American Indian Identity Research Articles

Identity Formation of American Indian Adolescents: Local, National, and Global Considerations

A conceptual model is presented that approaches identity formation of American Indian adolescents according to 3 levels of social contextual influence—local, national, and global—relative to types of identity, dynamics of identity, and sources of influence. Ethnic identity of American Indians is embedded within the local cultural milieu and encompasses an array of dimensions organized around identification, connection, and culture/spirituality. The national or societal level brings additional complexities according to bicultural, multicultural, and hybrid types of identity. There is little known about the global implications of identity formation for American Indian adolescents, but a review of the construct of indigenous identity provides some guidance along with examination of identity formation of indigenous youth in other parts of the world. Suggestions for research are provided throughout the paper, and theoretical implications for the broader topic of American Indian identity formation are provided with particular discussion of indigenous psychologies.

The Cherokee Conundrum: California Courts and the Indian Child Welfare Act

This article was prepared for presentation at the American Indian Identity Conference held at Michigan State University, October 16-17, 2008. After classifying a year of Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) cases in state courts, it became apparent that California had both the highest number of ICWA cases and that most of these cases were because of noncompliance with the notice provision of ICWA. In addition, it became clear that the majority of California cases involved parents claiming Cherokee affiliation. This article concludes there could be many reasons for this, including an informal exercise of the Existing Indian Family doctrine at the social worker level.

Plenary Rhetoric in Indian Country: TheLone Wolf v. HitchcockCase and the Codification of a Weakened Native Character

AbstractThe U.S. Congress passed the General Allotment (Dawes) Act of 1887 as a part of its assimilationist plan to remake American Indians in the image of the U.S. nation. The act helped constitute a changed Native identity as it contracted reservation lines and forced an agricultural economy onto Native reservations. The Supreme Court case Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock (1903) resulted from American Indian protests of the Dawes Act, including the argument that the assimilationist plan had been implemented against Natives' will. The resulting decision granted Congress the ultimate “plenary” power to abrogate treaties without any limits because American Indians were wards. Through an analysis of the case and Indian Commissioner reports addressing plenary power, I argue that the Lone Wolf holding served as an imperial discourse that maligned American Indian identities through a parent-child relationship. This denigration manifested through Lone Wolf's construction of American Indians as cultural wards, its reduction of Native property to commodity through a westernized economic plan, and its assimilation of Native communities into dominant U.S. culture. In addition, I contend that the Lone Wolf case solidified a wider U.S. nationalism by emboldening federal power over indigenous communities through a familial rhetorical strategy.

Social Identity and Culture Change on the Southern Northwest Coast

Driven by the participation of Native American people in the contemporary political, cultural, and academic landscape of North America, public and academic discussions have considered the nature of contemporary American Indian identity and the persistence, survival, and (to some) reinvention of Native American cultures and traditions. I use a case study—the historical anthropology of the Native American people of the Oregon coast—to examine the persistence of many American Indian people through the colonial period and the subsequent revitalization of “traditional” cultural practices. Drawing on archaeological data, ethnohistorical accounts, and oral traditions, I offer a reading of how, set against and through an ancestral landscape, traditional social identities and relationships of gender and authority were constructed and contested. I then consider how American Indian people negotiated the new sets of social relationships dictated by the dominant society.

Louisiana Creoles: cultural recovery and mixed-race Native American identity

Part 1 Foreword Chapter 2 Introduction: Who Is White? Chapter 3 The Reconfiguring of Creole-Indian Identity in Louisiana: Situating the Other in Social Discourse Chapter 4 Including Native Identity in the Creole of Color Movement: Ethnic Renewal and Cultural Revival within a Black-Indian Population Chapter 5 Migratory Movement: The Politics of Ethnic Community (Re)Construction Among Creoles of Color, 1920-1940 Chapter 6 Examining the Regional and Multi-Generational Context of Creole and American Indian Identity Chapter 7 Conclusion: (Re)Imagining and (Re)Writing Racial Categories

Language and social identity (review)

