LADONNA HARRIS

LaDonna Vita Tabbytite Harris is the founder of Americans for Indian Opportunity (AIO), which advances, from an indigenous worldview, the cultural, political, and economic rights of indigenous peoples in the United States and around the world. She was a founder of Common Cause, is active in the leadership of numerous other advocacy organizations, and was an honorary cochair of the 2017 Women’s March on Washington. Her autobiography, published in 2000, is LaDonna Harris: A Comanche Life.

LaDonna and her husband, Senator Fred Harris, lived down the street from our family in McLean, Virginia. Fred and my father were close allies in the Senate, and LaDonna was one of the leading advocates for Native American rights, which were very important to Daddy both as attorney general and later as senator. We often visited Indian reservations, and our home was filled with extraordinary artwork and craftsmanship from Native Americans. The Harrises often came to our home, and my mother and father took us on walks during the weekend, when we would drop in on our neighbors. LaDonna held a special place in my heart as a child, and I was delighted to reconnect with her after many decades for this interview.

Kerry Kennedy: LaDonna, let’s just go back to that day when you were at our dining table in Virginia in 1965. You were there with your grandmother. Her name was Wiki Tabbytite.

LaDonna Harris: My husband, Fred, was senator then—he was working closely with your father—and your mother invited us over when she found out my grandmother was coming to Washington. My grandmother had given Lady Bird Johnson a shawl when she was campaigning in Oklahoma City, and Lady Bird said, “When you come to Washington, we’ll give you a tour of the White House.” It was her first plane ride ever, and she met all the members of the Senate, and your mother invited us to come to your house for tea. All of you were in that little sunroom at Hickory Hill, and you got to ask your questions. My grandmother made you a member of the Comanche tribe and gave you an Indian name. Do you still remember it?

KK: Yes! Tsah Wakie, it means “One who looks for the best in everything”! I still have the certificate she gave me that day—it’s one of my prized possessions. My father had such a special affinity with the Indians, and I picked up on that. When he asked what we wanted to be when we grew up, my siblings all said a lawyer or a vet or a senator and I always said I wanted to be an Indian. Kind of cute, but really it came from a child’s understanding of her father’s deep respect for and the depth of his bond with so many tribes.

LH: That’s it! Oh, yes, thank you for remembering. It just makes me think of her.

KK: I could never forget that name. I use it all the time; my kids even know that name.

LH: Good! Well, she always wore traditional clothes and braided hair, and she told everybody when she got back that she met all of Bobby Kennedy’s children, and Ethel—that meant a lot to her, because it was so personal and intimate with your mother at your house. Before she went to your house, the international press wanted to interview her, and they asked her what impressed her the most, and she said, “All these trees.” She didn’t say any of the people that she met; she’d had a tour of the White House and everything. She was impressed by the green trees in Northern Virginia too. In Western Oklahoma it’s all brown flat plains.

KK: My father visited Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota for the second time during the ’68 presidential campaign. On June 5, 1968, he found out he’d won 99 percent of the vote from Pine Ridge. Why was he so popular in Indian country?

LH: Well, he wasn’t just a politician. He showed real concern and real interest. He knew how to talk to people and get them to express themselves on whatever issues that were important to them. Nobody else did that. I call South Dakota and North Dakota our Mississippi—the Indians’ Mississippi—the treatment was so blatantly prejudiced there. People up there, how they were treated, it was just two hundred times worse than anything I ever experienced growing up in Oklahoma. They were just so abused, they seemed to be trapped, until he came along. He came in 1963 and gave a beautiful speech to the National Conference of American Indians in South Dakota, and the people responded to him. He made a difference. Those children and young people in Oklahoma, it was the highlight of their youth to meet him. They went on to college, many of them, and they would come up to me years later and say, “Miss Harris, I’m one of your OIO babies, and now I’ve got a degree, or a master’s degree, I’m working on my PhD.” OIO is Oklahomans for Indian Opportunity, which was our educational program. Your father touched many lives because he knew how to listen. Your father and my husband, Fred, were trying to protect the poor people in the committee hearings. The Senate was going to change the law to make poor people, including Indians, work for their welfare checks.

KK: That’s not necessarily a bad idea, unless there are literally no jobs at all, which is what they faced in the Dakotas. And government must educate students so graduates are prepared to take those jobs.

