Native American Voices Introduction: Part I. Part I. Introduction Prehistoric Patterns of Change The Cultures of Prehistoric America The Eve of Contact Kinship and Religion Part II. European Perceptions The Clash of Cultures English Encounters Native Americans and European Contests for Empire Part III. Cultural Survival Strategies Clearing the Land of Indians The "Five Civilized Tribes" and the Civil War The Tragedy of the Western Indians Resistance on the Great Plains Wounded Knee Part IV. "Kill the Indian and Save the Man" Native Americans at the Turn of the Century Revitalization and Renewal Indian Power "Kill the Indian and Save the Man" In 1879, an army officer named Richard H. Pratt opened a boarding school for Indian youth in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. His goal: to use education to uplift and assimilate into the mainstream of American culture. That year, 50 Cheyenne, Kiowa, and Pawnee arrived at his school. Pratt trimmed their hair, required them to speak English, and prohibited any displays of tribal traditions, such as Indian clothing, dancing, or religious ceremonies. Pratt's motto was "kill the Indian and save the man." The Carlisle Indian School became a model for Indian education. Not only were private boarding schools established, so too were reservation boarding schools. The ostensible goal of such schools was to teach Indian children the skills necessary to function effectively in American society. But in the name of uplift, civilization, and assimilation, these schools took Indian children away from their families and tribes and sought to strip them of their cultural heritage. By the late nineteenth century, there was a widespread sense that the removal and reservation policies had failed. No one did a more effective job of arousing public sentiment about the Indians' plight than Helen Hunt Jackson, a Massachusetts-born novelist and poet. Her classic book A Century of Dishonor (1881), recorded the country's sordid record of broken treaty obligations, and did as much to stimulate public concern over the condition of Indians as Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin did to raise public sentiment against slavery or Rachel Carson's Silent Spring did to ignite outrage against environmental exploitation. Ironically, reformers believed that the solution to the "Indian problem" was to erase a distinctive Indian identity. During the late nineteenth century, humanitarian reformers repeatedly called for the government to support schools to teach Indian children "the white man's way of life," end corruption on Indian reservations, and eradicate tribal organizations. The federal government partly adopted the reformers' agenda. Many reformers denounced corruption in the Indian Bureau, which had been set up in 1824 to provide assistance to Indians. In 1869, one member of the House of Representatives said, "No branch of the federal government is so spotted with fraud, so tainted with corruption...as this Indian Bureau." To end corruption, Congress established the Board of Indian Commissioners in 1869, which had the major Protestant religious denominations appoint agents to run Indian reservations. The agents were to educate and Christianize the Indians and teach them to farm. Dissatisfaction with bickering among church groups and the inexperience of church agents led the federal government to replace church-appointed Indian agents with federally-appointed agents during the 1880s. To weaken the authority of tribal leaders, Congress in 1871 ended the practice of treating tribes as sovereign nations. To undermine older systems of tribal justice, Congress, in 1882, created a Court of Indian Offenses to try Indians who violated government laws and rules. Native Americans at the Turn of the Century As the nineteenth century ended, Native Americans seemed to be a disappearing people. The 1890 census recorded an Indian population of less than 225,000, and falling. The prevailing view among whites was that Indians should be absorbed as rapidly as possible into the dominant society: their reservations broken up, tribal authority abolished, traditional religions and languages eradicated. Late nineteenth-century federal policy embodied this attitude. In 1871 Congress declared that tribes were no longer separate, independent governments. It placed tribes under the guardianship of the federal government. The 1887 Dawes Act allotted reservation lands to individual Indians in units of 40 to 160 acres. Land that remained after allotment was to be sold to whites to pay for Indian education. The Dawes Act was supposed to encourage Indians to become farmers. But most of the allotted lands proved unsuitable for farming, owing to a lack of sufficient rainfall. The plots were also too small to support livestock. Much Indian land quickly fell into the hands of whites. There was to be a twenty-five-year trust period to keep Indians from selling their land allotments, but an 1891 amendment did allow Indians to lease them, and a 1907 law let them sell portions of their property. A policy of "forced patents" took additional lands out of Indian hands. Under this policy, begun in 1909, government agents determined which Indians were "competent" to assume full responsibility for their allotments. Many of these Indians quickly sold their lands to white purchasers. Altogether, the severalty policy reduced Indian-owned lands from 155 million acres in 1881 to 77 million in 1900 and just 48 million acres in 1934. The most dramatic loss of Indian land and natural resources took place in Oklahoma. At the end of the nineteenth century, the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Creek nations held half the territory's land. But by 1907, when Oklahoma became a state, much of this land, as well as its valuable asphalt, coal, natural gas, and oil resources, had passed into the possession of whites. Revivalization and Renewal During the 1920s, however, federal Indian policy began to shift away from its longstanding emphasis on assimilation. This shift was due in large measure to a reformer named John Collier, whose career illustrates in vivid terms the difference that one person's