Pantechnicon; BBC's America: A People Within A Nation

Good evening and welcome to the nightly magazine on attend the thoughts and ideas. Tonight we present the third of a four part series The BBC Radio takes a bicentennial look at America. The series is compiled and presented by Michael Sumner. Tonight's program a people within a nation. I really believe it is Christmas in the wimble over the Indian village of sand while I'm on the Rio Grande the New Mexico. But the people of the pueblo the Indians of the Taiba tribe I'm celebrating not Christmas but a much older festival of their early. They pray for good crops and good hunting in the year to come and they give thanks for the harvest in the year just ending meeting the. Placing the mist of the sun coming into the midst of the lake and the lake noise it is they who are seeing me in the mist of the sun

coming into the mist of the lake and the lake girls. It is THEY who are echoing their voices. Perhaps as long as thirty thousand years ago the ancestors of these people began moving down into the North American continent across the Bering Straits from the Asian landmass. These were the forebears of the tribes we know today as the Sioux the Apache the Cheyenne the Navajo the white man Christopher Columbus first saw them in fourteen ninety two he wrote to the king and queen of Spain. So tractable so peaceable are these people that they swear that he's not in the world a better nation. They love their neighbors as themselves. And there this course is ever sweet and gentle and accompanied by a smile.

Of course he saw nothing of this savage into tribal battles of the time. In the next 400 years the Indians came to know the white man well and his brutality. White men like cotton audio and a Spanish conquistadores who plundered the land and tortured its people into submission and acceptance of the Christian faith. White men who later took their lands in their hunger for gold and more or more living space in the 17th century the English arrived in Virginia and New England to found the nation and discovered there the sweet and gentle people you know and they were gone and power happen Indians. A leading American historian Dee Brown. His book Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee is a classic of its try and talk to me about that early relationship in those characters a relationship the beginnings of friendly attitude toward the white man from the Indians. Some of the Indians along the coast already had contacts before the

settlers actually came and in the case of the people who went in the New England where they had so much difficulty with food supplies Indians helped them survive. Why there such a relationship so quickly goes to the greed principle in there to your opinion was that they wanted the council wanted more more land more land over time is more calmness came in more so it came in and the leaders in tribes had no no conception of Europeans idea of personal property. The land was held in common by a tribe actually had no boundaries and winds on the map was always amusing. So there would be usually a white group of white men would say we want to buy our land from here to that river. You can buy it or exchange or

almost worthless gifts in most cases. And the Indians owe us felt there was plenty of land there or go back all further west in the years that followed. The Indians were forced back and back to their lands and hunting grounds and game animals taken from them. In only two years from eight hundred seventy two to eight hundred seventy four three million seven hundred thousand bison were slaughtered. Three and a half million by white men. By an irony of history the waves of Indian immigration in prehistoric times which had flowed eastward across the continent were reversed white settlement from Europe pressed the tribes back to the west in 1830 for it was decreed that the tribes should be moved to lands west of the Mississippi River everything to the east became white property. From that time until the last a dreadful massacre of the Sioux had Wounded Knee in 1890 there was constant warfare between Indian and White man

characterized by most appalling atrocities on both sides. In 1890 it was over practically every treaty was violated in some way at Wounded Knee in the Pine Ridge in South Dakota. The Sioux Nation was finally broken and its epitaph was spoken by the water Black Elk when he recalled the battle years later. I did not know then how much was ended. When I look back now from this high hill of my old age I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped didn't scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young and I could see that something else die there in the bloody mud and was buried in the blizzard of people's dream died there. It was a beautiful dream. Another great chief for the Sioux Red Cloud was even more bitter. They made as many promises he said. More than I can remember but they never kept but

one they promised to take our land and they took it. Today the million or so Indians who remain are scattered throughout the United States. The interests of most of them I'm looked after by our federal body the Bureau of Indian Affairs one of the bureau's senior officers Tom Oxendine is a Lumbee Indian himself from North Carolina. He graduated from the University of Southern California served in the Second World War in the United States Navy was the first Indian to become a jet fighter pilot and commanded a squadron in his office in Washington. He described to me the relationship between the tribes and the states and the federal bureau we have within the federal in relationship which is a trusting relationship.

