INDIANS AND MODERN SOCIETYONE OF THE intriguing little puzzles which anthropologists, Congressmen, missionaries, educators, and others often pose for themselves is whether an Indian tribe can survive in a modern setting. For the most part the question is posed as if the Indians were just coming out of the woods with their flint-tipped arrows and were demonstrating an unusual amount of curiosity about the printing press, the choochoo train, the pop machine, and other marvels of civilized man.
Black militants overbearingly tell Indians to “revolt, confront, destroy,” the “powerstructure” that oppresses them. Confusing notoriety with success, they equate confusion with progress, draw on their vast storehouse of knowledge of the modern world, and advise Indians to become militant.
Everywhere an Indian turns he is deluged with offers of assistance, with good, bad, and irrelevant advice, and with proposals designed to cure everything from poverty to dandruff. Rarely does anyone ask an Indian what he thinks about the modern world. So assured is modern man that he has absolute control of himself and his society that there is never any question but what Indians are moving, albeit slowly and inefficiently, toward that great and blessed land of suburban America, the mecca for all people.
When an Indian considers the modern world, however, he sees it being inevitably drawn into social structures in which tribalism appears to be the only valid form of supra-individual participation. The humor becomes apparent when the Indian realizes that if he simply steps to the sidelines and watches the rat race go past him, soon people will be coming to him to advise him to return to tribalism. It appears to many Indians that someday soon the modern world will be ready to understand itself and, perhaps, the Indian people.
In March of 1968 the Southern Christian Leadership Conference began plans to have a massive march on Washington. The march was to be comparable, SCLC hoped, to the great marches of the past which had been instrumental in producing Civil Rights legislation. The purpose of the Poor People’s Campaign was to bring attention to the plight of the poor with the hopes that Congress, which was then considering a six-billion-dollar cut in social welfare programs, would respond with a gigantic outpouring of funds to eradicate poverty. As the Poor People’s Campaign gained momentum the purpose narrowed to the proposition of guaranteed jobs or a guaranteed annual income.
Notably absent from the list of supporting organizations in the campaign was the Congress of Racial Equality. CORE had been a leader in the Civil Rights struggles of the past. It was headed by black nationalists who endorsed black power. It was regarded as one of the militant left-leaning organizations of blacks in the nation. But CORE refused to fall into line with the campaign because it was busy taking another approach to the problems of black poverty.
The CORE solution was unveiled in July of 1968 at a joint news conference which featured Roy Innis, Acting Director of CORE, and four Republican Congressmen, Charles Goodell of New York, Robert Taft, Jr., of Ohio, Thomas Curtis of Missouri, and William Widnall of New Jersey. CORE proposed the Community Self-Determination Act, which was designed to promote black capitalism of which CORE and Richard Nixon had both cooed approvingly earlier in the year.
The basic thrust of the Community Self-Determination Act of 1969 (which was not passed in the Ninetieth Congress but which has now been introduced again) was the Community Development Corporation. The Community Development Corporation, called affectionately CDC in the news conference, was to operate in six categories of activity:
1. Provider of neighborhood services and community improvement: basic education, child welfare, day care, pre-school training, health, consumer education, home ownership counseling, college placement, job finding, recreation, legal aid, and other services now available from federal sources.
2. Owner of stock of business enterprises.
3. Sponsor, owner, or manager of housing in the community.
4. Planning agency for-neighborhood renewal.
5. Representative of community interests in areas of public policy.
6. Encourager of outside financial sources to assist self-help efforts of the community.
In short, the CDC was to be the all-purpose corporation by which black poverty was to be eliminated from the black ghettos and self-determination given to ghetto areas. The CDC was hailed as an important new step in the development of black pride and initiative in the private area.
If the CDC was brand-new for blacks it had a mighty familiar ring to the Indian people. The tribal council, as set up under the Indian Reorganization Act, had precisely the same powers, functions, and intents. Indians have been using the tribal council as organized under IRA for nearly a generation. As Indians viewed the “new” CDC, the blacks were finally ready to tribalize. One young Indian waggishly suggested that if they made up enrollments they might call them blacklists.
In the corporate structure, formal and informal, Indian tribalism has its greatest parallels and it is through this means that Indians believe that modern society and Indian tribes will finally reach a cultural truce. The corporation forms the closest attempt of the white man to socialize his individualism and become a tribal man. And certainly when one thinks back to what has been written over the last decade about corporate existence, one can see the startling parallels.
