American Indian Culture and Research Journal

INTRODUCTION On 29 March 1989, the Exxon Valdez foundered on Bligh Reef just outside the Valdez Arm of Prince William Sound. Nearly eleven million gallons of crude oil spilled through the ship’s ruptured hull. An oil slick and oil balls drifted with tides and currents throughout large portions of Prince William Sound, southwest down the Kenai Peninsula to Kodiak Island, and then northeast into Cook Inlet. The consequences for the native and nonnative residents of the oiled area were many. One of the damage suits brought against Exxon Corporation was filed by a group of Native American residents from villages in the spill area who sought compensation for the damage the spill inflicted on their culture, and for cultural deprivation resulting from damage. The assertions made by social scientists for the native plaintiffs that their culture had been damaged; the assertion made by a social scientist for the respondent, Exxon Corporation, that native culture had been “smashed” centuries prior to the spill and that the modest differences between natives and nonnatives in the spill area at the time of the spill were “ethnic” only; and the decision of the federal judge at least in part informed by this “expert” testimony” constitute the occasion for this analysis. The consequences of the bad and irresponsible social science used in informing attorneys for both sides and informing the judge were serious and injured the natives.

INTRODUCTION Glacier ice, earthquakes, tidal waves, avalanches, volcanic eruptions, and massive storms formed the Gulf of Alaska coast, the traditional homeland of the Alutiiq people. Native people have prospered in this region for more than seven thousand years, in spite of natural and social disasters. On 24 March 1989, the Exxon Valdez accidentally released eleven million gallons of crude oil into Prince William Sound, Alaska. After the spill, images of dying sea birds and dead sea otters filled the media, fueling public anger against Exxon Shipping Company (the tanker owner) and Alyeska Pipeline Service Company (the oil company consortium with initial spill response equipment and mandate). Emotions escalated as the spill was labeled a national disaster, as dire predictions were made about the oil’s potential impact on the marine environment, and as residents and visitors viewed oiled shorelines. The acute oiling conditions that Alaskans, including myself, encountered in 1989 raised serious questions about the health of local resources, and many people expected the oil to cause long-term ecological disruption. Alaska is a unique land, and, on the surface, the damage seemed unparalleled. Oiled Alaska beaches reacted much like beaches hit by other large spills. Initial shoreline impacts were acute, but the long term environmental impact has not been catastrophic. About thirteen hundred of the more than nine thousand miles of shoreline in the Prince William Sound/Western Gulf of Alaska region were oiled to some degree, with conditions ranging from large quantities of relatively fresh oil on some Prince William Sound shorelines to weathered “tarballs” hundreds of miles away on Kodiak Island and Alaska Peninsula beaches.

Like other tribes in the United States, the Yurok of northwestern California have been dispossessed of most of their indigenous territory (figure 1). The majority is now owned by timber corporations or is part of national parks and forests. Although the Yurok Reservation includes a contiguous area of fifty-six thousand acres along the Klamath River, in 1995 only scattered parcels, comprising less than five thousand acres of the reservation, are under some semblance of tribal ownership, with the rest mostly in non-Indian hands. Historically, despite the granting of a reservation and allotments to Yurok people, control of reservation and allotment natural resources has been withheld from them under the auspices of scientific forest management. Landscape change resulting from the displacement of indigenous management regimes has been a major factor in divesting the Yurok people of natural resources, land, and indigenous lifeways. The direct effect of federal Indian land tenure policy on Indian lifeways has long been recognized, but the role of ecological change resulting from suppression of tribal control of natural resources has received less attention. This paper is an analysis of the replacement of Yurok forest management regimes with Euro-American “science-based” forestry programs—the shift from a forest for people to a forest for trees—and its role in the loss of Yurok ownership of and access to culturally and economically important natural resources.

INTRODUCTION Most people understand that interment of human remains is permanent, “earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” But for Native Americans since their earliest contacts with Europeans, this understanding has been violated. The Pilgrims brought loot from a grave back to the Mayflower —according to the admissions in a journal first published in 1622—setting a precedent of European disrespect for Native American dead that continues to this day. The sanctity of the grave as a straightforward matter of human dignity might seem easily protected in these enlightened times. Indians no longer pose any threat to European-American expansion; the new country on the “new” continent has achieved its manifest destiny. Continued grave robbing may only add insult to numerous injuries, but our contemporary lack of cloture on this issue was demonstrated again on 16 November 1990, when the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) was signed into law.

As a great fish swims between the banks of a river as it likes, so does the shining Self move between the states of dreaming and waking. — The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad In March 1932, John G. Neihardt, poet laureate of Nebraska, received an unusual thank you letter from a woman in New York City. It began, “Dear Mr. Neihardt, I have just finished ‘Black Elk Speaks.’ It makes me happy and sad all at once—sad for the days that are gone, and glad that a white man really lives who can enter into a right understanding of a Dakota’s vision, and can translate it into so poetic a form.” The woman writing Neihardt was Ella Deloria, a linguist and ethnographer at Columbia University, who was also a Yankton Indian. She wrote movingly to Neihardt about how her father, Philip Deloria, a Yankton chief and son of a “medicine man,” had abandoned his traditional Yankton life and become a Christian clergyman in order to help his people adjust to the social on-slaught of the white world. Deloria was deeply impressed by Neihardt’s ability to understand an important aspect of Native American spirituality in his book and present it so clearly to the outside world. She closed her letter by saying, I have in my texts collected for anthropological studies not a few examples of different people’s visions. I find them very inspiring—but I never knew until now how their meaning could be expressed in such a way as to be understandable to people of such a material civilization as this.

Pocahontas, whose name means “Playful Little Girl,” is perhaps one of the most romantic and gallant figures of early American history. However, the 1995 Disney movie has fancifully contributed another American Indian myth to U.S. history by omitting major elements of her young life and artificially contriving others. Pocahontas did save the life of John Smith, the leader of the first American settlement at Jamestown, when she was only a girl, but she did not fall in love with him and did not marry him, as the movie depicts. She was widowed while still a teenager and then married John Rolfe, later secretary of the colony of Jamestown, whose own wife and child had just died. She became a Christian, learned English, sailed to England and was received at the court of James I. She died at the age of twenty-two, just as she was beginning a return journey to America. She is buried at Gravesend, a few miles from London, on the Thames River. Pocahontas was the first Christian Native American, the first who spoke English, and the first Native American who had a child by an Englishman. Her place is extremely significant in North American history and in the relationship between early Europeans and native peoples. Over the western rotunda of the Capitol in Washington, D.C., she is memorialized on a marble frieze that depicts her rescue of John Smith.