Intertribal Conflict Research Articles

Red Power, white narrative: founding violence & the invalidation of Indigenous rights

ABSTRACT The disavowal of ‘founding violence’ remains a core proposition of settler colonial theory. This paper expands our theoretical understanding of the concept to account for the strategic invocation of founding violence to legitimate settler colonial racial orders. Drawing from a sample of in-depth interviews (n = 27) with settlers who have historical connections to the American Indian Movement’s (AIM) confrontational activism in the 1970s, I show how non-Indigenous territoriality is affirmed through the narrative displacement of founding violence onto Indigenous peoples. Across the U.S. state of South Dakota, where AIM’s ‘Red Power’ activism was most pronounced, interviewees routinely delegitimize movement grievances through historicized narratives of incessant inter-tribal conflict and Indigenous violence. Thus, in addition to justifying settler society’s bloody origins, the invocation of founding violence remains a powerful discursive mechanism for delegitimizing contemporary Indigenous rights.

Enigmatic Bones: A Few Archaeological, Bioanthropological, and Historical Considerations Regarding an Atypical Deposit of Skeletonized Human Remains Unearthed in Khirbat al-Dusaq (Southern Jordan)

Abstract This article presents the results of the archaeological, bioanthropological, and historical analysis of an atypical human bone deposit found at the medieval Islamic desert site of Khirbat al-Dusaq in southern present-day Jordan. This site has yielded several human remains deposits, most of which appear to be either ordinary or reorganised burials with a clearly identifiable sepulchral function. However, one particular deposit (labelled “Structure no 1 (Pièce 5)”) displays several atypical features which complicate its interpretation. As such, radiocarbon dating of this particular deposit indicates a chronological range extending from the second half of the seventeenth century CE to the end of the eighteenth century CE. In addition, the human bones contained within this deposit tend to show unusual osteological characteristics, such as possible cut marks resembling peri-mortem lesions inflicted upon the deceased by third parties armed with sharp objects. The precise historical contextualisation of this deposit enables us to discuss different scenarios that could explain the circumstances of its inception. In this sense, the spectrum of possible explanatory interpretations ranges from the conjecture that the remains under study represent one or several victims of an inter-tribal conflict, a brigandage or retaliation attack, a crushed popular uprising, or even individuals who died during one of the violent raids perpetrated by local Bedouin tribes against the Mecca pilgrimage caravans during the Ottoman period.

Determining Intermediary Closely Related Languages to Find a Mediator for Intertribal Conflict Resolution

Indonesia has a diverse ethnic and cultural background. However, this diversity sometimes creates social problems, such as intertribal conflict. Because of the large differences among tribal languages, it is often difficult for conflicting parties to dialog for conflict resolution. To address this problem, we aim to find intermediary closely related languages from a language similarity knowledge graph using the best-performing pathfinding algorithms. In this research, we analyze the performances of two pathfinding algorithms, namely, Dijkstra and Yen’s K, by comparing their execution time and the total lexical distances of the intermediary languages (called “the cost”). Our research findings show that even though the Dijkstra and Yen’s K algorithms have equal total cost for all the cases, Yen’s K outperformed Dijkstra at searching for intermediary languages that are closely related, with an average of 160% higher performance on execution time. The selection of native speakers of the obtained intermediary languages as mediators is formalized as an optimization problem with four criteria: language similarity, geographical distance, background, and expected salary. We present a case study where the intermediary closely related languages can be used as a guideline to find mediators who can help resolve the intertribal conflicts among Indonesian tribes. To calculate the first criteria, we implemented the Yen’s K algorithm to calculate the shortest path between target languages and return the path via the intermediary languages. This implementation shows the potential use of the mediator selection model defined in this paper in various other roles such as trader or salesman, politician’s spokesman, reporter or journalist, etc.

