The American Indians: The Un-Americans

...His travels and reseaches were financed in great measure by the Fund for Investigative Journalism of Washington, D. C. —The Editors One thng American Indians don't ^-^ lack is Indian experts...

...the Kashaya say they haven't had a child finish high school in years...

...Until now the bureaucrats have won, and they fully expect to keep on winning...

...Related to the central misfit problem are various other handicaps—language, for one...

...For example, on the poverty-stricken Oglala Sioux reservation at Pine Ridge, South Dakota, sixty-four research projects are currently under way with a combined cost in academic salaries alone that would feed all the hungry children on the reservation...

...As little as possible, like all the rest of the lazy bastards everywhere," he said unsmil-ingly...

...Not surprisingly, this misfit educational system long ago lost interest in its apathetic child victims...

...after two years and several stays of execution the governor commuted the sentence to life imprisonment with a recommendation against any consideration of parole...

...In the White Hawk case, an Indian college student from the Rosebud Sioux reservation, who was drunk, shot and killed an elderly white jeweler in the course of attempted robbery, and raped the victim's wife...

...The best known current attempts at bilingual Indian education are the Rough Rock Demonstration School in the Navajo country, and the new Navajo Community College nearby at Many Farms, Arizona...

...Most Indian communities would rather struggle along alive...

...Total Government expenditures in all Indian matters since 1781—including, among other details, the cost of buying the United States from its own...

...Youthful suicides, all but unheard-of among some Indian groups, such as the Pueblos, have reached fantastically high rates elsewhere in the Indian world, as at Fort Hall, Idaho, where child suicides have occurred as early as eight years of age...

...An Indian community can free itself any time of restrictions, of reservation status, of the BIA, merely by termination of its community life...

...His age was thirteen...

...Its meaning in Indian affairs is the termination of "Federal responsibility," the responsibility of the Federal Government to act as trustee for Indian lands, rights, and resources...

...The bulldog survival of some Indian communities through gen"The Indians' role is to listen to the experts...

...few Indian communities are rich and strong enough to survive on their own...

...But the Indian communities don't much care for the pie at all, and this is truly intolerable...

...In connection with this argument figures are often cited purporting to show the high cost in Federal funds and the large number of employes devoted to so few Indians...

...Do black people talk of police harassment...

...Politicians viewing Federal Indian costs with righteous indignation are seldom conscious of this fact...

...The experts talked mostly about education...

...The modern period in Indian statistics is neatly bracketed by the dates of 1891, when three Kiowa schoolboys froze to death trying to get home across blizzard-swept plains after Tuning away from school, and 1967, when two Navajo students died in precisely the same way...

...They listen because they have to, because essential structures of their community life are controlled by the experts and their "programs...

...The judge cleared his docket during a part of that time to go on a hunting trip...

...Generally speaking, whenever a politician, white or red, talks of "freeing" Indians from their "wardship restrictions" or demands "freedom" via the abolition of reservations and the BIA, he is probably plugging, openly or covertly, for termination...

...So, in 1965-66, the Government asked Indians what they thought of taking Indian children away from the Bureau of Indian Affairs and its segregated schools...

...All told, there are probably more experts than Indians...

...The Menominee Nation of Wisconsin, terminated some ten years ago and transformed into Wisconsin's smallest and poorest county, seems already near the end of a losing fight for life: White purchasers are being invited to buy homesites in numbers that will make them a majority in the county...

...Our "best" people think nothing can be finer for their own children than a bilingual education in French, but an Indian child is generally regarded as "disadvantaged" by red and white alike because he speaks Cherokee or Ojibwa or Tsimshian—this, even though it is beginning to be recognized that Indian languages possess their own literatures, often literatures of beauty and sophistication...

...My parents came from Denmark," he said...

...Even though our Indian education is, plainly, misfitted to basic Indian culture, it can still train students in technical and professional skills...

...In the other a well-to-do rancher, son of a former governor of South Dakota, shot and left to die a young Rosebud Sioux, the minister of an Indian church, who had come to protest the rancher's shooting of Indian dogs said to be causing losses in the calf crop on the Berry ranch...

