Custer Died For Your Sins

by Vine Deloria

  Already the cracks are showing. The berserk sniper characterizes the dilemma of the white man. Government by selective assassination is already well established as the true elective process.

  All groups must come to understand themselves as their situation defines them and not as other groups see them. By accepting ourselves and defining the values within which we can be most comfortable we can find peace. In essence, we must all create social isolates which have economic bases that support creative and innovative efforts to customize values we need.

  Myths must be re-examined and clarified. Where they are detrimental, sharp and necessary distinctions must be made. The fear of the unknown must be eliminated. The white mythologizes the racial minorities because of his lack of knowledge of them. These myths then create barriers for communication between the various segments of society.

  What the white cannot understand he destroys lest it prove harmful. What the Indian cannot understand he withdraws from. But the black tries everything and fears nothing. He is therefore at liberty to build or destroy both what he knows and what he does not know or understand.

  The red and the black must not be fooled either by themselves, by each other, or by the white man. The black has moved in a circle from Plessy v. Ferguson, where Separate but Equal was affirmed, to Brown v. the Board of Education, where it was denied by the Supreme Court, to Birmingham, Washington, Selma, and the tragedies of Memphis and Los Angeles. Now, Separate but Equal has become a battle cry of the black activists.

  It makes a great deal of difference who carries this cry into battle. Is it the cry of a dying amalgam of European immigrants who are plagued by the European past? Or is it the lusty cry of a new culture impatient to be born?

  The American Indian meditates on these things and waits for their solution. People fool themselves when they visualize a great coalition of the minority groups to pressure Congress for additional programs and rights. Indians will not work within an ideological basis which is foreign to them. Any cooperative movement must come to terms with tribalism in the Indian context before it will gain Indian support.

  The future, therefore, as between the red, white, and black, will depend primarily upon whether white and black begin to understand Indian nationalism. Once having left the wild animal status, Indians will not revert to their old position on the totem pole. Hopefully black militancy will return to nationalistic philosophies which relate to the ongoing conception of the tribe as a nation extending in time and occupying space. If such is possible within the black community, it may be possible to bring the problems of minority groups into a more realistic focus and possible solution in the years ahead.

  9 THE PROBLEM OF INDIAN LEADERSHIP

  QUITE EARLY IN the Civil Rights struggle certain individuals emerged and were accepted as representative leaders of the Negro people. Martin Luther King, James Farmer, Bayard Rustin, Whitney Young, John Lewis, and others were able to attract the attention of the communications media. It was largely through identification with these individuals that vast numbers of Americans began to be concerned about Civil Rights. By vicariously experiencing the exploits of King and others, people participated in the great marches and felt they had an important emotional investment in the outcome. For a time, at least, racial themes were submerged by the common appeal for simple justice.

  When the Civil Rights goals became blurred and a multitude of leaders appeared to be saying contradictory things, public sympathy vanished as quickly as it had arisen. No longer could people identify with simply understood individuals who stood for simple goals.

  Indians experienced an era similar to the Civil Rights movement in the closing years of the last century. Then Indian tribes and their great leaders dominated the news and attracted the attention of the public. The Indian struggle for freedom was symbolized by the great war chiefs Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, Chief Joseph, and Geronimo. They were better known than the important statesmen of those days. Public interest often reached a fever pitch and opinions were as evenly divided as to solutions to the Indian problem then as they are today about the Negro problem.

  Public opinion was fickle. When Custer was wiped out the impulse was to exterminate the Sioux. Yet several years later Sitting Bull was so popular that he appeared in Wild West shows. Chief Joseph, the great Nez Perce chief, left his reservation in Oregon with his people and headed for the Canadian border. Whites were terrified at first. Later they cheered for the Nez Perces as they eluded troop after troop of cavalry. When they were finally caught twelve miles from the Canadian border nearly everyone in the nation was on their side. Even the opposing generals, who had the task of catching the tribe, were attracted by Joseph’s obvious ability to command.

  The Cheyennes were corraled on a dusty reservation in Oklahoma and longed for their homeland in Montana. Facing starvation on their desert lands in the South, the tribe broke for freedom. They managed to elude the major cavalry forces that were sent out to catch them and got through Kansas unnoticed. In Nebraska the troops finally caught up and killed most of them. A few kept going and reached Montana. Some hid with Red Cloud’s Oglala Sioux at Pine Ridge, South Dakota, where they were given refuge. When the public realized the tragedy of Dull Knife and his starving band of homeward-fleeing Cheyennes, the tide turned in favor of the tribes. They were able to survive by submitting to confined reservations and the ration system, and were eventually freed from the fear of physical extermination.

  For a time the government attempted to break the power of the great war chiefs and failing, adopted the tactic of exile and assassination to render the Indian people completely docile. Once they were restricted to the reservations the might of the government was applied to the Indians to destroy their political and social institutions. Missionaries and government agents worked to undermine the influence of the old people and the medicine men. Of all the great Indian leaders perhaps only Red Cloud of the Oglala Sioux maintained his influence in his tribe until his death.