Intertribal conflict, educational development and education crisis in Yemen: A call for saving education

AbstractThe current political conflict and economic crisis have impacted all aspects of life in Yemen, especially intertribal conflict, which plays a significant role in hindering educational development. In this study, we measure the impact of this conflict on the educational infrastructure, students and teachers' behaviour, and educational development as perceived by students, teachers and administrators. We collected data from 384 respondents: 162 teachers, 163 students and 59 administrative staff in the Aden and Taiz governorates. We also conducted 18 structured interviews with stakeholders from local authorities. The results indicate that: (1) educational infrastructure in Yemen has changed from a poor to a damaged status because of the intertribal conflict; (2) educational development in Yemen is going backward because of the current political conflict and economic crisis; (3) violence being exercised during this conflict has transferred to high school students, teachers and administration staff; and (4) the educational infrastructure is either bombed and attacked by the Arab (international) coalition or used as military bases by the different parties of the conflict.

Inter-tribal Conflict effects on Educational Development in Yemen: A Qualitative Analyses

Purpose: The current inter-tribal conflict and economic crisis have impacted all aspects of life in Yemen, especially hampered the development of education. This study focuses the inter-tribal conflict effects on the development of education
 Approach: This is achieved by collecting data applying qualitative tools of data collection. The data was collected from the students, teachers and tribal elders in Aden and Taiz through in-depth interview and focused group discussion. The data analyzed in the light of different themes derived from the primary data
 Findings: The results indicated that the intertribal conflict has significantly affected the education infrastructure. Moreover, we found that inter-tribal conflict hampered the process of the development. More importantly, the educated people left the county and the government and people are not investing in the educational sector
 Implications/Originality/Value: For the development of (education in) Yemen, all the political parties in the nation and regional and international communities must show more responsibility and commitment towards the current and future generations of Yemen and the world. ‎

Bread and Salt: Labour, Reputation, and Trust between Syrian Refugees and Lebanese Hashish Farmers in the Northern Biqa'a

This paper addresses the intersection between forced migration, labour markets, and governance. Drawing on extensive fieldwork amongst Syrian refugees in the Northern Biqa’a Valley, Lebanon, the paper argues that understanding ‘refugees as labourers’ is central in explaining practices of both Lebanese villagers and Syrian refugee camps. This article builds on the findings of recent labour ethnographies in the Levant (Chalcraft, 2009; Proudfoot, 2017; Sajadian, 2020; Saleh, 2016; Turner, 2016) to demonstrate the centrality of labour-capital relations to understanding the governance of newly settled communities. Labour is a fundamentally important feature in the life of a camp, interacting with and underpinning other patterns of interactions based on, for example, state apparatus, infrastructure, and inter-tribal conflict. The article presents and analyses four ethnographic vignettes of typical economic partnerships between Lebanese landowners and Syrian refugee-labourers in rural Lebanon. Each relationship entails a pattern of mirrored capacities and weaknesses, structurally replicated throughout rural Lebanon, creating an environment of labour insecurity and heightening the value of long-term, trusting relationships.

Taking the Land to Make the City: A Bicoastal History of North America by Mary P. Ryan

