Bureau Of Indian Affairs Research Articles

Michigan Indian Education Before and After 1934: From Oppression to Neglect

Michigan Indian Education Before and After 1934:From Oppression to Neglect Tuhin Chakraborty (bio) During the last decades of the nineteenth century, Native American children were educated in boarding schools specially designed to, in the words of boarding school pioneer and Carlisle school founder Colonel Richard Henry Pratt, "kill the Indian, save the man."1 In 1893, the federal government institutionalized the forced assimilation of Michigan indigenous children into Anglo-American economic and sociocultural norms by opening the Mount Pleasant Indian Industrial School (MPIIS), named for its location in Mount Pleasant.2 Much like Carlisle and other federal Indian schools at the time, the Mount Pleasant school employed the standard tactics of assimilation, ranging from compulsory Westernized curricula based on Anglicized gender norms to the proscription of indigenous languages on school grounds.3 However, one important factor that distinguished MPIIS from other, more well-known boarding schools was the circumstances surrounding its closure.4 In 1934, the US Department of the Interior, under Secretary Harold Ickes, negotiated with Michigan Governor William Comstock what is now known as the Comstock Agreement, which transferred MPIIS from federal to state control.5 Around this time, many Indian schools across the country, such as the Haskell Institute in Kansas and the Chemawa school in Oregon, were ordered to shut down.6 However, their arrangements differed from Michigan's because they were either allowed to remain operating by Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) Commissioner John Collier or closed without state commitments to uphold indigenous education.7 The Comstock Agreement stipulated that Michigan would fully cover the costs of educating Native American school-age children so that they would not only receive a proper education, but also one on par with that for white students (and therefore better than the previous boarding school).8 This would be done in return for the Interior Department ceding MPIIS to [End Page 63] Click for larger view View full resolution The federal government established the Mount Pleasant Indian Industrial School in 1893 on 200 acres of land taken from indigenous people just decades before. Source: Clarke Historical Library, Central Michigan University. Comstock's administration so that the governor could convert the school into a facility to house and treat the mentally disabled. Broadly speaking, the state could not deliver on its promises. There was systemic oppression at MPIIS—well documented by historians, activists, and indigenous people—and it is important to illustrate the impact and aftermath of the not-nearly-as-publicized state of neglect indigenous school-age children faced after Michigan was unable to educate them adequately until the 1970s. Moreover, shifts in Indian education policy in Michigan over the twentieth century simultaneously paralleled and diverged from broader national phenomena, such as the 1934 Wheeler-Howard Act, highlighting Michigan's distinctive path to providing its indigenous population with the resources to continue their schooling.9 In stark contrast to Comstock's commitments, the transfer of MPIIS and the accompanying transitions in policy actually replaced federally structured assimilationism with the similarly poor conditions of myopic Native American educational policy. These conditions were exacerbated by a lack of federal financial support. High dropout rates, low college attendance rates, and other consequences of this neglect were, in turn, responsible for calls for renewed financial support and self-determination in the Michigan Native American education system after 1950. [End Page 64] Educational Assimilationism in Michigan After the establishment of the Michigan Territory in 1805, the young nation engaged in a multifaceted pattern of struggle and opportunistic cooperation with the indigenous communities already in the region to decide dominance (a story explored by scholars like Michael Witgen).10 According to Sarah Surface-Evans, such conflicts originally began as "external colonialism," where government armies fought back, subjugated, and militarily expelled indigenous peoples, such as the Iroquois in the early nineteenth century.11 However, by the late 1800s, after much of the remaining tribes' military power had decreased considerably with decades of war and one-sided treaties, "internal colonialism" became the norm.12 According to Surface-Evans, this included the inculcation of Native Americans into what was considered a "civilized" American lifestyle prioritized by US government officials.13 Although closely related, internal colonialism differs from...

Life of the Indigenous Mind: Vine Deloria Jr. and the Birth of the Red Power Movement by David Martínez

Reviewed by: Life of the Indigenous Mind: Vine Deloria Jr. and the Birth of the Red Power Movement by David Martínez Gregory D. Smithers (bio) Life of the Indigenous Mind: Vine Deloria Jr. and the Birth of the Red Power Movement by David Martínez University of Nebraska Press, 2019 FOR MANY OF US working in the fields of Native American and Indigenous studies, the moment we first read Vine Deloria Jr.'s Custer Died for Your Sins was transformative. I first read Deloria's 1969 classic as a teenager in the late 1980s. Reading Custer proved exhilarating; it sparked new insights and fresh questions. Deloria's style had me hooked. Anthropologists did not write like he did; historians certainly didn't. Since my teenage encounter with Custer, I've returned to Deloria's work regularly. Each time I learn something new. David Martínez's brilliant Life of the Indigenous Mind taught me even more about Deloria. Written in clear prose and thoroughly researched, Martínez organizes his analysis around Custer; We Talk, You Listen (1970); God Is Red (1973); and Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties (1974)—four key books in Deloria's influential career. Over ten chapters, Martínez covers issues ranging from tribal self-determination to Indigenous epistemologies. Today, most humanists and social scientists incorporate these themes into their work as a matter of course. But when Deloria began writing about self-determination and Indigenous knowledge as vital to the well-being of Native people—first in his role as head of the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) and later in his books and essays—he blazed a trail that continues to provide intellectual and political clarity on issues that still resonate across Indian Country. Martínez explains that Deloria made no pretense to the phony objectivity that characterized white scholarship. He wrote as an Indigenous person, specifically as a member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, and directed his message to "us"—other Native Americans (5). As Martínez explains in chapter 1, Deloria urged Indigenous people to work from within to resist American colonialism by advocating for a tribal court system that would buttress the self-determination of Native nations. Indigenous self-determination, or what Deloria referred to as "tribalism," required bold leadership at the tribal level (65). As Martínez explains in chapters 2 and 3, this meant Indigenous [End Page 162] leaders needed to rise to the challenge of reconnecting communities to the land and throwing off the shackles of termination policy. Indeed, the United States government must fulfill its treaty obligations by recognizing the sovereignty of Indian nations and restoring the nation-to-nation relationship enshrined in hundreds of treaties. Deloria recognized that achieving this new political reality would require a radical shift in how Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) bureaucrats "managed" Indian affairs (105). It would also necessitate creative new thinking out of Indian Country. Overturning what Deloria called the "atrocity" of termination would not be easy (109). However, Martínez notes that Deloria was not alone in championing tribal government, with Indigenous leaders and writers like D'Arcy McNickle also devoting themselves to the cause of self-determination in the decades after World War II. As Martínez argues in chapters 5 and 6, Deloria understood that Indigenous self-determination meant changing how Native people saw themselves and how settlers saw Indigenous people. This is where Deloria offered what, for his time, were stunning insights about the importance of political and cultural self-determination. Native Americans were not individual "others," something that made liberal civil rights discourse ill-suited to Indigenous politics. By taking the term "tribalism" away from anthropologists, Indigenous people could begin to undo stereotypes imposed on them over centuries by Christian missionaries, anthropologists, and politicians. To do so, Deloria insisted that Native people must come together if they hoped to protect their own rights, advance the cause of sovereignty, and articulate their own stories. Martínez has produced a rich and rewarding book. He is balanced in his critiques of Deloria's writings and careful to contextualize Deloria's political motives for self-determination. For those hoping to read a biography of Deloria that...

