American Indian Culture and Research Journal

Traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) systems continue to demonstrate that they play a significant role in developing working relationships between Indigenous communities and the world. By narrowing TEK’s application to ecologically distinct regions, we begin to understand that Indigenous peoples’ local knowledge of a place is experienced and observed over time, and how the incorporation of these knowledge systems can strengthen community initiatives. The study of Alaskan Native knowledge (ANK) that is the focus of this article is specific to cultural regions of Alaska and to areas where certain communities live. To better understand the importance of this “Local ANK,” the author explored its incorporation during a timber harvest in Fort Yukon, Alaska and completed first-person interviews with project personnel of the wood-to-energy project. Local ANK is paramount in the planning and implementation of industrial projects that move Alaskan Natives towards self-determination.

When pressured to remove after the 1830 Indian Removal Act, some from among the Seneca appealed to the federal government to prevent displacement. In these letters and petitions, their authors periodically invoked the notion of protection, an instrument of cross-cultural diplomatic encounters of the previous century. Seneca authors sought to defend their tribe against settler takeover by invoking two different kinds of protection, external and internal. They further drew upon a civil right, petitioning, although originally it had been a method of exclusion from full political rights, and rejected the legal incorporation forced upon American Indians through the “domestic dependent nations” ruling.

At the end of the nineteenth century, the US government established a system of off-reservation boarding schools in an effort to assimilate Indigenous youth into the American nation-state. Music emerged as one of the most enduring strategies that these schools employed to reshape the cultural sensibilities of young Native Americans. A lively music culture could be found, for instance, at Sherman Institute in Riverside, California, which was home to a marching band and dozens of other music groups throughout its history. Although school officials created these institutions for the purposes of assimilation and cultural genocide, this music program often had a more ambiguous place in the lives of students. To understand the role of music within Sherman Institute during the early twentieth century, this article examines the school’s marching band and the place of Indigenous cultural expression. While the school had students march to the beat of civilization, young Native Americans found various strategies to combat assimilation using the same instruments. At the same time, they also used the cultures of their communities to navigate life in an environment that the government created to destroy those very cultures.

In 2016, a historically large gathering of Indigenous peoples, tribal nations, and allies took place at the Standing Rock reservation, North Dakota, in response to the proposed construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). Under the assertion of Mni Wičoni (Water Is Life), a social movement emerged with the purpose of protecting clean drinking water and Indigenous lands. Drawing on Gerald Vizenor’s theoretical framework that emphasizes storytelling and active presence over settler resistance, this study argues that Indigenous water protectors’ collective action in the movement, as well as their stories and remembrance of Standing Rock, are acts of survivance, in which they are able to denounce othering and challenge the colonizer’s gaze. While water is often described as a first medicine by Indigenous peoples, the water protectors’ stories in this essay suggest that the movement itself represented another remedy as well. Specifically, this movement represents a pivotal moment of cultural revitalization and community across what participants refer to as “Indian country,” in which individuals are able to engage in large scale grassroots decolonizing praxis rooted in spirituality and ceremony, and suspend genocidal traps of victimary that they have long battled.

The current television era, sometimes called “Peak TV,” was ushered in with serious creator driven shows of the late 1990s. The increasingly frequent Indian character type of the manipulative, money-hungry, and usually criminal casino “chief”/CEO simultaneously offers dramatically significant guest-star roles for Native actors and reflects a neoliberal version of the Noble Savage fit for twenty-first century audiences. This article analyzes examples of the “casino Indian: characterization found in the award-winning television dramas The Sopranos, Big Love, The Killing and House of Cards. Adapting the figure of the imagined “Indian” to suit the anxieties of our political and economic moment, each of these critically acclaimed shows have created an image of “Indianness” in relation to “casinos” and thereby have added the casino Indian trope to the long-established line of “Indian” characters crafted by non-Native “experts,” writers, and artists of the stage and screen.