American Indian Culture and Research Journal

Teenage parenting, characterized as a “crisis”by some,’ and an “alternative life course strategy” by others, comprises an issue of debate and concern among policy makers, academicians, educators, and social-service providers alike. Not surprisingly, teenage parenting has received considerable attention from behavioral scientists over the past three decades. Still, significant gaps exist in the current literature. The majority of investigations have included Euro-American populations as the reference group, with secondary attention focused on Blacks and non-White Hispanics. Little attention has been afforded Navajo (and other Native American) teenage mothers. The individuals participating in the present study reside on the Navajo Reservation in Arizona. The Navajo Nation is the largest tribe in North America, occupies the most expansive reservation, and experiences higher rates of teenage childbirth among youth aged fifteen to nineteen than among similarly aged women across the United States as a whole (15.8 percent versus 12 percent). Beyond the public health data, little information exists regarding Navajo perceptions or attitudes toward parenting in general, or teenage parenting specifically. By focusing attention on majority groups and generalizing findings to non-majority populations, unique cultural and contextual influences are overlooked. Teenage parents, in general, do not comprise a homogenous group. Knowledge of unique influences that shape attitudes and behaviors is paramount for successfully assisting youthful adaptation to the parenting role.

At the December 1991 annual meeting, David Leroy, recently appointed director of the Office of the Nuclear Waste Negotiator, appeared before the National Congress of American Indians in San Francisco to offer all federally recognized Indian tribes a new deal for economic development: tribes could negotiate with his quasi-private offshoot of the Department of Energy to store highly radioactive spent fuel rods from the commercial nuclear industry on their reservation lands. Citing the famous Duwamish Chief Seattle on stewardship of the earth, Leroy offered tribes a no-strings-attached bid to consider this storage, suggesting they could negotiate for nearly anything they needed: all agreements would be on tribal terms. As he put it, “No one wishes to buy your land, no one wishes to mortgage your future. Instead, the Negotiator process [for storing nuclear waste] is the embodiment of a New Federalism. . . . [It] recognizes and emphasizes Indian rights and ownership of trust lands. . . . With atomic facilities designed to safely hold radioactive materials with half-lives of thousands of years, it is the Native American culture and perspective that is best designed to correctly consider and balance the benefits and burden of these proposals.” Thus unfolded our ongoing story of US-Indian relations, the most recent phase involving the marketing of nuclear waste to American Indians as a means of economic development, an offer wrapped in a “toxic multiculturalism” that highlights Native ties to land, spinning US society’s premier environmental “bads” into economic good. In marketing nuclear waste (and other forms of industrial garbage) to American Indians, the US government and corporations have seized upon a glaring contradiction in contemporary American Indian life embedded in its colonial legacy: an expanding political sovereignty within the context of continued, indeed in key ways heightened, economic vulnerability.

There is agreement today among a variety of scholars that the cultural characteristics of a tribe affect its economic development. Despite this agreement, a variety of pronouncements regarding that effect have been espoused. Some scholars argue that any analysis of economic development in a region must explicitly incorporate the cultural characteristics of the people in that region. Other scholars contend that culture may serve as a barrier to development on reservations. It has also been popular to assume that acculturation eliminated traditional pre-reservation cultures of tribes. Questions remain about the continuity of pre-reservation cultural characteristics and the impact of those characteristics on economic outcomes. Part of the uncertainty about the impact of culture on economic development, in any given instance, lies in the nature of the studies undertaken in this area. Analyses of the role of culture in development have generally remained anecdotal or subjective, focusing on one tribe. As a result, the findings of those studies are not easily generalized. While cross-tribal analyses do exist, they do not typically account for the array of cultural characteristics of a tribe that might affect the development process. Further, the analyses generally do not consider whether and how culture affects the various dimensions of the development process. Examples of the different dimensions in which a reservation economy can develop include the level of economic activity and the distribution of income across households on the reservation.

What are the ethical responsibilities of non-Native researchers working with Native American communities? While both Native and non-Native researchers recognize the importance of the ethical protocol of free and informed consent when negotiating entry into the field, specific problems of application need to be addressed when doing cross-cultural research. In particular, the problem I address arises from researchers who work in Native communities and have been widely criticized for their disregard of local ethics, adhering only to the conventions of scientific research. This critique comes from two general perspectives. First and foremost is the opinion of many Native American people that researchers have misappropriated knowledge. The second critique is located within academia: a common expression in postmodern theory is that modernist researchers, by not questioning their own ethics and methodologies, have unwittingly constructed the Other. While the importance of free and informed consent is accepted in most circles, what often goes unquestioned is that free and informed consent may have different meanings and implications in cross-cultural situations, particularly when doing research with Native American communities. It is the researcher's ethics, and not those of the researched, that often seem to govern the relationship. Researchers in cross-cultural situations often assume that the individual in question understands the project fully and is able to give full permission in a communicative code that happens to belong to the researcher. Drawing upon the significant work of scholars such as Devon A. Mihesuah and Caroline B. Brettel, this paper offers additional contributions to the ethics cross-cultural research with Native American communities. In particular, the purpose of this paper is to recommend alterations to the ethical protocols for obtaining free and informed consent. When research involve Native American communities, additional steps to those specified in typical ethical protocols must be taken to ensure free and informed consent.

