by Vine Deloria
In an absolutely democratic social structure like the Indian tribe, formal legal negotiations and contractual arrangements were nearly out of the question. Once a man’s word was given it bound him because of his integrity, not because of what he had written on a sheet of paper.
Men went to war because they had faith in a leader, not because they were drafted to do so or because they had signed a paper pledging themselves to be hired killers for a set period of time. Indians had little respect for white generals who did not lead their men into battle and contemptuously tagged the first white soldiers they saw as the “men who take orders from the chief who is afraid to fight.”
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The basic Indian political pattern has endured despite efforts by the federal government to change it. The people still follow a man simply because he produces. The only difference between two centuries ago and today is that now the Bureau of Indian Affairs defines certain ground rules by which leaders can be changed. These rules are called tribal elections. Otherwise leadership patterns have not changed at all.
Today a man holds his chairmanship as long as he produces, or at least appears to produce, for his tribe. Without making substantial progress or having the ability to present a fighting image, a man’s term in tribal office is short and severe. Demands are great. Some tribes have never had an incumbent re-elected because tribal goals far surpass any conceivable performance. A few tribes have had strong men dominate tribal affairs for long periods of time because of their tremendous following with the people.
Frank Ducheneaux of the Cheyenne River Sioux, Joe Garry, six-time President of the NCAI and long-time chairman of the Coeur d’Alenes of Idaho, Marvin Mull of the San Carlos Apaches, Roger Jourdain of the Red Lake Chippewas, and James Jackson of the Quinaults have all had many years as chairman of their respective tribes. Each man has been able to keep his chairmanship because of the progressive programs he has initiated, which have in turn created more respect and a greater following for him within the tribe. Success and respect go hand in hand in Indian affairs.
But other tribes throw out chairmen with such regularity it’s almost an annual event, anticipated with pleasure by the reservation people. In those cases the tribe has no discernible goals except to throw the rascals out. The safest political position is always as member of the out group.
Unlike hunting days, production today depends upon the ability to gain concessions from governmental agencies. Some tribes demand more from the bureau than others. Ability to produce the necessary demands in reasonable yet militant terms is sometimes enough to win and hold the chairmanship, even though the demands are not often met.
The more sophisticated the tribal demands, the better the chances a militant chairman has of remaining in office. The simpler the demands, the more criticism seems to be directed at the leader and the less his chances are for political survival.
This pattern of tribal behavior creates a basic insecurity which has a double edge when seen nationally in movements toward unification of the tribes. Some chairmen use state and national organizations as sounding boards for militant speeches that hopefully prove to reservation people they are not afraid to fight for Indian rights. Other chairmen withdraw from national and state inter-tribal organizations when they are elected to demonstrate that by their power alone the tribe is protected from its enemies.
Inter-tribal cooperation therefore has two aspects: one is to allow the chairman to fight paper tigers for the effect it will have on his critics; the other is for a chairman to advance his own plan for national unity which will give him such stature that his tribe will gain leverage in its dealings with private and governmental agencies.
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It is on the national scene, however, that new and different forces, which alter the methods by which Indian leadership defines its goals, come into play.
Years ago churches, anthropologists, and bureaucrats all discovered that it was a good idea to have Indians attend a meeting on Indian problems. It looked better. But they certainly didn’t have to invite the wrong kind of Indian. Like the treaty-makers of old, they could pick and choose who would represent the tribe and what philosophy he would support. Red leaders therefore had to adopt an official double-talk in order to bring reservation problems into the sphere of national communication.
For some time, conferences began to be set up, with white men outlining what would be accomplished and giving the background as to why their particular theory was best for Indians at that time. Some of these white men were so successful that they became the Great White Fathers who had almost total control of Indian policy. As for the Indians, while they were invited to the conferences, they were there only to agree with the proceedings or to enhance the white man’s reputation as the one who knew what was best for the tribes.
Of all the white saviors, Oliver La Farge was perhaps the best known and most skillful manipulator of Indian people. La Farge dealt primarily with Uncle Tomahawks who would say anything to stay on the good side of him. Real Indian leadership was anathema to La Farge and the thought of a national union of the tribes was complete heresy in his eyes.
La Farge built his reputation through his novels. During the 1950’s he was the white who always took it upon himself to come forward as the protector of Indian people in the press. But he also realized that he could not risk placing his organization in a position where its tax status might be questioned. So La Farge never made any appearances before Congressional committees during the termination period of legislation. Instead, the tribes had to bear the brunt of Congressional ire while La Farge reaped the benefits of national publicity as the defender of the lowly childlike Indian.
