped You in 1776 and 1812, 1918 and 1941.” Some 200 Tuscarora Nation demonstrators, including women and children, stood in the way of the surveyors’ equipment and lay down in front of bulldozers to stop them moving forward (Johansen and Mann 2000, 319–20; Wilson 1960, 144–45).

Failing to understand that the Tuscarora Nation’s value of community and their spiritual relationship to homeland was in conflict with his own belief in the value of unbridled progress at the expense of communities who got in his way, Moses responded to the demonstrations with an SPA report in which he outlined his offer of settlement, claiming that losses to the Tuscarora Nation were minimal and contending that the portion of Tuscarora Nation land he was requesting, the so-called Dearborn tract, was part of a land purchase in fee simple by the Tuscarora Nation after the Treaty of Canandaigua (1794), and was not protected by treaty as were the previous land gifts from the Seneca and the Holland Land Company. Although there was an appropriate alternative location in the town of Lewiston, Moses maintained that the Lewiston location was unrealistic, given that more residents would have to relocate, and arrogantly claimed that the Tuscarora Nation would not experience any hardship except the removal of fifteen homes on land that he considered to be abandoned. As part of a settlement, Moses offered recognition of fishing rights on the Niagara River, funds for scholarships, and community development.

By April 19, 1958, Tuscarora Nation nonviolent resistance moved into the courts with the purpose of upholding their legal standing as a reservation and seeking the protections offered by the treaty of Fort Stanwix (1784), the treaty of Canandaigua (1794), and the Federal Power Act (1920). They hired attorneys Arthur Lazarus, Jr. and Richard Schifter of the law firm of Strasser, Spiegelberg, Fried, and Frank, who filed a lawsuit in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, requesting a permanent injunction against taking Tuscarora Nation lands without the express consent of both the federal government and the Tuscarora Nation (Tuscarora Nation v. the State Power Authority, 257 F2d 885, 1958). Their request for an injunction was subsequently denied. On May 16, 1958, the Tuscaroras filed a petition in the Court of Appeals requesting a determination that the license granted to the SPA was not legal, since Tuscarora Nation lands are a legally recognized reservation under the authority of the Federal Power Act and the treaties of Fort Stanwix and Canandaigua. On February 3, 1959, the Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the Tuscarora Nation, stating that the land requested by the State Power Authority is defined and in use as part of a reservation according to the Federal Power Act, Section 4, and that the Tuscarora Nation cannot be forced to sell their lands. With this ruling, SPA surveying on Tuscarora Nation land was halted, and the SPA made plans to locate the reservoir in the town of Lewiston (Hauptman 1986, 171).

It is speculated that Moses used his political connections to finally defeat the Tuscarora Nation when, on March 24, 1959, the United States Court of Appeals granted permission to the Department of Justice to intervene on behalf of the Federal Power Commission (Federal Power Commission v. Tuscarora Indian Nation, 362 U.S. 99, 1960) and to review the definition of a reservation under the Federal Power Act. Simultaneously, the Six Nations Confederacy Council sought to present a petition to President Eisenhower objecting to the invasion by the SPA on Tuscarora Nation land, the resulting violation of the Treaty of Canandaigua (1794), lack of protection by the Justice department, escalating legal fees, interference in fishing rights on the Niagara River, and damage to the Tuscarora Nation environment by transmission lines (Hauptman 1986, 172). On March 7, 1960, the United States Supreme Court ruled against the Tuscarora Nation in a four-to-three vote, stating that there was no treaty obligation to protect their reservation, since the lands required for the reservoir, the Dearborn tract, were not acquired by treaty but were purchased in fee simple, and that therefore the land could be taken by eminent domain. The dissenting voice of Justice Hugo Black maintained that the Court had misinterpreted the Federal Power Act and that the Tuscarora Nation land was indeed protected. He considered the Supreme Court to be the “governmental agency that breaks faith with this dependent people,” adding that “Great nations, like great men, should keep their word” (Federal Power Commission v. Tuscarora Indian Nation, 362 U.S. 99, 1960). Subsequently, the Court denied the Tuscarora Nation’s request for a rehearing. Construction of the reservoir commenced and on February 10, 1961, it was dedicated in a ceremony at Niagara University in Niagara Falls, New York.

Impact and Renewal

The immediate impact of the Tuscarora Nation’s dispossession of a portion of their homeland was expressed in a renewed activism that was grounded in the Tuscarora Nation’s worldview and their experiences as a colonized nation. Their political activism reaffirmed a Tuscarora Nation presence in the Niagara region. In turn, they inspired indigenous nations throughout the United States to protect their land base and thereby set a precedent to the emerging Red Power Movement of the 1960s and 1970s.

As a result of the Tuscarora Nation’s overwhelming community-based activism and resistance, the SPA demand for Tuscarora land was reduced from 1,383 acres to 550 acres. Nevertheless, the loss was substantial: the reservoir consumed 495 acres, and power lines were positioned on the remaining 55 acres on the Tuscarora Nation reservation (Johansen and Mann 2000, 320). The subsequent flooding and forced relocation of part of the community ignited a sense of siege and indignation in the Tuscarora Nation that, in turn, generated increased political activism in the generation that was growing up at the time of the reservoir construction and anti-reservoir demonstrations.

One focus of current activism has been the issue of environmental justice. In 1992, the Haudenosaunee Environmental Task Force (HETF) was established, and, in turn, the Tuscarora Nation developed the Tuscarora Environmental Program (TEP), a plan for land stewardship that is directed toward the preservation and sustainability of “bio-cultural” concerns such as traditional foods, agriculture, fish migration, and energy (http://www7.nau.edu/itep/main/tcc/Tribes/ne_tuscarora). In October 2012, the Tuscarora Nation, under the auspices of the Haudenosaunee Environmental Task Force, developed a Tuscarora Grassland Restoration Proposal to correct damage done by the Niagara Power Project in 1958 when they rerouted waterways and condemned open space on the reservation. Restoration will safeguard traditional plants and nesting areas that were under threat (http://niagara.NYPA.gov/Tuscarora_Grassland-Restoration-Final-Proposal).

Rerouting waterways and building an invasive reservoir violated Tuscarora Nation values by putting economic progress before the rights of the Tuscarora Nation community to occupy their sovereign lands in peace and respect for the environment. William Rickard testified at the FPC hearings in 1958 that the land is a living, nurturing entity that cannot be bought or sold as a commodity for profit. In this context, resisting the reservoir was a spiritual act intended to protect all forms of life, protect the community from loss of food and housing, preserve community relationships, and preserve the sustainability of the earth for future generations, beliefs that are necessary for survival and intrinsic to Haudenosaunee and Tuscarora Nation philosophies. When the FPC imposed its value system on the Tuscarora Nation community by seizing their land for the reservoir, it violated the Haudenosaunee philosophy of the Two-Row Wampum that was foundational to the first Treaty between the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) and European settlers, in which respectful co-existence is pledged by all parties. These philosophies were central to Tuscarora resistance and were translated into proactive, non-violent action through community demonstrations, media attention, and litigation in the state and federal court systems.

The political relevance of the Tuscarora Nation cosmology becomes immediately apparent in a reading of the Federal Regulatory Energy Commission Environmental Impact Statement of the Niagara Project (2006), a requirement for relicensing, that cites contamination of fish and reservoir sediment with mercury and organic compounds (74), reduced vegetation and wildlife habitat due to the weekly changes in water level in the reservoir (100), and curtailment of customary land use, such as agriculture, hunting, and fishing. Further, many families were displaced when their homes were submerged under the reservoir waters. Although those families received new homes, and six homes were moved, the loss of a traditional, multi-generational home base was devastating. Tuscarora Dorothy Crouse refused to leave and was moved along with her home. Further, this loss had economic dimensions for many Tuscaroras. For example, in the Niagara Falls Gazette, Bill Branche notes that although “Chief Harry Patterson, Sr. received a new ranch-style home with two large steel-framed cinder block barns and two structures for his chickens and pigs, he had to abandon his family homestead, his extensive outbuildings, and a productive 600 acre fruit farm” (Branche 1960).

Sidebar 2: The Two-Row Wampum or Kaswentha

The Two-Row Wampum or Kaswentha is an iconographic statement consisting of two parallel purple rows running lengthwise across the wampum, against a white background. The purple rows suggest the principle of separate but equal co-existence and sharing land, and represent two separate cultures or peoples living in peace and respect, side by side. One purple row is the path of indigenous nations, and the other is the path of European settlers in America. Both rows are woven into a white background symbolizing peace. The concept of the Two-Row Wampum was first scripted to reflect the principles of an agreement or treaty between the Haudenosaunee and Dutch settlers in 1613 to remain separate but tolerant peoples and was later embodied in the Treaty of Canandaigua (1794). It can be read as one of the earliest iconic expressions of a pluralistic democracy in America.

When the SPA applied for relicensing in 2005, requiring the Environmental Impact Statement, the SPA also agreed to open up the process of relicensing to the public with the Cooperative Consultation Process (CCP) that considers the goal of low-cost energy for the governmental, industrial, and residential customers as well as provisions for non-profit values, such as balancing environmental concerns and preservation of historical sites. Although the interests of the Tuscarora Nation and other indigenous nations differ from a general public in that they are the First Peoples who made treaties intended to guarantee their rights and do not need the CCP or other committees to set air and water quality standards, the parallel process of the CCP resulted in a separate agreement and settlement between the Tuscarora Nation and the Power Authority of the State of New York (2005) in which the relicensing terms include a payment to the Tuscarora Nation of $21,824,176, allocation of low-cost power, the return of 52 unused acres, funding for Tuscarora Nation cultural initiatives, historic preservation, a customary use plan for land management, energy audits, post-licensing fish tissue sampling, funding up to $150,000 for a Power Vista exhibit documenting the culture of the Haudenosaunee and their relationship to the project, scholarships, a pledge for ongoing dialogue after relicensing, and protection from trespass on Tuscarora Nation lands (Relicensing Settlement Agreement Between the Power Authority of the State of New York and the Tuscarora Nation, Niagara Power Project, FERC Project No. 2216, 2005).

Further, the construction of the reservoir inspired contemporary cultural expressions, such as Eric Gansworth’s novel Smoke Dancing, in which his illustrations speak to the conflict between the Tuscaroras and the New York State Power Authority in representations of the traditional Three Sisters surrounded by gasoline tanks that, in turn, desecrate the wampum belt of the Treaty of Canandaigua (1794). On the frontispiece of his novel, a cigarette is crushed into the back of a Turtle. Tuscarora visual historian, Dr. Jolene Rickard, the granddaughter of activist Chief Clinton Rickard, visually documented the flooding of the Tuscarora homeland in an installation entitled Corn Blue Room (1998), currently located in the Denver Art Museum in Denver, Colorado. Entering the installation, the viewer becomes a part of a visual dialogue between images of corn, the reservoir and transformers. To enter the physical space of Corn Blue Room is to experience a place of Tuscarora Nation worldview and identity in dialogue with the appropriation of Tuscarora land by the New York State Power Authority.

Biographies of Notable Figures

Clinton Rickard (Rowadagahrade) (Tuscarora) (1882–1971)

Chief Clinton Rickard was a leader in the 20th-century Indian rights movement. Although he indicates in his autobiography, Fighting Tuscarora (1973), that due to health issues he could not be actively involved in demonstrations against the reservoir, his political initiatives were foundational to the Tuscarora Nation’s resistance to the incursions of the State Power Authority on the Tuscarora Nation reservation. His son, William Rickard (1918–1964), was also a political activist and a leader of the resistance to the reservoir until his untimely death.

Rickard was born in 1882 on the Tuscarora Nation reservation, the son of George and Lucy Rickard. He served in the United States Army and was stationed in the Philippines from 1902 to 1904 before returning home and raising a family. By 1920, he was a chief of the Beaver Clan on the national council of the Tuscarora Nation, where his name was Rowadagahrade, meaning “Loud Voice.” A lifelong activist in the service of Indian rights, he studied the U.S. Code and treaties between the federal government and the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois). In 1926, he was part of a group of Native American activists who founded the Indian Defense League of America (IDLA), setting a precedent for future litigation by using established treaties between the federal government and Indian nations to further land rights and cultural preservation (Johansen and Mann, 257–59).

Rickard challenged the United States and Canada to enforce the provisions of the Jay Treaty (1794), which provided for free passage of Indian nations across the border. He considered this provision as critical to recognition of the sovereign status of indigenous nations in the United States and Canada and came to the defense of Indians who were harassed by border officials, providing legal advocacy and financial assistance through the Indian Defense League of America (IDLA). Although an advocate of Haudenosaunee sovereignty, he is also considered to be a leader in the North American pan-Indian movement for Native American nationalism and considered the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act to be an instrument of social control over Indian nations stating that

… to us, it seemed that the United States government was just trying to get rid of its treaty obligations and make us into taxpaying citizens who could sell their homelands and finally end up in the city slums. (Wallace 2012, 141)

In the 1950s, Rickard fought against the federal policy of tribal termination and considered it a method of extinguishing Indian nations and their sovereignty.

In his autobiography, Rickard states that “the SPA [State Power Authority] got its reservoir, and we were left with scars that never heal” (Graymont 1973, 152). Although the scars refer to the loss of homes and farmland under the reservoir waters, pollution and cultural values, such as relationships to the land, the “scars” in part also refer to the social disruption created by ideological divisions regarding the building of the reservoir (Wallace 2012, 144).

Wallace “Mad Bear” Anderson (Tuscarora) (1927–1985)

Wallace “Mad Bear” Anderson’s advocacy of Native American rights and tribal sovereignty began in the 1950s, before the surge of Red Power activism in the 1960s and 1970s. He was born in Buffalo, New York, and raised on the Tuscarora Nation reservation. An advocate of nonviolent demonstrations against government interference and treaty violations, he adopted the name “Mad Bear,” given to him by his grandmother in his childhood due to what seemed to her to be his argumentative and confrontational presence. He enlisted in the United States Navy in 1944, serving at Okinawa in WWII and in the Korean War. Upon returning home, he became a leader in many protests against injustice and advocated nonviolent resistance to government interference on reservations and treaty violations.

Returning home after the war, his leadership centered on non-violent protest against Haudenosaunee payment of New York State income tax (1957), resistance to the State Power Authority’s appropriation of Tuscarora Nation land for a hydropower reservoir, opposition to government tribal termination policies, Haudenosaunee declarations of sovereignty in Brantford, Ontario (1959), a citizen’s arrest for the misconduct of Indian Commissioner Glen L. Emmons in Washington, D.C., and the takeover of Alcatraz Island (1969). In 1967, Anderson established the North American Indian Unity Caravan that traveled to indigenous nations throughout the United States. In the last decades of his life, his advocacy on behalf of indigenous rights moved into an international forum.

Robert Moses (1888–1981)

Robert Moses has been referred to as a “master builder” (Hauptman 1986, 139) who changed the landscape in New York State with his public projects. He was born in Connecticut in 1888 and grew up in Manhattan, New York. He attended Yale, Oxford, and Columbia Universities.

One of Moses’ first projects in public service was at the Municipal Research Bureau in New York, where he worked on restructuring New York City’s civil service system. In 1922, he became president of the Long Island State Park Commission, and by 1925 he was chairman of the State Council of Parks. By 1933, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia appointed Moses Director of the Parks Department in New York City, where he undertook major public works, building highways and bridges and renovating the Central Park Zoo. He held several offices, including the secretary of state for New York, commissioner of New York City Department of Parks and, in 1954, he was appointed by Governor Thomas Dewey to be chairman of the New York State Power Authority (Hauptman 1986, 139). He considered the St. Lawrence Seaway Project and the Niagara Project to be his crowning glories in a long and demanding career.

As early as 1946, Moses developed plans to remove the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) from their lands in New York State for public usage. When he was the Commissioner of the New York State Council of Parks, he hired Colonel William S. Chapin to analyze and develop a report about the impact of a potential dam, the Kinzua dam, in Allegheny State Park. The report revealed a federal plan to purchase the Allegheny Reservation and remove the Senecas to open their reservation for Upper Allegheny flood control and to “develop the land for recreational purposes” (Hauptman 1986, 139–40). Hauptman states that “as early as 1946, Moses had begun to view Iroquois lands as regional sacrifice areas for his vision of America” (Hauptman 1986, 140). He believed that the St. Lawrence Power Project and Seaway and the resulting inexpensive hydroelectric energy would attract substantial business interests to the area.

