In this article, the author talks about the experiences of many of the people involved in the Carnegie Project, an effort in the 1960s to establish ties with the "tribal community"--people who spoke Cherokee as their first language and lived in small kin-related settlements spread across five counties in northeastern Oklahoma--and directly involve them in a program to promote literacy in English. The story that emerges is not merely about a squabble between Indians and anthropologists in the state of Oklahoma. Instead it is about how Native and non-Native people engaged in the politics of community, identity, poverty, and power in Cold War America. Historians regard the 1960s as a tumultuous decade in which longstanding assumptions regarding who could speak, about what topics, and through which discursive procedures were called into question. These were years of disillusionment and anger, of divisions that left deep wounds in need of healing. The Cherokee Nation stood at the center, not the margins, of this history. Situating the story of the Carnegie Project in the context of a culture at war with itself allows one to see that there were no devils in disguise, only people who seemed that way amidst the confusion of troubled times. (Contains 47 notes.)