Indians Come Alive

by JOHN COLLIER

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THE Second World War is more than military struggle, planet-wide. In a most real sense it is a war within man’s spirit, within each nation, even each community. Here, in our Western world, is a population of thirty millions, distributed through most of the Republics, whose democracy existed before there was any Western republic. This population has shown what democracy means. It goes on today continuing the proof, enlarging it. What is it that this Red Indian population has in its keeping for us?

Our country’s Red Indians number 400,000. They total 0.3 per cent of our people. From the Rio Grande to Cape Horn, the Indians are 28.2 per cent of the whole population. In eight countries they are more than 50 percent of the population, and in three countries over 80 per cent. These are statistics of Indians of pure blood and Indians of strongly predominant native blood, many millions of whom speak none but the pre-Columbian languages.

By themselves the mere numbers tell little enough. Important and significant is the fact that remote and desert places of the Western world contain the great strategic materials — tin, manganese, copper, bauxite, rubber — and in these places, with a few exceptions, the Indian population is most dense. The labor which will work the mines and gather the priceless latex will be Indian labor. From Mexico City southward to Chile and the Argentine, this is the situation.

There have been moments of disquiet about the drift of the political currents to the south of us. Moments of breath-holding, lest by some incautious whisper we should lose important alliances. In a choice between democracy and fascism would our Latin-American neighbors remain on the democratic side? And again, by strange coincidence, the Indian emerges as the shadowy portent which may mark our days for all time to come.

Does any unity of power, of hope, purpose, destiny, bind the Sioux of our Great Plains, the Pueblo and Papago, Apache and Navajo and Cherokee, and the Otomi and Tarascan of Mexico, the Mayan, the millions in the Andes who have come down from the Inca Empire? Does the world’s future lean at all on them?

The twenty years gone by have answered these questions, I believe. There has been more than just a growth of knowledge and realization about the Indians and among them. There are many Indian groups whose whole mature membership knows what thing they live by. And few, if any, of the major populations of Indians do not contain men and women who consciously guard and feed an ancient but renewed sacred fire. They believe it is for the world. I shall try to show that they are right.

First, I shall need to make clear, briefly, what I intend in the use of the term “democracy.” Certainly no mechanical affair of who votes and who holds office and how such things are managed. And no mere matter of equality of opportunity and the guarantee of personal rights. These are important only because they reflect the deeper thing — they wither when the deeper existence runs dry. For it is a matter that begins in the spirit, that is fed by man’s deepest will to live, and that carries men to death unafraid, and lives on after them.

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The communities of the ancient Indians were positive democracies. They were democracies at many levels, and their institutional forms were extremely varied. A main base and objective of the tribal democracy was the land. The land existed for every soul of the tribe, was guarded and used by each one, and was not only a thing to be made use of: it was a revered source of being. A Yakima chief was speaking for all Indians when, seventy years ago, pleading with the white man against a forced division of the land, he explained that it was like cutting to pieces the living body of the Mother. What we mean mystically by the Universe, the ancient Indian meant by the Land. From it, the Source, no single member of the tribe must be shut away. Beneficial use of resources was the measure of ownership. The profoundest of tribal ceremonialism was inspired by the will to help the land do its work and to renew the soul out of the land.

Ancient Indian democracy was local democracy. Typically, it sought for the leadership which it needed among all who were born. This was leadership in internal regulation, in war, in planting and the hunt, in healing and the assuaging of anxieties, and in the rituals both solitary and congregate which were believed to influence nature and were known to release human power and to move the developing personality through its crises toward its mature capacity to endure, to be wise, to love, and to choose the way of the race as being the way of the self. Seeking leadership among all who were born, the Indian community trained its leaders both by shock and through long, succeeding stages of tutoring and of practice. What we call education was therefore central in every Indian community, but a more adequate term would be personality development — the pursuit of wholeness of life, social integration in terms of matured personalities.

This way it had been for many thousand years before the Incan, Mayan, Toltec, and Aztec consolidations and empires arose and seized responsibility away from the communities and formed hereditary classes and castes, and blazed with a marvelous incandescence very brief in Indian history, and crumbled away. No consolidations or empire-buildings took place (except very locally) north of the Rio Grande. So the early explorers did not romanticize, but truly found personal greatness to be usual among the tribes.

