Preserving Her Heritage: an American Indian’s Struggle

Activist devotes her life to preserving native cultures and shaking up philanthropy

As a girl in Pearl River, N.Y., in the 1950s, Dagmar Thorpe had visions of a future

that were at once modest and grandiose. “I wanted to be a teacher, and I wanted to have 12 children,” she recalls.

Growing into one of the most prominent leaders in American Indian philanthropy wasn’t on the agenda. Though her parents often reminded her of her heritage — and especially of the athletic achievements of her grandfather, the Olympic champion Jim Thorpe — her childhood in a white neighborhood rarely prompted her to think about being a descendant of the Sac and Fox, Kickapoo, Menomini, and Potawatomi tribes. But as an adult, Ms. Thorpe became passionate about preserving American Indian language and customs.

She also became deeply frustrated by how most mainstream foundations treated Indians, and began thinking about ways to encourage Indians to finance their nonprofit groups.

In particular, she and her colleagues have urged both mainstream and Indian foundations to pour more money into improving the schools that serve American Indians, spurring economic development, and supporting groups that have advocated for self-rule on reservations.

Support for American Indian causes has never totaled more than 1 percent of foundation giving in the United States, but efforts like those of Ms. Thorpe’s are a reason that at least $65-million from foundations went to Indian groups in 1999, according to the most recent statistics available, three times as much as a decade earlier.

“She’s been instrumental in trying to move Native American nonprofits into the forefront to where foundations and others can see them,” says Janice Gow Pettey, executive director of the Sacramento Regional Foundation and author of Cultivating Diversity in Fundraising. “She’s very outspoken.”

$500-Million in Grants

The efforts of Native Americans in Philanthropy, a group Ms. Thorpe co-founded in 1990 that links foundations and other large donors with American Indian causes, has also helped increase all types of giving to Indian nonprofit groups, she believes. Following years of what she terms “neglect” by philanthropy, American Indian organizations garnered $500-million from foundations, corporations, and individual donors in 1984 to 1999.

Ms. Thorpe also helped found and direct several organizations, including the Seventh Generation Fund, which channels grants from foundations and gifts from individual donors to groups organizing advocacy drives on Indian reservations, and LifeWay, which helps groups raise funds, develop programs, and organize advocacy campaigns devoted to revitalizing American Indian traditions and languages.

Today she serves as interim director of the Fund of the Four Directions, a New York foundation that finances nonprofit groups that maintain and restore American Indian traditions, a position that is a realization of the twin goals of her life’s work. The Fund of the Four Directions, started with money from a member of the Rockefeller family, is now self-sustaining and managed by Native Americans who hand out grants to those groups that do work similar to that of LifeWay.

Now 55, Ms. Thorpe has helped pave the way for a great expansion of Native American organizations.

Three decades ago barely any American Indian groups existed, and those that did were largely financed by foundations like Ford and Rockefeller; today, more than 1,800 operate nationwide and depend largely on money from Native American sources.

Ms. Thorpe and others concede that the social and economic problems of the country’s two million Native Americans — 25 percent of whom live in poverty — haven’t yet been solved by those organizations. But the growth of nonprofit groups has given them hope that American Indians can begin to use philanthropy as a way to improve the lives of many.

“We’re starting to make an impact,” she says. “As we have developed the skills to grow organizations, we’ve also had to develop the skills in philanthropy so we could back them. It’s all coming together now.”

Growth of Foundations

Among the reasons Ms. Thorpe and others are optimistic: Native Americans are starting their own foundations at a fast clip. Three foundations opened last year, adding to a rise in the number of American Indian foundations from three in 1973 to 32 in 1996, according to the Council on Foundations, to what some believe to be as many as 60 today.

“The combination of Native American foundations becoming more involved and the increase in the number of Native Americans on the boards of mainstream foundations shows progress,” says Ms. Thorpe.

Much of the largess goes to efforts to improve schools and colleges on reservations and to spur economic development. Organizations such as the First Nations Development Institute, which seeks to encourage economic development in predominantly Indian neighborhoods, have made loans to members of tribes to start enterprises that are consistent with American Indian culture, as well as to provide initial support for revolving-loan funds on reservations. Ms. Thorpe, who sits on the board of the institute, in Fredericksburg, Va., says the loan funds encourage self-rule and provide a culturally sensitive alternative to federal community-development programs, which, she says, have been inadequate.

But Ms. Thorpe says Native Americans should be giving more, especially considering the financial boon that tribes have received from running casinos and selling cigarettes, a profitable business because tribes don’t have to pay federal taxes on the sales. Profits from those businesses have allowed many tribes to finance museums and research centers that focus on American Indian customs and education.

Other philanthropy flows away from the reservation. The Cow Creek Umpqua Indian Foundation, in southern Oregon, gives money to nonprofit groups in seven counties surrounding its Seven Feathers resort, a casino in Canyonville, Ore.

“Our foundation was set up to share the good fortune of the tribe with the greater community,” says Martha E. Young, who oversees the foundation. Although the Umpqua tribe, which has 1,000 members, gives money to local Indian nonprofit groups, it does so out of its operating budget, not from its foundation.

