American Indian Culture and Research Journal

Recent criticisms of Native American collaborative autobiographies have focused on the ethical implications of colonialism. Hertha D. Wong notes that “as Native Americans and Euro-Americans clashed and negotiated historically, representatives of these two distinct cultures interacted textually within the pages of transitional autobiography.”’ Early collaborative Native American autobiographies, which emerge out of the contact situation of the late nineteenth century, must be viewed in the larger context of cultural control. To many Native Americans this critical period represented a time of adaptation to reservation life along with its threat to cultural identity. With virtually every area of Native American life and self-expression under attack from Euro-American colonizers, the question of who controlled the inscription of American Indian lives is crucial. Although many early ethnographers viewed the collaborative autobiography as a means for ”preserving” Native culture and identity, the strong control exerted by non-Indian collaborators over the process of cultural textualization in many cases amounted to acts of colonialism.

INTRODUCTION A great deal has been written about the indigenous peoples of North America before the colonization and conquest by Europeans. In this paper we utilize a theoretical approach that was originally developed to explain developmental differences among countries in the global system to try to understand what had happened in precontact North America. Why take a theory, or more precisely a perspective, originally developed to account for that colonizing effort and apply it to precolonial conditions? There are several reasons, which can be bundled into two groups: those that address explanations of long-term social change in the social sciences and those that address the problem of understanding the colonial encounter, its impacts on Native peoples, and the efforts to curtail those impacts. We begin with the latter because the former are the concern of the bulk of this article.

Among soldiers in America’s late-nineteenth-century frontier army there was virtually universal agreement that scouts were vital to the success of campaigns in Indian country. Colonel Richard Irving Dodge, a veteran with thirty-three years’ experience on the frontier, publicly acknowledged the army’s dependence on reliable scouts. In his 1882 book Our Wild Indians, which General William T. Sherman recommended to the military student, Dodge expressed his representative views: The success of every expedition against Indians depends to a degree on the skill, fidelity and intelligence of the men employed as scouts for not only is the command habitually dependent on them for good routes and comfortable camps, but the officer in command must rely on them almost entirely for his knowledge of the position and movements of the enemy. These they learn by scouting far in advance or on the flanks of the column, and here the knowledge of trailing becomes of the utmost importance.

On February 11, 1933 the federal government established by presidential order the Death Valley National Monument (DVNM) in southeastern California. One reason the government set aside 1,601,800 acres of land as a monument was because it pretended that Death Valley was virgin (vacant) land and a pristine wilderness. However, government officials quickly accepted the reality that Native Americans, members of the Timbisha Shoshone tribe, were already living inside the new monument's boundaries. The National Park Service (NPS), given the responsibility to administer the new monument, now had to deal with the Timbisha Shoshones. Additionally, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), created in the early nineteenth century to deal specifically with Native American tribes, also dealt with the Shoshones after the formation of the DVNM. This article traces the history of the unique tripartite state of affairs that developed between the Timbisha Shoshones and the two federal agencies, the NPS and the BIA. Although some positive developments emerged from this tripartite interaction, for the most part the interaction has been negative, especially in the case of the NPS.

Kit Carson and John C. Fremont were once unmitigated Western heroes. They remain important figures in Western American history. But both have been subject to revisionism. A recent biography of Fremont, John Charles Fremont: Character as Destiny by Andrew Rolle, critiques the ex lorer as an ill-fated adventurer and opportunist (it is Rolle who compares him to Lawrence of Arabia). Carson has been branded a genocidal racist, especially for his Navajo campaign of 1863 to 1864. Carson's supporters and defenders, whom I will call Kittites, have argued that Carson was not an Indian-hater, but merely an Indian fighter when provoked; moreover, he was married to two Indian women, raised a daughter from his first marriage, adopted another Indian son, treated the Utes with considerable equanimity when he was their agent in the late 1850s, and treated the Navajos as well as he could as a commander under orders to kill all Navajo men on sight and capture women and children until they surrendered unconditionally. Carson resisted his commander, General James Carleton, by not killing all the males, but often freeing them to convince their tribe to surrender and agree to be relocated to Bosque Redondo. The numbers of Navajos killed, livestock butchered, hogans burned, and crops wasted have all been exaggerated, according to the Kitties. Carson did not administer the Long Walk, nor did he pull up the peach trees in Canyon de Chelly, nor did he preside over the disastrous reservation Carleton provided for Navajo re-education in farming and Christian civilization.

