Taking Care of Business

[beep] [music] Good evening. I'm Art Alexander and welcome to TCB. On tonight's program, we'll be looking at two issues with two people. Later on in tonight's program, we'll be talking with Mr. Vine Deloria, Native American historian and scholar, about exploitation of Native American history and culture. But first on tonight's program, we'll be speaking with Mr. Jawanza Kunjufu of Chicago's Institute of Positive Education. The Institute is a publishing house and school founded by Haki Madhubuti formerly known as Don L. Lee poet and playwright. The Institute's perspective is pan-Africanist: that is to say, they feel that we, as black Americans, ought to trace our culture, our history, back to ancient Egypt much the way white America traces its high culture back to ancient Greece. Tonight, Mr. Kunjufu talks about his organization's perspectives on issues that face the modern African American. This segment originally aired last spring. We hope you find it was worth repeating. [Art Alexander] Could you tell me a little bit about what IPE's vision of, or for, Afro-Americans will be? [Jawanza Kunjufu] I guess, from [inaudible] perspective, we have to redefine that in

terms of African-Americans, because we believe that your identity comes from you your land base. And that also ties in with our vision. That we see our home as not being here in this country. And so for that reason then, we see Africa as a place for our future. At the same time, we also understand that, as a race, we're 700 million. And for 450 live in Africa, 120 live in the Caribbean, and 40 million live in the States. And I think, at this point, it's naive for us to assume that all of us can or will live in one location. So we take a position the nationalism, that our African-ness, should not be confined just to the geographical proximity. But, learning from the Jewish movement in this country, that Israel is a shining star. Where the Jewish position is expressed wherever they are in the world. That in New York or in Chicago, in L.A., even in Portland, they express their nationalism. And so African

people, we feel, wherever they are in the world, should see that their past is the same, that our current situation is the same, and that our future will be the same. And so, with that reason then, we should strive to be self-reliant where we are, always understanding that home is Africa, and there wherever we are, we must always push that shining star. [Art Alexander] In respect to what's happening here in the United States, you don't have to limited it to that if you want, what do you feel are two or three of the most pressing issues for African-Americans for the 1980s? [Jawanza Kunjufu] I think one major question is our continued attempt to survive in urban areas. The cost of survival in New York, Chicago, Detroit, or in large urban areas in the north, I think has reached the point where it will continue to go down for us now from this point on. There were eight people who died in New York this past winter just from the cold alone. They did not have a place to go inside. So that, for example, as James Weldon Johnson said, we have

become so mystified by neon lights and the lights and astroturf, that many of us don't want to leave those northern urban cities. And so I think that's one of the things that becomes a major issue for us in this point, and that ties in the whole question of land. In 1910, we owned 16 million acres but now, in 1980, we own less than nine million acres. I'm saying this country, the [inaudible] is here, understand the land's the most important resource in the world. And they try to buy it up, so not only do we need to relocate to an environment that's more conducive to our lifestyle, we also need to begin to acquire the most important resource in the world. And I think the last thing Black people need to do, in terms of looking at the next two decades, is that, we have begun to lose our traditional values. We have begun to buy more and more into the Western mentality of 'I is more important than We', and if we continue to do that, the only thing we have left to fight racism and fight slavery in this country had been each other, Black men and Black women and our children, but we now not only disrespect our children, we

now disrespect our elders, and we disrespect each other. So I'm saying that if we don't go back to our tradition, to our collective values, wherever we are, whether it's in the north or the south, we're not going to be able to survive this west this point. [Art Alexander] Portland has a small Black population, so perhaps maybe to make the question easier to deal with, let's take a city like Chicago. How would you get this across, or what kinds of things would, would you suggest a Black community begin to do, to, to recover some of the values you feel we're losing? [Jawanza Kunjufu] In Chicago, in a large urban area, or in Portland? [Art Alexander] In a large urban area. If you can address, Portland that would be fine. [Jawanza Kunjufu] I would like to address Portland as well. [Art Alexander] OK. [Jawanza Kunjufu] First of all, I feel very comfortable comfortable that, as America continues to falter, you see what's so advantageous right now is that America can't take care of itself, much less take care of the slaves. There's a pattern I think you agree to, that as the situation worsens for our people, we become closer to

