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Introduction: Cannonball, North Dakota

Michael D. McNally

in Defend the Sacred: Native American Religious Freedom beyond the First Amendment

This introductory chapter argues for the continued relevance of religious freedom for Native claims. First, Native claims to religious freedom have often failed in court. Indeed, many Native peoples ... More

This introductory chapter argues for the continued relevance of religious freedom for Native claims. First, Native claims to religious freedom have often failed in court. Indeed, many Native peoples are understandably reluctant to speak of their traditions in the language of religion, given that their orientation to place does not conform to the conceptual shape of religion conventionally understood. Native peoples also have good reason to be reluctant because of frequent associations of the sacred with the secret. But the problem of Native American religious freedom goes far deeper. As a growing body of critical religious studies literature has shown, the reason that some religions do not fully count for religious freedom legal protection is because the particular characteristics of Protestant Christianity is naturalized and universalized at the expense of traditions characterized more by community obligations, law, and ritualized practice. A fourth criticism of engaging religious freedom is the legacy of the plain fact that religion has long been used against Native American peoples.Less

Religion as Cultural Resource: Environmental and Historic Preservation Law

Michael D. McNally

in Defend the Sacred: Native American Religious Freedom beyond the First Amendment

This chapter explores what results when Native peoples articulate religious claims in the language of culture and cultural resources under environmental and historic preservation law. It argues that ... More

This chapter explores what results when Native peoples articulate religious claims in the language of culture and cultural resources under environmental and historic preservation law. It argues that cultural resource laws have become more fruitful in two respects. First, there is more emphatic insistence on government-to-government consultation between federal agencies and tribes. Second, in 1990, National Historic Preservation Act regulations were clarified by designating “Traditional Cultural Properties” as eligible for listing on the National Register of Historic Places and in 1992, that law was amended to formally engage tribal governments in the review process. In light of these developments, protection under the categories of culture and cultural resource have proved more capacious for distinctive Native practices and beliefs about sacred lands, but it has come at the expense of the clearer edge of religious freedom protections, while still being haunted, and arguably bedraggled, by the category of religion from which these categories ostensibly have been formally disentangled.Less

Introduction

Mark Rifkin

in The Erotics of Sovereignty: Queer Native Writing in the Era of Self-Determination

This book addresses how contemporary queer Native writers use the representation of bodily, emotional, and psychological sensation in challenging U.S. formulations of political subjectivity, while ... More

This book addresses how contemporary queer Native writers use the representation of bodily, emotional, and psychological sensation in challenging U.S. formulations of political subjectivity, while seeking to reimagine what counts as sovereignty and providing alternative ways of figuring Native experience. The supposedly apparent continuity of Indianness gives way to genealogies of sensation that trace how peoplehood exists within forms of feeling, prompting these queer writers to theorize dynamics of Indigenous sociality that shapes the meaning of self-determination under settler rule. Through this, possibilities for conceptualizing and realizing alternative versions of collective identity and indigeneity gradually emerge, in the attempt to go against the efforts to displace, translate, and erase Native peoples.Less

Coming of Age in Mississippi: The Life and Times of Warner McCary

Angela Pulley Hudson

in Real Native Genius: How an Ex-Slave and a White Mormon Became Famous Indians

This chapter focuses on Warner McCary's desire to escape his hometown of Natchez, Mississippi, and his own painful past by reinventing himself. It explores the brickyards and barbershops of the ... More

This chapter focuses on Warner McCary's desire to escape his hometown of Natchez, Mississippi, and his own painful past by reinventing himself. It explores the brickyards and barbershops of the Mississippi River port and sketches the city's complex cultural milieu—its reliance on chattel slavery, its briefly flourishing free black community, its connections to other ports, its rich indigenous life and history, and its varied cultural venues. McCary's decision to represent himself as an Indian following his manumission and departure from Natchez must be evaluated not only in the context of slavery, but also with an understanding of the influence of Native people and affairs on life in the South, including the context of Indian removal.Less

