Incident at Gresham

...This general diminution of the male role characterizes many Indian communities across the country, and some understanding of its roots in the past is basic to any account of the social dynamics behind the series of Indian takeovers of recent years...

...It is against considerations such as these that any attribution of the Warriors' occupation of the Novitiate to an overweening Indian male chauvinism must be carefully weighed...

...Most of the members of the Committee itself were women, and almost all the full-time jobs in tribal government were staffed by women...

...Soon after the Gresham occupation began, Brother Florian Eberle, president of the Alexian Brothers, commented that if the Warriors had only approached the Alexians in peace, their request for the Novitiate would surely have received favorable consideration, but that after the armed seizure, he did not believe the Alexians would ever agree to give the property to the Indians...

...Repetition is, after all, inherent in the learning process...

...The takeover a Gresham, then, represented an attempt organized by young males to assert themselves in a power bid against the female leadership of the Committee, in effect an effort to impress (or perhaps more accurately, to intimidate) the tribe with their uniquely male credentials for leadership...

...Because of the relative scarcity of European women, many of the early explorers and traders took Indian women as their partners...

...Such behavior is hardly descriptive of chauvinism in the usual sense of the word, nor is it a trait found only among the Menominees...

...While "adolescence" in the customary sense refers to a transitional period in the life of an individual, there usually exists an analogous stage in the "maturation" of a group from subordinate dependence to selfassertive independence...

...And the dissidents' call for a return to the rites and dances of what they called the Menominee Indian Religion was hardly regarded by the majority of voters as an issue of burning relevance at the time of the elections, especially since the community's religious orientation is largely Catholic...

...Many observers have noted quite the opposite of chauvinism in Indian men—strong cultural inhibition against self-assertion, a "drugstore Indian syndrome" involving a tendency to withdraw from social interaction and to remain silently "off to the s i d e , " even while taking keen note of the passing scene...

...The real explanation for the apparently rash resort to arms was that the Warriors did not want the property to be given to them on any terms by anyone, since continuing to accept such a role as supplicants for white charity would imply that they remained "weaklings" in need of assistance...

...This call for a return to tradition, however, was part of a coded appeal by the Advisory Council, the organizational nucleus of what later became the Menominee Warrior Society...

...Often a person affected by a traumatic neurosis displays the symptoms of a "repetition compulsion" characterized by an urge to reexperience the trauma in order to learn to master the intense anxieties aroused by it...

...What was essential was successfully to challenge "the white man's law"—to challenge it in an attempt to salvage a viable, contemporary model of Indian masculinity from the trauma of the past...

...In 1961 Congress had terminated Federal trusteeship of the Menominees in what was then widely hailed as an experiment in Indian self-government which, if successful, would chart the way for Congressional dealings with other Indian tribes across the United States...

...In a December 1974 election to fill three trustee vacancies on the Menominee Common Stock and Voting Trust, Ada Deer decisively defeated two of the dissidents, a stinging defeat for the male challengers...

...The immediate cause of the incident at Gresham appears to have been an attempted power play by one faction in an intra-tribal political struggle...

...As recently as February of this year, about twenty armed Indians, calling themselves the Navajo Warrior Society, occupied the Fairchild Corporation plant at Shiprock, New Mexico, and demanded better working conditions and health care services on their reservation...

...Attempts to account for the Indian motivations behind these events usually cite the widespread poverty on reservations—lack of schools and hospitals, unemployment, malnutrition—and there is no question but that such factors play a central part in legitimizing the occupations in the eyes of the Indian communities involved...

...Thus deprived of traditional means of subsistence and virtually confined to their reservations, these once proud citizens of the forests and plains found themselves reduced within several convulsive generations to the sorry status of a subject and dependent people...

...Early in 1973 the hamlet of Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Reservation of South Dakota was occupied for seventy-one days by the American Indian Movement—an episode that resulted in two deaths and much lingering hostility...

...And within the context of the history of their people, this could only mean wresting a concession from the hands of their cultural archenemy, the white man, through a show of force...

...From the Warriors' point of view, however, that consideration was quite beside the point, for Indians have been given many thing by interested persons and the Government in recent years, and the Warriors were fully aware that the Alexians were approachable in the usual manner...

...Before the occupation of the Novitiate, tribal politics had developed into a distinctly matriarchal pattern, and in a mirrored image of the white society in which women are becoming more active politically, in Menominee County it was the politically disenfranchised males who were challenging the female patterns of power allocation at the local level...

...A particular trauma in early childhood, for example, could persist in its effects as a shadow of misplaced or exaggerated apprehensions cast across an entire lifetime, informing a person's subsequent perception and behavior as though it had become a part of his instinctual equipment or "second n a t u r e ." Traumatic events may occur in the life of cultures as well as individuals, spanning generations and even centuries in their psychically numbing wake...

