Category: American Indians

The other Indian scandal

At Daily Kos, writer mbw tells one side of the Indian trust litigation story. This problem has been festering for 119 years, but somehow now it’s the fault of the current Administration. No issue is black and white — and issues in Indian country are particularly nuanced.

This incomplete and one-sided report seems to me to be a particularly good example of what passes for reporting in today’s media, mainstream or blog. But, as DailyKos is a big-time website, NewMexiKen thought mbw’s report should be noted.

Update: “mbw” is MB Williams at Wampum.

The New World

In a review where she calls The New World the “first necessary film of this young year” and describes Q’orianka Kilcher as “the sensational newcomer,” Manohla Dargis waxes poetically on film-making and imagery.

In the 1950’s, the young turks at Cahiers du Cinéma advanced an idea that cinema is not literature, but instead expresses itself visually through the mise-en-scène. The image of laundry hanging on a line or of a pair of empty shoes in a film by Yasujiro Ozu matters as much as the dialogue; those are no more decorative than the image of birds taking flight in “The New World.” The images don’t exist apart from the narrative; they are the narrative, adding layers and moods, imparting philosophies of life. In one film, the shoes convey a sense of profound loss, the ache of human impermanence; in the other, the birds speak to the idea that the world is not ours for the taking.

One of the pleasures of returning to a favorite film is that you are no longer as captive to the plot; you need not pay as close attention to who is saying what and why, and are therefore free to see – perhaps for the first time – how a filmmaker makes meaning with the images. Something I didn’t fully appreciate until I saw “The New World” a second time was how Mr. Malick uses physical space to contrast two separate world views. Indeed, the entire meaning of the film is conveyed in a single sublime edit that joins a shot of the grubby settlement as it looks from outside its walls – and framed inside an open door – with its mirror image. As the camera looks through the same door, this time pointed out, we see how the settlers would have viewed the beautiful wide world from inside a fort that was every bit as much a prison as their own consciousness.

Miss Kilcher, “Pocahontas,” 14 when the film was shot, was born in Germany. Her father is Quechua-Huachipaeri Indian (Peru), her mother Swiss.

Wampum

Wampum, a blog that bills itself “Progressive Politics, Indian Issues, and Autism Advocacy,” has been providing some much-needed attention to the Indian tribes’ point of view in the Abramoff matter.

The War That Made America

Virginia Heffernan reviews the PBS four-part edutainment series on the French and Indian War that debuts this evening. An excerpt:

She [co-executive producer Laura Fisher] has set out to render in lavish particulars the story of the strange war between the French and British empires for control of the Ohio River Valley in the 1750’s and 60’s. The war was triangulated: American Indians, for whom the valley was a homeland, played the empires against each other, eventually tipping the balance of power in favor of the British. The Indians’ strategy, diplomacy and unorthodox military tactics are the chief focus of this program, which attends closely to their considerable role in the war. (Graham Greene, the actor and Oneida Indian whose ancestors fought in the war, serves as narrator.)

Update: The first two hours (of four) were shown January 18th (remainder January 25th). NewMexiKen watched and it was good, though somewhat slow-paced. Greene’s narration explains most of what is happening in a useful but not burdensome way. The Indian role and agenda is demonstrated more thoroughly than ever before in a production of this type.

NewMexiKen assumes (but has no documentation) that I may well have had ancestors fighting for both the English and French sides.

Pablita Velarde

The woman who honored her own Tewa birth name Tse Tsa — Golden Dawn — by creating bright and captivating paintings died in Albuquerque at 87 on Tuesday.

Known to the world as Pablita Velarde, the Santa Clara Pueblo artist achieved international acclaim as an acutely observant traditionalist painter who managed to tell her cultural history in a variety of media even as she bent tradition to achieve her personal artistic goals.

“She really blazed a trail both for Native American and women artists by following her dream from the time she was a young girl,” said Shelby Tisdale, director of Santa Fe’s Museum of Indian Arts and Culture. “The museum has been planning an exhibition of her work for the spring featuring all her paintings from Bandelier National Monument. Now it seems more important than ever to honor her lifetime of work.”

The Santa Fe New Mexican

Pablita Velarde

Click image to enlarge.

A wonderful sampling of Pablita Velarde’s artwork is online.

Thanks to dangerousmeta for the pointer.

Five books in five days (5)

NewMexiKen spent much of the afternoon with M. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn, a superb novel that won the Pulitzer Prize in 1969. It’s my fourth complete book since Thursday.