life can make. After conducting an investigation of Indian living conditions for the General Federation of Women's Clubs in 1922, Collier became a staunch advocate of preserving tribal cultures and lands. He helped convince the Rockefeller Foundation to fund the Meriam Commission, a comprehensive investigation of federal Indian policies. The commission found that half of all Indians owned less than $500 worth of property and that 71 percent lived on less than $200 a year. The commission blamed Indian poverty on misguided public policies. When Franklin D. Roosevelt became president in 1933, he named Collier commissioner of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, a post he held until 1945. As commissioner, Collier led "the Indian New Deal"--wide-ranging efforts to extend New Deal relief and job programs to Native Americans and stop the sale of Indian reservation land. A special Indian Emergency Conservation work group was established which employed Indians in programs of soil erosion control, irrigation, and land development. The 1934 Johnson-O'Malley Act promoted cooperation between the federal and state governments in improving Indian agriculture, education, and health care. The Indian Reorganization Act, also passed in 1934, encouraged reservation Indians to take a more active role in managing their own affairs, by providing for the election of tribal councils to represent the tribes with state and federal governments. Funds were also allocated to provide scholarships for Indian students and help Indians establish their own businesses. World War II brought profound changes to Indian lives, as tens of thousands left reservations to serve in the military and work in wartime industries. In 1943 alone, over 46,000 took jobs off reservations in shipyards, lumbering, canneries, mines, and farms. Over 24,000 served in the armed forces--over a third of all Indian men between 18 and 50. Unlike African Americans, Indians were not confined to separate military units, performing all kinds of military duties. This policy increased theintegration of many Native Americans into the dominant currents of American society. Perhaps the most unique Indian contribution to the war effort was the development of a secret military code. During the war, Navajo radio operators, including 350 in the Pacific theater, used Navajo words for military radio transmissions--a code that neither the Germans nor the Japanese were ever able to break. Wartime experience intensified a sense of Indian identity, reinforced religious beliefs, and exposed many Indians to life outside the reservations. After the war, Indians became increasingly active politically, demanding equal voting rights and an end to discrimination. In Arizona and New Mexico, Indians who paid no United States taxes were denied the right to vote, in spite of the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act that granted Indians full U.S. citizenship. In 1948, both states ended this denial of voting rights. In other political activities, Indians resisted the construction of dams that threatened to flood reservation lands and destroy Indian fishing sites. The major postwar innovation in Indian policy was the establishment by Congress in 1946 of the Indian Claims Commission to compensate Indians for fraud or unfair treatment by the federal government. The commission, operating from 1946 to 1978, heard 852 claims and awarded about $818 million in damages. Indian groups criticized the Claims Commission for basing awards on land values at the time of cession and refusing to pay interest or adjust awards for inflation. A renewed sense of Indian nationalism emerged during the 1940s and 1950s. In 1944, Indian leaders from fifty tribes formed the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI), the first major intertribal organization. Among the group's primary concerns were protection of Indian land, mineral, and timber resources and improved economic opportunities, education, and health for Indians. During the 1950s, the organization led opposition to a congressional policy known as termination. In 1953, Congress passed a resolution that called for the government to transfer federal responsibilities for tribes to the states. It would also allowstates to assert legal jurisdiction over Indian reservations without tribal consent. The NCAI effectively organized opposition to these measures. "Self-determination rather than termination" was the NCAI slogan. Earl Old Person, a Blackfoot leader, explained: It is important to note that in our Indian language the only translation for termination is to 'wipe out' or 'kill off'...how can we plan our future when the Indian Bureau threatens to wipe us out as a race? Many Indians criticized another postwar government program--relocation--as termination in disguise. Under this policy, begun in 1948, the Bureau of Indian Affairs provided transportation, job placement, vocational training, and counseling to Indians who wanted to leave reservations. As a result of Indian protests, federal policies began to shift away from termination during the 1960s toward self-determination, the principle that Indians should exercise autonomy in matters affecting their welfare and economic well-being.   Indian Power In 1970 American Indians were the nation's poorest minority group, worse off than any other group according to virtually every socio-economic measure. The Indian unemployment rate was ten times the national average, and fifty percent of the Native American population lived below the poverty line. In that year, Indian life expectancy was just 44 years, a third less than that of the typical American. Deaths caused by pneumonia, hepatitis, dysentery, strep throat, diabetes, tuberculosis, alcoholism, suicide, and homicide were two to sixty times higher than among the whole United States population. Half a million Indian families lived in unsanitary, dilapidated dwellings, many in shanties, huts, or even abandoned automobiles. Conditions on many of the nation's reservations were not unlike those found in underdeveloped areas of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. In one Apache town of 2,500 on the San