Bureau Of Indian Affairs Research Articles

"Don't Even Talk to Me if You're Kinya'�anii [Towering House]": Adopted Clans, Kinship, and "Blood" in Navajo Country

"Don't Even Talk to Me if You're Kinya'áanii [Towering House]":Adopted Clans, Kinship, and "Blood" in Navajo Country Kristina Jacobsen (bio) and Shirley Ann Bowman (bio) For citizens of the Navajo diaspora Diné comedy duo James and Ernie perform in the Navajo reservation border-town of Farmington, New Mexico.1 In the routine, we are in a smoky bar: a Diné country western band, Aces Wild, is playing a popular song ("The Aces Wild Song"), Navajo couples are two-stepping to the music, and various Diné men are trying unsuccessfully to pick up women in the bar. "Hey baby, what's your CLAN?" one man asks with exaggerated intonation of the woman sitting next to him. With an air of impatience, the woman rolls her eyes and tells off the inquiring man: "Don't even TALK to me if you're Kinya'áanii!"2 HOW DO CLANS FIGURE INTO contemporary Navajo life, and what personality traits might be attached to, say, Kinya'áaniis, or members of the Towering House clan, that would make individuals from this clan more or less attractive as potential mates? What can we learn about Navajo or Diné histories of cultural mixture, belonging, and inclusion through the many "adopted" Navajo clan names?3 Given that close to half of all Diné citizens now live off the Navajo Nation, what might a contemporary ethnography of Navajo kinship, a topic so tirelessly explored by early anthropologists to Navajo country (see Reichard 1928; Franciscan Fathers 1910, 424; Matthews 1894, 1897), look like?4 This article examines ideologies surrounding the Diné kinship system, or k'é, in which Diné people are connected to one another through an elaborate matrilineal descent network of systems of obligation and reciprocity, otherwise known as the clan system (dóne'é).5 As elsewhere, kinship in Diné contexts is culturally specific, cultivated through daily use, and not a given, natural fact. As Gary Witherspoon noted over forty years ago, "The point here is that there is no set of biological or sexual ties unless they are said by the culture to exist. The nature of these ties, if they exist, is culturally explained, and the meaning attributed to such ties is culturally derived and assigned. Each culture independently explains the nature and meaning of kinship" (1975, 12). Using oral histories, interviews, archival materials, [End Page 43] humorous memes, comedy routines, data from Bureau of Indian Affairs and Indian census rolls, and contemporary scholarship from Diné scholars, we foreground the story of so-called adopted clans, or clans that reveal the Diné practice of adopting and incorporating non-Diné peoples into Navajo society as a way to solidify kin relationships. For example, out of some fifty-three clans identified by anthropologist Gladys Reichard in 1928, twenty-one, or over one-third, are listed as adopted clans or as clan names created for individuals or other Pueblo or Mexican groups that originally came from outside the Navajo Nation (1928, 16). Putting these various sources in conversation with one another, we attend to the "floating gap" (Vansina 1985, 23; cf. Gardner 2015) that exists between the "mythic time" of clan histories and the "calendrical time" of Diné settler-colonial histories from Spanish contact (ca. 1539) onward, dwelling in the space of possibility between the two histories. Using clans as a window into the ways Diné society historically included and incorporated non-Navajos into the fabric of the Navajo Nation, we probe what implications these stories might have for a Diné politics of citizenship and belonging today. Our goal is not to focus on clan histories and clan-internal stories perse—this is neither the appropriate medium nor the forum to share such typically private and culturally intimate stories—but rather to foreground Diné adoptive practices in order to broaden what we currently perceive as a discourse of "purism" around blood quantum and "being Navajo" experienced by many, including coauthor Bowman, in Navajo communities both on the reservation and off today (Barker 2011; Cody 2016; Denetdale 2006; Kauanui 2008; L. Lee 2007; Jacobsen-Bia 2014; Spruhan 2007, 2018; Webster 2015). Moreover, by suggesting that Navajos were remarkably open to a variety of categories of citizenship, we do not...

