American Indian activism

Significance: In the mid-1960s, American Indians embarked on a new phase in their dealings with the U.S. government and its citizens, one marked by proactive insistence on rights that had been secured by treaty with the United States.

During the 1950s, the official U.S. government policy toward American Indians involved “termination” and “relocation.” Termination was meant to end the special legal status of American Indians and to encourage the assimilation of native people into the U.S. citizenry. Through relocation, American Indians were to be taken off their traditional lands and relocated in urban areas for training and employment. The necessary complement to termination and relocation, in the government’s view, was the abolishing of treaty rights for all the tribes. By the beginning of the Civil Rights movement, however, some American Indians were beginning to adopt some of the tactics and strategies used by civil rights protesters.

Northwest Fish-ins

In 1964, the National Indian Youth Council (NIYC) organized a fish-in in Washington State. Tribes there had increasingly been prohibited from fishing in waters granted to them by treaty. Sportfishers and commercial fisheries believed that American Indian fishers were interfering with their ability to fish for profit and fun. The American Indian fishers, however, were most often fishing either in observation of tribal ritual or for subsistence. The fish-ins attracted widespread notice, drawing celebrities such as actor Marlon Brando and civil rights activist Dick Gregory. Case after case was adjudicated in the following years, from the Northwest to the upper Great Lakes. Many times the decision came down on the side of the tribal treaty rights. These successes, especially between 1964 and 1966, galvanized many young American Indians at a time when many of the tribal elders distrusted the course of activism. The success of NIYC leadership in the fish-in controversy legitimated more active protest.

Birth of the American Indian Movement (AIM)

In the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, in 1968, American Indian residents had noted the extremely high rates of arrest of American Indians relative to other groups. They also heard many stories of rough and sometimes brutal police treatment of American Indians. Some Minneapolis Indians began to follow police cruisers on weekends to document what happened. During the next ten months, police arrests of American Indians dropped to almost zero, demonstrating at least that having witnesses and advocates on the scene helped matters. This was the beginning of the American Indian Movement.

The Taking of Alcatraz

In November 1969, more than eighty American Indians landed on Alcatraz Island, formerly the site of a federal penitentiary, and declared it Indian territory under the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie, a treaty that granted federal land to American Indians if it was no longer in use by the federal government. The immediate reason for the taking of Alcatraz was that the San Francisco Indian Center had burned to the ground, leaving American Indians United, in town for a conference, without a place to stay. Though the island was empty two years later, the call for restoration of land by lawful treaty was once again established. Though there were successes in land restoration (for example, the return of Blue Lake to the Taos Pueblos and the return of Mount Adams to the Yakima), the issue of land and treaty rights brought into the spotlight the U.S. government’s history of treaty abridgment and effectively ended the policies of termination and relocation.

Early 1970s

In 1970, more than 150 Pit River tribespeople occupied parts of Lassen National Park and Pacific Gas and Electric land in Northern California. Other demonstrators took over Ellis Island in New York to protest treaty violations. Lakota briefly occupied Mount Rushmore, a site sacred to their tribe.

Early in 1972, the Chippewa won back their rights to police fishing inside their reserve. That spring at Cass Lake, Minnesota, AIM convened to help decide how those rights would be allocated. During the convention, roads were blocked and guns were in evidence; the atmosphere was tense as AIM members battled what they saw as overly conservative traditionalists. The situation so unnerved local resort owners that they acceded to demands for absolute Chippewa control.

Shortly after the Cass Lake convention, an older Pine Ridge Sioux, Raymond Yellow Thunder, was murdered in Gordon, Nebraska, by five white men. Gordon officials did nothing about the situation, so AIM convened one thousand American Indians, who descended on the town in protest. After the apparent public relations successes of these protests, AIM leaders began to plan a caravan across the nation to Washington, D.C., the Trail of Broken Treaties, for the fall of 1972, before the presidential elections. It was hoped that the caravan would create favorable public sentiment for the cause of treaty enforcement and force the U.S. government to pay attention to the protesters’ demands.

The group stopped in Minneapolis to release its list of demands, the Twenty Points, to the media. Among the demands was a repeal of the 1871 ban on further treaty making, the end of state court jurisdiction over American Indians, and a review of U.S. treaty violations of the past and redress for those violations. By the time the caravan arrived in Washington, D.C., on November 3, it had grown to numbers well exceeding expectations. A large number of reservation Indians turned out, although AIM was regarded primarily as an urban group.

Unfortunately, the unexpectedly large number of participants meant a shortage of accommodations. Eventually the Department of the Interior’s auditorium was booked as a place for the activists to stay. As people began to leave the Bureau of Indian Affairs building, overzealous guards began to push people out through the doors. Believing that they might be turned over to a police riot squad, activists rushed back into the building and barricaded themselves in, breaking apart furniture in order to board windows and fasten doors. They remained inside for six days. Finally, on November 9, negotiators reached a settlement: Those involved would not be prosecuted, and $66,000 was appropriated for return transportation. The Twenty Points would be considered, and a response would be made.

The response to the Twenty Points issued by the administration of President Richard M. Nixon in January 1973, disappointed the tribes. In essence, the administration rejected any notion of treaty enforcement or treaty reform although it promised more positive action.

