Custer Died For Your Sins Read online

  During the years since the reservation was created, members of other tribes came to visit and ended up as residents. Dull Knife’s Cheyennes hid at Pine Ridge for a while and a group of them came to be permanent residents. Osages, Kaws, and other Oklahoma tribes also had scattered families living on the reservation.

  Over the years the Oglala Sioux have had a number of problems. Their population has grown faster than their means of support. The government allowed white farmers to come into the eastern part of the reservation and create a county, with the best farm lands owned or operated by whites. The reservation was allotted and when ownership became too complicated, control of the land passed out of Indian hands. The government displaced a number of families during the last world war by taking a part of the reservation for use as a bombing range to train crews for combat. Only in 1968 was the land returned to tribal and individual use.

  The tribe became a favorite subject for study quite early because of its romantic past. Gradually theories arose attempting to explain the apparent lack of progress of the Oglala Sioux. The real issue, white control of the reservation, was overlooked completely. Instead, every conceivable intangible cultural distinction was used to explain lack of economic, social, and educational progress of a people who were, to all intents and purposes, absentee landlords because of the government policy of leasing their lands to whites.

  One study advanced the startling proposition that Indians with many cattle were, on the average, better off than Indians without cattle. Cattle Indians, apparently, had more capital and income than did non-cattle Indians. The study had innumerable charts and graphs which demonstrated this great truth beyond doubt of a reasonably prudent man.

  Studies of this type were common but unexciting. They lacked that certain flair of insight so beloved by anthropologists. Then one day a famous anthropologist advanced the thesis, probably valid at the time and in the manner in which he advanced it, that the Oglala were WARRIORS WITHOUT WEAPONS.

  The chase was on.

  From every library stack in the nation anthropologists converged on the innocent Oglala Sioux to test this new thesis before the ink dried on the scholarly journals. Outfitting the anthropological expeditions to Pine Ridge became the number-one industry of the small off-reservation Nebraska towns south of Pine Ridge. Surely supplying the Third Crusade to the Holy Land was a minor feat compared with the task of keeping the anthropologists at Pine Ridge.

  Every conceivable difference between the Oglala Sioux and the folks at Hyannisport was attributed to the quaint warrior tradition of the Oglala Sioux. From lack of roads to unshined shoes Sioux problems were generated, so the anthros discovered, by the refusal of the white man to recognize the great desire of the Oglalas to go to war. Why expect an Oglala to become a small businessman when he was only waiting for that wagon train to come around the bend?

  The very real and human problems of the reservation were considered to be merely by-products of the failure of a warrior people to become domesticated. The fairly respectable thesis of past exploits in war, perhaps romanticized for morale purposes, became a demonic spiritual force all its own. Some Indians, in a tongue-in-cheek manner for which Indians are justly famous, suggested that a subsidized wagon train be run through the reservation each morning at 9 A.M. and the reservation people paid a minimum wage for attacking it.

  By outlining this problem I am not deriding the Sioux. I lived eighteen years on that reservation and know many of the problems it suffers. How, I ask, can the Oglala Sioux make any headway in education when their lack of education is ascribed to a desire to go to war? Would not perhaps an incredibly low per capita income, virtually non-existent housing, extremely inadequate roads, and domination by white farmers and ranchers make some difference? If the little Sioux boy or girl had no breakfast, had to walk miles to a small school, and had no decent clothes and place to study in a one-room log cabin, should the level of education be comparable to New Trier High School?

  What use would roads, houses, schools, businesses, income, be to a people that everyone expected would soon depart on the hunt or warpath? I would submit that a great deal of the lack of progress at Pine Ridge is occasioned by people who believe they are helping the Oglalas when they insist on seeing, in the life of the people of that reservation, only those things which they want to see. Real problems and real people become invisible before the great romantic notion that the Sioux yearn for the days of Crazy Horse and Red Cloud and will do nothing until those days return.

  The logical conclusion of this rampage of “warriorism” was the creation of a type of education which claimed to make “modern Indians” out of these warriors. I will not argue right or wrong about the process, since too few Indian people on the Sioux reservations have become acquainted with it, and many of those who have, accept it as the latest revelation from on high.

  The question of the Oglala Sioux is a question that plagues every Indian tribe in the nation, if it will closely examine itself. Tribes have been defined as one thing, the definition has been completely explored, test scores have been advanced promoting and deriding the thesis, and finally the conclusion has been reached—Indians must be redefined in terms that white men will accept, even if that means re-Indianizing them according to a white man’s idea of what they were like in the past and should logically become in the future.

  What, I ask, would a school board in Moline, Illinois, or Skokie, even, do if the scholarly community tried to reorient their educational system to conform with outmoded ideas of Sweden in the glory days of Gustavus Adolphus? Would they be expected to sing “Ein Feste Burg” and charge out of the mists at the Roman Catholics to save the Reformation every morning as school began?

