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	President Lyndon B. Johnson - photo from Wikipedia

Fifty-one years ago this month, the Indian Civil Rights Act of 1968 was passed, giving Native people rights not spelled out in earlier legislation. The path to passage was long and difficult.

For many years, Native Americans suffered from policies developed by the federal government that were specifically designed to eradicate Native people entirely, or to assimilate them into the developing culture of the United States. Native people were forced from their aboriginal territories onto newly established reservations and Tribal lands where the laws of the U.S. Constitution did not necessarily apply.

After years of political movements stemming from the mistreatment of indigenous people, civil rights became a national issue. In the 1960s, figures like Martin Luther King, Jr., helped bring national attention to disparities in civil liberties and helped end forced segregation in different parts of the country. It was during this time that Native people formed the American Indian Movement (AIM) to protest for basic civil rights.

On November 22, 1963, President Lyndon B. Johnson assumed the role of U.S. President after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Following in the late President's footsteps, President Johnson sought to develop laws that delivered on the promise of civil liberties and freedom to each American, including people of color and Indian people. In 1964 he passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the first piece of legislation that outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex and national origin.

However, as previously stated, laws of the United States did not necessarily apply to Tribal lands. Aware of the gross mistreatment of indigenous people, President Johnson worked diligently to educate members of government on the issues that Native people faced.

In March of 1968, he delivered a message to Congress, titled "The Forgotten American", addressing the problems that indigenous peoples faced.

"The words of the Indian have become our words - the names of our states and streams and landmarks," stated President Johnson. "His myths and his heroes enrich our literature. His lore colors our art and our language. For two centuries, the American Indian has been a symbol of the drama and excitement of the earliest America. But for two centuries, he has been an alien in his own land."

In a section of the message seeking to promote Indian development through health, education, economic growth and strengthening community institutions, President Johnson stated, "In our efforts to meet that responsibility, we must pledge to respect fully the dignity and the uniqueness of the Indian citizen. That means partnership - not paternalism. We must affirm the right of the first Americans to remain Indians while exercising their rights as Americans. We must seek new ways to provide Federal assistance to Indians - with new emphasis on Indian self-help and with respect for Indian culture. And we must assure the Indian people that it is our desire and intention that the special relationship between the Indian and his government grow and flourish."

On April 11, 1968, President Lyndon Johnson passed the Indian Civil Rights Act of 1968 (ICRA). The Act afforded indigenous people the same protections promised in the Bill of Rights on Tribal land. The Act guaranteed Tribal people personal freedoms against Tribal governments and assisted in the establishment of formal legislative authority and trial courts in Indian Country.

Legal aspects of ICRA can be found on Washington LawHelp's website.

For more information on the development of ICRA and Lyndon Johnson's work with Native people, please visit Indian Country Today's website.

By Tom Tolan, Milwaukee Magazine

	Dancers perform at the Bear Moon Pow Wow at the Indian Community School in January; photo by Lacy Landre

Editor's Note:  Jason Dropik, a Bad River Tribal Member, is the head of the Indian Community School in Franklin, featured in this article.

The speakers of Wisconsin's native languages have dwindled to a few elders, but the Tribes are rallying to ensure this critical element of their culture is preserved.

The day care classroom looks pretty standard.

Six children, ages 1 to 2 and full of energy, are playing with toys, bouncing around the room and interacting with three teachers. A teacher, a grandmotherly woman named Annie Wilber, sits on the floor with the youngsters and sings that ubiquitous little-kids' song - "If you're happy and you know it, clap your hands!" The toddlers clap, stamp and jump on cue. Across the room, a little boy sneezes. Another teacher - tall, 23-year-old Donald Tourtillott - leans over. "Gross. Your nose is really snotty, let's wipe that nose."

What makes this place unusual: No adult in this room is talking to these children in English. All communications are required to be in Menominee, a language familiar to hundreds of Tribe members but spoken proficiently by only about 10 of them. This is a language-immersion day care on the Menominee reservation in Keshena, and part of an ambitious effort to resurrect the language that has lost so many of its native speakers that it might be headed to extinction without some kind of intervention. 

The number of people who learned Menominee before they started speaking English - known as first-language speakers, or native speakers - is down to five elders, all of them older than 80, according to Ron Corn Jr., the longtime Menominee language teacher who oversees teacher training for the Tribe's immersion day care. The idea of this place is to speak Menominee to babies and toddlers who are in their most formative years. "The sign of a healthy language is that the language is spoken by children," Corn says. "There's no other demographic that makes the language safe. So if it's spoken even by a thousand elders, that doesn't make your language safe."

There are some 150 indigenous languages spoken in North America, but many of them no longer have any first-language speakers. The last native speakers of many such languages have died in recent years, notes Monica Macaulay, a linguistics professor at UW-Madison who specializes in Native languages, particularly Menominee. Two examples she cites: the last native Mandan speaker, in North Dakota, and the last speaker of Wichita, in Oklahoma, both passed away in 2016.

