American Indian Culture and Research Journal

INTRODUCTION During the last few years anthropological research conducted among North American Indians has shown a high level of variability in its perceptions of gender, sex, and sexuality. Most of this research concentrated on the ideologies and norms underpinning social and ritual obligations as a means to determine the levels of institutionalization of roles assigned to individuals whose gender crossed or mixed men and women’s traits. To this day, not much attention has been given to indigenous representations of gender variability in North America, with the notable exception of minor interpretations of ambiguous figures in the rich iconography of Southwestern and Eastern peoples from prehistoric to historic times. Although a considerable amount of work has been done on Plains Indian pictorial conventions, specific research on representations of gender has been published only recently. In particular, the only articles about the iconography of gender variability in this region briefly concentrated on the female body. Despite a long history of academic interest in male gender variability among Plains Indians, there are few references to its visual representations; yet no proper analysis of the several known portraits of male gender variant individuals exists for the Plains area. This is in contrast to a modest body of research whose focus is the artistic production and material culture of some Plains Indian males who either donned women’s clothes or, because they crossed occupational boundaries, were considered to belong to a gender that was alternative to that of man or woman. This article will analyze the few published references to gender variation among Plains Indians in order to contribute to a growing corpus of literature concerned with building a more complete picture of the social and cultural lives of individuals accustomed to these practices. In recent years these people have been known among Native Americans under the collective term two-spirit.

The Akimel O’odham, or “River People” (Pima), have lived in the middle Gila River Valley for centuries, irrigating and cultivating the same land as their Huhugam ancestors did for millennia. This history of agriculture is part of the social, economic, and cultural fabric of the Pima, who benefited from a sufficient and fertile land, a steady and reliable supply of water, and favorable physiographic conditions to produce an abundance of food and fiber crops. These conditions continued until upstream diversions from the Gila River by settlers in the latter 1860s. The Pima economy depended on the waters of the Gila River and its tributaries. Following the himdag, or the cultural ways, of the Huhugam, the Pima exercised sovereignty over their land, enabling them to remain economically and politically independent for generations. They were, as sixty-five-year-old Pima elder George Pablo noted in 1914, “a self-supporting people” who raised crops “in abundance.” This independence changed to dependence in the 1860s, when federal land policies encouraged and fueled settlement in the Gila River Valley. Emigrants then diverted the limited water supplies from the river upstream of the Pima villages, leaving the Indians, in the words of one Pima elder, “high and dry.” The Huhugam built the earliest canals along the Gila River. Many of the historic canals constructed by the Pima followed these prehistoric alignments and irrigated lands in the historic breadbasket of the Pima villages. The Pima cultivated these lands since before the arrival of Spanish conquistadors in the sixteenth century, with the period between the late 1700s and the 1860s representing the pinnacle of Pima agriculture before upstream water deprivation destroyed their agricultural economy (see fig. 1).

In this article, I document the illness and health care problems facing indigenous communities in Baja California, Mexico, by using ethnographic data from research I conducted from 1999 to 2001 with rural, indigenous Kumiai and with their primary health care providers in urban Ensenada. I contend that barriers to care are structural and social, rather than constituted of competing ideas of illness causation and treatment. A history of multiple medical systems and hierarchical social relations work in concert to produce specific patterns of health care problems for indigenous communities. Multiple medical systems in Mexico rarely result in clearly differentiated models of health care, however. Individual health care beliefs and behaviors frequently blend Western allopathic, or biomedical, beliefs and behaviors with those of homeopathy, herbalism, and different spiritual healing traditions. The primary health care problem that faces indigenous communities is that health care, however defined, is frequently unavailable and rarely comprehensive. Nevertheless, most of their health care providers frequently presume that poor indigenous health is largely a result of competing indigenous illness and health care beliefs. Indigenous health and health care problems are largely a result of economic and ethnic marginalization, as the case of Don Ricardo will demonstrate. A thin, frail man, fifty-five-year-old Don Ricardo was dying of lung cancer in 1999, when I first spoke with him in his three-room house in an indigenous Kumiai community in northern Baja California. A biomedical physician provided through his employment at the nearby winery had diagnosed his cancer. Don Ricardo was too fatigued to continue his manual labor in the vineyards.

In August 1779, members of the Hasinai Caddo confederacy spotted a wave of people trekking through East Texas and heading toward the site of the Mission of Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe de los Nacogdoches, where the migrants eventually settled. The group appeared to be Spanish. Situated among several Hasinai villages, Spaniards had left the mission, and the area, six years prior. Now they returned. This migration “caused a great murmuring among the neighboring Indians,” for it occurred during a moment of social and political disquiet for the Caddo peoples. Several Caddo chiefs recently had perished from the latest bout of epidemic disease that struck the region. After the death of these political leaders, the Native people looked to their allies and consulted with Spanish officials during their quest for new leaders who understood Spanish-Indian diplomacy in the Texas colonial borderlands. The Hasinai also were trying to fend off Osage pressures from the North, which required armaments and military support. Like the ravages of disease, Osage raids brought the Caddo-Spanish alliance to the center of Indian diplomacy. Enemy violence made trade with the Spanish that much more crucial to the defense of Hasinai communities. For these reasons, the return of the Spaniards after a six-year hiatus instantly caused murmurs among the Hasinai; however, what the Hasinai did not know was that the Spanish establishment of the town of Nacogdoches would become central to Caddo-Spanish trade relations and diplomacy as well as to Hasinai life on the East Texas frontier. The 1779 settlement of Nacogdoches and the town’s trade networks played a strong role in forming a boundary between Texas and Louisiana. The Spanish and Hasinai redirected trade routes in Texas after 1779 and produced new spaces along the Texas and Louisiana corridor.

