1973 What is needed now are not Indian war chiefs but Indian statesmen.

Indians Need Good Orator

by Don Oakley

1973 Jan 6, The Salem News 

      One thing the American Indian movement could use today is an orator with the power to articulate the soul of his people and, as Martin Luther Kind did as a black man, touch the hearts of all men.

      Eloquence at one time was as much as requirement for Indian leaders as was prowess in battle, and their white opponents were not without their appreciation.

      Not so very long ago, for example, the famous lament of Logan for his massacred family was required reading in public schools. But there is any number of other examples over the past four centuries of history.

      Consider this statement by the Mohawk sachem Hendrick before the Battle of Lake George in 1755, in which the Mohawks reluctantly supported the British against the French. Looking despairingly at his small band of warriors, he said with a terseness worthy of a general of Caesar:

      “If they are to fight, they are too few; if they are to die, they are too many.”

      Or this from as recently as 1912 by Black Elk, shaman of the Oglala Sioux, which may remind some of the Book of Ecclesiastes:

      “The nation’s hoop is broken and scattered. There is no center any longer, and the sacred tree is dead.”

      The quotations are from “I Have Spoken,” subtitled “American History Through the Voices of the Indians,” published recently in paperback form by Pocket Books.

      The Collection is a timely addition to the growing list of books by and about American Indians. Edited by Frederick W. Turner III, and presenting in chronological order 251 examples of Indian oratory from 1609 to the present, “I Have Spoken” reflects in the red man’s own words his reactions to the alien force which landed on his shores and which he could neither comprehend nor combat.

      Old Tassel of the Cherokees, to U.S. commissioners negotiating a treaty in 1777:

      “Much has been said of the want of what you term ‘civilization’ among the Indians. Many proposals have been made to us to adopt your laws, your religion, your manners and your customs. We do not see the propriety of such a reformation. We should be better pleased with beholding the good effects of these doctrines in your own practices than with hearing you talk about them.”

      The Mohawk chief Joseph Brant, in 1804:

      “Among us we have no prisons, we have no pompous parade of courts; we have no written laws, and yet judges are as highly revered among us as they are among you, and their decisions are as highly regarded…. We have among us no splendid villains above the control of our laws. Daring wickedness is never suffered to triumph over helpless innocence.”

      Tecumseh, Shawnee chief, in 1810 expressing the Indian’s attitude toward the environment while vainly attempting to unite the tribes: 

     “No tribe has the right to sell (land), even to each other, much less to strangers… Sell a country! Why not sell their air, the great sea, as well as the earth? Did not the Great Spirit make them all for the use of his children?”

      Indian oratory, of course, did not stay the inexorable march of history for an instant, as red power advocates today could justifiably point out.

      Yet times have changed, and America has changed, if only because the Indian has hardly anything left for the white man to covet. Surely, if eloquence will not touch the heart of America, the white man’s obscenities which so many young Indian militants seem to have adopted are not likely to. 

1973 Jan 6, The Salem News 

Indians Need Statesman
1973 April 11, The Republic 
      More Americans sympathize with the Indians than with the federal government in the Wounded Knee dispute by some 51 percent to 21 percent, according to a recent poll.
      Behind this reaction is the 75-15 percent conviction that treatment of the Indians through history has been pretty lousy.
      Responded a store clerk in Waco, Texas: "They were here before we were, but we took away their land, took away the buffalo, and have been terrible in the way we treated them."
      We can guess pretty accurately, however, what the findings would have been had a similar poll been taken a hundred years ago, say, when millions of buffalo still roamed the rich, untilled plains and cities like Waco did not exist -- or if such a poll had been taken at any time before the settlement of the continent was complete.
      In other words, now that the Indian no longer has anything, or hardly anything, the white man can covet, Americans can afford the luxury of conscience.
      As one writer has suggested:
      “Today’s white American must ask himself, as he reflects on the hash fate of the Indian, whether or not he is prepared to wish the Indians had won and the white invader been driven back whence he had come. The question is a chastener to easy retrospective moral complacency.”
      At the same time, he adds, our current reappraisal of the past, reflected in the spate of books by Indians and Indian sympathizers, can be worthwhile if it serves to achieve justice and equity for living Indians. If it doesn’t, then it is so much self-serving hypocrisy.
      Public opinion is a lot like the proverbial mule that the farmer first had to hit over the head with a two-by-four to get its attention.
      Indian militants – who occupied Alcatraz Island, then the Bureau of Indian Affairs building in Washington and now Wounded Knee – have performed a “service” by getting our attention. Unfortunately, when they go to the extreme of proclaiming themselves as independent nation to war with the United States, they defeat themselves.
      Indeed, it begins to appear that the greatest obstacle to the justice they seek is not the white establishment, but many leaders – the so-called “Uncle Tomahawks” – among their own people whom they have alienated.
      In the final analysis, the success of the Indian cause depends upon the goodwill of the vastly greater non-Indian public. As the Harris poll shows, that goodwill is there.
      What is needed now are not Indian war chiefs but Indian statesmen.

1973 April 11, The Republic