American Indians: The Real American Revolution

...Many of these projects depend entirely on the prospect of buying Indian water rights for a questionable bowl of multiple-use pottage...

...the Association on American Indian Affairs, for one, is budgeting a six-figure expenditure for an advertising campaign intended to spread the full story before the public...

...Newly evolving forms of tribal government, usually including closed-membership corporations or reasonable facsimiles thereof, may bear resemblances now and then to white corporations—the same investment counselors and tax counselors may be hired by both—but in essence they are novel structures because they are built on foundations that are different, alien, foundations shaped by the tradition of communal ownership...

...It is very much alive—miraculously so, perhaps, but nevertheless so —even in the United States, where only about one per cent of the full-blooded Indians of the hemisphere live...

...Alaskan oil is the headline loot of the moment, and battle lines are being drawn to determine what will be either the biggest windfall or the biggest steal in the history of our generously looted native peoples...

...It is not only alive, it is, here and there, potentially strong and even potentially rich...

...The bitterness that has come into being between black and white is not generally echoed between red and white—at least not yet...

...Public users of the Blue Lake special-permit area, which takes in most of the 48,000 acres involved in the Taos demand, are not numerous—an average of forty non-Indians a year enter this region, by Forest Service records—but "The Indian world does not preach its revolutionary ideology...

...Even so, such grain might have been traded locally for hay, although not by regulation-shackled Indians...

...There are a number of such treasure troves of Indian water, particularly in the West...

...But these occasional successes have barely made a dent in the massive Indian poverty described in the first of these articles...

...The continuing Indian revolution is essential to the health of our own world in more ways than one: not only in providing our democracy with the oxygen of a truly alien presence, but in keeping alive that heartbeat of community so strong in the Indian world, so feeble in our own, so necessary, possibly, to the survival of us all...

...The communal point of view has always been difficult for the private-ownership mentality to grasp...

...We can help in many ways, some easy, some hard...

...The world of Indian communities is a world worth keeping with us...

...The whole spectrum of differences between an Indian community in action and a non-Indian community in action would repay the most serious large-scale study...

...the real business of the Indian revolution may turn out to be the illumination of the dark side of the soul, maybe even our own...

...Her tribal, parents, inhabiting a world of truly different dimensions, uninterested in proper American values, not even interested in seizing power, were, it seemed to me, the real revolutionaries of her family, absorbed in an authentic revolutionary movement: their Indian community...

...In California, showcase for all our newest ills, Santa Barbara Channel may be used for recreation, fishing, commercial shipping, and oil-drilling too...

...Most concrete Indian successes are realized in group terms—tribal cattle herds, or the communal big business of recreation on some reservations, such as the $1.5 million complex being built by the Crows in Montana, at Yellowtail Dam on the Bighorn...

...A particular property right comes in question, the right to delay development of a given resource or even to reject outright any multi-purpose uses offered, a right that may reach as far afield from utilitarianism as esthetics or religion...

...Beyond this, said the blanket-wrapped councilmen, only such multiple-use as their lands might receive at the hands of the Creator...

...The three paramount ones can be summed up: One—Restoration of lands and resources sufficient for present Indian populations...

...The BIA is absolutely essential as a trustee and protector of Indian rights and possessions, and should be strengthened as such...

...Yet the objectives she would fight for with the TWLF— more money, better jobs, even the grand objective of seizing power, were the usual and proper aims of the apple-pie American world...

...group identity easily comes into conflict with individual liberties, and the more "successful," the more powerful the tribal administration, the greater the danger that authoritarianism may take over and run wild...

...Ronnie Lupe, tribal council chairman of the White Mountain Apaches, was pilloried by all non-Indian Arizona in the spring of 1969 for standing firm against a multi-million dollar proposition that did not give the Apaches as much control as they wanted...

...The Indian world has by no means been shattered beyond repair, notwithstanding Sunday supplement obituaries...

...Indian control, or even supervisory participation, is also an urgent need in reservation development, including any industrial development...

...These sacred Blue Lake lands were included in a national forest preserve in 1906 under the erroneous assumption that they were public lands...

...But even without proselyting, the long-run redskin revolution may well have changed the world, already, more than might be supposed, by the mere example of the Indian presence, with its seeming classlessness and freedom from toil and tyranny...

