Today we offer an excerpt on the politics of culinary tourism in Indigenous communities in Mexico from the new edited volume Reimagining Marginalized Foods (University of Arizona Press). In this chapter, Lois Stanford, a cultural anthropologist in the Department of Anthropology at New Mexico State University, explains how the Ministry of Tourism in Michoacán, Mexico has promoted cultural tourism that both recognizes and assigns value to Indigenous foodways, but also appropriates and transforms them. In this excerpt, Stanford writes of her observations of Purhépecha chefs, and she critiques the effects on them of moving local food celebrations to a single, state-sponsored culinary event called the Encuentro de Cocineras. The culinary fair is part of Mexico’s on-going promotion of local Indigenous cuisines. Stanford writes that these events only focus on food preparation, which devalues cultural knowledge, and privileges those who “fit the image of indigenous chef” marketed by the ministry.

When the Marginal Becomes the Exotic
By Lois Stanford

In 2007, the Ministry of Tourism invited forty-five indigenous women to compete in the Encuentro de Cocineras in Morelia. I attended this event, and my discussion draws on my own observations. Moving the fair to the state capital [from regional centers] presented the indigenous women chefs with greater transportation challenges, since they were responsible for moving their equipment and food themselves. The women received vouchers to cover lodging and food expenses while in Morelia, but they assumed responsibility for transportation costs, purchase of all food ingredients, and transport of all cooking equipment required. In preparation for the increased professionalization, the Ministry of Tourism offered courses to interested indigenous chefs during which agency representatives taught the women how to organize the stalls and tables, arrange the food, and prepare food for transport over long distances, among other technical skills. The women who participated in these training sessions adopted culinary practices and stylistic arrangements that situated them more in line with the Ministry of Tourism’s conceptualization of indigenous chefs. The event was organized into two major series of activities: (1) a formal conference composed of presentations by food studies scholars, and (2) the food fair, in which invited indigenous chefs presented their traditional dishes, sold foods to tourists, and competed for prizes.[i]

The indigenous women chefs were “encouraged” to attend the formal conference, sitting in assigned seats in the front of a large hall. Formal presentations covered a range of food-related topics, all citing the significant contribution of indigenous foodways to the conservation of Mexican regional identity and traditional cultures. Implicit in these discussions was an alliance between Mexican chefs and food studies scholars, on the one hand, and indigenous women chefs, on the other, in defending the Purhépecha cuisine from the onslaught of “modern” Western foodways, characterized by processed junk food. Yet, contradictions and distrust underlay this alliance. Following one presentation by a CONACULTA representative, a representative from Morelia’s culinary institute rose to proclaim the importance of documenting and preserving traditional recipes, ultimately expressing her hope that “this year we can share the recipes from the food event.” In response, a Purhépecha woman stood up to state that her grandmother had handed these recipes down to her, and they were not hers to share. If she were to share the recipes, she asked, then “what will you need me for?”

Over the weekend, the food fair itself was held at Morelia’s convention center, drawing local residents and visiting tourists. In previous years, the food fairs had been held in the plazas of provincial towns, open to the public; by 2007, entrance to the event required purchasing a ticket, narrowing public participation. This event was marked by specific elements that heralded the transformation of Purhépecha cuisine under the promotion of culinary tourism: (1) the display and representation of the cuisine, (2) the commercialization of the food, (3) the judging, and (4) the construction of “authentic” indigenous chefs.

In comparison with earlier events, the 2007 organizers placed greater emphasis on the decoration of the stalls and presentation of the dishes. The Ministry of Tourism set up tents and tables for the attendees to eat at, and provided dishes and silverware on which the participating chefs were to serve their food. Each stall displayed a banner identifying the respective chef and her home community, and each chef was also responsible for decorating the stall and presenting the food in an “aesthetically pleasing manner.”  There was a marked contrast between the elaborately decorated stalls of the professional chefs, restaurant owners, and commercial food vendors versus those of many of the indigenous chefs, who adorned their tables with flowers or baskets brought from their communities. The elaborate displays and presentation contrasted markedly with earlier years as the Ministry of Tourism restructured the presentation of the food to fit more closely its expectations of the representation of an indigenous chef.

In an effort to market the indigenous dishes, the Ministry of Tourism charged an entry fee to the attendees. Upon entering the convention space, the visitors wishing to purchase food had to purchase vouchers from Ministry of Tourism representatives. Periodically throughout the two-day event, ministry staff collected the vouchers from the chefs, exchanging them for cash. As well, the Ministry of Tourism had identified in advance certain “preferred” dishes, which they promoted by identifying them on the stall’s banner. Those chefs with more training and experience had prepared dishes that traveled well and stood up well over the course of the daylong event. In fact, many of these chefs had prepared most of their dishes in their home communities, drawing on the labor and assistance of their extended kin networks. They brought the already prepared food to reheat and offered a limited number of dishes, which they could highlight to the judges as particularly authentic.

