Custer Died For Your Sins

by Vine Deloria

What, after all, is unity but the fellowship of people? Too often, unified efforts are created simply to take advantage of people as one special interest group battles another for concessions from the government. America is certainly not a democracy when it is controlled by pressure groups. Rather, it is a pressure cooker waiting to explode when the wrong ingredients come together. Recent events show this tendency all too well.

  After the latest Kennedy assassination, Congressman after Congressman came on TV and admitted that a vast majority of the American people wanted stricter gun control laws. But each stated that he couldn’t do anything about it because of the big bad NRA lobby. Anyone swallowing that type of statement deserves to live in the land of the sniper.

  Indians have always rejected unity as a weapon, though a number of younger Indians want unity precisely for that reason. Most of the tribes want unity as a fellowship of equals where they can play their Indian games with a minimum outside interference. Indian unity is what the churches mean when they say brotherhood, but which they dare not practice. It is what the white man seeks in his fraternities and exclusive clubs.

  Like he has done everything else, the white man has turned the idea completely inside out when he has put unity into action. He has defined the right to be oneself as the right of exclusive privacy, never realizing that to be alone is to be dead. He has tried to create one society and has done so by creating an incredible number of pressure groups which control his society.

  As Indians we will never have the efficient organization that gains great concessions from society in the marketplace. We will never have a powerful lobby or be a smashing political force. But we will have the intangible unity which has carried us through four centuries of persecution and we will survive. We will survive because we are a people unified by our humanity; not a pressure group unified for conquest. And from our greater strength we shall wear down the white man and finally outlast him. But above all, and this our strongest affirmation, we SHALL ENDURE as a people.

  10 INDIANS AND MODERN SOCIETY

  ONE OF THE intriguing little puzzles which anthropologists, Congressmen, missionaries, educators, and others often pose for themselves is whether an Indian tribe can survive in a modern setting. For the most part the question is posed as if the Indians were just coming out of the woods with their flint-tipped arrows and were demonstrating an unusual amount of curiosity about the printing press, the choochoo train, the pop machine, and other marvels of civilized man.

  Black militants overbearingly tell Indians to “revolt, confront, destroy,” the “powerstructure” that oppresses them. Confusing notoriety with success, they equate confusion with progress, draw on their vast storehouse of knowledge of the modern world, and advise Indians to become militant.

  Everywhere an Indian turns he is deluged with offers of assistance, with good, bad, and irrelevant advice, and with proposals designed to cure everything from poverty to dandruff. Rarely does anyone ask an Indian what he thinks about the modern world. So assured is modern man that he has absolute control of himself and his society that there is never any question but what Indians are moving, albeit slowly and inefficiently, toward that great and blessed land of suburban America, the mecca for all people.

  When an Indian considers the modern world, however, he sees it being inevitably drawn into social structures in which tribalism appears to be the only valid form of supra-individual participation. The humor becomes apparent when the Indian realizes that if he simply steps to the sidelines and watches the rat race go past him, soon people will be coming to him to advise him to return to tribalism. It appears to many Indians that someday soon the modern world will be ready to understand itself and, perhaps, the Indian people.

  In March of 1968 the Southern Christian Leadership Conference began plans to have a massive march on Washington. The march was to be comparable, SCLC hoped, to the great marches of the past which had been instrumental in producing Civil Rights legislation. The purpose of the Poor People’s Campaign was to bring attention to the plight of the poor with the hopes that Congress, which was then considering a six-billion-dollar cut in social welfare programs, would respond with a gigantic outpouring of funds to eradicate poverty. As the Poor People’s Campaign gained momentum the purpose narrowed to the proposition of guaranteed jobs or a guaranteed annual income.

  Notably absent from the list of supporting organizations in the campaign was the Congress of Racial Equality. CORE had been a leader in the Civil Rights struggles of the past. It was headed by black nationalists who endorsed black power. It was regarded as one of the militant left-leaning organizations of blacks in the nation. But CORE refused to fall into line with the campaign because it was busy taking another approach to the problems of black poverty.

  The CORE solution was unveiled in July of 1968 at a joint news conference which featured Roy Innis, Acting Director of CORE, and four Republican Congressmen, Charles Goodell of New York, Robert Taft, Jr., of Ohio, Thomas Curtis of Missouri, and William Widnall of New Jersey. CORE proposed the Community Self-Determination Act, which was designed to promote black capitalism of which CORE and Richard Nixon had both cooed approvingly earlier in the year.

  The basic thrust of the Community Self-Determination Act of 1969 (which was not passed in the Ninetieth Congress but which has now been introduced again) was the Community Development Corporation. The Community Development Corporation, called affectionately CDC in the news conference, was to operate in six categories of activity:

  1. Provider of neighborhood services and community improvement: basic education, child welfare, day care, pre-school training, health, consumer education, home ownership counseling, college placement, job finding, recreation, legal aid, and other services now available from federal sources.

