Civil Rights Movement

Great Tribal Leaders of Modern Times: LaDonna Harris

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Institute for Tribal Government
Year

Produced by the Institute for Tribal Government at Portland State University in 2004, the landmark “Great Tribal Leaders of Modern Times” interview series presents the oral histories of contemporary leaders who have played instrumental roles in Native nations' struggles for sovereignty, self-determination, and treaty rights. The leadership themes presented in these unique videos provide a rich resource that can be used by present and future generations of Native nations, students in Native American studies programs, and other interested groups.

In this interview, longtime advocate LaDonna Harris discusses her decades of tireless work on behalf of Indian tribes, civil rights, and world peace. Her most compelling task today is forming new leaders through the Ambassadors program of Americans for Indian Opportunity, the Albuquerque-based organization she created in 1972.

This video resource is featured on the Indigenous Governance Database with the permission of the Institute for Tribal Government.

Native Nations
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Citation

Harris, LaDonna. "Great Tribal Leaders of Modern Times" (interview series). Institute for Tribal Government, Portland State University. Portland, Oregon. 2004. Interview.

Kathryn Harrison:

"Hello. My name is Kathryn Harrison. I am presently the Chairperson of the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde Community of Oregon. I have served on my council for 21 years. Tribal leaders have influenced the history of this country since time immemorial. Their stories have been handed down from generation to generation. Their teaching is alive today in our great contemporary tribal leaders whose stories told in this series are an inspiration to all Americans both tribal and non-tribal. In particular it is my hope that Indian youth everywhere will recognize the contributions and sacrifices made by these great tribal leaders."

[Native music]

Narrator:

"LaDonna Harris, a citizen of the Comanche Nation of Oklahoma, today lives in Santa Ana Pueblo, New Mexico, where she continues a decade's long advocacy on behalf of tribal America. Her activism has also taken her into civil rights, the women's movement, environmental protection and world peace. Raised in rural Oklahoma during the Great Depression by her maternal grandparents, one an eagle medicine man and the other a devout Christian, Harris absorbed the respect that her grandparents had for one another, a quality she models today in her respect for diverse traditions. She went to public schools in Oklahoma and married her high school sweetheart, Fred Harris, who served as a Democratic member of the Oklahoma State Senate for eight years. He was elected to the United States Senate in 1964. LaDonna's public service career began as the wife of Senator Harris and the two were complementary partners in many social justice initiatives. As she gained political momentum and found the strength of her own voice, LaDonna got 60 Oklahoma tribes together and founded Oklahomans for Indian Opportunity, an organization that sought to rectify the stifling socio-economic conditions that were impacting Indian communities and other minorities. For her work in civil rights she was inducted into the National Black Sorority. LaDonna worked with leading Democrats including Sgt. Shriver and she campaigned for Hubert Humphrey in his presidential bid in 1968. In her partnership with Senator Harris, LaDonna was able to be a strong force in Congress where she was the first senator's wife to testify before a congressional committee. She exerted a beneficial influence on legislation such as the return of Taos Blue Lake to the people of Taos Pueblo. President Lyndon Johnson appointed her to chair the National Women's Advisory Council of the War on Poverty. In that era she was witness to the gains that tribes made through the Office of Economic Opportunity and the emergence of numerous great tribal leaders. LaDonna ventured into electoral politics herself in 1980. A founder of Common Cause, she was the vice presidential nominee on the Citizens Party ticket with Barry Commoner. Her political work also took her to the streets. In the early ‘70s she picketed the White House for equal pay for equal work. She was a founding member of the National Women's Political Caucus and still finds time to get together for fun with the Comanche Amazons. She founded the Multi-Tribal Americans for Indian Opportunity, AIO, in 1970, an organization that is a catalyst for new concepts and opportunities for Indian peoples. One of LaDonna's great passions is the weaving of traditional values such as dispute resolution into modern governance systems. In 1993, AIO created the acclaimed American Indian Ambassadors Program which provides two-year fellowships to Native students. The young ambassadors are instructed in tribal values and modes of government and sent to foreign countries to observe Indigenous governments first hand. AIO has partnered with a Maori, New Zealand, group in an initiative to foster the self-determination capabilities of Indigenous communities. LaDonna's international activism is spurred by the conviction that tribal America has a great contribution to make to global social justice. Just as new leaders are blessed with LaDonna's spirit in the Ambassadors Program, in 2003 she passed the executive leadership of AIO to her daughter, Laura Harris, though LaDonna remains strongly involved. She has two other children, Kathryn and Byron and one teenage grandson, Sam Fred Goodhope. LaDonna Harris has been honored with many awards and appointments. Her life and work have given depth and richness to the meaning of public service."

Growing up in Cotton County, Oklahoma

LaDonna Harris:

"I grew up on my grandparent's allotment. My grandmother and my grandfather had land abutting that. He put together, my great grandfather put together several of his children's allotments so he had a large base there and it was at the forks of Cash Creek in Cotton County, Oklahoma. So in relative terms we were well off and my grandfather who was a Spanish captive knew a little bit or recognized the necessity of rich soil so that was why we had...my grandfather was a pretty successful farmer so in relative terms we were well off in Cotton County in those days as you would say. My father went to California looking for work, he was Irish, and my mother went to work for Indian Health and so it was determined I would stay with my grandparents, my sister and I. And it was probably the most wonderful thing that happened to me because they were steeped in their Comanche culture and Comanche values and that was how I learned my value system and really has brought me to this place actually. My grandfather was a...never gave up the old religion. He had some eagle medicine as well as peyote. But grandmother was the second Comanche to be converted Christianity and so it was an interesting value system to grow up in. I really think that grandmother was a beautiful Christian woman but it was because she had Comanche values rather than following Christianity as such cause she was the matriarch of the family after her mother died, she became the matriarch of all of the Red Elk family. So I had a very strong grandmother and a very wonderful grandfather who would take us to church on Sunday and we would go to church and listen to all of the preacher preach and then we we'd come home and papa would sing his peyote songs in the evening as the sun was going down so it was a very rich environment that I grew up in. And grandmother of course still...Comanche was spoken at home. Unfortunately I don't speak it as well, though I understand it very well. But I'm learning, we're taking Comanche classes now, the children and I. So it was a wonderful childhood and you just, you had this sense of belonging to everyone. Grandmother would see elder Comanches on our little county seat, Walters, Oklahoma, and they would just chat in Comanche and I always sat and listened to them and I would ask grandmother, ‘How are we related to them?' cause she would call them by this kinship name and come to find out we're not really blood kin but we had this long family relationship that created this kinship that continued from I think it was like two generations ago our family did something with this family that created this relationship. So I always felt that I belonged to everybody."

Grandmother

LaDonna Harris:

"She had a sense of style about her and we'd go into town with her and go into a little department store that we had in our home town and they would say, ‘Oh, Mrs. Tabbytite, let me show you our new materials,' or whatever. So she was always treated like the grand lady that she was. And so it always gave you a sense of pride. What she really told me, she said, ‘I can't advise you because I won't have ever been where you're going so I can't tell you how to...you should act or what you should think but what I'd like for you to do is to have your own set of values and stay with them.' And she would never, in Indian way you never tell a child, this is what you should, how you should behave or the Comanches didn't anyway. They took you with them and so I would go with her to funerals, to family events and things and it was through those ways that I learned Comanche ways and because I showed interest then she would take me to another learning experience. And it was that combination of her selecting me to go with her to these, for these Comanche occasions like funerals and gatherings and that was...that she recognized that I had some spark or something there that she wanted to nurture and I just assumed that responsibility. It was a wonderful thing. And then also she said that she didn't understand all the things that I was having to learn and all the experiences that I would go through but to set my own pace and so I pretty much did that. And then it was interesting too, there was no conflict between papa's medicine and her ways and papa would say, ‘That's important for her, that's important for her to...that's her medicine way,' he would say, ‘and what's good for her is not necessarily good for me and it's important that you know that about other people.' He said, ‘You should never take their religion, mess with other people's religion or medicine,' as we say in Comanche way. And he said, ‘Because you will hurt them and more important you'll hurt yourself.'"

Relatives: grandparents and politics

LaDonna Harris:

"I had an uncle and really had a lot of different relatives in the military and he would listen to the news and listen to all of the...and he could discuss it. He could tell you, though he couldn't read he could tell you all the events. And my sisters and my mother bought Look magazine and those big beautiful pictures, Life and Look and then he'd call me over and in Comanche he said, ‘Tell me who these people are,' and I would tell him and he would make the association by listening to the news. When Fred would come to visit he would have these, try to have these conversations. He would talk real loud because he spoke in broken in English but he could curse really well in English. But his English was very broken cause he ran away from Indian boarding schools when he was young and never learned to read or write. But he'd have discussions about Truman firing MacArthur with Fred and Fred said, ‘Well, when did papa learn, how did he learn to read? Did he go to Indian boarding schools?' And I said, ‘He can't read.' And he said, ‘Well, how does he know all of these things?' But he could just, he figured all these things out for himself. He had this method so he could keep us up on current events and he was a strong Democrat. So here's my two little grandparents with their braids and shawls and going off and they'd be the first one to vote in their precinct. So all of that I inherited from them and then having married a politician it's just gone on and on and I guess I continue to still be involved."

School years, discrimination and questioning authority

LaDonna Harris:

"School was another thing. That was a whole different story. Turns out I'm severely dyslexic and so I don't learn like other people learn. So I had to learn, study the teacher and figure out how I could satisfy her without having to go through the exercises as she explained them. So I think that's one of the things that gave me a lot of talent of understanding people in office or people that we've had to deal with, the Indian communities had to deal with because I had to do that all my life. There were also forms of discrimination, mostly ignorance; it was more ignorance than it was direct. Occasionally there would be, people would get mad at us and...we rode the school bus into...we had to walk a mile, get on a school bus and then go into town and sometimes we would have encounters with some of the Anglo children there and they'd call us gut eaters. I remember that particular found so hurtful. And I came home crying to Gagu and I asked her, ‘Why would they say that and what did they mean by it?' Of course I had had tripe and as we all ended up eating tripe and most people in the world did, then we quit all of a sudden here in the United States. But anyway I came and was crying to grandmother about it and she said, ‘Oh, they just don't know better, don't pay any attention to them.' She said, ‘Besides they eat crawdads and muscle shells.' That seemed to satisfy me, I don't know why. It took me a great long time to overcome that idea about how to learn to eat oysters and clams, which I thoroughly love now but it was...there were some events like that that were painful. And even teachers, mostly just out of ignorance that were very hurtful. But in the church, the visiting ministers I found very hurtful and very painful about...that our ways had no value and we had to give them up in order to be a good person is really how they...at least that's how it was interpreted to me and the same way in the schools in many ways, that you had to give up who you were in order to become educated. It was always an either/or, they always put it in a position you had to give this up in order to become educated or become a good person or become however they put it ws always an either/or situation. I got some...I think it was all the loving and nurturing that I got that I said, ‘Well, something's wrong with it,' and made me question authority, I think it was mostly the ministers and so ever since then I've never necessarily believed anybody in authority. I always question it and say, ‘Well, they may be a good person but maybe they don't know or maybe they're not a very good person and we should figure out some other way of dealing with this issue.' Growing up like that is I think though it was very painful at the time that it gave me some skills that I still use today."

Dreams as a child and marriage

LaDonna Harris:

"I think I had what most little girls wanted, the picket fence, being married and kids and picket fence and kind of that was my dream. My mother and sister had great hopes for me cause I did get through school with pretty good reasonable grades and they had great hopes that I would go on and do great things. I was the one that was going to be able to do these things. Then I married my high school sweetheart, right out of high school and so they were kind of disappointed. They thought I should go on to college. My mother thought I should be a model. She had thought I was so neat or something, I don't know exactly what. But both of them thought that I was marrying below myself. This is Fred Harris. But we...he and I just, it was a wonderful relationship. We both had strengths and weaknesses and we fulfilled each other's weaknesses and strengths, we complemented each other's weaknesses and strengths and so we became good friends and good partners for many years."

Putting her husband through college

LaDonna Harris:

"Well, with just a high school education it was quite difficult. The first job I had, which I dearly loved was working in the library and all the new publications that would come in I would help put them in the proper place and the magazines and things that I knew what department they went to, it was working with one of the librarians there and working with new publications so it was always exciting to be around those beautiful, wonderful books full of great things. But then a new librarian came and reorganized it and did me out of a job and then I worked for continuing education and reproduced classes. They used to reproduce them by mimeograph machine and send them out to, people would take classes outside of the classroom and that was my job. When Fred was still in law school he ran for House of Representatives in Oklahoma and he was the youngest man to at that time, he was running against...and he lost that...he was running against an older person, a county commissioner and here he was still in college. He lost that campaign which probably was a good thing. It was by a very small, like 42 votes as I remember and so the next time he ran he ran for the State Senate and was elected and so we've been in campaigns ever since school where I'm always stuffing envelopes or doing something. But I was the stoic Indian girl. All this time from all through school and the first 10 or 12 maybe even 20 years of our marriage I was still very stoic, the stereotype of not speaking out and it was a form of protection I recognized later is to not to allow people to hurt me. If I was quiet and would observe them I would figure them out so I could interact with them in a way that I felt comfortable with. So it was a method that I used and it became very valuable in the campaign after that. We were the first people that used television. I was the only wife that would go to the State Senate and be around what was doing. I would go to like all the mental health hospitals and make reports back to him cause he was head of that committee. I would sit in committee hearings and he would ask my advice because he'd gotten dependent on me how I read people, how I saw them or my insights about them. He would depend on my insights about them and then we'd use Comanche to talk politically about, ‘here comes someone, here comes your brother, pay attention or here comes someone that doesn't like you,' not necessarily doesn't like you but you don't get on well so heads up. So we would talk to each other that way and Comanche became very valuable that way as well and Fred himself became a great student of Comanche culture and learned the language and can speak pretty well and he sings, can sing Comanche songs and he still does, still loves...of course everybody just loved him. We would take my grandmother to church. We had lost my grandfather by then and we would take my Gagu to church and I had a great uncle who still preached in Comanche and we would go, Fred would go and I would interpret what he was saying in his sermon. Of course then he learned all the songs and then we would go and have lunch with my great aunt. So we very much we would take grandmother with us every place we went and she even campaigned. She had a Fred Harris shawl, she was a great campaigner, she loved it."

