Devils in Disguise: The Carnegie Project, the Cherokee Nation, and the 1960s

It's not a question of who's right and wrong. It's a question of who's got the power.

Clyde Warrior (Ponca)

I suppose this is not a paper in the strict sense of the word, so much as it is the random thoughts of a confused man in rather troubled times, as I suppose we all are.

Robert K. Thomas (Cherokee), "Cross-Cultural Cannibalism"

In the summer of 1963, Robert K. Thomas, a doctoral candidate at the University of Chicago and faculty member at Wayne State University's Monteith College, penned a letter to his advisor, the eminent anthropologist Sol Tax. Thomas had just arrived in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, where he was to serve as the field director of a four-year cross-cultural education research project funded by the Carnegie Corporation in New York. After setting up his office at a local college, he went to visit Earl Boyd Pierce, general counsel of the Cherokee Nation. Sensing his host's apprehension, Thomas explained at length his reason for being there. The Carnegie Project research team would establish ties with the "tribal community"—people who spoke Cherokee as their first language and lived in small kin-related settlements spread across five counties in northeastern Oklahoma—and directly involve them in a program to promote literacy in English.¹ This literacy, in turn, would empower traditional Cherokees to break through the structural isolation and marginality they experienced in their daily lives. Thomas considered the meeting with Pierce a qualified success. "I think I soothed his ruffled feathers," he confided to Tax, "but he sure thinks you are the devil in disguise."²

What was it about the Carnegie Project that would ruffle feathers, and what had Sol Tax done to be cast in such an unflattering light? To make sense of Thomas's assertion it is necessary to considered it in the multiple contexts of the Cherokee community, the development of action anthropology, and the political culture of Cold War America. The importance of this latter point cannot be overstated, particularly because scholars have essentially written American Indians out of recent United States history. Indeed, Native people rarely appear—if at all—in syntheses devoted to the 1960s or the post-1945 period in general.³ This implicitly and perhaps unintentionally defines Indian history as tangential to the American story and therefore safely left at the margins. The following case study argues quite the opposite. It finds the Cherokee Nation at the center of a national and international culture war—at a time when the meanings of community, identity, poverty, and power were openly contested.

Community, Identity, and Power in the Cherokee Nation before 1963

When Robert K. Thomas drove into northeastern Oklahoma, he entered a complex space shaped by generations of conflict and change. After being forcibly removed from its southeastern homeland in the 1830s, the Cherokee Nation reestablished itself in what was then called the Indian Territory. The Cherokee people so effectively reconstructed their national government, courts, and schools that they could boast a level of political stability and educational achievement far surpassing that of their non-Native neighbors. But everything changed during the late nineteenth century when the federal government inaugurated its policy of assimilation and allotment. This assault on tribal sovereignty led to legislation that dissolved their government, allotted their lands, and culminated in Oklahoma statehood in 1907. Over the course of the next several decades, non-Indians politically, legally, and demographically surrounded the Cherokees. By the 1960s, a majority of Oklahomans accepted the fiction that tribal authority had been subsumed by the state and that Cherokee history and peoplehood were, for all intents and purposes, things of the past.⁴

In reality, the Cherokees survived this onslaught but not without being wracked by internal tensions. A clear division between those whose social lives revolved around close-knit traditional communities and others who accepted the dominant society as their own emerged throughout the twentieth century. Many in the former group had resisted allotment, arguing that the process violated their sovereignty. Whether or not...