The Indian Man: A Biography of James Mooney by L. G. Moses

Well-known among scholars of Wild West shows for his 2005 publication Buffalo Bill’s America, Louis S. Warren here turns our attention to a phenomenon vividly tied to US history through the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee, namely, the Ghost Dance. In God’s Red Son, Warren distinguishes Ghost Dancing from the Sun Dance, Medicine Dance, Grass Dance, and other ceremonial observances, and focuses on the charismatic, proselytizing, and spiritual longings of a religion not dissimilar in its workings from the religious revivals of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.Warren argues that the Ghost Dance is a religion, rather than merely a spiritual observance, because it traces back to an individual, a Paiute named Wovoka (aka Jack Wilson) from the Walker River Reservation in western Nevada, who was acknowledged as a powerful spiritual leader and a prophet of (G)od. While the Ghost Dance is best known today for its association with the Lakotas of South Dakota, the Ghost Dance religion was also observed on the Shoshone / Bannock Reservation at Fort Hall in Idaho, the Eastern Shoshone / Northern Arapaho Reservation in Wyoming, and on the Southern Cheyenne / Southern Arapaho Reservation near Darlington, Oklahoma. Warren cites these routes of dispersal in order to reconstruct pilgrimages to Wovoka that Indians made to learn his teachings and receive his blessings. These pilgrimages began in the 1870s, accelerated in the 1880s, and continued well past Wounded Knee and into the twentieth century (Jack Wilson died in 1932).Though initially ignored, the Ghost Dance came to be regarded by white officials, at least in Lakota Territory, as an attempt to resist white authority and foment rebellion. Warren argues that the Ghost Dance “helped many believers accept conquest while strengthening their resolve to resist assimilation” (145). Though hospitable to Jesus and Christianity, Wovoka / Jack Wilson was known among Paiutes for miracles like rainmaking, and for the promise of earthly renewal, as well as reunion with the dead through trance dreams. Millenarian visions forecast the disappearance of whites, the resurrection of ancestors, and the return of the buffalo, but Wovoka also taught his followers that, in their here and now, they should go to church, farm, send their children to school, and keep the peace. This mixture of old and new ways was regularized by Wovoka in 1891 into four nights of dancing (the last night until dawn), followed by a ritual bath and community dispersal. This sequence was to be repeated once every six weeks, and likely reflects the need to define and contain the Ghost Dance as a religion (not a political movement) in the aftermath of the massacre at Wounded Knee.The banning of the earlier Sun Dance in 1882 created a space in which the Ghost Dance could flower. Dances were never just for entertainment or devotion, but provided occasions for the redistribution of wealth, healing, electing chiefs, selecting camp marshals and police, and convening male ceremonial organizations. Any ban on dancing undermined the authority of holy men and disrupted social and cultural bonds. Warren traces the motives behind these ethnocidal bans to religious prejudice and competition among Christian missionaries, widespread Progressive Era attempts at social engineering, and the transfer of control over reservations to the Department of the Army in 1890 by President Benjamin Harrison. Above all, Warren cites the widespread land grab by whites, especially in the Dakotas, intended to force Indians onto shrinking reservations, where troublesome Chiefs could be replaced or jailed, gatherings such as dances curtailed, and church and school attendance mandated. That these measures fell most heavily upon the Lakota was due to their numbers. In 1890, there were some 18,000 Lakota, the most numerous of all Plains Indians, only 3,500 Southern Arapaho / Southern Cheyenne, the second-most vigorous Ghost Dance community.In addition to detailing Ghost Dance philosophy, leaders, migration, and practices, Warren provides biographies of Wovoka and his followers, including Porcupine (Cheyenne), Short Bull (Brulé), Kicking Bear (Lakota), and the Arapaho evangelist Sitting Bull. Warren also discusses the intersection of the religion with the massacre at Wounded Knee, the murder of Sitting Bull (Lakota), and with plains history in the last twenty-five years of the nineteenth century. Part of that history concerns how anthropology created the “Indian” subject via James Mooney and the gentlemen’s club that was the US Bureau of Ethnology, a division of the Smithsonian Institution ill-suited to Mooney, a high-school educated, Catholic son of Irish working-class immigrants. In 1894, when Mooney’s book The Ghost Dance Religion was published by the Smithsonian, the Bureau’s view of humanity was hierarchical, placing Christianity at the apex and “primitive religions,” such as Ghost Dancing, at the bottom. Though Mooney individualized, rather than hierarchized, the Indian cultures he studied, he ignored evidence that Indians were rapidly adopting and adapting material practices from the broader culture, while keeping their own culture very much alive.Perhaps no activity illustrates the flexibility of Indian cultures better than the utilization of the Wild West show by Ghost Dancers. Warren notes that a number of those arrested in 1891 were transported from the Dakotas to Fort Sheridan outside Chicago, where William F. Cody recruited most of them for Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. They toured Europe, then returned to the US to play at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. There, Cody brought family members to join the company on show campgrounds, where Indians could live as they wanted to, exemplars of the pluralistic society they now inhabited. The Ghost Dance continued to enrich Indian lives, and it has been revived in this century. Thanks to Louis Warren’s exhaustive scholarship, our knowledge of Wovoka / Jack Wilson and the Ghost Dance has been enriched as well.