Oklahomans for Indian Opportunity

LaDonna Harris:

"About that same time the University of Oklahoma was having a human relations study and it was going to be about Black and White relations and labor and management. So they'd invited Fred and Fred said, ‘Oh, I'm just out of school, I don't want to go back to a classroom situation so why don't you invite LaDonna and you'll get two for one and she'll contribute and then I'll get the full impact of what it is you want.' And so I went and I said, ‘What about...' and of course I was still in my stoic Indian woman phase and I said, ‘Well, what about Indian people,' when we were talking about Black/White issues and they said, ‘Oh, well, Indians don't have problems, the Bureau of Indian Affairs takes care of that.' So I burst into tears and said, ‘You don't understand.' I burst into tears because I was so inarticulate, I felt so frustrated I couldn't tell them how, what the situation was in that how the Bureau... So out of that frustration I got two major university professors involved and we started, they started coming to Lawton, Oklahoma, to my home and we would gather up the Comanches, mostly relatives, and we'd talk about what are the issues and what do we need to learn that we can be more articulate and make our case better and those kinds of things. And so it was the beginning of Oklahomans for Indian Opportunity. It was actually in my living room and then we started moving out to other towns and eastern Oklahoma and we met, ran into a great deal of resistance at that time. The five tribes of eastern Oklahoma, their chiefs were not elected, they were appointed by the Department of Interior so they didn't even have the right to choose their own leadership. So we caused a lot of turmoil over in eastern Oklahoma but it was a great learning experience. Also civil rights came along at the same time. So one day a week I would spend on integrating our hometown of Lawton and then the next time it would be Oklahomans for Indian Opportunity. Sometimes we would be in both groups and many of the Comanches were a part of that first gathering. We'd work on helping the Blacks integrate Lawton, going to restaurants and just sitting down and having food at a restaurant. It wasn't very...it was at that same time over in western Oklahoma they still had signs ‘No Indians and Dogs Allowed,' but we were in Lawton where I grew up in Walters. We were accepted in a great degree. There was a lot of ignorance but we were accepted but the Blacks were really discriminated against. So we were working on that and then we were working...so all of a sudden I just came into my own, all those skills that I learned came into become very important. And also that gave me organizational skills that I didn't have so the combination of hanging out with friends at the legislature and organizing communities both working with the Black community and the Indian community separately interestingly enough, separately though there were many of us, Indians like Iola Hayden and others, Bill Gover, Kevin Gover's dad, were a part of integrating Lawton cause we saw it as we could relate to what... they couldn't go to the movies, they couldn't go to the restaurants, they couldn't go to the amusement parks and so we integrated our whole town. This was way early, about the same time as the sit-ins in the south. So we learned a lot from that. We organized the first statewide Indian organization in Oklahoma because we had the tribes that were dislocated and forced into Oklahoma and then us plains people. We used to say the Five Civilized Tribes and the rest of us on the western side of the state. So that was a great accomplishment to have all the...there's, I've forgotten now how many tribes we have in Oklahoma but to have them all...and you could almost draw a line, the eastern tribes and the western tribes so to have them all come together and start working together. And then we took advantage of the War on Poverty and started organizing the communities. And Oklahoma wasn't, didn't have...they weren't entitled to funds because we didn't have reservation so that the OIO funds went to the county and the county was supposed to bring everybody in the community and of course they were totally ignoring the Indian community. So we made that case, we changed the policy and we funds into Oklahoma for the Indian community to organize themselves. When we started Oklahomans for Indian Opportunity there was no handbook, there wasn't anything written about how you organize communities. There wasn't anything written about civil rights that you could take say, ‘Well, let's get this book out and see how somebody else did it,' there was nothing to go by. We organized a statewide Indian youth group and then we used people like John Gardner and Sgt. Shriver and Bobby Kennedy all came to talk to our Indian youth in Oklahoma and Fritz Mondale. We gave them a prestigious opportunity because they were seeing people that other people in the school system didn't. But we challenged them that they had to participate in the school activities as well as community activities to be selected to come to OU to hear these men, these very recognizable people to come and participate in that program. So it was kind of a carrot so to speak of them participating as a full, within their school system. So it was a very...it was one of my exciting learning periods and also trying to learn to talk and explain how I felt about things and not only how I felt on trying and experimenting on what can work and being very conscious of cultural differences because we had so many tribes in Oklahoma and then the woodlands people and the plains people. We had all kinds of cultures there and so that made you conscious. And of course we had intermarried with the Kiowas, I had Kiowa relatives and recognizing but honoring. That was one of the things I never had trouble with because working with any kind of people I think being a Comanche, growing up Comanche taught you to say, ‘Well, what is good for the Apache is not good for Comanches,' but you honor their way because that's their way and it's good for them. So that's what I learned about being a Comanche and it allowed me to work with all kinds of people, that their way was different but that's great. You're having experience of a different way and I always tried to tell young people when we were having our youth groups that, ‘Just think that you have your Indian way to look at a...you have two ways of looking at a problem and you can solve, you're so much wiser than most people because you can look at it from your cultural perspective and you can look at it from your learned Western perspective. So you can look at an issue in two different ways,' because I had learned by that time that was what I was doing."

The War on Poverty years and Indian human rights

LaDonna Harris:

"Of course it was an exciting time because we had the War on Poverty going and civil rights was going. It was some real positive things that happened and I always say there were a lot of critics on the War on Poverty but I think the Indian community, most of the people that Gerald interviewed probably had a background somewhat related to... I know that Eddie Tullis' friends and Philip Martin, Ada Deer, all of us came through that door of opportunity. What it did was it allowed a platform for young emerging leaders to come out. The Philip Martins, the Ada Deers, the Joe De la Cruz', all of us and Peter McDonald, Peterson Zah, all my peer group literally found a forum to show some leadership, came through. And what happened was we were able to use that department to break what I call the stranglehold of the colonial dominance of the Department of Interior. They had colonialized us, they'd taken over managing our lands, they'd tell us how governments ought to be run, they were educating our kids. They took control of our, completely of our lives and the leadership that evolved out of the War on Poverty program we organized against the Bureau and we put it...and it lost its place, it's never regained, it's never regained its prominence in our lives because we took control of our own lives and that was the beginning. The ideas and the energy that came out of that group of people, that early ‘60s leadership, was just an amazing reservoir of new ideas. We changed the administration, Ada Deer changed termination when she, not only did she get her tribe back and made it a tribe again but she changed Congress who declared that they would never use termination as a form of governance. So those are the kinds of things that the Council of Energy Resource Tribes...just a few days ago, actually we honored a lawyer who was much involved in helping us get the Council of Energy Resource Tribes organized and once they got started they changed the federal government's attitude about that they would no longer stand for them managing our natural resources. And after CERT got organized the fishing tribes got organized, the timber tribes organized, now agriculture's organized. We organized around natural resources and so we've changed the policies, we've changed the way we do business, we're in control of them and it's just made, nobody could have made as many mistakes in our behalf as we could have...I mean as the government did for us so we certainly would be better to make our own mistakes and learn from them than to allow that to continue. And I think the example of that is this horrible trust lawsuit that's going on, the trust funds lawsuit that's going on. That's a residue of the mismanagement of the Bureau of our resources."

In the Lyndon Johnson era, hearings on Indian problems such as relocation

LaDonna Harris:

"He appointed I think seven Indian leaders and myself, they were all elected leaders like Wendell Chino and all the great old timers of that period, Red Lake, Roger Jordain, Navajo, Peter McDonald, they were members of this...and we sat with the cabinet. I was the only non-elected official. And we hadn't organized Americans for Indian Opportunity and we sat with them and it was a wonderful idea. The kind of power we could have had if that had maintained itself. And of course then the war and Johnson didn't run again and Hubert Humphrey was our chair, that chaired, the Vice President chaired this meeting. So I took on as my responsibility in that group was urban Indians. So I had hearings of urban Indians in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Dallas, Minnesota, Chicago and it was to say, because we found out in our OIO that we were all moving to the country, I mean to the cities because of relocation for one thing and then the following of relocation people were in great numbers migrating to the cities for jobs. So I said, ‘Well, just because they're not on the reservation doesn't stop them from being Indian and they deserve services,' and that was my whole point was to go and have these hearings. And this was before AIM was ever, I guess they might have been getting started but they hadn't really gotten organized. But it showed me the dilemma of Indian people in the cities like San Francisco and it was a very difficult time taking people from middle of rural Oklahoma or New Mexico, plopping them down in cities. I had cousins who went to Detroit who were relocated to Detroit and they had numbers of suicides. We need to recognize that one of the things we've done here, I've done here...I'm skipping around a little bit. What we have done here as Comanches is to organize to work with our own tribe, with our own community. So we have in Albuquerque, we call, we're the Mountain Band of Comanches because we live over the mountains from our folks and our leadership comes and pays attention to us. They come for election and I think that's a very important thing. I think the Menominees are doing that to their relatives in Chicago. They have a banquet, they recognize their accomplishments, the leadership of the tribe goes and meets with them and I think we're seeing more of the Cherokees come to New Mexico too. So we're seeing some real difference but that was my big first I guess trying to make a difference about our people who were relocated in the cities and had great adventures, there's wonderful stories about those times. I was working with Sgt. Shriver, I was on his advisory group, I testified before Congress, I was the first senate wife to testify before Congress. It was about OIO and to make sure that it got funded and making sure that Indian programs were still in the legislature, a few years I would never have thought I would be able to appear before a congressional committee and testify like that. But it was, those are the kinds of things...and it was different style. Dennis and all of the AIM guys were all good friends. In fact we were all in one building at one time. Kind of their style of confrontation was...my style was different; I would learn to figure people out and try to make it work. Theirs was, cause they were going still through their frustrating stages like I was when I cried and I think that frustrating was this confrontational kind of politic, which also brought us, got a lot of attention. And what it did, people like for our organization Americans for Indian Opportunity, we looked less radical and so therefore they would call on us to do things and we would help AIM get out of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. We were always involved in a kind of a different, in a different way but we were all involved in the same thing. And it was mostly because of their calling attention to the American public by their action really helped us to move the issues more effectively so we give them great credit for that."

Navigating roles as a woman, activist and senator's wife

LaDonna Harris:

"I remember campaigning in Oklahoma and women coming up to me and saying, ‘Well, what are you doing out here campaigning,' like it was a bad thing, that I shouldn't have been doing. Fred would get comments from some of the people in the campaign, ‘There's too much LaDonna in the campaign.' But we'd just ignore it because we depended on each other to do things. But when I got to Washington and I had worked in the Black community in my hometown and I got on the board of the Urban League, talk about strange. So I was on the board of probably the most prominent Black organization and very active at that time and I...but I was a token. I was both a token woman and a token Indian and so I had to play those roles. I'm a little older than some of the other women you're interviewing and I played those roles. I recognized I was token but I felt that it was an opportunity to learn, I was going to learn something from them that I could take home and use, I could use in our Indian community if I learned some of the strategies they were using. The Urban Coalition, I was involved in things like that. Of course I got involved in the women's movement. I guess being a little older I wasn't as sensitive to it except I always felt like I was being patronized, I always felt like I was being patronized because I wasn't as well educated as some people but it was really being patronized because I was a woman. And I thought, ‘Well, if they're patronizing because I don't have that many degrees,' but it was really because I was a woman."

Understandings of leadership, culturally and socially

LaDonna Harris:

"What I always recognize is that after we have said something in Americans for Indian Opportunity and it becomes part of the vocabulary of the rest of the Indian community. We may not get credit for it but we're the one who put it forward, the idea forward, the language forward in so many different ways. In Indian culture you're not supposed to put yourself ahead of the group anyway, Comanche culture. But it was perfectly all right for me to, as long as they were carrying on the ideas that was the satisfaction you got. You didn't have to be the one to do it. If it was Peter McDonald who was head of CERT, that was wonderful. They were taking on the responsibility of the idea that I had and that's where the satisfaction came in. I don't have to be the one out front. And it's always been that way. I think it's a Comanche value, a cultural value that we should honor...we say leadership is shared responsibility. If you look at leadership in the dictionary it says control, power over and those kinds of things. Well, you know that that's culturally inappropriate. So you figure out things that are culturally appropriate that make people comfortable in what it is you're going to share with them, they're more able to accept it. And we really believe in socializing people, having like a reception before a meeting so people get to know each other as individuals. My art as a hostess is always to find someone...if someone is standing there, find somebody that would know something that they are interested in and put them together and they always think that they had the greatest party at my house but all of it was putting people together and making them comfortable because I know how it is to be standing off by yourself and looking in and not carrying on conversation when everybody else is."

Strategies for getting things done

LaDonna Harris:

"It's how do you equalize people so that...cause we had become so accustomed of the government coming and talking down to us, talking to us and at us rather than with us and so we set up, everything that we ever set up we set up where it equalizes the people because we believe everybody has a contribution to make. And even the least of us have something to contribute to the thinking of the group to make you understand, we better consider this piece of it because if we don't see the total picture we won't make the right decisions. So that's been kind of our philosophy. And I might say that I've used every method. I've flirted sometimes, I have burst into tears on other occasions. I know that it just horrifies, particularly, I was with the Secretary of Labor and we wanted him to set up an Indian desk. I've forgotten exactly what all the details, and he just couldn't hear me. I would make a little presentation and he just wasn't hearing. I would say it another way, he just still couldn't get it. And Bobby Kilberg leaned over and said, whispered to me to tell him in this other way. So by that time I was very frustrated with him and so I started to say it and I said it in a way that made me feel emotional and I just burst into tears and he just said, ‘Okay, all right, anything you want,' just kind of get me out of the room. I'm not too good to use all kinds of methods that I had because when you run into someone who's going to stop what it is you have to figure out some way to get around them. I don't recommend crying but you need to figure out some way, if you have to get around that person how do you...how can you either influence that person or get around them. So I've had lots of experience in that field."

The great advances of the ‘70s

LaDonna Harris:

"Well, there were three things that happened almost one right after the other that seemed, that gave us some successes. First was the Taos Blue Lake, the Taos people getting their Blue Lake back. And Fred got very involved in that. It was during the Nixon administration. I had befriended a young woman who was a White House fellow. This is the importance of one of the things you learn as a Comanche or as an Indian is relationship is all there is. You have to develop relationships with people. Well, I had developed this relationship with this young woman and she was working in the White House. She got me into the Nixon White House. It was so wonderful and we talked to Lynn Garmet there and I said, ‘You had pictures, went all over the United States with the Taos people when you visited them. This administration owes them something,' and said, ‘Couldn't you help us get the Blue Lake back?' And so he called up the leadership of the Republican party and said, ‘Can you work with...would you send staff over and work with Mrs. Harris and Fred on this?" and so we made it a bipartisan effort. Of course a lot of people had contributed to it along the way to even get it to that point but Fred made a commitment to get it through and he helped with all the pieces of legislation coming out of a committee in order that it could get...cause we knew we had the votes on the floor but we didn't have the votes, necessarily know we had the votes in the committee. My role in all of that was to make it a civil rights...it was a human rights, it was a Native American issue. So I would get all these little groups of people that I'd worked with on civil rights to come in and make it a civil rights issue and so we had this...took it from all kinds of angles and got the support to get them to call members of Congress to help us through it and it became a bipartisan issue and it passed. So that was our...and the success of that we all celebrated, all of us that had anything to do with it and there were many people. Of course the Taos people themselves were the most important people. Then came the Menominee restoration. Probably my biggest contribution to that was giving Ada a place to sleep every once in awhile. She would come to town and she would talk to Fred and I about strategy about how she should go about it. Well, I wasn't sure that we could turn the Congress around on termination. Because I saw them but I was not going to tell my sister that this was a lost cause because she believed in it so strongly. By gosh, she went up there and walked those halls and she would find friends like us to stay with in town. We'd haul her into town and she would come back to Fred's office and come back and stay with us. She would talk about different members of the Congress that we might have known or would know and talk about strategy. But basically she did all the hard work on that and then of course Fred got to play a part in the actual legislation. But even more than returning...restoring the Menominees was that she got the Congress to say that they would no longer use termination as a policy. Now that, I'll always hold that up with members of the Congress today so that was... It was not just the Menominees. It was the whole negativeness of termination. So that was a wonderful thing."

The primacy of relationships

LaDonna Harris:

"So I really believe in developing relationships with people that you're going to have to work with and people who can...my daughters tease me and say, ‘You're the only one who goes and gives a hug to the red cap at the airport.' And I said, ‘That's a very important person in my life,' because I'm always going in and out of the airport in Washington, D.C. and they say, ‘Oh, Mrs. Harris,' and they'll take my luggage, they won't take my tips, they take care of me. If I'm running late they'll get me on the plane. So people, all people are important in different kinds of ways and you have to recognize the value that people have. Comanche society says all people have value, all people have value and you have to value them. And if you value them that helps you get things done. And if you truly value them as human beings and develop a relationship with them it works, it's a lot easier that way."

