UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA GRADUATE COLLEGE CLYDE WARRIOR’S “RED POWER”: A FRESH AIR OF NEW INDIAN IDEALISM A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE COLLEGE In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY By PAUL R. MCKENZIE-JONES Norman, Oklahoma 2012 CLYDE WARRIOR’S “RED POWER”: A FRESH AIR OF NEW INDIAN IDEALISM A DISSERTATION APPROVED FOR THE DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY BY ______________________________ Dr. R. Warren Metcalf, Chair ______________________________ Dr. Joe Watkins ______________________________ Dr. Albert Hurtado ______________________________ Dr. Benjamin Alpers ______________________________ Dr. Fay Yarbrough © Copyright by PAUL MCKENZIE-JONES 2012 All Rights Reserved. Dedicated to my wife Yvonne Tiger, our two children, Jordan and Lula, my three parents, Glyn, Carol (deceased) and Sue Jones, and my in-laws, Marcy and Sandy Tiger Acknowledgements It has been a long and convoluted journey, crossing two continents, to this dissertation. As such thanks are due to people in three countries. England, Scotland, and the United States. Four, if you wish to count Indian Country as a distinct region. Beginning in England, I owe a huge debt to Dr. Colin Harrison for authorizing my independent studies in American Indian history when my undergraduate degree offered no courses covering this material. Without this initial intellectual freedom, I doubt I would have continued the journey that led me to the University of Oklahoma. I also owe an equal debt to the American Studies Director, Joanna Price, for allowing me to eschew the numerous forms of critical theory thrown at me in favor of ‘close reading.’ Without close reading I think my academic career would have stopped with my BA. From the University of Glasgow, I must thank Director of American Studies, Marina Moscowitz for selecting me to participate in the exchange program with the University of Oklahoma. At the University of Oklahoma my biggest thanks go to two scholars for very different reasons. Dr. R. Warren Metcalf has guided my studies since I arrived on a six- month exchange program seven years ago. I owe him thanks, initially, for not running the other way when a tattooed Scouser ran across the Dale Hall parking lot trying to get his attention. Most people would have jumped in their car and quickly driven away without looking back. From that less than salubrious initial meeting, he acted as an unofficial advisor for my Glasgow MPhil thesis when I decided to stay in Oklahoma and apply for an MA in history. Since I have been enrolled in the OU Graduate Program he has offered me continued contextual and editorial advice through my MA and now iv PhD, as well as writing countless letters in support of funding and job applications. He has fought my corner many times, and occasionally offered much needed perspective when seemingly insurmountable obstacles appeared to block my way. He also trusted me enough to allow me as much intellectual freedom as possible, only pulling me back in when my ideas have threatened to go too far off track. The other debt of thanks goes to Dr. Robert Griswold. In those early years as an International Student, visa restrictions threatened to starve me through the summer months. Dr. Griswold managed to find me on campus employment each summer until my Permanent Residence was granted. Without his intervention, there were a few summers when I was convinced I’d need to pack up and go home. The Anne Hodges Morgan and H. Wayne Morgan Dissertation Fellowship, the Bea Mantooth Estep Award, the Graduate College’s Robberson Travel and Research Grant, and numerous travel grants from the College of Arts and Sciences also generously provided funding for dissertation research. I also must thank my committee, Dr. Joe Watkins, Dr. Ben Alpers, Dr. Fay Yarbrough, and Dr. Albert Hurtado, for their continued advice, willingness to write letters of support for grant and job applications, and quite simply, for agreeing to sit on my committee. Dr. Hurtado is also the one academic who straddles both legs of my journey. As a Visiting Scholar from the University of Oklahoma to the University of Glasgow, he convinced me that fighting for a place on the exchange program was the best choice for my academic career. v The Native American Studies Program faculty at the University of Oklahoma also deserves a special mention for allowing me the freedom to create and teach courses on American Indian activism and powwow culture. Crafting syllabi and lectures for these courses enabled me to analyze connections between these two integral aspects of Clyde Warrior’s world. For this, Drs. Clara Sue Kidwell, Jerry Bread, Barbara Hobson and Joe Watkins deserve my thanks. Without these connections my dissertation would be far poorer and missing important influences in Warrior’s life. Understanding these connections also gave me greater insight and allowed me to ask more informed questions