Biopolitical Resistance to Indian Relocation in the Great Lakes

Biopolitical Resistance to Indian Relocation in the Great Lakes Ashley Glassburn (bio) When the state of Indiana was founded in 1816, Anglo-American settlers controlled only the southernmost region of the territory. The Miami and Potawatomie managed the vast majority of the land and waterways. Such declarative acts illustrate the confidence and determination with which the federal government sought to appropriate these lands as an extension of the United States. Indeed, many of the Delaware, Piankashaw, Wea, and Kickapoo had already moved north or west to escape the seemingly inevitable violence of US westward expansion. Yet despite hundreds of years of colonization, the Miami Nation of Indiana remained on their homeland due partly to their strategic misuse of US biopolitical policies in the removal period. Biopower is almost always attributed to states, corporations, or institutions, though a Foucauldian conception of power is circulatory, moving throughout the entirety of social relations. As the United States developed increasingly cohesive policies for managing American Indian populations, Indigenous people were taking stock of their situations and choices and some, such as the Miami, began adopting US biopolitical tactics for their own purposes. The first removal treaty that the Miami signed in 1838 required all Miami, except a single family, to move west of the Mississippi River. By the time militia forced the Miami to leave in 1846, the majority of the Miami were legally exempt from the process. Miami leaders used the biopolitical tools of the state, such as population tracking, the regulation of marriage and adoption, and shifting notions of family to significantly thwart relocation and land dispossession. The biopolitical resistance of the Miami suggests the "soft" ways in which colonized and oppressed peoples resisted the control of state power and illustrate how well they understood the political forces in which they found themselves. Uninterrupted tribal council control of Miami membership rolls means that to this day the Miami were never subject to US blood quantum or other genocidal identity policies under the Bureau of Indian Affairs. In the first thirty years of Indiana statehood, Miami population and quality of life decreased dramatically. Initially the Miami benefited economically from [End Page 863] the flow of entrepreneurs and land speculators. Susan Sleeper Smith attributes Miami economic prowess partly to the swampy conditions of northern Indiana, which required speculators to pay the Miami to help them navigate the landscape and seasonally shifting waterways.1 By the end of 1846 nearly half of the Miami were forcibly relocated to Kansas, and those who remained in Indiana were rendered dependent on US annuity payments. In ten years the Indiana Miami population dropped from roughly 2,000 in 1830 to 800 in 1840 and then to 302 in 1846, with 248 residing in Kansas.2 The numbers alone speak to the social upheaval and severe loss the Miami experienced in this era. Though the Miami treaty negotiators were forced to make decisions in the fog of uncertain futures, their attentiveness to US investments in controlling Miami kinship and land relations allowed the Miami Nation to remain in their homelands, which allowed them to keep their stories, their language, and their culture alive. "Survivance" signals the victory of surviving colonial structures designed for genocide.3 The inherent dynamic between land, kinship, and sustenance is crucial to the biopolitical project of Indiana statehood and to understanding the success of Miami resistance. In 1816 Miami villages and encampments stretched across the majority of the newly designated state, particularly north of what is now Indianapolis. Villages were fairly permanent collections of buildings that housed people related through kinship or choice. Encampments were mobile and used for particular resources that were managed by clans—such as harvesting farmed land, hunting on seasonal grounds, and flintknapping. Miami traveled between relatives to gain use of such resources, learn skills, and to maintain relations. The clan system was deeply tied to these seasonal movements to provide food, medicine, and goods for trade, which is to say that the clan system was a crucial social structure for maintaining the health and well-being of the Miami as a collective. Clans are much more than a way to figure the difference between cousins and neighbors. Clans keep certain...

Transnational development training and Native American ‘laboratories’ in the early Cold War

AbstractIn the late 1940s and early 1950s, as the US launched the Point Four initiative of overseas technical assistance programmes, a number of American officials, academics, and analysts saw valuable global lessons in the US Bureau of Indian Affairs’ development interventions among Native Americans. These interests culminated in a suite of professional training experiments, involving trainees from around the world, which emphasized cross-cultural development methods and used certain south-western Native American communities as field ‘laboratories’. A foundational seminar programme, coordinated by Cornell University social scientists, inspired additional training initiatives, tied to Point Four projects abroad, which brought foreign government officers from South Asia and the Middle East for similar training in New Mexico and Arizona. These training experiments not only placed Native American situations at the centre of significant transnational conversations about development, but also reinforced and widely circulated particular ideas regarding ‘underdevelopment’, ‘experts” prerogatives, and the politics of development relations.

A Year of Crisis: Memory and Meaning in a Navajo Community's Struggle for Self-Determination

In 1979, when a remote Diné (Navajo) community in New Mexico learned that under new federal self-determination guidelines it could establish its own school, it jumped at the opportunity. But just two years after the school's founding, conditions were so bad that teachers and community, in fear of a Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) takeover, mounted a full-scale rebellion against the school's leadership. Now, some thirty-five years later, the author, who witnessed the events described, recalls in intimate and painful detail this story—a moment in Native American educational history, he suggests, not without meaning for other Indigenous communities' ongoing quest for greater educational sovereignty.

Toward a Native Archive: Chicago’s Relocation Photos, Indian Labor, and Indigenous Public Text

This article is an encounter with a governmentally organized archive, one that underscores how photo and text together describe emerging communities and alternative forms of belonging. Between 1953 and 1957 the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) began what it called the “relocation project,” which moved American Indians from rural reservations to major American urban centers. The BIA maintained an archive of photographs of relocatees both before and after relocation and produced pamphlets, internal documents, newsletters, and other bureaucratic material. This article illustrates how a literary historical reading of these images enables new claims on urban American Indian belonging in the United States in the early 1950s. It contextualizes American Indian relocation as an institutionalized but also surprisingly aestheticized endeavor. The project explores an aesthetics of the ordinary that demands rethinking the work of photography in the twentieth century and contributes to ongoing conversations in the construction of Native archives.