Given what seemed to be Moses’s unbridled power and arrogance, he had many detractors. He was accused of displacing some mostly poor 250,000 urban residents with his massive projects and was considered responsible for Brooklyn’s baseball team leaving the city because he refused to build a new stadium. Although he was widely criticized, he left behind a substantial record of accomplishment that included the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Shea Stadium, thirteen bridges, power projects, highways, and numerous parks in New York State. By 1959, Moses no longer worked for the state and had become president of the 1964–65 World’s Fair.

DOCUMENT EXCERPTS

The Treaty of Canandaigua (The Pickering Treaty) (1794)

Article II of this treaty is an agreement between George Washington, through his representative, Timothy Pickering, and the Senecas (Six Nations) that the United States will not interfere in the land rights of the Senecas or any of the Six Nations.

… the United States acknowledges all the land within the aforementioned boundaries, to be the property of the Seneca Nation; and the United States will never claim the same, nor disturb the Seneca Nation, nor any of the Six Nations, or of their Indian friends residing thereon, and united with them, in the free use and enjoyment thereof; but it shall remain theirs, until they choose to sell the same.

Source: Kappler, Charles. Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties, Volume 2, Treaties. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1904.

The Federal Power Act (1920)

Enacted in 1920, the Federal Power Act created the Federal Power Commission (FPC), now the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, that governs the licensing of hydroelectric power projects. In Section 796 (2), it defines reservations.

… reservations means national forests, tribal lands embraced within Indian Reservations, military reservations, and other lands and interests in lands owned by the United States, and withdrawn, reserved, or withheld from private appropriation and disposal under the public land laws;…

Source: 16 U.S. Code Chapter 12.

Federal Power Commission v. Tuscarora Indian Nation (1960)

In February, 1959, the Federal Power Commission ruled that the Tuscarora Nation tribal lands were a reservation and that the Tuscarora Nation could not be forced to sell land to the State Power Authority. Subsequently, the ruling was reheard by the United States Supreme Court, which, in a 4-to-3 decision, announced on March 7, 1960, ruled against the Tuscarora Nation, claiming that there was no treaty obligation to protect their lands, since the lands required for the reservoir, the so-called Dearborn tract, had been purchased in fee simple, and ruling that Tuscarora Nation land could be seized by eminent domain. Following are excerpts from Justice Black’s dissenting opinion.

… The Court holds that the Federal Power Act authorizes the taking of 22% (1,383 acres) of the single tract which the Tuscarora Indian Nation has owned and occupied as its homeland for 150 years. Admittedly this taking of so large a part of the lands will interfere with the purpose for which this Indian reservation was created—a permanent home for the Tuscaroras. I not only believe that the Federal Power Act does not authorize this taking, but that the Act positively prohibits it. Moreover, I think the taking also violates the nation’s long-established policy of recognizing and preserving Indian reservations for tribal use, and that it constitutes a breach of Indian treaties recognized by Congress since at least 1794.

Whether the Federal Power Act permits this condemnation depends, in part, upon whether the Tuscarora Reservation is a “reservation” within the meaning of the Act. For if it is, 4(e) forbids the taking of any part of the lands except after a finding by the Federal Power Commission that the taking “will not interfere or be inconsistent with the purpose for which such reservation was created or acquired …” There is no such finding here. In fact, the Commission found that the inundation of so great a part of the Tuscarora Reservation by the waters of the proposed reservoir “will interfere and will be inconsistent with the purpose for which such reservation was created or acquired.” If these Tuscarora homelands are “tribal lands embraced within” an Indian reservation as used in 3(2) they constitute a “reservation” for the purposes of 4(e), and therefore the taking here is unauthorized because the requisite finding could not be made.

I believe the plain meaning of the words used in the Act, taken alone, and their meaning in the light of the historical background against which they must be viewed, require the conclusion that these lands are a “reservation” entitled to the protections of 4(e) of the Act. “Reservation,” as used in 4(e), is defined by 3(2) which provides:

“ ‘reservations’ means national forests, tribal lands embraced within Indian reservations, military reservations, and other lands and interests in lands owned by the United States, and withdrawn, reserved, or withheld from private appropriation and disposal under the public land laws; also lands and interests in lands acquired and held for any public purposes; but shall not include national monuments or national parks …”

The phrase “tribal lands embraced within Indian reservations” surely includes these Tuscarora lands. They are tribal lands. They are embraced within the Tuscarora Indian Nation’s reservation. The lands have been called a reservation for more than 150 years. They have been so described in treaties, Acts of Congress, court decisions, Indian agency reports, books, articles and maps. In fact, so far as I can ascertain, they have never been called anything else, anywhere or at any time—until today. Even the Court of Appeals and the Federal Power Commission, and the briefs and record in this Court, quite naturally refer to this 10-square-mile tract of land as an Indian reservation. The Court itself seems to accept the fact that the Tuscarora Nation lives on a reservation according to (in its words) the “generally accepted standards and common understanding” of that term. The Court, however, decides that in the Federal Power Act Congress departed from the meaning universally given the phrase “tribal lands embraced within Indian reservations” and defined the phrase, the Court says, “artificially.” The Court believes that the words “other lands … owned by the United States,” which follow, were intended by Congress to limit the phrase to include only those reservations to which the United States has technical legal title. By the Court’s “artificial” interpretation, the phrase turns out to mean “tribal lands embraced within Indian Reservations—except when “the lands involved are owned in fee simple by the [Indians].”

Creating such a wholly artificial and limited definition, so new and disruptive, imposes a heavy burden of justification upon the one who asserts it. We are told that many tribes own their reservation lands … all such reservation lands are put in jeopardy by the Court’s strained interpretation.… The fact that the Tuscarora Nation holds technical legal title is fortuitous and an accidental circumstance probably attributable to the Indian land policy prevailing at the early date this reservation was established. Their lands, like all other Indian tribal lands, can be sold, leased or subjected to easements only with the consent of the United States Government. Congress and government agencies have always treated the Tuscarora Reservation the same as all others, and there is no reason even to suspect that Congress wanted to treat it differently when it passed the Federal Power Act.

Source: Federal Power Commission v. Tuscarora Indian Nation (362 U.S. 99, 1960).

Further Reading

Bilharz, Joy A. The Allegany Senecas and Kinzua Dame: Forced Relocation through Two Generations. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1998.

Bodley, John H. Victims of Progress. Mountain View, CA: Mayfield Publishing Company, 1999.

Branch, Bill. “Indian Families find SPA Generous Winner.” Niagara Falls Gazette (July 31, 1960).

Chevrier, Lionel. The Saint Lawrence Seaway. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1959.

Deloria, Vine. Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties: An Indian Declaration of Independence. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985.

Federal Power Commission v. Tuscarora Indian Nation (362 U.S. 99, 1960).

Graymont, Barbara, Ed. Fighting Tuscarora: The Autobiography of Chief Clinton Rickard. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1973.

Grinde, D. and B. Johansen. Ecocide of Native America. Santa Fe: Clear Light Publishers, 1995.

Haudenosaunee Environmental Task Force. The Words That Come Before All Else: Environmental Philosophy of the Haudenosaunee. Cornwall Island, Canada: Native North American Travelling College, 1999.

Hauptman, Laurence M. The Iroquois Struggle for Survival: World War II to Red Power. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1986.

Johansen, Bruce E. and Barbara A. Mann, eds. Encyclopedia of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois Confederacy). Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000.

Keal, Paul. European Conquest and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Landy, David. “Tuscarora Among the Iroquois.” In Handbook of North American Indians: Northeast. Vol. 15. Edited by Bruce E. Trigger. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institute,1978, 518–524.

Library of Congress. A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation: U.S. Congressional Documents and Debates, 1774–1875. rs6.loc.gov/ammem/amlaw/lawhome.html

McCully, Patrick. Flooding the Land, Warming the Earth: Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Dams. International Rivers Network: West Coast Print Center with Solstice Press, June 2002.

Parlato, Frank. “Tuscaroras Fear Contaminated Water Causes Cancer Deaths.” Niagara Falls Reporter, July 24, 2012.

Trigger, Bruce G., ed. Handbook of North American Indians: Northeast. Vol. 15. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1978.

Wallace, Anthony F.C. The Tuscarora: A History. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012.

Williams, Ted. The Reservation. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1976.

Wilson, Edmund. Apologies to the Iroquois. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1991.

National Indian Youth Council, 1961

Paul McKenzie-Jones

Chronology

1955		Santa Fe Indian Council is formed when college students at the University of New Mexico wish to visit local high schools to inspire Native students to graduate and move into higher education.
1956		University of Chicago anthropology professor Sol Tax creates the Workshops on American Indian Affairs, a six-week summer immersion course intended to provide sympathetic readings of Native cultures and histories to Native students rather than the standard “disappearing savage” rhetoric they received in standard educations forums.
1961		Southwest Regional Indian Youth Council elections see Clyde Warrior galvanize his cohorts with a short but effective “sewage of Europe” speech.
		American Indian Chicago Conference is organized by Sol Tax and sees over 500 Native delegates from 75 different Native nations convene to draft the Declaration of Indian Purpose as a challenge to newly elected president John F. Kennedy.
		Ten young American Indian activists meet in Gallup, New Mexico, to create the National Indian Youth Council in response to elected and appointed tribal leaders refusing to listen to their calls during the AICC for change in the status quo in Indian affairs.
1964		The fish-ins protest against treaty abrogation in the Pacific Northwest see between 500 to 20,000 Native protestors lead the first mass inter-tribal direct-action protest of the twentieth century.
1966		The National Indian Youth Council/Original Cherokee Community Organization leads a protest against the opening of the Cherokee Traditional Village in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, building upon the legacy of blockading begun at the 1964 fish-ins.
1968		Founder member Clyde Warrior dies of liver failure, aged 28.
		Browning Pipestem heads a leadership coup of the NIYC in protest at the direction of the movement under the old guard.
		There is a further split in the NIYC as several leading members, including Mel Thom, join forces with Martin Luther King and later Ralph Abernathy as part of the Poor People’s Campaign, maintaining a steady presence at Resurrection City even as the protest is broken up.
1970		Gerald Wilkinson becomes new leader of the NIYC and begins to turn the group in a new direction.
1977		NIYC lawyers help fight the Harjo v. Kleppe court case, which ends another form of federal paternalism in oversight of tribal politics.
2011		The NIYC celebrates its 50th anniversary as a continuing advocate for tribal rights, cultural sovereignty, healthcare rights, and the protection of sacred sites.

The National Indian Youth Council

In the 1960s, a decade of unprecedented civil unrest and cultural, racial, and political activism, the National Indian Youth Council forged the Red Power Movement as its members led the call to uphold traditional American Indian cultures, languages, and traditions against the American tradition of assimilation. In the face of increasing attempts by the federal government to terminate the federal trust relationship with American Indian nations and finally fully assimilate American Indians into the dominant western culture of the United States, the NIYC campaigned tirelessly for tribal self-determination, treaty rights, cultural preservation, and culturally relevant education for the indigenous peoples of the United States. Through tactics of direct action protest, model schools, and direct dialogue with federal power brokers, the NIYC changed the shape and tone of federal Indian affairs and paved the way for later, more celebrated militant activist organizations to fight for indigenous rights. The NIYC is the second-oldest continuously existing inter-tribal Native organization in the United States, significantly changed the face of American Indian activism in the 1960s, and remains committed to fighting on behalf of indigenous peoples from across the Americas.

On Thursday, August 23, 1961, a group of ten young American Indians convened in a rented office space in Gallup, New Mexico, to discuss their ideas for the future of a “greater Indian America.” The meeting, which lasted over three days, resulted in the creation of the National Indian Youth Council. The original ten members, Clyde Warrior (Ponca), Mel Thom (Paiute), Herb Blatchford (Navajo), Shirley Witt (Mohawk), Karen Rickard (Tuscarora), Mary Natani (Winnebago), Joan Noble (Ute), Thomas and Bernadine Eschief (Shoshone Bannock), and Howard McKinley Jr. (Navajo), quickly became the dominant voices of disaffected young, reservation and rurally raised American Indians during the decade that followed. The commitment of these young American Indians to the cultural aspects of their identities was reflected in the choice of location for the meeting, which “coincided” with the week-long Gallup Inter-Tribal Indian Ceremonial. While the origins of the NIYC are often posited as being born of frustration at being shut out and shouted down at the American Indian Chicago Conference earlier in that year, there were many roads that led these young men and women on the path to this pivotal meeting. Born of a confluence of regional college youth council members, Workshops on American Indian Affairs students, and individual tribal activists, the National Indian Youth Council was framed by multiple indigenous voices from all across the United States.

The Southwest Regional Indian Youth Council had originated many years earlier, also in New Mexico. In 1957, the Santa Fe Indian Club expanded its membership to include indigenous students from all across the Southwest. Charles E. Minton, Executive Secretary of the Southwest Association on Indian Affairs, who sponsored the youth councils and their annual conferences, proclaimed three objectives of the SRIYC: “to stimulate Indian youth to acquire … skills that would … be of service to the tribes and communities; to expand their circle of Indian acquaintance … and to acquire an understanding of the varied and complex problems in Indian affairs, so they will work together … to improve conditions among Indian people” (Minton, 55). By 1961, the SRIYC had expanded to include Oklahoma and Utah college campuses, which incorporated Mel Thom and Clyde Warrior into the sphere of influence. At almost the same time as the Santa Fe Youth Council was expanding into first the Regional Indian Youth Council and eventually the Southwest Regional Indian Youth Council, University of Chicago anthropologist Sol Tax was creating the Workshops on American Indian Affairs.

National Indian Youth Council: From left are Melvin Thom, president of National Indian Youth Council; Allen Jacob, a Chipewyan from Edmonton, Alberta, Canada; and Herb Blatchford, a Navajo from Gallup, New Mexico, and executive director of NIYC. NIYC is active on various issues and is the second-oldest national American Indian organization. (Duane Howell/The Denver Post via Getty Images)

The Workshops were conceived of as a practical extension of Tax’s concept of “action anthropology” as the ideal intellectual approach toward Native Peoples. Tax was as certain of the Workshops’ importance to the history of American Indian education as Minton was of the youth councils’. As Workshops instructor Al Warhrhaftig explained, “action anthropology held that by intervening in a community in such a way that new alternatives can be created without co-opting the power to incorporate only such alternatives as are perceived by its members to be beneficial, anthropologists can observe ‘values in action’: they can simultaneously study and help” (McKenzie-Jones, 54). Among the young Native students attending the inaugural summer workshops was Herb Blatchford, and in the 1961 summer straddled by the American Indian Chicago Conference and the inaugural NIYC meeting, among the six-week student cohort were Clyde Warrior, Karen Rickard, Bernadine and Thomas Eschief, and Mary White Eagle Natani.

Sidebar 1: Red Power

Red Power was first coined by Clyde Warrior and Mel Thom immediately after they heard Stokely Carmichael’s call for Black Power in 1966. Over the course of the following decade, Red Power assumed many forms. Originally conceived as a reference to the strength and endurance of indigenous communities, traditions, and cultures despite generations of enforced subjugation at the hands of the federal government, by the end of the 1960s, Red Power had evolved into a more political statement of militant action as the new groups campaigned for tribal self-determination built on the foundations laid by the National Indian Youth Council. By that time, Vine Deloria Jr. and then the American Indian Movement had adopted the phrase as a call to arms in the surge of occupations and direct-action protests that sprang from the occupation of Alcatraz Island in 1969, and was seen by many as best expressed in Deloria’s 1969 book Custer Died for Your Sins. At the same time, a third expression of Red Power emerged north of the border when Canadian Indian Youth Council founder Harold Cardinal published The Unjust Society. In the United States, the pinnacle of the Red Power Movement is seen as being the 73-day siege at Wounded Knee in 1973. In Canada, the same sentiment is reserved for the Oka Crisis at Kanesatake in 1990.