...It will require not only Indian teachers, now rare, but, even rarer, teachers of the same tribal tongue as the pupils, all plus factors of such magnitude for Indian education as to well repay the difficulties involved...

...In 1966, some 10,000 to 16,000 •—statistics differ—Indian children between the ages of eight and sixteen— somewhere about ten per cent of the total U.S...

...White Hawk was sentenced to be electrocuted...

...The U.S...

...A reconstruction of Indian education around the fundamental structures of the Indian world—a world of living together, rather than striving against one another for acquisitions, a world of community—might conceivably offer a vestibule to reconstruction of Indian education even in our mainstream world...

...Fort Lewis College, a state college at Durango, Colorado, is white orthodox in entrance requirements but runs an inter-cultural program well enough that it has more Indian students in its small enrollment than there are in the relatively giant universities of Arizona and New Mexico combined...

...The committee's chief professional staffer, James Gamble, originally appointed on the recommendation of Senator Clinton P. Anderson of New Mexico, has long been, in the words of Ralph Nader, "the chief Congressional worker for termination and assimilation...

...They wanted us children to appreciate America and be Americans...

...few Indian communities are rich and strong enough to survive on their own under state and local jurisdictions armed with tax powers and hostile to the Indian community's way of life...

...I asked a white businessman on the Northern Cheyenne reservation in Montana...

...ers—totals about three billion dollars...

...The late Senator Robert Kennedy's account of the jail-suicide at Fort Hall of a sixteen-year-old boy accused of drinking during school hours was given wide publicity but is by no means an isolated example...

...For many Indians such community disintegration is a fate to be fought off at all cost...

...Worst of all, since the children are danced into this invisible chasm of alienness without any idea that it is there, each child thinks his "failure" must mean there is something wrong with him personally...

...Booze and broken homes, a characteristic dirge of the urban ghetto, is less a constant theme in the Indian world, where a tightly organized community can sometimes withstand incredible poverty pressures—but when such a modality does take over, and children from it then collide with a rigid, ill-natured, alien outside world, the results are often dramatized in the absolute destruction of the young...

...The future of the Indian world may conceivably be even wilder than its past...

...They did not teach us children Danish...

...Karl Menninger of such instances: "Where one commits suicide, scores are in despair...

...Many Americans, in and out of officialdom, have pressed relentlessly for destruction of these, to them, alien Indian communities...

...Prison-like boarding schools were established for easier administrative efficiency, better living conditions for the staff, convenience in using the visual-aid gadgets that to the superficial mind define "quality education...

...Termination is truly a word of ill omen to tribal Indians...

...The model bilingual public school now in action is the Coral Way elementary school in Dade County, Florida, for the use of refugee Cubans...

...But the effects of the "primitive language" misconception will long remain, especially among the ignorant who speak of all Indian languages as "Indian dialects...

...Despairing Indian parents see no way out of a poverty future for their children" except to force them into the schools, and some Indian students do survive to remain tribal people while becoming university trained doctors, lawyers, or Indian chiefs...

...Another obvious move is toward bilingual education...

...some are trapped by the alien gods and find themselves "assimilated...

...Indian community" means a tribal community with a quasi-sov-ereignty of its own and a sense of re-latedness among its people akin to that of a religious community...

...By the time he finishes high school—sixty per cent drop out along the way—he has acquired less than a tenth-grade education...

...When this Federal responsibility is abrogated, the Indian community thus "terminated" is more than likely to fall prey to disintegration...

...We teach exactly the same courses and use exactly the same textbooks as all other Arizona schools," said the superintendent of the handsome new elementary and high school on the Papago reservation in the desert coun"The inherent Indian orientation is toward a sense of community, interpersonal harmony . . ." try of southern Arizona...

...The important news in Indian education is the wholesale transfer of Indian students into public schools...

...The superintendent all but implied that if the Indians didn't like this fine country they should go back where they came from...