Teaching & Learning Guide for: A Review of the Study of the Political Status of Indigenous Peoples in the Global Context

M A R K T. H O Y E R University of California, Davis Prophecy in aNewWest:MaryAustin and the GhostDance Religion i On New Year’sDay 1889, “the sun died.”During this total eclipse, a Northern Paiute named Wovoka, known to the whites asJack Wilson, fell into a trance in the Pine Nut Mountains ofwestern Nevadawhere he had been cutting wood. He reported upon reviving that he died and went to heaven, where he talked to God and saw “all the dead people,” Indian and white alike, all of whom were dancing and appeared to be young, well-nourished, and happy. God declared thatJack Wilson was to be, in effect, co-president with Benjamin Harrison, Wilson’sjurisdiction being the West and Harrison’s the East. To secure Wilson’s authority, God granted him power over the elements, specifically in the form of five songs for controlling the weather. He then instructed Wilson to command the Indians to cease all lying, stealing, and fighting, and to work peaceably with whites. He taught Wovoka a dance, a variation of the Paiute’s traditional Round Dance, which the Indians were to per­ form at regular intervals. It later became known to whites as the Ghost Dance, in reference to the dead that were to be reunited with the living. Believers in Wovoka’s “Great Revelation” were to be saved from an impending natural cataclysm that would cleanse the earth, their reward being rejuvenated youth in the next life, in a world of peace and plenty (Hittman 63-64).1 Within months, word ofWovoka’s revelation had spread to Indian tribes throughout the West, many of whom thought him to be “the Indian Messiah.”Although Wovoka’s message enjoined the Indians to get along with whites, the revelation changed in several ways as it traveled, due in part to the vagaries of translating between different 236 WesternAmerican Literature languages; in part to the fact that Wovoka could not write, and so never “recorded” the prophecy in a fixed form; and in part to the divergent needs of the various peoples to whom the prophecy spread. Thus both what the prophecy meant and how particular tribes reacted to it varied according to specific cultural contexts. Some Indian leaders received the message as foretelling the destruction of whites only, the land returning to its rightful inhabitants—a version of a prophecy that has a long history in Native American cultures (see, e.g., Trafzer). Although some believed that the Indians could help bring about the millennium by actively resisting or fighting the whites, what happened at Wounded Knee in December 1890 shows the extent to which white anxiety eclipsed the desire—or willingness—to accurately assess the threat posed by this militant minority. As Ghost Dance scholar L. G. Moses puts the situation, “Dancing, peaceful Indians awaiting their divine redemp­ tion did not sell newspapers, so journalists surfeited the country with stories about Indians dancing themselves into frenzies as they awaited reinforcements from the risen dead” (qtd. in Hittman 276). Acting under the orders of a government made uneasy by the supposition that a Ghost Dance ceremony wasa War Dance, the U. S. Cavalry opened fire on a band ofLakotawhich included women aswell as men, children and elders as well as warriors. The Indian dead numbered around two hundred fifty; some were found up to three miles away from the dance grounds. The Ghost Dance religion and Wovoka’s vision are thought by most to have died on thatwinter day in 1890, and, with the “final”defeat of Indian resistance to white military authority, any remaining hopes by Native Americans to retain their “traditional”way(s) of life along with it. This reading of the events at Wounded Knee has also been shared by most scholars, Indian and white alike. Most anthropologists, following Mooney, who worked east-to-west in gathering information and forming his conclusions about the Ghost Dance, focus on its manifestation among the Lakota and other Plains Indians, and thus foreground these tragic “final” events. Drawing cause-and-effect inferences between Wovoka’s doctrines and Wounded Knee, they assume directly, or indi­ rectly imply, or else state outright that Wovoka’s doctrine...