Reviewed by: Taking the Land to Make the City: A Bicoastal History of North America by Mary P. Ryan Steven L. Driever Taking the Land to Make the City: A Bicoastal History of North America. Mary P. Ryan. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2019. Pp. 438, photographs, maps, footnotes, index. $40.00, hardcover, ISBN 978-1-4773-1783-9. $40.00, eBook, ISBN 978-1-4773-1785-3. Mary P. Ryan expounds on the history of Baltimore and San Francisco through a chronological comparison beginning with the first human occupancy of their sites and surrounding areas and continuing through the 1860s. Ryan has succeeded in breaking new ground in the history of North America by focusing on local sovereignty as the key actor in local, regional, and national affairs. For many centuries before European colonization, fertile ecological zones in and around the Chesapeake and San Francisco Bays supported dense settlements of Native Americans. Ryan thus begins by describing [End Page 129] the natural forces that formed the estuaries and how the Ohlone people east of San Francisco Bay and the Algonquian-speaking tribes beside the Chesapeake exploited their bountiful environments. The Ohlone sustained hundreds of small, autonomous tribelets through hunting and gathering. The Algonquian tribes practiced horticulture and created a complex society, having a hierarchy of settlements that experienced intertribal conflict over territory. Neither people, however, built cities like the great Amerindian cities of Peru or Mexico or intensely exploited the sites of modern Baltimore and San Francisco. The taking of Native lands begins with the English arriving on the East Coast. Ryan makes clear that it was not official colonial policy but rather the arrival of Englishmen intent on enclosing land into farms and plantations that initially disrupted Indian territory. Soon, however, the taking was officially sanctioned on the grounds that the indigenous peoples were not "Christian People" and had not established permanent settlements and farms. Ryan attributes the seed for colonial Baltimore to Presbyterian Pennsylvania merchants who wanted to construct a port at the mouth of the Patapsco River to facilitate trade with the Caribbean and across the Atlantic. A town would be necessary to house the port's workforce, and, starting in 1745, Baltimore would grow along streets with adjacent land being divided into tidy lots that could be bought and sold repeatedly. Large landowners prospered while small leaseholders lived in small row houses, and most residents were propertyless. Receiving little help from Maryland's state legislature, Baltimore formed its own institutions to meet its most pressing needs. According to Ryan, the Spaniards, noted for their urban planning, merely cleared the land of Ohlone settlements and established a mission and presidio on the San Francisco Peninsula. The mission failed due to measles epidemics, venereal disease, and brutal punishments of recalcitrant Indians. The presidio was abandoned on Mexico's independence in 1821. The environment was permanently altered by invading plant and animal species introduced as the Mexican settlers began to convert the land to support the production of hides and tallow for export from ranchos. The second part of Ryan's book zooms down to the scale of streets and houses. We learn that Baltimore Town officially became the City of Baltimore in 1796 and witnessed local elites gradually transforming "mob town" into "monumental city," a civic-spirited community that [End Page 130] attracted enough immigrants to make Baltimore the third largest US city by the 1830s. Ryan argues that it was the process of street making that taught the Baltimoreans how to collaborate, leading to other city improvements such as building elaborate monuments, providing street lighting, extending wharves into the bay, and so on. Ryan avers that the benefits of active citizenship, unfortunately, were not extended to African Americans despite almost all of them in Baltimore being free. In Alta California local authority overrode Mexico's central authority. The secularization of the mission lands benefited leading Californios, while the displaced Indians became a servile labor force on their ranchos. The site of present-day San Francisco began development in the 1830s as an "anchorage" in the small Port of Yerba Buena on the northeastern corner of the peninsula and as the pueblo of Dolores to the south...

The Role of Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia in trying Khmer Rouge Human Rights Offender in Cambodia

<p><em>Conflict often occurs when two or more interests are in contradiction and no one wants to concede. We know a variety of conflicts today, from the conflict preexisting since a long time ago such as intertribal conflict to more modern conflict such as a state’s tapping over another. The way of resolving conflict is also varying according to the types of conflict, big conflict such as interstate conflict or the one attracting the world’s attention, using more complex resolution and usually using the third party. Therefore, a special organization will be founded to solve a conflict. One of organizations created to solve a conflict is the Extraordinary Chambers in The Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) aiming to try the war criminals during Khmer Rouge humanity crime incidence in 1975-1979. Humanity crime occurring in Cambodia is one of largest humanity tragedies in modern era post 2<sup>nd</sup> World War. This ECCC was founded because at that time Cambodia’s National Justice Institution could not try the perpetrator of humanity crime. Cambodian government along with UN then agreed to found a justice institution specifically aiming to deal with and to resolve Khmer Rouge case.</em></p>

Utilizing Zoos Victoria's Connect‐Understand‐Act model to enable social and biological gains in northern Kenya