...The inherent Indian orientation is toward a sense of community, interpersonal harmony, group endeavor and achievement, rather than isolated endeavor and individual achievement...

...A 1966 Government report much quoted by educators (the Coleman Report) revealed that twelfth-grade Indian students chose for themselves bottom rank in answers to the question, "How bright do you think you are...

...Acceptance of tribal Indians, these communal aliens, perhaps the only genuine aliens left in our world, may face rough times ahead, as paranoia becomes more and more a national characteristic...

...He visited scores of reservations throughout the nation in preparing his series of articles for The Progressive...

...Malnutrition is a deep-lying handicap, as is racial discrimination...

...Anne Smith, Santa Fe anthropologist and author of several works on Indian education in New Mexico...

...Indian students are, as a rule, just not interested in the kind of schools we provide for them...

...At Point Arena, California, where the Ka-shaya Pomo children from the wretched Stewart's Point reservation go to high school, all the Stewart's Point students are driven out sooner or later...

...He had been given no court hearing during his seven weeks in jail...

...the responsibility to protect Indian groups in these rights and possessions—protect them particularly against states, counties, cities, or other local powers that might divest them of their rights and possessions—and to provide certain services such as education and health...

...The intensity of his animosity toward what he considers the privileged position of Indians and the BIA...

...Anti-Indian prejudice, where it exists, is blazingly open...

...Senate subcommittee on Indian education, the "Kennedy Committee" first chaired by Senator Robert Kennedy, later by Senator Edward Kennedy...

...Our school system is naturally built to our own scale of values, "competitive, exploitative, oriented to acquisition, and above all to individual success," in the words of Dr...

...This bewildering problem has divided the experts into two camps...

...Office of Education has reported that one out of four public school teachers would prefer not to teach Indian children...

...The obvious first move toward achieving the goal is simply to let Indians run their own schools, or, in the case of mixed schools, to serve on school boards more proportionally than is now the case...

...The public schools are generally unprepared for Indian students, and, with only occasional exceptions, uninterested in any special preparation...

...Rather more flagrant might be the case of the Sioux boy who hanged himself in the Wilkin County jail at Breckenridge, Minnesota, in December, 1968, after having been held in the jail, according to a newspaper story, "in virtual isolation" for seven weeks...

...or hostile, as he comes to realize they are teaching false values compared to the values learned at home...

...See "Stu~ dent Activists: The Navajo Way," by Stan Steiner in the July, 1969, issue of The Progressive...

...All subjects are taught half the day in Spanish and half the day in English...

...It is not separation from the BIA that Indian communities most want but some control over their destiny under the umbrella of the BIA...

...Clearly, he approaches the big outside world ready for a joyous embrace, and the big outside world gradually infects his spirit with the nightmare sickness of finding one's self out of kilter with a world one expected to love...

...Termination does not raise the question of Indians remaining "primitive" or becoming "modern...

...These children's concentration camps have come in for flaming criticism, much of it from white patriots alleging the Indian schools were slowing down "assimilation" by keeping Indian children fenced off from the melting pot...

...To the Indian child therefore our schools are likely to seem either silly 'Termination is truly a word of ill omen to tribal Indians...

...The national arrest rate for Indians is five times that for blacks —twenty-five times the rate for whites...

...When I was in South Dakota a few months ago the Sioux were exercised— they still are—over the Tom White Hawk and the Baxter Berry murder cases...

...A strong terminationist cell in the U.S...

...It is the community that is brought into question: It is only the tribal community that lives under the constant menace of termination...

...The Indians' job is to listen to the experts...

...Office of Education...

...A number of recent studies have disclosed that the Indian family usually presents to the schools a stable, well-adjusted, willing, quick-learning child, who does splendidly at first, and then, at about the fourth or fifth grade, begins to regress...

...The Government thereupon carried out the vetoed proposal anyway but without saying so, and while education is still big business—two-fifths of the 1968 budget—in the BIA, two-thirds of all Indian pupils have been quietly transferred to public schools, where Federal funds pay for them by the head...