The devastating books of Vance Packard and William H. White outlined in detail how the corporation impinges upon individual man in his private life and reorients him toward non-individual goals. In the 1950’s no existence was hated by the undergraduate as much as that of the organization man. The early beatnik and his descendant, the hippie, both abhorred the organization man. Many a career was nipped in the bud rather than let it develop in the insidious ways of corporate existence.
But in the corporation, man was offered a tribal existence of security and ease. The corporation provided everything a man might need if he were to maintain an affluent life over and above that of non-corporate man and befitting a person of vast educational achievement. The higher the degree, the more privileges bestowed upon corporate man. With untold fringe benefits covering all conceivable circumstances which might arise, organization man dwelt in an economic tribe to which he needed only give his allegiance and daylight hours. In return he had social and economic security rarely equalled since the days of feudalism.
Post-war developments of the corporation created the phenomenon of the merger. As corporations were piled together to form conglomerates, it became possible for a man to work for a great many corporations which were enclosed within one monstrous holding corporation so diversified that it rarely knew how far its tenacles extended.
The corporation became comparable to the great Indian coalitions such as the Iroquois and the Creek confederacies which stretched for thousands of square miles and in which a member was entirely safe and at home. And like the Indian tribes, success was measured against those outside the corporations, by prestige and honors. Where eagle feathers measured an Indian’s successes, thickness of carpets measured executive success. Where a war chief might be given his choice of the loot of a war, the annual bonus and stock option became a regular means of rewarding the successful executive, home fresh from the competitive wars.
In short, corporate life since the last world war has structured itself along the lines taken a couple of centuries earlier by Indian tribes as they developed their customs and traditions of social existence. Totems have been replaced by trade marks, powwows by conventions, and beads by gray flannels. War songs have been replaced by advertising slogans. As in the tribe, so in the corporation the “chief” reigns supreme.
The life of the rugged individualist, beloved hero of Republican hymns, has now disappeared. The little family grocery or drug store, such as spawned the two chief contestants of the 1968 Presidential campaign, has now become the outpost, the frontier settlement, of the corporate conglomerate giant. Small businesses have all but vanished over the past two decades as the “chain” has driven them out of existence. Opportunity now exists within the corporate giant as a member of the tribe. The individual seeks fame only in bringing home the honors for his company.
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Classifying the corporation as the tribe takes a little reorientation for most Americans because they are so quick to judge by outward appearances. Rarely do they meditate on how something really operates. Instead they want to believe that because something is shiny and appears new, it is new.
But in understanding the corporation as a form of tribalism, a number of new paths of understanding are made possible. The life of organization man is not simply one of allegiance to a cold unfeeling machine. Rather it becomes a path by which he can fulfill himself within certain limits. But going outside of the limits is taboo. It negates the existence by which organization man has defined himself and allowed himself to be defined. Just as a Cherokee or Sioux would have never done anything to eliminate himself from the tribe and accepted the limits by which the tribe governed itself, so the organization man must remain within the limits of his corporate existence.
The primary purpose of the tribe, then and now, was to ensure as beneficial a life as possible for members of the tribe. The hunting grounds of the tribe had to be defended at all costs. Outside of that, individual freedom ran rampant. Certainly the CDC proposed by CORE, which will cover all aspects of social existence, purports to do the same.
It would appear then that we are witnessing the gradual tribalization of the white man as his economic tribes become more and more oriented toward social services for their members. What is now needed is the frank admittance by the white man that he is tribalizing and the acknowledgment that his tribalism will gradually replace government as we now know it, submerging the differentiated society into a number of related economic social units.
When executives can admit what they are doing, then it will be possible to form programs around those left out of corporate existence—the poor—and organize them as tribes also, completing the circuit from Pilgrimish individualism to corporate tribalism. Preliminary treaty-making—price fixing—has been declared wrong because it infringed upon non-corporate victims. The government decreed that until these victims became sufficiently strong to embark on corporate warfare, it would protect them. Government thus stands as arbitrator between corporate and non-corporate man, a role previously occupied by the Onondagas in the Iroquois League.
It is not only in economic terms that America is tribalizing. Scholars and students of the modern family bemoan the fact that the family unit is disappearing and members of the family now have their primary interests outside the home. The old picture of the clan gathered around the fireplace or trooping through the snow to grandmother’s house is fast fading into the historical mists.
