Stephen E. Feraca
“—and that means you, too!” He who fired this barb was a young mixed-blood with a law degree, an American of partial Indian ancestry, then newly employed with the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) at its headquarters in Washington. His target was a full-blood, an American totally of Japanese ancestry, a Nisei born in California. This “Honkey,” unlike the bearer of the law degree, had many years of professional experience in the administration of Indian Affairs. She had also, along with her entire family, experienced the supreme injustice and ignominy of internment during the Second World War.
Again in contrast with the belligerent Indian American who cannot speak the language of his tribal ancestors and is divorced from their traditions, the Japanese American is fluent in her ancestral tongue and fully literate in its complex writing system. Many tribal visitors, because of her physical features and the obvious non-European character of both her given name and surname, regarded her as Indian, and probably do still. They were confirmed in their belief to a large degree by the genuinely personal attention she gave to all the many tribal delegations with whom she came in contact.
This confrontation between the two employees, if it can be so-called, occurred at the beginning stages of the new emphasis on Indian preference in the BIA and the Indian Health Service (IHS). Many people, Indian and non-Indian alike, found that particular threat to be highly amusing. I did not, but an Afroamerican coworker became almost hysterical at the prospect of attaining honkeyhood. Half-jokingly, she resolved to find Indian ancestry in her genealogy but was warned that this would not suffice. Indian preference had been limited to one-quarter blood for initial appointments in the BIA, and later in the IHS when health services became separated from the Bureau. We all thought that with preference extended to promotions and training the same quarter-blood criterion would apply. The situation, however, became even more unpalatable and unworkable than it would have been if limited to the mythology of blood quantum.
These developments came during the mid-1960s, with the opening of the abuses of affirmative action (that is, officially sanctioned discrimination) in academia, in government, and in much less formal institutions of American society (see Glazer 1987). The BIA, close to the seat of federal power and particularly vulnerable to the wants of its own special-interest lobby, reflected the attitudes and policies of the dominant society sooner and quicker than other institutions. Affirmative action, meaning Indian preference, was bound to rear its ugly head but, as always in the field of Indian affairs, with a peculiar visage. In an official sense it began with a memorandum of May 3, 1966, from the Commissioner of Indian Affairs to all BIA chiefs. Most employees shrugged; a surprising number have forgotten it; I and others saw the handwriting on the wall.
A confused, blatantly racist, extraordinarily offensive atmosphere had surrounded the seating of the first Indian in this century, and the second Indian in history, in the Commissioner of Indian Affair’s chair. Commissioner Robert L. Bennett’s first bureau-wide memo, mentioned above, was titled “Indian Employment.” One cannot ignore the impression that this individual, of Wisconsin Oneida extraction and a long-term member of the society of professional Indians, a person reared in the Bureau’s Haskell Indian Institute, had been waiting a long time.1 The document stated in its most pertinent part:
We have always considered that Indian preference has applied only in the initial appointment process. We have taken the position that, as in the case of veteran’s preference, it has no force in connection with promotion and training opportunity ... I am sending this memorandum to you because I believe we have not been concerned enough with the Indian after he is employed. We have let his employment drift along after having given him his preference in appointment. I do not believe we can continue this. Too often I have seen an Indian and a non-Indian compete for promotion and the opportunity goes to the non-Indian because he is better qualified. While we must always endeavor to select the best qualified person for the job, we also must help the Indian to be among the best qualified.
During the next two years quarter-blood preference was applied in the filling of vacancies and in general recruitment in a growing climate of inconsistency and fear. Among other unsavory features was the spectacle of people who had never seen a tribal roll, and who did not know whether they were enrolled, feverishly trying to establish their blood quantum. To achieve a quarter-blood status they were enlisting the services of Whites who were familiar with useful records, including some with a flair for genealogy. Some of the exercises performed in that discipline, and in pedigree mathematics, were ludicrous. Tales of the individuals who added a 3/32nds father to a 3/64ths mother to achieve a better than one-fourth “blood” status are legion.
Then a blockbuster hit—a Memorandum of Agreement dated April 26, 1968, between the BIA and IHS. Titled “Maximum Utilization of Indians,” it was cosigned by Commissioner Bennett and the Director of the Division of Indian Health. Reaching all the way back to an Act of June 30, 1834, a century earlier than the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 (which statute would have in itself sufficed), this poorly drafted paper confirmed our suspicions about the future of professionalism in the specified agencies, and in other positions in Interior and Health, Education and Welfare (HEW) within Indian program fields. Using a quarter-blood cut-off earlier in the text, the second “policy” point read:
Maximum use will be made of trainee type positions and restructuring positions when feasible to permit Indians to qualify for appointments. For nonprofessional positions, in particular, when positive efforts have failed to produce a fully qualified candidate and there is an Indian preference eligible [i.e., applicant] available who is believed to possess the ability to perform the duties of the position satisfactorily but who does not fully meet the established qualification standards both agencies will utilize every means available to restructure such positions in an attempt to permit the Indian preference eligible to meet the requirements of it [emphasis mine].
