Tribal Homelands Research Articles

The Urban Indian Experience in America

Donald L. Fixico, the director of the Indigenous Nations Studies Program at the University of Kansas, has written a balanced account of the experience of Indians who resettled in cities throughout the United States during the second half of the twentieth century. In this book, Fixico clearly demonstrates how difficult it was for the first generation of migrants from tribal homelands to adjust to urban life. They resided in the ghettos of uptown Chicago, Bell Gardens in Los Angeles, and elsewhere. In these segregated metropolitan areas, Indian children encountered racism and dropped out of school. Their parents also suffered from the evils of alcoholism, found it difficult to obtain adequate health care, and paid high rents for substandard housing. Nonetheless, Indians managed to retain their cultural identities under these difficult circumstances. Fixico shows how extended families and tribal social clubs upheld traditional values in an alien environment. Furthermore, Indians participated in athletic events, powwows, and dances at over forty intertribal urban centers, which helped to forge a new pan-Indian cultural identity. This unexpected development encouraged the political activism associated with the red power movement.

Ecological Risk Assessment and Management: Their Failure to Value Indigenous Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Protect Tribal Homelands

Pour les Amerindiens des Etats-Unis, les territoires autochtones et tribaux sont essentiels pour le maintien de leur existence tribale et leur autonomie en tant que nations souveraines. L'A. analyse le role central des savoirs ecologiques traditionnels dans la protection des ecosystemes et la preservation des communautes tribales. La diversite et les valeurs culturelles sont aussi importantes que la diversite biologique et doivent etre integrees dans les methodes scientifiques d'evaluation des sols, des ecosystemes et des ressources. La conception et l'evaluation des projets et activites affectant les ressources et droits tribaux doivent prendre en compte les connaissances culturelles. L'A. considere les menaces qui pesent sur les territoires autochtones et les droits territoriaux stipules dans les traites, et le role des tribus pour leur protection. Il presente egalement un point de vue autochtone pour la question de l'evaluation et de la gestion des risques ecologiques. Il identifie trois domaines principaux qui doivent etre pris en compte par les agences federales pour la protection des ressources et terres tribales. En conclusion, il plaide pour une consultation directe avec les tribus indiennes pour la gestion des risques ecologiques.

Indians, ethnicity as a resource and aging: You can go home again

Ethnicity can be a facilitating resource throughout the life course for those who recognize and exploit its potential to be so. Ethncity is multidimensional, its elements experienced at differing levels of intensity across the life span. Life history trajectories of American Indians who lived in urban centers most of their adult lives and, upon retirement, returned to their tribal homelands underscore the positive contributions ethnic group membership makes to well-being in old age. Ethnographic research methods including: long-term, personal relationships with the participants, immersion in both their urban and rural cultural milieux, life history elicitation and observation of the participant's social and decision-making processes over time allow for an exploration of these theoretical assertions. Processual analysis of an exemplar life trajectory broadly representative of the sample group is presented here to illustrate the analytical process and its power to identify those ethnically-inflected statuses and roles which sustain well-being into old age and generate theoretical frameworks that account for cultural continuity, situationality, intensity and dimensionality in the interaction of ethnicity and aging and the structure of a social process - ethnic community reincorporation.

Israel and the Bantustans

In the middle of August 1985, while the world was watching South Africa writhe in agony, the chief of the Zulus was taking a camel ride in Jerusalem. The chief, 55-year-old Gatsha Buthelezi, was on an official visit to Israel. That Buthelezi was also chief minister of the bantustan, * * or tribal homeland, of KwaZulu did not detract from the warm welcome he received from the Israeli government. Not since the 1976 visit of South African Prime Minister John Vorster had Israel given a South African official such a high-visibility reception. The signal sent by Buthelezi's visit seems to be less clear because it occurred at a time when Israel was urgently casting about for a way to mend the damage to its image-particularly in the United States, its major allythat has accrued during a decade of intimate commerce with South Africa. Buthelezi's visit must be considered in the context of those attempted repairs. Nevertheless, the Zulu chief left Israel with promises of aid for KwaZulu from both the Israeli government and the Histadrut labor

Hermannsburg Aboriginal land grants in the Northern Territory

Abstract The Australian Government has granted freehold title over 3,797 square kilometres of their traditional lands to the people of five Aboriginal clans of the Aranda tribe at Hermannsburg in the Northern Territory. The grants are historic as they give some Aboriginal peoples ownership of their tribal homelands and, for the first time in Australia, Aboriginal clan boundaries have been delineated by surveying procedures and translated into registered titles. The Australian Aborigines' concept of land ownership is summarised, the involvement of the Hermannsburg Mission is outlined, and the legal and surveying requirements are explained. Photogrammetric techniques were adopted as providing the most economical solution to the surveying task. The surveying and photogrammetric methods which led to the preparation of plans for the issuance of registered titles are described.