In place of the traditional family has come the activist family in which each member spends the majority of his time outside the home “participating.” Clubs, committees, and leagues devour the time of the individual so that family activity is extremely limited. Competition among clubs is keenly predicated upon the proposition that each member should bring his family into its sphere. Thus Boy Scouts is made a family affair. PTA, the YMCA, the country club, every activity, competes for total family participation although it demands entry of only one member of the family.
Clubs as social tribes wage fantastic warfare for the loyalties of the individuals of a community. Their selling point is that only by participating in their activity can a family partake of the snowy trips to grandmother’s house in modern terms. The numena of American mythology is plastered indiscriminately over activities in order to catch unsuspecting participants and offer a substitute existence.
The American family is thus split into a number of individuals each claiming his blood relationship as a commitment on other members of the same biological source to support his tribe as against theirs. At best it is a standoff, with each member giving half-hearted recognition of the multitude of tribes to which the family as a conglomerate belongs.
The best example in intellectual circles of a tribal phenomenon is the magazine. Playboy early capitalized on tribal existence, although exemplified in the hutch instead of the tipi, and turned a magazine into a way of life. If ever there was a tribal cult oozing with contemporary mythology and tribal rites it is the Playboy club. Identity is the last concern of the Playboy, yet it is what his tribe offers him—and with a key.
Perhaps the only segment of American society to face tribalism head on has been the long-haired hippie and his cousins, yippies, zippies, and others. In 1966 strange beings began to appear on Indian land, proclaiming their kinship with the redskins in no uncertain terms. Some Indians thought that the earlier VISTA program had spoiled things for the hippies by their inept performance on the reservations, but no one had seen anything until the summer of 1966.
I used to sit in my office and suddenly find it invaded by a number of strange beings in gaudy costumes who would inform me of their blood-intellectual relationship with Indians. When one is used to the strange smells of legislation written by the Interior Department and is suddenly confronted by an even more exotic perfume, it is unsettling indeed.
Yet many hippies whom I met had some basic humanistic beliefs not unlike those of Indian people. Concern for the person and abhorrence for confining rules, regulations, and traditions seemed to characterize the early hippie movement. When the hippies began to call for a gathering of the tribes, to create free stores, to share goods, and to gather all of the lost into communities, it appeared as if they were on the threshold of tribal existence.
I remember spending a whole afternoon talking with a number of hippies who had stopped in Denver on the way west. They were tribally oriented but refused to consider customs as anything more than regulations in disguise. Yet it was by rejecting customs that the hippies failed to tribalize and became comical shadows rather than modern incarnations of tribes.
Indian tribes have always had two basic internal strengths, which can also be seen in corporations: customs and clans. Tribes are not simply composed of Indians. They are highly organized as clans, within which variations of tribal traditions and customs govern. While the tribe makes decisions on general affairs, clans handle specific problems. Trivia is thus kept out of tribal affairs by referring it to clan solutions.
Customs rise as clans meet specific problems and solve them. They overflow from the clan into general tribal usage as their capability and validity are recognized. Thus a custom can spread from a minor clan to the tribe as a whole and prove to be a significant basis for tribal behavior. In the same manner, methods and techniques found useful in one phase of corporate existence can become standard operating procedure for an entire corporation.
Hippies, at least as I came to understand them, had few stable clan structures. They lived too much on the experiential plane and refused to acknowledge that there really was a world outside of their own experiences. Experience thus became the primary criteria by which the movement was understood. Social and economic stability were never allowed to take root.
It seemed ridiculous to Indian people that hippies would refuse to incorporate prestige and social status into their tribalizing attempts. Indian society is founded on status and social prestige. This largely reduces competition to inter-personal relationships instead of allowing it to run rampant in economic circles. Were competition to be confined to economic concerns, the white conception of a person as a part of the production machine would take hold, destroying the necessary value of man in his social sense.
With competition confined within social events, each man must be judged according to his real self, not according to his wealth or educational prowess. Hence a holder of great wealth is merely selfish unless he has other redeeming qualities besides his material goods. Having a number of degrees and an impressive educational background is prerequisite to prestige in the white world. It is detrimental in the Indian world unless the person has the necessary wisdom to say meaningful things also.
