The Angry American Indian: Starting Down the Protest Trail
MOST Americans know the first Americans only by cliche. There is the 19th century image, caught in bronze and in lithograph, of the defeated warrior, head drooping forward so that his feathers nearly mingle with his pony's mane. The bow of his shoulders and the slump of his body evoke his loss of pride, of green and fertile lands, of earth's most favored continent. Then there is a recent image, often seen through air-conditioned automobile windows. Grinning shyly, the fat squaw hawks her woven baskets along the reservation highway, the dusty landscape littered with rusting cars, crumbling wickiups and bony cattle. In the bleak villages, the only signs of cheer are romping, round-faced children and the invariably dirty, crowded bar, noisy with the shouts and laughter of drunkenness.
Like most stereotypes, these caricatures possess a certain core of validity. They also help white America contain and numb the reality of past guilt and present injustice. Most important of all, they are less and less significant. After more than a century of patience and passivity, the nation's most neglected and isolated minority is astir, seeking the means and the muscle for protest and redress. Sometimes highly educated, sometimes speaking with an articulateness forged of desperation, always angry, the new American Indian is fed up with the destitution and publicly sanctioned abuse of his long-divided people. He is raising his voice and he intends to be heard. Listen:
"The next time whites try to illegally clear our land, perhaps we should get out and shoot the people in the bulldozers," contends Michael Benson, a 19-year-old Navajo and a freshman at Wesleyan University.
"It's time that Indians got off their goddam asses and stopped letting white people lead them around by their noses," says Lehman Brightman, a South Dakota Sioux now working on a Ph.D. at Berkeley. "Even the name Indian is not ours. It was given to us by some dumb honky who got lost and thought he'd landed in India."
"We weren't meant to be tourist attractions for the master race," scoffs Gerald Wilkinson, 30, a Cherokee who holds multiple degrees after attending four universities. "We don't use the language of the New Left, but that doesn't mean we're not militant."
"Some day you're going to feel like Custer, baby," shouted one unidentified Indian at Donald Dwyer, a former Minneapolis police chief recently invited to discuss city problems with a group of Minneapolis Indians.
Symbolic Protest
That kind of rhetoric is surprising, coming from people long accustomed to equating silence with dignity. But in acts as well as speech, the newly aroused Indian is no longer content to play the obsequious Tonto to the white man's Lone Ranger. A belligerent band of 100 Indians still occupies the abandoned federal prison at Alcatraz, which the Indians propose to use as a cultural center and are willing to buy--for "$24 in glass beads and red cloth." Says one of the invaders: "Alcatraz is still better than most reservations." Angered at the whites who litter their beaches with beer cans and broken bottles, Indians in the state of Washington set up road blocks and closed 50 miles of seashore. A group of 50 Passamaquoddy Indians in Maine charged motorists fees to pass through their land on a busy highway last July. Four Indians at Dartmouth College, which was founded partly "for civilizing and christianizing Children of Pagans," protested the Indian dress of the college mascot, and officials banished it from football games.
Going beyond such symbolic acts, Indians in Washington have deliberately violated fishing regulations that they consider a breach of their rights, and have gone to jail as a result. One of their leaders, Janet McCloud, a fiery Tulalip, contends that restrictions on catching salmon have reduced the Indian to "savages with no more rights than a bear." More softly, she concedes: "I don't like being a clown or a militant, but sometimes you have to break this conspiracy of silence." Another angry woman, Kahn Tineta Horn, effectively uses a trim figure in a tight buckskin dress to gain television attention for protest demonstrations. But sex is not her only weapon; she has been arrested for carrying a knife and for interfering with police.
Harassment by police is the target of a sophisticated Indian uprising in Minneapolis, which has one of the few Indian ghettos in any city. There Clyde Bellecourt, 33, a tough Chippewa who has spent 14 years behind bars, has organized an "Indian Patrol." Dressed in red jackets, its members use short-wave radios to follow police activity, then show up to observe the cops silently whenever an Indian gets into trouble. After the patrol was formed, there were no arrests of Indians for 22 straight weekends. Ironically, it was during a prison term for burglary that Bellecourt decided he could help other Indians. "I read a lot of books," he says, "and I started finding out that I wasn't a savage, that I wasn't dirty--and that I was smart." For his work, he is paid a salary by the Urban Coalition.
The new Indian activism is gradually beating its way into the nation's consciousness--and into its conscience. In ways both salutary and shabby, Indians are becoming fashionable. As The New Yorker's Calvin Trillin recently observed: "It is almost possible to hear the drums in the East Sixties."