Wounded Knee II

In January, 1973, a Sioux, Wesley Bad Heart Bear, was killed under uncertain circumstances. When a white man was charged with manslaughter instead of murder, Dennis Banks and Russell Means led AIM supporters first into Buffalo Gap, South Dakota, and then into Rapid City, demanding justice. Though tension filled the air for several days, a promise of justice was finally extracted, and Banks addressed the South Dakota legislature, promising a new era in race relations between whites and American Indians.

Banks and Means repaired to the Pine Ridge Reservation to celebrate. Unfortunately for them, Tribal Chairman Richard Wilson had declared (after the Raymond Yellow Thunder celebration and the occupation of the BIA office) that Means, Banks, and the AIM were never to celebrate on Pine Ridge again.

When they arrived, tribal police began to harass them. Tribal officials called in federal marshals to control the situation. On February 28, AIM occupied the Wounded Knee site on the reservation and announced political independence of Pine Ridge. More marshals arrived, and a number of AIM supporters from outside Pine Ridge arrived at the Wounded Knee compound, including a number of traditional holy people and a contingent from the Mohawk Nation.

The government issued several sets of ultimatums, culminating in an order during the second week that everyone leave Wounded Knee by six o’clock that day, or federal marshals would come in shooting. The National Council of Churches had representatives there, and they vowed that should such an order be implemented, they would stand between the marshals’ gunfire and the activists. The ultimatum was rescinded.

On March 11, Means announced on national television that the Oglala Sioux Nation had been formed and declared its independence from the United States. He promised to shoot anyone who crossed the nation’s borders. Hank Adams, a fish-in veteran who had helped negotiate the BIA occupation, met with high-level administration officials to bring about some of the changes desired by AIM. The occupation lasted seventy-two days.

Legislative and Judicial Activism

The principle of tribal sovereignty was established between 1823 and 1832 in a series of cases: Johnson v. McIntosh (1823), Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831), and Worcester v. Georgia (1832). In all these cases, the operative phrasing was that tribes were “dependent, domestic nations.” In United States v. Kagama (1886), the Supreme Court ruled that the federal branch of the U.S. government, specifically the Congress, held ultimate sovereignty over tribal nations. This solidified the “plenary power” of Congress, meaning that it could legislate American Indian affairs in any way it saw fit, without regard to constitutional review. Similarly, in Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock (1903), the Supreme Court ruled that Congress may abrogate at will any treaty with any tribe.

The tide in adjudication turned somewhat in the early 1900s. In United States v. Winans (1905), the Court recognized that tribes have rights reserved for them even if those rights are not specifically named in a treaty. In Winters v. United States (1908), the Court held that water rights are included even if not named in treaties.

The beginning of the modern era of American Indian law is the landmark case Hitchcock v. Lee (1959). In that case, the reserved rights by treaty were held to include the right of the Navajo to try a case in their own tribal courts. The state of Arizona’s position, that it alone had the right to try cases, was rebuffed.

By the 1960s, there were numerous organizations that pursued the rights of American Indians through the courts. These included the Indian Rights Association, the Association on American Indian Affairs, the Legal Services Corporation, and the Native American Rights Fund. One of the persistent cases was the battle over fishing rights, which came before the Supreme Court three times during the 1960s. This series of cases became known as the Puyallup Series. In United States v. Washington (1973), the Supreme Court upheld the American Indian right to share equally in the salmon harvest in the Northwest. A subsequent case, Washington v. Fishing Vessel Association (1979), modified the earlier ruling somewhat by granting American Indians only a “moderate” fishing livelihood.

During the 1970s, American Indians increasingly won judicial approval for many tribal and self-determining activities. These included education, taxes, tribal governance, adoption, and revenue-generating operations of all kinds. Two particular landmark cases are United States v. Mazurie (1975), in which tribal courts gained the right to try a non-Indian, and Fisher v. District Court (1976), in which it was held that the state of Montana could not intervene in a Northern Cheyenne adoption. Finally, in 1977, the decision in Delaware v. Weeks ended the doctrine of plenary power, as the Court applied constitutional review to an act of Congress regarding American Indians.

Since then, three important congressional acts have been passed that seem to many to mark a new attitude toward American Indians. The 1978 American Indian Religious Freedom Act extended to American Indians the same religious freedom enjoyed by other Americans. The 1988 Indian Gaming Regulatory Act opened the door to tribal generation of revenue through the gaming industry, a boon to many tribes’ coffers. The 1990 Native American Grave Protection and Repatriation Act began finally to address a problem most American Indians believed to be a symbol of American lack of respect for the First Nations.

Bibliography

Cobb, Daniel M., and Loretta Fowler. Beyond Red Power: American Indian Politics and Activism since 1900. Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research, 2007. Print.

Deloria, Vine, Jr. Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties: An Indian Declaration of Independence. New York: Delacorte, 1974. Print.

Josephy, Alvin M., Jr. Red Power: The American Indians’ Fight for Freedom. New York: American Heritage, 1971. Print.

Olson, James S., and Raymond Wilson. Native Americans in the Twentieth Century. Provo: Brigham Young UP, 1984. Print.

Ziontz, Alvin J. “Indian Litigation.” The Aggressions of Civilization: Federal Indian Policy Since the 1880s. Ed. Sandra L. Cadwalader and Vine Deloria, Jr. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1984. Print.