In compelling language, Momaday tells the story of Abel, an American Indian veteran who returns home to his pueblo in 1945. In telling Abel’s story we learn also stories about Abel’s grandfather, the priest, women in Abel’s life, friends. All this takes place in Walatowa, a fictional pueblo whose geography resembles the actual Pueblo of Jemez, the surrounding mountains and canyons, and in Los Angeles among relocated Indians.

And, while the story is moving and meaningful, it is Momaday’s language that soars. Abel at Valle Grande in the Jemez Mountains (truly, in real life, one of the world’s great scenic wonders):

Of all the places that he knew, this valley alone could reflect the great spatial majesty of the sky. It scooped out of the dark peaks like the well of a great, gathering storm, deep umber and blue and smoke-colored. The view across the diameter was magnificent; it was an unbelievably great expanse. As many times as he had been there in the past, each new sight of it always brought him up short, and he had to catch his breath. Just there, it seemed, a strange and brilliant light lay upon the world, and all the objects in the landscape were washed clean and set away in the distance. In the morning sunlight the Valle Grande was dappled with the shadows of clouds and vibrant with rolling winter grass. The clouds were always there, huge, sharply described, and shining in the pure air. But the great feature of the valley was its size. It was almost too great for the eye to hold, strangely beautiful and full of distance. Such vastness makes for illusion, a kind of illusion that comprehends reality, and where it exists there is always wonder and exhilaration. He looked at the facets of a boulder that lay balanced on the edge of the land, and the first thing beyond, the vague misty field out of which it stood, was the floor of the valley itself, pale and blue-green, miles away. He shifted the focus of his gaze, and he could just make out the clusters of dots that were cattle grazing along the river in the faraway plain.

Or this, the Navajo Ben Benally remembering a snow-filled day:

And afterward, when you brought the sheep back, your grandfather had filled the barrel with snow and there was plenty of water again. But he took you to the trading post anyway, because you were little and had looked forward to it. There were people inside, a lot of them, because there was a big snow on the ground and they needed things and they wanted to stand around and smoke and talk about the weather. You were little and there was a lot to see, and all of it was new and beautiful: bright new buckets and tubs, saddles and ropes, hats and shirts and boots, a big glass case all filled with candy. Frazer was the trader’s name. He gave you a piece of hard red candy and laughed because you couldn’t make up your mind to take it at first, and you wanted it so much you didn’t know what to do. And he gave your grandfather some tobacco and brown paper. And when he had smoked, your grandfather talked to the trader for a long time and you didn’t know what they were saying and you just looked around at all the new and beautiful things. And after a while the trader put some things out on the counter, sacks of flour and sugar, a slab of salt pork, some canned goods, and a little bag full of the hard red candy. And your grandfather took off one of his rings and gave it to the trader. It was a small green stone, set carelessly in thin silver. It was new and it wasn’t worth very much, not all the trader gave for it anyway. And the trader opened one of the cans, a big can of whole tomatoes, and your grandfather sprinkled sugar on the tomatoes and the two of you ate them right there and drank bottles of sweet red soda pop. And it was getting late and you rode home in the sunset and the whole land was cold and white. And that night your grandfather hammered the strips of silver and told you stories in the firelight. And you were little and right there in the center of everything, the sacred mountains, the snow-covered mountains and the hills, the gullies and the flats, the sundown and the night, everything—where you were little, where you were and had to be.

Awesome book; simply awesome.

Western icons

Larry McMurtry’s Oh What a Slaughter, mentioned just below, does make at least one interesting claim:

The movies, by their nature, favor only a few stars, and only a few national heroes. Of the thousands of interesting characters who played a part in winning the West, only a bare handful have any real currency with the American public now. Iconographically, even Lewis and Clark haven’t really survived, though Sacagawea has. With the possible exception of Kit Carson, none of the mountain men mean anything today. Kit Carson’s name vaguely suggests the Old West to many people, but not one in a million of them will have any distinct idea as to what Kit did.

The roster of still-recognizable Westerners probably boils down to Custer, Buffalo Bill Cody, Billy the Kid, and perhaps Wild Bill Hickok. …

Skimpy as the image bank is for white Westerners, it is even skimpier for Indians. My guess would be that only Sacagawea, Sitting Bull, and Geronimo still ring any bells with the general public. Crazy Horse, who never allowed his image to be captured, is still important to Indians as a symbol of successful resistance, but less so to whites. Even a chief such as Red Cloud, so renowned in his day that he went to New York and made a speech at Cooper Union, is now only known to historians, history buffs, and a few Nebraskans.