The Indian is spicing his protest with a grim kind of humor. His slogans proclaim: KEMO SABE MEANS HONKY, RED POWER!, and CUSTER HAD IT COMING. More stingingly, Indian Folk Singer Buffy Sainte-Marie, a Cree with a degree in education and Oriental philosophy, confronts white audiences with pointed lyrics:
When a war between nations is lost The loser, we know, pays the cost; But even when Germany fell to your hands You left them their pride and you left them their land.
The national abuse of the Indian reached Broadway last year as the subject of serious drama. Arthur Kopit's Indians played only twelve weeks; some critics considered it noisy, disorganized theater; some audiences seemed to find the penitential message discomfiting. A pro-Indian movie, Little Big Man, starring Dustin Hoffman, has been filmed on Montana's Crow reservation. It portrays George Custer as a villain leading troops bent on genocide. Three books personalizing Indian alienation have won critical acclaim. A novel, House Made of Dawn, by N. Scott Momaday, a Kiowa who teaches English at Berkeley, won a Pulitzer prize last year. Custer Died for Your Sins, by Vine Deloria, a Standing Rock Sioux, wryly details the Indians' own infighting and their frustrations in dealing with white society. Our Brother's Keeper: The Indian in White America angrily indicts whites for keeping the Indian a stranger in his homeland--"America's prisoner of war."
On the fad level, a budding renaissance of Indian cultural accouterments has inspired pot-smoking teen-agers and high-fashion socialites to don beaded necklaces, fringed jackets, Indian belts, bikinis and feathers. Most Indians scoff at the affectation and claim that much of the clothing is foreign made.
The Handicap of Dignity
Why has it taken the Indian so long to rouse himself to turn his ire toward action? Many a white bureaucrat, ruling a reservation like a colonial army officer, has assumed that Indian acquiescence stemmed from either respect or servility. Rarely has it been either. The Indian nation was physically shattered and spiritually demoralized by the U.S. Cavalry, which systematically destroyed its leaders and the best of its manhood in the late 19th century campaigns that whites euphemistically call the pacification of the West. Long before the white man's arrival, Indian tribes had, of course, waged limited war upon one another over hunting rights, and raids for revenge were common.
Yet on a personal level, Indian culture shuns confrontation. Even the meeting of eyes and the firm handshake were long avoided. Discussions of personal problems are painful. Indians have been known to sit in Government offices for hours before deciding to air a grievance, however just. "My mother won't even get rid of a salesman," says the Navajos' Michael Benson.
For too long, Indian dissent also has been stifled by their forced dependency upon whites for land and livelihood. This has made many of them regard white authority as an almost magical thing. One veteran scholar of Arizona's Hopis, E. D. Newcomer, notes that today's young Hopis even "feel that the god of the whites must be better than their own gods, because the whites have new clothes and shiny cars."
Handicapped by their special definition of dignity and fractionalized by their allegiances to about 300 tribes, the 652,000 Indians in the U.S. have never developed a unity that would sustain massive protest.* "Remember, I'm not Indian, I'm Osage," declares Charles Lohah, an Oklahoma judge who finds political intrigue both within and among tribes fascinatingly complex. "Often we have to strap our shields to our backs," he says. But Indians have also watched the nation respond to the marches, sit-ins and street tactics of restive blacks. Indians feel little affinity with blacks, and there is friction between the races in some federal antipoverty programs; still, the Indians are beginning to demand their share of the action.
That demand is not only just but long overdue. Ford Foundation President McGeorge Bundy insists flatly that "the American Indians are by any measure save cultural heritage the country's most disadvantaged minority." After studying U.S. ill-treatment of the Indian 26 years ago, Swedish Sociologist Gunnar Myrdal described it as "a morality play of profound importance" to American history. He said that it "challenges the most precious assumptions about what this country stands for--cultural pluralism, freedom of conscience and action, and the pursuit of happiness." The morality play is still a bad show today.
The indicators of Indian suffering are appalling. Their life expectancy is 44 years, compared with 71 for white Americans. The average income for each Indian family living on a reservation--and more than half do--is only $1,500. The average years of schooling is 5.5, well behind that of both the black and the Mexican American. Some officials rate 90% of reservation housing as substandard. Unemployment ranges from a low of 20% on the more affluent reservations to 80% on the poorest. The birth rate of Indians is 2 1/2 times that of whites --and a majority of Indians are under 20 years old. The average family has to carry water for its daily needs at least a mile. It is usually done afoot.
