American Indian Culture and Research Journal

On Ash Wednesday in the new millennium’s first year, the earth deep beneath Puget Sound slipped. Some thirty miles below Anderson Island, just off the Nisqually River’s delta, a piece of the planet’s crust fractured and slipped a meter or so, and sent out pulses of energy the equivalent of about thirty-five Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs. The resulting earthquake was felt from northern Oregon to British Columbia and had major effects throughout the region; in Seattle, the temblor damaged many of the city’s cultural icons. The world headquarters of Starbucks shed its cladding, while at the Windows XP operating system’s unveiling in the Westin Hotel’s Grand Ballroom, Microsoft founder Bill Gates was interrupted midspeech by falling light fixtures. Perhaps most frighteningly, the Space Needle rang like a titanic bell as it swayed from side to side. Despite the low number of human casualties—just one person died, from a heart attack—the region’s infrastructure was heavily impacted. Only in late 2004 did the Washington State Capitol Building, whose stone columns were shoved out of plumb, reopen to the public. Meanwhile, the future of the Alaskan Way Viaduct on Seattle’s waterfront, sent listing by the quake, remains among the city’s most hotly debated topics. This kind of thing had happened before. On 13 April 1949, a quake with nearly the same epicenter registered a 7.1 on the magnitude scale (in

Estelle Fuchs and Robert J. Havighurst presented the results from a national study of American Indian education in their book To Live on This Earth. Based on data obtained by researchers at the University of Chicago in 1972, the authors characterized the general state of Native American education in the following way: “With minor exceptions, the history of Indian education had been primarily the transmission of white American education, little altered, to the Indian child as a one-way process. The institution of the school is one that was imposed by and controlled by the non-Indian society, its pedagogy and curriculum little changed for the Indian children, its goals primarily aimed at removing the child from his aboriginal culture and assimilating him into the dominant white culture.” The creation of Navajo Community College (NCC) represented the establishment of a cross-cultural brokerage intended to overcome these assimilationist tendencies and to serve five additional purposes: (1) to give the Navajo people a Navajo-owned and -operated college with a curriculum taught by Navajos to help achieve Navajo educational self-determination in higher education; (2) to make higher education for Navajo college students more culturally relevant and culturally specific to the Navajo culture; (3) to help stem the tide of dropouts from colleges around the country by students who had received scholarships from the Navajo Tribal Scholarship Program; (4) to provide general education courses for Navajo students who might want to transfer to four-year colleges and universities; and (5) to provide job skills that were needed on the Navajo Reservation thereby helping to reduce the “brain drain” from the Navajo Nation.

When we think of schools run by the federal government or by Christian missionaries for American Indians, we are reminded that Indian education was designed—to borrow the words of Richard Henry Pratt, the government’s notorious Carlisle Indian Industrial School founder—to “kill the Indian to save the man.” Historically, American Indian education in the United States was inextricably linked to Euro-American colonialism. By the late nineteenth century, many Euro-Americans thought Native Americans were a “vanishing race,” and schools for Indians incorporated this belief into their design. In the United States, the large number and variety of schools for Indians that sprang up from the late nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries were intended as a means to assimilate Native communities into the American mainstream, turn “primitive” peoples into “civilized” individuals, and create Christian citizens who would adopt values of private property, hard work, and industry considered important by many Euro-Americans. Prompted in part by the Meriam Report findings of 1928, profound changes to federal Indian education began with the Indian New Deal in 1934 and occurred again in the 1970s when Congress passed legislation specifically designed to increase Native American access to and control of formal education. It was during these landmark periods that Indian education shifted to become more community-centered and more tolerant of the expression of Native cultural values and identities. Only a generation ago in most Native communities, everyone seemed to know someone who had attended one of these institutions of assimilation. Consider what Wilma Mankiller, the former principal chief of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, wrote about her family’s experiences at the government’s Sequoyah School, near Tahlequah, Oklahoma: The whole idea behind those boarding schools, whether they were government operated like Sequoyah or a religious operation, was to acculturate native people into the mainstream white society and, at the same time, destroy their sense of self. . . . [T]he fact remains that the primary mission of Sequoyah and the other boarding schools was for the children to leave everything behind that related to their native culture, heritage, history, and language. In short, there was a full-scale attempt at deracination—the uprooting or destruction of a race and its culture.

