by Vine Deloria
Culture, as Indian people understood it, was basically a lifestyle by which a people acted. It was self-expression, but not a conscious self-expression. Rather, it was an expression of the essence of a people.
All the white man had succeeded in creating in his time on this continent had been a violent conglomerate of individuals, not a people. Being a people is more a state of mind than it is a definable quality. Indians had it and now they began to give much consideration to strengthening that state of mind before racial conflict engulfed them.
When one is an integral part of the Indian world view, his values are oriented according to the social values inherent in the culture itself. Social relations become not merely patterns of behavior but customs which dominate behavior so that the culture becomes self-perpetuating. Once the cultural values take hold, crises do not cause disorientation. Thus the Indian enters a state of mind and behavior in which many things of secondary concern to him would ordinarily cause a non-Indian great emotional turmoil. Once a person is a vital part of the Indian frame of mind, it is impossible to leave. Like an old cavalry or circus horse, the call to action invoked by some distant echo produces certain action which everyone accepts as Indian. Since definition, any definition, is canceled by experience, Indian people have tended to equate behavior patterns with culture. Racial conflicts have not tended to be as important as have actual events.
There is, therefore, basically no way in which the ideology of the Civil Rights movement could reach Indian communities in a communicative sense. Outside of black power nothing that the Civil Rights people could have said would have indicated their meaning or opened lines of interaction by which the Indian people would have understood what the movement was all about.
The sight of blacks carrying TV sets through riot-torn streets completely turned off those Indian people who were trying to understand Civil Rights. America, rioters seemed to be saying, is a color TV and this is what we want from her.
Where we were hopeful of eventual peace, friendship, and cooperation between the various groups, many of us felt betrayed and confused. For years we had fought the fight for cultural survival only to find the situation reversed on us when we thought we were beginning to understand it.
It was incomprehensible to us that a people would rebel against a system that they felt was irrelevant and unresponsive to their needs. Blacks seemed to be saying that white society was bad, but they wanted it anyway.
Consequently, when a number of young Indians joined the Poor People’s Campaign, they seemed to be betraying the Indian fight for survival. Feelings ran extremely high during the Poor People’s March, particularly when Indian people were shown on television conducting demonstrations for fishing rights and food. Too many Indian people confused the means used with the ends to be achieved. Ideologically, Indian participation in the Poor People’s March seemed to be a surrender to white society because the basic thrust of the campaign was to endorse middleclass values through pointing out their absence in the life of the poor.
Resistance to Civil Rights ideas by tribal leaders has proved a catalyst to some Indian participants in the Poor People’s Campagn. Discussions with some of these Indians have convinced tribal leaders that dangerous times lie ahead for reservation people. The new militants appear ready to destroy the legal status of the tribes in order to introduce change. This attitude frightens tribal councils immensely and their fright convinces the new militants that their way is right. There appears to be very little leeway for compromise between the two groups.
Frightened tribal councils are beginning to create an atmosphere within which issues can be brought forward for solution, however. One good tangible result of Indian participation in the Poor People’s Campaign is that Indian people all over have begun to question the nature of their situation. They are asking what their specific rights and benefits are and what the Poor People’s March could possibly do to improve their situation.
In the defensive gesture of counting their blessings to show that the new militants should not have participated in the campaign, Indians have spent much time suffering new insights and attempting to digest what they have learned.
To many young Indians it has come through quite clearly that the problem of the Indian people is legal and not cultural, although the problem between Indians and other groups insofar as they inter-relate is cultural. That is to say, the white always presents opportunities for cultural enrichment when he is trying to steal Indian land. When the white sincerely wants to develop capital resources of the Indian people he invariably strengthens Indian cultural traits.
One has only to hear speeches by leading Democratic Senators who want to help Indians, to realize that there is a quiet move against the Indian land base. On the other hand, when attempts are made to develop Indian resources these thoughts are interpreted by Indian people as an affirmation of their way of life.
When we talk about basic solutions to the problems of each group, we talk about a startling reversal of concepts. Indian tribes need the basic gift of the white to the Negro—readjustment of tribal rights to protect person and property from exploitation by the federal government and private persons. Treaties need to be reaffirmed as the law of the land. Guarantees of free and undisturbed use of the reservation lands need to be enforced. Congressional pressure to destroy the Indian tribes and communities needs to be lifted.
On the other hand, the federal government needs to be the main supporter of the black quest for cultural development. The black does not need more legal rights so much as he needs the freedom to develop himself through experimentation. Prejudicial practices in law enforcement continually impinge upon the black communities, with cessions of police power and law to the local communities. During the riots after the assassination of Martin Luther King, those cities where militant black nationalists were strongest were the quietest because the young blacks kept order in spite of the white police.
