Alice Lee Jemison

Alice Lee Jemison
Born October 9, 1901
Silver Creek, New York
Died 1964 (1965) (aged 63)
Other names Alice Mae Lee Jemison
Occupation Native American journalist and activist

Alice Mae Lee Jemison (1901–1964) was a Seneca political activist and journalist. She was a major critic of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) and the New Deal policies of its commissioner John Collier.[1] She was supported by the Seneca Tribal Council, and also lobbied in support of California, Cherokee, and Sioux Indians during her career.[2] Her work was condemned by the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration and she was described harshly in press conferences and before Congressional committees.[2] For a time she was put under FBI surveillance.[1]

Personal life

Jemison was born on October 9, 1901, in Silver Creek, New York, near the Cattaraugus Reservation.[3] [4] Her mother, Elnora E. Seneca, was from a prominent Seneca family, and her father, Daniel A. Lee, was "a cabinetmaker of Cherokee descent." [4] Her goal was to become an attorney and she worked in the office of Robert Codd, Jr., but could not afford law school. In 1919, she graduated from Silver Lake High School and was married to Le Verne Leonard Jamison; they were separated nine years later because of his chronic alcoholism.[4] She financially supported her mother and her two children.[3] In addition to her journalism and activist career, she worked at various times as a beautician, salespserson, factory worker, clerk, peddler, dressmaker, and theatre usher.[5] Her daughter, Jeanne Marie Jemison, became a judge in the Seneca Nation.[6]

Early career

In 1930, Colthilde Marchand, wife of sculptor Henri Marchand, was murdered near Buffalo, and authorities charged two Seneca women, one of the artist's models Nancy Bowen and her friend Lila Jimerson, with the crime. The District Attorney called it an "Indian" crime and conducted warrantless searches of Seneca and Cayuga homes. Jemison supported their defense. With Chief Clinton Rickard and Seneca President Ray Jimerson, she appealed to political leaders, including U.S. Vice President Charles Curtis. Because of their efforts, the Bureau of Indian Affairs arranged for the U.S. Attorney to help represent the defendants.[3][7]

Jemison worked part time for Seneca President Ray Jimerson in the early 1930s and also wrote for the Buffalo Evening News. Her articles were syndicated by the North American Newspaper Alliance.[8]

In 1931, she was the spokesperson for the Seneca when they rejected an offer from New York State officials to settle a longstanding claim on the part of the Cayuga and the Seneca. The settlement would have given the Seneca $75,000 and the Cayuga $247,000 and the right to continue to live on the Seneca reservation.[9]

In the early 1930s she conducted legal research, wrote newspaper articles, campaigned for the Six Nations' candidate, and lobbied against the Indian Reorganization Act.[2]

Jemison moved to Washington, DC, in 1943 and began writing for the Washington Star.[8]

Lobbying against New Deal policies, John Collier, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs

Jemison's attacks on BIA Commissioner John Collier centered on his ideas about how the Indians should govern themselves.[10] She fought for a diversity of Indian lifestyles, fighting against a monolithic, romantic notion of primitives living on the pueblo.[10] Her ideas were influenced by the writings of Carlos Montezuma and Montezuma's one-time secretary, Joseph W. Latimer.[11]

In May 1933, responding to criticism from the Indian Rights Association, she criticized Collier's appointments of Indian Commissioner Rhoades and Assistant Commissioner Scattergood without holding a hearing and allowing Indian representatives to testify on their appointments. She said her argument was:[12]

...mainly against the principle of government by a bureau in which Indians have no voice. We believed the Indians were to be given a new deal and dared to raise our voice regarding the man whom we considered best qualified to be our guardian.... Other Indians spoke for other men and some just asked for an open hearing. An open council of all Indians might easily have been called and everyone given an opportunity to speak openly and publicly regarding their wishes. That would have been a new deal.

Jemison and her allies viewed the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 as a violation of treaty rights and a denial of tribal sovereignty.[13] Following this principle, she also fought the federal government's plans to subject the Seneca to the Selective Service Act of 1940 as U.S. citizens, insisting such authority belonged to the Iroquois Confederacy.[14]

Jemison also protested when Roosevelt vetoed the Beiter Bill[lower-alpha 1] in June 1935, which would have "restored tribal jurisdiction over fishing and hunting on [Seneca] reservations which had been taken away by the government in the Conservation Act of 1927", which she considered a violation of the Treaty of Canandaigua (1794).[13][15]

