AROUND THE CAMPFIRE: We All Have Heroes

I have had more heroes in my life than most people, I think. They started appearing to me when I was still a boy, and are still coming forth now that I am an old man. Most but not all were Indians. I wrote two books about 87 of the Indian heroes; it was published in 2007.

I was sitting on a bus in the dark at Utapao, Thailand in 1968 when I heard about one of my heroes being killed. One of the southern boys, who predominated in our Air Force squadron, came in and said, “They got that nigger.” Everyone knew who he meant; no one asked whom he meant. A small cheer went up, but I shed tears in the dark. That night was one of the hardest missions I ever flew.

Dr. Martin Luther King had been my hero for years by then. I started following him when he led the Birmingham bus boycott in 1955 that had been started by Mrs. Rosa Parks, another one of my heroes. I was mildly threatened once by one of the Mississippi boys, who told me my liberal views would get me into trouble. But they never did. That low-down dawg J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI, who tried for years to ruin Dr. King’s reputation, did it no harm. But they partly ruined theirs. Hoover was determined to prove that Dr. King was a communist, but he never did. The allegations Hoover made were outrageous.

The Freedom Rides, the march out of Selma, the speech on the Mall in Washington, the fight of the garbage workers in Memphis, and a dozen other efforts marked the life of this great man. He did more for the U. S. than many of our Presidents.

Dr. King opened up doors for both Blacks and Indians. No one acknowledges it, but our later gains through the Indian Civil Rights Act, the Self-Determination Act, and a dozen and a half more pro-Indian laws would not have been possible without the groundwork being laid in the civil rights movement.

Congressman John Lewis, who also led the civil rights movement, is a strong hero to me. I watched Louis Henry Gates present him his genealogy the other week on TV. It turns out that his great-grandfather was one of the freed slaves who registered to vote in December 1867 as soon as the law permitted. So the Congressman told Dr. Gates that voting must run in his blood.

He remained bloody but unbowed from the age of 17 until today. I met him briefly on the day he was first sworn in to the House in 1987. Three of us were having breakfast with Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell when Mr. Lewis came by. What a thrill it was to me.

I remembered seeing him trampled by horses and beaten with clubs in the confrontation at the Edmund Pettis Bridge. I saw him being beaten earlier than that on the first Freedom Rides. He told Dr. Gates how he wrote a letter to Dr. King as a high school student, asking to meet him. Dr. King sent him the money for a bus ticket. He rode the bus from Troy, Alabama that Saturday morning to meet Dr. King in his office. It changed his life forever. He is still fighting the good fight.

Despite being controversial, Richard Oakes remains one of my heroes. Richard was the undisputed leader of the Alcatraz occupation; he started it all. I wrote a chapter in a forthcoming book about all the positive changes that have happened after Alcatraz. They include ICWA, 638, NAGPRA, AIRFA, and a dozen other laws and programs. Richard and LaNada Boyer from Fort Hall were the people who made Alcatraz happen.

When I was still a young whippersnapper, I met Roger Jourdain¸who was Chairman at Red Lake for 36 years. He adopted me, more or less, by 1970. Roger was the first person at NCAI who started using the term “tribal sovereignty.” Other tribal leaders, who had been beaten down and cowed by the BIA, used to look at him and ask what he was talking about.

He and Wendell Chino from Mescalero brought the term back into use, by their advocacy as well as their actions. They took a lot of heat. People from Red Lake burned Roger’s house down. His wife Margaret and their kids got out just in time.

But Roger died not seeing his dream of an Indian Marshall Aid Plan come into being. He said the U. S. had built the nations of Europe, including Germany and Italy, back up after defeating them in the Second World War. But the U. S. had only destroyed Indian nations, and had done nothing to rebuild them. This is still true.

Wendell, who was my height, five feet and six inches, allegedly strapped a billy club on his side and dared the BIA and its goons to mix it up with him at Mescalero. When he was first elected in 1953, the tribe was on its knees. The BIA ran everything. Wendell was determined to put them back on their feet. Today, the tribe is much better off, has a large degree of self-rule, and is doing much better economically.

But Wendell died not seeing his dream of an Indian think tank come true. One morning in 1991 he showed up at my office and asked if I had time to go to breakfast. I said, “Sure, I will be glad to go with you.” He and I sat at Carrows Restaurant for the next three hours as he laid out his plans for a research institute. “Everyone but Indians has a think tank,” he told me. “Big Oil, manufacturers, the insurance companies, the banks—everyone but Indians has a think tank.”

“And Reagan took 25% of the initiatives from the American Enterprise Institute, the Republican think tank, and made them into laws. What did Indians get during that time? Almost nothing.”

“I want you to put it together,” he said. But when I sent invitations to a dozen and a half tribal leaders, I got no responses. We still need that think tank. No one knows some of the leading indicators we should know about in Indian Country—the joblessness, the poor health, the poor education, the drug use, the domestic abuse, and the poor housing.

Wendell and Roger were both way ahead of their time, which is the curse of strong heroes. They can see things the rest of us cannot.

Pat Locke, who was my mentor for 35 years, was also one of my heroes. Most people will not be involved in any movement in their lifetimes. A couple of percent will be involved in one movement. The extraordinary person will start a movement. Starting a movement, whether to improve schools or to fight breast cancer, requires an extraordinary level of determination.

Pat started eight movements in her lifetime. It still astonishes me what she did. The tribal departments of education, the tribal college movement, the native language preservation movement, the preservation of native religions, the repatriation of sacred objects—all owe their start to this Standing Rock woman.

Pat was the person who got the legislation written in many cases. She wrote most of the language for the Native American Languages Act (NALA). She personally helped to found 10 of the tribal colleges; she would help to put a board together, work out an agreement with a local college to help the tribal college get started, and help to raise the money to get it started.

She spent years lobbying Congress. She had the insight to do this when almost no one else was doing it. She had sore feet many times from walking the marble halls. Spend all day walking on that marble, and your feet will kill you.

The first Navajo to earn a doctorate degree, Dr. Sam Billison, was one of my heroes. Sam was one of the famous Navajo Code Talkers during World War II. But he came home to attend college, start teaching in Texas and Oklahoma, and earn his doctorate degree at Arizona in 1954. He served on the Navajo Tribal Council and ran the education department for the tribe. He was the founder of the National Indian Education Association.

All these heroes had their detractors. I have personally heard people disparage and curse every one of these heroes. Roger and Wendell were dictators, Dr. King was a communist, Cong. Lewis was a trouble maker, Pat was a Johnny-come-lately, Richard was too hotheaded, and so on. But this type of backbiting always comes from some small person who has never done anything to change the world. These people abound. You can find them under every rock you turn over.


Dr. Chavers is director of Catching the Dream, a national scholarship and school improvement program in Albuquerque. His next book, to be published by Peter Lang, is titled “The American Indian Dropout.”