Indian Lands Research Articles

NEBC Meeting News

October 1998. Dr. Lisa A. Standley, the Club's Vice President, spoke on the topic Beyond the Brooks Range—Flora and Fauna of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Among Dr. Standley's many activities, we learned, is participating in Sierra Club out ings. Twice in recent years, she has enjoyed ten-day backpacking trips to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in northeastern Alas ka. Both trips were in mid-June, and started with a flight into Fairbanks and transfer to a smaller plane that flew through passes in the Brooks Range to the Romanzof Mountains and the coastal plain of the Beaufort Sea, a couple of hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle. The area hiked was between two rivers, the Jago and the Aichilik, which flow northward from the mountains, crossing the coastal plain to the sea. The Refuge is contiguous with Indian lands and National Parks, which add to the wilderness landscape. It is home to the caribou's Porcupine Herd calving grounds and their migration routes to the mountains. Fortunately for us, Lisa was armed with a good camera and the ability to use it well. We were treated to excellent images of the region's plant life, interspersed with those of the often present and possibly curious caribou. Also, landscape shots illustrated some of the Ref uge's varied habitats and unadulterated beauty. The hiking area ranged in elevation from near sea-level to around 5000 ft. Most of the landscape is devoid of tall trees, although some of the narrower valleys supported white and black spruce in sheltered areas. Low willows were the more typical woody vegetation. The narrow valleys generally run east-west while larger river valleys run north-south. Precipitation is surprisingly low there, with only about 10 inches per year, Standley said. The few glaciers seen while crossing the Brooks Range were relatively small and not growing, evidently remnants of earlier times with higher rates of precipitation. The slide images gave a good sampling of the dominant plant families in the Refuge and the Arctic region, in general. The Cyperaceae, a family Standley knows especially well because of her research on the genus Carex, is one of them. Sedges were well represented and tipsy tussocks of cottongrass were frequently underfoot. More frustrating for Lisa than the tipsy tussocks, per haps, was that nearly all the sedges present in June were flowering rather than fruiting, making identification very challenging. An

There are No Implied Easements Over Trust Lands

Those who regularly practice law in Indian Country have no doubt encountered the myriad of issues surrounding rights-of-way over Indian lands. They can be pernicious. Among them are claims by non-Indian fee land owners that they have an implied easement over adjacent trust lands. Far from being arcane, this issue is one faced by tribes on a regular basis. This article shows why there are no implied easements over trust lands.

Writing Indian Nations: Native Intellectuals and the Politics of Historiography, 1827-1863 (review)

Reviewed by: Writing Indian Nations: Native Intellectuals and the Politics of Historiography, 1827-1863 Allen Mendenhall Writing Indian Nations: Native Intellectuals and the Politics of Historiography, 1827-1863. By Maureen Konkle. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. Pp. viii, 367.) A paradigm shift in Native American Studies, Maureen Konkle's Writing Indian Nationsfocuses on Native agency while attending to treaties and court opinions. Although provocative, its treatment of law, most notably the Supreme Court opinion Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, succumbs to generalizations that dispense with Native resistance. Konkle casts John Marshall as a rhetorician having his cake and eating it too, and as a mouthpiece for the United States (17, 18). Marshall is no doubt the former, but to accuse him of the latter is to assume too much. Konkle criticizes Marshall for making the "double-judgment" to concede Native autonomy while insisting on racial difference, and for resituating Cherokees in anachronistic moments in history (17-18). Her point is well-taken. She fails to cite Marshall, however, suggesting a lack of close reading and reliance on postcolonial talking-points; she also fails to show how Marshall "made use of sympathy … to further ensure the legitimacy of the United States' claim to authority over land"(18). "If the Courts were permitted to indulge their sympathies," Marshall says, "a case better calculated to excite them can surely be imagined" ( Cherokee [End Page 111] Nation, 15). The conditional phrase "if the Courts were permitted to indulge their sympathies" implies that courts are not permitted to do so. Rather than employ sympathy, Marshall eschews it. Cherokee Nationreached the court on a Cherokee motion for a subpoena and an injunction restraining Georgia from enforcing laws within Cherokee territory. Konkle never mentions the motion or the relief Cherokees sought. Her claim that "Cherokees hired William Wirt … to force the Court to come to a decision" implies non-Natives did all the work. However, a bill signed by John Ross, arguing that Cherokees are a distinct state, suggests otherwise. This bill maintains that Cherokees "were the occupants and owners of the territory in which they now reside, before the first approach of the white men of Europe" ( Cherokee Nation, 3). It chronicles U.S.-Cherokee relations, particularly as they pertain to land ownership, and contests Eurocentric rights of discovery whereby explorers claimed entitlement to Indian lands. It highlights the absurdity of these "rights" and almost ridicules explorers for "look[ing] upon the face of that coast without even landing on any part of it" (ibid., 4). The implication: explorers were too cowardly to chance the shoreline but haughty enough to declare themselves masters over it. Konkle misses an opportunity to show Cherokees appropriating European historical narratives, since she never mentions this bill. Not until the end of her discussion of Cherokee Nationdoes Konkle acknowledge the court's holding that it had no jurisdiction as "Cherokees were neither foreigners nor citizens" (22). She does not expound on this holding except to say, "Despite the importance of Cherokee Nationin succeeding years, the immediate effect of the ruling was only to delay a decision on the status of Native[s]" (21-22). Yet this holding is momentous. Marshall's claim of lack of jurisdiction is bound up with his claim that Indians constitute domestic dependent nations, which is, perhaps, bound up with colonizing ideology. Konkle never addresses how Marshall "punts" by interpreting Article III, Section II of the Constitution such that the term "domestic dependent nations" appears in dicta. Konkle should note legal rationales for the label "domestic dependent nations" and not rely on trite statements like this: "The chief justice's concept of 'domestic dependent nations' … attempted to reconcile the principles of U.S. government with the necessity of colonial control"(20). Konkle is right about what is happening on a grand scale, but a more scrupulous analysis would attend to what is happening on a micro scale—to what is happening, for instance, to the Cherokees' bill. [End Page 112] This bill asserts that "great progress has been made by the Cherokees in civilization" and that Cherokees "have established a constitution and form of government, the leading features of which they...