Carlos reservation in Arizona, there were only twenty-five telephones and most houses had outdoor toilets and wood-burning stoves for heat. On the Navajo reservation in Arizona, which is roughly the size of West Virginia, most families lived in conditions of extreme poverty. The birth rate was two-and-a-half times the overall U.S. rate and the same as India's. The average family's purchasing power was about the same as a family in Malaysia. The typical house had two rooms; sixty percent had no electricity and eighty percent had no running water or sewers. The typical resident had just five years of schooling and fewer than one adult in six was graduated from high school. During the 1960s, Native Americans began to revolt against such conditions. In 1961, a militant new Indian organization appeared, the National Indian Youth Council, which began to use the phrase "Red Power," and organized demonstrations, marches, and fish-ins to protest state efforts to abolish Indian fishing rights guaranteed by federal treaties. Native Americans in San Francisco in 1964 established the Indian Historical Society to present history from the Indian point of view, while the Native American Rights Fund brought legal suits against states that had taken Indian land and abolished Indian hunting, fishing, and water rights in violation of federal treaties. Many tribes took legal action to prevent strip mining or spraying of pesticides on Indian lands. During the late 1960s and 1970s, Indian activists staged a series of dramatic demonstrations to dramatize the plight of the nation's Indians. In November 1969, 200 Native Americans seized the abandoned federal penitentiary on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay. For nineteen months, Indian activists occupied the island to draw attention to conditions on the nation's Indian reservations. Alcatraz, they said, symbolized conditions on reservations: It has no running water; it has inadequate sanitation facilities; there is no industry, and so unemployment is very great; there are no health care facilities; the soil is rocky and unproductive. The activists offered to buy the island for "$24 in glass beads and red cloth"--the price that the Dutch had paid to buy Manhattan island. On Thanksgiving Day, 1970, the Wampanoag Indians who had taken part in the first Thanksgiving 350 years before, held a National Day of Mourning at Plymouth, Massachusetts. A tribal representative declared: We forfeited our country. Our lands have fallen into the hands of the aggressor. We have allowed the white man to keep us on our knees. Meanwhile, another group of Native Americans established a settlement at Mount Rushmore to demonstrate Indian claims to the Black Hills. The best known of all Indian Power groups was AIM, formed in 1968 by two Chippewas, Dennis Banks and George Mitchell, to combat poverty and unemployment and protest police brutality. In the fall of 1972, AIM gained national visibility when it led urban Indians and traditionalists along the "Trail of Broken Treaties" to Washington, D.C., seized the offices of the Bureau of Indians Affairs, and occupied them for a week to dramatize Indian grievances. In the spring of 1973, 200 Indians occupied the town of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, site of an 1890 massacre of 300 Sioux by the army cavalry, and occupied the town for seventy-one days to dramatize the injustices Indians suffered. They demanded the return of lands taken from Indians in violation of treaty agreements. These militant protests paid off. The 1972 Indian Education Act gave Indian parents greater control over their children's schools. To address deficiencies in Indian health care, Congress passed the Indian Health Care Improvement Act in 1976, while the 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act gave tribes control over custody decisions involving Indian children. A 1978 congressional resolution on American Indian Religious Freedom directed federal agencies to respect traditional Indian religions. During the 1970s, tribes asserted great control over their economic affairs. In 1975, twenty-five tribes with extensive oil and gas holdings formed the Council of Energy Resources Tribes to negotiate leases with energy companies. A series of landmark Supreme Court decisions aided the cause of Indian sovereignty and tribal self-government. In a 1959 case, Williams v. Lee, the court upheld the authority of tribal courts to make decisions involving non-Indians. A 1968 case played a particularly important role in establishing the principle of Indian rights. In Menominee Tribe v. United States, the high court ruled that states could not invalidate fishing and hunting rights Indians had acquired through treaty agreements. During the 1970s, a number of tribes initiated legal suits to recover land illegally seized by white settlers. In Maine, the Passamaquoddy and Penobscot tribes sued to recover twelve million acres, nearly two thirds of the state. In 1980, the Maine tribes agreed to drop the lawsuit in exchange for an $81.5 million settlement from the federal government. In 1980, the Supreme Court ordered the federal government to pay $105 million to the Sioux as payment for lands in South Dakota that the government seized illegally in 1877. Court decisions also permitted some tribal authorities to sell cigarettes, run gambling casinos, and levy taxes. No longer are Indians a vanishing group of Americans. The 1990 census recorded an Indian population of over two million, five times the number recorded in 1950. About half of these people live on reservations, which cover 52.4 million acres in 27 states, while most others live in urban areas. As the Indian population has grown in size, individual Indians have claimed many accomplishments, including receipt of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction by N. Scott Momaday, a Kiowa. Although Native Americans continue to face severe problems of employment, income, and education, they have demonstrated conclusively that they will not abandon their Indian identity and culture or be treated as dependent wards of the federal government.

 Credits     Contact Us     Copyright 2003