Just to Be Recognized

As the 1880’s drew to a close, “Buffalo Bill” Cody was touring America and Europe with a contingent of handsomely dressed Plains Indians. One of his biggest crowd pleasers was the elderly Sioux leader Sitting Bull, now a featured attraction in a “Wild West” show.

The Apache prisoner Geronimo, relocated from Florida to Oklahoma, suffered a similar fate. The aging leader was put on display at the 1898 Trans-Mississippi Exposition in Omaha, the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, and the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis. Geronimo sold his hand-made bows and arrows, posed for pictures, and pleaded unsuccessfully with authorities to allow him and his family to return to their beloved Arizona.

The Indian, it seemed, had become a symbol of the national heritage, a vanishing emblem of the heroic past to be idealized, honored, and remembered. By the 1890s, the American frontier had virtually disappeared. The four centuries of warfare that Native Americans had conducted to protect their homelands was coming to an end. In November 1890, Sitting Bull was killed during federal attempts to suppress the Ghost Dance religion in Dakota Territory. A month later, the U.S. Seventh Cavalry surrounded several hundred Indians at Wounded Knee Creek and raked the encampment with their rapid-firing Hotchkiss guns, killing 150.

For Indians in the South and elsewhere, the Massacre at Wounded Knee represented the close of one era and the beginning of another. The 20th century would be marked by continuing struggles over physical resources and constitutional rights — and by new struggles over the image of Indians being projected by the modern media.

 

The Indian Image

In 1892, despite the ravages of removal, the South was still home to a diversity of Indian cultures. Those who remained had mingled for centuries with black and white Southerners, at times preserving elements of their own heritage, at times adopting the ways of the surrounding society. The Houmas of Louisiana, for example, continued to live in isolation along remote bayous. But many other Indians lived in cities, traveled widely, and had more non-Indian than Indian relatives. The range of diversity was striking. In 1911, Americans were startled by the news that a Berkeley anthropologist had encountered an Indian named Ishi, the sole survivor of a Stone Age tribe in northern California. The following year, Jim Thorpe — a descendant of the Fox chief Black Hawk — won the Olympic decathlon and pentathlon in Stockholm.

But politicians and publicists were gradually reducing this remarkable variety to a single, confining stereotype. A generation of photographers was helping to shape an ethnic image of the noble Indian in a feathered headdress; Edward Curtis took thousands of portraits of solemn Indians in traditional dress. Cartoonists contributed as well, sketching caricatures of Native Americans wearing warbonnets and carrying tomahawks.

Rodman Wanamaker, a department store executive, captured the mood of the nation by suggesting a huge bronze statue at the entrance to New York Harbor to honor the passing of the Indian. The 165-foot figure of a young Indian, one hand raised in a sign of peace, would stand opposite the Statue of Liberty, rising 15 feet higher than the symbol of European immigration.

On George Washington’s Birthday in 1913, Wanamaker and other dignitaries gathered at Staten Island for a groundbreaking ceremony on land donated by Congress. Surrounded by 32 Indian chiefs transported to New York for the event, President William Howard Taft dug up the first shovelful of dirt and proclaimed that the proposed statue “tells the story of the march of empire and the progress of Christian civilization to the uttermost limits.”

The statue never materialized, but the U.S. Mint used the occasion to release its new Indian Head nickel. Iron Tail, an Oglala Sioux described as “America’s Representative Indian Chief,” served as one of several models for the stoic image, and his promoters later advertised him as “The Indian Chief That Made the Nickel Famous.” As if to link two endangered species, the Mint put a bison on the other side of the coin.

Many Americans who had never seen an actual Indian were spending their nickels attending early “Westerns” at the picture show. “With the coming of movies, the Indian was ensnared, then filmically embalmed, by a coincidence of history,” observes Raymond Stedman in his book Shadows of the Indian. Memories of the Plains Wars in the West remained fresh in the public mind as the motion picture industry assumed a commanding place in popular culture.

