McNickle urged the public to view the debate over the future of the Indian Office from the perspective of Indian people. His principal contribution to this effort was a general history of Native Americans in the United States, They Came Here First, which he published in 1949. The book opened with an autobiographical vignette that illustrated how little outsiders understood about how Native people viewed the world. McNickle described a discussion between him and a Hopi tribal leader who had refused to cooperate with a new Indian Office directive. The anonymous Hopi man complained to the author that white people never asked permission to enter their lands; “they just moved in. They did not ask what our rules were,” he added; “they wrote rules for us to follow. . . . How do you explain that?” McNickle recalled that he had been stumped. Moreover, he confessed, “nothing that had been written before by white men” could answer the Hopi elder’s question.
McNickle realized that the only justification for the government’s actions was the common assumption that Indians were a backward and defeated people who should simply follow the orders issued by their superiors in the Indian Office. He pointed out that the man confronting him on the Arizona mesa “was not [a] vanquished and vanishing American. Here was a living voice, and a competent voice, asking the white man to justify his works.” McNickle argued that the American public should hear the insistence in the Hopi man’s questions and respond to them in a spirit of equality and respect. He urged his white readers to learn more about Indian people and their history. He invited them to “visualize something of what it was like” for Indians in the past. “One ought to try,” he added. “It was important.”84
In an effort to further the goal of presenting a clear platform before the American public, McNickle urged his fellow NCAI members and other activists to avoid the political rancor of the 1930s and to unite around a set of common principles. Regardless of their internal differences, he believed Native leaders should recognize, as he wrote at the end of They Came Here First, that their political enemies were “the aggressively superior white men who would have no native people anywhere in the world, except as almsmen paying for their bread by praising their masters.”85 Like Yellowtail, McNickle was convinced that the differences among tribal leaders—over the scale of federal assistance, the future of the Indian Office, the power of treaty rights, or the meaning of U.S. citizenship—were far less important than their common belief that American Indians deserved to be recognized as occupying a permanent place within the society and government of the United States. Acting on this belief, he proposed in 1947 that all delegates to the NCAI convention sign a Treaty of Peace, Friendship and Mutual Assistance. He declared, “Never before has there been greater need for Indians to stand together against the forces that would deprive them of their rights, their liberties, and their lands.” The treaty’s conclusion invoked the spirit of the Iroquois Six Nations whose decisions, he declared, “have always in view not only the present but also the coming generations. . . .”86
The unity McNickle advocated was put to the test soon after Dwight Eisenhower’s triumphal election in 1952. Republicans now controlled both the White House and Congress. Political pressure had already moved the Indian Office under President Truman’s authoritarian appointee, Dillon Myer, a long way toward the Republicans’ termination position. But as the Eighty-third Congress convened early in 1953, Senators Butler and Watkins prepared to press their agenda with new vigor. In the confirmation hearings for Glenn Emmons, President Eisenhower’s nominee to head the Indian Office, Senator Watkins won a commitment from the former New Mexico banker to liquidate federal trusteeship over Indians “as rapidly as possible.”87 Watkins’s committee then brought House Concurrent Resolution (HCR) 108 to the floor for a vote. HCR 108 committed Congress to ending the Indians’ “status as wards” and named specific jurisdictions where the termination of federal services was to occur as quickly as possible. These included all the reserves in California, New York, Florida, and Texas as well as smaller agencies in several other states. The resolution ordered the Indian Office to come forward with plans for implementing these goals by January 1, 1954.
House Resolution 108 won final approval on August 1, 1953. Two weeks later Senator Watkins and his allies secured passage of Public Law 280, which unilaterally extended state civil and criminal jurisdiction over tribal communities in five states, including Wisconsin and Minnesota, and established procedures for similar extensions to occur in other states when requested. On the same day that it adopted Public Law 280, Congress voted positively on measures that lifted long-standing federal restrictions on the personal freedoms of Indians, including prohibitions on the sale of firearms and alcohol to Native people. The momentum for setting the Indians free suddenly seemed unstoppable. As Watkins and his allies prepared for the second session of the Eighty-third Congress that was to begin in January 1954, legislators moved to consider twenty termination bills that would affect all the tribes mentioned in HCR 108, plus other groups in Utah, southern Oregon, and Oklahoma.
