Indians In Unexpected Places Research Articles

Indian Cities: Histories of Indigenous Urbanization ed. by Kent Blansett, Cathleen D. Cahill, and Andrew Needham

Reviewed by: Indian Cities: Histories of Indigenous Urbanization ed. by Kent Blansett, Cathleen D. Cahill, and Andrew Needham Mikaëla M. Adams Indian Cities: Histories of Indigenous Urbanization. Edited by Kent Blansett, Cathleen D. Cahill, and Andrew Needham. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2022. Pp. x, 332. Paper, $32.95, ISBN 978-0-8061-7663-5.) Inspired by the seminal work of Philip Deloria in Indians in Unexpected Places (Lawrence, Kans., 2004) and Coll Thrush in Native Seattle: Histories from the Crossing-Over Place (Seattle, 2007), scholars of Native North America have increasingly pushed back against narratives that depict Indigenous people as rural, primitive, and premodern. Recent monographs by Andrew Needham, Colin Calloway, Daniel H. Usner, Laura M. Furlan, Kent Blansett, Douglas K. Miller, Nicolas G. Rosenthal, and Renya K. Ramirez—among others—have revealed the vibrant roles Indians have played in urban America as well as the creative ways that they have navigated and built lives in these metropolitan spaces. Far from being peripheral to the story of urbanization, Indigenous people, their lands, their resources, and their nations in fact have played a central role. Indian Cities: Histories of Indigenous Urbanization brings together cutting-edge scholarship on urban Native America and provides an important theoretical framework for making sense of this history in the context of American settler colonialism. Indian Cities is divided into four parts. Part 1 illuminates the savvy politicking of Indigenous people in colonial urban centers. As Nathaniel Holly reveals, ordinary Cherokees had “intimate knowledge” of the power structures of eighteenth-century Charlestown, South Carolina, which they used to access and define the terms of colonial trade (p. 27). Daniel H. Usner shows how the diplomatic rituals of Indigenous people in early New Orleans contributed to the “civic culture” of this port city, while also ensuring its survival through facilitating the exchange of goods and services (p. 52). [End Page 192] Part 2 turns to the nineteenth century and focuses on the ways that settler actions and mythmaking endeavored both to erase and to justify the erasure of Indigenous people from the nation’s burgeoning cities. Essays by Ari Kelman, Mishuana R. Goeman, C. Joseph Genetin-Pilawa, and Maurice Crandall explore how settlers performed Indigenous dispossession and disappearance in urban locales as far-flung as St. Paul, Minnesota, Niagara Falls, New York, Washington, D.C., and the mining boomtowns of central Arizona. As the authors point out, Indigenous people did not passively accept their presumed fate but instead fought for acknowledgment of their ongoing presence. Part 3 includes tales from the best-known period of Indian urbanization—the post–World War II era of termination, relocation, and Red Power. Elaine Marie Nelson and Sasha Maria Suarez extend the chronology of this era by showcasing how Native people made and remade Rapid City, South Dakota, and Minneapolis, Minnesota, from the early twentieth century onward. They show how Native communities devised strategies to survive economically, gather inconspicuously, and organize politically, as Suarez puts it, “(re)indigenizing the space of the city” (p. 199). Meanwhile, Douglas K. Miller and David Hugill focus on postwar Indigenous efforts to create community institutions in Dallas, Texas, and Winnipeg, Manitoba, that linked Native residents both to other “Indians living in urban places” and to their reservation communities (p. 220). These narratives of community organizing honor the ingenuity and resourcefulness of Indigenous people as they reclaimed urbanized home-lands or forged new connections that allowed them to survive and thrive in distant metropolises. Part 4 brings the volume up to the present with insightful essays on the anti–Dakota Access Pipeline movement and the COVID-19 crisis. As Dana E. Powell and Jennifer Denetdale reveal, the consequences of American settler colonialism for urban development are far from over. Although each essay makes a valuable contribution, the standout works are by Genetin-Pilawa and Powell. Genetin-Pilawa’s analysis of the ways that various Indigenous delegates proclaimed their presence in the U.S. capital deftly challenges readers to “take the time to look” for “hidden Indian histories” that may not be so hidden after all (p. 133). Through her detailed description of the grassroots construction of the Oceti Sakowin camp in South Dakota, Powell reimagines...