Then came white domination, applied to our northern tribes as well as to the millions south of the Rio Grande. A newborn racism of the Caucasian turned with a strange proselytizing fury upon the Indians. There were no values except the white man’s values. The crushing of the Indians’ institutions of democracy, commenced as a mere measure of war, became a civilizing mission pursued with all the resources of the State. The Indians, beaten in war, fought a slowly losing delaying action on the ground of the spirit. Yet even twenty and thirty years ago, in many desert regions of our own country, there could be witnessed the life of the Indians’ golden age. The glorious rituals went on, peace was laid on the Navajo soul by the nine-day sing; the Pueblo city-states carried forward their profound, organic democracies; each day the Zuñi sun-priest swung the sun into the heaven. Theodore Roosevelt could say of the Hopi villages that nothing in America was more precious or more worthy to be loved.

This, then, is the true significance of the position of the Indian in these troubled times. Behind him is an incalculable history of democratic life-ways, and these life-ways have survived astonishingly, just as he has survived in astonishing numbers. It will pay us to understand something of that survival, for we may be better able to predict the course of the years to come. More important, we may be able at critical moments to aid in bringing the future to realization.

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Are our few Indians in the United States — one-seventieth of the Indian race — representative of the thirty millions in the Hemisphere? Does what they are accomplishing predict what the millions may be expected to accomplish? I answer, first, that more of the pre-Columbian heritage has survived among our tribes than among any others except a few of the Indians south of the Rio Grande. This is the more remarkable when one remembers that in the United States, governmental absolutism applied to the Indians has been, until recent years, more inflexible, more implacable, more allsearching and all-penetrating, and culturally more hostile than any absolutism in any country south of here.

We started dealing with the Indian tribes as nation to nation. We took their land but we scrupulously left their internal affairs to themselves alone. But we kept on taking more of their land, violating the treaties we had executed in all solemnity. We hurled tribes back on the hunting and fishing and planting grounds of other tribes. So tribe had to fight tribe, and then commenced the border warfare which flamed or smoldered from Canada to Mexico for ninety years. The Indian fought, with great ability and courage, by virtue of his tribehood — his tribal institutions and leadership. So, as a measure of war or of pacification, we crushed his tribehood. We condemned and prohibited his institutions.

Then the civil arm took over the “Indian problem.” To smother, to exterminate the entirety of the Indian heritage became the central purpose in Indian affairs. Extermination was applied beyond the tribe and its government to the local community governments out of which the tribes were compounded, and beyond the local governments to the family. The Indian religions were made penal offenses; the Sun Dance, as an example, which was the supreme integrative institution of the Plains tribes, was persecuted out of existence. In order to break the Indian heritage, the child was taken at six years to a remote boarding school, in the summers he was farmed out to whites, and his use of his language was prohibited. As tribe and local community crumbled under the pressures, remote authority had of necessity to be extended past the group to the individual, and this authority was applied horizontally and exhaustively. Further to destroy grouphood and familyhood, the Indian lands were “allotted in severalty,” to each individual and not to heads of families, and through the white man’s inheritance system these allotments became split up into millions of heirship equities. The government administered the lands, and generally they were leased and then sold to whites. Only a few of the tribes were spared the full and prolonged operation of the whole range of invidious absolutism.

Invidious absolutism, and yet benevolent: invidious toward all that constituted Indianhood, toward every Indian instrument for molding or implementing personality, while yet benevolent toward the individual Indian. And through its benevolence, the far more subtly destroying. Always, through so many mediums, the Indian was told that as a race he was doomed by social inferiority or impracticability. Always he was challenged to build a new personality out of no cultural heritage at all. The mighty government told him this, through agents on the ground whose authority downward to the Indian was absolute. And such was the condition until only thirteen years ago.

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It was in 1922 that fundamental change commenced in this country’s Indian affairs. The bold and dramatic villainies of Albert B. Fall launched the change. The first years of the change were a struggle outside and inside Congress to break down that system of Indian management which President Lincoln had called “accursed.” In all the years after Lincoln the system had elaborated and entrenched itself, had developed an impenetrable ideology of racial superiority, and had achieved alliances with many and various regional and special interests. It was the Indians themselves who launched the struggle. They took their case to many of the great cities and to Washington through a delegation of seventeen governors and priests of the Pueblos. Strong and persevering white support arose East and West. The conflict intensified during seven years. In Congress some victories were gained, but within that strange world, like to none other, of Indian Service absolutism the repressions were dramatically intensified.

