Sean J. Flynn: Without Reservation: Benjamin Reifel and American Indian Acculturation. Pierre: South Dakota Historical Association Press, 2018.
At the end of his fifth and final term as a United States Congressman in 1971, and after a long prior career in the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, Benjamin Reifel had become “arguably the nation’s most influential American Indian”—surely the most prominent of his generation. A member of the Sicangu or Brulé Sioux, he had proved a forceful advocate of policies aimed at assimilating his people, and all Native Americans, into the American regime. He therefore became a rhetorical target of Russell Means, head of the separatist American Indian Movement.
Tocqueville had identified the problem, more than a century earlier:
“There is no Indian so miserable who, in his bark hut, does not entertain a haughty idea of his individual worth; he considers the cares of industry to be demeaning occupations; he compares the farmer to the cow who plows a furrow, and in each of our arts he perceives nothing but the work of slaves. It is not that he has not conceived a very lofty idea of the power of the whites and the greatness of their intellect; but if he admires the results of our efforts, he scorns the means by which we have obtained it, and while submitting to our ascendancy, he still believes himself superior to us. Hunting and war seem to him the only cares worthy of a man. The Indian, in the depth of his misery in his woods, therefore nourishes the same ideas, the same ideas, the same opinions as the noble of the Middle Ages in his fortified castle, and to resemble him completely he needs only to become a conqueror. What a singular thing! It is in the forests of the New World, and not among the Europeans who populate its shores, that the old prejudices of Europe are still found today.” [1] Tocqueville, an aristocrat himself, understood that in the modern, democratizing world, aristocracy would either adapt to the new way of life or perish. Reifel had the same insight.
He was born in 1906, more than a generation after the United States Army defeated Sioux forces and required them to cede the Black Hills of South Dakota, which the Lakota had seized from other Amerindian tribes a century before that. Relocated to the south-central region of the state, the Sicangu were among several reservations that “became the scene of a grand experiment on the part of reformers and federal officials to extinguish tribalism and hasten the individualization of Indians through the introduction of private ownership, farming and husbandry, formal education, and Christianity”—in a word, regime change, including written constitutions modeled on the federal and state American constitutions. The Lakota proved “stubborn experimental subjects,” as the respected Chief Spotted Tail “asserted that his followers were a premodern people that could not be hurried into a self-reliant lifestyle”; he “obstructed the introduction of agriculture, education, and Christianity,” “denouncing Christian schools as unsuitable for Lakota children” while his people “gunned down government-issue steers from the backs of horses while women butchered and dried the meat.” These acts notwithstanding, “their defiance…would not resurrect buffalo culture” and “the bands began breaking up.” Many Lakota “became listless and idle,” reduced to mocking those among them who accepted the changes; others attempted a religious revival founded by a Paiute Indian from Nevada. Wovoka, who claimed that “a new world, one without the presence of whites, awaited the Indian race,” a world where “Indians would enjoy eternal life amid relatives, friends, and great herds of buffalo.” Like so many religious conflicts, this one proved intractable, ending only with “the final armed confrontation between the United States and the Plains Indians” at Wounded Knee Creek in 1890. Twenty-five members of the Seventh Cavalry died, as did 146 Lakota men, women, and children; the confrontation “exposed the futility of resting the Euro-American presence” in Great Plains.
The conflict moved from warfare to civil resistance. “Possessed of a mystical attitude toward the land, perplexed by the concept of private ownership, and averse to tilling the soil, few Lakota men took to farming.” They defined government rations not as “a temporary form of assistance but a just and long-germ compensation for Teton Sioux lands” lost in the 1870s. In response, Congress and the Grover Cleveland administration had enacted the General Allotment Act of 1887, which redistributed land to individuals, not clans. This was followed two years later by the Sioux Act, reducing the Great Sioux Reserve by some nine million acres. All told, between 1887 and 1932, 91 million acres of Amerindian-owned lands would be lost. “Thus it was that in 1906, the year of Ben Reifel’s birth, the Brulé people found themselves struggling to adjust to a new language, new laws, new values, and a new economy,” all intended to integrate Amerindians into the American regime. The son of a white father and a Brulé mother, the boy listened to her mother’s advice: “Assimilate, she told him, if you wish to enjoy the good things made possible by the white people’s culture.” He became an enthusiastic student at the Rosebud Agency Government Day School, later wondering “Why did not the other Indians respond as I did?” Not only did he earn a high school diploma, but he left home for the South Dakota State College School of Agriculture intent on following his father’s advice: “Be on time, work hard, and save money.” Benjamin Franklin would have favored father and son with an approving nod; Flynn remarks that Reifel would become an admirer of both Franklin and Abraham Lincoln. He earned his Bachelor of Science degree in 1932 and, having joined the U.S. Army Reserve Officers Training Corps while in college, was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Army Reserve.