About not giving up

LaDonna Harris:

"There have been times when I've felt so tired from traveling or something that I would think, ‘Well, I'm going to take off a month or something.' But it's something, a responsibility that my grandmother gave me. I don't know if that's part of it. In Comanche society we believe if good things come your way and you're privileged, and I consider myself privileged having had all those experiences, then you're more obligated to give back, that you have an obligation to give back. So that's...I don't see how that could stop with age. It has to continue."

As Senator Harris's wife

LaDonna Harris:

"When I went to Washington I was going to be the perfect senator's wife until I could figure out that I could do other things. And one of them was when we had guests from Oklahoma was to give them the tour of the Capitol building. So I would take all of these wonderful Oklahomans visiting us to tour the Capitol building and we would wind up at the Vice President's office in the Capitol building. And if he was there he would always come out and shake hands and take pictures with us. We became very close friends. We traveled with him to Europe once and traveled also to Korea but one of the...but because...He admired Fred because of all the work he did and like for instance he presided over the Senate and as a freshman senator so that he would learn how the senate worked and so he would know all the rules and wouldn't get caught up and get out maneuvered by some of the older heads of the senate. Some people had admired, cause he was a really hard working person. So when Humphrey, when Johnson said he wasn't going to run and Humphrey was going to run for president of course we supported him. After we had committed to support him Fred and Fritz Mondale were his campaign managers for Humphrey. And after we'd committed to support him then Bobby Kennedy got in the race who was our neighbor around the corner, which made it very difficult. Ethel took it harder than Bobby I think but anyway that happened. But we were very loyal to Humphrey, we felt very strongly about him, he was such a wonderful human being, a great leader, national leader."

Vietnam

LaDonna Harris:

"So it was a very hectic time and a very sad time because we were very sympathetic against the war and we tried everything, tried to pass a resolution at the Convention and oh just all of that...all of that was, that was a part of all that turmoil. Before the war really took on this ugliness, well, we should have stopped it a long time ago but it was civil rights, it was War on Poverty, it was real positive pro-active kinds of things you could do and I got caught up in that. And I think that was one of the things that helped my work in the Indian community too. I could find ways of making it happen and so it was a wonderful time to be in Congress at that time. It's a totally different beast now."

Americans for Indian Opportunity, AIO, begins in the offices of Democratic chairman Senator Harris

LaDonna Harris:

"Of course then he was chairman of the party, a senator. So we had started Americans for Indian Opportunity and he had this big suite of offices, the Democratic party had this big suite of offices and of course we had no money cause we had to pay off Humphrey's and Bobby Kennedy's debt. So Fred was...he was the captain of the Titanic, that was the story. But there was enough empty space in there so he set up, I set up this little desk and office in there and that's where Americans for Indian Opportunity was born in the Watergate Hotel in the Democratic headquarters. So I had a person who worked with me and we just took off and I called all the people to be on the board, who would want to be on the board and this was all after the Bureau of Indian Affairs takeover. Out of my experience in Oklahoma, I'd learned so much and then also having these national hearings on urban Indians that I didn't feel were taken care of and then because there was this great movement in the community, everybody was moving, different levels in different ways but there was all this movement that was happening in the Indian community and I just thought that we could lend another point of view to it and maybe escalate it some. And so that was why we decided coming out of that Oklahoma experience and the urban experience that we should create one and be all inclusive. And then we had lots of people who were striving for federal recognition and things that we learned, so we were wanting to be very well rounded and inclusive and try to carry out a program that way. And that's how we started."

The work of AIO in the ‘70s

LaDonna Harris:

"In the ‘60s and the early ‘70s we were, I always call it we were hanging on by our fingernails and in the ‘70s we pulled ourselves over. Then these regional organizations started organizing and making influences and a lot of federal recognition came out of that, a lot of different kinds of things were taking place. We went through, I think our first initial work was with education in New York, urban Indians and Dallas. We did different kinds of work. Then we had, we did forms of evolution, of consciousness I guess. When we would work in a certain field it would open our eyes to another need and we organized a group of lawyers and then NARF organized and they took off, really did great, Native American Rights Fund. And then we started looking at tribal resource... or economic development was the big talk that was the answer, we always have a answer for Indian causes. Economic development was the answer so that the way that the government was going out they would initiate programs in Washington then sell them out here when many times they were culturally inappropriate. So we did research on that, wrote papers on it and showed that the ones that succeeded...then the government, when the programs didn't work the government would say, ‘Well, see those Indians can't manage anything.' And so we started looking at the kinds of programs and well we found that would succeed were like in Washington State where they were doing fisheries management and things where they were culturally related, they just seemed to have much more success than going trying to plop down an industry in the middle of the reservation. We discussed things at board meetings and in the staff and we'd bring people in and we'd talk about it and say, ‘Why are we the poorest people when we own land and we have some resources.' And I said, ‘How much resources do we own.' We couldn't find that out. None of the federal government could sit down and tell you what resources we own, how much or what. So about that time they were starting the Department of Energy and we said, ‘Well, let's...they can't have energy when we know we've got the largest amount of uranium in the country is on Indian reservation so how can they start an Energy Department and not talk to us.' They were managing our resources and we weren't even getting the going prices for them. We found out all kinds of things and that's why the Council of Energy Resources started and that's how the evolution of that changed. Then we got into the environment. One of the ways to protect those resources is have a good environmental policy so the tribes didn't even have, we couldn't even say the word mostly. Most of us could not even spell it and so we decided we should have an Indian policy statement and we got one where that Indians had the right as a government entity to have the right to say what its policies were. Well, they really fought us and particularly in some of the regions but we got Washington to declare it. The tribal governments had to deal with all of this on a tribal basis so they were messing with this. We still had many of our population who were still internalized colonialization. They had not gotten rid of their colonial mentality and that everything that, they didn't feel totally free of it. They had been victimized so long that they, it was hard. So we found that tribes were having a lot of internal problems and we were looking at those internal problems, we worked a lot with Reuben Snake and the Winnebagos and looking at problems. We decided we wanted to look at what was creating...and what we found were cultural values rubbing up against the way our governments were set up and so we saw these issues and we started working on those. We worked a great deal in tribal governance but nobody was ready to hear it. Neither was the funding sources, the federal government itself and the tribes because they were into economic development, into nation building but they hadn't gotten to governance and we still haven't quite got there yet. Looking at our own governments, they are obsolete, they were never intended to do what we're doing now and so we're always having to patch on new things to our constitution to make sure that we have some entity to take care of these issues, new issues that were...and very complex issues like environment and so forth. So those were the areas that we worked in for several years. We didn't become a nationwide phenomena at that time so we started looking at leadership. Some of the problems of how we'd become reactionary, that we were so accustomed to the government telling us what we should do that we would just react to it so that we had lost, many of us had lost the skills to be proactive. How do you learn to be proactive if you've been so conditioned after so many years, 500 years to be reactive to what's happening to us, to be proactive. So we decided that we should start a leadership program. So one of the things that we're sharing with these young people is how to use their intuition and their own tribal values and use them in a contemporary way. Don't forget them. And these people that talk about living in two worlds, that's nonsense. Everybody says, ‘Oh, we live in two worlds, we live our traditional life and then we have to live with White people.' You can't leave your values; if you're a real Indian you can't leave your values on the reservation and then come out here. It has to be with you every day. I like to think that I think in Comanche ways, I like to think I treat people in the way Comanche values put it forward, build my relationships and take care of my kinships and do the...treat them in the way that they're supposed to be treated. So that if you leave them, and so many of us are in the cities now that we have to find ways of reconnecting."

Indian values, indigenaity and the Ambassadors Leadership Training Program

LaDonna Harris:

"So we all have to think about how do we do this in a contemporary way while we bring our values with us and so I think it doesn't have to change because I think we have so much to offer. The way we communal ownership, the way we view the world, we're interconnected. All these things are...so if we're going to give it up we should just quit and go, all move to town or move someplace and give up our indigenaity or our tribal ways. But I think that they have real value in human life. If we follow those values we would all be better people and I think it's the demand of our younger children who have gone off and well educated and come back and are demanding. They need their language, they need their song, they need their dads to see themselves as a member of that tribe. And so I think that's what's important about indigenaity is how do you live it and maintain it? Culture is not static. I think one of the things that we get tied down is that like we were in the Museum of Natural History with all of the dinosaurs and the distinct animals that were becoming extinct. That's the way that we were viewed and so now here we are, we've turned into be this vibrant community of people while the rest of rural America is going down, here's Indian America is going up. We've gone from the 60s, we've just been on a rise like this and the gaming tribes are just way off the map in development and economic development and the rest of us are all moving along too in different kinds of ways. It's like in the last 30 years we have made such major changes have come into our lives and we, because we have demanded it. Indian people have demanded it and so our lives have changed, we've taken over the control of our governments, we've taken control of our resources and our environment. We're the ones, and our children in the Child Welfare Act and now we in our Ambassadors Program have teamed up with Maoris of all people of New Zealand to talk about how can we talk about this globally, how can we get the Indian world view out because it has great value to social behavior."

Tradition, technology and the conflict management program of AIO

LaDonna Harris:

"The beauty of our ancestors was their tenacity. Where would the Comanches have been if they didn't incorporate the Spanish horse? We became lords of the southern plains and because they utilized what they came across and they did it in great aplomb. So the cultures are alive and vigorous and we make adaptations of things. We've had to learn new words to put in our tribal vocabularies. I have a book of my relative's who were part of the code talkers, Comanche code talkers in World War II so they had to improvise, there wasn't words for tank, an army tank or a machine gun and they had to make up words and so it's that ingeniousness of Indian people who can figure out how to survive in the new environment they find themselves in. And so this is capturing that and making it work for you is kind of the essence of what it is we're trying to do with the Ambassadors Program. And one of the things, you talk about using technology, many of the tribes right now are having all these internal struggles, too many internal struggles. So we were trying to look at that and trying to figure out ways, and we had, we were looking at conflict management and Reuben Snake and John Echohawk and others. We would get together and talk about...so Reuben said, ‘Let's just make up our own, let's make up our own conflict management and see if we can find a tribal way to approach this,' that was our philosophy. We accidentally ran onto this mad Greek, this wonderful Greek Dr. Cristofus who, he didn't call it conflict management, he called it issues management and by taking the word conflict out of it, it became, it's an instrument to use to get your issue, work on your issues. Because what we found when we were working with all these different tribes and looking at what was happening internally that we would focus on, not the fringes but the outward manifestations of it. Say like alcohol, instead of looking at the root causes we were looking at the, we were focusing our attention on these things rather than trying to figure out what's creating this problem. And so what Dr. Cristofus and his colleagues had found, a method by using a computer and it was allowing a group to get to consensus. Well, guess what, we are consensus people and we're systems people. So they had this wonderful system, they had developed a computer system to help you, it just escalates the time of allowing you to come to a consensus and it's a way of allowing everybody to contribute and you honor their contribution, you can't bad mouth anybody's contribution. You know how we get sometimes; we get and criticize somebody's contribution. Well, you can't do that in this system. So we adopted it, we Indianized it. We made them sit in circles instead of tables. We had prayers depending on where we are, whose homeland we were in, they would have ceremonies. And he came to recognize that they were just, these non-Indians were reinventing an Indian system by governing by consensus. He borrowed from us and we borrowed from him and we call, what we call an issues and management system. So we were invited to go internationally to Crete this year to show how we use the system to make decisions that allows us to use our Indigenaity, our Indigenous world view in our decision making while using computers and all the high tech knowledge-y aspects of it but we're still bound with our traditional values in the meantime. So this was a great exploration and then we had the first meeting on the internet about the internet. Was it going to be another form of colonialization, would it take us over, we should jump right into it. It took a little longer than I'd hoped for us to get into it but we said, ‘Well, this is the first time we get to say who we are by using the computer. Here we have an opportunity to communicate directly with government, with our attorneys, with the agencies, with other institutions that we need to,' so it's changed our world and then we can communicate internationally as well so it's changed our world. But we can use it for our own, we can do, we can map our own tribal lands out, we can have all of that information that we need, instead of getting it from the Bureau that we can develop our own information database, we can do all kinds of things for ourselves by using this equipment. That's why I say...you don't have to give up your Indianess to do, your Indigenaity to do this. It's just another tool like our ancestors used from time to time to get them, so allowed them to continue as a people and that's what I see all the technology is just as we're using this camera today to record our history and to maintain our identity and making our history a part of American history. We still have Indian studies and we're still marginalized. We're not a part of the real textbook; we just continue to be marginalized. That's what the importance of your work is. So we have to accept, we have to embrace the technology and make it ours not letting it use us and I think we can do a lot better job about that than we have in the past."

The Citizen's Party: LaDonna looks back on her venture in electoral politics

LaDonna Harris:

"The Democratic Party seemed not to be able to know what it stood for. All of the things that brought us to it like grandfather, after the Depression, the rehabilitation of the country, the war and all of those things, it seemed to have lost its mission. And so I was asked by these people if I would be interested in being the vice presidential candidate for the Citizen's Party by starting a third party and Fred was out of the senate and was here teaching at the University of New Mexico. And I thought, oh, I'm not sure that I really wanted to do it. And they were pretty persuasive and Fred said, ‘Well, you'll never forgive yourself if you don't do it, why don't you do it,' and so I did. I wasn't running for the vice presidency, it was running to start a third party like the Greens have been successful in doing. It was a fascinating, I would never be a candidate again for anything but I liked the idea of starting the third party and right now, what's happening to us right now, I feel like the Democrats really need some strong leadership. I think they have just kind of let all of their responsibilities go and the President has taken over and again, we need to have some new direction. We have no real cause that we need to get onto. In the ‘30s the Democratic Party was like a religion and it was a social action, people got involved and were doing things so they were helping themselves and helping others, that kind of idea. ‘60s that was the, we felt that way and then in the ‘70s and ‘80s and ‘90s, in that particular time, we felt like we lost...we seemed to be going backward on civil rights. And the reason I use the term Indigenaity is that we need a new vocabulary to describe who we are right now, not only Indian people but the whole Civil Rights Movement, Women's Movement. We've been kind of overrun, the language we used in the ‘60s don't work for us now. People don't understand the terms that we generated during those times. So we need to find a new language and that was what we were trying to do. We were trying to start a third party...and mostly focused on the environment."

Dealing with disappointments and setbacks

LaDonna Harris:

"Well, my family always says that I never seem to remember the negative aspects of it. Well, I have...as one of my board members Charlie [Charles Lohah] would say, ‘We've created some Frankensteins in our days.' We've created things that didn't work. I just, I guess as my Comanche way I'd say, ‘well, the time's not right, it wasn't meant to be right now. So I'll put it on the back burner for awhile and then when its time comes it'll be all right so go ahead and do something that you can move with it.' That's the basic philosophy that I run on that sometimes I get disappointed in people and I say, ‘Well, maybe I won't call on them to help or I won't call on them to work with us because they're not dependable or some other reason,' I just put it in a category. ‘All right, this time they're going through a hard time and I've asked too much of them,' so that's the way I manage disappointment if you'd call it that or setbacks. And I've had some real setbacks. We were going to start it way back when, In OIO we were going to start an Indian Peace Corps and that was a total failure but we learned so much from the experience. And again it told you there are certain cultural things, if you don't pay attention to them, whether they're Anglo cultural things or departmental culture. Like the Department of Interior has a culture that it operates under or with internally and if you don't understand that you're not going to be successful in what you're doing. And that's what happened to me. I didn't understand the culture of the Peace Corps directors and the people in it. So we had to let that go. So now I'm kind of revisiting it with the Ambassadors Program as we're doing some, now looking at doing international work."

