Category: Indian assimilation

Indigenous Peoples Day

Once, years ago, we had a Nez Perce history discussion going on at the Josephy Center. Bobbie Conner, then and now director of Tamastslikt on the Umatilla Reservation, came in the door on another task. I greeted her from the balcony discussion group and announced that we were talking about Nez Perce Treaties. Bobbie walked up the stairs and told us that if we were talking about treaties we’d better start with the Doctrine of Discovery, and learn how it crept into American Indian Law.

Like many of us, I’d read past its mention many times, but never really looked at it, knew only that it was an ancient papal document that said that conquering Christian European countries could plant the flag of their ruling kings and queens and claim the lands of heathens. “The Papal Bull ‘Inter Caetera,’ issued by Pope Alexander VI on May 4, 1493… stated that any land not inhabited by Christians was available to be ‘discovered,’ claimed, and exploited by Christian rulers…”

The Gilder Lehrman synopsis further states that “[It] played a central role in the Spanish conquest of the New World. The document supported Spain’s strategy to ensure its exclusive right to the lands discovered by Columbus the previous year…” We start to get a picture of land seizures by Europeans in the New World.

Two weeks ago, we were treated to a talk by Dr. June Lorenzo, a Pueblo and Navajo scholar and Presbyterian ecclesiastic who works as a tribal judge and represents tribal concerns in state and federal courts. She talked briefly about the lingering problems left by uranium mining on Southwest tribal lands, but spent most of her talk on the Doctrine of Discovery and its impacts on Indian Law to the present day.

Which sent me back to the Indian lawyer Ray Cross and the book about him by Paul VanDeveler, Coyote Warrior: One Man, Three Tribes, and the Trial That Forged a Nation. I remembered that the book included the clearest explanation of how the Doctrine of Discovery was adopted into US Law and became the foundation of Indian Law in our country. I picked it up again.

Cross, who taught Indian Law for years at the University of Montana, and, unfortunately, passed just last year, cut his teeth as an Indian Lawyer representing the Klamath Tribe in its quest to regain sovereignty and water and land rights after the debacle of “Termination” in the 1950s. He won at the Supreme Court, and later won huge compensation—again at the Supreme Court—for lands that had been taken from tribes on the Fort Berthold Reservation in North Dakota, home to the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara peoples, his own reservation and people.

In the book, Cross was lecturing a bunch of BPA employees when he launched into a discussion of Chief Justice Marshall and the three decisions in the 1820s and 1830s that used the DOD to become the basis of all US Indian Law. These decisions, which were derided by President Jackson at the time, acknowledged that tribes “had governments” before European settlement, and that they retained status as “domestically dependent sovereign nations.”

Furthermore, tribal lands—and here is where the Doctrine of Discovery comes in, are actually the property of the US Government by the “discovery.” Indians were only “occupants” of lands owned by the government, but the US and not state governments (this was the piece that Jackson objected to and ignored as the Cherokee were removed).

Terrible, we say, because Marshall gave tribes only limited sovereignty. Cross sees it differently, and cites Marshall’s brilliance in claiming that the US Government is heir to the “Christian Rulers” of the Papal Bull of 1493. According to Cross, Marshall’s brilliance in establishing this Doctrine of Limited Sovereignty paved the way for treaty making—“between sovereigns”—and is the reason that the Boldt Decision on Indian salmon harvest on “usual and accustomed” places guaranteed by treaties made in 1855 lives with us today. Our treaty making ability distinguishes our US laws from aboriginal land law in Australia, New Zealand and Canada.

What Dr. Lorenzo recently brought to the discussion is what I will call a “climate of opinion” that existed in Europe in 1500 and, with some brilliance on the part of Marshall amidst very mixed feelings about Indians in general, was transmitted across time and space in the US in the 1800s. One of the quests at Dr. Lorenzo’s talk asked how church law from a distant pope could be translated so easily into civil law in the US. Because, she explained, it was the accepted knowledge of the time. In 1500, and in feudalism more generally, land was the province of the crown. To be doled out to lesser nobility and worked by tenants.

Fast forward to 1800 in the United States, when the knowledge of the time about Indigenous Americans was a mixed affair. Some, like Jefferson, considered Indians “savages” and were willing to push them out of the way as the country grew West. But west of the Mississippi was still largely in the hands of tribes, some of them, like the Lakota, very powerful tribes. And tribal people were the keys to an expanding US—they had the beaver and buffalo hides that the economy craved, and they knew the rivers and roads that Lewis and Clark would explore.

