Resilience

The election and the first days of a new and controversial Presidency have captured the news and national attention. For the most part, Standing Rock has slipped to back pages and Indian media websites, even as President Trump tweets and signs executive orders demanding a speedy resumption of pipeline building. The sheer number of tweets and executive orders helps obscure this news.

Life–1973

Water problems on one reservation and a lawsuit over education on another creep into the news, but, for the most part, Indians and tribal concerns are background noise once again, caught occasionally by a local press, or by an environmental media newly awakened to Indian allies, covered regularly only in Native news outlets.

But, I would argue, now is exactly the time we should be looking at and to tribes for guidance in dealing with current social, environmental, and political issues: Indians have the kind of history and standing that might instruct us now—while reminding us of past errors in their regards; it is becoming increasingly obvious that Indian environmental and legal concerns are concerns for all Americans; and, more than anything, Indians can remind us of and teach us about resilience.

Indians were here first, here to meet the boats from Spain, England, Holland, Portugal, Italy… Indians were then decimated by European diseases to which they had little resistance, enslaved, killed in wars over land, “removed” by Andrew Jackson, restricted to reservations, coaxed into assimilation by the Dawes Allotment Act, boarding schools, the Termination Act, and an urban relocation program.

But they have survived and, incredibly, retained tribal cultures and values.

And, they have survived from coast to coast and border to boarder, even made hay of their mistreatment in boarding schools by meeting one another, learning from one another, and emerging now, in 2016 and 2017 to stand together at Standing Rock.

After decades of Indian concerns over water, fish, and other natural resources, often in the face of majority opposition (see the “great fish wars” in the Northwest prior to the Boldt Decision), the environmental community is acknowledging Indians and the Indian stance in the natural world rather than over the rest of it. After water contamination in Flint, Michigan, Portland, Oregon and dozens of other places, we—majority culture environmentalists—see that clean water is precious and fundamental in North Dakota and everywhere.

And, as Standing Rock illustrates, Indians can teach us to bridge the rural-urban divide. In the 1950s, in the Eisenhower era, a last gasp at assimilation called termination policy aimed to erase the reservation system, Trust responsibilities, and the whole doctrine of Tribal Sovereignty. As an accompaniment—Indians were to join the main stream in America—thousands of young Indians were loaded on buses and moved to urban outposts across the country.  As a result, the Federal government and State and corporate interests terminated the Klamath and scores of Oregon tribes, and built the Garrison Dam on the Missouri River, coal fire plants in the Southwest, and the Kinzua Dam on Seneca land.

However, by standing their ground and established legal doctrine, Indians beat back termination—President Nixon famously said that “there will be no further termination of Indian tribes, but self-determination for Indians.”

Even then, Indians learned from their misfortune, met people from other tribes, studied at universities, learned to have a foot in two worlds. And now they are still in urban areas, at colleges and universities on reservations and off, and have trained their own as lawyers and battled in courts over land, water, and sovereignty. They have also retained family and tribal links, and move back and forth between city work and rural tribal work. They are trained in fisheries and wildlife management, business and gaming, and move from government to non-profit to tribal to private fluidly.

They run huge gaming and entertainment enterprises, and assist tribal programs and local non-tribal educational, cultural, and government programs with their winnings. (The Wildhorse Foundation on the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Reservation has given millions across northeast Oregon.)

Indians are everywhere, and more often than not they are on the side of the angels. As my old mentor, Alvin Josephy often said, “Indians are still capable of ‘group think,’ of thinking beyond the self and immediate family for the good of all.”

So now, in these troubled times, it is up to us, the majority white culture and African-American and Latino and Asian-American groups, to find them, support them, and learn from them. They know these roads. They know resilience.

