by Vine Deloria
Whites who attempt to help Indians are constantly frustrated by their tragic lack of understanding of Indian people. For Indians always know exactly what position they will take on major issues, how far they can push certain concepts, and when to delay so as to wear out their opponents and eventually get their way.
There is usually not the slightest difference in what the tribes want for the future, though any detectable difference is immediately grasped by whites and used to form a major breach with the hopes of preventing any conclusion being reached.
While this dissension is superficially disheartening, understandings are quite often worked out through a technique which resolves issues without bringing matters to the floor. But there is a difference between the manner in which Indians use dissension and the way that conferences are manipulated by white onlookers.
Whites generally have some tangible motive for stalling an Indian meeting. Generally it is benign and relates to what they honestly think is best for the tribes. Other times it is simply to keep the tribes apart so the whites can eventually get their own programs approved.
Indians use dissension and controversy to guide the sense of the meeting and also to maintain prestige among each other. It is a thrill to watch the psychological games played by Indians at a meeting. The most common game is an appeal to unity.
One Indian will get up and make a suggestion. He will be followed by another, who will agree completely with him but will phrase the speech in such a way as to create the impression that his predecessor is somehow against tribal unity. The second speaker creates such a sentiment in this audience that man after man gets up and speaks eloquently for unity of all Indians. Unity speeches roll down like a waterfall. Never did the Democrats unify like the Indians. If northern liberal Democrats and southern racist Democrats are cozy, Indians are stifling in their unity.
It would be fair to say that the best way to get a heated argument going in an Indian meeting is to speak on the need for unity. But the concern for unity serves to postpone divisions on the real issues in which unity is vital. It is far better to fight over unity than over something crucial to tribal existence.
Controversy over efforts to unify is naturally supported by Indian cultural motifs. In the old times as we have seen, a man’s position rested primarily upon his ability to attract followers. Indians have come to rely on a strong leader and this in turn has created the War Chief complex.
The War Chief during the days of glory provided success or failure for the tribe. Leadership often depended upon a quasireligious vocation and men were intimately concerned with the religious as well as political meaning of their lives.
In the Ghost Dance days, messiahshio came to dominate Indian thought patterns and all expectations were tinged with this other-worldly hope of salvation. Every Indian leader of today must face the question of whether or not he is a great figure of the past reincarnated to lead his people to victory, for legends die hard among our people.
One in a leadership role is therefore constantly bothered by undefined doubts as to his ultimate role in his people’s historical journey. He is inevitably drawn to compare himself in a mystical sense with Crazy Horse, Joseph, Geronimo, and others.
Initial spectacular success creates speculation as to how a leader compares with well-known tribal heros. If a man compares favorably, more work is placed upon him because of his capability and the people, satisfied with his performance, depend on him more and more and do less for themselves.
At my first convention of the NCAI there was very little for me to do because I was so new that no one had any confidence in me. A couple of years later I was fairly run to death doing minor errands because people had come to depend on me for a great many things.
Because Indian people place absolute dependence on their leaders, they exhaust more leaders every year than any other minority group. The useful national life of an Indian leader today is about two and a half years. After that he is physically and emotionally spent. His ideas have been digested and the tribes are ready to move on.
Unity, because of the ancient leadership patterns and the constant personal involvement between rival chiefs, becomes a function of personalities rather than issues. Unity as a team of experts is absolutely hopeless. Dynasties are impossible to maintain nationally and even temporary alliances are often destroyed by loss of a single individual.
National unification forms around popular leaders. But these people are generally worked to death by the time a significant number of people are supporting their program or before a large number of tribes accept them. The last three Executive Directors of the National Congress of American Indians achieved the largest number of member tribes the last year they held office.
When national or regional unification is, based upon the personality of the leader, insane jealousies develop which are fed by white elements hoping to weaken tribal alliances. But Indians themselves do more to permanently weaken efforts to develop effective working relationships between tribes because of the intense rivalry which they develop by regions, states, tribes, and programs.
National Congress conventions are often split according to regional lines and the idea of capturing the presidency for a certain area becomes all consuming, pushing aside obvious real problems that face all the tribes.
Let no one say that only the white man is cruel with his periodic assassinations and grief orgies. Or that blacks and Spanish cannot achieve unity. The Indian is so much more exquisitely skilled at political warfare and makes it so much more a casual game.
Indians know the human mind intimately. They can dwell for hours on slight nuances that others would completely miss or feel unworthy of their attention. I would put up an Indian brainwashing team against the Chinese Communists any day of the week.
Indians know the Indian mind best of all. They savor innuendo and inference above all. Consequently Indian meetings always have that undercurrent of psych-out that is a veritable preamble to existence as an Indian and the very antithesis of unity as the white man knows it.