In 1933, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt took office, Indian policy was changed in fashions radical and exhaustive. The change, in principle, was from maximal to minimal authority; from denial of Indian cultural values to their emphasis; from expectation of Indian doom to expectation of Indian triumph; from one-pattern policy to a policy of multiple options; but first and last, from denial to intense encouragement of group self-determination and self-government. Self-determination under the impact of difficulties and challenges crowding fast. Self-determination even where failure might be very damaging. Above all, self-determination oriented toward regenerating the land and toward using it beneficially. In a word, restoration to the Indian of his two inseparable heritages wherein he had been great — democracy and land, one and indivisible.

Numerous administrative actions were taken, and the changed policy was drafted into legislation amending largely — in principle, revolutionizing — the ponderous body of Indian law. This legislation was spread before the Indians in tribal gatherings in all parts of the country. They criticized and amended it variously. A cautious and slightly incredulous Congress trimmed the legislation and somewhat diluted the self-determination and self-administration provisions, but without significant impairment. Congress enacted the law in June, 1934, with the unusual proviso that every tribe and band by majority vote should place itself within or outside the new basic code. Tribes numbering 196 in a total of 273 voted themselves within the changed system. Thereafter, Oklahoma’s and Alaska’s Indians were “blanketed in” through Congressional enactments. Eighty-five per cent of all the Indians are now within the new policy, while those who remained out of it by choice still pursue their own tribal ends through administrative policy.

The Indians in these nine years have furnished to the world a proof that democracy when it is profoundly realized, and when it forges out for itself adequate mechanisms of consultation and of action, is a mighty power. Here are a few examples.

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The several Apache bands were crushed in war and were then held for two generations in idleness. They were governed by authority immovable though not unkind. The Mescalero Apaches in Southern New Mexico live amid 400,000 upland and high mountain acres. Nine years ago their land was used by white lessees. Six out of seven in the tribe inhabited a camp slum clustered about the Indian agency. The government in preceding years from time to time had endeavored to lure or force the Mescaleros out from their noisome camp and back onto the land. In vain; authority failed, and inducement and argument to the individual failed. Death-doomed, robbed of their war-way, the Mescaleros had regressed, and they silently immured themselves in their despondency.

To Santo Domingo Pueblo in 1934 the Mescaleros’ delegates came. The draft of the Indian Reorganization Rill was being presented, and the Pueblos said, “Indeed and of course, for this is our own old-time way.” Incredulous, the Mescaleros went home.

Congress passed the Reorganization Act. The Mescaleros were informed: It is the law. The law says that you must yourselves decide, for yourselves, whether you want to be free. You are required to make this choice, and it may be forever.

They chose freedom, and then they realized that it was they themselves who must plan their future life. Tribes under the Reorganization Act may formulate political constitutions which thereafter only they or Congress can change, and they may adopt corporate charters empowering them for the whole range of business enterprise. The Mescaleros framed a constitution and a charter, and earth and life began to emerge under a clear light, alight new and yet known from long ago. A miasma of collective regression started to fade away.

Utilizing a government loan, — there have been no delinquencies in repayment, — the Mescaleros abandoned their slum camp and resettled themselves out where farming and cattle-running could supplement each other. Their net income from cattle jumped from $18,000 to $101,000 in three years. They closed out all leases to whites and they now use their entire range and build up its herbage and soil while using it. Their farm crops multiplied eightfold in value in three years. These figures are indices merely. Long-range economic planning has become a matter of course with the Mescaleros. Their energies surge. They have their warway once more, their chance for combat, for leadership, the endless universal war-way wherein nature is antagonist and collaborator in one. Among the Mescaleros as among all the other tribes that have organized under the new policy, women and men have equal duties and privileges.

In the 1920 years, the Jicarilla Apaches, up near the Colorado line in New Mexico, were a more depressed group than the Mescaleros, their birth rate lagging far behind their death rate. For many years they, and indeed their local Indian administration as well, were dominated by a white trader who was at once benevolent and very ruthless. Having organized and incorporated, the Jicarillas procured a Federal loan and bought out this trader and all his interests. Now, an Indian trading enterprise is a complicated and difficult business. It sells to the Indian all that he consumes, sells for him all that he produces, and serves as his banker. Heavy credits are needed in the livestock business; the Jicarillas live by sheep. The Jicarillas organized their store on classic coöperative lines, “All for each and each for all.”Its success has been complete.