Translating Values: Mercantilism and the Many "Biographies" of Pocahontas

Seventeenth century mercantilist economics is based on "translating": foreign wealth changes meaning or value in becoming domestic property. The Pocahontas story manipulates biographical evidence to mercantilist ends: she is "translated" by love and marriage into a British subject, "domesticating" her Indian lands into British/American property. Retelling this story keeps American mercantilism alive, reaffirming the mythic belief that the US is the inevitable end-product of all translation.

OS TREMEMBÉ DE BURITI E SÍTIO SÃO JOSÉ E O ‘NOVA ATLÂNTIDA – CIDADE TURÍSTICA E RESIDENCIAL’: INCLUSÃO/EXCLUSÃO DE POVOS INDÍGENAS?

This article is about the situation faced by the Tremembe of Buriti and Sitio Sao Jose communities in the municipality of Itapipoca - Ceara, in relation to an international tourist mega-project imposed on these indigenous peoples. The conflicts brought onto these communities have caused tensions within families. Many are denying that they are Indians, as they capitulate to co-optation in exchange for wages offered by the entrepreneurs and, are also denying the existence of Indians in these comunities. Yet others are organising themselves as ‘Indians’ to claim land rights by the State in view of the threat posed by this mega-project. I take the opportunity to expand this discussion on indigenous peoples and tourism at the interface of Geography and Anthropology, and also to identify the advance of governmental and/or private tourist projects on Indian Lands in Brazil. Key-words: Indigenous peoples, tourism, Tremembe, governmental/private projects.

Manitou and God: North-American Indian religions and Christian culture

Manitou and God describes American Indian religions as they compare with principal features of Christian doctrine and practice. Thomas traces the development of sociopolitical and religious relations between American Indians and the European immigrants who, over the centuries, spread across the continent, captured Indian lands, and decimated Indian culture in general and religion in particular. He identifies the modern-day status of American Indians and their religions, including the progress Indians have made toward improving their political power, socioeconomic condition, and cultural/religious recovery and the difficulties they continue to face in their attempts to better their lot. Readers will gain a better sense of the give and take between these two cultures and the influence each has had on the other. In Algonquin Indian lore, Manitou is a supernatural power that permeates the world, a power that can assume the form of a deity referred to as The Great Manitou or The Great Spirit, creator of all things and giver of life. In that sense, Manitou can be considered the counterpart of the Christian God. From early times, the belief in Manitou extended from the Algonquins in Eastern Canada to other tribal nations-the Odawa, Ojibwa, Oglala, and even the Cheyenne in the Western plains. As European settlers made their way across the land, the confrontation between Christianity and Native American religions revealed itself in various ways. That confrontation continues to this day.

American Indian Water Rights

American Indian tribes own substantial quantities of water, but often encounter obstacles to winning legal and public recognition of their water rights. Antiquated nineteenth century water regimes completely cut reservations out of water allocations throughout the arid western states, leaving many Indian lands unproductive, even as public funds built massive federal irrigation projects to provide low-cost water for other farmers. Since the 1960s, protracted and acrimonious litigation has forced some changes in the status quo. Today, weary participants in the water wars are increasingly accepting the reality of tribal water rights and negotiating settlements of water claims. This paper presents case studies illustrating tribal efforts to secure water rights. It briefly explains United States water law and identifies the legal basis of the Indian reserved water right. The paper concludes with research guidance and an annotated bibliography of selected printed and electronic sources.

