During the twentieth century, relations between Indians and non-Indians in the United States have been marked by an unfortunate series of misunderstandings caused by prejudiced minds and negative stereotypes. Overcoming these obstacles, the nation's 2.1 million Native Americans have proved their resilience by surviving in a world dominated by other races and cultures.
During the nineteenth century American Indians, by tradition a communal people, were forcibly separated from their native cultures and lands. By the turn of the century Native Americans held only 77,865,373 acres of land, of which 5,409,530 had been assigned by federal commissioners to individual Indians. The effort to individualize Indians and force them to forgo their tribal and traditional ways caused strife among tribal communities and provoked a growing Indian opposition. Events like the Crazy Snake Rebellion among the Creeks of Oklahoma and the formation of the Four Mothers Society by Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws, and Chickasaws reflected a desire by some Indians to live according to old community ways. But the federal government insisted that all Indians conform to white ways. Indian Territory, designed always to belong to the Native Americans and containing sixty-seven different tribes, became settled also by Anglo-Americans, who pushed for statehood, achieving it on November 16, 1907, in spite of Indian opposition.
While America witnessed the populist movement in the farm states and the growth of European immigrant populations in eastern cities, American Indians were reduced in the public eye to the status of ancient relics. Most citizens were unaware, for example, that ten thousand Indian men were serving in World War I or that educated Indians were becoming teachers, farmers, and ministers. During the first decades of the century the gap between Indians and whites widened as, with a few exceptions, Native Americans continued to find the thinking of white Americans illogical. The exceptions were individuals like Charles Eastman, Luther Standing Bear, and others who had attended boarding schools and learned the ways of white society. In 1911 such "progressive" red Americans gathered to organize the Society of American Indians, promoting the adoption of white ways in place of tribal ways and the abolition of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). Federal officials continued to outlaw powwows and religious practices like the Sun Dance that they considered "heathen" and backward.
In the early twentieth century Indians continued to be the target of "civilization" efforts. The Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, the Haskell Institute in Kansas, and the Chilocco Indian School in Oklahoma were instruments for eradicating Indian languages and lifeways. Only English was allowed in the schools, and classes sought to redirect the lives of the Indian youth with training in new vocations and trades. But they could not change the young people's innate feelings of being Indian. Housed with children from across the country, Indian students began to reflect a broad Indian consciousness that was developing in response to the attitudes of dominant society and the federal government. Similarly, common resistance to federal authority often united reservation communities and produced new leaders who spoke for the groups. Men like the Navajo Chee Dodge and the Menominees' Reginald Oshkosh spoke the white man's language but sought the allegiance of their elders and kinsmen and worked to defend their tribes' interests.
The popular image of the 1920s as an age of roaring automobiles and dancing flappers had little meaning for Indians. Despite the creation of the Committee of One Hundred to investigate Indian affairs in 1923, the administrations of Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge made few changes in federal policy. Fraud and debauchery plagued the Five Civilized Tribes in Oklahoma as court-appointed guardians bilked Indian minors and elderly Indians out of their properties and money. The extreme was the circle of murders of members of the Lizzie Kyle family among the Osages in the early 1920s for oil head rights. In 1924 a federal law thrust U.S. citizenship upon the remaining Indian population, even though federal authorities permitted Arizona, Utah, and New Mexico to block Native Americans from voting for the next twenty years. The Indian Rights Association and the newly formed American Indian Defense Association stood ready to protect Indian rights—with the latter group becoming increasingly vocal—but the two organizations had a limited impact.