...Multi-purpose use is as sacred to the U.S...

...If not, what then can citizens of good will and concern do to help...

...Today's hippies, now a world-wide fifth column, profess in words and costume their vision of the revolutionary Indian community...

...The only real opposition to multiple-use as it is presently practiced lies in a notion dear to conservationists and wild-eyed old socialists—total planning, planning that deals with the total environment, with all resources, for the total benefit of the total world, not just on a piecemeal utilitarian basis...

...There are forces of some strength gathering to fight for this different world—forces concerned over growing populations, growing pollution, growing greed, growing strife...

...Blue Lake, a perfect-circle mountain lake where the Rio Pueblo has its source, is the most holy shrine of all...

...It is usually so indrawn as to seem occult and secretive...

...The so-called Indian Civil Rights amendment, tacked onto the 1968 Civil Rights Bill, is already back for repairs embodying recommendations a number of Indian witnesses had urged during six years of committee hearings...

...This is not an unheard-of occurrence in that desert country, and the average cattleman obtains emergency funds for buying hay and rides it through—but emergency funds for Indians have to be untangled from red tape...

...It is the place that is sacred, not its value...

...The Crows dropped nearly half a million of their own money in their first venture, an electric-toothbrush factory— located within cannon shot of the Custer battlefield—but have since been doing all right...

...But the Indians want no outsiders at all multiple-using in any way their Blue Lake country...

...One can then easily enough make known his support for public measures helpful to Indian communities, honestly meant to be helpful in relieving the all but unendurable privation the quiet revolutionaries there have endured generation after generation...

...It is often hard to ascertain the actual intent of public measures relating to Indian affairs...

...all life in its area, including the life of the pueblo and its people, is interlocked in a religious unity that must not be disturbed, and this unity must be observed and preserved by regular ceremonies in the Blue Lake forests that have been followed since—-say the Taosenos—the beginning of time...

...In such freewheeling operations, the top-dollar profit usually grows the biggest muscles...

...Each resource is milked for whatever it may provide...

...The one point on which all Indians and experts are agreed is that Indians must have more voice in their own affairs—especially in handling their own money...

...When it comes to legislation on Indian matters, Indian opinion is politely asked and regularly ignored...

...Forest Service and, for that matter, the United States itself...

...The difference could run into billions—even the Government's minimum first offer runs to half a billion or so...

...The issue, in its simplest terms, is whether the Eskimos, Indians, and Aleuts of Alaska will enjoy royalties even as would you and I if we were the owners of their lands, or whether they will be squeezed off with less than a fair price...

...they can be vociferous...

...This, as with the substance of each of these three articles, deals with ideas that might be expressed as brief definite proposals...

...The people of an Indian community generally will not sell out for individual opportunities no matter how alluring, will undergo any privations to remain part of their living community...

...But is communication already choked off between the .two worlds, red and white...

...But the Taos people want the land, not money...

...This is a high-spirited figure...

...One procedure resulted in an official request from the Department of the Interior to the Department of Agriculture to declare the tribe eligible for the Federal free feed grain program—to the bitter amusement of all cow-country people, who knew range cattle would not eat grain to begin with, and cows weakened by starvation could not handle rich grain even if they would eat it...

...The Indian world does not preach its revolutionary ideology...

...It is necessary to repeat—again—that a solution is not the abolition of the BIA, which would mean termination...

...We are solemnly obligated, by treaties sworn on the heads of our fathers, to sustain it in our midst, but in all likelihood the obligation is of less import than the long-time yield we may be returned...

...Or spectacularly in land: The financial renaissance within no more than ten years of the Cheyenne River Sioux in South Dakota (they now operate, among other things, a cattle business, sales pavilion, supermarket, and their own telephone company serving Indians and non-Indians in two counties) "The Indian world won't preach but it loves conversation...

...In some areas a certain cachet has always attached to being an Indian, and too many non-red Americans still listen with romantic longing to the distant Indian drum and "yearn with tenderness for its days calm and innocent," as Rousseau wrote two hundred years ago...

...Land-consolidation operations financed by the Indians themselves cannot possibly fill the required bill...