Indians, of course, are not statistics, and TIME Correspondent James Willwerth discovered that individual reality for Indians often consists of human deprivation in a setting of uplifting natural beauty. Visiting Arizona's White Mountain Apache reservation, he reported: "The land is like a painting --hills covered with ponderosa pine, snow-capped mountains in the distance, sprawling valleys filled with thick forests and rushing streams. In the midst of all this, there's a one-room shack with a corrugated metal roof that shows daylight from every angle. This is Judy's house. Judy is in her mid-20s, stocky but not fat, and rather pretty. But she drinks a lot, gets into fights when she does, and often ends up in jail.
"Her lovers are legion. The result of one liaison toddles toward me through broken glass and excrement. He's less than two years old. He lived with Judy's sister until recently, but Judy took him back to get some welfare money. Now they are living in this one-room place. 'It's got no windows,' she says. 'But that's nothing. I've never lived in a house with windows.' "
The grim individual vignettes are multiplied among entire tribes. In northern Arizona, twelve small villages of the deeply religious Hopis fight their uncertain struggle to avoid extinction. Reversing years of decline, the Hopis now number 6,000. Isolated for centuries, even their own villages still have no political links with one another. They live on three massive sandstone mesas in the Painted Desert, where pasture land is scarce and only their skillful dry-farming of corn provides a meager diet.
The sole tribal commerce of the Hopis is a trailer court and a few arts-and-crafts shops. Yet the hope of the Hopis lies in their determination to improve their condition. They teach their children to value schooling so highly that the average daily attendance in their elementary schools is a surprising 90% --a rarity among Indians. A score of older youngsters take a bus each day and make a 96-mile round trip to attend high school. Each day 50 adult Hopis get up at 5 a.m. to board a yellow bus and ride 65 miles to their jobs at a BVD underwear plant. Things may get better. Coal has been found on Hopi land, and a strip mine is scheduled to open this year. Ironically, the Hopi devotion to education is diluting what they value most: their own special kind of polytheistic belief that each living thing possesses a human spirit. Now, when elders hold their annual dance with rattlesnakes, many Hopi children laugh.
Agony and Anomie
To live in squalor while surrounded by beauty, to desire a better material life while clinging to tradition is, for American Indians, to know agony and anomie. Their alienation is aggravated by the fact that Indian culture is vastly different from that of whites in terms of technology, productivity and intellectual interests. From the viewpoint of what makes a modern civilization work, Indian culture appears hopelessly irrelevant. To some extent, the collision of Western and Indian cultures warped the conquerors' attitudes. When the Senecas sought assurances from President Thomas Jefferson in 1802 that their rights would be protected, no attempt was made to bridge the cultural gap. They received a patronizing note from a secretary that said: "Brothers, your father, the President, will at all times be your friend and he will protect you and all his red children from bad people." Only last fall Ted Rushton of New Mexico's Gallup Independent wrote haughtily of "the inevitable clash of a superior culture with a vastly inferior culture."
The Indian child who attends school with whites must brace himself for taunts: when it rains, he is told, "You must have done your dance." If he has a girl friend, he is asked: "How's your squaw?" Or it may be "Hey, Tonto, where's your horse?" and "What number is your teepee?" "Indian kids are shy, and can't take this," explains Gary Fife, 19, an Oklahoma Cherokee-Creek student at Northeastern State College.
Prejudice is as painful a fact to Indians as it is to blacks. Indians suffer just as harshly from biased history books. One text observes that "it is probably true that all the American Indian tribes in the course of their wandering lived for some generations on the frozen wastes of Alaska. This experience deadened their minds and killed their imagination and initiative." A white teacher in a Chippewa reservation school recently asked Indian children to write essays on "Why we are all happy the Pilgrims landed." Western movies and television, of course, still portray the Indian as the savage marauder. "How are you going to expect the Indian to feel a part of America when every television program shows him to be a brute or a stupid animal?" asks Ray Fadden, owner of a Mohawk museum in northern New York. On an Apache reservation, even an Indian girl was caught up in the TV drama. As an Indian actor crept up on an unsuspecting cowboy, the girl involuntarily shouted at the cowboy: "Get him! Get him!"