Many years ago, the Jicarilla tribal estate had been broken into individual allotments. I have mentioned that land allotment was one of the devices for breaking down the tribal authority and prestige. The Apaches resisted silently by ignoring the allotments. But then, suddenly, oil was discovered. The possible or probable value of an allotment leaped to tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. Under the Reorganization Act, voluntary return of allotments to the tribe is authorized. And every Jicarilla allottee proceeded quietly to revert his allotment to his people, the oil value along with the rest. The people are one, the land is one.

Now to a far profounder incident. Acoma Pueblo, “City of the Sky,”comes down from the stone age little changed. Its social organization, its magical and animistic worldview, its racial aims are from of old. That earth shall go on, and the inseparable Race, the tradition and spirit and subliminal power of the Race, is the unchanging preoccupation of Acoma, a democracy of very complex institutions whose pinnacles gleam with a wonder-light and whose foundations rest in a secrecy inviolable. But the Acomas are, too, one of the merriest of races, and sweet as wild birds.

In the years till ten years ago, like the Navajos who are mentioned below, the Acomas and many other tribes were persuaded, even compelled, to overload their ranges with sheep, goats, and cattle. This overgrazing wrecked the range. Long before 1933, the fateful stage of “critical erosion" had been reached and passed on Acoma’s land. The Acomas in 1935 were grazing 31,000 sheep-units on land whose diminished carrying capacity was 8500 units.

Livestock ownership at Acoma, as among nearly all the Indians, is individual. Wealth is measured by livestock ownership, and this wealth is an important element in prestige. The livestock owner uses, without paying rent, the common land. It is often and truly said that among whites in our country severe voluntary curtailment of livestock in order to save the public range is unknown.

What, at Acoma, should be the policy? An implacable necessity confronted Indian administration. The range must be saved at huge present cost to the Acomas. Full authority was in the government. Should it use the authority? Here was a chance to try democracy in an ordeal of fire.

The Acomas were invited to community meetings which lasted many weeks. They were given all the facts which the dismaying range surveys had made plain. They were told of cumulative sacrifices needed not across one year but across ten years at the fewest. And they were told definitely, conclusively: The decision is yours, because the land is yours; the actions must be yours and the pain must be yours. They were told: We know what you are going to do, because you care for the earth, and for your race in the long run, more than you care for your individual lives. The goal is sheep reduction from 31,000 units to 8500. We leave the result and the method to you. We will help you if you ask us, and if we can.

Acoma completely met the challenge. Saving the range involved more than just a 70 per cent sacrifice of livestock wealth. It involved the mastery and application of a wide range of new soil and water technologies, range management practices, breeding technologies, and methods of stock marketing. It involved an economic revolution.

There never was any wavering among the Acomas. There were no recriminations, no self-pityings. Their invincible merriment went laughing on. It was a passage from the stone age across our present time and into a future which as yet is far away from most white Americans. In peacetime, Indian democracy achieved the “moral equivalent of war. ”

The Navajos furnish the strongest epic of these Indian years. They are 50,000 humans, increasing at twice the speed of the whites, occupying 20,000 square miles of beautiful and terribly eroded plateau land in Arizona and New Mexico. Not 5000 whites could make a living from all that land. The realities were met with the shock of a head-on collision in 1933. The Navajos faced just what the Acomas were facing. But the Pueblos were deeply founded citystates, while the Navajos hardly had functioned as a tribe at all, except in war. Could the way here be the democratic way?

They were told: It is you, by your own sustained choice, who shall save your land.

Many wise advisers believed that it was wrong to tell the Navajos this, and to mean it; the policy laid an all but killing burden on their young and groping self-government. And surely it did entail conflict, mental anguish, and practical risk which a policy of authority could have spared them. But so it was done. Across nine years the struggle and effort went on. Never once was governmental authority or court process used except narrowly pursuant to the action and petition of the elected tribal council. All that the Acomas did, the Navajos have now done, and they remain more Navajo than before, their élan vital is more manifest than before, and their competence in social action is vastly increased. Saving their homeland, they are saving the watershed of Boulder Dam. A population of many millions has a stake in the battle the Navajos are waging.

