American Indian Culture and Research Journal

"On a global basis, human cultural diversity is associated with the remaining concentrations of biodiversity. Both cultural diversity and biological diversity are endangered. Modern cultures are undercutting traditional cultures, and modern knowledge is replacing traditional knowledge." - E.O. Wilson INTRODUCTION One of California's greatest assets is that it harbors the richest plant diversity of any state in the continental United States. There are about 6,300 species, subspecies, and varieties of native plants. Another great treasure is the cultural diversity of its Native American tribes. With over one hundred indigenous languages once spoken on California soils, the state can legitimately claim to be the most linguistically diverse place on the continent. California at the point of Euro-American contact was more densely populated than any area of equal size in North America. Despite these dense populations, early non-Indian settlers did not find a biologically impoverished land. On the contrary, they found a vast abundance and diversity of plants and animals. The immense herds of tule elk and prong-horn antelope in the Central Valley, for example, rivaled animal numbers in Africa’s Serengeti.

Mythical cosmologies are not the attempts of savages to explain in fantasy where empirical knowledge of reality is absent, but are rather the opposite-statements in allegorical form about knowledge of the interrelations between what we would call natural, psychic and cultural aspects of reality. Myth and science are polar opposites, not because one is wrong and the other right, but because myth portrays reality as it is experienced while science postulates a reality that is thought to exist but can never be experienced. Myth unveils what is known to be true, while science experiments to build realities that are thought not to be untrue. Myths through their symbols allow men to enter directly and experientially into the realm of meaningful reality. INTRODUCTION There are over a dozen Indian reservations in California encompassing several hundred thousand acres on which management of natural resources (timber, fish, wildlife, soils, minerals) is an important activity. While in the past much of this management was performed by Bureau of Indian Affairs technical staff on behalf of Indian owners, there is an increasing tendency and necessity for tribes to assume more of this responsibility themselves. This trend is exemplified in California by the pursuit of self-governance powers by some tribes (e.g., Hoopa, Karuk, Yurok), contracting for natural resource management by others under Public Law 93-638-the Indian Self-Determination and Educational Assistance Act of 1975-(e.g., Round Valley, Tule River, Campo), and formation of advocacy groups such as the California Indian Basketmakers Association and the California Indian Forest and Fire Management Council.

INTRODUCTION Public domain trust allotments (PD allotments) are parcels of land held in trust by the federal government for specific Indian individuals. It is a class of Indian lands created by the General Allotment Act of 1887 as an ancillary result of the effort to assimilate Indians into the general population by terminating reservations and making Indians homesteaders of private parcels. They were intended for Indians not residing on a reservation or for whose tribe no reservation was created. These "landless" Indians were permitted to make allotment selections from the public domain, including the national forests. PD allotments are not the same as the trust allotments created from Indian reservations that remain within the boundaries of a reservation. Both PD allotments and reservation allotments are supposedly entitled to the same services (and obligations or restrictions) conferred by trust status. As a practical matter, allotments within reservation boundaries have received considerably more attention than PD allotments. Reservation allotments are covered by natural resource management plans prepared for reservations and in general have provided greater benefits to their owners than PD allotments.

The study of cognitive metaphors is a recent one in linguistics, and has opened up new doors in our understanding of language, as well as of the cognition that underlies language. Until recently, metaphor was considered to be a phenomenon that occurred only in literary language. However, George Lakoff and others have shown that metaphors are in fact deeply embedded in everyday language and provide a window into both the minds and cultures of speakers. Metaphor does not only exist in language, however. It is a cognitive process that structures the way in which human beings reason about the world. Psychological studies such as those performed by Gentner and Gentner have shown the large extent to which metaphor is used in understanding and structuring the world around us. This paper discusses preliminary findings on the cognitive metaphors of Hupa, an Athapaskan language spoken in Northern California. The study of metaphor has, to date, focused primarily on metaphors in English and other Indo-European languages, with a few studies done on metaphors in non-Indo-European langua es, such as Thai and Japanese. Only one metaphor study that I know of has been done on a Native American language. That paper studied metaphors as they appeared in the prepositional system in Mixtec. One of the goals of this paper is to expand the cross-linguistic study of cognitive metaphors, a study that is essential to typological and universal issues as it will add to the general corpus of knowledge of cross-linguistic metaphors. This paper also has applications in other areas of linguistics such as second language acquisition, which I will address at the end of this paper.