In his first job at the Episcopal Hare Vocational School for Indian High School Boys, he watched as the Progressive educational principles of W. Carson Ryan, then director of Indian education at the Bureau of Indian Affairs were put into practice. [2] While Reifel concurred with Director Ryan’s refusal to continue the practice of segregated boarding schools for Indians—as Ryan wrote, “Sooner or later all Indians…will become participating citizens of the state and local community as well as of the United States”—he became skeptical of John Dewey’s educational philosophy, with its experimentalism, its attempt to treat all academic subjects as if they were divisions of empirical science. “There’s nothing wrong with the John Dewey approach,” Reifel later and too kindly observed, “if you have enough teachers well-trained and the equipment to follow the John Dewey method.” Such was not the case at Hare Vocational. Nor did a science-centered education translate into instruction in such foundational matters as learning “to read and to write and to figure.” The Progressives’ educational theory and practice failed to prepare Indian youth for the integration into American society that it aimed to accomplish.
After a year working at the school, Reifel took a job as a U.S. Farm Extension agent for the Oglala District of the Pine Ridge Reservation. The year 1933 inaugurated not only Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal but the “Indian New Deal” implemented by John Collier, the Columbia University-educated sociologist (and socialist) who served as commissioner of Indian Affairs for the next twelve years. Collier “suspended the assimilation policy, reversed the dissolution of Indian lands, provided legal protection for tribes, established tribal self-governance, and initiated an American Indian cultural revival.” None of this relieved poverty on the reservations, but it did make Indians more “politically self-conscious,” better able to navigate the federal bureaucracy the overall New Deal so substantially expanded. The legislative core of the Indian New Deal was the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934; fluent in both English and Lakota, Reifel was tasked with explaining the IRA to his people, with particular attention to the drafting of “Anglo-American-style constitutions in conformity with IRA guidelines.” Unfortunately, in Reifel’s view, those guidelines also included nods to Collier’s “collectivism and tribal traditionalism,” which effectively continued the segregation of Indian populations that wouldn’t be trained to compete with other Americans, off-reservation. “Filled with a lifelong aversion to free enterprise, individualism, and the pursuit of wealth for wealth’s sake, John Collier concluded that tribally centered American Indians ‘possessed the fundamental secret of human life—the secret of building great personality through the instrumentality of social institutions,'” a possession that might “save white America from what he viewed as the isolation and despair of industrial-age individualism” by “establish[ing] cooperative commonwealths that would serve as a model for individualistically oriented non-Indians” while reviving what Collier called the Indians’ “long, grandiose chivalric age” in which “the economic ambition was not to possess wealth but to give it away” in ceremonies embodying man’s “millennial hope of a deeper and lovelier part of the human spirit.” Reifel thought not. He “grew concerned with Collier’s obsession with tribal communalism,” inconsistent with a life lived according to the saying, “Be on time, work hard, and save money.”
Among American Indians, Reifel was not alone in his doubts. He concentrated his efforts on implementing the portion of Collier’s policy he did agree with, Indian self-government on American principles, including the consent of the governed. Among the traditionalists, he won trust by taking on the role of “boss farmer,” the term for the Indian Bureau agents who issued rations, mediated disputes, and performed other needed governmental functions. At Pine Ridge, “he became the district’s unofficial education specialist, financial consultant, and social worker.” In so doing, he aimed not at keeping Indians separated from the way of life of the American regime but at bringing them into it. As to Collier, Reifel judged that his program rested uneasily upon a contradiction. He wanted American Indians “to modernize themselves through the adoption of Anglo-American constitutionalism” while “urg[ing] them to protect themselves from foreign infringements on tribal traditions.” More logical than the bureaucrat-romanticist, Reifel “became increasingly impatient with crusades by Indians and non-Indians to restore premodern lifestyles and worldviews that were incompatible with modern economy, society, and technology.” At the same time, he chafed under Congress’s failure to approve the portion of the Indian Reorganization Act which would have established an independent judiciary among the tribal communities. No such independence existed, since the Indians’ courts were “the creature of the tribal council,” and such an arrangement conduced to abridgements of individuals’ civil liberties. “He had witnessed firsthand how tribal judges ignored individual rights” when his brother was arrested by tribal police, who accused him of fighting; the young man was jailed without a hearing or the opportunity to seek legal counsel. As Reifel later said, “although an Indian who appears before a state court or a Federal court is given full rights of the Constitution, when that same Indian appears before the Indian tribunals, he has no assurance of receiving such protections.”
