Viola Hatch (February 12, 1930 – April 22, 2019) was a Native American activist, founding member of the National Indian Youth Council, and former tribal chair of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes. She successfully sued the Canton, Oklahoma, schools regarding the right of students to obtain an education.
Early life Viola Sutton was born February 12, 1930 to Arapaho chief and Mennonite pastor Harry Arthur Sutton (1907–1978) and Sallie Blackbear Sutton (1912–1988) on her grandmother's allotment near Geary, Oklahoma. Around 1938, the family left Geary and returned to the Canton area where Sutton's father had an allotment which he inherited from his grandmother, Red Face.
She was raised on the family allotment with her siblings: Cora Mae Sutton Scabbyhorse Querdibitty (1932–2010), Patricia Ann Sutton Walker (1935–1997), Nancy Ruth Sutton (1937), Lavonta Sutton Kenrick (1939), former Arapaho chief William Ray "Billy" Sutton (1940–2015), Charlene Sutton Lime (1943–2013), Arthur Warren Sutton (1945–1945), Wilda Jean Sutton Allen Gould (1947), Georgia Mae Sutton Roberts (1948–2010), former Arapaho chief Allen D. Sutton (1950), Ava Dushane Sutton Benson (1954), and Marcella Dawn "Marci" Sutton Armijo (1967).
Sutton attended school in Canton and then the Concho Indian Boarding School. Concho was a vocational training school based on a military-style discipline model. While the students did study the same curriculum as public school students by the time Sutton attended, it was a working farm and the students were expected to care for the livestock and cultivate the gardens. The purpose of boarding school education was to teach girls "life skills," such as cooking and cleaning, and Christianity, to rid children of their pagan beliefs. Frustrated by insistence that she be trained for domestic work, Sutton abandoned further education and moved to Chicago as part of the Bureau of Indian Affairs Relocation Program. She found work at the Spiegel Company, which was operating as predominantly a mail-order clothing and home accessory company.
Activism As the 1960s emerged, a growing sensitivity to minority rights was born, spurred by Supreme Court decisions such as Brown v. Board of Education, Gideon v. Wainwright, Loving v. Virginia and legislation including the Voting Rights Act of 1957, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Fair Housing Act if 1968. Into this turbulent time, a pan-Indian movement developed predominantly with the goals of having the US government return native lands, right social ills, and provide funds for cultural education. The Red Power Movement and American Indian Movement were both born out of this pan-Indian awakening, and Viola was involved from the beginning.
While Viola was in Oklahoma, she was a Native American activist who sued the Canton School over her son Buddy and won, allowing him to wear his hair long. Viola Hatch was a member of the following organizations: American Indian Movement, board member of the National Indian Youth Council, Cheyenne & Arapaho Elder board member, Southern Arapaho language advisory board, Bear Butte forum, lead walker and organizer for the Family & Mother Earth Walk.
She had returned from Chicago and married Donald Hatch, a union organizer. Hatch opened senior and youth centers, worked with the homeless and VISTA volunteers, and urged political involvement by native peoples. She became involved in both local and national level organizations for Indian rights. Hatch also worked as a field operative for Oklahomans for Indian Opportunity (OIO), an organization developed by LaDonna Harris (Comanche) under the federal Office of Economic Opportunity programs.
The creation of the OIO was the first effort in the state of Oklahoma for the western plains tribes in the state to work with the Five Civilized Tribes. Field operatives, like Viola, began organizing tribal Head Start Programs, programs to deal with high Indian drop-out rates, native economic development programs and tribal human services.Philip (1995), p 222-224
National Indian Youth Council In 1961, a conference with over 800 participants was held in Chicago, Illinois with educators and anthropologists, and frustrated Native Americans from 13 to 20 June which produced a "Declaration of Indian Purpose: the Voice of the American Indian" – a policy created for Indians by Indians. They delivered the policy to President John F. Kennedy, but went on to form the National Indian Youth Council (NIYC) in Gallup, New Mexico later that summer, to translate words into actions. The founding members of NIYC – Herbert Blatchford, Navajo Nation; Gerald Brown, Flathead Indian Reservation of Montana; Sam English, Ojibwe; Viola Hatch, Arapaho of the Cheyenne-Arapaho Tribe of Oklahoma; Joan Nobel, Ute; Karen Rickard, Tuscarora; Melvin Thom, Walker River Paiute Tribe of the Walker River Reservation, Nevada; Clyde Warrior, Ponca Tribe of Indians of Oklahoma; Della Warrior, Otoe-Missouria Tribe of Indians of Oklahoma; and Shirley Hill Witt, Mohawk – included 3 members from Oklahoma. Although NIYC claimed to have hundreds of members, a core group of ten to fifteen people shaped the organization. Viola has continued to serve on the board from the inception through 2015.
