Roots of Jusctice: Native Americans, Part II

The Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s – aimed at abolishing legalized racial segregation and discrimination across the United States – found expression in Nebraska in many ways. From college protests to marches in Lincoln, the movement found a home within the youth and counterculture communities of Lincoln and Omaha. But less known is the way the movement impacted Native American populations, especially those in remote Nebraska communities. “Just as young Hispanics, Asians, and Native Americans across the nation were learning the lessons of the black experience of the 1960s and expressing their identity as they sought to claim their own niche in society in the early 1970s, so too Mexican Americans and Indians were becoming more visible in Nebraska,” write authors James C. Olson and Ronald C. Naugle.1 The most visible push for Native American civil rights could be seen in the efforts of the American Indian Movement, an indigenous rights organization established in 1968 in Minneapolis. The organization emerged on the national scene following its occupation of Alcatraz Island in 1969 before taking over Mount Rushmore and the Mayflower II. In Nebraska, AIM garnered headlines while protesting the February 1972 death of Raymond Yellow Thunder, a 51-year-old Lakota man whose beaten body was found in a pickup truck in Gordon. But even before Yellow Thunder’s death, Native American people in Nebraska towns like Alliance and Scottsbluff fought for their civil rights following the deaths of Native people in jails and at the hands of non-Native perpetrators. Native advocates succeeded in creating a state organization charged with monitoring Native issues and legislation and coordinating the efforts of state agencies as they responded to Native needs and concerns. The Nebraska Unicameral chartered the Nebraska Commission on Indian Affairs in 1971 under the leadership of Leonard Springer, vice-chair of the Omaha tribe and leader in the Native American Church. While many historians mark the first instance of American Indian activism in Nebraska as the 1972 AIM march in Gordon following Yellow Thunder’s death, still others point to the efforts of Native people in western Nebraska to call attention to the deaths of Native inmates as among the first examples of indigenous activism in the state. And still others argue the long road to civil rights for Natives in Nebraska began even earlier. Author David Christensen argues that the roots of civil rights for Native people in Nebraska developed in the early 20th century in western Nebraska’s potato fields.