The plight of American Indians attracted little attention until 1928, when a shocking study, the Meriam Report, exposed the pervasiveness of Indian poverty and the failure of allotment's promises. The culmination of this new interest in reform was the so-called Indian New Deal, instigated by Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes and Commissioner of Indian Affairs John Collier in 1933. Collier and the Interior Department's solicitor, the legal scholar Felix Cohen, drafted a radical new law that would restructure tribal governments and the administration of federal policies. The forty-eight-page bill became the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934. It introduced federal programs to support Indian agriculture, vocational education, and economic development, but its centerpiece was a provision allowing reservation communities to set up tribal governments patterned after local units of the American government. Although some critics of Collier and the BIA claimed that his determined pursuit of his goals perpetuated federal paternalism and undermined tribal traditions, the authority of Indian communities expanded during his tenure. The new Indian governments began to assert their rights and press local and federal officials to reverse the century-long decline in tribal sovereignty.
Popular images of Indians also began to shift during the 1930s. Dime novels, Wild West shows, and the early cinema reinforced the "savage" image of Indian people. But the new, pro-Indian effort in the Indian Bureau also brought new attention to Indian people. Indian writers faced the challenge of correcting stereotypes and presenting an Indian viewpoint. Prior to 1920, Alexander Posey, Charles Eastman, and Gertrude Bonnin (Zitkala 
a) had been pioneers in this effort. During the 1920s and 1930s new writers began to appear. They included Luther Standing Bear, John Joseph Matthews, Pauline Johnson, and D'Arcy McNickle. Their work in turn inspired a post-World War II generation of authors who burst on the scene in the 1960s and 1970s. These included N. Scott Momaday, whose House Made of Dawn won the Pulitzer Prize in 1969, James Welch, Vine Deloria, Jr., Leslie Marmon Silko, Paula Gunn Allen, Louise Erdrich, Wendy Rose, Linda Hogan, and Gerald Vizenor.
In spite of the early efforts of Indian writers, negative public images changed only marginally after World War II. Even though American Indians sent twenty-five thousand men and women to World War II, ten thousand to the Korean conflict, and forty-three thousand to Vietnam, their efforts did little to erase negative images of Indians. Such images have also persisted in federal policy. Following World War II the Bureau of Indian Affairs instituted a program to terminate the federal government's trust relations with many tribes. Officials proposed reducing federal expenditures and shrinking the federal bureaucracy by "getting out of the Indian business" and setting Indians "free" from federal support and protection. House Concurrent Resolution 108, passed in 1953, formalized the commitment and confirmed political support for termination. Dillon S. Myer, who headed the BIA in the Truman administration, favored the abandonment of tribal governments, and Utah senator Arthur Watkins, a favorite son of western business interests, worked simultaneously to eliminate the federal role in native life. A relocation program was instituted to recruit Indians to move to cities. Though many Indians migrated to cities successfully, the program was a disaster. After a period of subsidized "adjustment," Indian recruits were abandoned. Poverty and homelessness quickly produced frustration and anger, and these, in turn, produced additional problems: alcoholism, joblessness, and poverty.
The principal instrument for changing negative views of Indian people and for changing the policies was an upsurge in political activism by American Indians during the 1960s and 1970s. This Indian renaissance was produced by a complex combination of urban anger and tribally based assertiveness. For years the only national Indian voice was the National Congress of American Indians, a moderate group of tribal leaders who had begun meeting annually in 1944. A new voice began to be heard in 1961 when the American Indian Chicago Conference gathered to present an Indian agenda for the new Kennedy administration. After this meeting, the National Indian Youth Council formed as American Indian youth became more involved in national Indian issues. Additional examples of this new activism and militancy would include the founding of the American Indian Movement in 1968, the occupation of Alcatraz Island in 1969, the Trail of Broken Treaties march of 1972, and the armed occupation of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in 1973. These and other actions produced a national and highly visible call for Indian self-determination.
