The Truman administration pushed out John Collier, among many other progressive Roosevelt appointees. Following the end of World War II, attitudes among the ruling class and Congress regarding Indigenous nations turned from supporting autonomy to their elimination as peoples with a new regimen of individual assimilation. In 1946 Congress established the Indian Claims Commission and the Indian Claims Court to legitimize the prior illegal federal taking of Indigenous treaty lands. Between 1946 and 1952—the cutoff date for filing claims—370 petitions representing 850 claims were filed on behalf of Indigenous nations. Although the government’s stated purpose was to clear title for lands illegally taken, the claims mechanism barred restitution of lands taken illegally or acquiring new ones to replace the loss. Settlement was limited to monetary compensation based on the property’s value at the time of the taking, and without interest. Adding insult to injury, any expenditure made by the federal government on behalf of the Indigenous nations making claims was subtracted from the overall award, thereby penalizing the Indigenous people for services they had not requested. The average interval between filing a claim and receiving an award was fifteen years.
In creating the Indian Claims Commission, Congress was acknowledging the fact that the federal government had illegally seized Indigenous lands guaranteed by treaties. That validation became useful in Indigenous strategies for strengthening sovereignty and pursuing restitution of the land rather than monetary compensation. On the other hand, the process became a stepping-stone to ending federal acknowledgment of Indigenous nations altogether. The Eisenhower administration lost no time in collaborating with Congress to weaken federal trust responsibility, transferring Indian education to the states and moving Indian health care from the Bureau of Indian Affairs to the Department of Health.
This policy trend toward assimilation culminated in the Termination Act (House Concurrent Resolution 108) in 1953, which provided—in Orwellian language—that Congress should, “as quickly as possible, move to free those tribes listed from Federal supervision and control and from all disabilities and limitations specially applicable to Indians.” Under termination, the federal trust protection and transfer payments guaranteed by treaties and agreements would end. Dillon S. Myer, who had headed the War Relocation Authority that administered the concentration camps for US citizens of Japanese descent, was, significantly, the Eisenhower administration’s commissioner of Indian affairs to implement termination.23 Commissioner Myer noted that Indigenous consent was immaterial, saying, “We must proceed even though Indian cooperation may be lacking in certain cases.”24 In the same year, Congress imposed Public Law 280 that transferred police power on reservations from the federal government to the states.
Despite the piecemeal eating away of Indigenous landholdings and sovereignty and federal trust responsibility based on treaties, the US government had no constitutional or other legal authority to deprive federally recognized Native nations of their inherent sovereignty or territorial boundaries. It could only make it nearly impossible for them to exercise that sovereignty, or, alternatively, eliminate Indigenous identity entirely through assimilation, a form of genocide. The latter was the goal of the 1956 Indian Relocation Act (Public Law 949). With BIA funding, any Indigenous individual or family could relocate to designated urban industrial areas—the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Dallas, Denver, Cleveland—where BIA offices were established to make housing and job training and placement available. This project gave rise to large Native urban populations scattered among already poor and struggling minority working-class communities, holding low-skilled jobs or dealing with long-term unemployment. Yet many of these mostly young migrants were influenced by the civil rights movement emerging in cities in the 1950s and 1960s and began their own distinct intertribal movements organized around the urban American Indian centers they established. In one of the largest of the relocation destinations, the San Francisco Bay Area, this would culminate in the eighteen-month occupation of Alcatraz in the late 1960s.
CIVIL RIGHTS ERA BEGINS
The founding of the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) in 1944 had marked a surge of Indigenous resistance. An extraordinary group of Native leaders emerged in the 1950s, including D’Arcy McNickle (Flathead), Edward Dozier (Santa Clara Pueblo), Helen Peterson (Northern Cheyenne/Lakota), and dozens of others from diverse nations. Without their efforts, the termination period would have been more damaging than it was, possibly ending Indigenous status altogether. As a result of their organizing, the government ceased enforcing termination in 1961, though the legislation remained on the books until its repeal in 1988.25 However, by 1960, more than a hundred Indigenous nations had been terminated. A few were later able to regain federal trusteeship through protracted court battles and demonstrations, which took decades and financial hardship. Indigenous leaders such as Ada Deer and James White of the terminated Menominee Nation played key roles in the struggle to have Indigenous cases heard by Congress and by the Supreme Court in suits and appeals. The restitution movement attracted publicity through community organizing and direct action.26 Postwar Indigenous resistance operated in relation to a United States far wealthier and more powerful than before, but also within the era of decolonization and human rights inaugurated with establishment of the United Nations and adoption of its Universal Declaration of Human Rights as well as the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in 1948. Native leaders paid attention and were inspired.
