THE RED AND THE BLACKCIVIL RIGHTS HAS been the most important and least understood movement of our generation. To some it has seemed to be a simple matter of fulfilling rights outlined by the Constitutional amendments after the Civil War. To others, particularly church people, Civil Rights has appeared to be a fulfillment of the brotherhood of man and the determination of humanity’s relationship to God. To those opposing the movement, Civil Rights has been a foreign conspiracy which has threatened the fabric of our society.
For many years the movement to give the black people rights equal to those of their white neighbors was called Race Relations. The preoccupation with race obscured the real issues that were developing and meant that programs devised to explore the area of race always had a black orientation.
To the Indian people it has seemed quite unfair that churches and government agencies concentrated their efforts primarily on the blacks. By defining the problem as one of race and making race refer solely to black, Indians were systematically excluded from consideration. National church groups have particularly used race as a means of exploring minority-group relations. Whatever programs or policies outlined from national churches to their affiliates and parishes were generally black-oriented programs which had been adapted to include Indians.
There was probably a historical basis for this type of thinking. In many states in the last century, Indians were classified as white by laws passed to exclude blacks. So there was a connotation that Indians might in some way be like whites. But in other areas, particularly marriage laws, Indians were classified as blacks and this connotation really determined the role into which the white man forced the red man. Consequently, as far as most Race Relations were concerned, Indians were classified as non-whites.
There has been no way to positively determine in which category Indians belong when it comes to federal agencies. The Bureau of Indian Affairs consistently defined Indians as good guys who have too much dignity to demonstrate, hoping to keep the Indian people separate from the ongoing Civil Rights movement. Other agencies generally adopted a semi-black orientation. Sometimes Indians were treated as if they were blacks and other times not.
The Civil Rights Commission and the Community Relations Service always gave only lip service to Indians until it was necessary for them to write an annual report. At that time they always sought out some means of including Indians as a group with which they had worked the previous fiscal year. That was the extent of Indian relationship with the agency: a paragraph in the annual report and a promise to do something next year.
Older Indians, as a rule, have been content to play the passive role outlined for them by the bureau. They have wanted to avoid the rejection and bad publicity given activists.
The Indian people have generally avoided confrontations between the different minority groups and confrontations with the American public at large. They have felt that any publicity would inevitably have bad results and since the press seemed dedicated to the perpetuation of sensationalism rather than straight reporting of the facts, great care has been taken to avoid the spotlight. Because of this attitude, Indian people have not become well known in the field of inter-group and race relations. Consequently they have suffered from the attitudes of people who have only a superficial knowledge of minority groups and have attached a certain stigma to them.
The most common attitude Indians have faced has been the unthoughtful Johnny-come-lately liberal who equates certain goals with a dark skin. This type of individual generally defines the goals of all groups by the way he understands what he wants for the blacks. Foremost in this category have been younger social workers and clergymen entering the field directly out of college or seminary. For the most part they have been book-fed and lack experience in life. They depend primarily upon labels and categories of academic import rather than on any direct experience. Too often they have achieved positions of prominence as programs have been expanded to meet needs of people. In exercising their discretionary powers administratively, they have run roughshod over Indian people. They have not wanted to show their ignorance about Indians. Instead, they prefer to place all people with darker skin in the same category of basic goals, then develop their programs to fit these preconceived ideas.
* * *
Since the most numerous group has been the blacks, programs designed for blacks were thought adequate for all needs of all groups. When one asks a liberal about minority groups, he unconsciously seems to categorize them all together for purposes of problem solving. Hence, dark-skinned and minority group as categorical concepts have brought about the same basic results—the Indian is defined as a subcategory of black.
Cultural differences have only seemed to emphasize the white liberal’s point of view in lumping the different communities together. When Indians have pointed out real differences that do exist, liberals have tended to dismiss the differences as only minor aberrations which distinguish different racial groups.
At one conference on education of minority groups, I once mentioned the existence of some three hundred Indian languages which made bicultural and bilingual education a necessity. I was immediately challenged by several white educators who attempted to prove that blacks also have a language problem. I was never able to make the difference real to them. For the conference people the point had again been established that minority groups all had the same basic problems.
Recently, blacks and some Indians have defined racial problems as having one focal point—the White Man. This concept is a vast oversimplification of the real problem, as it centers on a racial theme rather than on specific facts. And it is simply the reversal of the old prejudicial attitude of the white who continues to define minority groups as problems of his—that is, Indian problem, Negro problem, and so on.
Rather than race or minority grouping, non-whites have often been defined according to their function within the American society. Negroes, as we have said, were considered draft animals, Indians wild animals. So too, Orientals were considered domestic animals and Mexicans humorous lazy animals. The white world has responded to the non-white groups in a number of ways, but primarily according to the manner in which it believed the non-whites could be rescued from their situation.
Thus Orientals were left alone once whites were convinced that they preferred to remain together and presented no basic threat to white social mores. Mexicans were similarly discarded and neglected when whites felt that they preferred to remain by themselves. In both cases there was no direct confrontation between whites and the two groups because there was no way that a significant number of them could be exploited. They owned little; they provided little which the white world coveted.
