The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee

by David Treuer

  Dixon found a receptive audience in Congress, where reformers were increasingly disturbed by the degree of corruption and malfeasance in the Indian service. The stubbornly defended existence of Indians continued to pose the question: What kind of country, what kind of democracy, had been created and defended, and at what cost? Surely one that was capable of treating the most disenfranchised people within its borders less poorly. Citizenship for Indians, in other words, was a tool meant to curb abuses by non-Indians. It was enacted in 1924 without much fanfare. The statute read:

  Be it enacted by the Senate and house of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That all non citizen Indians born within the territorial limits of the United States be, and they are hereby, declared to be citizens of the United States: Provided That the granting of such citizenship shall not in any manner impair or otherwise affect the right of any Indian to tribal or other property.

  All of a sudden the three hundred thousand Indians alive in 1924 in the United States became American citizens. And yet they did not have to renounce their tribal citizenship as part of this quasi-magical transformation: “Provided That the granting of such citizenship shall not in any manner impair or otherwise affect the right of any Indian to tribal or other property.” What this meant was profound: Indians were citizens and could vote, own property, could enjoy the “pursuit of happiness,” were “equal under the law,” could have wrongs redressed in court, and everything else with it. And at the same time, all the treaties not yet abrogated, all the rights to communal and tribal ownership of land, all the basic building blocks of tribal sovereignty were left in place. Indians—enjoying tribal and American citizenship—became a legally unique kind of American, both Indian and American.

  Many Indians, however, didn’t gain suffrage, as states often used what power they had to limit Indians’ access to the ballot. These states argued that Indians shouldn’t be allowed to vote because it wasn’t right for them to participate in both tribal and U.S. elections, or because they didn’t pay taxes on real estate, or because many of them lived on land held in federal trusteeship. Depriving Indians of the right to vote in the Southwest was a clear attempt to prevent Indian influence in local and state elections. Because there were so many Indians in that region, their participation would likely skew elections away from desired Anglo outcomes. As of 1938, seven states hadn’t extended suffrage to Indians, and it wasn’t until 1948—after thousands of Pueblo, Navajo, Hopi, and Apache had served in World War II—that Arizona and New Mexico (the two states with the largest proportion of Indians in the population) bent to federal pressure and allowed Indians to vote.

  The Meriam Report

  In 1928, four years after the Citizenship Act, the government released the Meriam Report. The massive report excoriated the government’s Indian policy and was the first comprehensive assessment of Indian life in the United States since Henry Rowe Schoolcraft was asked to undertake one in 1850. The appointment of the highly practical and unsentimental Lewis Meriam as lead investigator was something of a miracle for subjects who had, so often and for so long, been written about and advocated for by sensationalists who overlaid their real lives with meanings and significance that had little to do with them.

  For such a father of facts, however, precious few can be obtained about him or his views. He was born in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1883; took degrees at Harvard and George Washington universities; and received his PhD from the Brookings Institution. He worked primarily as a statistician and did serious work for the Census Bureau before he was asked to conduct a study on the lives and living conditions of Indians across the country. He assembled a team of experts from different areas—health, education, law, economics, agriculture, and “family life” among them. Once empaneled, the commission set out to see what was happening in Indian country, sometimes together and sometimes not, given the amount of ground they had to cover. Over a seven-month period they visited ninety-five locations—reservations, hospitals, schools, and agencies— in twenty-two states. It would take the team another two and a half years to organize and analyze the data they collected. When they were done they had managed to create a comprehensive, detailed, and impartial document that offered a damning assessment of how Indians had fared over the forty years the assimilation machine had been gobbling them up and churning out Americans.

  The report argued with facts and details, rather than passion and hyperbole, that federal Indian policy was a disaster. Health on reservations was as poor as it was in the boarding schools. Indians made—and continued to live on—much lower incomes than white Americans. Allotment had had a horrible effect on them. The allotments often couldn’t support any farmers, much less those new to the enterprise. And whatever strategies had worked for Indians in more “primitive” times had been supplanted by strategies that had been foisted on them and could not work where and how Indians actually lived. All in all, the report found that Indians were floundering on an American sea and were, as a whole, drowning.

  Lost in accounts of the years between 1918 and 1956 is the knowledge that the only reason there were any Indians left at all was that they had fought. They had fought against the government, and they had fought with it. Deprived of every conceivable advantage or tool or clear-hearted advocate, they had continued to fight. Not just in the ways Dixon and people like him imagined, as warriors astride horses roaming free across the Plains, but rather as husbands and wives and fathers and mothers. As writers and thinkers. As farmers and soldiers in the Great War. But what to do when the actual fighting stops and the pressures bear down back home? What to do when you can’t find the fight beyond the one for daily survival? What to do with that patrimony?

