American Indian Culture and Research Journal

In 1866 an American military officer reported an encounter between Navajo peace chief Zarcillos Largo’s wife and American soldiers. As other Navajos fled before the American military forces, the chief‘s wife sought her children who had been stolen by New Mexican slave raiders. “She is a woman well known and influential among her people, intelligent for an Indian, and though past middle age active and vigorous.” The military officer writing the report went on to describe how the Navajo woman used her influence to encourage her Navajo people to surrender to American soldiers. In contrast to popular stereotypes about Native American women that have cast them into the dichotomies of princess and squaw drudge, the few Navajo women in the historical record are noted as autonomous and self-assured. Because the lives of Navajo women have been viewed within theoretical frameworks that have guided studies of both Western and Native women, it has been difficult to understand the continuity of Navajo women’s roles. Navajo women are central forces in their families and communities. They enjoy a measure of autonomy and authority even though, beginning with the reservation era in 1868, economic and political institutions have favored Navajo men’s participation. A critical review of the existing scholarship on Navajo women raises questions about the ways Navajo women’s lives have been presented. Further, a re-reevaluation of the records demonstrates that Navajo women had and continue to have voices in economic, political, and social realms.

In Canadian (Cherokee-Greek-German) writer Thomas King’s 1993 novel Green Grass, Running Water several intertwined “realistic” plots involving contemporary Canadian Blackfoot characters parallel and then intersect with a mythically based “supernatural”plot which itself includes at least four parallel stories. Lionel Red Dog approaches his fortieth birthday uncertain of his purpose in life. Alberta Frank tries to figure out how to have a child while avoiding a relationship with either Lionel or the ambitious, successful Charlie Looking Bear. Lionel’s uncle, Eli Stands Alone, blocks the opening of a dam that would submerge his mother’s house. Each of these realistic characters has a complex history, which is also told. Simultaneously, four old Indians set out to “fix the world,” and arrive near the Blackfoot Reserve in time to celebrate Lionel’s birthday and attend the annual Sun Dance. They are occasionally accompanied by Coyote, who moves back and forth between their real-world adventures and another space in which an unnamed narrating “I” comments on storytelling, the events told, and Coyote’s behavior. Simultaneously, Doctor Joseph Hovaugh and Babo Jones, a janitor, set out to find the old Indians and return them to the hospital where they have been held, under treatment, according to Hovaugh, for depression. Most of these characters and their stories converge near the novel’s end for one or more of its climactic moments. The convergence of plots and the interactions not only among characters but also among their distinct planes of being demonstrate the interpenetration of the mythic and the mundane that is an essential element of traditional American Indian understandings of myth. While these convergences and interactions, particularly given their often parodic impact suggest a postmodernist critique, the novel’s dialogic double emphasis on the oral and the literate suggests a critical approach congruent with its multiple stories, sources, and effects.

They put me in the boarding school and cut off all my hair, gave me an education, but the Apache’s still in there. -Mitch Walking Elk This article details the account by Clarence Hawkins, a White Mountain Apache, of his escape from the Albuquerque Indian School around 1920. I knew Clarence for over twenty years, and he told me this story several times. I tape-recorded it in 1990, shortly before he died. The following quote from my journal may give some idea of his personal significance to me: Clarence died on Thursday, Sept. 23, 1993. He was 82. Alvino [his second eldest son] called me on Fri. morning at 7:00. The wake was to be held starting Thursday at Judy’s [his youngest daughter] house. I was so shocked that I didn’t even ask that till later. He died of cancer arid liver problems in the IHS hospital. He went into a coma before he died. Although there are a number of personal accounts about American Indian boarding school experiences, I believe the significance of Clarence’s story of his escape from Albuquerque is in the detail of the difficulties and the persistence he showed in his desire and effort to return to his reservation several hundred miles from the Albuquerque Indian School. It also exemplifies the type of reaction many Indian youth had to the American government’s plans for cultural assimilation. Clarence’s journey compares to. James McCarthy’s one-hundred-and-fifteen-mile walk from the Phoenix Indian School to Tucson in 1907, and the anonymous students who covered over 200 miles in their flights from the Mt. Pleasant Indian School in Michigan.

