American Indian Culture and Research Journal

At the October 1910 session of the New York State Supreme Court, sitting in Riverhead, New York, Judge Abel Blackmar announced his ”findings of fact” and ”conclusions of law” in the case of Wyandank Pharaoh, chief of the Montauk tribe of Indians, plaintiff, versus Jane Benson and the estate of the late Arthur Benson, defendants. The Montauk people in the crowded courtroom sat in stunned silence as the judge announced that the Montauk tribe no longer existed. The tribe, he said, ”has disintegrated. . . .They have no internal government, and they lived a shiftless life of hunting, fishing and cultivating the ground and often leaving Montauk for long periods to work in some menial capacity for whites.” The tribe, continued the judge, had been in decline for decades, and the purchase of their residence rights by Arthur Benson and his family merely gave the ”final death blow.” There is a tragic historical irony in Judge Blackmar’s ruling. During the first century after the establishment of the European settlements in North America, the Native American people were forced to give up their hunting grounds, language, religion, political and economic systems and accept a role as domestics or unskilled laborers in expanding settler communities. The ”good” Indians were those who became Christians and adopted the outward appearances of submission to the dominant culture. The Indians lost their land, they were told, because the whites knew better how to use it and make it productive. Now, two-and-one half centuries later, the judge was telling the descendants of those “good Montauk” that, because they had abandoned their culture, they had lost the right to their last small piece of land. The one consistency is that, in both cases, the Montauk lost their land.

Within the next week, most of you will enter a supermarket that has electric-eye doors for convenience, plays soothing Muzak, and presents its produce in a display worthy of Better Homes and Gardens. Oranges treated with chemicals to make them turn the desired color, apples coated with wax, and glistening fruits and vegetables sprayed with water are placed beside brightly colored packaging that screams "one-third off," or "fewer calories," or "organically grown, natural food." As you speed through the express lane checkout and glance at your watch, you select the shortest distance to sprint to your car, located near the handicap parking stall. Weaving between the parked cars, you manage to hit the main flow of traffic, never giving a second thought to the series of choices you have just made, many of which were influenced by the environment and the store manager as much as by you. In short, many of those value-laden decisions derived, whether consciously or subconsciously, from the culture in which you operate. So it is with all people.

INTRODUCTION I first ran across Charles Godfrey Leland’s The Algonquin Legends of New England or Myths and Folk Lore of the Micmac, Passamaquoddy, and Penobscot Tribes’ when I was looking for stories about Kluskap, the Abenaki and Micmac culture hero. An important source of stories since its publication in 1884, Algonquin Legends showcases the story of Kluskap and his evil twin, Malsum the Wolf, how they came into the world, what they did here, how Kluskap fought and killed his brother. Here, it seemed, was a key story in the Kluskap cycle. Yet I was suspicious. When set in its cultural context, the story exuded incongruity. For example, this kind of story, a story of beginnings, ought to be the linchpin of the precontact Abenaki and Micmac worldviews. But as far as we can know of those worldviews, it is not. Too suspicious to make any use of it at that time, I set the story aside. When I returned to Leland’s Kluskap-Malsumstory, it was with the idea of quickly discrediting the story (by means of this incongruity, bolstered by internal textual evidence), so I could move on to the question of why Leland did what he did. Instead I found myself simultaneously fascinated and repulsed by the way a well meaning folklorist of the late nineteenth century treated the stories and the storytellers he encountered. As a consequence, this study is about the way a particular “Indian” story came to prominence and the impact it continues to have.

”Do we tell them our stories?” I asked. I felt doubt again. Seated at Auntie Violet Chappell’s table with many of my aunties and uncles, I wondered whether our trip to Stanford University was a good idea after all. It was three A.M. We prayed, sang ceremonial songs for the trip. After the prayer ceremony, around midnight, we sat down to eat. We were still talking. In order to arrive at Stanford by ten in the morning we would have to leave the reservation at six, in just three hours. A former professor of mine had asked if I could get some members of my family to speak before a large audience about the popular and widely distributed ethnographic documentary film The Sucking Doctor. I said yes enthusiastically,even before consulting my family. The film covers the second night of a Kashaya Pomo healing ceremony in the Kashaya Roundhouse. Essie Parrish, Violet’s mother and the last Bole Maru leader, or Dreamer, of the Kashaya Pomo, sucks a pain out of her patient’s body. The audience hears many of her doctoring songs and witnesses her dancing and her work to locate and extract the disease. Cache Creek Porno medicine woman and Dreamer Mabel McKay claimed Essie’s death was due in part to her making of this film; not the making, perhaps, but the showing of our ceremonies to people unfamiliar with our rules. “She had to sacrifice,” Mabel said. ”I seen it in my Dream.”