With the black and the Indian, however, tensions increased over the years. Both groups had been defined as animals with which the white had to have some relation and around whom some attitude must be formed. Blacks were ex-draft animals who somehow were required to become non-black. Indeed, respectability was possible for a black only by emphasizing characteristics and features that were non-black. Indians were the ex-wild animals who had provided the constant danger for the civilizing tendencies of the invading white. They always presented a foreign aspect to whites unfamiliar with the western hemisphere.
The white man adopted two basic approaches in handling blacks and Indians. He systematically excluded blacks from all programs, policies, social events, and economic schemes. He could not allow blacks to rise from their position because it would mean that the evolutionary scheme had superseded the Christian scheme and that man had perhaps truly descended from the ape.
With the Indian the process was simply reversed. The white man had been forced to deal with the Indian in treaties and agreements. It was difficult, therefore, to completely overlook the historical antecedents such as Thanksgiving, the plight of the early Pilgrims, and the desperate straits from which various Indian tribes had often rescued the whites. Indians were therefore subjected to the most intense pressure to become white. Laws passed by Congress had but one goal—the Anglo-Saxonization of the Indian. The antelope had to become a white man.
Between these two basic attitudes, the apelike draft animal and the wild free-running antelope, the white man was impaled on the horns of a dilemma he had created within himself.
* * *
It is well to keep these distinctions clearly in mind when talking about Indians and blacks. When the liberals equate the two they are overlooking obvious historical facts. Never did the white man systematically exclude Indians from his schools and meeting places. Nor did the white man ever kidnap black children from their homes and take them off to a government boarding school to be educated as whites. The white man signed no treaties with the black. Nor did he pass any amendments to the Constitution to guarantee the treaties of the Indian.
The basic problem which has existed between the various racial groups has not been one of race but of culture and legal status. The white man systematically destroyed Indian culture where it existed, but separated blacks from his midst so that they were forced to attempt the creation of their own culture.
The white man forbade the black to enter his own social and economic system and at the same time force-fed the Indian what he was denying the black. Yet the white man demanded that the black conform to white standards and insisted that the Indian don feathers and beads periodically to perform for him.
The white man presented the problem of each group in contradictory ways so that neither black nor Indian could understand exactly where the problem existed or how to solve it. The Indian was always told that his problem was one of conflicting cultures. Yet, when solutions were offered by the white man, they turned out to be a reordering of the legal relationship between red and white. There was never a time when the white man said he was trying to help the Indian get into the mainstream of American life that he did not also demand that the Indian give up land, water, minerals, timber, and other resources which would enrich the white men.
The black also suffered from the same basic lie. Time after time legislation was introduced which purported to give the black equal rights with the white but which ultimately restricted his life and opportunities, even his acceptance by white people. The initial Civil Rights Act following the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth amendments was assumed to give the blacks equal rights with “white citizens.” In fact, it was so twisted that it took nearly a century to bring about additional legislation to confirm black rights.
In June of 1968 the Supreme Court finally interpreted an ancient statute in favor of blacks in the matter of purchasing a house. Had the right existed for nearly a century without anyone knowing it? Of course not, the white had simply been unwilling to give in to the black. Can one blame the black athletes at the recent Olympic Games for their rebellion against the role cast for them by white society? Should they be considered as specially trained athletic animals suitable only for hauling away tons of gold medals for the United States every four years while equality remains as distant as it ever was?
It is time for both black and red to understand the ways of the white man. The white is after Indian lands and resources. He always has been and always will be. For Indians to continue to think of their basic conflict with the white man as cultural is the height of folly. The problem is and always has been the adjustment of the legal relationship between the Indian tribes and the federal government, between the true owners of the land and the usurpers.
The black must understand that whites are determined to keep him out of their society. No matter how many Civil Rights laws are passed or how many are on the drawing board, the basic thrust is to keep the black out of society and harmless. The problem, therefore, is not one of legal status, it is one of culture and social and economic mobility. It is foolish for a black to depend upon a law to make acceptance of him by the white possible. Nor should he react to the rejection. His problem is social, and economic, and cultural, not one of adjusting the legal relationship between the two groups.
When the black seeks to change his role by adjusting the laws of the nation, he merely raises the hope that progress is being made. But for the majority of blacks progress is not being made. Simply because a middle-class black can eat at the Holiday Inn is not a gain. People who can afford the best generally get it. A socio-economic, rather than legal adjustment must consequently be the goal.
* * *
But the understanding of the racial question does not ultimately involve understanding by either blacks or Indians. It involves the white man himself. He must examine his past. He must face the problems he has created within himself and within others. The white man must no longer project his fears and insecurities onto other groups, races, and countries. Before the white man can relate to others he must forego the pleasure of defining them. The white man must learn to stop viewing history as a plot against himself.
It was more than religious intolerance that drove the early colonists across the ocean. More than a thousand years before Columbus, the barbaric tribes destroyed the Roman Empire. With utter lack of grace, they ignorantly obliterated classical civilization. Christanity swept across the conquerors like the white man later swept across North America, destroying native religions and leaving paralyzed groups of disoriented individuals in its wake. Then the combination of Christian theology, superstition, and forms of the old Roman civil government began to control the tamed barbaric tribes. Gone were the religious rites of the white tribesmen. Only the Gothic arches in the great cathedrals, symbolizing the oaks under which their ancestors worshiped, remained to remind them of the glories that had been.
Not only did the European tribes lose their religion, they were subjected to a new form of economics which totally destroyed them: feudalism. The freedom that had formerly been theirs became only the freedom to toil on the massive estates. Even their efforts to maintain their ancient ways fell to the requirements of the feudal state as power centered in a few royal houses.