This chapter will seek to outline the parameters of the “trust responsibility” as it relates to protections for the religious use of peyote by American Indians, to explain the significance of this doctrine in the preservation of tribal entities and American Indian culture, and to examine its shortcomings in relation to the preservation of the cultural institution of peyotism. Since American Indians first received a federal exemption for religious use of peyote in 1965, many groups seeking legal protection for the religious use of psychoactive substances have sought to capitalize on this exemption in the form of an Equal Protection challenge, arguing that their religious use of psychoactive drugs is parallel to the American Indian use of peyote. Challenges to the exemption are largely premised on the notion that “special” treatment of American Indians is based upon a fundamentally racial categorization, and is therefore constitutionally intolerable. The trust responsibility, while frequently misconstrued, has been applied in ways that raise legitimate questions regarding the use of racial criteria by the federal government when dealing with Native peoples. The importance of the trust responsibility will be examined in light of these race based Equal Protection challenges, and further critical examination of this doctrine will be made to understand how race has played a role in regulating religious use of peyote, and also how the static views of culture and cultural identity inherent in the racial application of this doctrine may ultimately threaten, rather than preserve, traditional American Indian practices such as peyotism.

Psychologists, psychotherapists, social workers, counselors, and other people involved in the mental-health fields are increasingly working with American Indians who practice various religious ceremonies and life ways foreign to Western-oriented epistemologies and ontologies. The American Indian Church and its sacramental use of peyote is one such example. This paper provides a brief history of the American Indian Church and its use of peyote, as well as the American Indian beliefs behind the use of peyote and the psychopharmacological data concerning peyote. It is shown that the sacramental use of peyote by the American Indian Church members is not a deviant hallucinogenic disorder and that in fact it provides a means of achieving and maintaining health, balance, respect, and a sense of community among participants and their social relations.

Responding to the rapid spread of the Ghost Dance among tribes of the western United States in the early 1890s, James Mooney set out to describe and understand the phenomenon. He visited Wovoka, the Ghost Dance prophet, at his home in Nevada and traced the progress of the Ghost Dance from place to place, describing the ritual and recording the distinctive song lyrics of seven separate tribes. His classic work (first published in 1896 and here reprinted in its entirety for the first time) includes succinct cultural and historical introductions to each of those tribal groups and depicts the Ghost Dance among the Sioux, the fears it raised of an Indian outbreak, and the military occupation of the Sioux reservations culminating in the tragedy at Wounded Knee. Seeking to demonstrate that the Ghost Dance was a legitimate religious movement, Mooney prefaced his study with a historical survey of comparable millenarian movements among other American Indian groups. In addition to his work on the Ghost Dance, James Mooney is best remembered for his extraordinarily detailed studies of the Cherokee Indians of the Southeast and the Kiowa and other tribes of the southern plains, and for his advocacy of American Indian religious freedom. Raymond J. DeMallie, director of the American Indian Studies Research Institute and a professor of anthropology at Indiana University, has edited James R. Walker's Lakota Society (1982) andThe Sixth Grandfather: Black Elk's Teachings Given to John G. Neihardt (1984), both published by the University of Nebraska Press.

