Native American Rights Research Articles

Red power rising: the National Indian Youth Council and the origins of Native activism

P revious treatments of “Red Power” and Native American activism in the 1960s and 1970s began their histories with the occupation of Alcatraz, lionized the male leadership of the American Indian Movement (AIM), or characterized Native activism as inspired by or derivative of the other “power” movements of the time period. Shreve challenges such portrayals by detailing the development of the National Indian Youth Council (NIYC), an organization of Native activists responsible for sparking two decades of grassroots and national activism in the mid-twentieth century. Using exhaustive archival sources and interviews with several key activists, he contextualizes the NIYC within a broader history of intertribal organizing, and traces its inception, development, key personalities, and controversies. In doing so, Shreve provides persuasive evidence that indigenous activism in the mid-century United States not only predates AIM and the Alcatraz occupation but also must be understood within the larger flow of 20th century Native American history. Doing so deepens and complicates our understandings of Native American activism at mid-century and prevents us from stereotyping “Red Power” as derivative of contemporaneous activist movements. After reviewing intertribal and Native youth organizing in the early twentieth century in the first two chapters, Shreve’s next two deal with the foundational years of the NIYC. His fifth chapter details NIYC’s successful involvement with the fish-ins of the Pacific Northwest, while chapters six and seven reveal an association of activists struggling to balance grassroots activism with their status as a national organization, and militancy with the need for institutionalization. The final chapter and epilogue follow the NIYC after the push for organization won out over militancy as the late 1970s saw legislative and legal successes for Native communities and the 1980s produced a sharp right turn in national politics. Shreve succeeds in asserting that the development of the NIYC is essential to understanding Native activism in the twentieth century. By Book Reviews 155

Native American Activism in Cold War America: The Struggle for Sovereignty

Book Review| April 01 2011 Native American Activism in Cold War America: The Struggle for Sovereignty Native American Activism in Cold War America: The Struggle for Sovereignty. By Daniel M. Cobb. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2008. xi + 306 pp. Maps, photos, notes, index, and bibliography. $34.95 (cloth). Matthew L. M. Fletcher Matthew L. M. Fletcher Michigan State University College of Law Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of American Ethnic History (2011) 30 (3): 88–89. https://doi.org/10.5406/jamerethnhist.30.3.0088 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Matthew L. M. Fletcher; Native American Activism in Cold War America: The Struggle for Sovereignty. Journal of American Ethnic History 1 January 2011; 30 (3): 88–89. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/jamerethnhist.30.3.0088 Download citation file: 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 Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressJournal of American Ethnic History Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2011 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2011 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Native American son: the life and sporting legend of Jim Thorpe

The first comprehensive biography of the legendary figure who defined excellence in American sports: Jim Thorpe, arguably the greatest all-around athlete in U.S. history. With clarity and an eye for detail, Kate Buford traces the pivotal moments of ThorpeAEs incomparable career: growing up in the tumultuous Indian Territory of Oklahoma; leading the Carlisle Indian Industrial School football team to victories against the countryAEs finest college teams; winning gold medals in the 1912 Olympics pentathlon and decathlon; defining the burgeoning sport of professional football; and playing long, often successful - and previously unexamined - years in professional baseball. At the same time, however, Buford recounts the difficulties Thorpe faced as a Native American. We also see the infamous loss of his Olympic medals, stripped from him because he had previously played professional baseball, an event that would haunt Thorpe for the rest of his life. We see his struggles with alcoholism and personal misfortune, and how he came to distrust many of the hands extended to him. We learn the details of his vigorous advocacy for Native American rights while he chased a Hollywood career, and the truth behind the supposed reinstatement of his Olympic record in 1982. Here is the story of a complex, iconoclastic, profoundly talented man whose life encompassed both tragic limitations and truly extraordinary achievements.

In the courts of the conqueror: the 10 worst Indian law cases ever decided

The fate of Native Americans has been dependent in large part upon the recognition and enforcement of their legal, political, property, and cultural rights as indigenous peoples by American courts. Most people think that the goal of the judiciary, and especially the US Supreme Court, is to achieve universal notions of truth and justice. In this in-depth examination, however, Walter Echo-Hawk reveals the troubling fact that American law has rendered legal the destruction of Native Americans and their culture. Echo-Hawk analyzes ten cases that embody or expose the roots of injustice and highlight the use of nefarious legal doctrines. He delves into the dark side of the courts, calling for a paradigm shift in American legal thinking. Each case study includes historical, contemporary, and political context from a Native American perspective, and the case's legacy on Native America. In the Courts of the Conqueror is a comprehensive history of Indian Country from a new and unique viewpoint. It is a vital contribution to American history. Walter Echo-Hawk (Pawnee) is of counsel to the Crowe & Dunlevy law firm of Oklahoma. As a staff attorney for the Native American Rights Fund for thirty-five years, he represented tribes and Native Americans on significant legal issues during the modern era of federal Indian law. In addition to litigation, he worked on major legislation, such as the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), and federal religious freedom legislation. He is a prolific writer whose books include the award-winning Battlefields and Burial Grounds.

