History Collected Works You Missed, Mr. Carter | You Missed, Mr. Carter |
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This is an article from a magazine that describes the 1978 Longest Walk. It has some interesting pictures and is started off with a note from the editor of the magazine that is aimed directly at the hypocrisy of our president at the time- Jimmy Carter.
If you would like to download a pdf of the article please right click here (4.4 mb pdf). It is created from original scans of the article and is a rather large file. If you do not have a fast connection speed and would like to read the article you can click on the title image at left and it will open up in our slideshow viewer (Slide 23-27 it opens at slide 23). If it is difficult to read you can click the read more link, Jean Morris downloaded the PDF and transcribed it for your reading enjoyment, thanks Jean! You Missed an Opportunity, Mr. President!(Transcribed by Jean Morris)"I think President Carter's stand on human rights is fantastic. He's really doing a wonderful job of running around the world screaming about how the human rights of people of different nationalities have been violated. It's just too bad that he doesn't take more time to do the research that will show there are millions of poor whites and blacks, Chicanos, Asians, and Indians whose human rights are being violated here in the United States." Lehman Brightman, California college professor and South Dakota Sioux Indian, flavored his words with a heavy salting of sarcasm. He had good reason for his disenchantment with our nation's chief executive. Brightman was one of the national coordinators of the Longest Walk (see articles on following pages), and he and other leaders of the thousands of Indian walkers had hoped, and worked every angle, for a meeting with the President. Mr. Carter was in town, recently back, as Brightman indicated, from proclaiming his human rights stand to European audiences. Here was a matchless opportunity to have first hand contact with - and express his concerns and support for - a US minority group, which over the years has endured gross human rights violations. For whatever strange reasons, the President chose to ignore the Native Americans who had walked for months to bring their concerns to the capital city, where they encamped for a week. Even worse, toward the end of the week Mr. Carter did meet with Indians- a group of Chippewa children (unrelated to the Longest Walk) that the White House staff hand picked to come and dance for the President. John Adams (director of the Board of Church and Society's Department of Law, Justice and Community Relations), who played the major role in generating church support for the walking Indians, sent a last-minute unheeded plea for a meeting with those Indians remaining at the end of the week in Washington. In the mailgram Adams stated skillfully what we would say to the world's premier human rights spokesman: "Elders and chiefs, as well as tribal officers of many American Indian tribes on the Longest Walk, have been seeking respectfully and persistently to meet with you. It would have been an appropriate time for you to sign into law the joint resolution on American Indian religious freedom, which is now on your desk. It is difficult to believe how inaccessible your office has been to peoples who have traveled 3,000 miles over five months to come to the nation's capital. Even as you or your staff have refused to see the elders of the tribes, wide publicity was given to your surprise visit to a country music concert. Such a juxtaposition has not gone unnoticed in the councils of the people. You are missing an opportunity brought to your administration at great sacrifice to others. Such a time will not come again ""the American Indians have sought for months to find a way to your office. The response is unbelievable and unacceptable." - eds. The Longest Walk participants trudged cross-country- To Save Their Indian Way of Life "This walk was one of the proudest activities that I have ever taken part in. When we came into Washington, D.C., I felt twenty feet high. As we walked into the suburbs, there were thousands of people along the way cheering us on. They offered juice and water and they had signs out that said, We love Indians!" "You can't imagine the lump in your throat that comes with people cheering you on like that particularly when you know that you have just completed an impossible task." "What a sight to see those old people and young people all walking so proud, marching four abreast, singing their hearts out, and all the banners flying. It looked like Genghis Khan's army coming down the street." Lehman Brightman South Dakota Sioux with an angular face and massive body that could have been chiseled from the Black Hills of his home state sat in the shade of a clump of trees at the base of the Washington Monument and talked about the Longest Walk. Brightman, one of the originators and national coordinators of the Longest Walk is a California college professor (who began the first Indian Studies program in the United States at the University of California at Berkeley in 1969). "This walk is one of the greatest displays of courage I have ever seen by any group of people. I fought in Korea with the Marine Corps and I have seen a lot of people displaying many kinds of courage, but this is a new kind of courage. To walk day after day after day on the hot or freezing pavement, when you are tired and hungry and you don't have enough clothing, when people are yelling at you and you are worried about your job when you get back, and about your children, when you have to go to the bathroom but you just keep walking, walking then you have to have some supernatural power within you. "I am not a religious person, not in any way, but on this walk I learned that people with a belief in something can overcome mountains. These people made a believer of me. They