The American Indian Response to Injustice and a Dire Situation
Interviewer: Josh Sennett Interviewee: Dr. Gabrielle Tayac Instructor: Mr. Haight Date: February 21, 2010 Table of Contents
Interviewee Release Form………………………………………………………2
Statement of Purpose……………………………………………………………3
Biography………………………………………………………………………..4
Historical Contextualization: “Destructive Policies, Broken Promises,
Removal, and Termination: The Modern Consequences of
American Indian Policies ……………………………………………….6
Interview Transcription………………………………………………………….31
Time Indexing Recording Log………………………………………………….55
Interview Analysis……………………………………………………………...56
Works Consulted………………………………………………………………..61 Statement of Purpose
The purpose of this project is to examine American Indians today and what factors have brought them to their current status. By interviewing Dr. Gabriel Tayac- who not only is an
Indian of the Piscataway Nation tribe, but is also an historian and curator of many exhibits at the
National Museum of the American Indian and an advocate for indigenous human rights- we can explore how Indians have resisted exploitation in the end of the 21st century. Biography
QuickTime™ and a decompressor are needed to see this picture.
Dr. Gabrielle Tayac was born in New York City in 1967. Her father, a Piscataway Indian, distanced her from Piscataway culture, but her grandfather, Chief Turkey Tayac, significantly influenced her and her connection to Piscataway heritage. Although her high school, the Bronx
High School of Science, barely taught about American Indian history, she knew that she wanted to study American Indian history as a career. She attended Cornell University from 1985 to 1989 because of its unique American Indian Program. She became the Program Coordinator in 1986 until she graduated with a B.S. in the Department of Human Service Studies and several awards.
She then went to Harvard to get her doctorate in Sociology. From 1990 to 2006, she worked as a curriculum consultant, advising textbook publishers on including accurate and adequate
American Indian history. In 1995, she became the Recognition Coordinator for the Piscataway tribe and created a petition under tribal direction for state recognition which was approved by everyone on the state-appointed Recognition Committee. Nevertheless, the petition is still pending approval. She began working with the National Museum of the American Indian in 1999 as a Research Consultant, and then curated some of the largest exhibits that are currently displayed. Such exhibits include Our Lives: Contemporary Native Life and Identity, IndiVisible: African-Native American Peoples of the Americas, and Return to a Native Place: Peoples of the
Chesapeake Region, as well as several others. She has given many speeches about American
Indians and indigenous peoples to various universities and museums. Today, she works in the museum as an historian. Her uncle, Billy Tayac, is the current chief of the Piscataway tribe, and
Dr. Tayac still participates and brings her two children to Piscataway cultural events.
Destructive Policies, Broken Promises, Removal, and Termination: The Modern Consequences of American Indian Policies
Shawnee War Chief Tecumseh declared, “Once there were no white men in all this country; then it belonged to the red men…placed on it by the [Creator] to keep it, to travel over it, to eat its fruits… [We were] once a happy race, but now made miserable by the white people, who are never contented, but always encroaching… we are determined to go no farther. The only way to stop this evil is for all to unite” (qtd. in Miller 188-189). Exemplified by
Tecumseh‟s words, American Indians have been mistreated by whites, yet have responded to fight this injustice. The status of Indians in the United States is directly related to their first contact with Columbus in 1492. Indians have prospered in North America for over 10,000 years, but throughout the last five centuries, have struggled to survive. In the way of European and
American progress, Indians have been slaughtered, removed from their homes, and forced to assimilate into American culture. Two aspects of the Indian-European relationship that remain consistent to today are the oppression of Indians by supposedly superior whites, and the resistance of this by proactive Indians. To understand the substandard conditions of American
Indians today, one must examine the history of the relationship and policies between Indians and
European explorers, the colonies, and United States, as well as gain a first-hand perspective from an American Indian who has experienced these hardships.
Christopher Columbus‟ treatment of the natives of the Bahama Islands became an archetype for future Indian-European relationships. The first affiliation between Europeans and
Indians formed between Christopher Columbus and the Arawaks of the Bahama Islands on
October 12, 1492. The natives greeted the Spanish sailors with hospitality and generosity, freely trading with them and bestowing Columbus with a mask of solid gold. Recently, gold became a new form of wealth in Europe, and the “frenzy for money” (Zinn 3) that dominated Renaissance Europe drove Columbus‟ thirst for wealth. The main purpose of his second voyage to America was to bring back slaves and gold. They went around the islands in the Caribbean, searching for gold and rounding up slaves. Indians who were unable to obtain the unrealistic quota of gold had their hands cut off, and any who fled were hunted down and killed. Battles, diseases, forced labor, mass suicides, and the murder of infants to save them from the Spaniards contributed to the extinction of the Arawaks by 1650. Yet somehow, Columbus‟ legacy is a topic of controversy. Historian Howard Zinn wrote in A People’s History of the United States, “In the history books given to children in the United States… it all starts with adventure—there is no bloodshed—and Columbus Day is a celebration” (8). Columbus‟ destructive, genocidal actions served as a paradigm for the future relationship between Indians and the colonists the United
States Government.
Throughout the early colonial period, tensions existed between Indians and the foreign settlers. The English colonists created the first colony at Jamestown, Virginia, where Powhatan ruled the Powhatan Confederacy. Captain John Smith, leading the colonists, treated Powhatan with respect, and established a peaceful and beneficial trading relationship. Powhatan even helped the colonists survive in the harsh winter conditions. However, more English settlers were sent to America, ordered to make a profit for the London stock company. Historian Frank
Waters wrote in Brave are My People: Indian Heroes Not Forgotten, “Instead of clearing new forest land for themselves, they drove Powhatans off their fields, burned their villages, and worked those captured as slaves” (18). This proved to be the first of many broken peace treaties for economic motives. Powhatan died in 1618 and was replaced by his brother,
Opechancanough, who led an attack on the English settlement. Over 300 colonists were killed.
Waters wrote, “The English retaliated with a campaign to exterminate every Indian man, woman, and child in all Virginia. All troop commanders were forbidden to make peace upon any terms whatever” (21). This war had two significant consequences: the extermination of the Powhatan
Confederacy by 1644, and the creation of a dehumanizing image of Indians that created racism.
Christopher Brooke, a Virginian colonist poet, describes the Indians as “Soules drown‟d in flesh and blood; Rooted in Evill, and oppos‟d in Good; Errors of Nature, of inhumane Birth” (qtd. in
Miller 118). This image would perhaps be more destructive than the weapons of the whites, because the image of a savage, inferior, and immoral Indian would exist for centuries, and provide justification for endless cruelty. Few Indians survived the retaliation, and their descendants live in Virginia today, among small and often poor reservations.
The elimination of the Pequot tribe exemplified the violence and cruelty of the colonists.
The Pequot War originated from the killing of Puritan trader John Oldham and his crew in 1636.
The Massachusetts Bay Colony sent 200 warriors to exterminate the tribe. Over 600 Indians were killed, and their villages and farms were torched. At the end of the war in 1638, a treaty designated where the remaining 200 Pequot Indians would be enslaved and how the land of the
Pequots would be split up. After a brutal battle, Captain John Mason declared “The Lord was pleased to smite our Enemies… and to give us their Land for an Inheritance” (qtd. in Madaras
28). This illustrates how colonists justified conquering Indian lands as the chosen people and how the image of Indians had transformed to become the enemies of the public. Clergymen even regarded Pequot as “agents of Satan” (Josephy 303). As a result of the war, wrote Historian
Alvin Josephy Jr., “Settlers moving ever-westward equated all Indian behavior with that of the war period in New England and, expecting the worst from every Indian, often committed violence first” (305). The misconception of Indians as violent savages exists today, and is destructive to the image of Indians today. By dehumanizing Indians, settlers were content to drive off any Indians in the way of westward expansion.
In the 18th century, the colonies and the U.S. government created several policies that would defend Indians from the invasion of frontier settlers. However, these policies were unrealistic and not enforced. King George III issued a Royal Proclamation Line in 1763, prohibiting all future purchases of land west of the Appalachian Mountains without a public meeting between the Indian owners and representatives of the British government. The protection of Great Britain would prevent colonists from taking the land by force. Josephy wrote, “But the task was impossible, and the proclamation line itself was not intended to be permanent” (314). Settlers continued to illegally cross the Appalachians. Skirmishes broke out, and a war led by Lord Dunmore, the governor of Virginia, forced Indians out of Kentucky in
1774. During the American Revolutionary War, many Indians sided with the British, hoping that their victory would keep Americans from expanding and conquering their remaining land. In
1779, General John Sullivan led an expedition into Iroquois land in New York, burning and destroying villages and farms, killing both innocent and enemy Indians. As a result, most of the surviving Iroquois fled to Canada, and the ones that remained in New York. The decimation of one of the most powerful tribes has impacted the tribe today, which exists today in small reservations throughout New York, and in Canada. The Treaty of Paris guaranteed the
Northwest Territory to the United States in 1783. However, the Indians there were not parties to the treaty, and the United States forcibly removed them over the next few decades. The
Northwest Ordinance of 1787 said, "The utmost good faith shall always be observed towards the
Indians; their land and property shall never be taken without their consent; and, in their property, rights, and liberty, they shall never be invaded or disturbed.” Nevertheless, wars continued in the territory until 1795, when the Treaty of Greenville granted Americans most of Ohio, part of
Indiana, and other strategically important locations in the Northwest Territory. According to
Josephy, “the treaty set a pattern for the westward movement of Americans. The peace that followed it could only be temporary: within a few years settlers filled up much of the ceded country and pushed on to threaten lands still held by the tribes” (316) The Northwest Indian War demonstrated that the constant pressure to expand westward would surpass the importance of the promises of peace with the Indians.
Early in the 19th century, Shawnee war chief Tecumseh displayed the first attempts to unite Indians against the American expansionists. Indian tribes were alienated: they spoke different languages, had different belief systems, and lived separately. Tecumseh dreamed of a separate Indian nation in America, but his dream was doomed to failure (Josephy 318). Some tribes stood with him, but many refused to join his cause. He urged all Indians to unite and refuse to cede any more land, but also preached more humane methods of warfare. His respect for whites was not mutual. Indiana offered fifty dollars for every Indian scalp, and Indians were to be completely separated from white society. William Henry Harrison, the governor of Indiana
Territory, was determined to remove all Indians from the Northwest Territory. Unprovoked, he marched an army near the Tippecanoe River near Tecumseh‟s village, and Indians attacked, threatened by his army. Harrison easily drove off the Indians and burned the village. The inhumanity of this battle was not given attention. In fact, Harrison gained popularity from this victory, and became president along with John Tyler as vice-president under the slogan,
“Tippecanoe and Tyler, too.” During the War of 1812, Tecumseh joined the British, hoping that a victory would allow the creation of an Indian nation. The British lost, and Tecumseh was killed. Without British allies, Indians were forced to give up their land. However, Tecumseh and the Indians that joined his purpose did not passively give up their land, or fight to recapture all the land that was taken from them. Rather, they fought to defend the land that they had, and worked to achieve a solution that would benefit both Indians and Americans.
