Growing up, my Ojibwe mother was very vigilant about hiding her native self. She never spoke her original language at home or in public. And while her brown skin was a giveaway, she managed to find solace and safety in silence.
Safety in silence was common for many Indians of my mother’s generation. Drawing attention to your Indianness meant opening up yourself to scrutiny and stereotype. This was life in a white man’s world. The only way to “make it,” was to literally lower your head and quietly go with the oftentimes hard life created by the white man.
Yet there are those who understand that to improve the lives of our people it is critical to risk exposure and ridicule. In her new book, “Standing Up to Colonial Power” (University of Nebraska Press), Renya Ramirez chronicles the activist lives of her Ho-Chunk and Ojibwe grandparents Henry and Elizabeth Cloud.
The Clouds grew up in the early years of the 20th century during an era of systematic federal government efforts to disconnect Indians from their homelands, culture, ceremony, and language, much of it through boarding schools for children and land theft.
After surviving boarding school Henry Cloud saw his best path to improving the lives of Indians was through embracing Christianity, higher education, and a life in administrative politics. It was a price he gladly paid.
While Elizabeth fought the war against “termination,” serving with the National Congress of American Indians, Henry set out to influence Indian policy through the Indian Reorganization Act. The Act was designed to replace traditional forms of tribal governance for white forms of rule—and in the end, as Ramirez lays out, led to mass corruption throughout Indian Country. But the hope at the time was that the act would strengthen tribal sovereignty and counteract abuse, neglect, and oppression by the federal government.
Together, the Clouds labored to document federal boarding school abuses. They also ran a college, the American Indian Institute.
Ramirez pulls from archives and personal letters to give us a full picture of her grandparents’ activist work, including the contradictions, at a time when Indian activism was virtually unheard of.
“Cloud as a ‘good’ Indian and an Indian agent, represented an instrument of the state, the Bureau of Indian Affairs,” Ramirez writes. “He was implicated in the very government apparatus created to keep indigenous dependent on colonial institutions—a role that pitted him against ‘bad’ Indians. In other words, ‘traditional’ Natives often saw Cloud as their enemy.”
Many people think Indian activism began in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when a ragtag group of hippie Indians occupied Alcatraz, the Bureau of Indian Affairs building in Washington, D.C., and a small dilapidated church at Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Reservation of South Dakota.
The American Indian Movement (AIM) gained traction in the public’s imagination. Unlike the Clouds, who worked in the shadows of the white man, members of AIM used visibility in the news media to pressure the federal government to address tribal corruption, oppression from police authorities, and economic improvements on reservations.
But like the Clouds, the war waged by AIM led to long term change for Indians and a greater acknowledgement of tribal sovereignty from the federal government. Like all fires of passionate social justice, the flame of AIM dimmed over the years. But despite enduring its share of scandal and corruption, the legacy of AIM modern Indian activism remains.
Today, Indian activism is alive in the halls of academia, and the quid pro quo of politics. Two native women have joined the U.S. Congress. And tribes are reclaiming their rightful role of world nations, demanding that officials in Washington, D.C., deal with them on a nation-to-nation basis.
For many Indians, silence continues to be a form of survival. But many others are willing to step out of the shadows to guard the traditional ways of living.