At the broadest level, only the white stars Custer, Cody, and Bill the Kid, and two tough Indians, Sitting Bull and Geronimo, are the people the public thinks about when it thinks about the Old West.

NewMexiKen would add Wyatt Earp, but otherwise thinks McMurtry is correct. Anyone feel differently?

Wounded Knee

The following is from The Library of Congress, posted on the Today in History page for this date last year, but not available this year:

On December 29, 1890 at Wounded Knee Creek, on the Pine Ridge Reservation, South Dakota, some 500 soldiers of the United States Seventh Cavalry opened fire on approximately 350 Lakota (Sioux) Indians of Chief Big Foot’s Miniconjou band. At the end of the confrontation, between 150 and 300 Sioux men, women, and children, including Chief Big Foot, were dead. This event marked the end of Lakota resistance until the 1970s. Apart from the few minor skirmishes that followed, the Wounded Knee massacre ended the Indian Wars.

In many ways, the massacre resulted from the Ghost Dance movement. The movement was led by a Paiute named Wovoka who claimed to have had a vision that the “Old Earth” would be destroyed and a new one created in which Native Americans could live as they had before the coming of the European. He preached that the only way to survive the impending apocalypse would be to faithfully perform the Ghost Dance and the ceremonies associated with it.

Continue reading Wounded Knee

Cherokee In Violation Of Indian Removal Act Of 1830

DAHLONEGA, GA—Authorities issued a warrant for the arrest and forced relocation of local carpenter and half-blooded Cherokee Indian Jonathan Silvers Monday, when he was found to be in violation of the federal Indian Removal Act of 1830.

“Mr. Silvers is in violation of federal law,” said Col. Jack Kippler, who is leading the Bureau of Indian Affairs case against Silvers. “For this reason, he was taken into custody, and he is currently awaiting forcible resettlement on a Cherokee reservation in Oklahoma by the U.S. Army.”
…

The BIA is currently fielding applications from families who would like to live on Silvers’ former land. According to Kippler, the Silvers’ two-story, 1,600-square-foot house, valued at $145,000, would make an excellent home for a white family.

From, where else, The Onion – America’s Finest News Source. There’s more.

Washita

The surprise attack on Black Kettle’s village of Southern Cheyenne at the Washita River in Indian Territory (now western Oklahoma) took place on this date in 1868.

Just before midnight, they crawled to the edge of a bluff which overlooked a river valley. One of the scouts announced he could smell smoke. The other heard a dog bark. Custer could not see anything, and he did not smell smoke or hear the dog. But in the quiet moments of listening, he heard a baby cry. He had found his Indians.

Custer divided his command into four detachments, which would surround the village, north, south, east, and west, and wait for dawn. On his command, they would charge from the four directions.

At first light, Custer turned to the band leader and directed him “to give us ‘Garry Owen’ [his favorite song]. At once the rollicking notes of that familiar marching and fighting air sounded forth through the valley, and in a moment were re-echoed back from the opposite sides by the loud and continued cheers of the men of the other detachments, who, true to their orders, were there and in readiness to pounce upon the Indians the moment the attack began. In this manner the battle of the Washita commenced.”

The “battle” in the village was short, barely fifteen minutes. The soldiers drove the people from their lodges barefoot and half naked, shooting them in the open. Many of the warriors managed to reach the trees, where they began to return fire; a few of them escaped, but after a couple of hours, the firing ceased and 103 Cheyennes lay dead in the snow and mud. Custer reported that they were fighting men, but others said that ninety-two of them were women, children, and old people. Black Kettle, the sixty-seven-year-old leader of the band, and his wife, Medicine Woman Later, who had survived nine gunshot wounds at the Massacre of Sand Creek four years before, had been shot in the back as they attempted to cross the Lodge Pole or Washita River. Their bodies, trampled and covered with mud, were found in the shallow water by the survivors.

The soldiers seized everything in the village—guns, bows and arrows, decorated clothing, sacred shields, tobacco, dried meat, dried berries, robes, and fifty-one lodges—and burned it. In addition, they captured 875 horses and mules. Custer gave the order to slaughter these animals by cutting their throats, but the horses feared whiteman smell and shied away, and after several attempts, the men grew tired. Custer gave the order to shoot the animals instead. Custer himself slaughtered camp dogs. Then the 7th Cavalry took its captives, mostly women and children and old ones, and headed north to its base of operations, Camp Supply.