Until the 1830‟s, Indians had been allowed to remain east of the Mississippi as long as they had assimilated. Many Cherokee Indians had demonstrated the ability to assimilate while keeping their tribal heritage, and by the 1820‟s, they had created schools, churches, roads, and even a constitution that asserted their sovereignty. Unfortunately, the discovery of gold on
Cherokee land created a drive for land. In 1828, Georgia created laws that would strip the
Cherokee of their rights with the intention of removal. The Cherokee Nation responded by suing
Georgia. In the case Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, Chief Justice John Marshall claimed, “Though the Indians are acknowledged to have an unquestionable, and, heretofore, unquestioned right to the lands they occupy… Their relationship to the United States resembles that of a ward to his guardian… and [an Indian tribe] cannot maintain an action in the courts of the United States”
(www.mytholyoke.edu). As domestic, dependent nations, Indian tribes had no right to sue the
United States. Although the laws were considered unconstitutional and Marshall claimed that
Indians deserved the land they were on, Andrew Jackson soon passed the Indian Removal Act in
1830, which allowed for the forced eviction of all Indians to west of the Mississippi River.
Historian Ronald Takaki wrote in A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America,
“Jackson claimed his goal was to protect them from the „mercenary influence of white men‟… he regarded himself as a „father,‟ concerned about the welfare of his Indian „children.‟ But if these „children‟ refused to accept his advice, Jackson warned, they would be responsible for the consequences” (87-88). John Marshall and Jackson, while claiming to be protecting the Indians, actually aided in their destruction. Jackson asked in a message to Congress, “What good man would prefer a country covered with forests and ranged by a few thousand savages to our extensive Republic, studded with cities, towns, and prosperous farms… filled with all the blessings of liberty, civilization, and religion?” (qtd. in Takaki 88). The Indians, according to
Zinn, had become “casualties of progress” (14).
The first tribe to be relocated was the Choctaws in Mississippi, after signing the Treaty of
Dancing Rabbit Creek on September 27, 1830. When the Seminole tribe of Florida refused to leave their homes, a war began, known as the Second Seminole War. This war cost the United
States a lot of money and soldiers, but by 1842, after 7 years of fighting, most Seminoles moved.
The Treaty of New Echota in 1835 permitted the government to relocate the Cherokee Nation to west of the Mississippi. The treaty was ratified by a minority representation of the tribe, in which none of the tribal officers were present. Major W. M. Davis wrote, “Sir, that paper… called a treaty, is no treaty at all… [It was] not sanctioned by the great body of the Cherokee,
[and was made] without their participation or assent” (qtd. in Takaki 95). In order to silence any opposition, the Georgia militia jailed Cherokee Chief John Ross, who was perceived as a threat to the treaty. The Cherokee newspaper was also suppressed in order to restrict information about the meeting. The journey westward for the Indians became known as the Trail of Tears.
Inadequate food, shelter, sanitation, and transportation made the conditions deadly. Of the
30,000 Indians forced west, 6,500 to 10,000 died due to federal incompetence and corruption.
Despite the incredible inhumanity of their situation, Indians had hope. Indians were promised this land, but just as previous promises were not upheld, Indian relocation would continue through the 19th century.
Although the Civil War had temporarily slowed the westward movement of whites, expansion to the west coast was inevitable. The 1871 Indians Appropriations Act declared that no Indian nation in the U.S. would be acknowledged as an independent nation. An attorney for a railroad corporation explained, “It is not a mere prohibition of the making of future treaties with these tribes. It goes beyond this, and destroys the political existence of the tribes” (qtd. in Takaki
102). After it was passed, the government began building railroads through the Plains, even though this violated earlier promises with the tribes. There were many detrimental effects from these railroads. Whites began to move to the Plains much more rapidly, and they began hunting buffalo at frightening rates. Takaki wrote, “They [Indians] watched the iron horse transport white hunters to the plains, transforming the prairies into buffalo killing fields… The decimation of the buffalo signified the end of the Pawnee way of life” (102-103). The Union Pacific
Railroad, constructed through the middle of the country, was threatened by Plains tribes. The government bribed several tribes to sign treaties to guarantee peace. Other tribes, such as the
Oglala Sioux led by Red Cloud, refused to give away more land. The government sent troops to protect the construction, anticipating a war. The Sioux Indians defeated the troops, and signed the Treaty of Fort Laramie, guaranteeing their ownership of the Black Hills in South Dakota. In
1874, a flood of miners invaded the Black Hills, because prospectors spotted gold. The Indians assaulted these trespassers, and a war broke out between the Indians and the government. The
Black Hills War lasted until 1877, when the government took over the Hills. This time period was characterized by wars such as this, in which the government frequently used troops to force
Indians off land that was granted to them.
While appearing as an honest attempt to help Indians, the General Allotment Act attempted to forcibly assimilate Indians. Family sized farms would be allotted to each Indian, and whatever extra land existed would be offered for sale to whites. Each of the Five Civilized
Tribes would sign the act, accept citizenship, and prepare a state constitution before it could then enter the Union. In 1889, Congress divided the Great Sioux Reservation of South Dakota into five smaller reservations, so the land could accommodate settlers from the east. Once split up, the Sioux Indians were forced to farm, raise livestock, and send Indian children to government- run boarding schools. The Bureau of Indian Affairs was responsible for supplying the Indians with food and supplies to transition, but corruption in the bureau led to embezzlement, and inadequate supplies. Red Cloud said, “Our rations began to be reduced; they said we were lazy.
That is false. How does any man of sense suppose that so great a number of people could get work at once unless they were at once supplied with the means to work and instructors to teach him?” (wps.ablongman.com). The General Allotment Act often is considered to have right- intention. This point of view is generally held by whites who considered themselves “Friends of the Indians,” such as Alice Fletcher, an ethnologist in the late 1800s. She said, “The Indian may now become a free man; free from the thralldom of the tribe; freed from the domination of the reservation system; free to enter into the body of our citizens. This bill may therefore be considered as the Magna Carta of the Indians of our country” (qtd. in www.nebraskastudies.org).
However, the reaction from an Indian perspective is quite different. Angie Debo, an Indian historian, described in And Still the Waters Run: The Betrayal of the Five Civilized Tribes how the General Allotment Act systematically manipulated American Indians to deprive them of their lands and resources. Whether or not they agree with the technique of assimilation, historians agree that the act caused the decline of Indians‟ status economically. The reservation conditions today are similar to a developing country, and are one of the poorest places in America.
The Indian boarding school became a significant method towards the assimilation of
Indians into Western civilization. Army Lt. Richard Henry Platt began the first Indian boarding school experimentation in 1875. Indian prisoners were taught English, European ideals, the concepts of civilization, and Christianity. After 3 years of education, they were on their way to becoming teachers in a typical school, and the experiment was considered a success. In 1879, the program was enacted upon reservations. The actual schools were located in Pennsylvania to create separation between the children and their culture. The students were forced to cut their hair- considered the pride of all Indians. The students had a schedule similar to a boot camp, and were beaten if they spoke in their native language. Many tried to run away, but most were caught and returned by the police. According to PBS‟s Indian Country Diaries, “They were taught to hate who they were born to be. Ojibwe student Merta Bercier wrote: „Did I want to be an Indian? After looking at the pictures… fighting, scalping women and children… No! Indians were mean people—I‟m glad I‟m not an Indian, I thought‟” (2). Although education of
American Indians today is not as dehumanizing as it used to be, most Indians do not learn their true history in schools. According to American Indian Susan Harjo, the president and director of the Morning Star Institute, “Too often, this history is posed as a romantic myth, and the uncomfortable facts about Columbus are eliminated” (13). Just as Columbus is romanticized, the
United States is as well, with the omission of facts that could jeopardize patriotism. If America continues to hide its past from students, Harjo said, “All people in this country are going to be complicit in the continuing effort to wipe out our Indian people” (13). The American Indian
Movement fights to improve the education system of Indians, and many Indian activists seek to eradicate the false stereotypes and facts of Indians in America through a more unbiased education for non-Indians.
During this period of Indian destitution, Wovoka of the Paiutes called for Indians everywhere to dance the Ghost Dance, claiming that Christ had returned to earth as an Indian.
The dance promised the restoration of Indian lifestyle, land, and the buffalo in a land without whites. Whites either felt threatened by the dance, or saw this as an opportunity to acquire more land. In 1890, troops were sent to surround the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, where
Indians performed the ghost dance. The Indian Bureau in Washington ordered the army to arrest them, including chiefs Sitting Bull and Big Foot. Sitting Bull was captured, and the Indians were surrounded by machine guns and armed soldiers. A shot was fired, and an Indian was blamed.
Men, women, and children were fired upon by the machineguns, and those that fled were pursued by the troops. Takaki wrote, “For Indian America, Wounded Knee violently symbolized the end of the frontier” (231). With no frontier to pursue, Americans directed their aggression towards the land that Indians owned, and for causes as unreasonable as the Ghost Dance, Indians were killed.
The Indian Reorganization Act in 1934 recognized the failure of the General Allotment
Act to assimilate Indians. Collier, the creator of the act, believed in preserving the culture of
Indians, and that “Modernity and white Americanism are not identical. If the Indian life is a good life, then we should be proud and glad to have this different and native culture going on by the side of ours” (qtd. in Takaki 238). This idea of cultural pluralism was vital to the future status of Indians. Tribes would write tribal constitutions, elect tribal councils, and incorporate tribal institutions. For the first time, the government worked to place the fate of Indians in their own hands. However, observed historian Graham D. Taylor, “it resembled earlier Indian policies in that it proposed to manipulate Indian behavior in ways which their white „guardians‟ thought best for them” (qtd. in Takaki 240). The Indian New Deal gave Indian tribes more freedom and self-dependence, but the Department of the Interior still maintained tight control over most financial and legal matters. The act essentially still was designed to achieve the national policy of Indian assimilation (Josephy 352). Nevertheless, the new freedoms of the tribes increased the energy and moral of the reservations. Later in 1934, the Johnson-O‟Malley
Act was passed, authorizing the Secretary of the Interior to make contracts with states for the education, medical attention, agriculture assistance, and social welfare of Indians (Josephy 352).
