American Indian Culture and Research Journal

The coast Indians between Cape Arago and Cape Foulweather have at one time been very numerous, the number of Indian graves and the vestiges of former habitations go to show that every stream and every nook was densely populated. Like most Indian tribes in the United States, the Coquille Indian tribe, from the southern Oregon Coast, has been marginalized politically, socially, and economically by the changing policies and laws enacted by the US government. This article is a personal and tribal history outlining the steps the Coquille took to strengthen its claim to tribal sovereignty through investment in tribal education, active participation in academic research, and the reestablishment of relationships through potlatches (gift giving). One of its most successful endeavors was initiated by Coquille scholars in 1995; called the Southwest Oregon Research Project (SWORP), it has been a major contributor to the Coquille tribe’s cultural revitalization and return to socioeconomic and regional political prominence. SWORP has become a celebrated archival research model whose focus on the repatriation of tribal intellectual properties is now revealing expansive collections that reside in private and government archives. These collections have been copied from the Smithsonian Institution Museum of Natural History’s National Anthropological Archives and the National Archives and returned to tribal and local libraries where they are easily accessible to tribal and nontribal scholars alike. This collection now comprises nearly 110,000 pages including maps, journals, linguistic and ethnographic field notes, military documents, voice recordings, and information relevant to the Coquille and other tribes from Oregon and surrounding states. These collections are centrally archived at the University of Oregon’s Knight Library and the Coquille Indian Tribal Library; in addition, pertinent documents have been copied and “potlatched” to tribes in Oregon, California, Idaho, Nevada, Washington, and Oklahoma. This paper chronicles the Coquille’s history, the inception of SWORP, the processes of two archival research projects in 1995 and 1998, and the reinstitution of the Coquille potlatch.

There is a long history of conflict between states and Indian tribes. In recent years, considerable progress has been made in reducing this conflict in some areas, but service delivery remains an issue of growing tension. Since the 1990s the federal government has reduced funding for some Indian programs; funding has increased in a few programs but has not kept up with increases in demand. As a result, tribes are forced to rely ever more on state and local services to make up the difference. These new demands come at a time when many states are dealing with tight budgets. Some states have resisted this growing need for their services, despite the fact that Indians living on reservations are entitled to all the same services and benefits as any other citizen of a state. These disagreements are an important part of the very complex and convoluted relationship between states and tribes. This necessity for state and local service delivery on Indian reservations is having a dramatic impact on the American federalist system and changing the relationship between state, local, and tribal governments. There are 562 federally recognized Indian tribes, with 55.7 million acres of Indian trust land. Clearly, Indian tribes are an important part of the federalist system. The delivery of services to Indian people, especially those living on trust land, is a critical aspect of that system. Changes in both the demand and the delivery of state services have engendered considerable political conflict.

When bubonic plague ravaged London in 1665, on hand to witness the event was author Daniel Defoe. Although he was only five years of age at the time, he built on that experience to craft a journalistic narrative of the epidemic, his Journal of the Plague Year. He relates that: “It was about the beginning of September, 1664, that I, among the rest of my neighbours, heard in ordinary discourse that the plague was returned again in Holland . . . whither, they say, it was brought, some said from Italy, others from the Levant, among some goods which were brought home by their Turkey fleet.” The plague was not native to Europe. It first emerged there three hundred years earlier, in 1348, and became known as the Black Death. It killed one-third of the population in just five years, about 25 million people. Perhaps 200 million people died by the end of the fourteenth century. The London epidemic witnessed by Defoe probably left one hundred thousand dead, about a fifth of the city’s population. A catastrophe of this magnitude is no longer part of our common experience. Plague, cholera, smallpox, typhus, and similar contagions have been banished to history or the Third World. These natural disasters have no visible cause and spread with alarming speed. When they suddenly appear on our doorstep we are quite rightly shaken. And when the disease is unknown to science, we are thrown back to the world experienced by Defoe’s Londoners, albeit with confidence that scientists will soon have an explanation if not an answer. Hantavirus first emerged in the spring of 1993 on the Navajo Reservation. Although it is by no means an “Indian disease”—there are four times as many cases of hantavirus pulmonary syndrome (HPS) among non-Indians (see table 1)—it has disproportionately affected Native Americans. Hantavirus is carried by the ubiquitous deer mouse. Close contact with mice in a dwelling is strongly associated with hantavirus and the resulting illness, HPS.