Indians smolder when the white operators of trading posts sell their Indian-crafted goods to tourists at 400% markups. They resent the white sportsmen who gun down caribou from airplanes, while their own hunting for lifesaving game is restricted by white laws. They become furious at the white shopkeepers' use of Indian religious symbols and bad portraits of Indian chiefs. Don Wilkerson, the Cherokee-Creek director of the Phoenix Indian Center, claims that a bar in Scottsdale, Ariz., has a huge picture of a great Indian chief on its roof as an advertising gimmick. "The Jewish people would not permit such treatment of one of their revered leaders," he says. "Nor would society allow Martin Luther King to be so humiliated."
Alcoholism and Suicide
Dispirited by poverty, rejected by a white culture in which they are often unable and unwilling to compete, many Indians choose death or drink. The suicide rate among Indian teen-agers is three times the national average; on some reservations it is ten times as high. Shattered by her parents' broken marriage, an 18-year-old Blackfoot girl not long ago killed herself on her Montana reservation with an overdose of tranquilizers, though she was an honor student. Accused of drinking during school hours, a 16-year-old youth on Idaho's Fort Hall Reservation hanged himself in the county jail. Just two days before, he had talked about conditions on the reservation with Senator Robert F. Kennedy.
Alcohol has long been a means of escape from boredom and pressures for Indians. On one Midwest reservation containing 4,600 adults, 44% of all the men and 21% of the women were arrested at least once for drunkenness in a span of three years. Many reservations have opened bars and liquor stores to keep Indians from killing themselves in auto accidents en route home from binges in the city. A much-repeated explanation quotes Bill Pensoneau, president of the National Indian Youth Council, as telling a new commissioner of Indian Affairs: "We drown ourselves in wine and smother ourselves in glue--because the only time we are free is when we're drunk."
The Paternalistic BIA
Sober or drunk, most Indians cite the Bureau of Indian Affairs when they lament their troubles. A unit of the Interior Department, it is supposed to help all native Americans under federal jurisdiction to achieve a better life, mainly by offering education and medical care and protecting their land, water and other treaty rights. More often, it suffocates Indians with its all-encompassing paternalistic authority. An Indian must have BIA permission to sell his land; he is taught by BIA teachers, and if he cannot support his children they may be taken from his home by the BIA and placed in boarding schools or with white foster parents. Most BIA employees are white.
The first Indian head of the BIA in this century was Robert Bennett, ap pointed by President Johnson in 1966 and admired by most moderate Indian leaders. An Oneida from Wisconsin and a career BIA man, Bennett resigned in dismay last July, charging that "the new Administration has completely ignored the Indians." His successor is Louis Bruce, part Mohawk and part Oglala Sioux, who seems just as frustrated as his people in dealing with the Great White Father. "I keep hearing terrible and sad things that are happening that I didn't know about." One trouble with the bureau, claims one of its most effective field men, is that it is overstaffed at top levels (there is one BIA employee for every 18 reservation Indians), and it takes three years to get new funds to pave a road. "We have created a monster," he says.
Indians have seen countless treaties broken, their lands diminished from 138 million acres in 1887 to 55 million acres today, their water diverted. They are convinced that the Government is determined eventually to dismiss the whole problem by terminating all reservations. Long a favorite white liberal policy, based on the assumption that all minorities will thrive by being assimilated into the mystical American melting pot, termination of the reservations is now heatedly rejected by nearly all Indian leaders. These Indians now want first to conserve all that is best of their own heritage, summed up in the slogan INTEGRITY, NOT INTEGRATION. They are thus moving in tandem with black groups that have rejected integration in favor of black power. Theoretically, at least, Indians have several advantages over the blacks in moving toward their goals. They have available a whole federal bureaucracy that professes to want the same end. While they lack national unity, their tribal traditions give them a sense of self-identity. And above all, they have their own lands.*
To Keep the Land
The fight to preserve those lands and the water required to make their acreage livable is a constant one for U.S. Indians. The Senecas are still bitter about the 10,000 acres taken in 1964 by the Army Corps of Engineers for the Kinzua Dam. The Senecas were paid $3,000,000, but to them land is no mere matter of money--it is a spiritual as well as a sustaining resource. The Tuscaroras of New York lost 553 acres to a reservoir in the late 1950s. They were paid $850,000, only to learn that nearby Niagara University got $5,000,000 for just 200 acres.
Currently, Indians in New Mexico, Montana and California are locked in battles with various Government agencies for control of land and water. The Paiutes of western Nevada have watched their emerald-green Pyramid Lake, ancient source of their cutthroat trout, shrink to one-third its former size by various water-diversion projects. The lake's ecological balance has been destroyed, and most of the fish have died.