The freedoms and benefits of the 1930‟s did not live up to their claims, but were necessary in initiating the political involvement of tribes and Indian activists.
During the 1940‟s to the 1960‟s, the United States adopted the policy of Indian
Termination. In 1943, the U.S. Senate commissioned a survey on Indian reservations. They found the extremely poor living conditions the fault of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and concluded that tribes would be better off with more independence, and should join mainstream
American society. According to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, the objectives of termination was to promote “(1) a standard of living for Indians comparable with that enjoyed by other segments of the population, and (2) the step-by-step transfer of Bureau functions into the
Indians themselves or to the appropriate agencies of local, state, or federal government” (qtd. in
Anderson 146). The House Concurrent Resolution of 1953 formally announced the policy of
Indian Termination, and immediately terminated all the tribes of several states. Indians were no longer wards of the state, and the government denied them the benefits that were earlier granted to them. Josephy wrote,
Soon after World War II, impatience with the speed of Indian assimilation,
motivated in part by concern over how long the taxpayer would have to continue
paying for treaty-guaranteed services to Indians, led to a violent reversal of
government policy that brought new demoralization to the tribes. Underlying the
change was hostility to the Indian Reorganization Act, which did not seem to be
moving Indians towards assimilation quickly enough. (353) As innovative as the Indian Relocation Act was, it only lasted nine years until Americans gave up their attempt to help Indians. The progress made with the Reorganization Act was reversed, and Indians suddenly lost all the few benefits they had. 109 tribes were terminated, and 13,263
Indians lost their tribal affiliation. Termination most significantly affected the economic stability, health care, and education of Indians throughout the rest of the 20th century, because support for these aspects of Indian tribes was suddenly withdrawn. The resistance of several tribes, such as the Klamaths and Menominees, caused the termination policy to eventually be abandoned. After the end of the termination policy, many tribes filed civil lawsuits
The Kennedy administration promoted several of the beneficial aspects of the Indian
Reorganization Act, such as dealing with reservation health and sanitation conditions, and the creation of new programs of education, vocational training, housing, and economic development
(Josephy 355). During the Johnson administration, the government put even more effort into improving Indians conditions and gave the tribes more responsibilities, allowing them to run self-sufficient programs to help economic stability in the reservations. These programs were successful because Indians had planned them according to how they experienced would fit. In
1967, an Indian Resources Development Act was sent to Congress, but tribes interjected, claiming that the bill did not reflect their desires. This bill was “the first test” (Josephy 356) of the political status of Indians, and they succeeded. Indians had the power to control their own fate. In 1968, Johnson formally announced to Congress the new goal of ending termination to begin self-determination. This provided hope for Indians, but according to Josephy, “did little more than give its Indian members a forum to air tribal complaints… The Department of the
Interior and the Bureau continued to maintain control and authority over the tribes and the policies and programs devised for them” (357-358). Since the government was unwilling to give up this authority, the tribes still did not have the Self-Determination defined in the Indian Self-
Determination and Educational Assistance Act of 1975. This declared that “the obligations of the United States to respond to the strong expressions of the Indian people for self-determination by assuming maximum Indian participation in the direction of… Federal services” (qtd. in
Anderson 148-149). Thus, the government did not truly prescribe their own policy. The U.S.
Department of the Interior admitted that, “Indians have been left perhaps even more dependent than before on the Federal Government for income, employment, and general provisions for their economic welfare... the level of discretion available to tribal governments in spending Federal funds has declined” (qtd. in Anderson 149-150). As beneficial as self-determination would have been in the 1960‟s and 1970‟s, the government was unwilling to fully give Indian tribes the full responsibility of policies and programs that they promised.
The civil rights movement and anti-war protests of the 1960‟s encouraged Indian activism. In 1969, 78 Indians occupied the abandoned Alcatraz prison on Alcatraz Island in San
Francisco Bay. These Indians represented over fifty tribes, and lived on the island. They offered to buy the island for glass beads and red cloth, the price paid Indians for Manhattan Island in the
1600s. The government cut off electricity water to the island, but the protestors remained on the island for over a year. They planned to turn the island into a center for the Native American
Studies for Ecology. They declared, “We are still holding the Island of Alcatraz in the true names of Freedom, Justice, and Equality… We have learned that violence breeds only more violence, and we therefore have carried on our occupation of Alcatraz in a peaceful manner, hoping that the government of the United States will also act accordingly” (qtd. in Zinn 387).
Within six months, the government sent troops in to physically remove the Indians from the island. This is one of many Indian activist movements of the 1970‟s. In addition to various Indian activisms throughout America, Indian militants united to form the American Indian Movement (AIM) in 1968. Indians wanted the Bureau to be restructured to better represent Indians, but this created tension between the officials there who were afraid of losing their jobs. The AIM invaded the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1972, trying to make a citizen‟s arrest of two officials of the Bureau. Josephy called this “the prelude to a stormy period in Indian relations” (360). It soon became revealed that tribal leaders, under the direction of Bureau officials, had signed secret leases for tribally owned resources. The
Department of the Interior then canceled these leases. More Indian activists joined the AIM due to the number of Anti-Indian accounts of violence, and the movement sought to fight the detrimental images of Indians. In 1973, AIM activists, along with non-Indian supporters, occupied the site of the Wounded Knee massacre. Similarly to the conflict in the previous century, violence erupted between the activists and Federal marshals, FBI agents, and the police forces of the Bureau, and the battle “left dozens of dead on both sides, set back reservation development by a generation, and left vengeful rivalries that remain up to the present day”
(Anderson 225). American Indian activists received worldwide attention, and the government soon passed several acts that would improve the conditions of Indians.
Nixon stated in 1970 message to Congress, denouncing Termination policy:
The first Americans - the Indians - are the most deprived and most isolated
minority group in our nation. On virtually very scale of measurement
employment, income, education, health - the condition of the Indian people ranks
at the bottom. This condition is the heritage of centuries of injustice. From the
time of their first contact with European settlers, the American Indians have been
oppressed and brutalized, deprived of their ancestral lands and denied the opportunity to control their own destiny… This, then, must be the goal of any
new national policy toward the Indian people to strengthen the Indian‟s sense of
autonomy without threatening this sense of community. (www.epa.gov)
Throughout the 1970‟s, the government passed legislation that helped the conditions of
American Indians. The Indian Civil Rights Act guaranteed tribes most of the rights of the Bill of
Rights, which Indians had been fighting for. Programs such as the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act, the Economic Development Administration, and the Legal Services
Corporation were created to improve the tribes‟ economic and social conditions. Programs such as Head Start, Medicaid, and food stamp programs also helped Indians in poverty, although they were provided to all races in America. The Indian Health Care Improvement Act of 1987 increased funds for Indian health services and allowed tribes to manage some reservation health facilities. In 1978, the Indian Child Welfare Act ended the system in which the Bureau controlled child custody proceedings, and gave this to the reservations. The American Indian
Religious Freedom Act, passed in 1978, protected the cultural practices of Indians, as well as other aborigine groups in America. Also, the government reestablished relations with many of the tribes that had been terminated. “Federal appropriations for the Indian programs, which had totaled $120 million in 1960, was estimated to have soared beyond $2 billion annually by the late
1970‟s” (Josephy 364). Nevertheless, in 1977, the American Indian Policy Review Commission observed that despite these funds, reservations still experienced unemployment, poverty, and poor sanitation.
President Regan withdrew a lot of the funds that the Bureau of Indian Affairs and Federal
Government provided tribes, claiming that they needed to assume responsibility for their own tribal economies. Tribal governments were granted several vital rights, such as the ability to collect taxes. However, the tribes were not financially stable enough to suddenly be fully self- sustained. Congress managed to restore some of the appropriations and programs that Regan cut, but
the tribes were gravely affected by the elimination or reduction of funds for
services that affected almost every phase of reservation life…The economic
progress that reservations had been making stalled and reversed; unemployment
rose dramatically to as high as 95 per cent among the tribes; and poverty, ill
health, and associated problems such as alcohol and drug abuse and reservation
violence increased. (Josephy 367)
In order to make a living, many reservations resorted to creating gambling enterprises that attracted non-Indians. In 1990, an estimated 130 tribes in over 20 states resorted to creating gambling enterprises to raise money. Although considered immoral and against the Indian culture, it was the essential support that the tribes needed to survive. Tribes still insisted on government observance of their treaty rights such as trust protection of reservation property, and some demanded that the Bureau stop treating them as wards of the country, or asked that they continue to direct and fund their reservation development. Congress responded in two ways.
First, Congress authorized the Tribal Self-Governance Demonstration Project in 1987, in which several tribes would receive five years of funding in order to take the initial steps towards achieving full self-government.
The second response came from a special investigating panel of the Senate‟s Committee on Indian Affairs in 1989, where billions of dollars that should have gone to the tribes was found to be wasted in the Bureau and other Federal agencies. As a result, Indians believed it was their right to take over the resources and functions of all Federal programs, including the Bureau. The 500 year anniversary of Columbus‟ first voyage in 1992 served as a catalyst to the awareness of maltreatment to Indians in America. As a result, the National Museum of the American Indian
Act authorized for the building of an American Indian Museum on the Washington Mall.
The conditions of American Indian reservations in the 21st century are similar to that of a third world country. A report by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights called Broken Promises:
Evaluating the Native American Health Care System stated in 2004:
Beyond disturbingly high mortality rates, Native Americans also suffer a
significantly lower health status and disproportionate rates of disease compared
with all other Americans… A long history of treaties and broken promises urges
the federal government to recognize that the concept of fulfilling treaty promises
through proper funding and effective administration is a moral imperative. (iii-iv)
One example is of the Indians living in Pine Ridge- the largest Indian reservation of South
Dakota. It is among the most impoverished and lacking in health care of any people in the
United States. According to South Dakota's Pine Ridge Indian Reservation Has Third World
Health Conditions, unemployment is at around 70 percent, and the poverty and rural isolation leads to alcoholism, drug abuse, and malnutrition. The infant mortality rate was double the average American infant mortality rate in 2005, and many diseases, such as cancer and diabetes exist at abnormal levels. Hospitals are understaffed, and there is almost no treatment available for special cases. The IHS and Indians in general, according to Argus Leader, “sit low on the government‟s priority list” (1).
