Saving the Reservation

Cover

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Title Page, Copyright

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pp. iii-vi

Contents

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pp. vii-viii

Preface

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pp. ix-2

This book is not a history of the National Congress of American Indians. Neither is it an inclusive account of government-Indian relations during the 1950s. It is the story of a remarkable American, Joseph R. Garry, who changed the course of events, who expunged the past as determinant of ...

1. Emergency!

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pp. 3-9

December 9,1953: They left Phoenix with disaster looming, a tempest gathering, those delegates to the tenth convention of the National Congress of American Indians. They left Phoenix's fabricated greenery and its tufarock capitol, with sculpted Truth and Justice atop, to go back to their reservations,...

2. "The Chance of Our Indian Lifetimes"

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pp. 10-30

When the National Congress of American Indians held its organizing convention in 1944, Sgt. Joe Garry was with the army in Europe. He was one of the new generation targeted by the founders of the NCAI in their call for delegates, one of those "away at war" who would come home "dissatisfied with the way things were before they went into the armed services....

3. The Crucial Year

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pp. 31-44

In the days after the emergency session of 1954, the year, took shape ominously. Congress uncaged plans that hovered like rapacious vultures over the Indian community. These "legislative proposals," warned the National Congress of American Indians, "constituted the gravest threat to Indian...

4. Turning Points

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pp. 45-65

In that crucial year of 1954, the Nation Congress of American Indians surged in visibility and prestige as the instrument of Indian peoples. Joe Garry, Helen Peterson, and others lifted it from near calamity by the skinniest of bootstraps, using Congress and the Bureau of Indian Affairs as...

5. Roots: The Coeur d'Alenes

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pp. 66-89

Joseph Garry descended from a mixed lineage of Kalispel, Spokane, and Coeur d'Alene Indians. And Irish. He could have settled among any of them - perhaps not among the Irish - but he was raised in the fertile Lovell Valley in the southernmost reaches of the Coeur d'Alene reservation, and considered himself a Coeur d'Alene....

6. Boy to Man

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pp. 90-114

Joseph Richard Garry was born as the sun broke over the forested hills to light the patterned fields and pastures of the Coeur d'Alene reservation on the crisp morning of March 8, 19IO. Glancing at the rose-streaked sky outside her tepee, his mother named him Dawn Light....

7. Toward a Victory of Sorts

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pp. 115-134

October 28, 1957: More than 200 delegates from eighty-six tribes crowded into Claremore over the weekend before the fourteenth annual convention of the National Congress of American Indians. They found the resort town of 6,000, site of an old Cherokee trading post, awash with visitors, hotels and boardinghouses crammed, and knots of men and women

8. The Garry Era Ends

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pp. 135-150

Holding the Missoula convention in September put the National Congress of American Indians on record before the I958 elections in November, and the early date also gave Joe Garry and his executive council a little more planning time before the next annual meeting. The council earnestly discussed changing the convention program structure-perhaps dividing delegates into working groups-to give everyone a chance to be ...

9. Money- and Its Consequences

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pp. 151-167

Adversity, that mother of ingenuity (from the old French verb meaning "turn"), turned Joe Garry from relative obscurity as a tribal councilman to national eminence in Indian political affairs. Adversity, in the form of the Julia Nicodemus tax case, thrust Garry into prominence among western tribes. The western tribes saw Garry as a leader, and he saw them...

10. "I Enjoyed Working with the People"

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pp. 168-186

Joe Garry's plan to spend judgment funds to rehabilitate the Coeur d' Alenes, to make the award his derrick to hoist them out of poverty and lethargy, was slow getting under way. And Garry's gordian personal agenda did not help: He was, at once, program director acting as chairman of the tribe, president of the Affiliated Tribes of Northwest Indians, and candidate for the U.S. Senate. He was also thinking seriously of making...

Epilogue

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p. 187-187

Notes

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pp. 188-208

Sources

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pp. 209-215

Index

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pp. 216-221