Women’s traditional occupations, their arts and crafts, and their literature and philosophies are more often accretive than linear, more achronological than chronological, and more dependent on harmonious relationships of all elements within a field of perception than western culture in general is thought to be. Indeed, the patchwork quilt is the best material example I can think of to describe the plot and process of a traditional tribal narrative, and quilting is a non-Indian woman’s art, one that Indian women have taken to avidly and that they display in their ceremonies, rituals, and social gatherings as well as in their homes. —Paula Gunn Allen In Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine, when Nanapush thinks about his future death and burial he instructs Lulu, “So when my time comes, you and your mother should drag me off, wrap me up in quilts. Sing my songs and then bury me high in a tree.” Quilts have become a part of American Indian culture, and they are mentioned and even highlighted in certain works of contemporary Native American literature. For example, in her novel Ceremony, Leslie Marmon Silko writes of “the old quilt” that Tayo’s mother provides for him while he sleeps on the earth. In Reservation Blues, Sherman Alexie describes how Thomas Builds-the-Fire wraps Robert Johnson’s guitar “in a beautiful quilt” and gives “it a place of honor in his living room.” In Thomas King’s Truth and Bright Water, Tecumseh’s mother Helen works on a quilt that becomes less “geometric” and more “freehand” as she experiences disappointment and frustration in life. The quilt becomes progressively unusual and strange as she attaches objects to it such as chicken feet, hair, porcupine quills, earrings, needles, fishhooks, and razor blades.

Whatever one thinks of his notorious comments on the 9/11 attacks, Ward Churchill has long been known to scholars of Native American studies as one of their most thoughtful and influential colleagues. Whether he ultimately proves to be of American Indian background or not—a subject of current controversy—his commentaries on the treatment of Indians in American society have been cogent and persuasive. His essays on a variety of topics, from colonial history to the Men’s Movement, have repeatedly revealed the harm done by acts that may seem innocuous or even respectful of Native heritage, and his analyses have done a valuable service to both the victims and the broader society that perpetrates or condones such behavior. As a timely example, one might note that the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) has recently come around to Churchill’s attitude toward the use of Indians as sports team mascots, considering them demeaning and barring teams that use them from postseason play. It is as an admirer of Churchill, then, that I find myself forced, however reluctantly, to disagree with his article “And They Did It Like Dogs in the Dirt: An Indigenist Analysis of Black Robe.” In his bitter condemnation of the film, he seems to misinterpret its intentions and message, not revealing the harm others have overlooked but imagining offense where there is none. By examining Churchill’s arguments, as well as other aspects of the movie he does not discuss, I offer a very different interpretation. Although he makes an ostensibly plausible case, I believe that he is mistaken and that Black Robe gives a historically accurate and sympathetic view of Native Americans.

Out of his black robe came Kraft, feedmills, blight, Benson Mines. From his prayers flowed the death of salmon and trout in mercury pools. From letters home to his mother settlers followed soldiers behind hooded priests. —Maurice Kenny Blackrobe: Isaac Jogues It must be said, first of all, that I find it quite humorous to be sitting here in midsummer 2007 framing a reply to a critique of a critique of a film I first published in 1992 and that was anthologized more than a decade ago. Somehow, I just can’t quite shake the eerie feeling that Miss Shively, my tight-lipped neo-Puritan of an eighth-grade teacher, will shortly be returning from her final resting place to correct the punctuation in that theme on the Black Hawk War I turned in on my way to becoming a freshly minted freshman at Elmwood High, majoring in football, small-block Chevies, and that oh-so-James-Dean-meets-Brando cool one might affect simply by firing up a Marlboro at the table outside our local Dairy Queen, smack-dab in the midst of Illinois’s endless cornfields. Fact is, I never quite managed to shake the image of the woman’s grimfaced visage extolling the virtues of the Pilgrim fathers, even after I was drafted as fodder for the war in Vietnam, coming back a Students for a Democratic Society/Vietnam Veterans Against the War (SDS/VVAW) volunteer and member of Fred Hampton’s original Rainbow Coalition in Chicago before gravitating to Sangamon State University, a governor’s grant magnet school for radicals situated outside Springfield, the state capitol, and, from there, being recruited into the American Indian Movement (AIM) by Clyde Bellecourt for what eventually turned out to be service in South Dakota, and later Colorado. Somehow, Miss Shively was always there, frowning at the way I saw things, the less-than-patriotic attitude I displayed, a hometown boy gone seriously wrong in her Middle American estimation. But, hey, that’s another story.