Coda: Naming the Legacy of Native Christian Missionary Encounters

Michael D. McNally

in Native Americans, Christianity, and the Reshaping of the American Religious Landscape

In closing, this book shows that each of its chapters has done much to complicate and open up our sense of past encounters between various Christian missionaries and various Native North American ... More

In closing, this book shows that each of its chapters has done much to complicate and open up our sense of past encounters between various Christian missionaries and various Native North American peoples. These encounters could transform missionaries even as their missionary projects could transform the cultures of Native communities. Missionary encounters have led to the tragic loss of many Native languages; missionary encounters have also led, through the mechanisms and practices of literacy, to the retention of Native languages. Missionary encounters could eradicate traditions; they could also provide material for new articulations of those traditions. The encounters could introduce or exacerbate divisions in Native communities and families, fomenting disastrous results, if not violence; through those encounters could also emerge novel social networks and institutions around which fragmented Native peoples could restore their communities.Less

The Indians of Today

Marie Louise Bottineau Baldwin

in Recasting the Vote: How Women of Color Transformed the Suffrage Movement

Marie Bottineau Baldwin saw the segregation of the federal civil service under the Wilson administration first-hand from her position in the Interior Department where she had been working for almost ... More

Marie Bottineau Baldwin saw the segregation of the federal civil service under the Wilson administration first-hand from her position in the Interior Department where she had been working for almost a decade. A large number of Native people were not U.S. citizens. In this increasingly rigid racial regime, white Americans had trouble classifying Métis people like Bottineau Baldwin who were of mixed Native and French descent and generally decided that if they kept ties to their Native kin, they remained Indians. As the Wilson administration built racial inequality into the civil service, it raised a number of very personal and immediate questions for Bottineau Baldwin. She went on the offensive. If Americans thought of her as an Indian, she would prove that Indians were different from African Americans. Echoing the language of the Wilson administration, she raised the specter of interracial relations.Less

Bodies in Motion: An Introduction

Ann M. Axtmann

in Indians and Wannabes: Native American Powwow Dancing in the Northeast and Beyond

This chapter introduces the Native American intertribal powwow as a popular and prolific performance genre. Powwows are spiritual, social, and communal events that occur annually throughout North ... More

This chapter introduces the Native American intertribal powwow as a popular and prolific performance genre. Powwows are spiritual, social, and communal events that occur annually throughout North America and vary significantly by geographical region, tribal and community organizers, and participants. Powwows are also present in our daily lives through music, television, and film; photojournalism; and academic studies. After examining some of these sources, Axtmann discusses the importance of studying powwow through its everyday movement and dance––and, more specifically, proposes bringing choreographic tools, Laban Movement Analysis, and notions of “performance” and “performativity” to this project. In particular, she considers the genocides historically suffered by Native peoples in relation to how the body expresses itself through dance. Finally, Axtmann announces the central topics of her book by chapter, introduces key terms that will be used throughout, and explains how her own identity as a non-Indian dancer, choreographer, and performance scholar is located within the project.Less

The Coming of the Book to Indian Country

Phillip H. Round

in Removable Type: Histories of the Book in Indian Country, 1663-1880

This chapter outlines how John Eliot's literacy mission served not only as the cornerstone of later book-centered Euro-American ideologies of conquest but also as the starting point for several ... More

This chapter outlines how John Eliot's literacy mission served not only as the cornerstone of later book-centered Euro-American ideologies of conquest but also as the starting point for several powerful alphabetic literacy complexes built and maintained by Native peoples in the eighteenth century. The coming of the book to Indian Country was a dialogic process. Books arrived in the New World and transformed it forever. Yet, just as significant, books were themselves transformed in the process. American books like those produced at Eliot's New England Mission press were often the result of bicultural cooperation and relied heavily on Indian compilers, translators, and editors. In the hands of these indigenous craftsmen, polemicists, writers, and readers, the European ideology of the book was put to the service of Native nation building in ways that far surpassed the expectations of the colonizers.Less

