RED POWER AND THE AMERICAN INDIAN MOVEMENT: DIFFERENT TIMES, DIFFERENT PLACES

Abstract

Termination had as its goal the repudiation of American Indian sovereignty, the severance of all federal responsibility for Indian people, the abrogation of the federal trust relationship that had been established by the U.S. Supreme Court in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831), the breaking-up of Indian reservations, the resultant return of Indian land to the public domain, and the relocation of Indian People into urban areas. Besides needs there are contributions already made and more to be made to America by its original inhabitants.

RED POWER AND THE AMERICAN INDIAN MOVEMENT: DIFFERENT TIMES, DIFFERENT PLACES Troy R. Johnson Daniel M. Cobb. Native Activism in Cold War America: The Struggle for Sovereignty. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008. xi + 306 pp. Figures, notes, bibliography, and index. $34.95.

The thesis of this book is simply stated but extremely complex. Daniel Cobb states that the book is "the culmination of a ten-year effort to shift 'everything that happened in the Seventies' back to where it belongs" (p. 1). That is to say that the author feels that defining American Indian activism as a period between 1969 and the late 1970s is myopic, frustrating, and results in a "widespread misconception that equates Red Power with the American Indian Movement (AIM)" (p. 1). Such a conception, Cobb argues, fails to take into consideration the history of previous American Indian political activism, the importance of the War on Poverty, and the U.S. political and social movements beginning as early as 1945 and culminating in the 1960s.

Cobb's frustration, and ultimately his motivation for writing Native Activism in Cold War America, grew out of an October 2001 meeting with the late Dr. Vine Deloria Jr., Standing Rock Sioux scholar, political activist, and former director of the National Congress of American Indians. At this meeting Cobb spoke with Deloria about the misrepresentation and misinterpretation of 1960s Indian activism. Reflecting on the oft-made connection between AIM and the Red Power movement, Deloria responded by speaking of the irony that AIM, founded in 1968, could be considered emblematic of 1960s activism and emphasized that even the most successful of the American Indian occupations-the nineteen-month-long occupation of Alcatraz Island-began in November 1969 and barely fell within the '60s. Deloria pointed out as well that the seventy-two hour occupation of the Washington D.C. Bureau of Indian Affairs headquarters in 1972 fell well outside of the parameters of a '60s Red Power event, as did the seventy-one-day-long AIM occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973.

To understand the concern expressed by Cobb and Deloria one must put aside the often accepted definition of activism that posits that activism must include transformative goals that can be achieved only through militant direct action. In Native American Activism, Daniel Cobb provides the reader with a different lens through which to view activism, one that incorporates nonconfrontational reformative goals and both conventional and unconventional political tactics. This form of activism-activism with a small "a"-is the focus of this book. This form of activism incorporated American Indian political leaders, tribal leaders, teachers, educators, administrators, and ordinary tribal members who worked to manipulate the political system, to stir the pot, and to change the way the U.S. government saw and addressed the needs and concerns of Native Nations and Native People. While this is often referred to as political activism, it stretches much beyond the realm of U.S. government and tribal politics as the author presents the history and efforts of grass-root and nascent national Indian organizations of the 1950s and '60s.

The organizations that are included in this exhaustively researched book include the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Association on American Indian Affairs, the National Congress of American Indian Affairs, the National Indian Youth Council, and the Coalition of American Indian Citizens. Indian and non- Indian participants, both the well known and obscure, include such personages as LaVerne Madigan, Oliver La Farge, Sol Tax, W. W. Keeler (Cherokee), Earl Boyd Pierce (Cherokee), Robert K. Thomas (Cherokee), Clyde Warrior (Ponca), Mel Thom (Walker River Paiute), Hank Adams (Assiniboine-Sioux), Vine Deloria Jr. (Standing Rock Sioux), Helen Peterson (Northern Cheyenne/Lakota), Robert Burnette (Lakota), Robert L. Burnett (Oneida), Dr. Jim Wilson (Oglala Lakota), Tillie Walker (Mandan-Hidatsa), and Rose Crow Flies High (Mandan- Hidatsa). Government programs and initiatives are explained, explored, and explicated in detail. These include the American Indian Point IV Program, the American Indian Chicago Conference, the Workshop on American Indian Affairs, the War on Poverty, the Office of Equal Opportunity, the Poor People's Campaign, and the presidency of Lyndon Baines Johnson, as each impacted and were impacted by Indian Nations and individual Indian People seeking to find justice and fair treatment somewhere in America.