Who is Doctor Bauer?: Rematriating a Censored Story on Internment, Wardship, and Sexual Violence in Wartime Alaska, 1941 - 1944

Abstract This article unites Indigenous women’s voices from oral histories and the archives to connect sexual violence and colonialism and to advance historical discourse on rematriation. Sexual violence, rape, and internment intersected in the Alaskan territory during the Second World War. From 1941 to 1944, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) employed the physician H.O.K. Bauer to work for the Alaska Indian Service. This physician’s power to enact sexual violence came from his position as an employee for the BIA—an institution that had a history of intimate colonial ties with Indigenous communities. Utilizing Native American and Indigenous Studies methods and ethics, making transparent the relationship between a scholar and elders in the community, and purposefully uncovering some silences while maintaining others allows this analysis of historical sexual violence to prioritize an Indigenous woman elder who advocated for the telling of a story of sexual violence. In doing so, it identifies rematriation as a process that unravels colonial power and restores power to Indigenous women.

Community policing on American Indian reservations: a preliminary investigation

AbstractIn the 1970s, Elinor Ostrom and her colleagues found that neighborhood policing works better than metropolitan policing. Though Ostrom articulated design principles for self-governance, the early studies of neighborhood policing did not. In this paper, we articulate the design principles for self-governing policing, which we term Ostrom-Compliant Policing. We then apply this framework to an understudied case: policing on American Indian reservations. Policing in Indian country generally falls into one of three categories – federal policing (by the Bureau of Indian Affairs and Federal Bureau of Investigation), state policing (by municipal and state police departments), and tribal policing (by tribal police departments) – that vary in the degree of centralization. Our main contribution is to show that tribal policing as it is practiced in the United States, which claims to be self-governing, is not Ostrom-Compliant. Thus, our approach offers insight into why high crime remains an ongoing challenge in much of Indian country even when tribes have primary control over policing outcomes. This does not mean centralization is better, or that self-governance of policing does not work. Rather, our research suggests that a greater tribal autonomy over-policing and meta-political changes to federal rules governing criminal jurisdictions is necessary to implement Ostromian policing.

The Apache Diaspora: Four Centuries of Displacement and Survival by Paul Conrad

Reviewed by: The Apache Diaspora: Four Centuries of Displacement and Survival by Paul Conrad Kiara M. Vigil (bio) The Apache Diaspora: Four Centuries of Displacement and Survival paul conrad University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021 366 pp. Paul Conrad's ambitious and powerful work The Apache Diaspora: Four Centuries of Displacement and Survival offers historians and Native American and Indigenous Studies scholars in-depth discussions and analyses of "apacheness"—the various identities through which Native people, while living in diasporic relation to their Indigenous homelands, both defined themselves and contended with the ways they were being defined by [End Page 616] the colonial states of Mexico and the United States. As the title notes, this is a sweeping work covering four hundred years of history in order to highlight pre- as well as post-conquest experiences of Apache life in regard to captivity, mobility, and colonization. The chronological range of this work enables Conrad to contend with both Spanish and Euro-American efforts at colonization and the shifting geopolitical and cultural spaces of the USMexico borderlands. Although this work is clearly for historians of Native America and Indigenous Studies, its geographical reach will also make it of interest to scholars working in Latin American history and LatinX Studies. Given Conrad's ability to focus on the life stories and experiences of specific individuals and groups, the book will be of great interest to scholars working in American literature, as will his adept use of diaspora as both a theoretical framing device and lived-experience. Centering "diaspora" in these ways enables Conrad to add new dimensions to Native American and Indigenous Studies approaches and will also interest scholars from African American Studies, literary studies, and American Studies. Similarly, by focusing on experiences of Apache peoples in terms of mobility and also enslavement and other experiences of life in exile, there are ample opportunities for scholars working at the intersection of Afro-Native Studies to consult Conrad's work for Indigenous-centered responses to these ways of being and knowing in the world that might further enhance that growing field. Conrad's book opens with a specific example built around the story of Sam Kenoi, who had been taken prisoner by the United States at the age of eleven, when he was sent to attend the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania in 1898, a critical moment for many of his Apache kin who were experiencing life as prisoners of war, living in exile in Florida, Alabama, and later Oklahoma after being taken from their homes in Arizona. Kenoi's life in exile, his first time being exposed to the conditions of diaspora, was full of "tragedy and triumph," Conrad notes, as the settler state promised him a better life through the attainment of industrial skills and an education that would assimilate him into American culture and society, even if he had to leave all traces of his Native identity behind (1). As many scholars of Native history have pointed out, this period of assimilation and allotment marks the end of violent resistance by Native people to settler colonialism. In many ways it also represents a period of growth in the colonial state's infrastructure and reach, as the Indian Office (which would [End Page 617] later become the Bureau of Indian Affairs) created new ways to confine and limit the power of its Indigenous wards. Mobility, then—for all Native people, including those the state called "Apache"—became a new site of resistance and survival. Kenoi's particular story, Conrad asserts, points us to a broader portrait of Apache life and death across North America and the Caribbean. "As Kenoi knew so well, the history of colonialism for Native people was one of pain and loss, slavery and dispossession, but it was also a history of resistance, adaptation, and return. These fantastic and terrible stories are Apache history, Native history, all of our histories" (13). Drawing on the poetry of Joy Harjo, Conrad reminds readers of the core themes of American Indian history: "rootedness and displacement, pain and laughter, a seemingly impossible but true survival" (2). Conrad uses these themes to expand on the example of Kenoi's life, arguing that his...

