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

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Department of Conservation, and that such state shall exist until such time as the State ofWisconsin shall recognize Federal treaties and statutes affording immunity to the members ofthis Band from State control over hunting and fishing within the boundaries of this reservation."Clarence Wesley, a prominent activist from the San Carlos Apache community and an emergingvoice in the NCAI, argued in a 1957 issue of AmerIndian that "real Indian issues are not generallyunderstood by the average citizen, even by some public officials. These issues are notassimilation, integration, emancipation, or government control over the Indian person. Or evencivil rights in the usual sense. The real issues are the continuing ownership of land." Wesleycontended, as activists would emphasize in the 1960s, that honoring Native American civil rightsinvolved "the protection of rights solemnly promised by treaty and law." That definition meantpreserving the reservation as a legally reserved space and restoring the privileges to use resourcesprovided in federal treaties, as the Chippewa demanded. Wesley situated this historical claim inthe contemporary frame of Cold War rhetoric and nation building when he called on the federalgovernment to offer both "an end to bureaucratic dictatorship" and "the same kind of [economicaid] program that is carried on in underdeveloped countries." 35Speaking for ThemselvesThe ideas of Native American internationalism spread by Wesley and other leaders found 37expression in other forums, in particular, the June 1961 American Indian Chicago Conference(AICC), a seminal event that produced the Declaration of Indian Purpose, a pan-tribal statementthat outlined activists' goals for the new frontier in Indian-white relations. Several months beforethe conference, AICC planners had distributed a draft of the proposed declaration to NativeAmericans around the country, asking them what they would like to see in the final statement.The conference organizer Sol Tax, an anthropologist from the University of Chicago, explainedin the accompanying letter that the chance to respond to this draft represented "a rareopportunity for Indians to speak for themselves, instead of having somebody else speak forthem." The responses from regional preparatory meetings reflected the diverse nature of NativeAmerica in 1961. Some embraced assimilation, rejecting what one respondent called Indians'"antiquated superannuated way of life," whereas others considered the struggle againsttermination a battle for Indian survival. The perspectives, while heterogeneous, articulated anIndian nationalism that conflated domestic and international contexts, demonstrating NativeAmericans' widespread engagement with the rhetoric of the Cold War, of decolonization, and of"the War of 1954," as a Montana writer referred to the 1954 blitz of congressional terminationlegislation. 36This photograph records one of the regional meetings held toprepare for the American Indian Chicago Conference.Participants in the meeting, at Haverford College in
Haverford, Pennsylvania, April 1961, included: first row:William Rickard (Tuscarora) and Theodore Hetzel (bothholding stick); second row: eighth from left, Sol Tax; fifthrow: ninth from left, Chief Clinton Rickard (Tuscarora),seventh from left, Tall Oak (Narragansett). Theodore HetzelPhotographs, Group C.2. Courtesy Center of Southwest Studies, FortLewis College. Used by permission.Many of the responses defending Indian identity drew on the rhetorical arsenal of freedom 38and democracy that termination opponents had employed during "the War of 1954." An activistfrom White Swan, Washington, protested the forced citizenship of American Indians by writingthat only "a dictator nation may be able to declare an individual of another power a citizen ofthat government," a process he compared to the United States' making "a RUSSIAN a citizen ofthis government." After attending a regional meeting in Haverford, Pennsylvania, Red Deer, aMohawk-Cherokee, echoed this spirit of independence, asking that the proposed declaration"safeguard [against] the loss of our lands in what is a de facto occupation of our country." Hesuggested a broad public relations effort to strengthen the reservation land base. RichardBounding Elk, from Maine's Penobscot community, supported the development of reservationlands, arguing that the government should create an "American Indian Recovery Program ... asort of Marshall Plan for Indians." Bounding Elk asked, "Why give [foreign aid] away to theworld—give it away here." A respondent from Bellflower, California, reflected this nationalisttheme and the belief in a program modeled on the Marshall Plan as both a panacea for NativeAmerican problems and an ethical obligation of the federal government. "We can't help but wishthat the United States would treat us as well as they have some of the foreign states in the pastdecade." 37Perhaps the most comprehensive response emerged from a gathering in Orono, Maine, in 39April. Its summary statement recommended that "all Indians ... remain separate, independent,autonomous, sovereign nations." Preaching "self-determination," it contended that NativeAmericans "are in great need of a 'recovery program,' much as the European nations were, in theyears following the last World War ... the American Indian Nations want to manage their ownaffairs, but need a great deal of aid. A Marshall Plan is only one possible solution. The 'PointFour' Program of aid for underdeveloped countries might be another way of extending thisfinancial assistance to the American Indians." Maintaining that "no one is more deserving thanthe Indians of foreign aid from the U.S. government," the Orono statement noted, "One morearguing point that comes to mind is the propaganda value of such a program, particularly as faras the colored peoples of the earth are concerned, and also the existing unfavorable propagandavalue of the lack of such a program." 38The responses, coming from Native Americans from Maine to Texas and from Alabama to 40the Pacific Northwest, illustrate how fully both reservation leaders and landless Indians who hadno reservation home or who had relocated to cities had internalized the moral dimensions of theCold War and linked them to its material dimensions. And they reveal a sharpened identificationwith the "colored peoples of the earth" and an embrace of "self-determination," the operating
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