I submit that no other federal agency would have countenanced such a monstrous declaration. Forgetting for the moment the non-Indians directly affected, exceedingly few individuals regarded this policy statement as offensive to Indians.
Although indisputably many of his fellow Haskell alumni and other Indian staff actively supported the commissioner, others were derisive. They were professionals with varying backgrounds in tribal tradition, or none at all. They appreciated the first preference that had been extended to them, but although most began their careers as clerks they had risen to responsible positions. In my view, some remained clerks regardless of grade, and far too many remained “country boys (or girls),” but this has nothing to do with Indianness. It is, indeed, a major problem encountered throughout the federal bureaucracy, where successive promotions often come with longevity, not growth in technical and administrative skills.
Those from Haskell Institute were loyal to the old school tie but some thought it had outlived its usefulness. Some were thoroughly critical of the speech and work habits of the younger graduates. This institution, located in Lawrence, Kansas, began as an off-reservation boarding school with a curriculum aimed at preparing reservation Indians for participation in the national work-force. In practice, it trained young Indians for careers in the BIA. My own mother-in-law, her brother, and two of her sisters graduated from Haskell; and all but one sister entered the Indian Service in low-level jobs, as typists and the like. Lacking the legally required one-quarter blood-quantum minimum, they were, however, permitted to attend, as were many other marginal “Indians.” They were all at the time strangers to any Indian community other than that formed by the Indian Service bureaucracy itself. Indeed, there is such an animal.
Haskell has for some time been a glorified high school with nominal community college status. One reason that young Indians—from reservation communities or elsewhere—are drawn to it is simply that tuition, board, and room come free. There are still many students enrolled who do not derive from reservation communities. The “old guard” Haskell graduates, many of whom were essentially Euroamerican in both ancestry and culture, have practically disappeared from the Indian scene, and some of them from this world. Among them were, as contrasted with too many of today’s professional Indians, competent, conscientious, and hard-working administrators. One, for example, was an Oklahoma Choctaw who was noted for being “unalterably opposed to spending a dime for off-reservation Indians” (his words in my presence). He was high-ranking and influential, and personally went out of his way to help in establishing a much-needed child welfare program for Florida Seminóles (it was a failure, however, through no fault of the Bureau). Not atypically in this respect (but we can’t all be perfect), he also said of a BIA—multi-tribal conference, “It was a real nice affair—no Indian dancing or stuff like that.” Oklahoma Cherokees and Choctaws were the most visible and powerful of this old guard. One such “Choctaw,” whom I first met at a Sun Dance in South Dakota, admitted that he had no Indian ancestry whatsoever but he did exhibit a healthy appreciation for tribal traditions among those who did. Unfortunately many were they who had no such sentiments and cared less. A few were, as privately labeled by the noted anthropologist Gordon Macgregor, “culture destroyers,” and MacGregor certainly was including non-Indians in this condemnation.
I am suggesting that Indians, genuine or spurious, are no better qualified than others to understand the dynamics of Indian societies and to gauge and cope with their needs. For instance, a Nisei with an anthropological background, Hiroto “Zak” Zakoji, achieved much success and well-deserved respect for his grass-roots person-to-person involvement with and sensitive analysis of some truly staggering sociopsychological conditions among Plateau and Northwest Coast tribes. (No, the Bureau is not and never has been loaded with Japanese Americans.)
I am not suggesting that Indians are intrinsically less qualified, but if non-Indians need highly special training, experience, and sensitivity in confronting these often exceptionally difficult problems so do they. Such knowledge and skills are not acquired through biological inheritance. The older Indian element, graduates of Indian Service schools or not, would generally agree. It need hardly be said, however, that it is a great rarity for younger Indian people of any level of sophistication to admit today that any qualification beyond that of an Indian identity is needed. Much of all this is lost on the poorer, less educated but mature reservation residents. Typical of their attitudes are the comments of several Florida Seminole women who approached me in a group before the beginning of what was to be a greatly enhanced summer recreation and learning program. These ladies, all mothers of teenagers, were working or visiting at the tribal commercial village. One woman pointedly asked who was under consideration for jobs as counselors for both the grade-and high-school programs. When I mentioned a few names, including a college graduate and some graduating high school seniors, she said unqualifiedly, “Don’t get any Indians.” All the other women present echoed this sentiment but I was constrained by my own and BIA policy to ignore them. I did add (as volunteer workers) a young White couple pursuing graduate degrees, and another young White woman borrowed from a county program. That the Seminole mothers knew what they were talking about was shown by later events, itself a sad commentary. The Seminole counselors would not try and could not control the kids enrolled in this program. On the other hand, the non-Indian volunteers tried and were unsuccessful, with painful results: both of the dedicated young women were assaulted.