LH: I listened in on that hearing. Your father asked questions in a way that helped the Indians who were testifying make their case. It was poignant. Your father and Fred worked together on a lot of things, along with Senator [Walter] Mondale. They were the youngest members of the Senate, and they all sat together in the back, and they got themselves in lots of trouble sometimes. They stood up against the old guys in the Senate on many issues. It was great!

KK: LaDonna, what comes through so much in your life story is how you were able both to retain traditional Comanche values and to integrate fully into the dominant colonial society. That had to be a very difficult balance.

LH: Many times it was. The Southwest Center for Human Relations Studies—they were the intellectuals of Oklahoma—they asked Fred to be on the board and he didn’t have the time, but he told them that if they asked me, they’d get two for one, since I’d tell him what I was doing and get his input. When they were talking about African American affairs and labor relations, I asked them, “What about Indians?” They said, “The Bureau of Indian Affairs is taking care of them.” I burst into tears. I said, “That’s part of the problem.” I lacked the confidence to communicate to them what the issue was. Many people have prejudice, and they’re not even aware of it. When we were interviewing Indian children trying to figure out how to stop the horrible dropout rate, eighth and ninth graders would say, “Indians can’t make straight A’s.” We would ask why they thought that was true, and they said their teachers told them that. We said, “Well, that girl sitting next to you made straight A’s!” They had such low self-esteem.

As a child, I was called squaw and gut eater. I came crying to my grandmother, and she told me, “They’re just pitiful people and they don’t understand you. They don’t know about Indians. They don’t know about our values. Don’t be mad; you just have to figure out a way to talk to them.” Let me go back to that values thing. One of the things that even Native peoples were saying was that Indian people live in two worlds: their cultural world and the white world. You’re leaving your values at home and changing your values when you come off the reservation and go into town. That’s not a good thing, because we don’t live in two worlds, we live in one world.

So we really worked on that, and we found that encouraging people to celebrate the richness of their own culture was helping them with their identity and making them stronger and more able to contribute. When we reinforced them in their worldview, they became independent individuals. They were Indians who had their own values, living in the larger world, but carrying their values with them.

KK: Did you still experience a tension between being an advocate for Indian rights and, as a woman, having to advocate for women’s rights within the Indian movement?

LH: I did, but in Comanche culture, it was a more balanced society. There wasn’t such a great distinction. Women controlled the home, the cultural and community activities, and we are matrilineal. When a young man married, he came to live with his wife’s people, and he would be indoctrinated in the way the wife’s family did things. There were certain etiquettes: the mother-in-law shouldn’t speak directly to her son-in-law, for example; she should tell her daughter to tell the son-in-law what she wanted him to know, so there would be no possibility of disruption or argument. The culture was designed to alleviate any dysfunction or conflict; we had protocols designed to do that. If a man bragged too much when he came home from war, or said he had done this or that, and that proved not to be so, the woman could give him a war bonnet, and he would have to live up to the war bonnet, which might really endanger his life. A woman could discipline a man publicly if he misbehaved or abused her. Children were never physically punished; I was never physically punished. Parents are supposed to be loving. If some discipline was needed, they could ask the aunty or the uncle to come and verbally correct the children. It was done just with tone of voice. Women’s roles were quite equal to the men’s: the women were heads of households, while the men were off hunting or raiding. It was a more equitable community, more balanced.

The struggle was never for women’s equality in the Native American community, except for where cultural oppression took over. The struggle was to educate the women’s movement about women of color. That’s where the struggle was.

It was very hard. I was an original convener at the Women’s Political Caucus, with Gloria Steinem and Shirley Chisholm. At the start, we noticed that almost everybody was Anglo, so they said, “Can we reach out and get some diversity?” We had sessions with African American women, and they would wind up with each group being almost mad at the other. So they started their own group, and the indigenous women started our own group. I could never figure out what the problems had been with communication. It was insidious; it was so embedded in the American culture that it was difficult to get to the bottom of the disagreements. I felt I had let everybody down. I still don’t know how to tell an individual what it is in her behavior that hurts people who are being excluded. I still haven’t been able to get that. There’s something about it: people have their truth; their point of view is the truth, so somebody else’s can’t be true. It’s white privilege, I guess; that’s the term everybody’s using nowadays. They don’t even see that they’re acting that way. They would be appalled if somebody brought it to their attention. It’s not something like Jim Crow laws, something obvious; it’s more subtle, so you don’t see the barriers, you just see that people can’t get past them.