The tribal councils were ruled by tribal elders, who “feared the bypassing, through secret balloting,” of the councils. Younger Lakotas “saw in the IRA the potential for democratic and progressive forms of local government from which tribes could leverage economic and educational resources.” Reifel thus saw a factional and generational struggle between ‘old regime’ men—in Tocqueville’s language, aristocrats—who vainly attempted to resist modernization and ‘new regime,’ indeed New Deal Indians, who wanted to work the FDR system for federal government benefits. Reifel disagreed with both sides, both regimes. He hoped “that by adopting IRA governments modeled after the United States Constitution, Indian tribes would experience participatory democracy and, in time, learn to appreciate the rewards of full American citizenship,” including (contra Collier) “the rewards of capitalism.” This would require extensive consultations with field agents like Reifel, especially given the elders’ deployment of such universal tactics as filibustering, slandering opponents, and misusing protocol to subvert efforts at political re-founding. On the federal administrative level, Reifel successfully resisted a proposal to elective representatives to the local Sioux tribal councils from kinship networks, which would have made the councils too big and more factionalized. Eventually, the Rosebud Sioux did adopt a new constitution, which was approved by referendum. It became “a source of pride among the Rosebud Sioux that their constitution…became a template for other northern plains tribes.” For the rest of the decade, Reifel worked with tribal officials to learn basic administrative procedures (minutes and other records, budgets) and to set policies in a manner consistent with their new constitutions.
The communalist dimension of Collier’s policy fared less well. It simply didn’t work. The Indians neither assimilated into the American regime nor served as a model for Americans, much less other nations, as Collier had also dreamed. Some of the Indians themselves went so far as to call him an atheist and a communist. The intensified national unity felt in the Second World War worked against “the classification of Indians as special citizens,” especially in view of their significant contributions to the fight. That spirit of unity also worked toward a willingness to integrate among the 25,000 Amerindians who served, as “few encountered the discrimination endured by African-American servicemen” and most “adjusted quickly to military life.” Forty thousand more Amerindians worked stateside; “no longer isolated from mainstream society, they were exposed to other subcultures and introduced to dozens of employment opportunities in a variety of industrial, service, and technical fields,” experiencing a higher standard of living as they did.
After his own stateside service as a military police officer, Reifel was appointed as district tribal relations officer for the northern Great Plains, then as agency superintendent at the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in North Dakota, home of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation or Three Affiliated Tribes, who had formed as a nation in the nineteenth century. He received a three-year leave of absence from Fort Berthold, during which he obtained a Ph.D. in administration from Harvard, but that was the easy part. At the time, the federal government moved to build the Garrison Dam and Reservoir in order to prevent downstream flooding of the Missouri River. This meant moving the Three Affiliated Tribes out of their homeland, “a place where, if they encountered obstacles in the white man’s world, they could return.” They invoked a treaty provision which stipulated that they could not be deprived of any tribal lands without their consent. Eventually, they made the anguished decision to sell, but the crisis set back efforts to educate the children and to provide regular administration.
Reifel chose the topic of the Fort Berthold relocation as the topic of his Ph.D. dissertation. In it, he identified overpopulation as the main problem on the Reservation. Overpopulation had occurred because MHA norms encouraging high birth rates suited premodern conditions, wherein mortality rates were also high, but not modern conditions of improved sanitation and health care. “Cultural practices that once saved the tribes from extinction now stood ‘in the way of economic adjustment necessary for the profitable use of the land.'” Further, to encourage MHA citizens to move out and integrate into the larger society, they would need education in the necessary skills. “Any opportunity or experience that exposed Indian youth to the white man’s world would benefit them.” To achieve this, Reifel recommended tribal financing of programs to place members who sought employment off the reservation, such as renting apartment properties in cities with strong job markets and a training program “in the ways of municipal living” sponsored by one of the North Dakota universities.
