From Phoenix Convention Center: Maggie Wilson — 1975

According to Dr. Bernard L. Fontana, ethnoanthropologist at Arizona State Museum and University of Arizona. "The new Indian, more than a million strong, is with us and he will not vanish. He has become visible and vocal and increasingly we will hear his demand that we accommodate to him rather than he to us."

In 1869, Fontana said, a group of Hualapai Indians from Arizona were "guests" of the United States Army on Alcatraz Island; 100 years later, Indians were back again, but in a drastically different role.

"To understand what has happened in our history with respect to American Indians and to see more clearly what is happening now, all of us need a fundamental grasp of the facts so that there can be mutual accommodation which will serve the betterment of Indian and non-Indian alike."

The more than 4,000 delegates to the recent National Indian Education Association conference at Phoenix' Civic Plaza provided testimony to the renewed vitality of American Indian life as well as some insights to the "Whither Indians?" query as students, lawyers, doctors, educators, writers, artists, entertainers, political and social scientists, historians, linguists, parents and militants voiced their concerns and aspirations.

Now, as in the past, both militants and men of more quiet persuasion speak for the Indian people. Thus, among the movers and shakers at the conference were such poles-apart types as Russell Means, an organizer of the militant American Indian Movement and a member of the Oglala Lakota tribe of South Dakota, and Dr. William Demmert of the U.S. Office of Indian Education in Washington, D.C., and a member of Tlingit tribe of Alaska.

Demmert, 40, a Harvard graduate and a founder of NIEA seemed the epitome of an Indian who has been assimilated completely into the dominant society: A bureaucrat in a business suit with an attache case. Yet, his parents had been punished and ridiculed for speaking their native tongue when they attended a government school in Oregon. His own years from 8 to 34 were spent the way Tlingits had spent them for generations: Fishing with purse seines in the summer to earn the year's livelihood, spending the other nine months of the year to developing and nurturing a complex society based on such beliefs as reincarnation, dreams, visions and obligations to one's own moiety (clan).

Said he: "It's taken a long time to realize the trauma and harm harm to the culture, the family and to self-concepts that resulted from government school practices such as my parents experienced.

"As a teacher myself, I can tell you with assurance that the Indian student who knows his own language and tribal traditions who knows who he is will be the Indian who makes it in both the dominant and Indian societies.

"So the big push in Indian education is for bilingual, bicultural schools for Indians, controlled by Indians. They won't be more ready for responsibilities by waiting for them; they are demanding the opportunity to teach their own languages along with English now, not later.

"The secondary thrust of the education movement is to instill understanding and appreciation among non-Indians about Indian contributions to the New World. We want you to know, for example, that 60 per cent of today's staple food crops such as corn and potatoes were domesticated and hybridized by Indians. And in the field of history, it's not yet widely known among white Americans that the U.S. form of government - including the House, Senate and Supreme Court - was patterned by Benjamin Franklin precisely after the system perfected by the Iroquois Confederacy.

"It's my philosophy that the marriage of native Indian skills with technical non-Indian skills will be an unbeatable combination if both regard and respect each other's contributions."

Means studied accounting at, among various other colleges, Arizona State University, has no degree but says he is accountable, all right, to the federal government at his legal trials.

"I regard Anglos with suspicion and distrust," he said, "because of what my ancestors went through and what I went through at Wounded Knee in '73.

"I realize technology and economic enterprises are here, but we must utilize them in traditional Indian ways or we'll become facsimile whites. Many of us already have."

The phrases "cultural independence" and "cultural persistence" the Indian ethics that put premiums on tribal and elan kinships rather than acceptance by the dominant white society were heard again and again.

Five modern Indian folk heroes, each of whom has made his own contributions to Anglo understanding of Indian thought are: Vine Deloria Jr., a Standing Rock Sioux who is an attorney as well as author of "Custer Died for Your Sins," a powerful critique of the policies and practices of government, missionary societies and social sciences; N. Scott Momaday, Kiowa, professor of comparative literature at Stanford University and author of the Nobel Prize-winning "House Made of Dawn," and the first American Indian so honored; Dr. D'Arcy McNickle, member of the Confederated Salish-Kootenai Tribes who studied at Oxford in England, Grenoble in France and Columbia University, an anthropologist who has authored a long list of fiction and non-fiction tomes about North American Indians; Dr. Alfonso Ortiz, Tewa from San Juan Pueblo, N.M., a social anthropologist who came from the community he studied and interpreted in "Tewa World," formerly a professor at Princeton, now at University of New Mexico;And Dr. Emory Sekaquaptewa, a Hopi from Oraibi, Arizona, an attorney and professor of anthropology at University of Arizona.

Sekaquaptewa puts the perspective this way: "Today we find Indians across the country groping for traditional Indian symbols symbols from the old tribal traditions in an attempt to preserve their own unique identities stemming from their own unique cultural heritage.

"The Indian takeovers of Alcatraz, Wounded Knee, and more recently, the novitiate in Wisconsin are external ramifications of the inner turmoil of Indians who have been assimilated into the white society and are fumbling with the problems of adjustment to it and confusions about their roles in it. Hence, their militant methods of calling attention to their problems; hence, their search for symbols to hang on to.

"We Hopis are more fortunate than most because we are aware of our place in the world and adhere to our own way. It is necessary to us. It's been taught to us. We believe in it. We can leave our land, our clan kinships and our kachina spirits for long periods to join an urban situation, but we never give up being Hopis.

"Tribes no longer having viable cultural persistence are faced with the possibility of extinction because of assimilation into an alien culture and an alien way of life.

"That's why there are Indian militants. They are not to be condoned, but they should be understood."