Through a Native Lens: American Indian Photography by Nicole Dawn Strathman

Reviewed by: Through a Native Lens: American Indian Photography by Nicole Dawn Strathman Cindy Ott (bio) Through a Native Lens: American Indian Photography By Nicole Dawn Strathman. Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 2020. Pp. 240. Through a Native Lens: American Indian Photography By Nicole Dawn Strathman. Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 2020. Pp. 240. In any good book about photographs, the images themselves should tell a valuable story, not just the text. Photographs alone can change our thinking and make us question our assumptions. In Through a Native Lens, Nicole Dawn Strathman has gathered photographs by and about American Indians that do just that. Photography has been central to the image-making of American Indians for as long as the technology has existed. Yet up until recent years, historians thought that American Indians had little to nothing to say about the photographic process or the images. An important turn in that thinking was Shamoon Zamir's The Gift of the Face: Portraiture and Time in Edward S. Curtis's The North American Indian (2014). He argues that American Indians who posed for Curtis participated in, and contributed to, the creation of those famous sepia-toned, soft-focus images of bygone days. Yet no matter the level of revisionist history, those powerful images of precolonial ways of life stick in our heads. Strathman sees herself following in Zamir's footsteps. And while she critiques classic portraiture from the early twentieth century, her most important contribution is to dig up and present images that defy categorization, before she even applies her deft interpretation. Images include young American Indian boarding school students goofing around in front of the handheld Kodiak Brownie of their Kiowa classmate Parker McKenzie. We see them in relaxed, playful interactions rather than posing before the official school photographer's large-format mounted camera in military precision, or at work in the classroom. The Native subjects of indigenous Alaskan Benjamin Haldane wore the latest fashions and directed their stare at the camera. They created self-portraits of wealth and sophistication, Strathman writes, rather than of exotic cultures from a distant time and place. Strathman's main and essential point is that American Indians, from the photographers to those who posed for them, controlled the technology and used it to their own ends. With Curtis's images still dancing in our heads, this is a useful reminder. Yet the value of Through a Native Lens doesn't stop there. The author also describes how Tribal communities have relied on these new technologies and images to document their history and perpetuate their values. In this way, the photographs become modern-day petroglyphs, ancient images incised or drawn on boulders, which Native people rely on as pneumonic devices to recall stories of who they are as a people. These photographs, and the stories about them, also make clear [End Page 898] that American Indians, even those from the same community, are never one and the same. Strathman presents images of American Indians in a variety of clothing, at work and play, with multiple motivations to use photography. She describes the controversies that the Tlingit photographer and anthropologist Louis Shotridge caused in communities when he took photographs against their will. This example highlights the diversity of experiences and opinions among Native people. Strathman's work is organized thematically, and it shifts from famous to everyday American Indians who sat for photographers, to professional and amateur American Indian photographers. The book synthesizes recent scholarship. The author cites Philip Deloria's Indians in Unexpected Places (University Press of Kansas, 2004), for example, to explain why modern American Indian women would pose as stereotypical princesses. Strathman owes a great debt to Johanna Cohan Scherer, longtime photo archivist at the Smithsonian Institution's Department of Anthropology. Scherer has spent decades studying and cataloging images of American Indians, and her comments, laced throughout the book, lend weight. Strathman offers many close readings of images based on extensive historical research. Yet sometimes she veers too far into speculation. She describes the motivations of the sitters with a certainty that lacks the documentation she needs to back up her assertions. In general, she moves on quickly from one image or person...

Expect to See Indians: Native American and Indigenous Peoples in Modern America

Expect to See Indians: Native American and Indigenous Peoples in Modern America Nicolas G. Rosenthal (bio) Kiara M. Vigil, Indigenous Intellectuals: Sovereignty, Citizenship, and the American Imagination, 1880–1930. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. xiv + 363 pp. Figures, appendices, notes, bibliography, and index. $33.99. Douglas K. Miller, Indians on the Move: Native American Mobility and Urbanization in the Twentieth Century. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. xiii + 257 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $29.95. Kent Blansett, A Journey to Freedom: Richard Oakes, Alcatraz, and the Red Power Movement. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018. xiii + 392 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $40.00. United States culture and society have a long-running Indian problem, often presenting American Indians as a people of a distant past despite more than five hundred years of interactions between colonizers and Indigenous peoples that continue into the present. What can explain how Native peoples are at once denigrated and romanticized, their cultures appropriated and caricatured with so little regard or recognition as modern, contemporary peoples or for the imagining of Indigenous futures? Some answers to these questions can be found in Americans, an ongoing exhibition at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) in Washington D.C. Americans vividly illustrates how Native American names, stories, and images have pervaded popular historical narratives and the experiences of everyday life in the United States, but almost always in ways that serve the social, cultural, and economic purposes of non-Indians. Scholarship in American Indian history shoulders considerable responsibility for both the development and potential revision of these popular narratives. NMAI Director Kevin Gover (Pawnee) has argued that a commitment to an honest discussion about the past is an essential precursor for recognizing American Indians as contemporary actors who “prick the conscience,” present modern issues, and make political demands.1 But only in recent decades has [End Page 74] there been a concerted effort by historians to understand the experiences of American Indians in the twentieth century. Much of this work follows from Philip J. Deloria’s seminal Indians in Unexpected Places (2004). It was not the first book to show Native people doing things like acting in Hollywood films, playing college football, and driving Model-T Fords, but it did provide an intellectual jolt and the language for exploring American Indian participation in the trends of modern American life as regular, dynamic, and meaningful, contrary to popular stereotypes. A growing sub-field in American Indian history is now working to historicize the claims made by anthropologist James Clifford in Returns: Becoming Indigenous in the Twenty-First Century (2013): Indigenous peoples have emerged from generations of survival, struggle, and renewal, still negotiating settler-colonialism, but adapted to modernity, and increasingly visible as they move through local, regional, and global networks. The three volumes under review here, each in an important series from an academic press, carry this trend forward in crucial ways by delving into early-twentieth-century performance and advocacy, mobility and urbanization, and late-twentieth-century political movements and activism. Building on the work of scholars who were among the first to address such topics, these authors often take new paths and make crucial interventions. Along with other recently published books and articles, they are helping to expand the understanding of American Indians as modern peoples who negotiated, participated in, and shaped the major trends of twentieth-century United States history, but always in ways that were rooted in their histories and identities as individuals and members of tribal and intertribal communities. Kiara M. Vigil’s Indigenous Intellectuals: Sovereignty, Citizenship, and the American Imagination, 1880–1930 joins a relatively short list of titles published by Cambridge University Press in its long-running Studies in North American Indian History series, some of which have fundamentally reshaped the field of Native American history. Notably, Indigenous Intellectuals is unique in relying on literary sources contextualized within a broader framework of cultural history, which reflects Vigil’s positioning as an American Studies scholar emphasizing literary analysis combined with historical context and narrative. Focusing on a generation of American Indian activists that emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Indigenous...