The government continues to take advantage of the inferior economic and political status of Indian reservations. Daniel Brook wrote, “Genocide against Native Americans continues in modern times with modern techniques... Environmental genocide is perpetrated by the U.S. government” (105). The United States government has solicited every Indian tribe to host a nuclear waste facility. Most reservations, filled with poverty and without major sources of outside revenue, have no choice but to accept the millions of dollars in exchange. Bradley
Angel, an international leader in the environmental health and justice movement, wrote,
“Virtually every landfill leaks, and every incinerator emits hundreds of toxic chemicals into the air, land, and water” (qtd. in Brook 107). However, Daniel Brook explains that the worst environmental hazard on tribal lands is the illegal dumping of waste. The corporations who secretly dump their wastes on reservations, or the tribal members who dump the government or corporation‟s waste, act without the permission of the tribe. Chemical agents created can cause serious and life-threatening sicknesses, such as leukemia and other cancers, organ ailments, birth defects, and harm to animals and plants (108). Indians believe in a spiritual connection with the earth, and have responded to the current environmental issues with anger and determination.
Angel wrote, “Instead of conquistadors armed with weapons of destruction and war, the new assault is disguised as „economic development‟ promoted by entrepreneurs pushing poisonous technologies” (qtd. in Brook 112). The government continues to secretly take advantage of
American Indians, and this increases the social and economic gap between Indians and non-
Indians.
The day after the Incident at Wounded Knee in 1973, The New York Times published an article called Armed Indians Seize Wounded Knee, Hold Hostages. Written by United Press
International, the story covered the first day of battle at Pine Ridge, South Dakota- the site of the
Wounded Knee Massacre. 200 to 300 AIM members were reported to have participated, demanding that “the State Foreign Relations Committee hold hearings on treaties made with the
Indians, that the Senate start a „full-scale investigation‟ of the Indians, and that another inquiry be started into „all Sioux reservations in South Dakota.‟” They vowed to cause no harm to the hostages. Mr. Camp, an AIM coordinator, said, “We will occupy this town until the Government sees fit to deal with the Indian people, particularly the Oglala Sioux tribe in South Dakota. We want a true Indian nation, not one made up of Bureau of Indian Affairs puppets.”
The court case Cobell v. Salazar, a court case that has existed since 1996, came to a conclusion on December 8, 2009. According to the Washington Post article, Government to settle suit over Indian land trusts by David A. Fahrenthold, the Obama administration has agreed to pay $1.4 billion to over 300,000 descendents of Indian tribes, and $2 billion for the re- purchase of lands distributed under the General Allotment Act of 1887. The lands granted to the
Indians were often not given up by the government, so any revenue made on that land should be split with the owners- the Indians. Elouise Cobell, the lead plaintiff said, “This is significantly less than the full accounting to which individual Indians are entitled.” Even so, U.S. District
Judge Royce C. Lamberth called the victory “a great day for Americans and for all Native
Americans.”
Piscataway Indians, located in the Chesapeake Bay Region, have conflicted with
European settlers and Americans for centuries. The first significant contact with Europeans was with William Claiborne, a Virginia colonist and merchant. He established a trading post at
Nacotchtank, a large village located off the Potomac River. This created devastating consequences, as English, Swedish, and Dutch merchants continually raided the village until it was abandoned. The Tayac (meaning leader) of the Indian tribe sent warriors to defend the village; this led to the English burning Moyaone. In 1634, Leonard Calvert began to clear the area to establish the Maryland colony. To do this, he would have to remove the Indians that currently lived there. Through a series of treaties, Indians lost their land to colonists in exchange for military protection and guarantees of other reserved lands. As more colonists entered the area, Indians were driven farther off. They retaliated by killing the free-roaming horses and cattle that often destroyed their gardens. This gave the colonists an excuse to threaten war.
“Faced with the impossible military superiority of the colonists in terms of numbers, resources, and technology, the native people had no choice but to retreat from the land they had occupied for centuries” (Piscatawayconoy.com). The colonists also failed to uphold their promises to protect these Indians, who were often attacked by northern tribes. For centuries following, these
Indians would constantly travel due to encroachment, disease, aggression and manipulation by colonists, and a lack of game to hunt.
After the Seven Years War, the French and Spanish were expelled from the continent.
The English, and eventually Americans, were “free to focus almost exclusively on the „Indian problem‟” (Piscatawayconoy.com). For almost a century following the war, this period became a brutal attempt of annihilation of Indians, both physically and demographically. After the
Revolutionary War, Maryland declared Indian jurisdiction extinct; the land granted to Indians by earlier treaties was revoked, and violence ensued. Since then, Piscataway Indians have struggled to cling to their identity.
Other states have acknowledged Indian tribes throughout the last few centuries, but
Maryland remains one of very few that does not recognize any Indian tribes. Nevertheless, there are several groups of Indians that currently live there today. Two that have descended from the native people of the Chesapeake area are the Piscataway Nation and the Piscataway-Conoy Tribe of Maryland. These two tribes have been pursuing state and federal recognition for decades by writing petitions to the Maryland state government and the federal government, aiming to affirm their identity and gain access to beneficial governmental programs. These programs are especially crucial for Piscataway Indians who, in general, are less healthy than most Americans- a characteristic of most American Indians. The Piscataway-Conoy Tribe wrote, “Adding to the problem [of poor health] is our lack of state and federal recognition, which cuts off access to vital healthcare resources and minority government set-asides” (Piscatawayconoy.com). In addition, a high level education is less available to Piscataway Indians than most Americans.
The denial of tribal recognition has caused severe consequences for Piscataway Indians.
Tribal recognition is often unjust process. Advocating for a bill that would make the recognition process fairer, Chairman of the Committee on Natural Resources Nick J. Rahall II remarked, “The criteria are too vague and overly subjective; documentation accepted as proof for one tribe is not accepted for another; the system is inherently biased, leaning heavily toward denying recognition… Let us act now so that no additional generations of Indian children will have to live the indignity of needing validation from the federal government.” The act, called the
Indian Tribal Federal Recognition Administrative Procedures Act, was introduced in 2007 to the
House of Representatives, but was not passed. The Piscataway Nation‟s petition for state recognition has existed for 15 years, but it has yet to be approved, although it follows the requirements.
Although the government does not affirm Piscataway Indians their identity, they continue to practice their culture. Seasonal ceremonies, Pow-wows, and other tribal gatherings and events continue. Still, their culture is threatened with extinction. For example, Chief Turkey Tayac of the Piscataway Nation was the last one to know the Piscataway language, and the last medicine man and cultural practitioner of the tribe. He died in 1978 and was buried at Moyaone, the homeland of Piscataway Indians before European conquest. The government created the Native
American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), requiring all federal agencies and institutions to return Native American cultural items to their respective peoples. Passed in 1990, it is a bill that has helped Indians reclaim aspect of their and their ancestors‟ culture. This may help restore a small bit of Indian culture, but cannot make up for all of the cultural artifacts that have been lost over the last 500 years.
The changing interpretations of American Indians and their relationship with whites have largely been based upon the biases of the historians. Indian historians, until the 1900s, mainly told stories orally, and until recently, this has been an unconventional, illegitimate source of history. The main sources of Indian history has been written by non-Indians, and did not Samuel
Eliot Morrison wrote about Columbus in Christopher Columbus, Mariner, “He had his faults and defects, but they were largely the defects of the qualities that made him great—his indomitable will, his superb faith in God… his stubborn persistence despite neglect, poverty and discouragement. But there was no flaw, no dark side to the most outstanding and essential of his qualities—his seamanship” (qtd. in Zinn 9). When whites told the history of American Indians, they omitted deemphasized aspects that would bring disloyalty or shame, such as the genocide of
Columbus. Not surprisingly, American textbooks omitted aspects of the past, such as the germ warfare used by colonists to spread smallpox to the Indians. This is called exculpatory history, and was written to justify the actions of the ruling class.
The first source of a written history by an American Indian was Angie Debo‟s And Still the Waters Run: The Betrayal of the Five Civilized Tribe, in 1940. The book explained the true effects of the General Allotment Act of 1887 on the Five Civilized Tribes. As Kelly Stewart wrote in From Reservations to Sovereign Nations: A History of the American Government's
Indian Policy, “Indians were still not in a position where they could revise the inaccurate
American perception of Indian history.” The book received little attention, because, according to a review by Publishers Weekly, the 1940‟s was not particularly receptive to the story about the betrayal of the American Indian. Recently, Angie Debo‟s book has been claimed to be a turning point for ethnohistory. The Indian Historian Press, founded in 1969, began to evaluate textbooks given to elementary and secondary schools, and of the four hundred evaluated, not a single one gave an accurate depiction of Indians (Zinn 389). Books such as Dee Brown‟s Bury My Heart at
Wounded Knee offer an Indian perspective. Indian historians such as Gabrielle Tayac continue to reveal the true histories of Indians, as well as their status today.
The other perspective of Indian history has been through liberal non-Indians such as
Howard Zinn, Alvan M. Josephy, and Gary Nash. They have focused on revealing the truth behind the treatment of American Indians throughout history, by using uncensored statistics and bold declarations, often considering the treatment of American Indians genocidal. Accepting and announcing his biases, Zinn stated, “My point is not to grieve for the victims and denounce the executioners. Those tears, that anger, cast into the past, deplete our moral energy for the present… it [history] should, I believe, emphasize new possibilities by disclosing those hidden episodes of the past when, even in brief flashes, people showed their ability to resist, to join together, occasionally to win” (11-12). Showing how Indians have united as active managers of their own fate could create more activism for Indian rights and status today.
Throughout the past, the relationship between Europeans and Indians has been characterized by the whites with superior technology, economics, politics, morals, and even religion, forcing their better principals on the ignorant, untutored Indians. However, this view overlooks the ways in which, perhaps, life before 1492 was happier and more just. Zinn wrote,
So, Columbus and his successors were not coming into an empty wilderness, but
into a world which in some places was as densely populated as Europe itself, where the culture was complex, where human relations were more egalitarian than
in Europe, and where the relations among men, women, children, and nature were
more beautifully worked out than perhaps any place in the world. (21)
Indian culture can teach America about responsible environmental behavior, spirituality with the earth, fairness and equality, and much more. American Indians struggle today to keep their way of life because so few Indians exist today compared to the original population before Columbus.