Mary Austin and the American West (review)

Reviewed by: Mary Austin and the American West Karen S. Langlois Mary Austin and the American West. By Susan Goodman and Carl Dawson. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. 344 pages, $29.95. This biography is a wonderful addition to scholarship on the writer Mary Hunter Austin (1868–1934). The biographical details add to the information that is available in Austin's autobiography, Earth Horizon (1932), and in two previous biographies. Beautifully written and wonderfully researched, it will prove indispensable to those who are familiar with Austin's work while also appealing to a wider audience. Austin is best remembered for writing the California classic The Land of Little Rain (1903). She has a vast oeuvre—thirty books in a wide variety of genres, including nature writing and long and short fiction, as well as articles, plays, and poetry. Her subjects range from her beloved desert landscapes and the people who inhabited them to the important issues of her day. Many readers are familiar with the general contours of her early life—her birth and youth in Carlinville, Illinois; her graduation from Blackburn College; her trip west at age twenty; her marriage to Stafford Wallace Austin. These are detailed in the biography's first chapter titled "Desert Places." Her years in California, which were the inspiration for many of her finest works, were also the period of two of her greatest heartbreaks: the realization that her only child was mentally disabled and the understanding that her married life would fail. The biography covers Austin's life in the high desert towns of Lone Pine, Independence, and Bishop; her move to the literary colony of Carmel, California, after her separation from her husband; and her travels to England and Italy. Later chapters consider her life in New York City and her eventual relocation to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she lived until her death at age sixty-four. Goodman and Dawson examine her literary work and her association with important figures of her day, such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Lincoln Steffens, Mabel Dodge Luhan, and Lou and Herbert Hoover. They also explore her activism in many of the important issues of her time, including the diversion of Owens Valley water to Los Angeles, women's rights, Native American rights, and the preservation of Native American and Spanish Colonial arts. In the last chapter, "The Accounting," they offer a summary of Austin's legacy. For all its merits, the biography does not displace Austin's engaging autobiography, which, though unwieldy, is poetic and insightful. It also does not negate the straightforward, no-nonsense insights of Austin's [End Page 104] first biographer, Augusta Fink, in I-Mary (1983). Furthermore, it does not attempt to ground Austin in American studies and feminist theory, the approach of Esther F. Lanigan in her critical biography, Mary Austin: Song of a Maverick (1989). Goodman and Dawson do offer more detailed information on Austin's life and times. Eventually, the book brings to mind a significant question. What genuine new insights are offered by this third biographical narrative of Austin's life? In that, the biography somewhat disappoints. In addition to her achievements, Austin is also distinctive for her theatrical, unconventional personality. For example, in Carmel, the thirty-eight-year-old Austin was noted for wearing flowing robes and writing in a tree house she called her "wickiup." In 1922, at a dinner in her honor at the New York City National Arts Club, she was escorted by a young Chickasaw artist, who was dressed in quill embroidered buckskin and wore a flamingo feather headdress and a necklace made out of alligator teeth. In addition to her eccentricities, Austin was known for being insufferably egotistical. She also had a well-earned reputation for exaggerating or disregarding facts. The challenge to biographers is to capture her complex persona. Scholars who are familiar with her correspondence know all too well that Austin could fly into a rage and hurl insults at her family, friends, and professional associates. Austin was, on various occasions, referred to as "the Priestess at Delphi" because of her know-it-all approach, "God's Mother-in-Law" because of her imperious attitude, and "Sitting Bull...

"I do not apologize for the length of this letter": the Mari Sandoz letters on Native American rights, 1940-1965

A voice as resonant as her love of the Plains, a commitment even deeper. Author Mari Sandoz was as passionate about plains people as she was about language and literary acclaim. That the mastery of Crazy Horse's biographer spilled into her zealous advocacy for Native Americans is scarcely surprising. An avid letter writer, Sandoz kept carbons of everything. Fortunately these came into the Sandoz Collection at the University of Nebraska Archives, organized by Kimberli Lee, foremost expert on Sandoz's writings. Through the activist correspondence, Lee traces an intimate, long-standing interaction with tribal communities, for whom Sandoz vigorously sought social justice. Sandoz was not above using her celebrity as leverage, yet the letters prove her a respectful and responsible ally, sensitive to the communities' best interests and solicitous of Native leaders. Though Sandoz richly deserves attention, recent scholarship is scant. In arranging and analyzing this correspondence, Lee reinstates Sandoz as one of the most significant non-Native chroniclers and advocates for Plains Indian cultures. There is much here for historians and other scholars of American Indian, Great Plains, rhetorical, and women's studies. Yet Sandoz's wider fan base should not be surprised to hearken to a voice and ardor they will find well familiar.