Modernity through Letter Writing: Cherokee and Seneca Political Representations in Response to Removal, 1830–1857 by Claudia B. Haake

Reviewed by: Modernity through Letter Writing: Cherokee and Seneca Political Representations in Response to Removal, 1830–1857 by Claudia B. Haake Rowena McClinton (bio) Modernity through Letter Writing: Cherokee and Seneca Political Representations in Response to Removal, 1830–1857. By Claudia B. Haake. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2020. Pp. xi, 282. $65.00 cloth; $65.00 paper; $65.00 ebook) Claudia Haake has uncovered numerous letters, petitions, and memoranda written by members of the Cherokee and Seneca nations. Leaders familiarized themselves with the English language for diplomatic means to undergird their political and cultural nationhood. Extensively mining primary sources from the National Archives and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Haake contends that her work differs from previous interpretations that viewed Indigenous peoples as victims when confronted with forced displacement. Haake reveals that both Cherokee and Seneca nations confronted the vagaries of U.S. policymakers critically and creatively when negotiating their uncertain future. Adopting the English writing system allowed Indians to strategize and plan their own agendas when facing cataclysmic change. Throughout the nineteenth century, Cherokees and Senecas continued their literary expressions while preserving their Indigenous voices. Haake contextualizes writing samples in the time period she addresses. For example, in chapter 1, "Civilization and the Removal Policy," the U.S. Congress passed the 1830 Indian Removal Act to make room for the ever-expanding settler appetite in the South, freeing lands for the escalating slave-based cotton growing plantations. To stem their loss of land, some Cherokees and Senecas had by 1830 accepted Christianity and the English language taught in mission schools. In addressing the public, chiefs from the Cherokees and Senecas, writing fluent English, refrained from employing the "Great Spirit" to debunk any notions of traditionalism. Yet, in these missives, they sustained and incorporated their tribal identity. Literacy was key to reiterate their survival as Cherokees or Senecas. To enhance their status with U.S. officials, Cherokee writers wrote what government [End Page 77] agents wanted to hear. Haake argues that Cherokee missives did not necessarily circulate among all tribal members. In contrast, because of their long-standing tradition of "forest diplomacy" whereby all villagers had a voice in decision making, Seneca letter writers circulated their writings among literate and illiterate peoples. No doubt, western literacy enhanced their political capital. As the nineteenth century progressed, their multiple letters unveiled why land as a tribal unity played havoc with tribal politics. Pressure mounted to vacate their original lands. Every crisis led to more crises. Tribal governments suffered. Through analyzing these missives, Haake details how the Cherokees became factionalized between the Treaty Party advocating abandonment of ancestral lands and the Ross Party promoting preservation of lands in the East. Likewise, the Senecas diverged between those who wanted to retain ancient domains and those who accepted removal. Each faction had members fluent in oral letter writing. Cherokees and Senecas attracted sympathetic audiences to discern their contrasting points of view. Their literacy gave them access to the wider American community that now could understand Indigenous peoples from a non-monolithic lens. Besides her enriching primary sources, Haake's monograph is replete with historiography. In-depth and fastidious research, her text is complementary to literary scholar Maureen Konkle's Writing Indian Nations: Native Intellectuals and the Politics of Historiography, 1827–1863 (2005). Very poignantly, Modernity through Letter Writing unfolds how both tribes envisioned their modernity in the context of literacy leading to political sovereignty. This text is a must read for undergraduate and graduate classes. [End Page 78] Rowena McClinton ROWENA McCLINTON is professor emerita of history, Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville. Copyright © 2021 Kentucky Historical Society

Trends of forest and ecosystem services changes in the Mescalero Apache Tribal Lands

Forests are critically important for the provision of ecosystem services. The Sacramento Mountains of New Mexico, USA, are a hotspot for conservation management and the Mescalero Apache Tribe's homeland. The multiple ecosystem services and functions and its high vulnerability to changes in climate conditions make their forests of ecological, cultural, and social importance. We used data from the Mescalero Apache Tribal Lands (MATL) Continuous Forest Inventory over 30 yr to analyze changes in the structure and composition of ecosystems as well as trends in ecosystem services. Many provisioning, regulating, cultural, and supporting services were shared among the MATL ecosystems and were tied to foundational species dominance, which could serve as a reliable indicator of ecosystem functioning. Our analysis indicates that the MATL are in an ongoing transition from conifer forests to woodlands with declines in two foundation species, quaking aspen and ponderosa pine, linked to past forest management and changing climate. In addition, we detected a decrease in species richness and tree size variability, amplifying the risk of forest loss in a rapid climatic change. Continuous permanent plots located on a dense grid (1 × 1 km) such as the ones monitored by the Bureau of Indian Affairs are the most detailed data available to estimate forests multiresource transitions over time. Native lands across the USA could serve as the leading edge of detecting decadal-scale forest changes and tracking climate impacts.