Between 1863 and 1868, the US Army waged a war on the Navajo people that ended in the Army holding perhaps half of all Navajos at Fort Sumner, New Mexico. The Navajo homelands before this time extended from southeastern Utah and southwestern Colorado across northeastern Arizona and northwestern New Mexico. Fort Sumner was hundreds of miles to the east. In 1868, a dozen Navajo headmen inscribed their Xes on a treaty with the US Army, which set aside a reservation in the middle of their much larger traditional homeland. Released from captivity, the Navajos gravitated to their former homes, including those off‘ the reservation. Other tribal members who escaped the Fort Sumner entrapment also resettled in their homeland. But things were different than they were before the forced march. The Navajos were to be governed from Fort Defiance, located near the new reservation’s southern boundary, by military authorities temporarily and by civilian authorities ultimately. The Navajos were to receive rations at Fort Defiance, so many settled nearby, at least until they could restore their sheep herds. In 1866 Congress set aside a swath of land south of the treaty reservation for a transcontinental railroad that would travel through the middle of the Navajos’ traditional homeland. The grant, alternate square-mile sections in a corridor soon expanded to 100 miles wide, was supposed to generate funds to finance railroad construction.“

Since the publication of J. J. Brody’s 1971 Indian Painters and White Patrons, a pioneering study on the rise of twentieth-century Native American painting, critical perspectives on the origins of this movement have focused almost exclusively on evaluating the primitivist beliefs of its patrons and their impact on works created in the Studio or Traditional style. With some important exceptions discussed below, elements of the subjectivity that the young Native American artists who originated this movement brought to their compositions remain beyond the breadth of these discussions, acknowledged principally through scattered observations. While the literature that has followed Brody’s work has provided this area of study with an increasingly satisfying level of theoretical and contextual richness, an immersion in its discourses leaves the reader conscious of a great unspoken divide that separates those elements of causation arid intentionality that they do and do not address. Aspects of the content, style, and even the medium of the watercolor paintings produced by Native painters in New Mexico and Oklahoma during the early twentieth century are rarely addressed with regard to the indigenous perspectives of the artists themselves. Instead, within a variety of analytical frameworks they are viewed as responses to their engagement with an assortment of well-intended but controlling patrons and promoters, including Indian Service teachers, anthropologists, and the prominent artistic and literary figures of the Taos and Santa Fe art colonies. While approaches that emphasize the importance of this relation offer valid paradigms for interpretation, the resulting picture is one-sided, implicitly suggesting that the characteristics of this art were solely determined by the nature of those interactions. Conspicuously missing is an exploration of reflexivity as it pertains both to the creative experience of the artist and the cultural viewpoint shared by the members of his or her tribal group. Scholarship has operated so far on the premise that this art served to communicate with one audience. The intention of this study is to suggest its relation to two others as well: the artist him- or herself, and his or her Native community.

This paper introduces complexity theory as a new conceptual approach to research in American Indian studies and, specifically, to gaming in Indian Country. Casinos may look like a good thing for Indian reservations. They can support economic development, tribal web pages, and the revitalization of tribal languages, arts, and community organizations. Less discussed, however, is the fact that a casino can also spawn major and irreversible changes in tribal communities. It can change the physical boundaries of a reservation through the acquisition of land and alter the membership of a tribe by redefining tribal roles for the purposes of distributing gaming receipts. An initial look at tribal responses to the 1988 Indian Gaming Regulatory Act (IGRA) through the prism of complexity theory suggests that Indian gaming holds within it the potential to both strengthen and weaken American Indian tribes and tribal sovereignty. THE INDIAN GAMING REGULATORY ACT The earliest stages in the development of profit-making Indian tribal gaming in the United States began in the 1970s when tribes in Florida, Connecticut, Wisconsin, and California first opened low-stakes bingo halls on their reservations and then gradually expanded their gaming enterprises. When the tribes began to offer higher stakes, stay open longer, and use paid workers rather than volunteers, they frequently came into conflict with adjacent state and local governments. When state officials charged the Indians with violating the law, tribal leaders responded that they were exercising their sovereignty and that state laws did not apply to their reservations.

Nothing so well illustrates differences between Native and European views of the world as mounded up earth. Endlessly fascinating, mounds, mound building, and mound builders have been “weighty issues” at the core of the Americanist tradition of scholarship because they are simultaneously civil, cultural, ecological, and mythological statements of both skillful engineering and complex symbolism. After reviewing familiar mound expressions and their explanations from the southeastern United States-and less known examples from the Northeast, California, Northwest, and Midwest-comparison of ethnologic, archaeologic, and linguistic evidence, especially as it relates to esoteric aspects of tribal knowledge, leads to the conclusion that, far from being lumps on a solid landscape, the thoroughly Native understanding of the world as characterized by flux and flow indicates that mounds are a haven of stability by virtue of their broad-based weight in a fraught and uncertain world of floods, earthquakes, attacks, and oppressive disdain, if not hostility. In large part, such misunderstanding of mounds is based in differences of language and perception. Since Native American languages rely on verbs and process, while English emphasizes nouns and product, this heavy solidity of mounds has yet to be sufficiently appreciated. Such earthworks, large and small, dot much of the East, with strong clusterings in the Southeast. After the Archaic Period, conical mounds for the dead filled Ohio River tributaries as manifestations of what archaeologists have called the Adena, followed by varieties of Hopewell earthen expressions.