White culture destroys other culture because of its abstractness. As a destroyer of culture it is not a culture but a cancer. In order to keep the country from complete divisiveness, separatism must be accepted as a means to achieve equality of personality both for groups and individuals. Separatism can be the means by which blacks gain time for reflection, meditation, and eventual understanding of themselves as a people.
The black needs time to develop his roots, to create his sacred places, to understand the mystery of himself and his history, to understand his own purpose. These things the Indian has and is able to maintain through his tribal life. The Indian now needs to create techniques to provide the economic strength needed to guarantee the survival of what he has.
In a real way, white culture, if there is such, is already doomed to its own destruction. Continual emphasis on racial rather than cultural problems will not only bring down white society but may also endanger ancient Indian society and newly emerging black and Mexican social movements.
The white man has the marvelous ability to conceptualize. He has also the marvelous inability to distinguish between sacred and profane. He therefore arbitrarily conceptualizes all things and understands none of them. His science creates gimmicks for his use. Little effort is made to relate the gimmicks to the nature of life or to see them in a historical context.
The white man is problem-solving. His conceptualizations merge into science and then emerge in his social life as problems, the solutions of which are the adjustments of his social machine. Slavery, prohibition, Civil Rights, and social services are all important adjustments of the white man’s social machine. No solution he has reached has proven adequate. Indeed, it has often proven demonic.
White solutions fail because white itself is an abstraction of an attitude of mind, not a racial or group reality. The white as we know him in America is an amalgam of European immigrants, not a racial phenomenon. But the temptation has always been present to define groups according to their most superficial aspect. Hence we have white, black, red, and the Yellow Peril. And we ar
e taught to speak of the Negro problem, the Indian problem, and so forth.
White has been abstracted into a magical nebulous mythology that dominates all inhabitants of our country in their attitudes toward one another. We are, consequently, all prisoners of that mythology so far as we rebel against it. It is our misfortune that our economic system reflects uncritical acceptance of the mythology and that economic movements tend to reinforce the myth.
There is basically nothing real about our economic system. It is neither good nor bad, but neutral. Only when we place connotations on it and use it to manipulate people does it become a thing in itself.
Our welfare system demonstrates better than anything else the means to which uncritical white economics can be used. We have all types of welfare programs: old age, disability, aid to dependent children, orphanages, and unemployment. There is continual controversy in the halls of Congress, state legislatures, and city halls over the welfare programs.
Conservatives insist that those receiving welfare are lazy and are getting a free ride at the expense of hard-working citizens. Liberals insist that all citizens have a basic right to life and that it is the government’s responsibilty to provide for those unable to provide for themselves.
What are we really saying?
Welfare is based upon the norm set up by the Puritans long ago. A man is defined as a white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant, healthy, ambitious, earnest, and honest, a man whom the Lord smiles upon by increasing the fruits of his labor. Welfare is designed to compensate people insofar as they deviate from that norm. Insofar as a woman has an illegitimate child, she receives compensation. Insofar as a man is disabled, he receives compensation. Insofar as a person is too old to work, he receives compensation.
Welfare buys that portion of a person which does not match the stereotype of the real man. Welfare payments are never sufficient, never adequate. This is because each person bears some relation to the norm and in proportion to their resemblance, they receive less.
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When this attitude is applied to groups, it is best seen in the political parties. The Republicans represent the best of the white economics. The Democrats represent all of the deviations.
The Republican Party has ostensibly stood for less government as a political philosophical position. But when you listen carefully to the Republicans you do not really hear less government, you hear a strange religion of early Puritan mythology. The Republican Party is in reality the truest expression of America’s religion of progress and white respectability. It stands for the white superman who never existed. The peddler’s grandson who conquered the unknown by inheriting a department store—such is the basic American religion unmasked. The measure of America’s willingness to examine the basis of its existence is to be counted in the number of registered voters who claim to be Republicans.
The measure of truth in the above assertion is the Republican willingness to lose elections rather than depart from cherished doctrines and myths. Only a religion can attract and hold such loyalty.
The other party is something else. Popular conceptions gloss over reality and continue the Rooseveltian myth that the Democrats are the party of the people. The old Roosevelt coalition of labor, minority and ethnic groups, and farmers fails to acknowledge one unpublicized member—the special interests.
More than the Republicans, the Democrats are the party of the special interests. Who else defends the oil-depletion allowance more than the Democrats? Who else creates farm subsidies, tariffs, foreign aid, large development projects? Who else piles special programs on top of special programs? Could the Republicans create the poor as a class in themselves? For, the Republicans know no poor because it is not within their religious comprehension. Nixon’s election was the last gasp of this quasireligious nineteenth-century, Horatio Alger, WASP ethic.
Until 1968 the Democrats won election after election by gathering the rejected into an amalgam of special interests for the sole purpose of splitting the pie which they would then attempt to create. The pie never exists; it is continually being created by the adjustment of the governmental machinery to include additional special interests, while eligible parties participate in the American religion carefully being nurtured by the Republicans in their isolation.
