Pantechnicon; Dr. Alfonso Ortiz: An Indian Perspective on the American Dream

Who introduced Dr OTs who was the associate professor of anthropology at Princeton University in New Jersey. A doctor my talk is entitled an Indian perspective on the American dream. Subtitle the dark side of the moon. In the spring of sixteen twenty eight one Thomas Morton of Marymount novel Braintree Massachusetts was deported to England in stocks by his Puritan neighbors. This story is undoubtedly known to most of you. The spring before he had scandalized these neighbors by erecting a maypole at Marymount and beginning one long seven day weekend of song dance and festivity. The Puritans were forced to take notice when some of their own ran off to join the little

band of revelers at Marymount. More immediately threatening to the Puritan sense of propriety order and destiny was the fact that Thomas Morton of Marymount recognized the rights and the humanity of the Indians of that time and place. He went among them to trade for furs. In fact beating the Puritan competitors in this business and welcome them when they came to Marymount. He also gave the Indians gun guns and powder and taught them how to use them. This the Puritan fathers could not forgive. So a band of these super wasps chopped down Thomas Morton's maypole and shipped them back to England in stocks. Half starving him in the process. This is merely the bearer sketch of the story of Thomas Morton of Marymount. I

began with it because it is a bit of local history and because it speaks so eloquently to our present circumstances it means many things a story depending on how one reads it. For me as an Indian I cannot help but think wistfully. Had there been a few more Thomas Morton's in 16 20 there would not have been a first Thanksgiving let alone a three hundred fifty years on a much deeper level of meaning. It is by not painfully clear that when the Puritan father reported Thomas Morton they deported a fundamental aspect of the real American dream that instead of casting out the devil as they believed. They rejected one face of the great bird. They seemed not to realize that by chopping down the Maypole of Marymount they were trying to chop down the tree of life for the

Maypole is but one manifestation of that White Spirit. An ancient religious symbol of man Khan's most noble aspirations. This is a symbol which was why it's as widespread among native North American religions as it was in those of the ancient Near East. From whence Christianity derived. And also in others of every continent of the Earth at some time. Although we shall never know for certain. I should like to think that the Indian people of Thomas Morton's time in this Massachusetts place perceived that here in the maple was something beautiful which they shared something which could serve as a cultural bridge between them. Still more fundamentally I should like to believe that Thomas Morton realized at the birth of the American dream that a part of him had to become

Indian in order to survive and to live on this land. Certainly the land adopted him for he kept coming back despite being deported twice managed and jailed for a year and one of his returns. Some among you may feel I make too much of a scoundrel that Thomas Morton was America's first hippie and Marymount his first commune. I like to think of him rather as the first white American worthy of the name. Almost two hundred fifty years after the events at Marymount two other events occurred within a few years of one another in widely separate parts of North America. Events which are instructive for a reason quite different from that of the story of Thomas Morton of merriment. Let us assume just for the sake of argument that Thomas Morton

was for a brief time all too brief on his way to becoming a little bit Indian in culture and in spirit. Then one might ask what might happen if a completely traditional Indian chooses to become a white man and culture and inspirit what one might ask if such an Indian become so successful in the white man's way that he can choose either path. The Indian or the out of the white man and walk either with distinction. There are two spectacular instances of this kind of confrontation which readily come to mind. The life of Dr. Carlos Montezuma Apache and that of Dr. Charles Eastman Sue Carlos models whom I was just six years old and living in the rugged mountains of the Central Arizona when in 1871

he was taken captive. One of the few survivors of an ambush and massacre. He had never seen a white man from up close before this time because his band was still resisting and fleeing when necessary. Before the fight at Mantes the Apache lad was sold for fifty silver dollars for thirty silver dollars pardon me to an itinerant frontier photographer named Carlos Gentilly. It was Gentilly who gave Carlos his rather interesting if misleading name. The two quickly became very close and Gentilly feeling the West to be a bad influence on his adopted son took him to live in Chicago. After some more travelling and several different homes Carlos at age 15 entered the University of Illinois. Four years later in 1884 he entered the Chicago Medical College also completing that

