Response

Abstract

Response Tink Tinker (bio) Andrea Smith touches on some of the complexities inherent in a long-term colonial arrangement such as characterizes the American Indian/euro-White relationship.1 Indeed, one idiosyncratic particularity of indigenous peoples over other kinds of liberation movements is that the master's tools, particularly the tools of euro-western discourse and its ensuing political structures, belong to such a different worldview and realm of human experience that they tend to be destructive for American Indian peoples, even when we learn to use them ourselves with some fluidity. Native sovereignty, and hence Native liberation, mandates that we tread very carefully down the path of analytic discourse and in our own creation of political structures. I am deeply appreciative of Smith's essay and hope that my own thoughts will push us a little further down the road toward a legitimate Native expression of sovereignty. In late summer 1994, the president of the United States invited all the American Indian national ("tribal") chairpersons to an event in the Rose Garden at his White House residence. This was a liberal president by some accounts, and this was an extraordinary event at such a late moment in the colonialist/capitalist dominance of the continent. At the height of the gathering, the president spoke and graciously reassured the national chairpersons that the United States fully intended to respect its government-to-government relationship with [End Page 116] Indian "tribes."2 While the gesture was deeply comforting to the White American left, many Indian activists were appalled that "our" political leaders, the chairpersons of each Indian nation, swallowed this gambit hook, line, and sinker without a whimper. When, they asked themselves, had Indian sovereignty been reduced to a government-to-government relationship—not unlike, I suppose, the relationship of the U.S. government to that of Dade County, the city of Miami, or the state of Florida? Whatever happened to the nation-to-nation relationship that every treaty signed between the United States and any Indian nation legally affirmed? Yet, as far as I can remember, not one of these Indian leaders objected to the language at that moment. Rather, all were enamored with the possibilities of finding new avenues for making what Smith calls heteropatriarchy work in the interests of their "tribe." With minds fully colonized, they bought into the very system that engaged in genocide against our peoples in order to steal the continent from its aboriginal owners. And now, our duly elected leaders look to that same system for some measure of equity, hoping this time to make it work for Indian peoples. Perhaps the greatest challenge lying in the path of Native sovereignty is the extent to which too many of our people have had their minds thoroughly colonized, including (perhaps especially) those of us who have earned Ph.D. degrees.3 A common result is that we cannot see much further beyond the normative givenness of the discourses of heteropatriarchy than can the White liberal [End Page 117] left. Our Indian politicians want a new policy here and there to address one inequity or another, seemingly unaware that they are merely strengthening the metanarrative of heteropatriarchy and the modern state's suffocation of all indigenous values and cultural practices. Indigenous academics all too often think they must mirror the discourses laid out in Indian studies by our colonial masters in anthropology, theology, or even comparative religious studies.4 Albert Memmi, commenting on the simultaneously destructive and constructive bond between colonizer and colonized, rightfully recognized that, "in order for the [colonizer's] legitimacy to be complete, it is not enough for the colonized to be a slave [dispossessed, disenfranchised, or reduced to "civilization"], he must also accept his [sic] role."5 As Lumbee legal scholar Robert Williams has said so eloquently, the conquest will never be complete until all normative divergence on the part of the colonized ends.6 We Native peoples seem forever to oscillate between resistance and compliance. To this extent then, too many euro-western–educated American Indians have learned to use the master's tools but are simply helping the master to build (remodel?) his own house—trying to make sure, albeit, that...