Native American Voting Rights in Utah: Federal Policy, Citizenship, and Voter Suppression

This paper explores the complex evolution of the role anthropologists have played as cultural experts in the regulation of the entheogenic use of the peyote cactus throughout the 20th century. As experts of the “peyote cult”, anthropologists provided testimonies and cultural expertise in the regulatory debates in American legislative and judiciary arenas in order to counterbalance the demonization and prohibition of the medicinal and sacramental use of peyote by Native Americans through state and federal legislations. In the meantime, anthropologists have encouraged Peyotists to form a pan-tribal religious institution as a way to secure legal protection of their practice; in 1918, the Native American Church (NAC) was incorporated in Oklahoma, with its articles explicitly referring to the sacramental use of peyote. Operating as cultural experts, anthropologists have therefore assisted jurists in their understanding of the cultural and religious significance of peyote, and have at the same time counseled Native Americans in their interaction with the legal system and in the formatting of their claims in appropriate legal terms. This complex legal controversy therefore provides ample material for a general exploration of the use, evolution, and impact of cultural expertise in the American legal system, and of the various forms this expertise can take, thereby contributing to the contemporary efforts at surveying and theorizing cultural expertise. Through an historical and descriptive approach, the analysis notably demonstrates that the role of anthropologists as cultural experts has been marked by a practical and substantive evolution throughout the 20th century, and should therefore not be restrictively understood in relation to expert witnessing before courts. Rather, this paper underlines the transformative and multifaceted nature of cultural expertise, and highlights the problematic duality of the position that the two “generations” of anthropologists involved in this controversy have experienced, navigating between a supposedly impartial position as experts, and an arguably biased engagement as advocates for Native American religious rights.

Poetry is revolutionary. It must be to survive. --Lance Henson (Cheyenne) In Sherman Alexie's novel Indian Killer, Marie Polotkin, a Spokane college student, explains to her Wannabe-Indian professor, for whom the Ghost Dance stands as a beautiful, and ultimately desperate act, that Wovoka's vision was more than mere symbolism and metaphorical beauty: Don't you see? If the Ghost Dance had worked, you wouldn't be here. You'd be dust (313). Indeed, though the Ghost Dance was not created as an act of violence, it was clear to its followers that this combination dance, chant, and religion would likely result in people and their culture be[ing] destroyed by a natural cataclysm (Mooney viii). From the Ghost Dance to the Mayan power song They Came from the East to the Iroquois's anti-Anglo spell Magic Formula to the Yana's Curse on People that Wish One Ill, Native communities have invested in language the ability to control identity and destiny. As scholar and linguist John Bierhorst argues, the belief that words in themselves have the power to things happen ... is one of the distinguishing features of native American thought (3). When Wovoka and his followers performed the Ghost Dance, they trusted that their singing would make things happen. If words, performative language, could reach their full potential, then, like a great spell, the unified chores of Indians would be able to act as an inverted Yahweh: they would speak all white people out of being. The ghost dance is a provocative vision of resistance, and it stands as a complex example of how Native Americans see language as a viable weapon to protect cultural identity and sovereignty. When physical resistance is implausible, linguistic resistance becomes necessary; stories can be told about the white devil, power songs sung, spells invented, and myths constructed. Not surprisingly, Native American communities have emerged with a relationship to language most contemporary Anglos do not and cannot understand. That so many Chippewa, Choctaw, Laguna, Navajo, Cherokee, Modoc, Creek, and countless clans and communities produce important poets is not a fluke. It is life. To sustain the transformative power of charged oral expression, writers from these clans, communities, tribes, and nations have, in the latter part of this century, turned to the lyric poem as a mode of both connection and resistance. Like its oral ancestor, the lyric has always sought the dual catalyzation of author and reader but has not really cultivated a reputation as a welcome space for protest or resistance, especially in the United States. While lyric poetry in English has not been without its private contrivances or tropes of conquest, for the most part its ontology has been one of engagement. In its essence, the lyric project seeks relation and transformation, as Edward Hirsch rightly notes: [r]eading poetry is an act of reciprocity, and one of the great tasks of the lyric is to bring us into right relationship with each other (4). For Native writers, poetry not only functions as a relationship but also as something sacred and powerful that transforms reality for author, reader, and the communities of both. In fact, in her recent book on contemporary American Indian poetry, Robin Riley Fast echoes Hirsch, arguing that Native writers engage in a poetry that modifies the for both speaker and listener, writer and reader. According to Fast, this dialogic exchange enacts a concept integral to Native oral cultures--that of language's efficacy, its power to change the world (214). Through the unusual and provocative conflation of public and private significations, performative powers, and subtexts of relation and confrontation, the contemporary American Indian poem has become a truly unique and effective form of simultaneous engagement and resistance. In the following pages, I look at poems by three contemporary Native writers--Louise Erdrich (Chippewa), Sherman Alexie (Spokane/Coeur d'Alene), and Wendy Rose (Hopi/Miwoc)--in an attempt to understand how recent American Indian writers use the lyric poem as a mode of resistance that also participates in the cultural history of Native oral discourse. …