As human populations grow, wildlife across the globe is increasingly threatened. As a zoo‐based conservation organization, Zoos Victoria (ZV) in south‐east Australia is dedicated to fighting wildlife extinction locally and globally. Our international partnerships work with local communities, governments and non‐governmental organizations. The focus of the ZV conservation programmes is on alleviating threats to wildlife while addressing the needs of the community. The shared vision of a partnership with the Melako Community Conservancy (MCC) in northern Kenya is to foster sustainable development that allows communities to live in balance with wildlife. In 2011, an opportunity arose to trial ZV's Connect‐Understand‐Act (CUA) model for influencing visitor behaviour change, and this led to the first practical application of this model in Kenya. The model utilizes best‐practice conservation, education and social science to shape wildlife‐friendly values and behaviours. The impact of this model is now being trialled in situ through a conservation‐based sports programme called ‘Kicking Goals for Wildlife’. After conducting a conservation‐needs assessment in 2010, the community identified human–wildlife conflict as an issue negatively impacting species such as the Beisa oryx Oryx gazella beisa and Grevy's zebra Equus grevyi. The Kicking Goals for Wildlife programme is targeted at morans (initiated youth ranging from 15 to 30 years of age, and also referred to as warriors), filling their ‘idle time’ with football as an alternative to harming wildlife or engaging in intertribal conflict. The outcomes of the programme will be measured through changes in warrior attitude, knowledge, behavioural efficacy, reduction in biological threat and social change. Preliminary feedback is showing positive progress across all aspects. An additional measure, in an effort to assess the programme's impact on target species, was distance sampling to monitor the changes in flight distance. This paper outlines the theoretical framework underpinning the model, using the Kicking Goals for Wildlife programme in the MCC as a case study for what is involved in planning, designing and implementing a conservation‐education programme in the field.

Mali’s Nomads: Bulwarks Against Jihad

Mali’s Nomads: Bulwarks Against Jihad

The epidemiology of lethal violence in Darfur: Using micro-data to explore complex patterns of ongoing armed conflict

This article describes and analyzes patterns of lethal violence in Darfur, Sudan, during 2008–09, drawing upon a uniquely detailed dataset generated by the United Nations–African Union hybrid operation in Darfur (UNAMID), combined with data generated through aggregation of reports from open-source venues. These data enable detailed analysis of patterns of perpetrator/victim and belligerent groups over time, and show how violence changed over the four years following the height of armed conflict in 2003–05. During the reference period, violent incidents were sporadic and diverse and included: battles between the major combatants; battles among subgroups of combatant coalitions that were ostensibly allied; inter-tribal conflict; incidents of one-sided violence against civilians by different parties; and incidents of banditry. The conflict as a whole defies easy categorization. The exercise illustrates the limits of existing frameworks for categorizing armed violence and underlines the importance of rigorous microlevel data collection and improved models for understanding the dynamics of collective violence. By analogy with the use of the epidemiological data for infectious diseases to help design emergency health interventions, we argue for improved use of data on lethal violence in the design and implementation of peacekeeping, humanitarian and conflict resolution interventions.

Native Place, Environment, and the Trade Fort Concentration on the South Platte River, 1835–45

This article analyzes the unusual trading post concentration—Fort Vasquez, Fort Jackson, Fort Lupton, and Fort St. Vrain—that operated simultaneously along the South Platte River during the late 1830s. These trading posts, or forts, dealt almost exclusively in bison robes provided by Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho hunters. The reasons behind this trading locus, which was unique to the fur trade era of the western Great Plains, are examined in the context of indigenous instrumentality and ecological factors. Heretofore unexamined environmental and archaeological data combined with historical research into intertribal conflict and place provide a more holistic explanation for this unique conjuncture.

The Effect of Inter-tribal Post Election Violence Conflict Trauma on Academic Performance among Secondary School Students in Mt. Elgon District, Kenya

Inter-tribal conflict in Kenya has persisted for a long time and intensifies during elections. The inter-tribal conflict in 2007-2008 in Mt. Elgon District was apparently over land dispute between the Soy and Ndorobo clans of the Sabaot tribe. This research aimed at establishing the effect of trauma as a result of inter-ethnic conflicts on academic performance among secondary school students in Mt Elgon District, Kenya. The ex-post facto research design was used. Two questionnaires, one for students and another one for teacher-counsellors were used to collect data. The sample of study comprised of 90 randomly selected students and six teacher-counsellors from six purposively sampled schools from a population of 22 secondary schools. Five (83%) out of the six sampled schools registered a negative performance index in the Kenya Certificate of Secondary Examination (KCSE) for the year 2008. In addition, 98% of the respondents recorded a negative performance index in their internal examination results. More girls (70%) registered a negative drop than boys (32%). The findings showed that 70 (78%) of the student-respondents sought counseling services while 20 (22%) did not. It was recommended that trauma counseling should be entrenched in the school system.

