As a witness to one of this lectures wrote, he “dressed in full Indian costume, beautiful headdress of white, green and lavender feathers, a Thunderbird design in center of [his] headband with a Swastika on each side; pants of buckskin trimmed with fringe and beads, a beaded vest and arm bands beaded in Swastika and Thunderbird design.”

When he spoke, it was often to rail against the Jews and the “Jew Deal” of President “Rosenfelt.” He praised Adolf Hitler as a spiritual brother and painted a vision of a coming war when white Christians and American Indians would unite to defeat the Jews.

In the history of Nazism in the Pacific Northwest, few figures stand out so incongruously as Chief Red Cloud, who was in reality the invented persona of a Native American attorney based in Portland named Elwood A. Towner. In the 1930s and ’40s he traveled to Seattle, Spokane, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Phoenix, Washington, D.C., Alaska, Mexico, and Canada and elsewhere, spreading the word about the threat Communism and Jews posed to America and the American Indian.

Towner was a regular attendee of Portland’s weekly German-American Bund meetings, an organization embraced by the Third Reich as the hub of America’s Nazi movement. He was admired by domestic fascists like William Dudley Pelley, whose Silver Shirt Legion sought to be the same for middle- and working-class “Aryan” Americans.

In 1939, an editorial in The New Republic titled “Red Indians, Brown Shirts” warned that Towner was “trying to mold Indians into good storm-troopers for use in a ‘future emergency.’”

That same year, Towner attended a Bund meeting in Portland where, according to an informant feeding information to the local Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, he said that “when it was all over the Jews, etc. would be in concentration camps surrounded by barbed wire and with Indians on guard. He said the Indians would find an excuse to see that all Jews were killed and the country and the world would be a lot cleaner.”

In another speech, Towner said the Jews were “chuck-na-gin,” which he claimed was an American Indian term for “children of Satan.”

[…]

Towner’s admiration of Hitler and hatred of Jews was not widely shared among Native Americans. According to scholar Paul C. Rosier’s book, “Serving Their Country: American Indian Politics and Patriotism in the 20th Century,” some 25,000 Native Americans served during the war. They did so for many reasons, including patriotism, martial tradition, and the fact that many recognized in Nazism and fascism some of the forces that they had been fighting since colonialism arrived on America’s shores.

Red Cloud seems to have retired from lecturing after Pearl Harbor — certainly his paying audiences were no more after the attack, as the Bund and Silver Shirts disbanded and the far-right turned away from overt Nazism. Towner continued to practice law and work for Native Americans until his death in the early 1950s.

The closest thing I’ve found to Towner’s own second thoughts about his Red Cloud phase was a comment he reportedly made as the meeting with the Jewish attorney David Robinson was breaking up. As a chain smoking Towner prepared to leave the Robinson’s office, he was heard to say, half to himself and half to his associates: “I guess I did some wrong talking.”

See Frank Usbeck’s Fellow Tribesmen: The Image of Native Americans, National Identity, and Nazi Ideology in Germany for more, but note that the fascination that some fascists had for Native Americans was part of a broader European phenomenon, and — more importantly — the Fascist ruling class was much more inspired by the European settlers.

If that sounds confusing to you, remember that all colonial empires — the Third Reich included — could exploit indigenous people when it was convenient to do so, then dispose of them when they were no longer useful; their needs were, at best, only secondary to the empires’ principle of expansion. Do not overstate the fascist exploitations and romanticizations of indigenous peoples: since tribes are not empires, hypocritically exploiting Native Americans could only prove useful for so long.