It is every American‟s responsibility to help preserve Indian culture and learn about the Indian history in America. Interview Transcription Interviewee/Narrator: Gabrielle Tayac Interviewer: Josh Sennett Location: National Museum of the American Indian, Washington DC Date: December 22, 2009
Josh Sennett: This is Josh Sennett and I‟m interviewing Gabrielle Tayac as part of the
American Century Oral History Project. This interview took place at 11:30 A.M. on December
22, 2009 at the National Museum of the American Indian. So my first question to you is: what was your life like as a child?
Gabrielle Tayac: My life as a child was very unique because I grew up in New York City. I grew up in a neighborhood called Greenwich Village. My mother is Jewish and my father is
Piscataway so I grew up in the 1970s in a very progressive and eclectic environment with a lot of diversity around me, a lot of people who were artists and writers and intellectuals, and that‟s where my dad felt very comfortable, because he was such a different person because of his background. Very sort of avant-garde in many ways, but also, I was raised with knowledge of both of my parents‟ culture.
JS: In a past Oral History Project, Marcella Giles, who was actually mentioned in the Our Lives exhibit, stated that in her high school, in the 1950s and 1960s, did not teach at all about
American Indian history. How was your high school in terms of teaching about actual Indian history?
GT: It was very deficient. There was about a paragraph in a textbook, and it was also very difficult to impress upon my social studies teachers that the history was incomplete, so it was very frustrating. And I went to a very good high school; I went to Bronx High School of Science in New York. Even there, it was very frustrating. It felt like it was something that was barely to be believed, or that I was causing trouble, that I was being problematic by criticizing the information I was being given.
JS: So did you first start taking an interest in Indian history during your high school?
GT: Yea, it was actually even before; I was always very interested in it. In New York City, like in many places around the country, there were American Indian education supplemental programs, so I would go after school, and I was very interested. I got very interested in this early on, but certainly through high school it started to solidify for me, and I had made up my mind almost probably by my freshman year that I wanted to do something in college to do with
American Indian studies.
JS: And you did. In Cornell… did you create that American Indian Program, or was that something you joined?
GT: No, I didn‟t. Thanks for doing your homework, that was very good. I actually applied to
Cornell specifically because they had an American Indian studies program, and I had decided that that was on the top of my list precisely for that reason, and so I set my sights on Cornell right away. That was my top choice and thank goodness I got in (laughs). It was interesting because when I made my application I went to my guidance counselor. There was only one other Native American in my class at Bronx Science. Interestingly enough, because we were in New York, he was half-Jewish too- I thought that was kind of odd. But we both encountered the same issue which was when we mentioned this to our guidance counselor; he thought that it was ridiculous for us to even consider American Indian studies. He was like, “Who cares about that?” and was like, “What‟s wrong with you?”, because actually, Andrew, the other kid, was very fair like me. It was kind of like, “Why would a girl with green eyes and blond hair from
New York even care about that?” Luckily, the American Indian Education Program called and interceded and made a complaint on our behalf, because, he said that it‟s really a waste of your time- it was everything a guidance counselor is not supposed to do (laughs). He interceded for us, and had also told both of us actually and me in particular, that he thought it was ridiculous for me to even apply; that he didn‟t think I could get in, even though my grades were really good.
So I did, and it was great, and I went up to visit. And an interesting story is that after I finished getting my doctorate at Harvard, my undergraduate professor from Cornell, Charlotte Heth, found out that I was finishing, and she hired me up here, at the museum. So you never know who‟s going to come back in your life. So yea, that‟s why I went to Cornell and it was great, it was a wonderful experience.
JS: So in the program in Cornell, what were some of the issues you were trying to promote awareness for?
GT: It was an interesting place, because I chose to live at the international living center, specifically because I was very interested in promoting ideas about Native American sovereignty and looking at native people as nations so it seemed to make total sense to me to live in the
International Living Center. I also became very active in the American Indian Students Organization there. So there were a number of things: one was that native history and cultures and peoples and issues are important and are relevant to today; the other thing being about issues land rights and human rights. I got very involved with that, especially in college. I did in high school as well, but especially in college. I started to look more at Latin American indigenous issues, and I went when I was a sophomore in college, or a junior… no, I guess as a junior in college, I went to El Salvador during the war1, and started to go to Indigenous people gatherings there in the Amazon and other places, so I wanted to bring back that awareness of human rights and social political issues, and I was very active, certainly starting early on in college, and throughout my life.
JS: As a youth and through college, were there Piscataway traditions that you followed, or were you more westernized?
GT: It‟s interesting. I was very fortunate for a bunch of things. One is that even though I grew up in this eclectic, progressive, contemporary world, my dad, as it so happens, was the son of
Turkey Tayac- also known as Philip Procter. This was a man, who was my grandfather, who was from like a different world. He was an extraordinary, almost magical man. We would come back and visit him and the family, and my uncle Billy who took up the torch from him. Billy, who is the chief now, and my dad, were probably the two closest siblings, they were very emotionally close. So we would come back, and visit maybe once or twice a year. So there was involvement in that sense. But my father, he grew up with a lot of racism and a lot of issues and so for him, it was like he always identified as a Piscataway Indian, he was always proud of it, but
1 The Salvadoran Civil War from 1980-1992. he also didn‟t want me to be exposed to the negatives. And now that I‟m a parent- I was very annoyed at him when I was a kid- but as a parent, now I get it, why you would want your child to have to deal with that. So we would be involved to some degree, but he also felt that he wanted me to have a very open mind, and he was also very much concerned about… Piscataways are also largely Catholic, so my dad had been very traumatized by Catholic school, so he didn‟t want anything to do with religion at all at that period. I started to go back, like anything, he was like live, (?horrible?), I was glad I was raised with that level of skepticism, but I started to come down here on my own when I was about 15. I would take the train and Uncle Billy would pick me up at the train station, and I would spend some time. Especially when I went to college, and later high school, I was very lucky that Turkey had continued with… he was really the last cultural practitioner, so he kept this thread of traditional practice. He was the only person who did, under extreme odds, and he was alone in it…
JS: And he was the last known person to know the Piscataway language.
GT: Yea, even to know the language. Really, crazy stuff, it‟s like, “What‟s this little sort of
Jewish girl from New York with this medical man granddad?” It was really interesting. He knew some of the language; he wrote down some of the language, he was a medicinal practitioner. When I was a kid, it was kind of scary. You know, you would see some old guy on the street, and he would have this World War One coat, and he was very dark, and he smelled like plant oil, and it was weird. But we came down, and then I started to come down, and I started to be involved myself, and started to get involved with ceremonies and things like that.
And interestingly, later, when I continued in college and kept coming, I said to my dad, “You really should come down,” and he was like, “I don‟t know,” and then he started, and it was very good for him. So in his later life, he became much more attached to his spirituality, and it was very good for him to make that level of reconciliation with his past. So we got very involved, and I still do that, I bring my kids, and it‟s great.
JS: I know that one of the issues the Piscataway tribe has had was the struggle to bury Turkey
Tayac at Moyaone. What‟s the significance of Moyaone?
GT: That‟s the sacred site. Moyaone is directly across from Mount Vernon in Virginia, right on the Potomac River, it‟s in a place called Piscataway National Park, which is run by the National
Park service. It was created in the 1960s. Basically, quirk of history, it was created to preserve the view from Mount Vernon. So, lucky for us that that particular place was protected, because
George Washington‟s house was like… so it was kind of ironic. So that place was the capital town for the Piscataway. The Piscataway were a chiefdom, which means that there was a high chief, and then tributary or subordinate tribes that reported to the center- kind of a federal government, but not really, not necessarily democratic. That was the main chief‟s town, the tayac‟s town. Tayac was a title. Incidentally, Turkey, his Christian name was Philip Procter but he did use Turkey Tayac as well, and in the „70s with the whole Indian pride movement and everything, Billy and his kids and family changed the name from Procter to Tayac. And then my cousins did it, and I‟m the youngest one, and then when I was 15, I „m like, “Yea, me too,” so I did it myself…
JS: So your dad never did? GT: My dad never did it. And then the other two siblings: my aunt Marge, her son did it but she didn‟t. They liked it liked it, they were glad. And then my uncle, Duke, who was also Philip
Procter, his daughter did it, but he didn‟t, and then I did it but my dad didn‟t do it. A bunch of us did it and then passed the name on to our kids. So it‟s kind of a pride thing. But that‟s what
Moyaone is, it‟s a sacred site but it‟s also an important historical site, and it was where Turkey wanted to be buried when he was diagnosed with leukemia. This was in about 1976, „77 and he knew that he was getting extremely ill. He planted a red cedar tree right on top of one of the old ossuaries which is where the old ancestral burial grounds were. And he said, “This is where I want to be, with my ancestors.” He thought that when he had been involved with the creation of the park to protect it, that he had made a verbal agreement with the secretary of the interior
Udall, and then when he started to realize how sick he was, when he was elderly, he went back and they said, “There‟s no written agreement, they never heard of you.” He got very worried because these are very religious people- he was very nervous. He died in 1978, but they had told him that in order to be buried in a national park, that there would have to be an act of congress.
He died in December 8, 1978, and it took an entire year for my uncle in particular to spearhead efforts. Senator Sarbanes sponsored the bill and he was finally buried a year later. It was a huge effort with Indians and non-Indians across the country, but he‟s the only person that can be buried there. Nobody else- that‟s it.
JS: So you‟ve been working to try to get the Piscataway Nation to be state recognized.
GT: Yea, it‟s so interesting, because growing up, when this whole issue of recognition even came up, everybody was kind of shocked, because everybody thought that we all were recognized. My dad said, “The nuns recognize me when they beat me up and call me a savage
(laughs).” Especially for our older people, it was shocking, because there had never been a question. They thought, “they had reorganized the tribe, they legally incorporated it, Turkey was buried as Chief Turkey Tayac, as a Piscataway Indian, the state passed this entire resolution about this and that,” and so it was really surprising. So in the mid 1990s, we were told that we had to apply for recognition under the new regulations which pretty much mirrored a federal process, and it‟s extremely difficult to work this out. So we put together a petition. What we had to do is put together a petition that meets certain criteria to show that you‟re a tribe of
Indians, descended historically, and that also you have maintained a community. It‟s extremely difficult, and if you look on it at the face of it, it‟s also very difficult, because you‟re saying,
“Here‟s a group of people, where there were serious efforts to eradicate this community; to wipe out its culture. So now you have to show that you were impervious to all these (?traditions?).”