REACHING CONSENSUS
By February 1954 the political activism sparked by John Collier’s New Deal reforms suddenly appeared in the national spotlight. The National Congress of American Indians hosted 117 Native leaders from forty-three tribes at an emergency conference at the Raleigh Hotel in Washington, D.C. These delegates gathered to voice an “organized protest . . . against legislation which, if passed, would endanger the tribal existence of the American Indian people. . . .” The emergency conference adopted a Declaration of Indian Rights that drew together the themes and issues that had preoccupied Jemison, McNickle, Yellowtail, and other activists in the years since World War II. This manifesto moved beyond the general sentiments contained in the NCAI’s treaty of peace to a set of specific goals. The emergency conference demanded recognition of the Indians’ “rights of citizenship” as well as a “good faith” endorsement of treaty rights and recognition of America’s continuing responsibilities to Indian people. “If the Federal Government will continue to deal with our tribal officials as it did with our ancestors,” the declaration noted, “if it will deal with us as individuals . . . governing only by consent, we will be able to . . . discharge our full responsibilities as citizens, and yet remain faithful to the Indian way of life.” The emergency conference marked an unprecedented moment of national unity. For the first time a group of representative Native leaders articulated a set of common principles and declared publicly that they would not be governed without their consent.88
The NCAI president, Joseph Garry, had issued invitations to the emergency conference on February 9, only three weeks before its proposed opening date, but the NCAI leadership had been discussing the idea of a national protest for months. The group’s retiring president, W. W. Short, a Chickasaw from Oklahoma, had reported the previous November that he and several other NCAI officers worried about the quickening pace of the Republicans’ termination campaign. Even relatively conservative tribal leaders were alarmed. “The Indians are up in the air,” Short wrote, “as they are very much disturbed over the much talked about withdrawal program.” Robert Yellowtail was more concerned. Writing to President Short from Montana shortly before the NCAI’s fall 1953 convention, the Crow leader declared: “The Indians are at the cross roads of their destiny. They must now hang together, go to Washington together and there together fight the bad bills. . . . I will be there to do my part,” he added, “and expect other Indian leaders to do the same.” Yellowtail urged the NCAI president to use the upcoming meeting to “marshal our forces.”89
Those who attended the 1953 NCAI annual meeting came ready to be mobilized. Even the Navajos, who continued to resist joining the NCAI, sent a delegation headed by their chairman, Sam Akeah. The delegates signaled their combative mood by electing forty-four-year-old Joseph Garry the organization’s third president. A generation younger than his two Oklahoma predecessors, Garry was a World War II veteran from Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. Handsome, fo
rceful, and articulate, he was a natural politician. He had served previously as the president of the Affiliated Tribes of the Northwest and was a firm advocate of both treaty rights and Robert Yellowtail’s style of retail politics.90
In keeping with the annual meeting’s energetic tone, Yellowtail spoke at the convention, telling his audience that he was drawing on “forty-four years of experience in the nation’s capital.” The Crows’ elder statesman urged the group “to never let down your guards on behalf of your people.” He emphasized the compatibility of treaty rights, federal support, and U.S. citizenship. “We are entitled,” he declared, “by treaty, to the protection of the supreme law of the land, treaty law, and the Constitution of the United States.” Yellowtail declared that the termination legislation then before Congress represented “a conspiracy” aimed “at the elimination of the Indian land base [and] separation of the Indian from all of his land holdings. . . . The job of the Indians everywhere,” he concluded, “is to arrest and defeat these bills. . . . There is no time for bickering among the tribal leaders; it is instead time for the united action against the common enemy.”91
