Native American Rights Research Articles

City Indian: Native American Activism in Chicago, 1893-1934 by Rosalyn R. Lapier and David R. M. Beck (review)

City Indian: Native American Activism in Chicago, 1893-1934 by Rosalyn R. Lapier and David R. M. Beck (review)

A Generation Removed: The Fostering and Adoption of Indigenous Children in the Postwar World by Margaret D. Jacobs

Reviewed by: A Generation Removed: The Fostering and Adoption of Indigenous Children in the Postwar World by Margaret D. Jacobs Catherine E. Rymph A Generation Removed: The Fostering and Adoption of Indigenous Children in the Postwar World. By Margaret D. Jacobs. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014. xxxv + 360 pp. Cloth $29.95. The story of indigenous child removal is a devastating one. The well-known Indian boarding schools of the late nineteenth century United States separated children from their families, communities, language, and culture and thus served as a radical assimilation project. Less familiar may be the ongoing removal of native children from their families deep into the twentieth century. In this fascinating book, Jacobs shows how post–World War II policy changes that scaled back governments’ existing obligations to indigenous peoples coincided with “purportedly color-blind liberalism” in the United States, Canada, and Australia to make indigenous placement in nonindigenous homes seem not only a practical but a humane way to promote the welfare of indigenous children (259). The book’s first two sections focus on Indian child removal in the United States and the grassroots activism that would come to oppose it. The third [End Page 347] section explores parallel histories in Canada and Australia. Although the particular legal and jurisdictional contexts were somewhat different in each country, there were remarkably similar patterns of reform and reaction in what Jacobs identifies as a global phenomenon. In the United States, beginning in the late 1950s, the Indian Adoption Project sought white parents to adopt Indian children and worked to persuade Indian mothers to relinquish newborns. The IAP was intended to address a host of perceived problems. For Jacobs, many of the “problems” that the experts were trying to solve through foster care and adoption were in fact “invented” by those same experts. By constructing children as “unwanted” and their families and communities as hopelessly impoverished and deviant, they helped create a powerful desire among liberal Americans to “rescue” these children as a way to address the “plight” of the Indian (39). Bureaucrats, Jacobs argues, too often turned to draconian solutions like child removal because they could not see the strengths that already existed in Indian families and because they were unable to imagine solutions for Indian children that involved shoring up Indian families and promoting economic and educational opportunity close to home. Native American activists, often initially motivated by the pain of their own experiences of child removal, argued that Indian children were not just members of nuclear families, but also of “extended families, clans, and tribes” (77). Thus the placement of a child outside the tribe affected the collective interests of a much larger group than just the child’s parents and could be seen as a form of cultural genocide. Jacobs details the remarkable stories of Native American activists (mostly women) and their white allies as they struggled to convey the harm done by the IAP. Their efforts culminated in the passage of the Indian Child Welfare Act in 1978, which aimed to curb the placement of Indian children outside of tribal communities by giving tribes sovereignty over child welfare. In the third section, Jacobs turns to the strikingly similar stories of Canada and Australia. The transnational approach allows us to see that Indigenous child welfare crises were “part of a pattern among settler colonial nations” (248). The grassroots movements against such policies were also international ones, strengthened by personal connections between activists in different countries that were stimulated by travel, speaking engagements, correspondence, and sharing of resources. Although indigenous child removal is indeed unique, there are also a number of fascinating parallels in the broader history of race, nationality, and poverty within adoption and foster care, which Jacobs might have done more [End Page 348] to acknowledge and address. That her book invites such comparisons, however, is a tribute to her thorough and complex treatment of a challenging subject. Scholars from a variety of fields will welcome this work. Catherine E. Rymph University of Missouri Copyright © 2016 Johns Hopkins University Press

Rosalyn R. LaPier and David R. M. Beck's <i>City Indian: Native American Activism in Chicago, 1893-1934</i>

Rosalyn R. LaPier and David R. M. Beck's <i>City Indian: Native American Activism in Chicago, 1893-1934</i>

Late-Holocene drought and fire drove a widespread change in forest community composition in eastern North America

Several regions of the world have recently experienced climate-induced changes in forest composition, highlighting the need to understand the causes, likelihood, and dynamics of abrupt vegetation change. Although few historical examples of climate-induced forest change exist from recent centuries, particularly in humid regions like the northeastern United States, paleoecological records are rich with examples. For example, pollen records from portions of the northeastern United States indicate that eastern hemlock ( Tsuga canadensis) and American beech ( Fagus grandifolia) abruptly declined in abundance between 500 and 600 yr BP. Concomitant increases in pine ( Pinus spp.) and oak ( Quercus spp.) occurred. Hypotheses to explain this change have included cooling during the ‘Little Ice Age’ (LIA), Native American activity, drought, and/or fires. To better understand spatiotemporal patterns of forest change and assess potential causes and dynamics, we synthesized regional pollen records and developed two high-resolution, coupled records of vegetation, fire, and drought from bogs in Maine. Results of our synthesis reveal >70% of regional pollen sites recorded shifts in forest composition during this time period. Bog records revealed that forest composition changed a few decades after the onset of drought and regional fires, consistent with increased recruitment of pine and oak during post-disturbance succession. Vegetation changes persisted until European settlement. Our data demonstrate that widespread, long-lasting forest changes were triggered by decadal-to-multidecadal drought and associated fires, highlighting the potential for abrupt, long-lasting forest changes in response to transient climate and disturbance events, particularly when such events occur against the backdrop of more gradual temperature change.