Music and Modernity among First Peoples of North America ed. by Victoria Lindsay Levine and Dylan Robinson

Reviewed by: Music and Modernity among First Peoples of North America ed. by Victoria Lindsay Levine and Dylan Robinson Ann Morrison Spinney Music and Modernity among First Peoples of North America. Edited by Victoria Lindsay Levine and Dylan Robinson. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2019. [xviii, 330 p. ISBN 9780819578624 (hardback), $85; ISBN 9780819578631 (paperback), $26.95; 9780819578648 (e-book), $21.99.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, index. This collection deserves a wide readership, because it exemplifies the conversations needed among the various stakeholders in traditional music to decolonize scholarship. The authors are performers, scholars, performer– scholars, and members and descendants of Native and settler communities in North America. Identities of contributors are not limited to any of these, though they are clearly stated; nor are their ideas corralled. By not imposing culture areas, census categories, musical genres, or theoretical schools in its organization, this volume demonstrates its main point: that Native North American traditions are not categorical. The music and musicking discussed are astonishing in their variety and a delight to listen to. A styles inventory would include hip-hop, powwow, pop, television soundtracks, performance art, and classical. The articles do not all supply links, but most of the music and video examples can be found easily online. Several examples in the "art music" category are significant innovations, worthy of inclusion in any contemporary-music survey course, not confined to Native American studies. By grouping many contrasting examples together here under that rubric, however, a strong point is made about the vitality of music making among first peoples of North America. The geographical coverage of the chapters is also broadly inclusive, ranging from Mi'kmaq in the Canadian Atlantic Provinces to the western United States–Mexico border; crossing the plains, encompassing both sides of the US–Canada border; and stretching from Inuit communities in Alaska east to Greenland. There are few articles limited to one community, location, or tradition. The collection is framed by two invitations, each from a Native musicologist. Heidi Aklaseaq Senungetuk opens the volume with an invitation to dance, "to consider the ideas presented here" (p. xiii), drawing from her experience of music performance in both classical and traditional styles. Trevor Reed closes with an invitation to listen, building on his work repatriating song recordings to emphasize that audience [End Page 282] experiences are central to understanding "whether the ideologies or desires the artists convey are actually being realized" (p. 263). Editor Victoria Lindsay Levine explains that rather than dividing the book into sections, they chose to let concerns and theoretical concepts weave among the articles. They will likely be read as individual pieces, but the collection has a kind of arc as it is laid out, with the most perspicacious theoretical arguments appearing in the latter chapters. (For this review, those on similar musical styles are considered together.) Ontology is a common focus throughout, as is reference to Philip Joseph Deloria's Indians in Unexpected Places (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004). Despite the sophistication of their arguments, these articles are not jargon-filled jawbreakers, but would be appropriate readings for upper-level undergraduates. In the first case study, David Samuels gently teases apart the contradictions apparent in the famous photographs of Frances Densmore and Mountain Chief, revealing these to be assumptions, not visual facts. Introductory ethnomusicology classes will benefit from his reconsideration. Gordon Smith's contextual analysis of Mi'kmaw funerals at Eskasoni focuses on the community's use of video recordings to "preserve traditions while creating new ones" (p. 33). The video examples he provides demonstrate the relationships between past, present, and future that confound Western teleological concepts. While he does not mention autoethnography, it is a useful reference for this chapter. Christina Leza examines activism on the US–Mexico border through hiphop. Leza sensitively explores the cooperation between indigenous and Chicano communities that is needed to confront abuses of authority along the border. Over different generations, both groups have made claims to this land. The crew Shining Soul on whom she focuses seems to have disbanded, but their tracks can still be found online, and her analysis of the codemixing and switching in their songs that speaks to both groups is not limited...