Peyote (Lophophora williamsii) is small spineless cactus which grows in limited area in southern Texas along the Rio Grande River and in northern Mexico. Peyote contains at least eight alkaloids, most importantly mescaline, and thus possesses psychedelic powers. For perhaps ten thousand years Native Americans have known and used peyote, eating or drinking it for medicinal purposes and as sacrament in religious ceremonies (Stewart, 1987). Over the years, elements of Christianity were incorporated into the peyote religion. By 1918, peyotists in Oklahoma formally organized into the Native American Church (NAC). It is estimated that the present membership of the NAC numbers between 250,000 and 500,000.2 Because of the intoxicating properties of peyote -users report experiencing a warm and pleasant euphoria, an agreeable point of view, relaxation, colorful visual distortions, and sense of timelessness (Stewart: 3) -the peyote religion has proven to be extremely controversial. Almost immediately from the time when it first appeared on American Indian reservations, missionaries and Indian agents viewed peyote as being -in the words of one opponent -an insidious evil and sought to suppress its use. Accordingly, the Indian Bureau devoted much time and effort to attempting to destroy the religion. Beginning with Oklahoma in 1899, number of states and territories passed laws prohibiting the use of peyote. In addition, various tribes also enacted anti-peyote legislation. The most notable of these tribal entities was the Navajo who outlawed the drug from 1940 to 1967. The constitutionality of this ordinance was upheld by the U.S. District Court of New Mexico in Native American Church v. Navajo Tribal Council (1959). The federal government itself, although condoning this early anti-peyote campaign, repeatedly rejected bills presented in Congress which would have created national ban on peyote use (Stewart).3 As scientific evidence mounted that peyote was neither harmful nor addictive to the user, attitudes, and consequently laws, began to relax in regard to the drug. Recent federal drug legislation, although continuing to list peyote as Schedule 1, hallucinogenic substance, meaning it possesses high potential for abuse, provides for an exemption for its use in religious ceremonies (Stewart: 4; Nelson, 1989: 433-434). Also important is the implied protection offered by the American Indians Religious Freedom Act of 1978 (Public Law 95 341) in which the U.S. Congress formally acknowledged the application of the Free Exercise clause to Native

Enhancing Language Services to Native American Children: A Look From the Inside

Few aspects of American history have gone through as rapid a transformation as Native American history during the past generation. In the not too distant past scholars, including many anthropologists, wrote accounts of particular Indian ‘tribes’. Many of these works, which were often quite sympathetic to their subject, concentrated on politics and wars. Beginning in the late 1960s, historians, anthropologists, and those calling themselves ‘ethnohistorians’ began to bring new perspectives to the subject. To date, many of the most important studies focus on the period before 1850. Taken together, these works testify to the fundamental importance of understanding the histories of indigenous peoples in the Americas. In recent years, scholarship about Native Americans has boomed. The cluster of six articles here suggests the range of work being done in the field. Nicholas Rosenthal provides an overview of some of the major developments and Joshua Piker offers a penetrating view of the concept of race and how it has shaped our understanding of Native peoples in early America. Ruth Spack’s short essay on American Indian schooling reveals a shift in the history of education based on the incorporation of indigenous perspectives. Tyler Boulware investigates the notion of national identity and its application for Native peoples. Dixie Ray Haggard’s perceptive piece offers nothing less than a major revision of scholars’ understanding of the Yamasee War of the 1710s, an event that played a pivotal role in the southeast during the eighteenth century. Finally, Steven Hackel and Anne Reid reveal the benefits of electronic publication. Their essay on the Early California Population Project provides insight into a major database housed at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, a project now available to scholars that will revolutionize our understanding the period from the 1760s to the midnineteenth century. The full cluster is made up of the following articles:

