WISR 40th Anniversary May 1-2, 2015

The Omaha Tribal Historical Research Project, Inc., OTHRP, wishes to thank theWestern Institute for Social Research, WISR for giving Dr. Dennis Hastings and myself, Dr. Margery Coffey,the opportunity to be here via technology at the 40th Anniversary of a unique educational institution. We especially thank Dr. John Bilorusky for his years of work helping in the creation of WISR and making it what it is today. We thank the Faculty and Board of Trustees of WISR, past and present, who have helped in the creation of this method of Higher Education and are sustaining it. We also wish to thank WISR’s students, past and present, who are truly the heart of this institution.

Dennis has been associated with WISR since the beginning of the school. He was one of the students that sat in on the planning sessions and searching discussions on the subject of schools, education and how to reach beyond traditional German-based American education. Time and circumstances led Dennis away from WISR initially, but when he was ready to get his Masters Degree, WISR was his immediate choice. His thesis became the book he co-authored with Dr. Robin Ridington, Blessing For a Long Time: The Story of the Omaha Sacred Pole, which is about the journey to retrieve the Omaha Tribe’s sacred artifacts. The book is a classic in its field and is still in print today.

My education was a bit more traditional, two years as a theatre major at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and achieving my Bachelor of Fine Artsdegree at Michigan State University as an artist.After several years of working for Dennis, he asked me to get my Masters and I, who in the mid-1970s had sat as a student at MSU dreaming of the alternative educationmovement on the West Coast, agreed immediately to come to WISR.It was during this time that I received a Newberry Library Fellowship through OTHRP for a six week study at their facilities in Chicago. They have a massive Native American focus within their facilities.

Dennis and I both have a background in Grassroots Organizing—Saul Alinsky style. Mine was basedinitially within the Anti-draft Movement during Vietnam then revised under Carter’s draft registration reinforcement as well as the Anti-nuke Movement and Native American support work in New York City while Dennis was doing Alcatraz in San Francisco Bay, Pit River in northern CA and Wounded Knee in SD. We met on the Omaha Indian Reservation in Nebraska and Iowa at a powwow in 1999.

Not only did our grassroots organizing backgrounds complement each other but also our skills, his in writing, applied anthropology and research and mine in writing, art and graphic design. As we worked on developing our Ph.D., we wrote in-depth papers on the specific elements that had a massive affect upon the Omaha. Our four major research papers were:

  1. Lewis and Clark.Our version of their story is the Indian point of view based upon their relatives’ experiences. Lewis and Clarkstarted their famous journey, to announce to the Indian Tribes along the way that they no longer owned their lands, with the Omaha. They were escorted by the two hired Omaha guides who knew multiple languages and the Missouri River. Within the tribes along their path, the expedition abandonedwomen and left their children behind. This co-mingled relationships between formerly unrelated tribes from the Missouri to the west coast. Swapping food supplies for sexual favors cost the expedition dearly during the winters when they came close to starving. We also looked at York’s experiences as Clark’s slave. Suffering the same life threatening situations as the rest, he was never paid and never freed from slavery by Clark and unlike the others he had no choice in whether to go or not.
  1. Steamboats.Both military and commercial ships came up the Missouri River as they were slowly developed to adapt to a treacherously fast-moving river.Three steamboats sank in the reservation’s section of the river. The steamboats took Omaha children and young adults on their first step of the journey towards the new education on the East Coast. This was not always voluntary. Thesteamboats were also the first step for the group of 19 Omaha who went to Paris, France in 1883 to be part of a French museum exhibition. The steamboats were replaced by the railroads by the end of the 19th century.
  1. Omaha Tribal member Hiram Chase. Chase and his partner, Omaha Tribal member Tom Sloanwere two of the success stories of the boarding schools. Chase became the First Native American lawyer. Charles Evan Hughes, a law professor at Cincinnati Law School when Chase was a student there, became Chief Justice of the Supreme Court around the timethe Chase and Sloan law firm argued their cases in front of that court.

While Chase argued cases in the US Supreme Court, he was not the first Native American to do so. Thomas Sloan got that honor. Sloan, a partner with Chase in the first Native American law firm, received his legal training under Hiram Chase. Chase also was the first Native American to devise a shorthand method of writing the Omaha Language, publishing a booklet on it in Pender, NE in 1897.

  1. Macy School Report. We tackled the present day reservation when we were asked by the Superintendent at that time to create a workbook for the faculty and staff of the school so they could understand the culture better. We did. We also documented exactly how we were treated in the process by the school. It is a testimony as to why Euro-American education fails on an Indian Reservation.

All of this and much more came together within our dissertation, “The Completely Illustrated: Grandfather Remembers -- Broken Treaties/Stolen Land: The Omaha Land Theft,” filling 1,500 pages along with 1,500 illustrations. It is a documentation from the Omaha viewpoint of their history from the Ohio River Valley to the Return of the Sacred Pole – it covers four centuries.