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American Indians, water, and the public good

Later, alternate title: “First Lessons From Standing Rock”

The late historian and activist on behalf of American Indians Alvin Josephy believed that Indians in America would solve the drug problem before others figured it out. “Indians,” he said “are still capable of ‘group think,’ of thinking for the tribe rather than focusing on the individual.” Josephy also believed that Indians still had things to tell, especially about the land, because they had lived on and with it for millennia.

from Huffington Post

Standing Rock is Group Think in capital letters. It has  attracted tribal members from Indian Nations across the country, white environmentalists, and veterans of all colors, who are now joining the water protectors in force in uniform. These veterans, schooled in tribal thinking (as illustrated in Sebastian Junger’s book, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging), and realizing that Indians have and do serve in the American military in greater numbers than any other sector of American society, are there to support their comrades in the next foxhole and throw their weight against wrongs that have festered from the beginnings of nationhood.

White and black Americans who have always talked about their Cherokee grandmother or some other distant relative tied to the original immigrants—immigrants scientists now tell us came from Asia well over 14,000 years ago, probably not on the “land bridge” that we learned about if we learned anything of First Americans, but on water, along the Pacific Shoreline, hopscotching their ways to South America while settling the lands along the way—are joining the Dakota chorus. Whatever wrongs they have suffered and seen in their own lives are coming into this focus on government mistreatment of Indians and disregard for water, the principle of all life.

The environmental community, gloomy with election defeat and their own experiences—or stories they’ve heard—of contaminated water in Flint, Michigan, Portland, Oregon and other urban and seemingly safe places, gradually realizing that the Indians’ fight for water and fair treatment is their fight, have awoken to and in North Dakota.

Maybe there is also guilt over the lack of support of tribes in the 1950s, when the Corps of Engineers bulldozed the Three Affiliated Tribes, the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation, and built the Garrison Dam on this very same Missouri River and flooded over 90 % of the then prosperous Indians’ agricultural lands. Or in the 60s, when the Corps abrogated the our oldest treaty, the Treaty of Canandaigua, signed in 1794 by George Washington, that established land boundaries and declared “peace and friendship” between the United States of America and the tribes of the Haudenosaunee, the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Seneca, Cayuga and Tuscarora, to build the Kinzua Dam in Pennsylvania. Environmentalists are on board at Standing Rock.

The mainstream media that has been castigated for not covering Indian concerns is there and reporting. To be fair, we—the general public—have never expressed much interest in current Indian affairs, preferring our Indian stories to be about deeds and misdeeds in the past, before the nation was formed and the West was won. Representatives of the New York Times and television news were actually at Standing Rock in August. The few stories they slipped past editors concentrating on the Presidential campaign and the constant drumbeats of Native media outlets helped raise national awareness. It is now national news, with daily stories from large and small media outlets, social media, and continuing Indian country media. Some days it even cracks the New York Times top ten “trending” list.

It is ironic and fitting that the tools that government used to assimilate Indians—especially the boarding schools, which began in the late nineteenth century and survive in modified from to this day, and the termination and relocation policies of the 1950s, have served to introduce tribal peoples one to another across the entire country. These tools led to AIM in the 70s, and now help bring people from 300 Indian nations in North America and indigenous people from Hawaii and Central America to Standing Rock.

And it is fitting that this attention to water and sustainability come from the first immigrants. Yes, there were tribal mistakes—did the Mississippi Mound peoples disappear because of over use of resources and exaltation of the rich and powerful? How did climate change and wars over resources play out in the Southwest 600 and 700 years ago? But in general the Indians of North America pre-contact lived lighter on the land, acknowledged the need for constant renewal, and eschewed the privatization and exploitation of lands and rersources.

They, like growing numbers of all Americans, realized that water is the key to all life, and that there are times and places when putting private goods over the public good jeopardizes everything. Standing Rock is a symbol—and maybe a beginning.

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Indians and Environmentalists

This before election results are in, knowing that one candidate thinks climate change is a hoax, and that neither candidate has acknowledged Indian efforts at stopping the Dakota Access pipeline—or, for that matter, having talked at all to Indians or about Indian issues and concerns.

There are three pieces in today’s New York Times that reflect advances and show the need to continue Alvin Josephy’s long-ago efforts at bringing the environmental community and Indian communities together.

