Devils in Disguise the Carnegie Project, the Cherokee Nation, and the 1960S

Devils in Disguise The Carnegie Project, the Cherokee Nation, and the 1960s daniel m. cobb It’s not a question of who’s right and wrong. It’s a question of who’s got the power. Clyde Warrior (Ponca) I suppose this is not a paper in the strict sense of the word, so much as it is the random thoughts of a confused man in rather troubled times, as I suppose we all are. Robert K. Thomas (Cherokee), “Cross-Cultural Cannibalism” In the summer of 1963, Robert K. Thomas, a doctoral candidate at the University of Chicago and faculty member at Wayne State University’s Monteith College, penned a letter to his advisor, the eminent anthropol- ogist Sol Tax. Thomas had just arrived in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, where he was to serve as the field director of a four-year cross-cultural education research project funded by the Carnegie Corporation in New York. After setting up his office at a local college, he went to visit Earl Boyd Pierce, general counsel of the Cherokee Nation. Sensing his host’s appre- hension, Thomas explained at length his reason for being there. The Carnegie Project research team would establish ties with the “tribal community”—people who spoke Cherokee as their first language and lived in small kin-related settlements spread across five counties in northeastern Oklahoma—and directly involve them in a program to promote literacy in English.1 This literacy, in turn, would empower traditional Cherokees to break through the structural isolation and marginality they experi- enced in their daily lives. Thomas considered the meeting with Pierce a qualified success. “I think I soothed his ruffled feathers,” he confided to Tax, “but he sure thinks you are the devil in disguise.”2 What was it about the Carnegie Project that would ruffle feathers, and what had Sol Tax done to be cast in such an unflattering light? To make sense of Thomas’s assertion it is necessary to considered it in the multiple contexts of the Cherokee community, the development of action anthropology, and the political culture of Cold War America. The importance of this latter point cannot be overstated, particularly because scholars have essentially written American Indians out of recent United States history. Indeed, Native people rarely appear—if at all—in syntheses devoted to the 1960s or the post-1945 period in general.3 This implicitly and per- haps unintentionally defines Indian history as tangential to the American story and therefore safely left at the margins. The following case study argues quite the opposite. It finds the Cherokee Nation at the center of a national and international culture war—at a time when the meanings of community, identity, poverty, and power were openly contested. community, identity, and power in the cherokee nation before 1963 When Robert K. Thomas drove into northeastern Oklahoma, he entered a complex space shaped by generations of conflict and change. After being forcibly removed from its southeastern homeland in the 1830s, the Cherokee Nation reestablished itself in what was then called the Indian Territory. The Cherokee people so effectively reconstructed their national government, courts, and schools that they could boast a level of political stability and educational achievement far surpassing that of their non-Native neighbors. But everything changed during the late nineteenth century when the federal government inaugurated its policy of assimilation and allotment. This assault on tribal sovereignty led to legislation that dissolved their government, allotted their lands, and cul- minated in Oklahoma statehood in 1907. Over the course of the next several decades, non-Indians politically, legally, and demographically surrounded the Cherokees. By the 1960s, a majority of Oklahomans accepted the fiction that tribal authority had been subsumed by the state and that Cherokee history and peoplehood were, for all intents and pur- poses, things of the past.4 466 american indian quarterly/summer 2007/vol. 31, no. 3 In reality, the Cherokees survived this onslaught but not without being wracked by internal tensions. A clear division between those whose social lives revolved around close-knit traditional communities and others who accepted the dominant society as their own emerged throughout the twentieth century. Many in the former group had resisted allotment, arguing that the process violated their sovereignty. Whether or not they accepted or later lost their individual parcels of land, traditional Cherokees predominantly lived in small, isolated, and extremely impov- erished enclaves scattered throughout the back reaches of northeastern Oklahoma. Though lacking material wealth, they retained a strong sense of social cohesion and cultural integrity through the Cherokee language, kinship ties, and involvement in the Baptist Church or one of several sacred societies, or both. Conversely, the other group of Cherokees often chose to live in white-dominated towns such as Muskogee, Bartlesville, and Tahlequah. Generally more affluent and educated in non-Indian schools, they took pride in their heritage and legal identity as Cherokees, but they