Lesson Plan: Indian Activism during the Cold War - Schaumburg ...

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our own Navajo Indian tribe and none of them who need help any worse, and they owe theirobligations to us North American Indians First." 16Those statements gave voice to a central critique made by Native Americans: Rather than 18fulfill promises made to people who shed blood for America and for the preservation offreedom around the world, the United States was instead bestowing on European nations,including former enemies, vast sums via the European Recovery Program, the Marshall Plan.Non-Indians also used the trope and the trauma of Native American poverty, especially Navajopoverty, to criticize the European focus of the Marshall Plan. A November 1947 Los AngelesExaminer article, part of a series called "The Citizens America Forgot," stated that "while theUnited States is sending billions for the relief of stricken Europe, Navajo Indians face slowstarvation in the vast concentration camp of the desert." The Examiner article cut both ways,however, painting the Navajo as passive victims confined in a "concentration camp" against theirwill while capturing a difficult truth about their material conditions. 17Moving to head off criticism of the Marshall Plan, still under review by the Congress, the 19Truman administration asked Congress to provide emergency relief to the Navajo and the Hopi;Truman hoped that such aid "forecloses those who would criticize my foreign aid program onthe ground that we are letting our First Americans starve." With Truman's support, Congressappropriated $500,000 in emergency relief in December 1947 and then in 1950 provided longrangefunding of over $88 million in the Navajo-Hopi Rehabilitation Act, the equivalent of aNavajo-Hopi Marshall Plan. The House of Representatives fashioned the emergency relief bill inthe middle of a debate on foreign aid, embedding the Navajo and Hopi question in the contextof international assistance. It is important to note that Truman and the Congress first respondedto the Navajo crisis in 1947, less than a month after the release of the report of the President'sCommittee on Civil Rights, which highlighted both the "moral" and the "international" reasonsfor addressing U.S. treatment of "underprivileged people." During the Cold War, Americanpresidents and federal officials paid attention to how their resolution of domestic policies wouldplay internationally. Emphasizing the impact of foreign criticism of federal Indian policy,Secretary of the Interior Julius Krug testified in favor of the Navajo-Hopi Rehabilitation Act inearly 1949 by asserting that Congress's passage of the bill would "consequently strengthen thisNation's international prestige and moral position." 18The Navajo (and Hopi) alone benefited from this Cold War imperative; D'Arcy McNickle, a 20BIA official who championed Indian self-determination, later complained: "Possibly the othertribes did not get enough newspaper publicity; perhaps they were not near enough tostarvation—though they might dispute this." In addition to stimulating federal efforts toforeclose criticism of the Marshall Plan and to improve race relations and thus America's imageabroad, Navajo poverty generated aid from private charity groups, which saw the Navajo, byvirtue of their wartime service, as especially deserving of their help. And the Navajo nation, givenits large population and expansive lands, had the literal and figurative shape of a nation. Thesubcommittee of the House Committee on Indian Affairs that sanctioned the federal relief efforthad noted that "this is a nation within our borders, recognized by treaty, that is actually in needof relief." Recent discoveries of uranium ore in the Colorado plateau of the four-corner area ofArizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah may also have solidified federal commitments torelief, marking the Navajo reservation as an important Cold War site for material as well as moralreasons. The Navajo participated in the making of the atomic West by facilitating uraniummining, as the Navajo Tribal Council put it, "in the interest of the nation and the NavajoReservation." 19
President Harry S. Truman supported Navajo short-termrelief efforts in 1947 and long-term rehabilitation projects in1949, forging bonds with Navajo nation leaders pictured herein a meeting at the White House. To the right of Truman:Chairman Sam Ahkeah and Vice-Chairman John Claw of theNavajo nation. Photograph by Milton Snow, Feb. 1952. Courtesy ofthe Navajo Nation Museum, Window Rock, Arizona, N09-287.The Containment of TerminationThe Navajo reservation was only the first site of Cold War conflict over U.S. relations with 21Native Americans. As noted, the Soviet Union eagerly exploited Native Americans' deprivations,as it did African Americans'. As Eleanor Roosevelt warned in her daily column in October 1949,"One of the Soviet attacks on the democracies, particularly in the United States, centers on racialpolicies. In recent months the Russians have been particularly watching our attitude towardnative Indians of our country." In one such exposition, the May 14, 1949, edition of SovietLithuania called American Indian reservations "true camps of death." The article, entitled "'In theCountry of the Yellow Devil': United States as It Really Is," also condemned the Marshall Planand the exploitation of African Americans' labor. 20Soviet propagandists and American politicians shared the view that reservations were camps 22of slow cultural death. Soviet officials would have also approved of the coercive ways federalofficials pushed for the termination of reservations. For example, the BIA's recommendedmeans to "overcome obstacles" to termination of all federal Indian programs provided to theBlackfeet nation read in part: "Issue certificates of ownership to each individual for theirproportionate share of tribal assets. Help to prepare necessary legislation. Insist that suchlegislation be mandatory and not subject to approval of local and state authorities or of Indiancouncil and Tribes." This dictatorial approach alarmed the key architects of the Indian NewDeal, in particular Felix Cohen, who had helped design IRA tribal constitutions in the late 1930s.Cohen argued in a 1949 article that "the Indian plays much the same role in our Americansociety that the Jews played in Germany. Like the miner's canary, the Indian marks the shift fromfresh air to poison gas in our political atmosphere; and our treatment of Indians, even more thanour treatment of other minorities, reflects the rise and fall in our democratic faith." Cohen,influenced by his legal service to several Indian nations and his experience with anti-Semitism,expressed better and more frequently than other white critics both the dangers Native Americans
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