...and concerned that our raids and attacks are chiseling away what lands and resources they still have left, which leaves the still growing Indian populations even poorer...

...Robert Roessel, a white educator with a Navajo wife...

...These, it seemed to me, were the main areas of Indian concern...

...This expense is high indeed, even allowing for the normally high pipe-friction costs of bureaucratic operation...

...Says Dr...

...But these values are directly opposed to the gods of the Indian world...

...Both were started during the last four years by Dr...

...They were concerned, too, that we, the "dominant society," raid and besiege and harass them because they are alien—indeed so alien they won't even leave their poor communities and go look for jobs some place else, as we would do...

...The struggle between those anxious to "break up the tribes" and the Indians who want to live as Indian communities has been going on for a long time, sometimes underground, sometimes in open view...

...Some younger Indians favored this, but most tribal spokesmen protested vehemently, less from love for the BIA schools than from opposition to the rejected goal of assimilation...

...ethnic minorities can be understood as long as all they want is a bigger slice of the American pie...

...The other camp, made up generally of experts concerned with the operation of local school districts, thinks we should keep hacking away at Indian children to carve them to fit into the pattern of our white education...

...For some this was because no schools were available, but for many others, even though few Indian parents these days will admit it, it must be considered a deliberate withholding...

...Nor do they seem aware that when Indian communities are terminated, the Federal expense, although thereafter more or less masked, remains at least as high, or goes even higher, as the state and local governments demand increased Federal aid in supporting the added expense the state and county and municipality have assumed...

...This is not quite enough to keep our brushfire war in Vietnam running for six weeks...

...This is true un-Americanism...

...Such a comparison puts the per capita Government expense for reservation Indians about equal to that for the general population...

...He was caustic about "Indian values" that were supposedly worth "saving...

...Achievement" rates are low...

...urban assimilated Indians are already counted as captured—perhaps prematurely, for it was young urban Indians who engineered the occupation of Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay, and if any national Indian movement ever develops it will probably be nonreservation urban Indians who set it off...

...These various possibilities and hopes are now only foreshadowed...

...The concluding installment will appear in our February issue...

...The Rosebud Sioux tribal council revoked tribal grazing permits held by Berry but was overruled by BIA officials who could find "no justifiable reason" for cancellation...

...What do these Indians do, mostly...

...He was charged with having been involved, along with three older boys, in a car theft...

...While Indian criticism is fired at Indian education in both BIA and public schools, some of the strongest Indian protests against the public-school switch are aimed at another target altogether: Removing education from the Bureau of Indian Affairs might be a step toward dismemberment of the BIA and thus toward "termination...

...states and local jurisdictions are never inclined to forget the legal Federal responsibility for Indians...

...Not surprisingly, beleaguered Indians have picked up a little paranoia, too, and see stealthy termination plots on every hand...

...The quality of being an Indian is not a matter of handicrafts or of grinding corn but of the all-important sense of community, which may well exist more genuinely in overalls or business suits than in feathers and beads...

...When parents practice prejudice, the children's teeth are set on edge...

...But the menace is indeed real, never entirely absent even under the friendliest of climates...

...Senate is in the very heartland of Indian political matters, the subcommittee on Indian Affairs...

...It calls for a White House conference and a Senate Select Committee to see that these basic changes are really made...

...The subcommittee's final report, presented early in November, 1969, offers sixty concrete recommendations designed to bring about "culturally sensitive" programs and bilingual programs and increased Indian control of Indian education...

...The termination argument given widest circulation is that it would be an economy measure—"get the country out of the Indian business," save some money even if it means violating every Indian treaty ever made...

...One aspect of termination, the Indian property of considerable value that might then go up for grabs, is an important aspect in the eyes of would-be terminators, and perhaps in some other respects may be more important to our mainstream world than is generally recognized even by termination-ists (as I propose to show in the concluding article of this series...

...The author of The American Heritage Book of Indians, Mr...