Native organizing, like the organization of the African American desegregation and voting rights movement, developed within the context of a nationalistic anticommunist ideology that intensified with the Cold War and nuclear arms race in the 1950s. This second great Red Scare (the first had been in the wake of World War I) targeted the labor movement under the guise of combating the “communist threat” from the Soviet Union.27 It also attacked the civil rights and self-determination movements of the period, and racism broadened and flourished. The wars against Japan and then Korea, along with the successful Chinese communist revolution, revived the early-twentieth-century racist fear of a “yellow peril.” Mexican migrant workers largely replaced the Asian agricultural workers displaced by the Japanese American internment, but in 1953 “Operation Wetback,” as the federal program was called, forced the deportation of more than a million Mexican workers, in the process subjecting millions of US citizens of Mexican heritage to illegal search and arrest. Native Americans continued to experience brutality, including rape and detention in the border towns on the edges of reservation lands, at the hands of citizens as well as law enforcement officials. The situation of African Americans was one of continued legalized segregation in the South, and extralegal but open discrimination elsewhere. Then, thanks to the long and hard work of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1954, the US Supreme Court ordered desegregation of public schools. Years of persistent and little-publicized civil rights organizing, particularly in the South, burst into public view with the bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, the following year. The white response was murderous: a well-funded campaign by White Citizens’ Councils that formed all over the country, accusing civil rights activists of communist influence and infiltration. When white vigilantes bombed and burned Black churches, it was said that “the communists” were doing it to gain sympathy for integration.
As national liberation movements surged in European colonies in Africa and Asia, the United States responded with counterinsurgency. The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was formed in 1947 and expanded in size and global reach during the Eisenhower administration under director Allen Dulles, brother of Eisenhower’s secretary of state, John Foster Dulles. The CIA instrumentalized the overthrow of the democratically elected governments of Iran in 1953 and Guatemala in 1954.28 Guatemala had been the leading light in developing the Inter-American Indian Institute, a 1940 treaty-based initiative that Dave Warren and D’Arcy McNickle were involved with. F
ollowing the coup, the institute headquarters relocated from Guatemala City to Mexico City, but there it no longer had the same clout. Covert action came to be the primary means of counterinsurgency, while military invasion remained an option as in Vietnam following a decade of covert counterinsurgency there. In the buildup to the US war in Vietnam, the CIA set the stage with its “secret war” in Laos, organizing the indigenous Hmong as a CIA-sponsored army. After Iran and Guatemala, the CIA engineered coups in Indonesia, the Congo, Greece, and Chile, while attempting assassinations or coups that failed in Cuba, Iraq, Laos, and other countries.
Two years before John F. Kennedy took office as president of the United States, the Cuban people, after decades of struggle and years of urban and rural organizing and guerrilla war, deposed the corrupt and despised dictator Batista, who had been financed and supported by the United States to the bitter end. The CIA spent the next several years trying to assassinate revolutionary leader Fidel Castro and made many attempts to invade, the most infamous of which was the 1961 Bay of Pigs fiasco. Many Cubans who left Cuba for the United States after the revolution were recruited as CIA operatives. The revolution in Cuba, just ninety miles off the Florida coast, would be a touchstone for increasingly radicalized young people in the United States, but even more so for the Indigenous peoples of Latin America, which resonated with Native American activists seeking self-determination to their north.
TEN
GHOST DANCE PROPHECY
A NATION IS COMING
The whole world is coming,
A nation is coming, a nation is coming,
The Eagle has brought the message to the tribe.
—from the Lakota Ghost Dance song, “Maka’ Sito’maniyañ”
Little Wounded Knee is turned into a giant world.
—Wallace Black Elk, 1973
THE NEW FRONTIER
Seventy years after the Wounded Knee Massacre, when the conquest of the continent was said to have been complete, and with Hawai‘i and Alaska made into states, rounding out the fifty stars on today’s flag, the myth of an exceptional US American people destined to bring order out of chaos, to stimulate economic growth, and to replace savagery with civilization—not just in North America but throughout the world—proved to have enormous staying power.