...Because the relentlessly encroaching whites " s t o l e " all of them, an inalienable conviction of injustice and betrayal burns at the core of the ancestral consciousness of the Indian people...

...Chauvinism was indeed involved, but it was a chauvinism rooted in a long history of dispossession and trauma, rather than in a desire to oppress others or to acquire additional property as such...

...As such, it was an attempt on the part of the Indians involved to reimmerse themselves in the anguish and privation of the confrontation trauma in an effort to transcend it, and thereby release ingrained tensions so they could help meet the real needs of the present...

...It is clear that at some point after their humiliation in the December elections, the Menominee dissidents concluded that they could effectively challenge the incumbents of the Restoration Committee through a resort to violent tactics...

...Wherever white settlements spread, forests were cleared for farming, and after the 1848 discovery of gold in California, legions of furtune-seekers in wagon trains slaughtered the prairie and mountain species which had been the diet of tribes already removed to the west of the Mississippi...

...In the past, such efforts have most often assumed some form of an avoidance of whites, as, for example, in the preference of many parents for exclusively Indian schools for their children...

...The useful role of Indian men had been preempted by the cultural reversals of the era of confrontation...

...7th Cavalry of more than 200 unresisting Indian men, women, and children on December 29, 1890, at Wounded Knee creek in South Dakota...

...In the new cash-culture, the skills of the hunter had suddenly become quite worthless, and what claim could be made to warrior prowess when tribes were being pushed and resettled from area to area...

...In addition to such historical influences, the impact of certain well-intended Government policies in our own day has been to perpetuate the social and economic dependency of Indian men...

...During the era of confrontation, however, not only the traditional domain was lost, but also the life of the hunt, freedom of movement, autonomy...

...Another cause of the cultural depreciation of Indian men stemmed from frontier conditions in which life, and particularly Indian life, was the cheapest commodity...

...In those elections, three women who had been active DRUMS organizers won the highest number of votes, and one of them, Ada Deer, captured 64.5 per cent of the total cast...

...How this affected the status of Indian men within their families and communities is illustrated succinctly in a passage from Erik H. Erikson's study of nurture patterns among the Oglala Sioux of South Dakota: "The weakest relationship . . .seems to be that between the children and their fathers, who cannot teach them anything and who, in fact, have become models to be a v o i d e d . . . .The children feel what their elders know— namely, that . . .'Washington,' the climate, and the market make all prediction imossible...

...Control of Indian destiny was no longer in Indian hands, and it should not be surprising that later observers were to detect a strong admixture of fatalism among certain subcultures of poverty in the United States...

...In the wake of a culture shock of this magnitude, it was only to be expected that their social worth would become an object of the deepest skepticism...

...Most of the effective social and economic advantages were possessed by whites, and the inevitable effect on Indian men was a profound sense of emasculation...

...The takeover was a political maneuver directed at least as much against the leadership of the Restoration Committee as against the white community...

...several of the warriors were charged with various felonies and are soon to be tried...

...Gunfire erupted on a number of occasions, but miraculously, no deaths occurred as a result of the clashes...

...It is not tribal tradition for skirts to lead our t r i b e . " Male leadership was therefore one of the traditions, in fact perhaps the main tradition, favored by the Advisory Council in its campaign against the Restoration Committee...

...It was not long, however, before this experiment was in deep trouble, mainly because of its disastrous financial impact on the community...

...This deathless longing for the old life was the essence of the supernatural visions which inspired a young Paiute named Wovoka, who prophesied a future of peace and happiness in which white men would have been driven from the land and the suffering Indian people would at last be reunited with their own departed ancestors...

...From the point of view of the Warriors, of course, " t h e establishment" is primarily " t h e white establish-ment," and that is why their hostility, defiance, and even their anti-white racism might be (despite all appearances) vital signs of psychological mobilization to a more stable and self-sufficient level of functioning: in certain instances involving previously withdrawn and alienated minorities, a limited catharsis of racial venom may well be an indispensable condition for their eventual rehabilitation to fuller lives in participation with the rest of society...

...And this impulse for avoidance also explains why the "laziness" of the adult Indian is so often illusory, representing in fact an attempt to preserve dignity...

...In response to a wound of this depth, there was nothing accidental about the widespread selfabandonment of successive generations of Indian men to the psychic anesthesia of alcoholism...

...I don't know if there is a term to describe a female chief...

...But the evident poverty of material goods is matched by a pervasive poverty of spirit, the psychological effect of life on the reservation...

...Attempts to deal with this pain, to survive with it and in spite of it, remain a persistent motif of Indian culture...

...The ties to white men of such well-noted Indian women as Pocahontas and Sacagawea were repeated many times by their lesserknown sisters in the early years of contact, and this process of disaffection tore at the heart of Indian culture...