Tradition, Sovereignty, and Conservation: The Controversy Surrounding the Wind River Indian Reservation Game Code

Abstract In December 1983, a highly publicized slaughter of over fifty elk at Wind River Indian Reservation reignited a dispute between the reservation’s resident tribes—the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho nations—over wildlife management. In response to diminished big game populations, the Eastern Shoshone Tribe had passed hunting regulations in 1980, but the people of the Northern Arapaho Tribe refused to do so, effectively derailing any attempt to manage wildlife at Wind River. After the Bureau of Indian Affairs imposed a game code on the reservation in 1984, the Northern Arapaho Tribe initiated a legal battle that culminated in the 1987 case of Northern Arapahoe Tribe v. Hodel. The court ruled that because the treaty rights of the two tribes overlapped in the area of wildlife management and because research conducted by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service at the request of both tribes had revealed a need for hunting regulations, the U.S. government had the power to impose the Wind River Reservation Game Code. Although the tribes jointly manage wildlife today and big game populations now thrive at Wind River, it is important to examine the controversy that involved conflicting visions of and concerns about cultural traditions, tribal sovereignty, and wildlife conservation principles and practices. Exploring how Eastern Shoshones and Northern Arapahos viewed those subjects differently and how their longstanding rivalry at Wind River shaped this conflict highlights some problems with the simplistic and romanticized concept of the “Ecological Indian.”

Doing Work on the Land of Our Ancestors: Reserved Treaty Rights Lands Collaborations in the American Southwest

The intent of this article is to raise awareness about an underutilized funding mechanism that possesses the capacity to help tribal and federal land management agencies meet their goal of restoring fire-adapted ecosystems to historic conditions in the American Southwest. We attempt to achieve this through an exploration of the Reserved Treaty Rights Lands (RTRL) program and how it has been used to implement collaborative fuel management projects on National Forest lands. RTRL is a funding program administered by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) that is designed to protect natural and cultural resources important to tribes on non-tribal lands that are at high risk from wildfire. Over the last year, our research team has studied the RTRL program in the Southwest by conducting in-depth, face-to-face interviews with tribal land managers as well as U.S. Forest Service tribal liaisons and other personnel who work with tribes. Our interviews revealed enthusiasm and support for RTRL but also concern about the fairness of the program as well as insufficient outreach efforts by the U.S. Forest Service. In response, we propose a policy alteration that (we contend) would incentivize the BIA to increase funding allocations to the RTRL program without losing the support of partnering agencies. The aim is to strengthen and expand shared stewardship efforts between tribes and federal land management agencies. We situate these implications against the backdrop of the Pacheco Canyon Prescribed Burn, an RTRL funded project that was instrumental in containing the Medio Fire that broke out in the Santa Fe National Forest in the summer of 2020.

Voice of the Tribes: A History of the National Tribal Chairmen's Association by Thomas A. Britten

Reviewed by: Voice of the Tribes: A History of the National Tribal Chairmen's Association by Thomas A. Britten Mark E. DeGiovanni Miller Voice of the Tribes: A History of the National Tribal Chairmen's Association. By Thomas A. Britten. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2020. Pp. 240. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.) If remembered today, the National Tribal Chairmen's Association (NTCA) is recalled as a pawn of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), a force against change that opposed the Red Power activists of the early 1970s while serving as a force of exclusion, seeking to silence the voice of newly arising unrecognized tribes, urban Indians, and pan-Indian groups. As I revealed in my book, Claiming Tribal Identity (University of Oklahoma Press, 2013), scholars have not paid enough attention to the legitimate concerns of federally recognized tribes in seeking to protect valuable economic, political, and social capital in opposition to a chorus of competing groups seeking to speak for the "Indian people" in the modern era of tribal sovereignty and self-determination that began in the early 1970s. With this work, historian Thomas Britten has provided a valuable and nuanced examination of these contending constituencies and demands through the lens of the NTCA from its creation in 1971 to its demise during the Reagan years in 1987. In clear prose, Britten details the efforts of the NTCA to influence developments in Indian policy during these important decades. As he notes, the chairmen's group claimed to be the only legitimate voice of Indian people due to its position as the representative body of duly elected tribal chairpersons. Until the mid-1980s when it reversed course (a stance that led to its demise, according to Britten), the NTCA strived to utilize its insider status, personal connections, and generally accommodationist strategy with the BIA (in the executive branch) and Congress to pursue its goals to improve the status of reservation-based Indians. National developments that the association influenced included helping to pass the landmark Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act of 1975 and other laws that protect Native children, trust lands, and natural resources. Britten concludes the NTCA was moderately successful in its lobbying and consulting work to defend recognized tribes from various efforts to erode tribal sovereignty posed by "backlash" groups over fishing and hunting rights, legal jurisdiction, and campaigns to end the BIA and the perceived dependency of Indian peoples on government funding. Throughout the book, Britten attempts to offer assessments as to the efficacy of the NTCA's work in its various campaigns. As critics often noted, the association potentially was compromised and coopted because it received almost all its funding from the federal government, particularly the BIA. To this Britten argues the NTCA was able to resist cooptation due to its ability to reach out to the public and by having made itself "indispensable" to the government in providing data and information, recommendations on legislation, and meaningful consultation. However, once [End Page 503] its new executive director Elmer Savilla took charge in 1981 and took a clearly adversarial tone and stance toward the anti-tribal Reagan Administration, its funding was canceled in 1987, and the organization ceased to exist. In its analyses regarding the impact of NTCA lobbying and political activities, the book is marred by a strong tendency to conclude with statements such as it "may never be known" or it "cannot be determined." This propensity is linked to the general absence of oral interviews, which if conducted correctly, could have rooted out the answers to these questions, given more voice to the participants, and strengthened the work overall. That said, the book is well-grounded in appropriate secondary sources as well as strong research into archival sources. Voice of the Tribes should be on reading lists of serious students of federal Indian policy, modern Indian organizing, and tribal politics of the 1970s and 1980s. It is well written and fills an important gap in the literature on native politics during these decades. Mark E. DeGiovanni Miller Southern Utah University Copyright © 2021 The Texas State Historical Association