Unexpectedness

The concepts of expectation, anomaly, and unexpectedness that Philip J. Deloria developed in Indians in Unexpected Places (2004) have shaped a wide range of interdisciplinary research projects. In the process, those terms have changed the ways it is possible to think about American Indian representation, cosmopolitanism, and agency. This article revisits my own work in this area and provides a short survey of related scholarship in order to reassess the concept of unexpectedness in the present moment and to consider the ways my deployment of it might change in order to better meet the needs of my students. To begin a process of engaging intergenerational perspectives on this subject, the article concludes with an interview with Dr. Jacob E. Perea, dean emeritus of the Graduate College of Education at San Francisco State University and a veteran of the 1969 student strikes that founded the College of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University.

“The Real Geronimo Got Away”: Eluding Expectations in <em>Geronimo: His Own Story; The Autobiography of a Great Patriot Warrior</em>

“The Real Geronimo Got Away”Eluding Expectations in Geronimo: His Own Story; The Autobiography of a Great Patriot Warrior Anita Huizar-Hernández (bio) If you had to pick a single person to stand for Indianness, you could do worse than Geronimo, the iconic Apache leader who stands in American popular memory for resistant warriors everywhere and the defeated prisoners we imagine they became. —Philip Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places Of course the real man they called Geronimo, they never did catch. The real Geronimo got away. — Leslie Marmon Silko, Almanac of the Dead The name Geronimo conjures up a wide variety of images, from World War II paratroopers to children jumping off the high dive to the code-name for the U.S. military’s covert operation to kill Osama Bin Laden. Well over one hundred years after his surrender to the U.S. military in 1886, Geronimo’s image remains a prominent part of the national imagination as a free-floating signifier for bravery, daring, and danger. Of the many things Geronimo is associated with, however, his own autobiography is not usually one of them. The hypervisibility of Geronimo’s name and face is contrasted with the comparative invisibility of what the man himself had to say in Geronimo: His Own Story; The Autobiography of a Great Patriot Warrior. Why is Geronimo so much more prevalent than Geronimo? Though Geronimo’s autobiography has not been completely ignored, particularly by interested academics, there is something about the text that is at odds with the dominant representations of Geronimo, positive or negative, [End Page 49] that have become so frequent and familiar within U.S. popular culture. In this essay, I argue that Geronimo’s relative obscurity is due to its generic constraints and enigmatic content, both of which frustrate the reader by eluding easy interpretation. This interpretive opacity is all the more exasperating given the pervasive nature of Geronimo’s image, for since its publication in 1906, Geronimo has been defying readers’ expectations. By refusing to tell either extreme of the Geronimo mythology, that is, by rejecting the image of both “the iconic Apache leader who stands in American popular memory for resistant warriors everywhere” and “the defeated prisoners we imagine they became,” Geronimo challenges our ability to make such a straightforward distinction in the first place (Deloria, Indians 136). geronimo, in his own words? One of the reasons Geronimo’s autobiography has received surprisingly little attention is the complexity of its authorial voice. The title Geronimo: His Own Story would seem to make the authorship of this text clear and simple: the reader expects the story of Geronimo as told by the man himself. As is always the case with Geronimo, however, the reality is much more complex than first impressions might suggest. In actuality, Geronimo, like other late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century narratives of the lives of Native American people, is a hybrid text somewhere between a biography and an autobiography.1 R. D. Theisz refers to this canon as “bi-autobiographies” and defines them as texts that present “segments or all of the life of a Native American man or woman, narrated orally or in writing, which is then recorded by a non-Indian editor, generally from among social scientists or literati” (66). Arnold Krupat identifies a third party within this collaboration: a translator (For Those 45–46). The end result, then, is not a straightforward telling of one’s own life but an opaquely polyvocal narrative. Geronimo: His Own Story is no exception, narrated by Geronimo to Oklahoma school superintendent S. M. Barrett through Apache translator Asa Daklugie. The first step in analyzing Geronimo, then, is a careful examination of the specific workings of this culturally, linguistically, and epistemologically complex collaborative process. As Krupat cautions, any analysis of this genre “requires consideration of the language, culture, and history both of Native Americans and of Eur-americans [sic]” (For Those xi). In [End Page 50] order to emphasize this inherent cultural duality, he proposes using the term “original bicultural composite composition” in lieu of autobiography (31). Untangling how this duality operates, as Hertha Dawn Wong warns, is no easy feat. Analyzing these texts requires readers...