Son of the Forest: William Apess and the Fight for Indigenous Rights

Son of the Forest:William Apess and the Fight for Indigenous Rights Philip F. Gura (bio) from The Life of William Apess, Pequot On April 10, 1839, Dr. J. S. Hurd, a New York City medical examiner, performed an autopsy on a man at William Garlick’s boardinghouse in lower Manhattan. Garlick’s boardinghouse stood at 31 Washington Street, two streets east of the Hudson River and bordered by Battery Place and Moore Street. Washington Street was one of several thoroughfares in a neighborhood that was home to crowds of low-paid workers, a population mirrored across the island along the East River, where eighteenth-century Dutch and English inhabitants had built sturdy homes adjacent to flourishing slips, piers, and warehouses. As commerce increased, though, the “East Ward” had become overcrowded. Wealthier families moved uptown, as far north as Fourteenth Street along Broadway, into neighborhoods delineated by the “grid” plan that the city’s Streets Commission had instituted for more orderly development. Their previous homes then became boardinghouses for an ever-shifting population of clerks, craft apprentices, cart men, dockworkers, sailors, and various day laborers. The deceased had lived at this address since January with his second wife, Elizabeth, to whom he had been married for at least two years. Within days of the inquest into his death, scores of newspapers in New York, New England, and down the East Coast were reporting his demise. But bespeaking the man’s obscurity, what publicity there was surrounding his death initially lay more in its circumstances, signaled by a notice in the Philadelphia North American, than in his identity. “lobelia again,” the column read, for the inquest had uncovered that a “botanic physician,” Dr. Asher Atkinson, had administered lobelia, a homeopathic drug, to his patient shortly before his death. Many people, particularly members of the established medical profession, regarded botanic medicine as quackery, and the headline implied that Atkinson’s ministrations had evidently contributed to another patient’s demise. In such cities as New York and Philadelphia, where tensions between botanic and allopathic physicians were especially great, many readers viewed this individual’s death as but another example of the failure of unregulated medical practice. The inquest, however, concluded that he had died of “apoplexy,” a diagnosis commonly used to describe something akin to a stroke and whose symptoms were congruent with what Dr. Hurd had found in his examination. The inquest [End Page 72] absolved Dr. Atkinson of any blame and dampened further attempts to place the lack of effectiveness of botanic medicine at the center of the story of this individual’s death. Instead, reports shifted to who he was. A notice in the Philadelphia North American described him as “a Narragansett Indian … otherwise known about the country as Apes the Missionary Preacher.” “The deceased in his lifetime was an author,” the Albany Evening Journal noted, who “wrote the Life of ‘King Philip,’ several sermons, &c, which he sold for his own interest.” The same paper mentioned, albeit erroneously, that the man’s wife was a “good looking white woman,” a fact that, though titillating to some genteel readers, would not have made the couple unusual in lower Manhattan neighborhoods. Five Points, for example, was notoriously multiracial. No newspaper, however, mentioned that six years earlier the deceased had begun a meteoric rise as a spokesperson for Native American rights and liberties. The deceased was forty-one-year-old William Apess. Two years earlier, he had been one of the country’s most important Native American intellectuals, having published more than any other indigenous writer before the twentieth century and attained fame and notoriety for championing his people’s tribal rights. In 1829, he had issued his autobiography, the first Native American to do so. He had led the successful challenge of the Mashpee Indians against the state of Massachusetts, through which the Mashpees sought to restore some measure of self-governance. Apess subsequently had embarked on a lecture career in New York, speaking on the history and culture of Native Americans. Despite Apess’s extraordinary significance, today he is known almost exclusively among scholars of Native American studies, with excerpts from his writings taught...

The Journey to and After Alcatraz: The Legacy of the Occupation of Alcatraz for Native American Protest Movements

The Occupation of Alcatraz was a movement in 1969, which sparked National Debate in the United States. The Occupation lasted from 20, November 1969 till June 1971 when 15 last occupiers were peacefully escorted off the island. The protest did not end with a change in government policy but inspired other protests and an activist group to be created for Native American rights. Reflecting on why the occupation at Alcatraz was ineffective, Vine Deloria, Jr. argued in 1994, “we want change, but we do not know what change.” Deloria was a well-known activist during the 1960s and was invited to the island of Alcatraz during its occupation. The Occupation of Alcatraz was seen as an unsuccessful protest because it did not spur government action to address Native American grievances. The occupation occurred at a time when tensions between minority groups and the government were rising due to the civil rights movement. Native Americans were forcibly removed from reserves due to relocation and assimilation programs, and land was being taken away for resources as well. The Occupation was a response to what seemed to be the continuous cycle of abuse from the American government. Termination and assimilation policies divided and separated families and tribes, which created disconnections among Native Americans, making it hard to unify against the American government. Though the Occupation did not end with government action or policy change, it started a collaboration of Native American protests, which revived Native American identities for many people. Native Americans’ reactions to federal suppression at the Occupation of Alcatraz led to a legacy of protests that changed Native American life.