The first of course is about the environmental community backing the Indians at Standing Rock in their fight to stop the Dakota Access pipeline by targeting big banks that are financing the project (perfect roles for such groups). The second and third articles—and a closer look might have revealed more—were about the smog in Delhi, India, which is literally choking the population with industrial overload, and another about oil companies, that, to varying degrees and seeking to serve their own best economic self interests, are exploring alternative energies. Good for them.

In ancient days, when David Brower was the head of the Sierra Club, Alvin said that his and other environmental organizations paid no attention and lent not a helping hand as a high-minded hell-bent-for-development Army Corps of Engineers

“built the Garrison Dam, the largest rolled-earth am in the world, across the Missouri River in North Dakota, ignoring the protests of Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Indians and chopping up and flooding sacred sites and large parts of their reservation. Repeating their high-handedness, the Corps then broke the American government’s oldest existing treaty, made in 1794 with the Seneca Indians of New York State, to build the Kinzua Dam, which flooded the center of the Senecas’ reservation and the burial ground of their famous revolutionary-era chief, Cornplanter, and again forced a heartbreaking relocation of most of the Indians.” (Walk Toward Oregon, pp 275-76)

Weed, California

There were other disagreements, and other cases where environmental groups disregarded issues in Grand Canyon and in Alaska, but Josephy insisted that the two sides should be talking, wrote an op-ed about it in the Times, and actually arranged a New York meeting between Brower, Alan Gassow, and others from Friends of the Earth with tribal leaders. Ultimately, he wrote several articles for Audubon Magazine and a book, Now That the Buffalo’s Gone, which gathered essays and arguments on many of these issues. They are as fresh today as when he wrote them in the 70s and 80s–Kinzua’s still there; the Indians are ahead at Pyramid Lake and on the Columbia, and controversy swirls in the Dakotas.

I told my OSU class in La Grande yesterday about canaries in coal-mines, and how Indian concerns over natural resource issues, especially over water issues, might be seen in the same way. Dakota Access is not the only water issue out there today. Look to see what is happening on the Navajo Reservation with drought and pollution, and the efforts of Crystal Geyser and Arrowhead to tap Indian water in other places.

There is plenty of work to do—from Standing Rock to Delhi—but good environmentally conscious citizens might look close to home for the Indian tribes and their canaries and see where they are pointing.

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Alvin Josephy, Cornplanter, and the Kinzua Dam

Sorry for the long time between Josephy Library blog postings. Now that kids are back in school, I plan to get back with some kind of regularity!
Did anyone hear the recent NPR interview with the Seneca Nation’s new president, Robert Odawi Porter? I had been digging through Josephy speeches and writings looking towards an anthology of his work that is still relevant today. And looking especially at articles and speeches that had to do with environmental issues. Alvin came to these concerns through Indians, of course. I remember him saying that he first learned that Peabody Coal was strip mining coal and wreaking havoc on Hopi and Navajo lands in the southwest—and went on to see the havoc that the strip mining and coal fire emissions were wreaking on everyone in the Southwest.
But back to the Seneca. The NPR interview sent me to Alvin’s December 1968 piece in American Heritage Magazine, “Cornplanter Can You Swim,” republished in Now That the Buffalo’s Gone in 1982. After two decades of Indian opposition, the Kinzua Dam had been built in 1965. Villages had been condemned, houses had been burned, and the remains of 300 Seneca Indians, including Chief Cornplanter—Alvin had a great talent with titles—had been moved by the Army Corps of Engineers to higher ground so that thousands of acres of Indian Lands could be inundated by the Alleghany Reservoir. The Corps was also running over, or abrogating, the oldest active treaty agreed to by the United States of America, one signed by Cornplanter and 58 other Seneca sachems and chiefs in 1794!
Fast forward to 2011, and a new Seneca Chief with a Harvard law degree, to a Seneca nation made wealthy by three casinos and a thriving tobacco business, and then to 2015, when a 50 year lease on the Kinzua Dam expires (the dam provides power to Pittsburgh!). Chief—or President—Porter thinks the Senecas should run the dam, and he and his tribe are marshalling their legal forces to make the case. I don’t know whether Alvin’s early work will be part of the case—but maybe….
And here is the link to the NPR interview. Googling Kinzua Dam and Seneca will get you much more.
p.s. For the Southwest, check “Murder of the Southwest,” Audubon Magazine, July 1971, and “The Hopi Way,” American Heritage Magazine, February 1973.