In 1954, when the NCAI met and began to plan its Point Four Development Program modeled after the experiment of Operation Bootstrap in Puerto Rico, La Farge hurriedly put together his own Point Four Program, which incorporated the basic points the tribes had been considering. He put forward his version after the tribes had fully discussed the proposal and before the Indians could publicize their efforts. Thus La Farge undercut Indian leadership in order to strengthen his own image as their savior.
Throughout his life La Farge looked contemptuously upon the Indian people as an inferior brand of human being who, if not properly controlled, would be certain to hurt himself. There was never any doubt in La Farge’s mind that he knew best about Indians.
La Farge and his friends systematically undercut Indian leadership. National Indian leaders had to play ball or suffer the consequences. La Farge’s successors, the Great White Fathers of today, continually attempt to appear as people with some mysterious knowledge about Indians, derived either from their extensive travels or their research into “the Indian problem.”
Indian people were kept in a stupor of self-acknowledged incompetency during La Farge’s reign as Indian spokesman. Because of his prominence as a writer and his access to public relations media in the East, La Farge was able to effectively block efforts by the tribes to gain recognition as a people capable of self-determination. For all the eastern United States knew, Indians moved only because Oliver La Farge had shown them the way and there was, it appeared, no significant movement by Indians except that which he planned.
But gradually a more sophisticated type of white man came into Indian country. He actually wanted to solve some of the problems and was not awed by the status La Farge and others had achieved as protectors of the Indians.
This new trend meant that reservations were scoured for a successful Indian who could motivate others. The same game was played, but this time the values were derived from a liberal orientation rather than a conservative one. Many national Indian leaders of the last generation had made their reputations by demonstrating their ability to be non-Indian. They were comparable to the old timers who had toured the continent with Buffalo Bill and acted pseudo-warlike for Europeans rather than stay home as real warriors chased all day by the cavalry.
Many of today’s leaders were attending hig
h school and college during the heyday of liberal self-helpism. Many of us were dragged from conference to conference to hear nearly identical speeches by model Indians of the day. I call to mind bits and pieces of speeches I have heard and a composite speech runs as follows:
Well, I’m an INDIN, just like you. [Never INDIAN. They had to identify with us.] I was born in a one-room log cabin with a dirt floor [later a rehab shack], and I walked fifty miles a day to school, a little one-room [everything was one-room in those days] school where I got my education, and I went to a little one-room chapel where I met my Lord every Sunday and He replenished my soul. And then I went to college, and although I received scholarships from the government and my church, my parents still had to give me most of their money and I still had only one meal a day. But I persevered and graduated and then I got a job and started my climb upward and so after many years of hard work I am now a success. I am accepted by the best people and eat in the fanciest hotels. I believe all In dins could do the same if they would only apply themselves. I hope all of you young people are inspired by my success and that you will someday be as successful as I am.
And then we used to watch this INDIN meekly agree with the most outrageous and prepostrous schemes to solve “the Indian problem” and take his farewell.
With modest examples like that it is a shame that so many of us didn’t make it. But we just didn’t. Somehow we realized that the day of the successful individual was gone. Time had run out for the individualist and the days of the professional rebel had come into vogue.
The professional rebel was a younger person who was invited to conferences primarily to recite the wrongs of the white man, the real issue of the last century, never the current white man. The idea was that we could make the white feel guilty. When he felt guilty it would somehow make his efforts more real, and then he was happy again.
It would curl your hair to learn that the white man had perpetuated a colonial system, that he had done all sorts of irrational things to Indians; then made an about-face and tried to atone for the past, in order that his ancestors might sleep peacefully. Although this is what these conferences produced, we have yet to experience white atonement.
The funny thing about this era was that one subject was absolutely forbidden. And that was any attempt to compare the white man’s treatment of Indians with that of other minority groups. That might have revealed a startling case against the whites’ dealings with all dark-skinned peoples. Endless hours were spent to convince us that somehow, in a way neither we nor they understood, Indians were unique in relation to other minorities.
Little did we realize that the main tactic was to keep in our minds the fact that if we were separate, then only a certain group of whites could understand us, care for us, and work with us.
There was very little we could have done anyway. They controlled all the travel money, organized all the conferences, made all the chiefs. We had not yet learned how to bring Indian problems to the attention of the public, but we thought that there was some impelling reason why we should. In the meantime the white friend was busy with his own orgy of self-flagellation. Our role was to crystallize his guilt individually as if he alone had done all these things and to us personally.
After the conferences, missionaries, educators, and bureaucrats proceeded to do exactly as they had planned to do anyway. Some continued the very practices they had confessed were wrong, but with released vigor now that they had undergone a catharsis at the conference.
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The guilt era ended when suddenly the skies opened and the money poured down. In 1964 there was talk about a great war that was to be waged. It was, we found out, a War on the Poor, officially designated as the War on Poverty.
