As the struggle for black equality gained momentum and national visibility through the 1950s and 1960s, it presented opportunities for and challenges to advocates of Native rights. The opportunities came in the form of increased attention and the opening of new spaces for dialogue about the rights of racial minorities. But riding on the coattails of the civil rights movement also presented challenges. For one thing, even well-meaning liberals often failed to distinguish the American Indian rights agenda from the African American one. If civil rights meant equality and equality meant sameness, as Standing Rock Sioux author Vine Deloria put it in his classic treatise Custer Died for Your Sins, Native nations wanted nothing to do with it.1
Even more dangerous was the agenda pursued by “terminationists” who wanted to end the trust relationship between tribal nations and the federal government, convert reservations into municipalities, and assimilate Indians into a narrowly constructed model of belonging. They routinely clothed their antisovereignty agenda, enunciated in House Concurrent Resolution 108 and operationalized through Public Law 280 in 1953, in the rhetoric of emancipation, freedom, and equality. While the former “named” tribes that were purportedly “ready” to assume “all the rights and responsibilities” of citizenship, and thereby handed Congress a legislative agenda, Public Law 280 was even more immediately perilous. It authorized several states to extend civil and criminal jurisdiction over tribes—whether or not they gave their consent—at their discretion. This was nothing short of a blatant assault on tribal sovereignty.
Members of Congress aggressively advanced termination legislation during the mid-1950s. In June 1954, the Menominees in Wisconsin, the Klamaths and sixty-one small tribes in western Oregon, the Alabama-Coushatta in Texas, and the Uintah-Ouray Utes and Southern Paiutes in Utah were all targeted. While pushback from the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) and other organizations stemmed the tide somewhat, the threat lingered through the 1960s. By the time of termination’s repeal in 1970, more than thirteen thousand Indians in one hundred tribes, bands, and California rancherias had their legal relationship with the federal government severed. All of them would spend the next two decades fighting for restoration.2
During this period, an American Indian youth movement placed its mark on the national campaign for Native rights. It grew in large part out of an influx of American Indians on college and university campuses after World War II. Indian clubs provided a place for Native students to build a sense of community, and many of them, in turn, formed the Southwest Regional Indian Youth Council (SWRIYC). This coalition, founded under the auspices of the New Mexico Association on American Indian Affairs in 1957, created an important network for engaged students. But the politicization of young people took place in other contexts. The most important one proved to be the Workshop on American Indian Affairs, a six-week summer program for college students held first at Colorado College and later at the University of Colorado.
The workshops served as an intellectual training ground for a cadre of young people, many of whom formed an activist organization of their own, the National Indian Youth Council (NIYC). In August 1961, these optimistic youths met in Gallup, New Mexico, and committed themselves to building “A Greater Indian America.” While much of their efforts involved giving talks on college campuses, attending meetings and conferences, and publishing editorials in their newsletters American Aborigine and Americans before Columbus, NIYC members increasingly became involved in confrontational politics. Over time, the organization embraced direct action by pledging its support for and becoming involved in the Pacific Northwest fishing rights struggle, picketing the White House, and supporting demonstrations within tribal communities.3
At the same time, the politics of poverty also served as an unanticipated means of countering termination. The War on Poverty, launched by the Economic Opportunity Act in 1964, operated on the assumption that people living in economically deprived circumstances needed empowerment. Its most contested innovation, the Community Action Program, called for “maximum feasible participation of the poor” and “local initiative” in the planning and administration of programs that affected their lives. Tribal leaders, seeing its guiding principles as a much-needed antidote to the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ paternalism, immediately used it to their advantage. Mississippi Choctaw leader Phillip Martin, for instance, reported in 1973 that the Office of Economic Opportunity was “the primary support for Indian governments attempting to achieve Self-Determination and self-development.”4
Chapter 3 highlights two critically important themes in Native activism. First, it shows how Native activists drew parallels to and forged alliances with organizations involved in the struggle for black equality. As racial politics grew more acrimonious, for example, Vine Deloria used his leadership position in the National Congress of American Indians to position Indians as a “safe minority” that politicians could champion without fear of white backlash. The NIYC, on the other hand, supported the black freedom struggle, and individual members participated in the March on Washington in 1963, the Selma march in 1965, and the Poor People’s Campaign in 1968.
A second and related theme revolves around the parallels Native activists drew with international politics and decolonization, a movement that gained momentum after World War II. These connections, as D’Arcy McNickle’s address in chapter 2 intimated, proved central to articulating a paradigm for asserting a vision that he referred to as “civil rights of a different order”—one built on the idea of nation building. But drawing these parallels and deciding how to act on them proved complex and controversial. Both veteran activists and newcomers were influenced by personal experience and local politics, concerns over modernity and loss of identity, movements for participatory democracy, struggles for racial and economic justice, the Cold War, and global decolonization. But they made sense of the connections in variegated, complex, and at times contradictory ways. While Native activists intended to take clear stands on citizenship, civil rights, and sovereignty, the documents in this chapter reveal that they were, in reality, engaging in delicate ideational dances and precarious political balancing acts that conveyed uncertain meanings and carried unknown repercussions.5