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	Banners from state Tribes are on display over the Bear Moon Pow Wow in January;  photo by Lacy Landre

When you visit the Indian Community School in Franklin, you can't help being blown away by the beauty of the place. It's a low-slung building hugging a ridge on 200 acres of former farmland about 13 miles from Downtown Milwaukee, but the spaces inside are vast and full of light. Supporting columns are wrapped in trees from the Menominee reservation. The school was built in 2007, designed by internationally known architect Antoine Predock, in collaboration with Milwaukee's Eppstein Uhen Architects and Chris Cornelius, an Oneida tribal member who teaches architecture at UW-Milwaukee.

In the high-ceilinged central hall near the building's entrance hang banners from each of the state's Tribes. The 4K-8 school, whose 372 students (all of them are Native American, and 64 percent qualify for free or reduced-price lunches) take a full elementary school curriculum, with math, social studies, art and music. But the kids also all take Native languages each day - committing as kindergartners to either Oneida, Menominee or Ojibwe instruction. The school is also in discussion with the Ho-Chunk to add daily instruction in that language, too. "We're very hopeful. It's very close," says ICS spokeswoman Siobhan Marks.

The heart of the school's teaching mission is making kids aware of their Native cultures, Marks says. At ICS, they learn to value their Native heritage and see how it's still alive in their hometown and state. During a morning visit to Renee Pfaller's Oneida language classroom in January, third-graders - all of them at least part Oneida - worked on sentences by asking each other about their clan membership. In the next period, second-graders sat in a way to simulate an Oneida longhouse, with members of the Wolf, Turtle and Bear clans on separate benches. Teaching assistant Lori Faber told the children about her first visit to a ceremony at the reservation's longhouse the weekend before, with plenty of Oneida terms and songs thrown in.

While much of the school's education focuses on places and cultures that thrived outside what's now the Milwaukee metro area, ICS teacher Michael Zimmerman Jr. likes to remind visitors of the city's Native roots. As students touring the school visited his Ojibwe language classroom last summer, he called up a 1920 article on the room's big flat-screen monitor to tell the story of the multiple Potawatomi-led villages in eastern Wisconsin at the time of European settlement. He indicated five of them in what is now Downtown Milwaukee and the surrounding neighborhoods, and named the Potawatomi chiefs who led them. He called up a photo of a plaque describing a village where the Hilton City Center now stands, headed by a chief named Kenozhoym, and read from it. "The village was located near a clear spring, at the foot of a steep bluff, atop of which were more wigwams and an Indian cemetery. A wild rice swamp lay to the east of the village; to the north, as far as Juneau Avenue, stretched a swamp of cedar and tamarack. ... The village was vacated in 1838, when the last of the Potawatomi were moved west of the Mississippi." He talked of other villages on today's Jones Island, at 24th and Clybourn, and at Fifth and National. "It's all within about 2.5 square miles," he tells the visitors. "When I asked my third-graders through eighth-graders, 'Where do you guys live?' most of them lived roughly within that same area."

We talk today about historically Polish, German, African-American or Hispanic neighborhoods in Milwaukee. But the Potawatomi lived here before any of them, notes Noodin. "It's never too late to remember indigenous history," said Noodin, who was there that day. "It is as much this city's heritage as any of the other layers. How do we move to the future? Perhaps by remembering all of the past."

The ICS started in the homes of three Oneida women in Milwaukee in 1969 who felt that Milwaukee Public Schools were not doing right by their kids. The school moved twice into more official homes before closing in 1983 because it was "struggling financially," according to an official timeline. In 1986, with the school closed but its board still active, it purchased land at 16th and Canal streets in the Menomonee Valley. The next year the school reopened on the former campus of Concordia College on Milwaukee's West Side, and three years later, after approaching several Tribes, it inked a deal with the Forest County Potawatomi transferring the Valley land - now the site of Potawatomi Hotel & Casino - and the old Concordia campus to the Tribe. The ICS operated on a lease from the Potawatomi until it moved onto its Franklin campus in 2007.

All of this came amid the growth of Indian gaming around the country as the result of the federal Indian Gaming Regulatory Act in 1988. The lease provided the school with millions of dollars of casino money each year, and allowed it to build not only the Franklin school, but also create an endowment now in the neighborhood of $500 million. "We invested the money very well, and that is what has allowed the school to be set into perpetuity," says Marks.

It has also allowed the ICS to create partnerships with the state's Tribes, and others. It was a million-dollar grant from the school in 1999 to endow at least two professorships at UWM that launched the Quinney Institute. Then in 2015 and 2016, ICS representatives visited all of the state's Tribes on a tour called "Listening to Tribal Voices." "Part of the talk of all tribal communities was how important language was," says head of school Jason Dropik, an Ojibwe from the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa. "It was talked about at every single meeting." The result was a new teaching plan for the school that is now in its first year. One major goal, says Marks, is to have all graduates conversational in their chosen language - with the hope that some will go on to become fluent.

Representatives from the state's Tribes visit the school often. Last fall, the executive council of the Forest County Potawatomi made their first trip as a group to the school - the beautiful building that their casino helped build. "That was a historic meeting," Marks says.

Read the full story featured in Milwaukee Magazine.