MOST Americans know the first Americans only by cliché. There is the 19th century image, caught in bronze and in lithograph, of the defeated warrior, head drooping forward so that his feathers nearly mingle with his pony’s mane. The bow of his shoulders and the slump of his body evoke his loss of pride, of green and fertile lands, of earth’s most favored continent. Then there is a recent image, often seen through air-conditioned automobile windows. Grinning shyly, the fat squaw hawks her woven baskets along the reservation highway, the dusty landscape littered with rusting cars, crumbling wickiups and bony cattle. In the bleak villages, the only signs of cheer are romping, round-faced children and the invariably dirty, crowded bar, noisy with the shouts and laughter of drunkenness. Like most stereotypes, these caricatures possess a certain core of validity. They also help white America contain and numb the reality of past guilt and present injustice. Most important of all, they are less and less significant. After more than a century of patience and passivity, the nation’s most neglected and isolated minority is astir, seeking the means and the muscle for protest and redress. Sometimes highly educated, sometimes speaking with an articulateness forged of desperation, always angry, the new American Indian is fed up with the destitution and publicly sanctioned abuse of his long-divided people. He is raising his voice and he intends to be heard. Listen: “The next time whites try to illegally clear our land, perhaps we should get out and shoot the people in the bulldozers,” contends Michael Benson, a 19-year-old Navajo and a freshman at Wesleyan University. “It’s time that Indians got off their goddam asses and stopped letting white people lead them around by their noses,” says Lehman Brightman, a South Dakota Sioux now working on a Ph.D. at Berkeley. “Even the name Indian is not ours. It was given to us by some dumb honky who got lost and thought he’d landed in India.” “We weren’t meant to be tourist attractions for the master race,” scoffs Gerald Wilkinson, 30, a Cherokee who holds multiple degrees after attending four universities. “We don’t use the language of the New Left, but that doesn’t mean we’re not militant.” “Some day you’re going to feel like Custer, baby,” shouted one unidentified Indian at Donald Dwyer, a former Minneapolis police chief recently invited to discuss city problems with a group of Minneapolis Indians. Symbolic Protest That kind of rhetoric is surprising, coming from people long accustomed to equating silence with dignity. But in acts as well as speech, the newly aroused Indian is no longer content to play the obsequious Tonto to the white man’s Lone Ranger. A belligerent band of 100 Indians still occupies the abandoned federal prison at Alcatraz, which the Indians propose to use as a cultural center and are willing to buy—for “$24 in glass beads and red cloth.” Says one of the invaders: “Alcatraz is still better than most reservations.” Angered at the whites who litter their beaches with beer cans and broken bottles, Indians in the state of Washington set up road blocks and closed 50 miles of seashore. A group of 50 Passamaquoddy Indians in Maine charged motorists fees to