Louis R. Bruce, a Mohawk-Sioux, succeeded Bennett as commissioner. Immediately upon Bruce’s confirmation, during Richard M. Nixon’s first term, the Indian preference policy reached new levels of stridency. About a year after he took office, Bruce said in Binghamton, New York, that of the twenty-three top positions he found in the Bureau, none was occupied by an Indian, but under his aegis soon there were twenty such positions, seventeen of them filled by Indians (Morello 1970). His claims were preposterous. Although their ranks had been thinning, the old guard Indians were veritably much in evidence when Bruce took office, and the deputy commissioner on deck, John O. Crow, epitomized the Haskell influence. But Crow was no friend of Bruce and his ilk, who loudly proclaimed that at last Indians had taken over the BIA. During the same Binghamton address Bruce said also that Indians are “fighting only to be heard. We don’t want to hurt anybody—just to be recognized. That’s what our red militants are doing.” Bruce’s stewardship was an utter disaster. His appointees were not only by-and-large militants and total strangers to administration, novices intent on reinventing the wheel, they actually sanctioned the use of federal office space, support facilities, and travel expenses for representatives of the American Indian Movement. To show their gratitude, in 1972 these young militants occupied and wrecked the BIA building, provoking the demise of Bruce and company, and ending as well Deputy Commissioner Crow’s distinguished career of service to Indian people. The situation was so bad under Bruce that we lesser, long-service fools in the Bureau thought that the discriminatory Indian preference policy would go out the door with him. No such luck; the pressure that Bennett, Bruce, and Interior Secretary Rogers B. Morton responded to with this racial preference policy continued, as did the policy itself.
On June 26, 1972, Secretary Morton, together with Bruce, issued an edict containing the boldest statement yet: “Where two or more candidates who meet the established requirements are available for filling a vacancy, if one of them is an Indian, he shall be given preference in filling the vacancy.” As noted by a then newly organized group of BIA employees, Dedicated Americans Revealing the Truth (DART), the statement “who meet the established requirements” did not mean equally qualified. Just before the application of this new garnish to the preference policy, the National Federation of Federal Employees had protested vigorously to the secretary in opposition to any discrimination based on race. Later, however, this employees union proved unwilling to do real battle for the BIA’s non-Indian segment of its membership. Non-Indians then began to pay increased attention to the activities of DART.
During this turbulent period federal government agencies, state institutions, and larger private employers everywhere were experiencing the thrust of affirmative discrimination in the form of quotas, or the threat of them, or of arbitrary employment decisions that produced the same results. Even before the Morton-Bruce declaration some highly irrational things were being said and done, absent any official sanction, to promote the interests of selected Indians. When a notably professional White branch chief expressed his frustration about filling some positions, his supervisor—a White Haskell Cherokee—advised that she “always thought there was a lot of talent in the mail room.” The mail room and some other operations in the BIA headquarters were almost entirely filled with individuals, usually rather young and uneducated, recruited directly from reservations. These and many secretarial positions were and are truly low-paying jobs.
Yet even with Black unemployment the problem it is in the Washington metropolitan area, the Bureau has no compunctions about filling these slots with people who have to be transported from places as distant as the Navajo Reservation. The protesting branch chief was engaged in extremely complex work pertaining to tribal government. Needing skilled and experienced help, he openly scoffed at any suggestions that he canvass the mail room. Further concerning Blacks in this context, I have discussed the nature of Indian preference with only a few Blacks, including a federal personnel officer. All except one woman, a BIA employee, fully accepted Indian preference in the capital city and everywhere else. For a long period my own small branch contained no Indians, but did include two Blacks and two Nisei, one of the latter a clerk-typist whose output was nothing less than prodigious. When acting as branch chief for an extended period, I was chided for maintaining an “integrated shop.” One of our people was a young, dark-complexioned historian with somewhat craggy features. Our regular chief of many years once said half-seriously, “I sure wish Mike looked more like an Indian.” This sort of thing is really not funny. This young man, a Ph.D. candidate and a specialist in Indian political history, got out when it became only too evident that professional advancement in the Bureau was impossible for anyone who could not or would not claim an Indian identity.
Those were the times that saw the beginnings of the placing of “natives” in Indian cultural studies programs. It was also the era of such witless concepts as the development of courses in Swahili for Black students. American Blacks largely derive from West Africa. Swahili began as an East African Bantu language laced with Arabic. The Swahili classes emptied as quickly as college classes in Indian languages. On a much lower academic level, a woman from a British Columbia reserve expressed her shock at discovering that the Teton Sioux language was being taught to children in a grade school in the western part of the state of Washington. The proponents of this form of fake nativism were unable to find an instructor in the local tribal language, but the kids were learning “Indian.” This is not funny, either. On a South Dakota campus a dear friend and colleague, a White native of that state who had spent his life in the study of Northern Plains ethnohistory, was summarily replaced by two thoroughly Americanized mixed-bloods who proceeded to achieve fame in the development not of meaningful Indian studies classes, but some astronomical travel and telephone bills.
The Honkey world, having witnessed such excesses only briefly mentioned above, riveted its attention on the De Funis and Mancari cases. Marco De Funis is a Sephardic Jew who challenged the emerging policy of affirmative discrimination, or reverse racism, and Carla Mancari is an Italian-American, who in fact hails from the region of my paternal ancestors. She battled furiously as gladiator in this legal arena, where the better class Christians, instead of joining the victims of discrimination, played the part of hungry lions. Although an organizer and later a shop steward of the union representing the BIA, I resigned because when things became truly intolerable that organization did not perform as expected. I was also one of the most vociferous opponents of Indian preference, but I did not formally join Mancari in her suit; and that I will always regret.