I discovered this aspect of Indian politics at my second convention as NCAI Director. We had put together a very effective team the previous year, working hard to develop the organization and increase its ability to bring the tribes together. I had assumed that we would all be elected again because of our success in reconstituting the organization. To my chagrin I discovered that the tribes were systematically dissolving and reforming our team simply because they wanted to have an exciting election and feared that we would be re-elected without any real fight. They wanted action.
There is no way, therefore, that a person involved in national Indian politics can be assured of his position no matter how good he is and what his record has been. Dissidents often take advantage of the War Chief complex and lead their opponents down the road of messiahship—only to later accuse them of thinking they are really the Indian messiah. Slight hints here and there are often the tip of the iceberg of jealousy or discontent.
I have watched devoted, exhausted men cry because their tribe had totally rejected them at the height of their successes without so much as a backward glance.
With leadership and unity so intensely personal, unless a man is extremely charismatic, incredibly lucky, and hides his true purposes from inquisitive whites, his chances for success nationally are nil. Above all he must accept the social and ceremonial aspect of Indian politics and work within that framework to bring issues into focus for his people.
Among those people occupying national leadership roles there is a common tacit understanding of their common plight. Unless there is an impelling reason to go against another leader, Indians will generally support each other against the common enemy—the out group.
Many people would rather see a meeting come to no conclusion than embarrass a good man in public if such embarrassment would give his enemies weapons, to be used against him. Most people realize that part of the chairman’s job is to make a good showing for the tribe wherever he
goes. Prestige committee assignments are handed out like presents at Christmas in an effort to maintain working relationships between tribal groups.
Most meetings held by Indians come to no conclusions which could be understood as agreements to do certain things. But every person attending a high-level meeting of Indians knows exactly what courses of action will be supported by the majority of tribes and exactly how to interpret the actions of the meeting to his people. Rarely do minutes of national meetings even need to be kept because of the silent understandings reached there.
The result of national meetings, therefore, is that there is mutual support and strength in the general concensus of tribes, from which each tribe gains more leverage and room to maneuver against the outsiders. It would be highly unlikely that an Indian meeting would or could develop a Poor People’s Campaign or a March on Washington. Direct action is extrinsic to general undertanding and traditional methods of problem-solving. But the tribes are able to get more for their people because of the insistence on indirect action.
When the Poor People camped in Washington the leadership left no room for retreat, placing themselves in a position of little negotiability with respect to government agencies. Tribes rarely box themselves into a position such as that. Rather, they always have such flexibility that they can change positions overnight and appear to be entirely consistent. For example the Hualapai tribe reversed its stand completely on the Marble Canyon Dam, finally supporting it, and no one thought a thing about it. Abernathy would not have dared make such a turnabout after his campaign began in Washington; the Hualapai could have changed every year and pulled it off.
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The struggle is not so much one of unification but of who will eventually call the shots in Indian Affairs. Competition is thus multi-leveled and inter-group as well as racial. National and state Indian organizations are constantly being undercut by white interest groups in an effort to control the vast sums spent in Indian Affairs every year. No one wants a cut of the action for personal monetary gain; prestige, power, and emotional involvement play a much more vital role. Ego moves Indian Affairs in both white and red spheres much more than the dollar does.
The largest and most consistent national movement toward unification is the National Congress of American Indians. The NCAI is a small united nations of tribes with a past checkered from battles on every level. Its existence is only grudgingly admitted by white interest organizations because of their very reasonable fear that if the public found out Indians were doing things for themselves the annual fund appeals would look ridiculous. For the most part these people masquerade as friends of the Indian, presenting a distorted picture of the unbelievable poverty which they alone are fighting and perpetuating the image of the inarticuate incompetent savage who would be utterly destroyed save for their work. But like the buffalo, their days have been numbered. Each time an Indian organization wins a victory they must inevitably claim it partially for themselves in order to prevent, or at least postpone, the day when their downfall is complete.
Meanwhile, the National Congress charges through Indian country with sporadic successes and failures. Tribal membership varies from thirty tribes to over one hundred according to the climate for temporary unification. When times are plush, as they have been in the 1960’s, the number of tribes participating is fairly high. When hard times come, membership dwindles and each tribe embarks on its own course to best determine its relationships with a menacing Congress.
It is this phenomenon of tribal membership that holds the key to understanding Indian unity and its twin, Indian leadership. The tribes do not depend upon the national organization for assistance on the local level. Where the NAACP, CORE, SNCC, and other Civil Rights groups have made use of local situations to highlight problems and work for their solutions, tribes totally reject assistance from the NCAI on the local level. It is inconceivable to most tribes that a national organization would work in localities to assist them. Rather, they look at the NCAI strictly in terms of the national scene. Consequently, membership is an abstraction whose mere presence heightens the total mystery of things.