The Magic in the Dye Pot: Mable Morrow, Alice Kagawa Parrott, and Sites of Exchange in Modern Weaving

In the late 1950s Japanese–American weaver and Santa Fe, New Mexico, resident, Alice Kagawa Parrott appealed to Mable Morrow, a former arts and crafts specialist for the United States Bureau of Indian Affairs, to teach her Hopi, Navajo, and Spanish-colonial methods for carding, spinning, and dyeing wool yarns. Markers of this seminal intergenerational exchange would echo throughout Parrott’s diverse production of tapestries, commercial yardages, and garments for the duration of her practice. In the following decades, she exhibited her weavings both locally and internationally and was active among a prominent network of modern artists and craftsmen such as furniture designer Sam Maloof, ceramicist Toshiko Takaezu, and fiber artist Lenore Tawney. While Parrott’s narrators have focused on her extensive use of natural dyes, the origins of this practice have received minimal attention. Addressing this gap in the scholarship, this article explores the intercultural and, at times circular, transmission of botanical and craft knowledge among Santa Fe’s Indigenous communities, government officials like Morrow, and local artists and weavers as far afield as Hawaii. An assessment of Morrow’s accumulation and preservation of traditional Native American techniques in the early twentieth century, and the adoption of these methods by Parrott in the 1960s, demonstrates that vegetal dye processes served to permeate the perceived boundary between Indigenous and modern craft production during this period. This transcultural mixing of materials and methods is perhaps best expressed by Parrott’s luminously pigmented yarns which intertwine and form the foundation of her practice and the final artworks themselves.

Invited Written Testimony of Professor Kirsten Matoy Carlson, on H.R. 3744, a Bill to Provide That an Indian Group May Receive Federal Acknowledgment as an Indian Tribe Only by Act of Congress, before the Subcommittee on Indian, Insular, and Alaska Native Affairs, Natural Resources Committee, United States House of Representatives, 115th Congress, September 26, 2017

H.R. 3744 intends to clarify the roles of Congress and the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) in the federal acknowledgment of Indian entities. In evaluating the proposal in H.R. 3744, members of this Committee should be fully informed about the historical role that Congress has played in the federal recognition process and the experiences of Indian groups seeking congressional recognition. This testimony summarizes the findings from two empirical studies that I conducted on the legislative and administrative recognition of Indian groups from 1975 to 2013. These studies reveal that while H.R. 3744’s goals of consistency and clarity are laudable, the bill rests on questionable assumptions about federal recognition and Congress’s role in it over time. I conclude with some observations about H.R. 3744 and its ability to increase transparency and efficiency in the federal recognition process.

Native Americans in the Movies: Portrayals from Silent Films to the Present MichaelHilger. Rowman and Littlefield, 2016.

in the Movies: Portrayals from Silent Films to the Present Michael Hilger. Rowman and Littlefield, 2016.It has been frustrating over the past thirty-five years, answering and re-answering the same questions regarding American Indians and the American Indian experience from students ranging in age from six to forty-five. Do Indians live in tipis? Why are Indians so mystical? What is in that 'peacepipe' they smoke? What's so bad about the 'Redskins' and other Indian mascots? And so on, ad nauseam. The age group really does not matter; I get the same litany of questions. Mindful of my promise to myself and to my American Indian friends to remain patient and to avoid overly sarcastic responses, I answer the mind-numbing questions with measured language delivered in sincerity-dipped tones. When I have asked non-Indian students what they think of American Indians, the sixyear-olds respond, They are mean! and the older students say, They love nature. So, through all we have been through as pluralistic and multicultural nation, it is not stretch to conclude that with regard to American Indians and their American experience, non-Indians remain, as group, pretty clueless. To what can we attribute this condition? We can blame school curricula that omit and distort the American Indian experience, and we can blame schoolteachers, prekindergartenthrough graduate school levels, who seldom speak of American Indians in the present tense. We can blame museum curators and scientists whose fascination with American Indian bones (just the bones) seems boundless. We can blame governmental policymakers who patronize in repetitive cycles, deciding whether to American Indians or to allow American Indians to help themselves. To the extent that the Bureau of Indian Affairs and tribal governments are run by American Indians, we can blame American Indians themselves. Throughout my academic career, I have focused my attention on television and movie portrayals of American Indians for their complicit roles. As father, I grew frustrated during my kids' most impressionable years with having to explain Disney's (and other cartoonists') racist portrayals of American Indians. And I am not alone in this frustration with Hollywood. Over the years, researchers have detailed how films, television shows, and images in popular culture propagate and perpetuate this collective ignorance. From Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr.'s seminal 1978 The White Man's Indian to Michael Ray FitzGerald's 2014 on Network TV, steady stream of studies analyzes this phenomenon from multiple angles-photographic images, images in popular culture (TV, film, advertisements, etc.), and school textbook treatment of the American Indian experience.To this flood of evidence, we can now add Michael Hilger's in the Movies: Portrayals from Silent Films to the Present. Hilger divides this very enlightening and useful study into two parts-a ninety-one-page critical examination of film portrayals of American Indians/First peoples and 337page encyclopedic listing, arranged alphabetically, a new canon of most sound films [and television films] and solid representation of silent films (and the rare animated short) in which and First characters play significant role (93). This listing is subdivided further in three appendices -Films by Nation (seventy-one different Nations/ Tribes listed), Image Portrayals of Americans (e.g., attack on fort, homosexuality, Native American activist, romance between mixed-blood American man and white woman, vengeance, etc.), and television films.The essence of Hilger's critical examination of cinematic portrayals of is reiteration of the well-documented dichotomous depiction of American Indians in films as either the Savage Savages or the Noble Savages. As Hilger succinctly states, With only minor variations. …