Hippies, at least initially, appeared to throw off the white man’s prestige symbols while refusing to accept the Indian prestige symbols. Hence there was no way in which tribalism, in its most lasting form, could take root in the hippie movement. What prestige they had, came with publicity. Quickly the media turned them into a fad and the hippie with something to say became no more than Batman or the Hoola Hoop.
Additional to hippie failure to tribalize was their inability to recognize the existence of tribal capital, particularly land. Tribal existence has always been predicated upon a land base, a homeland, within which tribal existence could take place. The primary concern of Indian tribes has been the protection of the land to which they are related. Once landless, a people must fall back upon religion, social values, or political power. But with a land base, nationalism in a tribal setting is more possible.
Only a very few hippies made an effort to develop a land base. A few communes are beginning to spring up around the country. But most of the flowers, unfortunately, have yet to be planted.
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Inter-corporate competition has revealed the necessity of banding together for political purposes to defend hunting grounds, be it oil import quotas, tariffs, or subsidies. In this respect white corporations are more aware of the inevitability of conflict than are Indian tribes. Whites know how to best use the corporate structure in an infinite variety of ways. And they know how to manipulate the governmental structure to obtain the goals of their corporations.
Some corporations, particularly social corporations such as those listed annually in the various United Fund appeals, have already mastered the technique of taxing the rest of society to support their ventures. They are thus one step beyond even the profit-making corporations which offer a substantial number of fringe benefits to their employees.
The United Fund agencies have achieved a status comparable to the Magi of yesteryear. The Magi, conquered by the Persians, promptly set themselves up as religious experts and soon exercised incredible control over Persian society. They burrowed right into the fabric of Persian life and dominated it. In the same way, United Fund agencies have captured the priesthood of social activity and now exact their pound of flesh as necessary organizations upon which the lifeblood of the community depends.
Examine, if you will, the agencies listed in the United Fund appeal the next time you are called upon to give. By and large they all do what everyone else is doing. Only, they appear to be doing it somehow differently. Had they been active in a meaningful programmatic manner, it would have been unnecessary for the government to conduct a War on Poverty. But should the government win its War on Poverty tomorrow, United Fund agencies would continue on their merry way.
What then is the genius of the United Fund agency? We called them above, the priesthood of our society and they are priests in the mediating sense. Where fraternities, sororities, and service clubs have the same basic clientele, United Fund agencies have developed a mediating role between diverse segments of society. They collect from one set of clientele and distribute to another set. Thus, as intermediaries they cannot be eliminated because they would leave two diverse sets of clients with peculiar needs—those who need to give and those who need to receive.
As the fortunes of agencies and foundations like the United Fund rise and fall, so do tribalism and tribal existence. These agencies are the weathervane of our society. We can tell at a glance how our society is responding to the expansion of tribal corporations by their progress and setbacks. As tribal corporations meet the challenges of modern life, there will be less use for United Fund agencies and their revenues and programs will decline. But if the tendency is away from tribalized existence on the corporate level, these agencies will expand and their revenues will increase. People will need to become more meaningfully involved and will seek out both services and recipients for their funds. Thus such agencies are an accurate indicator of giving and receiving in our society. From them we can take one cue as to what the future holds.
There is another aspect of modern society to which Indian society relates and that is law. The evolution of law is as fascinating as it is complex. The manner in which Indians and law can combine in the modern world depends upon an understanding of the nuances of law.
We first come across law in its original cradle of tribalism in the Old Testament. Torah, law, comes from a root word meaning to extend one’s hand as if pointing the way. A careful reading of the Old Testament and its concern for law can reveal—as it does for the Jews—a standard of behavior by which a person can be fulfilled. Thus originally law was not confining or regulating but indicating the way to a better life.
In feudal days law once again rose from the ruins of Roman codification as customs gradually became the laws of England and western European civilization. Only in certain aspects were early laws regulatory or confining. In most cases they were indicative of inter-personal relationships.
The history of America has shown the gradual replacement of custom and common law with regulatory statutes and programs so that law today is more a case of legalizing certain types of behavior and penalizing other types of behavior. We are just passing through the most radical period of law as a confining instrument of social control.