The Ontological Problem with Sovereignty: Indigenous Nations, Territoriality, and the Making of Natural Resources in Alaska

Congressional resolution of Alaska Native land claims in the 1970s, driven by a discursive collusion of carbon crisis and neocolonial urgency to build the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, has created a substantively different legal and economic relationship between Alaskan indigenous nations and the state than that which exists for Lower 48 tribes. It has also resulted in increasingly intense inter-tribal and intra-organizational conflict over environmental governance, development, and energy, most recently culminating in a January 2009 heating oil crisis in rural villages throughout the state. In this paper, cultural conceptions of fossil energy held by young indigenous anti-development activists from Gwich’in and Koyukon tribal villages are contrasted with those held by energy analysts in Doyon, Ltd, interior Alaska’s largest regional Native corporation. The villages rejected the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act and their citizen activists now provide counter-narratives of sovereignty and ‘natural resources’ that not only diverge from those held by Doyon members, but also illuminate indigenous diversity in conceptions of energy as category. Narratives of last winter’s rural crisis demonstrate how fossil energy is conceived of in culturally distinctive ways by Alaska Native environmental activists, policy makers, and energy analysts. Further, their evaluations of energy covary with diverse legal relationships between village governments, the corporations, and the state. By investigating fossil energy as a total social fact, critical ethnography can illuminate the multiple cultural understandings of relational sovereignty and energy that inform indigenous conflict in Alaska.

Pastoralists at War: Violence and Security in the Kenya-Sudan-Uganda Border Region

The majority of those living in the border region of Kenya, Sudan, and Uganda are pastoralists, whose livelihoods are dictated by the upkeep and size of their herds. Harsh environmental conditions force pastoralists to migrate in search of water and pasturelands during the dry season. With limited access to water and competing rights to land, intertribal conflict arises when pastoralists from one tribe enter the territory of another. The increased availability of small arms in the region from past wars increasingly makes ordinary clashes fatal. Governments in the region have responded with heavy-handed coercive disarmament operations. These have led to distrust and subsequent violent clashes between communities and security providers. This report reviews the scale, consequences of, and responses to the many pastoral conflicts, utilizing methodological tools such as key informant interviews, retrospective analysis, and a thorough review of available literature.

The Black Hawk War of 1832 , and: Inkpaduta: Dakota Leader (review)