Excerpt from Killing Custer by James Welch

Native Foods Nourish Again

How about some “three sisters soup” in tomorrow’s Thanksgiving menu? Read about American Indian foods in this interesting article by Kim Severson in The New York Times. Two excerpts:

As American Indians try to reverse decades of physical and cultural erosion, they are turning to the food that once sustained them, and finding allies in the nation’s culinary elite and marketing experts.

One result is the start of a new sort of native culinary canon that rejects oily fry bread but embraces wild rice from Minnesota, salmon from Alaska and the Northwest, persimmons and papaws from the Southeast, corn from New York, bison from the Great Plains and dozens of squashes, beans, berries and melons.

Modern urban menus are beginning to feature three sisters soup, built from the classic Indian trilogy of beans, squash and corn.
…

Native foods encompass hundreds of different cultures. “There’s only now becoming a more pan-Indian sense of what Native food can be,” said the author Louise Erdrich, whose mother was Ojibwa. She writes about tribal food in many of her books and is working on a cookbook with her sister, a pediatrician on the Turtle Mountain Reservation.

“You’re talking about evolving a cuisine from a people whose cuisine has been whatever we could get for a long time,” Ms. Erdrich said.

American Indian food is the only ethnic cuisine in the nation that has yet to be addressed in the culinary world, said Loretta Barrett Oden, a chef who learned to cook growing up on the Citizen Potawatomi reservation in Oklahoma.

“You can go to most any area of this country and eat Thai or Chinese or Mongolian barbecue, but you can’t eat indigenous foods native to the Americas,” said Ms. Oden….

One item that won’t be featured on her show is fry bread, the puffy circles of deep-fried dough that serve as a base for tacos or are eaten simply with sugar or honey and are beloved on Indian reservations. That bread is fast becoming a symbol of all that is wrong with the American Indian diet, which evolved from food that was hunted, grown or gathered to one that relied on federal government commodities, including white flour and lard – the two ingredients in fry bread.

Edge of America

The subject of modern Native American life is largely untapped, and any number of interesting films might have been made about it, especially now that casinos have brought new revenue and competing ideologies to some reservations. It is a shame that the producers instead chose to make a film concluding with the wisdom, “The basketball is round, like Mother Earth.”

From Ginia Bellafante in a The New York Times review of the Showtime movie Edge of America. The film is about an African-American coach and an American Indian girls high school basketball team.

Tribes’ Basketball Passion Turns Into Business

From the front page of today’s New York Times, an article on basketball, Indian tribes and the Yakama Sun Kings.

The stands in the SunDome were unusually full Tuesday night when Yakima’s minor league basketball team, the Sun Kings, bounded onto the court for an exhibition game a few days before the start of the season.

The crowd itself was atypical, too, filled with hundreds of members of the Yakama Nation, an Indian tribe that rarely mingles with the world outside its vast reservation about five miles east of here. But in a move that riveted tribes across the country and created a rift among Indians here, leading to the ousting of three tribal officials, the Yakama Nation became the new owners of the Sun Kings last spring.

And after Tuesday’s game, the first at home under the new ownership, the Sun Kings signed an Indian player, a Sioux from Montana who had electrified the crowd with his dazzling shooting for the opposing team. The player, Richard Dionne, a 6-foot-5, 210-pound forward, is believed by officials to be the only American Indian on the roster of the Continental Basketball Association, a national eight-team league that can be a steppingstone to the N.B.A.

The tribal ownership of the team and the signing of Mr. Dionne, 24, who had been playing here for a nonprofit team not in the league, come as Indians are slowly making their way into college, semiprofessional and professional basketball.

Indians have passionately played basketball for decades on the crude courts of reservations, on half-court patches of Alaska’s frozen tundra, or anywhere they can hang a hoop. Now, for the first time, tribes are looking to buy teams as they expand their reach beyond gambling and other traditional tribal businesses.

And this, at the end:

The team’s new logo features a band wrapped around a basketball with two feathers, replacing a flaming ball. And Mr. Palmer, the tribal director, said he would suggest to team and tribal officials that they start home games with an Indian prayer and traditional Yakama drumming, to go along with the Pledge of Allegiance.

Vine Deloria Jr.