“The 1950s saw the emergence of Ben Reifel as a leading voice in Indian affairs” as the Truman and Eisenhower administrations returned to assimilationist policies. “Deeply troubled by American Indians’ dependence on government assistance,” which inclined them to economic passivity and to a diminution of civic spirit, he also objected to efforts to place Indian policy into the hands of state governments, inasmuch as the federal government had “forcibly removed Indians to reservations.” His relocation programs did take effect, and he “never tired of telling American Indians about the benefits of the white man’s world.” And “if northern plains Indians resisted the relocation policy while multiplying their populations, their economic livelihoods would remain dependent on the services and support of the federal government” and “their status as independent, self-determining peoples would—and should—be called into question.” As he put it, “The United States is the Indian citizen’s ‘reservation’ today.” And to white audiences, he observed that the Lakota language lacks a word for time. “Time had not been important to nineteenth-century Lakotas, who enjoyed an unlimited supply of bison to meet their needs,” which most emphatically did not include accumulation of possessions or saving, practices that would only slow their movements as they followed the herds.
In 1957, Reifel returned to South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation. Once again, the reservation lacked the land to support its population; compounding the problem, was “the inflammatory nature of Oglala politics,” which he called “government by personalities rather than government by principles.” He advanced his own principles—time, work, saving— by ordering teachers to install clocks and classrooms and to follow a schedule during the school day, by raising academic standards, thereby putting the children to work, and holding up the examples of immigrants to America who “joined a new and dominant culture” successfully by working hard, economizing, and sending their children to school. “He refused to entertain pessimistic claims by members of his own race that the white man would never accept the red man as his equal.”
To prove it, in 1960 he ran for Congress at invitation of South Dakota Republicans, worried that Democrat George McGovern had won a seat to the U.S. Senate. He refused to be presented to the voters as “the Indian Candidate”: “I’m asking for your vote as Ben Reifel, not as a Native American, not by any other labels.” Instead, he chose to “personify the traditional, middle-class sensibilities of South Dakotans” as a moderate Republican. After winning election and then re-election two years later, he was appointed to the powerful House Appropriations Committee, where he earned a reputation as a budget cutter, skeptical of “what he considered to be the burdensome costs and unrealistic expectations created by the Great Society and War on Poverty” and going so far as to push for the reduction of federal agricultural programs, “despite the potential unpopularity of such cuts in South Dakota.” A strong anti-Communist, he supported American intervention in the Vietnam War. He continued to insist that federal monies supporting Indian education “go toward schools that brought together Indian and non-Indian students under one roof.” Acting on another long-expressed concern, he testified on behalf of the Indian Civil Rights Act, which extended the guarantees of the Bill of Rights to Amerindians. The Supreme Court later overturned this law in Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez (1978), holding that Amerindian tribes enjoy sovereignty over their internal affairs.
Appointed by President Gerald Ford as Commissioner of Indian Affairs, only to be fired by President Carter a few months later, Reifel’s main political enemy was Russell Means, who had been born on the Pine Ridge Reservation but spent his childhood and youth in the San Francisco Bay Area. Means had joined the American Indian Movement, participating in a variety of demonstrations in favor of getting rid of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the restoration of tribal lands and traditions. Against this, Reifel argued that the Sioux themselves had been “woodsmen armed with bows and arrows in the Great Lakes region,” from which “they had been driven from their homelands by Chippewa Indians armed with guns and powder”—i.e., modern firearms. “They relocated to the northern plains, where they were transformed,” adapting to “an entirely different cultural system, an entirely different set of religious symbols.” Had they not done so, “they would have perished.” Such adaptation had served the Sioux well, then, and would serve them well, now. The aspiration for tribal sovereignty animated by traditional customs could not endure under modern conditions. It might be added that the Sioux eventually did adapt to those conditions, having carved out a place in the casino gambling industry. Neither Reifel nor Means (nor Collier) won, in the end.
Note
- Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America. Volume One, Part Two, Chapter Ten. Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop translation. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000.
- The school was named in honor of Bishop William H. Hare of the Diocese of South Dakota, “the Apostle of the West,” who devoted his ministry to both the white settlers and the Amerindians of that region.
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