Mr. De Funis was the student who, graduating magna cum laude in 1971 from the University of Washington, applied for entrance to law school there. After being rejected he learned that thirty-six applicants with lower test scores than his were admitted. They were Blacks, His-panics, Filipinos, and Indians. De Funis sued, a lower court finding in his favor. The Washington law school then appealed and was upheld by the State Supreme Court. Meanwhile, court orders enabled De Funis to attend law school. The case reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 1974 but was declared moot because of De Funis’ admission to law school. He was by that time in the final quarter of his last year, the school assuring the court that he would graduate. We who were selfish enough to wish that he had not been admitted found ultimately, as described later, that insofar as Indian questions were concerned it would not have mattered anyway. William O. Douglas was one justice who dissented, saying, “If discrimination based on race is constitutionally permissible when those who hold the reins can come up with ‘compelling’ reasons to justify it, then constitutional guarantees acquire an accordion-like quality.” 2 The Mancari suit had already reached the Supreme Court. Our hero was Justice Douglas, who was going to save the Indian people from further patronization, and the rest of society while he was at it.
Carla Mancari was, at the time, one of many non-Indian education specialists at the BIA’s Albuquerque, New Mexico, South-western Indian Polytechnic Institute. She was a founder of DART and a principal behind the effort to place a hold on all personnel actions until the courts were able to settle the Indian preference issue. Her courage is unquestioned, but she knew little of the workings of Indian society, especially of tribal governments and the history and nature of the definitions of tribal membership. I like to think that I and others knowledgeable in the fields of tribal organization and enrollment would have been able to contribute data and analyses beyond the racial issue. But the suit brought by Mancari against Secretary Morton was, I must admit, essentially of a racial nature in the minds and hearts of all concerned. Indian views did not much differ from ours. Whatever proclamations disguise or legitimize this form of government sanctioned discrimination it remains fundamentally a question of racism. The U.S. Supreme Court thought otherwise.
A decision in Mancari was reached soon after the disappointing and frustrating De Funis case. Mancari had won in the District Court on the grounds of Indian preference being implicitly repealed by the 1972 Equal Employment Opportunity Act. The case was, as anticipated by all, appealed to the Supreme Court. That body held on June 17,1974, among other startling things, that the Equal Employment Act, as an extension of the Civil Rights Act of 1972, was “largely just a codification of prior anti-discrimination Executive Orders, regarding which Indian preferences had long been treated as exceptions . . .” 3 Indians are bound to be, in just about everyone’s view, different. Indians are not, as many Americans (especially Mormons) persist in believing, descended from the ancient Israelites. I am, however, in examining the extraordinary image of Indian people in this country and Canada, frequently reminded of the old story of the Jewish boy who asks his scholarly grandfather if Jews are like other people. The old gentleman lifts his eyes from his talmudic studies to reply, “Yes, but more so.”
The Mancari decision was unanimous. Justice Douglas, therefore, let us down, but along with the other eight magistrates did so in a manner that beautifully skirted those constitutional issues about which so many watchers expected a thorough and conclusive review. Stripping the decision of historical elements and jargon, what emerges from the bare bones of Mancari is that Indian tribes do not constitute ethnic, sociological, or racial entities but self-governing sovereignties; and the United States is responsible for the positioning of members of such sovereignties in those federal agencies charged with the enhancement of such sovereignty. What a far cry from the honest paternalism expressed to me on a June afternoon in 1954 upon arriving for the first time on Pine Ridge Reservation. Although hired as a summer laborer, I was admonished by the second-in-command at the agency that particularly because of my interest in Indian tradition I was expected to “make life better for our Sioux people.” I was not in much of a position to do that but, urged on by my new friends, I did take advantage of my non-Indian status, in nearby Nebraska, to illegally buy an awful lot of beer for their consumption. In fact, I did so the first night there, in the company of my great friend the late Clarence Janis, bearer of one of the oldest French names known to the Sioux and one of the finest traditional Sioux singers.
In the Syllabus of Mancari two basic findings are cited: firstly, that Congress did not intend to repeal Indian preference by the Civil Rights Act (as if it had been given any thought); and secondly, that Indian preference “does not constitute invidious racial discrimination in violation of the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment but is reasonable and rationally designed to further Indian self-government.”
If it is reasonable to apply Indian preference wholesale on a purely political basis, then it is eminently unconscionable to have Navajos involved in the affairs of the Utes, Sioux similarly empowered to manage the affairs of Blackfeet or Crows, and so forth. It would be reasonable, however, for the entirety of Crow Agency to be staffed by Crows; the Minneapolis Area Office to be populated by all the Chippewas necessary to handle strictly Chippewa business; and precisely the same divided arrangements prevailing in the Washington headquarters. The Pine Ridge IHS Hospital would, we should expect, be staffed with Oglala Sioux (except that medical officers are exempt from the preference policy, fortunately for the patients). God forbid that a Crow orderly be employed at that hospital. Such would not only tend to violate principles of Oglala self-government, the Crows have a healthy penchant for recalling intertribal warfare. Ridiculous? Of course it is; but since the court said nothing to Congress or the secretaries of Interior and HEW about the implementation of the policy many ridiculous actions were taken. Some of these really approached the nonsense sketched above. I do not know of any that strengthened the capacity for self-government of the several tribes but they certainly—hardly in keeping with the impossible idealism and romantic abstraction of the court—strengthened Indian racism.