While the support tribes give to local nonprofit groups has done much to improve their images in regions where they run casinos, sending gambling money outside of Native America often doesn’t sit well with some who believe that money made by American Indians should go to fighting Indian ills, such as low employment, poor educational opportunities, alcoholism, and a high suicide rate.

Ms. Thorpe says tribes that run profitable casinos should also give more to groups that work toward saving Native American customs from extinction. “There’s a tremendous need in our communities for both spiritual and material help,” she says.

Christopher Peters, executive director of the Seventh Generation Fund, in Arcata, Calif., adds that philanthropy leaders have put tribes with casinos under pressure to support poorer tribes that don’t have gaming tables, but with little success.

Even so, Ms. Thorpe says the existence of hundreds of grass-roots groups seeking funds from American Indian foundations is an exciting development. She says the growth in the number of groups results from years of hard work.

“We learned as we went along,” she says. “Now, we’re formalized and experienced. That has helped us adapt and grow.”

Family Background

Although Ms. Thorpe says her interest in American Indian culture was not piqued until she was in her 20s, even as a child she could rarely forget about her background. Her grandfather, Jim Thorpe, is still considered by many sports experts to be the greatest athlete of the 20th century.

Winner of the decathlon and pentathlon at the 1912 Olympics as well as a professional baseball and football player, Jim Thorpe, and his considerable shadow, reminded young Dagmar of the glory of her family and of her heritage.

Her passion for Native American rights and culture was born on Alcatraz Island, in San Francisco Bay, in the 1960s.

After high school and a two-year stint as a Vista volunteer in Oregon, Ms. Thorpe followed her mother, Grace Thorpe, to Alcatraz, the former prison that was occupied from 1969 to 1971 by a group of American Indians who wanted to demonstrate their desire to own and govern reservation land owned by the federal government.

Grace Thorpe encouraged her daughter in 1969 to join the protest, as well as to run a day-care center on Alcatraz.

Following on the heels of the black civil-rights movement and years of perceived injustice under the federal reservation system, Native Americans had begun to assert their claim to lands they once held.

“Our rights as indigenous people needed to be respected,” Ms. Thorpe says. “It was a statement” — one that got the government’s attention without ending in bloodshed, as the fight over land at Wounded Knee, S.D., did years later.

Although she stayed for only a year, the experience filled her with a passion for her people and their causes. “I began devoting my whole life to indigenous people and their way of life,” she recalls. “I haven’t deviated from that.”

Since then, Ms. Thorpe has been especially interested in preserving traditions and languages threatened with extinction. “There was and is this tremendous need for language revitalization,” she says. “It’s central to our identity as a people.”

Leading a Fund

After heading the Seventh Generation Fund in the 1980s, she led the Ira-Hiti Foundation (now the Foundation for Deep Ecology, in Sausalito, Calif.), where she developed a program for Americans Indians aimed at reinvigorating native customs in the early 1990s. By leading Ira-Hiti, which was started with money from the clothing magnate Douglas Tompkins, she became the first Native American to run a private foundation.

Ms. Thorpe also developed a relationship with Ann Rockefeller Roberts, a leading donor to American Indian causes and the daughter of former Vice President Nelson Rockefeller. Ms. Roberts gave tens of millions of dollars to American Indian causes and would eventually start the Fund of the Four Directions in 1976 before handing the foundation’s reins over to Native Americans in 1988.

With Ms. Roberts’s help, Ms. Thorpe took her case to foundations, in search of more funds for American Indians.

To her chagrin, she says that reinvigorating Native American ways hasn’t yet become a cause célèbre among mainstream foundations, even though foundations in general have stepped up their grants to deal with American Indian concerns.

As she splits her time between a home in Oklahoma and the YWCA in New York City, where she often stays when in town to conduct Fund of the Four Directions business, she ponders how to change that.

“Mainstream foundation funding has improved, but we’re not where we should be,” she says. “There remains a need to educate them about the value Native Americans place on traditions and how those traditions strengthen us where we live. “

As ancient Native American cultures embrace modern capitalism in the form of casinos and other businesses, Ms. Thorpe also hopes her people don’t lose sight of their roots. Her sense of an interlocking chain of history is reflected in her family life as well. As her mother taught her the need for activism and philanthropy, so has Ms. Thorpe explained the necessity for becoming involved in her people’s cause to her daughter, 18-year-old Tena Malotte.

Passing down cultural traditions, she says, is itself a tradition in Native American life, one that needs to be viewed seriously by all of those with a stake in American Indian life.

“Once you lose a language,” Ms. Thorpe adds, “you lose it forever.”

DAGMAR THORPE, INTERIM DIRECTOR OF FUND OF THE FOUR DIRECTIONS AND DIRECTOR, LIFEWAY

Age: 55

Place of birth: Japan

Education: Earned a bachelor’s degree in social psychology from Goddard College and a master of arts in indigenous studies from D-Q University, a tribal college in Davis, Calif.

Previous employment: Executive director, the Ira-Hiti Foundation (now the Foundation for Deep Ecology), in Sausalito, Calif.