Punishment in Indian Country: Ironies of Federal Punishment of Native Americans

Native Americans are US citizens, but they are also tribal nationals subject to complex and unique criminal jurisdiction arrangements over Indian lands. Tribal nations typically have tribal court jurisdiction over less serious crimes, but for serious crimes the federal justice system often supersedes tribal authority, exposing Native Americans to more severe punishments. In addition, recent federal programs have attempted to foster greater tribal/federal criminal justice coupling. Yet, examinations of criminal punishment of Native Americans are few, and most are outdated and/or of very limited generalizability. We examine the punishment of Native American defendants in federal court, focusing on 28 federal districts with substantial Indian presence. Using recent US Sentencing Commission data, as well as contextual data from the Bureau of Indian Affairs and tribal courts, we focus on differences in the federal sentencing of Native American defendants, and how these differences are conditioned by indicators of tribal-federal criminal justice coupling.

Whose Freedom of Religion?

Whose Freedom of Religion? Peter Heinegg Religious Freedom: The Contested History of an American Idea. By Tisa Wenger, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. 298 pp. $34.95. In this intellectually original, carefully conceived, cogently argued, but dully written work, Wenger (who teaches American religious history at Yale) surveys the baffling variety of ways the sacrosanct principle of freedom of religion has been used as a tool or weapon in crucial episodes of our history where politics, culture, and race were at least as much the issue as religion. Starting in the late nineteenth century and working through the mid‐twentieth century, Wenger focuses on the role of religious freedom in the U.S. occupation of the Philippines, government interference in ritual practices on Indian reservations, the quest for social acceptance by Catholics and Jews, and the African‐American struggle for equality. To call the concept a double‐edged sword would be an understatement. The American seizure of the Philippines in the wake of the Spanish‐American War might have been (was) an act of naked aggression, but politicians, clergymen, and journalists liked to see it as a Christian liberation of Filipinos from the medieval yoke of Spanish Catholicism. (The same notion applied to Cuba and Puerto Rico.) Of course, given the “infantile” condition of the natives, any real self‐determination would have to be put on hold (until 1946, as it turned out). But turnabout is fair play; and fighters for Philippine independence could claim that, like their white Protestant liberators‐adversaries, they believed in both the unique greatness of Christianity and the separation of church and state. And even traditional Catholics loyal to Rome could stress their superiority to both the Moros (militant Muslims in the south of the country) and pagan peoples. Yet, as with most of the other oppressed groups Wenger has studied, whatever American‐style rights the Filipinos maintained they had were not enough to move their American conquerors. And by stressing religion (the only legal card they had) to the exclusion of other elements of their identity, Filipinos were both misrepresenting themselves and not confronting the massive racism behind U.S. imperialism (but how could they?). Even before this time, American Indians, decimated and robbed of practically everything, were making desperate attempts to hold on to what was left of their native traditions, which included such late developments as the Ghost Dances (whence the catastrophic Battle of Wounded Knee in 1890), the “Shakers” in the Pacific Northwest (unrelated to the New England followers of Mother Ann Lee), and the peyotists (later incorporated as the Native American Church) in the Southwest. But they faced fierce resistance from the committed racists running the all‐powerful Bureau of Indian Affairs; and their invoking of freedom of religion to defend their folkways largely went for naught. What little success they had—at least until FDR's wise appointment of John Collier as head of the B.I.A. in 1934—was won by shaping their ceremonies to resemble Christian worship (and underlying belief) as much as possible. And once again, presenting their cause as wholly religious involved a serious distortion. The classical Enlightenment distinction between the sacred and the profane simply didn't apply to the Indians, whose languages often had no word for “religion” and whose “services” formed part of an all‐encompassing way of life. The most successful saluting the flag of religious freedom took place among Catholics and Jews, though the Jews plainly faced much deeper and more bitter bias. But by the end of World War II, the “tri‐faith” of Protestant–Catholic–Jew had become more or less established as the normal spectrum of religion in America. To fit into this scheme, Jews had to downplay the role of “race” (history, language, and a vast array of customs and habits) in a manner that Zionists, among others, could never be comfortable with. But this adjustment basically worked, as the thousands of panels ever since that feature a team of minister‐priest‐and‐rabbi have demonstrated. (How long will it take before the presence of an imam is also de rigueur?) One downside to this equal status, Wenger insists, is that...

