Our Brother’s Keeper: The Indian in White America

Description

The text describes the American Indian’s frustrations with his closed world, which thwarts and penalizes individual and tribal self-realization, which rewards and perpetrates dependency, and which demands alienation from one’s heritage as a price for survival. American society is described as arrogant and as attempting to insure that by systematic effort it will destroy or absorb the American Indian. The book is divided into 4 parts. Part 1, “Pieces of a Puzzle,” includes anecdotes gathered by listening to Indians on reservations, at ceremonial camp fires, in hogans or houses or huts, on the banks of the Columbia River, in upper state New York, Alaska, New Mexico, California, Oklahoma, the Dakotas, Nevada, and the Havasupai Canyon. Part 2, “How Not to Help A People Help Themselves; A Selective Examination of Governmental Approaches to Indians,” is subdivided into Education as War, White Man’s Medicine: The Indian and the Public Health Service, Indian Land–A Dwindling Asset, and Bureau of Indian Affairs’ 3 Lessons. Part 3, “Barriers to Change” includes A Case Study in Bureaucracy, The Compromised Advocate, and Winning the West: Congress’ Unfinished Business. In Part 4, “Civilizing the White Man,” the American Indian’s contributions to the white man are listed. A Postscript, Where Do We Go From Here, suggests that the American Indians should be allowed to shape their own policies and priorities.