He served in the Marine Corps from 1954 to 1956, then attended Iowa State University where he received his B.A. degree in 1958. In his youth, he had considered following his father in the ministry, but exposure to his father's frustrations convinced him that church life did not have the bearing on Indian life that he wanted his career to have. Before he gave up the idea entirely, however, he earned a B.D. in theology at Augustana Lutheran Seminary, Rock Island, Illinois, in 1963. The following year he was hired by the United Scholarship Service in Denver to develop a program to get scholarships for American Indian students in eastern preparatory schools. He successfully placed a number of Indian students in eastern schools through the program.
He served as the executive director of the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) in Washington, D.C., from 1964 to 1967, an experience he claimed was more educational than anything he had experienced in his previous thirty years. He was expected to solve problems presented by Indian tribes from all over the country, but found that unscrupulous individuals made the task impossible. He was frustrated by the feeling that the interests of tribes were often played against one other.
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