...Whether it then remains a white-dominated county, or is absorbed by other counties, or becomes a National Park as some unhappy and concerned Wisconsinites are urging, the Menominee Indian Nation, simply unable to handle the state and local costs piled on it, seems to be headed for the shadows...

...Berry was acquitted by an all-white jury on a plea of self-defense, although the murdered Indian had been unarmed...

...These responsibilities are based upon treaty promises or other equally legal commitments, in which the Federal Government pledged, in return for cessions of value, to render unto specific Indian groups specific rights and their protection, plus the provision of schools, hospitals, sawmills, teachers, doctors, tools and implements, roads, supplies when needed—-all the services of the modern world, to be supplied and administered by the Federal Government rather than administered under state and local jurisdictions, because of well-founded apprehensions that state and local jurisdictions might not be trustworthy in carrying out such promises...

...Their hope is based mainly on the work of the special U.S...

...Indian school-age population of some 150,000—were out of school altogether...

...Brandon has conducted experimental courses on the original inhabitants of North America at tjie University of Massachusetts...

...Many teachers have commented on the typical Indian child in kindergarten, so outgoing and happy and friendly, who turns into the withdrawn, rather apprehensive child of later grades...

...Most Indians seemed most concerned that Indian communities are poor because they do not have enough land and resources for their growing populations...

...This struggle underlies much of the action in Indian affairs, even where it may not at first glance seem to be an issue...

...Two of the leading specialists in Indian education, Professors Murray and Rosalie Wax, told me at the University of Kansas last summer that this hasty switch to public schools promises to be catastrophic...

...One camp, made up generally of experts with a nationwide point of view, believes we should reconstruct Indian education to fit the Indian world...

...Experts have a touching faith in education, but Indians don't cotton to our white education at all...

...Yet some are left hopelessly deformed...

...This can serve both the welfare of Indian students and the welfare of Indian languages, inextricably bound up together...

...Throughout the 2,371 pages of testimony, the opinion prevails that the present destructive schooling should cease and that education for Indians should be totally redirected to fit the outlook of the Indian world, to "strengthen and develop and ennoble" the Indian social structure rather than oppose it, as the subcommittee testimony quotes expert Bruce Gaarder of the U.S...

...its "goals" are for the benefit of the system, not the students...

...In traveling over the country last summer, interviewing Indians and Indian experts, I found these two groups did not share, at least not equally, the same concerns...

...They were happy to come to this fine country with all its great and wonderful opportunities...

...A few more orthodox schools and colleges have made some progress in such redirection...

...both schools have attracted attention from educators all over the world, particularly for their endeavors to make the Indian community an integral part of the educational process...

...There is involved a clash, a conflict so profound that it takes place in the soul's least conscious depths...

...is almost startling...

...Foreign communities of all sorts, from Amish to Orthodox Jewish, can be tolerated so long as the people in them are properly earnest about toil, thrift, and getting ahead...

...Most, however, reject the education that is so foreign to their real world: The average Indian ends his formal education with just five years of school...

...Their school dropout rates are high...

...There are many parallels between Vietnam and our Indian wars of the past, but cost is not one of them...

...A faint hope has sprung up among deeply concerned Indian experts that the practice of carving an Indian child to fit the white educational system may be overthrown...

...Almost the only people acquainted with Indians who don't claim to be Indian experts are the Indians themselves...

...But termination is aimed at reservation communities only, and turns on one issue only, the issue of alien-ness, pure and simple...

...But it is impressive that after these many years of force-fed misfit education so many Indians are still resisting...

...erations of shot and shell (figurative and literal) that would have annihilated a hundred Prussias is little short of miraculous...

...Classes are usually conducted in English although two-thirds of the children know no English at all when they begin school...

...However, the apparent high per capita ratio of costs and the number of public employes in the Indian business should be compared to a corresponding figure for the general public of total costs of goods and services and total number of public employes in all jurisdictions combined—Federal and state and local—for the nation as a whole...

...For Indian pupils this procedure will require translations into various Indian languages of grade-school textbooks dealing with subjects such as social and natural sciences, history, and mathematics...