Dissertation List

Dissertation List Jonathan Erlen and Jay Toth January 2006 Ackley, Kristina Lyn. "We are Oneida yet: Discourse in the Oneida land claim." PhD diss., SUNY at Buffalo, 2005. Alessi, Joseph P. "Settling America: Indians, Euroamericans, and the establishment of the frontier towns, 1600-1830." PhD diss., St. Louis University, 2005. Atine, Christine D. "The experience of Navajo families living with the stigma of mental illness: A phenomenological study." PhD diss., University of Denver, 2005. Davis, James Joe, Jr. "The effects of coalition building on Public Law 93-531: The Navajo and Hopi Land Settlement Act of 1974." PhD diss., University of Arizona, 2005. De Leon, Diana Fisher. "A study on forging a new front and building a new vision for tribal environmental health policy on the Colorado River Indian Reservation." PhD diss., University of Arizona, 2005. Denial, Catherine Jane. "A proper light before the country: The shifting politics of gender and kinship among the Dakota, Ojibwe and non-Native communities of the Upper Midwest, 1825-1845." PhD diss., University of Iowa, 2005. Evans, Lara M. "One of these things is not like the other: Works by Native performance artists James Luna, Greg Hill, and Rebecca Bemore." PhD diss., University of New Mexico, 2005. Fitzgerald, Barbara J. "Gender equity and technology use in K-5 classrooms in a Native American school." PhD diss., Walden University, 2005. Funk, Caroline L. "Evolutionary and cognitive influences on hunter-gatherer settlement location in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta of Alaska." PhD diss., University of Wisconsin, 2005. [End Page 549] George, Maggie L. "The promise of indigenous education: A case study of Navajo bilingual-bicultural teachers." PhD diss., University of Kansas, 2005. Green, Chris. "The epidemiology of diabetes in Manitoba: An exploration through time and space." PhD diss., University of Manitoba, 2005. Kipp, Billie Jo. "Crystallized versus fluid intelligence in American Indian children referred to developmental clinics: An examination of multiple measures and indicators." PhD diss., University of Montana, 2005. Krahe, Diane L. "Last refuge: The uneasy embrace of Indian lands by the national wilderness movement, 1937-1965." PhD diss., Washington State University, 2005. Labreche, Yves. "Appropriation et conservation des resources alimentaires chez les Inuit de Kangiqsujuaq-Salliuit, Québec arctique: Perspective ethnoarchéologique." PhD diss., Université de Montréal, 2005. Lambe, Jeffrey P. "We plant a tree of peace: Mohawk Chief Jake Swamp's narratives, dynamics of relationships, and principles of peace." PhD diss., Trent University, 2005. Lang, Martin Joeseph. "Conspicuous absence, quiet presence: Representations of American Indians and gaming in Minnesota's mainstream and Indian-produced newspapers." PhD diss., University of Minnesota, 2005. Larcombe, Linda Anne. "Native North American resistance and susceptibility to infectious diseases: An anthropological approach." PhD diss., University of Manitoba, 2005. Manuelito-Kervliet, Cassandra. "Widening the circle: Mentoring and the learning process for American Indian women in tribal college administration." PhD diss., University of Oregon, 2005. McGlennen, Molly Suzanne. "It is evidence of faith to create: Spirituality and contemporary Native American women's poetics." PhD diss., University of California, 2005. Milligan, Marianne I. "Menominee prosodic structure." PhD diss., University of Wisconsin, 2005. Pauli, Wayne E. "The Native American digital divide: A preliminary investigation of an undergraduate population in South Dakota." PhD diss., Capella University, 2005. Powell, Francis J. "Assessing the identity of black Indians in Louisiana: A quantitative and qualitative analysis." PhD diss., Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, 2004. Ramos, Frances Lourdes. "The politics of ritual in Puebla de los Angeles, Mexico, 1695-1775." PhD diss., University of Texas, 2005. Robertson, Carmen Lee. "Reel artists: National Film Board of Canada portrayals of contemporary Aboriginal and Inuit artists and their art." PhD diss., University of Calgary, 2005. [End Page 550] Stock, Karen S. E. "The Skownan First Nation model for sustainable development and Aboriginal stewardship." PhD diss., University of Manitoba, 2005. Tronsen, Beverly Kay. "The rhetoric of disappearances: Racialized discourse and the Cherokee Removal." PhD diss., Washington State University, 2005. Vermilion, Mary R. "The Loyd site (11 MS 74): A prehistoric Moorehead phase nodal site." PhD diss., University of Illinois, 2005. Wilmerding, Mary Elizabeth Gesek. "The cultural sequence at the Nunik site, Chernabura Island, Alaska." PhD diss., Washington State University, 2005. February 2006 Andersen, Christian. "Courting colonialism? The juridical construction...