Feudalism saw man as a function of land and not as something in himself. The European tribes, unable to withstand the chaos of medieval social and political forces, were eliminated as power consolidated in a few hands. Far easier than the Indian tribes of this continent, the Europeans gave up the ghost and accepted their fate without questioning it. And they remained in subjection for nearly a millenium.
The religious monolith which Christianity had deviously constructed over the Indo-European peasants eventually showed cracks in its foundations. The revolution in religious thought triggered by Martin Luther’s challenge to Papal authority was merely an afterthought. It did no more than acknowledge that the gates had been opened a long time and that it was perfectly natural to walk through them into the new era.
In the sixteenth century Europe opened up the can of worms which had been carefully laid to rest a millenium earlier. The Reformation again brought up the question of the place of Western man in God’s scheme of events. Because there was no way the individual could relate to the past, he was told to relate to the other world, leaving this world free for nationalistic exploitation—the real forger of identity.
Because tribes and groups had been unable to survive, the common denominator, the individual, became the focal point of the revolt. Instead of socially oriented individuals, the Reformation produced self-centered individuals. Social and economic Darwinism, the survival of the fittest at any cost, replaced the insipid brotherhood of Christianity not because Christianity’s basic thrust was invalid, but because it had been corrupted for so long that it was no longer recognizable.
The centuries following the Reformation were marked with incredible turmoil. But the turmoil was not so much over religious issues as it was over interpretation of religious doctrines. Correctness of belief was preferred over truth itself. Man charged back into the historical mists to devise systems of thought which would connect him with the greats of the past. Fear of the unfamiliar became standard operating procedure.
Today Europe is still feeling the effects of the submersion of its original tribes following the demise of the Roman Empire. Western man smashes that which he does not understand because he never had the opportunity to evolve his own culture. Instead ancient cultures were thrust upon him while he was yet unprepared for them.
There lingers still the unsolved question of the primacy of the Roman Empire as contrasted with the simpler more relaxed life of the Goths, Celts, Franks, and Vikings.
Where feudalism conceived man as a function of land, the early colonists reversed the situation in their efforts to create “new” versions of their motherlands. Early settlers made land a function of man, and with a plentitude of land, democracy appeared to be the inevitable desire of God. It was relatively simple, once they had made this juxtaposition, to define Indians, blacks, and other groups in relation to land.
The first organizing efforts of the new immigrants were directed toward the process of transplanting European social and political systems in the new areas they settled. Thus New England, New France, New Spain, New Sweden, New Haven, New London, New York, New Jersey, Troy, Ithaca, and other names expressed their desire to relive the life they had known on the other side of the Atlantic—but to relive it on their own terms. No one seriously wanted to return to the status of peasant, but people certainly entertained the idea of indigenous royalty. If your ancestor got off the boat, you were one step up the ladder of respectability. Many Indians, of course, believe it would have been better if Plymouth Rock had landed on the Pilgrims than the Pilgrims on Plymouth Rock.
The early colonists did not flee religious persecution so much as they wished to perpetuate religious persecution under circumstances more favorable to them. They wanted to be the persecutors. The rigorous theocracies which quickly originated in New England certainly belie the myth that the first settlers wanted only religious freedom. Nothing was more destructive of man than the early settlements on this continent.
It would have been far better for the development of this continent had the first settlers had no illusions as to their motives. We have seen nearly five centuries of white settlement on this continent, yet the problems brought over from Europe remain unsolved and grow in basic intensity daily. And violence as an answer to the problem of identity has only covered discussion of the problem.
* * *
In transplanting Europe to these peaceful shores, the colonists violated the most basic principle of man’s history: certain lands are given to certain peoples. It is these peoples only who can flourish, thrive, and survive on the land. Intruders may hold sway for centuries but they will eventually be pushed from the land or the land itself will destroy them. The Holy Land, having been periodically conquered and beaten into submission by a multitude of invaders, today remains the land which God gave to Abraham and his descendants. So will America return to the red man.
The message of the Old Testament, the Hebrew-Jewish conception of the Homeland, has been completely overlooked. Culture, if any exists, is a function of the homeland, not a function of the economic system that appears to hold temporary sway over a region.
Thus the fundamental error of believing a transplant possible practically canceled any chances for significant evolution of a homogeneous people. Even more so, it canceled the potentiality of making the new settlements the land of the free and the home of the brave—not when it was already the home of the Indian brave.
There never really was a transplant. There was only a three-hundred-year orgy of exploitation. The most feverish activity in America has been land speculation. Nearly all transactions between Indian and white have been land transactions. With Emancipation, the first program offered the black was one hundred dollars, forty acres, and a mule! But when it appeared the black might be able to create something on the land, that was immediately taken away from him.
Land has been the basis on which racial relations have been defined ever since the first settlers got off the boat. Minority groups, denominated as such, have always been victims of economic forces rather than beneficiaries of the lofty ideals proclaimed in the Constitution and elsewhere. One hundred years of persecution after Emancipation, the Civil Rights laws of the 1950’s and 1960’s were all passed by use of the Interstate Commerce Clause of the Constitution. Humanity, at least on this continent, has been subject to the whims of the marketplace.