Realizing this, Marshall gave the US government the tools to negotiate with tribes via treaties, to use tribal knowledge and purchase tribal lands. And in so doing he also cut out state governments as the negotiators and purchasers; they were not sovereigns. That upset President Jackson, who paid it no mind, but it remains US law to this day. Marshall thought that it would lead ultimately to assimilation, that Indians would gradually become white and integrated into the US melting pot, the treaties having served their purpose.

He was wrong about that, and couldn’t have imagined the climate of opinion today, which gives Native people and knowledge much favor. It is nurtured by recognition of past wrongs towards Native Americans and by the appreciation of Native knowledge of the land. We now value Native knowledge of fire, fish, and water, are seeking to restore waterways and fish runs, and emulating Native practices with fire. We read Native authors and appoint Natives to high office, talk of “co-management” of parks and forests, and of reparations for stolen lands. All possible today in large part due to the wisdom of Justice Marshall long ago.

And, though popes and conquistadors might be turning over or turning colors in their tombs, we have replaced what was once an ode to “explorers” called Columbus Day, with “Indigenous Peoples Day.”

# # #

George Washington and the Indians

There are new revelations on every page in Ned Blackhawk’s ambitious The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History. In putting Indians back into the history of the country, rather than treating the trials and tribulations of Indian peoples as a separate discipline, he changes the way we understand the past. Indians, he says, had “agency,” were party to the actions and decisions that shaped the country. His is a different understanding of early founders Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and especially George Washington.Read Rich’s Post →

An American Indian solution in Palestine?

When I am talking with non-Native audiences, and even when talking with Tribal friends, I sometimes say that I feel like I am body-surfing on a wave of pro-Indian sentiment in the country. I say that a big part of this is based on recognition of non-Native—read mostly white male—failures in dealing with the natural world. We haven’t been so smart about fire, fish, and water, and grope now, trying to play catch up with preemptive burns and reintroduction of beaver and bison.Read Rich’s Post →

Hurray for the Supreme Court

Last week the Supreme Court upheld the Indian Child Welfare Act. “The bottom line is that we reject all of petitioners’ challenges to the statute, some on the merits and others for lack of standing,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett, the conservative Trump appointee, wrote in her majority opinion. Justices Alito and Thomas were the only dissenters.

In brief snippets on National Public Radio, we were reminded that prior to the 1978 Act, “hundreds of thousands” of Native children were removed from their families and tribes. One account said that fully one-third of Native children were being removed from their families over decades in the twentieth century.Read Rich’s Post →

The Education of Little Tree–and Wannabe Indians

When I was in the bookstore, I sold many copies of The Education of Little Tree, by Forrest Carter, AKA Little Tree. It was the story of a child raised by Cherokee grandparents to the wonders of the natural world and Indian ways of living. The book was published in the same year that I opened the bookstore, 1976, and soon gained a devoted following—I remember people reading it and then buying multiple copies to give to friends. Carter had already written and published The Rebel Outlaw, Josey Wales, and worked that title—and Clint Eastwood’s “Josey Wells” movie—into an appearance on Barbara Walter’s celebrity TV program.Read Rich’s Post →

MLK and the Indians

I remember Alvin Josephy saying many times that the white liberals who had joined the Civil Rights Movement and Dr. King did not understand the Indian situation. To paraphrase him, “As the Civil Rights movement gained strength and won some victories, white liberals thought they could just transfer ideas and tactics over to Indian affairs. But there was a fundamental difference. Indians didn’t want their ‘civil’ rights, but their ‘sovereignty,’ the treaty rights and at least some of the land that had been stolen from them.”

Another constant theme of Alvin’s: “From the beginning Indians had three choices: become white—assimilation; move, across the Mississippi, further west, to reservations—removal; or extermination.” From the beginning, Euro-Americans who wanted to treat Indians fairly often thought the best way to do so was to assimilate them. Their assumption was that Indians had lost the continent, white civilization was on the march, and Indians were obliged to join the parade. Alvin’s boss at Time Magazine, Henry Luce, thought Indians who resisted this maxim were “phonies,” and should just get on with adapting. Alice Fletcher, the famous “measuring woman” among the Nez Perce who had actually written some of the Dawes, or Allotment, Act, had in mind to make every Indian a Jeffersonian farmer. She appreciated Indian cultures—some of the ethnographic work she did among the Omaha and other Plains tribes on Indian songs and dances is still available in Dover Books. But the Indian solution, in her mind, was assimilation. The culture would go to textbooks and museums.