course of study successfully. After brief stints as a doctor on two high plains indian reservations Carlos model Zuma set up private practice in Chicago and married a white woman and became a financial success. For most of his life he remained a believer in assimilation and the other elements of the American dream of that time. Then toward the end of his life he became as radical and single minded a fighter for Indian rights as any young firebrand today. He could have disappeared into Chicago society but he chose instead. In the last years of his life to expend his considerable energies and resources in trying to obtain a better deal for all Indians in their relations with the federal government. Near the very end of his life when he discovered he had tuberculosis a disease which in the past has almost always been fatal to Indians by the way. When he discovered he

had tuberculosis he boarded a train for Arizona without telling his wife why he was going. When he got to Finney Phoenix he immediately set out for the fort McDonnell reservation nearby to the east. Despite the fact that as a famous citizen was origins are in Arizona the frontier town of Phoenix wanted to to honor him as a son come home. He disappeared to the Fort McDowell reservation nearby where he found an isolated spot. He arrested a simple open shelter stripped to a breech clout spread a blanket on the bare earth floor and began his patient. But short wait for the day for the DC to finish its job on his body. He was sustained only by one meal a day brought him by a woman he retained at a nearby community for that purpose. When he did pass on the Apache who had so long rejected him as not one of them at last

came to reclaim their own to take him home. For he had proven to them that he knew who he was at the end when it mattered. A strikingly similar pattern of events unfolded in the life of Charles Eastman another great Indian physician and contemporary of Carlos model Zuma. Young though he yes as he was named Sue was was Sitting Bull's back and hiding out from the U.S. Cavalry and Manitoba Canada during the aftermath of the Custer battle of 1876. Now note well that I said Custer battle not massacre. Throughout American history if you look very closely you will find that whenever the Indians won it was a massacre. When the US Cavalry won it was a battle. He was 15 years old when his father who had become a Christian and adjusted to life on the reservation slipped across the border and brought him back to South

Dakota to live with a missionary family. Despite having to start much later than that of Karl's model Zuma and this process of plugging into the American dream Eastman learn fast and soon he was enrolled at the college. Later he went to Dartmouth and medical school like Carlos. He became a very distinguished and successful physician. But he was in addition a talented writer. He wrote a series of books about his life and about Sioux culture as he remembered it. And in these one gains a fascinating insight into the evolution of an extraordinary life. In his first book published in 1984 and entitled Indian boyhood. Eastman comes on as the biggest assimilationist and purveyor of the American dream in Indian America. He apologizes for his wild boyhood as a man child of a proud Sioux warrior band. In his later books he

gradually does one of the end turns out to be at almost total about face for he slowly begins to rediscover his Indian heritage. The first 15 years of his life. Toward the end of his life he discovers that these first 15 years were the most important in shaping his destiny. And he too returns home spiritually. Both he and Carlos model Zuma were born in completely traditional Indian settings. Both bought the whole of the American dream. And both rejected in the end both rejected it in the end after having fully realized it. It is an interesting notion to contemplate that these two Indian physicians of warrior background were traveling in one direction and Thomas Morton in another. But all three wound up as brothers of sorts in the end.

Briefly stated my thesis is as follows. I present them as a series of interconnected propositions. Since I have so little time. First unlike traditional historical assumptions which divide American Indian history since 1776 into seven periods determined and named by shifts in federal policy I propose instead for periods determined and defined by the Indian tribe which provide it the dominant stereotype for the nation as a whole. During each period. In other words I am saying that there has been one tribe during each period which served as a standard by which all other tribes were measured and judged. I argue next that not only that this dominant stereotype determine the policies and attitudes. Under which

all Indians would live. But by a dialectical or feedback process. The dominant stereotype also shaped and influence important sections of American life and culture. There are these three hundred fifty years the Indians have not merely been passive recipients of the American dream with whites completely immune from Indian influence. Yet most historians and social scientists have never seem interested in probing at the subtlety of this continuing Indian influence. Third the beginning of each of the four periods was called Terminus coincided with columns of national crisis and fundamental value orientations. 4th at such times of national crisis the Indian emerges onto center to center stage in much of the American

consciousness. He has made the subject of adulation by the culture creators writers poets playwrights and others. He is emulated by the young In brief he is discovered or rediscovered as the case may be. We are in the midst of just such a period today. This is why I subtitle my talk the dark side of the moon. 6 And finally there is during each of these four periods a dominant theme which characterizes Indian white relations be it political military ecclesiastical or something else. And these dominant themes can be used as pigs on which to hang one's observations. But it is also the most minimal distillation of many years of reading into American history with that special eye that only an Indian scholar can bring to the task. So what are these periods. First there was the Iroquois period

