Native Self-determination Research Articles

Ēwe Hānau o ka ʻĀina: A Policy Review Focused on Hawaiʻi’s Public Land Trust

ʻĀina (land) is central to Native Hawaiian culture and ways of life. The illegal overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom and annexation to the US resulted in the loss of Hawaiian crown and government land, which was placed in trust for the benefit of the Hawaiian people. These lands, now managed by the State of Hawaiʻi, were reconstituted as the Public Land Trust (PLT) with one of the articulated uses being the betterment of Native Hawaiians. While the Hawaiʻi State Constitution restored Native control over a proportional share of revenue generated from PLT lands, the US Supreme Court removed Native self-determination over the trust by opening its selection of trustees to non-Native Hawaiians. Applying a critical policy lens, this paper explores the rise and end of Native Hawaiian control over their own PLT share. Using the policy surveillance methodology, this study explores the recent expansion of Native Hawaiian consultation law and whether this has restored some self-determination over the Native Hawaiian PLT share, with the study finding that it has not. Thus, while Hawaiʻi’s laws clearly articulate a desire for Hawaiians to control the use of their share of the PLT, Hawaiian control of these resources has eroded, suggesting a need to adopt policies that realign with the original purpose of the PLT.

Primitive or empowered: representations of Native Americans and COVID-19 in news media

ABSTRACT Historically, representations of Native Americans in media have tended toward a narrative of a people who are savage at worst, primitive and helpless at best. During the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, Native Americans were often featured in news coverage about the viral outbreak. Using close textual analysis, this study differentiates between COVID-19 themed news stories featuring Native Americans as told by Native media sources and those offered by non-Native media sources. Though the representations of Native people offered in the reports from non-Native news agencies were generally sympathetic, they upheld longstanding and negative visual tropes of primitiveness and helplessness. Native news sources, however, portrayed Native people as empowered and community oriented. We conclude that when Native people construct their own stories, even in the midst of a devastating pandemic, their narratives further efforts toward Native self-determination and rearticulate the archetypal framing of Native identity in US news coverage.

Transmedia Uprising

Transmedia Uprising

Adapting PC CARES to Continue Suicide Prevention in Rural Alaska During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Narrative Overview of an In-Person Community-Based Suicide Prevention Program Moving Online.

This paper presents how a community mobilization program to prevent suicide was adapted to an online format to accommodate the impossibility of in-person delivery in Alaska Native communities during the COVID-19 pandemic. The intervention, Promoting Community Conversations About Research to End Suicide (PC CARES), was created collaboratively by researchers and Alaska Native communities with the goal of bringing community members together to create research-informed and community-led suicide prevention activities in their communities. To continue our work during the COVID-19 pandemic and restrictions, we adapted the PC CARES model to a synchronous remote delivery format. This shift included moving from predominantly Alaska Native participants to one of a mainly non-Native school staff audience. This required a pivot from Alaska Native self-determination toward cultural humility and community collaboration for school-based staff, with multilevel youth suicide prevention remaining the primary aim. This reorientation can offer important insight into how to build more responsive programs for those who are not from the communities they serve. Here, we provide a narrative overview of our collaborative adaptation process, illustrated by data collected during synchronous remote facilitation of the program, and reflect on how the shift in format and audience impacted program delivery and content. The adaptation process strove to maintain the core animating features of self-determination for Alaska Native communities and people as well as the translation of scientific knowledge to practice for greater impact.

The Rise of Native Self-determination and the Crisis of the Canadian Political Regime

This first commentary is part of a larger study which the author is doing at Abo Akademi, on minority communities and the right to development, using case examples from various societies. It presents an intriguing view from an outside commentator on some aspects of Native politics in Canada. In this paper, the author attempts to discuss how a marginalized people are exploiting a historical moment of national crisis to overcome repressed status. In Canada this end is being achieved by the emerging movement for Native rights.

Doing Unto Others: Applied Anthropology, Collaborative Research and Native Self-determination

This paper examines applied anthropology in relation to Native self-determination. Adherence to the principle of self-determination in research produces a fundamental shift from independent to collaborative research. The paper discusses Native people’s involvement in research design and the role of aboriginally defined policy in shaping the parameters of applied research.The research-policy nexus remains dominated by non-Native practitioners and bureaucrats employing inappropriate methodologies. Anthropologists can strengthen interdisciplinary research by advocating the use of participatory and other qualitative research techniques which Native people view as ‘culturally appropriate’.

The Never-Chosen: Samson Occom, the New Divinity, and Indigenous Self-Determination

The Never-Chosen: Samson Occom, the New Divinity, and Indigenous Self-Determination

The Midnight Rider: The EPA and Tribal Self-Determination

This article analyzes the EPA’s relationship with Native Americans, which has been neglected by historians. It seems like the EPA, a federal agency born during the self-determination era, would be open to new approaches in federal Native American policy, but this was not the case in 2005. Republican senator James Inhof of Oklahoma added a rider to an otherwise benign transportation bill making it illegal for tribes residing within Oklahoma to operate environmental protection programs without first negotiating with the state government of Oklahoma. The rider eroded the federal trust relationship and infringed on Native self-determination. Oklahoma’s tribes and Native American leaders from around the nation worked to get the new law overturned, but the EPA decided to help tribes work within the confines of the new law. Despite the EPA’s stance on the law, the tribes continued to challenge it as they had in the past when hurt by paternalistic federal policy.