The programs initiated by President Johnson are sometimes looked at as the logical extension of the New Deal concept of government as development agent for social welfare programs. It has been said that the War on Poverty was simply a rehash of the WPA projects and the CCC camps. But close examination of the Economic Opportunity Act, the Economic Development Act, the Model Cities programs, Urban Renewal, and other Great Society programs will reveal a basic foundation completely foreign to New Deal concepts. All of these programs are founded upon the premise that the federal government must help local efforts to accomplish certain things, but that government itself cannot do those things for local people. Law has thus begun a new cycle of existence as a means to social fulfillment.
Programs of the Great Society point the way toward experimentation by local people in various ways and means of creating a more meaningful existence. They therefore become vehicles for change and fulfillment of potential, rather than payoffs to certain groups who would otherwise refuse to participate in modern economic ventures. While there is no doubt that Great Society programs have political overtones, within certain limits most American citizens can participate in them.
The great fear of minority groups in the 1968 elections was that law and order meant a return to the conception of law as an instrument of confinement and away from the idea of law as an expansion of opportunities. Regulated existence has rarely been able to provide the stability and potential which societies need to survive. When codification has been emphasized, societies have tended to decline because law has traditionally been a means of confinement and oppression.
When law takes on its most creative aspect, customs develop to operate internally within the social structure. The vacuum created by expanding and developing programs and laws gives rise to the need for internal controls by which men can govern themselves. Customs naturally arise to fill this need and custom depends upon participation by all members of society.
A good example of custom is the American system of two political parties as an undefined adjunct to the Constitution. Nowhere does the Constitution outline the need or the structure for political participation. No parties are mentioned. They have arisen through customs which filled in the missing pieces of the Constitution. No one had to follow one path or another. But over the years a significant number of citizens adopted the same customs and the great political processes of our nation took shape.
As the political parties became structured with rules and regulations, additional customs arose which by their solution gave meaning to the unarticulated problems of the process. Thus, for example, for a while the candidate remained at home awaiting the demand of the people that he become a candidate. This custom was overcome by Roosevelt’s daring visit to the convention in 1932 and the rise of primaries in the various states.
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As we become aware of our customs we will become more able to live in a tribalizing world. Tribal society does not depend upon legislative enactment. It depends heavily in most areas upon customs which fill in the superstructure of society with meaningful forms of behavior and which are constantly changing because of the demands made upon them by people.
One of the chief customs in Indian life is the idea of compensation instead of retribution in criminal law. Arbitrary punishment, no matter how apparently suitable to the crime, has had little place in Indian society. These customs have by and large endured and many tribes still feel that if the culprit makes a suitable restitution to his victim no further punishment need be meted out by the tribe.
Contrast this outlook with the highly emotional appeals to “lawnorder” over the last year and it is easy to see that the white man’s conception of criminal law has changed little from the harsh codes of the ancient eastern despots. America’s prison population continues to climb as society attempts to punish those guilty of violating its mores. Little is done to restore the victim to his original state. The emphasis is on “getting even” on the victim’s behalf by imposing a term of imprisonment on the offender.
With the passage of the 1968 Civil Rights Act, Indian tribes fell victim to the Bill of Rights. The stage is now set for total erosion of traditional customs by sterile codes devised by the white man. Some tribes are now fighting to get the law amended because the law allows reliance on traditional Indian solutions only to the extent that they do not conflict with state and federal laws.
Although the Bill of Rights is not popular with some tribes, the Pueblos in particular, I do not believe that it should be amended. With the strengthening of tribal courts Indian tribes now have a golden opportunity to create an Indian common law comparable to the early English common law.
Many national leaders have encouraged Indian judges to write lengthy opinions on their cases incorporating tribal customs and beliefs with state and federal codes and thus redirecting tribal ordinances toward a new goal. Over the next decade the response by Indian judges in tribal court may well prove influential in the field of law. Perhaps the kindest thing that could be said of non-Indian law at present is that it combines punishment and rehabilitation in most instances. With an additional push for compensatory solutions Indian people could contribute much to the solution of the problem of crime in the larger society.
The stage is now being set, with the increasing number of Indian college students graduating from the universities, for a total assault on the non-human elements of white society. Ideologically the young Indians are refusing to accept white values as eternal truths. Such anomalies as starvation in the midst of plenty indicate to them that the older Indian ways are probably best for them.
