American Indian Culture and Research Journal

Few nineteenth-century artists used native women who participated in the North American fur trade as the subjects of their paintings. Of those who did produce a significant number of representations of such individuals, Alfred Jacob Miller is among the best known. The purpose of this study is to explore how a number of nineteenth-century conventions of depiction employed by Miller perpetuated and /or challenged two culturally dominant discourses that furthered the subjugation of Native American women. The first discourse to be examined, Orientalism, functioned through literary and artistic representations that positioned colonized individuals as irrevocably other than, and morally inferior to, their European colonizers. The second discourse, commonly labeled “domestic ideology,’’ functioned through an ideal of feminine domesticity that positioned women as moral, civilizing influences on the frontier. I have chosen to focus on Miller for two reasons. First, over the span of his long career, he produced an unusually large number of paintings and drawings of native women that offer abundant opportunity for exploration of the artistic conventions used in portraying this subject. Second, as the products of an individual of high social standing and considerable professional repute, Miller’s representations exhibit most clearly the culturally dominant attitudes reproduced in and perpetuated by nineteenth century representational practices.

This paper makes three related points: first, that many of the present-day legal codes of U.S. Indian tribes are unexpectedly innovative and representative of contemporary indigenous viewpoints, especially in the ways in which individual rights are conceived; second, that the variability in the way the codes treat issues of special concern to women demonstrates the extent of the imprint of local tribal people on their own codes; and third, that analysis of the implications of tribal codes for Indian women is a valuable and hither to undeveloped avenue in clarifying women’s circumstances. I address these points by comparing the categories of code that eight western Washington tribes have created and by looking at a set of legal issues that particularly influence women’s lives. This essay is intended as a preliminary effort to make use of legal materials in the analysis of contemporary Coast Salish life. The codes of these eight tribes vary in their overall emphases, in their legal treatment of family networks, in the rights of parents, and in attention given to women’s issues generally. In 1985, William Rodman commented that legal innovation in small-scale societies “is a topic so few anthropologists have studied that a summary of relevant sources takes only a few paragraphs”; he noted further that “[llegal scholars use ’innovation’ exclusively to denote changes that the state introduces,

In July 1585, a collection of English soldiers and settlers supported by Sir Walter Ralegh settled on the northern end of Roanoke Island in the Outer Banks of coastal North Carolina. Ralegh placed the fledgling colony under the command of Ralph Lane, a veteran of Elizabeth I’s brutal wars against the Irish. The settlement would last for only one year-abandoned, most historians agree, when Lane recognized that he faced a massive Algonquian conspiracy led by the Roanoke weroance Wingina. Historians have been forced to rely on Lane’s account in their efforts to reconstruct the history of Ralegh’s first Roanoke Colony. In so doing, many have been careless in their acceptance of Lane’s story, specifically his contention that Wingina organized a plot to attack the English settlement with the assistance of neighboring Algonquian bands. An alternate reading of Lane’s narrative suggests that his indictment of Wingina may well have been groundless. Lane and the 107 men in his charge were to use the island as a base from which to seek a northwest passage to the Orient, as well as a harbor suitable for privateering operations. Things began badly for the colonists, however. The expedition’s flagship, the Tyger, under the command of Sir Richard Grenville, struck ground on the treacherous shoals of the Outer Banks. According to one chronicler, the ship “beat so manie strokes upon the sands, that if God had not miraculouslie delivered [Grenville], there had beene no waie to avoid present death.” Saltwater poured into the hold of the ship so “that the most part of his corne, salt, meale, rice, bisket, & other provisions that [Grenville} should have left with them that remained behind him in the countrie was spoiled." According to Thomas Hariot, who traveled to Roanoke as the expedition’s scientist and geographer, the accident left the colonists with food for only twenty days. The entire question of survival in this colonial outpost, then, was given new meaning. Unless the colonists could obtain food from the Indians-for they had arrived too late in the year to plant their own-the colony would face the prospect of starvation. Ralegh‘s Roanoke Colony was born in crisis.

In February 1992, a judge of the Supreme Court of the province of British Columbia ruled that the native ritual of spirit dancing is subject to Canadian law protecting individual rights and is not an aboriginal right under Section 35(1)of the Constitution Act, 1982. The decision emerged from a civil suit brought by a Salish Indian against several other members of the Salish Nation on Vancouver Island, in which the plaintiff argued that he had been unwillingly subjected to this ritual. Spirit dancing, which was banned under Canadian law from 1880 to 1951, is a therapeutic ritual involving fasting and confinement until a person hears the song of a guardian spirit and begins singing and dancing. Ordinarily, entrance into this ritual is voluntary and is considered to be an honor by tribal members. According to Salish tradition, however, relatives may request that a person be subject to this rite to help that person solve personal problems; this tradition reflects the community’s responsibility for its individual members. The judge’s decision angered tribal leaders within coastal Indian communities, who claim that cultural traditions stressing the primacy of the community over its members are collective aboriginal rights that are shielded from Canadian law, which is rooted in the belief of the supremacy of the individual. The spirit dancing case brings into sharp focus an issue that has been a critical part of the aboriginal rights debate in Canada for more than a decade, namely whether the protections of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms guaranteed to Canadian citizens should apply to Indian First Nations in their relationship with their own tribal members, who are also Canadian citizens.

