Custer Died For Your Sins

by Vine Deloria

  The centuries following the Reformation were marked with incredible turmoil. But the turmoil was not so much over religious issues as it was over interpretation of religious doctrines. Correctness of belief was preferred over truth itself. Man charged back into the historical mists to devise systems of thought which would connect him with the greats of the past. Fear of the unfamiliar became standard operating procedure.

  Today Europe is still feeling the effects of the submersion of its original tribes following the demise of the Roman Empire. Western man smashes that which he does not understand because he never had the opportunity to evolve his own culture. Instead ancient cultures were thrust upon him while he was yet unprepared for them.

  There lingers still the unsolved question of the primacy of the Roman Empire as contrasted with the simpler more relaxed life of the Goths, Celts, Franks, and Vikings.

  Where feudalism conceived man as a function of land, the early colonists reversed the situation in their efforts to create “new” versions of their motherlands. Early settlers made land a function of man, and with a plentitude of land, democracy appeared to be the inevitable desire of God. It was relatively simple, once they had made this juxtaposition, to define Indians, blacks, and other groups in relation to land.

  The first organizing efforts of the new immigrants were directed toward the process of transplanting European social and political systems in the new areas they settled. Thus New England, New France, New Spain, New Sweden, New Haven, New London, New York, New Jersey, Troy, Ithaca, and other names expressed their desire to relive the life they had known on the other side of the Atlantic—but to relive it on their own terms. No one seriously wanted to return to the status of peasant, but people certainly entertained the idea of indigenous royalty. If your ancestor got off the boat, you were one step up the ladder of respectability. Many Indians, of course, believe it would have been better if Plymouth Rock had landed on the Pilgrims than the Pilgrims on Plymouth Rock.

  The early colonists did not flee religious persecution so much as they wished to perpetuate religious persecution under circumstances more favorable to them. They wanted to be the persecutors. The rigorous theocracies which quickly originated in New England certainly belie the myth that the first settlers wanted only religious freedom. Nothing was more destructive of man than the early settlements on this continent.

  It would have been far better for the development of this continent had the first settlers had no illusions as to their motives. We have seen nearly five centuries of white settlement on this continent, yet the problems brought over from Europe remain unsolved and grow in basic intensity daily. And violence as an answer to the problem of identity has only covered discussion of the problem.

  * * *

  In transplanting Europe to these peaceful shores, the colonists violated the most basic principle of man’s history: certain lands are given to certain peoples. It is these peoples only who can flourish, thrive, and survive on the land. Intruders may hold sway for centuries but they will eventually be pushed from the land or the land itself will destroy them. The Holy Land, having been periodically conquered and beaten into submission by a multitude of invaders, today remains the land which God gave to Abraham and his descendants. So will America return to the red man.

  The message of the Old Testament, the Hebrew-Jewish conception of the Homeland, has been completely overlooked. Culture, if any exists, is a function of the homeland, not a function of the economic system that appears to hold temporary sway over a region.

  Thus the fundamental error of believing a transplant possible practically canceled any chances for significant evolution of a homogeneous people. Even more so, it canceled the potentiality of making the new settlements the land of the free and the home of the brave—not when it was already the home of the Indian brave.

  There never really was a transplant. There was only a three-hundred-year orgy of exploitation. The most feverish activity in America has been land speculation. Nearly all transactions between Indian and white have been land transactions. With Emancipation, the first program offered the black was one hundred dollars, forty acres, and a mule! But when it appeared the black might be able to create something on the land, that was immediately taken away from him.

  Land has been the basis on which racial relations have been defined ever since the first settlers got off the boat. Minority groups, denominated as such, have always been victims of economic forces rather than beneficiaries of the lofty ideals proclaimed in the Constitution and elsewhere. One hundred years of persecution after Emancipation, the Civil Rights laws of the 1950’s and 1960’s were all passed by use of the Interstate Commerce Clause of the Constitution. Humanity, at least on this continent, has been subject to the whims of the marketplace.

  When we begin to talk of Civil Rights, therefore, it greatly confuses the issue and lessens our chances of understanding the forces involved in the rights of human beings. Rather, we should begin talking about actual economic problems; and in realistic terms we are talking about land.

  No movement can sustain itself, no people can continue, no government can function, and no religion can become a reality except it be bound to a land area of its own. The Jews have managed to sustain themselves in the Diaspora for over two thousand years, but in the expectation of their homeland’s restoration. So-called power movements are primarily the urge of peoples to find their homeland and to channel their psychic energies through their land into social and economic reality. Without land and a homeland no movement can survive. And any movement attempting to build without clarifying its goals usually ends in violence, the energy from which could have been channeled toward sinking the necessary roots for the movement’s existence.