In his recent book, Elazar Barkan proposes that since August 1952, when Germany agreed to compensate Jews for the crimes of the Holocaust, there has been a gathering momentum for nations to admit that they committed historical injustices and to offer restitution to the victims. The claims of indigenous peoples for return of land, for compensation for dispossession, and for repatriation of skeletal remains and other sacred items are an essential part of this transition to what Barkan sees as a new age of “moral politics.” By admitting to injustice and offering some form of compensation, Barkan argues, the state assuages its guilt and the indigenous population gains a reinforced identity, an enhanced legitimacy, and perhaps improved economic status. In Barkan’s conception, this is a global process worked out differently in each national setting, because each nation has a particular colonial narrative and a distinctive political culture. This is the point of departure for this article, a comparison of the US Indian Claims Commission, which heard Native American claims from 1946 to 1978, and New Zealand’s Waitangi Tribunal, which has received Maori claims since 1975. The objective is to ascertain which forum-and society-has achieved the most in redressing the injustices of colonial rule and which, therefore, offers the better precedent for other societies negotiating the contorted terrain of land and other categories of claims. There exists a considerable body of scholarship comparing indigenous peoples’ dispossession and claims in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States. Yet the United States and Native Americans are often set apart in such comparisons. The assumption seems to be that, because the United States (through the Marshall Trilogy) early and unambiguously recognized Native title in law as a right of occupancy that could only be extinguished through treaty, its relationship to its indigenous people is exceptional.

In “Notes from the ‘Culture Wars’: More Annotations on the Debate Regarding the Iroquois and the Origins of Democracy” (American Indian Culture and Research Journal 23:1), Professor Bruce E. Johansen asserted the general proposition that the Iroquois influenced the development of American democracy and the particular claim that this development therefore must have included an Iroquois influence on the writing of the United States Constitution. When I replied to Johansen-in “Iroquois Influence: A Response to Bruce Johansen’s ‘Notes from the “Culture Wars”’ (Amm’canIndian Culture and Research Journal 24:2)-I neither denied nor affirmed the general proposition. My argument was only with the notion that the Iroquois example somehow served as a model for the Constitution, and I suggested that even if significant similarities could be found between the Constitution’s structuring of the federal government and the Iroquois model, particularly the way the League council formulated policy, those similarities would not mean much if no Founding Father knew what the Iroquois structure was. In his reply to my reply-“Data or Dogma? A Reply to Robert L. Berner” (American Indian Culture and Research Journal 242)-Johansen demands that I match his “data” with my own and suggests that I have ignored Exemplar of Liberty (1991), in which, he says, he and Donald Grinde Jr. have amassed “the historical evidence Berner complains we lack. . . .”

Robert L. Berner does not tell us whether he has actually read Exemplar of Liberty (1991), or whether he has merely fished through the book’s index in search of debating points. Berner’s latest rebuttal indicates that he has not read the book in its entirety. He complains, for example, that we have committed a “howler” by placing John Adams at the Constitutional Convention. The “howler” is actually Berner’s, because on page 199 of Exemplar of Liberty we write: “Although Adams had been selected as a Massachusetts delegate to the Constitutional Convention, he chose not to attend, and published his lengthy essay, Defence of the Constitutions of . . . the United States, instead.” Johansen’s wording in his first reply to Berner (American Indian Culture and Research Journal 24:2) stating that Adams discussed such things “at the Constitutional Convention” could be misread. Had he completely read Exemplar, Berner would have understood that this was a reference to Adams’s book, not to his physical presence. When Berner asserts that “No founding father knew what the Iroquois structure was,” he commits a rather astounding “howler”by writing out of the record Benjamin Franklin, who was probably the most influential founder of them all. It was Franklin who printed treaty accounts from 1736 to 1762, and who started his diplomatic career by attending Iroquois councils during the early 1750s. Franklin was present at the Constitutional Convention, and published actively in the Philadelphia press on questions of political theory. Thus, Berner cannot dismiss the influence idea by dismissing John Adams’s role. It was Franklin who merged European and Native American political precedents in his Albany Plan and Articles of Confederation.

The ultimate inevitability for most Americans is death, but for the Native peoples of both these continents, death is not a single event but a prolonged process with stages between the living now and the deading after. On December 12,1997, I was standing in the chill of the Northwest, freezing from the toes up while waiting to help as needed with an annual “burning for the dead” in preparation for an evening candlelight service in the local smokehouse (Native church) at which everyone in attendance could light a candle in the name of a deceased relative, friend, or loved one. Regardless of religion-Catholic, Pentecostal, Indian Shaker, or traditional-participation was community-wide. This sacrificial burning required a rectangle about five-by-fifteen feet composed of crushed papers, kindling, and logs. Upon this table, or pyre, plates of varied food were to be placed individually as the name of the person for whom it was intended was loudly called out. In addition to familiar groceries purchased from any store, plates also held Native foods and personal favorites. Inevitably, after an early afternoon of preparations spaced among long waits, the arrival of the officiating ritualists from Canada called for a renewed flurry of activity. All cedar logs had to be replaced with split alder brought from their home across the border. From the moment of their arrival, these ritualists took charge of the situation by organizing us into an effective work force to do their bidding. Using special words (dicta, enchantments) inherited only in certain families, both ritualists prepared the blank table before it received thirty plates set in rows. Then more enchantments were recited to fix all the settings before flames were lit.