  After the war chiefs had been killed or rendered harmless, Indians seemed to drift into a timeless mist. There appeared to be no leaders with which the general public could identify. The status of the Indian became a nebulous question which seemed familiar and important but for which there was apparently no answer.

  Missionaries soon filled the vacuum through clever exploitation of natives who had turned Christian. There began in the East the great round of testimonial appearances of native clergymen who made speeches appealing for more missionary work among their tribes. Church congregations, indoctrinated with the message of the White Man’s Burden, cooed with satisfaction to hear formerly fierce and feathered warriors relate how they had found the Lord and been brought out of their pagan darkness.

  Poor things, so great had been the pressure on them to conform to the white man’s way that they could do nothing else if they and their people were to survive. Only the fickle sentimentality of the churches often stood between them and the government policy of total dispersal or extinction of their people.

  But the Christianized warrior role did not provide any significant means by which white people could identify with the real desires and needs of the Indian people. The post-pagans simply recited what they had been taught concerning their people’s needs. Indian beliefs held most tenaciously were forbidden subjects and there was no way to attract the sympathy of the public to support ideas that were considered foreign.

  After the turn of the century, Jim Thorpe almost overnight changed the image of the Indian in the mind of the public. Suddenly the Indian as the superathlete dominated the scene. This concept was soon replaced by the Indian as a show business personality with the rise to popularity of Will Rogers, the Cherokee humorist.

  In large measure the Indian path to visibility has been paralleled by the Negro. A mythology created to explain Jim Thorpe and Will Rogers was later applied to Joe Louis and Dick Gregory in order to make Negroes comprehensible when they began to appear in American life. After the Indian had been
accepted as a humorous, athletic, subspecies of white man, historians and popular writers revisited the past and carved out a role for the Indian that overlooked the centuries of bloodshed between white and red, effectively neutralizing historical betrayals of the Indian by the government.

  The supreme archetype of the white Indian was born one day in the pulp magazines. This figure would not only dominate the pattern of what Indians had been and would be, but also actually block efforts to bring into focus the crises being suffered by Indian tribes.

  It was Tonto—the Friendly Indian Companion—who galloped onto the scene, pushing the historical and the contemporary Indians into obscurity.

  Tonto was everything that the white man had always wanted the Indian to be. He was a little slower, a little dumber, had much less vocabulary, and rode a darker horse. Somehow Tonto was always there. Like the Negro butler and the Oriental gardener, Tonto represented a silent subservient subspecies of Anglo-Saxon whose duty was to do the bidding of the all-wise white hero.

  The standard joke, developed as group consciousness arose, had the Lone Ranger and Tonto surrounded by a tribe of hostile Indians, with Tonto inquiring of the Lone Ranger, “Well, White Man?” The humor came from Tonto’s complete departure from his stereotype. The real Tonto would have cut down his relatives with a Gatling gun rather than have a hair on said Ranger’s head mussed.

  But Tonto never rebelled, never questioned the Lone Ranger’s judgment, never longed to go back to the tribe for the annual Sun Dance. Tonto was a cultureless Indian for Indians and an uncultured Indian for whites.

  Tonto cemented in the minds of the American public the cherished falsehood that all Indians were basically the same-friendly and stupid. Indeed, the legend grew, not only were tribes the same, but all Indians could be brought to a state of grace—a reasonable facsimile of the white—by a little understanding.

  But Tonto also had another quality about him. Although inarticulate to a fault, he occasionally called upon his primitive wisdom to get the Lone Ranger out of a tight spot. Tonto had some indefinable aboriginal knowledge that operated deus ex machina in certain situations. It was almost as if the Lone Ranger had some tragic flaw with respect to the mysterious in nature which Tonto could easily handle and understand.

  In those crises where Tonto had to extricate the Lone Ranger by some impossibly Indian trick, a glimmer of hope was planted in the subconscious of the Indian that someday he would come into his own. Few whites realized what this was, or that it existed; but to Indians it was an affirmation of the old Indian way. In an undefined sense, Tonto was able to universalize Indianness for Indians and lay the groundwork for the eventual rejection of the white man and his strange ways.

  And so when no one succeeded Thorpe and Rogers, Tonto cornered the market as the credible Indian personality. Turncoats of history who could be resurrected as examples of the “friendly Indian companion” were publicized in an attempt to elaborate on the Tonto image.

  Squanto, who had welcomed the Pilgrims and helped them destroy the tribes in Connecticut and Long Island, was reworked as a “friendly” Indian as opposed to Massasoit, the father of King Philip the Wampanoag chief, who had suspicions about the Pilgrims from the very start.

  Keokuk, the Sac and Fox subchief who had betrayed Black Hawk during the war which bears his name, was also brought back to life as a friendly companion. Washakie, the Shoshone chief who tattled on the other tribes every chance he got and finally received a nice reservation in Wyoming, was another early fink who was honored posthumously as a good guy.

  Eastern society matrons somehow began to acquire blood from John Smith and Pocahontas. The real Indian leaders who had resisted the encroachments of the white man and died protecting their homes, became sullen renegades unworthy of note.