  Or the Irish? Would they submit to a group of Indians coming to Boston and telling them what a modern Irishman was like? Expecting them to dress in green and hunt leprechauns so as to live on the leprechaun’s hidden gold would hardly provide a meaningful path for the future.

  Again let us consider the implications of theories put forward to solve the problems of poverty among the blacks. Several years ago the word went forth across the land that black poverty was due to the disintegration of the black family, that the black father no longer had a prominent place in the home.

  How incredibly short-sighted that thesis was. How typically Anglo-Saxon! How in the world could there have been a black family if people were sold like cattle for two hundred years, if there were large plantations that served merely as farms to breed more slaves, if white owners systematically ravaged black women? When did the black family unit ever become integrated? During the years of the grandfather clause, when post-Civil War Negroes were denied the vote because their grandfathers hadn’t been eligible to vote? Thanks to the programs of the Ku Klux Klan?

  Academia, and its by-products, continues to become more irrelevant to the needs of people. The rest of America had better beware of having little quaint mores that will attract anthropologists or it will soon become victim of the conceptual prison into which Indians have been thrown.

  What difference does it make?

  Several years ago an anthropologist stated that over a period of some twenty years he had spent, from all sources, close to ten million dollars studying a tribe of less than a thousand people! Imagine what that amount of money would have meant to that group of people had it been invested in buildings and businesses. There would have been no problems to study!

  Therein lies the trap into which American society has fallen and into which we all unknowingly fall. There is an undefined expectation in American society that once a problem is defined, no matter how, and understood by a significant number of people who have some relation to the problem, there is no problem any more.

  Poverty programs are the best contemporary example of this thesis. The poor, according to Harrington, are characterized by their invisibility. Once that thesis was accepted, discussions of poverty made the poor so visible that eventually solutions to poverty replaced the visible po
or and the poor faded once again into obscurity. And everyone was outraged to discover that three years of discussion and underfunded programs had not solved the problem of poverty.

  In defense of the anthropologist it must be recognized that those who do not publish, perish. That those who do not bring in a substantial sum of research money soon slide down the scale of university approval. What university is not equally balanced between the actual education of its students and a multitude of small bureaus, projects, institutes, and programs which are designed to harvest grants for the university?

  The implications of the anthropologist, if not for all America, should be clear for the Indian. Compilation of useless knowledge “for knowledge’s sake” should be utterly rejected by the Indian people. We should not be objects of observation for those who do nothing to help us. During the crucial days of 1954, when the Senate was pushing for termination of all Indian rights, not one single scholar, anthropologist, sociologist, historian, or economist came forward to support the tribes against the detrimental policy.

  How much had scholars learned about Indians from 1492 to 1954 that would have placed termination in a more rational light? Why didn’t the academic community march to the side of the tribes? Certainly the past few years have shown how much influence academia can exert when it feels impelled to enlist in a cause? Is Vietnam any more crucial to the moral stance of America than the great debt owed to the Indian tribes?

  Perhaps we should suspect the real motives of the academic community. They have the Indian field well defined and under control. Their concern is not the ultimate policy that will affect the Indian people, but merely the creation of new slogans and doctrines by which they can climb the university totem pole. Reduction of people to ciphers for purposes of observation appears to be inconsequential to the anthropologist when compared with immediate benefits he can derive, the production of further prestige, and the chance to appear as the high priest of American society, orienting and manipulating to his heart’s desire.

  A couple of years ago Roger Jourdain, chairman of the Red Lake Chippewa tribe of Minnesota, casually had the anthropologists escorted from his reservation. This was the tip of the iceberg breaking through into visibilty. If only more Indians had the insight of Jourdain. Why should we continue to be the private zoos for anthropologists? Why should tribes have to compete With scholars for funds when the scholarly productions are so useless and irrelevant to real life?

  I would advocate a policy to be adopted by Indian tribes which would soon clarify the respective roles of anthropologists and tribes. Each anthro desiring to study a tribe should be made to apply to the tribal council for permission to do his study. He would be given such permission only if he raised as a contribution to the tribal budget an amount of money equal to the amount he proposed to spend in his study. Anthropologists would thus become productive members of Indian society instead of ideological vultures.

  This proposal was discussed at one time in Indian circles. It curled no small number of anthropological hairdos. Irrational shrieks of “academic freedom” rose like rockets from launching pads. The very idea of putting a tax on useless information was intolerable to the anthros we talked with.

  But the question is very simple. Are the anthros concerned about “freedom” or “license”? Academic freedom certainly does not imply that one group of people have to become chessmen for another group of people. Why should Indian communities be subjected to prying non-Indians any more than other communities? Should any group have a franchise to stick its nose into someone else’s business? No.

  Realistically, Indian people will continue to allow their communities to be turned inside out until they come to realize the damage that is being done them. Then they will seal up the reservations until no further knowledge, useless or otherwise, is created. Thus the pendulum will swing radically from one extreme to another, whereas with understanding between the two groups it would not have to swing at all.

