A woman with strong ties to Pine Ridge told me this week that young people from that reservation have been detained by ICE. And I know that the Native American Rights Fund (NARF) sent out word to tribal people across the country to carry enrollment cards and other forms of official identification.
Early in the still young T administration, when he talked about rescinding birthright citizenship, someone in or close to the administration posted comments that American Indians should not be considered birthright citizens. The logic?
In 1868, when the Fourteenth Amendment, defining and making birthright a constitutional right, Native Americans were not citizens of the United States (with exceptions of some who owned private property and paid taxes). They were considered citizens of their tribes, which had been deemed semi-autonomous sovereigns in Supreme Court decisions in the 1820s and 1830s.
In 1924, the “Indian Citizenship Act” made all Native Americans born in the territorial US, even those who had not taken up allotments or in other ways acquired citizenship, citizens.
This ICE business, harassment really of Native Americans, comes after the Biden administration and BLM Director Deb Haaland were hailed as the best for Indian Country—maybe ever!
It’s a roller coaster!
I am reminded that when I moved to Wallowa County in 1971, relationships between local citizens and Indian visitors—the Nez Perce had been forcibly removed almost 100 years earlier—were fraught, with fights on Main Street in Joseph (the town named after Chief Joseph) on Chief Joseph Days (the rodeo named after the Nez Perce chief). I lately have realized that the early 1970s were a low point in Indian-white relations across the country. The Indian occupation of Alcatraz was in 1969. The Vietnam War hung on and on; and Black Power and Brown Power movements were in the news. Wallowa County hunkered down white.
In the 1980s, those attitudes softened, there were powwows during Chief Joseph Days, and the Nez Perce Wallowa Homeland was born, with Indians from three reservations and local people joining to buy land and build a dance arbor and later a Longhouse.
I became involved to a small extent earlier, when historian Alvin Josephy became a friend and mentor. I read his books and brought them into my bookstore. I met Indians as the Nez Perce National Historical Park sites were extended into Wallowa County. I invited Indian writers to Fishtrap, the non-profit writing organization that is still here and continues to include Indian writers in its programs.
One of the Nez Perce I met over time was Si Whitman, who had been head of Nez Perce Fisheries and came to tell us about that at the Josephy Center when we did an exhibit on Dams and Salmon. A later exhibit featured Nez Perce Music, and I learned that Si’s dad had been one of the musicians in the Nez Percians, who road in the parade with headdresses, moccasins and horns, and played music at Chief Joseph Days in 1947. Si said he had had a rock’n’roll band in the 1950s and played at the Gold Room, and that he worked the harvest and ate good meals at the Klages farm in those days.
In the early 1960s, The Josephys, Lockes, McClarans, and other local families started the Wallowa Valley Day Camp—which became the Chief Joesph Summer Seminars. They brought Indian kids up from Lapwai to stay at their homes and attend the camp.
By 1971 those warm feelings were gone. There is a story that CJSS faculty—often professors from universities in Oregon, Idaho and Washington—marched in the Chief Joseph Days Parade with anti-Vietnam War signs. Indians too, with Alcatraz, and the later confrontations at the Bureau of Indian Affairs office in D.C. and on the Pine Ridge Reservation, were drawing close, some joining AIM, the American Indian Movement. Cooperation with non-Indians became difficult from their side.
So, Indians in our country have been on a continual roller coaster of feelings and relationships with the white Euro-Americans who came to take and settle what they considered a broad and “empty” (of “civilized” people) continent. Phil Deloria, the first Native historian at Harvard, says that beginning about 1900, when Indigenous populations had shrunk to about 250,000, when boarding schools had done as much as they could to snuff out Indian languages and culture, Americans had a renewed and romantic interest in Indians!
Indians were featured in car ads and names—Pontiac; there were Indian “villages” in Hollywood film lots in the silent movie days; Indian athletes, Jim Thorpe being number one, were popular and adored; Indian music and musicians toured and were integrated into American classical music. The Indian Citizenship Act was passed in 1924.
The Depression sent tribal people back to their reservations, and Roosevelt tried to help out with new guidelines for tribal governments, and all-Indian Civilian Conservation Corps crews. The CCC crew from Umatilla built the wall around the Indian Gravesite at Wallowa Lake in 1939-40.
Years ago, a friend from California sent me a book, Fast Cars and Frybread, by Gordon Johnson, who was enrolled on the Pala Reservation in Southern California. When I went to Oceanside for my 50th high school reunion, I made a date to have breakfast with Gordon. I asked him what it was like to grow up Indian in Southern California in the 1940s and 50s “If you were light,” said Gordon, “you passed as White. If you were dark, you were Mexican. Indians were at the bottom of the barrel.”
It turns out some of the Mexicans I went to school and played baseball and football with in the 1950s were in fact Indians. And at least one blonde crewcut and handsome white kid a year ahead of us was Indian too. He told me that his family told him not to talk about it, but now, 50 years later, “the next time you’re in town, let me know. I have some very good family regalia.”
The 50s—my California school years—was the time when the US government gave one last effort to assimilating—erasing—Indians with the Termination and Relocation acts. Some Tribes were “bought out,” and terminated. Tribal people across the country were given bus tickets and directions to jobs and schools in the cities.
It didn’t work. Tribes and reservations are still with us. Indians are still here, hanging onto their tribal ID cards, and, I imagine, once again wondering how high or low the roller coaster will go.
# # #