When we begin to talk of Civil Rights, therefore, it greatly confuses the issue and lessens our chances of understanding the forces involved in the rights of human beings. Rather, we should begin talking about actual economic problems; and in realistic terms we are talking about land.
No movement can sustain itself, no people can continue, no government can function, and no religion can become a reality except it be bound to a land area of its own. The Jews have managed to sustain themselves in the Diaspora for over two thousand years, but in the expectation of their homeland’s restoration. So-called power movements are primarily the urge of peoples to find their homeland and to channel their psychic energies through their land into social and economic reality. Without land and a homeland no movement can survive. And any movement attempting to build without clarifying its goals usually ends in violence, the energy from which could have been channeled toward sinking the necessary roots for the movement’s existence.
Civil Rights is a function of man’s desire for self-respect, not of his desire for equality. The dilemma is not one of tolerance or intolerance but one of respect or contempt. The tragedy of the early days of the Civil Rights movement is that many people, black, white, red, and yellow, were sold a bill of goods which said that equality was the eventual goal of the movement. But no one had considered the implications of so simple a slogan. Equality became sameness. Nobody noticed it, but everyone was trained to expect it. When equality did not come, black power did come and everybody began to climb the walls in despair.
* * *
In 1963, when the Civil Rights drive was at its peak, many of us who occupied positions of influence in Indian Affairs were severely chastised by the more militant churchmen for not having participated in the March on Washington. One churchman told me rather harshly that unless Indians got with it there would be no place for us in America’s future. Equality, he assured me, was going to be given to us whether we want it or not.
We knew, of course, that he had equality confused with sameness, but there was no way to make him understand. In the minds of most people in 1963, legal equality and cultural conformity were identical.
We refused to participate in the Washington March. In our hearts and minds we could not believe that blacks wanted to be the same as whites. And we knew that even if they did want that, the whites would never allow it to happen. As far as we could determine, white culture, if it existed, depended primarily upon the exploitation of land, people, and life itself. It relied upon novelties and fads to provide an appearance of change but it was basically an economic Darwinism that destroyed rather than created.
It was therefore no surprise to us when Stokely Carmichael began his black power escapade. We only wondered why it had taken so long to articulate and why blacks had not been able to understand their situation better at the beginning.
A year earlier, during the Selma March, Abernathy introduced Martin Luther King with a stirring speech. He reminded his audience that “God never leaves His people without a leader.” When we heard those words we knew where the Civil Rights movement was heading. It was then merely a question of waiting until the blacks began to explore peoplehood, toy with that idea for awhile, and then consider tribalism and nationalism.
Peoplehood is impossible without cultural independence, which in turn is impossible without a land base. Civil Rights as a movement for legal equality ended when the blacks dug beneath the equality fictions which white liberals had used to justify their great crusade. Black power, as a communications phenomenon, was a godsend to other groups. It clarified the intellectual concepts which had kept Indians and Mexicans confused and allowed the concept of self-determination suddenly to become valid.
In 1954, when the tribes were faced with the threat of termination as outlined in House Concurrent Resolution 108, the National Congress of American Indians had developed a Point Four Program aimed at creating self-determinative Indian communities. This program was ignored by Congress, bitterly opposed by the national church bodies and government agencies, undercut by white interest groups, and derided by the Uncle Tomahawks who had found security in being the household pets of the white establishment.
So, for many people, particularly those Indian people who had supported self-determination a decade earlier, Stokely Carmichael was the first black who said anything significant. Indian leadership quickly took the initiative, certain that with pressures developing from many points the goal of Indian development on the basis of tribal integrity could be realized. Using political leverage, the NCAI painstakingly began to apply itself to force change within the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
In April of 1966, following the forced resignation of Philleo Nash, as Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Stewart Udall, Secretary of the Interior, held a conference to determine what “they” could do for “their” Indians. The tribes balked at the idea of bureaucrats planning the future of Indian people without so much as a polite bow in their direction. So sixty-two tribes arrived at Santa Fe for their own meeting and forced Interior to realize that the days of casually making Indian policy at two-day conferences was officially over. It took, unfortunately, another two years for Udall to get the message that the Indian people meant business.
All through 1966 and 1967 Interior tried one scheme after another in an effort to sell an incredibly bad piece of legislation, the Omnibus Bill, to the tribes. In May of 1966 an embryo bill was conceived within Interior, which purported to solve all existing Indian problems. September of that year saw the Commissioner of Indian Affairs embark on a tour of the West to gather tribal suggestions “in case the Interior Department wanted to suggest some legislation”—coincidentally the bill of May, 1966.
In July of 1966, however, the National Congress of American Indians obtained a copy of the Interior bill. By September all of the tribes had versions of the proposed legislation—the same legislation which Interior claimed wouldn’t even be on the drawing boards until after the regional meetings to gather tribal opinions on legislative needs
Commissioner Bennett’s task of presenting a facade of consultation while Udall rammed the bill down the Indians’ throats later that year dissolved in smoke as irate tribal chairmen shot down the proposal before it left the launching pad.
As success followed success, Indians began to talk playfully of red power in terms similar to what SNCC was saying. The bureaucrats became confused as to which path the tribes would take next. After all, a two-year skirmish with the Secretary of the Interior and achievement of a standoff is enough to whet one’s appetite for combat.