Twenty-First Century Indigenous Historiography: Twenty-Two Must-Read Books

Home is the Hunter: The James Bay Cree and Their Land, by Hans Carlson. Vancouver, University of British Columbia Press, 2008. 344 pp. $87.00 Cdn (doth), $36.95 Cdn (paper). Do Glaciers Listen? Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters, and Social Imagination, by Julie Cruikshank. Vancouver, University of British Columbia Press, 2005. 328 pp. $97.00 Cdn (cloth), $36.95 Cdn (paper). Indians in Unexpected Places, by Philip J. Deloria. Lawrence, University Press of Kansas, 2004. 312 pp. $18.95 US (paper). To Rise in Darkness: Revolution, Repression, and Memory in El Salvador, 1920-1932, by Jeffrey L. Gould and Aldo Lauria-Santiago. Durham, Duke University Press, 2008. 400 pp. $94.95 US (cloth), $26.95 US (paper). Arctic Justice: On Trial for Murder, Pond Inlet, 1923, by Shelagh Grant. Montreal & Kingston, McGill-Queen's University Press, 2002. 368 pp. $110.00 Cdn (cloth), $32.95 Cdn (paper). Elder Brother and the Lazo of the People: Contemporary Kinship and Cowessess First Nation, by Robert Alexander Innes. Winnipeg, University of Manitoba Press, 2013. 256 pp. $27.95 Cdn (paper). Trials of Nation Making: Liberalism, Race, and Ethnicity in the Andes, 1810-1910, by Brooke Larson. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004. 318 pp. $104.99 US (cloth), $34.99 US (paper). Makuk: A History of Aboriginal-White Relations, by John Lutz. Vancouver, University of British Columbia Press, 2008. 448 pp. $87.00 Cdn (cloth), $36.95 Cdn (paper). Courage Tastes of Blood: The Mapuche Community of Nicolas Ailio and the Chilean State, 1906-2001, by Florencia E. Mallon. Durham, Duke University Press, 2005. 344 pp. $94-95 (cloth), $25.95 (paper). Indigenous Women, Work, and History: 1940-1980, by Mary Jane Logan McCallum. Winnipeg, University of Manitoba Press, 2014. 336 pp. $27.95 Cdn (paper). Cree Narrative Memory: From Treaties to Contemporary Times, by Neal McLeod. Saskatoon, Purich Publishing Limited, 2007. 144 pp. $25.00 Cdn (paper). Colonizing Hawaii: The Cultural Power of Lazo, by Sally Engle Merry. Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2000. 432 pp. $43.95 US (paper). Seasons of Change: Labor, Treaty Rights, and Ojibwe Nationhood, by Chantal Norrgard. Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2014. 216 pp. $29.95 US (paper). Written as I Remember It: Teachings of (?ems ta?ew) From the Life of a Sliammon Elder by Elsie Paul, in collaboration with Paige Raibmon, and Harmony Johnson. Vancouver, University of British Columbia Press, 2014. 488 pp. $125.00 Cdn (cloth), $39.95 Cdn (paper). Authentic Indians: Episodes of Encounter from the Late-Nineteenth-Century Northwest Coast, Paige Raibmon. Durham & London, Duke University Press, 2005. 328 pp. $89.95 US (cloth), $24.95 US (paper). Standing Up with Ga'axsta'las: Jane Constance Cook and the Politics of Memory, Church, and Custom, by Leslie A. Robertson with the Kwagu'l Gixsam Clan. Vancouver, University of British Columbia Press, 2012. 596 pp. $125.00 Cdn (cloth), $39.95 Cdn (paper). Telling it to the Judge: Taking Native History to Court, by Arthur J. Ray. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2012. 304 pp. $49.95 Cdn (cloth), $29.95 Cdn (paper). Hunters at the Margin: Native People and Wildlife in the Northwest Territories, by John Sandios. Vancouver, University of British Columbia Press, 2007. 360 pp. $87.00 Cdn (cloth), $36.95 Cdn (paper). Skin for Skin: Death and Life for Inuit and Innu, by Gerald M. Sider. Durham, Duke University Press, 2014. 312 pp. $89.95 US (cloth), $24.95 US (paper). The Archive of Place: Unearthing the Pasts of the Chilcotin Plateau, by William J. Turkel. Vancouver, University of British Columbia Press, 2007. 352 pp. $87.00 Cdn (cloth), $36.95 Cdn (paper). The Colonization of Mi'kmaw Memory and History, 1794-1928: The King v. Gabriel Sylliboy, by William C. …

