Despite these efforts to restructure the BIA, many Indians involved in the Red Power Movement regarded the organization with wariness and distrust due to its long history of disenfranchising Native Americans while erasing Native culture and language through its infamous Indian boarding schools.

Two years into Oxendine’s BIA tenure, hundreds of Native American activists took part in “The Trail of Broken Treaties,” caravanning across the nation toward D.C. to demand a meeting with President Nixon and deliver their Twenty-Point Position Paper, aiming to assert the sovereignty of the Indian Nations and reopen treaty negotiations.

When they arrived on November 1, 1972, protestors were denied this meeting and found themselves lacking adequate housing. While attempting to arrange for temporary shelter in the BIA building, conflict erupted as guards tried to forcibly remove protestors, who refused to leave, barricading themselves in.

By the end of their six-day siege, protestors had taken possession of many BIA files that they claimed as evidence of corruption and scandal within the BIA, as well as Native artwork and cultural objects that they regarded as rightfully theirs.

The Trail of Broken Treaties was only the beginning of a decade of intense American Indian activism, including the Wounded Knee Occupation, the 1976 Trail of Self-Determination, and The Longest Walk in 1978.

The 1973 Wounded Knee Occupation in South Dakota received wide press coverage, and Oxendine conducted many of the twice-daily press briefings of the protest, handling international journalists as well as dozens of American TV crews, newspaper reporters, wire-service representatives, magazine writers, and members of the Indian and underground press.

While working for the BIA, Oxendine became involved in the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI), an American Indian and Alaska Native rights organization founded to represent Native tribes and to resist federal pressure for termination of tribal rights and cultural assimilation.

NCAI provided support and advocacy for Nixon’s proposed policy of American Indian self-determination, which was passed in 1975 as Public Law 638, the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act.

The act expanded tribal authority over the administration of federal funding and reversed a 30-year effort by the federal government to sever treaty relationships with and obligations to Indian tribes. Oxendine also became a member of the National Aviation Club and was one of the first American Indians to be admitted to the National Press Club in D.C.

At home in Arlington, he served as chair of the Indian Parent Committee, collaborating with the Arlington school system to address the specific needs of American Indian children.