  * * *

  Recently, the world of the anthropologist has produced a book the influence of which will be very great. And very detrimental to Indian people. Perhaps when the implications of this book reach the tribes in the form of government programs, they will finally awaken and push the parasitic scholars off the reservations and set up realistic guidelines by which they can control what is written and said about them.

  The book is called Man’s Rise to Civilization as Shown by the Indians of North America from Primeval Times to the Coming of the Industrial State. It exemplifies all the sacred innuendos by which Indians have been hidden from view over the years. The unexamined premises under which the book was written are many and the book will merely serve to reinforce existing stereotypes concerning Indians which have been so detrimental for years.

  The explanation of the book, as found on the jacket, indicates sufficiently the assumptions under which the book was written. In the foreword, by Elman R. Service, Professor of Anthropology at Michigan, it is noted that “beginning with the most pitiful and primitive Indians found by explorers, the Digger Indians of Nevada and Utah, Mr. Farb shows that even they are much above the highest non-human primate.” Thank you, Mr. Farb, we were pretty worried about that.

  The back of the jacket describes Mr. Farb as having been acclaimed by Stewart Udall, former Secretary of the Interior, as “one of the finest conservation spokesmen of our period.” This statement will raise the question in Indians’ minds of who read the book to Stewart Udall.

  Being acclaimed as a conservationist by Udall is not exactly gathering laurels either. Udall has allowed Pyramid Lake in Nevada to languish some eight years with a mere pittance of water although it is the finest natural water resource in the state. And although he has repeatedly promised the Pyramid Lake Paiute tribe water for the lake. In many people’s minds the best way to eradicate a species is to authorize Udall to conserve it. In his own inimitable style he will accomplish the task posthaste.

  Farb’s basic assumption is that somehow Indians have risen to civilized heights by being the victims of four centuries of systematic genocide. Under these assumptions the European Jews should be the most civilized people on earth from their graduate course in gas ovens given by Eichmann.

  The implications of Farb’s book are even more frightening. Indians, people will feel, weren’t really as good as we thought, therefore we must hurry them on their way to civilization. Indians weren’t really conservationists, therefore all this business about them having an attachment to their lands is bunk. Why not, therefore, go ahead with the plan for wholesale mortgage of Indian lands, they aren’t using them anyway.

  One has only to read Stewart Udall’s review of Farb’s book to understand the implication of it for future Indian policy. It is a justification for all the irrational policy decisions which Udall had wished he had been able to make but which Indian people brought to a halt. Many Indians still remember Udall’s frantic ramblings at Santa Fe in 1966 when he questioned and answered himself on why Indians had not made progress like his friends in Arizona. His answer: because they didn’t have the management tools that IBM, General Motors, and Bell Telephone had.

  The eventual solution, as proposed by the Department of the Interior, was the creation of a bill under which land could be mortgaged for development, with bureaucrats “giving” technical advice and sharing none of the responsibility for failure, should it occur. The Udall Omnibus Bill was basically to continue “man’s rise to civilization” by systematic confiscation of existing capital owned by those-to-be-civilized, through the device of ill-advised mortgages.

  Farb continues to use phrases such as “test tubes” and “living laboratories” in describing the development, or rather unfolding, of Indian cultural change. In essence, then, Indian communities exist primarily for people to experiment with. Bureaucratically this means “pilot projects.” Anthropologically, as we have seen, it means the continued treatment of Indian people as objects for observation.

  One classic statement—
“Modern American society has little place for institutionalized rites of rebellion, because it is a democratic society; it is characteristic of a democratic society always to question and challenge, never to be certain of itself”—blithely dismisses social reality.

  American society has, in fact, institutionalized rebellion by making it popular. Once popularized, rebellions become fads and are so universalized that not to be rebellious is to be square, out of it, irrelevant. Television ads make a big noise about the great rebellions going on in the auto industry. Deodorants and soaps are always new, a radical departure from the old. Cigarette smokers are cautioned to break away from the crowd. Unless a man is rebelling, he is not really a man. And to achieve relevance in American society a person must always be the pioneer, the innovator, against the establishment.

  The import of institutionalizing rebellion is that when real rebellion occurs society climbs the walls in its fright. I keenly remember our confrontation with Department of the Interior officials at Santa Fe, when several advised us to go home or we would be “terminated.” A democratic society is always up tight about real rebellions because its very operating premise is that rebellions are nice. When rebellions turn out to be not so nice, panic prevails.

  Democratic society is always absolutely sure of itself. It could not be otherwise, for to be unsure would call into question the very basis of the political institutions which gave it existence. Even more horrifying would be an examination of the economic realities underlying the society.

  With institutionalized rebellion a way of life, one of the major differences between white and Indians emerges—ingratitude. Whites always expect Indians to be grateful according to the whites’ ideas of gratitude. Or else they expect ingratitude to be expressed in institutionalized behavior, as other members of society have been taught to do. When Indians do not respond in accustomed ways, because the way is irrelevant to Indian modes of expression, Indian response is attributed to the innate savagery of the Indian.