  Emergence of Tribal Governments

  As early as 1918, Indian tribes began to organize themselves formally despite the control exerted by the Office of Indian Affairs and the federal government more generally. At Red Lake Reservation, under the guidance of Peter Graves and the hereditary chiefs of the tribe, they formed the Red Lake General Council, a kind of amalgam of the hereditary chieftain positions the Ojibwe had employed for centuries and newer, representative forms of government. In 1893, at age twenty-one, Peter Graves—by blood half white and half Ojibwe from the Leech Lake Reservation but raised at Red Lake—was recruited by the Indian agent there to serve in the Red Lake police force. Within five years he was chief of police. During that time, Graves—through sheer force of character—developed a very good relationship with the agent and with all of his superiors in the Office of Indian Affairs. When a skirmish at Leech Lake broke out in 1898 at Sugar Point and Red Lakers were eager to go down and join the Leech Lakers in open, armed revolt against the U.S. government, Graves stood up in council and shouted down the hereditary chiefs, saying that anyone who went down to Leech Lake would forfeit membership at Red Lake and wouldn’t be allowed to return. Graves was so persuasive—yelling, teasing, cajoling—that in the end no Red Lakers went to Leech Lake.

  He became indispensable to the Office of Indian Affairs, acting as an unofficial diplomat between the chiefs and the government. Graves was also—in his role as liaison and police chief—increasingly annoyed and angered by the inroads white people were making into the sovereign territory of the Red Lake Ojibwe: timber crews, homesteaders, tourists, and fishermen flocked to the reservation. Everything revolved around the white people, who at times came to outnumber the Red Lakers on their own reservation. Moreover, even though Red Lake, alone among Ojibwe tribes in the region, had resisted the provisions of the Dawes and Nelson Acts, the government wasn’t content to let it alone. They kept trying to allot it, and Graves knew that once they did, all of the timber and, more important, control of the lake itself would evaporate. He also knew that the council of hereditary chiefs was not respected by the government. Something else was needed.

  In 1918, Graves joined forces with the chiefs, and they drafted a constitution for the General Council of the Red Lake Band o
f Chippewa Indians (“Chippewa” was the older mispronunciation of “Ojibwe” but was in common usage among the Ojibwe). It was a unique document and a bold move. Article 1 established the General Council. Article 2 recognized and codified the positions of the hereditary chiefs at Red Lake and “empowered them to be the primary political agents at Red Lake.” Seven hereditary positions in all were identified in the document, and each of the seven was to appoint five representatives to the General Council. All these members were voting members. Article 3 gave the General Council the right to appoint a chairman and other officers, though none of these had voting powers. The new/old Red Lake government held its first meeting on April 13, 1918, and it became the force that governed there, gradually eroding the power and efficacy of the Indian agent just as the agent had once eroded their authority. And though it didn’t happen overnight, gradually they were able to isolate and expel all of the white people living at Red Lake. But even as Red Lake took control of its destiny, wedding its ancestral modes of government to modern democratic rule, in 1934 government came to them, as it had come to Indians all across the country: from the top down, dreamed up by a few officials, and imposed uniformly in diverse communities, regardless of their needs.

  John Collier and the Indian Reorganization Act

  John Collier was born into a powerful political and banking family in Atlanta in 1884. Studying at Columbia, he came to believe that capitalism, if not modernity itself, was not altogether a good thing. American society, he would later say, was “physically, religiously, socially, and aesthetically shattered, dismembered, directionless.” In his mind, mechanization, modern life, and the striving for money eroded community and purpose. From 1907 to 1919 he served as the secretary for the People’s Institute, which taught political theory and social philosophy to workers and immigrants in New York City, focusing on ways to bolster ethnic and cultural pride through parades, lectures, and pageants. In 1920 he visited Taos, New Mexico, where he studied Pueblo life and culture. He came away changed: he was appalled by the government’s efforts at forced assimilation. He understood the “Indian problem” mostly as a policy problem the government had created. Plurality, freedom of religion, the right to self-governance—basically everything that had made America what it was—had been denied to American Indians, and only restoring and strengthening Indian tribes and tribal government could help Indians emerge from the nightmare of the past fifty years.

  Collier spent the next decade fighting for Indian rights, first as a part of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, where he did research for the Indian Welfare Committee. The GFWC believed, as he did, that the key barriers to Indians’ well-being were the loss of land under the Dawes Act and allotment, the illegalization of Indian religion under the Office of Indian Affairs, and economic and social dependency as a result of both. He, with the GFWC and on his own, lobbied to have the Dawes Act overturned. He joined the American Indian Defense Association formed by Robert Ely in 1923 to fight the religious oppression that was part of the federal program of assimilation. He was so relentless and so effective in his quest for not just equality but plurality and fairness that he was almost single-handedly responsible for the curtailment of religious persecution and the allotment process. He was the driving force behind the research and drafting of the Meriam Report in 1928. This didn’t win him many friends. A press release from the Interior Department claimed that Collier was a “fanatical Indian enthusiast with good intentions, but so charged with personal bias and the desire to get a victim every so often, that he does much more harm than good. . . . His statements cannot be depended upon to be either fair, factual or complete.” Nonetheless, after Franklin Delano Roosevelt took office, Collier was appointed commissioner of Indian affairs. He served from 1933 to 1945 and made sure the New Deal was a deal that reached into and lifted up Indian communities from coast to coast. Under Collier, the New Deal came to Indian country as the Indian Reorganization Act, passed in 1934.

