36.

Lyndon B. Johnson. Whitehouse.gov

Lyndon B. Johnson. Whitehouse.gov

Playing presidential catch up here. I’ll have 37 up tomorrow, and 38 on Tuesday, the regular day.

Two months after Lyndon Baines Johnson took office as the 36th president of the United States, he pledged to put Indians at the “forefront” of his war on poverty.

The statistics were grim for the 400,000 Indians living on reservations, Johnson told members of the National Congress of American Indians during a January 1964 speech. The average family income was less than one-third the national average; unemployment rates ranged between 50 and 85 percent; the average young adult had an eighth-grade education; the high school dropout rate was 60 percent; and the average lifespan of an Indian on a reservation was 42, compared with the national average of 62.

“Both in terms of statistics and in terms of human welfare, it is a fact that America’s first citizens, our Indian people, suffer more from poverty than any other group in America,” Johnson said. “That is a shameful fact.”

The speech came 12 days after Johnson, in his first State of the Union address, urged Congress to declare “all-out war on human poverty and unemployment” and to prioritize civil rights.

“Unfortunately, many Americans live on the outskirts of hope—some because of their poverty, and some because of their color, and all too many because of both,” he said. “Our task is to help replace their despair with opportunity.”

This War on Poverty was part of Johnson’s plan to “build a great society, a place where the meaning of man’s life matches the marvels of man’s labor.”

This utopia or “Great Society” became Johnson’s central goal, and he pushed for sweeping socio-economic reform that improved education, health care, conservation and economic development.

[Read more…]

Books.

Ethno

A while back, I posted about this book. At that time, I didn’t have the book yet. I have it now, and it is a wonderful read, filled with great information. Some of it made me very homesick, like the entry for Hairy Manzanita (Arctostaphylos columbiana). The manzanita that grew in Idyllwild, Ca., is a different Arctostaphylos, but those differences are minor, and manzanita has always been used by Indigenous peoples in various ways. I love every single thing about manzanitas, and it makes me ache a little, just thinking about them. Patricia’s book includes a whole lot of plants I was not familiar with, and was not at all familiar with Indigenous uses of them. I learned a lot, and was delighted over and over again, like when I was viewing a photo of an older Indian woman wearing a pine nut apron.

The writing flows like water, and this isn’t just a story told, this is a text which provides learning, and a reference to all the wonders around us. You can order the book here, and I highly recommend it.

35.

John F. Kennedy. Whitehouse.gov.

John F. Kennedy. Whitehouse.gov.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy often gets credit for serving as president during the Civil Rights Movement of the early 1960s, but the man beloved for championing African-American rights and working to eradicate poverty was assassinated before he could fulfill his promises to Native Americans.

Just 11 days before winning the 1960 election, Kennedy called for a “sharp break” from past Indian policies. That included termination policy, which severed tribes’ special relationships with the federal government, divided reservations into private ownership and sought to assimilate Indians into full citizenship.

Kennedy pledged to reverse termination policies, making a “specific promise of a positive program to improve the life of a neglected and disadvantaged group of our population,” he wrote in an October 28, 1960, letter to Oliver La Farge, president of the Association of American Indian Affairs.

“My administration would see to it that the Government of the United States discharges its moral obligation to our first Americans,” he wrote, promising better education and health care, access to federal housing programs, increased economic opportunity and “genuinely cooperative relations” between Indians and federal officials.

“Indians have heard fine words and promises long enough,” he wrote. “The program to which my party has pledged itself will be a program of deeds, not merely of words.

Yet Kennedy failed to live up to those words, said Thomas Clarkin, a history professor at San Antonio College and author of the 2001 book Federal Indian Policy in the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations. Kennedy, who was assassinated after serving 1,036 days in office, was a transitional president, bridging the gap between the termination policies of the 1950s and the more sympathetic Indian policies enacted during the ‘60s and ‘70s.

[Read more…]