American Indian Culture and Research Journal

Tourism is one of the world’s largest and most global industries and is a major factor in the cultural and economic sustainability of local communities. The hundred-year history of tourism among the Miccosukee of South Florida provides an example of purposeful self-generated heritage and eco-tourism in which indigenous people maintain control of the enterprise’s management and profits through their own strategic decisions. This small group of Native Americans began organized tourism in the early 1900s on the Miami River. By the 1930s, their villages in the Everglades west of Miami were Native owned and operated tourist destinations. In the 1980s, promotional efforts of Lee Tiger at international tourism exhibitions began a flow of international travelers from Europe, and by the 1990s this tourism and international marketing expertise benefited many other tribes. By the 2000s, exhibitions and Internet web pages promoted Native America at the global level. During this period, the Miccosukee transitioned from Everglades’ hunters and traders to casino resort managers, from families striving for everyday survival to CEOs of a diverse array of economic enterprises. Most histories portray indigenous peoples as responding, accommodating, and assimilating to non-Indians and the US government. Using a life-history approach, this article highlights the successful entrepreneurial skills of the Miccosukee from the perspective of Lee Tiger using ethnohistorical methods to triangulate interviews, participant-observation, archival documents, and existing publications. This story reveals the agency, empowerment, and voice that are part of self generated tourism, cultural education, and the marketing of indigenous culture. Overall, this article adds to our knowledge of indigenous-led proactive endeavors, providing a model for indigenous communities throughout the world that strive to sustain their community’s economic, cultural, and environmental integrity. It also highlights critical issues about tourism, the commodification of tribal culture, and forms of indigenous capitalism.

This article outlines original research on the scale and scope of Indian-themed street names in white residential spaces across the United States, and theorizes how these forms of spatial production are implicated in contemporary forms of colonization and occupation. Given that place is crucial to indigenous identity, this research reveals how Indian-themed street names participate in the abstraction and incorporation of Indianness, and further dis-locate contemporary American Indian identity, presence, and claims to sovereignty. The study also contrasts these 'Indian’ spatial markers with those used for other racialized peoples (African Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos), noting how street names referencing Native people are unique in that they have historically functioned to mark demographically white places, and to discursively reproduce white residential space.

In the decades following the Protestant revivals known as the First Great Awakening, Algonquian-speaking peoples living in communities in southern New England began to attend formal schools and adopt English literacy and language skills. As a part of a larger process of cultural adaptation that occurred at Algonquian settlements in Connecticut, Rhode Island, and on Long Island (New York) during the eighteenth century, many Native men, women, and children expressed new and growing interest in obtaining the knowledge and literacy of their Euro-American neighbors, and linked the ability to read and write to the practice and growth of their new Christian faith. By the 1750s and 1760s, many children and youth attended colonial schools—namely Eleazar Wheelock’s Charity School located in Lebanon, Connecticut—where they were exposed to and instructed in a new language and letters. The new educational regimen that Algonquian students encountered at such institutions certainly reflected the prejudice and ethnocentric goals of colonial authorities, but also served to equip a number of Natives with new tools for communicating and strengthening the ties between their communities. Far from serving the goals of ministers and other officials to “civilize” Native children and their wider communities and to “purge” their “Indian” culture, schooling and literacy provided Algonquians with an innovative means for asserting their own voices, interests, and understandings of community and land. Using writing to protect communal interests and defend their homelands, Algonquians challenged the encroachment and dispossession they suffered throughout the mid-eighteenth century and strengthened, rather than diminished, kin networks and cross-communal ties.

Aboriginal peoples in Canada are increasingly moving to urban communities in search of educational and economic opportunities. For many urbanization is not an easy process, in particular when they move to cities that historically have had few Aboriginal citizens and where social traditions of resistance and resentment towards Aboriginal rights prevail. In this paper we explore one such case through studying the phenomenon known as NIMBY (not in my backyard). We apply critical discourse analysis to understand how concepts of citizenship were taken up when a non-profit society of Aboriginal women sought to establish a transition home for women and children moving to a small Canadian prairie city. Resistance to the women’s plans was expressed in neoliberal discourses that denied the women civic citizenship while affirmation of the women in terms of collective values and relational citizenship was undermined in the political maneuvers of public debate.

Background/purpose Public health and medical studies in American Indian / Alaska Native (AI/AN) populations have not commonly included AI/AN researchers in principal roles. This leadership disparity may be attributed, in part, to the low numbers of AI/AN researchers who have sufficient training and leadership experience to plan and conduct epidemiologic and health research studies. Under Indian Health Service and National Institutes of Health funding, we have planned and implemented a three-week intensive training program aimed at increasing biomedical research skills among AI/AN health professional and students. We offer a core series of courses to provide fundamental training in research that is needed by all biomedical researchers. Our courses include a large portion of AI/AN faculty in key teaching and mentorship roles. Furthermore we offer a diverse set of health research courses each year. Course offerings are modified year to year. Sixty-seven (67) trainees participated in the 2008 Summer Institute. The paper describes the evaluation of the outcomes and impact the Summer Institute had on the 2008 cohort of students. Methods We assessed the experience of the training program at the time it occurred through course evaluations (n=186), while the outcomes evaluation focused on utility of the knowledge gained six months after participating in the training program (n=49). The impact evaluation also focused on the benefit of the Summer Institute training experience in the workplace environment. Results/outcomes Overall, the evaluation suggests that graduates were quite positive in their assessments of the training program and their ability to utilize the newly gained knowledge and skills in the workplace or in their academic pursuits. Supervisors confirmed that graduates had grown from their learning experiences at the Summer Institute training and this growth was having a positive impact on their organization.

This paper analyzes the antagonistic relations between white residents of southeastern Connecticut and the small tribe of American Indians who own one of only two casinos in Connecticut. The economic success of Foxwoods Casino Resort has enabled the tribe to buy back land, sparking fears of land annexation by American Indians. Antagonism between the two groups has a long history but the existence of American Indians had been obfuscated, so their rights to a casino and to the wealth it has generated are not accepted by some. The new wealth and the small size of the tribe have led to negative reactions by white residents. Theoretical constructs of cross-cultural ‘incompossibility’ (Lyotard) and of power relationships (Foucault) are used to reveal representations and discursive systems deployed through history and today to maintain identity and separation between these two groups. Power relationships, however, can be resisted or subjected to change, even if they had seemed immutably normal in southeastern Connecticut.