The overlap of the original NIYC cohort containing members who were both youth council and workshops students speaks to the miniscule number of American Indian students attending college in the 1960s. By 1963, “3,141 Indians were attending colleges or universities and 2,290 others were enrolled in post-high school vocational schools” (McKenzie-Jones, 45). The councils and workshops facilitated a unity among what would otherwise have been a disparate number of indigenous students spread thinly across United States college campuses. There were, however, still students attached to neither of these groups, and this is where the American Indian Chicago Conference provides the final piece of the inaugural NIYC jigsaw. Witt attended the conference as a representative of her home community and was introduced to other young caucus members by her childhood friend Karen Rickard. Both Witt and Rickard had been privileged enough to spend their childhood listening to stories from Tuscarora chief Clinton Rickard, famous for his campaigns for the sovereign rights of the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy. As such, Rickard and Witt were both outspoken champions of American Indian rights who gelled seamlessly with the other members of the original NIYC. It was at the AICC, where despite being an integral part of the drafting of the Declaration of Indian Purpose that transpired from the conference, the collective group of young Indians, angry and frustrated at being constantly silenced by the more experienced tribal political leaders, decided to meet later in the year to form their own organization.

The urgency with which these young Native students viewed the relationship between American Indians and the U.S. government was exposed by Beryl Spruce (Laguna) in his inaugural RIYC address, “We Are Born at a Time When the Indian People Need Us,” and later at the American Indian Chicago Conference by Shirley Witt. Spruce, controversially at that time, called American Indians themselves to account for being acquiescent in the colonial subservience to white America in which many of them found themselves. He argued, “We’re lazy. We’re lazy and we’re proud that we’re little babies sitting in a mud puddle, sitting there and wishing that someone else would come and pull us out. We’re saying to ourselves, ‘I’m just a poor little Indian. I’m ignorant. If I go to school, I won’t make it. I just know I won’t make it.’ I don’t think we’re even nearly the proud Indian that used to live long ago. I don’t think we even have a right to be proud that we are their descendants … They had courage. They had pride and self-discipline. Those are things we seriously lack today. We don’t have them anymore. We’re cowards” (Shreve, 55).

Witt later recalled that at the conference, “As our youth caucuses felt more and more lifted up by our conviction and commonality of ideas, and as those ideas began to take shape on scraps of paper passed from group to group, we knew that we had something to contribute to the ponderous atavistic deliberations taking place each afternoon in the general assembly” (Shreve, 90). By the end of the conference, however, the constant rejection of their ideas by the assembled tribal political leaders led the youth groups to determine to form their own intertribal organization of indigenous uplift.

Although unrelated, Spruce’s speech set a precedent for much of the rhetoric that the later NIYC members, and Clyde Warrior in particular, would mirror. In late 1964, Warrior ran an article in the NIYC’s newspaper ABC, Americans Before Columbus, under the headline “Which One Are You? Five Types of American Indian.” The types were a reflection of the worst perceptions of Indians by white society, and included “the slob, or hood,” who molds himself into the white misconception of Indian-ness “by dropping out of school, becomes a ‘wino,’ eventually becomes a court case, usually sent off … another Indian hits the dust, through no fault of his own” (Warrior 1964, 1). The second was the “joker,” who “has defined to himself that to be an Indian is a joke. An Indian does stupid, funny things … and he goes through life a bungling clown” (Warrior). The third was the “redskin, white noser or sellout,” who “has accepted … the definition that anything Indian is dumb, usually filthy, and immoral, and to avoid this is to become a “LITTLE BROWN AMERICAN” by associating and identifying with everything that is white. Thus society has created the fink of finks.” (Warrior). The fourth “type” was the “ultra-pseudo Indian” who “is proud that he is Indian but for some reason does not know how one acts. Therefore, he takes his cues from non-Indian sources, books, shows, etc. and proceeds to act ‘Indian.’ Hence, we have a proud, phony, Indian” (Warrior).

The final type was the “angry nationalist” who “is generally closer to true ‘Indianism’ than the other types, and they resent the others for being ashamed of their own kind” (Warrior). The “angry nationalist,” with whom Warrior himself was usually associated, “tends to dislike the older generations who have been ‘Uncle Tomahawks’ or ‘yes men’ to the Bureau of Indian Affairs and whites in general” (Warrior). He claimed that this type viewed the “problems of personality disappearance” with “bitter abstract and ideological thinking” and were labeled “radicals” as they tended to “alienate themselves from the general masses of Indians for speaking as it appears to them, ‘TRUTHS’ ” (Warrior).

While Warrior was becoming the more well-known of the NIYC leaders because of such strident rhetoric, other NIYC members were equally vocal in their critique of the status quo of the iniquity of Indian-white relations. Mel Thom, first president of the NIYC had coined the phrase “A Greater Indian America” in which he positioned American Indians at the forefront of the American consciousness as a juxtaposition of the reality of general American Indian invisibility in American culture. Additionally, one of the first major agreements that the inaugural group made among themselves was the equal voice and importance of all involved, male or female. While this was a reflection of their commitment to common cultural motifs of gender equality in American Indian communities, especially pre-dating European contact, it also set the NIYC apart from many other activist movements of the 1960s, which reflected to more normative patriarchal structures of American society. This commitment to equality was vitally important for the continued support of members such as Witt and Rickard, who were raised in communities where women were significant voices in all decisions of cultural and political significance.

In 1964, the NIYC burst onto the national spotlight of American Indian affairs and pushed American Indian issues into the wider American social consciousness as they helped orchestrate direct-action protests against treaty abrogation in the Pacific Northwest. Long before the more famous occupation of Alcatraz Island by the Indians of All Tribes, the fish-ins of the Pacific Northwest introduced a new militant aspect to intertribal campaigns for self-determination and tribal sovereignty. Soliciting the help of celebrity civil rights advocates Marlon Brando and Dick Clarke, the protests raised awareness of the long history of treaty fishing rights being ignored in the region, and the wider history of treaty abrogation by state and federal agencies nationwide. In the specific case of the Pacific Northwest protests, they eventually culminated in a 1974 federal ruling in favor of the tribes of Washington state (Shreve, 119–38). The Boldt decision awarded 50 percent of the annual allowable catch to treaty tribes in the State. While historian Bradley Shreve locates the fish-ins as the birth of Red Power Movement, the origins of the slogan came later, in 1966, when Clyde Warrior, Mel Thom, Della Warrior, and two other activists rented a car and gate-crashed the annual parade of the National Congress of American Indians. On the car’s right side was a banner with the words “Red Power, National Indian Youth Council.” On the left, “Custer Died For Your Sins.” And in addition to Red Power, the NIYC also introduced phrases such as “Red Apples” and “Uncle Tomahawks” into the language of American Indian affairs to denote those tribal leaders, Native government employees, and other indigenous peoples whom they perceived as being complicit in maintaining the status quo of settler colonial power structures that rendered American Indians as second-class and racially inferior citizens (McKenzie-Jones, 76).

In contrast to these perceived cultural sellouts, the Red Power of the NIYC was framed almost entirely within a cultural framework that reflected their commitment to the “medicine ways” and their traditional upbringings at the feet of their parents and grandparents within the bosom of their communities. This was reflected in the words of both Karen Rickard, when she described listening to her father’s stories, such as “how the Tuscarora left the home in the Carolinas” (Shreve, 75), and Clyde Warrior, who recalled listening to his grandparents talk of a time when “the Indians were a great people, when we were rich, when we lived the good life” (McKenzie-Jones, 116). This commitment to the old ways of community life was exemplified by the group’s decision to hold all annual meetings on reservation land rather than urban hotels or conference centers.

Following their success in raising awareness over treaty abrogation, the leaders of the NIYC switched their focus to cultural relevancy in education. Their childhood educational experiences, whether in public or boarding schools, had been replete with discussions of Indian savagery, disappearance, and unworthiness, and the activists sought to change this through systematic educational reform, from kindergarten level all the way through college. In addition to simply wishing for a true history of American Indian cultures and languages to be presented in the classroom, there were multiple cultural reasons for their campaign for culturally relevant education. Many were reflected in Warrior’s essay on the five types of Indian, and the group were determined to erase one of the most pernicious ways in which Native children were taught to disregard their own cultures, communities, and even parents and elders as worthless. They embarked on an impressive number of educational projects, from sponsoring the United Scholarship Services and Upward Bound educational agencies, to embarking in the late 1960s upon a ten-site model reservation school project, in partnership with the Far West Laboratory for Educational Research and Development. In addition, several leaders, including Clyde Warrior and Browning Pipestem (Oto-Missouria), organized NIYC-sponsored summer workshops in competition with (and eventually replacing) the Boulder, Colorado, workshops of which they were both alumni (McKenzie-Jones, 144–68). These projects, and others that followed, eventually led to the federal government passing the Indian Education Act in 1972.

At the same time, the growing militancy of the NIYC’s rhetoric and their impatience toward the removal or restructuring of the federal policies that governed American Indians saw them increasingly at odds with the more established National Congress of American Indians. Having set in motion a series of events that allowed Vine Deloria Jr. to ascend to the executive office of the NCAI at a very young age, NIYC leaders, and Clyde Warrior especially, became disillusioned with his commitment to the organizations preferred path of steady, engaged dialogue with federal government. The relationship descended into often personal acrimony as Warrior, Thom, and others saw Deloria betraying the vitality of youth in his preference to dialogue over protest, while Deloria, in turn, viewed the NIYC leadership as “crass but effective” (McKenzie-Jones).

Events at the end of the 1960s left an indelible mark on the NIYC, as first, founding member Clyde Warrior died of liver failure in 1968, and then a schism appeared among the leadership as Browning Pipestem led a coup at the annual meeting later that same year, due to a schism forming in the organization as factions of the NIYC led the American Indian cohort of the Poor People’s Campaign. At the end of the decade, as other American Indian organizations shone in the spotlight, the increased awareness of Native issues saw membership numbers soar, however. While maintaining an initial focus on educational reform, the new leadership, under Cherokee Gerald Wilkinson, also began to initiate legal fights to protect sacred sites and tribal sovereignty, including the significant Harjo v. Kleppe case in 1976, as well as creating a new job-placement program for young American Indians that still exists today.

Sidebar 2: Harjo v. Kleppe (1976): A Fight for Tribal Self-Determination

Harjo v. Kleppe was a landmark court case in the fight for tribal self-determination. In a bitterly fought Muscogee Creek leadership election between Allen Harjo and eventual winner Claude Cox, the issue of National Council representation was a key component of both side’s election campaigns. Cox wished to write a new tribal constitution that would allow for National Council membership candidates to be chosen from districts rather than traditional towns. Harjo promised to reinstate the National Council under the more traditional format of Creek Town representation as laid out in the nation’s 1867 constitution. When Cox won, along with the fact that the new constitution required approval from the Secretary of the Interior, Harjo’s supporters urged him to challenge the legal standing of the fact that the office of the President of the United States would only formally recognize the right of the chief to govern and not his National Council. They felt that this failure to recognize the council as a legitimate branch of government was further proof of federal paternalism undermining tribal sovereignty. With the help of NIYC lawyers, Harjo’s case against Thomas S. Kleppe, who was deemed representative of the federal government as the Secretary of the Interior, and actually approved Cox’s rewritten constitution while the case was pending, ultimately helped end federal paternalism and strengthen tribal sovereignty. The court ruled that the 1906 Five Civilized Tribes Act had, in fact, reinforced the right of the nation to govern itself in the consensual manner it saw fit. In other words, while Cox’s redistricted national Council was allowed, he was no longer able to claim complete autonomy over tribal affairs in internal relations or interactions with the federal government.

In 2011, the National Indian Youth Council celebrated its 50th anniversary as an intertribal advocate of Native rights, federal treaty obligations, tribal sovereignty, health care, employment, and culturally relevant education. The longevity of the organization, championed a movement by its first president, Mel Thom, is a testament to the groundbreaking legacy of those young American Indian men and women who were so readily dismissed as callow, inexperienced youths by tribal leaders at the Chicago conference. In those early days, the National Indian Youth Council dramatically changed the way American Indians protested social, cultural, and political inequity and paved the way for the more easily recognized militant protests that followed their lead in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Their dedication to traditional cultural motifs flourishing in the modern world, and the equal standing of Native women within their movement, also set them apart as trendsetters and trailblazers in contemporary American Indian history.

Biographies of Notable Figures

Clyde Warrior (1939–1968)

Clyde Merton Warrior was born into a traditional Ponca family in 1939 and was raised with Ponca as his first language. Raised by his grandparents, who were traditional drum-makers, Warrior was a fluent singer and fluid dancer by his fourth birthday, even leading songs at the drum. This upbringing framed Warrior’s worldview and shaped his activism and ideology for Red Power. It was also the defining anchor of his fight for culturally relevant education and his desire to see tribal self-determination reflect the old ways rather than mirror the political system of the United States.

Warrior’s route into activism began when he attended Cameron Junior Agricultural College in Lawton, Oklahoma, and joined the Ittanaha Club. From there, Warrior transferred to the University of Oklahoma and won the presidency of the Sequoyah Club. It was during his Sequoyah presidency that Warrior won the presidency of the SRIYC in a landslide with the short but devastating speech, “I am a full-blood Ponca Indian from Oklahoma. This is all I have to offer. The sewage of Europe does not run through these veins.” The speech quickly cemented Warrior’s position as one of the most bellicose and militant of the young activists who were changing the shape of American Indian protest in the 1960s. Warrior was a reluctant leader, however, and preferred to champion the community rather than himself. One such example was his role in the Cherokee traditionalist protest against the opening of the tribal heritage village and museum in the mid-1960s, and his long-standing commitment to Native education, first as a student researcher and later as a leader of the NIYC. Amongst his many achievements in his short lifetime, Warrior was the creator (alongside Mel Thom) of the Red Power motif and the architect and ideologue of the early and foundational incarnation of the movement. His commitment to the traditional medicine ways of the past infused his every speech and article and clearly framed Red Power as the bedrock of that which American Indians already possessed, in community, tradition, and cultural identity.

Warrior’s tragic death from liver failure in 1968 at the age of 28 robbed Indian country of one of its most dynamic speakers and powerful intellects. His words and speeches still resonate with American Indians, young and old, more than 40 years after his death, and he continues to inspire a desire to fight for change in Indian-white affairs.

Mel Thom (1938–1984)

When Thom became the inaugural president of the NIYC, he was also president of the tribe of Many Feathers student group of Brigham Young University. He was a critical choice as figurehead of the NIYC in its early days and was a dynamic and forceful speaker in federal conferences and meetings throughout the 1960s. Raised traditionally on the Walker River Paiute reservation, Thom was a passionate and dedicated advocate for tribal treaty rights and self-determination. At the end of the 1960s, Thom was the lead Indian delegate for the Poor People’s Campaign, a member of the Committee of 100, and a major figure in the events surrounding Resurrection City in Washington, D.C. After being ousted of his NIYC leadership by Browning Pipestem in 1968, Thom walked away from national intertribal politics and returned to his home community on the Walker River Reservation in Nevada. Once home, he was elected tribal chairman and served until 1974. In the decade that followed, until his suicide in 1984, Thom established his own construction company and largely avoided involvement in activism or Indian education. When he did attend national conferences, it was with the NCAI rather than the NIYC. His decision to end his own life was based upon deteriorating ill-health related to a car accident that had happened sometime after he returned home and served as tribal chairman.

Shirley Witt (1940–)

Shirley Hill Witt was an instrumental figure in the early years of the NIYC and featured strongly in the creation and growth of the organizations newspaper, including leading the charge to change its name from the original Aboriginal to the later ABC, Americans Before Columbus. Raised traditionally in the matrilineal framework of Iroquois culture and now a respected clan mother with a prominent position within her community, Witt insisted that the NIYC was almost uniquely gender egalitarian among activist organizations in the 1960s.

After leaving the NIYC to pursue work with the Civil Rights Commission in the late 1960s, Witt earned her PhD in anthropology at the University of New Mexico and went on the be a respected scholar at the university of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Colorado College through the 1970s. She also served as an American Indian delegate to the United Nations, alongside Kirk Kickingbird, in the Carter administration. There, she campaigned on behalf of indigenous women’s rights to equal access to, and equality in, the workplace. In recent years, Witt has returned to the board of the NIYC and continues to advocate for Native rights in the legal, cultural, political, and social spheres of contemporary life.

