Yet we have other un-Americanized enclaves of much longer standing. I refer to a number of the Indian tribes. In the first seventy years of the twentieth century, major progress was made in Americanizing these people. Some tribes lost their languages entirely. In most of the others, many of the younger people had limited or no ability to speak their tribal language. Then, in the last one hundred years, and particularly in the last seventy years, this healthy trend has been reversed. The children are taught the tribal language from infancy. Most tribes have modernized their languages for twenty-first century use by developing new words from old roots, or "adapting" American words by adding native prefixes or suffixes.
If we are to exert legal pressures on these recent immigrants to adopt the American language and culture, we must first eradicate these cultural regressions by the Indian tribes, who, after all, have been recalcitrant for a much longer time.
Mr. Bendicks: It's reassuring to know, Mr. Secretary, that we have you in there fighting to Americanize the American Indian. Now, let me ask one more time: Why, exactly, does the Administration want to cancel the treaties with the Indian tribes and transfer the reservations to the public domain? I'd like you to state it explicitly, if possible, for the record. Sec. Pendleton: Senator, the unfortunate cultural recalcitrance of these Indian tribes is rooted in the reservations. The administration has no argument with Indians as a whole. The number who live away from the reservations is five times the number who live on the reservations. Twelve times if we include those who identify themselves as Indian or part Indian and as having more than one-eighth Indian blood, so to speak. The majority of these are from mixed tribal stocks-Cherokee and Kiowa for example, or Jemez and Acoma. They speak only English, and essentially have been assimilated into the mainstream of American culture. To remove the Indian populations from the reservations would result in the completion of Indian assimilation. Mr. Bendicks: Thank you, Mr. Secretary. I presume you're aware of the proposals by the Bureau of Reclamation for the large scale pumping of desalinized water to a number of the western reservations, and the establishment of urbanization projects on them. No doubt reservation land would become very valuable then. Who do you suppose would profit from this, if the land was first taken from the tribes and then made available for purchase from the public domain by developers?. .
The army landed at Lukachukai on February 6, 2075. Also at fifteen or twenty other places on the Navajo Reservation. It was a Wednesday. Not that February or Wednesday mean anything now; the calendar is more complicated here. But I remember those things because I am an old man. I forget yesterday, but I remember well what happened long ago.
My wife and I lived at Mescalero, New Mexico, then, but sometimes we did consulting, mostly on Apache reservations. Strictly speaking, the Navajo are Apaches. Were Apaches. The Spaniards got the name Apache from the Zunis, who used it for all the Athapaskan-speaking tribes that raided them. The Spaniards called the biggest of those tribes "Apache de Navajo," Apaches of the Fields, because they cultivated corn and squash. The Spaniards never did conquer them.
If you know much about Indians, you might guess from my name, Carl Boulet, that I didn't start out as Dinneh, as Apache or Navajo. I'm a Chippewa-Sioux mixed blood. My great grandmother told me that the French last name came from one of Louis Riel's m?tis refugees from the Manitoba Insurrection in the 1860s.
But that's not what you want to hear about. You want to know what it was like to come in exile to this world, and what it was like here in the old days. I will tell you the best I can. I did not talk English for many Earth-years till you came here. Once it was my best language; I had three university degrees, and talked it like you do, better than Chippewa. Better than Mescalero. Now it comes forth differently, even though my words are English. That's because I have come to think differently, living as we do here.
The September before the army came to Lukachukai, my wife and I-her name was Marilyn-established a program in applied domestic ecology in several Navajo schools, on a trial basis. It is strange to remember things like that. I was a different person in those days. At the end of January, we went back to see how it was going. On February 6, she was at Window Rock while I'd driven up to Lukachukai the day before.
It was noon. I'd eaten lunch, and was in the gym shooting baskets with a couple of teachers. I have not remembered shooting baskets for a very long time. Then the principal hurried in. The army, he said, had just landed at Window Rock, and federal marshals had arrested the tribal government. Troops had landed at Tuba City and Dinnehotso, too; they'd probably land at every town on the reservation that day.
Just then it was snowing hard at Lukachukai, which may have been why they hadn't landed there yet. The men I'd been shooting baskets with didn't even look at each other. They started for the door. Lemmi Yazzi paused long enough to call back to me, "Maybe you better come too."
I hesitated for maybe a second, then grabbed my parka where it hung in the teachers' lounge and followed them outdoors. They scattered; I stayed with Lemmi and we trotted to his pickup; we got in, he lifted it on its air cushion, and we left the parking lot in a hurry.
"Where are we going? I asked him.
"A place we've set up in the Chuskas," he said. "One of the places."
Instead of going northeast into the Chuska Mountains on the maintained road, he drove west a little way, then turned north on a small dirt road, not made by engineers but cleared through junipers and pinyons by stockmen, for their trucks. You couldn't see very far through the snow, which was fine with us. The snowfall thinned and thickened but never stopped. As we got farther north, the land grew higher, and the pinyon and juniper began to be displaced by ponderosa pine. And there the snow wasn't just today's new fall. There was snow left from before.
I worried about Marilyn. It sounded as if, at Window Rock, there'd been no warning. I wondered if I was doing the right thing to go with Lemmi Yazzi. But if she was interned at Window Rock and I was interned fifty miles away at Lukachukai. . I turned the radio on in the pickup and got the tribal station out of Window Rock. It was playing "America the Beautiful." In English. That made it real to me; the government had taken over.
We'd been warned, kind of. The summer before, a rumor swept the reservations all over the United States, that the government was going to start taking over and selling Indian lands and relocating reservation Indians.
Ten years earlier, hardly anyone would have taken a rumor like that seriously. But in '72, the Soviets had begun rounding up some of the Turkic and Mongol peoples in Asia and relocating them by force to a world called Haven. It was scary to read about.
Countries had been sending volunteer immigrants to Haven for years, and once, out of curiosity, I'd read up on the planet. Not in the newsfax, but in technical journals. Haven sounded like a bad place.
Some tribes, the Mescaleros and Navajos among others, had set up unofficial committees of resistance. Not that we thought it would really happen, but just in case. Hideouts were built or dug in, in hidden places in canyons and forests, and supplies were hidden in them. It was to one of those that Lemmi was driving us.
We were the first ones to reach it. It was two hogans topped with a foot of dirt and twenty inches of snow, on one side of a shallow draw, shaded by pines and firs. The hogans would be hard to see from the air, with the naked eyes. Maybe an instrument search would show them.