That exists with 266 different tribes bands and groups of Indians throughout the United States living on more than 50 million acres of land. We basically have four tribes east of the Mississippi. And the remaining federally recognized tribes would be in the western part of the United States. There are estimated to be some 250000 Indians who are. What is termed non federally recognized and that includes tribal Indians who have moved to urban areas. It also includes Indians whose land reservation is held in trust by the state in which they live. We have two near the nation's capital in the state of Virginia and others in Massachusetts and other states and those are call state

reservations as a matter as the Lumbee Passamaquoddy is I could go on to name many but there are more than 100 different tribal groups whose assets and resources and want to have it are not held in trust by the federal government. They've been assimilated into the. One might say the dominant society. There is inevitably I suppose a strong element of paternalism in the relationship between official America and the Indians. Perhaps the nation's conscience has been touched by the sins of the past but more likely it's been stirred by the publice of the of the past few years given to militant Indians through organizations like the American Indian Movement. A I am. It was AIM which organized with calculated symbolism. The occupation of the hamlet of Wounded Knee in 1973 protesting they

said against breaches of the 1868 treaty between the SU and the United States government. It was that they claimed that had led to the present poverty of the SU the organizer's incidentally were subsequently rejected by their fellows threw in the elections on the reservation although their protest did bring about a number of reforms. Many white Americans feel that it's the fault of the Indians themselves that they remain poor and underprivileged that they don't try to compete within American society. To such Americans Vernon and Audrey Thompson ranchers in Arizona who've lived among Indians for many years. Indians are just like other people they're real nice in the end there are good Indians and the poor Indian and ambitious Indians and there's lazy Indians. My grandfather worked the old Indians. And I've heard many many stories of the way they worked and

what they did for him they cleared his ranch and all of this type of thing which is where I was raised and the comparison in the good old Indian that I knew as a child and the ones that I know of now is is unbelievable. Their morals have completely fallen apart. They they they don't care about anything except possibly alcohol I think alcohol was probably the worst thing we ever did and maybe that can be blamed on the white man because we let him have it. Alcohol is a serious problem on the reservations and it hasn't helped anyone when they made it readily available but I think they should have because they're citizens they should be treated as anybody else. But they would sooner spend their welfare money for alcohol than they would or their wages and they would go ahead and and make a life for themselves. And I don't think it's from frustration that it's they just would sooner do that

because they know that they're going to be taken care of than that it doesn't make a difference whether they work or will they don't. Undoubtedly there is much truth in what the Thompsons have to say. Yet it isn't the whole truth. As I came to see go to New Mexico I've been towed into the old southwest near the Mexican border. I meet the oldest Native Americans the Pueblo Indians whom the Spaniard Colorado found nearly 500 years ago a quiet people secretive and jealous of their culture their religion their traditions. So I traveled the old scent of a trail by car of course and not by stagecoach to Santa Fe itself and San Juan and Santa Clara Santa Domingo and Coach T to Suki and tiles the ancient Spanish names bestowed upon them by the early Spanish conquistadores. What an ancient land this is. Old Red Mountains range upon range of them. I could see a hundred miles I thought in that crystal at 7000 feet above the distant sea.

The Rio Grande they rushed along its red walled canyons the Spindrift tumbled across the desert in the wind. The giant saguaro cacti stood like spiky sentinels in the thin soil and the wood smoke from the pueblos the sweet smell of the burning pinion wood drifted leisurely on the breeze. There's a special kind of peace in the pueblo country and the Indians are a special people such an Indian is Jorah baiter who comes from Santa Clara Pueblo. Joe feels strongly about white attitudes which downgrade the Indian to an inferior status to a second class citizen. As far as being a second class citizen I think that there are a lot of people in this country that would like to put us into that category. But I won't allow myself to be put into that category. I think for example when it comes to employment the fact that you. Qualify yourself for the fact that you announce yourself as being a Native American creates an attitude in the minds of a lot of people that you're inferior that you are second class that you're not