Karen Rickard (1938–)

Karen Rickard was born on the Tuscarora reservation in New York State as the daughter of the powerful and influential chief Clinton Rickard. While she shared some similarities with Warrior in being raised traditionally on a family farm, her childhood was also spent witnessing her father’s tireless campaigning on behalf of the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy. Her political outlook was framed early in life as she listened to her father fight for the rights of Haudenosaunee people on both sides of the U.S.–Canadian border. Besides her work with the NIYC, Rickard, a graduate of State University of New York, Buffalo, taught in Niagara Falls before working with Native freshman students at the University of California, Los Angeles. From UCLA, she moved to Michigan, where she taught high school for twenty-five years until her retirement in 2004.

Herb Blatchford (1928–1996)

Herb Blatchford was considered by many of the early NIYC stalwarts as the glue that kept the organization together in its formative years, stemming from his previous experience in organizing the first Santa Fe Indian Youth Council from which the regional councils sprang. Born in 1928 on the Navajo reservation, and traditionally taught shepherding as a child, although he did attend boarding schools, Blatchford was also the grandnephew of legendary Navajo chief Manuelito. It was he who decided upon Gallup, New Mexico, as the venue for the inaugural meeting, and ensured that office space and sleeping quarters were available for the young activists who attended. Prior to and after his involvement with the NIYC, Blatchford was director of the Gallup Indian community center and worked closely with the local community to reduce alcoholism among relocated Native residents. In the late 1970s, he rejoined the NIYC and helped them fight against coal extraction on the Navajo reservation. After again splitting from the NIYC after disagreements with executive director Gerald Wilkinson, he continued to campaign for environmental causes in Native communities until his death in a house fire in 1996.

DOCUMENT EXCERPT

Declaration of Indian Purpose

In 1961, almost 700 tribal delegates representing 64 tribes attended the American Indian Chicago Conference. The Declaration of Indian Purpose was later presented to incoming President John F. Kennedy as a unified call for self-determination and a challenge from America’s indigenous peoples to be included in his New Frontier.

In order to give due recognition to certain basic philosophies by which the Indian people and all other people endeavor to live, We, the Indian People, must be governed by principles in a democratic manner with a right to choose our way of life. Since our Indian culture is threatened by presumption of being absorbed by the American society, we believe we have the responsibility of preserving our precious heritage.…

We believe in the inherent right of all people to retain spiritual and cultural values, and that the free exercise of these values is necessary to the normal development of any people. Indians exercised this inherent right to live their own lives for thousands of years before the white man came and took their lands …

We believe that the history and development of America show that the Indian has been subjected to duress, undue influence, unwarranted pressures, and policies which have produced uncertainty, frustration, and despair.…

The Indians as responsible individual citizens, as responsible tribal representatives, and as responsible tribal councils want to participate, want to contribute to their own personal and tribal improvements and want to cooperate with their Government on how best to solve the many problems in a businesslike, efficient, and economical manner as rapidly as possible.

We believe that where programs have failed in the past, the reasons were lack of Indian understanding, planning, participation, and approval.

A treaty, in the minds of our people, is an eternal word. Events often make it seem expedient to depart from the pledged word, but we are conscious that the first departure creates a logic for the second departure, until there is nothing left of the word.

What we ask of America is not charity, not paternalism, even when benevolent. We ask only that the nature of our situation be recognized and made the basis of policy and action.

Source: American Indian Chicago Conference, June 13–20, 1961, 5–6.

See also: American Indian Movement, 1968

Further Reading

Bruyneel, Stephen. The Third Space of Sovereignty: The Post-Colonial Politics of U.S.—Indigenous Relations. St. Paul: University of Minnesota Press, 2007.

Cobb, Daniel, M. Native Activism in Cold War America: The Struggle for Sovereignt. Lawrence: University Press of Kansa, 2008.

Cornell, Stephen. The Return of the Native: American Indian Political Resurgence. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Declaration of Indian Purpose. American Indian Chicago Conference Booklet.

McKenzie-Jones, Paul, R. Clyde Warrior: Tradition, Community, and Red Power. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2015.

National Indian Youth Council. Preamble.

Shreve, Bradley G. Red Power Rising: The National Indian Youth Council and the Origins of Native Activism. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2011.

Steiner, Stan. The New Indians. New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1968.

Warrior, Clyde. “Poverty Community, and Power” New University Thought, 4, No. 2, 1965.

“Which One Are You? Five Types of American Indian.” ABC, Americans Before Columbus, Vol. 1, No. 4, December 1964.

American Indian Movement, 1968

Frances Holmes

Chronology

July 28, 1968		AIM is founded.
1969		AIM establishes the Minneapolis Indian Health Board.
		AIM presents challenges to National Council of Churches conference.
		AIM pressures Minneapolis Mayor Naftalin to establish the first Indian Week to occur anywhere in the country.
		November 20, Alcatraz occupation. Visited and supported by AIM members.
1970		Minnesota Legal Rights Center opens.
		Assists with Lizzy Fasthorse and Muriel Waukazo’s takeover of Mount Rushmore.
		Occupies empty building Naval Air Station, Fort Snelling.
		Assists Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwa of Wisconsin Winter Dam takeover.
		Plymouth Rock takeover. Includes occupation of Mayflower replica and appearance at Thanksgiving pilgrim re-enactment.
1971		AIM members travel to Washington, D.C.; citizen arrest of John Old Crow.
		May prayer vigil at Mount Rushmore.
		July 4th protest at Mount Rushmore.
1972		Heart of Earth Survival School opens, Minneapolis.
		Red School House opens, St. Paul.
		February 14, death of Raymond Yellow Thunder, Gordon Nebraska.
		Trail of Broken Treaties.
1973		Death and trial of Wesley Bad Heart Bull. Custer, South Dakota. Town razed.
		71-day Wounded Knee takeover.
		We Will Remember Survival School opens, Pine Ridge, SD.
1974		International Indian Treaty Council established in Geneva, Switzerland.
		Assists in establishing Gaelic language school, Derry, Northern Ireland.
		Clyde Bellecourt addresses World Council of Churches Montreaux, Switzerland.
		Wounded Knee trials begin and last through 1976.
1975		AIM sponsors Little Earth of United Tribes Urban Housing Program.
		Shootout at Jumping Bull Ranch; FBI agents killed; Leonard Peltier imprisoned with two life sentences.
1976		February 24, prominent AIM member Anna Mae Pictou Aquash is found murdered.
1977		MIGIZI Communications founded—produces indigenous radio news.
		United Nations formally recognizes indigenous peoples of the world by granting the International Treaty Council non-governmental organizational (NGO) status.
		AIM calls for the enactment of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act.
1978		AIM establishes first prison education for Native adults.
		“Longest Walk,” Alcatraz to Washington, D.C.
		Circle of Life Survival School opens.
1979		AIM establishes American Indian Opportunities Industrialization Center (AIOIC).
1981		Yellow Thunder Camp in the Black Hills is established.
1983		KILI Radio station in Porcupine, South Dakota, is begun.
1984		Federation of Native Controlled Survival Schools is established, consisting of 16 schools.
1988		Elaine Stately/Peacemakers Center opens in Twin Cities.
		Minneapolis patrol is reinitiated due to murdered Native women.
1989		AIM secures boat landing for tribal members’ right to spear fish in northern Wisconsin lakes.
1990		First Youth and Elders gathering, Okmulgee, Oklahoma.
1991		AIM Founds National Coalition on Racism in Sports & Media.
1992		National Coalition on Racism protests during the Super Bowl in Minneapolis.
		Demonstrations against the 500th anniversary of Columbus stops parade in Denver, Colorado.
1994		“Walk for Justice” from Alcatraz to Washington, D.C., publicizing Peltier’s treatment.
1998		AIM provides security for Ward Valley, California, protest.
1999		AIM occupies Whiteclay, Nebraska.
2008		“Longest Walk 2,” Alcatraz to Washington, D.C., with participation of the Maori people.

Introduction

The 1960s and 1970s brought significant social upheaval in the United States. Transitioning from the Vietnam War, citizens were angry, and minoritized populations were frustrated by their social circumstances. Black Panthers, farm workers, and feminists engaged in protests to bring attention and change to their circumstances. Dee Brown had captured the public’s sympathies with his book Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, and Vine Deloria Jr. had published an indigenous call to action with Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto. While Native Peoples had already experienced lifetimes of resistance as a result of Euro-American genocide, recent decades had brought the Indian Reorganization Act (IRA), with its potential for puppet governments, as well as Termination and Relocation. These circumstances set the stage for new efforts of resistance by Natives through the American Indian Movement (AIM). This chapter provides highlights of the most publicized AIM efforts, achievements, individuals, and underlying meanings of AIM advocacy.

The Origins of AIM

Dennis Banks and George Mitchell, both Ojibwa, initiated the first AIM meeting on July 28, 1968, to discuss the concerns and welfare of Native Peoples. Clyde Bellecourt, also Ojibwa, who had been working to increase opportunities for “city Indians,” also attended. Native Peoples were struggling with racism, discrimination, violence, low wages, and poor housing. AIM was initially composed of urban Natives with an intent to restore dignity and reclaim a sense of “Indian-ness.”

American Indian Movement (AIM) co-founders Vernon Bellecourt and Dennis Banks, Ojibwa. AIM was founded in 1968 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and modeled on the Black Panthers. It initially addressed police harassment and issues that urban Indians faced. (Bettmann/Getty)

Banks, Mitchell, and Bellecourt established a street patrol to protect Natives from the abuse and corruption of local police. The AIM patrol was patterned after an organization established by the Black Panthers. Strangely, “[i]n Minneapolis, only 10 percent of the population was Indian, but 70 percent of the inmates in the city’s jails were our [Native] people” (Banks and Erdoes 2004, 63). Minneapolis police regularly stormed Native bars, indiscriminately beating and arresting Natives. AIM canvassed the downtown bar areas and would clear out the bars before police arrived. Within 39 weeks, the arrest rate dropped to near zero (Deloria 1985, 36).

Many urban Natives had lost their sense of spirituality through boarding school, Termination, and Relocation. AIM leaders incorporated the spiritual leadership of Leonard Crow Dog (Lakota) into their decision-making processes. AIM grew to over 5,000 members in more than 79 chapters nationwide (Banks and Erdoes 1995, 64). Russell Means, Oglala Lakota, had been working to establish an Indian Center in Cleveland, Ohio, but joined forces with AIM after meeting Banks and Bellecourt at a conference in San Francisco (Means and Wolf 2004, 147). Banks and Means became the flashy, charismatic leaders of AIM; neither lacked self-confidence. Both leaders had a gift for thought-provoking sound bites (Nagel 1996, 167).

Sidebar 1: People Involved with the Early American Indian Movement

Senator James Abourezk		U.S. Senator of South Dakota during Occupation of Wounded Knee. Grew up in South Dakota.
Henry Adams		Native American who provided AIM with its intellectual energy.
Anna Mae Aquash		AIM activist. Found murdered execution-style in South Dakota in 1976.
Dennis Banks		Founder of AIM, significant leader.
Clyde Bellecourt		Founder of AIM, significant leader.
Vernon Bellecourt		AIM member, brother of Clyde.
Pedro Bissonette		Leader of Oglala Sioux Civil Rights Organization (OSCRO), participant in AIM and Trail of Broken Treaties.
Wallace Black Elk		Lakota Spiritual leader.
Marlon Brando		Prominent actor and supporter of AIM. Personal supporter of Dennis Banks and Russell Means.
Lehman Brightman		During Alcatraz occupation, established University of California, Berkeley’s Native American Studies department
Wesley Bad Heart Bull		Murdered in 1973. Sentencing hearing for his killer was site of AIM riot in Custer, South Dakota.
Robert Burnette		Tribal Chairman Rosebud Sioux tribe during Wounded Knee Occupation.
Carter Camp		AIM leader from Oklahoma, confidante of Banks and Means.
Frank Clearwater		AIM member, shot and killed during Wounded Knee occupation.
Jack Coler		FBI agent shot and killed at Jumping Bull Ranch in Pine Ridge Reservation.
Leonard Crow Dog		Spiritual leader and member of AIM.
Vine Deloria Jr.		Dakota scholar/writer/lawyer/activist.
Douglas Durham		FBI informant within AIM.
Jimmie Durham		AIM organizer and diplomat for International Indian Treaty Council.
Frank Fools Crow		Oglala spiritual leader—leader of traditional Natives during Wounded Knee.
John Graham		AIM activist convicted of killing AIM activist Anna Mae Aquash.
William Janklow		Lawyer and governor of South Dakota. Previously advocated for Native people, became an antagonist. Stated, “The only real way to deal with these kinds of people is to put a bullet in their heads. Put a bullet in a guy’s head, and he won’t bother you anymore” (Hendricks 2006, 151).
William Kunstler		Social activist and lawyer. Represented Banks and Means in Wounded Knee trials. Previous clients included Martin Luther King.
Buddy Lamont		AIM member, shot and killed at Wounded Knee occupation.
Arlo Looking Cloud		AIM activist convicted of killing AIM activist Anna Mae Aquash.
Russell Means		Significant AIM leader.
Louis Moves Camp		AIM member who became a federal informant against AIM.
Senator George McGovern		South Dakota U.S. senator during Wounded Knee occupation.
Judge Fred Nichol		Judge in Wounded Knee trials of Means and Banks.
Richard Oakes		Leader of Alcatraz occupation. Murdered in California.
Leonard Peltier		Serving two life sentences for the murder of two federal agents at Jumping Bull Ranch.
Floyd Red Crow Westerman		Native singer and actor. AIM advocate and activist.
Reuben Snake		Advocate and organizer for AIM, American Indian Church roadman.
Ken Tilsen		Primary lawyer for Means and Banks in Wounded Knee trial.
John Trudell		Primary participant of AIM, spokesperson at Alcatraz. Wife and children died from probable house arson. Author and singer.
Ron Williams		Federal agent shot and killed at Jumping Bull ranch at Pine Ridge Reservation
Dick Wilson		Co-opted Pine Ridge chairman. Ran puppet government during Wounded Knee.
Raymond Yellow Thunder		Murdered and found dead five days later in truck sitting in used car lot in the border town of Gordon, Nebraska.

AIM challenged school curriculum and protested derogatory films, church organizations, welfare workers/offices, and the BIA. Drawing national attention, AIM assisted Lizzy Fast Horse and Muriel Waukazoo in their occupation of Mt. Rushmore in September 1970. Twenty-three protesters, including AIM members’ spiritual leader John Fire Lame Deer and activist John Trudell, climbed up the mountain and made camp behind Roosevelt’s head (Means and Wolf 1995, 170). Activists remained there for approximately four weeks. The group placed a large flag with the words “Sioux Indian Power” over the monument (Banks and Erdoes, quoting Lizzy Fast Horse, 2004, 110).

November 1970 marked the 350th anniversary of the Plymouth colony and a large celebration and re-enactment had been planned. The Wampanoag people asked AIM for help in staging a protest. AIM led a march through the town, singing and drumming (Johansen 2013, 245). The re-enactors welcomed the over 300 protestors, thinking that they lent an air of authenticity to the celebration. However, Means gave a speech on the pedestal of Wampanoag leader Massasoit’s statue. Means called Thanksgiving a national day of mourning. AIMsters (as AIM members call themselves) climbed aboard a replica of the Mayflower in the adjacent harbor and dumped its pilgrim dummies overboard. Means and Bellecourt buried Plymouth Rock with sand and then marched out to a Plymouth plantation, where a feast was taking place. More statements were exchanged; tables and chairs were turned over (Means and Wolf 1995, 175–78).

Raymond Yellow Thunder

In Gordon, Nebraska—a town adjacent to the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota—Raymond Yellow Thunder (Oglala) was found dead and frozen in an unlocked truck at a used car lot. His February 1972 death resulted in an unprecedented backlash from the Native community. Yellow Thunder, a 51-year-old ranch hand, had been out drinking. A group of four whites had stripped and beat him and thrown him into their car trunk. They drove around, eventually throwing him into an American Legion Hall. He wandered out to the street, and the four assailants grabbed him and repeated their actions. Thinking that Yellow Thunder was drunk, the police brought him to jail to sleep it off. The next morning, he staggered out of the building and found his way to a used car lot, where he remained until he was found dead five days later (Smith and Warrior 1996, 112–15).