did not have social, cultural, or linguistic connections with the traditional communities.5 This cultural chasm became politicized through an unanticipated turn of events. In the wake of allotment, the federal government pro- vided for the continuation of a tribal political entity that would remain in existence long enough to finalize matters related to tribal lands and resources. Under this arrangement, the president of the United States appointed the principal chief. The Cherokee people, in other words, had no say in who would speak and act on their behalf. This may not have been so controversial had it remained temporary. But the appointed government actually gained power by securing a $14.7 million settlement in 1961 for the illegal taking of Cherokee lands. Per capita payments were to be distributed in 1964 to enrolled members, with the balance remaining in tribal coffers.6 By the early 1960s, then, a Cherokee government led by a federally appointed principal chief stood poised to reassert itself as a political and economic force in the northeastern part of the state. This may have made at least some local non-Indians and particularly leaders of municipal and county governments anxious, but it surely caused conflict within the Cherokee Nation. Black Cherokees, for instance, asserted their right to a part of the claims settlement by virtue of being descendants of slaves who gained membership following their emancipation from Cherokee Cobb: Devils in Disguise 467 slaveholders after the Civil War.7 At the same time, members of the traditional communities spoke out more forcefully against the establishment. “I’ll just put it like this: The appointed chief of the Cherokees, Mr. [W. W.] Keeler, has good intentions for a Cherokee,” stated one critic. “But his techniques and tactics has never worked, never will. And just to put it plain as day, he just doesn’t know a Cherokee. He’s a white man.”8 The Carnegie Project arrived in northeastern Oklahoma as difficult questions about the meaning of community, identity, and the legitimate exercise of authority surfaced. The appointed leaders of the Cherokee Nation, acting upon what they defined as the best interests of their people, began to contemplate potential investments and strategies to consol- idate their power. Members of the traditional Keetoowah, Seven Clans, and Four Mothers societies simultaneously evidenced signs of organiz- ing to press for the popular election of the principal chief, in hopes of bringing to office someone who embodied their values. Moreover, both of these groups operated within a dominant society that preferred to believe that Cherokees had assimilated long ago.9 sol tax, robert k. thomas, action anthropology, and the meaning of peoplehood If the Carnegie Project entered into an already contentious situation, the personal histories and points of view of its central figures compli- cated matters even more. Sol Tax authored the initial grant and served as the overall project director. Born in Chicago and raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, he came from a German Jewish immigrant family. Tax received informal political tutelage at the dinner table from his socialist father and his academic training under anthropologists Ralph Linton and A. R. Radcliffe-Brown. By the time he joined Chicago’s faculty in 1944, he had conducted fieldwork in American Indian communities in New Mexico, Iowa, and the Great Lakes region and spent some ten years on a research project in Guatemala and Mexico under the direction of Robert Redfield. In his work as a teacher, researcher, and founding edi- tor of Current Anthropology, Tax demonstrated a penchant for thinking about indigenous peoples in the context of international modernization and development.10 A desire to use social science as a means of promoting positive change led him to “action anthropology.” This approach called for “a partici- 468 american indian quarterly/summer 2007/vol. 31, no. 3 pative ethnography in which the informants were coinvestigators and the investigators were students of the informants.” Action anthropologists immersed themselves in the communities they studied but were to limit their intervention to providing alternatives their hosts could use to confront the problems and challenges they faced. Through participant observation, the researchers drew theories about how different peoples negotiated cultural, political, social, and economic change.11 The Carnegie Project reflected Tax’s interests in both international development and action anthropology. In the original proposal, he argued that a study of how Cherokees acquired English could be applied to other peoples adjusting to globalization. “One sees the growing inter- est in reading ability on every hand,” he noted. “[The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization] devotes enormous energy to the problem as does every underdeveloped land that wishes to cease being underdeveloped.” The techniques and theoretical principles they would garner would be applicable to “the cross-cultural education problem in large parts of the world; e.g., Latin America and Africa,” he continued.

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