Marisol: sculptures and works on paper

The Paris-born, Venezuelan artist Marisol (b. 1930) burst onto the 1960s New York art scene with large figural sculptures in a wild amalgam of mixed media. Often satirical, Marisol's art is inspired by sources as diverse as Pre-Columbian art, folk art, Cubism, and Surrealism. For the past several decades, however, Marisol has shunned the spotlight and her artwork has been overlooked as a result. Accompanying the first retrospective of Marisol's work in more than a decade, this long-awaited and beautifully illustrated volume offers a much-needed corrective, reestablishing her role as a major figure in postwar American art. Essays by leading scholars of Latin American and 20th-century art explore all facets of her work including her influences, the theme of family, American politics and pop culture, Native American rights and poverty, her role as a female artist, and her relationship to Latin America and Latin American art.

Land, children and politics: Native Americans and Australian Aborigines 1900–1930

In this publication to honour Professor Ann Curthoys this article considers the comparative aspects of Native American and Australian Aboriginal political activism in the time period 1900–1930. Central to the study is the importance of revealing the missing chapters of Indigenous political history in both the countries during these important and largely overlooked decades. The approach undertaken is restorative history and privileges the tools of historical narrative (story). The current study places the significance and impact of Indigenous campaigners at the forefront of an awakening awareness of the shared political and racial challenges confronting Indigenous people in the USA and Australia. There were many similar issues confronting both the Indigenous groups. These included the pressures applied on Indigenous land and its resources and the removal of Indigenous children from their families. The article highlights the tactics and voices of Indigenous opposition in fighting courageously for their rights and people.

Anthony Benezet: The Emergence of a Weighty Friend

Anthony Benezet:The Emergence of a Weighty Friend J. William Frost (bio) Anthony Benezet emerged as a leader in the international antislavery movement because he already enjoyed a community of support in the Society of Friends in America and Britain that gave legitimacy to his many charitable activities and access to political leaders in Pennsylvania and London. Why he became a Quaker, his understanding of Christian living, and how he became a reformer among Friends and their influence upon him are the subjects of this article. Had Benezet joined any other denomination in Philadelphia, it is doubtful that he could have become such an influential person. Although Benezet remains little known by the general public, scholars of colonial Quakers and antislavery have often noted his many accomplishments: creator of the international antislavery movement, indefatigable pamphleteer about the slave trade and slavery, advocate for relief of the Acadians, defender of Native American rights, defender of pacifism, proponent of what is now termed “progressive education,” and beloved teacher in Penn Charter schools for boys, girls, and African Americans. Historians have provided good secondary literature focusing on Benezet’s public career after 1755, but no one has concentrated on what can be discovered about his earlier life, particularly on his roles in Friends meetings where he gained the skills that he later utilized.1 The Benezets had been a prominent and prosperous Huguenot family in France before Louis XIV repealed the Edict of Nantes and began the persecution of Protestants. In 1713 Anthony was born in St. Quentin, France, but two years later, after John Stephen Benezet’s estate was confiscated, his family fled first to Holland and then to England where they lived until 1731. John Stephen Benezet prospered as a merchant in London, but, according to an account provided many years later by Anthony Benezet, “My father was not better pleased with those [priests] of England; wishing to get out of the way of all hierarchy.”2 Living in Philadelphia and Germantown, John Benezet prospered and both he and his son attended Friends meetings. While it would be tempting to assume that Philadelphia Quakers immediately recognized Anthony Benezet’s talents and piety upon arrival as a young immigrant, that does not seem to have been the case. Benezet did not have many of the advantages of most eighteenth-century weighty Friends in Philadelphia. He was an immigrant, even if he did Anglicize his name, during a period that France and England were often at war.3 Initially, he was an unsuccessful merchant [End Page 1] living among Quaker leaders like the Pembertons, Logans, Smiths, Morrises, and Norrises who had become wealthy by trade and land speculation and whose families had long been influential in Philadelphia Monthly and Yearly Meeting. Benezet’s family, though prosperous, was no help because he was the only one who remained a Friend. Speaking in meeting and being recognized as a minister was one way for outsiders who were not wealthy to gain stature in meeting, but Anthony never became a minster. Unlike London Yearly Meeting, where school teachers Alexander Arscott, David Hall, and John Gough provided intellectual leadership, the only prominent Philadelphia teachers before the Revolution were George Keith, who was disowned, Francis Daniel Pastorius of Germantown, who was a lawyer and scholar, and John Woolman, who also was a minister. Teachers in the Penn Charter Latin School, mostly immigrants from England, had prestige and a substantial salary, but that was not true of Benezet who taught first in the English school for boys and then a school for girls. Anthony Benezet arrived in Pennsylvania in 1732 as a boy of eighteen who was accepted by Philadelphia Yearly Meeting as a member, but we have little personal information before he emerged as an antislavery advocate twenty-two years later. The compilation of Benezet’s letters by George Brookes has only two letters, an application to be a schoolmaster in the English school of Philadelphia Friends in 1742 and one he wrote on behalf of his father and brothers in 1751 attempting to persuade his sister, Susanne Pyrleus, not to leave her infant children behind while she accompanied her Moravian missionary-minister husband on a trip to...