A Review of Native American Entrepreneurial Activity

The primary scope of this research is to identify the business and entrepreneurial activity taking place in the Native American community and includes a literary review of ten articles found to be of significant importance in gathering a broader scope of how tribal entrepreneurship is succeeding and evaluating recommendations for improvement. Early on, tribal people shared a similar economy that greatly differed from the market economy of today where entrepreneurship problems loom large in Indian Country. Through this review we will gain a better understanding of where business and entrepreneurship activity stands in Native America. Tribal colleges serve not only as places of education but also offer business assistance and are community hubs, often independent of tribal government. These colleges are vital to economic improvement of tribes and suffer from low retention rates and staff turnover due to inadequate funding. The tribes of the United States are not alone as other tribal people from Canada and New Zealand share many of the same problems of their US counterparts. In particular, Canadian reporting processes are inefficient and create difficulties in getting needed funds where they belong. Individual entrepreneurs also face stiff competition and often are not afforded the needed loans and capital to begin on-reservation business. Individual businesses increase tribal economic development, employ tribal members, and keep valuable tribal dollars on the reservation. Tribal nations have shown the most progress in productive economies by reinvesting dollars back into profitable industries like the cement plant of the Passamaquoddy tribe or the Flexcrete Company of the Navajo nation. Much of this tribal success is attributed to the introduction of gaming and the revenues now provided to tribes. Although gaming has been a profitable solution, it is only a temporary fix as tribes continue to make strides toward independent economic development. Tribes have shown that incorporating culture into the strategic planning process can also be successful if implemented properly. Tribal government remains the largest hindrance to economic growth for Native tribes. Most government agencies still prioritize employment and education as keys to success and are only now beginning to provide more support of economic development endeavors such as loans, regulation, and stability, all of which business owners need for on-reservation start-ups. Research suggests tribes focus on institutional change and transformation while also maintaining a positive relationship with tribal entrepreneurs who share in the economic incentive to provide a growing tribal economy. It is evident that tribes are showing major transformation from transfer-based economies to productive economies. A secondary transformation is also occurring where reservation communities are becoming their own private sectors which are bringing highly skilled tribal members back to their communities and driving economic growth from within. Despite these best efforts, tribes still are facing tough issues today. Tribal colleges are helping to overcome the issues of education and experience. Governments are beginning to provide support for individual entrepreneurs. Natural resources and Indian lands are being utilized to overcome the location and distance from market deficiencies. However, much is yet to be done if Native Americans are to truly establish entrepreneurial success on the reservation.

Standing Up to Sugar Cubes: The Contest over Ethnic Identity in California's Fourth-Grade Mission Curriculum

In the 1960s and 1970s, Native American and Chicano activists launched attacks against the romanticized depiction of the Spanish Past that was taught in California schools. Contests within and among the reform groups (and the eventual resolution found in today's educational standards) reveal a complex effort to shape children's perceptions of race and identity. By tracing the evolution of Native American and Latino activism on this subject and the responses of the state Board of Education, this article shows the symbolic significance of education debates in state politics.

Inheriting the past: the making of Arthur C. Parker and indigenous archaeology

In recent years, archaeologists and Native American communities have struggled to find common ground even though more than a century ago a man of Seneca descent raised on New York's Cattaraugus Reservation, Arthur C. Parker, joined the ranks of professional archaeology. Until now, Parker's life and legacy as the first Native American archaeologist have been neither closely studied nor widely recognized. At a time when heated debates about the control of Native American heritage have come to dominate archaeology, Parker's experiences form a singular lens to view the field's tangled history and current predicaments with Indigenous peoples. In Inheriting the Past, Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh examines Parker's winding career path and asks why it has taken generations for Native peoples to follow in his footsteps. Closely tracing Parker's life through extensive archival research, Colwell-Chanthaphonh explores how Parker crafted a professional identity and negotiated dilemmas arising from questions of privilege, ownership, authorship, and public participation. How Parker, as well as the discipline more broadly, chose to address the conflict between Native American rights and the pursuit of scientific discovery ultimately helped form archaeology's moral community. Parker's rise in archaeology just as the field was taking shape demonstrates that Native Americans could have found a place in the scholarly pursuit of the past years ago and altered its trajectory. Instead, it has taken more than a century to articulate the promise of an Indigenous archaeology, n archaeological practice carried out by, for, and with Native peoples. As the current generation of researchers explores new possibilities of inclusiveness, Parker's struggles and successes serve as a singular reference point to reflect on archaeology's history and its future.

