American Indian Culture and Research Journal

Fred Mahone, recently sprung from Chilocco Indian School and just about to ship out for France, took time in the summer of 1918 to reflect on the past and think about the future. Whiling away his time at Michigan’s Selfridge Field, Mahone put pencil to paper in the language he had only recently learned to write, and announced himself to the world, “I am a full blooded born from ... Ancient descendent who has gained three fourth of an education.” But having no use for what would come to be called primitive anti-modernism—that tangle of ideas which celebrated the past, and often indigenous peoples, as repositories of authenticity, and used them as anodynes for the hurly -burly of modern life—Mahone was eager to jettison the Indian past he said he learned about at Chilocco. He urged: “Let us forget today the sole object of the mere early savagery of the passed period. Wearing apparel of peculiar specimens, long hair, feathers, blankets, moccasins are curiosity for to-day.” Shucking the hull of primitivism, however, did not mean growing the skin of a white man. Mahone, hoping to escape from underneath the weight of history—a weight pressed upon him, not a burden he chose to bear—implored “the redmen of the western hemisphere must make up our mind to be ... in the modern History of to-day.” After all, he said, the “ancestors of the redmen remains the same. But their present generations are aiming themselves toward the modern life.” And to help the Hualapai aim straighter, Mahone drafted an eighteen-page manifesto. Broken down into nine parts and thirty-seven sections, his letter from Michigan was a thoroughly modern and quite detailed blueprint for self-government and education, as well as a clear demand for citizenship and all its privileges and burdens, including the right to vote and the responsibility of paying taxes. When he came home to the Hualapai Reservation in northwestern Arizona after the war, a new tribal organization, “The Redmen Self Depentendent [sic] of America,” would carry out his plan.