Although Indian self-determination has been embraced as a goal by every president since Lyndon Johnson, congressional action has rarely matched presidential rhetoric. Congress and the Johnson administration were frequently preoccupied by the Vietnam War and social unrest at home. Change was more frequently inspired by journalistic efforts such as those of Carl Rowan in Minnesota, lobbying by the National Indian Youth Council and the National Congress of American Indians, and local protests such as the "fish-ins" in Washington State. Nevertheless, pro-Indian legislation did emerge during the 1970s. New laws included a settlement of land claims in Maine in 1978 and two pieces of landmark legislation passed the same year—the Indian Child Welfare Act and the American Indian Religious Freedom Act. The first established a role for tribes in the adoption of Indian children, and the second declared constitutional support for Native American religious freedom. Another law, the Indian Self-Determination and Educational Assistance Act, was passed in 1975 but only gradually became the basis of federal Indian policy. The Self-Determination Act stipulated that tribes could enter into contracts with the Indian Bureau to administer their own programs, from education to health care to housing. In 1978, Congress attempted to monitor the progress of the government in implementing this important measure by creating the American Indian Policy Review Commission to survey programs undertaken in tribal communities and funded by the federal government.
Because tribal governments increasingly operate as sophisticated business corporations, the future of Indian-white relations rests on Indian self-determination. Tribal leaders shoulder enormous responsibilities that include the protection of hunting and fishing rights, water rights, religious traditions, and cultural heritage. At the same time, modern tribal governments struggle to develop successful gaming operations, profitable industrial factories, and effective educational and social-welfare programs. Tribes that have fulfilled this ambition include the Mississippi Choctaws, Navajos, White Mountain Apaches, Oklahoma Cherokees, Pequots, and Oklahoma Creeks.
Accompanying changes in federal legislation have been victories in state and federal courts. From a low point in 1903 after the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock permitted Congress to abrogate treaties, Indian interests have risen in the eyes of judges and legal commentators. In 1946 Congress authorized a general review of outstanding land claims by creating the Indian Claims Commission. Over its thirty-year term the commission reviewed hundreds of cases and recommended millions of dollars in awards. And beginning in the 1950s, assertive tribal governments and their attorneys brought a growing number of cases to the federal and state courts for review. Their efforts produced major victories in the areas of water, fishing, and mineral rights and in the legal prerogatives of tribal governments.
Despite the emerging partnership between tribes and federal officials, Indians and whites continue to occupy separate worlds. As much as 67 percent of the total Indian population of the United States lives in urban areas, a large part of this group having settled Indian communities in Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle, Oklahoma City, Albuquerque, Detroit, San Francisco, and other major centers. American Indians live among, work with, and even marry non-Indians, but Indian communities and an "Indian" identity continue to exist. This identity is distinctive and enduring, even though it often differs from the ideas of Indians who have continued to follow the traditions of their individual tribes. A significant Indian population continues in modern America, even though so much of tribal culture has been lost that the "Indian way" is sometimes equated with Pan-Indian activities such as powwows, art shows, and dances.
The Indian renaissance of the 1990s has attracted a growing following for "Indianness," defined by many as an attitude of respect for the environment and for native spirituality. Because this new popularity of Indian values has accompanied the emergence of native-run casinos, there has been an unfortunate bandwagon effect as non-Indians and Indians who previously would not admit their native heritage suddenly seek to cash in by lobbying to become tribal members. Their appeals have created a new problem for the tribes. At the same time, the negative stereotypes of the past have dissolved in favor of a pro-Indian attitude cultivated by the non-Indian media and the movie industry. During the 1990s films and documentaries such as Dances with Wolves, The Last of the Mohicans, and Pocahontas produced generally positive portraits of native people but rarely delved into the complexity and detail of daily life. Despite great changes in law and policy, the non-Indian world continues to define what it means to be an Indian, and the responsibility to define and defend their interests remains with Indians themselves.
Stephen Cornell, The Return of the Native: American Indian Political Resurgence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Vine Deloria, Jr. and Clifford M. Lytle, The Nations Within: The Past and Future of American Indian Sovereignty (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984).
Donald L. Fixico
Seminole, Creek, Shawnee, Sac and Fox
Western Michigan University