The Return of Wampum Belts

In May 1988 a ceremony was held to celebrate the return of eleven wampum belts to the Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy in Grand River, Canada. Another commemoration took place in October 1989 when twelve wampum belts were returned to the Onondaga Nation in New York. Hundreds of people attended these formal ceremonies; tribal chiefs and clan mothers wore ceremonial dress and traditional food was prepared. These ceremonies are but two of many commemorating the repatriation of Native American cultural items to their original creators or owners. They are the results of a long process of Native American activism that emerged in the 1960s and culminated in the passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) in 1990. Numerous cultural and religious artifacts, works of art and human remains have been returned to their original owners over the past three decades as these communities have moved toward self-governance, and the world at large has come to recognize greater Native American sovereignty. However, the repatriation movement has not been without conflict. Questions about ownership, chain of custody, theft, responsibility, access, and economy have been raised and remain unresolved.These same types of questions apply to the repatriation of Native American materials in archives. archival community must address problems such as the following: Who owns and cares for the archival materials concerning Native Americans that are now scattered across institutions in this country? Under what circumstances were they collected? Who now determines access policies to these sensitive materials? Protocols for Native American Archival Materials from 2007 present guidelines regarding some of these issues. Using the return of the Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy and the Onondaga Nation wampum belts as case studies, this paper will examine some of the ethical issues involved in the repatriation of archival materials and how these issues are treated in the Protocols.Wampum Belts as DocumentsIn everyday language the word wampum means money, and wampum has indeed served as a historical medium of trade and exchange throughout eastern North America, especially after the arrival of Dutch traders (Richter, 1992). Strictly speaking, wampum refers to beads made from the white and purple parts of shells native to the New England Coast. However, for the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois Nations) wampum has far greater cultural significance than mere currency. According to the Onondaga Nation Web site wampum has many uses, including conveying social status. Each clan mother and tribal leader has a wampum string, which is passed from one tribal leader to the next with the office or title. At gatherings, the person holding the wampum string is given special attention; whoever is holding the wampum string is said to be speaking the truth. Wampum strings are also used to document agreements. Onondaga Web site states, The speaker puts the words of the agreement into the wampum. Each speaker thereafter uses the wampum to remember the initial agreement and the history that has happened to date. Wampum can also have spiritual significance. For example, according to the Encyclopedia of North American Indians (1996), the Huron who adopted Christianity used wampum beads in their rosaries and even made belts with Latin inscriptions dedicated to various saints.Some wampum belts were specifically constructed to commemorate and document important events and treaties. They range in length from two to six feet and have patterns created by the interweaving of white and purple beads made from shells. Important agreements were generally represented by larger belts, and important agreements with a large amount of information were collectively stored and maintained by and in the tribal body (Rasmussen, 2007). belts are entrusted to a hereditary keeper and brought out for ceremonial occasions when the wampum keeper reads the belt. …

Native American Activism in Cold War America: The Struggle for Sovereignty. By Daniel M. Cobb (Lawrence, University Press of Kansas, 2008) 306 pp. $34.95

Native American Activism in Cold War America: The Struggle for Sovereignty. By Daniel M. Cobb (Lawrence, University Press of Kansas, 2008) 306 pp. $34.95

"Industrial & Picturesque Narrative": Helen Hunt Jackson's California Travel Writing for the Century

"Industrial & Picturesque Narrative"Helen Hunt Jackson's California Travel Writing for the Century Christine Holbo The end of the Civil War marked the beginning of a new era in American magazine publishing, an era of demographic and geographic expansion of the American public, but also of increasingly specialized readerships. The beginning of Helen Hunt Jackson's career as a writer coincided with this new era. Taking up the pen in the months immediately after the end of hostilities, Jackson—then the Civil War widow Helen Hunt—would flourish in the 1870s through her sophisticated navigation of the magazine culture of the period. Working as a poet, travel writer, domestic advice writer, and novelist, Jackson recognized that she spoke to a number of different audiences, and she cultivated distinct authorial personas to appeal to her diverse readerships. Much of this work was forgotten after Jackson's death, and her reputation came to rest upon two books—or, more properly speaking, two books and two strikingly distinct projects. As an activist writer, Jackson has been remembered as the author of the classic of legal journalism A Century of Dishonor (1881), long a key resource for critical studies of Native American rights and history. As a popular writer, Jackson has been remembered as the author of the sentimental novel Ramona (1884), whose imagery inspired the early twentieth-century recuperation of California's Spanish heritage and the enshrinement of the mission style as a semi-official California architecture.1 The two books could hardly be more different. A Century of Dishonor presents a rigorously focused defense of Native American rights within the frameworks of U.S. and international law. By contrast, Ramona is a generic chimera, many books in one: a narrative tour of California's natural beauty, a Cooperesque celebration of "vanishing Americans," a study [End Page 243] of the California economy, and a story of orphaned girlhood in search of a loving mother—not to mention the source of what may be the world's only annually produced anti-genocide musical, the Ramona Pageant of Hemet, California. The divide separating A Century of Dishonor's legalistic human rights activism from the kaleidoscopic and even campy aesthetics of Ramona deserves more attention. Undoubtedly, the two projects shared a common concern for the plight of Native Americans in post-Reconstruction America. But their differences suggest, at the very least, a disconnect between means and ends. To the degree to which Ramona can be read as an appeal on behalf of Native American rights, a continuation of the project laid out in A Century of Dishonor, the novel must be read against its romantic interpretation of mission- and Mexican-era California. Any reader who takes Jackson seriously as a writer and activist in the 1880s must ask how someone whose central purpose was to raise consciousness about Native American legal rights, and whose original point of interest had been the struggle of the Ponca tribe for a midwestern homeland, ended up being identified with the campaign to market Romantic California. This article does not resolve the problem posed by Jackson's two legacies. Rather, it examines the emergence of this disjunction within Jackson's writing in the last half-decade of her life, seeking to understand its significance in terms of the articulation of genres and publics, politics, and aesthetics in the magazine world of the 1880s. The subject of this article is a series of five travel essays Jackson published in the Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine in 1883. These articles offer a unique vantage point from which to consider, on the one hand, Jackson's trajectory, her expanding ambitions to reach not only readerships but a public; and, on the other hand, her confrontation with a recently articulated standard of cultural sophistication, a standard which heralded the division of readerships and the clash of tastes as a new aesthetic value. This new standard, I will suggest, played an important role in transforming both the function of magazine writing and its meaning in relation to the public and to the world of literature at the end of the nineteenth century. Jackson's Century articles have significant implications for understanding not only the dynamics of Ramona...

