Visible Nicknames and Invisible Warriors

By Charlie Barber
Staff Writer

As he once again boldly steps into the middle of the road over the UND nickname controversy [Bismarck Tribune, 4/22/10], Governor John Hoeven is in good company with Jim Hightower’s “yellow streak and dead armadillos.” Hoeven thereby joins his cynical colleague, Attorney General Wayne Stenehjem, in trolling for votes by courting diehard opposition to change that works.

In opposing the new Health Care Law, Stenehjem says he wants to trash the first health care legislation in American history to cover Native Americans on an equitable basis with the rest of us, in addition to its other major virtues.

Hoeven is a piker by comparison. He only wants to give Native Americans in North Dakota a chance to trash each other and the Board of Higher Education before the November 30, 2010 deadline, so conveniently set just after the Fall elections.

Republican Hoeven’s support of the image of a Native American is a far cry from the Nonpartisan League tradition of support for real Native Americans since the late 1920s. Documents in the William Langer Papers at UND show that NPLer Frank Vogel encouraged Wild Bill and the NPL to recruit Native Americans to their political party.

Frank’s son, the late Judge Robert Vogel, explained to me how the NPL ran a Native American statewide before World War II. In 2010, the Democratic/NPL proudly runs Native American Merle Boucher for Agriculture Commissioner, a position once held by Frank Vogel’s granddaughter, Sarah Vogel.

Keepin’ it real, unlike Republicans who appeal to fears and fantasies while picking people’s pockets through pointless law suits, timid governance and self-serving legislation. As a newcomer to North Dakota in 2003, but not to politics, I was proud to run as a Democratic/NPLer for the Legislature in 2004, although the necessity to be nicer than I was used to being in Chicago cost me a case of the shingles.

Politics is warfare in Chicago,—as true for “bleeding-heart” reformers like myself, as for Democratic “machine” stalwarts who coined the phrase, “politics ain’t beanbag.”

In the 1970’s reformers cut down on retail vote fraud in Chicago [wholesale fraud being a Republican specialty], by placing volunteers in each precinct willing to testify to observed electoral skulduggery in open court. I did this as a judge with Democratic credentials, but we also required one in each precinct with Republican credentials who had no stake in the outcome. My most memorable companion in this mundane trial of civic courage was a Native American woman, spoiling to catch an act of vote fraud by a judge or precinct captain, so that she could “do him in,” so-to-speak. A real warrior.

My thoughts about this brave young lady were rekindled when I took part in a reenactment of the Lewis and Clark journey in 2005 and 2006 with the Discovery Expedition of St. Charles, MO. I was thus privileged to meet and celebrate with many Native Americans I would not otherwise have chanced to know, among them: Ojibwé-Cree, Chinook, Nez Percé, Blackfoot, Lakota, Crow, Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikira.

By the time I finished canoeing, marching and dancing my way from Montana to the west coast and back to North Dakota, I discovered I was amidst remarkable people—almost all men having served in the U.S. military or men and women currently doing so. Their regimental insignias were on display at colors in the morning and the evening. The Lewis and Clark Expedition was a military one, after all, and we observed those rituals all along the way, often in companionship with the National Guard.

I am well aware of efforts by the United States to obliterate Indian peoples, first physically until 1900, then culturally with the boarding school movement. Finally, neglect and despair took over, evident in disgraceful health care for Native Americans we swore to preserve and protect in exchange for theft of their homelands.

Nevertheless, Native Americans continued to honor their warrior tradition under the American Flag through service in the U.S. Armed Forces, most notably the Marine Corps in decades nearest memories of the behavior of the U.S. Army in the 1800’s. In return, white Americans honored that warrior tradition with nicknames and mascots for sports teams. Image instead of humanity was not a fair exchange, but arguably better practice than scalp bounties for men, women, and children, or firing low into the teepees of Chief Joseph’s people at the Battle of Big Hole.

Human mascots are tricky. One person’s proud symbol is another person’s insulting cartoon. For every whimsical representation, such as a Viking for people who relish jokes about Ole, Lena and lutefisk, there is the national and international disgrace of the Washington, D.C. NFL team logo, the “Redskins.”

It is a tribute to our continuing moral confusion that the nation’s capital is home to the most racist term still used by sports teams in our country to depict a Native American, even as we elect an African-American to be President. In truth, most figures and events celebrated by other Americans spelled disaster and defeat for Native Americans. The American Revolution, celebrated on July 4, was tragic for Native Americans, as the British deeded land in 1783 which they had promised to their Indian allies in 1763. The aftermath of Lewis and Clark, and the Civil War was worse.

Presidents we celebrate on Mt. Rushmore are not easily celebrated by Native Americans. George Washington led forces which drove Indians away to the west, north, and south. Thomas Jefferson urged extermination of Shawnee and removal of Cherokee beyond the Mississippi. Abraham Lincoln executed Santee Sioux and engineered a land grab by railroads, spelling the end of buffalo cultures in the West. Teddy Roosevelt, despite fondness for a few Indian Rough Riders, believed in the natural inferiority of Native Americans. Presidents who empowered Native Americans, like Lyndon Johnson and Richard NIxon, are probably not candidates for Mt. Rushmore.

Ah, but that other guy out there—Crazy Horse—he was a real warrior to represent Native Americans. Not until such real warriors are celebrated for who they were and are, in the nation’s capital, can we expect wounds to heal that are only exacerbated by nicknames and mascots.
You can’t have a “man-to-man” discussion with a cartoon. Until UND retires its logo, it will continue to be difficult for Native Americans and non-Native Americans in North Dakota to talk to each other as real people; all of us different as individuals, yet all of us the same as human beings.

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