The “Middle Ground” Perspective on the Expropriation of Indian Lands

In How the Indians Lost Their Land, Law and Power on the Frontier (2005), Stuart Banner weaves together a perceptive interpretation of the historical record, with a novel economic analysis of conflicts, to create a sophisticated narrative of the process by which European colonists took control of the lands that now comprise the United States. Banner's view of expropriation falls somewhere between the parsimony of an economic model and the richness of a traditional historical account. It forms part of a growing trend to focus on finding positive facts about the taking of Indian lands, as opposed to making normative judgments.

Race Matters in the Colonial South

When Europeans began colonizing the southern stretch of North America in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, they had been thinking and writing about Indians and Africans for at least a hundred years. As Europeans hungered for Indian lands and African labor, their ethnocentric notions of cultural difference were transformed into ideas of immutable, inheritable, racial difference. From Jamestown to St. Augustine, Charleston to Santa Fe, North American colonizers drew upon ideas circulating throughout the early modern Atlantic world to identify and signify differences that were then used to organize and justify social hierarchies and determine access to economic, political, and social rights. While Europeans shared ideas about Africans and Indians, each of the various groups of Europeans had specific colonial goals, and the circumstances they encountered varied across the South. As a result, the racial orders that emerged by the end of the colonial period were quite distinct. And just as material realities influenced how officials and elites decided whether and, if so, how to incorporate Indian and African bodies into their social orders, North Americans of all ancestries similarly made pragmatic decisions about how race would shape their lives. In recent decades we have learned much about racial ideas and their codification in law but far less about how race really worked on the ground. Focusing on representations of Africans and to a lesser extent Indians, histories of racial thought analyze how Europeans' ideas about differences between themselves and those who would become colo nized others developed as Europeans found themselves increasingly involved in transatlantic ventures that depended upon the exploitation of Africans and Indians.1 This process of racial formation began long

Red Jacket and the Decolonization of Republican Virtue

History has not always been kind to Sagoyewatha, or, as he is more commonly known, Red Jacket. One of the most eloquent spokesmen for Native sovereignty in the early national period, Sagoyewatha was nonetheless accused by his peers of cowardice, alcoholism, and egotism. Although none of these character allegations damage his contributions to Indian nationalism (many of the charges originated in political rivalry), the more insidious argument about Red Jacket's life treats him like one of James Fenimore Cooper's vanishing race. An influential Seneca leader after 1790, Sagoyewatha is generally recognized as a principal engineer of the 1794 Treaty of Canandaigua, which guaranteed Indian sovereignty over four million acres of upstate New York. In other achievements, he defended arrested Senecas from state prosecution, made numerous trips to Washington, D.C., to lobby for Seneca rights, and he stridently opposed missionary presence on Indian lands after 1803. Echoing the social opinions of the late 1820s, however, Euroamerican and Indian historians alike have characterized him as the last of the Senecas, a tragic figure who represented the final days of his nation.' Fortunately, this picture is beginning to change. Christopher Densmore's recent biography has helped to clear away the cloud of demonization that obscured Red Jacket's life. Literary scholars and historians, such as Maureen Konkle and Matthew Dennis, have begun to frame Sagoyewatha's career as an influential contribution to discourse about Native sovereignty. Furthermore, given the existence of a large number of Red Jacket speeches with good provenance, his work provides an archive of Indigenous political thought and action that has yet to receive the study it deserves.2

Environmental Justice in Indian Country: Dumpsite Remediation on the Swinomish Indian Reservation

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) defines environmental justice as the "fair treatment for people of all races, cultures, and incomes, regarding the development of environmental laws, regulations, and policies." The last decade has focused considerable national attention on the environmental pollution inequity that persists among the nation's poorest communities. Despite these environmental justice efforts, poor communities continue to face adverse environmental conditions. For the more than 550 Native American communities, the struggle to attain environmental justice is more than a matter of enforcing national laws equitably; it is also a matter of a federal trust duty for the protection of Indian lands and natural resources, honoring a promise that Native American homelands would forever be sustainable. Equally important is the federal promise to assist tribes in managing their reservation environments under their reserved powers of self-government, an attribute that most distinguishes tribes from other communities. The PM Northwest, Inc. (PMNW) dumpsite is located within the boundaries of the Swinomish Indian Reservation in Washington State. Between approximately 1958 and 1970, PMNW contracted with local oil refineries to dispose of hazardous wastes from their operations at the reservation dumpsite. Almost two decades would pass before the Swinomish tribe was able to persuade EPA that a cleanup action under Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA) was warranted. This article reviews the enduring struggle to achieve Indian environmental justice in the Swinomish homeland, a process that was dependent upon the development of the tribe's political and environmental management capacity as well as EPA's eventual acknowledgement that Indian environmental justice is integrally linked to its federal trust responsibility.