After a lack of action by the police, Yellow Thunder’s family asked AIM to step in. AIM descended on the area and caravanned through town. By the end of the week, there were 1,400 Natives in town—doubling the population of Gordon (Johansen 2013, 303). There were three days of boycotts, demonstrations, and marches. The guilty men were only charged with manslaughter. This effort marked AIM’s first collaboration with rural reservations.

Trail of Broken Treaties

In 1972, Robert Burnette suggested a march to Washington, D.C., during the presidential election. The Trail of Broken Treaties originated from several points along the west coast in October. Winding through reservations, the participants met in St. Paul, Minnesota, where a twenty-point position paper was written (Deloria 1997, 46–56). From St. Paul, a four-mile long caravan, comprising a hundred Natives—young and old, urban and rural—arrived in Washington, D.C.

Sidebar 2: Trail of Broken Treaties Twenty Point Position Paper, October 1972, Minneapolis, MN

The following consists of the 20 points determined through four days of workshops chaired by Reuben Snake with the participants of the Trail of Broken Treaties. Over two days, Hank Adams reformulated the information into 20 points. Vine Deloria Jr. called this “the best summary document of reforms put forth in this century” (Deloria 1997 50).

1. Restoration of constitutional treaty-making authority.
2. Establishment of treaty commission to make new treaties.
3. An address to the American People & joint sessions of congress.
4. Commission to review treaty commitments & violations.
5. Resubmissions of unratified treaties to the senate.
6. All Indians to be governed by treaty relations.
7. Mandatory relief against treaty rights and violations.
8. Judicial recognition of Indian right to interpret treaties.
9. Creation of congressional joint committee on reconstruction of Indian relations.
10. Land reform and restoration of a 110 million-acre Native land base:

A.  Priorities In Restoration of the Native American Line Base

B.  Consolidation of Indians’ Land, Water, Natural and Economic Resources

C.  Termination of Losses and Condemnation of Non-Indian Land Title

D.  Repeal of the Menominee, Klamath, and Other Termination Acts.

11.  Revision of 25 U.S.C. 163; Restoration of rights to Indians terminated by enrollment and revocation of prohibitions against “dual benefits.”

12.  Repeal of state laws enacted under public law 280 (1953).

13.  Resume federal protective jurisdiction for offenses against Indians:

A.  Establishment of a National Federal Indian Grand Jury

B.  Jurisdiction over Non-Indians Within Indian Reservations

C.  Accelerated Rehabilitation and Release Program for State and Federal Indian Prisoners

14.  Abolition of the Bureau of Indian Affairs by 1976.

15.  Creation of an “Office of Federal Indian Relations and Community Reconstruction.”

16.  Priorities and purpose of the proposed new office.

17.  Indian commerce and tax immunities.

18.  Protection of Indians religious freedom and cultural integrity.

19.  National referendums, local options, and forms of Indian organization.

20.  Health, housing, employment, economic development, and education.

The full version of the Twenty Points can be found on the AIM website: http://www.aimovement.org/ggc/trailofbrokentreaties.html

After arriving in Washington, D.C., on November 3, it became clear that Burnette had failed to make lodging arrangements. Frustrated by this and the inability of the federal government to send a representative to hear their grievances, AIM’s intentions shifted to an occupation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) building (Nagel 1996, 169). Desks, file cabinets, and chairs were used to block doors, windows, and hallways in the building. As riot police harassed the occupiers, the building became subjected to increased destruction. Negotiations were proposed but never materialized. Administrators promised that the AIMsters would not be prosecuted if they would take money given to them to return home. AIMsters took 20,000 tons of agency files as they left (Johansen 2013, 251).

Custer Courthouse

In Buffalo Gap, South Dakota, in January 1973, a barroom brawl between Wesley Bad Heart Bull (Lakota) and Darld Schmitz occurred. Early in the evening, Schmitz had voiced his intent to kill an Indian. Wesley had gone to the bar for a drink with his mother and wife. The two men exchanged insults, and Schmitz stabbed Bad Heart Bull seven times. Schmitz was arrested and charged with involuntary manslaughter, and released on $5,000 bail (Means and Wolf 1995, 243). He claimed self-defense. The case was then tried at the county seat in Custer, South Dakota.

On February 6, 1973, angry AIM leaders led a caravan of 30 cars, with more than 100 people, through heavy snow to Custer. Riot police greeted them. AIMsters held a rally on the courthouse steps. Only Banks, Means, Peltier, and Dave Hillwere (Choctaw AIMster) were allowed inside to talk with County Attorney Hobart Gates. The AIMsters informed Gates that they wanted Schmitz’s charge changed to murder. Gates refused.

Means told the crowd of the decision, which caused an uproar. Wesley’s mother was on the steps and attempted to enter the courthouse. Protesters rushed the door, and the riot police began swinging batons and dispensing tear gas. Wesley’s mother was grabbed by the police and shoved down the stairs. The riot consumed the town for several days. The courthouse and chamber of commerce building were burned down, and 22 people were arrested. Wesley’s killer was acquitted and never served any jail time (Banks and Erdoes 2004, 151–56).

Wounded Knee II—Occupation

Throughout these 1973 events, the Oglala people on Pine Ridge had been suffering. The BIA had set up a land-use situation that originated with the Dawes Act. Land on reservations had been divided into allotments, which were divided further among individual heirs, decreasing their size until useless. The BIA then leased the lands to non-Native ranchers for grazing, divesting the allottees of their land. The Oglala organized the Oglala Sioux Landowners’ Association (OSLA) to reform this policy. Oglala Chairman Dick Wilson resisted the organization, and tensions escalated. In response, the Oglala Sioux Civil Rights Organization (OSCRO) was formed with the intent of impeaching Wilson (Mohawk 2010, 465).

Wilson, of mixed blood, had previously proven himself corrupt. He had supposedly received $10,000 from white businessmen promising to support their bootlegging enterprise on a “dry” (no alcohol) reservation. He was also accused of paying and transporting unregistered voters to the poles for his election. Many claimed that Wilson had purchased tribal land for his use at one-quarter the cost, increased his salary by 50 percent, refused to keep a budget, and forged the tribal secretary’s signature on a $69,000 check (Hendricks 2006, 47–48).

Wilson cancelled the IRA required council meetings and managed tribal decisions through a handpicked committee. He was concerned that AIM would aid the Oglala people, so he set an ordinance banning AIM and any supporters from the Pine Ridge reservation. Shortly thereafter, the BIA provided Wilson with $64,000 to establish a policing squad, the “Guardians of the Oglala Nation” (GOONS), which operated at his beck and call. It is speculated that this money influenced Wilson’s decision regarding a transfer of uranium-rich land to the U.S. Forest Service (Churchill 2003, 168).

AIMsters filed a complaint with the U.S. Attorney’s Office, citing the rules and regulations that Wilson was violating. They received no response. However, as tensions escalated between the AIMsters and Wilson during his impeachment process, the BIA sent 110 federal marshals to protect him. The Pine Ridge tribal headquarters became barricaded, and police were stationed on the rooftops. This Special Operations Group (SOG) of federal marshals walked the streets in bright blue jumpsuits with their side arms, rifles, and machine guns clearly displayed. GOONs were given riot training, judo instruction, batons, and eventually AK-47s. Wilson dominated the impeachment process. Those who opposed him retreated to the community hall in the village of Calico. Calling for AIM to support them, the Calico hall quickly filled with hundreds of Oglalas and AIMsters (Hendricks 2006, 46–57). Spiritual leader Fools Crow asked AIM to make a stand at Wounded Knee, sacred ground.

During the evening of February 28, 1973, 60 to 80 vehicles made their way to Wounded Knee. The contingent consisted of traditional, urban, and spiritual Lakota, as well as representatives from the Iroquois League Nations (Deloria 1985, 75). The intent had been to conduct a news conference, but the action progressed into a 71-day occupation. At Wounded Knee, there was a small store and museum run by non-Natives who had been capitalizing on the scared site. The buildings, and their contents, which included some food and ammunition, were taken over. AIM drew up a list of demands. An FBI special agent met with AIM right away. Means provided him with a copy of their demands, which basically restated the agreements made in the 1868 Laramie treaty—the return of the Black Hills, the re-establishment an independent Oglala Nation, and a task group to investigate the BIA (Means and Wolf 1995, 257–61).

Publicity was drastically skewed. Networks broadcast that AIM had taken white hostages and had executed a commando-type raid with significant firepower. Yet, the Natives were very poorly equipped. AIMsters had brought a few weapons and used hunting knifes from the trading post. So as to appear well armed and to keep the federal marshals at a distance, AIMsters created the illusion of more weapons. AIMsters painted coffee can lids black and attached wires to them. They buried them in full sight of the marshals, leading them to believe that a perimeter of land mines had been set. To simulate a machine gun, AIMsters draped an ammunition belt over a lead pipe and then rapidly fired 10 shotgun rounds (Weyler 1982, 85).

Wilson’s GOONS set up roadblocks and surrounded the area. FBI agents, 300 armed field marshals and BIA police SWAT teams arrived, F4 Phantom jets flew overhead and military flares lit up the sky (Johanasen, 2013, 29). Armament included “17 [a]rmored personnel carriers […] 41,000 rounds for grenade launchers and helicopters” (Churchill 2003, 169), and 120 sniper rifles (Hendricks 2006, 132). Additionally, “[m]ilitary officers, supply sergeants, maintenance technicians, chemical officers, and medical teams [were provided on site]” (Churchill, 2003, 169). An estimated half-million rounds were fired. An additional 200 airborne troops in Colorado were put on 24-hour standby. Informants were planted to destabilize and provoke individuals to participate in illegal activity within the AIM organization. Some of these informants tried to suggest violent methods of handling situations, or attempted to corner AIM leadership into purchasing illegal weapons. A few of these informants were discovered, others confessed (Akwesasne Notes 1974, 15).

Smuggling routes were constructed to bring in additional food and ammunition for the AIM occupation. Churchill contends that as many as 13 people who were trying to smuggle in supplies were killed by GOON patrols and secretly buried (Churchill 2003, 170). Negotiations became increasingly strained, and as result, ultimatums were issued. On Friday, March 9, 1973, the government told the AIMsters they needed to leave Wounded Knee, or else the FBI would come in shooting. That afternoon, the Natives from Pine Ridge filled the surrounding roads as they tried to get to their relatives. The National League of Churches stated that it would send representatives to stand between the Natives and the federal marshals. Telegrams and letters of support for the Oglala flooded the White House. Consequently, the federal marshals had to deal with the 300 permanent inhabitants of Wounded Knee as well as the 1,000 Natives descending on the area. Reports indicate that the cars leading into the area were seven miles long (Deloria 1985, 76–77).

Negotiations were re-established. Ceasefires would occur, only to have shooting resume. After AIMsters Buddy Lamont (Oglala) and Frank Clearwater (Apache) were killed, AIM leaders surrendered 71 days into the occupation, with the promise of investigations into Wilson’s illegal practices and violations of the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty—neither happened (Johanasen 2013, 29).

In an overt effort to disable AIM, the FBI made 562 arrests. The entire legal charade resulted in only 15 convictions. AIM leadership was tied up in the courts for years, and all of AIM’s monies and fundraising efforts were used for the various litigation fees. While AIM leaders and many of the participants were dealing with their court proceedings, Wilson continued to terrorize the population of Pine Ridge. As Russell Means accounted in his autobiography, over a three-year period after the occupation, at least 69 AIM members on the reservation died violently, and 350 others suffered severe injuries from attack (Means and Wolf 1995, 296, 304).

The Charges, Court Cases, and Decisions Reached from the Wounded Knee Occupation

Although “acts done under a claim or right are not criminal,” (Sayer 1997, 37), in 1973 Russell Means consented to arrest once he signed an agreement with the federal government regarding the Wounded Knee occupation. After submitting to the negotiator who was onsite, Means was handcuffed and placed on a helicopter and taken to the Rapid City jail. Once released on bail, he flew to Washington, D.C., to meet with the federal government to discuss the agreements he had made with them. However, Means was told that government representatives would not meet with him because the activists at Wounded Knee had refused to lay down their weapons. Barred from returning to Wounded Knee by the judge who had released him on bail, Means took on speaking engagements at universities and lecture halls to earn money for AIM. After an unfortunate misunderstanding with the press regarding Means’s comments associated with the judge who had granted his release, Means was picked up and jailed again in the Minnehaha County, South Dakota, jail, where he stayed for six weeks (Means and Wolf 1995, 284–93).

The federal government stated that if the activists of Wounded Knee would lay down their weapons officials stated that they would meet with the chiefs and leaders of the Lakota. The activists were assured that there would be no arrests, except for outstanding warrants. However, within minutes of the Wounded Knee surrender, the FBI began handcuffing the activists as they left the occupation site (Means and Wolf 1995, 292–93). At the close of the Wounded Knee occupation, several leaders were jailed immediately with significant bail bonds:

Russell Means: $150,000 bond

Pedro Bissonette: $152,000 bond

Stan Holder: $32,000 bond

Leonard Crow Dog: $35,500 bond.

There were over 562 arrests and 185 federal indictments (Johansen 2013, 299). These indictments against Wounded Knee Occupation defendants encompassed eight sections of Titles 18 and 26 of the U.S. Criminal Code. The offenses charged included:

• Impeding or obstructing federal officers during the lawful performance of their duties incident to a civil disorder
• Assaulting a federal officer
• Transporting firearms for the use of disorder
• Using firearms in commission of a felony
• Being in possession of unregistered (illegal) firearms
• Robbery
• Various combinations of burglary and larceny
• Destroying a motor vehicle
• Reckless disregard for the safety of human life
• Conspiring to commit one or more of the charged offenses (Sayer 1997, 44)

“By the fall of 1973, agents had amassed some 316,000 separate investigative file classifications on those who had been inside Wounded Knee” (Churchill, 170, citing Dunbarr Ortiz). However, there were only 15 convictions and none of them were substantial charges (Johansen, 299).

“Banks and Means were specifically charged with three counts of assault on federal officers, one charge each of conspiracy, and one each for larceny. Banks and Means would have each had to serve eighty-five years in prison” (Sayer 1997, 69). The Wounded Knee occupation trial began on January 8, 1974, at 10:00 AM and lasted nine months.

The primary attitude of the defendants in the trial was that it was not merely United States v. Means and Banks, but instead a political trial. In fact, AIM attorney William Kunstler had stated, “for the first time in an American jury would have the ability to pass on what has happened to the American Indian” (Sayer 1997, 63). He also remarked: “The major difficulty inherent in representing Native American activists accused of serious federal crimes lies in the apparent willingness of the government to resort to any form of official misconduct to gain convictions” (Kunstler 1985, 611).

The trial was moved from South Dakota to St. Paul, Minnesota, in response to concerns of extreme racism. Several other prominent lawyers came to the aid of AIM leaders, including Ken Tilsen. The defense’s needs were so great, and there were of so many volunteers, that the effort became known as the Wounded Knee Legal Defense/Offense committee (WKLDOC). By the end of June 1974, there were 21 lawyers from six states in Rapid City. (Sayer 1997, 49–51).

Throughout the trial, the government provided altered documents, as well as FBI agents and witnesses who lied on the witness stand. Each of these instances was met with Judge Nichol’s threat of a dismissal. Kunstler referred to the judge’s explanation of his final decision to dismiss the case: “The prosecution in this trial had something other than attaining justice foremost in its mind … [i]ncidents of misconduct formed a pattern throughout the course of the trial [leading] me to the belief that this case was not prosecuted in good faith or in the spirit of justice (United States v Banks, 383 F. Supp. 397)” (1985, 611). See below, Document Excerpts, for Judge Nichol’s remarks in his dismissal.

AIM’s Significant But Less Publicized Activities

AIM initiated many other advocacy-based activities. The leaders established legal support for many urban Natives. AIM was involved in housing issues and established several “Survival Schools” that focused on culturally relevant curriculum. Protests and demonstrations were led against racist and derogatory professional and college sports team mascots. In 1978, the Longest Walk was organized. Participants walked from Alcatraz to Washington, D.C., to educate the American public about the injustices that occur for Native Peoples. AIM has been involved in international indigenous working groups, including the United Nations with its work on indigenous rights. In 1981, an 880-acre area within the Black Hills was occupied with the intent of securing sacred space. It was named after Raymond Yellow Thunder.