Review

166 Michigan Historical Review one of the stronger essays in part three, Charles Wilson Goode convincingly argues that men like George Meldrum and William Park made choices during the Revolutionary War that reflected “personal preferences” rather than political ideals or national loyalties. Although each man made a different choice (Meldrum remained in the United States while Park moved across the Detroit River), each did so to preserve his local political and social status. By moving, Park remained “a prominent figure in a British settler society” (p. 135). Similarly, by remaining in Detroit, Meldrum preserved his place “in the town’s emerging political and social structure.” Each man, then, privileged the benefits of his local ties over his “affection for either Britain or the United States” (p. 136). With varying degrees of success, the essays in this volume contribute further to the dominance of White’s middle-ground framework. Many of the contributions also remind readers that even amidst great international conflict local concerns often shaped how people confronted change in their communities. Perhaps most importantly, however, this collection of essays successfully demonstrates that there is much to learn from those who lived and struggled in the Detroit region during the revolutionary era. Thankfully, the editors have also included an impressive bibliography at the end of the volume, encouraging curious readers to pursue their own investigations of Detroit’s rich and diverse eighteenth-century past. Suzanne Cooper Guasco Queens University of Charlotte Daniel M. Cobb. Native Activism in Cold War America: The Struggle for Sovereignty. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008. Pp. 336. Bibliography. Index. Notes. Photographs. Cloth, $34.95. In Native Activism in Cold War America: The Struggle for Sovereignty, Daniel M. Cobb hopes to broaden not only our understanding of Native activism but also how Native activism in the 1960s was inextricably interwoven and intertwined with the larger history of the time. Native activism did not happen in a vacuum, Cobb argues, nor was it inherently or exclusively militaristic in character. Cobb contends that Native American activism extended beyond overt militancy expanding to encompass what he calls “reformative goals and conventional tactics” (p. 2). He believes that history’s fixation with the American Indian Movement limits our understanding of the time, the goals of the people Book Reviews 167 involved, and the people themselves. By approaching Native activism from this angle and through this lens, Cobb broadens the spectrum to include not only overt, and often controversial actions like Wounded Knee II and the occupation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs building, but also less obvious but equally important actions like letter-writing campaigns, grant writing, and community meetings. Cobb contends that all of these tactics need to be recognized as legitimate forms of activism in order to both appreciate the changes that were taking place and understand this period fully. Central to the book’s theme of “reformative goals and conventional tactics” are the War on Poverty and Point IV programs, which Cobb believes were crucial to discussions regarding sovereignty and selfdetermination within Native communities, even though they were not always successful. These programs were essential because they linked what was happening in Indian Country not only with what was happening within the larger United States but also with what was happening globally. In fact, according to Cobb, “politics of tribal sovereignty and self-determination cannot be understood apart from the larger global policies of modernization and decolonization or the turbulent contests over race, poverty, and war at home” (p. 3). Cobb’s arguments are informed by many disciplines, including sociology, community-development theory, and anthropology; and he uses new archival sources and extensive interviews to support his hypotheses. His use of interviews is particularly important because he includes the obvious players of the time as well as those who were less well known, thus supporting his overall thesis that it takes all kinds of actions and people to force change. In doing so, however, he admits that neither type of activism—militaristic or conventional—was fully successful. Anyone seeking a broader understanding of Native activism in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s will find this book useful because it does not tell the same old story nor does...