The War on Poverty created a land office business (to use a painful phrase) in which everyone with a soft spot in his heart for the Indian, a desire for big money, and a plan to solve the plight of the reservations headed for the nearest tribe to offer his talents.
Universities that hadn’t known that Indians existed outside of the textbooks charged into the forefront of social responsibility. Indian centers sprang up where no Indians had previously been allowed to loiter. Plans for massive archives, research, pilot projects, and developments mushroomed until we were convinced there would not be enough Indians to go around.
Washington was flooded with grass roots proposals to fight poverty on the different reservations. Looking out from a tribal office in the late afternoon, one could see a veritable wave of consultants treading their way to the motels. Evaluators greatly outnumbered workers. Feasibility replaced reality.
But plans were not automatically funded. Everyone was looking for the complete proposal that would solve every problem at once. Conferences dwelt on complete solutions. It sounded like the French Revolution, as proposal after proposal was presented to the assembled delegates only to be demolished by those experts on poverty.
It became popular to shoot down proposals with grass-roots sayings. The ultimate psych-out game of today’s Indians was developed. Unity took a strange twist when proposals were gunned down because all tribes were not represented or because the tribes were so different that no one plan could serve them all.
Various tribal leaders would be asked to present their interpretation of tribal needs. After an Indian had finished speaking, educators, bureaucrats, sociologists, and anthropologists holding the opposing point of view would rise and, like a chorus in a Greek play, proclaim, “But he doesn’t represent the grass roots.”
One educator constantly blasted me because NCAI didn’t represent all the Indians. Then one day a fellow bureaucrat received a buffeting by urban Negroes and this same educator asked me to send a telegram of support because NCAI “represented all the Indian community.” Such were the inconsistencies around which the national unity of Indian tribes was being predicated.
Indians who had spent their lives in Wounded Knee, Red Shirt, Cherry Creek, and Black River Falls were suddenly unrepresentative of the real Indian people and unceremoniously drummed out of consideration by conferees. Even full bloods who two years before would not have been invited because they were too Indian were brushed aside because they were thought not to know the reservation problems.
One full-blood acquaintance of mine had spent some thirty years on his tribal council. He was dismissed because he was part of the establishment!
Indian unity and Indian problems became the subjects for intense manipulation behind the scenes, as professional Indian-lovers fought to keep some semblance of cooperation among the tribes while arrayed against it were the universities, educators, and old-line bureaucrats. One friend of mine, a sociologist, suggested that we Indians be heeded “so far, but only insofar, as they represent all the Indians.” After that remark I was tempted to rise at the next conference and state that I represented 107 of 315 tribes, so I could be trusted 107/315 of the time. And that the building was on fire.
The ultimate insult came at a conference at which about thirty of the most knowledgable Indians in the country were present to discuss Indian education. They were airily dismissed by a white educator because the real Indians were the ones he worked with and, since none of them were in attendance, the white felt he ought to represent them because he alone knew what they wanted.
In the last several years the very concept of unity has been used against the tribes to prevent their cooperation on national programs. Knowing that tribes are in all stages of development, whites have insisted upon uniformity of goals and definitions before they will accept Indian ideas as real. Because there cannot be such a concensus, Indian unity has been made to appear impossible.
National conferences, even National Congress conventions, have been confused by the whites’ demand for that single answer which can then be passed on to government, church, or private agencies for the solution of Indian problems.
With the broad spectrum of tribes and the different levels of sophistication, plus the background maneuvering of whites
with a financial or emotional interest in the outcome, you can imagine the impossible discussions that characterize national Indian meetings.
The first Indian will announce that he lives in a one-room shack. He will be rebutted by an Indian educator who has lost his identity between two cultures. Another will agree about the two cultures and will immediately be refuted by an old timer fighting for his treaty rights who is simultaneously challenged because he doesn’t speak for all the Indians.
A national Indian meeting thus bears more resemblance to the Tower of Babel Improvement Association than it does to a strategy planning session.
The major problem, therefore, in unifying the tribes and supporting constructive leadership is that everyone is subject to judgment according to the standards of two distinct points of view. The white society is not satisfied with anything less than the efficiency of an Irish political machine. The Indian society expects little articulation, but infallible and successful exploits. And there is no attempt by either white or Indian to distinguish between the two.
Indians have no concept of teamwork as it is known by white society. Assignment of personnel to component jobs within an action plan leaves Indians cold. Rather, they expect leaders to charge ahead and complete the task. If anyone wants to assist in the job, so much the better. But there is no sense of urgency or need for efficiency in anything that is undertaken.
With their social structure largely undefined and modern society changing to data processing, Indians appear quite primitive. Charts, graphs, and statistics are irrelevant to most tribes. Their concern is the reality of the goals, the eventual effect a program will have on the tribe. Techniques and means of operation are left largely for staff considerations.