The political effect of this behavior is just the opposite of what the tribes expect. Local difficulties bog them down and prevent progress in many areas of concern. Precedents that affect tribal rights all across the country are set on the local scene. Most of the problems Indians encounter are local, yet they refuse to face them on a realistic basis.
In recent years the NCAI has been able to sit back and pick its national battles. It has had considerable success in some scraps. If anything, leaders at the national level have set their sights too low and could have accomplished more with no more effort.
But with emphasis on creating a position for negotiating inside the government establishment and rejecting action programs used by the blacks, Indians have doomed themselves to political obscurity and impotence. Where SCLC could create pressure for a number of major laws through marches, Indians wait to take advantage of the tide of social legislation and gain a few crumbs when the goods are divided.
Unless Indians can adapt their tactics to place more emphasis on exploiting the local situation they will remain an unknown factor in American life. Always, it seems, issues detach themselves from the local situation and nebulously float off into the paragraphs of the perennial Task Force reports done by Interior and related agencies every few years.
So Indians are placed in the most inconsistent position for determining their own policy. They can very quickly reach a concensus on their problems. They are fairly sophisticated and experienced in getting their way with government agencies. But when they attempt to articulate what they are doing so that the white society can understand them, unity dissolves into chaos and the movement, along with the ideas supporting it, collapses.
Indians simply cannot externalize themselves. Externalization implies a concern for the future. Indians welcome the future but don’t worry about it. Traditionally the tribes had pretty much what they wanted. There was no reason to get up tight about wealth and its creation. The land had plenty for everyone. Piling up gigantic surpluses implied a mistrust of the Great Spirit and a futile desire to control the future.
In addition no tribes had complex writing as did the white society. Winter counts and stories memorized by the favorite storytellers served to perpetuate the great events in tribal history. Other than that, there was no concern for recording events. Life thus had a contemporaneous aspect which meant immediate experience of life, not continual analysis and dissection.
Attempts to force the tribes to expound on great themes for dispersion to non-Indian parties results in sheer chaos and disaster. Why, the people feel, should we explain anything to someone else, it is enough that we understand it.
Inability to use the white man’s objective criteria most seriously hampers Indian programs. Resolutions passed at national meetings appear to be like white man’s policy statements, but are actually only a polite nod to his way of doing business. It is almost as if by passing a resolution the tribes had fulfilled all righteousness for the express satisfaction of the whites who might be watching.
This type of operation creates the most baffling misunderstandings between Indians and the non-Indians with whom they must work. Actions of a tribal or national organization, although clear on the surface, seldom mean what they appear to mean and often mean something entirely different. If one cannot read between the lines he is at a loss to explain the apparent inconsistency.
In early 1967 there was a big meeting in Washington, D.C., to consider Udall’s Omnibus Bill. Though this was heralded as the greatest thing ever to come down the pike, tribes universally rejected it. Yet for five days in January the tribes argued all around the point, and, rather than rejecting it outright, sent a letter to President Johnson asking for more time. Everyone knew that another century would not suffice to change the mind of one tribe.
Many of our white friends have been ecstatic at some of our speeches, res
olutions, and policy statements in the NCAI. Later, however, they’ve been horrified to see us take absolutely opposite stands on an issue.
To understand Indians and their unique place among the minority groups, one must look at unity through Indian eyes. Unity is strictly a social function of the tribes. Indians prefer to meet and have a good time; conventions are when you have a chance to get together and renew old friendships and learn to trust one another.
The real impact of the NCAI is the personal trust developed between people which in turn affects how each tribe views the others. The convention is merely a facade to confuse any wandering white man who should be in the neighborhood. After several days together, tribal leaders instinctively know how much they can depend upon each other, what a certain tribe is experimenting upon, and what issues are vital to their tribes. Then they are ready to go home again.
Social unification can best be illustrated by observation of the many powwows and celebrations held around Indian country each year. At a certain point in the program the announcer will proudly state that “eighty-three tribes are represented at this great event.” Beware.
What the man means is that people from eighty-three different tribal backgrounds happened to have been in the neighborhood and decided to attend the doings; not that eighty-three tribes sent delegations to the event.
At one celebration a group of us each took turns adding up tribes and padded the total to well over one hundred tribes by simply stating that we had seen certain people from certain tribes present, although in fact we hadn’t. Our announcer friend glowed at the prospect of so many tribes at powwow.
It is important to understand that the more tribes claimed, the better the powwow. This was an Indian doing and the more Indians involved the better everyone felt. This was unity for all of us.