Only When I Laugh

CUSTER DIED FOR YOUR SINS by Vine Deloria. 279 pages. Macmillan. $5.95.

Indian history is notoriously full of broken covenants, callous horse soldiers and greedy land-grabbers--all encouraged from Washington. Though Vine Deloria dwells on such things with savage wit in this remarkable book, he is more bitterly concerned with the recent past and the havoc worked among the long-suffering tribes in the past 20 years by less officially baneful agencies--compassionate missionaries, humane anthropologists and liberal bureaucrats. Their doings, says Deloria, justifiably provoked a Sioux leader to tell a congressional hearing that what the Indians really want is "a leave-us-alone law."

Deloria is in a unique position to know. A young, tough and dedicated member of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, he is, at 36, a former executive director of the National Congress of American Indians and an aspirant lawyer. He is also a wittily perceptive writer, as he shows best in a provocative chapter devoted to "Indian Humor."

Far from being wooden, Deloria says, Indians are wildly comic. He invokes two favorite subjects of Indian mirth. One is Custer, who was found wearing "an Arrow shirt," and the other is Columbus. Indians, watching his landing, groaned, "There goes the neighborhood." Deloria cites bumper-sticker slogans: "God is Red" and "We Shall Overrun." There are other contemporary jokes, like the one about a poll which disclosed that while only 15% of the Indians wanted U.S. forces to get out of Viet Nam, 85% wanted U.S. forces to get out of America. The source of Indian humor, Deloria makes clear, is a kind of desperation that makes for grim laughter: "If they bring that War on Poverty to our reservation, they'll know they've been in a fight."

Termination and Tribalism. The book ranges from the origins of scalping to differences between the new black and the old red nationalism. But Deloria really wants to talk about topics that few white Americans know anything about --termination and tribalism.

Termination is the proposed final solution to the Indian problem, a Government policy advocated since 1953 with the apparently laudable, liberal and practical notion that federal aid to Indians should be cut off, reservations closed down, and all remaining Indians independently blended into something called "the American economic and cultural mainstream."

A classic example, in Deloria's view, is the Menominee tribe of Wisconsin. With large tax-exempt holdings, communal responsibility, a profitable sawmill and lumbering business, about 3,000 Menominees, before "termination" began in 1961, were nearly selfsupporting. They cost the Federal Government only about $50 per head in aid a year, a level far lower than in many white communities. Then the reservation was made into a regular Wisconsin county, tax exemptions were cut off, and Indians who occupied land were allowed to buy or rent it. In the eight years since termination, many have become dead weights on the state's welfare programs. They have, in fact, cost Wisconsin nearly $2 million.

The fact that the Menominee fiasco was brought about with the approval of liberal, high-minded and progressive men, among them Senator Frank Church of Idaho, is indicative of a historic conflict between the highest white American ideals and the requirements for Indian cultural survival. For nearly a century, the American dream has been a composite society in which arriving immigrants, eager to be assimilated, dropped their old folkways in favor of the means provided by their adopted countrymen. Until just lately, American rhetoric glorified the melting pot--and assumed that it was working. Then blacks, who could not really be assimilated because of their color, and some whites who gave thought to the strength and vitality lost with the old ways, began to complain. Indians, Deloria says, have always objected. For more than 100 years they have been desperately trying to practice red nationalism in a white land. In Deloria's opinion, the termination policy, which implies integration of Indians, is a loser's game. It has not worked and it will not work. It creates hardship among Indians, and it does not, in the long run, save money. Indians do not want to be assimilated. They want to be themselves.

Jobs and Education. The enduring quality of the Indian, Deloria says, lies in the tribe. Tribes behave in many different ways. Yet "they stubbornly hold on to what they feel is important to them and discard what they feel is irrelevant to their current needs." Deloria has as little patience, however, with those anthropologists who feel that Indians should ignore the white world and immerse themselves in folk customs as he has with tribal chieftains ("Uncle Tomahawks," he calls them) who will do anything to butter up the whites. What he clearly hopes for is a sensible use of both worlds. Indians should keep their reservations as a source of renewal and spiritual strength but exploit opportunities offered by the white world, both in jobs and education, to make themselves and their dependents selfsupporting.

White cultural history may at last be moving in favor of the Indians. The new emphasis on the value of primitive societies, the growing U.S. concern over maintaining the ecological balance of the continent, the agitation of black nationalists for a separate but equal black culture in white America are all significant to Deloria. In some ways, too, uptight white institutions seem to be copying the Indian. With hardly any tongue in cheek, Deloria devotes a number of pages to a new form of white tribalism. What strikes his eye particularly is the clannishness and the need for reassurance implicit in the intertwined loyalties and duties that buttress giant U.S. corporations. But whether such things are a sign of healthy atavism or an invitation to Orwellian nightmare it would take a medicine man to decide.

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