Reviewed by: Language and social identity ed. by Richard K. Blot Liwei Gao Language and social identity. Ed. by Richard K. Blot. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003. Pp. xx, 295. ISBN 0897897838. $83.95 (Hb). This book consists of papers concerned with the relationships between the social use of language and the positioning of language users within a specific social stratum by other people. Articles in this collection also address the issue that particular uses of language are usually viewed as an indicator of language users’ geographic, ethnic, age, and gender attributes. The chapters in this volume mainly address two questions: (1) Under what circumstances is it necessary or desirable to resort to the use of a particular variety of language to construct a particular identity? and (2) What are the consequences of the building of various types of identities? Following an introductory chapter by Richard Blot, three essays examine the role of narratives in constructing contrastive identities by Indians in the Americas. Gary Gossen looks at the situation in Chiapas, Mexico. He discusses a Tzotzil Maya story and suggests that narratives provide the Indian community with resources for treating linguistic performance as a foundation of social identities and social inequality. Janet Chernela and Eric Leed discuss the Unurato myth narratives in the Brazilian Northwest Amazon and explore how a collective identity is generated and preserved through narratives. Jerry Kelly studies the circulation of visionary Mayan narratives in southern Belize and shows that even when narratives are used for the purpose of reconstructing traditional identities to fight against modern oppression, the latter may still exert a strong influence in this rebuilding process. [End Page 454] The next three articles highlight the important role that language plays in ideologies and practices of inclusion and exclusion and point to the shifting relations between language, identity, and political-economic development. Kathryn Woolard discusses the transformation of Catalan from the language of a suppressed minority to the official language of an economically and politically powerful Catalonia in Barcelona. Maria Lagos looks at the way in which individuals in Cochabamba, Bolivia, reproduce and transform the dominant discourse in a society where markers of class and ethnic differences have become ambiguous. Maria Villalon analyzes an Enapa text from Venezuela and argues that narratives constitute a major part of Enapa politics of self-representation, which help build different representations of personhood against the homogenizing procedures of the criollo society. The remaining studies focus on the United States. Michael Long argues that the Ebonics debate was actually started mostly by the appearance of the New Right and its goal of weakening challenges to racial oppression. Bonnie Urciuoli examines the phenomenon that Spanish is used sparingly in the advertising in the magazine Hispanic and argues that this is a strategy for avoiding clashes with the rise of the Official English movement. Ellen Schnepel discusses language and gender in the French Caribbean and suggests that language planners, among others, have not paid sufficient attention to the way in which changing gender relations help shape the relationship between Creole and French in Guadeloupe and Martinique. James Collins looks at new strategies for mobilizing American Indian identities against historical and contemporary pressures to eliminate Tolowa identities in California. In examining the interaction among language, social identity, and the worldview, John Pulis calls attention to the importance of verbal performance in building Rastafarian identities in Jamaica. In scrutinizing passionate speech and literate talk in Grenada, George Mentore contends that the literacy practices that seem to be instrumental to political participation are actually imperialist tools for suppression that aim to produce acquiescent citizens. Liwei Gao Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center Copyright © 2007 Linguistic Society of America

Selling Indian Education: Fundraising and American Indian Identities at Bacone College, 1880-1941

When we think of schools run by the federal government or by Christian missionaries for American Indians, we are reminded that Indian education was designed—to borrow the words of Richard Henry Pratt, the government’s notorious Carlisle Indian Industrial School founder—to “kill the Indian to save the man.”1 Historically, American Indian education in the United States was inextricably linked to Euro-American colonialism. By the late nineteenth century, many Euro-Americans thought Native Americans were a “vanishing race,” and schools for Indians incorporated this belief into their design. In the United States, the large number and variety of schools for Indians that sprang up from the late nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries were intended as a means to assimilate Native communities into the American mainstream, turn “primitive” peoples into “civilized” individuals, and create Christian citizens who would adopt values of private property, hard work, and industry considered important by many Euro-Americans. Prompted in part by the Meriam Report findings of 1928, profound changes to federal Indian education began with the Indian New Deal in 1934 and occurred again in the 1970s when Congress passed legislation specifically designed to increase Native American access to and control of formal education. It was during these landmark periods that Indian education shifted to become more community-centered and more tolerant of the expression of Native cultural values and identities.2 Only a generation ago in most Native communities, everyone seemed to know someone who had attended one of these institutions of assimilation. Consider what Wilma Mankiller, the former principal chief of the Cherokee

Christopher Arris Oakley.Keeping the Circle: American Indian Identity in Eastern North Carolina, 1885–2004.:Keeping the Circle: American Indian Identity in Eastern North Carolina, 1885–2004.(Indians of the Southeast.)