As 1968 opened, national Indian Affairs appeared to be heading faster and faster toward real involvement with other minority groups. In January, twenty-six urban centers met at Seattle, Washington, to begin to plan for participation of urban Indians in national Indian affairs. Seattle was the high point of the red power movement. But Indians quickly veered away from “power” as a movement. We knew we had a certain amount of power developing. There was no need to advocate it. The task was now to use it.
Too, black power, as many Indian people began to understand it, was not so much an affirmation of black people as it was an anti-white reaction. Blacks, many Indian people felt, had fallen into the legal-cultural trap. They obviously had power in many respects. In some instances, publicity for example, blacks had much more power than anyone dreamed possible. Indians began to question why blacks did not use their impetus in decisive ways within the current administration, which was then sympathetic to the different minority groups.
As spring came Martin Luther King had begun to organize the Poor People’s Campaign. The thesis of the movement, as many of us understood it, was to be built around the existing poverty among the minority groups.
Indians had understood when Carmichael talked about racial and national integrity and the need for fine distinctions to be made between white and black. But when King began to indiscriminately lump together as one all minority communities on the basis of their economic status, Indians became extremely suspicious. The real issue for Indians—tribal existence within the homeland reservation—appeared to have been completely ignored. So where Indians could possibly have come into the continuing social movement of the 1960’s, the Poor People’s Campaign was too radical a departure from Indian thinking for the tribes to bridge.
Some Indians, under the name of Coalition of Indian Citizens, did attend the Washington encampment, but they remained by themselves, away from Resurrection City. By and large they did not have the support of the Indian community and were largely the creation of some national churches who wished to get Indians involved in the Poor People’s Campaign. With church funding, these individuals wandered around Washington vainly trying to bring about a “confrontation” with Interior officials. They were sitting ducks for the pros of Interior, however, and the effects of their visits were negligible.
* * *
The remainder of 1968 was a traumatic experience for Indian tribes. Ideology shifted rapidly from topic to topic and dared not solidify itself in any one place for fear of rejection. National leaders trod softly when discussing issues. No one seemed to know which direction the country would take. Return to the old integration movement seemed out of the question. Continuing to push power movements against the whole of society seemed just as senseless.
Cautiously the subject of capital began to come into discussions. Too many Indian people realized the gulf that existed between the various groups in American society. A tremendous undefined need for consolidation, capitalization, and withdrawal took hold of Indian Affairs. Many tribal chairmen began to withdraw from conferences and others began to hedge their bets by remaining close to the reservation.
Tribal leaders became concerned about ongoing economic development which would be aimed at eventual economic independence for their tribes, rather than accepting every grant they could squeeze out of government agencies.
The National Congress of American Indians refused to join the Poor People’s March because the goals were too generalized. Instead the NCAI began a systematic national program aimed at upgrading tribal financial independence.
In 1968 Indian leadership finally accepted the thesis that they would have to match dollar for dollar in income and program to fight the great clash between white and non-white that was coming in the months ahead. And Indian leaders began to realize that they had a fair chance of winning.
Many tribes began to shift their funds from the U.S. Treasury into the stock market. Mutual funds and stocks and bonds became the primary interest of the tribal councils. Those tribes with funds available put them into high-paying investment programs. Other tribes ordered a general cutback on overhead to give them additional funds for programming and investment.
In the move toward capitalization the tribes followed the basic ideas outlined years before by Clyde Warrior and others when the National Indian Youth Council first began to concentrate on building viable Indian communities. But it was too late for the National Indian Youth Council to take advantage of their success. Warrior died in July of 1968, some say of alcohol, most say of a broken heart.
Warrior had already been a rebel in 1964 when the majority of the tribes had lined up to support the Johnson-Humphrey ticket in the general election. Clyde supported Goldwater. His basic thesis in supporting Goldwater was that emotional reliance on a Civil Rights bill to solve the black’s particular cultural question was the way to inter-group disaster. Warrior had been right.
What the different racial and minority groups had needed was not a new legal device for obliterating differences but mutual respect with economic and political independence. By not encouraging any change in the status quo, Goldwater had offered the chance for consolidation of gains at a time when the Indian people had great need to consolidate. Now consolidation was a move that may have started too late.
When a person understands the basic position developed by Warrior in 1964, one comes to realize the horror with which the Indian people contemplated their situation in 1968.
All the white man could offer, all that Johnson offered, was a minor adjustment in the massive legal machinery that had been created over a period of three hundred years. Rights of minority groups and reactions of the white majority depended solely on which parts of the machinery were being adjusted.
For many Indians the white had no culture other than one of continual exploitation. How then, they wondered, could an adjustment in methods of exploitation which had prevented formation of a culture solve their cultural problem? Thoughtful Indians, young and old, began to withdraw as they saw America building up toward a period of violent conflict. The basic problems which the colonists had brought over from Europe had not been solved and many felt there was a great danger that they would be solved violently in the future.
Culture, as Indian people understood it, was basically a lifestyle by which a people acted. It was self-expression, but not a conscious self-expression. Rather, it was an expression of the essence of a people.
All the white man had succeeded in creating in his time on this continent had been a violent conglomerate of individuals, not a people. Being a people is more a state of mind than it is a definable quality. Indians had it and now they began to give much consideration to strengthening that state of mind before racial conflict engulfed them.