A key to John F. Kennedy’s political success was that he revived the “frontier” as a trope of populist imperialism openly based on the drama and popular myth of “settling” the continent, of “taming” a different sort of “wilderness.” In Kennedy’s acceptance speech at the 1960 Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles, historian Richard Slotkin writes, the presidential nominee “asked his audience to see him as a new kind of frontiersman confronting a different sort of wilderness: ‘I stand tonight facing west on what was once the last frontier. From the lands that stretch 3000 miles behind me, the pioneers of old gave up their safety, their comfort and sometimes their lives to build a new world here in the West. . . . We stand today on the edge of a new frontier … a frontier of unknown opportunities and paths, a frontier of unfulfilled hopes and threats.’”1
Kennedy’s use of “new frontier” to encapsulate his campaign echoed debates about US history that had begun more than six decades earlier. In 1894, historian Frederick Jackson Turner had presented his history-making “frontier thesis,” claiming that the crisis of that era was the result of the closing of the frontier and that a new frontier was needed to fill the ideological and spiritual vacuum created by the completion of settler colonialism. The “Turner Thesis” served as a dominant school of the history of the US West through most of the twentieth century. The frontier metaphor described Kennedy’s plan for employing political power to make the world the new frontier of the United States. Central to this vision was the Cold War, what Slotkin calls “a heroic engagement in the ‘long twilight struggle’” against communism, to which the nation was summoned, as Kennedy characterized it in his inaugural address. Soon after he took office, that struggle took the form of a counterinsurgency program in Vietnam. “Seven years after Kennedy’s nomination,” Slotkin reminds us, “American troops would be describing Vietnam as ‘Indian Country’ and search-and-destroy missions as a game of ‘Cowboys and Indians’; and Kennedy’s ambassador to Vietnam would justify a massive military escalation by citing the necessity of moving the ‘Indians’ away from the ‘fort’ so that the ‘settlers’ could plant ‘corn.’”2
The movement of Indigenous peoples to undo what generations of “frontier” expansionists had wrought continued during the Vietnam War era and won some major victories but more importantly a shift in consensus, will, and vision toward self-determination and land restitution, which prevails today. Activists’ efforts to end termination and secure restoration of land, particularly sacred sites, included Taos Pueblo’s sixty-four-year struggle with the US government to reclaim their sacred Blue Lake in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of New Mexico. In the first land restitution to any Indigenous nation, President Richard M. Nixon signed into effect Public Law 91-550 on December 15, 1970, which had been approved with bipartisan majorities in Congress. President Nixon stated, “This is a bill that represents justice, because in 1906 an injustice was done in which land involved in this bill—48,000 acres—was taken from the Taos Pueblo Indians. The Congress of the United States now returns that land to whom it belongs.”3
In hearings held in the preceding years by the Senate Subcommittee on Indian Affairs, members expressed fear of establishing a precedent in awarding land—based on ancient use, treaties, or aboriginal ownership—rather than monetary payment. As one witness testifying in opposition to the return of Taos lands said, “The history of the land squabbles in New Mexico among various groups of people, including Indian-Americans and Spanish Americans, is well known. Substantially every acre of our public domain, be it national forest, state parks, or wilderness areas is threatened by claims from various groups who say they have some ancestral right to the land to the exclusion of all other persons … which can only be fostered and encouraged by the present legislation if passed.”4
Although the Senate subcommittee members finally agreed to the Taos claim by satisfying themselves that it was unique, it did in fact set a precedent.5 The return of Blue Lake as a sacred site begs the question of whether other Indigenous sacred sites remaining as national or state parks or as US Forest Service or Bureau of Land Management lands and waterways should also be returned. Administration of the Grand Canyon National Park has been partially restored to its ancestral caretakers, the Havasupai Nation, but other federal lands have not. A few sites, such as the volcanic El Malpais, a sacred site for the Pueblo Indians, have been designated as national monuments by executive order rather than restored as Indigenous territory. The most prominent struggle has been the Lakota Sioux’s attempt to restore the Paha Sapa, or Black Hills, where the odious Mount Rushmore carvings have scarred the sacred site. Called the “Shrine of Democracy” by the federal government, it is anything but that; rather it is a shrine of in-your-face illegal occupation and colonialism.
RESURGENCE
The return of Taos Blue Lake was not a gift from above. In addition to the six-decade struggle of Taos Pueblo, the restitution took place in the midst of a renewed powerful and growing Native American struggle for self-determination. The movement’s energy was evident when twenty-six young Native activists and students founded the National Indian Youth Council (NIYC) in 1961, based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. From twenty-one different Native nations, some from reservations or small towns and others from relocated families far from home, the founders included Gloria Emerson and Herb Blatchford (both Navajo), Clyde Warrior (Ponca from Oklahoma), Mel Thom (Paiute from Nevada), and Shirley Hill Witt (Mohawk). Cherokee anthropologist Robert K. Thomas mentored the militant young activists. Although primarily committed to local struggles, their vision was international. As Shirley Hill Witt put it: “At a time when new nations all over the globe are emerging from colonial control, their right to choo
se their own course places a vast burden of responsibility upon the most powerful nations to honor and protect those rights.… The Indians of the United States may well present the test case of American liberalism.”6
In 1964, the NIYC organized support for the ongoing Indigenous struggle to protect treaty-guaranteed fishing rights in Washington State. Actor Marlon Brando took an interest and provided financial support and publicity. The “fish-in” movement soon put the tiny community at Frank’s Landing in the headlines. Sid Mills was arrested there on October 13, 1968. Eloquently, he explained his actions:
I am a Yakima and Cherokee Indian, and a man. For two years and four months, I’ve been a soldier in the United States Army. I served in combat in Vietnam—until critically wounded.… I hereby renounce further obligation in service or duty to the United States Army.
My first obligation now lies with the Indian People fighting for the lawful Treaty to fish in usual and accustomed water of the Nisqually, Columbia and other rivers of the Pacific Northwest, and in serving them in this fight in any way possible.…
Just three years ago today, on October 13, 1965, 19 women and children were brutalized by more than 45 armed agents of the State of Washington at Frank’s Landing on the Nisqually river in a vicious, unwarranted attack.…
Interestingly, the oldest human skeletal remains ever found in the Western Hemisphere were recently uncovered on the banks of the Columbia River—the remains of Indian fishermen. What kind of government or society would spend millions of dollars to pick upon our bones, restore our ancestral life patterns, and protect our ancient remains from damage—while at the same time eating upon the flesh of our living People?
An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States Page 21