An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (28 page)

Kennedy's use of “new frontier” to encapsulate his campaign echoed debates about US history that had begun more than six decades earlier. In 1894, historian Frederick Jackson Turner had presented his history-making “frontier thesis,” claiming that the crisis of that era was the result of the closing of the frontier and that a new frontier was needed to fill the ideological and spiritual vacuum created by the completion of settler colonialism. The “Turner Thesis” served as a dominant school of the history of the US West through most of the twentieth century. The frontier metaphor described Kennedy's plan for employing political power to make the world the new frontier of the United States. Central to this vision was the Cold War, what Slotkin calls “a
heroic
engagement in the ‘long twilight struggle'” against communism, to which the nation was summoned, as Kennedy characterized it in his inaugural address. Soon after he took office, that struggle took the form of a counterinsurgency program in Vietnam. “Seven years after Kennedy's nomination,” Slotkin reminds us, “American troops would be describing Vietnam as ‘Indian Country' and search-and-destroy missions as a game of ‘Cowboys and Indians'; and Kennedy's ambassador to Vietnam would justify a massive military escalation by citing the necessity of moving the ‘Indians' away from the ‘fort' so that the ‘settlers' could plant ‘corn.'”
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The movement of Indigenous peoples to undo what generations of “frontier” expansionists had wrought continued during the Vietnam War era and won some major victories but more importantly a shift in consensus, will, and vision toward self-determination and land restitution, which prevails today. Activists' efforts to end termination and secure restoration of land, particularly sacred sites, included Taos Pueblo's sixty-four-year struggle with the US government to reclaim their sacred Blue Lake in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of New Mexico. In the first land restitution to any Indigenous nation, President Richard M. Nixon signed into effect Public
Law 91-550 on December 15, 1970, which had been approved with bipartisan majorities in Congress. President Nixon stated, “This is a bill that represents justice, because in 1906 an injustice was done in which land involved in this bill—48,000 acres—was taken from the Taos Pueblo Indians. The Congress of the United States now returns that land to whom it belongs.”
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In hearings held in the preceding years by the Senate Subcommittee on Indian Affairs, members expressed fear of establishing a precedent in awarding land—based on ancient use, treaties, or aboriginal ownership—rather than monetary payment. As one witness testifying in opposition to the return of Taos lands said, “The history of the land squabbles in New Mexico among various groups of people, including Indian-Americans and Spanish Americans, is well known. Substantially every acre of our public domain, be it national forest, state parks, or wilderness areas is threatened by claims from various groups who say they have some ancestral right to the land to the exclusion of all other persons … which can only be fostered and encouraged by the present legislation if passed.”
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Although the Senate subcommittee members finally agreed to the Taos claim by satisfying themselves that it was unique, it did in fact set a precedent.
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The return of Blue Lake as a sacred site begs the question of whether other Indigenous sacred sites remaining as national or state parks or as US Forest Service or Bureau of Land Management lands and waterways should also be returned. Administration of the Grand Canyon National Park has been partially restored to its ancestral caretakers, the Havasupai Nation, but other federal lands have not. A few sites, such as the volcanic El Malpais, a sacred site for the Pueblo Indians, have been designated as national monuments by executive order rather than restored as Indigenous territory. The most prominent struggle has been the Lakota Sioux's attempt to restore the Paha Sapa, or Black Hills, where the odious Mount Rushmore carvings have scarred the sacred site. Called the “Shrine of Democracy” by the federal government, it is anything but that; rather it is a shrine of in-your-face illegal occupation and colonialism.