When one is an integral part of the Indian world view, his values are oriented according to the social values inherent in the culture itself. Social relations become not merely patterns of behavior but customs which dominate behavior so that the culture becomes self-perpetuating. Once the cultural values take hold, crises do not cause disorientation. Thus the Indian enters a state of mind and behavior in which many things of secondary concern to him would ordinarily cause a non-Indian great emotional turmoil. Once a person is a vital part of the Indian frame of mind, it is impossible to leave. Like an old cavalry or circus horse, the call to action invoked by some distant echo produces certain action which everyone accepts as Indian. Since definition, any definition, is canceled by experience, Indian people have tended to equate behavior patterns with culture. Racial conflicts have not tended to be as important as have actual events.
There is, therefore, basically no way in which the ideology of the Civil Rights movement could reach Indian communities in a communicative sense. Outside of black power nothing that the Civil Rights people could have said would have indicated their meaning or opened lines of interaction by which the Indian people would have understood what the movement was all about.
The sight of blacks carrying TV sets through riot-torn streets completely turned off those Indian people who were trying to understand Civil Rights. America, rioters seemed to be saying, is a color TV and this is what we want from her.
Where we were hopeful of eventual peace, friendship, and cooperation between the various groups, many of us felt betrayed and confused. For years we had fought the fight for cultural survival only to find the situation reversed on us when we thought we were beginning to understand it.
It was incomprehensible to us that a people would rebel against a system that they felt was irrelevant and unresponsive to their needs. Blacks seemed to be saying that white society was bad, but they wanted it anyway.
Consequently, when a number of young Indians joined the Poor People’s Campaign, they seemed to be betraying the Indian fight for survival. Feelings ran extremely high during the Poor People’s March, particularly when Indian people were shown on television conducting demonstrations for fishing rights and food. Too many Indian people confused the means used with the ends to be achieved. Ideologically, Indian participation in the Poor People’s March seemed to be a surrender to white society because the basic thrust of the campaign was to endorse middleclass values through pointing out their absence in the life of the poor.
Resistance to Civil Rights ideas by tribal leaders has proved a catalyst to some Indian participants in the Poor People’s Campagn. Discussions with some of these Indians have convinced tribal leaders that dangerous times lie ahead for reservation people. The new militants appear ready to destroy the legal status of the tribes in order to introduce change. This attitude frightens tribal councils immensely and their fright convinces the new militants that their way is right. There appears to be very little leeway for compromise between the two groups.
Frightened tribal councils are beginning to create an atmosphere within which issues can be brought forward for solution, however. One good tangible result of Indian participation in the Poor People’s Campaign is that Indian people all over have begun to question the nature of their situation. They are asking what their specific rights and benefits are and what the Poor People’s March could possibly do to improve their situation.
In the defensive gesture of counting their blessings to show that the new militants should not have participated in the campaign, Indians have spent much time suffering new insights and attempting to digest what they have learned.
To many young Indians it has come through quite clearly that the problem of the Indian people is legal and not cultural, although the problem between Indians and other groups insofar as they inter-relate is cultural. That is to say, the white always presents opportunities for cultural enrichment when he is trying to steal Indian land. When the white sincerely wants to develop capital resources of the Indian people he invariably strengthens Indian cultural traits.
One has only to hear speeches by leading Democratic Senators who want to help Indians, to realize that there is a quiet move against the Indian land base. On the other hand, when attempts are made to develop Indian resources these thoughts are interpreted by Indian people as an affirmation of their way of life.
When we talk about basic solutions to the problems of each group, we talk about a startling reversal of concepts. Indian tribes need the basic gift of the white to the Negro—readjustment of tribal rights to protect person and property from exploitation by the federal government and private persons. Treaties need to be reaffirmed as the law of the land. Guarantees of free and undisturbed use of the reservation lands need to be enforced. Congressional pressure to destroy the Indian tribes and communities needs to be lifted.
On the other hand, the federal government needs to be the main supporter of the black quest for cultural development. The black does not need more legal rights so much as he needs the freedom to develop himself through experimentation. Prejudicial practices in law enforcement continually impinge upon the black communities, with cessions of police power and law to the local communities. During the riots after the assassination of Martin Luther King, those cities where militant black nationalists were strongest were the quietest because the young blacks kept order in spite of the white police.
White culture destroys other culture because of its abstractness. As a destroyer of culture it is not a culture but a cancer. In order to keep the country from complete divisiveness, separatism must be accepted as a means to achieve equality of personality both for groups and individuals. Separatism can be the means by which blacks gain time for reflection, meditation, and eventual understanding of themselves as a people.
The black needs time to develop his roots, to create his sacred places, to understand the mystery of himself and his history, to understand his own purpose. These things the Indian has and is able to maintain through his tribal life. The Indian now needs to create techniques to provide the economic strength needed to guarantee the survival of what he has.
In a real way, white culture, if there is such, is already doomed to its own destruction. Continual emphasis on racial rather than cultural problems will not only bring down white society but may also endanger ancient Indian society and newly emerging black and Mexican social movements.
The white man has the marvelous ability to conceptualize. He has also the marvelous inability to distinguish between sacred and profane. He therefore arbitrarily conceptualizes all things and understands none of them. His science creates gimmicks for his use. Little effort is made to relate the gimmicks to the nature of life or to see them in a historical context.