In 1908 moviegoers saw D. W. Griffith’s The Redman and the Child. Other directors followed with On the Warpath in 1909, The Indian Raiders and Saved from the Redmen in 1910, The Flaming Arrows and Incendiary Indians in 1911. That same year, representatives from four Western tribes traveled to Washington to protest the treatment of Indians in the popular new industry, but they were too late. Powerful media stereotypes regarding “good Indians” and “bad Indians” were already firmly in place.

 

Long Lance

In the South, these powerful images intersected with the reality of a world deeply divided by racial antagonism and misunderstanding. Consider the unusual case of Sylvester Long. He had been born in North Carolina in 1890, just days after the death of Sitting Bull and before the Massacre at Wounded Knee. His parents were former slaves whose ancestors apparently included white and black Southerners as well as Cherokee Indians.

Living in a poor section of Winston Salem, the Long family attended a white church until they were turned away and sent to worship with the African-Americans. While his father worked as a janitor at a white school, young Sylvester would slip into the library and read about Indians, trying to connect the romantic stories in the popular press with the narrow limitations of his own life. He visited the small Wild West shows that passed through North Carolina, and he learned a few words of Cherokee.

Adopting the name Long Lance, Sylvester gained admission to Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania. Carlisle was the best known of the boarding schools established by zealous reformers, who believed they could assist Native Americans by stripping Indian children of their past identity and forcing them to learn the ways of white culture. For Long Lance, Carlisle provided an opportunity to live with “real” Indians from the West and to see the complexities of their interaction with mainstream society.

Sylvester proved a fast learner. He ran races against his school mate, Jim Thorpe, and he watched as authorities cut the long hair of Geronimo’s son Robert and challenged his pride in being an Apache. In 1915, after a stint as the token Indian at a white military academy, Long Lance obtained an appointment to West Point from President Woodrow Wilson. Afraid that his mixed ancestry would be discovered and eager to enlist in the First World War, the bright student purposely failed his entrance exam and headed for Canada. The Canadians had already entered the war and were accepting American recruits. Soon Sergeant Long Lance was training in England.

Ironically, African-Americans and Indians like Long Lance who faced discrimination at home were among the most eager to enter the Great War. The service provided an escape from poverty and second-class status, and it offered a way to prove patriotism and skill to a doubting white public. As the U.S. entered the war in 1918, the percentage of Indians enlisting far exceeded that of whites. Predictably, the press showed special fascination for Native Americans willing to fight the Germans. “Many of the Indians who are on the front or in training camps,” asserted the Baltimore Star, “are sons of famous chiefs who so bravely and hopelessly opposed the march of civilization.” The New York Evening World pro claimed, “The war whoop of the greatest natural fighter the world has ever known — the American Indian — will be shrilled over the red fields of France. With a machine gun instead of a tomahawk, with new weapons but the old craft and courage ... the red tribes are on the warpath for the Germans.”

One “new weapon” that the Army exploited was the language of Indian troops. The 142nd Infantry used Choctaw-speaking soldiers to operate field telephones and confuse German intelligence. But if Indians “carried into battle the glorious bravery of their race, their indifference to physical injury and stoicism in moments of peril,” as one newspaper claimed, their personal valor did not protect them from shrapnel and mustard gas. Often given the most dangerous assignments, five percent of all Indian servicemen died in action —five times the rate for American forces as a whole. Many more died of influenza as the troops were returning home.

Long Lance escaped with only shrapnel wounds, but he refused to return to the South, where whites were lynching blacks at a rate of more than 100 a year. His brother Walter had accepted a black identity and settled in Winston-Salem, but Sylvester headed west, living among the Blackfeet in Canada and emerging as a spokesman for Native Americans.

To emphasize the legitimacy of his Indian heritage, Long Lance began presenting a false nativity: “I was born, child of the teepee, during a blizzard on the great plains of Montana.” Handsome and articulate, he gained attention as an Indian actor before a newspaper publicized his mixed ancestry and brought an end to his career. It would not be the last time a Southerner would gain popular recognition by projecting an Indian identity (see sidebar.)