Passing the mantel to the next generation, American Indian values, the Ambassadors Program and global interactions

LaDonna Harris:

"Because everything is global now that we also as Indigenous people have to be a part of that global interaction, that our world, as comfortable as we've been on the reservation and in our little urban dwellings that we have to pay attention either economically or socially or politically, we're involved in it and we've always been a part of it but we just, we haven't...we've been on a survival mode. Now we have the time to be philosophical about looking at who we are and what we have to contribute, our relatives in Latin America, looking to work with them. We developed this wonderful relationship with the Māori because they were at the same place at the same time we were and it was like magic. They have now taken our Ambassadors Program and now they've started one and within a year's time they're just doing all these things and we're having this wonderful interaction and we're figuring out now how do we work with other Indigenous peoples and let them start their own leadership program rather than being Lady Bountiful going down to Latin America, we're going to solve their problems, that's what's always, that's what's took us so long to get where we are because people were always going to solve our problems for us. It is when we decided we were going to solve our own problems that all of this wonderful things have happened to us. And that was what was so beautiful with the Māori people, is we were thinking at the same time. We don't think in victimization, we're not victims anymore, we have something to contribute, we want to find a way to contribute it and that's where we are now. And I think that's throughout Indian Country, we have passed the survival stage. Through all the miseries and everything that we got to get here we still have cultural and political autonomy and that's what we have to share, that's one of the things we should share with our other Indigenous peoples. And so that's why we came up with our word we're sharing our Indigenaity."

Current concerns about United States priorities

LaDonna Harris:

"It is scary because we would, for instance we would be presumed in our work in Oklahoma and, well, the work in the ‘60s would be terrorists, if the AIM people would be labeled terrorists and thrown off to jail with no rights at all under this administration if we got that Homeland Security bill passed. That's a very scary position and I think if you talk to Indian people they recognize what we did in Iraq was inappropriate. If you look at the people who are serving in the Armed Forces are people of color and that's going to be the ones who serve in this horrible situation we find ourselves in. Just recently the Navajo Code Talkers came out against the war. So I think we need to think about sending messages to our government and to our representatives that this is a war that was absolutely uncalled for. I feel very strongly about that. There are so many questions that come out of this Homeland Security thing and as a person of color and people of color I think we ought to think about it. And those prisoners in Cuba in that Air Force base down there without any rights whatsoever. It just seems totally violation of everything we say we are."

LaDonna's most rewarding work

LaDonna Harris:

"Well, I think the work in Oklahoma for the first cause it opened my skills that I...I come to recognize that I had something to contribute. That was probably the first consciousness that I had something major to contribute and then the Ambassadors Program. These young people, ah, I tell you. it's so amazing to watch them. It's just wonderful. As Eddie Tullis said, ‘We feel like our future's in good hands,' when you see them operate."

The legacy she would leave

LaDonna Harris:

"That I was a good Comanche woman. I didn't mean to get emotional because I'm really excited. It's not sadness, it's an excitement about what the future, what we can do as Native people. I think it's limitless, I think it's going to take a lot of creative thinking and a lot of collaboration and so we certainly have the minds and the mental and emotional power to do it. I'm still excited about what the possibilities are. I think that's what I would like to leave with people is that I still have that excitement and the possibility of working internationally with other...with our people, our Native people working with other Indigenous people is what keeps me vigorous and gives me my vitality."

The Great Tribal Leaders of Modern Times series and accompanying curricula are for the educational programs of tribes, schools and colleges. For usage authorization, to place an order or for further information, call or write Institute for Tribal Government – PA, Portland State University, P.O. Box 751, Portland, Oregon, 97207-0751. Telephone: 503-725-9000. Email: tribalgov@pdx.edu.

[Native music]

The Institute for Tribal Government is directed by a Policy Board of 23 tribal leaders,
Hon. Kathryn Harrison (Grand Ronde) leads the Great Tribal Leaders project and is assisted by former Congresswoman Elizabeth Furse, Director and Kay Reid, Oral Historian

Videotaping and Video Assistance
Chuck Hudson, Jeremy Fivecrows and John Platt of the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission

Editing
Green Fire Productions

Photo Credit:
Family of LaDonna Harris
Americans for Indian Opportunity

Great Tribal Leaders of Modern Times is also supported by the non-profit Tribal Leadership Forum, and by grants from:
Spirit Mountain Community Fund
Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs
Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde, Chickasaw Nation
Coeur d'Alene Tribe
Delaware Nation of Oklahoma
Jamestown S'Klallam Tribe
Cow Creek Band of Umpqua Indians
Jayne Fawcett, Ambassador
Mohegan Tribal Council
And other tribal governments

Support has also been received from:
Portland State University
Qwest Foundation
Pendleton Woolen Mills
The U.S. Dept. of Education
The Administration for Native Americans
Bonneville Power Administration
And the U.S. Dept. of Defense

This program is not to be reproduced without the express written permission of the Institute for Tribal Government

© 2004 The Institute for Tribal Government 

Great Tribal Leaders of Modern Times: John Echohawk

Producer
Institute for Tribal Government
Year

Produced by the Institute for Tribal Government at Portland State University in 2004, the landmark “Great Tribal Leaders of Modern Times” interview series presents the oral histories of contemporary leaders who have played instrumental roles in Native nations' struggles for sovereignty, self-determination, and treaty rights. The leadership themes presented in these unique videos provide a rich resource that can be used by present and future generations of Native nations, students in Native American studies programs, and other interested groups.

In this interview, conducted in July 2002, Native American Rights Fund (NARF) co-founder and Executive Director John Echohawk shares his journey as a leader in Indian Country. A powerful voice in cases supporting Indian rights throughout the U.S., he has won numerous awards for his achievements.

This video resource is featured on the Indigenous Governance Database with the permission of the Institute for Tribal Government.

People
Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Echohawk, John. "Great Tribal Leaders of Modern Times" (interview series). Institute for Tribal Government, Portland State University. Portland, Oregon. July 2002. Interview.

Kathryn Harrison:

"Hello. My name is Kathryn Harrison. I am presently the Chairperson of the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde Community of Oregon. I have served on my council for 21 years. Tribal leaders have influenced the history of this country since time immemorial. Their stories have been handed down from generation to generation. Their teaching is alive today in our great contemporary tribal leaders whose stories told in this series are an inspiration to all Americans both tribal and non-tribal. In particular it is my hope that Indian youth everywhere will recognize the contributions and sacrifices made by these great tribal leaders."

[Native music]

Narrator:

"John Echohawk, Executive Director of the Native American Rights Fund, NARF, today oversees multiple lawsuits on behalf of Native tribes in a more than 30 year career of correcting century's old injustices through the legal system. NARF, a nonprofit organization located in a rehabilitated fraternity house in Boulder, Colorado, provides legal representation and technical assistance to Indian tribes, organizations and individuals nationwide, a constituency that has historically lacked access to the justice system. Echohawk has been with NARF since 1970 and served as Executive Director since 1977. Born and raised in New Mexico, John Echohawk is a member of the Pawnee Tribe of Oklahoma. From a family that emphasized education, he is one of three siblings out of six that grew up to be lawyers. After attending Farmington High School he received his BA from the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque and was the first graduate of the University of New Mexico's special program to train Indian lawyers. He was a founding member of the American Indian Law Students Association while in law school. His years of study coincided with a time of national tumult and social change, when the inequitable treatment of African Americans and other minorities including Native Americans was coming into vivid focus. His studies also coincided with a crucial period in federal Indian relations when the federal government had been systematically dismantling reservations through legislation. The Ford Foundation which had also assisted the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People issued a grant to California Legal Services for an Indian Legal Defense Fund. From this the Native American Rights Fund was formed. The organization was then moved to Colorado to be more central to the tribes it represents. In his years with NARF John Echohawk has worked with tribes throughout the lower 48 and Alaska on crucial and often contentious issues of natural resources, tribal sovereignty, human rights and ancestral burial grounds. His rule of thumb if, "˜Never give up.' Twice recognized by the National Law Journal as one of the 100 most influential lawyers in the United States, Echohawk has opened doors and forged many alliances in his work for Native tribes. One of the boards on which he serves is the National Resources Defense Council. He believes that Native Americans and environmentalists ought to be natural allies. He also serves on the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy and the National Center for American Indian Enterprise Development. In 1995 he was appointed by President Clinton to serve on the Western Water Policy Review Advisory Commission. One of the most sought after experts on Indian issues, John Echohawk has received numerous awards over the years including The Spirit of Excellence Award from the American Bar Association. On behalf of the Native American Rights Fund he accepted the seventh Carter-Menil Human Rights Prize in 1992. Echohawk has been married almost 40 years to his wife Kathryn whom he met in Farmington where the two grew up. He has one son, a scientist at the Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico and a daughter who works at the American Indian College Fund in Denver helping Indian colleges grow. John and Kathryn Echohawk also enjoy spending time with their grandchildren. The Institute for Tribal Government interviewed John Echohawk in Portland, Oregon, July, 2002."

The war on poverty initiative and the beginning of the Indian Law Program

John Echohawk:

"I was one of the participants in the first Indian Law Program started by the federal government to develop some Indian attorneys that had been realized by the federal government at that time through their Office of Economic Opportunity, the War on Poverty that occurred during the 1960s, that there were only a handful of Native American attorneys across the whole country and that perhaps one of the best strategies to try to fight poverty in Indian communities was to get some Indians who were professionals like doctors and like lawyers. I checked with the University of New Mexico Law School for scholarship assistance and they told me that they had just contracted with the federal government to start this Indian Law scholarship program so I was just in the right place at the right time and accepted one of these scholarships and became part of the first class of Indian law students to start studying law under this new federal initiative."

The impact of the social movements of the 1960s on Echohawk's life work

John Echohawk:

"The Civil Rights Movement was something that I was able to put into context by going to law school. Of course I learned about the legal process and how that system works and basically I found that through the use of law in litigation that people could have their rights recognized and enforced even though they were politically unpopular and that's what was happening during the Civil Rights Movement. The courts were doing cases that provided equal protection and equal treatment for African Americans in this country for the first time and even though that was not politically popular this is what was required by the laws of this country if there was to be equal treatment of all people in this country. And so I saw how that happened through the use of the litigation process and when we started thinking about how that impacted Native American people we saw that we needed to utilize that same strategy. There had never been Indian law taught in the law schools and so the professors started pulling together the materials relating to Indian treaties and federal statutes relating to law and the treatises that had been done on Indian law and so the first time there was a body of materials that could be studied about Indian law. And when us Indian law students started reading that we saw that our tribes had substantial rights in the treaties and in the federal laws that were really going unenforced and the reason that was happening is because this legal process requires you to have attorneys to assert and protect your rights and if you don't have attorneys then it doesn't matter what it says in the treaties and the statutes. You don't have any rights. The tribes did not have lawyers cause they didn't have any money. They were poor and so we knew that what needed to be done was to get lawyers for tribes to assert these rights that tribes had. And that's when we decided that we needed to start the Native American Rights Fund, a nonprofit organization that would raise funds, hire lawyers expert in Indian law and make them available to the tribes around the country. We knew this would be something that would be beneficial cause we had seen at the same time we were in law school the start of civil legal services programs funded by the federal government being put out into poor communities around the country so that poor people could have lawyers. And some of these programs were started on Indian reservations. Of course the federal government didn't have enough money to put legal services lawyers on all the reservations so it was really present on only a few of the reservations but where they were active they were able to do many things in terms of enforcing Indian laws for the benefit of Indians. So we saw the formation of something like the Native American Rights Fund as being able to take the provision of legal services to tribes on a national basis and help many more people."

Native American Rights Fund attorneys modeled their efforts on the NAACP in building up their organization

John Echohawk:

"Well, again, we learned from the Civil Rights Movement how that was done. We looked at where the lawyers for the African Americans was coming from that brought the Civil Rights litigation and their counsel most of the time was the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund and that was a nonprofit organization that raised money and then hired lawyers to represent these African Americans in these important Civil Rights cases. And the funding, primary funding for that NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund came from the Ford Foundation in New York City. So we made contacts with the Ford Foundation in New York City and started discussions about forming a national legal defense fund for Native Americans and they were interested and ended up making a grant then in 1970 to start the Native American Rights Fund in that same model as the Civil Rights organization for the Blacks, they provided the counsel. We began as part of the California Indian Legal Services, one of these federally funded Indian legal services programs I talked about and we were a project of that organization for a year until we were able to incorporate separately and establish our national headquarters in Boulder, Colorado."

The priorities of the growing Native American Rights Fund

John Echohawk:

"Well, we started with the three lawyer program but we quickly got overwhelmed by requests for assistance from throughout Indian Country to help and with that we sought additional funding that came through from different foundations and the federal government through this legal services program and we were able to expand in a very short time to a staff of about 15 attorneys and we were able to do a wide variety of cases under the direction of an all-Indian Board of Directors. That established us as priorities cases relating to the protection of our tribal sovereignty, our existence as tribal governments, secondly the protection of our natural resources, our land, our water rights, our hunting and fishing rights and thirdly protection of our human rights, our rights to cultural and religious freedom and expression."

The historic Menominee termination case

John Echohawk:

"And one of the first cases that we undertook was to try to reverse the federal Indian policy at that time which was one of termination of tribes. The federal government had decided that the best policy for tribes was to quit being Indians and to have their tribal governments terminated and to be forced to assimilate into the larger non-Indian society. And this was the existing federal policy at the time when the organization was founded in 1970. So to do away with that termination policy we undertook to represent the Menominee Nation of Wisconsin, one of these tribes that had been terminated starting with an act of Congress in 1954. And of course at the time the Congress told the Menominee people, 'this would be good for you, this is going to help you,' and of course what happened as a result of that is exactly the opposite. It nearly destroyed the Menominee Nation. They lost a lot of their land through that process, many of their people ended up instead of being productively employed ended up on the unemployment rolls and it just devastated that community. So we helped the Menominee Nation go to Congress and develop a bill that would restore the Menominee Nation's tribal government and tribal status and eliminate this termination of the tribe. We asked the Congress to basically look at the record and admit that this termination policy was wrong and to change it and to their credit Congress did that. They said, 'Yeah, this was clearly a mistake, this was not good for the Indian people so we need to change that.' They restored the tribe and that set up restoration of all the other tribes that had been terminated during that same period and of course that's happened over the last 30 years since that first Menominee restoration in 1973."