...The Forest Service, in line with its basic multiple-use approach, is entirely amenable to the Taos people Using the land for religious purposes, among other multi-purposes...

...Meanwhile, officials conferred on emergency measures...

...They want their mountain church returned wholly and exclusively to them, and have been saying so with Pueblo patience and stubbornness for more than half a century...

...Pasadena's tourist business, worth millions, died in refinery smog, worth more millions...

...Hardest of all acts of assistance is one that is a mere act of thought, or maybe spirit: simply realizing that the Indian community is genuinely alien, and accepting it as such...

...As a consequence they are tempting many a reflective eye...

...The tribe had coming, however, a check for some three million dollars from copper-mining interests in connection with the opening of a $100 million copper mine on the reservation...

...Colonialism dies hard—there is still a feeling in the business world that the lion's share of Indian resources, whether human, vegetable, or mineral, should go to the white raj...

...He told me that he and the council had decided they should not take any deal in which the tribe did not have eighty per cent ownership...

...The Navajos are a well known example of hardnosed sue* cess and home-owned to boot—their portfolio contains quite a list of diversified ownerships, including, as a sort of ultimate in something, the Navajo Tribe's own credit card...

...Other Indian riches are in strategic lands, other subsurface rights, and, especially, water rights...

...Forest Service, for example, as Smokey the Bear—"Your National Forest, Land of Many Uses...

...It would for the most part recoil in embarrassment from anything like the New Left's aggressive self-righteousness...

...Nothing less will work...

...The nation simply needs to honor its given word in securing to the Indian communities a livable land base...

...20036) or an Indian-related organization such as the Association on American Indian Affairs (475 Riverside Drive, New York, N.Y...

...Forest Service testified before a Congressional committee with equal earnestness that in his belief the Taos people would have reasonable freedom to pursue their religion within the Forest Service framework of multiple-use, including planned commercial timber "harvesting," increased short-term visitor use, and range management for increased livestock use involving the division of the whole area into cross-fenced sub-units...

...Chiefs and headmen" have no authority to dispose of these rights, and even a majority of the tribe or community has no authority to sell the communal property, which would seem to constitute, said the Court, "taking away the property of the minority and disposing of it without their consent...

...In the summer of 1969 a drought ruined grazing and caught the Papagos, in southern Arizona, short of feed for their tribal herd...

...Funds appropriated to the Bureau of Indian Affairs for Indian benefit travel a labyrinth wilder still...

...Supreme Court...

...Although Indian leaders, too, give lip service to the pious aims of more money and better jobs, these are acceptable only on the Indian community's terms...

...The Indian world won't preach but it loves conversation...

...The community superlife, calling for inter-personal harmony rather than inter-personal striving, is in absolute opposition to the orthodox American gods of work-as-a-virtue anal amassing personal wealth as the measure of success...

...Indian water rights are almost the last such rights still undeveloped, in many cases are already quite valuable, and in some cases will become of almost incalculable value...

...Most deals are considerably closer to zero percentage in Indian ownership...

...Indian rights, in such fast company, would be hopelessly overmatched...

...or make known opposition to those measures offering help with booby-traps attached or aiming directly at the destruction of Indian communities, such as drives for "termination...

...But can they hang aloof...

...More than 500 head of Indian cattle had died of starvation before the "paper processing" for emergency help even got started...

...But the associate chief of the U.S...

...In the same way, if the destruction of the Indian world and its children by misfit education is to cease, Indian education must be oriented to the Indian community, as the second article in this series tried to demonstrate...

...The Indian Claims Commission ruled in 1965 that Taos Pueblo was indeed the rightful owner of the Blue Lake country, and the pueblo was offered compensation, as is customary in Indian claims cases...

...The one thing he knows about white men, says James Baldwin, is that they do not want to be black...

...Even after nearly five centuries of acculturation in the profit motive, much of this quaint tendency still survives in the deeps of the Indian spirit...

...None at all, said the council members...

...grew mainly from initial successes with a tribal land-consolidation program...

...Except for their secret religious ceremonies they wanted the entire area left untouched, subject to proper conservation practices that would be carried out by the Department of the Interior as trustee for the lands...