  Civil Rights is a function of man’s desire for self-respect, not of his desire for equality. The dilemma is not one of tolerance or intolerance but one of respect or contempt. The tragedy of the early days of the Civil Rights movement is that many people, black, white, red, and yellow, were sold a bill of goods which said that equality was the eventual goal of the movement. But no one had considered the implications of so simple a slogan. Equality became sameness. Nobody noticed it, but everyone was trained to expect it. When equality did not come, black power did come and everybody began to climb the walls in despair.

  * * *

  In 1963, when the Civil Rights drive was at its peak, many of us who occupied positions of influence in Indian Affairs were severely chastised by the more militant churchmen for not having participated in the March on Washington. One churchman told me rather harshly that unless Indians got with it there would be no place for us in America’s future. Equality, he assured me, was going to be given to us whether we want it or not.

  We knew, of course, that he had equality confused with sameness, but there was no way to make him understand. In the minds of most people in 1963, legal equality and cultural conformity were identical.

  We refused to participate in the Washington March. In our hearts and minds we could not believe that blacks wanted to be the same as whites. And we knew that even if they did want that, the whites would never allow it to happen. As far as we could determine, white culture, if it existed, depended primarily upon the exploitation of land, people, and life itself. It relied upon novelties and fads to provide an appearance of change but it was basically an economic Darwinism that destroyed rather than created.

  It was therefore no surprise to us when Stokely Carmichael began his black power escapade. We only wondered why it had taken so long to articulate and why blacks had not been able to understand their situation better at the beginning.

  A year earlier, during the Selma March, Abernathy introduced Martin Luther King with a stirring speech. He reminded his audience that “God never leaves His people without a leader.” When we heard those words we knew where the Civil Rights movement was heading. It was then merely a question of waiting until the blacks began to explore peoplehood, toy with that idea for awhile, and then consider tribalism
and nationalism.

  Peoplehood is impossible without cultural independence, which in turn is impossible without a land base. Civil Rights as a movement for legal equality ended when the blacks dug beneath the equality fictions which white liberals had used to justify their great crusade. Black power, as a communications phenomenon, was a godsend to other groups. It clarified the intellectual concepts which had kept Indians and Mexicans confused and allowed the concept of self-determination suddenly to become valid.

  In 1954, when the tribes were faced with the threat of termination as outlined in House Concurrent Resolution 108, the National Congress of American Indians had developed a Point Four Program aimed at creating self-determinative Indian communities. This program was ignored by Congress, bitterly opposed by the national church bodies and government agencies, undercut by white interest groups, and derided by the Uncle Tomahawks who had found security in being the household pets of the white establishment.

  So, for many people, particularly those Indian people who had supported self-determination a decade earlier, Stokely Carmichael was the first black who said anything significant. Indian leadership quickly took the initiative, certain that with pressures developing from many points the goal of Indian development on the basis of tribal integrity could be realized. Using political leverage, the NCAI painstakingly began to apply itself to force change within the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

  In April of 1966, following the forced resignation of Philleo Nash, as Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Stewart Udall, Secretary of the Interior, held a conference to determine what “they” could do for “their” Indians. The tribes balked at the idea of bureaucrats planning the future of Indian people without so much as a polite bow in their direction. So sixty-two tribes arrived at Santa Fe for their own meeting and forced Interior to realize that the days of casually making Indian policy at two-day conferences was officially over. It took, unfortunately, another two years for Udall to get the message that the Indian people meant business.

  All through 1966 and 1967 Interior tried one scheme after another in an effort to sell an incredibly bad piece of legislation, the Omnibus Bill, to the tribes. In May of 1966 an embryo bill was conceived within Interior, which purported to solve all existing Indian problems. September of that year saw the Commissioner of Indian Affairs embark on a tour of the West to gather tribal suggestions “in case the Interior Department wanted to suggest some legislation”—coincidentally the bill of May, 1966.

  In July of 1966, however, the National Congress of American Indians obtained a copy of the Interior bill. By September all of the tribes had versions of the proposed legislation—the same legislation which Interior claimed wouldn’t even be on the drawing boards until after the regional meetings to gather tribal opinions on legislative needs

  Commissioner Bennett’s task of presenting a facade of consultation while Udall rammed the bill down the Indians’ throats later that year dissolved in smoke as irate tribal chairmen shot down the proposal before it left the launching pad.

  As success followed success, Indians began to talk playfully of red power in terms similar to what SNCC was saying. The bureaucrats became confused as to which path the tribes would take next. After all, a two-year skirmish with the Secretary of the Interior and achievement of a standoff is enough to whet one’s appetite for combat.

  As 1968 opened, national Indian Affairs appeared to be heading faster and faster toward real involvement with other minority groups. In January, twenty-six urban centers met at Seattle, Washington, to begin to plan for participation of urban Indians in national Indian affairs. Seattle was the high point of the red power movement. But Indians quickly veered away from “power” as a movement. We knew we had a certain amount of power developing. There was no need to advocate it. The task was now to use it.