  Both whites and Indians were buried under the weight of popular pseudo-history in which good guys dominated the scene and tribes were indiscriminately scattered throughout the West in an effort to liven up the story. Contemporary Indian leadership was suppressed by tales of the folk heroes of the past. Attempts to communicate contemporary problems were brushed aside in favor of the convenient and comfortable pigeonhole into which Indians had been placed. The Sioux warbonnet, pride of the Plains Indians, became the universal symbol of Indianism. Even tribes that had never seen an eagle were required to wear a warbonnet to prove their lineage as Indians.

  It was probably only because Indians were conveniently forgotten that a movement for national unity of all tribes became a possibility. So rigid was the stereotype of the friendly childlike Indian that all efforts by Indians to come together were passed off as the prattling of children who could not possibly do anything without instructions from their white friends.

  Indian tribes were thus freed to experiment with the concept of inter-tribal unity because they were considered irrelevant. First on regional levels, occasionally with regional congresses, then finally on a national basis, tribes began to come together. They soon learned to use the prejudices of the friendly whites to their own advantage.

  * * *

  Reconstruction of past traitors as good Indians also brought with it remembrances of previous attempts to unify the tribes and repel the white invaders. Indian unity had been an old dream. Deganawidah had forged the great Iroquois confederacy out of a miscellaneous group of refugee tribes who had been driven out of the Missouri-Arkansas area in the fifteenth century by the stronger Osage and Quapaw tribes. Eventually this conglomeration dominated the northern portion of the United States completely. They were the balance of power in the colonial wars between England and France.

  In the South the Creek confederacy had controlled a vast area in what is now Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama with extensions of its power well into northern Florida. The Natchez confederacy ruled the Mississippi River plains almost completely and extended its influence a considerable distance southwestward.

  With the westward movement of whites, temporary alliances were formed for the purpose of protecting hunting grounds. Pontiac and later Tecumseh brought the tribes together for momentary successes against the whites. But always it was too late with too little. Nowhere was there enough time for effective groupings to be built which guaranteed more than sporadic success.

  In the Great Plains, traditional hunting alliances did their best to prevent white encroachment on their hunting grounds, but they could not stem the tide. The Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho united briefly to send Custer on his way. But shortly after the battle the tribes split into a number of small bands which were all rounded up and placed on reservations by the following winter.

  In the southern plains the Kiowa and Comanche had occasional successes before being overcome and sent to their western Oklahoma reservation. The desert areas saw the Paiutes and Shoshones futilely oppose the white man but quickly give in. The Northwest had a brief Yakima war and an even briefer struggle by Chief Joseph and his Nez Perces.

  By and large the hunting economy was so entrenched that the destruction of the buffalo eliminated the economic base by which tribal alliances were cemented. The tribes seemed doomed to follow the buffalo. No large number of people could be kept together because they could not be fed. Thus sustained warfare was impossible for the tribes while still a way of life for the white man. In separate groups the tribes were easily defeated and confined to reservations through a series of so-called peace treaties. In fact, treaties were ultimatums dictated by historical reality. While the tribes could have fought on, absolute extinction would have been their fate.

  Because buffalo and other game were so essential to the tribes, hunting areas defined the manner in which tribes would fight and where. It was fairly easy to divide and conquer the various tribes by exploiting their rivalry over hunting grounds. This the white man did with deadly and consummate skill. Indian warfare was oriented toward protection of food supply and courageous exploits. Sustained warfare to protect or control territory which they could not settle was inconceivable to most of the
tribes. Killing others simply to rid the land of them was even more unthinkable. Thus the white man’s way of war was the deadly antithesis of the Indian s.

  From Plymouth Rock to the lava beds of northern California, the white man divided and conquered as easily as if he were slicing bread. The technique was not used simply to keep different tribes from uniting, but also to keep factions of the same tribe quarreling so that when their time came they would be unable to defend themselves. And most important, the United States government used the treaty as an ultimate weapon to destroy the tribal political institutions by recognizing some men as chiefs and refusing to recognize others.

  In treating for lands, rights of way, and minerals, commissioners negotiating for the government insisted on applying foreign political concepts to the tribes they were confronting. Used to dealing with kings, queens, and royalty, the early white men insisted on meeting the supreme political head of each tribe. When they found none, they created one and called the man they had chosen the Chief.

  Finding a chief at treaty-signing time was no problem. The most pliable man who could be easily bribed was named chief and the treaty was signed. Land cessions were often made and a tribe found itself on the way to a treeless desert before it knew what had happened. Most of the Indian wars began because of this method of negotiation. The Indians were always at a loss to explain what had happened. They got mad when told to move off lands which they had never sold and so they fought. Thus were renegades created.

  Most tribes had never defined power in authoritarian terms, A man consistently successful at war or hunting was likely to attract a following in direct proportion to his continuing successes. Eventually the men with the greatest followings composed an informal council which made important decisions for the group. Anyone was free to follow or not, depending upon his own best judgment. The people only followed a course of action if they were convinced it was best for them. This was as close as most tribes ever got to a formal government.