...It is an attitude truly revolutionary for our present world, which rather derives from the Old World kingship pattern—public domain regarded as the property of a ruling government apparatus, a notion prevailing in most modern states, socialist or Communist included...

...Money earned by an Indian community, from leases or whatever, is customarily paid into the U.S...

...and even seamier considerations have appeared here and there, as in current efforts to thrust a giant paper mill upon Isleta Pueblo, New Mexico, so as to sidestep anti-pollution rules set up by the state (Indian land isn't subject to state control...

...It is the alien-ness of this communal identity that elicits much of our harassment (conscious and unconscious) of the Indian world, that puts Indian children at odds with our schools, and that fires the pressures for "termination" of Federal protection of Indian groups with the ultimate objective of forcing the collapse of the Indian communities, compelling their people to disperse and, at last, to become "assimilated" in our own competitive culture...

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

...This community superlife, based on a communal ownership still frequently in evidence, is the unique quality of the Indian world...

...It still is...

...His travels and researches were financed in great measure by the Fund for Investigative Journalism of Washington, D.C...

...In the true communal ownership of Indian tradition, each member of the community has an "absolute and complete" right of actual ownership, as the U.S...

...The regulations, the restrictions, the line-by-line reporting, the delays, the frustrations cultured among conscientious BIA people as well as among the Indian victims, attain without doubt some of the finest triumphs of bureaucracy in our time...

...The Crow Tribe in Montana claims a little matter of fifty-five miles of the Big Horn River...

...The overall loss in cattle before the drought and the nightmare ended in early September was some 2,000 head...

...The Forest Service has even tried to placate the Indians with special-use permits...

...It will take more than dents to remedy reservation poverty—it will take a solid breakthrough in giving back to the Indian communities sufficient land to live on...

...Actual aims, as in any political dealings, are often painstakingly masked, and in any case Indian matters are a foreign land not easy to know...

...Three—Direct Indian control of Indian funds, public as well as tribal...

...Rousseau and Marx and Engels, among others, made specific acknowledgment of its influence...

...At present, the process is still going the wrong direction: Indian lands and resources are still being whittled away...

...In general, where Indian resources and particularly water rights are concerned, some experts feel that the typical American multiple-use concept will be all but confiscatory, if Indian communities consent to sell out for participation in the big-bankroll water-development programs now tooling up...

...Nor have I been able to learn," wrote Columbus of the first New World people he met, "whether they held personal property, for it seemed to me that whatever one had, they all took shares of...

...This check was due to arrive at any moment—but of course it could not be drawn against in advance...

...On the other hand, the white raj, chronically hostile to the whole idea of group identity, would be not at all displeased to destroy it in the name of civil rights, a splendid new weapon in the assimilation arsenal...

...The radical character of the Indian world is most easily discernible in its sense of community, a community identity originally founded on the custom of communal ownership: ownership of land in common by a related group of people is one of the few traits that might be applied sweeping-ly to nearly all American Indians throughout the hemisphere...

...The Editors A young Indian girl in Berkeley told me that in saying goodby to her old-fashioned parents—her mother in blanket and high moccasins, her father in sober tall black sombrero— she had felt she was leaving them as far behind as on another planet, because she was becoming a "catalyst of rebellion" in the Third World Liberation Front...

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

...The sportsmen and the Forest Service clearly see themselves as defenders of the faith of multiple-use against the heresy of exclusive use desired by "these Indians...

...A new revolutionary conflict could be shaping up here, from the collision of Indian concepts of nature with the multiple-use concept that is so firmly established in all our affairs...

...Can this praiseworthy philosophy be in error...

...The point is that multiple-use is basically catch-as-catch-can utilitarian...

...For the total herd of 12,000 head, some 1,200 bales of low grade hay a day were needed, which, at $3.25 a bale, about twice the normal price, was far beyond anything the Papagos, who are among the poorest Indians in the country, could scrape up out of their own ready cash...

...Has the Indian world already been shattered beyond repair...

...Two—Direct Indian control of Indian schools...

...The Tribal Land Enterprise agency of the Rosebud Sioux in South Dakota buys land at a rate reaching a quarter-million dollars a year, and the land-consolidation program of the Crows has reached a half-million dollars' worth a year...

...Will we, can we, permit this revolutionary world to go on ticking away in our midst...