And the other issue is that there‟s a major history of racial issues here. There has been early intermarriage with African Americans. So the identity got obscured. The other thing was that as reservations got dissolved in the early 1700s, it was very common to then say, “We don‟t have any more treaty obligations to these people,” dissolve the reservation, and then you see the same group of people get racially classified differently. So it also plays very much in the census records, on the government records, people are not classified as Indians. In the church records, we are. It brings up all these weird, ugly racial issues which the community itself has a hard time dealing with. In spite of all of this, and I guess it‟s easier for me because I‟m from New
York, “This is fine, let‟s just work it out, let‟s just explain it and it‟ll be fine,” (laughs) and it didn‟t work that way… It was one of those things where we did put together a huge petition.
There‟s also another Piscataway organization which put together a huge petition. Both petitions went through. Both, after years of analysis, thousands of pages of documents… this thing was ridiculous, and what do you get out of it? I was thinking, what do we really get from this?
Nothing much, except that we can say what we‟ve always said, and you have some legal status…
JS: Aren‟t there benefits though to becoming state recognized?
GT: There are not really any financial benefits at all. You can‟t apply for gaming, no casinos or anything like that. You do have some cultural rights which have been accorded to American
Indians. You can‟t call your art or crafts American Indian made unless you‟re state recognized.
So any of our folks that do any traditional crafts, if they sell it as Indians, it‟s against the law.
So, there are things like that. There are some educational grants that are available to American
Indians if you‟re from a state recognized tribe, which is helpful, and they‟re minorities. But there‟s no funding for a tribal council or building projects or land or anything like that. It‟s really more about saying that you acknowledge that this group of people and who they say they are. Petitions were submitted in 1995, and by 1997, both petitions were found to meet the criteria for state recognition, and then they kind of sat there. I was about to give birth to my son,
I was laying on my husband‟s office floor while he was Xeroxing everything to send in, and at 9 months pregnant I delivered the petition. And my kid just turned 15 today, so this is like the benchmark. Both petitions through the governor appointed recognition advisory committee were found to meet the criteria, but one was rejected, the Piscataway-Conoy confederacy _____ was rejected. Ours; nothing ever happened to it, it just sat there. And the issue regarding the rejection of Piscataway-Conoy Tribe, which they‟re certainly deserving the recognition too, it is kind of a political organizational split. To say from the governor that he was worried about gaming issues- state recognition carries no gaming rights at all, so nobody‟s going to make any money off of this. It‟s really problematic, and people are very upset about it, that it would take this long for something like this to happen. Maryland is about one of the only states in the country that doesn‟t recognize any…
JS: Virginia even recently recognized all Powhatan tribes.
GT: Yea, in 1983, and they‟re supporting their federal bid. What was funny was, Turkey went and worked with them in the 1920s to help them reorganize the second Powhatan Confederation.
He also went and helped Nanticoke in Delaware and both these guys have been state recognized.
It‟s really odd to me that Maryland is known to be very progressive and democratic- it generally has the reputation of being more open and liberal. So why is that? It‟s just very strange to me. I think a lot of it is that the general public doesn‟t know enough about it or they misunderstand it hugely. So that‟s the ongoing issue, but I‟m hopeful that we‟ll be able to get it through and that more people will understand why it‟s really kind of a nice thing to have endurance of Native culture and history in a place.
JS: Saying that the public generally doesn‟t know much about Indians in Maryland or Indians in general, I have a quote from Susan Harjo, president and director of the Morning Star Institute:
“Too often this history is posed as a romantic myth, and uncomfortable facts about Columbus are eliminated.” She then said, “All people in this country are going to be complicit in the continuing effort to wipe out our Indian people.” That‟s more about Columbus, but do you agree with that throughout Indians in history? GT: Yea. Here‟s the thing. I don‟t think it‟s that there‟s always a malice involved. I think that when you do sit down and talk to people about this, they get very upset. I find that people that come to the museum and they‟re like, “Why don‟t I know this? Why didn‟t I learn this? This is so upsetting; I don‟t want my kids to be ignorant of this. I don‟t want to be part of this anymore.
This is wrong.” It‟s interesting, because in general, in the American character, there‟s this huge pride about Native history and culture and deep fascination with it and people wanting to make it right. That‟s why it‟s important that you‟re doing this, not necessarily that you‟re interviewing me; it could be anybody. I think that just like not that everything‟s all solved and perfect, but there‟s been a huge shift in consciousness and attitudes of African Americans in the past 40 plus years. So I think we‟re kind of 30 years behind the curb there. We‟re a little late, (laughs) but I think that at some point, we‟ll get to a better phase. But now, my question to Maryland, and I don‟t think anyone‟s really put it this way, is “If you‟re saying that there‟s no Indians here, what you‟re saying that you killed everybody, and that Maryland committed a complete and total genocide. So where‟s the apology? Then you should be sorry.” It‟s very interesting. I think the main reason we‟re in the situation we‟re in is not because of what the facts are, but because of what the politics are. Susan makes a very good point, but I don‟t think it‟s malice for the general population.
JS: Do you think when textbook writers publish textbooks that don‟t portray the history of
Indians as it really is, do you think that‟s more malice though?
GT: I think it‟s extreme ignorance. If you had asked me this maybe 15 years ago, I might have said that there‟s this big conspiracy. But now, I've been here for 10 years, I've worked with textbook companies who want to do something better. I just worked with a Maryland textbook writer. She just sent me the elementary school, I think it‟s like the 5th grade or 6th grade
Maryland history textbook, and she did spend a reasonable amount of time dealing with Indians.
It‟s not perfect, but she tried. I think a lot of it is that one thing builds on the other: you don‟t have good information to start. There are also a lot of stereotypes. We get hugely ingrained with stereotypes. With my kids, watching even Scooby Doo, you have evil Kachina Man. We‟re sitting there the other day, and I was thinking, “Scooby Doo, please don‟t do this to me.” So it‟s hugely pervasive.
JS: Especially with sport mascots.
GT: Right, sports mascots. People are infuriating. I went to a couple of the Redskins protests years ago. People we‟re nuts, infuriated, like, “How dare anybody say anything bad against their team.” So it wasn‟t about the team, it was about the mascots. So you have these kinds of things, the ideas that Indians are equated with dinosaurs or some sort of legendary non-real human figure. They‟re like noble savages, how romantic and beautiful, and everybody‟s winded in terror from Dances with Wolves, or evil and conniving and scalping and stuff like that, and where‟s the real person in that? So I think textbook writers and school materials have a long way to go, and some of the things that I see teachers hand out, because they‟re just looking for something, they don‟t really know where to go.
JS: There‟s the issue that if you have textbooks that really portray American Indian history as it really is, don‟t you fear there‟d be some kind of loss of loyalty or patriotism for America?
GT: No, I think it would make people more patriotic. You could approach it in a number of ways. First of all, native contributions in cultural practice are quite extraordinary. That should be a huge source of pride for everybody who lives in this country, whether they‟re recent immigrants, or have been here since the Mayflower or Jamestown. The other thing is that the
Civil Rights Act did not make people… it makes our country better, that we were able to elect president Obama, acknowledging that slavery and racism existed and are a part of our past and things that we have to struggle with today. I think it‟s about being mature. When you‟re a mature, grown up person, you can deal with some difficulties and take responsibility and make it better. The question is: is America going to be mature, or run away? I think the other thing is that a lot times people feel guilty. It‟s like, “I didn‟t do that, why should I learn about that?
That‟s really hard, that‟s really horrible.” It‟s not about guilt. It‟s about understanding what role that everybody has…
JS: And the continuing effects of today.
GT: Yea. People didn‟t understand at first when they were spraying DDT that it would kill all the eagles. They didn‟t know that. But once you find something out, and you realize that it‟s a problem, and that it makes you a weaker society, then it‟s important to address it. Then you have this incredible achievement to say, “Look at what we did. Look at what we‟ve accomplished.”
The fact that we can absorb pre-Civil War history, that we can deal with slavery, that we can deal with the fact that women didn‟t have the vote until the 20th century, that we can deal with all these things. It doesn‟t make us less; it can make you feel more proud.
JS: Would you say that American Indian activism has increased over the last four decades?
GT: Yea, it‟s interesting. It spiked, just the whole country. You have the Civil Rights
Movement. A huge shift, and that level of activism had to happen. My uncle, Billy, was really… it‟s interesting; you have Turkey who was this cultural bearer who kind of hung on. But he would be very old style, like, “Yes ma‟am, yes sir,” he still was very concerned about his social position, understanding that people who were white and wealthy, you have to be very different to them. And then you have my uncle, Billy, who kicked down the door, and was part of this major movement, and the militancy. Quite honestly, that had to happen. It had to happen for black people, for women, for gay people, for Chicano people, the whole society. Stuff had to just happen like that. So it spiked, in the late „60s, „68 and „69, huge in the „70s, still pretty busy in the 80s, and by the 90s, things started to shift because, I think about, what was my position. I was very active, organized all kinds of demonstrations, petitions, walked into government offices with groups of people, I did all that stuff, and that was really good. I‟m glad that I did that. It kind of had to be done. And then I went to grad school and got my doctorate from Harvard, and started to think more about, we‟re at a point now where you need people to do that sort of pushing, but we also have people who are lawyers, they are writing legislation.
JS: And that‟s just as important as well.
GT: Yea, because now there‟s the opportunity for us now. There wasn‟t before. My dad wasn‟t even able to really finish high school, and Turkey had a third grade education. My dad ended up getting a GED, and then I went to a PhD program and we have lawyers and teachers and all kinds of people in the family now. So we were all able to do that and to make change more, like where we can sit down… I don‟t think 10 years ago, I wouldn‟t have had a high school come and talk to me like this, and I can give you a nicely printed out study guide that‟s sponsored by the
Smithsonian Institution (laughter) and co-sponsored stuff by Scholastic, in this lovely conference room, and we‟re not sitting out in a chicken coop in my uncle‟s farm, trying to write some kind of manifesto. So we‟ve been able to change our activism into different formats now, and start to take it in a more institutional way. Not that there aren‟t some dire issues that are still occurring for native people: the poverty rates are still the highest in the country, suicide, alcoholism, gang violence, incarceration- they‟re still a huge problem. I‟m very privileged, and I understand that, and that‟s why we use our education and position to be able to educate enough people so they carry enough to want to create a different kind of environment for all sectors.
JS: One of the issues is that American Indians as students are not getting the proper education.