The funeral for Vine Deloria Jr. is Friday in Golden, Colorado. NewMexiKen has been wondering why this great leader hasn’t seen more national honors since his death Sunday. Someone I read wrote that Deloria was to American Indians as Rosa Parks was to African-Americans. I would say more that Vine Deloria Jr. was to American Indians as Martin Luther King Jr. was to African-Americans — an intellectual and spiritual leader.

I don’t know his wishes, those of his family or his religion, but I believe it would have been fitting if Mr. Deloria had lain in state in the rotunda of the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington.

Block That Mascot? Bite Your Tongue

Marc Fisher in The Washington Post:

Two major studies show that while activists are busy suing teams, many Indians take no offense. A survey of Indians conducted in 2002 for Sports Illustrated found that 81 percent don’t think high school or college teams should drop Indian nicknames. Asked about the Redskins, 75 percent said the name doesn’t offend them. Last year, the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Election Survey found that 90 percent of Indians did not consider “Redskins” offensive.

Best team name mentioned in the column: Southeastern Oklahoma State University women’s teams — the Lady Savages.

Court: Indian money accounting impossible

A federal appeals court decided Tuesday that it was unreasonable to require a historical accounting of money the government has been managing for Indian tribes, saying the bookkeeping chore would “take 200 years.”

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia sided with the government and the tribes in their effort to block a lower court order for a detailed tally of money owed the tribes going back to 1887.

The accounting had been ordered by U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth, who is overseeing a class-action lawsuit in which thousands of Indians claim they were cheated out of more than $100 billion in oil, gas, grazing, timber and other royalties overseen by the Interior Department.

In their appeals, the government and the Indians argued that the massive historical accounting Lamberth ordered would cost up to $13 billion – far more than was reasonable.

On Tuesday, a three judge appeals panel agreed, overturning the accounting and calling Lamberth’s decision “ill-founded,” an abuse of discretion and was not favored by either side in the lawsuit.

AP via Seattle Post-Intelligencer


The Opinion [pdf file].

Note: The case concerns individual Indian money, not tribal money as stated in the AP story.

Vine Deloria Jr.

Some words about Vine Deloria Jr., who died Sunday at age 72:

Mr. Deloria, who was trained as both a seminarian and a lawyer, steadfastly worked to demythologize how white Americans thought of American Indians. The myths, he often said – whether as romantic symbols of life in harmony with nature or as political bludgeons in fostering guilt – were both shallow. The truth, he said, was a mix, and only in understanding that mix, he argued, could either side ever fully heal.

And while [Custer Died for Your Sins], with its incendiary title, was categorized at the time as an angry young man’s anthem, Mr. Deloria’s real weapon, critics and admirers said, was his scathing, sardonic humor, which he was able to use on both sides of the Indian-white divide. He once called the Battle of the Little Bighorn, where Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer and the Seventh Cavalry were defeated by a combined force of Sioux and Northern Cheyenne in 1876 in the Montana territory, “a sensitivity-training session.”

“We have brought the white man a long way in 500 years,” he wrote….

The New York Times

“Vine was a great leader and writer, probably the most influential American Indian of the past century — one of the most influential Americans, period,” said Charles Wilkinson, of the University of Colorado School of Law at Boulder and an Indian law expert.

Deloria wrote more than 20 books, but it was his first in 1969, “Custer Died for Your Sins,” that brought him to the nation’s attention.

In 2002, Wilkinson called it “perhaps the single most influential book ever written on Indian affairs” and described it as “at once fiery and humorous, uplifting and sharply critical.”

Los Angeles Times

Burn tobacco today for the wonderful spirit of Vine Deloria Jr., who passed into the world of the ancestors Nov. 13.

Indian Country Today

Pueblos from A to Z

The Seattle Times provides a brief description of the 19 New Mexico pueblos — “the oldest tribal communities in the United States, having descended from the ancestral Pueblo cultures that once inhabited Chaco Canyon, Mesa Verde and Bandelier.”

The accompanying article — Catching glimpses of tradition in New Mexico’s native villages.

Thanks to Ah, Wilderness! for the link.