The Cherokee ghost dance movement of 1811-1812 got its name from James Mooney in 1891 but has been known to historians since the first account was published by Thomas L. McKenney in 1838. Recently a number of important works have generated new insights into ghost dance religions, cargo cults, millenarian movements, and nativist revivals. They suggest the need to re-examine the Cherokee phenomenon. I have tried to assemble here all the primary accounts and to re-assess them in the light of these recent studies, particularly those by A. F. C. Wallace, Peter Worsley and Kenelm Burridge. Although the evidence is still fragmentary, it casts serious doubts on the claim that there was a direct link between the Cherokee movement and the ghost dance religion among the Creek. Not only did the Cherokee movement precede that among the Creek, but it remained passivist in tone where the Creek movement was militantly activist. Re-examination of the evidence also questions McKenney's account of a single prophet who inaugurated and directed the movement. By following McKenney and conflating a variety of prophets, prophecies and events, historians and ethnographers have given the ghost dance a coherence and consistency it did not have. Furthermore, previous accounts have, in my opinion, dismissed the movement rather too easily on the basis of its more extreme manifestations and mistakenly attributed its demise to the failure of some of the more extravagant predictions to materialize. Far from being a trivial incident, the Cherokee ghost dances marked a critical turning point in Cherokee history. The standard versions of the Cherokee ghost dance movement derive essentially from the account given to McKenney by the Cherokee chief, The Ridge, in the 1830s, and the account given to Mooney by the Cherokee, James Wafford, in 1891.1 They can be summarized as follows: In

The Sartorial IndianZitkala-Ša, Clothing, and Resistance to Colonization C. Daniel Redmond (bio) In 1919 Zitkala-Ša ended her five-year association with the Society of American Indians (sai). Two years later, American Indian Stories was published. These writings, most of which originally appeared in the Atlantic Monthly and Harper’s Monthly between 1900 and 1902, included three new additions: two short stories, “A Dream of Her Grandfather” and “The Widespread Enigma Concerning Blue-Star Woman,” and a closing commentary about the impact of U.S. Indian reform policy on Native Americans, “America’s Indian Problem.” This essay begins its analysis of this collection by suggesting that Zitkala-Ša’s departure from the sai and the 1921 publication of American Indian Stories is no coincidence. As Lucy Maddox observes, the decision to republish older material “alongside [newer] reform stories suggests” that Zitkala-Ša viewed the earlier pieces “as relevant to the efforts of organizations like the sai and the Women’s Clubs to secure rights for American Indians, especially the rights of citizenship.” Consequently, Maddox recommends that American Indian Stories be read “as a 1921 publication intended to address a particular set of issues . . . crucial to Indian intellectuals and reformers of the post–World War I period” (142). Building on Maddox’s observation, I interrogate how American Indian Stories advances the reformist agenda that Zitkala-Ša developed and refined during her work with the sai from 1914 to 1919, in particular through her use of clothing. Recent scholarship has done much to enlighten us as to the motives behind the sai’s push for citizenship for all Native Americans. K. Tsianina Lomawaima, in “The Mutuality of Citizenship and Sovereignty: The Society of American Indians and the Battle to Inherit America,” sees this effort as a struggle against a nation that legitimated its existence on American soil by “[m]aintaining American Indians as wards, in circumstances [End Page 52] that denied or destroyed economic development.” This “Indianness,” as she calls it, which was “marked by selectively maintained cultural differences, economic incapacity, and communal property” (335), was made possible by the U.S. construction of “a distinctive citizen-but-ward status for American Indians” along with the parallel policy of treating tribal governments as little more than “sovereign–but–domestic dependent” nations subject to federal control.1 In essence, the “ambiguous status of Native individuals and nations” (343) under the law was intentional, despite the stated assimilationist goals of U.S. Indian policy, and it was this cultivated difference that members of the sai targeted in their reform efforts calling for full citizenship for all indigenous peoples. But, as Lomawaima makes clear, while the members of this organization may have shared the same goal, their individual efforts to articulate “the possibilities of coexistence of indigeneity and modernity, of life as a tribal member and an American individual varied dramatically,” revealing a “powerful legacy of layers” through which each tried to imagine what “an equitable, respected place in modern American society that descended from and remained connected to their indigeneity” would look like in practice (335, emphasis in original).2 Situating Zitkala-Ša’s reform work and American Indian Stories within these layers involves considering how she differed from her contemporaries in the sai. While she too targeted the Indian Bureau as an ineffective bureaucracy, her approach to Indian reform sets her apart from thinkers like Carlos Montezuma: “Unlike many of her sai colleagues—certainly including Montezuma—Bonnin continued to put the reservations and a traditional Sioux ethos at the center of her philosophy as a reformer and a thinker” (Maddox 150). Similarly, P. Jane Hafen adds that whereas sai founder Arthur C. Parker and others like him preferred “to foreground progressive and educated Indians” in their reform efforts on behalf of all Native Americans, “Bonnin remained immersed in tribal work” (201). As Hafen notes, “Bonnin’s rhetorical themes reveal a consistency of resistance, tribal nationalism, and call for civil rights” that display an awareness “of her audience,” allowing her to “presen[t] her ideas in a pattern that affirmed tribalism while paradoxically utilizing ideologies of the colonizer” (199, emphasis added). Yet, as I will show, this paradox unravels if one reads...