The return of Taos Blue Lake was not a gift from above. In addition to the six-decade struggle of Taos Pueblo, the restitution took place in the midst of a renewed powerful and growing Native American struggle for self-determination. The movement's energy was evident when twenty-six young Native activists and students founded the National Indian Youth Council (NIYC) in 1961, based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. From twenty-one different Native nations, some from reservations or small towns and others from relocated families far from home, the founders included Gloria Emerson and Herb Blatchford (both Navajo), Clyde Warrior (Ponca from Oklahoma), Mel Thom (Paiute from Nevada), and Shirley Hill Witt (Mohawk). Cherokee anthropologist Robert K. Thomas mentored the militant young activists. Although primarily committed to local struggles, their vision was international. As Shirley Hill Witt put it: “At a time when new nations all over the globe are emerging from colonial control, their right to choose their own course places a vast burden of responsibility upon the most powerful nations to honor and protect those rights.… The Indians of the United States may well present the test case of American liberalism.”
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In 1964, the NIYC organized support for the ongoing Indigenous struggle to protect treaty-guaranteed fishing rights in Washington State. Actor Marlon Brando took an interest and provided financial support and publicity. The “fish-in” movement soon put the tiny community at Frank's Landing in the headlines. Sid Mills was arrested there on October 13, 1968. Eloquently, he explained his actions:

I am a Yakima and Cherokee Indian, and a man. For two years and four months, I've been a soldier in the United States Army. I served in combat in Vietnam—until critically wounded.… I hereby renounce further obligation in service or duty to the United States Army.

My first obligation now lies with the Indian People fighting for the lawful Treaty to fish in usual and accustomed water of the Nisqually, Columbia and other rivers of the Pacific
Northwest, and in serving them in this fight in any way possible.…

Just three years ago today, on October 13, 1965, 19 women and children were brutalized by more than 45 armed agents of the State of Washington at Frank's Landing on the Nisqually river in a vicious, unwarranted attack.…

Interestingly, the oldest human skeletal remains ever found in the Western Hemisphere were recently uncovered on the banks of the Columbia River—the remains of Indian fishermen. What kind of government or society would spend millions of dollars to pick upon our bones, restore our ancestral life patterns, and protect our ancient remains from damage—while at the same time eating upon the flesh of our living People?

We will fight for our rights.
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Hank Adams with other local leaders founded the Survival of American Indians Association, which was composed of the Swinomish, Nisqually, Yakama, Puyallup, Stilaguamish, and other Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest to carry on the fishing-rights struggle.
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The backlash from Anglo sport fishers was swift and violent, but in 1973 fourteen of the fishing nations sued Washington State, and, in a reflection of changed times, the following year US District Court Judge George Boldt found in their favor. He validated their right to 50 percent of fish taken “in the usual and accustomed places” that were designated in the 1850s treaties, even where those places were not under tribal control. This was a landmark decision for historical Indigenous sovereignty over territories outside designated reservation boundaries.

The NIYC saw itself as an engine for igniting local organizing, marshaling community organizing projects with access to funds from the Johnson administration's “War on Poverty,” the mandate of which was to implement the principles of economic and social equality intended by authors of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Interethnic alliances, including a significant representation of Native peoples, developed during the mid-1960s. These culminated in the 1968 Poor People's Campaign spearheaded by the Reverend Martin
Luther King Jr., which consisted of community organizing and leading marches across the country. In the final month of campaign planning, Dr. King was assassinated on April 4, 1968. Thousands of marchers arrived in Washington, DC, in the next month and gathered in a tent city, then remained there for six weeks.
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While local actions multiplied in Native communities and nations, the spectacular November 1969 seizure and eighteen-month occupation of Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay grabbed wide media attention. An alliance known as Indians of All Tribes was initiated by Native American students and community members living in the Bay Area. They built a thriving village on the island that drew Native pilgrimages from all over the continent, radicalizing thousands, especially Native youth. Indigenous women leaders were particularly impressive, among them Madonna Thunderhawk, LaNada Means War Jack, Rayna Ramirez, and many others who continued organizing into the twenty-first century. The Proclamation of the Indians of All Tribes expressed the level of Indigenous solidarity that was attained and the joyful good humor that ruled:

We, the Native Americans, reclaim the land known as Alcatraz Island in the name of all American Indians by right of discovery.

We wish to be fair and honorable in our dealings with the Caucasian inhabitants of this land, and hereby offer the following treaty:

We will purchase said Alcatraz Island for twenty-four dollars (24) in glass beads and red cloth, a precedent set by the white man's purchase of a similar island about 300 years ago.