Reviewed by: The Black Hawk War of 1832, and: Inkpaduta: Dakota Leader John W. Hall The Black Hawk War of 1832. By Patrick J. Jung. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007. ISBN 978-0-8061-3811-4. Illustrations. Appendix. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. xii, 275. $19.95 Inkpaduta: Dakota Leader. By Paul N. Beck. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008. ISBN 978-0-8061-3950-0. Maps. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. xii, 188. $24.95. Anglo-Americans have commonly admired the tragic-romantic figure of the Indian resistance movement leader. Paradigmatic is Tecumseh, who enjoyed the empathy of some Americans even while at war with the United States. By their conduct or circumstances, other Indian resistance leaders have left more ambiguous legacies. In two recent works, historians Patrick J. Jung and Paul N. Beck revisit the defining moments of Indian leaders on opposite ends of this spectrum: the Sauk war captain Black Hawk and the Dakota headman Inkpaduta, respectively. Whereas Jung seeks to solidify Black Hawk’s place in a significant tradition of pan-Indian resistance, Beck aims to lend humanity to a man remembered almost exclusively as a bloodthirsty “savage.” Jung’s first book, The Black Hawk War of 1832 is not a biography of Black Hawk but rather the most recent general history of his efforts to retain land and autonomy in the face of Anglo-American expansion into the Old Northwest. Coming fast on the heels of another commendable telling of this story (Kerry Trask, Black Hawk: The Battle for the Heart of America [New York: Henry Holt, 2006]), Jung’s book is distinguished by its scholarship and engagement with the broader historiography of Indian resistance movements. While Jung makes the case that the Black Hawk War “provides an excellent example of how Indian wars came about and how they were conducted” (p. 6), his central argument is that Black Hawk was heir to an ideology of pan-Indian resistance to white expansion that counted Pontiac and Tecumseh among its previous leaders. Ultimately, Black Hawk failed because this nativist movement had fractured in the years after the War of 1812 and broke on the shoals of intertribal conflict in the upper Mississippi River Valley. If not as engaging as Trask’s book, The Black Hawk War of 1832 may very well be the best campaign narrative of the conflict. Jung provides a concise and yet—on the basis of exhaustive primary research—authoritative narrative of the underlying causes and events of the war. Especially valuable is his treatment of the intertribal struggle that coincided with the Anglo-American war against Black Hawk. Indeed, Black Hawk’s prospects for mounting a pan-Indian resistance appear to have been slimmer than Jung admits. Rent by generational disputes and informed by their respective histories, Black Hawk’s Indian enemies saw little reason to surrender their perceived interests in favor of Indian solidarity. Jung overstates American agency in exploiting intertribal disputes, but he recognizes them as critical to the war’s outcome. While Black Hawk has long enjoyed the privileged status of “patriot chief ” (he was fêted on the east coast within a year of surrendering), the Dakota leader Inkpaduta owns no such legacy. The principal figure behind the “Spirit Lake Massacre” [End Page 1331] of 1857, in which nearly forty Iowa and Minnesota settlers lost their lives, Inkpaduta has instead endured historical ignominy. In Inkpaduta: Dakota Leader, Paul Beck offers “a new interpretation of Inkpaduta’s life—based not on myth, legend, racism, or white memory but rather on sound historical research” (p. xix). Tracing the events leading up to the “Spirit Lake Massacre,” Beck demonstrates that the white residents of Smithland, Iowa, goaded Inkpaduta’s followers to violence by confiscating their weapons in the midst of a harsh winter. After the attacks, Inkpaduta became something of a bogeyman to white settlers on the northern Great Plains, who implicated him in every subsequent Sioux “depredation” or conflict. Recognizing his value as a scapegoat, other Sioux groups endorsed these stories and discredited Inkpaduta as a renegade. Following the Battle of the Little Big Horn (in which he certainly participated), Inkpaduta eluded American capture in Canada, where he lived out...

"Enemies Like a Road Covered with Ice": The Utah Navajos' Experience during the Long Walk Period, 1858-1868

“What is history but a fable agreed upon.” So wrote Napoleon Bonaparte, a man considered by many to be a tactical genius and by others to be a bloody butcher. Reality lies somewhere between, part of the fable. Defined as “a narrative making a cautionary point . . . a story about legendary persons or exploits . . . [or] a falsehood,” the term fable characterizes, in a positive and a negative sense, the treatment of many historic episodes, including the Navajo Long Walk period.1 Much has been written of this time when the Navajo people, following what appears to be a fairly short resistance, surrendered in droves to the US military, collected at Fort Defiance and other designated sites, then moved in a series of “long walks” to Fort Sumner (Hweeldi) on the Pecos River in eastern New Mexico.2 There was much that preceded these events. Stretching back to the beginning of Euro-American occupation of the Southwest, the Spanish initiated a slave trade against the “wild” or unsettled (non-Puebloan) Indians that pitted various groups against their neighbors. Two major players in the arena were the Utes and Navajos. They shared relatively few years of peace, remaining generally in a state of warfare that simmered somewhere between hostility and open conflict. As with so many colonial wars, the beginning of these tit-for-tat reprisals is lost to history, but its constancy is not. Spanning the Spanish, Mexican, and early territorial period of the American Southwest, the slave trade was a prime source of fuel for intertribal conflict and provided the owner of captive Indians with labor to enhance comfort and spur economic development.3 Much of what characterized this period of history and Navajo/Ute relations is comparable to what happened to other peoples in different settings.

Yutaka Hirano. « On the Intertribal Conflict Known as ‘The Takkalu Disaster’ ». Meiji University Journal of Asian History, 10, 2005, pp. 55-67 [in Japanese

By analyzing the course of a civil war in 1531, generally known as “The Takkalu disaster,” this paper reconsiders the process with which Sāh Ṭahmāsp, the second Safavid ruler, took power into his own hands. Since the ascendance of the young ruler, the reign of the Safavid State had remained in the hands of powerful Qizilbash leaders, who fiercely vied for the pre-eminent position of amīr al-omarā. The incident began with the accession of Chūha Solṭān Takkalu to this office in 1527. His lust f...

