An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States

poor people in each place. At the invitation of King and the Southern
Christian Leadership Conference, a variety of activists met in Atlanta on
March 14 for a Minority Group Conference. Among the Native attendees
were Hank Adams (Assiniboine), Mel Thom (Walker River Paiute), and
Tillie Walker (Mandan-Hidatsa). They had long been involved in activism,
including participating in the National Indian Youth Council, fish-ins, and
the 1961 American Indian Chicago Conference. It is not clear that King and
Abernathy fully understood everyone’s positions, but they listened, and
their comrades appreciated that. 33 Because of his tragic assassination, he
was unable to see the impact of his efforts. However, Ralph Abernathy took
over the leadership reins. Native people played a central role in the Poor
People’s Campaign as well. 34
It should not be surprising that Indigenous peoples participated in civil
rights issues. As historian Daniel Cobb notes, “The fact is that Native
people have always engaged in political activism—whether or not it
captured the imagination of the dominant society.” 35 While they always
fundamentally sought Indigenous sovereignty, they also understood that
Native people had immediate needs and, in some ways, found comradery
with Black Americans who also suffered under the boot of exploitation and
subjugation. For some, fighting for the basic needs of Native people,
especially the poor, did not stand in contradiction to their goals of tribal
sovereignty. 36 They coalesced with a broad range of people. On May 1,
1968, Hank Adams, speaking on behalf of the Natives who traveled with
him to DC, explained to Stewart Udall, the secretary of the interior, and
Robert L. Bennett, commissioner of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, why he
and other Native people were joining the Poor People’s Campaign:
We have joined the Poor People’s Campaign because most of us know
that our families, tribes and communities number among those
suffering most in this country. We are not begging, we are demanding
what is rightfully ours. This is no more the right to have a decent life
in our communities. We need guaranteed jobs, guaranteed income,
housing, schools, economic development, but most important, we
want these things on our own terms.
Our chief spokesman in the Federal Government, the Department
of the Interior, has failed us. In fact, it began failing us from its very
beginning. The Interior Department began failing because it was built