American Indian Culture and Research Journal

Among the American Indians of western Washington State and northwest Oregon stories have served as educational tools by presenting lessons concerning the traditional culture. Several types of instruction have been noted in the oral literature of these Indians of the Southern Northwest Coast. June Collins, for example, describes several rules of ethics (caring for the aged and handicapped, limiting potential marriage partners after the death of a spouse, and treating step-children humanely) in stories of the Skagit Indians. William Shelton (1868–1938), a Snohomish Indian, affirms that such stories impart principled messages to the audience: “My parents, uncles, and great-uncles told me, in days gone by, stories which would create in me the desire to become brave, and good, and strong, to become a good speaker, a good leader; they taught me to honor old people and always do all in my power to help them.” There is, however, another set of messages beyond ethics, good citizenship, and bravery. A subset of the oral literature, either whole stories or parts of them, provides its audience with information about human health concerns. These stories attempt to teach listeners how to prevent certain illnesses, avoid bodily harm, and relieve minor afflictions. They also deal with mental health issues, sexual instruction, spirit-power contact, and coping with old age. Today these stories present another type of insight. They allow us access into the cosmology of the Southern Northwest Coast populations and provide us with a look into their methods for analyzing nature. Through these stories we are able to judge the validity of claims that the indigenous understanding of contagious disease very often parallels Western concepts of germ theory.

[T]he Indians . . . continued to increase their cultivated lands and were prosperous and contented. White people began to take water from the river about forty years ago. The first diversion being so small we hardly noticed it, but they gradually took more out each year till we noticed our loss by not being able to irrigate all our fields. We were forced to abandon them little by little, until some twenty years ago when we were left high and dry. —Chir-purtke, sixty-seven-year-old Pima elder, June 1914 INTRODUCTION On 17 June 1902, after more than a decade of political debate and maneuvering, the National Reclamation Act became law. This legislation provided direct federal subsidies for the development of irrigation projects across the arid West. Initially, reclamation projects focused on public, rather than private, lands; and since there were large tracts of public lands in the Gila River and Casa Grande valleys, many people—including government officials—believed the first federal reclamation project in Arizona would be built there. Political leaders and farmers from these valleys, banking on a large area of public lands waiting to be developed, were well aware of the chief factor they believed would carry them in their desire for the first federally financed reclamation project: the well-known but unfulfilled government promises to alleviate the water problems of the Pima tribe.

INTRODUCTION Criminal justice organizations that are operated by indigenous peoples play many important roles beyond simply providing services for indigenous people involved with the criminal justice system or at risk of such involvement. Service provision is their explicit role, but these organizations also have important implicit roles in the community and, in some cases, regionally, nationally, and internationally. It is important to understand the full contributions that these (and other indigenous service) organizations make to indigenous and nonindigenous society because of their often precarious existence within the criminal justice systems of countries that were historically invaded and settled by European powers. The dominant society within these countries continues to marginalize indigenous inhabitants through a variety of economic, political, and legal processes that contribute to the overrepresentation of the indigenous population in crime statistics. Previous research has identified six general roles played in communities by any organization; however, because of the special needs and history of indigenous communities, these roles take on unusual characteristics. In this essay I describe and analyze the explicit and implicit roles of five organizations. Explicit roles include providing a variety of programs—directly related, indirectly related, and not related at all to criminal justice. As important as these explicit roles are, the implicit roles of the organizations are of more interest because they are seldom discussed in the literature and not always utilized to their full potential for the benefit of indigenous organizations and communities alike.

My goal with this research is to contribute to our current understanding of how contact with and incorporation into the modern world-system may affect the trajectory of change among indigenous peoples. I do this by examining (1) the nature of social organization among the various peoples known collectively as Mississippians; (2) the processes involved in the supplanting of their political, cultural, and economic structures during the sixteenth-century conquest; (3) the changes that occurred within the precolonial Mississippian cultures following their initial contact with European agents in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries; and (4) the impact of such changes on the Mississippian people’s subsequent integration into the world-system. By expanding our understanding of the process of incorporation and the concurrent structural transformations, I seek to extend Chase-Dunn and Hall’s hypothesis that episodes of incorporation, disintegration, and reincorporation may vary in highly predictable and interrelated ways in “interchiefdom systems as well as interstate systems.” In this essay I employ the methodologies of historical sociology, which are aimed at studying the past to discover how societies operate and evolve. I start from the perspective that we can best understand social change in terms of its historical specificities rather than generalizations that dominate contemporary sociology. I incorporate historical detail gleaned from previously published works from the fields of anthropology, archaeology, and history to develop a detailed explanation of what Peter Peregrine has called the “Mississippian World-System,” the nature of its sixteenth-century contacts with European agents, and the effect of those contacts on the area’s subsequent incorporation into the European world system. When did the Mississippian culture first begin to decline and under what specific conditions? How were these changes related to contact with early European explorers? The Mississippians are a fitting case on which to focus since the North American continent was largely “external” to the modern world-system prior to contact with European explorers in the decades following 1492. By focusing on this episode of incorporation and the associated transformation of the Mississippian system’s social structures and processes, I hope to understand better the dynamics of change that occur when two “worlds” collide.

We have had lots of researchers come to this community. They don’t understand the people. They come here for a short time, talk to a few people, then they leave and write a report or book with their name on it that is totally inaccurate. Then other researchers quote them continuing the problem and then you have guys like at the college or the government forestry department quoting these guys to our youth instead of listening to us. —Raymond Beaver, personal communication At a conference hosted by the University of Calgary’s Department of History in 1977 both Chief John Snow (Stoney) and Dr. Joseph Couture (Métis/Cree) called for a greater reliance on the oral history of Aboriginal peoples. In his address Chief Snow called on historians to “recognize another form of history, the oral accounts of historic events and understandings passed down by the elders of our tribes.” He denounced the emphasis on written history as truth and noted that by denying the validity of oral history misunderstanding, prejudice, and fallacy often result. For his part Dr. Couture held that “as a point of professional integrity, historians must come to grips with the issue of the accuracy of native oral history, in order, as a sine qua non, to develop a more comprehensive understanding and appreciation of that history.” I believe Chief Snow and Dr. Couture meant that academics need to get over the obstacles that prevent them from viewing this rich source of material as the literature, not only because it is ethical to do so but also because otherwise one cannot produce solid work whether it be in history, anthropology, education, or health research.