The Failure of the “Red Power”

Few Americans were aware of the true conditions of life in these places. For most Americans the reservations began to be seen as living museums or a promise of where one might enjoy life in the new American mode.

The farcical character of the whole situation was increased by Hollywood film makers, who romanticized the life of the Indian. No longer solely objects of derogation, the "red men" came to be viewed as a heroic people, living reminders of a glorious past. In some circles it even became fashionable to boast of possessing "Indian blood."

On June 2, 1924, America's original residents were finally granted citizenship. Four years later the Institute for Government Research published a report on "The Problems of Indian Administration" pointing out the dismal failure of assimilationist policy and setting forth bold recommendations. At last somebody seemed to be caring.

In 1933, a new program was instituted to permit the Indians to retain their traditions without the overwhelming imposition of "white" ways.

The Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 also permitted Indians to sell their land to tribal members, to establish tribal councils to manage local affairs, and to incorporate into self-governing units.

Since then progress has been very uneven. Some Indians have made significant gains. Here and there fallow lands have been irrigated and erosion halted. In some places education has been improved. Birth rates have dramatically increased and death rates have declined as health and welfare problems are being dealt with more effectively through such government agencies as the Public Health Service.

Yet the same Bureau of Indian Affairs (a branch of the Department of the Interior) still maintains administrative control over most Native Americans, now numbering approximately one million, the large majority of whom live on reservations, two-thirds of them concentrated in the states of Oklahoma, Arizona, New Mexico, and the Dakotas.

Yet in spite of the fact that some were integrated into the general community and found employment in specialized trades (for example, the high-steel workers among the Mohawks), most suffered the plight of other "colored" minorities. Most urban Indians are concentrated in metropolitan areas on the West Coast, in the Southwest, and the Midwest. There are, however, as many as 15,000 in New York City, mostly Mohawks but many from the West—"Hopi from Arizona, Navajo from New Mexico, Creek from Oklahoma, Blackfeet from Montana, and others..."

For those who remain on the reservations life continues to be harsh.

In the 70-ies some young Native Americans knew what was happening and many decided to fight. Representatives of different tribal groups have formed "Red Power" organizations as both cultural centers and bases for challenging the system that in their view does little of a positive nature and much that is destructive to Indian peoples.

In some areas the loose confederation of Indian militants gained limited success. The most dramatic cases were the invasion and occupation of the abandoned island of Alcatraz and its empty prison buildings in 1970, the takeover of the Bureau itself in Washington in 1972, the two-month siege of Wounded Knee in 1973, and the bloody fight at the Red Lake Reservation in Minnesota in 1979 in which two Chippewas were killed in the confrontation with federal authorities.

Other attempts have been less successful. Most Native Americans do not see themselves as brothers to members of distant (or sometimes even proximate) tribes. They are Navaho or Seminole or Cherokee or Sioux, not "Indians." And they often have very different notions of what they want and where they want to go.

Over the years many young Indians thought it best to leave the reservations and the villages to settle in the cities.

Most were poor who, like other impoverished peoples, sought the opportunities they expected to be available in the urban centers.

In 1990 according to the Census of Population:

the average Indian had but five years of schooling, the family income was only $1,500 per year (the $34,000 per year income of an average American.

Some young Indians, however, were among the best trained and the most success-oriented and they took their skills and talents with them, leaving a vacuum behind.

Have a look at the brief life stories of these people of Ondian extraction:

Margo Gray-Proctor, Jack C. Montgomery and Freda Porter.