We're Still Here!

After Half-Century Fight, Indian Culture Is Going Strong, Author Says

For nearly 500 years, American Indians have survived every excruciating challenge white society has delivered, including in more recent centuries, forced assimilation and blatant efforts to terminate Indian reservations.

After World War II, Indian nations nearly succumbed to the relentless pressure; today, tribes are stronger than they have been in 150 years, a noted scholar of tribal rights said Thursday at the University of Montana.

Indian Country is vibrant because, when it was threatened most in the late 1950s and 1960s, Indian people drew strength from one another and largely refused to hand over their lands, their culture or their sovereignty, said Charles Wilkinson, a former attorney with the Native American Rights Fund.

Wilkinson spoke at UM's Tribal Leaders Institute Symposium, a two-day event celebrating and discussing the 30th anniversary of the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act of 1975.

Signed by President Nixon, the historic legislation gave tribal governments the right to exercise greater control over Indian affairs, including education, health care and law enforcement.

Although the legislation was classic "top-down" lawmaking - no Indians were consulted on the language or particulars of the act - Nixon ushered in a new era for Indian people.

In the years following World War II, from the late 1950s through the 1960s, reservation life was at an all-time low, Wilkinson said. Unemployment was 50 percent or more, and except for federal Bureau of Indian Affairs offices and churches, many reservations were without electricity or running water.

Wilkinson interviewed Indians who were tribal officers during those years for his newly released book, "Blood Struggle: the Rise of Modern Indian Nations." Those officers remember a life wholly controlled by the BIA, whose federal employees bullied and manipulated the reservation community, even going so far as to open and read tribal leaders' mail.
"Paternalism isn't nearly a strong enough word for it," Wilkinson said. "It was suppression and oppression."

At the same time, federal and church officials forbade the teaching of native languages and the practice of many tribal customs, Wilkinson said. People were afraid they would be shipped off to government boarding schools, or be branded as unfit parents and have their children taken from the community.

At the time, reservations lost one-third of their children through adoption to non-Indian families; many of the children were taken away for no reason, Wilkinson said.

In 1953, Congress passed House Concurrent Resolution 108, which attempted to wipe out Indian nations altogether by demanding that all tribal lands be sold, federal support withdrawn and rigorous assimilation programs implemented.

"It was going to be the end of Indian-ness," Wilkinson said.
But across Indian Country, Indian people like Vine Deloria Jr. and Ada Deer refused to give up what they had, and led an Indian revival - a civil rights campaign as profound and as successful as the racial, feminist and environmental movements of the same era.

Tribal governments got involved and lobbied Congress to include Indian tribes in War on Poverty legislation.

The lobbyists succeeded and tribes were given access to federal grants, which helped create tribal offices and pay for trips to Washington, D.C., where Indian leaders could meet with lawmakers and champion tribal needs. In Navajo country, tribal officials built the first language school, which continues to thrive today.

When Nixon stepped forward with the Self-Determination Act, he was credited with giving Indians "independence" - a future of their own making.

However, it was essentially like "putting new wine in old bottles," Wilkinson said.

"Indian people have been self-determining for hundreds of years," he said. "There were governments, not some lawyers' legal fiction. They were governments from the beginning."

But the act did set in motion other Indian legislation, such as the 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act, which gave tribes more control over the adoption of Native children.

In the years that followed, Indian Country chipped away at the prejudiced federal bureaucracy and gradually became stronger.
Now, 70 tribes have 300 or more members who are tribal government employees, 70 tribes have tribal forests managed by Indians, and old customs such as the once-banned Sun Dance have been revived, Wilkinson said.

Sweat lodges, language and ancient burial ceremonies have been also been revived and are again being handed down generation to generation.

"Indian people still have many miles to walk before reservations are secure homelands," he said. "Difficult health and social problems remain."

"I don't know what forever means," Wilkinson said, but as the momentum in Indian Country builds, he strongly believes tribes can only continue to thrive.

As they once did, he said. With access "to an enduring landscape of Indian Country forever."

Reporter Betsy Cohen can be reached at 523-5253 or at bcohen@missoulian.com