People's History of the United States_ 1492 to Present, A - Zinn, Howard [317]
A counterattack began in the schools. In early 1971, forty-five Indian students at Copper Valley School, in Glennalen, Alaska, wrote a letter to their Congressman opposing the Alaska oil pipeline as ruinous to the ecology, a threat to the “peace, quiet and security of our Alaska.”
Other Americans were beginning to pay attention, to rethink their own learning. The first motion pictures attempting to redress the history of the Indian appeared: one was Little Big Man, based on a novel by Thomas Berger. More and more books appeared on Indian history, until a whole new literature came into existence. Teachers became sensitive to the old stereotypes, threw away the old textbooks, started using new material. In the spring of 1977 a teacher named Jane Califf, in the New York City elementary schools, told of her experiences with fourth and fifth grade students. She brought into class the traditional textbooks and asked the students to locate the stereotypes in them. She read aloud from Native American writers and articles from Akwesasne Notes, and put protest posters around the room. The children then wrote letters to the editors of the books they had read:
Dear Editor,
I don’t like your book called The Cruise of Christopher Columbus. I didn’t like it because you said some things about Indians that weren’t true. . . . Another thing I didn’t like was on page 69, it says that Christopher Columbus invited the Indians to Spain, but what really happened was that he stole them!
censearly, Raymond Miranda
On Thanksgiving Day 1970, at the annual celebration of the landing of the Pilgrims, the authorities decided to do something different: invite an Indian to make the celebratory speech. They found a Wampanoag Indian named Frank James and asked him to speak. But when they saw the speech he was about to deliver, they decided they did not want it. His speech, not heard at Plymouth, Massachusetts, on that occasion, said, in part (the whole speech is in Chronicles of American Indian Protest):
I speak to you as a Man—a Wampanoag Man. . . . It is with mixed emotions that I stand here to share my thoughts. . . . The Pilgrims had hardly explored the shores of Cape Cod four days before they had robbed the graves of my ancestors, and stolen their corn, wheat, and beans. . . .
Our spirit refuses to die. Yesterday we walked the woodland paths and sandy trails. Today we must walk the macadam highways and roads. We are uniting. We’re standing not in our wigwams but in your concrete tent. We stand tall and proud and before too many moons pass we’ll right the wrongs we have allowed to happen to us. . . .
For Indians there has never been a clear line between prose and poetry. When an Indian studying in New Mexico was praised for his poetry he said, “In my tribe we have no poets. Everyone talks in poetry.” There are, however, “poems,” collected in William Brandon’s The Last Americans and in The Way by Shirley Hill Witt and Stan Steiner.
An Ashinabe “spring poem” translated by Gerald Vizenor:
as my eyes
look across the prairie
i feel the summer
in the spring
“Snow the Last” by Joseph Concha:
Snow comes last
for it quiets down everything
This from a fifth-year group in a Special Navajo Program in the year 1940, called “It is Not!”
The Navajo Reservation a lonesome place?
It is Not!
The skies are sunny,
Clear blue,
Or grey with rain.
Each day is gay—
in Nature’s way.
It is not a lonesome place at all.
A Navajo house shabby and small?
It is Not!
Inside there’s love,
Good laughter,
And Big Talk.
But best—
it’s home
With an open door
And room for all
A Castle could have no more.
In March of 1973 came a powerful affirmation that the Indians of North America were still alive. On the site of the 1890 massacre, on Pine Ridge reservation, several hundred