Changing federal policies toward sovereign Indian governments

John Echohawk:

"Since 1787 when this nation came into being and adopted the Constitution, what's the relationship between tribal nations that of course pre-existed the start of the United States government and the United States itself and of course in the Constitution this nation recognizes that tribal governments have sovereign status, that they are governments like state governments and like foreign governments and that there's this government to government relationship between the United States and between the tribal nations that's governed by the Congress. For a long time that was done by treaties and then later it was done by federal statute. But essentially it's a relationship between sovereigns, between governments and from time to time U.S. policy in dealing with tribes has been rather one sided and they haven't listened to what the tribes have wanted to do and they have basically forced their own version of what they think is good for Indian people on Indian people through the passage of these laws. And one of them was this termination policy that reflected really the paternalism of White America about what was good for our people without really even asking them and they were basically saying, 'You're better off not being an Indian,' and that was the crux of the termination policy but again they never asked the Indians about that. And when they did, the Indians said, 'We want to continue to be Indians, we want to continue to exist as tribal people, we want to continue to govern ourselves through our tribal governments and exercise a sovereignty that we've had since time immemorial and control our own affairs and continue the existence of our tribal nations.' And of course that's what's become the policy now that the termination philosophy was rejected and this Indian self-determination policy accepted by the federal government. Of course that's now been in place about 30 years and I think it's helped our tribes tremendously as we've finally been able to put a stop to this termination policy and start governing ourselves once again."

Finding allies in Congress for a reversal of termination

John Echohawk:

"We had gone to the Congress looking for representatives in the Senate and in the House who would be supportive of this tribal position. And it's been so long ago I can't remember all of the players but there were some champions there that came through for us. I think on the Senate side Senator Abourezk from South Dakota was very helpful in particular and on the House side Congressman Morris Udall from Arizona was very supportive as well. But Indian people generally have been able to rely on champions like that beginning in the '70s, into the '80s and through the '90s and here into the new millennium too to basically stand up and fight for tribes and support their rights under new laws and the Constitution of this country."

The unique situation and challenges of Alaskan villages and tribes

John Echohawk:

"Well, I mentioned this termination policy that had been in place. The version of that for the Alaska tribes was this Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act that was passed by the Congress in 1971. The tribes in Alaska had never been able to get the attention of the federal government and to make treaties with the federal government to have their claims to tribal sovereignty and their aboriginal title to their lands and waters and hunting and fishing rights recognized by the federal government. They had just been in limbo all this time clear up until 1971. But the Natives finally got some leverage with the discovery of oil on the north slope of Alaska and they wanted to put the pipeline down through the middle of Alaska and transport the oil that way. Well, the Natives saw a way to get the attention of the federal government by filing lawsuits to block the pipeline until such time as their claims to that land were settled. That was their aboriginal land and the Congress refused to deal with that issue. But when the Natives threatened to stop the pipeline through this lengthy litigation then Congress finally was forced to deal with land claims of tribes in Alaska and that resulted in the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971. The tribes came away with recognition of title to land of about 44 million acres, about 10 percent of Alaska and about $1 billion in compensation for their other claims. But the strange part of the legislation was that this land and money did not go directly to the tribes. Congress again in the final stages of this termination period in an experiment set up Native corporations and put the land and the money into Native corporations and the Natives became shareholders of corporations. And so their land and money was held in a different way than tribes in the lower 48 where it's held by tribes. What that left open then was whether tribal governments had jurisdiction over that land in the same way that tribes have jurisdiction over their land in the lower 48. Is that Indian Country over which tribal governments can assert jurisdiction since it's not owned by the tribe, it's owned by these corporations that are owned by the individual tribal members? That was the question presented in this case brought by the Native village of Venetie where they sought to generate some revenues to support their tribal government by imposing taxes on people who lived and worked on their land and some of those people were non-Indians and they challenged the authority of the Venetie tribal government to tax them saying they didn't have authority to do that and the question was, is this Indian Country just like in the lower 48 and even though we won the case in the lower courts the Supreme Court reversed our victories and held that there is no Indian Country jurisdiction in Alaska, that the fact that these lands are held by Native corporations and not tribal governments makes a difference and that we have no tribal authority over our lands in Alaska because of this corporate status."

The impact of the Supreme Court reversal

John Echohawk:

"Well, what it means is that the tribes in Alaska don't have the same authority over their lands as the tries in the lower 48 and that means they're under state jurisdiction and with tribal governments being a distinct minority in Alaska they have difficulty controlling what happens in their own communities on their own lands and this is something that they want to correct and they've started discussions with the State of Alaska and with the Alaska delegation about this and they've started to make some inroads in getting the authority of Alaska tribal governments over their lands addressed. So even though the case was lost it started a discussion and a dialogue up there that started to result in change where tribal governments in Alaska are starting to be recognized as having the same powers and authorities over their lands as the tribes in the lower 48 so again it's another come back from this termination policy that had plagued us for so long."

Some of NARF's cases have roots deep in the past: the Trust Funds case

John Echohawk:

"The Trust Fund's case described as this case brought by Elouise Cobell as the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit is a case that had really been out there for a long, long time that we were aware was out there for a long, long time but we were hoping wouldn't really ever have to be brought. Of course we had questions whether we would ever have the resources to bring it since it is the largest case that we've ever gotten involved in. But it starts with the fact that Indian lands are held in trust for Indians by the federal government. In that sense it's different from ownership of land that most people are familiar with in the United States. Generally speaking the title to tribal lands and individual Indian lands on reservations is not held by the tribe or by the individual Indians, it is held by the United States but it's held in trust for the benefit of the tribes or the individual Indians and that makes the federal government a trustee. In the beginning the land started out of course as land owned in common by the tribes. Initially that was the way that the federal government and the tribes established their relationship. But beginning in the 1880s with the Indian Allotment Act, Congress adopted a new policy part of this assimilation mentality that they had trying to force Indians to assimilate into the mainstream. They took some of this tribal land and divided it up and gave some of it to individual Indians, members of the tribe. And so individual Indians on some reservations for the first time got individual ownership of land but that land was still held in trust by the federal government for them. And of course as trustee then, like any bank, well, what that means then is the trustee when the land's to be leased for timber development or oil and gas development, the trustee signs the leases, collects the money and keeps it in an account for the beneficiary, the individual Indian. So the United States as our trustee became our banker and they were supposed to do all this for individual Indians who got these individual allotments beginning in the 1880s on many reservations across this country. Well, the federal government over all that time has not made a very good banker. They didn't keep track of all of these records and all these accounts and all of this money on all of these leases. This became evident pretty early. Beginning in the early 1900s there were starting to be reports of how the government was not managing these individual Indian money accounts for all these individual Indians that had these leases that the federal government was administering. Complaints were made to the Congress and to the Bureau of Indian Affairs and unfortunately nothing was done about them and even though these complaints would regularly be raised in the Congress and in the administrations all throughout the 1900s nothing was ever done about it. The latest effort was led by Elouise Cobell, the lead plaintiff in this lawsuit that we're talking about. She got an act of Congress passed together with many other people in 1994 called the Trust Reform Act and what this did was put a special trustee into the Department of the Interior Bureau of Indian Affairs to clean up this mismanagement of the individual Indian trust funds. Well, it turned out to be politics as usual because promptly after 1994 the administration never asked for any money to implement this law and Congress didn't give them any, didn't provide any itself so everybody passed this law and kind of promptly forgot about it so it was business as usual. So we made a determination at that time that the Indian trust funds mess was never going to be resolved politically by the Congress and by the administrations, that we had to enlist the aid of the federal courts to do that and to enforce this clear federal trust responsibility and make them account for all of this money for these individual Indians that everybody knew had been mismanaged but nobody was ever going to fix it. But by enlisting the aid of the court, the court could enforce the trust responsibility and make the Interior Department reform the trust and do an accounting. That's what we asked for in the lawsuit that was then brought in 1996. The courts have responded magnificently. They've read the law, they see that the Congress has accepted this role as trustee through the enactment of all of these laws relating to our people that the federal government has a clear responsibility that has to be carried out by the Interior Department and the Department owes all of these individual Indian money account holders now estimated to be as 500,000 an accounting of their funds going back to the 1880s. And the federal government has resisted the efforts of the individual Indian money account holders at every step of the way since 1996 but again the courts have ruled in favor of the Indians at every turn and we're still waiting for this accounting of funds."

The conditions of Indian tribes and the obligations of the federal government

John Echohawk:

"Even though the federal government has taken on substantial obligations to tribes through the treaties and through the laws they have never lived up to their responsibilities. That's why we've got such poor social and economic conditions on Indian reservations. We're at the bottom of the ladder on virtually everything. We've been able to make substantial inroads into that in the last 30 years during this self-determination policy when we've taken more of the control ourselves but still we have a lot of catch up to do. There's not only neglect in the management of the trust funds of individuals and of tribes but in education, in health, in roads and infrastructure on Indian reservations, jobs, income, whatever it is we're at the bottom of those statistics and much of it is due to the fact the federal government just has not provided the assistance and support that they promised the tribes through the treaties and through the statutes. Much of that comes down to the appropriation process where Congress appropriates money to carry out the treaties and its responsibilities and even though all of our tribes have worked very hard to get the necessary appropriations to implement those laws we just haven't been able to get the kind of funding that we need and that's why tribes through the exercise of their authority as tribal governments have worked so hard in developing their economies and prioritized economic development because unless we're able to provide for ourselves it's unlikely that the conditions on our reservations are going to change very much cause the Congress, the United States of America just has not done a good job of fulfilling its responsibilities to Native people."

The public is informed about trust funds mismanagement but the problem continues

John Echohawk:

"I think this case has gotten a lot of widespread publicity across the country. We've worked very hard at doing that hoping to be able to force the federal government to enter into negotiations with us and settle this case but all of that exposure has really not worked in the sense that the federal government continues to resist, continues to deny that it has any responsibility for the mismanagement of these funds and continues to resist us at every turn. But thankfully we have the support of the federal courts and I think it's one of the most difficult cases they've ever had trying to force the executive branch of government to do what they're supposed to do, which is to follow the law. And it's gotten so bad now that we've asked the court to hold federal officials responsible for the trust reform in contempt of court for not complying with court orders and to put these officials in jail and assess fines against them personally. And we've also asked the court to basically take these responsibilities away from the Department of the Interior on a temporary basis and to have the court appoint a receiver that would carry out the trust reform under the jurisdiction of the court until such time as we got it fixed and then got the Interior Department people trained in how to administer that trust and then turned it back over to them once they demonstrated they're able to do it properly. These are extreme measures but again they're prompted by the fact that there has been extreme reluctance on the part of the executive branch to carry out the law of this country."

What the injustice over trust funds has meant for tribal people

John Echohawk:

"Well, we think as a result of the shoddy mismanagement of these Indian trust accounts that our people over the generations have really been defrauded and have lost a lot of the money that was due them under these leases that were being managed by the federal government. And of course interest is due on all of that money that we should have had too. So as Elouise Cobell likes to talk about, she thinks a lot of the wealth that our people had in these lands has been dissipated, lost by this mismanagement. And if we had had that money the conditions of our people over the last few generations would have been better. But that should be made up by this accounting when we I think basically determine that there have been billions of dollars that have been lost through that process and together with interest there are billions that are owed to these account holders and that's the part of the case that we're pressing forward on right now in 2002. The next phase of the case after we get this trust reform effort underway to stop the bleeding to fix the system now and that's to get to the accounting part of the case and to have a trial on that issue and establish that there should be billions of dollars in these accounts and the accounts should be restated to reflect that. Like I say, we didn't expect it to go on as long as it has. We thought the federal government would use this as an opportunity to settle what's clearly been recognized a long time as a mess."

How John Echohawk has maintained the strength of his commitments for more than three decades

John Echohawk:

"As a lawyer with tribal clients I take those responsibilities seriously and I represent my clients to the best of my ability. It's very interesting work, very rewarding work. We haven't been able to win all of these cases but we've won a substantial number of them and I've seen where that's made a difference in our Indian communities as we've talked about the change in Indian policy from termination to self-determination here over the last 30 years and the gradual improvement of social and economic conditions amongst our tribes even though we've got a long way to go and we're still pretty bad off, it's a lot better than it used to be. So it's been rewarding. I see the kind of work that I'm doing as something that really falls to each generation of Native people in this country. Reading the history of our people and all of the legal and political struggles they've been through since the founding of the nation in 1787 and even before then, each generation of Native people has had these issues that they've had to deal with. What's their relationship with the United States and what kind of conditions are they going to be living under today and what power do they have as tribal nations to impact that? And these are issues again that past generations have had, that our generation now has and the future generation of Native American people are going to have as well. I think that's why it's good to have programs like the Institute for Tribal Government do these kinds of projects where we can educate younger Indian people and Americans across the board about the history of tribes, the current issues and the future issues that are coming along that impact tribes and to get the younger generations of Native and non-Native people ready to deal with these issues because they will go on. The status of Native American people in this country has always been an issue in this country and it will always continue to be an issue in this country."

The preservation of Native religions and culture

John Echohawk:

"Well, our people are not only governments, nations but we're also people with different cultures and religions and that's I think the most important thing to our people is to continue to live the way that we were brought up by our mothers and fathers and our ancestors before that and to be able to follow the traditions and cultures and religions of our people and having the sovereign status as nations, as governments allows us to do that, to be able to make decisions that protect our tribes, our ways of life, our cultures and our religions and traditions. So along with protecting this governmental status we want to make sure that we can protect our culture and religious rights as much as possible, that's why this is one of the priorities that we've worked on at the Native American Rights Fund over this time. One of the areas we worked in quite a bit has been in the religious freedom of Native Americans. So many people in this country don't understand that many tribes have their own religions and in our view these religions are entitled to the same protection in this country as other religions but so many people just do not understand first of all that we have our own religions and then too they have trouble understanding that these religions ought to be accepted and protected on the same basis as other religions in this country so we've got a lot of work on that concept. The Congress passed the Indian Religious Freedom Act in 1978 which was a declaration of policy intended to help all Americans understand that tribes do have their own religions and they're entitled the same respect as other religions but actually getting that implemented across the board has been difficult and there's been many cases on that. We've been involved in a number of them and it's still a very difficult and contentious issue."

Protecting Native sites, the Native American Graves and Repatriation Act

John Echohawk:

"The whole country at one time basically being Indian Country we have inhabited the whole area since the beginning of time and we have burial sites all over this country, not just on the lands that we have left called reservations but on all of these lands and as this development occurs they are unearthing many of our tribal burial grounds and for so long under this termination policy most of America thought that tribes were extinct or disappearing and so when they did unearth our ancestors they hauled them away as if they owned them and that we as tribes didn't have any control over the remains of our ancestors. And we finally got Congress to pass a law in 1990, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act that stopped that practice and recognized that our tribes own and control the remains of our ancestors and their burial goods and that they can't be taken away by other interests and that they do belong to us. So we've been able to stop that process and start reversing it by repatriating the bodies of our ancestors they've taken to the museums and all of the burial goods that they've confiscated and to return those to our people. And that has been a significant development."

Indian tribes and environmental issues

John Echohawk:

"The environmental movement really started about the same time as the Indian self determination movement in 1970. The environmental movement resulted primarily in a number of federal environmental laws that protect the environment across the country by setting minimal environmental standards that are to be met to stop and manage the pollution that has occurred. Under these federal laws most of them are carried out by states that contract with the federal government and then follow these federal environmental standards and implement them in the states. Well, of course as we've established in this Indian self determination era going back to the treaties, the jurisdiction on the Indian lands is the combination of tribal law and federal law based on this federal tribal relationship and state law does not apply on our lands unless that's been made applicable by a treaty or an act of Congress. These environmental laws did not give the states jurisdiction to enforce these environmental laws on our lands. That's still a prerogative of the tribal governments so what we've been doing as part of this Indian self determination and environmental movement is having the tribes develop their own environmental laws under the federal environmental statutes to take care of the environment on Indian lands. The environmental organizations that have been involved in overseeing this whole process like many Americans have not really been familiar with tribes and tribal governments and tribal authority so it's been important to reach out to them and explain to them why on Indian lands these environmental laws are implemented and controlled by the tribal governments instead of the state governments. I think they've become learners like American people generally about the existence of tribes and tribal governments and tribal authority and tribal nations and have been supportive of tribes regulating the environment on tribal lands. I've been one of several tribal people who have been involved in outreach to the environmental community about these issues and I've found it very interesting to see their reaction which is generally positive after they learn how all of this fits together under this legal system we have. But at the same time I've benefited from working with environmentalists to learn more about the environmental threats that do exist around the world and in this country and on our own lands too and be able to work with them to address these environmental problems that we have on our lands."