 

Unearthing the Past

While Hollywood directors were creating one kind of Native American, university scholars and museum curators were creating another. The turn of the century brought the flowering of natural history museums in major American cities and the creation of anthropology departments on university campuses. In the wake of Darwin, modern science would be pressed into use to discover and explain the ancient origins and current differences among human beings.

The market for Indian artifacts rivaled that for dinosaur bones, and museums paid pot hunters to scour the landscape. “I shall make a trip through western North Carolina this spring,” A. J. Osborne announced in a circular, “at which time I propose buying all ‘INDIAN RELICS’ which you may have collected.”

Just as they had adjusted to white demands for deerskins in previous centuries, Southern Indians now adapted to the growing pressure for relics. Enterprising Catawbas carved soapstone imitations of the scarce items that Osborne desired, and the relic hunter delivered some of their replicas to the Valentine Museum in Richmond, Virginia, where he presented them as originals.

As the competition for artifacts continued, it gave rise to a subculture of amateur relic diggers and grave looters. Federal lawmakers were slow to protect Indian burial sites. The Antiquities Act of 1906 safeguarded artifacts on federal land, but contained no felony provision. In 1979, Congress finally passed the Archaeological Resources Protection Act, making it a federal crime to vandalize historic sites or transport artifacts across state lines.

Undaunted by the new law, pot hunters paid $10,000 to the owner of the Slack Farm in Uniontown, Kentucky for the chance to pillage more than 600 Indian graves dating from Mississippian times. The for-profit destruction prompted Congress to enact a tougher law protecting Native American graves in 1990.

Scholars who excavate gravesites have also been pressured to be more respectful of Indian remains. “Archaeologists used to gather up all the bones they could find,” says anthropologist Stephen Davis of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “But now we are careful about what materials we take to analyze, and we work with the State Indian Commission.” When Davis and his colleagues unearthed the 17th-century Indian town of Occaneechi on the Eno River near Hillsborough, the discovery encouraged several local residents to look into their Eno-Occaneechi ancestry.

From their earliest days, anthropologists have supplemented material evidence with oral traditions. At the beginning of the century, scholars like Frank Speck and John Swanton devoted their lives to recording diverse details of traditional Indian life in the South. James Mooney lived with the Cherokees and compiled extensive notes on their myths and sacred formulas. Mooney’s chief informant was a man named Swimmer who had been born in 1835, shortly before removal. He spoke no English, and “his mind was a storehouse of Indian tradition.” When Swimmer died in 1899, Mooney wrote: “Peace to his ashes and sorrow for his going, for with him perished half the tradition of his people.”

 

The Tourist Trade

During the 1920s and ’30s, interest in Indian arts and crafts spread beyond museums to encompass tourists, designers, and collectors of all kinds. Assistant Chief Fred Sanders of the Catawba Nation recalls that his grandmother supported the family during the Great Depression by selling pottery outside the gate of Winthrop College in South Carolina.

Strengthened by the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, many Southern Indian groups consolidated their present by drawing on their past. The Mikasuki Seminoles of southern Florida, forced to modify their subsistence life when drainage began on the Florida Everglades in 1906, exploited the increasing tourist trade to nearby Miami. With the opening of Great Smoky Mountain National Park in western North Carolina, the Cherokees also found themselves in a position to sell traditional goods to a seasonal flow of tourists.

But tourism has proved a mixed blessing to the Cherokees and other Indians, much as the deerskin trade had for their 18th-century ancestors. Although the steady flow of visitors has provided a much needed market for traditional arts and crafts, it has also reinforced patronizing stereotypes of what constitutes a proper Indian. The Cherokees have discovered, for instance, that many tourists want to be photographed beside an Indian wearing the warbonnet headdress and buckskin costume of the Plains warriors they have seen in the movies.