Today, AIM chapters are still somewhat active in various locations. Each chapter has a focus unique to the Native Peoples it serves. The Survival Schools established in Minnesota are still in operation. Banks, Bellecourt, and Bill Means (Russell’s brother) continue with their dedication to advocacy for Native Peoples in various ways. Trudell died in 2015.

Conclusion

Formed in 1968, AIM was associated with activist events and circumstances advocating for the betterment of Native Peoples and their circumstances. As the movement evolved, it was clear to many people that the fundamental aspect of AIM was land. Reflections from Means and Banks, and other scholars have brought this to light. Specifically, the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 stipulated that the Sioux reservation consisted of over two million acres (Deloria 1985, 64). Naturally, land is the foundation, for, by and about Native perspective and existence.

Following the Wounded Knee Occupation, AIM was criticized for its inexperience and opportunism, and for taking advantage of uneducated or unsophisticated rural Natives. But events outlined in this chapter highlight some of AIM’s greatest work whereby modern, traditionalist, urban, and rural activists came together to fight their common enemy of colonization. Was it successful? Native Peoples today are more vocal, more involved, and more present on the minds of Euro-Americans. Elizabeth Cook-Lynn sums up AIM well in her reflection of the life of Russell Means:

The trend toward greater understanding, some say, would probably not have happened without the influence of the upheaval called the American Indian Movement, and the lifelong dedication to an idea of public dissent by Russell Means and other Indians in the United States. With the absence of dissent and protest the situation on Indian reservations will only get worse.

No one argues that AIM was not ruthless and narcissistic and the leadership exploitive, but those born and raised on South Dakota reservations in the twentieth century, as was Russell Means, know that AIM and its leadership were never irrelevant. AIM represents the obligation of indigenous peoples to keep in touch with what matters to them—the land. (Cook-Lynn 2012, 17)

Biographies of Notable Figures

Dennis Banks (1937–)

Dennis Banks (Ojibwa) was one of several very influential leaders of the American Indian Movement (AIM). Banks was born at his grandparents’ home at Federal Dam on the Leech Lake Chippewa Reservation. It was a typical reservation home for that era—no running water, electricity, or plumbing. However, this remote area, which boarders Leech Lake with its 640 miles of shoreline, dotted with streams, forests, and open meadows, was a fragrant and beautiful place for a boyhood. At a feast given in honor of his birth, Banks was given his Ojibwa name of Nowa-Cumig, which means “at the center of the universe” (Banks and Erdoes 2004, 14). Banks’s family logged, trapped, fished, sugared, and harvested wild rice.

When Banks was five years old, he and his older brother and sister were forced to attend boarding school in Pipestone, Minnesota. The school was 250 miles from their home. The boarding school era functioned at its height from 1900 to 1930. It was one of the federal government’s efforts to deculturate and assimilate Native children. (See Carlisle Indian Industrial School, 1879, this volume.) When Banks and his siblings arrived at the school, they were each scoured with DDT insecticide, and the boys had their heads shaved down to their scalps (Banks and Erdoes 2004, 25). Banks was issued uniform-style clothing and slept in a dorm. He attended Pipestone for nine years, never returning home in the summer. Banks ran away nine times. He was transferred to a junior-high boarding school in Wahpeton, North Dakota, when he was 11 years old. Two years later, he was transferred to a larger boarding school at Flandreau, South Dakota. From there, he escaped one final time and returned home to Leech Lake (Banks and Erdoes 2004, 31).

In 1954, Banks joined the United States Air Force. He became an aerial photographer of such places as Korea, Manchuria, China, and the Soviet Union. Banks was eventually stationed in Japan. There he became involved with Machiyo Inouye and had a child. Banks, however, was denied permission to marry her. He was then ordered back to the States. Refusing to go, Banks went AWOL twice and was eventually brought back to the United States in chains. He worked, trying to earn enough money to return to Japan but was unable to accumulate enough funds. It was during this period that a significant amount of frustration and anger built up within him (Banks and Erdoes 2004, 57).

Banks then moved to Minneapolis and eventually became a heavy drinker. The St. Paul police would arrest hundreds of Natives weekly at the “Indian Town” bars. Those arrested on drunk-and-disorderly charges would then be used to work on city projects. Banks was pulled into these mass arrests approximately 25 times. In 1966, Banks was arrested for stealing groceries to feed his family of 10. He read about Native history while in jail. From newspapers, he learned about the civil rights movement, Vietnam protests, and the Black Panthers (Banks and Erdoes 2004, 60).

Once Banks was released from prison, he contacted George Mitchell. Together they printed 500 leaflets calling for a meeting on July 28, 1968, to discuss the possibility of starting a movement for the benefit of Native Peoples. Mitchell and Banks went from door to door and called their friends, families, and relatives. On the night of the meeting, sure that no one would show up, the small church basement filled with over 200 people. Clyde Bellecourt, another prominent AIM leader, was in attendance. With Banks as field director and Bellecourt as chairman, AIM was born (Banks and Erdoes 2004, 62).

During the Yellow Thunder Protests (see narrative), Banks met his long-time wife, Darlene Nichols, or Kamook. Together they had three daughters and a son (Banks and Erdoes, 119). After his participation in the Occupation of Wounded Knee (see narrative) and his defense in subsequent trials, Banks was found guilty of assault and riot charges for the Custer courthouse riot (see narrative). On August 5, 1975, he jumped bail for that charge and eluded the authorities by driving between South Dakota and the west coast repeatedly—each time to accomplish different purposes. In the process, Banks stayed with friends, such as the actor Marlon Brando, John Trudell, and Lee Brightman, as well as various other supporters and sympathizers. While staying with Brightman, Banks was apprehended by the FBI (Banks and Erdoes 2004, 314).

Banks was jailed in San Francisco, charged with “unlawful flight to avoid prosecution” and was held for extradition to South Dakota. Upon his release, Banks held a press conference conveying the seriousness of his extradition: the current South Dakota Governor Bill Janklow had publicly proposed putting a bullet through Banks’s head. Marlon Brando rallied his friends and supporters, while many of Banks’s supporters wrote letters to California Governor Jerry Brown. As a result of these efforts, Governor Brown denied Banks’s extradition to South Dakota (Banks and Erdoes 2004, 322).

During his time in California, Banks became the Chancellor of California’s Native American DQ University. However, after eight years, Governor Brown chose not to run for office again. The incoming governor, George Deukmejian, made it very clear that if asked he would extradite Banks back to South Dakota. Banks appealed to the Six Nations Confederacy in upstate New York for sanctuary. After a lengthy process of consideration, they granted his request. Banks and his family stayed on the Onondaga reservation for approximately two years (Banks and Erdoes 2004, 337). In 1984, when Bill Janklow was no longer the governor of South Dakota, Banks turned himself over to the sheriff. After a hearing in Custer, South Dakota, Banks was sentenced to three years in prison. He had served one year and two months when he was released on parole (Banks and Erdoes 2004, 346).

After his release, Banks continued to work and provide leadership for Native communities. He has organized sacred runs and protests regarding Native remains and sports mascots, as well as “walks for justice” to bring attention to Leonard Peltier’s circumstances.

Russell Means (1939–2012)

Russell Means (Oglala Lakota), a primary leader of AIM, was born November 10, 1939, in Porcupine on the Pine Ridge Reservation. He was the oldest of four boys. His mother was Yankton Sioux, and his father was Oglala Lakota. Her parents lived a very traditional life—growing their food, cattle, and horses while leasing their land to ranchers for grazing. The foundation of Means’s Native perspective came from the time and experiences he had with his grandfather as they walked the land together. In this way, Means learned about the plants and animals and stories of Iktomi, the Lakota trickster (Means and Wolf 1995, 12). The Lakota name given to him in his youth was Wanbli Ohitika, or Brave Eagle. Means has often said that he learned his most profound lessons from his grandfather, as he would not provide Means with the end of the story. Instead, Means had to determine the end for himself. From this method of oral teaching, he learned patience and the practice of deep contemplation.

Both of Means’s parents attended Indian boarding schools. However, because they moved to Vallejo, California, in 1942, he attended public schools there. His father was a welder and was able to find plentiful work in California. In 1945, after WWII had ended, shipyards laid off thousands of workers, including Means’s father. In 1946, Means’s mother had twins. As soon as the babies could travel, the family returned to South Dakota, as there was more work available there, however the family eventually returned to Vallejo. Means’s adolescent years were rocky. His father was an alcoholic, and his mother was the major influence in his family. Means often fought with his mother and began to struggle academically and socially. Running with a rough crowd, he succumbed to alcohol and drug abuse, skipped school, and committed petty thefts. In an effort to corral his behavior, Means’s mother sent him to boarding school in Winnebago, Nebraska (Means and Wolf 1995, 28–57).

Russell Means (Oglala Lakota), American Indian Movement (AIM) leader, speaks to a crowd of followers in South Dakota in 1974. Means was an early leader in 1970s protests. (Bettmann/Getty)

After returning from Winnebago, Means became addicted to drugs and began to deal them. After several rounds of going on and off the drugs, Means stuck primarily to alcohol. Once while driving drunk, Means hit another car and injured the occupants. He was sentenced to jail (Means and Wolf 1995, 66–76). As an adult, Means did accounting, assembly line operations, data processing operations, printing, mail delivery, janitorial, rodeo riding, and dance instruction work. However, Means had also been homeless and arrested for petty theft, drunkenness, assault, and disorderly conduct (Johansen 2013, 187). At various times, Means lived in Los Angeles, on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota, and in Cleveland, Ohio. While in L.A., Means married and had two children.

Later, after to moving to San Francisco, Means married again and had a child with his wife, Betty. Soon thereafter, Means and his father participated in the first attempt to take over Alcatraz in 1964. After the takeover, Means left San Francisco and returned to South Dakota. He found a job in Sturgis, South Dakota, as a bookkeeper with a construction company. He would leave his home, wife, and children frequently, although returning many times over during the course of their marriage. After living for a short time in Mission, South Dakota, on the Rosebud Reservation, Means, his wife, Betty, and their two children moved to Cleveland, Ohio. They divorced in 1970. In Cleveland, Means helped to establish an American Indian Center. It was while establishing the center that Means attended a conference in San Francisco, where met Banks and Bellecourt, the leaders and founders of AIM (Means and Wolf 1995).

Weeks after the conference, Banks and Bellecourt called Means and asked him to attend the National Council of Churches conference with them. At the conference, Banks and Bellecourt questioned the council about the money that they had been accumulating on the behalf of Native children while none of it was being spent on Natives. After being shuffled from room to room, Bellecourt grabbed a microphone during a general assembly and demanded to be heard. He questioned the attendees about following their God’s commandments, and he publically questioned their morals. Means became exhilarated by the leaders’ ability to confront the crowd regarding their wrongdoings, and he realized that he wanted to join AIM.

After the occupation of Wounded Knee, and court proceedings that went on for years (and jail time), Means ran for tribal office, was nominated to run for president on the Libertarian Party’s ticket, and also ran for governor of New Mexico. He assisted with the seizure of 880 acres in the Black Hills, naming the land Yellow Thunder Camp. The sacred land of the camp was held for five years. Means supported several international indigenous issues, including the Miskito Indians against the Sandinistas. He wrote Where White Men Fear to Tread with Marvin Wolf. Means starred in several films, including The Last of the Mohicans, Pocahontas, and Natural Born Killers. He also created art, wrote music, and sang.

In 2011, Means learned he had esophageal cancer, which had spread and was inoperable. Means declined chemotherapy and turned instead to indigenous therapies. On October 21, 2012, Russell Means walked on to another realm. Means had married five times and divorced four times, and had ten children.

DOCUMENT EXCERPT

Wounded Knee Trials

After a trial lasting nine months, in St. Paul, Minnesota, U.S. District Judge Fred Nichol dismissed charges against Dennis Banks and Russell Means in 1974, for charges against them in the Wounded Knee occupation in South Dakota.

Memorandum Decision

NICHOL, Chief Judge.

This memorandum decision concludes the trial stage of the government’s case against two leaders of the 1973 occupation of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, the historic Indian village. The occupation lasted seventy-one days and the trial lasted slightly over eight months. Although the trial was often protracted and tedious, it came to a swift end. After deliberating the case for about nine hours, one of the jurors became ill and could not continue deliberations. The government would not agree to accept the verdict of the remaining eleven jurors. In the meantime the defense team filed a motion for judgment of acquittal, thus giving this court the alternative of granting a mistrial or ruling on the motion. I have decided to dismiss all charges remaining in this trial.

Defendants’ motion for judgment of acquittal is based generally on allegations of government misconduct. The alleged misconduct consists of the following: 1) conspiracy to suborn perjury and to cover up said subornation in the case of Louis Moves Camp, a prosecution witness; 2) suppression of an FBI statement exposing the perjury of Alexander David Richards, a prosecution witness; 3) illegal and unconstitutional use of military personnel and material at Wounded Knee and the government’s effort to cover up said use; 4) violation of applicable professional, ethical and moral standards; and 5) various other incidents of governmental misconduct. For the reasons given below, this court treats defendants’ motion as a motion for dismissal and grants judgment of dismissal.

At the end of the decision, District Judge Fred Nichol had disappointed and harsh criticism against the U.S. government for its prosecution of the case.

Conclusion

This court is mindful of the heavy responsibility that it bears in our criminal justice system. It is unquestionably essential to our society that our laws be enforced swiftly and surely. This court also believes, however, that our society is not bettered by law enforcement that, although it may be swift and sure, is not conducted in a spirit of fairness or good faith. Those who break our laws must be brought to account for their wrongs, but it is imperative that they be brought to this accounting through an orderly procedure conducted in the spirit of justice. This court’s first duty, then, is to insure that our laws are fairly enforced, or as Mr. Chief Justice Warren aptly put it: “[our duty] is to see that the waters of justice are not polluted.” Mesarosh v. United States, supra, 352 U.S. at 14, 77 S. Ct. at 8.

Although it hurts me deeply, I am forced to the conclusion that the prosecution in this trial had something other than attaining justice foremost in its mind. In deciding this motion I have taken into consideration the prosecution’s conduct throughout the entire trial. The fact that incidents of misconduct formed a pattern throughout the course of the trial leads me to the belief that this case was not prosecuted in good faith or in the spirit of justice. The waters of justice have been polluted, and dismissal, I believe, is the appropriate cure for the pollution in this case.

Source: United States v. Banks, 383 F. Supp. 389 (D.S.D. 1974).

See also: Occupation of Alcatraz, 1969–1971; Anna Mae Pictou Aquash (1945–1975)

Further Reading

Akwesasne Notes. Voices from Wounded Knee. Cornwall Island Reserve, Canada: Akwesasne Notes, 1974.

Banks, Dennis and Richard Erdoes. Ojibwa Warrior: Dennis Banks and the Rise of the American Indian Movement. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004.

Churchill, Ward. Acts of Violence: The Ward Churchill Reader. New York: Routledge, 2003.

Cook-Lynn, Elizabeth. “Twentieth-Century American Indian Political Dissent and Russell Means.” Wicazo Sa Review. Vol. 29, No. 1, 2014.

Deloria, Vine, Jr. “Alcatraz, Activism, and Accommodation.” Edited by Troy Johnson, Joane Nagel, and Duane Champagne. American Indian Activism: Alcatraz to the Longest Walk. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997.

Deloria, Vine, Jr. Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985.

Hendricks, Steve. The Unquiet Grave: The FBI and the Struggle for the Soul of Indian Country. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2006.

Johansen, Bruce. Encyclopedia of the American Indian Movement. Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood, 2013.

Kunstler, William M. “By Hook or by Crook,” Hamline Law Review, Vol. 8, pp. 611–624, 1985.

Matthiessen, Peter. In the Spirit of Crazy Horse. New York: Viking, 1991.

Means, Russell and Marvin J. Wolf. Where White Men Fear to Tread: The Autobiography of Russell Means. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995.

Mohawk, John. “Directions in Peoples Movements.” Edited by Susan Lobo, Steve Talbot, and Traci L. Morris. Native American Voices. New York: Prentice Hall, 2010, pp. 463–468.