Because of the drunken Indian stereotype and other myths often associated with American Indians, it is important to critically examine the detailed evidence that best defines the epidemiology of alcohol abuse among Indians and particular tribal communities. Public health understandings and programs must be based not on myth but on fact. In this paper, twelve major myths, statements, and questions about the nature of the alcohol abuse problem are reviewed. An analysis of current mortality data and an understanding of the extant literature will reveal that many current myths are either false or, at best, half-truths. The literature on American Indians, at one time rather small, has grown to a substantial body of useful documents. In a bibliography of the relevant Indian alcohol literature published before 1977, Mail and McDonald list 969 works. The number published since 1977 is anyone’s guess and a task for future research. One would be safe in assuming, however, that the literature has at least doubled in the last fifteen years. Furthermore, it is evident to those of us in this field that the quality of information and data has improved in some areas. With such an extensive and growing body of literature, there is no excuse for one to operate on myth and common knowledge. Although not all questions are answered in the literature, many certainly are. The literature needs to be used more by students, scholars, public health workers, health officials, and tribal groups. A critical reading can advance knowledge greatly. A series of common myths, questions, and statements regarding alcohol and Indians is presented below. Some of these myths have been presented before. They do not seem to go away, even though more evidence is accumulated that speaks directly to them. The evidence for and against various myths and common beliefs is summarized in a very terse fashion in this paper. References cited, however, contain much more detail for the interested reader to consult.

In popular culture, images of peaceful, traditional American Indians characteristically evoke ecological sentiment . . . . [M]any non-Indians see only this symbolic association and do not heed the importance of contemporary American Indians as agents and theorists of environmental concerns. In the mid-1970s, Leslie Marmon Silko, a woman of Keresan (Laguna Pueblo) descent, wrote Ceremony, a novel commenting on the death drive behind our modern technological culture and the need for a return to the feminine. At the same time white, middle-class feminists were making a connection between the technological exploitation of land and the oppression of women. Although the ground they cover is similar, ecofeminism could benefit from a close examination of Silko’s novel. She traces out a complex web of interrelations between her characters and the earth but manages to avoid the pitfalls of essentializing men and women, vilifying technology while romanticizing nature, and reproducing hierarchical ways of thinking, which weaken ecofeminism. One problem with ecofeminism is its unfortunate tendency to homogenize those who qualify as ecofeminists. Consider Charlene Spretnak’s discussion of the three ways in which women (no mention of men) have reached an ecofeminist philosophy. The first is that women who were exposed to political theory, particularly Marxism, “rejected the Marxist assertion that domination is based solely on money and class: if there is a universally dominated class, surely it is women.” Spretnak thus sweeps aside all other oppressions to enshrine women as the greatest victims, as well as to dilute all differences among women. She argues that these women, noticing that nature was similarly dominated, became ecofeminists. A second way that women became ecofeminists was that they became involved in Goddess worship, learned about ceremonies that celebrated nature, and then became activists to protect nature.The third means of entry into the ecofeminist movement, according to Spretnak, occurs when women with careers in environmentalism find themselves stalled in middle management because of their gender and become feminists.

The writer of Native American history faces many vexing problems: the lack of aboriginal documentary or published sources; the reliance on subjective, oral Indian testimony; the need for internal tribal histories; and the investigation of non-Western aboriginal cultures, which is refractory to the methods and concepts of the modern social scientist. Among the problems of writing Indian history is the lack of communication between historian and anthropologist. Although ethnohistory developed as a separate entity in the 1950s, history and anthropology have not successfully merged. As Reginald Horsman has pointed out, the two have divergent interests in the writing of Native American history. These divergent interests involve different methodologies and emphases. Historians write about (recent) Anglo-Indian contacts and federal Indian policy; anthropologists write of precontact existence. Historians approach native biography from the printed sources, anthropologists from the oral testimony of informants. History does not use, or rarely uses, the primary method of research of anthropology-fieldwork. Historians view the aboriginal cultures from afar, the anthropologist from within the hogan. The historian writes narrative prose, free of jargon; the anthropologist writes highly technical, deductive analyses that sometimes are hard for his fellow anthropologists to understand.

INTRODUCTION A manifest imperative in Indian Country is maintaining the cultures and strengthening sovereign powers. Only when the individual tribe both controls its own resources and sustains its identity as a distinct civilization does economic development make sense; otherwise, the tribe must choose between cultural integrity and economic development. The current paper promotes development as a means to the end of sustaining tribal character; as such, it is vital that all development plans be formulated with an understanding of how they will impact the structure of the society. The intertwining of culture and economic development in planning frameworks can lead to creation of a community of opportunity for each Native American tribe.