The most dramatic controversy over native lands is one now raging over the ownership of 90% of the acreage of Alaska. Aided by some of the nation's best lawyers, including former Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg and former Attorney General Ramsey Clark, 55,000 Indians, Eskimos and Aleuts contend that they hold title to the Alaskan land because the U.S. did not purchase it from Russia in 1867; it bought only the right to tax and govern the territory. When Alaska became a state in 1959, the state began to assert claim to the area. It has seized 450,000 acres for itself. The natives are willing to give up all except 40 million acres --10% of the state--at a price of $500 million and a 2% royalty on revenues from the surrendered lands. If they do not get satisfaction this time, the native groups calculate that they have sufficient legal options to tie up the land in court contests for years.
Today activist Indians throughout the U.S. are determined to push all such holding operations to the limit of their resources, since they have seen the devastating impact of closed-down reservations. The Menominees of Wisconsin had good schools and community services, plus a sawmill owned by the tribe, when they were "terminated" in 1961. Since then, many Menominees have had to sell their lands to pay taxes in their new ownership status. The Indian hospital shut down and sawmill profits dwindled. As a result, the state paid out more than six times as much money in welfare to the Menominees as before--and the Menominees lost their identity. "The Menominee tribe is dead," reports Professor Gary Orfield in a study for the University of Chicago, "but for no good reason." Also terminated in 1961, Oregon's Klamath tribe suffered soaring rates in suicides, crime and drunkenness.
There are, however, encouraging signs of progress on some reservations. The Lummi tribe of Washington State, a sea-oriented people along Puget Sound, are using federal funds and considerable hard labor to develop the most advanced aquafarm in the U.S. They control the spawning and cultivating of oysters, the breeding of hybrid steelhead-rainbow trout and the harvesting of algae, used in making toothpaste, ice cream and pudding. It may net $1,000 an acre for the Indians, compared with at most $40 an acre in land farming.
Elsewhere some 150 commercial and industrial enterprises, among them General Dynamics and Fairchild Camera, have moved onto Indian reservations, enticed by the freedom from real estate taxes accorded reservation enterprises --and by cheap labor. They provide jobs and profits for individual Indians as well as their tribes. Simpson Cox, a white Phoenix lawyer, has spent 22 years with the Gila River Pima-Maricopa Indians, successfully pressing the Government to compensate the tribe fairly for confiscating their lands. He has helped them build industrial parks, a tourist center, a trade school, farms, community centers and an airstrip.
Antipoverty funds are also beginning to benefit Indians, since by any definition no group in the U.S. is more impoverished than Indians. One group utilizing such funds is Oklahoma for Indian Opportunity, founded by LaDonna Harris, the attractive, mixed-blood Comanche wife of Senator Fred Harris, chairman of the Democratic National Committee. Her group fights federal red tape to help reservation Indians, gathers evidence when whites discriminate against them, forms buying clubs to combat high grocery prices, trains young Indians for jobs and leadership. There are sharp contrasts in the efforts to help reservation Indians. Navajos at their tribal headquarters in Window Rock, Ariz., have eagerly taken to instruction in the use of a computer to handle industrial-development projects. In northern Minnesota, Indians had strayed so far from their traditions that white sportsmen had to be employed to teach them the rudiments of canoeing, water safety and fishing.
Life in the City
Indians also now have a few influential voices in the U.S. Congress. One of them belongs to Senator Edward Kennedy, whose subcommittee on Indian education recently charged that "our nation's policies and programs for educating American Indians are a national tragedy." Another friend is Minnesota Senator Walter Mondale. An honorary Chippewa chief, Mondale criticizes Indian schools as containing the elements of disaster. "The first thing an Indian learns is that he is a loser."
The Indians who move off the land and into big cities are indeed apt to become losers. More than 200,000 Indians have done so. They do not congregate as closely as blacks, partly because they meet less resistance in moving into low-income white neighborhoods. There are nearly 60,000 in Los Angeles, perhaps 20,000 in the San Francisco Bay area, about 12,000 in Phoenix, 15,000 on Chicago's North Side. Some 12,000 inhabit the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, almost half in shabby apartment houses and creaky Victorian houses near Minneapolis' Franklin Avenue, which cops and Indians alike call "the reservation."
