Warrior Memorial

Clyde Merton Warrior (1939-1968)

Clyde Warrior was one of the most outspoken and courageous young activists of his generation. He was born to Gloria Collins in Ponca City, Oklahoma, on August 31, 1939. As a student at Cameron Junior College in Lawton, Oklahoma, he was elected President of the Southwest Regional Indian Youth Council and, in 1962, earned the Outstanding Indian Student award. From Cameron, he went to the University of Oklahoma and then to Northeastern State College in Tahlequah, where he completed a bachelor’s degree in education in 1966.

Clyde Warrior loved and respected his people, and he learned a great deal from them. He listened as his grandparents Bill and Metha Collins taught him what it meant to be Ponca. At a very young age, he demonstrated a remarkable ability to memorize and perform tribal songs and dances. By the time he reached his teens, he had become an accomplished—and frequently a champion—fancy dancer.

In 1961, Warrior became the driving force behind the American Indian youth movement. That year he attended the Workshop on American Indian Affairs, a six-week summer program for Indian students. In June, his class attended the American Indian Chicago Conference, a meeting of some 600 tribal leaders that met to draft a “Declaration of Indian Purpose” to present to President John F. Kennedy.

Warrior and his cohort played an important role throughout the Chicago conference, but they quickly lost their patience with the older generation’s foot-dragging. “It was sickening to see American Indians get up and just tell obvious lies about how well the federal government was treating them, what fantastic and magnificent things the federal government was doing for us,” he later remembered. When the youths formally expressed their dissent from the conference floor, they met with resistance.

Like so many young people during the 1960s, they felt as though they belonged to a generation whose time had arrived, and they resolved to do more. In August 1961, Clyde Warrior met with several other youths in Gallup, New Mexico, to found the National Indian Youth Council. Having pledged themselves to “attaining a greater future” for Indian people, they threw their energies into building a grassroots movement to protect and promote tribal sovereignty.

From 1961 through 1968, Warrior served as an officer of the National Indian Youth Council. He simultaneously worked for the University of Kansas Indian Education Project and Denver Commission on Human Relations, co-edited a journal entitled Indian Voices, served on the Indian Advisory Board to Upward Bound, acted as an advisor to the National Congress of American Indians, helped to organize the Poor People’s Campaign, and gave lectures at Oberlin College, Monteith College, and the University of South Dakota, among others.

In his speeches and formal writings, Warrior angered and inspired. He made no compromises. People that knew him respected him for saying things that they felt but never dared to say out loud. In essays such as “Don’t Take ‘No’ for An Answer,” “Which One Are You?,” “Time for Indian Action,” “How Should an Indian Act?,” and “Poverty, Community, Power,” he talked about taking pride in Indianness, demanded respect for

traditions, and condemned the dominant society for dehumanizing and alienating tribal people. He threw his support behind the fish-ins in the Pacific Northwest, testified before Congress, cajoled the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, criticized established tribal leaders, and protested outside the White House. In word and deed and spirit, Clyde Warrior inspired the nationalist movement that would be known as Red Power.

He lost his life too soon, succumbing to liver failure in early July 1968. His close friend Mel Thom (Walker River Paiute) offered a powerful and appropriate eulogy. “Our leader is gone,” he wrote, ““But the spirit of such a leader is never gone. We can still hear him teasing, laughing, cussing, singing, and talking as few men could. We will always hear him. His words made Indian people feel good ….. In his short life he brought us a long way ahead in our struggle for human equality.” Another person who knew Warrior well described him as full of “thunder and lightning and tears.” “The power and urgency of his spirit, the depth of his inner life, the courage of his commitments, caused him to be uncommonly misunderstood,” he added. “In a sluggish, apathetic, complacent world, Clyde Warrior's passion for candor and justice vexed the sluggish, troubled the apathetic, outraged the complacent ….” Clyde Warrior’s legacy lives on. He continues to inspire people to carry forward the fight for tribal sovereignty, cultural survival, and human dignity. In words as appropriate today as they were in 1968, Mel Thom observed, “Clyde leaves us with our struggle just beginning.”

Daniel M. Cobb, Ph.D.

Miami University

Oxford, Ohio

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