• fighting life: 1914–1945

1914–1945: World Wars

• Indian participation in World War I
• high concentrations of Indians in the Allied Expeditionary Force; Canadian army members since 1914
  • code talkers, vocational workers, infantry; had higher experience and pay due to boarding schools
  • 1918 descent into trench warfare during WW1
  • “Indian brave” stereotypes reinforced by placement of Indians at forefront in dangerous infantry assignments; 5x higher casualty rates
• North American Indian Cavalry: Indians in these regiments were granted citizenship without jeopardy to tribal status
  • Dr. Joseph Kossuth Dixon, The Vanishing Race; assimilation and segregation of all-Indian regiments
  • some cavalry regiments existed; preservationists → most were integrated
• army fighters gained skills and returned home to ravages by allotments, leases, and commerce
• fewer than half Indian population after WW1 were citizens; less had the right to vote; many who served did not gain citizenship
  • veteran trauma and struggles
  • American Legion posts
  • spiritual and political leadership positions
• those who returned became disillusioned due to the WW1 international experience at a non-U.S. lens; new communities were formed
  • “A mere twenty-eight years after the massacre at Wounded Knee, American Indians had helped to perpetuate global violence and proved that they were good at it, but something else was happening, too, something that escaped notice at the time.”
  • 1917: Indian births > Indian deaths
• Friends of the Indian, IRA, and Dixon argued for Indian citizenship; Congress agreed in order to curb Indian abuse
• 1924: Indian citizenship without renouncing of tribal citizenship
  • no suffrage; arguments due to “unfairness” of participation in tribal and US elections, taxes, trusteeship; deprivation of influence in federal government
  • 1938: 7 states did not extend suffrage
  • 1948: AZ and NM enabled suffrage

1928: The Meriam Report

• requested in 1850
• final first assessment of Indian policy and Indian life
• Lewis Meriam: unsentimental, non-sensationalist investigator
• seven-month periodic of 95 locations in 22 states; 2.5y data collection; impartial report on disaster of policy

the report found that Indians were floundering on an American sea and were, as a whole, drowning. Lost in accounts of the years between 1918 and 1956 is the knowledge that the only reason there were any Indians left at all was that they had fought. They had fought against the government, and they had fought with it. Deprived of every conceivable advantage or tool or clear-hearted advocate, they had continued to fight. Not just in the ways Dixon and people like him imagined, as warriors astride horses roaming free across the Plains, but rather as husbands and wives and fathers and mothers. As writers and thinkers. As farmers and soldiers in the Great War. But what to do when the actual fighting stops and the pressures bear down back home? What to do when you can’t find the fight beyond the one for daily survival? What to do with that patrimony?

1918–1934: Tribal Governance

• 19th century: Red Lake General Council
  • Peter Graves
• 1918: General Council of the Red Lake Band of Chippewa Indians constitution
  • establishment of council, codification of chief positions and political power + inheritance
• 4/13/1918: first meeting
  • erosion and expulsion of Indian agent and whites of Red Lake

1934 Indian Reorganization Act

• John Collier: “Indian problem” was a policy problem
• 1923: overturned Dawes Act
• 1928: drafted Meriam Report
• 1933–1945: appointed commissioner of Indian affairs
• 1934: New Deal → Indian Reorganization Act/Howard-Wheeler Act
  • ended allotment
  • allowed reobtaining of land and incorporation of new land
  • constitutions and governments for Inddian communities; allowed to vote on IRA governments
  • subtler but constant coercion:
    • federal grants and assistance required a recognized government
    • voting process vague; absentees decided for them
    • IRA subtle bias; pueblo and small town structures were applied to large, diverse communities based on Collier’s experience
    • inadequate for policing, educating, and handling large lands and nations

1941–1948: World War II

• 6/13/1942: reproach from the I.C. at the capitol of the Axis nations
  • declaration of war from the nation confederacy; allyship with U.S.
  • following 12/11/1941 declaration from US
  • “It should be noted that no peace had been made between Germany and the Iroquois Confederacy in 1918, and so the Confederacy was still, technically, at war with Germany and now simply added Italy and Japan to the list.”
• 1941: 27 Meskwaki North African cavalry; “Sac and Fox” (16% of Meskwaki population)
• 1944: ⅓+ male Indian adults drafted and volunteered; necessary due to low wages/income for reservation families; exodus into army
  • Navajo code talkers, Choctaw transmission; effective
• Ira Hayes, Pima, Sacaton AZ; famous photograph of flagpole runners at Iwo Jima
  • ½4/1955: death from exposure andd alcohol poisoning
• Loss wasn’t the norm, it couldn’t be. I didn’t have the words for it then, what it felt like to watch my cousin, whom I love and whose worries are our worries and whose pain is our pain, manage to be so good at something, to triumph so completely. More than a painful life, more than a culture or a society with the practice and perfection of violence as a virtue and a necessity, more than a meanness or a willingness to sacrifice oneself, what I felt—what I saw—were Indian men and boys doing precisely what we’ve always been taught not to do. I was seeing them plainly, desperately, expertly wanting to be seen for their talents and their hard work, whether they lost or won.

That old feeling familiar to so many Indians—that we can’t change anything; can’t change Columbus or Custer, smallpox or massacres; can’t change the Gatling gun or the legislative act; can’t change the loss of our loved ones or the birth of new troubles; can’t change a thing about the shape and texture of our lives—fell away. I think the same could be said for Sam: he might not have been able to change his sister’s fate or his mother’s or even, for a while, his own. But when he stepped in the cage he was doing battle with a disease. The disease was the feeling of powerlessness that takes hold of even the most powerful Indian men. That disease is more potent than most people imagine: that feeling that we’ve lost, that we’ve always lost, that we’ve already lost—our land, our cultures, our communities, ourselves. This disease is the story told about us and the one we so often tell about ourselves. But it’s one we’ve managed to beat again and again—in our insistence on our own existence and our successful struggles to exist in our homelands on our own terms.