were long on only one thing- guts!" "We started February 11 from Sacramento, California, with very little money, very little food, and very few support vehicles. There were old and young people. Some students quit college and others quit high school; some adults left their jobs to begin the walk." "They walked until their feet got sore, blistered and bled. They walked when they were tired and hungry. They walked when the weather was five or ten below zero. They walked and sometimes some of them ran through blizzards, across deserts, and through states like Illionois and Ohio where they wouldn't let us walk on their bridges and freeways and threatened to arrest us." "But they walked anyway and they got through. You can't pay people to walk in freezing weather when their feet hurt and they are tired and hungry, when for several days they've had nothing to eat but peanut butter sandwiches. People won't endure that kind of pain unless they are walking for something. And these people were! They were walking because of their belief in saving their land and saving their Indian way of life." Protest Anti-Indian Bills In the last quarter of the Twentieth Century Native Americans no longer face the US Calvary protecting white invaders who claim Indian lands under the unholy guise of manifest destiny or seek to "civilize" and "Christianize" pagan original inhabitants of this new nation. Now powerful business interests want the lands, not so much for the land as for the resources beneath the earth or the water that flows through it. These business interests have stirred legislation in Congress that would reduce Indian water, fishing and hunting rights on Indian lands or even abolish all Indian treaties. Thus the Indians organized the dramatic walk to protest anti-Indian legislation before Congress (see "A Walk of Love for All Humanity," engage/social action, July 1978). According to Lehman Brightman, the walk helped stymie such legislation - for the present. "Senator Alan Cranston (Senate Majority Whip from California) said the bills had little chance of passing, and that made everybody happy. The walk was designed to call attention to the legislation, and it did that. We had hundreds of speaking engagements in towns and cities across the country. We lobbied legislators in Washington. So we helped to knock the bills in the head." "But we are definitely going to keep track of the bills. They're dormant, not dead. They can be reintroduced again next year, or the next, or they can be broken up and attached to other bills. So we have to keep up a constant watch." While the anti-Indian legislation (which had little chance of passing even without the Indian efforts), became a focal point for protest, the walk had other positive benefits, according to Brightman. For instance, it offered participants a stage from which to talk about anti-Indian backlash that has surfaced after recent court cases upholding Indian water and land rights. "There is a definite anti-minority backlash that has been spreading across the country for the last three or four years," Brightman says. "It's particularly aimed at American Indians. Like a malignant cancer, this backlash is spreading hate and fear. It is trying to destroy all the progress minorities have made over the last dozen years." Brightman points to the emergence of the American Nazi Party and the Ku Klux Klan, but he emphasizes the Interstate Congress for Equal Rights and Responsibility, which he calls "the largest hate group in the United States today." According to Brightman, this group, which the average American doesn't know exists, was organized specifically to destroy Indians. It has spread into twenty-two states, has deep financial support, maintains a troop of lawyers in the nation's capital to lobby against pro-Indian legislation, and provides significant support to campaign legislators. The Longest Walk also provided an opportunity for participants to highlight human rights violations that they believe have occurred for decades in government relations with Native Americans. Brightman, for instance, declares that "the federal government is conducting one of the most systematic genocidal campaigns in this world's history. It is conducting an all-out campaign to sterilize most of the Indian women in this country." Brightman supports this radical charge with his own personal research and congressional reports indicating free-wheeling Indian Health Service sterilization practices, sometimes carried out deceptively on Indian women. He posits the startling figure of 300,000 Indian women sterilized in the last twenty years - or, he says, more than 50 per cent of all Indian women in this country. Furthermore, he indicates that plans are underway to file massive suits against the Indian Health Service and the Department of Health, Education and Welfare in relation to the purposed sterilization. Such concerns will have a more united Indian effort because of the Longest Walk, Brightman believes. "The walk has united people in our common cause. It brought together a lot of persons who hesitated to join past demonstrations because they didn't like the militancy and feared the possibility of conflict." The Longest Walk, as its leaders proclaimed, was a spiritual and very peaceful event. Lehman Brightman walked about 600 of the cross-country miles; his nine year old son, Gall (after the famous Sioux chief), walked about 200.In some places the y may have trod over footsteps of ancestors who walked because the US government forces them onto reservations far from the areas they originally called home. Walkers in 1978 had not forgotten their roots. The Longest Walk," Brightman declares, "will go down in us history as a tremendous effort. I think we were effective in stopping the legislation, in alerting people about our concerns, in unifying our Indian people. I'm optimistic." - Lee Ranck ' |
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