Vicki Lee, a thirty-year-old Shoshone Indian from San Diego, said to the San Francisco Examiner and Chronicle, “My little girl said they held a gun to her chest and she asked, ‘Are they going to kill me?’ and my son hid under the bed but came out when they put a gun to his head. I don’t think my husband should carry arms for the U.S. [in Vietnam] when his children are at gunpoint at home.” She finished by declaring, “We will return to Alcatraz. If not Alcatraz, someplace else. We are prepared to die.”[49]
Although the Indians of All Tribes were eventually strong-armed by the U.S. government, Vicki Lee was right: The movement’s fuse had been lit, and demonstrations and occupations were exploding all over the country in what became known as the Self-Determination Era. In 1970 alone, inspired by the actions on Alcatraz Island, Indian groups staged invasions, occupations, or general protests at Fort Lawton, Washington; Fort Lewis, Washington; the BIA office in Denver; Ellis Island; the BIA office in Alameda; Pyramid Lake, Nevada; Rattlesnake Island, California; Middletown, California; Stanly Island, New York; Belmont Harbor, Illinois; Lassen National Forest, California; Hiawatha National Forest, Michigan; Tacoma, Washington; Mount Rushmore; Burney, California; Badlands National Monument, South Dakota; Davis, California; Santa Rosa, California; Healdsburg, California; Wohler Bridge, California; Plymouth, Massachusetts; and the Southwest Museum in Los Angeles.
Some actions were as creative as Richard Oakes’s unsanctioned toll collection on through-roads of a Pomo Indian reservation in California. Rifle in hand, he stopped motorists and charged them a dollar for passing through Indian land. Oakes was arrested and initially charged with armed robbery but eventually let go on the promise that he would cease his toll collections.[50]
In the years following the Alcatraz occupation, dozens of similar demonstrations persisted. The trend of militant indigenous actions in the 1960s and ’70s was not the product of innately savage minds, as many government figures from colonial to recent times have asserted. It was the result of centuries of trauma induced by an abusive paternal government who gave Native peoples few options but resistance. Walter Prescott Webb wrote in The Great Plains that “when men suffer, they become politically radical; when they cease to suffer, they favor the existing order.” This truth extends not only to the sordid history of Native Americans, but also to white settlers who were later subject to similarly discriminatory understandings of property.
The Indians of All Tribes claimed their land by right of discovery—by virtue of having been there first—but the U.S. government claimed their portion of North America by “title by genocide.”[51] Property law was a nasty game, and until Indians could play dirty on the level with colonizers they would never retrieve the land they had lost during the primary years of imperialism.
That said, in 1983, the Connecticut Pequot tribe legally and bureaucratically re-annexed an acreage of their original land base in accordance with the 1790 Trade and Intercourse Act. Local whites were furious. Then-Connecticut Attorney General Joe Lieberman called the move “welfare for the rich,” as three years later the Pequots would go on to own the lucrative Foxwoods Casino in southeast Connecticut. Steve Kemper complained in Yankee Magazine, “Tribes like the Pequots have reached the point where land annexation is not about preserving a culture or achieving self-sufficiency. It is about expansion of an already successful business in a way that harms their neighbors.”[52]
Whether or not this is an accurate assessment, white policy makers in the third richest state in the country still found reason to feel victimized by the Pequot tribe. After all, if Indians weren’t a people of the past to pity for their poverty, then they were legitimate competition for capital. As Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr. wrote in The White Man’s Indian,
Since Whites primarily understood the Indian as an antithesis to themselves, then civilization and Indianness as they defined them would forever be opposites. Only civilization had history and dynamics in this view, so therefore Indianness must be conceived of as ahistorical and static. If the Indian changed through the adoption of civilization as defined by Whites, then he was no longer truly Indian according to the image, because the Indian was judged by what Whites were not. Change toward what Whites were made him ipso facto less Indian.[53]
By this definition of “Indian,” the affluent Pequots of Connecticut were nothing of the sort. Suddenly everyone else in the state was the loser, impoverished at the hands of a gang of merciless Indian socialites. Duthu describes this event as challenging “one of America’s most enduring mythologies—the myth of the ‘vanishing Indian.’”[54] And what might challenge that mythology more: the idea that the Indians were not completely exterminated when that sort of thing was more globally acceptable, or the idea that they had learned property law? According to Duthu, the land claim lawsuit of the Pequots exemplifies a surge of similar claims that have re-established and sometimes enhanced the dimensions of ancestral homelands. Utilizing federal laws from the 1930s Indian Reorganization Era, tribes continue to win back the land that was stolen from them centuries ago.
In United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians in 1980, the tribe won a money judgment that has accrued over $500 million, but that remains untouched in the U.S. Treasury because the Sioux maintain that the lawsuit was never about money—they wanted their ancestral lands back.[55]
The U.S. government was not prepared for the indigenous resurgence demonstrated in the latter half of the twentieth century. The Supreme Court admitted in a court opinion of South Dakota v. Yankton Sioux Tribe in 1998 that
within a generation or two, it was thought, the tribes would dissolve, their reservations would disappear, and individual Indians would be absorbed into the larger community of white settlers. With respect to the Yankton Reservation in particular, some Members of Congress speculated that “close contact with the frugal, moral, and industrious people who will settle [on the reservation would] stimulate individual effort and make [the tribe’s] progress much more rapid than heretofore.”[56]
In the late-nineteenth century, when, in spite of the law, the indigenous peoples of Yellowstone continued to hunt for food within the park’s bounds, they were vilified as an “unmitigated evil.” But later, as white poachers moved into the park and began illicit hunting practices, suddenly the clean, bold line between whites and Indians was blurred. If the Indians were the ones with no respect for the law, then what was a white man of similar lawlessness? Thus, locals created two categories of Indian: red Indians and white Indians. This usage suggests that “the privilege of whiteness could depend on one’s environmental practices.”
Similarly, today, if a proficient level of legal manipulation makes a white man a white man, then what do you call an Indian property lawyer? As Duthu writes, “Only the restorative legal magic of one legal fiction—the federal ‘lands into trust’ process—can counter the destructive magic of another legal fiction, the loss of tribal lands through ‘discovery.’”[57]
Captain Richard H. Pratt wanted to kill the Indian to save the man. What he didn’t anticipate was that the man who would emerge might understand the legal fiction of American property laws better than the Indian who came before him.
a. Fee simple: A permanent and absolute tenure of an estate in land, with freedom to dispose of it at will.
b. According to the official line, “termination” referred to extinguishing the formal relationship between the U.S. government and Native American tribes. The subtext here, however, is that they would arrive at a terminated relationship by first terminating the distinct people—a process known as assimilation.
c. A poverty inflicted by the introduction of capitalism to non-capitalist societies.
d. Johnson writes, “According to Native Americans, the failure of the BIA to recognize their independence tended to generate feelings of paternalism