Historically, Northwest Coast First Nations artists have been active participants in local and external economic markets. In Alert Bay, British Columbia, home of the ‘Namgis People of the Kwakwaka’wakw Nation, artists have sold their work in urban centers since the 1950s. Now they are more rigorously involved in selling their work to local shops and art galleries, in addition to the markets in Vancouver and Victoria, and in selling to international collectors. Based on the narratives of artists and local community members, this article examines why some ‘Namgis artists choose to remain in Alert Bay despite profitable economic opportunities that exist beyond their local community. This article also considers the mechanisms artists use to develop and maintain connections to both local and nonlocal art market centers and looks at some of the tensions that arise from artists’ simultaneous involvement in both areas. In particular, the discussion points to the ways in which artists make use of brokers and create personal connections to patrons and clients in order to remain in local communities. As they participate in different types of brokered relationships with their audiences—the local community, brokers, urban art galleries, and collectors—they confront and create varying concepts of “authenticity” and assessments of the quality and aesthetic value of their work. Through their own direct contacts and through brokers, artists seek to move among local, regional, and international markets and among what Fred Myers has identified as differing “regimes of value,” while actively seeking to express their own agency. Whether they create art pieces for local markets, ceremonial purposes, or nonlocal markets, artists attempt to maintain control of their work by aligning it with traditional and contemporary interpretations as ceremonial objects, market commodities, and artistic expressions of Native aesthetics.

In order to account for several puzzling, if not inexplicable, things that happened to me while researching the life and times of Wovoka, also known as Jack Wilson, 1890 Ghost Dance prophet, I propose the neologism extraordinary personal experience (EPE). An EPE, simply put, references events and circumstances that occur during and beyond focused ethnographic field investigations and seem to defy scientific explanation. Mine began fifteen years after completing a doctoral dissertation at the University of New Mexico about opiate addiction that destroyed the lives of Northern Paiute (Numu) members belonging to the birth cohort who succeeded the 1890 Ghost Dance religion’s generation—the prophet’s daughter included. Intent on calling attention to the centennial of Wovoka’s Great Revelation, I approached the Yerington Paiute tribe’s council in 1988 to pitch the Wovoka Centennial Project (1889–1989), a proposed collaboration that would include my writing a tribally authorized biography of their most famous son. They, happily, approved. No sooner did I return “to the field,” however, than I experienced the first EPE. Having asked my adopted bia (mother), Ida Mae Valdez, in whose home I’ve lived off and on since 1968, to escort me to Pine Grove, Nevada, formerly a thriving gold-mining community in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, and where the 1890 Ghost Dance religion effectively was born, she in turn suggested we bring along her wanga-a, or “younger brother.” Who better than Russell Dick, after all, to serve as our guide? “Hooks” had worked his entire lifetime as an irrigator and a cowboy at the Flying M Ranch, which was located in this same East Walker River country and was owned by hotel magnate Baron Hilton, who had purchased it from another financial tycoon, Max Fleischman, the margarine manufacturer.

One cannot read important voices of nature writing and ecology literature without noticing a view of landscape that closely parallels an indigenous perspective. For example, Barry Lopez gains insight from the Navajo culture to ground his thoughts concerning how story and landscape function to bring interior harmony to an individual otherwise bound in chaos. The Navajo ceremony Beauty Way is “a spiritual invocation of the order of the exterior universe” for the purpose of “re-creating” individuals in order “to make the individual again a reflection of the myriad enduring relationships of the landscape.” Other writers in the genre, such as Aldo Leopold, emphasize a view of land similar to that of a Native understanding. In his famous “Land Ethic” he warns against seeing land as a commodity, instead emphasizing the communal aspects of land. John Graves, in Goodbye to a River, echoes the notion of spirituality, landscape, and individual identity and consciousness. In his elegiac journey Graves’s Thoreau-like observations also include reverential references to the “People” who inhabited his Brazos River before the whites arrived. Another important book for literary ecologists, Harry Middleton’s The Earth Is Enough, posits Elias Wonder, a dislocated Sioux, along with the two protagonists who resist modernization, relying instead on the insights gained by observing indigenous culture. Jack Burns, the protagonist of Edward Abbey’s The Brave Cowboy, celebrates the “rocks and trees and spirits of the wilderness” as he is acutely aware of “another presence.”