The Other Movement: Indian Rights and Civil Rights in the Deep South
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The Other Movement: Indian Rights and Civil Rights in the Deep South
280Paperback(First Edition)
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Overview
While tribal-state relationships have historically been characterized as tense, most southern tribes—particularly non-federally recognized ones—found that Indian affairs commissions offered them a unique position in which to negotiate power. Although individual tribal leaders experienced isolated victories and generated some support through the 1950s and 1960s, the creation of the inter-tribal state commissions in the 1970s and 1980s elevated the movement to a more prominent political level. Through the formalization of tribal-state relationships, Indian communities forged strong networks with local, state, and national agencies while advocating for cultural preservation and revitalization, economic development, and the implementation of community services.
This book looks specifically at Alabama and Louisiana, places of intensive political activity during the civil rights era and increasing Indian visibility and tribal reorganization in the decades that followed. Between 1960 and 1990, U.S. census records show that Alabama’s Indian population swelled by a factor of twelve and Louisiana’s by a factor of five. Thus, in addition to serving as excellent examples of the national trend of a rising Indian population, the two states make interesting case studies because their Indian commissions brought formerly disconnected groups, each with different goals and needs, together for the first time, creating an assortment of alliances and divisions.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780817356910 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Alabama Press |
| Publication date: | 11/08/2022 |
| Series: | Contemporary American Indian Studies |
| Edition description: | First Edition |
| Pages: | 280 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.00(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Other Movement
Indian Rights and Civil Rights in the Deep SouthBy Denise E. Bates
THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS
Copyright © 2012 The University of Alabama PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-1759-1
Chapter One
Back on the MapThe Emergence of a Deep Southern Indian Rights Movement
In 1970, Ernest Sickey, a father of three in his late twenties and leader of Louisiana's Coushatta Tribe, appeared at attorney Ruth Loyd Miller's private practice office with his family, pleading for legal assistance on behalf of his community. The approximately 250 Coushatta of Allen Parish had endured almost twenty years of federal neglect. This neglect began in 1953 when the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) ended its trusteeship of Coushatta land, held since 1898, and began depriving the tribe of services. With no formal action by the federal government to terminate the Coushatta, they fell into a state of limbo and what a news editorial described as "crude brutality." In fact, in a survey taken of thirty-eight Coushatta families in the early 1970s, thirty-three had annual family incomes below $3,000, and none was above $5,000. With such staggering statistics, it's no wonder that Sickey wanted to help his community. His determination touched Miller, who was previously known for her passionate support of challenging injustices committed against women. Miller agreed to help Sickey by using her political connections to forge a relationship between the state of Louisiana and the tribal communities of the Coushatta, Chitimacha, Houma, and Tunica. The creation of this historic partnership between Sickey and Miller was the spark that fueled the development of a new Indian movement in Louisiana, one that had already ignited elsewhere through out the South.
While Ernest Sickey fought for the betterment of the Coushatta and other Louisiana Indians, Chief Houston McGhee of the Creek Nation East of the Mississippi was just a few hundred miles away building Alabama's own Indian movement. Unlike Sickey, McGhee did not need to forge new ground but instead followed in the footsteps of his father, Calvin McGhee, who was called the "Martin Luther King of the modern Creek movement" because of his success a few decades earlier in fighting for Creek rights and better educational opportunities. The younger McGhee brought monetary aid to his impoverished and federally ignored community and, like Sickey, petitioned the state government for assistance. In a 1974 letter to Governor George C. Wallace, Houston McGhee asked for the state's help in obtaining some land and access to federal Indian services. He cleverly argued that "if federal services become available to Indians in Alabama, it could relieve a number of public burdens for welfare, education, and economic development." This line of reasoning struck a chord with Wallace, who not only gave his support to McGhee's efforts but also played a crucial role in following in the footsteps of Louisiana by developing a formal relationship between the state government and the local Indian population.
The leadership and foresight of Sickey and McGhee promoted massive changes for the Indian people of Louisiana and Alabama. Their actions represented a new chapter in the development of tribal-state relations that evolved through out the Southeast. Indian groups became increasingly vocal in their efforts to gain greater public recognition and more privileges as Indians despite their essential invisibility maintained through years of racial discrimination and marginalization. The region-wide Indian rights movement developed against the backdrop of a changing national economic and social environment, which mobilized people both physically and politically. This chapter examines this shift in the South—and more specifically in Alabama and Louisiana—by examining the context in which Indian interests were able to intersect with state politics—in sometimes unexpected ways—through the development of state Indian affairs commissions.
A Nation in Transition: Making Sense of It All
In order to effectively understand the significance of the dramatic turn that Indian affairs took in Alabama and Louisiana, we must first look at the big picture. What factors preceded Sickey's decision to seek legal assistance in reaching out to the state legislature or McGhee's bold confidence in writ ing directly to the governor? Although Indian families through out both states had been struggling for decades, what prompted Indian leaders to finally transcend their marginalized status and demand resources? The response is multilayered—if not complex—because it involves cultural, social, political, and economic shifts at both the regional and national levels.