Those chefs with less experience brought ingredients with them, only to face the great challenge of preparing labor-intensive traditional dishes in a timely manner. This contrast between dishes, such as tamales, that could hold up for a day versus more fragile albeit often more traditional cuisine was apparent in the stall where my student and I worked. In an effort to present dishes containing relatively exotic and obscure wild greens and spices, and thus to demonstrate the variety and richness of the Purhépecha cuisine, our colleague opted for dishes less familiar to the tourists. She explained that the fair provided an opportunity to teach non-Purhépecha tourists about the history and diversity of her indigenous cuisine. Thus, while she prepared her dishes, carefully constructing the small tamales by hand, we frantically set up the stall, arranged the dishes, and stalled passersby who were looking to purchase food. By the time all the dishes were presented, the first dishes were cold and unpalatable. Those chefs with more competitive experience offered special dishes to the judges, courting them with their salsas and savory dishes.

During the course of the event, judges visited the different stalls, tasting the offerings and making notes on their clipboards. They interviewed the chefs, inquiring about cooking procedures, ingredients used, and so on, and recording information about the recipes. None of the women I interviewed knew who the judges were or how they had been selected. Several women commented on the irony that mestizo judges, particularly male judges, were evaluating the authenticity of indigenous food.

Finally, in the process of planning the Encuentro de Cocineras the Ministry of Tourism essentially singled out particular chefs for recognition and transformation. Ministry representatives selected the competitors from different indigenous and mestizo communities throughout Michoacán, basing their selection on the individual chef’s reputation and participation in prior food events. Through this process, the Ministry of Tourism essentially branded certain individuals as the recognized chefs from their respective communities, although within the communities, other women were often recognized as equally talented and capable. The selected women were extracted from their communities and presented to the tourists in Morelia as the best of their community. Thus, food preparation, normally recognized as a collective activity within the community, became an act that distinguished individual women, granting them higher status.

From Reimagining Marginalized Foods: Global Processes, Local Places edited by Elizabeth Finnis. © 2012 The Arizona Board of Regents. Reprinted by permission of the University of Arizona Press. Reimagining Marginalized Foods: Global Processes, Local Places is now available from the University of Arizona Press. The volume brings together ethnographically based anthropological analyses of shifting meanings and representations associated with the foods, ingredients, and cooking practices of marginalized and/or indigenous cultures. Contributors are particularly interested in how these foods intersect with politics, nationhood and governance, identity, authenticity, and conservation.

From regional language workshops to international conferences, 2012 will offer a variety of gatherings for Native language learners, teachers, activists, and practitioners. We’ve compiled here a list of some of those conferences, workshops, and symposia for the coming year. Be sure to check out the Falmouth Institute’s round-up of 2012 language revitalization events and Northern Arizona University’s Teaching Indigenous Languages website for additional information on upcoming language conferences and symposia.

Where Your Keys? Workshop
San Xavier District, Tohono O’odham Nation
February 10-11
The two day, hands-on workshop will introduce the key concepts and techniques of Where Are Your Keys? (WAYK), enabling participants to quickly learn any language by talking with a fluent speaker without the help of textbooks, dictionaries, or translations.  The WAYK method is not intended to replace any existing language learning method but rather is an additional tool that can be used and modified to enhance any current language learning curriculum. The workshop will be entirely experiential, not theoretical.

Conference on Endangered Languages and Cultures of North America
University of Utah
Salt Lake City, Utah
March 23-24
In this 8th annual meeting, special interest is being placed on language documentation and description, computational approaches to documentation and revitalization, community outcomes of language documentation, and lessons learned from language documentation.

Native American Language Revitalization Summit

Native American Language Revitalization Summit
Falmouth Institute
Phoenix, Arizona
March 28-29
At Falmouth Institute’s fourth annual Language Revitalization Summit participants will hear from experts on the forefront of language revitalization efforts and return home armed with practical knowledge that can help make reclaiming their tribe’s language an achievable goal. The summit will also feature an idea-generating facilitated group discussion with summit attendees. Participants will have the opportunity to discuss  insights on best practices and shared challenges with other educators, policy-makers, and community leaders doing hands-on language revitalization work in their communities.

The 8th Giving the Gift of Language
University of Montana
Missoula, Montana
April 19-21
This year’s workshop speakers will highlight youth voices of success. Presenters will speak about their experiences as second language learners in the hopes that their sharing will help participants learn how they can utilize these successes in their own efforts to keep their languages vigorous and healthy.

19th Stabilizing Indigenous Languages Symposium
Thompson Rivers University
Kamloops, British Columbia
May 17-19
This symposium will bring together presenters engaged in the complete spectrum of Indigenous language revitalization including traditional teaching and learning, research, language preservation innovations, to “effective practices” workshops, from formal to informal presentations and/or performances. An important sub-theme of the symposium is the importance of an understanding of how to garner new knowledge that will guide teachers, researchers, and other professionals.

Language Revitalization in the 21st Century: Going Global, Staying Local Conference
CUNY Graduate Center
New York, New York
May 31 – June 1
The CUNY Graduate Center and the International Centre for Language Revitalization of the Auckland University of Technology will hold a two-day symposium on language revitalization. A central goal of this symposium is to share successful language revitalization strategies from around the world and to understand how revitalization can strengthen local cultural identity and at the same time connect speakers to one another across the globe.

