Known nationally from the 1950s to the 1980s as a political fighter for Indian civil rights and tribal self-determination, Robert Phillip Burnette was born in Rosebud South Dakota, on January 26, 1926. His parents Grover and Winnie Rogers Burnette, were members of a family of Sioux ranchers and farmers in the White River area of Rosebud Reservation.
———Political activism came almost naturally to Burnette. His grandfather and father had both been prominent in reservation politics, representing their districts on the tribal council, and had also been active in Democratic Party politics in the state and national levels. One of Burnette's earliest memories was of his own campaigning at the Rosebud Boarding School when he was eight years old, opposing the tribe's acceptance of the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 because it withheld from Indians the right of self-government.
———Burnette received all his formal education at the Rosebud Boarding School. In 1943, when he was seventeen years old, he enlisted in the Marine Corps and served with an antiaircraft unit in the Pacific. During World War II, he saw San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and other off-reservation places for the first time, observing the better material standards of living enjoyed by non-Indians and persuading himself that after the war the government would see to it that Indians on reservations also had a better life.
———Yet when he returned to Rosebud in 1946, he found things the same, or even worse. At first he joined his father in farming and ranching, and in 1947 he married Bernice E. Briggs of the Rosebud Reservation community of Okreek, with whom he eventually had nine children. But anti-Indian prejudice, discrimination, and the policies of the Bureau of Indian Affairs still presented everyday problems for the Sioux people. Earlier, government allotment policies — which resulted in the breaking up of Sioux cattle associations, whose members had grazed their stock in common on tribal lands — had forced Indian ranchers to confine their cattle to their own small allotments. This change had driven many Sioux out of ranching and had caused others, including Burnette's family, to curtail their operations and rent grazing lands from others.
———Now there were new problems. Pressed by whites who wanted the Indians' lands, the termination-minded Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1950 raised the Indian ranchers' rents and adopted other policies designed to force the Sioux to sell or lease their allotted lands to the whites. The economic squeeze and the loss of reservation lands to white angered Burnette, who blamed much of what was happening on collision between corrupt tribal officials and the Bureau of Indian Affairs. In 1952, after a hard-fought campaign, he won election to the Rosebud Tribal Council, representing the reservation's Swift Bear community. Two years later, at the age of twenty-eight, his dynamism and commitment to reform led to his election as tribal president. He served in that capacity for eight years, being reelected in 1956, 1958, and 1960.
———By the late 1950s he had won widespread attention as a combative Indian leader, representing his tribe in national and regional Indian organizations, helping organize Indian intertribal councils in Arizona and California, and gaining support for Indian causes from many prominent non-Indians who in time would include the philanthropist Doris Duke, John and Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr. In 1961, backed by a hreform faction of tribal leaders and believing that he could better serve his people by working on the national level, he resigned from the presidency of his tribe and assumed the duties and responsibilities of executive director of the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) in Washington, D.C.
———There, working with legislators on Capitol Hill and the Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall and other government officials, he struggled to bring about reforms at all levels of Indian affairs. Many of the causes for which he fought, including self-determination and an Indian civil rights act (one finally passed in 1968, though it was largely nullified by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1978 Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez decision), were aimed at ending collusion on reservations between dictorial government agents and corrupt tribal officials, and inevitably Burnette's championing of these causes made him powerful enemies as well as friends.
———Meanwhile, conditions among his own people on the Rosebud Reservation had continued to concern him, and in 1964, feuding with Cato Valandra, his successor as tribal president, he retired from his position with the NCAI and returned to his people. In the following two decades, he continued to battle for self-determination, sovereignty, and other Indian causes both on the national scene and on his reservation. Backed largely by young Indians, as well as by elders, full bloods, and other traditionalists, he ran repeatedly for the tribal presidency, losing several times through what he charged were fraudulent actions by his opponents, but winning in 1974. At the same time, he played leading roles, sometimes as a mediator and advocate of nonviolence, in some of the historic Indian activist events of the late 1960s and early 1970s, including the takeover of the Bureau of Indian affairs building in Washington D.C., and the 1973 siege at Wounded Knee. Documenting the Indians' struggles, he published The Tortured Americans in 1971 and coauthored The Road to Wounded Knee in 1974.
———Burnette's last years were marked by bitter political fights seeming from his attempts to gain independent tribal judiciary at Rosebud that would enable Indians to rein in the powers of corrupt tribal officers. Trumped-up charges of misconduct in office were leveled against him, and he was denied the right to work office again. He fought the charges and was cleared by the tribal court. But it was too late. On September 12, 1984, preparing once again to run for president of his tribe, he died of heart failure.
———In a time of great change in the relations between Indians and the rest of the American people, Burnette's significance by the crusading role he played in Washington and among non-Indians, as well as Indian, friends and supporters that helped to turn public opinion on the federal government away from the 1950s policy of terminating reservations and, by the 1970s, toward one of recognizing the Indians' right of sovereignty and self-determination. A memorial card printed for his funeral read, "One man, with the courage of his convictions, is a majority" — a sentiment that to many reflected his qualities of perseverance and committment.

ALVIN M. JOSEPH, JR.
Greenwich, Connecticut