extending from the nation's birth and beginning before to the War of 1812. Next was the Cherokee period extending from the aftermath of the War of 1812 until the end of the Civil War. Then came the superior which has lasted for more than a century now until the present time a fact when it which in itself is significant as I will indicate later. Now in the 1970s we are shifting wants again into another. A fourth period. I think I can guess as to the identity of the tribe which will provide the new mythical super Indian pawning the way to the brave new world of the 21st century. Providing fodder for playwrights poets and assert an assortment of letters providing the

standard by which all other Indians are measured. Providing the underlying determinant of the shape of governmental and philanthropic philanthropic policies toward the Indians providing the mirror in which one can see reflected America's moods aspirations and beliefs about herself. I should prefer not to reveal the identity of the new stereotypical tribe until I have established the case for my whole argument. Now let me summarize each of the periods. And note the legacy each delivered to the next period. In so far as each legacy permits us to understand better our present circumstances. As all of you know this nation and the American dream were born not only amidst the rocket's red glare the bombs bursting in air.

But before that more quietly at the Boston Tea Party. And do you remember what the revelers were dressed as. I myself would like to think that the Indian at that time was the symbol of freedom for these people. It is too painful to contemplate that the Indian was already the symbol of violence as he so clearly became during the post-Civil War SU period. There is one other background fact which must be borne in mind as the periods unfold. It is that this is the first great nation in history to be established of rootless men and women and extremely heterogeneous cultures languages and even

racists all but the Indians were immigrants. Australia New Zealand and Canada in the modern world. Share with us the status. Of nationhood comprised totally of rootless men and women who are what these people get their roots their sense of sharing in a continuing tradition since so much of what they left they reject it because it was painful. I began with a quotation from Benjamin Franklin. It will be a strange thing if Six Nations of ignorant savages should be capable of forming a scheme for such a union and be able to execute it in such a manner that it has it that it has subsisted ages and appears in the suit insoluble.

And yet that a like union should be impossible in practicable for ten or a dozen English colonists to whom it is more necessary and must be more advantageous and who cannot be supposed to want an equal understanding of their interests. The infant nation was too small yet to underpopulated. Too underdeveloped if you will to pretend to take any other stats with regard to its relations with the Indian people. They could. This is a time to bargain because the forces were so evenly matched that there were times when the Iroquois Confederacy could have wiped out a lot of colonies. And also there were three other great powers as you know one fated France but the colonies the British and the French were trying to pay to play the earthquake off one against the other. In brief the Iroquois occupied center stage. They were the balance of power. Occasionally the balance of her familiar words

at the birth of the American dream post 1776 with the fading of the Iroquois as a people and as a dominant thing in the American consciousness the American true dream began to go that way and they were quite green that way. Perhaps the most interesting for its enduring effects upon the pleasant present time was the Cherokee period. This was so short in if the period was ushered in with the birth of the nation the Cherokee period was ushered in with a Southeastern land boom. The south east became the booming area. The next mythical super Indian had to come from this area the old south east. The people who were in the way first and who were the most numerous were the Cherokee of the so-called Five Civilized nations. They assume center stage very quickly just as the Iroquois began to face this country because they could not take chances. You know

in a sort of self-conscious birth development in childhood they could not take chances on being regarded as practice and savagery by older more sophisticated civilized nations as it treated the Indians tried to treat the Indians fairly. The idea was that if they could learn our ways civilized so that we could assimilate them quietly bloodlessly. Also there were so many and as one person termed it it cost more to fight the Indians for a day than to feed them for a year. The Cherokee were made the objects of an unrelenting effort. Much of it enlightened to civilize and lo and behold it took they bought it they out white man the American or American the Americans or a white man the white man you know call it what you will. In northeastern Georgia adjacent portions of Tennessee by the 18 by the teens 20 and certainly before they were removed in 1838 they had farms plantations which were the envy of their neighbors.