WISR gave us the space to take a real in-depth look at the situation in which we were working and documenting.At the same time WISR offered its expertise and a friendly place to exchange ideas and evaluations. We worked on our joint Ph.D. together, blending our work with the work of others historically recognized in our field of interest. We placed it against the backdrop of the history of Euro-Americans. Together we created a collage of Omaha history through story, text, art, photographs and song. As is true in any creative endeavor, it took on a life of its own and taught all of us who worked on the project, changing forever the way we looked at history, religion, government and its relationship to people in this country, Omaha specific.

The American government has always been consistent. The foreign policy refined upon Native America through wars of extermination and courts that reward the rich over the people is the same policy as the one we are using in the Middle East. At home, Americais repeating the 19th century endlessly asit continues to steal Indian land,exterminate black males, repress women andstarve children while itexports its military based philosophy around the world. Time only makes the technology more horrendous and genocide more efficient. Unless change happens, this policy of greed will continue until everything is gone and the earth is bare with some life forms struggling on a hostileplanet.Unlike us, cockroaches will probably make it, they adapt very well.

We have a short time to turn things around. Water has become critical in many areas of the world, California being one of them. Here, your traditional American government punished the people and rewarded the rich industries with water. In Detroit, their government simply turned the water off in their ghettos. Peru also had a water problem. It turned billboards into water collectors from the humid winds that blew moisture from the ocean over the mountains. The billboards collected the water into tanks that were free to the public for usage around the clock.

We have the ability to solve our problems. We do not have the mechanism in which to do so. The American government is styled on governments by the rich, of the rich and for the rich. Its bureaucracy is designed to say “no” to all problems so that it has less to do, costs go down andthat way it can survive and the wealthy can get richer. That doesn’t work in the long run. In recorded history going back to Babylon all civilizations that have used this approach have failed.

Our schools are in shambles. Truth is being banned from the classrooms and mythology is being promoted in its place. Our higher educational systems are beholden to large government and industrial grants so they adapt the military/industrial mode and punish the students with unreasonable lifetime debtsin order that the institution can grow indefinitely and cover it all with the antics of their expensive professional football teams. Not WISR.

WISR believes in real education where the teachers learn as much as the students. WISR believes in the integrity of the educational process and studies the experiences of other alternative educational practices from around the world. It is open to the process of sharing ideas and creating an atmosphere where this can be applied within their classrooms and through the Internet, world-wide.

WISR’s impact upon the Omaha has been profound. The Omaha reservation boundaries are basically the same as Thurston County, NE. The reservationborders the Missouri River with some land on the Iowa side. The town of Pender is the official county seat. There has been a lot of turmoil stemming from that over the years. The racism of the Euro-American establishment on the reservation is basically very actively anti-Indian and has been from the beginning.Their history includes Pender’s public gun runs, via the railroad, to the city of Omaha (80 miles south) so that they could try tooverthrow the legal law enforcement of the Omaha on the reservation, a preview of the KKK in NE. The whole idea of Indian police having any kind of jurisdiction over a Euro-American controlled town located on the Reservation is beyond the pale for the historical immigrant population. Never mind that the Omaha did not want to sell their lands at the time,the town was created illegally and the Omaha have never been paid for the land yet, Pender filed a lawsuit against the Tribe to prevent them from creating liquor taxes to help solve the chronic alcohol problem locally, claiming they were not on the reservation. The lawsuit was funded basically byracist out-of-state interestsand the local liquor industry initially.

Omaha Tribal Council called a special meeting with OTHRP at that time and we were privileged to meet with Dr. R. David Edmunds from the University of Texas' School of Arts and Humanities where he serves as the Anne and Chester Watson History Professor. Dr. Edmunds was hired by the Tribal lawyers to do a historical background report on the reservation boundary dispute being fought within the courts over Pender, NE. Since “Grandfather Remembers” documents the historic periods that covers both the illegal acquisition of the property and the attitudes stemming from this period as they irrupted over the centuries afterwards, OTHRP had a lot to say. It was a three hour interrogation on Omaha history, Pender applicable, by both Dr. Edmunds and thesevenOmaha Tribal Council members. At the end of the session Dr. Edmunds asked for a copy of our dissertation. Portions of our dissertation were used directly in the Omaha TribalBrief that was submitted to the courts.

To make a long story short, Pender lost at Tribal Court, they lost again at Federal Court. The racistinfluencefrom out-of-state backed out of the case financially and Pender levied a tax to cover their appeal. A three judge panel of the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against them. Pender appealed for a hearing in front of the full court. The Court said NO. They not only lost every step of the way, but also each Court lectured Pender about submitting frivolous law cases to the courts. The Tribal Courtjudge was polite, the Federal Court made itself unquestionably clear, the judges of the Appellate Court spelled it out in no uncertain terms. Pender has levied a second tax in order to take the case to the US Supreme Court.

This is the first case in the 200 year history of arguing legalities with the Euro-American legal system in which the Omaha won across the board. Everything. Always it has been a 2/3 decision, the Euro-Americantakes 2/3 of the decision and the Omaha get 1/3 of what they should have gotten. It shocked both sides. WISR deserves credit for this. OTHRP would never have had the time to do the research and writing on its own. It was the ability of OTHRP combined with the opportunity at WISR that allowed this to happen. Wi’bthiha. Thank you WISR.