Mancari in truth elated most Indians but neither they nor non-Indians immediately realized how loose and newly extended a definition of Indianness was made possible, indeed, virtually mandated by the decision. When legal and other minds were agonizing over the drafting of implementing regulations it remained clear that the affected agencies were still thinking in racial terms. “Certificates of Indian Blood” were for years after the 1974 decision still being required of Indian applicants with little attention being given to the factor of tribal membership per se. Only slowly did managers, applicants, and others begin to grasp that the political nature of the matter allowed for Indian preference to be extended to all members of tribes—White members, Black members, four-fourths blood members, thirteen sixty-fourths blood members, and the many thousands who would have to dig deeply for a distant ancestor with an Indian name. Not until the end of 1977 did the BIA at last publish rules for the definition of the term “Indian” for employment purposes. Long before then the racist climate had become completely unbearable.
Characteristic of the blatancy of some of the abuses was the notice of a combined Bureau of Indian Affairs and Indian Health Service party, to which only Indian employees were invited. I must remark that the only “Indian” item on the reception’s limited menu was “fry bread.” I have never seen the proper adverbial form “fried” employed in any of the innumerable meeting and Pow Wow notices that mention this item. Most Indian people and members of the larger society seem oblivious to the pre-Columbian absence of the makings of this distinctively modern Indian delicacy. There was no wheat cultivated in the Americas, this form of bread being adopted by Indian people from the French and Spanish.
It was not necessary to travel any distance beyond our own modest division in the BIA’s Washington offices to find examples typical of the repressive racist atmosphere. Abuses in personnel actions were not unknown before the coming of Bennett and his policies, nor was it unknown for the Indian Service to harbor both Whites and Indians who had little more than contempt for reservation people. There were, however, Indian and non-Indian bureaucrats who in those days said “no” to Indian leaders when any other response would have been patronizing. There were Indian and White Agency superintendents and other officers who took their jobs damned seriously. They seemed to have had some silly notion that they were employed not by the tribes but by the federal government, in service to all Americans.
Truthfully, well before Bennett’s arrival on the scene and absent any fanfare there was a move on to recruit qualified Indian graduates, not always with complete success. Representatives of a large Midwestern university, while arranging contractual services for our division, advised us that a recent law graduate there employed, a Chippewa characterized as a real whiz, might be attracted to the field of tribal government operations. Both Indian and non-Indians involved were anxious to recruit this man who arrived without delay, lugging his omnipresent, massive, bulging briefcase. He was given a specific and complex assignment, made an appearance late on a few afternoons, and then disappeared—to the great relief of those personally responsible for him. It was learned soon afterwards that he had a severe problem with alcohol and had produced nothing for the university. The Bureau had, in a word, been conned. The university people had served themselves doubly, getting rid of an incompetent by bumping him upstairs, while avoiding any accusation of discrimination.
Not long after the formal announcement of the expanded racial preference policy there arrived, again in the same office, a young man who supposedly was a member of one of the many tiny southern California “tribes.” To me and others his claimed identity was extremely suspicious, not only because he appeared and behaved as non-Indian as was conceivable. I checked. The group from which he derives is totally unorganized and has no membership criteria. The official enrollment ended with a 1940 reservation census. He was born in 1941; his name was added to the census by a White field staff member only when he showed up seeking Indian preference. This individual who is not, and under the circumstances cannot be, a member of any tribe, and who has little Indian ancestry, has had—in addition to his initial appointment—at least two promotions based on Indian preference. He was, moreover, incompetent and his ignorance of Indian society reached a level just above that of bedrock. Two or three doors away from his shop was another new employee who was in his own speech “a Indian” working on his “doctorial dessertation [sic],” his academic program being federally funded. Although assigned to tribal enrollment activities, he flatly refused to continue an important enrollment research project, admittedly tedious in certain respects. This work was to have been performed under my supervision; I completed the portion that was expected of him and most of the rest of this lengthy project. No one would touch him, least of all his White branch chief, a professional of many years experience who had acquired a real fear of those Indians on her staff. She and I and others who declined to make an issue of the matter were all wrong. The employee eventually went on to better things in Indian programming, always by virtue of Indian preference, and in time was indeed invested with a doctorate (or is it “doctoriate”?).
By no means exhausting the horror stories within our own corridor (as this is about aspects of the Indian world I have not mentioned cases like that of the psychotic White secretary), I vividly recall the “summer student,” a longhaired boy from Oklahoma with distinctly Indian features. He positively refused to return so much as an ordinary greeting delivered by any White staff member and sulked throughout the employment period. After his return to school were found in his desk copies of letters and memoranda he had written. They had been directed to the Equal Employment Opportunity Office and bitterly complained about the absence of Indians among the women who ordinarily supervised him. This unfortunate young person was tragically depriving himself, all the more so because he wrote excellent prose.