‘No sovereign nation, no reservation’: producing the new colonialism in Cayuga Count(r)y

ABSTRACT‘No sovereign nation, no reservation’: producing the new colonialism in Cayuga Count(r)y. Territory, Politics, Governance. Since 1980, the Cayuga Nation has worked through various US politico-legal mechanisms to establish sovereignty over land taken from them by European settlers and their descendants in what is today New York State beginning in the 1700s. When, in 2005, the US Supreme Court refused to review a lower court’s dismissal of their case, the Cayugas began purchasing land they claim from local (non-Cayuga) property owners. Relatedly, they petitioned the US Bureau of Indian Affairs to place the land that they collectively own into federal trust, which would exempt them from various taxes. These efforts have engendered strong opposition from elements of the non-Native population, particularly the organization Upstate Citizens for Equality (UCE). This article interrogates the discourse of UCE, and its allies and antecedents, one that effectively nationalizes the Cayugas by producing them as ‘normal’ US citizens, as well as that of the federal courts. It illustrates how a discourse emphasizing equality, fairness, (US) nationhood and private property obfuscates the Cayuga’s dispossession and the nature of their land claim, to reproduce a colonized space, and to give rise to what we call ‘the new colonialism’, producing an impasse whose overcoming requires a far-reaching rethinking of territory and sovereignty.

Clyde Warrior: Tradition, Community, and Red Power. New Directions in Native American Studies Series. By Paul R. McKenzie-Jones.

Clyde Warrior: Tradition, Community, and Red Power. New Directions in Native American Studies Series. By Paul R. McKenzie-Jones. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2015. xxii + 234 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $29.95.) Clyde Warrior (1939–1968) has long deserved a full-length biography, and we can now thank Paul R. McKenzie-Jones for providing one. Warrior was one of the leading young American Indian activists of the 1960s, in part due to his role as founder and leader of the National Indian Youth Council, established in 1961. Along with contemporaries during the red power era, Warrior challenged the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) and other Indian leaders and organizations he found overly cautious and conciliatory to non-Indians. Warrior was … jlagrand{at}messiah.edu

The Scoop on Health: How Native American Newspapers Frame and Report Health News

ABSTRACTThe health status of Native Americans is known to be lower than that of other Americans. One way to get relevant health information to this population is through Native-produced media. Tribal newspapers are the most popular form of Native media, consumed more often than their mainstream counterparts. As such, these community-based newspapers are meaningful tools for relevant health information gathering. This study content analyzes a census of health-related newspaper articles (N = 644) over a 1-year period from 20 Tribal newspapers across 10 regions designated by the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs. Findings profile the nature of health topics reported in Native news publications. Health news stories were shown to use episodic frames significantly more than thematic frames. Inclusion of supplementary information (e.g., causes/symptoms, treatment, and prevention) and inclusion of mobilizing information (i.e., provides readers resources for further action) were both shown to significantly differ by health topic. Results provide an important baseline understanding of how health news is reported in Native news publications.

The Big Black Box of Indian Country: The Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Federal-Indian Relationship

The Big Black Box of Indian Country: The Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Federal-Indian Relationship

The Big Black Box of Indian Country: The Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Federal-Indian Relationship

The Big Black Box of Indian Country: The Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Federal-Indian Relationship

A Generation Removed: The Fostering and Adoption of Indigenous Children in the Postwar World

