In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

121 chapter five Red Power Activism, the American Indian Movement, and Wounded Knee The Rise of Modern Indian Leadership We contacted all of our relatives, friends, acquaintances, and people from the reservations as well as from the Indian slums in the city. We went from house to house with five hundred leaflets we had printed, handing them out to every Indian we could find. . . . Our first meeting was set for eight o’clock on the evening of July 28, 1968, in the basement of a rundown church. . . . Almost two hundred people had gathered to listen and to begin making their voices heard. . . . As the meeting went on, people began to speak up. One man spoke of the police brutality and said, “When do you propose to go down there to Franklin Avenue, to all those Indian bars where the cops inflict abuse on our people every night?” I told him, “We could go down there tomorrow night.” He said, “Hell No, let’s go down there right now, tonight!” . . . In that moment, AIM was born. Dennis Banks, Ojibwa, 1968 “I can’t get no satisfaction. I can’t get no satisfaction. ’Cause I try and I try and I try and I try,” sang Mick Jagger in June 1965 as the world and the United States rocked and rolled in turmoil and confusion. If you recall this song, then you are a baby-boomer that lived during these years or you like 1960s music. This tumultuous decade witnessed pivotal changes in politics, society, and culture, and more change appeared on the horizon. Change seemed to rush forward like a tide, compelling Americans to reexamine their core values. The country had not encountered such havoc since the economic suffering of the 1930s, the Civil War of the 1860s, and the colonial revolution that founded the United States. 122 · Rebuilding The protest movement of many organizations in the Cold War 1960s proved mostly to be destructive, pulling society apart, except for the fact that the tempestuous energy forged a modern Indian leadership. This was a time of the youth movement that challenged old conservative thinking, creating a generation gap. One could argue convincingly that this fresh leadership derived from Indian activism during the civil rights era and protests against the Vietnam War. But in examining the periods of the twentieth century to the present, one could also point out a broader scope, suggesting the seeds of this leadership emerged as early as 1911 with the founding of the Society of American Indians in Columbus, Ohio. A group of fifty frustrated, educated Indians included a core of leaders: Dr. Charles Eastman, Dr. Carlos Montezuma, Henry Standing Bear, Laura Cornelius , Charles Dagenett, and Thomas L. Sloan. This brazen group advocated the abolishment of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) for its paternalism and pressed for the protection of Indian legal and cultural rights until the organization fell by the wayside in the 1930s. Although the society was not founded in the West, it operated on a national scale. In Denver, Colorado, an intrepid gathering was held of Native leaders who arrived from various parts of Indian Country with one goal in mind: to protect the rights of tribal communities. Native Flathead scholar D’Arcy McNickle was a core leader, as well as Judge Napoleon B. Johnson, a Cherokee, who served as the first president of the National Congress of American Indians in 1944. One of the founding delegates, Ben Dwight (Choctaw), metaphorically explained that the group had to find common ground: “Now I know that you can’t put the same blanket over everybody because when you do that you are going to pull it off of somebody else. The same blanket won’t go over everybody at the same time, but if you use some judgment you can spread the blanket out so that the one that is a little bit colder can get warmth from it.”1 Indian groups would need to work together, forgoing tribal differences, to stand shoulder to shoulder to protect their interests and rights. Later decades witnessed the founding of the National Indian Education Association in 1970, National Tribal Chairman ’s Association in 1972, Council of Energy Resource Tribes in 1975, and several regional intertribal organizations. In 1961, with tireless work, professors Sol Tax and Nancy Lurie, Robert Thomas (Cherokee), anthropologist Alice Marriott, and others organized a pan-Indian conference held at Midway near the University of Chicago. This weeklong American Indian Chicago Conference brought together frustrated Indians...

Share