Soapbox Discourse: Tribal Historiography, Indian-White Relations, and Southeastern New England Powwows

Abstract

ANN MCMULLEN is curator of North American ethnology at the Milwaukee Public Museum and holds a Ph.D. in anthropology from Brown University. She has written widely on Northeastern woodsplint basketry and began dissertation research on Native American conceptions of history in southeastern New England as preparation for the exhibition Entering the Circle: Native Traditions in Southeastern New England at the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology, Bristol, Rhode Island (1992-93). The data and conclusions presented here are dealt with in much greater depth in Ann McMullen, Culture by Design: Native Identity, Historiography, and the Reclamation of Tradition in Twentieth-Century Southeastern New England (Ph.D. diss., Brown University, 1996), based on ethnographic and ethnohistorical fieldwork done between June 1990 and May 1994. Research was funded by the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology, Brown University; the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research; and the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America, Brown University. I gratefully acknowledge this assistance here. I am indebted to my dissertation committee-Shepard Krech III, George L. Hicks, William O. Beeman, Patricia E. Rubertone, and William S. Simmons-for discussion on this paper, and to Dan Odess for his critical reading of earlier versions, subsequent discussions, and support. In addition, I thank Barry O'Connell and two anonymous peer reviewers for their critical comments on an earlier draft, and Ann Marie Plane and Clara Sue Kidwell for their encouragement. Within the text and notes, I have used italicized pseudonyms to disguise informants' identity, but individuals deceased during the period of my research retain their true names.