Recording Race: General Stores and Race in the Late Nineteenth-Century Southwest

Recording Race:General Stores and Race in the Late Nineteenth-Century Southwest Linda English (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Excerpt from J. J. McAlester's 1875–1878 daybook in which the storeowner distinguishes both tribal citizenship and race. Ledger no. 153, J. J. McAlester Collection, M2046, p. 279, courtesy Western History Collection, Norman, Oklahoma. [End Page 192] "Turbulent" hardly seems an adequate term to describe the volatility of race relations in late-nineteenth-century America. From a Southern perspective, this was the period of Reconstruction, terror campaigns, lynch law, Redemption, and de facto and de jure segregation. From a Western perspective, this was the period of migrations west, Indian wars, and the Dawes Severalty Act. For Texas and Indian Territory, a region that straddled both the South and the West, this was indeed a turbulent time. Across the nation, the challenge of the late nineteenth century was to negotiate new ground rules for governing race relations in the postbellum environment. On the period of Reconstruction, Elliott West recently observed, "Never had our presumptions about race been so jangled and divergent. And never had we faced such fundamental decisions about the arrangement of our racial parts." 1 Despite federal policies that addressed basic equity issues and assimilation, long-standing attitudes on race prevailed, not just in the South, but in all parts of the nation. Testifying before Congress on the state of race relations in the immediate postwar period, Carl Schurz asserted that "the relations between the white and black races, even if improved by the gradual wearing off of the present animosities, are likely to remain long under the troubling influence of prejudice." 2 In the 1870s and 1880s, America was still recovering from the Civil War and still grappling with that conflict's social and economic ramifications, in particular the numerous calamities (namely poverty, dislocation, and violence) afflicting the roughly 4 million former slaves living in the South. [End Page 193] All the while, the nation looked covetously at former, and soon-to-be-former, Indian lands in the West for possible expansion and development. The belief in and pursuit of "progress," so endemic to the Gilded Age, seemed to necessitate the destruction of Indian tribal power and the appropriation of Indian property. 3 In Western outposts, racial tensions existed not only between whites and African Americans, but also between Mexican Americans and Native Americans. The lofty goal of Reconstruction was to overcome the racial and regional divisions of the nation. Of course, the challenge of the period was to meet these idealistic goals at a time when racial boundaries were sharpened, strained, and deeply contentious. Critical to the Reconstruction impetus was the national policy toward bridging the divides in America through economic and social "consolidation." Regardless of region of origin or skin color, federal authorities attempted to integrate all Americans into the national economy—as both consumers and producers. It should be noted that the motivations behind this consolidation imperative were political and economic; by no means was the government, either sincerely or rhetorically, attempting to consolidate the races. To be sure, few in America would have supported such a policy. Attempts to integrate the hegemonic social or cultural mores of the white middle class filtered through such institutions as the Freedmen's schools for ex-slaves and agency and boarding schools for Indians. Elliott West contends that economic integration for freedmen and Indians came through—at least ideally—forty acres and a mule, sharecropping, and allotment. 4 In keeping with this intellectual framework, general stores also enabled such economic integration. In effect, store merchants provided a forum for bringing outsider groups, specifically Native Americans, Mexican Americans, and African Americans, into the national economic agenda. This study examines stores situated in the cotton-rich areas of east Texas—Jacksonville and Melrose (a small community located east of Nacogdoches)—as well as stores located in the more economically diverse regions of south-central Texas, specifically Austin and Refugio. In Indian Territory, the stores under analysis were both located in what is now eastern Oklahoma—Okmulgee, the former capital of the Creek Nation, and McAlester, a community that began as an early trading...

Paper Talk: A History of Libraries, Print Culture, and Aborginal Peoples in Canada before 1960 (review)

