Viola Hatch (February 12, 1930 – April 22, 2019) was a Native American activist, founding member of the National Indian Youth Council, and former tribal chair of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes.
[23] The purpose of boarding school education was to teach girls "life skills," such as cooking and cleaning, and Christianity, to rid children of their pagan beliefs.
[24] Frustrated by insistence that she be trained for domestic work, Sutton abandoned further education and moved to Chicago as part of the Bureau of Indian Affairs Relocation Program.
Into this turbulent time, a pan-Indian movement developed predominantly with the goals of having the US government return native lands, right social ills, and provide funds for cultural education.
[1] While Viola was in Oklahoma, she was a Native American activist who sued the Canton School over her son Buddy and won, allowing him to wear his hair long.
Hatch opened senior and youth centers, worked with the homeless and VISTA volunteers, and urged political involvement by native peoples.
They delivered the policy to President John F. Kennedy, but went on to form the National Indian Youth Council (NIYC) in Gallup, New Mexico later that summer, to translate words into actions.
Their focus includes preserving traditional religious practices and sacred sites; elimination of barriers to full political participation by native citizens; promotion of public education for tribe members which honors Indian contributions to the overall culture and respects positive image reinforcement of native traditions, customs and people; employment training and placement; protection of treaty rights, including tribal sovereignty, hunting and fishing rights and environmental conservation; and promoting international coordination and support for protection of the rights of indigenous people throughout the Western Hemisphere.
From January to February, 1969 a task force met and prepared the document, which would become the basis of the Special Recommendations on Indian Affairs delivered by Nixon on 8 July 1970.
Their recommendations were that Indians needed to be involved in their own governance, be consulted, be allowed to design and implement processes, and be able to express their grievances and propose legislative and policy solutions.
[37] Hatch, Frances Wise, Roberta Black and numerous other native leaders reported on the failures of the Department of Justice and the FBI to respond and/or investigate civil rights abuse claims by Indians against state and local law enforcement officers.
Seventeen reservations were visited with the goal of determining how to best implement the newly passed Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act.
As administration of a wide range of government services which had previously been carried out by federal agencies were to become the responsibility of the tribes, the report was a first step in determining tribal readiness to do so.
As tribal governing bodies moved to assume those roles, they had to be aware of state, federal, and municipal implications, as well as treaty provisions.
[40] The American Indian Movement (AIM) was founded in 1968 by a group of Anishinaabe that included Dennis Banks, Mary Jane Wilson, George Mitchell, and Pat Ballanger.
[43] The goals of the movement were self-determination of tribal people and development of a framework to address the critical issues —racism, illness, poverty, high unemployment, sub-standard housing, inadequate educational opportunities, and abrogation of treaty agreements— facing them.
Negotiations with the BIA broke down and the facility was occupied until 14 September, when a compromise was reached to freeze spending on Johnson-O'Malley funds for the fiscal year until an external audit of the expenditures could be undertaken.
[30] Because of long-standing prejudice against native students, lack of desire to preserve native heritage or even present it in a positive light, little support from administrators, high dropout rates, and improper use of Johnson-O'Malley subsidies in the Hammon Public School System, Cheyenne students and their parents were in favor of creating the Institute for the Southern Plains.
[47] Peggy Dycus (Sac & Fox) was in charge of running the Southern Plains School, but she had trouble obtaining utilities, or even a house to rent, as she had been branded as an AIM radical.
[45] In January 1973, Dennis Banks began gathering AIM members for a major civil rights campaign to expose corruption on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, the poverty and broken treaties there, as well as several uninvestigated deaths.
[47] Eventually, electricity, water and food supplies were cut off by federal marshals and national guardsmen, in an attempt to break the standoff.
[56] In the midst of her federal trial, Hatch continued her activism, organizing the Women's Healing Walk for Family and Mother Earth from Los Angeles, California to St. Augustine, Florida.
[57] The walk was the first such commemoration of the native prisoners by Indian people[47] and also focused on cleansing rites to protest nuclear dumping and desecration of burial mounds and other sacred sites.
[6] In May 2002, the City of Sturgis, and a group of private businessmen, submitted an application to Governor William Janklow for community development funds to build a sports complex and shooting range about 4 miles north of Bear Butte, a sacred place used for thousands of years by the Arapaho, Cheyenne, Sioux, and 30 other tribes for ceremonial purposes.
[61] In February 2006, a long-term planning meeting of the Intertribal Coalition to Defend the Bear Butte, met in Sturgis, South Dakota with international partners, tribal members and leadership, and other supporters to develop strategies to protect the sacred site.
The oil and gas interests appealed the case to the U.S. Western District Court for Oklahoma in an action styled Mustang Fuel Corp. v. Hatch.
Therefore, the Tribes can validly impose a tax on the valuable oil and gas development taking place on those lands as a source of revenue to fund tribal services within their territory".
An audit by the Interior Department in 1992 had claimed that hundreds of thousands of dollars had been misused by the tribal business committee resulting in the near bankruptcy of the tribes.
[84] In July 1995, in a federal courthouse in the U.S. Western District Court at Oklahoma City, Hatch and the other tribe members were indicted on charges of embezzlement, conversion, and conspiracy.
According to court documents, while there were irregularities and a lack of oversight protections in the processing of travel expense claims, the government's allegations that Hatch ever possessed the funds were unsubstantiated.