INTRODUCTION The development of sound financial strategies that both guarantee native autonomy and assure continued program financing is one of the most complex yet vital components to aboriginal self-government. Unfortunately, history has demonstrated that the failures in this area tend to overshadow any successful inroads made in aboriginal people’s efforts to attain self-determination. In fact, many native groups operate in an environment that can best be described as continual financial exigency. This phenomenon is not unique to the United States. The aboriginal population in Canada has also experienced difficulty in acquiring the resources needed to govern themselves. Examples include the financial difficulties that arose out of the 1971 Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA), the 1978 James Bay and Northern Quebec agreements, and the 1984 agreement signed with the Inuvialuit of the western Northwest Territories. All of these examples explicitly demonstrate that, for those groups in the process of negotiating claims settlements, the development of a sound financial strategy is inextricably linked to the successful negotiation of aboriginal claims settlements. In Alaska, the creation of a series of corporate structures that were antithetical to native culture, the lack of investment opportunities, the cost of capital-intensive projects in the North, the high cost of venture capital, and the lack of training programs for natives charged with managing their new public administration infrastructure all contributed to the expenditure of the nearly one billion dollars in compensation received under ANCSA. Now that the money is gone, Alaska Natives fear the loss of their lands as well. The financial woes of the Inuvialuit and the Cree and Naskapi of northern Quebec continue. On an annual basis, the latter are required to negotiate program funding for current fiscal year operations with no less than nine separate federal and Quebec government agencies.

Detailed linguistic work, involving both internal and comparative reconstruction, traditionally has been an important source of information about the cultural history of nonliterate peoples. Such work, in turn, depends on descriptive materials obtained in the field, but, as native languages evolve or disappear, it becomes increasingly necessary to resort to philological methods more familiar from the study of literate cultures. As Ives Goddard reminds us, we must then dust off older, often prestructuralist descriptions of American Indian languages, which have fallen into oblivion but which, in spite of all sorts of problems of interpretation, are sometimes the best because the oldest sources of information. A case in point is the kinship terminology of the Uto-Aztecan language Tubatulabal, formerly (and perhaps still) spoken in Kern County, California. Along with much else, these words are simply missing from Charles F. Voegelin's brief vocabulary, which is the most recent published lexical work on the language. However, even though this work is full of errors both of omission and commission, since its appearance, no Uto-Aztecanist has, to my knowledge, looked for Tubatulabal vocabulary in older sources for this language, which go back to the beginning of the century.

An essay like this usually deals with the ways through which people of one culture look at representatives of another. In such cases, authors generally discuss all aspects of culture, from literature and press to scholarship and ordinary people's opinions. My scope is narrowed intentionally and considers the influence of state ideology on social thought as it applies to a particular field: coverage of American Indian-related topics in the Soviet press and in Indian studies. The materials presented below certainly have historiographical character, and therefore I could not avoid describing what has been done in Soviet Indian studies generally, although it is an independent theme worthy of a special article. In the Soviet period of Russian history, social thought developed within the strict limits of Marxist methodology, with Marxism understood as the state ideology; and Indian studies has been a vivid reflection of the general state of things. Social scholarship and the press had to serve governmental interests, and much concrete research that had little or nothing to do with ideological matters also could not avoid this fate.

In late July 1990, the Senate Select Committee on Indian Affairs called a hearing for Senate bill 2770, the “Indian Finance Corporation Act." This bill proposed the most significant innovation in economic development for Indian Country since the passage of the Indian Finance Act in 1974. It would have established a ”finance corporation” patterned after the development finance institutions found elsewhere in the world. An earlier version, the Indian Development Finance Corporation Act, did pass both houses of Congress, only to be vetoed by President Reagan in November 1988. That proposal would have made available up to $140 million for private sector development under the direction of a public/private corporation jointly owned by the federal and Indian governments. Because of strong support within the Indian community for this bill, it was reintroduced, despite the veto, during the next session of Congress, by Senators Inouye (Hawaii) and McCain (Arizona), as S.143. It never made it to the floor of the Senate. What follows is the saga of this opportunity nearly gained but subsequently lost.

In the field of conservation, discussion has increased about the need to restore environmentally safe lifestyles that not long ago described indigenous cultural livelihood and values. A consumptive economy, along with extracting land and water policies and the depletion of nonrenewable resources caused by industrialization, have motivated environmentalists, politicians, and other officials to advocate for a more conserving approach to human subsistence. Whatever the origins of the ”new” environmental movement, its advocates advise individuals and organizations that want to protect the environment to examine the ecological example of indigenous people. In an article entitled “The Ecologically Noble Savage,” author Kent H. Redford utilizes modern European concepts and ideas about conservation to evaluate indigenous groups as ecological people. He then unravels these ideas of ecology and separates the ecological idea from the indigenous character to reveal the danger and illusion of the “ecologically noble savage.” Redford prefaces his article with strong supportive statements about the need to study and preserve native cultures, but he is indignant that policymakers implement development plans in accordance with cultural sensitivities. According to Redford, there is no need to consider cultural values in anyone’s plans for economic development, because the values that enshroud culture (as they are relevant to indigenous people) are only values that originate from Europe. He claims that the whole idea that Indian people are ecological is a “European ideal”; in this way, he attacks what some people regard as the “inherent superiority” of the indigenous way of life. He overlooks some of the best examples that would support his argument, such as the clear-cutting of Chaco Canyon by the ancient Anasazi Indians, which is the typical case scenario set forth by other denouncers of Indian myth; instead, he attacks the ideological truisms that he says misguide the best intentions of today’s development programmers.