The Insurrection of Subjugated Futures

The Insurrection of Subjugated Futures Dean Itsuji Saranillio (bio) Ioften wonder what the double-hulled voyaging canoe Hōkūle‘a might do to different New Yorkers’ conceptions of possibilities when the crew arrives in New York City—Lenape territory—in the summer of 2016. Through the ancestral art of wayfinding, those courageously navigating and sailing the Hōkūle‘a are able to brush aside colonial tropes that infantalize Oceania as a “wasteland of non-achievement.”1 Navigators on the Hōkūle‘a use no instruments; rather, they rely on knowledge taught by the Satawalese grandmaster navigator Mau Pialug, coupled with an ongoing Hawaiian creative practice that reads the sun, moon, stars, clouds, winds, waves, and the patterns of a diversity of nonhuman species to find their way.2 The Hikianalia, a companion voyaging canoe that will sail at times as an escort vessel or solo, is named after a companion star that rises with the star named Hōkūle‘a, and possesses solar panels that charge electric motors that, if necessary, will help keep crews safe. Hikianalia is also Internet ready, thus capable of communicating via photos, blogs, videos, live chats, and other media for educational purposes.3 The canoes’ worldwide voyage is called Mālama Honua (to care for our Earth) and is expected to cover forty-seven thousand nautical miles, eighty-five ports, and twenty-six countries in order to, as the Polynesian Voyaging Society describes it, “engage all of Island Earth—practicing how to live sustainably, while sharing, learning, creating global relationships, and discovering the wonders of this precious place we call home.”4 In a historical moment defined by, yet largely apathetic to anthropogenic climate change, what mana might we witness when the voyaging canoes arrive at their various destinations with the possibility of flipping colonial modernity on its head and creating space for Kanaka ‘Ōiwi and other Indigenous “subjugated knowledges” to chart new epistemes for the twenty-first century?5 That non-Natives are disposed, as Philip Deloria argues in Indians in Unexpected Places, to imagine Natives through the colonial tropes of “primitivism, technological incompetence, physical distance, and cultural difference,” which undergird colonial expectations of Indigenous peoples, makes the worldwide voyage of the HMkūle‘a and Hikianalia “unexpected,” if not “unthinkable.”6 [End Page 637] Indeed, these voyages are preceded by a longer history of the Hōkūle‘a sailing more than 140,000 miles over the past three decades, inspiring twenty-five other voyaging canoes. This is also preceded by an even longer history of seafarers who first found the Hawaiian Islands more than two thousand years ago. Within the tropes of presumed “technological incompetence,” what might be further “unexpected” is the ability for the Hikianalia to possess such a technologically advanced communication system. Taken together, these are Hawaiian examples of the “unexpected” historical “anomalies” that, as Deloria asserts, may be less anomalous than representative. By examining the frequency of these “secret histories” (rare, occasional, frequent), we might be better equipped to challenge dominant characterizations and assumptions of Indigenous peoples, and instead write complex and transformative histories informed by or in relation to Native cultural politics. As Deloria writes: “Those secret histories of unexpectedness are, I believe, worth further pursuit, for they can change our sense of the past and lead us quietly, but directly, to the present moment.”7 As we reach a critical point in this planet’s history, global systems of US Empire, militarism, and capitalism reveal themselves as accountable to abstract notions of profit and power, yet increasingly materialize in their capacity to destroy the resources and relations sustaining various forms of life. Indeed, there are few places in the world where the adverse effects of rising sea levels caused by climate change are felt so dramatically as they are in the island nations of Oceania.8 Ty P. Kāwika Tengan thus argues that our historical moment demands “ever new ways of understanding the world”; numerous movements for cultural revitalization, the Hōkūle‘a and Hikianalia among many, “enable new sorts of political and social action … where important historical transformations have occurred with the recoding of cultural categories, especially in the ‘contact...

Tribes in “Unexpected Places”: The NLRA, Tribal Economic Actors, and Common Law Expectations of Tribal Authenticity