We will give to the inhabitants of this island a portion of the land for their own to be held in trust by the American Indians Government and by the bureau of Caucasian Affairs to hold in perpetuity—for as long as the sun shall rise and the rivers go down to the sea. We will further guide the inhabitants in the proper way of living. We will offer them our religion, our education, our life-ways, in order to help them achieve our level of civilization and thus raise them and all their white brothers up from their savage and unhappy state.…

Further, it would be fitting and symbolic that ships from all over the world, entering the Golden Gate, would first see Indian land, and thus be reminded of the true history of this nation. This tiny island would be a symbol of the great lands once ruled by free and noble Indians.
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Despite the satirical riff on the history of US colonialism, the group made serious demands for five institutions to be established on Alcatraz: a Center for Native American Studies; an American Indian Spiritual Center; an Indian Center of Ecology that would do scientific research on reversing pollution of water and air; a Great Indian Training School that would run a restaurant, provide job training, market Indigenous arts, and teach “the noble and tragic events of Indian history, including the Trail of Tears, and the Massacre of Wounded Knee”; and a memorial, a reminder that the island had been established as a prison initially to incarcerate and execute California Indian resisters to US assault on their nations.
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Under orders from the Nixon White House, the Indigenous residents remaining on Alcatraz were forced to evacuate in June 1971. Indigenous professors Jack Forbes and David Risling, who were in the process of establishing a Native American studies program at the University of California, Davis, negotiated a grant from the federal government of unused land near Davis, where the institutions demanded by Alcatraz occupants could be established. A two-year Native-American–Chicano college and movement center, D-Q (Deganawidah-Quetzalcoatl) University, was founded, while UC Davis became the first US university to offer a doctorate in Native American studies.

During this period of intense protest and activism, alliances among Indigenous governments—including the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) led by young Sioux attorney Vine Deloria Jr.—turned militant demands into legislation. A year before the seizure of Alcatraz, Ojibwe activists Dennis Banks and Clyde Bellecourt founded the American Indian Movement (AIM), which initially patrolled the streets around Indigenous housing projects in Minneapolis.
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Going national, AIM became involved at Alcatraz. With the rather bitter end of the island occupation, as Paul Smith and
Robert Warrior write: “The future of Indian activism would belong to people far angrier than the student brigades of Alcatraz. Urban Indians who managed a life beyond the bottles of cheap wine cruelly named Thunderbird would continue down the protest road.”
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With the Vietnam War still raging and the reelection of Richard Nixon in November 1972 imminent, a coalition of eight Indigenous organizations—AIM, the National Indian Brotherhood of Canada (later renamed Assembly of First Nations), the Native American Rights Fund, the National Indian Youth Council, the National American Indian Council, the National Council on Indian Work, National Indian Leadership Training, and the American Indian Committee on Alcohol and Drug Abuse—organized “The Trail of Broken Treaties.” Armed with a “20-Point Position Paper” that focused on the federal government's responsibility to implement Indigenous treaties and sovereignty, caravans set out in the fall of 1972. The vehicles and numbers of participants multiplied at each stop, converging in Washington, DC, one week before the presidential election. Hanging a banner from the front of the Bureau of Indian Affairs building that proclaimed it to be the “Native American Embassy,” hundreds of protesters hailing from seventy-five Indigenous nations entered the building to sit in. BIA personnel, at the time largely non-Indigenous, fled, and the capitol police chain-locked the doors announcing that the Indigenous protesters were illegally occupying the building. The protesters stayed for six days, enough time for them to read damning federal documents that revealed gross mismanagement of the federal trust responsibility, which they boxed up and took with them. The Trail of Broken Treaties solidified Indigenous alliances, and the “20-Point Position Paper,”
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the work mainly of Hank Adams, provided a template for the affinity of hundreds of Native organizations. Five years later, in 1977, the document would be presented to the United Nations, forming the basis for the 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.