The American Indian Policy Center in Minnesota wrote, “The education system is clearly unresponsive to cultural and social needs of Indian youth.” When you worked with students, would you say that schools were reaching out or not reaching out? What were some of the pluses and issues with the school system for Indians?
GT: A lot of it is just really poor for a lot of native kids, especially in reservation areas. You‟re talking about also really poor areas, so if they‟re in an urban environment, a lot of people are living in not optimal places. So you have all of those issues. You also have concerns sometimes where teachers that couldn‟t get hired anywhere else or got fired somewhere else for incompetency got sent to the reservation schools. So it‟s a combination of lack of resources and very frequently getting some of the lower quality materials; very similar with any disenfranchised minority group, but then there‟s less access, a lot of times very rural areas, so you‟re talking about really far out there. With all of that, there are people doing incredible work, really dedicated, trying to do language programs, trying to do the best that they can with their kids and also making it culturally relevant. You have the situation for, especially for native people who are reservation based, the impact of intergenerational boarding schools, where little kids were sent out to boarding schools and had to spend their whole lives there. You have several generations of that. Can you imagine being raised by a parent who didn‟t have a parent or the grandparent didn‟t have a parent- they were raised in an institution. It had a huge social and cultural impact on places. But people are working really hard to recover what they can.
There‟s a lot of hope out there, but there are a lot of difficulties. And then the materials; again, it takes a lot of money to create materials and resources, and it means you have to get enough people who want to do it. So there‟s a lot of neglect there still.
JS: So what‟s the economic status of Piscataway Indians in general?
GT: You know it‟s interesting. It probably, in a lot of ways, the economic status mirrors… it depends on where people are. It would follow the same pattern as African Americans in southern Maryland. So you have some people who are working class- probably a lot of people are working class. And then some people who have done very well, in business or have gone on to education. You have a lot of people who have moved away. Just looking at my own family, I grew up in New York; there are people who grew up in San Francisco, another in San Diego, people who ended up in Pittsburgh, in Philadelphia, some who ended up in Florida, all over the place. Just like what you would kind of see as your contemporary American family. You have a range of people. If you looked at PG [Prince George‟s County] and Charles County, usually if you looked at any black family from there or more rural poor people, it would kind of look like that. So we do better, on average, than reservation Indians for example. I think we‟re much more affluent, we‟re right near DC. There are a lot more opportunities for people. But it also meant that a lot of people did leave because of the poverty in the early 20th century. They did leave the home base and moved out. Interestingly, people in the 19th and early 20th century, they had farms and they did OK, they did alright.
JS: In 2006, you gave a presentation called Diaspora, Genocide, and Identity Continuity:
Jewish and Native Intersections. That seemed interesting. I was wondering if you talk about that.
GT: This was really interesting. Because of my background, I was asked by National B‟nai
B‟rith to give a particular tour here at the museum, and also to go in and talk to their staff and start to think about what possible programming there was. That was the first…because I've always lived this personally, and I‟ve thought about this a lot, obviously. I started to look for books, are there any books, was there anything written on it, and there really wasn‟t anything much, and if there was it was a little weird, or didn‟t seem to be terribly well researched. But it was looking at some commonalities and looking at the idea that you have people displaced or marginalized from their ancestral spiritual homeland, you have people who have been persecuted, you have to try to figure out how do you keep a culture going when you have become a minority in a place, how do you do that, and looking at some of those kinds of similarities. And even starting to look at, is there anything else that people could find some levels of convergence. So talking about the whole genocide issue, Diaspora certainly is relevant, and then how central and important family and community are and how people try to keep those up wherever they are. But it‟s very different for Indians, because the culture is very based in a place, so it‟s important for you to be in the place. There‟s also a lot of diversity. I‟m sure that was true in Jewish history right in the time of Diaspora, you have all different types of people and it kind of gets consolidated. So trying to think about how to approach it- it was an interesting conversation, and one that I would like to continue with people.
JS: What are your feelings about the Obama administration in regards to American Indians and the Piscataway Tribe?
GT: I‟m thrilled out of my mind at Obama, even a year later, we were all really happy about this. He is very interesting in the sense that he reached out so much to Native people. He has senior policy advisors for Native issues, interagency coordinators in the White House. He has people on his staff for the first time in the White House who deal with Native affairs; it‟s fantastic. So that‟s wonderful. I think that at the same time, he‟s inherited a huge, giant, hundred year long mess. Now there was just the case that was settled, the Cobell case2, so you‟ve been following that- very progressive. This has taken forever to work it out. Our current director is Kevin Gover who was the secretary for the BIA under Bill Clinton, the Bureau of
Indian Affairs under Clinton. Not because he‟s him, but because he was in that position, he was
2 In Cobell v. Salazar, a 13 year old case between plaintiff Eloise Cobell and Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar, Cobell, representing over 500,000 Indians, sued under the claim that the federal government mismanaged Indian trust accounts that originated from the 1887 Dawes Act. On December 8, 2009, an agreement was reached so that the plaintiffs would receive $1.4 billion and $2 billion would be spent to buy back land allotted by the 1887 act. the target of the lawsuit. It was very interesting because when he came to work here as our director, also on our board is Eloise Cobell, so they were in a board meeting together (laughs).
But yea, I think that that‟s the case, I think that in terms of Barack Obama‟s general, the whole way that the society… it‟s not just him, but the fact that the society is ready to look issues of race and race dynamics and multiculturalism at a level that we all haven‟t quite been there yet, but I think we‟re in a new phase now. I think for issues of federal recognition, I don‟t think it is going to matter. I think that for state recognition though, governor O‟Malley has made serious gestures towards wanting to resolve this, and I think this is an Obama effect. It‟s part of this general feel of wanting to resolve racial issues, ethnic issues, come face to face with your history, make it better, bring everybody on board. O‟Malley‟s administration has made very serious gestures towards at least saying that they want to resolve this. Now, you know, we‟ll see…
JS: That has happened in the past.
GT: It has happened before, but this was the first time it felt the most serious to me. All of us, though, yea we submitted the thing in 1995, but Maryland was created in 1632, they all got here in 1634. Everybody‟s been dealing with a lot of disappointment for the past 400 years, so nobody‟s feeling like, “Yea, it‟s gonna happen.” Everybody‟s like, “He invited us to the dinner, the dinner was OK. Hmm… Maybe, we‟ll see.”
JS: In Our Lives, in one of the pictures in the background, it was a protest poster that said something like, “The BIA doesn‟t control us.”
GT: “We‟re not your Indian anymore”
JS: Yea, that‟s it. Throughout the last century, there‟s been so much conflict with the Bureau, and corruption. Do you know what the Bureau is like now? Has it progressed?
GT: The Bureau is a big, giant bureaucracy and it has got a lot of problems. You‟ve got some people in there that are really progressive. EchoHawk3 is the new secretary; he‟s a great guy, very smart. I think Kevin Gover is also very smart and his heart is in the right place. You‟ve got this huge administrative bureaucracy that‟s been going on for a very long time. How you actually are able to process through all of that is another story. So you can set all kinds of wonderful policies and agendas but you have your civil servants, who, it‟s like, are they really going to do it? That‟s just what I've heard from people who have arrived there as appointees under the new administration and just took up new jobs like, “We‟ll see, I've been here for two weeks. (Laughs) We‟ll see what we can do.” There are a lot of good people who work at BIA, and there are a lot of people for whom it‟s just the job they show up for, they go home, and it doesn‟t really impact them on a day to day level what happens a thousand miles from here. It‟s a tough one to work through. But they do have majority Native American staff. So there are a lot of possibilities with the Bureau, but it‟s going to take a lot of work and a very long time and the question is, can one administration get through what has already been in process for so many years. But the Cobell case is an indicator of that. And Shinnecock in Long Island just got recommended for recognition, and that‟s an old tribe of Indians who are also very highly mixed
3 Larry EchoHawk (Pawnee) is the first American Indian to be elected to a constitutional statewide office. Nominated by Barack Obama, he became the Head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 2009. African American and they‟ve been struggling along and the fact that they‟re coming into focus for a positive finding is great. So that was very helpful, I thought.
JS: So would you say that this recent spark of Indian lawyers and historians and involvement in government a result of the more opportunities that they‟re getting?
GT: Yea, affirmative action. Huge. And here‟s the thing about affirmative action that‟s really interesting: what it meant was that I was admitted to Cornell, I came from a prestigious public high school, I had the grades, so it wasn‟t that it was like, “What‟s that dumb girl doing there?”-
Harvard, same thing. But, what was interesting when I went to Cornell, what I noticed was that my dear friends and counterparts, who were white males, got hired by other white males‟ parents: fathers, who were also alumni. There was like an affirmative action thing going on. It was the access: it gave you access. To get hired here, it was my professor from Cornell because she knew me; she knew the quality of my work. It meant that I had the access to her. She had done stuff pre-affirmative action, gotten her doctorate, and was at UCLA also, and then came here and hired me. I've noticed that a lot of people get hired, or people that you know or people that you‟ve met at the University: my Indivisible4 colleagues are Native American scholars who were able to get to those places, it‟s like I know this person‟s research is really solid and really good, and that has a lot to do with it. Just the fact that there are more opportunities for people and once you get that in place, you get people sort of planted along at different places, and they‟re looking out to make sure they have a very diverse work force. The museum staff is only
30% Native staff. It‟s 70% non-Native staff.
4 Indivisible: is an exhibit in the National Museum of the American Indian that shows the indissoluble connections between African Americans and Indian Americans, and the current situation with many African-Native Americans. JS: So when the government removed most American Indians in the 1830s and actually throughout the entire 19th century, how come a lot of Indians were able to stay, such as the
Piscataway Tribe?
GT: Because we had already gone through our removals and problems in the 1600s and 1700s.
So we weren‟t considered a tribe by the U.S. government anymore. So that‟s why most east coast people are not federally recognized, because people who had already been on the Atlantic seaboard primarily, it was already seen as Indian problem solved. Basically, we had English settlement in the area in 1607 so it‟s a long way from the formation of the United States. It was already nearly 200 years of colonialism by the time the United States had been established. So a lot of the tribes that still were left in the east that were maintained, they did become subject to removal. But most of them were either a little further into the interior, or you had big, huge things like Cherokee Nation, which was considered a Civilized Tribe5, so they were kind of left in place until the Jackson administration, and then he had such a huge concept of racial purity that he wanted to get rid of everybody that wasn‟t white. So that was the motivator there rather than to absorb them or to partner with them, rather it was to get rid of them so that we can have pure white people there with black slaves in the same place instead of Cherokee with black slaves which was also very problematic. So for Piscataway and people all throughout this area and even New England, we weren‟t an Indian problem anymore, they already had everything of ours- all of our land was already taken over, so why get rid of us?