The white man is problem-solving. His conceptualizations merge into science and then emerge in his social life as problems, the solutions of which are the adjustments of his social machine. Slavery, prohibition, Civil Rights, and social services are all important adjustments of the white man’s social machine. No solution he has reached has proven adequate. Indeed, it has often proven demonic.
White solutions fail because white itself is an abstraction of an attitude of mind, not a racial or group reality. The white as we know him in America is an amalgam of European immigrants, not a racial phenomenon. But the temptation has always been present to define groups according to their most superficial aspect. Hence we have white, black, red, and the Yellow Peril. And we are taught to speak of the Negro problem, the Indian problem, and so forth.
White has been abstracted into a magical nebulous mythology that dominates all inhabitants of our country in their attitudes toward one another. We are, consequently, all prisoners of that mythology so far as we rebel against it. It is our misfortune that our economic system reflects uncritical acceptance of the mythology and that economic movements tend to reinforce the myth.
There is basically nothing real about our economic system. It is neither good nor bad, but neutral. Only when we place connotations on it and use it to manipulate people does it become a thing in itself.
Our welfare system demonstrates better than anything else the means to which uncritical white economics can be used. We have all types of welfare programs: old age, disability, aid to dependent children, orphanages, and unemployment. There is continual controversy in the halls of Congress, state legislatures, and city halls over the welfare programs.
Conservatives insist that those receiving welfare are lazy and are getting a free ride at the expense of hard-working citizens. Liberals insist that all citizens have a basic right to life and that it is the government’s responsibilty to provide for those unable to provide for themselves.
What are we really saying?
Welfare is based upon the norm set up by the Puritans long ago. A man is defined as a white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant, healthy, ambitious, earnest, and honest, a man whom the Lord smiles upon by increasing the fruits of his labor. Welfare is designed to compensate people insofar as they deviate from that norm. Insofar as a woman has an illegitimate child, she receives compensation. Insofar as a man is disabled, he receives compensation. Insofar as a person is too old to work, he receives compensation.
Welfare buys that portion of a person which does not match the stereotype of the real man. Welfare payments are never sufficient, never adequate. This is because each person bears some relation to the norm and in proportion to their resemblance, they receive less.
* * *
When this attitude is applied to groups, it is best seen in the political parties. The Republicans represent the best of the white economics. The Democrats represent all of the deviations.
The Republican Party has ostensibly stood for less government as a political philosophical position. But when you listen carefully to the Republicans you do not really hear less government, you hear a strange religion of early Puritan mythology. The Republican Party is in reality the truest expression of America’s religion of progress and white respectability. It stands for the white superman who never existed. The peddler’s grandson who conquered the unknown by inheriting a department store—such is the basic American religion unmasked. The measure of America’s willingness to examine the basis of its existence is to be counted in the number of registered voters who claim to be Republicans.
The measure of truth in the above assertion is the Republican willingness to lose elections rather than depart from cherished doctrines and myths. Only a religion can attract and hold such loyalty.
The other party is something else. Popular conceptions gloss over reality and continue the Rooseveltian myth that the Democrats are the party of the people. The old Roosevelt coalition of labor, minority and ethnic groups, and farmers fails to acknowledge one unpublicized member—the special interests.
More than the Republicans, the Democrats are the party of the special interests. Who else defends the oil-depletion allowance more than the Democrats? Who else creates farm subsidies, tariffs, foreign aid, large development projects? Who else piles special programs on top of special programs? Could the Republicans create the poor as a class in themselves? For, the Republicans know no poor because it is not within their religious comprehension. Nixon’s election was the last gasp of this quasireligious nineteenth-century, Horatio Alger, WASP ethic.
Until 1968 the Democrats won election after election by gathering the rejected into an amalgam of special interests for the sole purpose of splitting the pie which they would then attempt to create. The pie never exists; it is continually being created by the adjustment of the governmental machinery to include additional special interests, while eligible parties participate in the American religion carefully being nurtured by the Republicans in their isolation.
Recent elections tend to show the reality of this analysis. Eisenhower proved that a President was not necessary for the true American religion to progress. Kennedy proved that if enough special interests are combined, even Americans will desert the long-term goals of progress for the immediacy of splitting the pie which was to be created. The New Frontier promised a new chance to be cut in on the action, a short cut into Republican heaven for those groups who had deviated from the norm either by birth, place of origin, or failure to deal themselves in at some previous point in history.
Johnson simply dealt more cards to more people than had ever been dealt before. And his opponent was out preaching salvation by works alone. No wonder there was a religious revolt! The election of 1964 was comparable to the Protestant Reformation, for never had the choices been so clear between faith and works.
Politically, most minority groups have shifted to the Democrats and remained loyal through thick and thin. Margins compiled by blacks, Indians, and Mexicans for Democratic candidates have been incredible. In 1964 it took a strong Indian to support Gold-water in spite of his publicized heroic flights to the Navajo and his superb collection of Hopi Kachina dolls.
The Kennedys increased the normal margins which minority groups gave to the Democrats because of their apparent interest in minority groups. Few members of the Indian community realize or will admit how little the Kennedys really did for Indians. Although the mythology of the Kennedys has made them appear as the only saviors of minority communities, the legislative record compiled by both Jack and Robert Kennedy shows another story.
Jack Kennedy broke the Pickering Treaty and had accomplished little besides the usual Interior Task Force study of Indians before his death. Robert Kennedy did little for Indians legislatively or administratively. He drew some fire and spotlighted some of the problems, but in doing so he practically pre-empted any chance of action because of his many political enemies and their outright rejection of causes he advocated.