Individuals and foundations nationwide who believe in the protection of Native rights support NARF

John Echohawk:

"We've been able to establish a network of 40,000 individual contributors across the country that help us raise funds every year. In recent years too we've also seen tribes because of the increase in the ability they have to generate funds to help their people and their social and economic development be able to contribute part of that back to organizations like the Native American Rights Fund that have helped them do that so we've seen tribal contributions grow in recent years. I think even though we've been able to sustain the Native American Rights Fund at this level of around 15 attorneys for this 32 year period that we've been around, we haven't really despaired too much because the major development that's occurred during that time has been the number of tribes who are now able to afford their own attorneys. Thirty-two years ago there were only a handful of tribes that could do that but these days because of the progress that tribes have made most of the tribes today have their own attorneys. Maybe not as many as they need but they at least have some legal assistance available to them and that's helped them tremendously because I think tribes have learned so much of what's involved in protecting your tribes is dealing with the legal and political systems in this country and that for better or worse requires the use of lawyers. And our tribes now have a lot of legal counsel today, many, many more than they had when we started back in 1970 when together with Indian Legal Services we were about the only legal counsel available to tribes."

How to deal with setbacks

John Echohawk:

"Well, you try to figure out what you can learn from that and then how you can move forward with basically the same issues and try to change the outcome. In other words, never give up."

Never giving up, using the cases to educate the public

John Echohawk:

"I think really a process of starting with the United States Constitution, which is to say you talk about the American system of government and how tribes fit into that system. Even though that's really very basic so many Americans don't really understand that. It should be taught in our public schools and in our civics courses but unfortunately it's not addressed. And so we end up with the vast majority of American people not having any idea about the existence of tribal governments in this country today and the fact that it's based on the Constitution and treaties of this country. So it's a process that me and other Native Americans are involved in all of the time, it's a continual education process. It's particularly critical at the congressional level when these issues end up before Congress cause we end up with so many of our elected representatives really not only in Congress but the state level too not understanding the basics of American government that includes tribal governments. So we talk amongst ourselves about having to do an Indian 101 course like in college when you talk with federal and state leaders cause so many of them don't have any idea about our status as governments."

Educating around misconceptions about Indian issues, especially gaming

John Echohawk:

"Well, you have to talk about the Constitution and the treaties and the fact that tribes are governments like the states and like the federal government and that tribes like other governments have a need to raise revenue to provide services and just like the state governments do who operate games of all kinds to generate revenues, tribal governments are able to do that too under tribal law and that even though tribes have that option not all of them exercise that, that not all of the tribes are involved in gaming. There are 557 recognized tribes around this country. Less than half of them engage in gaming. Of the ones that do engage in gaming only a handful make a lot of money off of it because of their location and because of their business skills. The rest of them have fairly marginal operations but the revenues that are generated provide services for their Indian communities and very few Indians get these per capita checks that some people think we all get and that we're all rich and that's just not the case. And again, it's a continual process of educating people about that cause some of them pick up the wrong information, get the wrong impression about things so it's a continuing education campaign that many of us are involved in."

How tribal governments are impacted by the federal budget emphasis on national security

John Echohawk:

"So much of the budget is starting to be deferred over to these national security issues and what that's meant is that the difficulties we usually have trying to get appropriations for Indian programs are made even more difficult by this competing priority of funds for national security. It's made things even tougher and we're seeing that in this appropriation cycle now. We're barely able to have appropriated the same funds that we have appropriated last year before this national security crisis hit and it's very, very difficult, very tough going to ask for increases in all these programs that are woefully inadequate to start with."

The most beneficial piece of federal legislation for tribes in the past 30 years

John Echohawk:

"I think it has to be the Indian Self Determination Act of 1975 because that really implemented this Indian self-determination policy that we had all been pushing for and got Congress officially onboard that concept and what it means. It was really a change in Indian policy because under the old termination policy that of course self determination replaced the thinking of the federal government and the policy makers was that Indian affairs were to be managed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the federal government on our lands until such time as we were able to manage for ourselves. And when that happened then we would be terminated and the federal government through the Bureau of Indian Affairs would leave the reservations and our tribal governments would be eliminated and we would come under the authority of the states. That was their prescription for us. But with the Self Determination Era what happened was we would accept the Bureau of Indian Affairs leaving the reservations or taking a back seat on the reservations but what would come forward was the tribal governments and that's been the biggest development here over the last 30 years has been the growth of modern tribal governments where our tribal institutions have stepped up and began governing our reservations in place of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. And the Self Determination Act facilitated that by providing the funds that usually went to the Bureau of Indian Affairs to govern our reservations and to get those funds over to the tribal governments so the tribal governments could govern our reservations."

Planning for the struggles ahead in light of recent Supreme Court decisions

John Echohawk:

"Well, the Tribal Sovereignty Protection Initiative is an effort by tribal leaders across the country to address what I think is the biggest threat to Indian Country today and that is the big change that we have seen in the decisions of the United States Supreme Court as they affect Native American rights. Throughout this whole 30 year period we've been talking about tribal progress has been driven by and large by favorable decisions of the United States Supreme Court upholding tribal rights in this country. In the last 10 years or so that has changed dramatically as the makeup of the Supreme Court has changed and it's become more conservative. Now the tribes lose virtually every case that goes to the Supreme Court. It used to be that they would take cases that we lost in the lower courts and decide them in our favor or take the cases that we won and affirm them in Supreme Court opinions. But anymore what they do is take cases that the tribes have won in the lower courts and then reverse them and come out with new interpretations, limiting interpretations of tribal rights. And this trend is of great concern to tribal leaders particularly because of two cases that came out last year that established that tribes have virtually no sovereign inherent authority over non-Indians in Indian Country whether it's on fee land owned by non-Indians within Indian Country or whether it's on tribal lands now. The tribes have virtually no authority over non-Indians in our territories and of course this is going to have a devastating impact on our ability to control public health and safety on our lands. It's going to impact our economic development and all of this comes at a time when of course we thought that we had clearly established what our authority was to control things on the reservations and now we find through these recent Supreme Court decisions that we do not have this governmental authority over non-Indians in Indian Country that we thought that we had. And tribal leadership has determined that it's not a good future for our tribes without this authority over non-Indians and it's so grim that we need to do something that's going to be very difficult and that is we need to go to the Congress and share with the Congress our concerns about these Supreme Court decisions and have the Congress reaffirm tribal authority over non-Indians in Indian Country so that we can protect the health and safety of everybody on the reservations and we can also continue to develop our tribal economies in a way that benefits our people and non-Indian people as well. This is going to be a very difficult issue cause it raises of course the basic question of the status of tribes in this country and their authority in this country but it's something that we have to do because the Supreme Court has basically decimated the tribes in terms of their authority over non-Indians on the reservations. We understand that the concern of the Supreme Court primarily has been how the tribal governments treat non-Indians as they exercise authority over them particularly in our tribal courts and the laws relating to the tribes basically empower those tribal courts in past years to decide these issues relating to non-Indians but the court has withdrawn that authority now because of their concern that these tribal court decisions are not subject to review by the Supreme Court, by the federal courts and the court has said as much. They want an opportunity to review all of these decisions of the tribal courts and that's the only way they can insure that non-Indians get treated fairly in our tribal courts. So part of what the tribal leaders are ready to do is to talk to Congress about having their authority over non-Indians restored and in return the tribes are willing to subject their tribal courts to federal court review of their treatment of non-Indians. It's just a very difficult issue that tribes face. Some of them are ready to do that, some of them are not ready to do that just yet."

The need to address not only civil jurisdiction but also criminal misdemeanor jurisdiction

John Echohawk:

"The crime statistics in Indian Country are abominable. While the crime rates across the country generally have gone down, in Indian Country they've gone up and that's primarily because the tribal governments don't have any authority over non-Indians in the criminal context and any prosecutions have to be done by federal or state authorities. And of course they're not really there in our Indian communities so much of the crime that happens does not get prosecuted and the tribes are powerless to do anything about it. So the tribes, many of them want this misdemeanor jurisdiction authority over crimes on reservations so that they can address the crime problem themselves so all these issues are going to Congress because we are not going to win these issues in the Supreme Court. They have basically denied our authority to do that so we have to get Congress to recognize our authority to do that."

Extreme cases have stirred minority descent

John Echohawk:

"In one of these cases last year when the court basically extended their interpretation of the limited authority of tribes over non-Indians on non-Indian land those same limitations over to now jurisdiction over non-Indians on our own Indian lands. They said there's virtually no difference between tribal authority over non-Indians whether they're on non-Indian land in Indian Country or whether they're on Indian land in Indian Country, it doesn't matter who owns the land, the fact of the matter is they're non-Indians and tribes have very limited if no authority over non-Indians anywhere in Indian Country. And this surprised three of the justices so much that six of the justices would all of a sudden announce this interpretation of Indian law that we had virtually no authority over non-Indians even on our own Indian lands that three of the justices in a very vigorous descent said the court has gone way too far in basically ignoring all of their past decisions relating to the authority of tribal governments over non-Indians back to the earliest days of the nation and all of a sudden announced this new doctrine, this new rule of law that takes away from the tribes authority that they have always had that we have to object. We have to descent vigorously and tell the majority of the court that they have made a really wrong decision, a bad decision and a decision judges should not be making because it's not the law of this country, that's not the law of tribal sovereignty. The opinion was written by Justice O'Connor supported by Justice Breyer and Justice Stevens."

The project ahead with Congress

John Echohawk:

"It's going to be a long process, there's going to be a lot of debate involved on all sides about the status of tribal governments and what kind of authority they should have over non-Indians and the impact on the states and local governments and non-Indian people. But it's one that has to be done because otherwise tribes face an uncertain future lacking control over a lot of things that happen in Indian Country that they need to be involved in."

The role of familial support

John Echohawk:

"Well, I've got a wonderful wife and family. They've been very supportive of me in my work even though it takes me away from home quite a bit traveling throughout the country on these cases and various issues. They understand it's important work and that my workplace is basically the whole country and I need to be at my workplace and it's not always in my office at home, it's different places around the country. So they've really been very supportive of me in that regard. I couldn't do it without them."

The values that underpin John Echohawk's work

John Echohawk:

"Well, I believe in the fairness and justice in this country and under the American system and even though our people don't always receive that sometimes we do. And it's really great when we're able to win something and make some progress for our people. And when that fairness and justice doesn't come through then it's very disappointing but at the same time we never give up and we figure another way to try to get the point across and get this fairness and justice that we're due under this system."

Education about the history of Indian nations for both tribal youth and non-Indians

John Echohawk:

"Well, I try to take advantage of every speaking opportunity I get in front of college classes and Indian youth in particular. But on a broader scale we're trying to impact the education systems on or near reservations so that tribal governments get involved more in that. And through the involvement of the tribal governments then they can modify the curriculums and what happens in the schools so that the existence of modern day Native Americans can be taught and appreciated in these schools and so that people come to learn about the history of our Indian nations and our legal status today as Indian nations. And again not only our Native youth but also the non-Indians involved in those same systems that our neighbors come to understand that too."

The greatest contribution of Native Americans to the country

John Echohawk:

"I think it's remarkable that our Native people have been able to maintain their sense of spirituality throughout all of this time that we've had dealings with non-Indians in this country and despite all the terrible things that have happened to us. Our people are still I think very open and caring and that's why they try to preserve their way of life and also continue to try to reach out and share with non-Indian people and try to deal with non-Indian people fairly too in recognizing the place of the human being in the larger universe and in this environment and our obligation to recognize that environment and our place in it and our obligation to take care of it."

The thread in Echohawk's own story he would extend to youth

John Echohawk:

"Well, I think the same thing that my parents engrained in me and my brothers and sisters that education is important. It really helps to understand the world around you and how it works and that you need to have that information to be able to take care of yourself but also to be able to help in your communities and that you have an obligation to do that. Our youth sooner or later at some point in their lives will come to understand those things and I think the earlier they understand that they need this information, they need this education for themselves and for their families and communities the better off they will be. So many of them resist the idea of education but I think once they see how it helps them personally and how it helps their families and communities the better off they're going to be and I think the easier it will be for them to open up and be receptive to educational opportunities."

The legacy Echohawk and his generation will leave

John Echohawk:

"I think I was raised in an era where I'm part of the first generation of Native American people who became professionals in this country, lawyers and doctors and we're able to use that knowledge then for the benefit of our people in a way that never had been done before. I think the assumption was always if our people got educated then we would be like White people and that has not proven to be the case. All of us have used the knowledge and education that we've gotten to benefit our people in our own terms and to continue our Indian ways and I think that has really surprised the American culture generally and has basically given our people a future where we see that our tribes are going to be able to exist in perpetuity."

The Great Tribal Leaders of Modern Times series and accompanying curricula are for the educational programs of tribes, schools and colleges. For usage authorization, to place an order or for further information, call or write Institute for Tribal Government – PA, Portland State University, P.O. Box 751, Portland, Oregon, 97207-0751. Telephone: 503-725-9000. Email: tribalgov@pdx.edu.

[Native music]

The Institute for Tribal Government is directed by a Policy Board of 23 tribal leaders,
Hon. Kathryn Harrison (Grand Ronde) leads the Great Tribal Leaders project and is assisted by former Congresswoman Elizabeth Furse, Director and Kay Reid, Oral Historian

Videotaping and Video Assistance
Chuck Hudson, Jeremy Fivecrows and John Platt of the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission

Editing
Green Fire Productions

Photo credit:
John Echohawk
NARF
Anthony Allison
Joseph Consentino
Thorney Lieberman
Gary J. Thibault

Great Tribal Leaders of Modern Times is also supported by the non-profit Tribal Leadership Forum, and by grants from:
Spirit Mountain Community Fund
Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs
Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde, Chickasaw Nation
Coeur d'Alene Tribe
Delaware Nation of Oklahoma
Jamestown S'Klallam Tribe
Cow Creek Band of Umpqua Indians
Jayne Fawcett, Ambassador
Mohegan Tribal Council
And other tribal governments

Support has also been received from
Portland State University
Qwest Foundation
Pendleton Woolen Mills
The U.S. Dept. of Education
The Administration for Native Americans
Bonneville Power Administration
And the U.S. Dept. of Defense

This program is not to be reproduced without the express written permission of the Institute for Tribal Government

© 2004 The Institute for Tribal Government 

Great Tribal Leaders of Modern Times: Wilma Mankiller

Producer
Institute for Tribal Government
Year

Produced by the Institute for Tribal Government at Portland State University in 2004, the landmark “Great Tribal Leaders of Modern Times” interview series presents the oral histories of contemporary leaders who have played instrumental roles in Native nations' struggles for sovereignty, self-determination, and treaty rights. The leadership themes presented in these unique videos provide a rich resource that can be used by present and future generations of Native nations, students in Native American studies programs, and other interested groups.

In this interview, conducted in July 2001, former Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation Wilma Mankiller traces her ascendancy from a child of the termination and relocation policies of the 1950s to becoming the first female elected to serve as principal chief of her nation.