U.S. Law and Native American Rights in Action – A Law Professor and Activist's View

I think it’s fair to say that we as Native American peoples are subject to the same swings of the system as any other people, or any other sovereign, in America. I’m referring to swings like the grand political shifts between conservative and liberal, national rights to states’ rights, changes in federalism, and so forth. We are subject to those swings of the pendulum whether we like it or not. So some small part of the ups-and-downs we experience with law is justifiable, I think, because it is part of a general process that affects everyone. This requires us to sit down, educate ourselves (or get educated by others), understand it, use it to our advantage – and sometimes the law even plays along. Of course sometimes it doesn’t. Either way, it’s just a reality we have to deal with alongside everyone else. However, then there are some more specific theoretical and ideological lessons that American Indian peoples have to face when we are trying to work with American law. This can depend a lot on the particular situation at hand, and on the law involved. If we’re talking about “positive law” – laws that a particular state, or the federal government, has decided to reduce to writing – then these laws always embody value systems. Those values are often not ours, and the laws are not of our making. I think we almost always find that these kinds of laws are against our best interests. They always seem to be designed to do the work of those with power – the conqueror, the colonizer, the exploiter. We find, historically, that these kinds of laws are almost always designed to separate native peoples from their wealth. The General Allotment Act, for example, drawing lines in checkerboard fashion across Indian Country – was purportedly designed to provide a system of private property to individual Native Americans (U.S. Congress 1887). But native people already held private property, although it wasn’t in the kind of system that the U.S. government would recognize; instead, they did it their way. What is clear is that all the Allotment Act has done is to make the timber on those lands, and the oil and gas under them, more readily severable, subject to the trusteeship of the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, and brought to market. In fact, we have seen that the result was indeed to make these resources more readily acquirable, by purchase or otherwise, by the state or by corporations or by outsiders who lived around the reservations. That is not to say that this was a concerted, completely well-planned system, but certainly the net result of positive law in the U.S. has been to separate native peoples from our wealth. On another level, it is also clear that formal law in the United States has been designed to separate Indian peoples from our cultures and our identities, perhaps starting with the use of the word “Indian.” The system that required native children to go away to boarding school obviously had this effect. So too did the system whereby Indian Country was divided up among various Christian denominations, permitting them to go forth and missionize natives – Methodists in this part of the Country, Catholics in that part of the Country – all designed to separate us from our cultures. We find telling examples of this kind of effort in the Indian Reorganization Act; even the name “Reorganization” tells us a lot in that regard. This Act came out of a time, in 1934, when Congress was dealing with reorganizing corporations that were going bankrupt in a way and at a rate that the U.S. had never experienced. So, on the one hand legal models were floating around for reorganizing corporations in the context of bankruptcy. Out of that we got the Indian Reorganization Act, which treated us all as if we were corporations – with a governance structure much like a corporation, instead of having a structure like a government. A model of government, we would think, should be more democratic, more deliberative, and more transparent. Instead we received these creatures, created on Indian reservations by the force of federal law, that are not transparent. They hold proprietary information; they act and talk and walk like private corporations; and of course these, too, are ideas that separated Indians from their wealth and from their cultures and from their identities.

Theorizing Native American Land Seizure: An Analysis of Tactical Changes in the Late Twentieth Century

This paper advances the existing literature on tactics by analyzing the persistence of land seizure as a particular strategy in Native American political activism over five decades. It examines the different types of spaces seized and the claims made during three distinct historical periods: public spaces on reservations during the recuperative phase (1950–69), surplus federal lands away from reservations during the expropriative phase (1969–75), and high-profile locales on and off tribal lands during the demonstrative phase (1975–2000). Land seizures were often means to make material demands or articulate normative claims, but always served to complicate the state's exercise of power over Native peoples. Through case studies the paper demonstrates how spatial disruption, resource availability, and dynamism affected the continued viability of land seizure as a tactic to advance Native Americans' political demands.

Enriched by Otherness: The Transformational Journey of Cabeza De Vaca

Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca's Relacion presents one of the earliest accounts of Spanish exploration in North America. Although it begins as a common tale of a sixteenth-century Spanish conquistador in search of gold and glory, Cabeza de Vaca's story is anything but typical. In fact, it depicts a remarkable adventure unequaled in the history of the New World. (1) Forming part of the ill-fated 1527 expedition of Panfilo de Narvaez, Cabeza de Vaca found himself shipwrecked off the coast of Florida. Struggling survive in a hostile environment, and under conditions of desperate need, the original group of six hundred men was eventually reduced just four. La Relacion (The Account) narrates Cabeza de Vaca's decade-long adventure in the New World, culminating with his amazing pilgrimage westward through the wide expanses of present-day Texas the Sea of Cortes, and then south Mexico City. This journey made him and his three companions the first non-Indians cross the North American continent on foot. Cabeza de Vaca survived by living among the Indians, first as slave, then as trader, and finally as healer an experience that deepened his Christian faith and turned him into one of the first--and most passionate--advocates for Native American rights. Upon his return Spain in 1537, Cabeza de Vaca spent three years diligently preparing his manuscript, which was first published in Zamora in 1542 as La Relacion. (2) In 1555, a second edition was printed in Valladolid, which also contained his Comentarios, a longer work that recorded his subsequent failed exploits as governor of the provinces of Rio de la Plata, the enormous region now occupied by southern Peru, Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay. (3) This later edition, which contains only minor alterations from the first, (4) is the one most frequently cited, translated, and studied. The North American narrative soon became known as Naufragios, (5) which literally means Shipwrecks, but which has been liberally (and arguably more poetically) translated as Castaways. The work exemplifies a cronica, a traditional genre in Spanish literature. The cronicas de Indias (chronicles of the Indies or New World chronicles) share a common stated objective: to provide a direct account of the concrete facts of the discovery, exploration and conquest of the New World's lands and cultures (Pastor 2). Scholars typically distinguish two trends among this body of work. The official accounts of the conquest were those commissioned or sanctioned by the Catholic Monarchs. (6) These historiographical chroniclers reconstructed the events based upon oral accounts and testimonies gathered from participants in the action. The second group, on the other hand, consists of narratives that reported the first-hand experiences of the direct participants themselves. These early accounts were generally not written for the benefit of posterity, but rather for purely pragmatic purposes: persuade their audience, the sovereigns, recognize and reward their service with wealth, land, or position (Hart 17-18). Cabeza de Vaca's Relacion falls squarely within this second category, but stands out in significant ways: first, Cabeza de Vaca is a gifted and engaging storyteller whose work reveals a transition from historiography literature (Pastor 188). Second, of all the known New World chroniclers, he is the one who most fully immersed himself in the indigenous cultures; and finally, unlike the majority of early accounts of military action in the New World, which took the bias of the invading Spanish forces, Cabeza de Vaca's Relacion presents a much more complex point of view. The rather short work has inspired much critical dialogue, numerous translations, (7) several fictional works, (8) and an award-winning feature-length film. (9) La Relacion is valuable for historians, literary scholars, ethnographers, and anthropologists. It offers, for example, the first reported sightings of the buffalo, as well as the first descriptions of the Mississippi River and the southern regions of the present-day United States. …