The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend by Glenn Frankel (review)

Reviewed by: The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend by Glenn Frankel Edwin Whitewolf The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend. By Glenn Frankel. New York: Bloomsbury, 2013. 416 pages, $28.00. Within the introduction to The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend, Glenn Frankel explains that what he finds most striking about the film is John Ford’s “ability to weave myth and truth into a seamless fabric” (8). This book is Frankel’s attempt at deconstructing the myths behind the film: the kidnapping of a white settler girl named Cynthia Ann Parker, her assimilation into Comanche society, and her “rescue” decades later by the Texas Rangers. Frankel elucidates how this history has been written, rewritten, and reinterpreted by a number of people and groups, including Ford in his 1956 film The Searchers. The first two sections of the book compose the most compelling half of the narrative when Frankel deals specifically with the mythology of how Parker’s story has been passed down and translated throughout the years by her white and Comanche descendants, as well as by US western writer Alan LeMay and filmmaker John Ford. Frankel deftly deconstructs a number of interwoven mythologies involving white settlers, Comanches, Texas Rangers, western fiction writers, directors, producers, Navajo actors, movie stars, and he convincingly illustrates how the story of one woman became a part of the mainstream US consciousness. Also admirable is how Frankel privileges histories written by women, representing much of the mythology surrounding Parker as the product of male creation: “Each of these male authors created and buffed the macho frontier legend using whatever facts fit their vision and discarding those that were less convenient. But occasionally, someone came along who gathered a more modest, fact-based account” (151). Thus, he privileges the voices of Rachel Plummer, Marion Ross, Susan Parker St. John, and Araminta Taulman in telling this history. It is disappointing, however, that Frankel settles upon a particular representation of the Comanches. He elides the history and cycles of violence that had shaped Comanche/Euroamerican relations for hundreds of years previous to the kidnapping of Parker and portrays the Comanche people largely as marauding, baby-killing rapists bent on the destruction of white bodies. While he comments about the regrettable way US citizens and the US government treated Native Americans in general, he claims, “The modern image of Indians—nurtured by the Native American rights movement, revisionist historians, and the film Dances with Wolves—has been one of profoundly spiritual and environmentally friendly genocide victims seeking harmony with the land and humankind. But the Comanches were nobody’s victims and no one’s friends. They were magnificent, brutal, and relentless” (32). While only a revisionist historian could portray the Comanches as a peaceable or docile people, Frankel portrays them using the language one [End Page 490] would use in describing the great white shark in Jaws (1975). He largely ignores that the Comanches fought back against the Euroamerican encroachment that had dispossessed them from their land and spread disease and famine among them for generations. Additionally, many Native American studies scholars and many people within the Native American rights movement, or even those familiar with it, would take issue with Frankel’s suggestion that they have nurtured an image of Native Americans as anything other than human beings who are not simply figures of a brutal or a romanticized past. Finally, is Frankel proposing that Native Americans were not victims of genocide? Is genocide a word that can only be applied to those victims that can be deemed friendly or incapable of resisting? In the introduction, Frankel explains what he found most fascinating about The Searchers when he watched it in his youth: “What entranced me most were the Comanches. … Ford’s portrait of them is mostly one-dimensional: Indians in The Searchers are for the most part murderers and rapists” (7). It is, therefore, ironic that Frankel largely portrays the Comanches in the same fashion. This lack of historical contextualization is especially frustrating because, otherwise, the book is truly captivating. Frankel’s illustration of how a specific history gave birth to a number of mythologies and how those mythologies in turn...

“This Isn’t Your Battle or Your Land”: The Native American Occupation of Alcatraz in the Asian-American Political Imagination

This article assembles a historical narrative about the Asian-American presence at the Native American occupation of Alcatraz in the earlly 1970s by examining three sources: a series of contemporary articles from the newspaper Gidra , Shawn Wong’s novel Homebase (1979), and Karen Tei Yamashita’s novel I Hotel (2010). In contextualizing this moment within the larger history of cross-racial coalitional politics during the 1960s and 1970s, this paper illustrate how minority nationalisms of the time emerged in “mimetic dynamism”: a process of contiguous interchange that changes the conditions by which it exists. This paper focuses on the Asian-American appropriation of the concept “self-determination” and its relation to land occupation.

To Tell the Truth

Review Article| November 01 2013 To Tell the Truth Randolph Bergstrom Randolph Bergstrom Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar The Public Historian (2013) 35 (4): 7–9. https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2013.35.4.7 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Randolph Bergstrom; To Tell the Truth. The Public Historian 1 November 2013; 35 (4): 7–9. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2013.35.4.7 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentThe Public Historian Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2013 by The Regents of the University of California and the National Council on Public History2013 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

In the Smaller Scope of Conscience: The Native American Graves Protection & Repatriation Act Twelve Years After

