Native Americans in the Poor People's Campaign, 1968

From the National Park Service series "The Struggle for Sovereignty: American Indian Activism in the Nation's Capital, 1968–1978". Words of the activists quoted in the source are paraphrased here.

On June 19, 1968, Martha Grass, a Ponca woman from Oklahoma and mother of 11, stood before as many as 100,000 people on the National Mall to bear witness to Native American poverty. She spoke of broken treaties that had stripped Native communities of land and identity and left many destitute. To applause, she invited government officials to visit her run-down house in Oklahoma to see how poor people lived — offering to share what little remained of her commodities, the woefully inadequate federal food assistance.

The campaign

Her speech came at Solidarity Day, the climax of the Poor People's Campaign, which ran through May and June 1968. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had conceived it: by 1967 he argued that civil rights alone would not bring justice, and that the country must fight inequality of class as well as race. President Lyndon B. Johnson had declared a War on Poverty in 1964, yet four years later about one-fifth of Americans were still below the poverty line — and on Indian reservations roughly 60 percent. King envisioned an interracial coalition of the poor gathered in the capital to demand jobs and a basic income for all.

King was assassinated while organising it, but the Southern Christian Leadership Conference carried the plan through. Caravans brought people from across the country to petition for economic and social reforms through marches, demonstrations and sit-ins, and, as King had planned, they camped on the National Mall. Their tent city, Resurrection City, was a rallying point that put poverty on the doorstep of the country's leaders.

Colonialism, not only civil rights

Native Americans shaped the campaign from the start. In the month before the mass demonstration, the Committee of 100 — the movement's vanguard — took its demands to Congress. At least ten of its members represented Native interests, among them Tillie Walker (Mandan-Hidatsa) of the National Indian Youth Council, Mel Thom (Walker River Paiute), a founder of that council, and Henry Lyle "Hank" Adams (Assiniboine-Sioux), a leader in the fight for fishing rights in the Pacific Northwest.

Native people marched arm in arm with African Americans, Latinos and white Appalachians, all of them shaped by unequal education, housing and work. But Native poverty had a distinct cause: America's expansion, broken treaties and continuing colonialism. Rather than civil rights as the wider movement understood them, Native activists demanded the right to decide their own futures as separate tribal communities and to control their own land and resources.

Meeting Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall and Commissioner of Indian Affairs Robert L. Bennett, Mel Thom presented the Native contingent's statement. It named colonialism as the root of Native poverty and blamed the federal government directly: the Interior Department, it said, had failed Indians because it rested on a racist, paternalistic, colonial system that could not be reformed, only abolished — paternalism was the disease, and the Secretary was its carrier. Tribes had governments, land and ability, it argued, but were allowed to control nothing and make no real choice except to leave.

Those struggles were playing out across the country.

• The Missouri River: Tillie Walker had turned to activism after dams on the Missouri in North Dakota took more than 150,000 acres — over 90% — of her tribe's farmland, leaving it ever more dependent on the federal government.
• The Nisqually River: tribes around Puget Sound were fighting Washington State over fishing rights guaranteed by the 1854 Treaty of Medicine Creek. At the height of the campaign, the Supreme Court upheld the convictions of 24 Nisqually and Puyallup members for fishing ancestral waters with traditional gill nets against state law.

The message was that ending Native poverty meant dismantling the colonial relationship between the federal government and the tribes.

Caravans to Washington

More than 200 American Indian activists took part, travelling in the caravans that left cities across the country in mid-May by car, bus and even mule train. Most came with the Western caravan, which left Los Angeles and San Francisco on May 15 and 16 and joined up in Denver on May 18; a smaller Indian Trail caravan left Seattle on May 17. Both stopped at reservations to rally support.

The Western caravan reached Washington on May 23. Though most of the Native contingent did not stay in Resurrection City, they joined as many as 3,000 other campaigners in daily protests at the Capitol, the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. The testimony of Native women about feeding, housing and clothing their children made a particular impression on officials.

At the Supreme Court and the BIA

On May 27 the Supreme Court decided Puyallup Tribe v. Department of Game: the tribes had a treaty right to fish at their usual places off the reservation, but Washington State could still regulate that fishing. In effect, the ruling subjected the tribes to state authority despite their federal rights.

Hank Adams was ready. Born to an Assiniboine family on Montana's Fort Peck Reservation and raised on the Quinault Reservation, he had organised fish-ins against state fishing restrictions in 1964, inspired by the Civil Rights sit-ins. On May 29 more than 400 campaigners, many of them Chicano activists, protested at the Supreme Court with Indian chants and a rendition of "La Cucaracha", and a delegation led by Adams presented a protest statement to Chief Clerk John Davis. The press dwelt on a few broken windows and a circus atmosphere, but many protesters counted it a victory for putting Native concerns at the centre of national politics.

Two days later, 60 Native demonstrators surprised the Indian Claims Commission at the Bureau of Indian Affairs to demand fair compensation for land taken in the past century. Frank Allen of the Stillaguamish tribe offered to buy an acre from any commissioner for $1.10 — the price per acre the government had offered his tribe. Reportedly there were no takers. In the following weeks Native activists led sit-ins and protests at the Supreme Court, the BIA and the Departments of the Interior and Agriculture.

The end of Resurrection City

After Solidarity Day the campaign unravelled. Resurrection City's permit, already extended once, was due to expire at 8:00 p.m. on June 23, and the National Park Service refused a second extension. George Crow Flies High (Hidatsa) handed Ralph Abernathy a "Proclamation of Temporary Cession", signed by the Native contingent, declaring that the government had taken the land illegally, that Native people were reclaiming it, and that they granted the campaign permission to stay. The authorities did not recognise it. Just after 11:00 a.m. on June 24 they began clearing the camp, and about 230 remaining protesters lined up peacefully to be arrested.

An ending that was a beginning

Seven weeks of protest had won only a modest expansion of food stamps and child nutrition aid, none of the major legislative goals, and nothing on Native issues. The campaign is a largely forgotten chapter of the Civil Rights Movement. But for many Native participants it opened a new era. It had shown that theirs was the struggle of colonised peoples for sovereignty, not simply an extension of civil rights, and activists increasingly turned to direct action to assert sovereignty and reverse termination.

Weeks later, activists in Minnesota founded the American Indian Movement. The next year, the Indians of All Tribes occupied Alcatraz Island. The two would come together in the next great Native demonstration in Washington, the Trail of Broken Treaties.

Sources

• National Park Service, "Native Americans in the Poor People's Campaign", in The Struggle for Sovereignty: American Indian Activism in the Nation's Capital, 1968–1978. https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/native-activism-poor-peoples-campaign.htm
• Correction: the source says President Johnson declared the War on Poverty "in 1968, but four years later"; he declared it in 1964, as the "four years later" requires.
• The source's photograph of Solidarity Day, from the D.C. Public Library's Washington Star Collection, is not reproduced.
• Words on this page from people and organisations outside the federal government are paraphrased; rewritten in hubnx's own words.