each other. And I think that, whether it's in Portland or Chicago, as the unemployment rate, as the inflation rate, as the homosexuality, the drug abuse, the suicide rates, all that continues in our community, you and I will be forced to come closer to one another, regardless of where the situation resides. And I think America helps the Black community, as they continue to suffer under the ills of a system where you continue to take more out than you put in, and that's the contradiction of capitalism. When you have a group of people that continue to live for today, not tomorrow, and they continue to take out more than they put in, that will help Black people in the future. It's sad to say that we- we are reactionary, and we respond to our present situations but that is a reality and I'm aware of that. [Art Alexander] Do you think that response will be increased nationalism as well as being closer together? Because I don't see them as necessarily being the same. [Jawanza KunjufuI] I think that it will increase nationalism. And hopefully

Nationalists this time, because we see that opportunity every 20 years, all right, the 40s, 60s, and early 80s, hopefully this time the Nationalists will not have a anti-ideology, but they have a pro-ideology. And the last struggle, as you well know, we could tell all we did not like, we could not tell we were for, I think this time, you and I, when we hit the streets, this time we will be able to help Black men and women to direct their energy in a positive light and hopefully we will direct it in a more family-oriented kind of way. I think they have been at least eight to 12 Black institutions who survived the 60s who are now prepared in the 80s, and they've learned over the past 14-to-20 year period, they have now learned what the mistakes were, and now we have the challenge this time for a more productive use. So, in other words, instead of destroying a building, we're now going to build some buildings this time. [Art Alexander] What are some of those institutions that you feel have survived and can do more in the 80s? [Jawanza KunjufuI] I think, going from from region to region in the south in New Orleans, we're talking about Ahidiana. In New York, we're talking about the East. In Washington, we're talking about Nation.

In Chicago, we're talking about the Institute [inaudible]. On the West Coast, we're talking about the Us Organization Maulana Karenga. We're talking about, in San Francisco we're talking about [inaudible]. We're talking about, in Portland, [inaudible]. [Art Alexander] If you were going to try and, and make a connection to Africa, to someone who really has been educated to dislike or not respect or not think about Africa at all, a Black American, how would you begin? would you begin? [Jawanza KunjufuI] How would I try to influence someone in this country to return back to Africa? [Art Alexander] Well, to pay attention to Africa at all, given that, I would say, would you would you agree that the majority of Black Americans don't feel any particular degree of political attachment? [Jawanza KunjufuI] I think that again, it, it's very sad to say that we are so reactionary, but I'm really enjoying the current state of affairs in this country because it's forcing all of us here to become more involved in international affairs. Whether the blood

likes it or not, what goes on in Iran or goes on Afghanistan affects oil prices, affects gas prices. I'm saying there are very few people left in this country who I think feel that this country, this country's policies, in and of itself, will dictate what goes on in their lives. I think that now, more and more of us begin to realize that America is part of an international network, and that what goes on across the water will affect his, his situation, not only in terms of the draft, not only in terms of the oil, but also in terms, for example, there were some people in this country who lost some family members [inaudible] when on in Liberia. So, all that affects us each and every day. So, I'm very thankful to see that take place. [Art Alexander] Are there any leaders or perhaps individuals that you mention in connection with those organizations, that you would identify as being particularly positive, particularly good for Black people to be looking towards? [Jawanza KunjufuI] I think that one of the problems that we have as a community is that