Movements to re-educate Indians along liberal lines only serve to increase the visibility of the differences between their own backgrounds and the backgrounds of the non-Indians. Yet the bicultural trap, conceptually laid for Indians by scholars, does not appear to be ensnaring the most astute young Indian people. Accommodation to white society is primarily in terms of gaining additional techniques by which they can give a deeper root to existing Indian traditions.
The corporation serves as the technical weapon by which Indian revivalism can be accomplished. At the same time it is that element of white culture closest to the tribe and can thereby enable it to understand both white and Indian ways of doing business. As programs become available, tribal councils should simply form themselves as housing authorities, development corporations, and training program supervisors, continuing to do business according to Indian ways. The tribe is thus absorbing the corporation as a handy tool for its own purposes.
Of all the schemes advocated today for the solution of poverty, the guaranteed annual income appears to be the most threatening to ultimate tribal progress. Guaranteed annual income would merely accelerate the inertia which continues to nip at the heels of reservation development. Yet the humanistic basis of the guaranteed annual income is solidly within Indian traditions.
In the old days a tribe suffered and prospered as a unity. When hunting was good everyone ate, when it was bad everyone suffered. Never was the tribe overbalanced economically so that half would always starve and half would thrive. In this sense all tribal members had a guaranteed annual income.
With the basic necessities guaranteed by tribal membership, means had to be devised to grade the tribe into a social ladder. Exploits in hunting, warfare, and religious leadership effectively created status necessary to structure the interpersonal relationships within the tribe. A man was judged by what he was, no by what he owned.
Society today has largely drifted away from accomplishments. Concern is focused instead on “image”—what a man appears to be, not what he is. Thus the 1968 elections saw Richard Nixoi cautiously refuse to face any issues which might have taken votes away from him. In previous years the Kennedys made even greater use of image and it will probably never be known exactly what the Kennedys accomplished on behalf of their constituency. People will rather remember Jack and Bobby as they appeared on television.
As Indians continue to appear in modern society other issues will come to be drawn in certain areas. Some tribes have zoned their reservations so that the land is used primarily for the benefit of reservation people. Gradually planners in the white society will come to recognize the necessity of reserving land for specific use rather than allow helter-skelter development to continue unchecked.
Education must also be revamped; not to make Indians more acceptable to white society, but to allow non-Indians a greater chance to develop their talents. Education as it is designed today works to destroy communities by creating supermen who spend their lives climbing the economic ladder. America is thus always on the move and neighborhoods rarely have a stable lasting residency. In the future, minority groups must emphasize what they share with the white society, not what keeps them apart. Black may be beautiful but such a slogan hardly contributes to the understanding of non-blacks. Intensity turns easily to violence when it has no traditions and customs to channel it into constructive paths of behavior. The powwow serves as more than a historical re-enactment of ancient ways. In a larger sense it provides an emotional release heavily charged with psychological and identity-absorbing tensions. This is perhaps one reason why “red is beautiful” has not become a necessary slogan.
Non-Indians must understand the differences, at least as seen in Indian country, between nationalism and militancy. Most Indians are nationalists. That is, they are primarily concerned with development and continuance of the tribe. As nationalists, Indians could not, for the most part, care less what the rest of society does. They are interested in the progress of the tribe.
Militants, on the other hand, are reactionists. They understand the white society and they progress by reacting against it. First in their ideas is the necessity of forcing a decision from those in decision-making positions. Few militants would be sophisticated enough to plan a strategy of undermining the ideological and philosophical positions of the establishment and capturing its programs for their own use.
Nationalists always have the option of resorting to violence and demonstrations. Militants shoot their arsenal merely to attract attention and are left without any visible means to accomplish their goals. Hence militancy must inevitably lead on to more militancy. This is apparent in the dilemma in which the SCLC found itself after the 1966 Civil Rights Bill. Demonstrations had proved successful and so SCLC found itself led on and on down that path, never satisfied. Even after Kings death, when SCLC could have changed its goals and techniques, it continued to the disaster of Resurrection City.
But Indian tribes riding the crest of tribal and nationalistic waves will be able to accomplish a great many things previously thought impossible by Indian and non-Indian alike. There is every indication that as Indians articulate values they wish to transmit to the rest of society, they will be able to exert a definite influence on social developments.
At present the visible poverty of Indian tribes veils the great potential of the Indian people from modern society. But in many ways the veil is lifting and a brighter future is being seen. Night is giving way to day. The Indian will soon stand tall and strong once more.