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

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The image of the reservation as a civilizing tool degenerated with the emergence of scientific 10racism, attacks on the "socialistic" and "communistic" nature of tribalism, and Native Americanresistance. American policy makers had always denied legitimacy to Indian land tenure because itinvolved communal ownership, and they had used force to convert Indians into Americans livingin accord with the white political-economic imperative of laissez-faire capitalism. But theemployment of anticommunist ideology to justify coercive programs became more common inthe 1870s and beyond. The Paris Commune in particular fueled white Americans' conflation ofRed Indians and Communist Reds. Less than a month after the commune met its violent end onMay 28, 1871, the New York World termed Indian resistance in Texas "the Red Spectre."Contesting the label of "communism" to preserve their political sovereignty and cultural space,Cherokee politicians complained to Congress in 1880 that "the statements made to you that we,or any of the Indians, are communists ... are entirely erroneous. No people are more jealous ofthe personal right to property than Indians." The commissioner of Indian affairs, J. D. C. Atkins,conceding that Indian resistance was "patriotic and noble," asked a fundamental question that isat the heart of modern Indian-white relations: "Is it not asking too much of the American peopleto permit a political paradox to exist within their midst ... simply to gratify this sentimentalityabout a separate nationality?" In the 1880s an expanding America was not ready to embrace thepolitical paradox of "domestic dependent nations," the term Supreme Court Justice JohnMarshall had employed in trying, unsuccessfully, to defend Cherokee nationalism during theremoval crisis of the 1830s. Thomas Morgan, Atkins's successor, found nothing noble orpatriotic in Indian nationalism, arguing in his 1889 annual report that "tribal relations should bebroken up, socialism destroyed, and the family and the autonomy of the individual substituted."The discourse of "Americanization" reflected Morgan's notion that American individualismwould have to replace Indian "socialism," even if the transformation required antidemocraticstate intervention in the form of the federal allotment policy, which legislated the division oftribal estates into small homestead plots of 160 acres, whether Indian families wanted them ornot. 9 Native Americans' service in World War I and the first Red Scare reinforced such visceral 11opposition to the reservation. Shortly after the war, which had accelerated the spread ofAmericanization campaigns throughout the country, Rep. Melville C. Kelly of Pennsylvaniaattacked the reservation as "a prison pen where human beings are doomed to live amid sadmemories of their ancestors and among the ghosts of the dead." Ignoring Native Americanreligious traditions that derived from a relationship with land and ancestors, Kelly's argumentboth captured politicians' animus against the reservation system and reacted to new conceptionsof Native American patriotism engendered by army service. Kelly and other policy makersinterpreted such national service as evidence that all Native Americans considered thereservation anachronistic space. 10Attacks on the "communistic" nature of tribalism resurfaced in 1933, after Commissioner of 12Indian Affairs John Collier began promoting the Indian New Deal, a series of initiatives relatedto the national New Deal and designed to ameliorate Native American poverty and strengthentribal self-government. The Indian Reorganization Act (IRA) of 1934, the cornerstone of theIndian New Deal, not only rejected the policy and philosophy of allotment by providing federalfunds to tribal governments for use in adding land to reservations but also encouraged thosegovernments to expand sovereign powers over reservation boundaries and resources throughregulations codified in tribal constitutions. Flora Warren Seymour, a lawyer and author, called theIRA "the most extreme gesture yet made by the administration in this country toward aCommunistic experiment." Some Indian leaders echoed those anticommunist sentiments,
forming the American Indian Federation (AIF) in 1934 to protest Collier's retribalization agenda.AIF cofounder Joseph Bruner, an Oklahoma Creek, argued that at its core was a "RussianCommunistic" conception of life. Collier countered such arguments by maintaining that "whitepeople all over the United States own land in partnerships and companies and corporations. It isnot communism to allow Indians to do the same if they want to." But it was his 1939 attack onthe AIF for its links to such pro-Nazi groups as the German-American Bund and Silver Shirtsthat prevented Congress from significantly altering or repealing the IRA; AIF member Alice LeeJemison's later admission that the Bund paid her to incite resistance to the draft among PlainsIndians further undermined the AIF's legitimacy. 11The Nazi regime engendered an image of the reservation more consonant with13Commissioner Lea's policy of concentration. It is difficult to pinpoint the first use of the term"concentration camp" to describe a reservation, but it predated 1942, when American officials,including President Franklin D. Roosevelt, called the Japanese American detention centersconcentration camps. And it was used before knowledge about the Nazi camps gave"concentration camp" its horrific connotation. In March 1940 an American politician hadcompared a reservation to a concentration camp. During a congressional hearing on a billrecommending "relief of needy Indians," Rep. John Schaefer of Wisconsin asked the Blackfeetnation politician Levi Burd whether the U.S. record on Indian affairs "more than parallels theatrocities and so-called concentration camps abroad." The historical record, Schaefer said, wasthat "the white man took the Indians' land, debauched their women, killed many of them, andherded the survivors in concentration camps which we now call Indian Reservations." Burdrejected the analogy since it painted Blackfeet as passive victims contained against their will,instead sounding a theme that would emerge in the postwar period: "If there are any people thatare neglected, it is the Indians." To cite another example: in 1944 a congressional committeeinvestigating Indian affairs explained that its goal was to "try to rehabilitate the Indians so theymay be assimilated into the American way of life and not be in the reservation like aconcentration camp; for, after all, a reservation is only a step or two from a concentration camp."The 1944 statement represented the reemergence of congressional critiques of the ira, whichbecame the foundation of the termination movement. After World War II, during an era of ColdWar conformity, critics of federal Indian policy used the term concentration camp more openlyto describe reservations as an oppressive space. Thus began a new stage in a long-running battleto deconstruct reservations as sites of ethnic difference. 12The Politics of Indian SpaceNative Americans' participation in World War II campaigns at home and abroad fueledterminationists' calls for reform of Indian affairs. Native Americans volunteered for army serviceand purchased war bonds at rates equal to those of any other American ethnic group; roughlytwenty-five thousand Native Americans, including eight hundred women, served in the armedforces. Sen. D. Worth Clark, an Idaho Democrat, remarked that Native Americans' wartimeactivities were "an inspiration to patriotic Americans everywhere." In addition to lives and labor,Native Americans contributed land for gunnery ranges, airfields, and camps to house JapaneseAmericans. The most iconic sacrifices came from Ira Hayes, one of the six Marines who hoistedthe American flag on Iwo Jima in 1945, and the Navajo code talkers, who developed and usedNavajo language–based signal codes that the Japanese military never cracked. Even as NativeAmericans acted patriotically and heroically to defend the United States and their conception ofAmericanness, white commentators began calling for an end to federal Indian programs. As14
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Page 13 and 14: President Harry S. Truman supported
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Page 17 and 18: adding the sentiment: "We know that
Page 19 and 20: government supervision. But federal
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Page 25 and 26: January 20, 1949[Delivered in perso
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Page 31: Declaration of Indian Purpose“Wha

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