Social work under apartheid

Marjorie Hope Young, MSW, is As sistant Professor of Social Work and Sociology, Wilmington College, Wil mington, Ohio. identities of the so cial workers quoted in this article must remain confidential. If you tiy to apply basic social work Among the most important laws is principles in this country, you run the Group Areas Act, which zones land against the laws. so rigorously that millions of African, A Caseworker Colored, and Asian people have been Republic of South Africa ordered of their homes and busi nesses and moved miles beyond the All the world, social workers city limits to dreary housing in experience the gap between theory and townships (locations outside white practice. But nowhere, perhaps, is the cities for Africans who work in urban disparity as great as in the Republic of areas). According to the Black Sash, an South Africa. This report of conditions organization of middle-class white there is based on interviews with social women volunteers specializing in workers from eight agencies in South helping Africans with pass law Africa. For obvious reasons, their problems, over 2,115,000 people have identities must remain confidential. been removed, all but 7,000 of them Black and white South African social black. Still to be removed are 1,727,000 work students follow similar curricula people, all but 1,600 of them black.1 (in separate schools). great Moreover, if African workers lose their majority of authors they read are job, they may be endorsed out to the great names in the American tradia tribal homeland, even if they have tion: Perlman, Garrett, Friedlander, never seen it and even if they have a Konopka, and others, together with a working spouse who remains behind, few British writers such as Turner and splitting the family. Laws require all Younghusband. The only work by an Africans age 16 to carry a docu African I ever read consisted of a few ment detailing their name, tribal origin, articles by Moses Bopape, the acting where they are allowed to live, and head of the social work program at the what sort of work they are permitted to blacks' University of the North, an do. Africans cannot move without this African social worker told me on one of pass, and failure to have an official my two recent visits to the republic. He stamp on it entitling them to be where continued: they are can lead to imprisonment or cr , ce . being endorsed out to a homeland. Sure, some of the stuff we study is r L.( .i,, „ In 1977, 200,000 Africans were ar usetul, but the theories are based on , ' „ the situation in America or Britain. reste or Pass 'aw °^enses' and t e Many of these principles should be statistics for 1978 show an increase of universal—common human needs 100,000 in those arrested for pass of ure common, and self-determination fenses, indicating increased oppres is a basic right. As for the importance sion.2 Laws forbid interracial marriage, of the family in human and sex across the color line is a crime, that s as true of blacks as whites, a job reservation policy, which actu But we have a government that ofa[|y differentiates between civilized ten breaks up African families-delabor and that done b .. |e who liberately. And almost all training, harhi,miK .-t sets aslde the best jobs whites, almost all of whom are conwhites. servative. So what we learn is pretty Despite official rhetoric about sepa irrelevant when you get into the rate development, the entire South world. African economy depends on cheap black labor, hence, the millions of real world of South Africa Africans—servants, laborers, and a few seems unreal to anyone born anywhere professionals—who live in townships, else. Some 4.5 million Afrikaansand In addition, blacks come to the cities to English-speaking whites control the work in white-owned enterprises as mi destiny of 17 million voteless black grant workers. They must leave their Africans, 2.5 million mixed-race Colfamilies behind in the homelands and oreds, and 770,000 Asians (mostly Inlive in huge concrete hostels, the dians). This is accomplished by scene of prostitution, venereal disease, means of a complex edifice of legislaalcoholism, and malnutrition. tion. Bantu Education Act confines blacks to

The Cayuse Indians: Imperial Tribesmen of Old Oregon

In this book, Robert H. Ruby and John A. Brown tell the story of the Cayuse people, from their early years through the nineteenth century, when the tribe was forced to move to a reservation. First published in 1972, this expanded edition is published in 2005 in commemoration of the sesquicentennial of the treaty between the Cayuse, Umatilla, and Walla Walla Confederated Tribes and the U.S. government on June 9, 1855, as well as the bicentennial of Lewis and Clark's visit to the tribal homeland in 1805 and 1806.Volume 120 in The Civilization of the American Indian Series