The Washington emergency conference in February 1954 was a dramatic response to Yellowtail’s invitation. More than one hundred delegates registered at the Raleigh Hotel. Dozens of tribes that could not send representatives sent official statements of support. Conference organizers claimed that also attending were more than thirty tribal emissaries who were not listed on the official register of 117 delegates, In addition, nineteen mainstream, non-Indian organizations were represented. These included the Boy Scouts of America, the National Council of Churches, Fisk University’s Institute of Race Relations, and the American Friends Service Committee. Seven of the Indian delegates present, including D’Arcy McNickle and the former president Napoleon Johnson, had attended the organization’s founding convention in 1944. They were joined by tribal representatives from New York, Washington State, the Southwest, Oklahoma, and the Plains. Also present were Robert Yellowtail, Mrs. Henry Roe Cloud, the widow of the recently deceased educator who had campaigned for the IRA in the 1930s, and the NCAI’s former executive director Ruth Muskrat Bronson.92
Notably absent was Alice Jemison, then living in suburban Herndon, Virginia. The Seneca activist never accepted the leadership of men like Yellowtail and McNickle, whom she dismissed as Collier protégés, while for their part, the NCAI leaders made little effort to draw their former critic into their united front. Nevertheless, Jemison was heard from. She testified at the congressional hearings on the proposed termination bills a few days before the emergency conference began. Watkins and his allies probably hoped she would provide some political cover for their cause, but as soon as she introduced herself, Jemison made it clear that she represented only herself. “I am here voluntarily,” she said in her statement, “sort of a lone wolf howling.”
Jemison’s testimony was hardly supportive of the terminationists’ agenda. She explained that she favored giving Indians more freedom, but she added: “I do not believe that the bills that are before this committee will accomplish that purpose. . . . I have been working in Indian affairs for more than twenty years,” she told the committee; “let me please show you what is wrong with this legislation.” In addition to specific suggestions, aimed primarily at preventing congressional meddling in Indian property rights, Jemison renewed her earlier proposal for a constitutional amendment to repeal Congress’s power to regulate commerce with the Indian tribes. Such an amendment, she argued, would bolster Indian treaty rights by undercutting Congress’s legislative power over the tribes. “Until the Constitution of the United States is amended,” she told the legislators, “the property and the lives of tribal Indians will continue to be your responsibility.” Jemison argued that treaties should be the sole basis for a tribe’s relationship with the United States. Her appearance surely disappointed Watkins and his supporters; it generated no interest from the press.93
By contrast, the emergency conference was a high-profile hit. It had been timed to coincide with the joint hearings on the Republicans’ termination proposals, and the city was full of angry tribal leaders prepared to speak directly to the threats before them. The NCAI gathering took full advantage of their presence. Fortunately as well, the venerable Indian Rights Association, whose patrician white leaders had lost considerable influence over policy making during the Collier years, agreed to subsidize the hiring of Jim Hayes, a public relations specialist, to help the NCAI broadcast its message as widely as possible. Hayes reported after the gathering that the emergency meeting had generated twenty-one editorials (“all sympathetic”) and more than one hundred news stories written either by wire services or by local reporters. In his letter of thanks to the IRA leadership, Joseph Garry noted that the publicist “not only showed phenomenal skill in getting the press—in Washington and in Indian states—to print the Indians’ position on issues, but he gave even greater help . . . by encouraging and aiding the Indian delegates who held individual sessions with reporters, press conferences, and private meetings with members of congress.” With Hayes’s help, Garry wrote, “even inarticulate Indian delegates became effectively vocal.”94
The emergency meeting expressed support for both the Indian Office and a long-term federal commitment to tribal governments. While relationships among activists from different regions and tribes remained fluid and uncertain, it was now clear that the organization’s effectively vocal members were speaking with one voice. The infrastructure for political activism had changed dramatically from the days of Gus Beaulieu and Thomas Sloan, when Indian advocates scrambled for an audience and counted their allies on the fingers of one hand. At the same time, in contrast with the early days of the New Deal, the reach of Indian leaders had been extended across the nation and into the highest levels of policy making. Still, the message Joseph Garry and other leaders delivered in 1954 was a familiar one; it would have been recognizable to their predecessors from Indian Territory, Nevada, Nebraska, or Minnesota.