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At Taxco, in Mexico, in 1931, at the home of Moises Saenz, educator, Indianist, and diplomat of Mexico, a little group was discussing the strange and wistful history of the Indians. Mexico, since 1920, had re-enfranchised the ejidos, the Indian pueblos of old time. In the United States the Pueblos were carrying ahead their winning fight for group liberty for all Indians. Far out in the gray mountain wilderness of Mexico, of Guatemala, and far down on the Andes, tens of thousands of Indian communities, bereft since hundreds of years ago of all their material and external power, still in the realm of human relations, the realm of intangibles where personality is formed, were keeping their democracies alive. The talk went out along the one golden cord that unites Indian history in terms of the good-will of white men — the work of the great monastic orders. Jesuits, Franciscans,and Dominicans—from near to the Arctic tundra of Canada to the forests and plains of Paraguay they had done huge work. The Franciscan missions in the United States were remembered, the hospitales of Don Vasco de Quiroga in Mexico— coöperative communities of the Indians, around which Spanish colonial ferocity prowled in vain; and the Jesuit utopia of Paraguay. In that utopia, strangely unremembered by history, white men numbering fewer than one hundred were able to unite and organize Indians numbering 150,000 into a happy, voluntary life of lavish productiveness aesthetic and material; it continued a century and a half and was destroyed by war.

We asked: Will the time come when the Indians can be united, when the Republics can pool their experience with Indians, when hemisphere-wide programs for the release of Indian spiritual and economic powers can be set upon their way? Once, in the Laws of the Indies, procured through the monastic orders, a hemisphere-wide bill of rights for Indians had been attained, and the two basic Indian requirements had been acknowledged — land, and grouphood on the land. Could that historical unity live and work again?

At Patzcuaro, in Michoacán, Mexico, in April, 1940, all the Republics of the West joined in supplying the answer. There the first Inter-American Congress of Indians was brought together. The official delegations of the twenty-one Republics were there. “Indianists,” or technicians on the problems of the Indian, came from all the countries. Indians came, from Northern United States all the way to Peru and Chile. From our own country, the Papagos, Apaches, Hopis, New Mexico Pueblos, Osages, Nez Percés, and Flatheads sent representatives. Plenary and technical sessions went on through ten days. Out of debates and struggles often excited and very prolonged, but never embittered, there emerged declarations of policy and recommendations of detail which became official and unanimous when voted by the plenary sessions of the Congress. These declarations, as undertakings by the Republics, would have been thought impossible ten years ago; yet they are historically continuous with the early and unbroken opinions of our own Supreme Court and with the Laws of the Indies. Here are some of the declarations: —

That by preference Indian education should be made bilingual — in the native and the national tongue.

That, recognizing the social individuality of the Indian, all the countries should establish offices of Indian affairs; but these offices should not monopolize Indian service and should not be authoritarian, but should work as stimulating and coördinating agencies and as agents of social discovery.

That landless Indians should be revested with land, and their tenure be made effective through financial credit, coöperative organization, and technological advice and aid.

That the ruling of Indians, the service and upbuilding of Indians, should take fully into account the Indian local group, should incorporate the group into the national system, and should reach to the individual through his re-enfranchised group.

And that for research, the pooling of experience, and the inauguration of programs, a permanent Inter-American Institute of the Indian should be created through treaty between the Republics. This international Institute should have local embodiment in a national Institute of the Indian within each of the Republics.

Moises Saenz was chosen as provisional director of the international Institute. He died in Peru before the permanent Institute, flowing from the Inter-American treaty, could be formed.

The permanent Inter-American Institute of the Indian has now been established and is fully active, headquartered in Mexico City, with the eminent anthropologist, Manuel Gamio, as its director. And pursuant to the treaty or in anticipation of it, national Indian Institutes, formal or informal, have been established in Mexico, in the United States, in Guatemala, Paraguay, Ecuador, Peru, and Chile.

It is well to note that this union of the Republics in terms of their Indians did not come about as a war measure. Its beginning and its achievement preceded the involvement of the Western Hemisphere in the World War. Yet how relevant, how central to the issues of this second World War it is. To declare minority rights, not in general, but in implementing particulars; to declare democracy, down into the detail which sees that democracy is the creator of men and of societies; to declare that the most cast down among all Western peoples shall be enabled to rise again; to recognize a Western-world solidarity in terms of a population and an earth-loving spirit ten or twenty thousand years old: these actions by the Republics have their importance in the ultimate crisis which has enveloped us all.