I. THE TRUE COMPROMISE Standing before the United States Senate on October 26, 1990, Senator John McCain asked the approval of his colleagues to consider H.R. 5237, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (1) (NAGPRA). passage of legislation marks the end of a long process for many Indian tribes and museums. The subject of repatriation, stressed McCain, is charged with high emotions in both the Native American community and the museum community. I believe this bill represents a true (2) H.R. 5237 had originally been introduced by McCain's fellow Arizonan, Representative Morris Udall. With McCain's urging, the Senate passed the bill by a voice vote. The House of Representatives passed the amended version by unanimous consent the next day. Congress was not acting unilaterally in supporting NAGPRA. A May 11, 1990 letter to House and Senate members urging passage of repatriation legislation was signed by representatives of the American Baptist Churches, American Ethical Union, Church of the Bretheren, Church Women United, Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Friends Committee on National Legislation, Episcopal Church, Jesuit Social Ministries, Mennonite Central Committee, Presbyterian Church, Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations, United Church of Christ, and the United Methodist Church. (3) An October 12, 1990 letter from the American Association of Museums also indicated its support of H.R. 5237. (4) An October 17, 1990 letter to members of Congress further broadened support for H.R. 5237 to include representatives of the American Civil Liberties Union, American Jewish Committee, American Jewish Congress, Central Conference of American Rabbis, National Council of Jewish Women, and Union of American Hebrew Congregations. (5) A November 2, 1990 letter urging President George Bush to sign the bill into law further added and diversified parties to this compromise. (6) The letter was signed by the heads of the Society for American Archaeology, American Anthropological Association, American Association of Physical Anthropologists, Archaeological Institute of America, Association on American Indian Affairs, Native American Rights Fund, National Conference of State Historic Preservation Officers, National Congress of American Indians, National Trust for Historic Preservation, Preservation Action, Society for Historical Archaeology, and Society of Professional Archaeologists. The long process of which McCain spoke began in 1986, as Congress sought to reconcile four major areas of federal law. As civil rights legislation, Congress wished to acknowledge that throughout U.S. history, Native American human remains and funerary objects suffered from disparate treatment as compared with the human remains and funerary objects of other groups. (7) Congress also wanted to recognize that the loss of sacred objects by Indian tribes and Native Hawaiian organizations to unscrupulous collectors negatively impacted Native American religious practices. (8) In making this Indian law, Congress founded its efforts on an explicit Constitutional recognition of tribal sovereignty and the government-to-government relationship between the United States and Indian tribes. (9) Regarding property law, Congress wanted to clarify the unique status of the dead as well as highlight the failure of American law to adequately recognize traditional concepts of communal property in use by some Indian tribes. (10) Lastly, in trams of administrative law, Congress would direct the Department of the Interior to implement Congress' mandate, including the promulgation of regulations to ensure due process, awarding of grants, and assessment of civil penalties. (11) In all, 26 separate bills were proposed or introduced, and two public laws were enacted over a four-year period as a compromise on these multiple issues was negotiated. (12) NAGPRA reconciled these various concerns by establishing three sets of provisions. …

Genomic Research in Indian Country: The New Road to Termination?

Genomic science has generated controversy in the social, legal, and ethical arenas for decades, and indigenous populations continue to be a subject of great interest in this area. This article looks at the recent concept of population genomics, a biotechnology used to help scientists understand how genetic variation relates to human health and evolutionary history. Parts II and III examine the debate among scientists as to the migration of the “first Americans” into North America, a debate that is quickly being influenced by the DNA markers found in the human genome. Part IV surveys the history of scientific research involving indigenous peoples – a history predominantly colored by ignorance and bias – as science was presented as conclusive proof of their savage nature and inferiority as a race. Scientists today proffer evidence that the ancestors of Native Americans were, in reality, colonists who immigrated from Africa, Europe, and/or Asia, and Part V analyzes a number of indicators that point to the possibility of genomic research providing justification for another termination of the special status and rights of Native Americans. Part VI looks at a number of tools that tribes may wish to consider using to help protect the genetic information of their members as they are faced with the seemingly endless need of researchers for Native American DNA. The article concludes that while suppositions of geneticists are in actuality just theories of historic migration, these theories have gained acceptance as fact in mainstream society. Given current indicators, Congress and/or the courts may very well use genomic science to justify another termination of the federal/tribal trust relationship.

Emerson’s Politics

Arsic, Branka. 2010. On Leaving: A Reading in Emerson. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. $51.50 hc. xi + 387.Greenham, David. 2012. Emerson's Transatlantic Romanticism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. $85.00 hc. xiv + 213.Habich, Robert D. 2011. Building Their Own Waldos: Emerson's First Biographers and the Politics of Life-Writing in the Gilded Age. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. $29.95 sc. $29.95 e. xxviii + 186.Levine, Alan M., and Daniel S. Malachuk, eds. 2011. A Political Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. $40.00 hc. $40.00 e. xi + 487.Writing for a nation that had recently ended Reconstruction with a devil's bargain that took the federal government out of race politics, Emerson's first biographers had little incentive to commemorate him as a religious rebel who became an abolitionist. Rather, Emerson's legacy was first written in the affirming terms of a literary nationalism built around the heroic independence of the private individual. But in 1882 when Emerson died, even that effort faced significant obstacles because his name, like the word Transcendentalism, was already shorthand for a self-indulgent posture of mystical optimism.Despite the emerging caricature, oracular sketches of the sage of Concord always competed with serious efforts to grapple with Emerson's writing. Friedrich Nietzsche's absorption of Emerson's essays and John Dewey's 1903 commemorative essay Emerson: Philosopher of Democracy began a continuing project of incorporating Emerson's thought into analysis of identity, aesthetics, epistemology, and spirituality. Partly because of the caricature, Emerson's relevance to politics has always been ambiguous. Philosophers with a particular interest in public life have often addressed Emerson's writing. But they have tended to assume that Emerson's thought is fundamentally self-reflective and that its importance for politics is more implicit than explicit. The priority that George Kateb gives to mental over active self-reliance, for example, characterizes this approach to Emerson's thought about liberal political identity (2002, 33-36). In recent criticism, however, it has become common to assume that Emerson's essays make explicit political interventions. Thus, in addition to its relevance for subjectivity, spirituality, aesthetics, and epistemology, Emerson's writing also bears on questions of community, structures of public authority, situated selfhood, citizenship, civic obligation, the value of institutional memberships, and other questions related to political integration.The distinction between Emerson's implicit and explicit relationships to political thought is important because it repositions his project in relation to civil society. It makes him less a critic and skeptic trying to defend individuality against the alienations of mass democracy and industrialization, and more an affirmative theorist of communal relationships trying to envision citizens living in an actually existing civil society.In the 1990s, works such as Len Gougeon's Virtue's Hero (1990), Phyllis Cole's Mary Moody Emerson and the Origins of Transcendentalism (1998), and Albert J. von Frank's The Trials of Anthony Burns (1998) led to extensive reconstruction of the Transcendentalists' involvement in politics. This research has demonstrated the depth and breadth of their involvement in antislavery and their advocacy of women's and Native American rights. As a result, where it was once reasonable to dismiss Emerson as politically irrelevant and to treat Transcendentalism as an effort to withdraw from the politics of Jacksonian democratization, it is now much more difficult to do so. On the other hand, with the reconstruction of Emerson's thought about race and slavery, recent historicist work has also made it easier to argue that Emerson's politics are either aggressively racist or methodologically reactionary. For example, in her recent history of race in the United States, Nell Painter (2010) singles Emerson out as a uniquely pernicious advocate of Anglo-Saxon superiority. …