The Cupeño of Southern California exemplify forced removal of Indians from their homelands which has resulted in subsequent forced urbanization for many members of the band. My research, based on the oral history of one urban Cupeño family, traces this phenomenon. Tucked into a corner in the light industrial Huntington Park area of Los Angeles is an attractive residential street where four generations of women reside: Anna Dawn, a widowed great-grandmother, her daughter Patricia, Patricia's daughter Tracie, and Trade's baby daughter McKenna. These women are members of a small "Mission Indian" group, the Cupeño, who probably numbered between 500 and 750 at the time of contact in 1795 and who presently have a population of approximately 800. The history of the Dawn family, which has lived in the same area southeast of central Los Angeles for six generations, is quite different from that of the majority of Indians living in this city. At the time of the termination and relocation programs of in a massive migration to Los Angeles of Indians from all over the United States, the Dawn family had already been living in the city for three decades. The urbanization of the Dawns, as with other Mission Indian families, is the consequence of significant phenomena in California history: missionization and secularization, the accompanying dislocation from traditional lands, and the conversion from a direct relationship with the land to wage and subsistence labor.

The Colorado River weaves its course like a snake, moving south through the desert along the present-day borders of California and Arizona. Just north of the communities of Yuma and Winterhaven, the river turns abruptly west and flows toward a solitary and rocky mountain called Pilot Knob. The river swings south at a right angle, cutting a natural border between Baja California and Arizona, and continues its journey to the Sea of Cortez. Since the time of emergence when Kwikumat created the earth and Kumastamxo put the world into motion, this region of southeastern California has been the home of Quechan Indians. In the 1770s and 1780s, their lives were interrupted briefly by two expeditions of Captain Juan Bautista de Anza, the missionizing activities of Fray Francisco Garces, and the civil settlement of Alferez Santiago de Islas. The Quechan rose in a rebellion to expel Spanish soldiers, settlers, and missionaries, and after the 1780s Spain's agents never returned to resettle among the Quechan. The Indians were affected far more adversely by soldiers, settlers, miners, ranchers, farmers, and agents from the United States. Much has been written about the impact of the white invasion of Quechan in the nineteenth century in terms of war, land, and sovereignty, but little is available regarding the ill effects of the reservation on Native health or the relationship of non-Indian ranching and farming on Quechans in the early twentieth century.

In recent years, the use of alcohol and other drugs by pregnant and parenting women has been a concern. Evidence suggests that prenatal substance exposure can expose newborns to a higher relative risk of health or developmental problems. There are also concerns about the potential substance abuse related problems for the health and psychosocial well-being of mothers, children, families, and communities. Despite the fact that education, outreach, assessment, and treatment are known to be crucial in preventing or alleviating problems, relatively little is known about the most appropriate composition of these services for pregnant and parenting substance-involved women. And relatively little is known about the special needs and concerns that substance-involved pregnant and parenting American Indian women may have. Rarely do surveys over-sample American Indians so as to provide specific American Indian data.

Their baskets made out of split rushes are too well known to require description; but though waterproof, they were used only for dry purposes. The vessels in use for liquids were roughly made of rushes and plastered outside and in with bitumen or pitch, called by them sanot. -Hugo Reid I Despite Hugo Reid’s confident words, the baskets he described, coiled bowls and asphaltum-coated water bottles, find no place in Ramona‘s pages. Nor do the coiled trinket baskets so avidly sought by later collectors. Although seemingly atypical, Ramona’s baskets are worthy of serious study because of the otherwise scanty record we have of Southern California basketry during the thirty years between Reid’s 1852 account and the publication of Ramona in 1884. In this paper, I will review the descriptions of basketry in Ramona and discuss the literary accounts, basketry collections, and ethnographic experiences of Helen Hunt Jackson which may have inspired these passages. I will then analyze Ramona as an ethnohistorical record of Southern California basketry during the years in question. Finally, I will attempt to assess the influence that Ramona had on the “basket mania” which arose at the end of the century.

