The National Congress of American Indians and the Legacy of the NCAI
The National Congress of American Indians, founded in 1944, is the organizational heir to the tradition that Zitkála-Šá helped establish with the National Council of American Indians.
The NCAI — which remains the largest Native advocacy organization in the United States — was explicitly founded to create the kind of pan-tribal political organization that Zitkála-Šá had envisioned and worked toward. Its founding reflected lessons learned from the previous generation of organizing: the need for a more broadly based organization with more stable institutional funding than the National Council of American Indians had been able to achieve.
The NCAI has been the principal vehicle for coordinated Native political advocacy in the decades since its founding. It has engaged on issues including voting rights, treaty rights, religious freedom, economic development, health care, education, and the specific questions of tribal sovereignty and self-determination that have been central to Native political advocacy since the New Deal era.
The specific organizational model — a pan-tribal advocacy organization working in Washington, D.C., to influence federal policy — is the model that Zitkála-Šá was trying to instantiate. The NCAI’s longevity and effectiveness represent, in part, the realization of what she was working toward.
The connection between her work and the NCAI is not merely abstract. The people who founded the NCAI in 1944 were working in a tradition that included the Society of American Indians and the National Council of American Indians. They were building on organizational experience and political frameworks that the earlier generation of advocates, including Zitkála-Šá, had developed.