Disorderly Pasts: Kinship, Diagnoses, and Remembering in American Indian-U.S. Histories

“Disorderly Pasts” centers on life stories from South Dakota’s Canton Asylum, a federal psychiatric hospital for American Indians. Between 1902 and 1933, the Asylum detained nearly four hundred Indigenous men, women, and children from more than fifty Native nations. Focusing especially on the experiences of Menominee people collectively stolen from their homes in Wisconsin to Canton in November 1917, this article exposes contested understandings of kin, diagnoses, and remembering. Complex relationships between the three concepts also emerge: medical diagnoses were used to undermine Indigenous kinship, and they complicate remembering. At the same time, remembering—recalling and repopulating the past—offers a way to challenge pathological diagnoses and affirm Native self-determination. Motivated by disorder , the desire to “disrupt the systematic functioning or neat arrangement of” historical work, this project unsettles the projected objectivity and commonsense logic of U.S. medical diagnoses and institutionalization. It brings to light the violent entanglement of settler colonialism, racism, ableism, and patriarchy and their impact on Native sovereignty, Indigenous kinship, and remembering. Collaborating with relatives of those incarcerated at Canton, and drawing on decolonizing and disability studies methodologies, this work seeks to generate meaningful historical knowledge and new theoretical strategies and perspectives.

Nullifying Settler Democracy: William Apess and the Paradox of Settler Sovereignty

This essay examines the concept of “Indian nullification” in the political writings of William Apess by situating his defense of native self-determination in the context of debates about the legitimacy of nullification in U.S. constitutionalism. It illustrates how Indian nullification operates, not as a feature of constitutional design asserting minority rights over the tyranny of the majority, but rather as a rhetorical form of political contestation exposing the constitutive exclusions of American settler democracy. Apess illuminates how constitutional ideals of popular sovereignty cohere around regimes of settler colonialism and indigenous dispossession, highlighting the paradox of settler sovereignty that provides the basis for American democracy. Indian nullification is not a simple demand that the boundaries of liberal citizenship be expanded to include Indians. It is a way of narrating and rhetorically representing the forms of settler conquest that establish the material and conceptual foundation of popular self-rule for white settlers.

On Records: Delaware Indians, Colonists, and the Media of History and Memory

On Records: Delaware Indians, Colonists, and the Media of History and Memory

On Records: Delaware Indians, Colonists, and the Media of History and Memory

On Records: Delaware Indians, Colonists, and the Media of History and Memory

An Unexpected Alliance: Stella Atwood, the California Clubwomen, John Collier, and the Indians of the Southwest, 1917–1934

During the 1920s and 1930s, women's clubs in California and throughout the nation took up the cause of Indian reform. These clubwomen brought national attention to the conditions and repressive policies under which Indian peoples across the country lived. In alliance with John Collier and Pueblo Indians, California clubwomen waged effective political campaigns, agitating for Indian religious freedom, the protection of tribal lands, and Native self-determination. Commissioner of Indian Affairs under Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Collier has long been considered the major architect of reformist policies with regard to Indians, yet the clubwomen were the primary individuals motivating him to take up Indian reform. The unexpected alliance forged between John Collier, the clubwomen, and Native Americans was the effective force that brought Indian reform to the nation.

I Am the Grand Canyon: The Story of the Havasupai People (review)