Reviewed by: Paper Talk: A History of Libraries, Print Culture, and Aborginal Peoples in Canada before 1960 Carole Gerson Brendan Frederick R. Edwards. Paper Talk: A History of Libraries, Print Culture, and Aborginal Peoples in Canada before 1960. Lanhan, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 2005. 225 pp. The story of First Nations' relationship with European modalities of print and language is complex and dispersed. Bibliography offers one essential cornerstone: Joyce Banks's Books in Native Languages in the Rare Book Collections of the National Library of Canada grounds us in the onslaught of print by which Europeans sought to convert and contain Aboriginal Canadians, while James Danky and Maureen Hady's Native American Periodicals and Newspapers, 1828–1982 continues the story with many examples of Indigenous communities creating their own print resources. Paper Talk, approaching the topic through First Nations' attitudes toward and access to reading, provides a different entrance. Its "plot" is the unfolding of a struggle over the powerful medium of print, as Aboriginal communities sought its benefits without utterly yielding to the agendas of church and state. [End Page 208] The result of thorough research in government archives, supported with copious notes and references, Paper Talk is a valuable compact resource on the history of Aboriginal literacy in Canada. It begins with an introduction to prevailing indigenous pre-contact sign systems such as wampum belts, petroglyphs and pictographs, winter counts, and pictorial birchbark scrolls. Presenting Canada's First Peoples as inclined to forms of literacy before the arrival of Europeans, Edwards deals carefully with the delicate issue of the origins of the scripts known as M'ikmaq hieroglyphics (first described in the seventeenth-century by Récollet missionary Father Christian LeClercq) and Ojibwe and Cree syllabics, whose attribution to the Methodist missionary, Reverend James Evans, is under some dispute. With both languages, Edwards notes, Evans enjoyed considerable assistance from educated Native advisors. Once established in 1840, the Cree system spread quickly, due to the fact that it "drew on shorthand, as well as symbols already in use among the Cree" (51). For missionaries, Native literacy was inseparable from conversion; Edwards informs us that in the records of the Department of Indian Affairs, "the earliest report of a library in any Aboriginal community" is a Sabbath school library conducted in 1864 by the Wesleyan Methodist Society for the Saugeen Chippewas at French Bay on the Bruce peninsula (49). For the Department of Indian Affairs, Native literacy was one component of a larger program of control and improvement, in which only salutary texts were recommended. Hence recreational reading received little support, and the libraries of the Indian day schools contained few attractive titles. Some Native elders regarded Western literacy with suspicion, linking reading with idleness and loss of traditional skills. However, Edwards is more interested in tracing the stories of Native individuals and groups who sought to encourage reading and establish libraries but were thwarted by a bureaucratic and short-sighted system that, under the administration of Duncan Campbell Scott, lacked sympathy and imagination. Throughout the volume, figures emerge who are dedicated, fascinating, and often heroic. Especially valiant is Charles A. Cooke, a Mohawk clerk and translator who spent more than thirty years (from 1893 to 1926) working for the Department of Indian Affairs. His efforts render Edwards's account of the first quarter of the twentieth century brighter than the following period, although his proposal for an inclusive circulating collection of Native records, to be known as the "Indian National Library," was limited by Scott to a small disorganized body of material restricted to government employees. Cooke also produced one of the first newspapers in the Mohawk language (Onkweonwe, 1900), compiled important linguistic [End Page 209] data on Iroquois personal names, and in his last years assisted Marius Barbeau and others at the National Museum of Canada. Another lost cause documented by Edwards is the 1901 attempt of Joshua Adams, the Dominion Government Indian Lands Agent at Sarnia, to enable the members of the Aamjiwnaang community to create a free circulating library on their Reserve. However, the Department of Indian Affairs refused to envision anything beyond the books in the day school that they already administered. It was up to...

A Unifying Vision: Shingwaukonse’s Plan for the Future of the Great Lakes Ojibwa

The speeches of Shingwaukonse between 1846 and 1850 furnish some of the most explicit testimonials to the principle of Native right to be expressed in the United Canadas during the mid-nineteenth century. Shingwaukonse's ideas and actions set precedents which exerted a profound influence on the future course of Indian policy in Canada. By 1850, the chief had defined three major goals for Ojibwa people: first, to establish linkages with government agencies just beginning to exercise jurisdiction in the Upper Great Lakes area; second, to preserve an environment in which Native cultural values and organisational structures could survive; and finally, to devise new strategies conducive to the formation of band governments capable of assuming a degree of proprietorship over resources on Indian lands. Recently a debate has arisen in Canadian historiography over what constitutes “Native agency“, as distinct from “Native viclimhood”. This paper not only rejects the idea that “victimhood“ describes the fate of Shingwaukonse's leadership career, but also stresses the need for the concept of “Native agency” to be expanded beyond the semantic parameters set by the agent/victim dichotomy, so that it may prove a better analytical tool to examine historic evidence of this chief's ideas and actions obtained from both oral and documentary sources.

Selling Beaver Skins in North America and Europe, 1720-1760: The Uses of Fur-Trade Imperialism

Historians have tended to assume that, during the last decades of French rule in Canada, competition in the fur trade and the imperial contest in North America ran along the same lines. The posts of the rival empire on Hudson Bay or south of Lake Ontario are thought to have posed the main threat to the fortunes of the Montreal-based traders established in the heart of Indian lands. This article assesses the evidence for price competition between such distant antagonists in the trade in beaver. Owing to the Compagnie des Indes' pricing policies, this commodity usually fetched a lower price in the French trading system than it did in the one centred on London. There is little sign of a response in the distribution of beaver receipts to changes in the intercolonial price differential. This suggests that Canadian merchants exaggerated the force of foreign competition in order to lend weight to their appeals to the state for an increase in the price of beaver. The paper concludes that the obsession with the external foe, which the official sources have transmitted to historians, has obscured the internal dynamic of the Canadian fur trade during these years.