Tribes in “Unexpected Places”The NLRA, Tribal Economic Actors, and Common Law Expectations of Tribal Authenticity Stephen H. Greetham (bio) expectation and anomaly in the fields of statutory silence In the midst of the Great Depression, Congress enacted the National Labor Relations Act (nlra),1 a sweeping reform statute that arose from a specific historical moment to quell economic disruptions by creating a framework for nongovernment worker collective bargaining rights. Notwithstanding the fact that Congress took such action barely one year after it passed the Indian Reorganization Act (ira),2 another sweeping reform statute that arose from a different (but equally specific) historical moment to attempt a reversal of the government’s destructive allotment and assimilation policies, the nlra makes no mention of American Indian tribes or Congress’s intent for the act’s application in their regard. More to the point, while the act defines “employer” to exclude a range of largely governmental actors,3 it makes no mention of tribal governments, much less express provision relating to their status (or not) as statutory “employers.” When considered in the context of the law’s general treatment of tribes as sovereign or quasi-sovereign actors and the modern reality of increasing tribal economic activity, that silence has contributed to a burst of litigation over its implications for tribal workplaces and rights to self-determination and governmental economic development. From its inception, US federal Indian law has ostensibly put the government’s political branches in charge of defining the legal rights and status of American Indian tribes.4 However, those branches have often treated tribes as an afterthought and, at such times, have offered only awkward statutory silences as to how their enactments should be read in relation to indigenous legal and political rights. Those silences, in turn, [End Page 427] give way to litigation over how one should divine the relevant political branch’s intent, thus inviting the courts into those fields from which so much of federal Indian law has grown: the common law. This dynamic is now playing out in relation to the nlra’s particular silence, with arguments essentially turning on the question of who should bear the burden of the statutory silence, the defending tribe or the federal regulator. However, rather than offering an analysis of those particular arguments,5 this article examines the subject more broadly through the lens of Philip Deloria’s theory of expectation and anomaly, offering an exploration of the cultural discourses within the federal common law of American Indian affairs rather than the legal doctrines that ostensibly drive its development and application. In Indians in Unexpected Places, Deloria persuasively illustrates through a series of case studies from the worlds of, among others, sports, music, and technology how specific social mechanisms (i.e., stereotypes and ideologies that manifest through the cultural discourses of power relations) serve to restrict American Indians to a specific place in the collective consciousness, a place that limits any adaptive notion of identity: “The key ideologies describing Indian people—inevitable disappearance, primitive purity, and savage violence, to name only a few—have brought . . . uneven disadvantage to the social, political, economic, and legal relations lived out between Indians and non-Indian Americans.”6 Deloria traces the effect of these ideologies in shaping cultural expectations of tribal identity and argues that designation of a noncon-forming tribal actor as an anomaly serves two powerful purposes: first, to reinforce the overriding colonial discourse on the proper place, role, and identity of American Indians—a “mutually constitutive” process through which perception of anomaly shapes the very expectation that is offended; and second, to provide material justification for treating the anomalous tribal actor as a threat that should be put back in its place.7 As he puts it, “Expectations . . . exist in relation to concrete actions,”8 meaning that cultures have ways of coercing conformance. As such, these expectations are not mere social conventions but, instead, are the very means by which we build social orders. While his model is more typically applied to the analysis of historic, cultural, and literary phenomena and texts, the relationship Deloria maps among expectation, anomaly, and coerced conformance renders it an apt frame for the reading of...

Introduction: American Indian Languages in Unexpected Places

This special issue of the American Indian Culture and Research Journal brings together a set of essays that integrate two seemingly disparate intellectual trends in the humanities and social sciences. On the one hand, there is Philip Deloria’s work about American Indians in “unexpected places.”1 On the other hand, there is the work of linguistic anthropology. Deloria’s writings have been integral to the growing corpus of critical approaches to the study of Native peoples, including the ways in which representational practices of the past continue to resonate and the ways in which (de)colonization of indigenous histories and structural (in)equities are intertwined.2 We say “seemingly disparate” because this line of scholarship, including Deloria’s work, is concerned with the naturalization of inequalities, the ways in which expectations about Native American peoples have led to a denial of coevalness.3 However, there is also a tradition in linguistic anthropology that has sought to understand the ways in which linguistic inequalities are naturalized and circulated. Our intervention is to place linguistic anthropology in a meaningful dialogue with contemporary indigenous studies. Deloria’s Indians in Unexpected Places challenged the representational “expectations” and “anomalies” of American Indians in history and popular culture. Deloria called for examining why certain imageries and practices have been

Unexpected Languages: Multilingualism and Contact in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century North America

Expectations, like blinders, allow only certain images and sounds to be processed. Observations that aren’t clearly contained within the bounds of those expectations remain invisible and inaudible, or, in cases in which unexpected images or sounds persist, they are simply repudiated. Theories and models of analysis are particularly fraught with the tensions of expectation. Researchers are torn between the anticipation of discovery and the dampening expectations that comprise those models. It is precisely those expectations that inhibit insight beyond the enduring boundaries of those models. Philip Deloria’s Indians in Unexpected Places elegantly exposes a number of external expectations of Indianness in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century. He puts unexpected images and sounds in front of the reader, refusing the denial that comes so easily to those who cannot imagine a world beyond the expected. Deloria exquisitely removes one set of blinders only to reinforce a somewhat different set of expectations within the confines of a contemporary, binary model built around a colonial discourse of power and domination:

All Intimate Grammars Leak: Reflections on "Indian Languages in Unexpected Places"

I want to begin by thanking the editors for inviting me to comment on these thoughtful and thought-provoking articles and to thank the American Indian Culture and Research Journal for publishing a special issue on Native American languages in which the authors took inspiration from the trope of Philip Deloria’s pathbreaking book, Indians in Unexpected Places, and its imaginative reframing here to focus on the important but neglected topic of American Indian languages.1 As a commentator, I enjoy the delightful yet difficult task of exploring these articles in a manner that somehow does some descriptive and analytical justice to each while recognizing a collective pattern or two. Allow me to begin by briefly mentioning two cross-cutting patterns and move on to some more particular observations, leaving it in part to you, dear readers, to weave this warp and weft together more securely than I can do in these brief remarks. The first, a kind of an appropriation of a venerable W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1903 concept, is the relevance of something like a “double consciousness”

Red Power: Liselotte Welskopf-Henrich and Indian Activist Networks in East and West Germany

Acuriousphotograph appeared in 1976 in the East-German newspaperJunge Welt(Fig. 1). Two well-known members of the American Indian Movement (AIM), Dennis Banks and Vernon Bellecourt, were shown together with an elderly German woman, Liselotte Welskopf-Henrich, at her home in East Berlin. This photo, like so many of the photos of Indians in unexpected places, always seems to amuse people, leading them to ask with a snigger why the Indians were there. The Indians' presence in such places, however, is seldom a laughing matter, and in this case, scholars of the post-war era might find the answer to the simple question of the Indians' presence somewhat disconcerting.

