Contemporary American Indian History

Historical Background

The Commencement of an Era: Native Americans in the 1960s and 1970s

Understanding key elements of the experiences of Native Americans in our country is crucial to understanding the texts American Indian writers produce. Louis Owens succinctly draws this comparison:

Just as the major figures of modernism – T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, et al. – demanded that readers know Greek and Roman mythology and the literary history of their western cultures, Indian writers today have come to expect, even demand, that readers learn something about the mythology and literary (oral) history of Native Americans…In addition to some basic knowledge of the tribal histories and mythologies of the Indian cultures at the heart of these novels, reader should be aware of crucial moments in Native American history of the last two centuries.⁴

Thus, as one prepares to teach a unit on Native American texts, one must first become acquainted with the history of the people who are writing them. An intimate knowledge of the historical contexts in which, and from which, these novels arise is crucial. Literature is influenced by history and history informs the movements from which literature is birthed.

Beginning in the 1960s, a proliferation of Native American voices began to rise into the public consciousness.  While this recovery seemingly appears in isolation, it is, in fact a resurrection of storytelling traditions that have existed for centuries before and after the arrival of Europeans on North American soil. Native voices resound; however, American literary society does not always listen. A First Wave of novels, poetry and essays by American Indians parallels the surge of activism beginning with the occupation of Alcatraz by a group called Indians of All Tribes (IOAT) from November 1969 to June 1971.⁵ During this period, IOAT organized around the principles of rejection of federal termination policies and demands of restoration of treaties with Indian tribes. Key leaders of this group include Russell Means, LaNada Means, and Russell Oakes.⁶

Forced assimilation arose after a 1943 survey of living conditions of reservations, which the Senate investigated Native American’s quality of life, finding destitution and horrific instances of extreme impoverishment. After this exploration, the federal bureaucracy, via the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), enacted a policy from 1953 to 1968 known as House Concurrent Resolution 108.⁷ Instead of permitting maintenance of their own cultural practices and customs, forced assimilation plunged urban American Indians into even worse “dereliction” of spirit than the termination policies attempted to recover.⁸ The Termination Policy of 1953 came after a series of legislations, each more austere than the previous. These adjudications follow Andrew Jackson’s infamous Indian Removal Act of 1830 and the creation of Indian Boarding Schools beginning in 1860.

Termination slated Native Americans to be essentially bused into urban areas and assimilated into typical Anglo-American lifestyles and mores. An overwhelming failure, termination splintered families, placed Native Americans into housing facilities also used to house recently released felons and provided limited and ineffective job training and placement for those forced into these bewildering urban environments.⁹ Indian Law expert Charles Wilkinson describes the assimilation process as creating a “nearly universal sense of alienation and dislocation” including the wide spread proliferation of alcoholism.¹⁰ Similarly, Owens remarks:

With twenty-five thousand American Indians enlisting in World War II, the Indian  veteran became a common sight in urban Indian gatherings and back on the reservations. Suffering the same kinds of trauma experiences by all soldiers at war, the Indian veterans had the added pains of discrimination and, more crucially, the eventual return to an Indian world where identity had been difficult for a long time.¹¹

One positive residual effect of the voluntary relocation programs was the provision that “many children, having grown up in the cities, helped build the Indian professional middle class, which played a central role in revitalizing Indian life in the latter part of the twentieth century.”¹² From this stock, activist intellectuals like Vine Deloria, Jr., Clyde Warrior and other college educated youth emerged. This allowance for social mobility, and most importantly high quality education, created a space in which the “Native American Renaissance” could occur. Louis Owens remarks “contemporary American Indian writers indeed most often permanently enter that [leisure] class, possessing as they do a consistently high level of education (almost always at least one college degree) and mastery of English.”¹³ This fact most certainly muddies the complex history of seemingly simultaneous oppression by and emancipation from the white Eurocentric world. Later, Second Wave Native American writers such as Sherman Alexie, albeit indirectly, spring forth from the same vein.

Self-Determination to Present

Through determination, perseverance, and sheer force of will, the official policy to replace termination with self-determination was passed into law in the 1970s. Wilkinson notes: “Ever since the reservation system, Native Americans held dear the impulse to govern their homelands free from BIA control.”¹⁴ Self-determination began the path toward satiation of this desire. Though the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) created years before addressed this wish the establishment policy was not directly for or about American Indians. The OEO, however, signaled the beginning of the use of the terminology of self-determination for sovereign tribal governments. Institutions such as the Rough Rock Demonstration School, and, later, the Navajo Community College (now called Diné College) signaled the beginning of opportunities for Native Americans to manage their own major programs.¹⁵ This legislation became the first instance of a “leadership class that they finally had the power to make their own mistakes.”¹⁶ In other words, tribal leaders and members had options to exercise agency, instead of forcible determinations being enacted upon them. Officially established in 1975, the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act, created an environment in which “instead of the federal agencies’ building a tribal community center, setting up a day care program, running a health clinic, or writing an economic development plan, a tribe could contract with the agency, receive the funding directly, and do the job itself.”¹⁷ This proved to be the first in many steps toward tribal governments establishing and expanding “tribal infrastructures and leadership opportunities.”¹⁸ It was a policy of choice and the first of its kind.

Reservation life, tribal governance – both its benefits and its limitations – and socio-economic issues inform the experiences of many of the Native Americans in the United States to date. Self-Determination simultaneously helped and hindered tribal people, as vastly as the ways in which the tribes generate and allocate income through the passing of the Act.¹⁹ Today, there is a much wider variation in voices of Native Americans. These narratives proliferate through the outcroppings of new mediums such a YouTube, Twitter and informational websites. For instance, the sketch comedy group, The 1491s, work in a tradition of irony and cynicism, calling attention to the paradoxes, micro-aggressions and points of tension that contemporary Native Americans face daily. Additionally, Native Americans are increasingly involved in stand-up comedy, spoken word, dramatic readings and other forms of expression previously unexplored.