The Archives of Deborah Miranda’s Bad Indians

The Archives of Deborah Miranda’s Bad Indians Laura M. Furlan (bio) Tell the lies now and maybe lateryour descendants will digfor the truth in libraries,field notes, museums,wax cylinder recordings,newspaper reports of massacresand relocations, clues you left behindwhen you forgotto lielie lie lie. —Deborah Miranda, Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir In the poem “Lies My Ancestors Told for Me,” Deborah Miranda (Ohlone-Costanoan Esselen and Chumash) evokes the colonial archive, the collection of historical documents and materials that informs her 2013 memoir, Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir, of which this poem is part. Significantly, Miranda suggests here that “truth” can be found in institutional archives, among the “lies” told in the interest of survival: “and when you tell that lie/tell it in Spanish,” “Give your children/Spanish names,” “Don’t tell them/you still speak Chumash/with their mother” (40). Throughout this complex memoir, Miranda demonstrates the need to look to many sources—and to read them critically—to find these “clues” that help her reconstruct her story of self and the story of her people, a story of genocide at the hands of the Spanish missionaries and later those of the United States.1 “Constructing this book has been hard,” she writes in the book’s introduction, “listening to those stories seep out old government documents, Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) forms, field [End Page 27] notes, the diaries of explorers and priests, the occasional writings or testimony from Indians, family stories, photographs, newspaper articles” (xx).2 But Miranda tells a different story, one that she centers around the Esselen word xu-lin (meaning to reclaim, return, recover),3 making her “tribal memoir” simultaneously an act of discovery and recovery, a testimony, a tribal genealogy, a reclamation, and a historical reconstruction.4 The memoir also functions as a quest to find her ancestors’ voices in the archives—those telling the “lies” in the poem cited above.5 Miranda is not the first Indigenous author to go to the archives to reconstruct and write the history of her people, but what makes this text unique and compelling is how she calls attention to and interprets the colonial record and how she positions Indigenous archives and knowledge. In this book, Miranda not only reclaims or recovers archival materials, but she also demonstrates how to read them, how to translate them from an Indigenous perspective, and how to read them in tandem with Indigenous sources and stories. In so doing, Miranda challenges the colonial archive as the sole keeper of knowledge and calls attention to the gaps in and the narrative power of the historical record, enacting what literary scholar Emily Lederman has called “archival sovereignty”—work that both “destabiliz[es]” and “repurpose[es]” colonial archival documents, “by positioning the US colonial record within an Indigenous frame” (64; 65).6 Similarly, in Red Ink, literary scholar Drew Lopenzina theorizes about an alternate Indigenous archive, what he terms a “longhouse of the archive,” one that is grounded in Native epistemologies, and about how archival recovery means “making a space for a [historical] narrative” that has been “unwitnessed” (18; 24).7 The Indigenous archives movement, which began in earnest with Vine Deloria, Jr.’s 1978 report entitled The Right to Know, first focused on Indigenous peoples’ access to knowledge in institutional archives.8 Debates over archives continue into the present, as scholars like Marlene Manoff, Randall Jimerson, and Ann Stoler point to the bias of archives and the knowledge they represent, suggesting that we read them not solely for historical accuracy but to instead think about the gaps and misrepresentations, issues of provenance and access (including how to limit outsider access to sensitive Indigenous knowledge in these archives), cataloguing, user groups, digital surrogates and repatriation, and how, why, and by whom the collections were constructed.9 Read within the context of these debates, Bad Indians offers a method of [End Page 28] interpreting what the author finds in the contested space of the colonial archive, which she supplements with family and personal archives and her own autobiographical account to provide a counternarrative that “makes space” for an alternate Indigenous history—similar to the process...