Christopher Arris Oakley.<i>Keeping the Circle: American Indian Identity in Eastern North Carolina, 1885–2004.</i>:Keeping the Circle: American Indian Identity in Eastern North Carolina, 1885–2004.<i>(Indians of the Southeast.)</i>

CHRISTOPHER ARRIS OAKLEY. Keeping the Circle: American Indian Identity in Eastern North Carolina, 1885-2004. (Indians of the Southeast.) Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 2005. Pp. xii, 191. $50.00

CHRISTOPHER ARRIS OAKLEY. Keeping the Circle: American Indian Identity in Eastern North Carolina, 1885-2004. (Indians of the Southeast.) Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 2005. Pp. xii, 191. $50.00

Keeping the Circle: American Indian Identity in Eastern North Carolina, 1885-2004

Keeping the Circle: American Indian Identity in Eastern North Carolina, 1885-2004

Developmental Trajectories of Personal and Collective Self‐Concept Among American Indian Adolescents

Developmental trajectories of personal and collective self-concept were examined among American Indian adolescents. Personal self-concept (self-esteem) and collective self-concept (American Indian identity, Euro-American identity, community-mindedness) were assessed 6 times over 3 years in 4 cohorts of adolescents from 3 American Indian cultural groups (N=1,252). An accelerated longitudinal design was used to estimate developmental trajectories from 14 to 19 years; parallel-process and covariate models were used to examine variation in trajectories. Both personal and collective self-concepts were generally positive and showed small gains; they were moderately related to one another and differentially related to cultural group, gender, and perceived social support. The findings highlight the complexity of self-concept for American Indian youth and the significance of both personal and collective identity.

Keeping the circle: American Indian identity in eastern North Carolina, 1885-2004

Introduction 1: Acculturated but not Assimilated 2: From Pitchforks to Timecards 3: What's in a Name? 4: Protests and Powwows 5: Consolidation and The Search for Validation Conclusion: Keeping the Circle Strong

Medical Communication in Older American Indians: Variations by Ethnic Identity

The authors analyzed audiotapes from 102 patients of American Indian race (≥50 years) to explore how ethnic identity influences medical communication. A standardized interaction analysis system was used to classify patient utterances into categories: information-giving, questions, social talk, positive talk, negative talk. The authors identified patient subgroups distinguished by level of identification with American Indian and White identity and explored whether some subgroups devoted more communication to certain categories of talk. Patients highly affiliated with American Indian identity devoted a significantly greater percentage of communication to “positive talk”—including statements of optimism, reassurance, and agreement—than patients identifying at lower levels (p &gt; .05). They devoted less communication to “negative talk,” including corrections, disagreements, and anxiety statements (p &lt; .05). Effects persisted after adjustment for confounders, including health status. Patterns may encourage providers to underestimate distress and overestimate satisfaction and comprehension in patients highly affiliated with American Indian identity.

Cultural identities and perceptions of health among health care providers and older American Indians

BACKGROUND: Differences in provider-patient health perceptions have been associated with poor patient outcomes, but little is known about how patients’ cultural identities may be related to discordant perceptions. OBJECTIVE: To examine whether health care providers and American-Indian patients disagreed on patient health status ratings, and how differences related to these patients’ strength of affiliation with American-Indian and white-American cultural identities. DESIGN: Survey of patients and providers following primary care office visits. PARTICIPANTS: One hundred and fifteen patients ≥ 50 years and 7 health care providers at a Cherokee Nation clinic. All patients were of American-Indian race, but varied in strength of affiliation with separate measures of American-Indian and white-American cultural identities. MEASUREMENTS: Self-reported sociodemographic and cultural characteristics, and a 5-point rating of patient’s health completed by both patients and providers. Fixed-effects regression modeling examined the relationships of patients’ cultural identities with differences in provider-patient health rating. RESULTS: In 40% of medical visits, providers and patients rated health differently, with providers typically judging patients healthier than patients’ self-rating. Provider-patient differences were greater for patients affiliating weakly with white cultural identity than for those affiliating strongly (adjusted mean difference=0.70 vs 0.12, P=.01). Differences in ratings were not associated with the separate measure of affiliation with American-Indian identity. CONCLUSIONS: American-Indian patients, especially those who affiliate weakly with white-American cultural identity, often perceive health status differently from their providers. Future research should explore sources of discordant perceptions.