Even photographer Edward Sheriff Curtis felt that Indian cultures were “vanishing,” and sought to keep as many of them as possible alive in words and images. To Curtis’s credit, his time of work, the years on either side of 1900, were probably the nadir for Indians. According to the US Census Bureau, there were only 237,196 Indians left in the country in 1900.
Indians have not disappeared—Fletcher and Curtis would both be happy with that. And in fact their resurgence did have something to do with the 1950s and 60s Civil Rights Movement. Martin Luther King was aware of Indian history, which he naturally interpreted in racial terms in his 1963 book, Why We Can’t Wait:
Our nation was born in genocide when it embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race. Even before there were large numbers of Negroes on our shores, the scar of racial hatred had already disfigured colonial society. From the sixteenth century forward, blood flowed in battles of racial supremacy. We are perhaps the only nation which tried as a matter of national policy to wipe out its Indigenous population. Moreover, we elevated that tragic experience into a noble crusade. Indeed, even today we have not permitted ourselves to reject or feel remorse for this shameful episode. Our literature, our films, our drama, our folklore all exalt it.  
King trumpeting the Indian story nationally in such graphic terms had to have had an impact. And Indians did follow what was happening with American blacks. The NCAAP, the oldest civil rights group, was formed in 1908. NCAI, the National Congress of American Indians, the first national Indian lobby, was formed in 1944, and NARF, the Native American Rights Fund, was modeled after the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund in the mid-sixties, at the height of the Civil Rights Movement.
Today, sovereignty and treaty rights, not always secure, not always playing out the Indian way, are acknowledged and of moment across the country—with a much greater understanding by white liberals. It’s all speculation, but one might argue that AIM, Alcatraz, the second Wounded Knee, none of it would have happened without the Civil Rights Movement and Martin Luther King. And the way King brought Alvin’s third Indian alternative—extermination, or, in 20thcentury terms, genocide—to the fore has certainly had a sobering influence on policy makers and Indians themselves over the last 50 years.
As King and Indian leaders would say, there is still much work to do, but we are a long way from 1900 and a “vanishing race.”

# # #

“Noble Savage”

After the last blog on Mildred Bailey and “passing as white,” a friend suggested that it sounded accurate on the one hand, but on the other, why is it that so many Americans claim Indian roots? There are jokes about the number of people with Cherokee great-grandmothers, but when, he asked, have you heard someone obviously “white” claim a slave ancestor from Sierra Leone.

What’s with this contradiction of widespread pride in Indian ancestry—and white America’s disregard for and continuing practice of forgetting Indian history and consciously eradicating Indian culture?

I can’t site a page in a Josephy book or remember a specific conversation, but I know that he believed that, from the earliest days of white settlement, relations with Indians were dominated by a triad of white attitudes toward them: romanticize, kill, or assimilate.

We now know that diseases often preceded actual contact and that millions of indigenous Americans died before they saw a white face. We also know, though it is less frequently mentioned, that Europe, and especially northern Europe, was in the final throes of the little ice age when those first ships sailed to the North America. Famine was fact, and the people who traveled were a scrawny lot (I read somewhere that Napoleon’s army was made up of men who barely topped five foot, unlike Charlemagne‘s much earlier army of six footers.) And their first sightings of Indians must have been awe-inspiring. Think of the early paintings of the “red men,” and of the Indians who were brought to Europe to parade in front of kings, queens, and philosophers.

These able-bodied Indians appeared to be living well without the trappings of European civilization, without large houses, police forces, and only the barest of manufactured goods. “Noble savages,” Rousseau called them. At least some of the early colonists, Benjamin Franklin among them, read and were influenced by the Europeans and found confirmation of their views in personal experience.

I don’t remember which general declared that the only good Indian was a dead Indian, and there is not time or space to chronicle the attempts by do-good white Americans to assimilate Indians. The Dawes Act, Indian Reorganization Act, and Eisenhower’s termination policy can serve as brief reminders

But is it too much to say that Josephy’s original triad is with us still? That White America is still conflicted about Indians, and that we carry with us these old attitudes—all of them. At Fishtrap, we hosted the Makah filmmaker Sandy Osawa, and watched her documentaries on musician Jim Pepper and prima ballerina Maria Tallchief. We listened to Horace Axtell describe a language and sounds related directly the world around us.

And now that powwow’s are mainstream, we are stirred by jingle dancers and Indian elders with eagle feathers. I remember selling a book of Indian sayings in my bookstore days: To Touch the Earth.

Maybe that is what the Cherokee great grandmother is all about….

check out Sandy Osawa and Maria Tallchief here: http://indiancountrynews.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2006&Itemid=80