They had a far more efficient system of town government than any of the boatload of thieves that James James or will Thor unleashed in Georgia. You know crooks criminals and outpouring from English jails they had a better school system than any other neighbors in that time and place on the church front. They were the objects of an unrelenting missionary effort. That too took that to talk very well because they quickly became Methodist by and large and a host of other minor you know less numerous sects of the time. And in fact Europe the society of the pre 1830 1830 it was the date of the Trail of Tears the year the trail of tears was far more advanced along the several areas. I might mention also there are newspapers. The Cherokee Phoenix if you know was better than a mock than the moccasin telegraph of today and carry news from one end of the country to the other. So for out white manning

the white man. And for civilizing too well they could not be forgiven when gold was discovered in northeastern Georgia 1830s tremendous an unrelenting pressure build up to remove them. Andrew Jackson who was president at the time and Iraq frontiersman raw and uncouth and who never did like Indians no friend of Indians no champion of Indians. He would have done it a lot sooner. Remove them from these valuable lands in Georgia and Tennessee. If not for the fact that Chief Justice John Marshall was just the opposite of Andrew Jackson he was a champion of Indians. Chief Justice Marshall was of the opinion that justice humanity morality in government and so on demanded that the Cherokee be dealt with this independent sovereign nations within the United States Jackson. And one of the earliest mask rip offs would have none of this

despite in 1833 Chief Justice John Marshall ruling that his way was proper and honorable. Jackson made one comment about this ruling which is echoed down through the centuries down through the decades and generations. Jack the chief justice has made his ruling let him try to enforce it. The Cherokee were removed and yet once again after losing thousands walking this 1000 plus miles however much it was from Georgia Tennessee to Indian Territory in Oklahoma in 1938. You think that if people could be whipped they would take decades generations to put their life back in order again. Not so. Within a few years they wants again re-established are complex and splendid system of government in Oklahoma. Again they were ended by their Arkansas neighbors. Again they build up their newspaper

system their society that fine fine plantations splendid orchards. They learn knitting weaving room had their own mills and so on. The same thing that they left in Georgia. Very civilized and in the current sense as civilized as any other people. On this land. But then came the Civil War and its aftermath and their dream died a second time. This time they were not to return not to their former heights of glory and so on. This time they were dispirited but they did it not wants but twice. Robert Frost has a point called The Road Not Taken. I think I don't have it committed to memory but it is so beautifully eloquent and so appropriate for a lesson that America should have learned way back in the eighteen teens and 20s that here were people who did make it

make it you know fulfill the American dream as a tribe. And what did they get for it. Killed at the economic success of the civilizing successes of the Iroquois especially economic. Branded into the national consciousness the idea that all Indians could be civilized if you gave them a chance that all Indians could if you gave them 160 acres of land and put a white farmer next to them to teach them at home they could emulate and copy in the civilizing arts that all Indians could really be farmers. Because of that your key success in converting demonstrating themselves to be easily convertible. The Church's National Council National Mission Board National Council of Churches and later got the notion and they've never gotten rid of it really. They're just it's just not been beating the hell out of them but in the general questioning American Society of institutional religions everywhere

that all Indians could be instantly convertible if they proved a bit recalcitrant like the puddle Indians that they swallow Catholicism you know Catholicism then swaddle them they subjugated it to the powerful and in religion. OK another thing that you were a key were good Indians. They were acceptable Indians they were a credit to their race. You know in the American sense they were ok especially if you could invoke a Cherokee Princess. You see this is why from this period because the Cherokees made it so big in civilising and in converting that to the present day generations of Americans still from that time on. If they claim any Indian at all and some like to just for fun you know many especially again today we have more application seekers in times like this than never than ever before. They as a tribe like model Zuma and Eastman as individuals fulfill the American dream. But for doing so they could not be forgiven.

We've come full circle. Well during the Civil War and Its Aftermath When the Cherokee dream was being shattered again for the second time and the south east was filled in the notion of manifest destiny a frontier. This era between 1860 and 1890 deep Brown has written so magnificently and Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee the a long time bestseller. It deals exclusively as closely with the ending wars of this period. The idea of manifest destiny a frontier turn from the southeast to the high plains and beyond to the Canadian border. Therefore it was appropriate especially when this was punctuated the end of the Cherokee dream was punctuated by the Civil War a time of crisis and national upheaval. A question of priorities alienation. Make no bones about it it was one of those times to like now. It was also appropriate therefore that in this