"Lost and Lonesome":Literary Reflections on Museums and the Roles of Relics Lee Schweninger (bio) In Gerald Vizenor's screenplay and in the film Harold of Orange (1984) Harold, the trickster word-warrior, stands on a glass display case in the anthropology department museum (presumably at the University of Minnesota) and from his perch berates anthropologists as he likens the effect of museums to that of zoos. Harold's comparison is doubly effective (and disturbing) because it plays on images of caged animals on display and at the same time suggests that Native American visitors to the museum feel themselves displaced because of such displays: "Those anthropologists invented us, and then they put our bones in these museum cases. We come to the cities from our tribal past and pace around . . . like lost and lonesome animals." In the same scene Harold recalls the nineteenth-century ghost dance to suggest that such museum collections will simply disappear: "I was dancing how high the earth will be come the ghost dance vision . . . [w]hen all this disappears."1 In this scene Vizenor offers comic reversals that, according to Kimberly Blaeser, "challenge readers to reconsider the readily accepted treatment of the remains of 'primitive' cultures as museum objects and the implied hierarchy that allows or endorses such practice." Vizenor repudiates colonialism and ethnocentric assumptions which he believes underlie the practice of Indian anthropology, particularly the practice of raising to the level of ultimate explicator recorders of culture on the single basis of their being themselves from an "other," dominant and supposedly superior culture.2 Through comedy and comic reversals Vizenor also asks his readers and viewers to reconsider the pat assumptions and the ethnocentric worldviews [End Page 169] that proscribe the bones and material culture of one ethnic group to museum-piece status while members of another ethnic group—that of Western Europeans and of Western European descent in this context—remain free, in Vizenor's language, of their tribal pasts. Vizenor is one of several American Indian writers who reflect on the place of objects as they are displayed for cultural consumption, questioning the role of museums particularly in housing and displaying those objects. In light of such works of literature I argue that in different ways each of these writers presents a critique of museum culture and in so doing offers a form of American Indian self-representation that challenges mainstream European and European American accounts of history and identity through artifact. Although much has perhaps changed since the passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 (NAGPRA), according to several of these writers and other indigenous peoples, much remains the same. Tuscarora scholar Rick Hill, for example, argues that museum apologists "argue that these sacred materials are essential to maintaining the integrity of their collections and that the remains of our dead are part of the national heritage" of the United States. Even with the passage of a bill like NAGPRA, suggests Hill, a problem remains: "Despite their centrality to the museum world, American Indians are often viewed as being outside the fiduciary and moral mandate of these institutions." Furthermore, there is "embedded in this policy . . . the assumption that modern native people lacked sufficient ties to their ancient ancestors" and thus would not deserve to have returned to them the artifacts or human remains in question.3 Hill also maintains that there are problems involving cultural patrimony, which NAGPRA defines as "an object having ongoing historical, traditional, or cultural importance central to the Native American group or culture itself."4 Hill's concern here, a concern echoed by the writers investigated in this essay, is that "the validity of Indian beliefs is often questioned, bringing the resistance to repatriation to a new level of paternalism. Indian concepts of sacredness, spirit, and religion differ from those of other cultures."5 These differences often result in misunderstandings and confuse issues of how or whether artifacts should be displayed, stored, or repatriated. Despite his several misgivings, Hill does conclude his essay by noting that some progress has been made. He foresees improved relations between museum personnel and people in American Indian communities. [End Page 170] Writing in the 1980s...