Early North American free trade agreements

NewMexiKen is reading Charles Mann’s excellent 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. I found this passage particularly interesting:

Guns are an example. As Chaplin, the Harvard historian, has argued, New England Indians were indeed disconcerted by their first experiences with European guns: the explosion and smoke, the lack of a visible projectile. But the natives soon learned that most of the British were terrible shots, from lack of practice-their guns were little more than noisemakers. Even for a crack shot, a seventeenth-century gun had fewer advantages over a longbow than may be supposed. Colonists in Jamestown taunted the Powhatan in 1607 with a target they believed impervious to an arrow shot. To the colonists’ dismay, an Indian sank an arrow into it a foot deep, “which was strange, being that a Pistall could not pierce it.” To regain the upper hand, the English set up a target made of steel. This time the archer “burst his arrow all to pieces.” The Indian was “in a great rage”; he realized, one assumes, that the foreigners had cheated. When the Powhatan later captured John Smith, Chaplin notes, Smith broke his pistol rather than reveal to his captors “the awful truth that it could not shoot as far as an arrow could fly.”

At the same time, Europeans were impressed by American technology. The foreigners, coming from a land plagued by famine, were awed by maize, which yields more grain per acre than any other cereal. Indian moccasins were so much more comfortable and waterproof than stiff, moldering English boots that when colonists had to walk for long distances their Indian companions often pitied their discomfort and gave them new footwear. Indian birchbark canoes were faster and more maneuverable than any small European boat. In 1605 three laughing Indians in a canoe literally paddled circles round the lumbering dory paddled by traveler George Weymouth and seven other men. Despite official disapproval, the stunned British eagerly exchanged knives and guns for Indian canoes. Bigger European ships with sails had some advantages. Indians got hold of them through trade and shipwreck, and trained themselves to be excellent sailors. By the time of the epidemic, a rising proportion of the shipping traffic along the New England coast was of indigenous origin.

The “epidemic” Mann refers to is the one — probably viral hepatitis — during the late 1610s that killed as many as 90% of the Indians along the Atlantic coast of what is now called New England.

Thinking about Columbus Day

NewMexiKen is well aware of the feelings among many American Indians about Columbus Day. One Lakota woman who worked for me used to ask if she could come in and work on Columbus Day, a federal holiday.

My feeling is we can’t have enough holidays and so I choose to think of Columbus Day as the Italian-American holiday. Nothing wrong with that. We have an African-American holiday on Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday. We have the Irish-American celebration that is St. Patrick’s Day. And Cinco de Mayo is surely the Mexican-American holiday, a much larger celebration here than in most of Mexico.

So, instead of protesting Columbus Day, perhaps American Indians should organize and bring about a holiday of their very own. Given the great diversity among Indian nations (and, lets face it, a proclivity for endless debate), the tribes might never reach agreement, though, so NewMexiKen will suggest a date.

The day before Columbus Day.

Columbus Day — ‘with fifty men we could subjugate them all’

They … brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks’ bells. They willingly traded everything they owned…. They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features…. They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane…. They would make fine servants…. With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.

— Christopher Columbus writing in his log upon meeting the Arawaks.

The American Indian Great-Grandmother Princess

A fascinating article from Wired on the “blood feud” between the Five Civilized Tribes of Oklahoma (the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek and Seminole) and the descendants of “Freedmen.”

And yet, three-quarters of a century after the death of Cherokee legend Stick Ross, there’s no room for his great-grandson in the Cherokee Nation. Leslie Ross has been denied citizenship in the tribe on the grounds that he is not truly Indian. “They said I don’t have any Indian blood. They say blacks have never had a part in the Cherokee Nation,” says Ross, his usually calm voice swelling with anger. “The thing is, there wouldn’t be a Cherokee Nation if it weren’t for my great-grandfather. Jesus, he was more Indian than the Indians!”

Ross is just one of at least 25,000 direct descendants of Freedmen who cannot join Oklahoma’s largest tribes. Once paragons of racial inclusion and assimilation, the Native American sovereign nations have done an about-face and systematically pushed out people of African descent. “There’s never been any stigma about intermarriage,” says Stu Phillips, editor of The Seminole Producer, a local newspaper in central Oklahoma. “You’ve got Indians marrying whites, Indians marrying blacks. It was never a problem until they got some money.”

I will fight no more forever

I am tired of fighting. Our Chiefs are killed; Looking Glass is dead, Ta Hool Hool Shute is dead. The old men are all dead. It is the young men who say “Yes” or “No.” He who led the young men is dead. It is cold, and we have no blankets; the little children are freezing to death. My people, some of them, have run away to the hills, and have no blankets, no food. No one knows where they are – perhaps freezing to death. I want to have time to look for my children, and see how many of them I can find. Maybe I shall find them among the dead. Hear me, my chiefs! I am tired. My heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever.

Chief Joseph of the Nez-Percé surrendering to Gen. Nelson Miles on this date in 1877.