Epilogue

Sarah Deer

in The Beginning and End of Rape: Confronting Sexual Violence in Native America

The epilogue is self-reflective of the author’s own history of working towards helping victims of sexual assault. It outlines her futures goals of scholarship in regards to sexual assault against ... More

The epilogue is self-reflective of the author’s own history of working towards helping victims of sexual assault. It outlines her futures goals of scholarship in regards to sexual assault against Native women. The author wishes to examine the role of language in shaping people’s experience of reality and social relations. In addition to studying the linguists of Native peoples, the author is interested in elevating the voices of Native women who have developed their own solutions and interventions within their tribal nations.Less

. The Indian Claims Commission: From Hope to Reality

David E. Wilkins

in Hollow Justice: A History of Indigenous Claims in the United States

The Indian Claims Commission (ICC) was not the perfect solution but it gave hope. The chapter looks at the ICC and analyses its effectiveness. Native peoples no longer had to fight individually to ... More

The Indian Claims Commission (ICC) was not the perfect solution but it gave hope. The chapter looks at the ICC and analyses its effectiveness. Native peoples no longer had to fight individually to have bills introduced that would, if successful, allow them to file claim suits against the federal government. And no longer could single lawmakers block a tribe's right to present its claim before a court. All natives now had an opportunity to have their claims heard by a commission empowered to hear them. The chapter looks at the extent to which the ICC met up to expectations.Less

An Ojibwe Woman in Washington, D.C.

Marie Louise Bottineau Baldwin

in Recasting the Vote: How Women of Color Transformed the Suffrage Movement

Marie Louise Bottineau Baldwin, a woman of Ojibwe (Chippewa) and French descent, went to Washington, D.C., for the same reason many Native people had before her: to negotiate a treaty. In Washington, ... More

Marie Louise Bottineau Baldwin, a woman of Ojibwe (Chippewa) and French descent, went to Washington, D.C., for the same reason many Native people had before her: to negotiate a treaty. In Washington, she connected with an intertribal Native community as well as with white suffragists. She grew increasingly politically active as she tried to navigate and then reshape the attitudes of a public who believed that Native people were disappearing and who had trouble understanding her mixed heritage.Less

The Somatics of Haunting: Embodied Peoplehood in Qwo-Li Driskill’s Walking with Ghosts

Mark Rifkin

in The Erotics of Sovereignty: Queer Native Writing in the Era of Self-Determination

This chapter discusses the issues pertaining to the institutionalization of a heteronormative vision of Cherokee identity, while depicting that structure as a preservation of the principles of ... More

This chapter discusses the issues pertaining to the institutionalization of a heteronormative vision of Cherokee identity, while depicting that structure as a preservation of the principles of peoplehood. It explains how this kind of indigenous description can be understood as responsive to particular types of historical pressures placed on Native peoples. Cherokee scholar and poet Qwo-Li Driskill, through his poem “Stolen from Our Bodies,” offers the notion of a “Sovereign Erotic” as a way of connecting Native bodies, individual and collective self-representations, and ongoing histories of invasion, detribalization, and removal. The chapter also cites Driskill’s collection of poetry, Walking with Ghosts, where he develops an archaeology of Indigenous peoplehood and structures of feeling through reference to sensuous bodily experience.Less

It Seemed Like the Whole Bay Died

Kai Erikson

in The Sociologist's Eye: Reflections on Social Life

This chapter examines the impact of the Exxon Valdez oil spill on the Native peoples of Alaska. The disaster occurred in March 1989, when the supertanker Exxon Valdez ran aground on a reef in Prince ... More

This chapter examines the impact of the Exxon Valdez oil spill on the Native peoples of Alaska. The disaster occurred in March 1989, when the supertanker Exxon Valdez ran aground on a reef in Prince William Sound. At least eleven million gallons of crude oil blackened more than a thousand miles of Alaskan coastline. The chapter considers what harm the disaster did to the Native individuals exposed to it and what damage it caused to the texture of their customary ways of life. In particular, it analyzes the ways that the oil spill affected the Alutiiq people's subsistence life as well as the Native way of being. It also discusses the Alutiiq's feeling of homelessness in the wake of the disaster.Less