Nagel, Joane. American Indian Ethnic Renewal: Red Power and the Resurgence of Identity and Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Sayer, John William. Ghost Dancing the Law: The Wounded Knee Trials. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997.

Smith, Paul Chaat and Robert Warrior. Like a Hurricane: The Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee. New York: New Press, 1996.

Weyler, Rex. Blood of the Land: The Government and Corporate War against the American Indian Movement. New York: Random House, 1982.

Occupation of Alcatraz, 1969–1971

Paul McKenzie-Jones

Chronology of Events

1945		Congress approves the passage of Senator Arthur Watkins House Concurrent Resolution 108, which called for termination of the federal trust relationship between the United States and its indigenous nations.
1956		Congress asks the Bureau of Indian Affairs to implement the Indian Relocation Act, under which a relocation program was aimed at bringing reservation-based American Indians into the cities as a means of improving employment prospects and assimilating into the dominant culture.
1963		The federal government shuts down the high-security prison on Alcatraz Island due to crumbling infrastructure and spiraling maintenance costs.
1964		In what is an admitted publicity stunt, four young Sioux residents of San Francisco “reclaim” Alcatraz Island for American Indians, citing a clause in the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie that promised to return any decommissioned federal lands to the Sioux Nations. The occupation lasts four hours.
1968		A traveling band of Native activists, poets, and artisans, calling themselves the White Roots of Peace, begin touring the United States preaching acceptance and culture based upon Iroquois traditions.
1969		The San Francisco Indian center burns down, and the city refuses to allocate funds to rebuild it.
		Richard Oakes dives into San Francisco Bay and begins the occupation of Alcatraz Island.
1970		Richard Nixon delivers a “Special Message to Congress” calling for “self-determination without termination.”
		Richard Oakes’s daughter dies after falling down a flight of concrete stairs, forcing him to leave the occupation.
1971		The occupation ends after factionalism, alcohol, and drug issues cause chaos among the last remaining activists on the island.
1975		Congress passes the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act, which formally recognizes the rights of federally recognized American Indian nations to govern through their own laws and implement their own culturally relevant education policies and programs.

The American Indian Occupation of Alcatraz Island

The 1969 occupation of Alcatraz Island was a landmark moment in contemporary American Indian history. Building upon the militant rhetoric of the National Indian Youth Council, disaffected urban Indians seized the island and catapulted American Indian issues onto the global stage. The occupation signified a major shift in Indian activism as the protestors adopted the mantra of Red Power from a foundation of cultural retention to one of political militancy. Using treaty rhetoric and the language of federal Indian policy as weapons of protest, the Indians transformed the art of activism from protests and blockades to land seizure and reclamation. The event changed the face of Indian/white relations and inspired further movements to organize in the fight for tribal sovereignty and self-determination.

A group of American Indians, members of Indians of All tribes, occupy the former prison at Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay, California, on November 25, 1969. The occupation of the island drew public attention to the plight of American Indians and resulted in significant changes in the federal government’s policies, including improvements in education and health care. (AP Photo)

On November 20, 1969, several boatloads teeming with American Indian students disembarked on the abandoned federal prison island of Alcatraz. Isolated as it was, alone on a rocky island surrounded by the shark-infested waters of San Francisco Bay, the prison was most famous for being inescapable: in its almost 30-year history as a federal prison until its closure in 1965, there was only one successful escape out of a mere 14 attempts. As such, the thought of a group of people breaking into the island prison just a year after its closure was indeed a strange concept to the general public at that time. In the years before its conversion to a federal prison, Alcatraz served as a military prison, which ironically held American Indian prisoners at various times. The first Indian to be imprisoned on Alcatraz as a military prisoner of the United States was a Paiute who arrived in 1873.

Over the course of the next several years, an estimated ten or eleven Indians of a variety of nations were imprisoned on Alcatraz, including in 1874, Natchez (Paiute), the brother of Sarah Winnemucca, and in 1881, at the height of General George Crook’s campaign against the Chiricahua Apache, Kaetana, an influential war chief. Two years after his incarceration, when he was allowed to return to Arizona, Crook sent a letter to General Sheridan noting that “Ka-e-te-na … who less than two years ago was the worst Chiricahua of the whole lot, is now perfectly subdued. He is thoroughly reconstructed, has rendered me valuable assistance and will be of great service in helping me to control these Indians in the future. His stay at Alcatraz has worked a complete reformation in his character.” The largest number of American Indians prisoners held at the island prison, at least until the occupation, was 19 Hopi Indians incarcerated between January and August 1895 “until they shall evince, in an unmistakable manner, a desire to cease interference with the plans of the government for the civilization and education of its Indian wards, and will make proper promises of good behavior in the future.”

The 1969 invasion was not a mere publicity stunt, however, but was rather the result of months of meticulous preparation to begin an unarmed occupation of the island as a means of highlighting treaty abrogation, broken promises of relocation officers, and termination of the federal trust relationship with tribes across the country. Nor was it the first such attempt to take over the island. There had been two previous attempts, both more symbolic gestures than the practical effort of the third attempt. The first occupation lasted four hours and occurred in March 1964. This short-lived occupation was led by Richard McKenzie, a Lakota from the Rosebud reservation, as he and four other Sioux residents of San Francisco laid claim to Alcatraz, citing the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie as promising to return all surplus federal land to the Sioux Nations with whom the United States signed the treaty. Within this claim, they also demanded that the island be used as an American Indian university. While the attorney general decided that the claims were without legal foundation, it was only a month later that the island was indeed declared to be surplus federal land.

This rhetoric was recalled and developed six years later during the full 19-month occupation that lasted from November 20, 1969, until June 20 1971. The second, intervening occupation attempt, although intended as the occupation date, ended up becoming a dress rehearsal for the student occupiers, calling themselves Indians of All Tribes to represent the multi-tribal coalition of the individuals involved (Smith and Warrior, 11). In both instances, the primary instigators were a young Mohawk student activist named Richard Oakes and a middle-aged civil organizer named Adam Nordwall (Shoshone). Both men were aware of the treaty rhetoric used by the 1964 occupiers but moved in very different circles until they met a Halloween party thrown by journalist Tim Findley just days before the invasion. Each had been devising his own plan for occupation of the island with the intent of developing the community center and university that McKenzie and his fellow Sioux had demanded five years earlier, and both were spurred into urgency by the October 10 fire that burned the San Francisco Indian Center to the ground. The center was a focal point for urban Indian residents and a haven of community and friendship for relocated Indians trying to adjust to life in a foreign city. Its sudden loss struck at the heart of San Francisco’s Native community as they now had no place to call their own (Smith and Warrior, 13).

Sidebar 1: Termination Policy

In 1953, Senator Arthur V. Watkins of Utah, presented House Concurrent Resolution 103 to Congress. The bill was designed to terminate the federal trust relationship between the government and federally recognized Indian nations. Since the end of World War II, Congress had been focused upon extricating itself from the “Indian business,” and Watkins’s termination policy offered them just such a route. The policy was enacted by identifying tribes deemed capable of being part of mainstream American society and putting before them a proposal to sign away their rights and expectations to the continued support of the federal government’s social and economic treaty obligations. Under the policy, which ran from 1953 until 1968, but was only formally repealed by the 1975 Self-Determination Act, 109 tribes were terminated, with federal jurisdiction and responsibility being handed over to the relevant states. The majority of state governments had no intention of inheriting the federal obligations and acted accordingly (or ignored them). Two of the most famous tribal cases during the Termination era were the Menominee and Klamath tribes. The Menominee, of Wisconsin, had such successful lumber and forestry operations that the BIA was convinced the tribe could function sustainably without federal support. The Klamath, of Oregon, were targeted for similar reasons, having valuable timber resources on their land. Termination was devastating for both tribes, with poverty and homelessness realities for many tribal members. Citizens of both tribes began campaigning to have the process reversed, and recognition restored. While the Menominee were successful in 1973, it took the Klamath until 1986 to win restoration as a federally recognized tribe. During the Termination era, approximately 2.5 million acres of land fell out of federal trust status, and 12,000 American Indians lost their tribal affiliation, thus ceasing to be recognized as Indian by the federal government. (See also Termination Policy, Mid-1940s to Mid-1960s.)

Sidebar 2: Relocation Program

The congressionally mandated Indian Relocation Program ran concurrently with the Termination Policy. Aimed at relieving American Indian poverty by removing Indians from reservations and relocating them into cities, the program resulted in the largest migration of American Indians in U.S. history—larger even than any of the formed removals of the 1830s or post-Civil War era. Modeled after the 1950 Navajo-Hopi Rehabilitation Act, which was deemed a success after four years despite having a ten-year goal to boost economic situations of both people’s, the Relocation Program was a response to a 1950 census report that highlighted the massive economic disparity between American Indians and other groups within the United States. According to the census, the average reservation-based American Indian earned $950 per year. This contrasted with the average African American earnings of $2,000 per year, and the average white annual income of $4,000. Nine major U.S. cities were chosen as relocation centers, mainly due to their proximity to the larger number of reservation-based American Indians. As such, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Jose, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Cleveland, and Dallas saw a huge influx of American Indians in the second half of the twentieth century. While the intention was for the Indians to ultimately assimilate into the larger population, one unintended consequence was the creation of Indian centers, such as the one that burned down in San Francisco, by the newly relocated residents determined to provide a place of community and help for those new relocatees who did not receive the services promised them by the BIA. The oldest continually running urban Indian Center is in Chicago, which first opened its doors in 1953. While many Natives eventually decided that city life was not for them, and returned to the reservations, it is estimated that approximately 750,000 American Indians migrated to cities between 1950 and 1980, mostly as a result of the Relocation Program. To put this into context, in the 1940 census, eight percent of American Indians were city dwellers. In 2000, that figure had risen to 79 percent. (See also Bureau of Indian Affairs American Indian Relocation Program, 1952.)

While Nordwall, Oakes, and others wondered aloud about the legality of the Fort Laramie claims in relation to Alcatraz (Smith and Warrior, 15), the treaty claim was in many ways a symbolic gesture as no San Francisco land had been exchanged in that 1868 treaty. As such, the Sioux Nations had no real legal claim to the island under the Fort Laramie treaty, Their argument of sovereign indigenous occupancy carried more weight but no ‘legal’ substance under California law. What they were claiming was ownership on behalf of all Indians rather than specifically for their own people, in response to the myriad of treaty promises that the United States had made, and then broken, during the short, but tumultuous, history of Indian/white relations. The concept of a needing a community “home” in the San Francisco area tied neatly into the concept of reclamation of the land with Alcatraz Island, as everywhere else in the United States, originally being indigenous homelands. The original inhabitants of the coastal region from Point Sur, in central California, to San Francisco in the north, were the Ohlone, a linguistically connected group of almost 50 different indigenous nations. After European contact and colonization, originally by the Spanish, before the United States acquired the land, the populations of Ohlone people had dwindled to fewer than 1,000 people, with the last monolingual fluent speaker dying in 1939. The modern descendants of the various Ohlone nations have consolidated their community into the state-recognized Muwekma Ohlone tribe of the San Francisco Bay area and in the early 21st century began to aggressively pursue culture and language revitalization programs. In 1969, with there being no cohesive Ohlone community present, the urban student coalition Indians of All Tribes attempted to reclaim their land in absentia.

The language of reclamation and treaty abrogation was made clear on November 9, 1969, just eleven days before the full occupation. The moment was exponentially more frenetic an event than either of those that sandwiched it. In the buildup to the proposed landing on Alcatraz, Nordwall briefed local news reporters on their plans, under oath of secrecy, leaking the time and location of the departure from Fisherman’s Wharf. At the proposed moment, Nordwall, Oakes, and the rest of the activists turned up to a throng of reporters eager to chronicle the occasion, including a boatload ready to record the actual landing. The only problem was that the prearranged boats to take the Indians across the bay had not turned up. As Nordwall hurriedly tried to track the boats down, and Oakes stalled the reporters with a drawn-out reading of the Alcatraz Proclamation, salvation appeared in the form of a schooner named Monte Christo. Nordwall convinced the captain, Richard Craig, to allow them aboard, although he agreed only to take them around the perimeter of the island rather than dock and allow them to disembark (Smith and Warrior, 16).

As the boat neared Alcatraz, Richard Oakes decided that simply circling the island was not enough, stripped off his shirt, and dived in the frigid waters of San Francisco Bay. As he swam to shore, his body attempting to adjust to the exhilaration of his actions as well as the strong current and icy water, the captain turned the ship away from the island, but not quickly enough to prevent three more students jumping ship to catch up with Oakes. Although they were picked up by the Coast Guard and returned to Fisherman’s Wharf within the hour, a marker had been laid down. After returning surreptitiously the following night, on a boat called the New Vera II, with half a dozen other people, and informing the lone federal employee remaining on the island that they claimed it on behalf of all Indians, Oakes decided that a more emphatic statement needed to be made. Symbolism was no longer enough, and the occupation needed to happen for real (Fortunate Eagle, 82).

Ten days later, in the dark early hours of November 20, several boats carrying a combined total of 78 American Indian students docked on the east side of the island. Among them were Oakes, who was elected as the group’s spokesman rather than leader, and LaNada Means, who would later become a prominent figure of the occupation. After the landing became public knowledge, the Coast Guard organized a blockade, and state and federal officials scrambled to draft a response, the island occupiers set about creating as habitable an environment as possible on the abandoned edifice of rock. Amid the euphoria of the successful landing, the proclamation that Oakes had used as a stalling technique a week and a half earlier was released to the public. Amid the rhetoric of land reclamation and treaty inequity, the paucity of American Indian life on reservations across the United States was laid bare in ten poignant observations. These observations, were inserted midway through the proclamation, which was written by Nordwall, who was not on the island, but attending an education conference in Minneapolis. It read,

“We feel that this so-called Alcatraz Island is more than suitable for an Indian Reservation, as determined by the white man’s own standards. By this we mean that this place resembles most Indian reservations in that:

1. It is isolated from modern facilities, and without adequate means of transportation.
2. It has no fresh running water.
3. It has inadequate sanitation facilities.
4. There are no oil or mineral rights.
5. There is no industry and so unemployment is very great.
6. There are no health care facilities.
7. The soil is rocky and non-productive; and the land does not support game.
8. There are no educational facilities.
9. The population has always exceeded the land base.
10. The population has always been held as prisoners and kept dependent upon others.

Further, it would be fitting and symbolic that ships from all over the world, entering the Golden Gate, would first see Indian land, and thus be reminded of the true history of this nation. This tiny island would be a symbol of the great lands once ruled by free and noble Indians.” (American Indian Center, 1969)

While the words themselves were nothing new in Indian affairs, and reflected attacks on the federal administration of Indian peoples and lands by members of the National Indian Youth Council, the National Congress of American Indians, and the Society of American Indians, as well as the government’s own early 20th-century Meriam Report, the media attention to the occupation gave the charges an international exposure that none of these previous examples had experienced. The scale of the favorable public reactions to the occupation was exponentially reflected by the number of American Indians who flocked to San Francisco with the intention of beating the Coast Guard blockade and joining their fellow indigenous counterparts on the island.

What they hoped to help create was a vision of turning the desolation described in the proclamation into a thriving focal point of American Indian cultures and values open to any members of all tribes across the nation. Oakes described plans for a enter for Native American Studies, an American Indian Spiritual Center, an Indian Center of Ecology, an Indian Training School, and an American Indian Museum. As a student, and one who had recently been galvanized to fight for what was important by the visit of the White Roots of Peace to the San Francisco Bay area, education was a fundamental necessity to any improvement in American Indian life in America. The reality of life on the island was, however, quickly deteriorating for the occupiers, despite the blockade being lifted. While this enabled supporters to send provisions to the island, it also allowed increasing numbers of supporters to land. The numbers of arrivals, with an estimated total of 5,600 American Indians coming and going from the island during the occupation, meant that the island population almost always exceeded its meager resources.