A Tutelo Inquiry: The Ethnohistory of Chief Samuel Johns’s Correspondence with Dr. Frank G. Speck

Obscured by the invasive expansion of an aggressive Iroquois confederacy, there exists today a remnant population of eastern Siouan peoples known as Tutelos amid the Six Nations Reserve at Grand River, Ontario. While there is a general dearth of source materials for the Tutelo Indians of Virginia, there is an interesting correspondence between a Native elder at Grand River and Dr. Frank G. Speck that took place during the years 1934 and 1935. These letters, composed for Chief Samuel Johns, reveal insight concerning the enduring complexity of American Indian identity. In noting this ethnohistorical puzzle, it is the purpose of this article to explore and examine the Tutelo initiative and voice in asserting a unique ethnic identity amid the Hodenosaunee, or Great League of the Iroquois. For far too long, the collaborative and self-motivated participation of Native Americans in anthropological fieldwork has been ignored because their role has usually been characterized simply as “informants.” In his correspondence with the noted University of Pennsylvania anthropologist Frank Gouldsmith Speck, Chief Johns reveals his Tutelo ancestry and makes an inquiry concerning that ethnic heritage. By this standard, the Johns letters stand out as an inquiry of scholarly interest in Native ethnohistorical criticism and research. Chief Johns initially writes Speck from Middlemass, Ontario on 4 September 1934. In his first letter, Johns reveals his Tutelo ancestry and requests historical information regarding the tribe. On 31 December 1934, Johns again writes Speck informing him of historical findings that report the Tutelo country along the east branch of the Susquehanna River

Navajo Cultural Identity: What Can the Navajo Nation Bring to the American Indian Identity Discussion Table?

Navajo Cultural Identity: What Can the Navajo Nation Bring to the American Indian Identity Discussion Table?

Changes in attitudes about importance of and willingness to pay for salmon recovery in Oregon

Salmon are perhaps the quintessential icon of the Pacific Northwest, affecting the region's culture, politics, and economy. The importance Oregonians place on salmon recovery and their willingness to pay for salmon recovery efforts was assessed biennially between 1996 and 2002 through the Oregon Population Survey. Based on these data, we found that Oregonians appear to have become less supportive toward salmon recovery and salmon recovery efforts over that time period; they were less likely to say salmon recovery is important and chose lower willingness to pay responses in 2002 than in 1996.Attitudes do appear to be related to the economic conditions and demographic composition of residents of the state. In particular, we found that local unemployment rates, age of respondent, and rural county residence are significantly negatively correlated with the respondent's expressed support for salmon recovery efforts. Attributes positively correlated with expressions of support for salmon include male gender, graduate-level education, and American Indian identity. We found that a significant portion of the decline in support is unexplained by the variables included in the analysis.

US Multicultural Pathways

Emily S. Rosenberg, A Date Which Will Live: Pearl Harbor in American Memory (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003, £18.95). Pp. 248. ISBN 0 8223 3206.Greg Robinson, By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003, £12.95). Pp. 322. ISBN 0 674 01118 X.Tetsuden Kashima, Judgment without Trial: Japanese American Imprisonment during World War II (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003, $35.00). Pp. 336. ISBN 0 295 98299 3.Gerald Early, This Is Where I Came in: Black America in the 1960s (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, Abraham Lincoln Lecture Series, 2003, £11. 50). Pp. 144. ISBN 0 80302 1823 0.Deborah Davis Jackson, Our Elders Lived It: American Indian Identity in the City (DeKalb, IL: University of Northern Illinois Press, 2002, $20.00). Pp. 191. ISBN 0 87580 591 4.Yen Le Espiritu, Home Bound: Filipino American Lives across Cultures, Communities, and Countries (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2003, $21.95). Pp. 271. ISBN 0 520 23527 4.Elizabeth Boosahda, Arab-American Faces and Voices: The Origins of an Immigrant Community (Austin: The University of Texas Press, 2003, £18.95). Pp. 288. ISBN 0 292 70919 6.John Kerry, patrician Massachusetts liberal, war hero, and yet dissident from the Vietnam era, vies for the 2004 presidency against George Bush, White House dynastic Republican, self-nominated caring conservative, and yet hard-edged ideologue. Notwithstanding Kerry's Catholicism, or his Jewish family line, both candidates hold sway as heirs to WASP cultural style bolstered by considerable personal fortunes. Howard Dean, New York MD and former Vermont governor, and like Kerry and Bush a Yale graduate, storms the early polls by his activist left-liberal agenda and Internet fundraising. John Edwards, North Carolina senator, personal injuries lawyer, and up-from-the-ranks millionaire, his father a textile factory worker and his mother a postal office employee, conducts a widely agreed good race for the Democratic Party nomination before joining the ticket as would-be Vice President. Had multiculturalism led to any shift of paradigm in connection with canonical whiteness? Or, to put matters more plainly, were not the front-runners once again executive white men, whatever their respective merits or social origins?

