American Indian Culture and Research Journal

In 1992 the government of British Columbia launched a public inquiry to investigate persistent allegations that Aboriginal people in the central interior of the province were being subjected to racial prejudice and unfair treatment by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and the provincial justice system. Over a six-month period the Cariboo Chilcotin justice inquiry held hearings in ten of the fifteen Tsilhqot’in, Carrier, and Secwepemc reserve communities of the region. Aboriginal people brought forth almost two hundred incidents of complaint, including allegations of police assaults in jail cells, inadequate responses to calls for help, abuses of police authority, and poor representation by lawyers. The commission’s final report concluded that problems of racial prejudice, discrimination, and cultural incompatibility were widespread between Aboriginal people and the justice system. The Cariboo Chilcotin justice inquiry is one of the more recent of a series of public inquiries, hearings, task forces, and royal commissions in the last decade examining the relationship between Aboriginal people and the Canadian justice system. The highly publicized cases of the wrongful incarceration of Mi’kmaq Donald Marshal, the shooting death of Manitoba Native leader J. J. Harper, and the murder of Helen Betty Osborne in La Pas, Manitoba, along with the more recent shooting by an RCMP officer of Connie Jacobs and her young son in their home on an Alberta reserve, have drawn much public attention to the complex ways in which factors of racism, poverty, gender, culture, and history are implicated in the difficulties that Aboriginal people across Canada continue to experience in their dealings with Canadian justice.

The article examines the work of two First Nations artists active along the Northwest Coast during the assimilation era (1867-1951): Frederick Alexie and Mathias Joe. Although they were by no means the only Northwest Coast artists active during this period, I have selected them specifically because they are not normally discussed in the plethora of books and articles on Northwest Coast art published since 1947. Neither, for example, appear in the pivotal 1980 catalogue The Legacy, the who’s who of historic and contemporary Northwest Coast artists. They did, however, receive Euro-Canadian attention during their lives and shared a willingness to produce work drawing on what might be called non-traditional sources of inspiration. Through their creations, these men also addressed Native and non-Native publics about the central issues of land, education, and First Nations status in Canadian society. In these ways, they disrupt the paradigm commonly applied to Northwest Coast art that privileges objects produced solely for ceremonial use and sees the history of Northwest Coast art as one of a “classic”mid-nineteenth-century climax, early-twentieth-century “decline,” and mid-twentieth-century “renaissance.” This outdated, European-derived model fails to account for the complex political and social circumstances that informed both the production and reception of Northwest Coast objects during the era of assimilation and undervalues the ways in which indigenous arts contributed to the public assertion of and debate over Indian policy in Canada.

This article seeks to deepen our understanding of an all-too-recurrent process: Washington, D.C.’s eviction of Indians from lands that the American government itself had previously “secured” for them. The intricacies of this process appear in a little-known story that precedes the Navajo-Hopi land dispute. It is the story of how Navajo families lost lands, which we call the Chambers Checkerboard (see fig. l), along the railroad in Arizona during the 1930s through the process of allotment. This story is told through alternating chronicle and hindsight, through statements of both Navajos and non-Indians, thereby acknowledging the patchy underpinnings of any reconstruction of this history. We hope to elucidate how people experienced, analyzed, and tried to cope with or influence the events that ensued. Similar events unfolded across the state line in New Mexico, where allotted areas stretched north and east to Chaco Canyon and beyond. Because the Chambers Checkerboard is more compact and more accessible to the railroad than most of the New Mexico allotted areas, however, land-grabbing was more intense and the processes underlying allotment gain and loss more starkly apparent. The documents for the Chambers Checkerboard also give heretofore unpublished details on the logistics of sending non-Indian, nonlocal-government land surveyors among widely dispersed, unschooled, non-English-speaking Navajos to take their written applications for specific half-mile-square parcels of land and mark each square on the ground. The documents further tell how the Navajo families, most of which traded wool, livestock, and weaving at local trading posts for store credit, were induced to pay with hard currency for the surveys and leases on surrounding unallotted railroad lands.

In the fall of 1991, members of the Child and Family Services Research Group, Faculty of Social Work at the University of Manitoba and the Southeast Resource Development Council (SERDC) began meeting to plan a response to a special competition established by the then National Welfare Grants (NWG) of Health and Welfare Canada to conduct research on social service issues. At this meeting, SERDC identified the needs of adolescents as a priority concern because of rising teenage suicide rates, increasing numbers of young people coming before the courts, and possible high rates of adolescent addiction. The groups held further meetings and submitted a joint proposal to NWG in early 1992. Research was subsequently conducted under the auspices of SERDC, a tribal council organization formed by nine Ojibwa First Nations communities in the southeastern part of Manitoba. This article describes the realities involved in such a research project, discusses the efficacy of participatory research with First Nations communities, and illustrates the phenomenon of contracting with First Nations organizations, or structures, that are external to the communities they serve.

Readers and critics have long noted the important presence of Catholicism in most of Louise Erdrich’s novels, notably Love Medicine (1984 and 1993), The Beet Queen (1986), Tracks (1988), and Tales of Burning Love (1996). The Bingo Palace (1994) and The Antelope Wife (1998) focus on Chippewa’ culture and spirituality, and largely exclude Catholicism. I believe the critics are incomplete in their analyses of the roles of Catholicism in Love Medicine and Tracks where it is a much more central theme than in Erdrich’s other fiction. My chief purpose in this article is to provide a broader and deeper view of the matter in question than anyone has previously attempted by joining literary, biographical, and historical analyses. My argument concerning Love Medicine is that the conflict of Catholicism with shamanic religion and traditional culture provides perhaps the strongest single unifying addition to the 1993 revised edition of the novel. Additionally, I argue that the same theme in Tracks is considerably more ambivalent than it is in Love Medicine-and more pervasive than the critics have acknowledged. I especially press for a revised view of Pauline, one of the two narrators in the novel, who later becomes Sister Leopolda and appears in several other Erdrich novels. In the second part of this study, I assemble Erdrich’s comments in interviews regarding Catholicism in her life and works and draw conclusions about these remarks, especially in regard to the novels in question. Erdrich, in both the fiction and interviews, identifies the Turtle Mountain Chippewa Reservation as an important source for the settings of the two novels. Peter G. Beidler and Gay Barton also assert that the reservation can easily be identified as Turtle Mountain in Love Medicine and Tracks, though in other novels both the fictitious reservation and Argus, a fictional town, are removed from the actual Turtle Mountain Reservation. My contribution here is to assemble a short history of Catholicism on that reservation and to speculate that Erdrich’s fictional settings could indeed be closely based on historical realities.

The study of American Indian tribal politics and intergovernmental relations still remains quite marginalized in political science. Some law schools are better than others in their Indian law course offerings. Historians contribute to what is termed Indian history, though much of that bypasses Indian perspectives on history. In keeping with its early interests in tribes and aboriginals, anthropology has a larger literature on American Indians than most disciplines. Under the anthropological umbrella, archaeology, kinship studies, and linguistics come closer than other academic investigations to a philo-sophical analysis of Indian values that takes Indian thinking seriously. In spite of a considerable literature on Indian worldview, including John G. Neihardt’s Black Elk Speaks, Paul Radin’s Autobiography of A Winnebago, and Leo W. Simmons’s Sun Chief: The Autobiography of a Hopi Indian, few attempt to capture the inner worlds of Indian life.