of interviewees. To those who shared their memories of Warrior and the time to retell them, I will be eternally grateful. Warrior’s family, from his widow Della (Otoe-Missouria), to his sisters, Charmain Billy, Darlene Harjo, and Elizabeth Primeaux, and his cousin Steve Pensoneau, (all Ponca) were especially gracious in sharing precious memories of a cherished family member. Without their memories I would never have understood exactly how intense Warrior’s love of his Ponca culture was. Family friends Mona Reed and Thomasine Grass (both Ponca) also added to my understanding of Warrior’s relationships within the Ponca Tribe of Oklahoma. Shirley Hill Witt (Mohawk), the last surviving member of the original founding members of the National Indian Youth Council offered instruction as well as memory and I will always gratefully remember her input and advice, especially with regard to issues of identity, culture, and collective responsibility within the NIYC framework. Fellow NIYC members Charlie Cambridge (Navajo) and Gerald Brown (Flathead) added to my understanding of how cultural identity played such an integral role in Warrior’s activism. Al Wahrhaftig crossed the vi bridge between instructor and friend to Warrior and I thank him for his stories, especially the one about the Cherokee National Air Force. Close friends from Warrior’s student days at the University of Oklahoma and the Workshops of American Indian Affairs added a depth to my perception of Warrior that was invaluable as I wrote about his life, and for this I thank Jeri (Caddo) and Kathryn Red Corn (Osage), Garrick Bailey and Tony Isaacs. I also wish to thank Frank Turley, whose memories of travelling the powwow circuit with Warrior were enlightening. He and Mike Tucker also offered me invaluable first hand knowledge of Warrior’s role in the Ponca’s Hethuska Society, as did John Lukavic and Gordon Roy (Ponca). This knowledge provided me with vital cultural insight into the connection between culture, identity, and activism. Thanks, also, to Gus Palmer Jr. (Kiowa) for his childhood memories of travelling back and forth to Gallup listening to Warrior and his uncle since Ponca and other tribe’s songs on both legs of the fifteen-hour journey. I must also thank Gus for his added support, advice, humor, and letter writing. Each and every one of the above remains a faithful friend to Warrior and I am grateful that they trusted me with their memories. I would also like to thank Charmain, Darlene, and Frank especially, for treating me like family and ‘adopting’ my kids in the ‘Indian Way.’ There are four more scholars whom I must thank. I don’t think I will ever be able to repay them personally for their generosity of time and knowledge but I am determined to use them as examples in my future academic career. The first is Dr. Clyde Ellis, who shared his vast knowledge of the early Oklahoma powwow circuit and passed on the contact numbers of several of the sources I thank above. Dr. Bradley Shreve shared his insight and understanding of the early years of the NIYC and several vii documents I had not uncovered. Dr. Robert Warrior (Osage) allowed me access to his research files from Like A Hurricane as well as copies of transcripts of interviews he conducted with Della Warrior and Hank Adams. And Dr. Fred Hoxie allowed me to bounce ideas off him when we shared a shuttle bus to and from the National Archives. There are many archival staff to whom I also owe thanks: staff at the Center for Southwest Studies in the University of New Mexico, Stanford University’s Special Collections Department, the Wisconsin Historical Society, Eau-Claire, the National Archives, and the National Museum of the American Indian Archives, deserve special mention for finding and mailing materials occasionally requested from long distance. This is not to depreciate the help of the archivists at the University of Oklahoma’s Western History Collections, the Newberry Library, or the Special Collections Departments of the University of Chicago and Princeton University. The office staff from the University of Oklahoma’s History department, Barbara Million, Rhonda George, and Kelly Guinn, deserves thanks for the number of emails sent and papers filed on my behalf. Surviving the graduate experience requires a solid support network, and I was lucky enough to one on both sides of the Atlantic. Back home, my sister Sharon, cousins Richard and Kate Parry, and good friends Chris and Janine Bull and Gill and Sarah Collinson were never more than a phone call or email away. Without my parents financial and emotional support, the trip across the Atlantic would never have happened, and I will always thank them for dipping into their meager savings to pay for my plane ticket. On this side of the Atlantic, visits from E-Clare are always fun and rather frantic, while “Stanley Matthew” Despain has allowed me to vent, bounce ideas viii off him, and generally just been there when I’ve needed to escape for a while.