Wunnaumw�yean: Roger Williams, English Credibility, and the Colonial Land Market

Wunnaumwáyean:Roger Williams, English Credibility, and the Colonial Land Market Jeffrey Glover (bio) In early 1638, John Winthrop wrote to Roger Williams requesting information concerning a series of recent land sales by Narragansett sachems to Antinomian settlers in Narragansett Bay. Writing back, Williams confirmed sales on two islands, reporting that a party led by William Coddington had claimed ownership of a tract of land on the north shore of the Isle of Aquidneck. However, even as Williams charted in detail the extension of an English presence into the bay, he suggested limits to the use of English documentary systems for describing exchanges that established ownership of such large amounts of Indian land. "[B]e pleased to understand your great mistake, "Williams replied. "Neither of [the islands] were sold properly, for a thousand fathom would not have bought either, by strangers. The truth is, not a penny was demanded [by the sachems] for either, and what was paid was only gratuity, though I chose, for better assurance and form, to call it sale" (Correspondence 165). The problem of documenting land sales was much on the mind of Boston magistrates as the population of the Massachusetts Bay Colony swelled from successive waves of emigration in the late 1630s. As the Antinomian and other theological controversies spread, groups of religious dissenters and other settlers fanned out across the Narragansett Bay region asserting land claims and entering into markets in cattle, pelts, and wampum. In describing the transfer on the islands as a gratuity, Williams hit on the anxiety, often noted in Winthrop's journal, that dissenters would purchase land through gifts of tribute to Narragansett leaders. To Winthrop, English deeds emphasizing Native legal systems were evidence that Williams or other settlers might have "turned Indian" (Williams, Correspondence, 163). The participation of nonconformists in Native ceremonies seemed yet another manifestation of dissent, only one that now threatened to cross racial as well as religious boundaries. [End Page 429] The letters exchanged by Williams and Winthrop offer a revealing window into how land purchases from Native groups shaped the politics of religious dissent in early New England. From the Massachusetts Bay Colony's inceptions in the 1620s, Boston leaders saw the documentation of land sales as crucial for maintaining the appearance of social order in the colony. To attract and reassure metropolitan investors, they sought to distinguish their venture from the well-publicized failure in Virginia by insisting that all purchases of Native lands be authorized by the colony's royal charter and documented according to English standards.1 The movement of Antinomian settlers to the Narragansett Bay strained these controls by enabling many dissenters to circumvent the Boston land system and establish claims through direct purchase from sachems, often in ceremonies that combined elements of Native and English legal systems. Based as they often were on friendship with Native leaders, a form of cultural capital most available to wandering Separatists like Williams, these ceremonies offered an expedient means for religious dissenters to found settlement communities beyond the political reach of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. In this essay, I turn to the most publicly active English dissenter, Roger Williams, in order to show how conflicts over recording land exchanges with Natives figured in the establishment and defense of Providence Plantations and Rhode Island. In doing so, I seek to situate these legal conflicts in the broader context of what the scholar Phillip H. Round has described as the "transatlantic civil discourse" through which colonists performed their credibility for financers and colonial administrators (xi). Legal histories of early New England have tended to describe the replacement of indigenous oral systems of land transference by written deeds, a process that excluded Native people from land markets.2 However, in looking at the range of documents Williams generated in the struggle to claim legality for the land purchases that formed the basis of Providence Plantations, I hope to reveal the extent to which Puritan settlers saw Native legal systems as accounting media capable of transmitting powerful information about English credibility throughout the coastal region and even across the Atlantic. To the extent to which settlements on Indian lands threatened to breathe political life into controversial opinion, the...

« L’Empire de la liberté» selon Thomas Jefferson : un oxymore emblématique de la pensée nationale américaine à l’époque de l’expédition de Lewis et Clark (1804-1806)

The transcontinental expedition of Lewis and Clark, as the first step of America’swestward expansion, was set within the framework of Jefferson’s project for an •empire of liberty”, or •for” liberty. The phrase itself gives insights into the tensions of Jefferson’sdiscourse, tensions that are detected in the policy of the Jefferson administration, regarding Indian lands and slavery. The influence of this founding paradox is still to be felt today.

Indian lands, “Squatterism,” and slavery: Economic interests and the passage of the indian removal act of 1830

In May 1830, the U.S. House of Representatives narrowly passed the Indian Removal Act that authorized the president of the United States to exchange land west of the Mississippi River for Indian land in the east and appropriated $500,000 to assist tribes in the move west. Three days later the House also passed the Preemption Act of 1830, giving squatters a right of first refusal to purchase land they had occupied prior to its being opened for sale. In a recent paper, Kanazawa (1996) finds that the willingness of squatters to illegally occupy federal lands greatly raised the cost of enforcing property rights and this was a significant factor behind the passage of the first general Preemption Act in 1830. We build on his work to test the hypothesis that Congressmen who favored squatters’ rights would also favor moving Indian tribes out of the old southwest. A logit analysis of the vote on the Removal Act of 1830 shows three statistically significant variables. Democrats, representatives from slaveholding districts, and those who voted for preemption were more likely to vote for removal. Congressmen from slave states were very likely to favor both Acts, which stands in contrast to southern opposition to a homestead act in the late 1850s.