Josephy, Indians, and the Environment

This is from the transcript of an interview that Jack Loeffler did with Alvin in August 1995, File 3, page 37, 38, 40 in the Josephy Library at Fishtrap archives.

Several times in the interview Alvin refers to subjects that he will or will not address in his memoir (A Walk Toward Oregon, published in 2000). Here he describes his conversion from being a “pro-development guy,” who wanted to see the West–the “other half of the country”– developed as the East had been, to seeing the country in an ecologically sounder and more sustainable way. You have to read A Walk Toward Oregon and know something of his extensive work on Indians to get the whole picture, but here is the shorthand: companies and government agencies were screwing the Indians–and oh, they were screwing a lot of other people too in the name of development and profit. At least some environmentalists were taking a longer view of things, did not have private selfish motives in it. So I will join the fight….

And he did. The first piece one on the Seneca and the Kinzua Dam (“Cornplanter, can you swim?” American Heritage Magazine, 1968), and then on to the Four Corners in the Southwest, and to the Garrison Diversion Project in the Dakotas. Here, in the interview with Loeffler, he is reflecting on it all, on his personal journey in Indian Country and post WW II America, as he begins writing the memoir.

“…this is why I’ve devoted so much of my life, once I began to make the turn to redeem myself so to speak from having been a pro-development guy, writing about it and urging it in the pages of Time magazine and the radio and all the rest, various things began to happen to turn me around to see the light. And they all really had to do with Indians. I began to meet and know Indians and then see how they were being screwed and how the whites were putting their culture higher than that of the Indians and really what they were doing is saying the Indian must go or Indianness must go. We’re not out to kill you anymore. We’re out to kill your Indianness

“I saw Indians being victimized by development projects; large scale things happening. It wasn’t one episode or one incident that changed me. I saw for instance what the army engineers were doing to the Iroquois, the Senecas, in building Kinzua back in western New York state in 1960 and ’61 and breaking the oldest existing treaty in the United States. Historically I knew about that. It was an historic episode. Morally and ethically it was revolting to me what went on, and I went up to do a story on it, to find out everything going on. It was worse than I thought. I was finding real estate people who were conniving against the Indians with the Army Engineers, and the way the BIA was treating the Indians and so forth….

“I got to know Udall and he sent me off to represent him in a number of things. I’m going to go into a lot of this in the book. This is really the theme of my book: how I changed. It didn’t take me too long, because by the time you [Jack Loeffler, who worked with Alvin on Hopi and coal issues in the Southwest] and I met I was pretty much already on the side of those who were trying to protect the environment. Why? Because there was justice there and decency. You weren’t rooking people. The companies were rooking people. I’ll never forget going down to New Oraibi, sitting in Banyacya’s home with that Peabody Coal Company vice president that I yanked along. Remember he had his plane and flew me over there to Black Mesa? And then we went to Tom’s house and met a bunch of Hopis. There was (sic) a couple of blind old men and there was a young—Carlotta Shattuck, I think her name was—crying and so forth. It shook up this guy from St. Louis, vice president for public relations or something.

“When we left and drove back to where his plane was, he said to me, and this is in the lead of my story, ‘We have one hell of a community relations job to do here.’ That was the way he viewed it, you see, as a corporate thing. In other words, really we’ve got to fool the people. We’ve got to find a way to get them on our side here and we can’t do it honestly. We’ve got to find the devices because we’ve got to have that coal mine whether they want it or not.”

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