ABSTRACT
In his primary campaign speech for president of the Southwest Regional Indian Youth Council in 1960, 21-year-old Ponca activist Clyde Warrior countered his opponent’s standard line of the day-Indians’ need for education and professionalism-with a short speech that prefigured the revolutionary rhetoric of the coming Indian movement of the sixties and seventies and signaled a turn in Native discourses of politics, publics, and the body. Strolling up to the podium with his cowboy hat pushed casually back on his head, Warrior looked at the audience of young Indian people, rolled up his sleeves, held out his arms, and said only two lines: “This is all I have to offer. The sewage of Europe does not flow through these veins” (Smith and Warrior 42). Clyde Warrior won the election by a landslide that day, thus marking a shift in the Indian public from a politics and rhetoric of assimilation and accommodation to one of nationalism and essentialism. The rhetorical effectivity of his short speech assumes a number of political notions of Native identity. Warrior addressed his audience pantribally, as “Indians” opposed to “Europe,” illustrating that distinction through the concept of blood, and then using blood and body (specifically, his own) to symbolize Indian culture and nationhood, a linkage that would continue to resonate in the Indian movement from Alcatraz to the Longest Walk to Wounded Knee II.