Robert Kennedy did prove that race was not the real thing bothering this country and that the turmoil over Civil Rights was misunderstood. He presented himself as a person who could move from world to world and never be a stranger anywhere. His genius was that he personified the best traits of his Irish heritage and made an attempt to define white in a different way.
Other people were frightened at Kennedy’s obvious attempt to re-create the days of the New Frontier. White mythology sees the kingship as demonic, as against the American religion of ostensible equality.
Indian people loved the idea of Robert Kennedy replacing Jack. For them it was an affirmation of the great war chief from the great family leading his people in his brother’s place. Robert Kennedy became as great a hero as the most famous Indian war chiefs precisely because of his ruthlessness. Indians saw him as a warrior, the white Crazy Horse. He somehow validated obscure undefined feelings of Indian people which they had been unwilling to admit to themselves. Spiritually, he was an Indian!
* * *
Robert Kennedy’s death has completely changed the nature of the Civil Rights movement and has altered the outlook of the American Indian toward American society.
Winds of caution have set in and sails are being trimmed. There appears to be no means by which the cultural crisis can be understood by those outside the group. Indian people are becoming more and more reluctant to consider alternatives. They are becoming distrustful of people who talk equality because they do not see how equality can be achieved without cultural separateness. To the degree that other groups demand material ransoms for peace and order, Indian people are fearful of the ultimate goals of the different movements.
There is no basic antagonism between black and red, or even between red and white. Conflicts are created when Indians feel they are being defined out of existence by the other groups. Historically, each group has its own road to travel. All roads lead to personal and group affirmation. But the obstacles faced by each group are different and call for different solutions and techniques.
While it is wrong and harmful to define all dark-skinned people by certain criteria, it is also wrong to pretend that they have nothing in common. It is what Indians, blacks, and Mexicans have in common and where their differences lie which should be carefully studied.
Time and again blacks have told me how lucky they were not to have been placed on reservations after the Civil War. I don’t think they were lucky at all. I think it was absolute disaster that blacks were not given reservations.
Indian tribes have been able to deal directly with the federal government because they had a recognized status within the Constitutional scheme. Leadership falls into legal patterns on each reservation through the elective process. A tribal chairman is recognized by federal agencies, Congressional committees, and private agencies as the representative of the group. Quarrels over programs, rivalry between leaders, defense of rights, and expressions of the mood of the people are all channeled through the official governing body. Indian people have the opportunity to deal officially with the rest of the world as a corporate body.
The blacks, on the other hand, are not defined with their own community. Leadership too often depends upon newspaper coverage. Black communities do not receive the deference tribes receive, because they are agencies in the private arena and not quasi-governmental. Law and order is something imposed brutally from without, not a housekeeping function of the group.
Above all, Indian people have the possibility of total withdrawal from American society because of their special legal status. They can, when necessary, return to a recognized homeland where time is static and the world becomes a psychic unity again.
To survive, blacks must have a homeland where they can withdraw, drop the facade of integration, and be themselves. Whites are inevitably torn because they have no roots, they do not understand the past, and they have already mortgaged their future. Unless they can renew their psychic selves and achieve a sense of historical participation as a people they will be unable to survive.
Already the cracks are showing. The berserk sniper characterizes the dilemma of the white man. Government by selective assassination is already well established as the true elective process.
All groups must come to understand themselves as their situation defines them and not as other groups see them. By accepting ourselves and defining the values within which we can be most comfortable we can find peace. In essence, we must all create social isolates which have economic bases that support creative and innovative efforts to customize values we need.
Myths must be re-examined and clarified. Where they are detrimental, sharp and necessary distinctions must be made. The fear of the unknown must be eliminated. The white mythologizes the racial minorities because of his lack of knowledge of them. These myths then create barriers for communication between the various segments of society.
What the white cannot understand he destroys lest it prove harmful. What the Indian cannot understand he withdraws from. But the black tries everything and fears nothing. He is therefore at liberty to build or destroy both what he knows and what he does not know or understand.
The red and the black must not be fooled either by themselves, by each other, or by the white man. The black has moved in a circle from Plessy v. Ferguson, where Separate but Equal was affirmed, to Brown v. the Board of Education, where it was denied by the Supreme Court, to Birmingham, Washington, Selma, and the tragedies of Memphis and Los Angeles. Now, Separate but Equal has become a battle cry of the black activists.
It makes a great deal of difference who carries this cry into battle. Is it the cry of a dying amalgam of European immigrants who are plagued by the European past? Or is it the lusty cry of a new culture impatient to be born?
The American Indian meditates on these things and waits for their solution. People fool themselves when they visualize a great coalition of the minority groups to pressure Congress for additional programs and rights. Indians will not work within an ideological basis which is foreign to them. Any cooperative movement must come to terms with tribalism in the Indian context before it will gain Indian support.
The future, therefore, as between the red, white, and black, will depend primarily upon whether white and black begin to understand Indian nationalism. Once having left the wild animal status, Indians will not revert to their old position on the totem pole. Hopefully black militancy will return to nationalistic philosophies which relate to the ongoing conception of the tribe as a nation extending in time and occupying space. If such is possible within the black community, it may be possible to bring the problems of minority groups into a more realistic focus and possible solution in the years ahead.