we don't make a distinction between leaders and spokesmen. For example, for the listening audience, they cannot tell me who the white leader was in this country, nor could they tell me who the Jewish leader was in this country, because good leadership understands what the role is all about. Good leadership is collective leadership. Collective leadership is self-sustaining [inaudible]. When all our models are tied in to Dr. King, and if he dies, then so goes the movement. Right now, as you well know, 60 Minutes and the rest of this country has elected Jesse Jackson as our leader. What happens to the movement if Jesse Jackson dies? I'm saying what we need to be about, I'll give you an example, is Ron Herndon here in Portland or Reverend Dorothy in New York or [inaudible] in Chicago or other men and women across this country, for instance [inaudible] Sonia Snachez, I'm saying these are men and women who are involved with organizations and their participants decide what is in the best interest of Black people. Not Jesse Jackson. Not Ben Hooks. The collective community decides what's in our best interests. And then, someone like you and I, who

announced to the public what their decision is. If white America decides to kill us, it has not stopped the collective community from make those kind of decisions. So, therefore, the movement has stability. So, well, I'm striving and hopeful [inaudible] will see that what we need to have is more, more members involved in decision making process and quit allowing the larger mass media to decide for us who our leadership is. What we really need is a few spokesmen and have all of us involved in the collective decision process. [Art Alexander] Mr. Jawanza KunjufuI. Our second piece this evening involves an issue that's common to all racial minorities in the United States. Our speaker is Mr. Vine Deloria, author and Native American historian. We are presenting an excerpt from a presentation he gave at the Willamette Valley Racial Minorities Conference, which was held at the Oregon College of Education in Monmouth just a few weeks ago. The topic is this book, Hanta Yo, by Ruth Beebe Hill. The issue is how, through a lack of cultural ethics, a piece of total

fiction about a racial minority can be marketed to the general public as being only a half-step away from absolute fact. [Vine Deloria] [inaudible] Hanta Yo It's a book that came out about two years ago and aame out with very extravagant claims as to authenticity etcetera, and has raised a considerable furor in the Indian community. There are many different issues that go back and forth within the story of the book. Some years ago, Alex Haley put out Roots. This was produced by David Wolper Productions. Of course, big television smash. Now, the number, you must be aware that, after that, a number of other authors came in against Haley. Said that he'd

taken parts of their books. The most prominent, I think, is Harold Courlander. In or out of court settlement, Haley remains a historian, but careful analysis will indicate he had a lot of problems. Nevertheless, Wolper Productions made a bundle. So, about two years ago, this manuscript was sent out from Doubleday saying this was the Indian Roots. Members were asked to read it, and in my opinion, most of it's completely unreadable because Mrs. Hill, the author, claims that she did all this linguistic gymnastics, whereby she wrote a novel, which, as far as I understand, a novel is fiction, but later she claims it isn't fiction. She claims to have written this novel, and then to have

translated it into archaic Sioux, which is the language Indians spoke before the coming of the white man. then to have translated it into the English diction of 1903 or four. At this point, it kind of gets vague, just what's going on. Then, to finally put it in a modern English, and this exercise was to make it authentic. What it does is make it unreadable. Now how many of you have taken German? Put your hands way up. So, like, yeah, OK. I'm going to write a sentence in German, or write a sentence in English and then translate it into German. Where would I put the verb? Huh? The very end, OK? Then, if I'm to retranslate that, word for word, back to English, what would I have?

Dog cat house he the chase, or something like that, right? Well, that's what you end up with, with Hanta Yo, so it is extremely difficult reading. So anyway, this manuscript goes around, and a number of us received it, and should have been tipped off by the editor's letter, this is going to be the next Roots, and most people didn't respond. You read something like this, and you think, well it's probably a new editor and they've probably have never read a book or written one. Those are the kind that get employed as editors. [audience laughter] There's no reason not to [inaudible] Doubleday's [inaudible]. So, you don't hear anything for a long time, and all of a sudden, in the Smithsonian Magazine one day, out comes this incredible article about a 60-some-year-old white woman that became an Indian in order to write the true story of Indians,

followed by just an absolutely superb PR campaign. Like, if I could step back out of controversy just to marvel at the technique used by Doubleday. It's a masterful PR campaign, because the country is blitzed in about three months, the thing goes to the best seller list. And, of course out in Indian country where Indians are trying to make a living, the idea of critiquing something that you might only encounter in Omaha, if you happen to go to Omaha, nobody knows [inaudible]. Until one day Mrs. Hill goes to the Chicago Indian Center, and gets up and screams at the Indians there, "You'd better read my book to find out how to be Indians." The Indians are kind of in a state of shock. And so, she's made all these outrageous claims about knowing the archaic language, so