A major catalyst that fueled the development of the southern Indian rights movement was the changing federal Indian political environment. American Indians endured a legacy in which the federal government attempted to forcibly relocate them from their homelands and either left them without the "protection" of the federal trust relationship or subjected them to a stream of federal Indian policies intended to assimilate and culturally and politically obliterate them. The impact of the termination policy of the 1950s and 1960s, for example, although only directly affecting a small number of tribal communities, "aroused tremendous fear and hostility through out Indian country." As the legal scholar Stephen Cornell argues, it was the shared anxiety over cold war Indian policies—in addition to the experiences of World War II Indian soldiers—that paved the way for Indians to conceive of themselves as a nationally unified group and begin speaking the language of sovereignty, economic justice, and cultural preservation.
In response to the federal government's drive to abrogate its trust responsibilities to tribal nations, the National Congress of the American Indian (NCAI) was established to address the hostile turn that federal Indian policy had taken. This pan-Indian organization held its first convention in 1944 with delegates from more than fifty tribal communities. Over the next several years, the NCAI drew the attention and the eventual membership of nearly all tribes in the United States—including some of the previously isolated communities of the South. Tribal representatives came together within the NCAI to monitor federal Indian policy and to encourage "unity and cooperation among tribal governments for the protection of their treaty and sovereign rights."
Laurence Hauptman and Jack Campisi argue that by the 1960s "many eastern Indians viewed the NCAI as too conservative, too much aligned with the BIA, and too opposed to eastern Indian interests, including federal recognition efforts." As a result, the 1961 American Indian Chicago Conference (AICC) was called to address the interests of a broader range of tribal groups. The AICC, which was held at the University of Chicago, proved to be another turning point in southern Indian activism when delegates from unrecognized—and predominantly isolated—tribal groups were invited to attend this nationwide conference, at which they were encouraged to come up with solutions to their own problems. Sol Tax, an anthropology professor and conference coordinator, was astounded when more than 450 Indian delegates—from reservation and non-reservation communities—became "somewhat of a community" as they realized that they shared common problems. Conference delegates asserted themselves as "angry Indians" with inherent sovereign rights that had been threatened and eroded by the federal policies of the 1950s. As a result, the delegates of the AICC drafted the Declaration of Indian Purpose—a document that thirty-two Indian leaders delivered to President John F. Kennedy the following year during a noon ceremony on the White House lawn. The Declaration emphasized Indian self-determination—a theme Kennedy didn't fully embrace when he interpreted the document as one that simply demonstrated that Indian services were still inadequate and that the federal government had a great deal of "unfinished business" to tend to. It was not until after Kennedy's death, when Lyndon Johnson took office and launched his War on Poverty, that Indian groups began to develop programs designed to realize the vision outlined in the AICC document.
The influence of the AICC reached the South. Alabama's Poarch Creek leader, Calvin McGhee, shared experiences and strategies with other Indian leaders when he traveled to Chicago with his wife and at least four other Creeks from Alabama and Florida. He could not believe there were "so many Indians in the same boat." According to the conference roster, southern Indian groups were well represented, with delegates from the Alabama Coushatta of Texas, the Louisiana Choctaw, the Mississippi Choctaw, and the Virginia Cherokee. From North Carolina there were representatives who were Cherokee, Lumbee, and Haliwa. The Louisiana Houma also sent two delegates, who later returned to inspire the political and social development of their community. Not only did the AICC draw the attention of federal policy makers, it also gave legitimacy to the needs of the underrepresented groups in the South that were drawn into the larger arena of Indian political activism, information sharing, and inter-tribal collaboration.
The 1970s marked a time when Congress carefully examined its obligation to Indian tribes and reimagined the future of the federal-Indian relationship. In 1975 the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act was passed and, although its purpose has been heavily debated, the common interpretation is that it was intended to empower tribes by ridding them of federal domination and allowing them to administer federal Indian programs themselves. The same year that the act was passed, Congress created the American Indian Policy Review Commission (AIPRC)—made up of legislators and Indians of varying political statuses—to issue recommendations on the course that Indian affairs should take. Significantly, the commission emphasized supporting tribal self-governance, offering services to terminated or unrecognized tribes, and limiting the role of the BIA. Although not all of the ambitious recommendations issued by the commission were implemented, its influence helped shape the course that recognition policy took as Congress created a task force to look into the claims of terminated and non–federally recognized tribes. The many hearings held by the task force across the country served as forums for unrecognized Indians to lodge complaints about governmental injustice, which ultimately resulted in a series of more recommendations, one of which was the establishment of an "Office of Acknowledgment" within the Department of Interior.