The thing about your father was that he knew how to get past things like that. He knew he needed to learn and he wanted to learn. He didn’t have an attitude of White privilege toward people of color or any people who were different from himself. You always got the feeling you could share with him, and he would understand what you were saying. My strength, which is from my Comanche culture, is that I would wait to read people. I learned that at a very early age. I think it was kind of a defense mechanism, a way to make sure these people wouldn’t be able to hurt my feelings. I would figure out how to work with them. Even in high school, I was the first Indian ever nominated for anything. I give my Comanche grandmother and grandfather credit for it: they taught me how to be fair with people who were not informed about our culture.

If you use a lot of negative energy, they’ve defeated you, because then they’ve taken away some of your medicine. I shared many of our Comanche ideas with your dad. I talked to him about how everybody has medicine. That’s the philosophy of the Comanche. Everybody has medicine; everybody has value. When people are hurtful, just look at them and think, “Bless your heart, you don’t know any better.” I don’t feel bad about it anymore, though sometimes I still get aggravated. I try to give some of my time to helping people understand Indians. We have a slide show presentation—“Indian 101” workshop, because most Americans don’t know much about Native Americans as we are not in the history books. We talk about history, the different cultures and different values, and the whole thing is reinforcing their understanding that our worldview is valuable enough that it should be at the table.

KK: Mental health is a big issue in Indian Country, where the suicide rates are horrifically high. You’ve worked to help people with mental health challenges, and you investigated conditions in institutions back in the 1960s. Are you surprised that fifty years later we still don’t treat mental health on parity with physical health?

LH: While living in Washington, there was a need for a Native American to serve on Carter’s Commission on the Mental Health of Children. I was the only person without any education in the field; everybody else had two or three degrees and they were professors of psychology or psychiatry. I went to that meeting—and this is the example of not recognizing their own issues. They would come up with something, these great learned people, and they would say such and such, and I would say, “Well, I don’t think that would apply to children of color. I know for sure it wouldn’t apply to Indian children.” They were very condescending; they said, “That’s all right, LaDonna,” and they just went on. I liked them individually, and I decided to invite them to the house for summer supper. In the meantime, my Comanche relatives from Oklahoma were in town, because we were starting Americans for Indian Opportunity, so I invited them to come out too. We’d all had cocktails, and Bill, who worked with me and was Comanche, walked up to one of those PhD doctors, and who was wearing a bolo tie. Bill grabbed that bolo and said, “Just be glad it’s wooden. If it was turquoise I’d have to whip your ass.” At my little dinner party! But nobody heard me when I tried to explain the issue to them. One of my other guests was an African American professor of psychiatry, from Harvard, and they talked to him. He could speak their language, so he didn’t sound like the angry black man, but to have this angry Indian attack this guy with a bolo tie, that was just beyond their perception. At the next meeting we had—they had called a special meeting—they said, “We’re going to create a committee on the mental health of minority children,” and they did that. They said I planned it that way, and I said, “No, I didn’t. But I’m glad you’re doing this!” On that committee we had two black psychiatrists; a Hispanic; another Indian activist, Ada Deer; a Japanese man who was in a concentration camp as a child; and me. It was a really neat group. The black psychiatrist from Harvard was there too, Price Cobbs, who, with William Grier, coauthored the book Black Rage. Our approach was, we looked at the patient, we looked at the abused person. Our conclusion: white racism was the number one mental health problem for children. The Commission wouldn’t accept our report. They rejected the report from all these great, learned people; they wouldn’t incorporate it. It’s somewhere in the basement of the National Institute of Mental Health. It never got published.