“You Think It Strange That I Can Love an Indian”: Native Men, White Women, and Marriage in the Indian Service

“You Think It Strange That I Can Love an Indian”1Native Men, White Women, and Marriage in the Indian Service Cathleen D. Cahill (bio) The history of intermarriage between whites and American Indians is a half-told tale. Scholars have produced an impressive body of work on the political and economic benefits that accrued from pairings between white men and Native women, but the literature on relationships between Native men and white women remains sparse.2 Studies focusing on unions between white men and Native women are often situated on frontiers where whites accepted the relationships (if sometimes grudgingly), particularly when the couples remained outside of white society. Relationships between white women and Indian men, by contrast, were more deeply interwoven into the fabric of white society because of white women’s symbolic importance as the moral centers of American civilization. Through their marriages, Native husbands became “Indians in unexpected places,” in the homes of white women and therefore in the bosom of white society. Such relationships also stand in striking contrast to the contemporaneous violence perpetrated against black men in the American South over the smallest threat that they might cross the sexual color line.3 The few historians who have considered intermarriage between Native men and white women have noted that late-nineteenth-century theories of assimilation contributed to these relationships. Margaret Jacobs has used a comparison of two interracial marriages to establish an important framework for understanding the shifts in America’s racial ideologies at the turn of the century. Although Jacobs’ evidence is limited to two relationships—she relies on one couple to stand for each phase in racial thinking—she urges scholars to look for more. More recently, Katherine Ellinghaus has uncovered evidence of other such couples. Focusing primarily on male students who attended the eastern off-reservation boarding schools of Hampton, Virginia, and Carlisle, Pennsylvania, she recognizes that the schools’ curricula encouraged the marriages.4 [End Page 106] This article demonstrates that there were more of these relationships than historians have suspected, and that the federal government played a significant role—both bureaucratically and ideologically—in orchestrating them. During the closing decades of the nineteenth century, the federal government’s strategies for changing Indian societies tacitly encouraged interracial marriage. To implement its assimilation policies the Federal Indian Service, the workforce of the Office of Indian Affairs, hired large numbers of whites and Indians who came to know each other as a result of their employment. Moreover, the rhetoric administrators used to describe the government’s assimilation policy offered both white women and Native men compelling reasons to believe that their personal relationships had wider social and political implications. In particular, policymakers emphasized that the household model and family relationships were engines of social change that would bring Indians into the citizenry. This rhetoric led some white women to see marriage to Indian men as a logical extension of assimilation policy. This article also addresses some of Ellinghaus’s conclusions. Her comparative study of the United States and Australia suggests that the experience of American interracial couples compared favorably with those in Australia. In particular, she emphasizes the American couples’ ability to attain middle-class status. While some American Indian men at the turn of the century were able to achieve middle-class status, my findings indicate that this status was hard won, incomplete, and often contested by whites.5 These ideas also speak to broader theoretical issues in the study of colonialism. Anthropologist Ann Stoler has examined familial and sexual relationships as key aspects of larger imperial projects. In particular, she has emphasized “intimate colonialism,” which she defines as “the production and harnessing of sentiment as a technology of the state.”6 Stoler has urged historians to explore “intimate sites of implementation”—that is, relationships between colonial agents and the colonized—in order to see this technology at work.7 It is at the micro-level, Stoler argues, that the complex interactions among race, gender, class, and colonial power are most visible. Other scholars have also begun to explore the ramifications of the intimate and its unfolding across “domestic frontiers” in both imperial (or external) and settler (or internal) colonial systems.8 In...

Indians in Unexpected Places. By Philip J. Deloria (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004) 300 pp. $24.95 cloth $17.95 paper

<i>Indians in Unexpected Places</i>. By Philip J. Deloria (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004) 300 pp. $24.95 cloth $17.95 paper

Indians in Unexpected Places

The Journal of Popular CultureVolume 40, Issue 1 p. 170-172 Indians in Unexpected Places Jeffrey Cain, Jeffrey Cain Sacred Heart UniversitySearch for more papers by this author Jeffrey Cain, Jeffrey Cain Sacred Heart UniversitySearch for more papers by this author First published: 24 January 2007 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-5931.2007.00359.xRead the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Volume40, Issue1February 2007Pages 170-172 RelatedInformation

Indians in Unexpected Places

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Indians in Unexpected Places

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Indians in Unexpected Places by Philip J. Deloria

Indians in Unexpected Places by Philip J. Deloria