  John Collier and Blackfeet Chiefs, circa 1934

  The IRA, or Howard-Wheeler Act, was revolutionary. It put a stop to the erosion of Indian homelands through allotment, created processes by which some of the land already lost could be gotten back, and devised structures by which new lands could be incorporated. It also brought constitutions and governments to Indian communities that had suffered under the lazy (but energetically corrupt) hand of the Office of Indian Affairs. The kicker was that tribes did not have to agree to the models of government proposed in the act, or even be reorganized along the lines drawn in it. They could vote on it among themselves and decide if it worked. Article 18 read: “This Act shall not apply to any reservation wherein a majority of the adult Indians, voting at a special election duly called by the Secretary of the Interior, shall vote against its application. It shall be the duty of the Secretary of the Interior, within one year after the passage and approval of this Act, to call such an election, which election shall be held by secret ballot upon thirty days’ notice.”

  This was a far cry from the way legislation had generally been forced down the throats of Indian communities—and land grabbed, children taken away, and rations and annuities withheld for noncompliance. And yet more subtle coercion nevertheless ensued. It was intimated that it would be difficult if not impossible to receive federal grants and assistance—for public projects, livestock and grazing, roads, hospitals, and schools—without a government in place that the U.S. federal government recognized. Moreover, the voting process was murky. Who was eligible to vote? By 1934 many non-Indians lived within the boundaries of Indian reservations as a result of allotment. Could they vote? The IRA would affect them, too. And what about absentees? Many thousands of Indians didn’t live—either permanently or temporarily—in their homelands or on their reservations. It was decided that absentees counted as votes for the new government. The Navajo, in particular, were dead set against the IRA because of Collier’s involvement in the Navajo Livestock Reduction Program, which forced the Navajo collectively to sell off half their livestock in an effort to curb erosion and overgrazing. Collier had the dissenters jailed and then pressed for a vote. In the end 172 tribes voted for the IRA, 73 against. To this day, many Diné regard Collier as a dictator.

  If one looks through the many constitutions that came into being for tribes between 1934 and 1938, it seems clear that Collier, despite (or because of) his interest in Native life, imagined a very specific kind of government for Indian people. He had, after all, spent more of his time among Indians at Taos Pueblo than in any other place or with any other tribe. The Pueblo lived in sedentary, village-centered communities that had existed within first the Spanish, then the Mexican, and finally the American governments. No wonder the majority of the tribal constitutions adopted as a result of the Indian Reorganization Act structured tribes much in the manner of small towns across America. But Taos (and the other eighteen Pueblos) are very different from the many hundreds of other tribes and many thousands of other tribal communities around the country. Moreover, they had not been subject to the treaty process as had most other tribes, because they had not been legally defined as Indians. Pueblo tribal constitutions more closely resembled charters or ordinances for municipalities. The IRA applied the same structure to their sample constitutions. These provided for a governing body of five to nine people, a chairman, secretary, treasurer, and district representatives, election cycles, rights and responsibilities such as entering into contracts, acquiring and disposing of land, administering and collecting funds, hiring and firing, and enrollment. As a rule, Collier’s suggestions and templates in the IRA did not include any kind of democratic structure like that enjoyed by the country at large: three separate independent bodies (executive, legislative, judicial), a bill of rights, or anything resembling constitutional rights. All in all, as the years began to show, IRA constitutions were grossly inadequate to the enormous job of policing large tracts of land, making education truly “local,” resolving disputes
not just between Indians of the same tribe but between Indians of different tribes and between Indians and their non-Indian neighbors. A Pueblo might be something like a village. But the Pine Ridge Reservation or the Blackfeet Nation or the Wind River Shoshone and Arapaho were nothing like villages at all. They were large, diverse nations, defined by treaties, had been sedentary for only fifty years, and each comprised many villages and family groups, not to mention bands. And each was still contending with the predation of outsiders who wanted a piece of what was left. Only now, in the early twenty-first century, are tribes radically rethinking their constitutions and trying to draft and redraft founding documents that fit their culture, land, history, and sense of self as a people.

  Perhaps Collier felt that the combined effect of his efforts and the Meriam Report would be enough to put a stop to the depredations of the Office of Indian Affairs and that in a less aggressive mode the office was sufficient to mediate disputes, see to the health of tribal institutions, and tend the ever-evolving relationship between tribes and local, state, and federal governments. Perhaps he saw tribal sovereignty and tribal citizenship less as the defining features of Indian life and more as spices that merely flavored the tribal meal. After all, tribal sovereignty was only quasi-sovereignty: they couldn’t (legally) raise armies, develop currencies, enter into treaties with foreign nations, or enter into trade relationships with, say, Germany. So, given all this, perhaps Collier thought that the constitutions that came about as a result of the IRA were adequate. They were not, and many tribes didn’t like them.

  The Red Lake Ojibwe, for example, having created a hybrid government twenty years before the IRA, saw no reason to change their constitution and government now. They voted against the IRA government despite immense pressure to accept it. Even the Pueblos, on whom the proposed constitutions were modeled, generally wanted no part of the switch.