What I tell people now is, Let’s quit looking at the victims, and let’s look at the perpetrators. Let’s say, “What is wrong on that side of it?” It’s so difficult to talk about white privilege—I don’t even love the term—but how do we talk about it so people can look at themselves and see what they’re doing? So much of it is from childhood experiences. I know I had to clean up my language coming from Oklahoma, because we had funny little tacky things we said, that were names—“Little Sharpshooter” and things—that were racist by nature. The children and I used to have games at the house, and if people said anything racist or antifeminist, they’d have marks against them and we’d get to make fun of them. They caught me—I wasn’t as bad as they were, but we all have it. First you have to recognize how people get that way. We all had little goofy, ugly, racist names for certain kinds of things. We learned not to say those things. And also sexist things, we got sexist terminology out of our vocabulary too. When we talk about race, we tend to look at the victims: “Isn’t that a shame what’s happening to them?” What you need to think about is what a person in a racist society has to think up in their minds to adequately exist in that society. The browning of America is occurring with our Hispanic population, and ours, and all the people of color are having children, and the other population is going down. I think that’s what we’re seeing in the West; they’re afraid the people of color are going to take over. That’s why they were so mean and ugly to Obama. I think they felt he was instrumental in the browning of America, on his own. If you look at our population now, there’s nobody really preparing us for it. We look at it as a racist society, which it is. What we need to do is figure out other ways of talking to each other. We need to understand how people deceive themselves. We need to see how that affects people of color who suffer from racism. That’s the behavior that makes children of color suffer from mental health issues. Racism can mess up your mind, whether you’re a racist or a victim of racism.

I always knew I didn’t have the answers. I went to my grandmother, and I said I was having a problem, and she said to me in Comanche, but I’m translating, “I don’t know what to tell you because what you’re going through is so different from what I went through.” She went to an Indian boarding school; she was actually born in a Tipi. She told me, “You’re going to have to figure it out yourself. Use your Comanche ways to figure it out. You don’t have to have all the answers; the people you’re working with will help you solve your issues.” We organized Oklahomans for Indian Opportunity; we lowered the dropout rate from 75 percent to 35 percent in the Indian community; we started some businesses; we started Americans for Indian Opportunity; and it was those Indian values that helped me succeed in those things. Those values are still strong; we always go to the community for help, to work out the issues we have. We have an ambassadors program; it’s a leadership program. We looked up the word leadership in the dictionary and it said “somebody who has authority over someone.” We knew that didn’t match our values in the Indian community, so we call them ambassadors from their tribe.

Everybody has medicine; some people’s medicine is nurturing. Your mom and dad both nurtured you, to have a drive to do good in the community. That comes from recognizing that everybody has value. I think your dad had that medicine—to nurture and to recognize that everybody has value. And he was always a fighter for justice for the poor and minorities.

KK: LaDonna, talk about violence perpetrated by non-Indians against women.

LH: We can never stop fighting. In 1978, they took away our jurisdiction. We have sophisticated tribal court systems, but we no longer have jurisdiction over criminal acts committed on the reservation by non-Indians. When people got arrested, if they weren’t a member of the tribe, we had no control over them, and there are nowhere near enough federal prosecutors to handle the rapes and other violent crimes. Amnesty International did a study on how many rape cases were perpetrated by non-Indian people coming onto the reservation, and there were a huge number, because serial rapists knew they could get away with it. The Violence Against Women Act was up for reauthorization in 2013, and we fought for and got back the power to prosecute non-Indians who perpetrate violent crimes against Native women on tribal land. It was a great victory, and the women’s movement came together and helped us do that—Amnesty International and the women’s movement in Washington.

KK: As I recall, one-third of all rapes of Indian women on the reservation were committed by off-reservation white men. I don’t know if I mentioned this to you, but I was the chair of the Amnesty International leadership council at that time. We launched that report at the National Museum of the American Indian in New York City. There was a woman there who said: “My great-grandmother was raped. My grandmother was raped. My mother was raped. I was raped. My daughter was raped. My daughter just gave birth to my granddaughter, and I don’t want her to be raped.”

LH: It’s particularly bad in South and North Dakota. When I was traveling around, teaching at colleges, I experienced it. You felt like you were in danger all the time. You had to be on alert. There were places in Nebraska and also in New Mexico that were just as notorious. The women voters’ organization studied that for a while and found that more of our people were arrested and had longer jail sentences. The Indians in South Dakota were 7 percent of the total population and 16 percent of the prison population. Now they’re into the sex trade in North Dakota—that’s so scary. It’s the oil boom up there. It’s destroying the communities affected by it. We can never stop fighting, and we will never stop fighting.