11/27/2023 0 Comments Oregon thunderbird native americanRoosevelt’s the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which was touted as the American Indian’s “New Deal.” The act sought to reverse the policy of assimilation of Native Americans and to re-establish tribal control over native lands. With his distrust of federal authority established, Towner opposed the Indian Reorganization Act, a reform package of American Indian policy by Franklin D. Towner also opposed the federal government’s big dams on the Columbia River, and filed suit on behalf of Native American elders whose traditional fishing grounds were being decimated. “The Indian bureau…has spent millions of dollars of taxpayers money encouraging a system of peonage and slavery in supporting an educational system immeasurably inferior to that of the public schools.” He condemned the system for its segregation and for inducing “a feeling of racial inferiority.” He believed closing American Indian boarding schools would be part of the “emancipation” of Indians and that such schools were extremely damaging to Native Americans. In 1933, Towner wrote an editorial in the Oregonian urging the closure of the Chemawa school. He was a leader on the Siletz reservation and did legal work for native and tribal clients throughout the region. Marine corps during WWI, got his law degree from Willamette University. He also attended public high school in Salem, and after service in the U.S. As a boy he had been sent to Salem’s Chemawa Indian boarding school, part of a system of government-run schools meant to assimilate tribal youth into mainstream American culture. Born in the late 1890s on Oregon’s Siletz Reservation, his people were from the lower Rogue River region and had been displaced by the Rogue River War of the 1850s and removal to the reservation of many other tribes of Western Oregon. In another speech, Towner said the Jews were “chuck-na-gin,” which he claimed was an American Indian term for “children of Satan.”īefore preaching on behalf of Hitler, Towner was known as a Northwest tribal advocate. He said the Indians would find an excuse to see that all Jews were killed and the country and the world would be a lot cleaner.” would be in concentration camps surrounded by barbed wire and with Indians on guard. That same year, Towner attended a Bund meeting in Portland where, according to an informant feeding information to the local Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, he said that “when it was all over the Jews, etc. In 1939, an editorial in The New Republic titled “Red Indians, Brown Shirts” warned that Towner was “trying to mold Indians into good storm-troopers for use in a ‘future emergency.’” Towner wearing a Native American headdress and a swastika armband. He was admired by domestic fascists like William Dudley Pelley, whose Silver Shirt Legion sought to be the same for middle- and working-class “Aryan” Americans. Towner was a regular attendee of Portland’s weekly German-American Bund meetings, an organization embraced by the Third Reich as the hub of America’s Nazi movement. In the 1930s and ‘40s he traveled to Seattle, Spokane, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Phoenix, Washington, DC, Alaska, Mexico, and Canada and elsewhere, spreading the word about the threat Communism and Jews posed to America and the American Indian. In the history of Nazism in the Pacific Northwest, few figures stand out so incongruously as Chief Red Cloud, who was in reality the invented persona of a Native American attorney based in Portland named Elwood A. When he spoke, it was often to rail against the Jews and the “Jew Deal” of President “Rosenfelt.” He praised Adolf Hitler as a spiritual brother and painted a vision of a coming war when white Christians and American Indians would unite to defeat the Jews. As a witness to one of this lectures wrote, he “dressed in full Indian costume, beautiful headdress of white, green and lavender feathers, a Thunderbird design in center of headband with a Swastika on each side pants of buckskin trimmed with fringe and beads, a beaded vest and arm bands beaded in Swastika and Thunderbird design.” In the late 1930s, he appeared in public schools, lecture halls and at youth organizations in the Northwest talking about the plight of the American Indians, their role in creating American democracy, and the dangers they faced from a global foe - the Jews He was a Native American from Oregon who called himself “Chief Red Cloud,” and he cut an impressive figure.
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