The Jews' Indian: Colonialism, Pluralism, and Belonging in America by David S. Koffman

Reviewed by: The Jews' Indian: Colonialism, Pluralism, and Belonging in America by David S. Koffman Jonathan Schorsch (bio) The Jews' Indian: Colonialism, Pluralism, and Belonging in America. By David S. Koffman. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2019. 276 pp. Considering the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, the period of peak US expansion and national consolidation, Koffman sets out to understand encounters between Jews and Native Americans. [End Page 300] "How did American Jews make use of Indians, both real and imagined, as their ambitions in America as both Americans and Jews transformed? How did American Jews understand the place of Native Americans in their own quests for integration and advancement or for helping ensure justice and equality in America? How did Jews, a newly arrived 'clannish' group in a country celebrated for its diversity, openness, and meritocracy, see themselves as related to, distinct from, or refracted by those other quintessentially 'tribal' Americans? [H]ow did Jews put Indians to use in their efforts to remain Jewish or recreate Jewishness in America"? (3). Chapter 1 looks at "pioneer" Jews who moved to the western US, seeing themselves "as colonial whites and their own settlements, hardships, and accomplishments as heroic contributions to the winning of the American West." They "acted as unabashed agents of colonialism as a way of combatting anti-Semitic stereotypes that criticized Jewish men for lacking brawn or not pulling their weight in the nation's military operations…Western Jews cast themselves as recapitulations of the original pilgrims, clearing the path for commerce and settlement through their efforts at both engaging Indians in productive capitalism and subduing them through acts of violence. They viewed Indians as both impediments to and vehicles of their participation in the march toward civil progress" (15). In Chapter 2 Koffman discusses Jewish attitudes toward land, arguing that "immigrant Jews absorbed and fueled America's quest for imperial acquisition in the West, helping form part of its potent vision of expansionism and an equally martial vision of manhood. Nineteenth-century Jewish desire to feel existentially rooted in the new land fueled much of what Jews worked through in their imaginations of and encounters with Native Americans" (15). Chapter 3 presents Jewish merchants and the economic encounter with American Indians, the most prominent manifestation of face-to-face meetings between members of the different groups. Jews who "went west primarily as small businessmen to pursue wealth…constructed meaning out of their roles as traders and linked this Jewish occupational profile to the nation-building process," in which "Indians provided an intimate foil for Jews keen on having petty trade recognized as beneficial for expansion." One intriguing subset of the Jewish-Amerindian commercial interaction comprised the "Jewish Indian 'curio' dealers…who positioned themselves between red and white worlds as half Indian, half ethnographer experts, representing the Indians whose 'Indianness' they sold in the form of cultural objects" (16). In Chapter 4 Koffman turns to the "acculturated, enfranchised Jews of the urban east who devoted considerable efforts to justice for Native Americans" in the early twentieth century's climate of rising xenophobia (16). "American Jews and Native Americans fretted over their exclusion [End Page 301] from the mainstream American body politic; both feared that white America's assimilatory aspiration for them would lead to their cultural obliteration." Amerindians "provided Jews with a useful and malleable rhetorical tool for confronting tensions around assimilation and disappearance, naturalization, citizenship, and the idea of 'adoption' versus naturalization" (17). Chapter 5 describes a "cadre of Jewish pro-Native activists" in and beyond Washington, DC (17). Acting out of "Jewish enlightened self-interest," this set of "Jewish bureaucrats, lawyers, and philanthropists […] worked on behalf of Indian causes," finding "power and influence in the federal government for the first time in America under the Roosevelt Administration," playing a fundamental role in "drafting, passing, and implementing the 1934 [Indian Reorganization Act], consolidating federal case law on Indian affairs, and promoting Indian cultural, economic, health, education, and political interests" (17–18). At the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), Jews "consistently linked Indian uplift with an articulation of minority rights and cultural pluralism within the United States and on international stages that went beyond Indian...

Ojibwe, Activist, Priest: The Life of Father Philip Bergin Gordon, Tibishkogijik by Tadeusz Lewandowski

Reviewed by: Ojibwe, Activist, Priest: The Life of Father Philip Bergin Gordon, Tibishkogijik by Tadeusz Lewandowski Brandon Dean Tadeusz Lewandowski, Ojibwe, Activist, Priest: The Life of Father Philip Bergin Gordon, Tibishkogijik. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2019. 200 pp. $28.95 (cloth). With Ojibwe, Activist, Priest, Tadeusz Lewandowski provides a concise, compelling biography of Philip Gordon, the first Indigenous person to be ordained as a Catholic priest in the United States. Lewandowski points out that, unlike his contemporaries among the “Red Progressives,” Gordon has received little attention from scholars. This is despite his prominent role in the Society of American Indians (SAI) and his determined opposition to the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). Lewandowski’s biography, however, illuminates the life and work of a complicated individual, whose careers as both a priest and a Native rights advocate speak to the larger issues facing Native Americans in the early twentieth century. At the heart of Gordon’s complexity was the apparent tension between his adoption of assimilationist beliefs that were steeped in early twentieth-century progressivism and his tireless advocacy for Native rights. A product of Indian boarding schools himself, Gordon was a true believer in the “civilizing mission” that sought to assimilate Native Americans into White culture through education and religious conversion. And yet, it was Gordon’s lifelong determined defense of Native people that earned him the moniker “Wisconsin’s Fighting Priest.” Avoiding the temptation to judge Gordon harshly for his assimilationist ideals or to dismiss his relevance, Lewandowski instead argues that Gordon’s zeal for religious reform drove him passionately in both directions at once, often much to the chagrin of friends and opponents alike. After briefly recounting the history of the Ojibwe people from earliest [End Page 181] European contacts through the nineteenth century, Lewandowski details Gordon’s family background and his early life as a promising young Catholic student. Following Gordon’s story chronologically, Lewandowski pays attention to two distinct narrative threads, which often converged at key moments. The first is Gordon’s ecclesiastical career. This work suffered a series of ups and downs but was most fulfilling when Gordon was able to minister directly to his fellow Native people. The second thread is Gordon’s involvement with the “Red Progressives,” particularly his participation in and influence on the SAI. Through that society, Gordon came into contact with influential Native progressives such as Carlos Montezuma, Charles Eastman, and Gertrude Bonnin. Gordon also published a short-lived but groundbreaking newsletter entitled War-Whoop, which was the precursor to Montezuma’s influential anti-BIA publication, Wassaja. Although Lewandowski covers Gordon’s entire life and career, the majority of his chapters focus on 1913–1924, a time when both Gordon’s influence and epistolary output were at their peak. Lewandowski’s final chapters briefly detail Gordon’s activities post-1924. In that period, he finally found a stable appointment as a beloved parish priest in Centuria, Wisconsin. He ministered there until his death in 1948. Where sources directly related to Gordon are thin, Lewandowski turns to more general events relevant to Native American experiences so as to highlight the context in which Gordon worked. In this way, Lewandowski’s biography of Gordon also becomes a window into the everyday struggles on Indian reservations in Wisconsin and Minnesota. These struggles were exacerbated by poverty, disease, and the unscrupulous actions of White loggers. Overall, Lewandowski’s biography offers a flattering account of Gordon, while also noting the often-disagreeable personality traits that made controversy and personal conflict his constant companions. One notable exception to Lewandowski’s favorable portrayal concerns the Ojibwe priest’s short tenure at the Haskell Institute in 1915. The abysmal conditions at this Lawrence, Kansas, facility represented everything that was wrong with the Indian boarding school system; and yet, Gordon seems to have overlooked the illness, death, and psychological toll of family separation and forced assimilation while ministering to the spiritual needs of the school’s Catholic students. Lewandowski is right to recognize this blind spot, given that Gordon’s judgment seems to have been consistently clouded by perceived rivalries with Protestant missionaries and ministers. On this particular point, Lewandowski knowingly invites a degree of controversy [End Page...