Cancer represents an increasingly important health problem impacting the health status of American Indians and Alaska Natives (AI/ANs). At the turn of the century and as recently as the 1950s, cancer was such an uncommon occurrence among AI/ANs that they were thought,to be immune. Today, malignant disease represents a leading cause of death among these peoples. This relatively sudden increase has left communities and health agencies unprepared. This paper presents the framework for approaching cancer control research among AI/ANs, including the development of accurate surveillance systems; enhanced public and professional education; research focused on risk-factor prevalence and etiology; improved communication between Native communities and researchers; comprehensive evaluation of cancer control programs; dissemination of successful intervention programs; and research to examine factors responsible for the low risk of specific cancers among Native populations. Moreover, results from a series of national surveys providing a comprehensive overview of the limited cancer control programs directed toward AI/AN populations are highlighted. Efforts to maximize the health status of American Indians and Alaska Natives through cancer control efforts will rely upon a cooperative approach between individual tribal groups along with the proactive involvement of federal and state public health agencies, as well as the support of appropriate private and nonprofit organizations.

Alfonso Ortiz suffered a fatal heart attack at his Santa Fe, New Mexico home on January 28, 1997. Born in San Juan Pueblo, Professor Ortiz taught anthropology and Native American studies at the University of New Mexico since 1974, where he received an undergraduate sociology degree in 1961. He earned his master's and doctoral degrees from the University of Chicago and taught at Princeton, with adjunct positions at the University of California, Los Angeles and Stanford. Ortiz was a MacArthur and Guggenheim fellow who chaired the Advisory Council of the D'Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian History at The Newberry Library in Chicago. He was president of the Association on American Indian Affairs and served on the governing boards of the Ford Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and Cultural Survival, Inc. Among his many publications stood the pioneering study, The Tewa World. Alfonso Ortiz was a tireless advocate for Native American rights, an academic of international distinction, and a friend to many, from reservation to Congress, across the country. The anniversary of his death calls for a spirit releasing ceremony, according to tribal custom, addressed in the following eulogy.

In 1993 my dissertation fieldwork took me to the North Island of New Zealand where I collected the life history of an elder Maori woman. While there I also began comparing the national indigenous policies of New Zealand to those of the United States. It was interesting to discover that the historical relationships between Native Americans and Maoris and their respective colonizing governments bear striking similarities in terms of treaty relationships, cyclical policy waves, and sovereignty disputes. Colonized according to a similar value arrangement inherent in the European colonial pattern, American Indians and Maori have inherited a fairly common set of socio political circumstances. Wherever Europeans went, also went the European colonial pattern whose legacies, such as fourth world status and factionalism, are a continual reminder of past injustices.

One afternoon while perusing the monthly book club catalog, I ran across the latest and unfortunately last work published by Carl Sagan during his lifetime, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. Intrigued by the title (and the author), I ordered a copy. Carl Sagan was definitely the most outspoken public champion of science and the objective study of nature in recent years, and this book explicitly addresses what Sagan perceives to be a great increasing threat to rational thought in American culture today. After reading the book cover to cover and recommending it to many of my academic colleagues, a friend of mine who studies Native American history and oral tradition encountered a review of the work in this journal by Steve Pavlik, which she thought I might enjoy reading. As it turns out, I do like and appreciate Pavlik’s review, but at the same time I find there to be a few points made in the paper which reflect perhaps a misunderstanding of the scientific process, scientific knowledge, scientific goals, and the personal attitudes and beliefs of scientists in general. It is these misunderstandings that I would like to discuss in this essay, both in the context of Sagan’s book and with an eye to the attitudes of many of today’s practicing scientists.

As I read through Eric M. Riggs' comments on my essay "American Indian Spirituality, Traditional Knowledge, and the 'Demon-Haunted' World of Western Science," I was more taken by the things we agreed on than the areas on which we disagree. Riggs acknowledges the "all too common transgressions made in the name of science or improved technology." He also admits that "science tends commonly to carry with it a sense of invulnerability, a sense of possible omniscience, and paradoxically a kind of narrow-mindedness. These shared observations pretty much form the foundation of my entire essay. We do, (however, disagree on the extent and depth of the conflict between science and spirituality, as well as the position that Carl Sa an assumed on such matters. It is to these disagreement that I will direct my response to Professor Riggs. Riggs states that "the only conflict between science and spirituality comes from those at the extremes of each." He may be right. I believe, however, that defining extremism is a rather nebulous proposition which depends largely on the person making that judgment. In other words, if someone disagrees with us on an issue we feel strongly about, we tend to view and label that person an extremist. Moreover, extremism in itself is not necessarily a bad thing. I would argue that the forces which resulted in much, if not most, of mankind's progress were initiated by people others considered to be extremists. The key is to have someone else who ultimately finds the common ground.