Anyone who thinks that such painful experiences as those few described above further Indian programming, tribal self-government, or the aspirations of young Indian people eager to work and to learn has several more guesses coming. On one occasion, when lunching in the Interior cafeteria, I was treated to an unsolicited condemnation of Indian preference voiced by a tribal leader seated at the adjoining table. Indian both culturally and phenotypically, he was justly proud of his success in steering programs toward his previously neglected tribe. He fully admitted that he had strongly supported Indian preference, anticipating that the policy would attract specialists with a genuine knowledge of social and economic needs. Observing that “We expected the best and got the worst,” the strongest such charge I have ever heard, he ticked off the names of several undesirables also known to me. The rest of his remarks echoed the points made in a paper a few of us Honkies signed and delivered to Interior Secretary Andrus. We wrote that it was nearly impossible in our branch to fill vacancies left by two non-Indians. We said that this was becoming endemic to the Bureau, and “as a result of the ambiguous manner in which the Indian preference policy is administered the situation can only rapidly worsen due to attrition.” There was no response.
I am among the ranks of those who have often begged for the opportunity to select and train Indian students and newly graduated individuals in all the fields in which I have been employed, beginning in adult education and community development on Pine Ridge Reservation. The closest I ever came to any such opportunity was to help in “sensitizing” sanitation engineers in the Health Service (but they were my age and White), and training a young, totally acculturated Indian woman, for too brief a period, in the processing of Indian claims awards. She was not selected by me and although she proved to be an excellent worker, I would have sought someone with a background more characteristic of reservation Indian society. On Pine Ridge there was at that time no chance to train an Indian assistant or even to establish such a slot. My successor was the whitest of Whites, a run-of-the-mill shop teacher looking for the promotion he received with no affinity whatsoever for adult education or community work. I understand that he functioned largely as a truant officer, something I had avoided like the plague. Added to the irony was that he got to use the brand-new agency car that was delivered one week before I was transferred. My position had not been assigned a vehicle. For more than three years I had to borrow the superintendent’s car, catch rides from other BIA staff or from IHS people with similar destinations, or use my own.
At the Seminole Agency in Florida the tribal member on my staff I considered to be most promising became the president of the tribal board less than a year after I arrived. He spoke both native languages used by the Seminóles, and was much more aware than I could ever have become about the overwhelming sociopsychological problems of many individuals and whole families. On a Florida reservation one of the more public drunks, an alligator wrestler when he worked, produced children by both of his wife’s daughters from a former marriage, and twins by one of his daughters from that wife, all living in the same household. Immediately after my arrival in Florida, I undertook arrangements for transportation and other business involving Seminole children scheduled to attend BIA boarding schools in Oklahoma. When I registered astonishment at the disproportionately high numbers being shipped away from their homes, my assistant explained that many of those being processed were the victims of severe family situations. She took pains to point out that the agency regularly sent the youngest teen-age girl from the incestuous family away to school to save her from the fate of her sister and half-sisters. (What is done for other Floridians to combat this kind of horror, not having a Bureau of Indian Affairs?)
The lady lamented, however, that neither she nor anyone else had ever been able to persuade the girl to remain in Oklahoma through the summer months, although a job for her could be arranged through the boarding school. The following year I mentioned to this girl’s half-brother, well educated in the formal sense, that I intended to do everything possible to place her in an Oklahoma job, appropriately supervised by Bureau field staff (I failed; she came home as usual). He conveyed to me that he could not understand why I was so intent on keeping her away from home. This man succeeded to my position. The tribes and the local communities have little hope, except accidentally, of being competently served and educated, in the broad sense of this word, absent the careful recruitment of individuals who are qualified well beyond any position-description sheets. Today all such advertisements emphasize detailed Indian preference statements. The local, often isolated Indian communities starving for information, attention, and encouragement ordinarily do not care where any employees come from or about their racial characteristics. Of course, most tribal politicians—their attention fixed on the power center in Washington—can be counted on to say that they do.
Kelsey T. Kennedy, personnel officer at a Bureau field installation, wrote a letter of August 11, 1975, to all members of Congress enclosing a copy of a “petition,” really a paper titled “Indian Preference—An American Apartheid.” The covering letter states that the enclosure “seeks an end to the discriminatory, inequitable, and un-American policy of total Indian preference as practiced in the BIA today.” Kennedy says also, “Although I do not presume to speak for Indians, I believe this petition is in the interest of Indians and of all Americans.” Noting that at the time it was being circulated the federal government was fighting for the desegregation of Boston’s public schools, the paper reads in an opening paragraph:
Although the government’s apartheid policy for Indians is being pushed with equal vigor, most Americans are not aware of this policy because it has little impact on their lives. When this policy does attract public attention, efforts are made to conceal its malignant and pernicious nature and to make it appear benign and beneficial. Such slogans as “Indian self-determination,” “Indian involvement,” and “tribal assumption of programs affecting Indians” have become the catchwords to disguise Indian apartheid. Out of a vague sense of guilt and without any first hand knowledge of the situation, most non-Indian Americans react positively to such expressions as clear evidence of their government’s determination to improve the lot of Indians.