competent that you're not capable that you're in fact inferior. But I think unless we stand up and declare ourselves to this kind of attitude it's going to continue I think it's a bad attitude and I think that it's changing as time goes on because people have proven themselves they're succeeding. They're able to beat people at their own games. Here in New Mexico as in all other Indian areas the beautiful opinion of him is to a very large extent the springboard from which the Indian to leap if he so wishes. Into the twentieth century the urban affairs of course administers a federal Indian policy and that policy is a trust relationship holding in trust these lands and resources for Indian tribes. Basically the Bureau of Indian Affairs provides the programs and services to Indians under this relationship. That other citizens in the United States get from their local canny state and other federal agents is of course their bureau and

ministers through their agents a local agent says the school. The. Social welfare programs the road building and the police protection only other kinds of services that citizens are entitled to. Then the Bureau of an affairs administers for Indians under that trust relationship. Tom Oxendine but I'm not sure that all Indians wish to embrace 20th century American society their way of life. Their concern for their environment and the balance of nature has a beauty and a rhythm. The white man has lost. Our sun is coming up. Old man Sam is looking he is singing on the Pueblo of San Juan shining on the San Juan boys dancing. Our sun is coming up old man sun is

coming out. He is singing on the playbill of San Juan shining on the San Juan boys singing they are in the Oh. So many of these songs and dances form a vital part of the Indian religion and emphasize the eternal cycle of sun and wind and rain. Spring Summer Autumn Winter male and female man and animal and food crop the left handed governor of the San Juan Pueblo a secular official elected by the people is Herman a go yo basically the end in respect of Mother Earth. You know that he has to offer. We depend on Mother Earth for moisture for writer and it provides as. A media in which we can communicate. With a supreme being you know they're supernatural beings. So starting

with ACORN. And the. Things that the animals have to operate in we have for example the antlers we used and there's you know deer dances. We used the skunk skin in our turn of bands. And we used many other things that the animal life provides man for all that the people of the pueblos spring from the same roots and have similar customs. They remain apart from each other and mix very little. For all the togetherness which enabled them to exclude the white man from their most secret ceremonies and to keep their culture virtually intact. Each Pueblo is an entity in itself. But how long I wonder can this way of life persist. So many Pueblo Indians have had to become wage earners as Clark's cleaners secretaries. Some even up to four thousand dollars a year that they're already part of the white man's world. The white man has raped their land and drained it of its oil mined its gold torn

out its timber and left the soil to a road in the hot summer wind. He's driven motorways across it polluting the air with petrol fumes and the stink of factories. They choose this very place to put the world's greatest atomic center at Los Alamos and here they developed the atomic bomb. How do the Indians see these changes. A question I put to a distinguished anthropologist an archaeologist Dr. Bethany Dutton who spent her long lifetime among the Indians even though they don't realize it. There are these day early changes and young people resent us especially today after the activities and related movements that have been started and the young people resent the white people very very strongly. But the older Indians realize that they can't live without Everest and their living depends upon us in so many ways. And so they

counsel their children to be tolerant and realize that we must all work together for the better of each as yet the militancy of the Northern Indians has not penetrated the pueblos to any significant extent. Aim the American Indian Movement has little influence here and of course ways are from to Suki Pueblo is right. It may never do so. I believe because of our form of government and our respect for our elders and our respect for our culture and our religion we were down to earth about things we're realistic about things and we take an attitude that what we get is what we fight for and not in a military sense but on a technical education espec tackling problems that arises where if enough pressure is drawn upon by legislation or other means of our tribal governments to pursue then I think we get more done that way than taking a

militant attitude or even arms like some other areas have done. We don't believe in violence where we were brought up to respect our elders to respect our leaders and to respect the people we work with. And I think just it's just a matter of communications at all levels to dig into our problems are resilent to the best ability that we have in educating the non-Indians to our plight and pursuing it in that direction. Politics apart must modern technology the ever growing demand for land and natural resources inevitably submerge that gentle bred low culture. I put this to an Indian ask him how he can possibly reconcile his way of life with that of the white man in this twentieth century. Unlike your beta he will show you a confident ought to be. I think that as time goes on and through better education programs and even Merican can begin to understand American society I think that presently there are. Growing examples of people. That are able to.