Simple Tribal Co-Management: Using Existing Authority to Engage Tribal Nations in Co-Management of Federal Public Lands

Each year Native American tribal nations enter hundreds of federal contracts worth billions of dollars to run federal Indian programs. By substituting tribal governments for federal agencies, these “self-determination contracts” have been enormously successful in improving the effective delivery of federal programs in Indian country. However, tribal governments wish to do more. Tribes wish to co-manage federal public lands, including lands that lie outside their reservations, and they have a lot to offer in this area. For example, a tribe might seek to contract with the Fish & Wildlife Service to operate a wildlife refuge, or with the National Park Service to manage a park or monument or even with the Bureau of Reclamation to operate a federal dam. Tribes are natural partners for much of this work. Many federal units are located on lands that are, or were, tribal aboriginal lands. Although the federal government has had the legal authority to enter such contracts since 1994, federal agencies have been slow to enlist tribes in the management of federal public lands. A review of the few existing successful cases suggests that tribes confront dramatically different dynamics when seeking to contract functions with agencies beyond the Bureau of Indian Affairs or Indian Health Service and other agencies providing services to Indian people. At a time when indigenous-led conservation is crucial to addressing climate change and our national conservation goals, this article examines the obstacles to tribal co-management of public lands and proposes solutions.

«ПРОСТО МОЛОДОЙ ТУРИСТ В НАШЕЙ СТРАНЕ»: ЛИНГВИСТ И АНТРОПОЛОГ НЕЗ-ПЕРС АРЧИ ФИННИ

Born in Culdesac, ID, Archie Phinney, a Nez Percé, was the first Native American to receive an undergraduate degree from the University of Kansas. He collaborated with prominent Smithsonian anthropologists J. N. B. Hewitt and T. Michelson as well as the great Franz Boas; visited Leningrad after being invited by Vladimir Bogoras in the context of an academic exchange program; defended his candidate thesis at the Institute of Anthropology, Archeology and Ethnography (MAE); and returned to serve as an Indian agent in different reservations in the USA. The USSR scholarship of Phinney fell on a difficult yet crucial period in the history of Soviet ethnography, when it was not yet completely closed and remained receptive to the influences of Boas’ School. Through Phinney and other American researchers like him, who visited the Soviet Union at that time, the Soviet practice of “indigenization” had a reverse effect on J. Collier’s liberal Indian New Deal. Phinney collaborated with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, when the latter was on the Indian Commissioner’s post. Today, Phinney’s figure again attracts interest after some oblivion. The department of anthropology at the University of Idaho, Moscow, occupies a building named in his honor. The scope of the paper is based on the Boas Paper collection — his correspondence with Phinney, Bogoras, Averkieva, Barton and others, stored at the American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia. The analyzed materials, representing the general atmosphere in the 1930s Soviet academic community, are still little-known to the Russian-speaking reader.

The Formal Conventions of Colonial Medicine: Bureau of Indian Affairs’ Agency Physicians’ Reports, 1880–1910

This article takes a historical view of Dawes Era medical communication, focusing on National Archives Record Group 75 (the Bureau of Indian Affairs papers). Examinations of reports from the Pine Ridge and Nett Lake Agencies focus readers’ scrutiny on prevalent formal codes and paracolonial conventions of Indian Bureau medical reports. This article challenges writing studies scholars to forthrightly concern themselves with the ways in which discourses of power are encoded in document structures and designs.

Climate Variability and Change in Western U.S. Rangelands

We examine variability and change components of precipitation and minimum and maximum daily temperatures, and the derived variables potential evapotranspiration (PET) and the Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI), over rangelands in the region 30-50N, 100- 125W. We focus on areas administered by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), with a view toward understanding how future climate variations may affect ecosystems, and ultimately, grazing on these lands. Based on an analysis of the annual precipitation cycle we adopt a three-season partition for the year, classifying land areas by season of maximum precipitation; this yields a coherent subregional map. Masking with a combined BLM/BIA footprint, we find that in all subregions both tmin and tmax have increased in response to anthropogenic forcing, the rate being generally greater for tmax. Significant precipitation trends are not detected, whereas PET exhibits significant upward trends in all regions. While PET-normalized precipitation, as well as PDSI, do not exhibit significant trends individually (by variable and region), the fact that most trend downward nevertheless suggests a systematic drying. We conclude that temperature constitutes the principal detectable control on hydroclimatic changes in rangelands within the study area. Although ecosystem responses may be complex, future temperature increases are expected generally to reduce soil water availability. The unforced component of variability isinvestigated with respect to several key climate indices on both interannual and decadal time scales.