Native Voices: American Indian Identity and Resistance

Native Voices: American Indian Identity and Resistance

Seminoles and Africans under Seminole Law: Sources and Discourses of Tribal Sovereignty and &amp;quot;Black Indian&amp;quot; Entitlement

The Seminole Nation1 has been much criticized in American news media after amending its constitution in July 2000 so as to remove two communities of African Americans, known as Seminole Freedmen, from membership in the Nation and representation on the General Council. A series of op-ed pieces in the New York Times and a segment of the television news magazine 60 Minutes II, for example, have portrayed the situation as a case in which American Indians motivated by racism and greed attempt to exclude entitled African Americans from a tribe and its benefits.2 That portrayal is based in a counterhistorical narrative propounded by advocates for the Seminole Freedmen. Journalists have accepted the story prepackaged by its proponents and have relayed it uncritically to their audiences. Parties to this public discourse have all but ignored the sovereignty of the Seminole Nation and treated the matter instead as an issue of U.S. public policy. Voices invoking tribal sovereignty have had little access to the media that carry the discussion. Although the legal issue rests on an article of a treaty between the Seminole Nation and the United States signed in 1866, the court of public opinion admits arguments irrelevant to that case. "There have been blacks among the Seminole tribe all along. It's a totally multiracial tribe," says Jon Velie, attorney for the Freedmen, inaccurately.3 He represented the Freedmen in a lawsuit designed to gain them access to funds of the Seminole Nation,4 but while the case made its way through the U.S. court system, a vigorous publicity campaign has aroused U.S. [End Page 23] public opinion in favor of the Freedmen's cause and against a strawman representing the Seminole position. "[The Freedmen] are citizens of the Seminole Nation," says Velie, "and all citizens should be treated equally." Who could disagree with equal treatment under the law? The uninformed observer must conclude that the Seminoles are too venal or ignorant to practice simple fairness. The ad populum appeal on behalf of the Freedmen is the counterhistorical narrative of a "multiracial" history of Seminole-African/African American relations. The narrative extends into the past well before the relevant date of 1866 to a spurious origin of the Seminole Nation. As a member of the Seminole Nation, trained as a scholarly historian and employed on an American Indian studies faculty, I "write back" in this article to address that flawed historical narrative and the associated defamation of my people. I examine the history of the Seminole-African-United States relationship, focusing on the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century through the treaty in 1866 that forms the legal basis of the Freedmen's present claim. My method is to review the discourse of Freedmen entitlement in light of the relevant scholarship. Where scholars have ignored the Seminole Nation's sovereignty and the legitimacy of the Seminole government and legal system of that time, I interpret the scholarship to take account of those factors. That is, I use an American Indian studies approach. The inherent sovereignty of tribal peoples and their right to practice their indigenous systems of government and law are key factors in the question of African American entitlement to American Indian identities and tribal resources. Those factors are ignored, however, in the discourse of "Black Indian" identity. That slight is essential to the hegemonic function of that discourse. This article considers "Black Indian" discourse as but one thread of the hegemonic historical narrative that props up American colonial power in Native America. The really big factor that is being ignored, then, in discussion of the Seminole-Freedmen issue is the colonial nature of U.S. relations with the American Indian tribes and other indigenous peoples-including the Seminole Freedmen communities. I want to make clear that when I address the pseudohistorical narrative advanced on...