In the first years of the 1970s, Indian Country became paradoxically more interwoven and yet also more divided. Three case studies from Oklahoma’s Indigenous communities illustrate this transformation. Beginning in the mid-1960s, a boom in Indigenous media allowed Indigenous people to communicate far more quickly over once prohibitive distances. In western Oklahoma, Southern Cheyenne parents relied upon Navajo ideas to form their own indigenous controlled school in early 1973. As a result of these exchanges between previously removed people, new indigenous communities emerged along ideological lines rather than those of tribal citizenship or ethnic identity. A few months earlier, the National Indian Youth Council’s Oklahoma chapters, one such evolving ideological community out of many in the United States, successfully brought attention to and changed a key state policy affecting indigenous students in public schools. Even as Indigenous activists collaborated with new vigor, corresponding divisions emerged in existing Indigenous communities; Native people began to debate the meaning of the messages new communities popularized. The American Indian Movement attempted to hold its 1973 national convention at Pawnee, Oklahoma, only to find that Indigenous people in the region did not support the gathering as the movement’s leaders anticipated. Together, these three case studies present a portrait of a diverse, indigenous world that facilitated collaboration through Native media yet wrought with emerging ideological schisms.

Truden, John. '“You’re in apple land but you are a lemon:” Connection, Collaboration, and Division in Early ‘70s Indian Country." Online Journal of Rural Research and Policy 15 no. 3 (2020). https://newprairiepress.org/ojrrp/vol15/iss3/1/

© 2020 John Truden
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
This Article is brought to you for free and Open Access by New Prairie Press. It has been accepted for inclusion in ORJJP by
an authorized administrator of New Prairie Press. For more information, please contact cads@k-state.edu.

John Truden is the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Native American and Indigenous Studies, Center for the Futures of Native Peoples at Dickinson College.

This published version is made available on Dickinson Scholar with the permission of the publisher. For more information on the published version, visit New Prairie Press's Website. https://newprairiepress.org/ojrrp/vol15/iss3/1/

Citation

Thumbnail	Title	Date Uploaded	Visibility	Actions
	Truden.You_re_in_Apple.pdf	2024-01-30	Public	Download