...what counts is the reality of the tension the Indian influence can still bring to bear against the majority morality...

...Vestiges of it may be seen now and then on the surface: In the spring of 1969 a Wisconsin jury found a city-dwelling Ojibwa Indian not guilty of auto theft for the temporary appropriation of another city-Indian's car, after hearing testimony on the Indian tradition of communal property...

...BIA weaknesses in stance and procedural rules are at least in some part the result of deliberate intent to cripple on the part of hostile Congressional committees, and will be repaired only by a struggle that could last a long time...

...The Indian has a property in the moon, Thoreau said, and he did not mean astronautically...

...especially sacred are the slopes of spruce and fir providing the watershed for the little river, the Rio Pueblo, that furnishes the pueblo's water...

...It is possible that in the United States this great debate could open, within the next few years, over the legal question of Indian water rights...

...The Forest Service, encouraged by various groups of "sportsmen," has been equally tenacious in fighting to hold onto the Blue Lake lands...

...10027) will bring inside information on any current issue...

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

...On September 13 the tribe received, in proper form through the proper channels, the copper check—$3.7 million...

...Treasury and then returned via a maze of red tape, and beribboned with controls, to the Indian community...

...Court of Claims held in an 1893 opinion later sustained by the U.S...

...So what exactly can we do...

...The need, obviously, is for a thorough revision of the ungainly regulations under which the Bureau of Indian Affairs operates...

...But an inquiry to an Indian organization such as the National Congress of American Indians (1346 Connecticut Avenue N.W., Washington, D.C...

...The Shoshones claim another stretch of the same river above them, in Wyoming...

...I think communication is wide open, for anyone who will lend an ear and a voice...

...Tragedies, real and unnecessary tragedies, are a commonplace in the Indian world as a direct result of this situation...

...But there is no reason whatever that Indian communities should not at once receive and control directly all their own funds, and the operational portion of Federal funds appropriated for Indian-related purposes, as Federal grants of whatever kind to towns and cities and counties are normally administered by the recipient community itself...

...At a meeting of the Taos Pueblo Council I asked what concessions they might ever consider in the way of multiple-use for the Blue Lake area...

...but this is not so true as to red and never has been...

...Secretary of the Interior Walter Hickel, with an impressive record of brutally squeezing Eskimos while he was governor of Alaska, is in charge of the Nixon Administration's maneuvers in this caper, which is undoubtedly the major Indian concern of the Administration...

...And so, throughout July and August, the cattle died, bringing far-reaching hardship for those Indian families dependent on stock-raising as their only means of livelihood...

...But the Alaska Federation of Natives is employing heavyweight legal counsel, and the natives have some determined supporters...

...The "correctness" of the vision is immaterial...

...Taos Pueblo, which in current archaeological opinion has been in business at the same location since at least 900-1100 A.D., sits at the foot of mountains containing regions regarded as sacred by the Taos people...

...The little river brings life for all living things within its dominion...

...The 1893 Court remarked that this difficulty was no doubt at the bottom of "many of our troubles with the Indian tribes...

...Indian communities deeply need a strong Federal agency conserving and guarding their interests against other governmental agencies and powerful predators from the "private sector," but that protection surely does not need to extend to a minute interference in the communities' own internal operations...

...But ownership entails risk and maneuverability, which Indian communities, in their mummy-wrappings of Bureau of Indian Affairs red tape, can seldom offer—and when they do, they are often, at least at first, as lambs in a world of wolves...

...The subject is of much importance to the Indian world...

...On the one hand, civil rights represents a constant danger area in tribal life...

...The obvious response is that of course we can and of course we should—we should, in fact, do everything in our power to aid its sur". . . even without proselyting, the long-run redskin revolution may well have changed the world . . ." vival...

...There are huge projects of this sort—the Four Corners Project in the Navajo country is one example, including a planned model city that will cost a billion dollars...

...The much-publicized project of bringing industry to the reservations has made another dent, somewhat offset by the fact that the main pitch to industry has been low capital cost and cheap labor, scarcely conducive to blue-chip deals...

...The Taos Indians of New Mexico argue that it certainly can be, and base their argument on claims of sacredness that considerably antedate Smokey the Bear and the U.S...