Put on a necktie to put on a sport coat to come into Santa Fe to compete with the society in general. To go to the state capital to defend themselves. To present themselves to discuss issues that concern them and to do it. Adequately to do a very good job at it. I think those same individuals as times going on are able to go back into their community to take the necktie off and to be able to function and to be able to communicate with some of the older more traditional people in the public. And I think that. Though it's been a difficult process. That the Native American may stand to gain from this. Situation because I believe that they possibly be able to look at a problem from two perspectives from two points of view. And hopefully come out with a solution or resolve a problem that is in their best interest. Here in the San Juan Pablo here in the middle of the plain below

the blue corn maidens are roaming the yellow corn maidens are roaming. You may say that this ancient civilization is an anachronism in the 20th century. I myself feel with sadness it cannot survive like the Thompsons in Arizona. You may feel that only by competing in the modern American world 10 these people raise themselves up from the lowest poverty level. Certainly that's the official American view. In 1970 President Nixon a man not distinguished for his compassion for the underprivileged sent a message to Congress laying down policy guidelines for a new deal for the American Indian. He said the first Americans the Indians are the most deprived and most isolated minority group in our nation on virtually every

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. What then are the obstacles facing Tom Oxendine and his colleagues in the Bureau of Indian Affairs. I guess the number one problem. Overall dealing with an INS would be the quite often the lack of a viable economy the economy of a reservation is pretty much dependent upon the natural resources of the land they live on. Now that. Of course would. BE Maybe applicable to Pine Ridge South Dakota which does not have a good economy and all of the ills that go with the economy probably exist on that or other types of reservation I

think. Many tribes are making immense economic development the muscularity Apaches in New Mexico have many viable. Economic undertakings where is their neighbor. And some of the other poor in that same area would not want their culture disturbed. They would preserve and hold on to their religious traditions and culture and therefore they are not interested in the change. There are still many millions of Americans that like the Thompsons who remain unconvinced that the Indian can ever find the dedication the strength of character to take advantages of the opportunities especially the education open to them. I think that the white man has broken most of these treaties with the Indians. But on the other hand he's done a lot for the end and most of the reservations especially in the northern part of United States is some of the

choice land of the whole area from a ranching standpoint and from a mineral standpoint in certain instances. They're not using what they did get. I think we've given them too much. We've made it far too easy for them. They haven't had the challenge that white people have had or that some other groups have had. They've had the opportunity to go to school and I've known some some brilliant Indians I still do know some brilliant Indians but they aren't doing anything with their brilliance. I think it's because they don't have to. They don't have to. I think they resent it. They actually resent the fact that we have given them this stuff and say figure why take care of it. The white man gave it to me anyway. But pull squeezer and beta tell you we're Indians from the Santa Clara and to Suki pueblos have new dots where Indian furs I mean and first.

My family are Indian first. Americans were so when they came over. Well they they were of a different nature that the Indians will always be and though in the end in itself is a word that was bestowed upon us that I think it looses some of its meaning also when they talk about in this persay in this country there is a numerous type of endurance even going to Mexico and finance Also you can go into foreign countries and find in the US. But as far as us are concerned I think we're more in this than Americans though. That's you know the terminology they use nowadays for people and Native Americans they call us now. I used the term Native American I guess because it's a contemporary kind of term. And if I was asked a question where are you from who are you I'd say my name's job a time. A tailor from Santa Clara problem that happens to be in the state of New Mexico in the state of New Mexico happens to be a part of the United States. I think that a number of years ago we came and I'm talking of making a general statement that we came close to defeat and we came close to losing

what we've got because we were taught and tried. Now people tried to convince us to be ashamed of ourselves not to accept who we were not to accept what we were but rather to put that behind us and move toward something something else called American society I guess. But I think that as time has gone on we've realized that our strength lies in what we are. Our strength lies in who we are and that if we abandon that strength that we are going to be gullible and I guess eaten up. So the answer to the question is there's no doubt in my mind that I'm tremendously proud of being a Native American I'm very excited about the idea. I never disavow or never. Be ashamed of that. Yes we've been listening to the people within a nation. Part of

the BBC radio bicentennial look at America. Thank you for being with us tonight. That is every night at 6:30 and weekends at 5:30 p.m.. The bad technique on this is all honest out Wishing you a very pleasant good evening.