  Too, black power, as many Indian people began to understand it, was not so much an affirmation of black people as it was an anti-white reaction. Blacks, many Indian people felt, had fallen into the legal-cultural trap. They obviously had power in many respects. In some instances, publicity for example, blacks had much more power than anyone dreamed possible. Indians began to question why blacks did not use their impetus in decisive ways within the current administration, which was then sympathetic to the different minority groups.

  As spring came Martin Luther King had begun to organize the Poor People’s Campaign. The thesis of the movement, as many of us understood it, was to be built around the existing poverty among the minority groups.

  Indians had understood when Carmichael talked about racial and national integrity and the need for fine distinctions to be made between white and black. But when King began to indiscriminately lump together as one all minority communities on the basis of their economic status, Indians became extremely suspicious. The real issue for Indians—tribal existence within the homeland reservation—appeared to have been completely ignored. So where Indians could possibly have come into the continuing social movement of the 1960’s, the Poor People’s Campaign was too radical a departure from Indian thinking for the tribes to bridge.

  Some Indians, under the name of Coalition of Indian Citizens, did attend the Washington encampment, but they remained by themselves, away from Resurrection City. By and large they did not have the support of the Indian community and were largely the creation of some national churches who wished to get Indians involved in the Poor People’s Campaign. With church funding, these individuals wandered around Washington vainly trying to bring about a “confrontation” with Interior officials. They were sitting ducks for the pros of Interior, however, and the effects of their visits were negligible.

  * * *

  The remainder of 1968 was a traumatic experience for Indian tribes. Ideology shifted rapidly from topic to topic and dared not solidify itself in any one place for fear of rejection. National leaders trod softly when discussing issues. No one seemed to know which direction the country would take. Return to the old integration movement seemed out of the question. Continuing to push power movements against the whole of society seemed just as senseless.

  Cautiously the subject of capital began to come into discussions. Too many Indian people realized the gulf that existed between the various groups in American society. A tremendous undefined need for consolidation, capitalization, and withdrawal took hold of Indian Affairs. Many tribal chairmen began to withdraw from conferences and others began to hedge their bets by remaining close to the reservation.

  Tribal leaders became concerned about ongoing economic development which would be aimed at eventual economic independence for their tribes, rather than accepting every grant they could squeeze out of government agencies.

  The National Congress of American Indians refused to join the Poor People’s March because the goals were too generalized. Instead the NCAI began a systematic national program aimed at upgrading tribal financial independence.

  In 1968 Indian leadership finally accepted the thesis that they would have to match dollar for dollar in income and program to fight the great clash between white and non-white that was coming in the months ahead. And Indian leaders began to realize that they had a fair chance of winning.

  Many tribes began to shift their funds from the U.S. Treasury into the stock market. Mutual funds and stocks and bonds became the primary interest of the tribal councils. Those tribes with funds available put them into high-paying investment programs. Other tribes ordered a general cutback on overhead to give them additional funds for programming and investment.

  In the move toward capitalization the tribes followed the basic ideas outlined years before by Clyde Warrior and others when the National Indian Youth Council first began to concentrate on building viable Indian communities. But it was too late for the National Indian Youth Council to take advantage of their success. Warrior died in July of 1968, some say of alcohol, most say of a broken heart.

  Warrior had already been a rebel in 1964 when the majority of the tribes had lined up to support the Johnson-H
umphrey ticket in the general election. Clyde supported Goldwater. His basic thesis in supporting Goldwater was that emotional reliance on a Civil Rights bill to solve the black’s particular cultural question was the way to inter-group disaster. Warrior had been right.

  What the different racial and minority groups had needed was not a new legal device for obliterating differences but mutual respect with economic and political independence. By not encouraging any change in the status quo, Goldwater had offered the chance for consolidation of gains at a time when the Indian people had great need to consolidate. Now consolidation was a move that may have started too late.

  When a person understands the basic position developed by Warrior in 1964, one comes to realize the horror with which the Indian people contemplated their situation in 1968.

  All the white man could offer, all that Johnson offered, was a minor adjustment in the massive legal machinery that had been created over a period of three hundred years. Rights of minority groups and reactions of the white majority depended solely on which parts of the machinery were being adjusted.

  For many Indians the white had no culture other than one of continual exploitation. How then, they wondered, could an adjustment in methods of exploitation which had prevented formation of a culture solve their cultural problem? Thoughtful Indians, young and old, began to withdraw as they saw America building up toward a period of violent conflict. The basic problems which the colonists had brought over from Europe had not been solved and many felt there was a great danger that they would be solved violently in the future.