This video resource is featured on the Indigenous Governance Database with the permission of the Institute for Tribal Government.

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Mankiller, Wilma. "Great Tribal Leaders of Modern Times" (interview series). Institute for Tribal Government, Portland State University. Tahlequah, Oklahoma. July 2001. Interview.

Kathryn Harrison:

"Hello. My name is Kathryn Harrison. I am presently the Chairperson of the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde Community of Oregon. I have served on my council for 21 years. Tribal leaders have influenced the history of this country since time immemorial. Their stories have been handed down from generation to generation. Their teaching is alive today in our great contemporary tribal leaders whose stories told in this series are an inspiration to all Americans both tribal and non-tribal. In particular it is my hope that Indian youth everywhere will recognize the contributions and sacrifices made by these great tribal leaders."

[Native music]

Narrator:

"Wilma P. Mankiller, former Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation, was the first female in modern history to lead a major tribe. Mankiller was born in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, in 1945 and today lives on the land allotted to her paternal grandfather in 1907 just after Oklahoma became a state. The family name, Mankiller, she explains is derived from the title assigned to someone who watched over Cherokee villages, a kind of warrior. Wilma Mankiller herself is a protector of her people and a kind of warrior for justice. Her goal as a community organizer and leader of the Cherokee Nation has been to help bring self-sufficiency to her people. Most of Mankiller's childhood was spent close to the land and in strong relationship with other Cherokee people. In the 1950s the Bureau of Indian Affairs encouraged the family to move to San Francisco under the Bureau's relocation program. The adjustment was extremely difficult for the Mankiller children but Wilma Mankiller was later able to benefit from participation in the social reform and liberation movements of the 1960s. She was inspired by the events of 1969 when a group of students occupied Alcatraz Island to bring attention to the concerns of tribes. Also in California her understanding of treaty rights and tribal sovereignty issues was deepened when she worked with the Pit River Tribe. Mankiller returned to her ancestral home in Oklahoma in the early 1970s. Her ideas for development in historic Cherokee communities caused Chief Ross Swimmer to take note of her work. Mankiller's work was interrupted by a near fatal accident and 17 operations. But through near-death and convalescence she emerged renewed and even more dedicated to work for her people. Chief Swimmer convinced Mankiller to run as his Deputy Chief in 1983. When Swimmer resigned to head the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington, Mankiller assumed the duties of Chief as mandated by Cherokee law. She was strongly opposed by tribal members who did not want to be led by a woman. She ran for Chief on her own in 1987, was elected and ran and won a second term. Wilma P. Mankiller has made a great impact on her own people and other Americans as a tribal and spiritual leader. She received the Ms. Magazine Woman of the Year Award in 1987 and to her great pride one of the health clinics that she helped found bears her name. In 1998 President Clinton presented Mankiller the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In an interview conducted by the Institute for Tribal Government in July, 2001, Mankiller spoke about the historic struggles of the Cherokee people, her development as a tribal leader, her battles to win the post of Chief and the important issues for tribes today."

The Cherokee people

Wilma Mankiller:

"In 1492 we were in the southeastern part of the United States in North Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, a little part of Virginia, a little part of Alabama and the whole southeast. The Cherokee people I think went through a lot of different phases and a lot of different discussions about how to relate to their new neighbors. Certainly like every other tribe in the country we were forced into treaties where we always ended up ceding land and eventually lost a lot of land in the southeast just through treaties and through war and many other events. But at different periods we were at war. At other periods we had an official policy of almost accommodation where we tried to figure out how to get along with our new neighbors and whether we were in a war era or whether we were in an era of cooperation. It didn't matter, we lost our land and lost many of our rights anyway and so no matter what our official policies might have been."

The Cherokee Nation rebuilds itself after repeated injustice and assault

Wilma Mankiller:

"One of the most famous stories among the Cherokee is that when Jackson was a soldier and fighting one of the major battles that a Cherokee person actually saved his life, a Cherokee warrior saved his life and he lived to regret that. Later Jackson made his reputation as an Indian fighter and as a military man and then later when he became President, almost one of the very first acts was to try to convince the Legislature to pass the Removal Act, which eventually resulted in the Cherokees being dispossessed of their land in the southeast. Most people refer to the Cherokee removal as the Trail of Tears or the Trail Where They Cried because of the large loss of land and large loss of lives but actually all the tribes in the southeast went through the same sort of removal process. The Choctaws and the Creeks and the Chickasaws, the Seminoles, many other tribes went through the same situation. Our story I think is just the one that's more familiar. Our land where we had lived forever was given away in lotteries to White Georgians after the Cherokees were removed and this land's very different in Indian Territory than the land in the southeast. The political system, the cultural system, the medicines, the life ways, everything we'd ever known was left behind so our people arrived here with everything in disarray. Many people dead, everything familiar gone and yet what's absolutely remarkable about Cherokee people is that they almost immediately began to reform the Cherokee Nation and rebuild their families and rebuild their communities and rebuild a Nation and it's just absolutely amazing that they were able to do that given what had just occurred. So everybody helped each other. Most people were farmers and had small animals and they lived basically on a barter system where they...if one had eggs they would trade them to somebody else for milk or if one grew corn they would trade them to somebody who grew tomatoes or that sort of thing. People had a strong sense that if they were going to survive they had to rely on each other."

Life as a child at Mankiller Flats, family, community, connection to the land

Wilma Mankiller:

"My father was a full blood Cherokee who went to...attended boarding school. In those days when my father was a child they took children without permission from the parents. They literally came out and picked...to this community and picked up my aunt and picked up my father and took them to boarding school. A lot of people have stories about losing their language in school, in boarding school but my aunt and my...neither my aunt nor my father ever lost the ability to be very fluent in Cherokee. I think in part because they had each other to talk to. He had a lot of mixed experiences at boarding school but the one thing that he learned at boarding school was he learned the love of reading and of literature, which he passed on to his children. My mother is as best we can tell she says she's Heinz 57 varieties but she's Irish mostly and a little bit Dutch. She is also from this community. She went to probably maybe the seventh grade or something. Very well read, very politically astute. I guess she's what everybody would want for a mother. She is always steady, always gives her children unconditional love. My brother went to Wounded Knee and her advice to him was, ‘Well, just don't get shot.' It was mostly a life of a relationship with the land because we had a large family and a small house and no electricity or indoor plumbing or any other amenities and only one person several miles from here had a television. So our life was really very centered around the land. And we all took turns gathering water from the spring for household use and for consumption. It was the same spring that my grandfather had used and my father had used and so there was a sense of connection to the place and to the land. And so when I think of my childhood I think mostly of being outside and having a very close relationship with the land."

The family relocates to San Francisco in the 1950s

Wilma Mankiller:

"I think the Bureau of Indian Affairs basically told my father that he could have a much better life for his children if we moved away. And it seemed like a way to make sure that we were provided for and all that. That was the main sales because at the time we couldn't conceptualize a world beyond Muskogee. We'd been to Muskogee to the State Fair and to even talk about going to someplace like California was, we were unable to think about it in anyway. It would be like us sitting here saying, ‘I think I'll go to Mars,' and it was a world we couldn't visualize and couldn't imagine. We just knew that it was away from here and we'd have to leave home so we were not happy at all about that and in fact I asked my parents if I could stay here in Oklahoma with relatives. It was a very difficult time. I remember vividly the day we left on the relocation program, we're all piled in the car and headed to Stillwell and I sort of looked very carefully at everything to try to memorize it, the school, the road and everything else. And I always knew I would come back, even at 10, I knew that I would come back. We left a very isolated and somewhat insular world here, a very Cherokee world and got on a train and several days later we ended up in San Francisco with all the noise and confusion and everything else going on and we actually...the Bureau of Indian Affairs arranged for us to go to a hotel. I'll never forget, it was called the Keys Hotel in the Tenderloin District of San Francisco which is the Red Light District of San Francisco and we saw and heard things that were inconceivable to us. I remember my brother Richard and I hearing a siren and we could only relate that to what we knew so we thought it was an animal and we were trying to identify what kind of animal was making that sound. In fact I hated school ‘til I got to college. I couldn't stand school and found every opportunity that I could to avoid school because we were so different. We were country kids and we dressed like country rural people. We had the name of Mankiller. Children can be very cruel and so we were treated differently. We were immediately labeled as different and so...in school...so school became an unpleasant place. And as I got a little older we started going to the San Francisco Indian Center and that was the place where we met other people like ourselves who were from someplace else and just trying to figure out a way to...how to carve a life out in the city. And so that was extremely helpful."

Mankiller learns social issues from family: seeds of activism

Wilma Mankiller:

"There were always Indian people at our house and there was always discussion of what was going on in the world, what was going on in the communities and so eventually there were a lot of people who had ideas about relocation, which was really a very misguided policy and just about things in general. In terms of a political background or figuring out how to be engaged in the community I probably figured out how to do that just by listening to people at home. At the time I did not appreciate that. All I saw as a child and as a teenager is that dad would bring home people and my sister and I would have to give up our bedroom so these strangers could stay there but it sort of soaks in. Or dad didn't have money for us but he always had a $20 bill that he folded up and kept way in the back of his wallet that he would give to a family down on their luck. And so we would rather he had taken us to the beach or given us the money for the show and then later you realize that all that has an impact on you."

The family lives at Hunter's Point, an African-American community

Wilma Mankiller:

"And I still value that time because it gave me a close view of how an African community works from inside the community. There's a lot of strength and a lot of leadership, untapped leadership in African-American communities that nobody ever taps into and when people sit around and wring their hands about what to do about inner city problems, I think, ‘Why don't they just go sit down with the people and ask them?' In fact the first volunteer work I ever did was with the Black Panther party, which was again not like at that early stage not like the media portrays it but there were people who wanted to provide breakfast for elderly people and do a lot of...provide programs, a lot of really good things. And then in 1969 when Alcatraz was occupied, it was kind of a watershed experience for me and my whole family and four of my brothers and sisters moved over almost immediately to the island and helped out and so it was just an unbelievable period of time."

Mankiller discovers new strength from the Women's Movement

Wilma Mankiller:

"It was a marvelous time because before that I think we had like many women of my generation we had lived our lives through the men we were with and through our children and through other people, our lives were in response to somebody else, they weren't who we were and so we were always in a secondary role. We were...at the time I was doing work in the Native American community and I was the person who wrote the speeches for the men and arranged their press conferences, wrote the proposals and always tried to convince them that we should do one thing or another but never articulated my own ideas and so it was a time of awakening for us and kind of coming into our own."

Mankiller cultivates leadership skills directing a youth center in Oakland, attending San Francisco State University and working with the American Indian Resources Center

Wilma Mankiller:

"I gained skills on how to run a youth center period. I had no idea when they offered the job to me what it entailed. You had to develop curriculum, hire teachers, find the building. I thought, ‘Oh, this'll be a neat job.' Well! Anyway, so I ended up having to locate the building, find painters, fix it up, develop a curriculum and I loved the job. It was an inner city street after school program really and it was called the Native American Drop In Center. And all the kids would come after school to be there and work on their homework or have recreation and we did all kinds of things to help them feel good about themselves. At the time there was a Mescalero Apache singer named Paul Ortega who was making the rounds and so we had his music playing all the time and Jim Pepper, a Caw musician and other people like that to show them some role models, Native American role models. We taught the girls how to make shawls and taught the boys how to dance and drum, lots of things like that. It was fun."

Mankiller works with the Pit River Tribe in Northern California

Wilma Mankiller:

"Well, I think I was inspired at Alcatraz, by what had happened at Alcatraz to be more involved in things around me and I actually saw the Pit River Tribe on the evening news and they reminded me so much of people here. They were rural, Native American people who seemed familiar and so I called up their lawyer who had done an interview on the evening news and I volunteered to do some work for them, whatever they wanted me to do. And so mostly I worked as a volunteer at the legal offices in San Francisco but I spent a lot of time with Pit River people on their land and learned a lot. They were the first group of people I worked with who framed Native American sovereignty issues in an international context and saw the issues as international issues and not just national issues. So that was very helpful for me. I learned a lot about treaties, the treaty rights and the relationship between the federal government and tribal governments during that period at Pit River and in part because I worked for them as a volunteer at the legal offices and I've also helped them put together their history books and various things like that. But I learned a lot just sitting on the porch of some of the elders there at Pit River and I still have a very vivid image of these older people, Charlie Buckskin and Raymond Lague going and finding this little precious box of old papers, which supported their claims to their land near Mt. Shasta. And they treated those papers almost like they were sacred objects because it was their claim to their homeland. So that was a wonderful experience for me and my association with them was for about...until I left, until probably the mid ‘70s I was associated with them."

Mankiller balances life as a single mother, as a student and activist

Wilma Mankiller:

"I don't think that I balanced it very well for most of the time I was doing all that. I think that I had a singular focus on getting things done and so I just did the best that I could under the circumstances. My children went with me wherever I went. My children went to meetings, my children went to Pit River; whatever I did my children did those things with me. I co-founded a Freedom School in Oakland while I was there along with other Native American people and my children, I took my children out of public school for well over a year and they went to school in the Freedom School. Whatever I was involved in they were involved in."

In the mid 1970s Mankiller decides to return to Oklahoma

Wilma Mankiller:

"I think that part of the decision had to do with wanting my children to experience being part of a Cherokee community, part of it was that I wanted to do more local work and wanted to work with my own people. I had helped gather documentation for the 1977 conference in Geneva on Indigenous Rights and so I was dealing with very lofty principles of international law as they relate to Indigenous people and that's all well and good and certainly that work needs to be done but it was hard to reconcile that work with coming home and finding kids sniffing paint and people needing housing and needing healthcare."

Mankiller begins work with the Cherokee Nation in 1977

Wilma Mankiller:

"Basically I recruited Native American students from around the state for environmental training at a small college near Oklahoma City. When I took the job I had no idea where Midwest City was or where all these other tribes in Oklahoma were situated or anything. I hadn't been home that long but I thought, ‘I can figure it out.' And by the time I got processed and onboard it was early November of '77 and I had to recruit students for the spring semester beginning in January but I did it. I got the students there and did what I was supposed to do. Well, I sort of kept moving up. I started writing on my own, grants for the tribe and for projects and I've always liked writing and liked development and so then I moved into a development position and then eventually moved from the field office to the main office and moved into planning and then ultimately ended up doing community development work."

Chief Ross Swimmer moves Mankiller to tribal headquarters

Wilma Mankiller:

"Well, I had pitched to him before he started doing community development the idea of doing more work in communities like mine which is a rural Cherokee community. And the people who seemed to me to be getting the most services from Cherokee Nation were people who knew how to work the system and who had the ability to get to the Cherokee Nation. By and large they were many more mixed blood people than full blood people who knew how to get around and get things done and were much more pushy. And people in communities like mine were not getting served. And so I had written a paper, co-written a paper with a colleague at work and pitched the idea of doing work more in historic Cherokee communities. And so that...when he started thinking about doing community work I came to mind because of the paper I think."

Cherokees in small communities

Wilma Mankiller:

"I think they felt and I think they continue to feel a sense of alienation from the tribal government because the current system of tribal government that we have and which I was elected to bears little resemblance to our original way of doing things and the original way of doing things was that tribal communities had a great autonomy and their own leadership and there was no single leader or set of leaders who had unilateral authority over all the people. And so the only time all the Cherokee villages came together was probably in times of great catastrophe or an external threat and there was great respect for the local community leadership. And so Cherokee, the Cherokee Nation, like many tribes that have a form of government that's no longer their traditional form of government, have relatively low voter participation because people see the government as a place to go and get services but not the government in the sense of it being an integral part of their family or their community."