Book Reviews 200 I hesitated, and then decided to go ahead and offer a few comments. The collective efforts that I chronicle find an echo in my drawings and maps. If I imagined, researched, and sketched them, that was just the beginning. These drawings were revised, improved, and polished over the 20 years that it took to make A City for Children into a richly illustrated book. Students, colleagues, and even members of my immediate family chipped in to help with conceptualization and delineation as I realized that pen-and-ink drawings needed to be turned into digital files and as I uncovered new information. Some of the new evidence came from talking to elderly men and women who used places in the charitable landscape as children. To make the plans of the New Century Club (p. 189), I relied on information offered by Arthur Patterson, and for plans of the Children’s Home (p. 280), I turned to Mollie Fisher and Belva Cooley. I should have made my debt to Arthur, Mollie, and Belva clearer in the text. That leads me to my next comment, which is in response to finding and interpreting children’s voices. Agreed, this is so important, and I so admire the historians who’ve found stunning examples in the archives of middle- and upper-class children writing about, drawing, and even creating physical spaces. Annmarie Adams and Karen Sánchez-Eppler come to mind. Yet this evidence is so rare, so challenging to find for the children who lived in and used institutions in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Oakland. I found all sorts of adults—journalists, reformers, matrons, patrons—who spoke for working-class children in the city, kids who lived in the West Oakland Home and attended the West Oakland Free Kindergarten and the New Century Club. Yet, and alas, no one recorded their voices or kept track of their drawings and diaries. This absence in the archive is troubling—how do we recover lives lost to the historical record? I hoped to begin to mitigate it by thinking about children and their everyday lives in material and spatial terms. Here’s another point that perhaps I could have made clearer: while we may not be able to recover children’s words, we can recuperate them through their spaces. A Generation Removed: The Fostering and Adoption of Indigenous Children in the Postwar World Margaret D. Jacobs (2014) Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 360 pages. $29.95 (hardback); ISBN 978-0-8032-5536-4. Margaret D. Jacobs’ A Generation Removed tells a postwar story of Indigenous child removal that continues to structure questions of sovereignty, child welfare, and adoption policy today. In June of 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court took up the case Adoptive Couple vs. Baby Girl, which pitted non-Indigenous adoptive parents against baby Veronica’s biological father, a citizen of the Cherokee nation. In a landmark decision, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the adoptive parents, Book Reviews 201 dealing a swift blow to the legal safeguards for Indigenous families enshrined in the Indian Child Welfare Act (IWCA). Jacobs, a Chancellor’s Professor of History at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, begins her study well before the 1978 passage of ICWA. Devised by the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1958, the Indian Adoption Project (IAP) helmed a national program of Indigenous foster care and adoption that greatly undermined Indigenous claims to land, sovereignty, and family across the nation. By the late 1960s, an estimated 25 to 35 percent of Indian children had been separated from their families. In 1976 alone—two years before the passage of ICWA—the per capita foster care rate for Indian children in South Dakota was 22 times higher than for non-Indian children. A Generation Removed finds that a toxic combination of factors contributed to this postwar crisis in Indian child welfare. Government officials eager to cut Indigenous social and legal services welcomed the idea of placing Indian children with middleclass white families. Compounding these cost-cutting measures were prevailing ethnocentric beliefs in both the primacy of the nuclear family and the degraded socio-economic status of Native Americans. Many Indigenous...

Hollow Justice: A History of Indigenous Claims in the United States by David E. Wilkins (review)

Reviewed by: Hollow Justice: A History of Indigenous Claims in the United States by David E. Wilkins Beth R. Ritter Hollow Justice: A History of Indigenous Claims in the United States. By David E. Wilkins. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013. v + 249 pp. Notes, bibliography, index. $40.00 cloth. David E. Wilkins has delivered yet another invaluable resource for students and scholars of indigenous claims, federal Indian policy, and the asymmetrical relationship that has persisted between the United States and Native nations. Divided into eight chapters, Wilkins’s book traces the history of indigenous claims from the US [End Page 188] Court of Claims to a special three-chapter treatment of the Indian Claims Commission, to the Cobell case, and a final chapter that identifies opportunities and limitations for pursuing indigenous claims in the 21st century. Wilkins’s expertise in federal Indian law, policy, and history evokes the legacy of his professor, Vine Deloria Jr. Grounded in jurisprudence and thorough historical research, Wilkins advances our critical analyses of the factors that have shaped this very peculiar field in law and policy. Peculiar, that is, in relation to the manner in which all other claims have been litigated and settled in the history of the United States. Wilkins raises a number of thought-provoking questions, such as: Even though they were eligible to participate, why did the Bureau of Indian Affairs (bia) fail to notify the Eastern Tribes about the establishment of the Indian Claims Commission? Why have the federal courts been allowed to create new legal doctrines or redefine existing ones in order to deny Native peoples any recovery under the law? How did the Indian Claims Commission morph from Congress’s stated intent to establish a commission into becoming a court? Why are Natives’ claims cases the only claims that have “offsets?” And finally, should indigenous claims be litigated or should they be negotiated? As Wilkins demonstrates over and over, the indigenous peoples of the United States have seldom received “equal treatment under the law.” For scholars interested in the Great Plains, there are myriad examples drawn from this region—the homeland of dozens of Native Nations. In particular, Wilkins considers individual cases involving the Poncas, Winnebagos, Turtle Mountain Chippewas, Sisseton Wahpetons, Cheyennes, Lakotas, Blackfeet, Otoes and Missourias, and Osages. And even though the class action suit that bears her name included 500,000 other Native claimants, Elouise Pepion Cobell of the Blackfeet Tribe of Montana is given her due credit for providing leadership and persistence in this landmark claim settled in 2010. Wilkins’s documentation and analysis of the Cobell case is excellent, but what is even more valuable is the context he provides for this very complex case. When I first received this assignment, I was skeptical there was enough material to warrant a book-length treatment of a subject already covered in the seminal work Irredeemable America: The Indians’ Estate and Land Claims (1985), edited by Imre Sutton. While there is some overlap, I highly recommend Wilkins’s book. His consummate scholarship examines indigenous claims through a different lens, updates the literature, and offers a useful framework to consider indigenous claims in the past, present, and future. Beth R. Ritter Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Native American Studies University of Nebraska at Omaha Copyright © 2015 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