TIME Correspondent Richard Saltonstall talked to many Indians who had tried the urban life. "Nobody mistreated me in Dallas," he was told by Donna Flood, a mixed-blood Ponca. "But I was unhappy there. It was too fast. There was noise, fumes, confusion--the white man's problems. In the city you lose your contact and feeling for the land. You become isolated." Hiner Doublehead, a Cherokee with two children, took his family to Chicago. "God, it was a jungle when we got there," he recalled. "The people lived like foreigners --unfriendly, clannish. It was the closeness and the crammed-in living that got to me. The bars were the only places to get acquainted and to unwind. But the friendships never went far. Nobody would invite you up to his house. I didn't feel like I was human up there."
Even the Indians who manage to make it often get restless and long to return to their reservation families for spiritual renewal. Many do so, abruptly abandoning jobs. It is the lure of the land, most often, that proves irresistible. "They used to tell me that the land is like your mother," explains Tom Cook, a 21-year-old Mohawk. "The trees are your brothers, as are the birds in the air and the fish in the water. They give you life; they give you food; they give you everything. It was so pretty the way my grandmother used to tell it." Cook attends college in New York City and is a full-time steelworker in Manhattan.
Something of Value
Indian grievances are specific, but the goals of redress so far remain diffuse. There are no Indian leaders who, with any confidence of national support from their people, can speak on precisely what should be done. Traditionalists merely tend to look at the mountains that have sheltered their tribes for centuries and at the writings of their ancestral prophets, and they say patiently: "We'll outlast you whites." There are others who seek accommodation of white and Indian cultures. Says Ronnie Lupe, tribal chairman of the White Mountain Apaches: "We know what the white man offers us. There are certain comforts in your culture--good homes, good cars, good jobs--but there is a certain way to get these and yet retain our identity, and we have yet to find it."
But even that kind of reasonableness is dismissed by the new Indian militants as the talk of "Uncle Tom-Toms" or "Uncle Tomahawks" and "Stand-Around-the-Fort Indians." What these leaders seem to want most is for the Federal Government, which now spends only $500 million a year on aid to Indians, to increase its spending for Indian schools, roads, housing and medical care--and to stop smothering Indians with restrictive regulations and unwanted advice on how to run their affairs. They want their water and land rights protected and expanded, not contracted through treaty violations. They want help in attracting job-providing industries to their reservations, but they want to determine what kinds and how they will be operated. They want federal benevolence, in short, as compensation for the loss of more than half a continent, but they want to be free to go their own way--even though they are not yet certain of their direction.
The Indians' longing to live harmoniously with nature touches recesses of nostalgia in the minds of many Americans. Indeed, at a time when the drive to protect and restore the nation's physical environment is the most popular cause of the day, whites' guilt over their spoilage of air, land and water engenders a new admiration for those who have fought for so long to protect their own plains, lakes and hunting grounds. It would be wrong to romanticize Indian culture, but there is something to be valued, or at least envied, in a society that respects the wisdom of elders, enjoys the closeness of kinship, prefers tranquillity to competition, and sees little merit in 9-to-5 punctuality at a desk.
Although they now live in what one Indian calls "a schizoid world of fractured loyalties," all Indian leaders agree that the best of their ancient heritage is a priceless resource. To many white Americans, who are constantly told these days how much they have to feel guilty about, the demands of yet one more minority may seem almost more than the conscience can bear. Yet Indians can hardly be expected to keep their peace just because they have only lately joined the queue of those vociferously demanding social justice. If they continue to be rejected, many young Indians will continue to despair and will embrace the sentiments of Phil George, a young Nez Perce, who wrote:
This summer I shall Return to our Longhouse, Hide beneath a feathered hat, And become an Old Man.
The new militants reject such resignation, and are determined that Indians be heard along with all of America's second-class citizens. Their aim is nothing less than to reverse the perspectives of the races. Explains one:
You will forgive me if I tell you that my people were Americans for thousands of years before your people were. The question is not how you can Americanize us but how we can Americanize you. The first thing we want to teach you is that, in the American way of life, each man has respect for his brother's vision. Because each of us respected his brother's dream, we enjoyed freedom here while your people were busy killing and enslaving one another across the water. We have a hard trail ahead of us, but we are not afraid of hard trails.
* At the time of Columbus, the native population of what is now the U.S. was probably between 1,000,000 and 3,000,000. By 1860, that had dropped to about 340,000, and by 1910 to an all-time low of 220,000. No longer vanishing, the Indians are now the nation's fastest-growing minority. * The first reservation opened in 1853, and the system still includes some 284 BIA-supervised enclaves. Indians are free to leave reservations whenever they wish, but those who do not live on them do not benefit from most Indian-aid programs. All Indians were granted full citizenship status in 1924.
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