American Indian Culture and Research Journal

This article examines in detail the ingenious ways in which Sherman Alexie appropriates the blues as a vessel for Native Americans to creatively express their predicament and a subversive instrument in their struggle to resist colonial cooption. In Reservation Blues (1995) Alexie’s writing itself creates a Native American version of the blues that appropriates such blues staples as the AAB stanza, improvisation, and syncopation. The author’s multiple references in the novel to mainstream popular culture are in contrast to the role of the blues, which arguably serves as the music of choice for Alexie’s principal project: the survival of Native America.

This article argues that military conflict with the Lakota and Cheyenne caused a major spiritual crisis among the Pawnee Indians in the first half of the nineteenth century. In their desperation, some Pawnees allowed Christian missionaries among them in the hope of acquiring additional spiritual power, while others sought to end the ritual sacrifice of human captives in the Skiri Pawnee Morning Star Ceremony to gain the political and military support of the United States. In addition, an increasing number of Skiri Pawnees turned toward the worship of Pahukatawa, a man who had returned from the dead after he had been slain by the Sioux in the early 1830s. Pahukatawa was controversial among Skiri Pawnees who favored Morning Star, but eventually he was accepted as one of the Pawnee sacred powers who assumed a prominent place in the Pawnee pantheon. The worship of Pahukatawa revitalized the Pawnee, but unlike other revitalization movements, this one was the result of Lakota and Cheyenne expansionism rather than Euro-American settler colonialism.

Legibility is a state-sponsored goal of making citizens known, visible, measurable, and controllable (Scott 1998). Projects undergirding this goal include censuses, cadastral surveys, and the creation of permanent surnames, all of which, unsurprisingly, were important parts of the push to assimilate Native peoples in the United States. While land allotment is well understood as a keystone of assimilation policy, less well known is a project to “rename the Indians,” the goal of which was to provide inheritable family surnames. Guidelines called for using Native names wherever possible, an end to the adoption of English names, and rejecting “ridiculous” or “offensive” names. Renaming rolls were created by Dr. Charles Eastman for a number of Dakota and Lakota tribes in the early 1900s. An analysis of the Sisseton and Wahpeton renaming rolls shows that most tribal members had adopted permanent surnames prior to Eastman’s work. Many used English translations of their Native surnames, and English first names had become almost universal. Somewhat surprisingly, we found virtually no “famous” names such as those notoriously given at boarding schools. Women in most cases lost their Native names due to the Anglo-American practice of the wife adopting her husband’s surname. While allotment and renaming indeed had the effect of making Native Americans more “legible” to the government in a manner that “made sense” to them, these policies had the perverse effect of making Native names and people less legible, constituting a calculated displacement of Natives in addition to an imposed and futile land-tenure system.

Tied into current research on both internet memes and American Indian activist rhetoric, this article analyzes selected internet memes created by campaigners and activists concerned with the imprisonment of the American Indian Movement activist Leonard Peltier and initiates debate on the internet memes employed within American Indian activism. With unprecedented potential for quickly reaching a large number of users all over the world, the use of internet memes necessitates a variety of strategies for raising awareness, educating, and triggering political activism. At a deeper level, memes also functionalize intimately connected discourses on the power to control both knowledge and representation. The creative potential inherent in internet memes and their dissemination is discussed not only in close connection to Peltier’s conviction and the political activism that ensued as a result of his incarceration, but also analyzes underlying claims to knowing and owning “the truth” about the (presumed) unjust incarceration of a cultural leader and elder and the right to represent this “truth” within a framework of American Indian activism and politics within the United States. This rhetorical analysis helps us to understand the high degrees of cultural and political agency and resistance—the language of “survivance”—involved in these memes.

Since the 1880s, the federal government has supported the migration of Native peoples to urban spaces. In the decades following World War II, American Indians migrated in large numbers to cities such as Chicago, both on their own and through the federal relocation program. Based on oral history interviews and ethnographic research, this paper explores reflections from multiple generations of contemporary Chicago Natives on urban migration and cultural survival in city spaces. This paper describes the motivations for urban migration and demonstrates the central role Native social organizations have played in the survival of Native culture and communities in urban spaces.

The Lincoln administration’s Indian policies were, for the most part, consistent with those of his predecessors and shared many of the same goals. Lincoln and Commissioner of Indian Affairs William P. Dole supported assimilation, the allotment of Indian lands, the concentration of Native peoples on reservations, and the termination of federal responsibilities for Indian nations. While some Lincoln-era Indian policies were certainly well intentioned, they did irreparable damage to Native American societies and severely diminished the Indian land base. While exercising enlightened and steadfast leadership during the Civil War crisis, Lincoln’s Indian policies cast an altogether different light on his presidency and help explain the ambiguity that many Native peoples feel about his tenure as Great Father.