time of shuffling of priorities that the Indian stereotype also be shifted. There seems to be an attempt to cleanse all of America to purify herself. And so the ending gets caught up in the process too with everything else. Here then after the Civil War a dominant stereotype shifted to the SU they were the numerous the proudest the last to be conquered and the for most fierce of warriors. All attention turned to them because the Sioux resisted so heart and why not. There was born in this period the most pernicious the most awful and harmful notion regarding American Indians which survives on to the present time. The Indian as a symbol of violence. How many of you and N people have sat in American households. White households of supposedly good friends of long time standing and a kid start acting up being

unruly and the mother says with it sitting there in your presence to the kids. Stop behaving like wild Indians. You know what those kids are going to grow up believing. I hung my head in shame and almost left the place one or two years ago at the end of 1969 was exactly two years ago. Then Secretary of the interior Walter Hill came to talk at Princeton and kids were mad at him because of his statements about he didn't believe at that time that the ecology for ecology sake and so on. So what did they do. And shapes reminiscent of the Boston Tea Party. They dressed up as Indians put on war paint and went in the great auditorium at Princeton to heckle Secretary Hagel. I don't know how many of you realize and this also had its genesis in the soup period. That if there is a cosmic drama. Enact it by

almost every middle class white child in this country. Or let me just say. Any child who has bought the American dream or whose parents have European immigrants trying to raise or their children the American way. If there is one cosmic drama period they go through it is that of playing cowboys and Indians you know. Gone down to Woolworths buying rubber tipped barrels and dye turkey feathers and whooping it up. But you know it is a cosmic drama a great act that all children go through. It is that because while it is hurtful to the inter Indians period because a Cowboys always win. I was sitting in a school a Navajo reservation visiting briefly wants. When I saw a bunch of Navajo kids playing cowboys and Indians. And here the 6 or 8 year old kids the ultimate tragedy. They were cheering for the Cowboys. You all know that the culture creators and there are millions a millions of words hundreds of thousands of pages written on the end in warse. You know

that movies great the Westerns monotonously and for ever seem to have us chasing John Wayne and Ronald Reagan across the silver screen. Too bad we never called him. A place you know as likely as not you get a plains indian stereotype. OK that's three of my guests for the mythical super Indian stereotype. To follow. Yes. The Hopi. Here's Matt in nature. The most conservative tribe in North America men living in nature in a delicately adjusted environment very delicately adjusted eking out a living for who knows how many thousands of years they've been there. And most

importantly of all they have more of their religion they're always intact. It frightens me. There is also a ready made issue the Black Mesa strip mining crisis. Peabody Coal except wholly owned subsidiary of Kennicott copper mining operations to which will Bill result in a seven pollution strewing power plants to be built in the Southwest's and for the Navajos. That is blackmail is only a part small part really of their reservation not an insignificant part. But for the whole piece it is their whole life. And we've got messianic kids with Messianic glows pouring out of the nation's universities especially the east and west coasts who are turned on by Frank Carter's book of the Hopi or some other thing they've read and are pouring out to the southwest to save the Hopis. This is one of the things I mean I wish I could you know take some more. But there were times this is one of the things I mean by you white America can learn

so much about yourself by what has happened to us because we are like a mirror to you to understand yourself better. It should not be obvious that if America has a soul it is an Indian soul. And the sooner we realize this the better we are the better off we as a nation will be. For if we did not excess. America would have to invent us. America. I should like to think that we Indians have given you and your consciousness your soul and your national symbolism. We have also provided ourselves our communities and our land mostly unwillingly. As the workshop in which you have tested your ideas of democracy mostly we have suffered by these experiments. We have

provided the mirror in which you can see your national destiny a destiny we could not share. So speaking for myself I reject the present form of the American dream because not only have my people been denied it been denied a share in it. It has unfolded itself at their expense. Thank you. Thank you. If there are any other questions we're doing it with passion I'd just put that question to the president and I would like to speak to him. People always ask you know what do you Indians want. One of those specifics is that there are many Indian reservations. My colleague said talked about the Black Mesa. My

tribe originally own half of the state of Maine we settle for 45000 acres 17000 still exist and we can't even control that there is a specific give the dam land back to us instead of exploiting it and leasing it for 999 years. There's a specific check with the Hopi check with the Navajo check with the octomom and their land shrinking policies the Bureau of Indian Affairs that needs to be revamped every time we talk about specifics. India has come up with specific saying let us control the Bureau of Indian Affairs and somewhere along the line from President Nixon on down there's always somebody that stops it and we put it away for another 10 year period for another celebration we talk about it but we never do anything about it in terms of education. We talk about specifics. We want our native cultures reinforced in those schools not to be not for Indian children to be taught to be ashamed of themselves. There is a specific.