American Indian families experience many of the societal forces common to American family life, as well as those that are unique to their historical, regional, and cultural context. They have survived aggressive efforts to abolish their culture and continue to endure the effects of systems that disregard their values and discredit their identity. It is apparent that American Indians have impressive reservoirs of strength and coping in spite of adversity, but that adversity is not without cost, for they do experience high rates of disorders associated with social stress. What is lacking in the empirical literature are studies of effective adaptation strategies (in contrast to pathological ones) used by American Indian families in response to numerous challenging life circumstances. One such challenge is the presence of a family member with a disability. American Indians have a disability rate that is higher than other groups in the United States—21.9 percent compared to 9.9 percent for Asian and Pacific Islanders, 15.3 percent for Hispanics, 19.7 percent for white people, and 20 percent for black people.3 Furthermore, American Indian children are frequently labeled as having a disability. A national survey found that only half (53 percent) of American Indian students were classified as “not handicapped in any way and 11 percent were classified as mentally retarded.” The higher disability rate may be associated with economic conditions. Disabilities in general are more prevalent among children in poor families than in families who are not poor. Without doubt, American Indians are among the most impoverished people in the United States. The 1999 per capita income of American Indians and Alaska Natives was $12,893, much lower than the national average per capita income of $21,597 and lower than the $14,437 per capita income of African Americans. These data define the scope of a significant cultural and societal challenge that has not been systematically addressed.

Although Native populations suffer a disproportionate cancer burden, studies of risk reduction for cancer incidence among Native peoples have not been strongly supported by federal or private funding sources, and few published data are available to assess the success of cancer control efforts among Native community members. Furthermore, cancer etiologic investigations and cancer control studies in Native populations have not commonly included Native researchers in principal roles. This lack of involvement is related primarily to the low numbers of Native researchers who have adequate training and experience to address Native cancer problems. Although numerous social and biological scientists who have Native status are engaged in productive research careers, the encouragement that has been offered Native students to formulate career goals devoted to cancer etiology or cancer control in Native peoples has had limited success. To address cancer-related challenges adequately and to implement successful cancer control programs in Native communities, more well-trained, culturally competent researchers are required. The Native Researchers’ Cancer Control Training Program (NRCCTP) was designed to address this need. The present essay provides a description of our training program and a summary of the NRCCTP from 1995 to the present.

All theories of the “peopling” of the Western Hemisphere acknowledge the abundant evidence, from remotest pre-Columbian times to the present, that American Indians have traveled long distances for direct subsistence, trade, and other purposes. Yet most Indian societies have not produced “maps” in the familiar sense of “a representation, usually on a plane surface, of a region of the earth or heavens.” Outside the influence of European colonizers, and with the pre-Columbian exception of urbanized Mesoamerican groups, these groups have relied mainly on speech and memory to transmit and store important information, including knowledge about the earth’s surface and wayfinding on it. Scholars working within Eurocentric traditions of keeping written records have documented some of these spoken and memorized portrayals of the earth’s surface. Today scholars, especially geographers, recognize a variety of ways that human societies represent the earth and heavens, as the following definitions of “map” attest: According to J. B. Harley, “Maps are graphic representations that facilitate a spatial understanding of things, concepts, conditions, processes, or events in the human world.” More than mere “representations,” states Denis Wood, maps are social constructions that “make present—they re-present—the accumulated thought and labor of the past . . . about the milieu we simultaneously live in and collaborate on bringing [into] being. . . . they enable the past to become part of our living. . . . (This is how maps facilitate the reproduction of the culture that brings them into being).” These constructions have many forms, both tangible (visual, “artifactual”) and intangible (verbal, “mental,” performed). Intangible maps include the cognitive maps that each person constructs mentally from direct experience and other sources (often traditional). They also include verbal maps, that is, constructions of the earth’s surface in spoken forms, such as descriptions or narratives. Much of the literature on verbal maps, at least those of American Indians, concerns place-names and how they organize information associated with the places, including memorized strings of placenames used to mark travel corridors.

One afternoon, in August of 1881, the Sixth Cavalry of the US Army was nervously setting up camp along Cibecue Creek after arresting Nockaydelklinne, a medicine man accused of stirring unrest among Apaches newly settled on small reservations in Central Arizona. Ordered to “capture or kill” Nockaydelklinne, the soldiers had boldly entered Nockaydelklinne’s quarters and told the old man that he would come with them. Nockaydelklinne acquiesced—but soon hundreds of Apache warriors surrounded the cavalry, incensed that he was seized without cause. Shots were fired, and men fell on both sides; a soldier shot Nockaydelklinne point blank. Later, seeing the medicine man still miraculously alive, a soldier decapitated him. The Eastern press reported that Indians massacred 117 men. The final count was six. For months afterward, Apaches broke from the reservations, reoccupying their traditional lands. They were incessantly hunted by the army—killed or forced to return. The citizens of Arizona were outraged that these Indians dared to exceed the boundaries of the land assigned to them. A century later, scores of texts chronicling the battle of Cibecue have been published. Yet nearly every article and book simply recounts the story from the standpoint of the Euro-American participants. The voice of the Apache victims, their experiences and perspectives, has been utterly and almost completely silenced.