...Paradoxical though it seems, to achieve this goal it was not necessary to do actual violence to whites—it was not even necessary to be angry at whites as such...

...In the most basic sense, what the Warriors had set out to capture was respect and a sense of cultural pride as they saw these for themselves and their people...

...In 1972, a controversy over fishing rights led to a tense stand-off at the Leech Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota...

...The classical formulation of this concept was provided in 1895 with the publication by Freud and Breuer of Studies in Hysteria, in which they traced certain types of symptoms to the repressed memory of "traumatic" events which were so disturbing that the emotions which were aroused could not be faced at the time the events occurred...

...By 1970, the Menominees were largely united behind the leadership of a new organization, Determination of Rights and Unity for Menominee Stockholders, or DRUMS, Inc., in an effort to revoke Termination...

...The issue raised by the Advisory Council appeared to attract little popular support...

...Several years ago a group of Milwaukee Indians similarly took over an abandoned Coast Guard station and converted it into an Indian community school...

...That sentiment was echoed by a female member of the tribe who said, "From an Indian woman's point of view, I have waited a long time for men, Menominee men, to be our spokesmen...

...Within only a few generations, the elaborate tribal hierarchies of status and rank based on the male as hunter and warrior had collapsed under the impact of military conquest and industrial expansion...

...The Alexian Brothers, deeply committed to the principle of nonviolence, took an intransigent stance, convinced that capitulation to the Warriors would encourage reliance on force...

...To account for this role development, it is again necessary to consider the effects on Indian culture of the confrontation with Europeans in preceding centuries...

...The power of the Advisory Council, however, was insufficient to oust the incumbents...

...New epidemics brought by the Europeans, such as measles, the dreaded smallpox, and remnants of such earlier plagues as the Black Death ravaged the Indian population, which was exposed to these diseases suddenly and for the first time—and tens of thousands died...

...Last May about sixty Mohawks occupied a former youth camp at Big Moose, New York...

...That confrontation, lasting for several centuries, was the epochal trauma in terms of which Indians continue to perceive and experience the world: Their age-old aboriginal culture had been shattered by the technological and industrial transformations ushering in the modern world...

...The situation in the rural ghetto of Menominee County was analogous in many essentials to the "female-dominant" culture of the black urban ghetto...

...Such groups (be they labor unions in the process of organizing, upwardly mobile socio-economic classes, or, as in this case, restive racial minorities) almost invariably exhibit counterdependent hostility against "the establishment" as a by-product of their efforts at attaining greater autonomy...

...But the key factor in the Gresham affair remains the original seizure of the property What happened at Gresham was not an isolated event but part of a nationwide pattern of recent years...

...In practical terms, the great majority of AFDC funds are disbursed in the form of checks made out to female heads of households...

...There, selfdefeatist apathy, withdrawal from painful contacts with the outside, submerged rage, and a persisting sense of inferiority have long taken their silent toll in wasted lives and unused talents, and no discussion of incidents such as Gresham and Wounded Knee can fail to take account of the effects of such residual Indian attitudes about themselves and the world at large...

...In essence, these incidents represent a generation's culturally distinctive rite of passage into a new and more functional identity within American society as a whole...

...Since AFDC, in many low income communities such as Menominee County, constitutes the largest source of personal, disposable income, this fact is clearly related to the maintenance of the matriarchal patterns of authority and control...

...The Lac Court Oreilles Indians of northwestern Wisconsin seized a dam on the Chippewa Flowage and won Congressional support for their bid to reclaim part of that area...

...Such was the experience of slavery for the American Negro and of the Nazi holocaust for European Jews...

...Tribal elections were held in March 1974 to choose an interim Menominee Restoration Committee which would act as a caretaker government pending the reestablishment of full tribal government under the Executive Committee of the Tribal Council...

...To dismiss the Gresham affair, therefore, as nothing but an outburst of chauvinism would be to slight reality...

...The role-cornered male has always enlisted physical violence as the persuader of last resort...

...In this concept, Gresham and the numerous similar confrontations of recent years are not the expression of a suddenly renascent Indian hatred of whites, but, on the contrary, they signify psychologically imperative efforts on the part of Indian culture to heal the wounds and hatreds of the past...

...The Council had, for example, criticized Ada Deer's suggestion that a city manager be hired at a high salary, which she defended on the hardly unreasonable grounds that such a rate of pay was necessary to attract qualified applicants...

...Rebellion against " p a t e r n a l " authority is, of course, characteristically adolescent behavior...

...The religious centrality of tribal domain in the Indian circle of values is well known, and the restrictive borders of the reservation were painfully vivid and pervasive reminders of the vastness of the territories relinquished to white settlement...