The Mississippi Band of Choctaws has also relied on tourism to survive, but it has provided a meager existence. Having staved off efforts to move them to Oklahoma at the start of the century, the Choctaws gained official recognition of their Mississippi territory in 1918. Enduring depression agriculture and segregated education, they watched as their Neshoba County was torn apart by the violence used against the civil rights movement in the early 1960s. In 1964 several Choctaws found the charred remains of the car in which three civil rights workers — Schwerner, Goodman, and Cheney —had been murdered by Klansmen. In 1966 the average Mississippi Choctaw family had a yearly income below $1,000.

Since then, however, conditions have improved. In 1968 the Choctaws joined with the other federally recognized Indians of the region — the Cherokees and Seminoles — to organize the United Southeastern Tribes of American Indians. Government grants and new businesses — such as Choctaw Electronics, which makes speaker components for Chrysler cars —have brought money into the reservation. Conditions remain poor; one in every eight Choctaw families still made less than $3,000 in 1986. But the number of Choctaw high school graduates has more than tripled in the past 15 years. The Choctaw language is currently being taught in three reservation schools, and the ancient Choctaw stickball game is being played in an intramural league.

Creek rejuvenation has been equally steady, thanks in part to the efforts of Calvin McGhee, a descendant of the Creek guide who earned a large tract of land as his reward for assisting Andrew Jackson. In the late 1940s, McGhee and others sued their local school board for a decent education for their children. The legal battle resulted in a judgment by the Indian Claims Commission that brought money and renewed pride to the 600 Eastern Creeks living around Atmore, Alabama. In 1971, a year before McGhee’s death, the tribe incorporated as the Creek Nation East of the Mississippi.

 

“A High Mountain”

Other Indian groups that lived in even closer contact with black and white Southerners have had more difficulty reasserting their identity. The 80,000 Native Americans in North Carolina constitute the largest Indian population of any state east of the Mississippi, yet many have no group identity beyond the name of their location, such as the Person County Indians or the Sampson County Indians. In 1965 the Indian residents of rural Halifax and Warren Counties combined the two county names to create a “tribal” name — Haliwa.

Farther south, ethnic identity in Robeson County is even more complicated. In the 1880s a white politician and amateur historian linked local Indians to those who had met the “Lost Colony” of Sir Walter Raleigh and gave them the name “Croatan.” But within a generation, non-Indians had shortened the name to “Cro” and were using it as a slur. In 1911 the state legislature shifted the designation to “Indians of Robeson County.” The title was soon modified to “Cherokees of Robeson County,” and later to “Siouan Indians of Robeson County.” Census takers simply listed one-third of the county’s people as “Indians.”

Finally, in 1953, a community referendum prompted the state to change the name to “Lumbee,” a reference to the nearby Lumber River. Five years later, several of the newly designated Lumbees made national headlines when they broke up a Ku Klux Klan rally near Maxton. During the 1970s the Indian community challenged white domination of county politics, eliminating a biased system of “double-voting” in school elections and helping to elect the first non-white county officials. Though long-recognized at the state level, Lumbee Indians failed last winter to obtain federal recognition through an act of Congress.

Today Robeson County maintains an unusual balance among the forces that have shaped the South over the past five centuries. The population is almost evenly divided among blacks, whites, and Indians. Most of the Native Americans consider themselves part of the Lumbee community, which numbers roughly 30,000 — but great diversity remains. Struggling to rediscover their own heritage, some Indians continue to explore their personal links to earlier tribes such as the Saponi, Cheraw, Hatteras, and Tuscarora.

Leola Locklear lives in the town of Maxton in Robeson County. A short, determined woman in her sixties, her cupboards are full of records and clippings dealing with her Hatteras-Tuscarora ancestors. “If we could ever set down our history,” she tells visitors, “that would be a high mountain.”

Like thousands of Southerners descended from Native Americans, her heart is set on achieving official acknowledgment and public respect for her Indian status before she dies.

“Just to be recognized,” she says in her quiet, thoughtful murmur. “That would mean so much.”