Sign-off: Digital Test Patterns

Dustin Tahmahkera

in Tribal Televisions: Viewing Native People in Sitcoms

This chapter summarizes the analysis of indigenous and nonindigenous representations that collide, converge, and are creatively adjusted and readjusted by generations of sitcom producers. Indigenous ... More

This chapter summarizes the analysis of indigenous and nonindigenous representations that collide, converge, and are creatively adjusted and readjusted by generations of sitcom producers. Indigenous producers like the 1491s promote a network of texts whose visual, sonic, and affective representations are programmed to empower Native Peoples. It challenges and motivates reflection on understandings of indigenous identities, supports the activist work of decolonizing views of Native cultures, and inspires current and future generations to create and broadcast their own Native tribal televisions.Less

Forced to Choose: Queer Indigeneity in Film

Lisa Tatonetti

in The Queerness of Native American Literature

This chapter assesses the images that have been used to depict queer Native people in contemporary narrative film. Contemporary narrative film, which offers the most widely viewed representations of ... More

This chapter assesses the images that have been used to depict queer Native people in contemporary narrative film. Contemporary narrative film, which offers the most widely viewed representations of queer Native people, often reenacts fragmenting visions of the erotic. Films like Big Eden, Johnny Greyeyes, and The Business of Fancydancing replicate the legacies of settler colonialism in their depictions of Two-Spirit Native people, leaving queer Indigenous people with an untenable choice in which they are “forced to choose.” They must either embrace family and nation in the silence of desire, or embrace sexuality at the expense of tribal and familial alliances.Less

The Unfulfilled American Revolution

Laurie Weinstein, Diane Hassan, and Samantha Mauro

in Historical Archaeology of the Revolutionary War Encampments of Washington's Army

This chapter uses ethnohistoric research to address history’s failure to recognize the roles that peoples of African descent, Native peoples, and women had in the revolutionary cause. The chapter ... More

This chapter uses ethnohistoric research to address history’s failure to recognize the roles that peoples of African descent, Native peoples, and women had in the revolutionary cause. The chapter further describes how white men of privilege were not the only ones who voiced “the spirit of freedom,” as evidenced by Abigail Adams’s inspirational words. The research provides information about camp followers and presents specific biographic accounts of African Descendants and Native peoples who were stationed at the Middle Encampment in Redding, Connecticut.Less

Americanize the First American

Gertrude Simmons Bonnin

in Recasting the Vote: How Women of Color Transformed the Suffrage Movement

A few months after the United States declared war on Germany in the summer of 1917, Gertrude Simmons Bonnin moved to Washington, D.C as the Society of American Indians had elected her secretary. ... More

A few months after the United States declared war on Germany in the summer of 1917, Gertrude Simmons Bonnin moved to Washington, D.C as the Society of American Indians had elected her secretary. Bonnin managed to juggle war work with advocacy for other causes, which quickly brought her into the orbit of politically active white women in the District. She displayed a masterful political sense, gaining white allies by deploying her identity as a Native woman. She would use a similar strategy in her suffrage work. She also turned her energy to a ban on peyote use, which put her in conflict with other Native people.Less

The Historical and Cultural Context of Fort St. Joseph

José António Brandão and Michael S. Nassaney

Michael S. Nassaney and Michael S. Nassaney (eds)

in Fort St. Joseph Revealed: The Historical Archaeology of a Fur Trading Post

This brief overview of the cultural and historical context of Fort St. Joseph explores how Natives and newcomers created a vibrant social and economic life on the frontier of the French empire. The ... More

This brief overview of the cultural and historical context of Fort St. Joseph explores how Natives and newcomers created a vibrant social and economic life on the frontier of the French empire. The Fort was an important trading post and a key cog in the French network of trading and military posts. Interactions between French speakers and Native peoples at the Fort initiated a process of ethnogenesis, even as both Native peoples and French settlers sought to maintain key elements of their particular culture.Less