Native Activism uses, as its underpinning, the U.S. government's policy of termination to begin the discussion of the rise of American Indian activism. The Termination Act was passed in 1954 as pressure in Congress mounted to reduce the United States' responsibility for Indian People and to end the reservation system. This same period saw the rise of 100 percent Americanization and a movement to eradicate all reference to "hyphenated Americans" in the U.S. While Mexican Americans became simply Mexicans and Asian Americans became Asians, the government moved to "get out of the Indian business" entirely. Termination had as its goal the repudiation of American Indian sovereignty, the severance of all federal responsibility for Indian people, the abrogation of the federal trust relationship that had been established by the U.S. Supreme Court in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831), the breaking-up of Indian reservations, the resultant return of Indian land to the public domain, and the relocation of Indian People into urban areas. Two months following the passage of the Termination Act, the same Congress also passed Public Law 280. Public Law 280 transferred jurisdiction over criminal offenses involving Indians in Indian country to state and local governments in five states and allowed other states to assume similar jurisdiction. Taken together, the two Acts meant that an unspecified number of reservations were to be disestablished and, for those reservations remaining, federal responsibility for Indian tribes was to be transferred to individual states: the sworn enemies of Indian people. These Acts struck fear into the hearts of American Indian people who had experienced centuries of governmental policies that had continuously eroded the Indian land base and had made Indians the invisible Americans without voice and without hope. Although active termination ended in 1962 when the Ponca tribe was terminated, the fear of termination was set deep in Indian hearts and souls and was passed from generation to generation. To this day American Indians fear that every bill and piece of legislature passed by the Congress has Indian termination at its heart and as its intent. The history of the struggle to reverse these past injustices and to restore Indian Nations to their right of full sovereignty is also at the heart and soul of this book.

Having said the above and given a somewhat inclusive list of the various organizations and people discussed in Native Activism, I must emphasize that not all of the organizations and individuals shared common ideas and approaches as to how best to achieve their goal. Some were in direct conflict with others and some were counterproductive to the efforts of others. For the most part, however, their goals were the same, differing primarily in their approach to the problem. One such group covered in detail in Native America was the Association on American Indian Affairs (AIAA). The AIAA was founded in 1922 and initially consisted primarily of non-Indians who carried considerable political influence in American Indian policy decisions in Washington, D.C. Oliver La Farge served as the association's first president; and Felix Cohen, former Solicitor of the Interior Department, served as general counsel. Under their direction, the AIAA moved beyond raising pubic awareness of Indian issues and began to engage the political process in Washington, becoming increasingly involved in Indian communities at the local level. Ultimately, the association's concerns reached throughout the country. Perhaps the most important contribution of the AIAA was the embracing of the Point Four Program for American Indians that had been proposed by the National Congress on American Indians (NCAI) as a counterattack on the termination policy of 1954. The Point Four Program was a U.S. policy designed to provide technical assistance and economic aid to underdeveloped countries. Felix Cohen compared life on Indian reservations to poverty in underdeveloped countries and questioned the capacity, desire, or willingness of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) to serve the needs of American Indian People. He described the BIA as a benevolent dictatorship. Daniel Cobb credits the impetus for AAIA's embracing of the Point Four Program to a letter from LaVerne Madigan to Oliver La Farge after she had read a New York Times article that announced President Dwight Eisenhower's intent to create a Point Four Program for economically distressed areas in the U.S. Following receipt of Madigan's letter, La Farge wrote a letter to President Eisenhower calling for the inclusion of American Indians in a domestic Point Four Program. The machinations of this effort, including victories and defeats, are extremely important in understanding the lingering grip of colonialism in the U.S. during this period and are intricately woven throughout this book. Ultimately, as the author points out, the U.S. Congress failed to adopt a Point Four Program for American Indians. Cobb goes on to state, however, that, "For the activists who devoted their lives to countering colonialism, the United Nations' Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People might seem a crowning achievement. . . . In essence, it proclaims the necessity of recognizing the inherent sovereignty of indigenous peoples (pp. 204-5).

As stated above, the AIAA was influenced by the National Congress on American Indians (NCAI), and at one point the two organizations joined forces in an attempt to overturn termination and to lobby Congress to adopt a concurrent resolution to repudiate the government termination policy as set forth in House Concurrent Resolution 108. The NCAI was conceptualized by D'Arcy McNickle (Flathead), Archie Phinney (Nez Perce), and Charles Heacock (Lakota) and was established in 1944 as a national pan-Indian organization that campaigned for the adoption of the Point Four Program for Indian People and against the termination policy. The first convention in 1944 included eighty Indian delegates from twenty-seven states, representing more than fifty tribes, groups, and associations. In about a year's time, members of the NCAI accounted for nearly all U.S. tribes. Prominent tribal leaders were always part of the NCAI and acknowledged the danger that termination created for Indians' legal rights and cultural identity, and they worked to uphold the well-being and identities of the Indian community on a national scale. As the nation became embroiled in the civil rights issues of the late 1950s and 1960s, the NCAI made a decision of conscience to separate American Indian issues from those of other racial groups. As the author points out, in February 1957, NCAI Executive Director Helen Peterson expressed her concern that the NCAI needed to scrutinize its modus operandi. "We can't hope to get people to understand the problems of this truly complicated arrangement unless we can disentangle Indian issues from civil rights issues-Indian problems aren't civil rights problems" (pp. 22-23). By the late 1950s, the AIAA and NCAI had joined with the advocates of the cold war movement to support the nascent reform movements seeking assistance for developing nations and seeking change at home for Indian people. The AAIA and NCAI "began to conceptualize tribes as communities emerging from colonialism rather than minorities desiring integration" (p. 27).