Recent elections tend to show the reality of this analysis. Eisenhower proved that a President was not necessary for the true American religion to progress. Kennedy proved that if enough special interests are combined, even Americans will desert the long-term goals of progress for the immediacy of splitting the pie which was to be created. The New Frontier promised a new chance to be cut in on the action, a short cut into Republican heaven for those groups who had deviated from the norm either by birth, place of origin, or failure to deal themselves in at some previous point in history.
Johnson simply dealt more cards to more people than had ever been dealt before. And his opponent was out preaching salvation by works alone. No wonder there was a religious revolt! The election of 1964 was comparable to the Protestant Reformation, for never had the choices been so clear between faith and works.
Politically, most minority groups have shifted to the Democrats and remained loyal through thick and thin. Margins compiled by blacks, Indians, and Mexicans for Democratic candidates have been incredible. In 1964 it took a strong Indian to support Gold-water in spite of his publicized heroic flights to the Navajo and his superb collection of Hopi Kachina dolls.
The Kennedys increased the normal margins which minority groups gave to the Democrats because of their apparent interest in minority groups. Few members of the Indian community realize or will admit how little the Kennedys really did for Indians. Although the mythology of the Kennedys has made them appear as the only saviors of minority communities, the legislative record compiled by both Jack and Robert Kennedy shows another story.
Jack Kennedy broke the Pickering Treaty and had accomplished little besides the usual Interior Task Force study of Indians before his death. Robert Kennedy did little for Indians legislatively or administratively. He drew some fire and spotlighted some of the problems, but in doing so he practically pre-empted any chance of action because of his many political enemies and their outright rejection of causes he advocated.
Robert Kennedy did prove that race was not the real thing bothering this country and that the turmoil over Civil Rights was misunderstood. He presented himself as a person who could move from world to world and never be a stranger anywhere. His genius was that he personified the best traits of his Irish heritage and made an attempt to define white in a different way.
Other people were frightened at Kennedy’s obvious attempt to re-create the days of the New Frontier. White mythology sees the kingship as demonic, as against the American religion of ostensible equality.
Indian people loved the idea of Robert Kennedy replacing Jack. For them it was an affirmation of the great war chief from the great family leading his people in his brother’s place. Robert Kennedy became as great a hero as the most famous Indian war chiefs precisely because of his ruthlessness. Indians saw him as a warrior, the white Crazy Horse. He somehow validated obscure undefined feelings of Indian people which they had been unwilling to admit to themselves. Spiritually, he was an Indian!
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Robert Kennedy’s death has completely changed the nature of the Civil Rights movement and has altered the outlook of the American Indian toward American society.
Winds of caution have set in and sails are being trimmed. There appears to be no means by which the cultural crisis can be understood by those outside the group. Indian people are becoming more and more reluctant to consider alternatives. They are becoming distrustful of people who talk equality because they do not see how equality can be achieved without cultural separateness. To the degree that other groups demand material ransoms for peace and order, Indian people are fearful of the ultimate goals of the different movements.
There is no basic antagonism between black and red, or even between
red and white. Conflicts are created when Indians feel they are being defined out of existence by the other groups. Historically, each group has its own road to travel. All roads lead to personal and group affirmation. But the obstacles faced by each group are different and call for different solutions and techniques.
While it is wrong and harmful to define all dark-skinned people by certain criteria, it is also wrong to pretend that they have nothing in common. It is what Indians, blacks, and Mexicans have in common and where their differences lie which should be carefully studied.
Time and again blacks have told me how lucky they were not to have been placed on reservations after the Civil War. I don’t think they were lucky at all. I think it was absolute disaster that blacks were not given reservations.
Indian tribes have been able to deal directly with the federal government because they had a recognized status within the Constitutional scheme. Leadership falls into legal patterns on each reservation through the elective process. A tribal chairman is recognized by federal agencies, Congressional committees, and private agencies as the representative of the group. Quarrels over programs, rivalry between leaders, defense of rights, and expressions of the mood of the people are all channeled through the official governing body. Indian people have the opportunity to deal officially with the rest of the world as a corporate body.
The blacks, on the other hand, are not defined with their own community. Leadership too often depends upon newspaper coverage. Black communities do not receive the deference tribes receive, because they are agencies in the private arena and not quasi-governmental. Law and order is something imposed brutally from without, not a housekeeping function of the group.
Above all, Indian people have the possibility of total withdrawal from American society because of their special legal status. They can, when necessary, return to a recognized homeland where time is static and the world becomes a psychic unity again.
To survive, blacks must have a homeland where they can withdraw, drop the facade of integration, and be themselves. Whites are inevitably torn because they have no roots, they do not understand the past, and they have already mortgaged their future. Unless they can renew their psychic selves and achieve a sense of historical participation as a people they will be unable to survive.