Steven Fast Wolf, who is an excellent speaker of the Sioux language, speaks some archaic Sioux. Well, she can't speak the archaic Sioux. Well, let's see some of the manuscript with it. So, that sets off then a war between Indians, Sioux Indians around the country, and Mrs. Hill. And, so Doubleday, looking at it as any publicity is good publicity, apparently just keeps her on the trail. And she [inaudible] college campuses at different places, and it's always, whether it's her personality or whether it's a Doubleday's instructions, always antagonizing whatever Indians are in the audience about 'they don't really know how to be Indians because they're still alive.' She talked always 'authentic Indians years ago that are now passed on, they're the only true

representatives of Indians.' And so, she got a number of Indian people really curious and really mad, and the Rosebud Medicine Association started looking more closely at the book, and the closer reservation people look at the book, the madder they got. [inaudible] book are various sensationalist sexual activities. Now, I have no personal objection to any of those today, In fact, some of them seem to be new, stuff I never thought of. [audience laughter] So, in that sense, it is, you know, but they're not taken from any mainstream. They're [inaudible] They're not taken from any mainstream Sioux culture.

Most of them are things that might have happened to one or two individuals in five-hundred years, and to bring that forward as 'this is Sioux culture,' that's what Indians object to. And so, issue then becomes her saying that it's authentic, and different reservations, or different groups, are saying 'that's not authentic, we never did that.' So, it becomes a very difficult situation, which [inaudible] I kind of get dragged in the back door because people say, 'well, what do you think about it?' Well, I believe anyone should be able to write anything they want and publish it. I can't hardly write books myself and say, well, people should only be authentic.' In Time Magazine, when they wrote up this controversy,

said, you know, implied that I said only a Sioux with a Ph.D. should write books on Sioux Indians. I would never say that because I don't have Ph.D. [audience laughter] But, if you look at all the people that have written books, and there have been some terrible books written, and you never had a national outburst like this, because the author has never gone out and claimed this is the only valid book on Indians. The only book that gives insight roots on Indians. I got a friend, Ernie Schusky, used to be a friend, did a book called The Forgotten Sioux. He's one of the most capable ethnographers in the country. In '65 he did a very good thing. Sioux Indians posture towards him [inaudible]. When he did The Forgotten Sioux, Ernie, you know, someone must have been hitting him with a two by four, because that's just a bad book. And I wrote a bad review of it. I told people,

you know, putting pages between two hard covers does not make a book. And I was greatly distressed with Ernie. Well, Ernie never toured the nation saying this is the only authentic thing ever written on Indians. He was quite aggravated that I said it was one the worst books ever written, but he never went around throwing it in Indians' faces, saying, 'hey, you better read this. You're gonna find out how to be an Indian.' So, it's been the additional activities that really stirred the controversy up. And there gets to be this weird logic by Mrs. Hill in this confrontation, that if you're not a full-blood Indian who's never seen a street car, or something like that, like that, not 90 years old, then by definition, you know nothing about Indians. The complaints about me are that I'm three-eighths Indian; I don't speak the Sioux language;

I haven't lived on a reservation since the 1950s. Making those accusations then in her mind disqualifies me from knowing anything about Sioux Indians. To then turn around and say that my aunt, Ella Deloria, who did a major linguistic work on Sioux people, told her more about Sioux language then she did me, who saw my aunt from the time I was a little child to the time I'm 37, with the implication that only the elderly Indians will tell Mrs. Hill the truth about Indian culture and they won't tell their own relatives about Indian culture. Therefore it makes her the only accurate portrayer of Indian culture. Now, that is not an attitude unique to that one writer. I would say at least half the non-Indians that come out to Indian country and are trying to write books, come out and they talk to people at random.