5 The Five Civilized Tribes included five Indian Nations: Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole. These Indian Nations were considered civilized because they adopted many of the colonists‟ customs, and generally maintained good relations with whites. Although originally, intents were to assimilate these Indians into America, Andrew Jackson‟s Indian Removal policy, starting in 1830, forced all Indians to the west into Indian Country. JS: Is there anything else you want to talk about that I didn‟t get to?
GT: Sure! I guess the main thing is I‟m really interested now, for Piscataway, there‟s a number of things that is in focus for us, I think that‟s one of the reasons I decided to work on the
Indivisible project, because I felt that that was of a huge key to understanding what has happened to us and why we‟re in the situation we‟re in. It helped me to really open my mind. It was very interesting because for a lot of Piscataway people; it‟s not that they‟re denying African American heritage, it‟s that they actually don‟t think that they have... people really honestly truly, don‟t feel that they have this ancestry at all. And it‟s undeniable and it‟s very important for us to understand this because it has also been used against us to say, “These people aren‟t really
Indians, they‟re black people. They‟re lying. These people are lying and they‟re fakes and they‟re frauds, they‟re this and they‟re that.” When you look at that kind of language, you can see precisely the same language being used in the early 20th century and late 19th century with eugenics and race law, and really hateful kinds of stuff. The reaction for our folks is: “Let‟s just pretend it‟s not there. Let‟s just run away over here, let‟s just deny everything.” And my view, I guess because I didn‟t grow up in the racist context, so it doesn‟t scare me as much, so it was just to say that we really need to understand that this kind of linked history really explains a lot about why we don‟t have the rights that we [should] have, why we are in the position that we are in, and when we could perhaps to convince the state to say: are people‟s identity canceled out because of racist issues versus trying to say that the people aren‟t really deserving. I feel very fortunate to be living in the era that I live in. I mean, we have all kinds of issues and things aren‟t resolved, and we don‟t have completely open access our burial grounds and we would really like to have that. At the same time, I‟m not getting my house burned down, I‟m not getting thrown out, my kids aren‟t getting denied an education. So we‟re able to think about these things more carefully, and we‟ve really been able to partner with a lot of people of good faith in Maryland. The Accokeek Foundation which is down on the national colonial farm has been very supportive; Saint Mary‟s City has been very supportive and really great. So there‟s a lot of interest, and for that reason, hopefully, people will press for their congress people or state delegates, state senators, it‟s time to embrace our native culture, because it‟s something that‟s really great for everyone. I‟m just really glad for my kids that it‟s not weird or odd or strange, and I live in Takoma Park, and they have all different kinds of friends, and it‟s very diverse and its very great, and for them, its like, why would anyone ever have a problem with this? It‟s shocking to them to hear that their granddad used to have to sleep at the side of the road because they couldn‟t stay somewhere or that they wouldn‟t be allowed into particular places because they were not white. That, to them, is completely shocking. That‟s good in some ways but it‟s very important for them to understand that those were hard won victories by people who just didn‟t give up. Time Indexing Log
Audio Type: Digital (DAT)
Minute Mark: 5 Experience with high school Guidance Counselor
10 Visiting Uncle, Chief Billy Tayac
15 Chief Turkey Tayac planning to be buried at Moyaone
20 Petitions by Piscataway Indian Nation for recognition
25 Quote from Susan Harjo
30 Misconceptions of Indians in media
35 Change from militant activism to a more political method
40 Struggles of reservation schools
45 Intersections and differences of Holocaust and Indians
50 The Bureau of Indian Affairs today
55 Why eastern Indians remained after removal
60 Comparing conditions today with before
Interview Analysis
On the first day of U.S. Euro History in 10th grade, each of Mr. Whitman‟s students stood up, and declared, “I am an Historian!” Students were unaware of the tremendous responsibility they had just received. A quote on the classroom‟s wall from poet A. H. Housman read, “Accuracy not a virtue, it is a duty.” Nevertheless, historian Howard Zinn believes that a historian has more than the duty to just be accurate. He wrote in The Future of History that objectivity is “not possible,” and “not desirable… We should have history that does reflect points of view and values, in other words, history that is not objective. We should have history that enhances human values, humane values, values of brotherhood, sisterhood, peace, justice, and equality” (13). According to this statement, history is an account of a past event or period with the purpose of promoting certain values. Oral history is simply a form of history with the perspective of someone who has experienced an event or period first hand. Some question the validity of oral history, claiming that the information provided is either biased or unreliable.
However, biases are inevitable, and any type of history can be just as unreliable. Oral history is an important source of history because the first person perspective allows for an honest interpretation from someone and their experiences, rather than the interpretation of a historian who himself is distanced from the event. Interpretations in oral histories sometimes differ from the interpretations of historians; this demonstrates that historians often do not honestly or correctly portray the past. Gabrielle Tayac enforces the idea that Indians have actively been defending their culture and rights, and that the economic and health conditions of Indians are perhaps the worst in America.
In the beginning of the interview, Dr. Tayac briefly spoke about her childhood in
Greenwich Village, New York. She took an interest in American Indian history before she began high school, even though the entirety of American Indian history taught in her classes
“was about a paragraph in a textbook” (Tayac 31). Despite discouragement from her guidance counselor, she was accepted into Cornell where she continued to study American Indian and
Latin American indigenous issues. She then describes her grandfather, Chief Turkey Tayac, who was the last Piscataway cultural practitioner. Here she began to talk about the tribe‟s conflict with the government to try to bury Turkey at Moyaone. She then spoke about the Piscataway‟s main government conflict: the process of becoming a state recognized Indian tribe. She explained how she and other Piscataway Indians tried to apply for recognition, which ultimately failed. She also explained that state recognition would bring very few benefits to the tribe. Dr.
Tayac then responds to a quote regarding the lack of American Indian history taught in school.
She stated that as harmful as this is, the harm is unintended by the teachers or even textbook writers who omit important sections of history. She claimed that this omission was the result of
“extreme ignorance” (Tayac 42). “We get hugely ingrained with stereotypes,” (Tayac 42) she said. Schools should teach more about Indians and their relationship with the United States‟ government. She believes that teaching this history “would make people more patriotic” (Tayac
43). Dr. Tayac then talked about the excitement and hope that the Obama administration has brought to the Piscataway tribe, followed by a conversation about the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
Although many workers in the BIA are progressive and want to help Indians, “it has got a lot of problems” (Tayac 50). She wrapped up the interview optimistically, pointing out that she is a lot more fortunate than the previous generations of Indians and that hopefully; Indian activism will continue to grow as it has over the last fifty years since the beginning of the civil rights movement. As a result of the General Allotment Act, Indians were segregated from American civilization and they did not have the opportunity to speak out against injustice. However, the
Civil Rights Movement sparked similar movement for American Indians. Regarding this time period, Howard Zinn wrote in A People’s History of the United States, “Indians began to do something about their „own destruction‟—the annihilation of their culture” (389). This preservation and defense took many forms: one was the editing of textbooks to change inaccurate and dishonest depictions of Indians. Another form was through activism, such as the occupation of the Pine Ridge reservation, where the Wounded Knee massacre took place in 1890. These extensive efforts to promote Indian rights flourished since the 1970s, influenced by the Civil
Rights Movement. Gabrielle Tayac encompasses the type of activism that Zinn described. She became an activist and her entire career has been dedicated towards the preservation of Indian and Piscataway rights and culture. She said, “I was very active, organized all kinds of demonstrations, petitions, walked into government offices with groups of people…It kind of had to be done… So we‟ve been able to change our activism into different formats now, and start to take it in a more institutional way” (Tayac 45). She works at the National Museum of the
American Indian with the goal of preserving Indian culture and dissipating false stereotypes of
Indians. She has worked with textbook publishers to include a fair representation of Indians in history. She helped create a petition with other Piscataway Indians to apply for state recognition.
While at first she fought for Indian rights militantly, she has changed to fight in a different way.
It is evident that Zinn‟s interpretation of the last fifty years is accurate; that Indians have undoubtedly become more involved to protect their own culture and rights.
The conditions of American Indians vary throughout the country. Rarely, a reservation might prosper because they are allowed to operate casinos. Other American Indians have completely assimilated into the United States as citizens and share the same economic and health characteristics as most Americans. However, the treatment of the Indians has lead to the poor conditions of most Indians today, according to Susan Harjo, president of the Morning Star
Institute. She said in an interview, “There is a reason we are the poorest people in America.
There is a reason we have the highest teen suicide rate. There is a reason why our people are ill- housed and in poor health, and we do not live as long as the majority population. That reason has to do with the fact that we were in the way of Western Civilization and we were in the way of western expansion” (Harjo 12). Gabrielle Tayac enforced this statement, stating that for
Indians, “the poverty rates are still the highest in the country. Suicide, alcoholism, gang violence, incarceration- they‟re still a huge problem” (Tayac 45). The poorest conditions are on reservations. Although Dr. Tayac does not live on a reservation, she has worked on them with
Indian students before, and as a historian, her statements can be considered valid. Gabrielle
Tayac‟s analysis that the health, economic, and social conditions of Indians is perhaps the worst in America agrees with Susan Harjo‟s conclusion that the conditions of Indians is a result of their relationship to Western civilization.
Originally, I began the Contextualization Paper to answer the question, “How has the
U.S. government mistreated Indians and how has this manifested itself through the conditions of
Indians today?” Now, I realize that I entered this paper with this subconscious preconception. I was missing a significant part of the history, relating to the more recent events. During the interview, Dr. Tayac mentioned how lucky she was to have all the opportunities she does and was very optimistic; she spoke more about the progress Indians have made rather than the losses they have experienced. Now, I can now answer the previous question in addition to two more.
First; “How has the government recently tried to reverse the effects of the destruction?” The government‟s method of dealing with Indians has evolved over the last few hundred years, but over the last few decades, it has really improved. Presidents have honestly worked to help
Indians, and Dr. Tayac exclaimed that she was very hopeful about the Obama administration.
The other question that I now can answer is, “How have Indians protested and improved their rights?” Evident from Dr. Tayac herself, I learned how active Indians have improved and continue to improve their own rights and preserve their culture.
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