The 2019 Partial Government Shutdown and Its Impact on Health Care for American Indians and Alaska Natives.

The 2018-9 partial government shutdown created a 35-day gap in federal appropriations for the Indian Health Service and tribal health programs. With ongoing challenges for American Indian and Alaska Native health systems, including clinician shortages and poor health outcomes, the funding gap engendered substantial health risks. Other federal health systems have been sheltered from this and past shutdowns through receiving their appropriations in advance. Several approaches exist to implementing advance appropriations, including instituting advance appropriations across Bureau of Indian Affairs and Indian Health Service programs; or by moving Indian Health Service funding to the same appropriation as the Department of Health and Human Services. Furthermore, building and strengthening health partnerships with non-federal institutions, such as academic medical centers, may help distribute financial risk and strengthen care systems.

Nature Behind Barbed Wire: An Environmental History of the Japanese American Incarceration by Connie Chiang

Reviewed by: Nature Behind Barbed Wire: An Environmental History of the Japanese American Incarceration by Connie Chiang Jonathan van Harmelen (bio) Nature Behind Barbed Wire: An Environmental History of the Japanese American Incarceration, by Connie Chiang. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. 328 pp. $35.00 paper. ISBN: 9780190842062. Connie Chiang’s Nature Behind Barbed Wire offers a comprehensive environmental history of Japanese American incarceration during World War II. This book has been excitedly anticipated since the publication of Chiang’s 2010 article on the subject, “Imprisoned Nature: Towards an Environmental History of the World War II Japanese American Incarceration.”1 In her book, Chiang expands upon her initial argument that the incarceration “was an environmental process, deeply embedded in the lands and waters along the coast and the camps further inland” (5). During each step, the natural environment was a deciding factor in the creation and implementation of the camp process, and, with the trauma that it caused, one that still lingers with survivors today. Not only does Chiang bring a fresh take to a familiar topic in Asian American studies, but her pairing of survivor testimony alongside reports from the War Relocation Authority allows her to develop her argument and humanize the events of the incarceration. Chiang’s book is organized in chronological fashion, starting with prewar anti-Japanese sentiment, which fueled the movement to incarcerate Japanese Americans following Pearl Harbor, and ending with the later memorialization of the camps and the corresponding environmental justice movement beginning at the dawn of the 1970s. The book includes three parts: chapters 1 and 2 present the creation of the camps; chapters 3 to 6 examine how the confined population interacted with the environment; chapter 7 and the epilogue discuss the legacy of the camp in terms of environmentalism. While the first two chapters catalogue the forced removal of Japanese Americans from their homes and to the camps, their main focus is the administrators of the camps. The other chapters of the book focus on the experiences of the incarcerated. [End Page 304] To echo Hana Maruyama’s assessment in Edge Effects, Nature Behind Barbed Wire “connects the dots” of varied experiences that many historians—those of both Nikkei history and the incarceration overall—have discussed.2 The harshness of the environment, combined with the omnipresent importance of agriculture and the need to survive on the bare minimum of supplies, serve to connect the various episodes of the camp experience. Chiang’s book paints a vivid picture of the harshness of the perilous journey to camp and the toll it took on the confined. It was not only the cruelty of Arizona sandstorms, for example, or the bitter cold of Utah’s winters but also the government’s inability to bring out equipment and necessities to these camps that further accentuated the isolation and hardship of the incarcerated. Even human factors such as the hastily built barracks and the dripping of hot tar that scarred Takako Asano’s face as she slept can be traced in some part back to the environment (56). Not only does Chiang do an excellent job of bringing to life the experience of living in these prison “islands” in the deserts, but she also lays out clearly the intricate connections among these camps. One of the most important contributions Chiang makes to the historiography of Japanese American incarceration during World War II is her detailed explanation of how the camp locations were selected. While all the camps were located in desolate areas, her use of archival material in narrating the debates among various government agencies—the War Relocation Authority, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and Bureau of Reclamation—demonstrates the intimate involvement of the federal government and various private citizens in undertaking this flawed project. Yet after providing an extended narrative of bureaucratic infighting involved in the construction of the camps, Chiang skillfully brings the reader back to the experiences of individuals with the environment. She further brings together different voices of indigenous communities, such as the Pima tribe, affected by the construction of the Gila River Camp on their lands. While some authors like Richard Drinnon have forwarded the comparison between the camps and Native American...

We’re Not Doing Enough Prescribed Fire in the Western United States to Mitigate Wildfire Risk

Prescribed fire is one of the most widely advocated management practices for reducing wildfire hazard and has a long and rich tradition rooted in indigenous and local ecological knowledge. The scientific literature has repeatedly reported that prescribed fire is often the most effective means of achieving such goals by reducing fuels and wildfire hazard and restoring ecological function to fire-adapted ecosystems in the United States (US) following a century of fire exclusion. This has translated into calls from scientists and policy experts for more prescribed fire, particularly in the Western US, where fire activity has escalated in recent decades. The annual extent of prescribed burning in the Western US remained stable or decreased from 1998 to 2018, while 70% of all prescribed fire was completed primarily by non-federal entities in the Southeastern US. The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) was the only federal agency to substantially increase prescribed fire use, potentially associated with increased tribal self-governance. This suggests that the best available science is not being adopted into management practices, thereby further compounding the fire deficit in the Western US and the potential for more wildfire disasters.