George Bush, Bedouin Poet

Bedouin poetry composed in vernacular Arabic is an ancient art, and is nowadays often thought of as a dying one. However, in the period since the foundation of modern Arab states, before and since the Second World War, its practitioners have discovered new champs de bataille outside the traditional ones of inter-tribal conflict. With appropriate innovations in its traditional topoi and language, it now functions as a vehicle for commentary on all kinds of national, regional and even (as here) international political issues, providing a ‘grass roots’ view of the world—and in a witty and pungent vernacular idiom—that is usually absent from news and comment forums of Arab public life. Poetry of this kind occasionally appears in newspapers, but given the strong and often controversial views expressed, publication can be a risky business. More often, it circulates by word of mouth, on cassette tapes, and even via mobile phones and text messaging.

"A Happiness That Sleeps with Sadness": An Examination of "White Scabs" in Fools Crow

A prolific and popular writer, James Welch has captured the attention of both Native and non-Native readers since his first publication of poems, Riding the Earthboy 40, in 1971. Welch continued to dazzle and captivate his readers into the twenty-first century with several highly acclaimed novels presenting stories about tribal lives and culture in both the past and present until his untimely death in 2003. He mesmerized his audience through his ability to create a sense of participation of writer and reader, storyteller and listener. This was noted by prominent Native writer Louis Owens who commented that Welch was "the storyteller committed to rediscovering and preserving this lost [Pikuni] identity . . . [and that] the role of storyteller is crucial to cultural and individual psychic survival, for stories confer meaning and identity in the Indian world."1 One of Welch's stories that is of particular interest to me as an academic researching Native Americans and health is Fools Crow with its epic representation of the lives of the Pikuni (Blackfeet), especially their contact with "white scabs" (smallpox).2 The story of the coming of disease among the Pikuni in Fools Crow was not Welch's first literary focus on this topic, however. Welch's powerful poem "The Man From Washington," published in his 1971 book of poems, introduces his readers to the coming of disease and other destruction, The end came easy for most of us. Packed away in our crude beginnings in some far corner of a flat world, we didn't expect much more [End Page 178] than firewood and buffalo robes to keep us warm. The man came down, a slouching dwarf with rainwater eyes, and spoke to us. He promised that life would go on as usual, that treaties would be signed, and everyone— man, woman and child—would be inoculated against a world in which we had no part, a world of money, promise and disease.3 This poem set the foundation for Fools Crow, for it tells of the ending of traditional Pikuni life through the coming of the "man from Washington" who signed treaties that promised a new way of life filled with opportunity and possibility, but in reality brought the destruction of traditional life, disease, and death. Fools Crow begins with the introduction of the protagonist, White Man's Dog, a Lone Eater (a Blackfeet band) living in the Two Medi-cine Territory of Montana. White Man's Dog is "restless" and "not so lucky . . . he had little to so show for his eighteen winters."4 The story, which can be interpreted partly as a coming-of-age story, follows the life and transformation of White Man's Dog from a young man to be pitied to one who earns the new name Fools Crow and becomes a well-respected tribal member. Fools Crow is more than a coming-of-age story, however, because as the life of Fools Crow unfolds, so does a Blackfeet story of epic proportions. Welch brings an emotional realism to Fools Crow and requires the reader to pay attention as he draws readers deeply into the Pikuni world. Mixing both real and imagined stories, people, and events, Welch brings readers a world filled with love, unity, disunity, conflict, death, and survival. The reader travels the Montana landscape of the 1800s with the well-developed characters. We, the readers, become attached to people who suffer trials and tribulations as they fight for their survival and way of life in the face of white encroachments, intratribal and intertribal conflict, and disease. The multidimensional Fools Crow provides a wealth of information about the Pikuni and their representation of sickness. The story humanizes the impacts and devastation of illness, raises questions of morals and values, and illustrates the historical and cultural contexts of disease and [End Page 179] care. Both Native and non-Native illnesses...