Strong factionalism arose in 1962 and 1963 as the NCAI was pressed to decide between a more proactive policy of immediacy and one of gradualism in its approach to solving the myriad problems facing the Indian community. Issues of termination, relocation, reservation poverty, sovereignty, and selfdetermination had been pressed through the BIA and the Congress for years without resolution. The policy adopted by NCAI leadership would have far and deep reaching consequences. Vine Deloria Jr. said in defense of the NCAI's incremental approach, "you can't throw all the pieces up in the air [thinking] when they land it's going to form a picture. Tribes had much to gain and nothing to lose from working the system" (p. 154). The NCAI reasoned that the battle for tribal sovereignty would be won in Congress and in the courts, not in the streets. Accordingly the NCAI refused to support the Poor People's Campaign and the 1963 March on Washington that represented a coalition of several civil rights organizations, all of which sought justice and equality. It was out of the NCAI's policy of gradualism that the National Indian Youth Council gained its momentum and proactive approach to demanding that Indian voices be heard. The NIYC challenged the wisdom of the NCAI leaders who continued a policy of pursuing Indian justice through unresponsive legislative appeals and a court system that was unsympathetic to tribal needs. One of the founders of the NIYC, Mel Thom, articulated the concerns of young Americans, especially the over 50 percent who resided in urban areas outside of Indian reservation boundaries, when he proposed a creed that was adopted by the NICY as its preamble to the Southwest Regional Indian Youth Council. The creed read:

At this time in the history of the American Indian, we the younger generation, find it expedient to band together on a national scale in meeting the challenges facing our Indian people. In banding together for mutual assistance we recognize that the future of the Indian people will ultimately rest in the hands of the younger people, and that Indian youth need be concerned with the position of the American Indian. We further recognize the inherent strength of the American Indian heritage that will be enhanced by a national Indian organization. The needs of the American Indians to be served are numerous and varied. Besides needs there are contributions already made and more to be made to America by its original inhabitants. We believe in a greater Indian America (p. 60).

Clyde Warrior took this message to the floor of the American Indian Chicago Conference and openly challenged tribal leaders such as W. W. Keeler and Earl Boyd Pierce for acting like "little brown Americans" (p. 61). Cobb states that the "NIYC advanced a dynamic interpretation of identity and community. They demanded foremost the right to have the latitude necessary to define the meaning of modern tribalism on terms of their own making" (p. 60). The tide now began to turn away from the stoic, time-honored tradition of negotiating with the federal government to one that would ultimately lead to a period of Red Power activism that ended in 1975. That activism clearly began in the mid-1960s and was a direct result of the unrest manifested at the Chicago Conference and the rise of the NIYC as the voice of young Indian America. Cobb does acknowledge the 1964 Washington State fishing rights struggles led by Hank Adams and the associated arrests and violence that accompanied that event. He fails to mention, however-and this is my only criticism of this otherwise outstanding book-the occupation of Alcatraz Island that took place in March 1964. While this was certainly a short-lived occupation, the five occupiers, led by Richard McKenzie (Sioux), demanded that the federal government recognize Indian treaty rights and return stolen Indian land, demands that had been ignored in Washington for decades. These reforms were at the center of concerns for the AIAA, the NCAI, and the NIYC and were at the heart of the nineteen-month occupation of Alcatraz Island that also began in the 1960s.

This is an exceptional book that requires a close read. It is well researched and brings to the reader an understanding of Indian political activism that has long been neglected or relegated to the dustbins of history. Organizations and people that fought in obscurity for Indian rights are presented in great detail, including their strong and weak points. U.S. government officials are both honored and criticized for their actions for and against the Indian call for sovereignty and self-determination. The importance of the Community Action Program (CAP) that was the heart of President Lyndon Johnson's antipoverty campaign is made clear, as is the ruination that the Vietnam conflict brought to President Johnson's War on Poverty and the associated American Indian policy initiatives. I highly recommend this book for colleges and universities for inclusion in courses on American Indian History post-1960, Contemporary American Indian Issues, and Federal Indian Law. Daniel Cobb's book, Indian Politics in Cold War America: Parallel and Contradiction (2006), is the companion book that further illuminates this critical period in understanding the reassertion of Indian sovereignty, self-determination, and self-governance.