Hopi Oral Tradition and the Archaeology of Identity

Native American activists of the civil rights era leveled heavy critiques at archaeology and anthropology for their prior support of colonial legislation and lack of sensitivity towards Native viewpoints. Archaeology in particular was taken to task for the destruction of numerous burial sites and the theft of thousands of Native American bodily remains and cultural items for over a century. The decades-long efforts by Native Americans and their non-Indian allies (which included some archaeologists) to secure the return of these remains and objects paid off in 1990. The passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) mandates that all federally funded institutions possessing Native American remains and artifacts return them to tribes able to demonstrate historical and cultural connections to the items. As a consequence of Native American opposition to the racial and cultural insensitivities within archaeology, social scientists in general have learned that Native people can no longer be counted on to passively sit back and accept what outsiders say and write about them. Today, archaeology is a much more collaborative effort between archaeologists and Indians, with Native viewpoints often serving as focal points underpinning studies rather than as quaint addendums or trivial postscripts.

Review

126 The Michigan Historical Review In addition, Baldwin manages to capture the perspectives of island residents—including fishermen, resort owners, and families with longheld property interests—all of whom were frequently caught among competing federal entities, logging firms, and environmentalists. Ironically, it was these same residents’ work to preserve the Isle Royale wilderness that led to their ultimate departure from the island. As a scholarly work, Becoming Wilderness suffers shortcomings in its photo captions and reference notes (this reviewer is still not clear where Albert Stoll’s “Detroit News Isle Royale Papers” reside). But such criticism is negligible, and the book’s humble length (90 pages) and affordable price clearly target a more general audience. Baldwin’s narrative is supplemented by more than 60 photographs and maps, a perfect read for the ferry crossing to Rock Harbor—or to tuck into your rucksack for later enjoyment. Erik Nordberg Michigan Technological University Charles E. Cleland et al. Faith in Paper: The Ethnohistory and Litigation of Upper Great Lakes Indian Treaties. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011. Pp. 391. Bibliography. Index. Maps. Notes. Tables. Cloth, $95.00. During the treaty era from 1815 to 1871, American settlement expanded westward and encroached increasingly upon indigenous territory in the Great Lakes region. The presence of Native Americans on so much economically viable but misused land (from the American purview) constituted the “Indian problem,” the solution to which was the formation of a legal relationship by treaty. Anthropologist Charles Cleland explains this process in Faith in Paper, a book that deftly blends ethnohistory with jurisprudence to reveal a complex narrative of cultural interaction between Native Americans and settlers. In turn, this study of the nineteenth-century Great Lakes region illuminates present legal disputes over territorial rights by examining how and why treaties were established. As the author states, the “proper alignment of law, anthropology, and history could be a powerful force for social change” (p. 3). Faith in Paper is multifaceted in both its content and purpose. It is arranged into segments alternating between the historical background supplied by Cleland and the analyses of contemporary court cases by the Book Reviews 127 book’s contributing authors. In this way, the work juxtaposes the broader history of the upper Great Lakes, the development of treaties between Native residents (the Anishinaabeg cultures of the Odawa, Ojibwe, and Potawatomi) and Americans, and contemporary legal conflicts between the states and Native nations. Cleland strives to remain objective throughout the work, though he concedes that his role as an expert witness in several of the court cases analyzed in the text has influenced his observations. At any rate, he carefully presents the perspectives and motivations of both parties in the treaty-making process. Moreover, Cleland contends that, given the lack of written histories among the Anishinaabeg, knowledge of culture proves a useful tool for extrapolating an indigenous point of view otherwise lost in the historical record. The information provided by Cleland is incredibly detailed and fascinating, though the history of treaty negotiations is not necessarily groundbreaking on its own. The true value of the histories he examines is their current relevance, which is made manifest by the book’s contributing authors. Lawyers and Native American rights activists, including Bruce Green and Kathryn Tierney, draw from their experiences in more recent cases, such as United States v. Michigan and Lac Courte Oreilles Band v. Wisconsin, to demonstrate the importance of recognizing the nation-to-nation treaty relationship between tribal groups and states. For example, using Cleland’s descriptions of the usufruct privileges granted in perpetuity by the treaties of 1836 and 1855, Green, Tierney, and others show the utility of applying history to resolve current disputes. Faith in Paper is a terrific study of the treaty era in the Great Lakes and how negotiation and accommodation—both fair and imbalanced— were crucial to cultural interaction in the region. By combining cultural and legal histories, the book also illustrates the increasing viability of an interdisciplinary approach to academic research in Native American studies. Finally, the book implicitly pushes important concerns of Native Americans to the fore. Faith in Paper is informative, but it also calls for a more progressive public dialogue...

