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Montanan Assails In   ations, Charges They Resemble Soviet Slave Camps

By THOR SEVERSON.
Denver Post Staff Writer.

Russia has its concentration camps and the United States its Indian reservations—and the difference between them is slight since life is regimented, controlled and imprisoned in both.

This was the assertion Monday in Denver of Robert Yellowtail, Montana Crow Indian and champion of Indian liberation, initial speaker at the opening session Tuesday of the National Congress of American Indians in the Cosmopolitan hotel.

PLAN 4-DAY PARLEY.

Yellowtail, former superintendent of the Crow reservation in Montana, said the American Indian is a "prisoner" in the land of his birth—that he is the "forgotten man in a land of plenty."

Upwards of 400 representatives of Indian tribes throughout the United States began arriving Monday for the four-day national convention, the fifth such congress since the association was organized in Denver in 1944.

Exhaustive studies are planned by the congress into programs aimed at liberating the American Indian. The elimination of government control is one aim. The appointment of an Indian to the office of U.S. Indian commissioner is another aim.

SPENDING CITED.
Yellowtail lashed the present U.S. bureau of Indian affairs, terming it a "fumbling political organization which has become the feeding trough for 11,000 employes." The bureau, Yellowtail said, has degenerated into a "white man's pension bureau." It is autocratic, dictatorial and incapable of progressive programs as now organized," Yellowtail charged.

The Montana Crow Indian, who twice unsuccessfully sought a seat in the U.S. congress, said the Indian service has spent more than one billion dollars since 1903. Ostensibly, said Yellowtail, the bureau was created to "free the Indian."

"That liberation is as distant today as it was a century ago," he added. "How was the money spent, the billion dollars? For salaries, for programs strung with red tape, for keeping the Indian on the reservation."

(Leader sought for liberation fight. Page 2, col. 3.)

[[3 images]]
Denver Post Photos by Al Moldvay.

There was a touch of the old and the new in the Cosmopolitan hotel Monday as delegates to the four-day National Congress of American Indians began arriving for congress sessions. Left are two delegates, Tom Joe of Pendleton, Ore., and Nathan Wayne of Towoco, Colo., a Umatilla and Ute, respectively. They will participate in congress studies. On the right is Robert Yellowtail, a former superintendent of the Crow Indian reservation in Montana and one of the scheduled keynote speakers. The congress will be addressed Tuesday by Will Rogers Jr., son of the late humorist and author.