  2. Owner of stock of business enterprises.

  3. Sponsor, owner, or manager of housing in the community.

  4. Planning agency for-neighborhood renewal.

  5. Representative of community interests in areas of public policy.

  6. Encourager of outside financial sources to assist self-help efforts of the community.

  In short, the CDC was to be the all-purpose corporation by which black poverty was to be eliminated from the black ghettos and self-determination given to ghetto areas. The CDC was hailed as an important new step in the development of black pride and initiative in the private area.

  If the CDC was brand-new for blacks it had a mighty familiar ring to the Indian people. The tribal council, as set up under the Indian Reorganization Act, had precisely the same powers, functions, and intents. Indians have been using the tribal council as organized under IRA for nearly a generation. As Indians viewed the “new” CDC, the blacks were finally ready to tribalize. One young Indian waggishly suggested that if they made up enrollments they might call them blacklists.

  In the corporate structure, formal and informal, Indian tribalism has its greatest parallels and it is through this means that Indians believe that modern society and Indian tribes will finally reach a cultural truce. The corporation forms the closest attempt of the white man to socialize his individualism and become a tribal man. And certainly when one thinks back to what has been written over the last decade about corporate existence, one can see the startling parallels.

  The devastating books of Vance Packard and William H. White outlined in detail how the corporation impinges upon individual man in his private life and reorients him toward non-individual goals. In the 1950’s no existence was hated by the undergraduate as much as that of the organization man. The early beatnik and his descendant, the hippie, both abhorred the organization man. Many a career was nipped in the bud rather than let it develop in the insidious ways of corporate existence.

  But in the corporation, man was offered a tribal existence of security and ease. The corporation provided everything a man might need if he were to maintain an affluent life over and above that of non-corporate man and befitting a person of vast educational achievement. The higher the degr
ee, the more privileges bestowed upon corporate man. With untold fringe benefits covering all conceivable circumstances which might arise, organization man dwelt in an economic tribe to which he needed only give his allegiance and daylight hours. In return he had social and economic security rarely equalled since the days of feudalism.

  Post-war developments of the corporation created the phenomenon of the merger. As corporations were piled together to form conglomerates, it became possible for a man to work for a great many corporations which were enclosed within one monstrous holding corporation so diversified that it rarely knew how far its tenacles extended.

  The corporation became comparable to the great Indian coalitions such as the Iroquois and the Creek confederacies which stretched for thousands of square miles and in which a member was entirely safe and at home. And like the Indian tribes, success was measured against those outside the corporations, by prestige and honors. Where eagle feathers measured an Indian’s successes, thickness of carpets measured executive success. Where a war chief might be given his choice of the loot of a war, the annual bonus and stock option became a regular means of rewarding the successful executive, home fresh from the competitive wars.

  In short, corporate life since the last world war has structured itself along the lines taken a couple of centuries earlier by Indian tribes as they developed their customs and traditions of social existence. Totems have been replaced by trade marks, powwows by conventions, and beads by gray flannels. War songs have been replaced by advertising slogans. As in the tribe, so in the corporation the “chief” reigns supreme.

  The life of the rugged individualist, beloved hero of Republican hymns, has now disappeared. The little family grocery or drug store, such as spawned the two chief contestants of the 1968 Presidential campaign, has now become the outpost, the frontier settlement, of the corporate conglomerate giant. Small businesses have all but vanished over the past two decades as the “chain” has driven them out of existence. Opportunity now exists within the corporate giant as a member of the tribe. The individual seeks fame only in bringing home the honors for his company.

  * * *

  Classifying the corporation as the tribe takes a little reorientation for most Americans because they are so quick to judge by outward appearances. Rarely do they meditate on how something really operates. Instead they want to believe that because something is shiny and appears new, it is new.

  But in understanding the corporation as a form of tribalism, a number of new paths of understanding are made possible. The life of organization man is not simply one of allegiance to a cold unfeeling machine. Rather it becomes a path by which he can fulfill himself within certain limits. But going outside of the limits is taboo. It negates the existence by which organization man has defined himself and allowed himself to be defined. Just as a Cherokee or Sioux would have never done anything to eliminate himself from the tribe and accepted the limits by which the tribe governed itself, so the organization man must remain within the limits of his corporate existence.

  The primary purpose of the tribe, then and now, was to ensure as beneficial a life as possible for members of the tribe. The hunting grounds of the tribe had to be defended at all costs. Outside of that, individual freedom ran rampant. Certainly the CDC proposed by CORE, which will cover all aspects of social existence, purports to do the same.

  It would appear then that we are witnessing the gradual tribalization of the white man as his economic tribes become more and more oriented toward social services for their members. What is now needed is the frank admittance by the white man that he is tribalizing and the acknowledgment that his tribalism will gradually replace government as we now know it, submerging the differentiated society into a number of related economic social units.