Custerology: the enduring legacy of the Indian wars and George Armstrong Custer

On a hot summer day in 1876, George Armstrong Custer led the Seventh Cavalry to the most famous defeat in U.S. military history. Outnumbered and exhausted, the Seventh Cavalry lost more than half of its four hundred men, and every soldier under Custer's direct command was killed.It's easy to understand why this tremendous defeat shocked the American public at the time. But with Custerology, Michael A. Elliott tackles the far more complicated question of why the battle still haunts the American imagination today. Weaving vivid historical accounts of Custer at Little Bighorn with contemporary commemorations that range from battle reenactments to the unfinished Crazy Horse memorial, Elliott reveals a Custer and a West whose legacies are still vigorously contested. He takes readers to each of the important places of Custer's life, from his Civil War home in Michigan to the site of his famous demise, and introduces us to Native American activists, Park Service rangers, and devoted history buffs along the way. Throughout, Elliott shows how Custer and the Indian Wars continue to be both a powerful symbol of America's bloody past and a crucial key to understanding the nation's multicultural present.

Anthropogenic disturbance and the formation of oak savanna in central Kentucky, USA

AbstractAim To deepen understanding of the factors that influenced the formation of oak savanna in central Kentucky, USA. Particular attention was focused on the link between historical disturbance and the formation of savanna ecosystem structure.Location Central Kentucky, USA.Methods We used dendrochronological analysis of tree‐ring samples to understand the historical growth environment of remnant savanna stems. We used release detection and branch‐establishment dates to evaluate changes in tree growth and the establishment of savanna physiognomy. We contrasted our growth chronology with reference chronologies for regional tree growth, climate and human population dynamics.Results Trees growing in Kentucky Inner Bluegrass Region (IBR) savanna remnants exhibited a period of suppression, extending from the establishment date of the tree to release events that occurred c. 1800. This release resulted in a tripling of the annual radial growth rate from levels typical of oaks suppressed under a forest canopy (< 1 mm year−1) to levels typical of open‐grown stems (3 mm year−1). The growth releases in savanna trees coincided with low branch establishment. Over the release period, climatic conditions remained relatively constant and growth in regional forest trees was even; however, the growth increase in savanna stems was strongly correlated with a marked increase in Euro‐American population density in the region.Main conclusions Our data suggest that trees growing in savanna remnants originated in the understorey of a closed canopy forest. We hypothesize that Euro‐American land clearing to create pasturelands released these trees from light competition and resulted in the savanna physiognomy that is apparent in remnant stands in the IBR. Although our data suggest that savanna trees originated in a forest understorey, this system structure itself may have been a result of an unprecedented lack of Native American activity in the region due to population loss associated with pandemics brought to North America by Euro‐Americans. We present a hypothetical model that links human population dynamics, land‐use activities and ecosystem structure. Our model focuses on the following three land‐use eras: Native American habitation/utilization; land abandonment; and Euro‐American land clearance. Ecological understanding of historical dynamics in other ecosystems of eastern North America may be enhanced through recognition of these eras.