Reviewed by: I Am the Grand Canyon: The Story of the Havasupai People Timothy Braatz (bio) Stephen Hirst . I Am the Grand Canyon: The Story of the Havasupai People. 3rd ed. Grand Canyon, AZ: Grand Canyon Association, 2006. ISBN: 0-938216-86-5. 276 pp. This book has had a few names. It first appeared, in 1976, as Life in a Narrow Place: The Havasupai of the Grand Canyon. In 1985 the Havasupai tribe published Havsuw 'Baaja: People of the Blue Green Water. It was essentially the same book, only with fewer photographs, and concluding with an author's note briefly summarizing a few political developments from the intervening years. Now the tribe, in cooperation with the Grand Canyon Association, gives us a third edition. The bulk of the text is unchanged except for some light editing, including new subheadings, but it feels fresher. Hirst, who spent eleven years at Supai, beginning in 1967, has returned and gives the first chapter more of a present-tense feel. In chapter 2 he works recent scholarship into a discussion of Havasupai origins. The change is subtle, but in comparing the speculations of non-Indian anthropologists to Havasupai accounts, Hirst appears now to have increased respect for the latter's claim to cultural and regional continuity. Also in the new edition, color photographs taken in the 1970s and 2005 by Lois Hirst, the author's wife, will make it easier for the casual reader to imagine Havasupais as contemporaries rather than only as historical people, locked in the past, staring out from old black-and-white prints. Unchanged, though, are moments of what I call the ethnographic perfect. For [End Page 81] example, Hirst writes, "A child receiving a cookie will break it into as many pieces as the friends with him" (11). In the new preface, we learn that a Havasupai man "once referred to this book as 'our Bible'" (xii). Hyperbole and tribal interests aside, the analogy works so far as the book is a varied and sometimes scattered collection of texts. Some sections are ethnographic surveys, by an outside observer, of Havasupai lifeways. There is a review of the history of Havasupai encounters with non-Indians—"strange-looking aliens from another world" (42)—beginning with Garcés in 1776, but mostly emphasizing the U.S. assumption of sovereignty over Havasupai lands. Hirst includes stories—oral history—taken directly from Havasupai informants. He also invents a story. "A Season on the Plateau," he explains, "is a recreation of the final years of the old life, distilling the stories and remembrances of Havasupai people, many gone now, whom I was privileged to know during my years among them" (109). The tribe's repeated promotion of the book appears to validate this approach. All of this feels like background to Hirst's primary concern here: telling the story of the Havasupai land-claims struggle as seen from Supai, not from Washington. For centuries, Havasupai families tended summer gardens in canyon lands; then, as winter approached, they relocated to hunting camps on the high plateau. In 1882 an executive order pronounced Havasupai territory to be only the narrow bottomlands of Havasu Canyon. In the following decades, U.S. officials evicted Havasupais from other canyon regions and the surrounding plateaus. To regain access to their homelands, the impoverished tribe had to overcome opposition from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, National Park Service, U.S. Forest Service, and environmental groups, most notably the Sierra Club. After years of persistent lobbying, the Havasupais won the support of Arizona's congressional delegation, including the powerful Sen. Barry Goldwater, and the Nixon administration. Still, the outcome was in doubt until President Gerald Ford, on January 3, 1975, signed a bill returning 160, 000 acres to the Havasupai tribe and guaranteeing tribal members the right to use 95, 000 additional acres of national park land. Hirst's account of this political [End Page 82] triumph is a lasting contribution to the literature of Native self-determination, resilience, and sovereignty. The new title is an improvement. The original title referred to the limitations of the imposed reservation boundaries. The second title seemed to legitimize those limitations. My understanding of Upland Yuman...

Traditional Native Healing: An Integral Part of Community And Cultural Revitalization

Today, many Native people are reaching back into their cultural pasts and recapturing traditional knowledge. This process is part of the movement toward Native self-determination and self-government. Part of the process of cultural and community revitalization and self-determination involves renewing traditional healing practices. This paper draws the connection between traditional Native healing and community and cultural revitalization. How and why is traditional healing important for community and cultural revitalization? This question is explored by highlighting four areas where traditional healing practices could benefit the revitalization of community and culture: the enrichment of cultural values, beliefs and traditions, the establishment of self and cultural identity, the encouragement of traditional language, and the improvement of community relations. Knowledge, understanding and practice of traditional healing can enhance community and cultural strength by rooting people to a history, culture, and identity that has historically been denied.

Alaska's North Slope Borough revisited

AbstractAlaska's North Slope Borough, established in 1972, is a unique institution of Native-controlled local government in the north. Providing a case study of Native self-determination under favourable conditions of indigenous, local control of resource wealth and political power, it has been the instrument by which local Inupiat capturedand used oil wealth, with clear economic and political benefits. They have gained high levels of local public services, jobs, and incomes; and effective representation in negotiations with external corporate and government authorities; the borough has also preserved and adapted critical elements of traditional culture. Costs of development and changeunder borough leadership have included waste and inefficiency, crime and corruption. Centralized power in borough headquarters has reduced the independence of borough villages and encouraged borough citizens to act like clients and consumers. Borough economy remains dependent on uncertain tax revenues from oil, with uncertain future employment opportunities for a rapidly growing Native population. North Slope Borough government has provided the Inupiat with means to greater political self-sufficiency, and the borough has responded effectively, under great pressure, to the opportunities and problems that petroleum development has brought to the region.

Politics in the Pacific Islands: Imperialism And Native Self-Determination

Les iles du Pacifique ont connu et connaissent encore l'imperialisme, la militarisation, les colonialismes francais (Polynesie francaise et Nouvelle-Caledonie), indonesien (Papouasie occidentale, Timor oriental) et americain (Belau, Mariannes, Marschall, Etats federes de Micronesie, Guam, Samoa americaines et Hawai). La survie des habitants de ces iles passe par l'autodetermination, un Pacifique sans nucleaire, la protection des ressources naturelles et culturelles, des polices etrangeres et une securite regionales. Des experiences communes et une similitude geographique devraient pousser a une cooperation regionale