Introduction to the Special Issue: The Native American Languages Act of 1990/1992 — 20 Years of Federal Support for Indigenous Language Revitalization

Introduction to the Special Issue The Native American Languages Act of 1990/1992 - 20 Years of Federal Support for Indigenous Language devitalization LarisaWarhol This commemorates (NALA) special of1990/1992 issue the20th of and anniversary the attendant Journal of federal the of Native American support American for Indian Native Languages Education American Act commemorates the20th anniversary oftheNative American Languages Act (NALA) of1990/1992 andattendant federal support for Native American languages. Begun asa grassroots effort byNative language activists andeducators inthelate1980s,NALA affirmed thefederal government's roleinpreserving andprotecting Native American languages. Thepolicy alsoestablished a grant program through theAdministration ofNativeAmericans (ANA) that serves as a primary resource forcommunityand school-basedNativelanguage revitalization programs. NALA has servedas a foundation formorerecent federal, stateand community-based policiesencouraging Nativelanguage education. Language andeducation policy intheUnited States, though, remains challenging and oftencontradictory, as the articlesin thisspecial issue demonstrate. Following NALA's passage, someargued that itcametoolate, with many communities already experiencing languageshift. Moreover, thepolicywas inherently limited as itwasa declaration lacking anyenforcement plans, andthe funding foritsprograms hasbeenmeager (Romaine, 2002;Schiffman, 1996). While these arguments reveal thelimitations ofofficial policy, NALAnonetheless reversed centuries ofsystematic linguistic andcultural eradication, demonstrated theself-determination of Nativecommunities to establish policydirectly in support oftheir goals,andcreateda foundation forNativecommunities to continue to buildpoliciesand changeideologiesabouttheimportance of strenthening Indigenous languages. NALAalsostands as theonly official stance thefederal government hastaken onlanguage todate.Itspassagemarks a shift inideology instate andfederal language andeducation policy, andintheways that Native communities viewthemaintenance oftheir languages as wellas in other socialdomains andinstitutions suchas schoolsanduniversities, many of Journal of American Indian Education -51,Issue3,2012 1 which havechosen tosupport communities' revitalization efforts. Whilemany communities hadbeenengagedinrevitalization work formany yearsprior to NALA,thelaw's passageheralded increased scholarly attention tolanguage revitalization within thefields oflanguage planning andpolicyandAmerican Indianeducation. Thus,NALA's importance to thelanguagerevitalization movement cannotbe over-emphasized. The remainder of thisintroduction provides background andcontext onNALA,including itsadministration bythe ANAfor thepast18years, andsituates thearticles inthisspecialissueas they address policyconsiderations andcurrent language revitalization activities in Indigenous communities throughout theUnited States. The NativeAmericanLanguagesActof1990/1992 NALAwaspassedbytheU.S. Congress in1990as a federal policy declaration insupport ofthepreservation andprotection ofNative American languages. The policy wasunprecedented for a variety ofreasons. First, historically federal policy hadaimedtoeradicate thesesamelanguages. Second,NALA recognized the connection between language andeducation achievement, andthird, itestablished anofficial federal stance onlanguage despite thefederal government's refusal toacknowledge anofficial U.S. language. NALAreaffirmed federal recognition ofthestatus ofNativelanguagesintheU.S. anditsposition towards those languages andtheir speakers. Simultaneously, thestatute reaffirmed Native American rights toself-determination andsovereignty as wellas theimportant connections between language, culture andchildren's academic achievement. (See policytextincludedin thisspecial issue.) NALA established thefederal government's responsibility inensuring thecontinuation ofNativelanguages, calledfor evaluation ofcurrent government programs inorder tofurther support Nativelanguages, and encouraged statesto use Nativelanguagesin state institutions, including schools. In 1992 NALA was amendedto includefinancial appropriations and provisions forcommunity languageprograms, training programs, materials development and language documentation. These grantprogramsare administered bytheANAwithin theAdministration for Children andFamilies. TheANAcurrently hastwotypes ofgrant programs: onefor assessing, planning orimplementing a community-based language project orprogram, andanother specifically for Native language immersion survival schools. Funding for the latter beganin2008 as an outcome ofthe2006 Esther Martinez NativeAmerican Languages Preservation Act(seethearticle byWarhol andthetext ofthislaw inthisspecialissue) - theresult ofanother grassroots movement tofurther amend NALAtoprovide for immersion schools asthey haddemonstrated success with both language revitalization andacademicachievement. Development ofNALA Theimportance ofNALAislargely connected totherationale for itsgenesis by Native language activists andeducators inthe1980s.Whilethepolicy beganas 2 Journal of American Indian Education -Volume 51,Issue3,2012 a resolution emerging from the1988Native American Language IssuesInstitute (NALI)/American Indian Language Development Institute (AILDI) conference inTempe, Arizona (McCarty, 1993),itsdevelopment andpassagewerea result ofa convergence ofefforts bybilingual educators andlinguists, theHawaiian language revitalization movement andtheinterests oftheSenateCommittee on Indian Affairs tofight a growing tideofstate-level English-only initiatives. NativeAmerican bilingual education beganinthe1960sontheNavajo reservation atRoughRock,Arizona andother community-controlled bilingual schoolssoonsprang upintribal communities throughout theU.S. (McCarty, 2002;St.Clair& Leap,1982;Watahomigie & Yamamoto, 1992).Thisadvent ofbilingual education established early collaborations between academic linguists andlocal Nativeeducators, leadingtothecreation ofregional institutes and national organizations thatbothreflected and lentcrucialsupport to these collaborations. Institutes andorganizations that emerged from federal policies suchas the1968Bilingual Education Actandthe1972IndianEducation Act includeAILDI, NALI, andtheshort-lived NationalIndianBilingualCenter (NIBC). The hallmark goalsoftheseorganizations weretosupport andtrain Nativeeducators andlinguists, provide professional development toschools servingNativestudents, and produceNativelanguageteachingmaterials (McCarty etal.,2001).Theseorganizations alsobecame important sites for tribal policydevelopment in support ofNativelanguageeducation andtheywere instrumental inestablishing a foundational network oflanguage educators and activists acrossIndianCountry. Concurrently, the Hawaiian...