Cross-Cultural Collaboration: Native Peoples and Archaeology in the Northeastern United States (review)

Reviewed by: Cross-Cultural Collaboration: Native Peoples and Archaeology in the Northeastern United States Jon Daehnke (bio) Jordan E. Kerber , ed. Cross-Cultural Collaboration: Native Peoples and Archaeology in the Northeastern United States. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006. 379 pp. Paper, $24.95. The call for greater collaboration between archaeologists and Native American communities was first meaningfully sounded by Native American activists concerned about the mistreatment of ancestral remains by archaeologists and the lack of recognition of the sovereign right of tribes to control their own histories. Following this initial round of tribal activism, "collaborative" efforts were driven primarily by the necessity of compliance with cultural resource legislation that mandated consultation with descendant communities. In recent years, collaborative projects between archaeologists and Native Americans that are voluntary rather than compliance driven have appeared with increasing regularity. All three of these drivers of collaboration—Native American activism and sovereignty concerns, cultural resource compliance, and voluntary partnerships—are apparent in Cross-Cultural Collaboration, a publication that provides a very useful and engaging discussion of Native American involvement in the practice of archaeology in the northeastern United States. Cross-Cultural Collaboration is a compilation of twenty case studies that highlight the nature and details of collaborative projects in eleven northeastern states as well as parts of southeastern Canada. The contributing authors represent a diverse set of professional backgrounds; they are academics, state and federal archaeologists, contract archaeologists, tribal repatriation coordinators, and tribal historic preservation officers. Of the thirty-three authors whose writings appear in the [End Page 183] volume, nine are Native American. The book is divided into three main parts: collaboration and regulatory compliance within the context of burials and repatriation, collaboration and regulatory compliance within the context of sites and places, and voluntary collaborations in research and educational outreach. The first section of Cross-Cultural Collaboration focuses on repatriation and human burials in both NAGPRA (Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act) and non-NAGPRA contexts. Richard W. Hill Sr.'s excellent opening chapter addresses the difficulties that the Haudenosaunee Nation has faced in their efforts to repatriate ancestral remains and describes the stonewalling tactics that some museums, archaeologists, and state organizations have used to prevent the repatriation of human remains and cultural items to Native American populations. Hill's chapter helps to set the tone of the book, demonstrating that the goal is not to present a simple celebratory image of the collaborative process, but rather to look realistically and critically at collaboration as a process that remains troubled, especially within the context of the repatriation of human remains. Other chapters in the first section continue this cautious tone, noting the challenges of attempting to make the supposedly uniform bureaucratic process of repatriation compatible with the specifics of tribal sovereignty and politics (Nina M. Versaggi), wrestling with repatriation to tribes that are not federally recognized (Ramona Peters, Brona G. Simon), and the reluctance of some archaeologists to relinquish control over the disposition of human remains (John B. Brown III and Paul A. Robinson). While all of the chapters in this section are interesting and useful, the most helpful discussions focus on NAGPRA repatriations to nonrecognized tribal nations (which is important, given how often it is incorrectly stated that NAGPRA precludes repatriation to nonrecognized groups) as well as the use of state unmarked burial laws to repatriate human remains outside of NAGPRA contexts. The choice to put this section first is important, as it emphasizes the idea that repatriation—especially the repatriation of human remains—is the most fundamental and central form of collaboration. If we as archaeologists cannot collaborate with tribes by standing up for tribal primacy in determining what happens to human remains, then our other forms of collaboration become much less relevant. The second section focuses on collaboration and regulatory compliance [End Page 184] in the context of sites and places. Chapters in this section discuss the challenges and rewards of collaborations on large-scale highway survey projects (Robert L. Dean and Douglas J. Perrelli, Ira Beckerman), dialogue between tribal and archaeological voices over differing values and interpretations (David M. Lacy and Donna Roberts Moody), contract archaeology on Martha's Vineyard (Holly Herbster and Suzanne Cherau), the...

The collected speeches of Sagoyewatha, or Red Jacket

In the first collection of a Native American orator's speeches, Granville Ganter presents the complete speeches of Red Jacket or Sagoyewatha (Shay-go-ye-watha), a formidable diplomat and one of the most famous Native American orators of the nineteenth century. As a representative of the Seneca and the Six Nations, Red Jacket negotiated with American presidents from George Washington to Andrew Jackson, establishing a legacy that continues to influence discussions of native sovereignty and cultural identity. In speeches spanning over forty years, he eloquently voiced the rights of Native Americans, opposing the encroachment of white man's religion and culture and the sale of native lands. Presenting more than fifty speeches of Red Jacket, some previously unpublished and others revised using modern standards of textual editing, this volume encourages a wider readership of Red Jacket's work. Ganter's accompanying essays offer a detailed historical framework, presenting archival research about the interpreters and the circumstances of each speech. The great majority of Red Jacket's speeches were interpreted by reliable translators who were often chosen by the Senecas for their accuracy. This edition spans Red Jacket's political career from 1790 to 1830 and includes major addresses to Presidents Washington, Adams, and Monroe. Additionally, it contains original versions of his speeches to evangelical missionaries and land speculators, which circulated for nearly 150 years after Red Jacket's death. This book will stand as the definitive critical edition of Red Jacket's speeches and as a remarkable record of Native American political history. It will be of crucial interest to historians and literary scholars of Native American studies.