The goals of the National Indian Youth Council from the beginning were to honor and preserve the customs and lives of Native people. Their focus includes preserving traditional religious practices and sacred sites; elimination of barriers to full political participation by native citizens; promotion of public education for tribe members which honors Indian contributions to the overall culture and respects positive image reinforcement of native traditions, customs and people; employment training and placement; protection of treaty rights, including tribal sovereignty, hunting and fishing rights and environmental conservation; and promoting international coordination and support for protection of the rights of indigenous people throughout the Western Hemisphere.
American Indian Taskforces When Nixon was elected in 1968, Indian activists were unsure of what his policies would be, in spite of campaign promises. They remembered the termination policies of his Republican predecessors and demanded a clear policy proving that self-determination had arrived. The president-elect requested that native leaders compile a document briefing him on policy, their desires and solutions, needs, and priorities. From January to February, 1969 a task force met and prepared the document, which would become the basis of the Special Recommendations on Indian Affairs delivered by Nixon on 8 July 1970.Josephy (1999), p 79 After completion of the report, the task force which was composed of "many of the best known Indian leaders in the country," including HatchJosephy (1999), p 93 one of only six women on the task force, met in Washington, DC in November 1969 to present their ideas. On 10 November, they met with Vice President Spiro Agnew and on 12 November, they presented the statement to Congress. Their recommendations were that Indians needed to be involved in their own governance, be consulted, be allowed to design and implement processes, and be able to express their grievances and propose legislative and policy solutions. They asked for their sovereignty to be respected, for state governors to be required to honor treaties and federal statutes, and they asked for Congress to establish a system of redress so that if federal programs, which were designed for the benefit of Native Americans, were not in fact benefiting them, there would be mechanisms to obtain justice.Josephy (1999), pp 95–100
A second task force, also created in 1968, by the American Indian Policy Review Commission was charged with review of federal Indian law and policy to make recommendations of obsolete laws for repeal, consolidations of redundant provisions, or amendments of existing provisions to provide conformity throughout the US Code. Hatch, Frances Wise, Roberta Black and numerous other native leaders reported on the failures of the Department of Justice and the FBI to respond and/or investigate civil rights abuse claims by Indians against state and local law enforcement officers. The task force concluded its work in 1976 and made a full report to Congress.
From June through August, 1974, a task force of Indian law students, Indian lawyers, and tribal representatives, assessed how tribal legal systems could be utilized to strengthen tribal governing bodies and implement judicial decisions. There were only three participants from Oklahoma on the task force—Hatch was the sole tribal representative and two Cherokee Nation student participants, Robert Steven Lowery and David Ricketts-Kingfisher. Seventeen reservations were visited with the goal of determining how to best implement the newly passed Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act. As administration of a wide range of government services which had previously been carried out by federal agencies were to become the responsibility of the tribes, the report was a first step in determining tribal readiness to do so. The analysis was an important one, as previously the federal government had been responsible for the complexities of overlapping jurisdictions of Indian Affairs. As tribal governing bodies moved to assume those roles, they had to be aware of state, federal, and municipal implications, as well as treaty provisions.Parker (1975), p 5 The report highlighted numerous deficiencies in tribal governing documents and tribal court systems and recommendations for eliminating those deficiencies.Parker (1975), pp 202-209
American Indian Movement (AIM) The American Indian Movement (AIM) was founded in 1968 by a group of Anishinaabe that included Dennis Banks, Mary Jane Wilson, George Mitchell, and Pat Ballanger. In 1969, while visiting the Occupation of Alcatraz, Banks, recruited John Trudell (Santee Sioux), who became AIM's primary spokesperson for the next decade and Russell Means (Oglala Lakota), who became AIM's primary strategist. As many as a dozen chapters sprang up in Oklahoma in the 1970s, led by Carter Camp (Ponca). The goals of the movement were self-determination of tribal people and development of a framework to address the critical issues —racism, illness, poverty, high unemployment, sub-standard housing, inadequate educational opportunities, and abrogation of treaty agreements— facing them.
On 12 September 1972, about forty to fifty Indians from the AIM movement, including Camp and Hatch, took over the office of the state Indian Education director, Overton James (Chickasaw) in Oklahoma City, to protest the way federal money for Indian education was allocated. In Oklahoma, about 150 school districts having 10 percent or greater American Indian enrollment, annually received $2 million from the Johnson-O'Malley subsidies. The activists claimed the funds were being spent on the general expenses of schools and not specifically for native students. Negotiations with the BIA broke down and the facility was occupied until 14 September, when a compromise was reached to freeze spending on Johnson-O'Malley funds for the fiscal year until an external audit of the expenditures could be undertaken.