The emergency conference occurred at a sensitive moment, when public interest in racial injustice was on the rise. The long era when white supremacy was simply accepted as an established fact and racial conflict was viewed as an unpleasant but inevitable feature of regional life in the South or the West was finally coming to an end. New Deal reformers had largely avoided racially sensitive issues (in fact much of Roosevelt’s agenda had been enacted with support from his party’s segregationist southern wing), but the rising activism of African Americans and the broad impact of World War II rendered that approach increasingly problematic. The postwar years produced two important symbolic events: Jackie Robinson’s dramatic integration of professional baseball in 1947 and President Truman’s order to integrate the armed forces one year later. At the time of the emergency conference even more momentous change was in the offing. Thurgood Marshall presented his oral arguments in the landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, three months before the NCAI’s delegates arrived at the Raleigh Hotel. When the justices announced their unanimous decision in the case on May 17, two months after the NCAI delegates had left town, the long reign of separate but equal suddenly came to an end.
For the Indian activists gathered at the Raleigh Hotel that February, the principal symbol of their new, united agenda was a forceful statement declaring that Native communities must henceforth be consulted in the development of legislation and Indian office policy. The assembly approved the text of a proposed congressional resolution it offered as a substitute for the general termination resolution passed by the Republican majority the previous summer. The NCAI resolution demanded that “any Indian tribe, band, or other identifiable group of Indians who may be directly affected by any legislation, shall be consulted prior to its drafting, particularly bills affecting rights and privileges guaranteed by Executive Orders, treaties or agreements.”95 This simple statement placing Indian consent at the center of future policy makin
g captured the concerns of the Indian activists who had risen to prominence over the previous two decades.
The men and women who gathered for the emergency conference in 1954 were products of the New Deal. They may have differed earlier over the wisdom of John Collier’s reforms, but they were now numerous enough and visible enough so that their declaration could not be ignored. While Alice Jemison was estranged from the NCAI leadership, she likely would have applauded their resolution’s demand for consultation and respect for treaty rights. And while a political operator like Yellowtail and a cautious bureaucrat like McNickle had different upbringings and different agendas, they worked together to draft and promote the organization’s declaration. The emergency conference did not stop the termination campaign, but the delegates’ unanimous support for the NCAI’s resolution damaged it considerably. Few in the Indian Office or in Congress could ignore the reality that most tribal leaders were now publicly opposed to the withdrawal of federal services and the elimination of legal protections for tribes.
By linking treaty rights and citizenship rights and demanding that tribes be consulted prior to the adoption of any new policies that might affect them, the delegates to the 1954 conference not only summarized the central beliefs of activists like Jemison, Yellowtail, and McNickle but also established the framework for national policy discussions to come. Federal officials would continue to bully and manipulate tribal leaders, but they could never again pretend that Native communities did not—or would not—exist as permanent, vocal members of American society. Speaking at a celebration of the fifteenth anniversary of the NCAI’s founding in 1959, D’Arcy McNickle noted that while “a convention is not a good place to talk about ideas,” powerful ideas had been central to the organization’s success. The NCAI’s ideas were particularly potent, he added, because they were products of a generation or more of struggle: “they came out of man’s experience and out of his heart’s desires.” Recalling perhaps his personal struggles as a young author as well as the NCAI’s struggle to forge a united position across the previous two decades, McNickle added: “Ideas born in this manner have a way of living, whatever forces may be ranged against them. An idea cannot be crushed like an eggshell.”96
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