Congress and everybody else in this land do not listen to specifics. I like to talk about them they have like to have a list of them but nobody ever wants to do anything about that. OK another specific is this that the coca pause have a reservation in Arizona in the southern part. And what has happened is that the the town of Yuma Arizona is dumping raw sewage into the Colorado River. And if you think this trying to find out who gave the authority no one knows they won't commit themselves in terms of who gave the permission to dump dump raw sewage. And of course this is going to hamper the the fish life and other life in the river and eventually this will. Well that and the Colorado River is being polluted now they'll be become even more so. You know this is another specific possibility for you was hoping at one session like this would come where there wouldn't be you. I think

you are a super American WASP whether you are a fox or not. You're already concerned about the body count. You are the same sort of individual who was concerned about how the daily body count told Second World War Vietnam now you want to know how many and it's our luck to kill all that body count. Mentality Well it's a bad thought it's a variant of the same kind of thinking which is what I'm condemning your TONIGHT. Pasta to my heart you got you got want that you're going to listen to that answer. Because I go I go one for you. Just one other one more element to it. This is not just pierced dark intolerance on my part if it is not partly obvious to you that there are a lot of us and how we got you or you are not going to describe to you because there are no chance in the world article I can see that you and others like you can possibly understand.

But there are an awful lot of us. If it's not obvious to do to you that we're here because we are fighting tooth and nail and that if it's not obvious to you that part of my message in direct because it's not. Messengers what bus should best be and director was to call in their return to the real American dream that never had a chance to unfold that exists on paper that are returned. Commitment to first principles. I reject what it has done for myself. I say speaking for myself you know where the American dream has gone unfolded because my people have not been a part of the good things that are awful but I don't reject the unfulfilled potential of that dream. I try to call into the unfulfilled potential and that is of doing something if that isn't firing. If you consider that you are mourning and whining. We have absolutely no basis whatsoever for communication. I'm

comfortable pretending that people like you don't excess and going about my own way doing positive things who win. Are you. I think in the past two hours you have not listened to one word and I'm not. I was mad just a moment ago but I recollected after my eloquent brother here said what I wanted to say but let me tell you sir that if you think this is all in the past and were moaning and groaning and I will admit to the possibility that I sound moaning and groaning all the time but I would stop if the reasons for making me moan and groan stopped. My friend is in federal penitentiary right now for stealing a six pack of beer. So you're going to tell me it's all over it eight maybe. It'll we're trying to live

that's positive enough I think. I think specifically we could talk about a lot of things but I think that my brother here is trying to relate to you the kinds of things that we're trying to do and one of the basic things we're trying to survive as a people. Take a very bright watch. Over their history of her forehead. Right. So part of it help me. How much is the word that you're asking for. Well if we're not sure if there are scholars. Well there you go. You're not a. Very high hurdle if you're you're you know. The subject of the paper. Personally what you heard tonight is just the outline and condensation of what I hope will be you know in a few years

a very large volume whether it's substantial in another way or not I don't know but it is going to a very large volume in American history. Is it just a distillation for you know spoken purposes to what I hope will be just such a history my contribution anyway. Another thing underdone what are we doing kind of. Every one of us sitting at this table I think is spread so thin those sold in serving are not activist boards scrounging around trying to raise money trying to keep some poor reservation youngsters in school. The amazing thing is that we just are worn down within a very few years and become just parroted. It's just not the Indian way the amazing thing is that dark while I think of older ones we're still going strong at 87 living this kind of life like my grandfather. He died without ever having recognized the existence of the United States of America. He died a very happy man. Two squares one decides not to go out there yet that most people on the

Hopis and probably most people have a marvelous ability to deny the existence of something which is obnoxious to them. They just turn their back on as quick squint their eyes and give you that can thousand year old local and say you're not their man. I don't see you and it can be done successful if you have a lot of practice. Well the point is perhaps a little bit about ability is on the rest of us to all of us too. Can't speak for all have some education here can but I can't begin to tell you the stream flood tides literally of correspondence of requests of speech or speaking engagements of boards of. Demands by tribes of National Indian organizations and meetings consulting ships were being called to Washington to help drive you know policy and so on. No Indian who is a life and corporation can possibly be an actor.

Not in this day and age.