The Hollow Icon: An American Indian Analysis of the Kennedy Myth and Federal Indian Policy

Abstract

As Godfrey Hodgson observed while describing the Kennedy years in his America in Our Time (1976), the U.S. entered the 1960s in an Augustan mood: united, confidant, conscious of an historic mission, and mobilized for the great task of carrying it out. Americans of the 1960s felt the maturity of their power. They accepted the legitimacy of their institutions. They believed not in perfection, but in the perfectibility of society. If they were anxious about danger from abroad, it was because they saw their own society as so essentially just or benevolent that danger could come only from elsewhere. If they found international affairs frustrating, it was because they found it infuriating that foreigners could not always believe that their own ambition was a generous desire to share the abundance of American capitalism and the promise of American democracy with those less fortunate than themselves.1 Although such a description is undoubtedly accurate in describing the zeitgeist prevailing among the mainstream of early 1960s American society, one must ask whether such cultural chauvinism really apprehends the sentiments of the more disenfranchised sectors within the U.S. at the time. Did American Indians, for example, share in such glorifications of The American Dream? Kennedy himself called his political agenda the New Frontier, a rhetorical device not exactly designed to reassure an indigenous population nearly obliterated during the U.S. conquest of its first wilderness, and specific to his Indian policy was something termed the New Trail, a phrase smacking of the same assimilationist mentality which had so recently marked the termination and relocation policies of the Truman and Eisenhower administrations. Further, during Kennedy's presidency there was an acceleration of the shift from the historical, supposedly custodial role of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) under the Department of Interior, to that of serving as a sort of entrepreneurial governmental agency. This last emphasized the development of the human and natural resources available in Indian country, with considerable effort devoted to attracting various industries to locate on reservations, and to expand vocational edu-