Museum exhibits about Indians almost always draw an enthusiastic audience, but how did the personal belongings of Indian people come to be in museums? What do Indian people think of museum exhibits about their cultures? What do Indians think a museum’s responsibilities should be to the people whose culture it collects, displays, and interprets? This paper will provide an historical overview of the history of collection, display, and interpretation of Native peoples and their material culture in museums, and summarize what has been learned about the contemporary opinions of California Indian people on the subject of such museum activities. The terms Native and Indian are used interchangeably in this paper.

This paper focuses on the access of unacknowledged or unrecognized tribes, especially those in California, to legal rights of repatriation-that is, rights founded in statutes or administrative rules that are enforceable through the courts. Some tribes have been able to secure repatriation through negotiation even where legal rights have been uncertain or nonexistent by persuading a state or federal agency to cooperate in the return of skeletal remains or objects. Such negotiations have spared all interested parties the cost and distress of litigation. Often, however, it is difficult for tribes to conduct such negotiations unless they can make at least a colorable claim of legal entitlement to repatriation. For the many federally unacknowledged tribes in California, therefore, it is important to know whether they can invoke legal rights of repatriation. Initially, it is worth clarifying exactly what it means to be an unacknowledged or unrecognized tribe. I want to underscore that a Native American group does not need to be acknowledged or recognized by the federal government to be a tribe. Federal recognition is merely an affirmative act by the federal government to acknowledge its trust responsibility and its statutory and other obligations to provide services and pro rams to Indian groups. The fact that the federal government a as not provided this recognition or acknowledgment does not mean that an Indian group is not a tribe. But certain consequences flow from this recognition, the most important being the many services and programs in education, health, and welfare that the federal government provides to Indian people.

The process of repatriation, set in motion by the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), is part of ongoing negotiations between American Indian nations and the United States federal government. Participating in repatriation necessarily brings one into contact with the historical gears of the process of colonization which ultimately give way to less mechanical and more personal strategies of assimilation, denigration, and/or creative transformation between people and nations. These various strategies are to be found in both the minute details of implementation and the overt policy decisions on the part of anyone involved in repatriation, Native American or non-Native. Strategic differences are the result of very different cultural standpoints and very different interpretations of the intent of NAGPRA. The overt goal of the NAGPRA repatriation process is to return to Native American control of all that has been taken from Native American communities without their consent: not only ancestral remains, but also funerary memorial offerings, sacred artifacts, and artifacts of cultural patrimony. From my perspective from within one institution involved in that process-the University of California, Los Angeles-and from my participation in the implementation of NAGPRAI - consulting with Native people on the cultural affiliation of human remains - I am very aware of the differences among Native American, federal, and institutional interpretations of the statute.

Many theorists are pondering the relationship of distinctive groups of people within the United States, trying to understand what contributes to the overall stability of a nation-state composed of people from varied cultures. While the difference between cultures is one way to think about the problems of citizenship, this article opens a new discussion about Native Americans, a discussion of the differences between political systems. Unlike the discussion from many disciplines that examines the merits of limited diversity and multiculturalism for stability, I argue that members of indigenous nations bring a diversity to the dominant society that is not only unique, but is also contingent upon the integrity of tribal political boundaries within the United States. Here, I explore some of the historical pressures forming the political identities of Native people, especially the pressure by the United States on Native people to abandon tribal political systems and boundaries. Some forms of that pressure are commonly known, such as removals from homelands, relocations, and the mandatory education of Indian children in federal boarding schools.

Recent developments within the United Nations (U.N.) and its subsidiary bodies present opportunities for an unprecedented dialogue on the relationship between States and indigenous peoples and the rights of these peoples under international law. These opportunities may not be pressed to fullest advantage in the United States, however, because knowledge of the U.N.'s work on indigenous rights is not widespread among Native American communities, nor is the U.N. generally viewed as a forum to which they may bring their concern. Indeed, it would be rare for Native American tribes, whose attention is increasingly focused on congressional actions which threaten their political and economic survival, to divert limited resources from domestic issues to the international dialogue on the rights of indigenous peoples. Nevertheless, it is at the international level and within the U.N. that the best hope for long-term protection of indigenous peoples may lie.