Settler-State Apologies to Indigenous Peoples: A Normative Framework and Comparative Assessment

Settler-State Apologies to Indigenous Peoples:A Normative Framework and Comparative Assessment Sheryl Lightfoot (bio) DURING THE PAST TWO DECADES, an increasing number of states have issued official apologies to Indigenous peoples. The first wave of state apologies to Indigenous peoples began in 1991 when Canada’s assistant deputy minister for Indian affairs offered what may have been the first governmental apology to Indigenous peoples, and the first of three apologies Canada has offered for its century-long Indian Residential Schools program that removed Indigenous children from their homes and forcibly placed them in church-run Residential Schools.1 Shortly thereafter, in 1993, the United States Congress issued an official apology for “the illegal overthrow” of Hawaiian sovereignty in 1893.2 This non–legally binding apology, a joint resolution passed by Congress and signed in a small ceremony by U.S. President Bill Clinton the very same day, acknowledged the overthrow of Hawaiian sovereignty, but it also carefully sidestepped Hawaiian sovereignty claims and did not provide any federal recognition for Native Hawaiians. In 1997 and 1998, the kings of Norway and Sweden each offered formal apologies to the Sámi people for years of widespread discrimination and injustices committed against them, including forced dislocation, resettlement, and assimilation programs.3 Also in 1998, Canada’s Indian affairs minister Jane Stewart issued a “Statement of Reconciliation,” Canada’s second official “apology” to Aboriginal peoples, which was widely criticized by Aboriginal people as insincere and inadequate. Then, in September 2000, at a ceremony marking the 175th anniversary of the United States Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), BIA director Kevin Gover gave an apology speech expressing “profound sorrow” for the “historical conduct of this agency.”4 In 2008 and 2009, a fresh wave of apologies to Indigenous people washed over the Anglosphere.5 On February 13, 2008, Australia’s newly elected Labour prime minister Kevin Rudd opened his first session of Parliament with his government’s first official act. With crowds gathered outside and his image broadcast live on television throughout the country, the prime minister rose and delivered an official apology on behalf of the government of Australia to [End Page 15] the Stolen Generations—the Aboriginal children that had been removed from their homes and families under a century-long forced assimilation program. Several months later, on June 11, 2008, the Conservative prime minister of Canada, Stephen Harper, stood before Parliament in the House of Commons and delivered a new “official statement of apology” that he said was offered to Aboriginal survivors of Canada’s Residential School system “on behalf of the government of Canada and all Canadians.”6 The next year, the United States Senate passed a resolution7 apologizing for past policies of the U.S. government toward Native peoples, which was highly criticized by Native Americans for its lack of ceremonial presentation since it was tacked on to a defense appropriations bill and quietly signed, without ceremony, by President Barack Obama on December 19, 2009.8 Meanwhile, highly detailed and ceremonial apologies have been made to Māori claimant groups by the New Zealand government, acknowledging all documented violations of the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi, ongoing since 1992, as standard practice in settling treaty claims. In 2010, the trend of state apologies to Indigenous peoples extended to Latin America. In January 2010, Chile’s president Michelle Bachelet apologized to the descendants of a group of Kawesqar people, from Chile’s southernmost region. The remains of five Kawesqar, who had been taken captive in 1881 and displayed as curiosities in Europe, were returned to the Kawesqar people for proper burial, accompanied by a formal apology offered by Chile’s president. While the apology was only directed at the descendants of the Kawesqar people, Bachelet did acknowledge that wider mistreatment of Indigenous peoples was the result of Chile’s past racist attitudes.9 In October of the same year, on the 518th anniversary of Columbus’s landing in the Americas, Mauricio Funes, president of El Salvador, offered an apology to the nation’s Indigenous peoples for “the persecution, for the extermination of which they were victims for so many years” under a “reigning model of oppression.”10 Given the notable recent...