Within a few short months on the island, the lack of amenities and isolation began to take their toll, with increasing factionalism and violence breaking out among the occupiers. One of the major issues to emerge was growing among the island occupiers toward the attention received by Richard Oakes. As he spent more time away from the island attending dinners and press conferences on the mainland, people began to doubt his commitment to the cause, as well as the influence of those Indians on the mainland who were handling many of the organizational decisions for those on the rock. Matters came to a head in a December 1969 conference when LaNada Means, Richard Oakes, and others sat at a table underneath a banner that read, “Indians on Alcatraz will Rule Alcatraz” (Fortunate Eagle, 160). This public display of unity between the island Indians and Oakes did not last too long, however, and moves were taken behind the scenes to remove him as the de facto leader of Alcatraz. Before these moves could materialize into action, however, a personal tragedy struck Oakes, from which he never recovered.

On January 3, 1970, Yvonne Oakes, the twelve-year-old daughter of Richard and Anne, slipped on the third-floor landing of their apartment building, which had previously housed prison guards and the island’s caretaker, and fell straight to the concrete floor below. She lay in a coma for five days in an Oakland, California hospital before finally succumbing to the injuries sustained in the fall. Richard Oakes returned to Alcatraz only long enough to recover his belongings and then left the island permanently. Perhaps surprisingly, given the attempts to subvert his leadership, Oakes’s departure left a power vacuum that threatened to devolve into an ungovernable factionalism that would undo all the good work of the occupation. It was here that LaNada Means (Shoshone) and John Trudell (Santee Sioux) stepped into the breach and saved the occupation from imploding. Means had been on the island from the very first day and was a well-respected figure among the people who remained, and was entrusted with trying to push forward with the creation of a permanent Native American university on the island. Trudell, meanwhile, had gained an increasing profile as the voice of Radio Free Alcatraz, an ad hoc broadcast in which he interviewed visitors and residents of the island and expressed the political issues at stake with calm assuredness over the airwaves (Fortunate Eagle, 170).

Life on the island continued to become increasingly tense, however, especially after the authorities cut off all water and power supplies to the island. On June 1, 1970, a fire engulfed sections of the island and burned down the iconic lighthouse. With the water having been cut off on the island, the residents had little left to fight the fire with and simply had to survey the damage the next day. Despite such setbacks, and increasingly belligerent tactics from the state and federal authorities, the occupation continued. Fire, to the San Francisco Indian Center, had been one of the final catalysts to the occupation, after all. It was not going to be allowed to bring it to its knees. Another fire, later in the occupation, seriously burned LaNada Means as she sought to keep the flames from her son, but ultimately it was a second invasion, this time by federal marshals, that brought the occupation to an end. By the time of the June 11, 1971, landing, only 15 Indians remained on the island. Trudell and Means had stayed almost to the end, but they, too, were gone when the marshals landed and removed the final residents.

Throughout the occupation, the federal response to the activists had been a source of frustration. Initially reacting in a somewhat typical manner, by blockading the island and attempting to stop any traffic—either people or supplies, on or off Alcatraz—the government then lifted the blockade and agreed to negotiate with Oakes, Nordwall, and others. Negotiations were more lip service than literal, however, from both sides of the divide. The Indians steadfastly insisted that they would settle for nothing less than the university, cultural center, and museum, while the government was equally trenchant in their demands that the occupation cease, and the Indians leave the island. Neither side was willing to compromise. At most, the federal acquiescence to negotiations was merely a waiting tactic, as government advisors expected the occupation to last a far shorter period of time than it ultimately did. When the federal marshals landed and removed the final 15 residents, Trudell noted that the entire federal strategy had been to lie to them. Many people argue that the occupation of Alcatraz was ultimately a failure, as the demands for free title to the island and the creation of a community center, museum, and university never materialized. This, however, ignores the monumental shifts in public perception, understanding, and law that Alcatraz was responsible for. For several years after the occupation, Indian rights were firmly in the public consciousness, and America’s indigenous peoples were no long invisible. The administration of Richard Nixon, already committed to reforming Indian policy and ending termination, went further and pushed for education assistance for American Indians to be written into law. In Indian country, there was a massive shift in outspokenness and cultural advocacy as through the exposure Alcatraz received in comparison to earlier movements, an increasing number of young American Indians found the confidence and inspiration to speak out against the institutional and social injustices they suffered on a daily basis. Historically, the occupation of Alcatraz is a seminal moment, when the culturally focused Red Power of the National Indian Youth Council evolved into a vociferously militant call for political power and recognition through the actions and rhetoric of Indians of All Tribes.

Biographies

Richard Oakes (1942–1972) was born on May 22, 1942, in Mohawk Nation territory at Akwesasne in New York. After a childhood learning the tradition lifeways of the Mohawk people, he started adult life as a high steelworker, a common and contemporary Mohawk tradition for young men seeking work. After visiting San Francisco, however, he decided to pursue higher education and enrolled in San Francisco State University. After a visit by a traveling group of activists preaching traditional Mohawk belief systems, and values of peace, Oakes was galvanized into challenging the university to offer more culturally relevant classes for the Native student population. Oakes himself wrote the curriculum for the Native American studies department that the university eventually agreed to. After the occupation of Alcatraz, Oakes continued to fight for American Indian rights, and aided the Pit River Indians as they attempted to reclaim three million acres of land from Pacific Gas and Electric. Several months after leaving Alcatraz after the death of his daughter, Yvonne, Oakes was left in a coma for several days following a bar fight in which he was hit over the head with a pool cue. A visit to his bedside by Wallace Mad Bear Anderson is credited as the catalyst to his recovery. On September 20, 1972, Oakes was shot to death in an altercation with Michael Morgan, a YMCA camp manager with a reputation for treating Native children in his care badly.

Adam Fortunate Eagle (1929–) was born Adam Nordwall on the Red Lake reservation but spent much of his childhood at Pipestone Indian Training School after his father died. The name Fortunate Eagle was given to him by a Crow elder in 1971. Upon graduating from boarding school, he attended the Haskell Institute of Kansas (now Haskell Indian Nations University). After moving to San Francisco and creating his own successful termite company, First American Termite Company, it was he, in his role as chairman of the United Bay Area Council of American Indian Affairs, Inc., who proposed the occupation of Alcatraz. After Alcatraz, Fortunate Eagle taught Native American Studies at California State University Hayward. It was there that, through a colleague, he was invited to attend the International Conference of World Futures in Rome. As he exited the plane, Fortunate Eagle “claimed” Italy through the right of discovery. Also a successful author, Fortunate Eagle has written three books, Pipestone, My Life in an Indian Barding School, Heart of the Rock, his account of the Alcatraz occupation, and Scalping Columbus and other Damn Indian Stories, a collection of personal stories and anecdotes.

LaNada War Jack (née Means) (1945–) was born and raised on the Shoshone Bannock reservation and sporadically attended BIA boarding schools before becoming the first American Indian student to enroll in the University of California Berkeley. While at Berkeley, Means co-founded an organization called United Native Americans, which became a key player in the years of militant activism that followed Alcatraz. She was also a committed anti-war protestor against the United States’ involvement in Vietnam. After the occupation, Means remained committed to American Indian treaty rights and education, receiving her bachelor’s degree in Native American law and politics in 1971. In 1999, she gained her doctorate in political science from Idaho State University. She has also served on the Fort Hall Business Council of the Shoshone Bannock tribes as well as spending three years as the tribal executive director, overseeing more than 60 tribal departments and advising council members on organizational and policy initiatives. Since 2008, she has been President of Indigenous Visions network, an educational organization dedicated to increasing awareness of the historical issues of oppression and colonization since European contact.

John Trudell (1946–) was born in Omaha, Nebraska, and raised in a variety of towns in Nebraska and South Dakota. Before Alcatraz, Trudell had dropped out of school at 16 and joined the navy. After serving in Vietnam, he left the navy in 1967 and enrolled in radio and broadcast studies at San Bernardino Community College. After Alcatraz, Trudell was a prominent member of the American Indian Movement and involved in the height of the Native activist protests that culminated in the 1973 armed stand-off with the federal government at the Wounded Knee hamlet at Pine Ridge, South Dakota, including the Trail of Broken Treaties. He was also national chairman of AIM from 1973 to 1979. Trudell lost his wife and children in a tragic fire at the home of his in-laws in 1979. While Trudell firmly believed that the fire was a deliberate arson attack in retaliation for his and his family’s activism, the BIA deemed the fire accidental.

After his family’s deaths, Trudell turned to music and released the highly acclaimed Tribal Voices album in 1983, in which he skillfully wove together a complex thread of spoken word poetry over a layer of traditional northern and southern plains drum songs. As well as being a highly sought after motivational speaker, Trudell was a successful actor and writer. He appeared in several successful films, including Thunderheart, On Deadly Ground, and Smoke Signals, and also starred in Hallmark’s TV movie, Dreamkeeper. In 2008, he released Lines from a Mined Mind: The Words of John Trudell, a collection of his lyrics, poetry, and essays since he began writing after his wife’s death. He is also the subject of a 2005 biographic documentary Trudell.

DOCUMENT EXCERPTS

House Concurrent Resolution 108

HCR 108 is the federal bill that is more commonly known as the “Termination Bill,” which formally set the federal government on the path of “getting out of the Indian Business.”

“Whereas it is the policy of Congress, as rapidly as possible, to make the Indians within the territorial limits of the United States subject to the same laws and entitled to the same privileges and responsibilities as are applicable to other citizens of the United States, to end their status as wards of the United States, and to grant them all of the rights and prerogatives pertaining to American citizenship.…

Resolved by the House of Representatives (the Senate concurring),

That it is declared to be the sense of Congress that, at the earliest possible time, all of the Indian tribes … located within the States of California, Florida, New York, and Texas … should be freed from Federal supervision and control and from all disabilities and limitations specifically applicable to Indians.…”

Source: August 1, 1953 | [H. Con. Res. 108] 67 Stat. B122. In Keppler, Charles. Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties. Volume VI, Laws. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office.

Indian Relocation Act

The Indian Relocation Act of 1956 was inspired by the success of the Navajo-Hopi rehabilitation bill in removing destitute Navajo and Hopi citizens to nearby urban centers.

“Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That in order to help adult Indians who reside on or near Indian reservations to obtain reasonable and satisfactory employment, the Secretary of the Interior is authorized to undertake a program of vocational training that provides for vocational counseling or guidance, institutional training in any recognized vocation or trade, apprenticeship, and on the job training, for periods that do not exceed twenty-four months, transportation to the place of training, and subsistence during the course of training. The program shall be available primarily to Indians who are not less than eighteen and not more than thirty-five years of age and who reside on or near an Indian reservation, and the program shall be conducted under such rules and regulations as the Secretary may prescribe.”

Source: Public Law 959, Chapter 930, [S. 3416] 70 Stat. 986. August 3, 1956.

Alcatraz Proclamation

The Alcatraz Proclamation formally announced the intention of the Indians of All Nations to seize Alcatraz in lieu of broken treaty promises. The document serves as a banner of self-determination even today.

“Proclamation to the Great White Father and All His People

We, the Native Americans, re-claim the land known as Alcatraz Island in the name of all American Indians by right of discovery.

We wish to be fair and honorable in our dealings with the Caucasian inhabitants of this land, and hereby offer the following treaty:

We will purchase said Alcatraz Island for twenty-four dollars ($24) in glass beads and red cloth, a precedent set by the white man’s purchase of a similar island about 300 years ago. We know that $24 in trade goods for these 16 acres is more than was paid when Manhattan Island was sold, but we know that land values have risen over the years. Our offer of $1.24 per acre is greater than the 47¢ per acre that the white men are now paying the California Indians for their land. We will give to the inhabitants of this island a portion of that land for their own, to be held in trust by the American Indian Affairs [sic] and by the bureau of Caucasian Affairs to hold in perpetuity—for as long as the sun shall rise and the rivers go down to the sea. We will further guide the inhabitants in the proper way of living. We will offer them our religion, our education, our life-ways, in order to help them achieve our level of civilization and thus raise them and all their white brothers up from their savage and unhappy state. We offer this treaty in good faith and wish to be fair and honorable in our dealings with all white men.”

Source: http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/alcatrazproclamationandletter.html

Alcatraz Letter

This letter was sent out as a call to arms to raise awareness and support of the Alcatraz occupation.

December 16, 1969

Dear Brothers and Sisters:

This is a call for a delegation from each Indian nation, tribe, or band from throughout the United States, Canada, and Mexico to meet together on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay, on December 23, 1969, for a meeting to be tentatively called the Confederation of American Indian Nations (CAIN).

On November 20, 1969, 78 Indian people, under the name “Indians of All Tribes,” moved on to Alcatraz Island, a former Federal Prison. We began cleaning up the Island and are still in the process of organizing, setting up classes and trying to instill the old Indian ways into our young.

We moved onto Alcatraz Island because we feel that Indian people need a Cultural Center of their own. For several decades, Indian people have not had enough control of training their young people. And without a cultural center of their own, we are afraid that the old Indian ways may be lost. We believe that the only way to keep them alive is for Indian people to do it themselves.

While it was a small group which moved onto the island, we want all Indian people to join with us. More Indian people from throughout the country are coming to the island every day. We are issuing this call in an attempt to unify all our Indian Brothers behind a common cause.

We realize that there are more problems in Indian communities besides having our culture taken away. We have water problems, land problems, “social” problems, job opportunity problems, and many others.

And as Vice President Agnew said at the annual convention of the National Congress of American Indians in October of this year, now is the time for Indian leadership.

We realize too that we are not getting anywhere fast by working alone as individual tribes. If we can gather together as brothers and come to a common agreement, we feel that we can be much more effective, doing things for ourselves, instead of having someone else doing it, telling us what is good for us.

So we must start somewhere. We feel that if we are going to succeed, we must hold on to the old ways. This is the first and most important reason we went to Alcatraz Island. [Italics in the letter.]

Source: http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/alcatrazproclamationandletter.html

Nixon’s Special Message

Nixon’s special message was his declaration to seek ways in which American Indian governments could function more autonomously, and is seen as the beginning of the self-determination era, even though the Self-Determination Act was not passed until 1975.

To the Congress of the United States:

The first Americans—the Indians—are the most deprived and most isolated minority group in our nation. On virtually very scale of measurement -employment, income, education, health—the condition of the Indian people ranks at the bottom.

This condition is the heritage of centuries of injustice. From the time of their first contact with European settlers, the American Indians have been oppressed and brutalized, deprived of their ancestral lands and denied the opportunity to control their own destiny. Even the Federal programs which are intended to meet their needs have frequently proved to be ineffective and demeaning.

This, then, must be the goal of any new national policy toward the Indian people to strengthen the Indian’s sense of autonomy without threatening this sense of community. We must assure the Indian that he can assume control of his own life without being separated involuntary from the tribal group. And we must make it clear that Indians can become independent of Federal control without being cut off from Federal concern and Federal support. My specific recommendations to the Congress are designed to carry out this policy …

Source: Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Richard Nixon, 1970. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1971, 564–76.

See also: National Indian Youth Council, 1961; American Indian Movement, 1968

Further Reading

Alcatraz History. Accessed July 17, 2015. www.alcatrazhistory.com

American Indian Center Seizure of Alcatraz Island. 1969. Digital History ID 721. Digital History. Accessed February 28, 2016. http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?smtid=3&psid=721

Fortunate Eagle, Adam. Heart of the Rock: The Indian Invasion of Alcatraz, Norma: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002.

History Is a Weapon. “Alcatraz Letter and Proclamation.” Accessed July 12, 2015. http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/alcatrazproclamationandletter.html Accessed July 12, 2015

Johnson, Troy. The American Indian Occupation of Alcatraz Island: Red Power and Self-Determination. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008.

Josephy, Alvin and Troy Johnson. Red Power: The American Indians’ Fight for Freedom. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999.

Nagel, Joane. American Indian Ethnic Renewal: Red Power and the Resurgence of Identity and Culture. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Smith, Paul Chaat and Robert Warrior. Like a Hurricane: The Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee. New York: The New Press, 1996.

U.S. National Park Service. Alcatraz Island. “We Hold the Rock.” 2016. Accessed July 17, 2015. http://www.nps.gov/alca/learn/historyculture/we-hold-the-rock.htm

Winton, Ben. “The Occupation of Alcatraz: Don’t Give Us Apologies. Give Us What We Really Want.” Feb. 28, 2012. Accessed July 31, 2015. http://www.thenativepress.com/life/alcatraz.php