I've been, I've been trying to make a movie with Marlon Brando for 17 years, and when you just get the guy set on some kind of format for the movie, and he meets an Indian at a bus stop, and he says, hey we're going to film Sand Creek. And the Indian will say, no, you'd better do the Trail of Tears, Marlon. Then he'll turn around to 10 people who worked three months trying to get a script, saying, we're going to the Trail of Tears.' This has been going on for 17 years. So, what you have, with the phenomenon you have, is, I think, a desperate need for some kind of ego support, for whites who want to know about Indians. So, they take whatever any Indian tells them as, this is the first time it's ever been revealed outside the tribe, so I'm a special character, therefore it's authentic. And so, they write these books, which are really

exercises in kind of them regurgitating what they've picked up about Indians all over the country, and kind of pass themselves in this quasi priestly role of, this old Indian chief wanted to pass on his heritage. There was no one around, and I was driving up the road, and a rabbit crossed the road, and I said this is a sign, and I stopped, and the old chief went like this, [audience laughter] and I- and I came up to his rocking chair, and he said, my son, I got to pass this onto you, and out comes the book. [audience laughter] You know, Mrs. Hill is the classic example of this. So that, we can't document when or where she was on reservations or who she talked to or whatever, but she has very sharp mind in terms of remembering facts, so she has simply remembered everything she's ever been told. You put it down in what, in my opinion, is one the most boring, most difficult to

read novels I've ever seen. It is very difficult for me to come in because I don't want any work, I don't want any author, you know, even you might disagree with them 100 percent, I don't want them to be deprived of the right to write a book. If Doubleday had been honest and said, this is a fictional novel about Indians before the coming of the white man and let it go at that, that would be one thing. But where Doubleday then takes a book and says this is an ethnographic tour de force, it's the first inside look ever done on an Indian tribe, it is the most authentic thing in the world, thereby saying that Charles Eastman, full-blood Santee Sioux, wrote many books, Indian Boyhood, Soul of the Indian, Henry and Luther Standing Bear, Arthur Park, my aunt, Ella Deloria, the books with Neihardt and Black

Elk, Joseph Epes Brown with Neihardt, or with Black Elk, and the La Flesches, Omaha scholars, that all those books are not an inside look at Indian, at the Indian culture? And if this white lady from Friday Island, Washington, who made a couple trips through Sioux country, you know, in the 60s and 70s, she knows more about Sioux Indians than Charles Eastman, who whose family was in the Minnesota massacre, who had to flee to Canada? Finally [inaudible] these famililies slipped back across the border down in the Santee area, a white missionary helped him get to school. Finding in his mature years, he was the physician at Wounded Knee, was Army physician, that devastation at Pine Ridge, when they brought in all the wounded from the massacre, and it turned him against Christianity and turned him against the government, to see what the government had done to his own people, that that

guy is not the first inside look at Sioux culture? And you see, the dishonesty of the Doubleday campaign just infuriates me because now we're in a position where books being submitted to publishers, these damn editors will say, oh, this Beebe Hill is a big authority on Indians, we'd better send this book out for approval. I learned the other day, Ruth Beebe Hill had been one of the people to read and say yes or no to Creek Mary's Blood, a book by Dee Brown. Yeah, and that's completely insane because her only credentials as [inaudible] and any knowledge on Indian whatsoever come out of the Doubleday PR department. No Indian scholar, no non-Indian scholar, that I know of, unless they want to pick a fight with someone attacking the book, [inaudible] written a review, [inaudible] was really trying to attack one Indian scholar. No

one has said that this any more than drivel, and drivel badly written and too much of it. But, when you look into a multinational corporation comes in, they're going to make money off the book, and shove thousands of copies [inaudible] every PR blitz. Who is there that you can, you know, appeal to, to say, no, this isn't real. [Art Alexander] Despite Native American protests, the producers of Roots have purchased Hanta Yo and intend to turn it into a mini-series that will probably be on your television set within the next two years. That's it for tonight's program, I'm Art Alexander please tune in again next week. You? Please have a good evening.