Re-Membering Our Own Power: Occaneechi Activism, Feminism, and Political Action Theories

Re-Membering Our Own PowerOccaneechi Activism, Feminism, and Political Action Theories Marshall Jeffries (bio) The feminist decolonization project seeks the integration of spiritual, psychological, and physical health, or rather the recognition that these elements cannot exist outside of their interrelation. The question of how to hold all these elements together in our thinking and activism is a question of practice. Reconstructing tradition and memory is a vital element of indigenous survival, and there is nothing simple or one-dimensional about the process of reconstruction. Lisa Kahaleole Hall, Kanaka Maoli scholar Tucked away in the rural township of Pleasant Grove, North Carolina, a small American Indian tribe formally known as the Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation (obsn) fights to maintain a modern existence. The area now known as Pleasant Grove was settled by Occaneechi farmers and tenant farmers in the 1780s and would come to be the permanent home of the tribe, which had migrated in response to violence, encroachment, and force.1 By the early 1980s members of the Occaneechi community recognized the growing threat of full assimilation and cultural extinction and formed a tribal organization that would spend nearly twenty years fighting the state of North Carolina for tribal recognition. Since state recognition was achieved in 2002, members of this small, tight-knit community have been engaged in grassroots efforts to undo the many damages caused by white settler colonialism. While members of the community proudly proclaim activist identities, little of their postrecognition achievements would appear to result from legitimate political action as it is understood in academic discourses. Activism is normally defined by attempts to directly challenge the power of the state, leaving little room for the types of work that Occaneechi activists describe.2 This analysis will draw on the work [End Page 160] of feminist and Indigenous scholars to demonstrate the fundamentally political nature of this small tribal community’s courageous efforts to reclaim power over their own history and identity and to restore traditions that have been all but annihilated through the legislative efforts of the state and a toxic local racial environment. Because of a shared position in the local agricultural economy, along with residential proximity, Occaneechi residents of Pleasant Grove have forged deep alliances with African Americans and poor whites in the region. The realities of racial mixing and cultural assimilation are apparent, along with long-lasting effects of eugenic and antimiscegenation laws that directly challenged the legal identities of local American Indians.3 Despite these realities many families in the community have held on to traditions and an American Indian identity. Yet some Occaneechi continue to live in fear of publicly identifying as Indian because of the ongoing legacy of racism and white supremacy. The legal pursuit to gain recognition paid off in 2002 when a state Supreme Court ruling declared the obsn the eighth state-recognized tribe in North Carolina. The legislative fight for recognition took a great deal of effort and was accomplished with severely limited resources. In addition to petitioning the colonialist state government for a right to exist as a political entity, the Occaneechi faced hostility from other tribes in the state that pointed to the prevalent intermarriage between Occaneechi people and African Americans as evidence of inauthenticity. White supremacy and antiblack racism have long shaped Indian communities, forcing a strict division between Natives and African descendants.4 Further complicating the Occaneechi petition for tribal status were political definitions used by the state to measure the legitimacy of tribes. The standards for recognition at the state level are based on federal requirements used by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. One such requirement at both the state and the federal levels is that a “legitimate” tribe must have maintained a political presence since colonization.5 This is mostly impossible for many of the region’s tribes, which, like the Occaneechi, were forced to hide in order to evade persecution and removal.6 Ultimately, the success of the Occaneechi in the North Carolina Supreme Court gave new visibility to a community that had been more or less invisible to outsiders for more than a century. With state recognition accomplished, Occaneechi activists would shift their attention away from the...

Strategic Safety Management Plan for Wind River Indian Reservation

For years fatal and injury crashes have been documented as being higher for Native Americans than for any other groups across the United States. Studies have been performed to determine the trends and to identify ways to assist tribes in improving their traffic safety. Tribal transportation stakeholders recognize the many factors that contribute to this problem, including lack of resources, lack of crash data, and crash data accuracy. Tribal sovereignty presents a challenge in working across jurisdictional lines with state and local agencies. Strategic highway safety plans are required for states and also provide an opportunity for tribes to accomplish their goals in reducing fatal and serious-injury crashes. Communication and collaboration across jurisdictional lines are vital to the success of a strategic highway safety plan for a tribal government. The Wind River Indian Reservation (WRIR) was selected for one of three pilot tribal transportation safety management plans, a program instituted by FHWA to assist tribes in developing their own strategic plan. The WRIR has had great success in establishing cooperation among stakeholders and, with the support of committed tribal leadership, is working toward the goal of reducing fatal and serious-injury crashes. Key to the success of the safety management plan is collaboration among safety stakeholders, namely, the state departments of transportation, tribal leadership, local technical assistance program, Tribal Technical Assistance Program, Bureau of Indian Affairs, local and tribal law enforcement, Indian Health Services, and others.