Kennedy brought the house down with the following observation, the noisiest applause coming from those of us who were sickened by the political games being played with the lives of Indians:
Although Indians have been the victims of many past injustices, the solutions to today’s Indian problems will not be found by turning back the clock or trying to undo the past. Solutions must be found within the context of the total American society of today. The popular stereotype of the Indian brave riding his trusty steed and shooting buffalo with his bow and arrow has no resemblance to the current realities of American Indian life. The future belongs to the Indian who can understand, adjust to, live with, socialize with, cooperate with, and compete with his fellow Americans of all races. The assumption that the Indian can be made whole by apartheid, by insulating him from his non-Indian neighbors and creating special Indian-made and Indian-operated social and political mechanisms to serve him is an unproved and unsound assumption. It smacks of social experimentation [emphasis mine].
Referring to the Morton-Bruce announcement of June 1972, Kennedy, who was surely knowledgeable of the BIA employment situation, held that with Indian preference limited to first appointments the 18,000 BIA force of the time was, nonetheless, two-thirds Indian. He emphasized that Indians, therefore, had achieved the 66 or so percent employment in the Bureau’s work-force through merit. When Kennedy was writing, the quarter-blood criterion was generally still being employed. With the dissemination of the 1977 regulations, Indianness in this context was expanded to all enrolled tribal members, consistent with Mancari, irrespective of the degree of their European or African ancestry.
In principle, membership in most tribes is based on some degree of Indian ancestry, however remote. However, there are many exceptions, and I refer to both Whites and Blacks. The Oklahoma Cherokee and Seminole tribes still contain enrolled Freedmen—Afroamericans descended from their former slaves. I do not know of any such enrolled “Indians” who have applied for Indian preference—but I am waiting. The regulations, however, inconsistent with Mancari and fundamentally racist, are based on the language of the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act (IRA), which includes persons who are descendants of members of tribes who were residents of any reservation on June 1, 1934. My wife has never lived on any Chippewa reservation, having been raised among her tribe’s ancestral enemies, the Sioux. If she had been born just a little earlier our children, who are not enrolled with any tribe, would be afforded Indian preference—and that would be ludicrous. The preferential list, again following the IRA, includes people of Alaskan Eskimo and Indian descent, making clear that any quantum of blood suffices, without regard to tribal membership. It further embraces anyone of one-half blood derived from tribes indigenous to the United States. This means that, for example, persons with New York Seneca fathers but White mothers, who are not admitted to this matrilineal tribe’s membership, are still given preference if the father is classed as a full-blood.
What have been the employment results of the bitterness, the confusion, and the damage to Indian programming of all these years beginning with Bennett’s first, deathless memorandum? During the fiscal year 1985 the total Indian complement of the BIA was just over 75 percent. This includes a great many fully acculturated, phenotypically White individuals, nominal Indians or Indians “by definition,” who are, more significantly, not the products of any Indian community. Naturally, no statistics are readily available for such variables. As the employment grades descend, the Indian percentage rises (so, too, does the level of cultural traditionalism). The higher reaches of BIA positions are reserved for those least Indian culturally, while the percentage of Indians at less than Civil Service Grade 6 is almost 97. In the BIA’s education office we find the lowest Indian figure, roughly 43 percent, this despite the incessant din created by those who insist that only Indians can possibly understand Indian children. These days practically all Agency superintendents, all the BIA Area directors, and many of the IHS field office heads are Indians. The IHS director is a White Kiowa and the BIA head is a White Cherokee.
More than twenty-five years ago the associate commissioner of Indian affairs, a White anthropologist, told a gathering of his colleagues that the superintendents had become “handmaidens to the tribal chairmen.” He should have included the area directors, and if he thought that the picture was bad at that time he would have been truly repelled if he had stayed around for a few more years. There was a time when serving one’s own tribe as agency superintendent was anathema, a notable exception in the 1940s being Crow agency.
A specially debilitating feature of Indian preference, a practice preceding Bennett’s tenure, is that of tribal councils reviewing and passing on all candidates for the higher-level field positions, and many of the lower ones. With all too great frequency the tribes demand and get their own members for superintendents and other positions, with the question of conflict of interest being raised—and ignored—every time. But this practice is, after all, entirely consistent with Mancari. The tribes are usually getting, including area directors, individuals who are more Americanized than the old Haskell elite. Together with all other exacerbated problems, nepotism, an old story in the BIA, has reached an alarming rate with whole families being employed, often at the same installation. But they are all “Indians,” more-or-less. Yes, but the involvement and influence of individual Indians is thereby lessened. Leave it to the Teton Sioux (who have been responsible for so much Indian policy) to set a standard that, fortunately, has not so far been followed by others. A few years ago on Pine Ridge the posts of tribal chief and agency chief were shared by full brothers, but their mother was a Creek.