As Anne McCulloch and David Wilkins argue, "Federal recognition is the primary method used by tribes to affirm their existence as distinct political communities within the American system." Federal recognition also gives tribes access to federal resources that serve communities in the areas of health, education, social services, and economic development. When the BIA established a process to acknowledge previously unrecognized tribes in 1978, the leaders of such tribes across the nation saw an opportunity to improve the status of their communities. As a result, petitions poured in. Although this seemed to be a good opportunity for Indian groups, the process met much criticism because of its stringent criteria that rely on documentation that many groups, particularly in the South, lack. It is a highly contested process that is subjective, complex, and politicized. The very definitions of "tribe" and "Indian" are problematic and put researchers for the Branch of Acknowledgment and Research (BAR) into a never-ending quandary of how to avoid consistently issuing contradictory findings. The fact is that a singular definition of these terms simply cannot be consistently applied to all Indian groups. As Alexandra Harmon illustrates in her examination of groups in the Puget Sound region, Indian identity is part of a political and historical process that often reflects changing social conditions. Studies conducted on the Lumbee of North Carolina and the Mashpee of Massachusetts, which served as test cases for what constitutes an Indian tribe under U.S. law, offer valuable insight into the challenges of the process faced by groups whose Indian identities were questioned. The issues raised in these studies reflect the challenges that other groups through out the Southeast faced in their efforts to obtain federal recognition despite their "mixed" ancestries.
Despite the headaches—and heartaches—that the federal acknowledgment issue brought to many Indian communities, it is within this context of tribal resurgence and self-determination that the southern Indian rights movement developed. Kevin Bruyneel has deemed this a "claim for postcolonial nationhood" that was born out of a politically vibrant period in which "indigenous political actors faced the tension of having to construct and express their politics betwixt and between a civil rights framework."
It was amid this movement toward tribal preservation and resurgence and the push to assert their political existence that southern Indians began to find their own voices through inter-tribal coalition building. In 1972, the Coalition of Eastern Native Americans (CENA) was formed to encourage marginalized groups in the East to seek recognition from state governments and the U.S. government. Although CENA did not survive the decade, Helen C. Rountree notes that "it showed Native Americans through out the eastern United States that their local experiences with prejudiced non-Indians were normal, not isolated instances peculiar to only a few places." CENA also educated tribal leaders in how to apply for federal grants offered through other departments outside the BIA. Other inter-tribal endeavors, such as the United South eastern Tribes, Inc., and the Lumbee-run Indian Information Project, helped southern Indian groups capitalize on the evolving federal Indian policy of the 1970s and 1980s that emphasized self-determination and resulted in a growing political awareness, land claims, and gains in the areas of education and social welfare.
Southern Indian groups varied widely in their appearance and degree of cultural maintenance. Their social patterns ranged from closely knit and insular to scattered and politically disconnected. Despite the ability of some southern indigenous communities to sustain an internal cultural identity, within the larger southern culture all of these groups were subject to a biracial social structure that relegated anyone who was identifiably non-white to the bottom of the social ladder, denying them access to white resources and public spaces. The broader tensions that developed as a result of institutionalized racism in the form of Jim Crow laws provided part of the unique social and political context from which Indian affairs in Alabama and Louisiana evolved, arming tribal leaders with new opportunities and helping shape their motivations and decisions.
Scholars of the American South in the mid-twentieth century have long recognized that "a movement for equal rights for African-Americans worked a revolution in southern race relations." The southern black freedom struggle, or civil rights movement, invited national attention to the region's racial tensions, demanded the desegregation of public spheres, and pressured local, state, and federal governments for policy reforms to challenge directly the system of white supremacy. Over the past twenty years, much research has expanded our understanding of the civil rights struggle by examining the roles of individual activists and adding new dimensions to the study of social justice while emphasizing the complexities within the movement. In addition to scholarly attempts to understand the black freedom struggle, the major television documentary series Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years proved influential by offering a widely accepted trajectory of events that came to define the movement. Even with the expansion of civil rights history in this new direction, many holes remain in our understanding of how the movement altered race relations beyond the black-white racial paradigm.
Like African Americans, Native Americans nationally issued a similar list of civil rights complaints, including prison sentences that were more severe for Indians than for whites and limited access to state and county welfare assistance programs. Across the Jim Crow South, Indians were often forbidden admission to white schools, and they frequently avoided black schools. As a result, some Native people had no access to public education, while others sent their children to "special" Indian schools. Many of these schools were "small, poorly equipped, poorly taught and poorly attended." Yet at the same time these schools often served as community centers and important symbols of Indian identity.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Other Movement by Denise E. Bates Copyright © 2012 by The University of Alabama Press. Excerpted by permission of THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
List of Illustrations vii
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xvii
Indian Groups and Organizations of Alabama and Louisiana xviii
Key People xix
1 Back On The Map: The Emergence Of A Deep Southern Indian Rights Movement 1
2 "We'll Do It in the Spirit of Brotherhood": Inter-Tribal Politics and the Challenge of Centralizing Representation 41
3 Acknowledging Indians in a Bipolar South: Shifting Racial Identities 70
4 Starting from Scratch: Struggling to Improve Indian Lives 99
5 A Regional Makeover: Tourism and How Indians Remade the South 141
Conclusion 172
Appendix: Other Tribes Of The South 177
Notes 181
References 233
Index 249