...After a year or two of intense lobbying, the 1961 act was, in fact, repealed by Congress in December 1973...

...She and the Committee were similarly able to defend the legal fees charged by lawyers retained by the tribe...

...a number of organizations offered to utilize the novitiate for a variety of purposes...

...This cult swept like fire across the northern plains, culminating in the massacre by the U.S...

...In the course of the thirty-four-day occupation that followed, Governor Patrick J. Lucey called up the National Guard, white residents of the area staged large demonstrations demanding an end to the occupation, and local vigilantes threatened to attack the National Guard so as to breach the Novitiate defenses and evict the Warriors by force...

...To be a "success" at work means dancing to the white man's tune, kowtowing to the white establishment...

...In an extreme sense, the tragically high suicide rate among Indian youth in urban environments provides further testimony to the persisting influence of this cultural factor...

...Seen in Indian terms, hard work may not denote pride at all, but selfabasement...

...Only after it had become obvious that the takeover was rapidly approaching the flashpoint of a wider social conflagration did the Alexians agree to relinquish the estate to the Menominee tribe in return for "$1 and future considerations...

...Thus, the standoff at Gresham with white authorities was a staged reconfrontation clearly molded after the confrontations of the frontier as retained in the collective memories of the tribes...

...To most whites, work is virtually synonymous with personal dignity, the essence of the Protestant ethic, but to many Indians it represents a painfully forced reconfrontation with white society, on terms defined exclusively by whites...

...To the Indian, the legacy of the era of confrontation remains an open wound, a source of inborm pain deepened by the presence of whites...

...In occupying the Novitiate, the Warriors did not want, primarily, to acquire an unused building: They wanted respect (perhaps mainly self-respect) and a sense of cultural pride for their people...

...This time, for once, they intended to 'take what they wanted, thus staking their claim to a new identity as a power to be reckoned with...

...By late 1974 a faction calling itself the Advisory Council attempted to challenge the Restoration Committee's control...

...Psychologists use the concept of trauma to refer to extremely painful or disruptive events in the life of an individual...

...The $1 offer was withdrawn, then reinstated, then rejected by the tribe...

...But there was much more to the Warrirs' bizarre action than rank male chauvinism, however relevant such an interpretation might be in the terms of the American majority culture, for within American society it would be difficult to identify a group traditionally less visible or influential than Indian men...

...Since then a blur of events has tended to obscure the significance of the initial takeover of the property by the warriors...

...Incident at Gresham JOHN STUEWER Last New Year's Eve an armed band of Indians who call themselves the Menominee Warrior Society seized a Catholic church property, the Alexian Brothers Novitiate, at Gresham, a rural community in northern Wisconsin...

...These were the real prizes for which the Warriors desperately fought at Gresham...

...The challengers criticized what they felt was an attitude of "dictatorial" unresponsiveness on the part of the " t h r e e powers" (Ada Deer, Shirley Daly, and Sylvia Wilber, the three leading women members of the Committee), along with the sluggish pace of economic development in the community—without, however, offering concrete alternatives of their own...

...To hasten the coming of that happy time, Indians everywhere must call upon the aid of their dead kinsmen by dancing the Ghost Dance...

...For the American Indian, the confrontation with European settlers in the expansionist, rapidly industrializing phase of the early frontier was an ordeal of cultural dislocation and untold suffering...

...The events at Gresham, therefore* figured as a key element in the dissidents' bid for a redefinition of sex roles as they has evolved politically within the community...

...According to Ted Boyd, chairman of the Menominee People's Committee, which supported the Warriors, "The chief is always regarded as a male...

...Tribal leadership under the Committee was, in fact, largely in women's hands...

...Many affluent Americans of today who lived through the Great Depression of the 1930s continue to be affected by a gnawing sense of insecurity...

...Most of the Warriors and their supporters were late adolescents or young adults, a fact which reinforces an "identity theory" of the real reasons behind their takeover...

...While the "paternalism of the Bureau of Indian Affairs" has become a cliche in tribal parlance, the effect of such social programs as Aid to Families with Dependent Children has been less recognized...

...In the first such incident of note, the San Francisco Bay island of Alcatraz, after being abandoned as a prison facility, was seized by eighty-nine Indians in a midnight invasion in 1969...

...and, finally, a mysterious fire virtually put an end to the usefulness of the building complex...

...The cultural birthmark of every Indian is a sense of paradise lost...

...The series of takeovers such as Gresham and Wounded Knee can be interpreted as another, more recent attempt of Indian culture to deal with the residual shock of the era of confrontation—a shift from numbed withdrawal to assertive reengagement...

...A-bomb neuroses" haunt the memories of Japanese hibakusha (explosionaffected persons) who were present at Hiroshima or Nagasaki at the moment of atomic attack...