Congress by the late 1970s at last began to examine the Indian preference mess insofar as some problems were concerned, one of which was the plight of non-Indian BIA and IHS personnel. Members of Congress noted that morale was shattered; many highly qualified staffers had left; others had nowhere to go and, denied promotions themselves, had to endure the spectacle of the advancement of the new and the less competent. It became acutely embarrassing for managers, Indian and non-Indian, to turn away well-qualified non-Indian applicants (or to quietly advise them, as I did, not to bother responding to a position advertisement). The powers that be, still entrenched, had developed a technique disbelieved by non-Indian applicants. For a given position opening, assuming several non-Indian candidates and one Indian candidate, only the Indian, despite minimal qualifications, would appear on the certification list presented to the selecting office. However, in a few offices non-Indian professionals were actively, if surreptitiously recruited. In one of these shops, almost wholly and compromisingly White, an applicant was quickly assisted in establishing his remote Cherokee ancestry and, in this instance, his tribal membership. He is a highly professional person, but an Indian in no more than the legal sense. Federal Court decisions and administrative practice are causing otherwise proud, well-qualified people to graft new roots on their family trees, solely to achieve positions they deserve on the basis of their own merits.
Congresswoman Gladys Spellman from Maryland and Senators Stevens from Alaska and Percy from Illinois, among others, became aware of the injustices and the gross failures of the whole system and began to allude to the dissatisfaction also expressed by Indian leaders. Simultaneously they were of a mind, reluctantly so because of the potential of setting a bad precedent, to ease the burden of the affected non-Indians. I do not know of any politician who seriously considered amending the Indian Reorganization Act and other statutes containing Indian-preference provisions. The political hazards of such a bold step would be too heavy to bear.
The so-called remedy, for which we all are expected to remain grateful, was to legislate the “Honkey Out Act” of December 5, 1979. The legislation made retirement for non-Indians within certain categories somewhat attractive. In my own case it permitted an early retirement—without full benefits—after twenty-five years of service regardless of my age. It also provided for those employees who reached fifty-five years of age within five years of the date of the act to make a decision about taking advantage of the provisions, unless a waiver was secured for one year. The act was recently (and very, very quietly) amended to permit those who had reached the mandatory class to continue for another five years. Today there is only a handful of these die-hards left, since the legislation encouraged an exodus of the “Old Honkies” in December 1984.
I followed the crowd two months later. With their passing, and mine, the BIA soon fell apart, a fact only now entering the consciousness of journalists and the Congress. I have much respect and sympathy for those few professionals, Indian and non-Indian, still with that agency. There remains an unjust and as usual unforeseen ramification. I refer to the Indian employees who never received Indian-preference in any form, including initial employment when the quarter-blood criterion was in vogue. They are being told they cannot retire under the act. Included are the employees who became officially enrolled tribal members long after they entered the Indian Service. Often enough their tribes only lately established formal enrollment criteria. These people are among the innocent victims of these discriminatory policies. So, too, are most of the others who have been granted preference in hiring and promotion on the basis of race, although they and patronizing Americans may not yet be aware of it.
Nowhere else within the minority-preference syndrome, legal or otherwise, has the principle of affirmative discrimination been so applied. In its first BIA applications it was unique; and it is now found in every federal agency containing an “Indian desk” or even an “Indian interest” of any kind, such as Housing and Urban Development and the Smithsonian Institution. It is also found in state agencies handling special Indian programming of all types, and includes our universities, private and public. And it is found in the Vatican. When Kateri or Catherine Tekakwitha, a Mohawk, was approaching beatification, the step before canonization, the Church admitted that there were no bona fide miracles to be ascribed to her intercession. In all other cases miracles have been necessary to achieve beatification—but not for an Indian, and there were no other Indian candidates. She was beatified in 1980 amidst much pomp and ceremony including a Catholic Indian pilgrimage to Rome to see the Pope, who had waived the standard qualifications, expressing the Church’s own version of affirmative discrimination. I was unaware of any ethnic or racial preferences to be found among the company of saints. Non-Indians who have made their way up through the ranks, like San Francesco of Calabria, of whom it is still said that a day he did not work a miracle was a miracle, are fortunately not concerned about promotions on the basis of their ancestry. They did not ascend heavenward through the branches of their family trees.
This essay is an excerpt from the author’s forthcoming, “Why Don’t They Give Them Guns? The Great American Indian Myth” 1990. Lanham, MD: The University Press of America, used by permission of the author.
1 For an official biography of this “effective bureaucrat who worked within the system rather than as a leader,” see Ellis 1979.
2 De Funis et al. v. Odegaard et al., 416 U.S. 312 (1974).
3 Morton et al. v. Mancari, et al., 417 U.S. 535 (1974).
Ellis, Richard N. 1979. “Robert L. Bennett: 1966-69.” In The Commissioners of Indian Affairs, 1824-1977. R.M. Kvasnicka and H.J. Viola, eds. Lincoln: The University of Nebraska Press. 325-331.
Glazer, Nathan. 1987. Affirmative Discrimination: Ethnic Inequality and Public Policy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Morello, Steve. 1970. “Getting ‘More Than Words’.” Binghamton, New York Press, October 27.