In November 1938, she testified before the Dies Committee, forerunner of the House Un-American Activities Committee, which was investigating Communist influence in labor unions, foreign relief services, and government agencies. On behalf of the American Indian Federation (AIF), she testified that nine officials of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and its parent, the Interior Department, including Interior Secretary Harold Ickes, were members of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), known to the Committee as a Communist front organization. She said the Bureau and the ACLU had engineered the passage of the 1934 act that sought to "restore the Indians to a state of communal bliss with their tribal lands held in common instead of in allotments".[16] Ickes called the Committee's work "a side show" and Dies an "outstanding zany". He gave the press copies of a letter from an anti-Semitic organization, James True Associates, soliciting funds for the AIF. Collier said that the organization Jemison represented was a "trouble-making pro-Nazi racket" trying to engage Indian support nationwide for legislation that would enrich only its own members.[17]

Historians note that Jemison's attacks on the Roosevelt administration, Collier, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs were often unfair or could be described as red-baiting. For example, Jemison claimed that Native Americans were controlled by a group of federal officials "who have well-known regard for radical activities and association with, or admiration for, atheists, anarchists, communists, and other 'fifth columnists'".[18]

Appearing on behalf of the AIF at Congressional hearings in 1940 on the Indian Reorganization Act, six years after its enactment, she said the Bureau of Indian Affairs represented "communism and distinctly Russian in variety" and its plan to compensate Native Americans individually for renouncing land claims "the program of the Christ-mocking, Communist-aiding, subversive and seditious American Civil Liberties Union and its subsidiary, the Progressive Education Association".[19]

When Jemison needed financial support in 1937, received either direct support or payment for reprinting her writings in their publications from several extremist critics of FDR, including the anti-Semites James True and William Dudley Pelley. This later prompted Collier to identify the AIF with Nazi sympathizers.[20]

In January 1939, at a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee considering the nomination of Felix Frankfurter to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court, Jemison testified in opposition along with a number of anti-Semitic and nativist witnesses, opponents of the ACLU, and Communist conspiracy theorists. According to the New York Times:[21]

Mrs. Alice Lee Jemison, a Seneca Indian, sobbing and pounding the table, declared that Professor Frankfurter, as a member of the Civil Liberties Union, was at least partly responsible for alleged government attempts to "communize the American Indians."

Its report noted this referred to the 1934 Act, which established tribal deeds because the earlier distribution of allotments had "resulted in the Indians selling much of their land to whites".[21]

Defense of other Indian nations

Jemison defended the rights of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians along with Cherokee Vice-Chief Fred Bauer, successfully moving the path of the Blue Ridge Parkway to a less disruptive route.[11]

Jemison's efforts to defend South Dakota and California Indians increased the voice for diverse Indian opinions before Congress by bringing Native Americans to testify.[11]

The First American

Jemison published a newsletter, The First American, which discussed congressional legislation, violation of Indian civil liberties, the image of the American Indian, the abolishment of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the removal of Commissioner Collier.[10]

Notes

  1. ↑ The Beiter Bill was named for Representative Alfred F. Beiter, a New York Democrat from the Buffalo area. He worked in the Interior Department in 1939–40.

References

  1. 1 2 Hauptman 1979.
  2. 1 2 3 Hauptman 1979, p. 15.
  3. 1 2 3 Hauptman 1979, p. 16.
  4. 1 2 3 Hauptman 2008, p. 69.
  5. ↑ Hauptman 1979, p. 17.
  6. ↑ Hauptman 2008, p. 48.
  7. ↑ Reis, Elizabeth (1998). Spellbound: Women and Witchcraft in America. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield. pp. 185–90. Retrieved April 15, 2015.
  8. 1 2 Frankson 2014.
  9. ↑ "Senecas Oppose State Agreement". New York Times. November 18, 1931. Retrieved April 15, 2015.
  10. 1 2 3 Hauptman 1979, p. 21.
  11. 1 2 3 Hauptman 1979, p. 19.
  12. ↑ Jemison, Alice Lee (May 20, 1933). "Letters to the Editor: Indian Affairs". New York Times. Retrieved April 15, 2015.
  13. 1 2 Hauptman 1979, p. 18.
  14. ↑ Hauptman 1981, p. 52.
  15. ↑ Hauptman 1981, p. 46.
  16. ↑ "Williams of WPA Assailed by Dies". New York Times. November 23, 1938. Retrieved April 15, 2015.
  17. ↑ "Name-Calling Led by Ickes and Dies". New York Times. November 24, 1938. Retrieved April 15, 2015.
  18. ↑ Rosier 2010, p. 74.
  19. ↑ Weeks, Charles J. (July 1976). "The Eastern Cherokee and the New Deal". The North Carolina Historical Review. 53 (3): 317. JSTOR 23529643.
  20. ↑ Hauptman, Laurence M. (November 1983). "The American Indian Federation and the Indian New Deal: A Reinterpretation". Pacific Historical Review. 52 (4): 398. JSTOR 3639073.
  21. 1 2 "Frankfurter Goes To Hearing Today". New York Times. January 12, 1939. Retrieved April 15, 2015.

Sources

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