Recent Dissertations

Abeita, Lynn Ann. "American Indian Compliance with Health Screening Behaviors." PhD diss., University of Virginia, 2004. Aguilera, Dorothy E. "Who Defines Success: An Analysis of Competing Models of Education for American Indian and Alaskan Native Students." PhD diss., University of Colorado, 2003. Ballenger, Thomas Lee. "The Development of Law and Legal Institutions among the Cherokees." PhD diss., University of Oklahoma, 1939. Bauer-Sanders, Katherine. "Students' Perceptions of Bullying Phenomenon in a Native American Elementary School." EdD diss., University of South Dakota, 2003. Begaye, Timothy. "Adaptive Leadership: Challenges of Navajo Leaders in a Contemporary Society." EdD diss., Harvard University, 2003. Berrington, Susan L. "Successful Native American Students: Responses to Challenges and Barriers in College." EdD diss., University of San Francisco, 2003. Bodinger de Uriarte, John Joseph. "The Casino and the Museum: Imagining the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation in Representational Space." PhD diss., University of Texas, 2003. Boyer, Stephen Paul. "Capturing Education: The Role of Culture at a Tribally Controlled Community College." PhD diss., Pennsylvania State University, 2003. Brandon, Stephen. "Sacred Fire and Sovereign Rhetorics: Cherokee Literacy and Literature in the Cherokee and American Nations, 1760–1841." PhD diss., University of North Carolina, 2003. Brooks, Lisa Tanya. "The Common Pot: Indigenous Writing and the Reconstruction of Native Space in the Northeast." PhD diss., Cornell University, 2004. [End Page 348] Brown, Loren Nunn. "The Work of the Dawes Commission among the Choctaw and Chickasaw Indians." PhD diss., University of Oklahoma, 1937. Browne, Annette Jo. "First Nations Women and Health Care Services: The Sociopolitical Context of Encounters with Nurses." PhD diss., University of British Columbia, 2003. Burdette, Patricia Wells. "The Power of the Spirit: American Indian Worldview and Successful Community Development among the Oglala Lakota." PhD diss., Union Institute, 2003. Cain, Mary Celia. "Songbirds: Representation, Meaning, and Indigenous Public Culture in Native American Women's Popular Musics." PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2003. Calder, Kim J. "Differentially Scaffolded Instruction for Aboriginal and Non-Aboriginal Students during Writing in the Elementary Years." PhD diss., University of British Columbia, 2003. Carlson, Keith Thor. "The Power of Place, the Problem of Time: A Study of an Aboriginal Collective Identity." PhD diss., University of British Columbia, 2003. Christal, Mark Allen. "Virtual Museum Projects for Culturally Responsive Teaching in American Indian Education." PhD diss., University of Texas, 2003. Connell, William F. "Emerging Ladino Spaces in the Parcialidades of Mexico City: Race, Identity and Indigenous Self-government, 1564–1700." PhD diss., Tulane University, 2003. Covington, James Warren. "Relations between the Ute Indians and the United States Government, 1848–1900." PhD diss., University of Oklahoma, 1949. Dodge, William A. "The Meaning of Place at Blackrock: Change and Identity on the Zuni Indian Reservation." PhD diss., University of New Mexico, 2003. Fuchs, Dana Lee. "Native American Healing and Counseling: Cantadora." PhD diss., University of Connecticut, 2003. Gates St-Pierre, Christian. "Variabilite, stase et regionalisation stylistiques: La ceramique du site Hector-Trudel et Du Nord-Est americain au Sylivicole moyen tardif (500 a 1000 ap. J.-C.)." PhD diss., University of Montreal, 2003. Hernandez, Andrew S., III. "The Indian Slave Trade in New Mexico: Escalating Conflicts and the Limits of State Power." PhD diss., University of New Mexico, 2003. Hirshman, Amy Jo. "A Case Study in the Relationship between Social Complexity [End Page 349] and the Organization of Ceramic Production from the Lake Patzcuaro Basin, Michoacan, Mexico." PhD diss., Michigan State University, 2003. Horton, Tonia Wood. "Indian Lands, American Landscapes: Toward a Genealogy of Place in National Parks." PhD diss., Arizona State University, 2003. Johnson, M. Rene. "A Perpetual Peace: American Indian Treaties and the Environment." PhD diss., Michigan Technological University, 2003. King, Valerie Claire. "The Organization of Production of Chuska Gray Ware Ceramics for Distribution and Consumption in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico." PhD diss., University of New Mexico, 2003. Lawson, Michael J. "Baskets, Pots, and Prayer Plumes: The Southwest Ethnographic Collections of the Smithsonian Institution." PhD diss., Arizona State University, 2003. Leckie, William H. "The Military Conquest of the Southern Plains Indians." PhD diss., University of Oklahoma, 1954...