  When executives can admit what they are doing, then it will be possible to form programs around those left out of corporate existence—the poor—and organize them as tribes also, completing the circuit from Pilgrimish individualism to corporate tribalism. Preliminary treaty-making—price fixing—has been declared wrong because it infringed upon non-corporate victims. The government decreed that until these victims became sufficiently strong to embark on corporate warfare, it would protect them. Government thus stands as arbitrator between corporate and non-corporate man, a role previously occupied by the Onondagas in the Iroquois League.

  It is not only in economic terms that America is tribalizing. Scholars and students of the modern family bemoan the fact that the family unit is disappearing and members of the family now have their primary interests outside the home. The old picture of the clan gathered around the fireplace or trooping through the snow to grandmother’s house is fast fading into the historical mists.

  In place of the traditional family has come the activist family in which each member spends the majority of his time outside the home “participating.” Clubs, committees, and leagues devour the time of the individual so that family activity is extremely limited. Competition among clubs is keenly predicated upon the proposition that each member should bring his family into its sphere. Thus Boy Scouts is made a family affair. PTA, the YMCA, the country club, every activity, competes for total family participation although it demands entry of only one member of the family.

  Clubs as social tribes wage fantastic warfare for the loyalties of the individuals of a community. Their selling point is that only by participating in their activity can a family partake of the snowy trips to grandmother’s house in modern terms. The numena of American mythology is plastered indiscriminately over activities in order to catch unsuspecting participants and offer a substitute existence.

  The American family is thus split into a number of individuals each claiming his blood relationship as a commitment on other members of the same biological source to support his tribe as against theirs. At best it is a standoff, with each member giving half-hearted recognition of the multitude of tribes to which the family as a conglomerate belongs.

  The best example in intellectual circles of a tribal phenomenon is the magazine. Playboy early capitalized on tribal existence, although exemplified in the hutch instead of the tipi, and turned a magazine into a way of life. If ever there was a tribal cult oozing with contemporary mythology and tribal rites it is the Playboy club. Identity is the last concern of the Playboy, yet it is what his tribe offers him—and with a key.

  Perhaps the only segment of American society to face tribalism head on has been the long-haired hippie and his cousins, yippies, zippies, and others. In 1966 strange beings began to appear on Indian land, proclaiming their kinship with the redskins in no uncertain terms. Some Indians thought that the earlier VISTA program had spoiled things for the hippies by their inept performance on the reservations, but no one had seen anything until the summer of 1966.

  I used to sit in my office and suddenly find it invaded by a number of strange beings in gaudy costumes who would inform me of their blood-intellectual relationship with Indians. When one is used to the strange smells of legislation written by the Interior Department and is suddenly confronted by an even more exotic perfume, it is unsettling indeed.

  Yet many hippies whom I met had some basic humanistic beliefs not unlike those of Indian people. Concern for the person and abhorrence for confining rules, regulations, and traditions seemed to characterize the early hippie movement. When the hippies began to call for a gathering of the tribes, to create free stores, to share goods, and to gather all of the lost into communities, it appeared as if they were on the threshold of tribal existence.

  I remember spending a whole afternoon talking with a number of hippies who had stopped in Denver on the way west. They were tribally oriented but refused to consider customs as anything more than regulations in disguise. Yet it was by rejecting customs that the hippies failed to tribalize and became comical shadows rather than modern incarnations of tribes.

  Indian tribes have always had two basic internal strengths, which can also be seen in corporations: customs and clans. Tri
bes are not simply composed of Indians. They are highly organized as clans, within which variations of tribal traditions and customs govern. While the tribe makes decisions on general affairs, clans handle specific problems. Trivia is thus kept out of tribal affairs by referring it to clan solutions.

  Customs rise as clans meet specific problems and solve them. They overflow from the clan into general tribal usage as their capability and validity are recognized. Thus a custom can spread from a minor clan to the tribe as a whole and prove to be a significant basis for tribal behavior. In the same manner, methods and techniques found useful in one phase of corporate existence can become standard operating procedure for an entire corporation.

  Hippies, at least as I came to understand them, had few stable clan structures. They lived too much on the experiential plane and refused to acknowledge that there really was a world outside of their own experiences. Experience thus became the primary criteria by which the movement was understood. Social and economic stability were never allowed to take root.

  It seemed ridiculous to Indian people that hippies would refuse to incorporate prestige and social status into their tribalizing attempts. Indian society is founded on status and social prestige. This largely reduces competition to inter-personal relationships instead of allowing it to run rampant in economic circles. Were competition to be confined to economic concerns, the white conception of a person as a part of the production machine would take hold, destroying the necessary value of man in his social sense.

  With competition confined within social events, each man must be judged according to his real self, not according to his wealth or educational prowess. Hence a holder of great wealth is merely selfish unless he has other redeeming qualities besides his material goods. Having a number of degrees and an impressive educational background is prerequisite to prestige in the white world. It is detrimental in the Indian world unless the person has the necessary wisdom to say meaningful things also.