Who’s Afraid of Identity Politics?

Who’s Afraid of Identity Politics?

Sephardism and Marranism in Native American Fiction of the Quincentenary

So then, after having expelled all Jews from all your kingdoms and domains, in same month of January, Your Highnesses commanded me to take sufficient ships and sail to said regions of India. And in consideration you granted me great favours and honoured me thenceforth with title 'Don' and rank of Admiral of Ocean Sea and Viceroy and Governor in perpetuity of all islands and mainland that I should discover and take possession of. --Christopher Columbus, Journal of First Voyage, 1492 (3) Columbus, marrano in search of an eternal haven, landed five centuries later in hundreds of historical studies. That a marrano would be celebrated as discoverer of this nation, and, in words of President Ronald Reagan, inventor of American Dream, is an ironic weave of narrative histories; alas, marrano must be an onerous signature to antisemites. --Gerald Vizenor, Eternal Havens (113) In their reflections on quincentenary commemorations of Columbus's discovery of America, Ella Shohat and Robert Stam observe, For many Native Americans, to be asked to celebrate is equivalent of asking Jews to celebrate (66). Accordingly, a number of Native American activists, artists, and scholars have employed analogies to advance their critiques of myth. Contributors to The Submuloc Show/Columbus Wohs, a 1992 exhibit that explored Native American responses to quincentenary, refer in catalogue to Hitlerian facts (Smith 9) of the Holocaust (62). In her curator's statement for The Submuloc Show (the title of which reverses spelling of explorer's name), Jaune Quick-to-See Smith identifies as responsible for beginning of world's major holocausts and characterizes US government's Quincentennial Jubilee as the celebration of holocaust of Americas (iii). Controversial Native American studies scholar Ward Churchill also relies heavily on analogies in his A Little Matter of Genocide: and Denial in Americas, 1492 to Present (1997). Churchill includes as a frontispiece to his book Pam Colorado's poem What Every Indian Knows, which opens with lines Auschwitz ovens / burn bright / in America (xi, lines 1-3). Like highly charged discussions surrounding United States Memorial Museum's relationship to National Museum of American Indian, these assertions of a Columbus Holocaust are informed by a logic that Michael Rothberg terms competitive memory, in which the interaction of different collective memories ... takes form of a zero-sum struggle for preeminence (3). (1) Two Native American novels that were published in 1991 to coincide with quincentenary, Michael Dorris and Louise Erdrich's The Crown of and Gerald Vizenor's The Heirs of Columbus, distinguish themselves from such contestations by advancing an identificatory reading of Columbus. Moreover, in an inversion of Shohat and Stare formulation, this identificatory reading is made possible by their presentation of explorer not as a Hitler figure but as a crypto-Jew--a Marrano or secret Jew who preserved a connection to Judaism after forced conversions in Spain and Portugal. Indeed, while Crown and Heirs diverge significantly from one another in formal and thematic terms, they share an unusually sympathetic reading of that is enabled by distinctive manner in which they bring Native American and Jewish cultural narratives into relation. Crown and Heirs each feature prominent Jewish characters who serve as allies, facilitators, and mentors for Native American protagonists in their quests for political and imaginative sovereignty. It is striking that in both novels, majority of non-Native characters are Jewish. Both novels also incorporate a retelling of expulsion of Jews from Spain, thereby resituating landfall and its aftermath for indigenous peoples in context of Europe's relations with its internal Jewish Others. …