Mankiller's life is transformed by a series of events beginning in 1979

Wilma Mankiller:

"When I came home, I didn't come home and necessarily enter the world of the Cherokee Nation and politics. I came home to the traditional Cherokee world and I guess I'd missed it and I guess I didn't feel whole without that so I spent a lot of time going to stomp dances, I spent a lot of time with my uncle who's now passed away who led a ceremonial dance, a stomp dance, and my world was very different and my view of the world was very different. And so I saw the world from a different perspective and in that world disagreements were settled sometimes by medicine. There was good medicine where people could heal each other and provide comfort in times of stress or trauma or heal an illness and that sort of thing using traditional medicine. And there were also people who could use negative medicine to harm people. And during that period of time I learned from traditional Cherokee people that there were certain signs, if you were quiet and looked for signs that there were signs that you could see of an impending disaster or like a warning or something. And one of the things that they told me was that owls were messengers of bad news and so I became kind of leery of owls. The night before something really bad happened to me, two of the people who were part of what was my world then, a guy named Bird Wolf and his wife Peggy who are both full blood Cherokee people who are very involved in the ceremonial grounds came by to visit. And we spent the evening talking about, in part about the extent of which Cherokee medicine still had a huge role in the life of Cherokee people. And it was really interesting because that night that they were here we had...the house became surrounded by owls and in a way that it's just even hard to believe today that this happened because it was not the kind of behavior I've ever seen before and rarely heard of. But the owls actually came up to the window and they were everywhere, all over, and it was really very frightening. But I didn't connect that with anything going on in my life, it was just kind of a frightening situation."

In a head on collision with a car driven by a friend, Mankiller survives but her friend does not

Wilma Mankiller:

"And I remember briefly seeing the car, of course not seeing her but seeing the car, and then I didn't wake up for several days. But what was interesting and life changing is that I came so very close to death during that head on collision that I could actually feel it. I know what it feels like and it's actually very enticing and at the time I didn't know anything about near death experiences or hadn't read anything about them and so I didn't see a light or a lot of things the other people see during that period of time but I felt bathed in the most wonderful unconditional love and I felt drawn toward death. It was like this is what I lived for, everything I'd ever lived for and it was the most emotionally all-encompassing feeling that I've ever had. And I remember during that period of time when I was moving toward that feeling and was going to settle there that an image of my children, Felicia and Gina, who were young and I...that image sort of called me back and pulled me back from going there and staying there. So I think that had a profound impact on me, just the fact that I no longer, when I came out of that experience, I no longer feared death and so I therefore no longer feared life. So in a way I think because of some thinks that happened to me after that, I think that that accident prepared me for what was to come because I came out of that whole experience a different person."

Mankiller and Charlie Soap organize the Bell Community Project

Wilma Mankiller:

"Bell Community is not unlike other Cherokee, historic Cherokee communities. It was probably 85 to 87 percent of the people were bilingual. It was considered to be a rough community, a very troubled community. The school was in danger of closing cause so many young families were leaving. They had no water, no central water line. About I would say 25 percent of the people in the community had no indoor plumbing. There was a need for new houses. There was a lot of dilapidated housing in the community; very few services or programs. Many people weren't even enrolled in the Cherokee Nation tribal government and so anyway they wanted housing. In order to get housing they needed water and in that community it made more sense to do a water line. And so the Chief wanted to try to do a self help project there and so Charlie and I facilitated that process. And so the Chief and Charlie and I basically were probably the only three people who believed that people would actually rebuild their own community. So anyway we got the community together, we worked for them. They organized a steering committee with local leadership, elected from every single corner of the community and planned their own program with us as the facilitators. We just kind of kept a timeline and brought resources when we needed to, an engineer to design the system, funds to pay for the material, developed a system for organizing the labor so that it was done in a consistent way. And at the end of probably a little less than a year we finished...they finished an 18 mile water line using volunteer, totally using volunteer labor. Women worked and men worked and every family was represented."

Chief Swimmer asked Mankiller to testify for him before Congress

Wilma Mankiller:

"He had more confidence in me than I had in myself. Oh, my god, I had no idea where I was going, what I was doing and everywhere I went...I went to testify before a committee for the Chairman Yates was presiding over and after I finished my stumbling testimony he said, ‘Where's Ross Swimmer?' But, my goodness, my first trip was a disaster. It got better after that but he certainly had a lot more confidence and I'm sure he got lots of phone calls saying, ‘Who is this woman?' And then he asked me to represent him at various meetings and that sort of thing when he was ill as well."

Chief Swimmer asked Mankiller to run as his Deputy Chief

Wilma Mankiller:

"Initially I said no because I couldn't imagine myself making the transition from a community organizer and kind of a social services person who was a little bit bookworm-ish to a politician and our tribe's a very large tribe and elections are real mainstream kind of elections with...during that time they used some television, a lot of radio, a lot of direct mail. I just launched my own campaign, completely separate campaign without knowing anything about it but I used my own money and bought ads and did a lot of things to get myself elected."

Mankiller deals with resistance and hostility during her campaign

Wilma Mankiller:

"I tend to be a positive person and try to be very forward thinking and focus on the future. And there's a Mohawk saying that's probably my favorite saying that says, ‘It's very hard to see the future with tears in your eyes.' And so you can't spend a whole lot of time dwelling on negative things or crying about negative things or it blurs the future. So you have to kind of stay focused and keep moving forward. I think the accident prepared me for all that because it literally never touched me. I never saw their attacks as anything personal having to do with me. I saw them having to do with something going on with themselves or just a disagreement they had with me on an issue. I never took it personally and I think I was very fortunate throughout my entire political career that I was able to do that. I'm able to stay real focused on what I need to do, whether it's build a clinic or win an election. It's not about me, it's about a much larger issue and if I would have let my energy be drained off into thinking about me or my reaction to hostility, I'd have never got anything done and so I just didn't focus on it. I think that in any given political situation, people who put themselves out there to be elected know that there's immediately going to be a contingent of people who are very hostile, some overtly hateful who are going to be that way for reasons of their own that have little to do with me. And then I think people have a legitimate right to disagree with their leaders and so they have a right to have their own view of things."

As Deputy Chief, Mankiller heads the tribal council

Wilma Mankiller:

"Well, at first, because the entire tribal council had opposed my election they weren't real crazy about my being their president and so it took awhile to establish a relationship with them. And once they saw that I was going to be serious and focused and wasn't going to be drawn into games or negativity in anyway, that I was about the business of the tribe, I think they settled down and we settled into kind of a routine. And of course they thought the world would crash and burn when Ross Swimmer resigned two years after I was elected Deputy Chief to go head the Bureau of Indian Affairs and then I became principle Chief. Then they were just absolutely alarmed. So there were a number of threads running then. I think they one thought that things were going to be terrible for the last two years of Ross's term which I filled and on the other hand they thought, ‘Well, we'll just live through these two years and we'll defeat her in the next election,' which was the 1987 election. So it was a very difficult time because our constitution allows for the Deputy Chief to move into the Principle Chief's office if he resigns or vacates the office. If the council had had to make the decision I would have never been selected. They would have selected somebody else. So I was left with his staff, his mandate, a council that didn't support me and I had to figure out a way to get some work done in that situation."

Mankiller runs for Chief with the enthusiastic support of her husband and family

Wilma Mankiller:

"Charlie was very enthusiastic and very, very supportive of my election and I would not have won election without his support because he's very fluent in Cherokee and was able to talk to a lot of people who, older people and other people who would not I don't think had voted for me -- men -- a lot of people would not have voted for me had he not been able to sit down and talk with them in Cherokee and explain to them why I should be elected. So he was critical to my election. My whole family was supportive. My mom got out and put up signs and my sisters served as poll watchers so everybody was extremely supportive of me during that whole period of time.

Her priorities as Chief

Wilma Mankiller:

"When I came to the Cherokee Nation in 1977 as an employee there was almost no healthcare system. Our options were two Indian hospitals one Claremore Indian Hospital, the other one was Hastings Indian Hospital and being able to take the plans put together by tribal health staff and tribal members and make those plans real is probably the thing I'm most proud of. We basically were told by the people that we needed to decentralize healthcare and move it closer to the people. So during my tenure we built a $13 million clinic in one community, $11 million clinic in another community, we bought a hospital in still another community and renovated a building in another community and when I left we'd started another $10 million project in another community and so we built a lot of healthcare facilities that are closer to people. And the one in Stillwell in this town, our hometown, is named after me. The council...I was out of town and the council passed a resolution naming the clinic in this town the Wilma P. Mankiller Health Center, which is interesting given the fact, given how I started out with the council."

Relationships with other tribes

Wilma Mankiller:

"It would seem natural to me because I had been involved in the San Francisco Indian Center with many tribes and had done a lot of work among other tribes. Having relationships with other tribes seemed not only natural and normal but desirable. I wanted to know what they were doing and oftentimes some of the smaller tribes with far less resources than the Cherokee Nation were doing far more innovative than what we were doing at the Cherokee Nation. So I learned things from them, we shared information, we tried to support one another and help one another. And so I think that for some tribes I think they get a little tired of always hearing about the big tribes like the Cherokee Nation or the Navajo Nation and so there's a little bit of that but I think by and large there was a great relationship. The two times when tribes had to select people to represent them with President Reagan and with President Clinton and both times I was selected by the tribes themselves as one of the people to go and meet with the President. So was Pete Zah, my partner in a lot of this work."

Cherokee lands and environment

Wilma Mankiller:

"I personally had taken a hard and fast rule, pro-environmental rule so we weren't approached by a lot of people who would do damage to the environment so that was never a real huge issue for us. I think someone came once, you could always tell these guys that are coming from organizations that'll devastate the environment, they generally have a Rolex watch and a great spiel about how they can protect the environment and do all this stuff and so we would send them away."

During his lifetime, the great Chief John Ross revered the judicial system of the United States. Mankiller comments on the system today

Wilma Mankiller:

"I think I was less shocked than the rest of America by the Supreme Court's involvement in the 2000 election because I've seen how politicized the judicial system can be. We're very fortunate in the 10th Circuit in Denver for our region to have I think a pretty fair set of judges but that's certainly not the norm. I think that I've come to understand how very political the justice system is and you can simply look at the number of Native American women and men that are in prison and the number of Black men and Black women that are in prison and look at, compare that to White people who have committed similar crimes and understand a little bit about the judicial system in this country. And so I didn't have...I don't think I had the blind faith that other people had and I've never had the optimism that John Ross had that the judicial system was indeed just. So I wasn't shocked by what the Supreme Court did at all, not at all. I think it's significantly diminished the stature of the Court in the eyes of most Americans."

What progressive people can learn from opposing forces

Wilma Mankiller:

"Well, I'll tell you, the right wing has certainly figured out how to organize families and communities around the issues that are important to them and I think that people on the left in the ‘60s let the right just walk away with issues around spirituality and religion and a lot of other family values and they practically turned religion and spirituality in a bad word because they have such a narrow interpretation of...the right has such a narrow interpretation of religion and spirituality. I think we have a lot to learn about how they listened to the people then organized around issues that are important to everyday people. I think there's that lesson. For me, because I live in a state that's very conservative and there are a lot of right wing people, I'd rather deal with up front, right wing people than I would these squishy liberal people who are just as racist, just as greedy and are just as unsupportive of Native American rights who will read these wonderful stories about Chief Seattle and quote him in their meetings but who wouldn't lift a finger to help tribes and tribal sovereignty issues or tribal rights or who would not stand with Indian people in times of trouble. Give me an out and out racist any day than someone who will have the liberal chatter at a cocktail party and have more of a smoke and mirrors way of doing the same thing."

Interdependence and our responsibilities to the earth

Wilma Mankiller:

"What I mean by interdependence is I think that the Creator gave Indigenous people ceremonies to help us understand our responsibilities to each other and the responsibilities to the land and I think that the original instructions we were given as Indigenous people are what keeps us together as a people and that everything's connected to everything else. And so to me a life is not worth living unless you're engaged in the community around you, unless you have some sense of interdependence with other people and with the land and so when I speak of interdependence that's what I speak about. I think that the message we hear on television and magazines and films about doing for yourself and only thinking about yourself and that sort of thing, I think we should reject those messages and remember that we have a responsibility to each other as human beings and we have a responsibility to the land."

Major challenges for tribes today

Wilma Mankiller:

"We have just a daunting set of health, education, housing and economic development problems but the central issue I think for people is going to be...the central question is going to be, ‘How do we hold on to a sense of who we are as Indigenous people?' We can't do that if we lose traditional medicines, traditional knowledge systems, any sense of connection to our history and to our stories and to the land. And we've lost everything if we've lost that."

The prophecy of Charlie and the two wolves

Wilma Mankiller:

"Since almost the time of contact the Cherokees have debated the question of how to interact with the world around us and still hold on to a strong sense of who we are as Cherokee people. And the question became more confusing and more difficult as Cherokee people began to intermarry with Whites. And so at some point in history Charlie the Prophet appeared, a Cherokee man appeared before a meeting with two wolves and he warned the Cherokee people that they would die if they didn't go back to the old ways, the old Cherokee ways of planting their own food and living according to the old values. And I keep that statue and I have also a poster in the hallway of this same prophet to kind of remind me that it's an ongoing and continual debate among Cherokee people. How do we hold onto a sense of who we are as Cherokee people and still interact with the society around us? And I think that Charlie the Prophet when he was talking about the Cherokee people would die if they didn't go back to the old ways, he wasn't talking about physical death, he was talking about a spiritual and a cultural death and so I think his message is an important one that if we're to survive as tribal people and enter the 21st Century and beyond that the single most important thing we can do is to find a way to hold onto our culture, hold onto our life ways, hold onto our ceremonies and songs and language and sense of who we are."

The Great Tribal Leaders of Modern Times series and accompanying curricula are for the educational programs of tribes, schools and colleges. For usage authorization, to place an order or for further information, call or write Institute for Tribal Government – PA, Portland State University, P.O. Box 751, Portland, Oregon, 97207-0751. Telephone: 503-725-9000. Email: tribalgov@pdx.edu.

[Native music]

The Institute for Tribal Government is directed by a Policy Board of 23 tribal leaders,
Hon. Kathryn Harrison (Grand Ronde) leads the Great Tribal Leaders project and is assisted by former Congresswoman Elizabeth Furse, Director and Kay Reid, Oral Historian

Videotaping and Video Assistance
Chuck Hudson, Jeremy Fivecrows and John Platt of the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission

Editing
Green Fire Productions

Photo Credit:
Wilma P. Mankiller
Clinton Presidential Materials Project

Great Tribal Leaders of Modern Times is also supported by the non-profit Tribal Leadership Forum, and by grants from:
Spirit Mountain Community Fund
Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs
Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde, Chickasaw Nation
Coeur d'Alene Tribe
Delaware Nation of Oklahoma
Jamestown S'Klallam Tribe
Cow Creek Band of Umpqua Indians
Jayne Fawcett, Ambassador
Mohegan Tribal Council
And other tribal governments

Support has also been received from:
Portland State University
Qwest Foundation
Pendleton Woolen Mills
The U.S. Dept. of Education
The Administration for Native Americans
Bonneville Power Administration
And the U.S. Dept. of Defense

This program is not to be reproduced without the express written permission of the Institute for Tribal Government

© 2004 The Institute for Tribal Government