American Indian Language Development Institute
University of Arizona
Tucson, Arizona
June 7-29
The theme for the 2012 summer session is “Language Authenticity for the Next Generation.” The summer institute promotes and cultivates an atmosphere of sharing among the participants by structuring classes to have both a teaching and learning component. Through lectures, readings, assignments and other hands-on activities, courses are designed for students to apply their skills and knowledge to their schools and communities.

Canadian Indigenous Languages and Literacy Development Program
University of Alberta
Edmonton, Alberta
June 9-27
CILLDI hosts an annual summer school held at the University of Alberta whose goal is to train First Peoples speakers and educators in endangered language documentation, linguistics, language acquisition, second language teaching methodologies, curriculum development, and language-related research and policy-making.

Northwest Indian Language Institute
University of Oregon
Eugene, Oregon
July 9-27
The theme for the 2012 summer institute is “Reclaiming Daily Conversations” with a focus on teaching participants strategies on how to reclaim daily conversations from English. The third week of the institute will include intense applied teaching practices, peer reviews, teaching demonstrations, strategies for teaching conversation, and ways to motivate adult language learners.

We’re looking forward to another full conference season this spring. In addition to displaying  new books and meeting with authors, First Peoples staff will be presenting on panels at as many as three of the six conferences we have on our roster (stay tuned for more information). If you have plans to attend any of the conferences we’ve listed below, be sure to come find us and say hello – we love to meet our blog readers in person. And be sure to check out our calendar for a complete listing of upcoming conferences relevant to the field of Indigenous studies.

American Indian Studies Association
February 2-3 — Tempe, Arizona
This year’s theme, “Making the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Work for Tribal Communities,” looks to explain, understand, implement, and critique the declaration through a broad range of interrogations.

Indigenous Book Festival
April 12-13 — Albuquerque, New Mexico
Last year’s festival included readings and creative presentations by renowned Native poets and writers as well as up-and-coming artists from the Institute of American Indian Arts. The festival also featured scholars, librarians, and publishers who addressed issues pertinent to critical Native studies and served as “a forum for the discussion of issues critical to the continuance of Native peoples.” The organizers are pulling together another impressive slate of authors and scholars for this year’s festival. Check back soon for additional information about the 2012 Indigenous Book Festival.

Organization of American Historians
April 19-22 — Milwaukee, Wisconsin
The Organization of American Historians and the National Council on Public History will meet in Milwaukee, a shoreline city where immigrant leaders initiated innovative public policies during the industrial era. Panels will address the shaping role of evolving market systems, class relations, and migrations over the long chronological sweep of American history, and explore the frontiers of social imagination and/or territorial encounters that have altered understandings of other peoples and traditions.

Latin American Studies Association
May 23-26 — San Francisco, California
The bicentennials of independence being celebrated now by many Latin American nations offer an excellent opportunity for a multidisciplinary discussion about the multiple ways of constructing the past and forecasting the future; the new meanings of “independence,” “revolution,” and “national identity;” the role of Latin America in the new global economic order; and the transformative power and limitations of democratic institutions in Latin America’s third century of national independence.

Native American and Indigenous Studies Association
June 3-7  — Uncasville, Connecticut
A group of New England institutions working collaboratively will host the fourth annual meeting of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA). The conference will be held at Mohegan Sun Resort on the Mohegan Tribe’s Connecticut reservation and will bring together scholars of Indigenous studies from around the world.

The International Conference of Tribal Archives, Libraries, and Museums
June 4-7 — Tulsa, Oklahoma
The International Conference of Tribal Archives, Libraries, and Museums, provides a network of support for tribal cultural institutions and programs. It is a unique event that brings together a wide variety of people who share the common goal of cultural preservation. ATALM is a national non-profit membership organization. It maintains a network of support for Indigenous programs, provides culturally relevant programming and services, encourages collaboration among tribal and non-tribal cultural institutions, and articulates contemporary issues related to developing and sustaining the cultural sovereignty of Native nations.

Check back next week for a post on upcoming language revitalization workshops, conferences, and symposia.

This spring we have our largest list yet, adding nine new titles to our initiative. This brings our total to thirty-three books as we embark on the fourth year of our grant. Our new books continue to show how our partners are publishing powerful Indigenous studies titles that speak to a broad array of fields. This season’s titles delve into climate change, colonization, Polynesian faith and identity, traditional foodways, recent Peruvian histories, Indigenous allies to colonialism, traditional knowledge, urban identity, and ethnomusicology. Here’s a brief introduction to each new book. Look for essays, interviews, and more in-depth posts as they are released.

Asserting Native Resilience
Pacific Rim Indigenous Nations Face the Climate Crisis
Edited by Zoltán Grossman and Alan Parker
This volume presents a rich variety of Indigenous responses to the climate crisis, reflecting the voices of more than twenty contributors, including tribal leaders, Native and non-Native scientists, scholars, and activists from the Pacific Northwest, British Columbia, Alaska, and Aotearoa/New Zealand.
Oregon State University Press

A Chosen People, a Promised Land
Mormonism and Race in Hawai’i
By Hokulani K. Aikau
Using the words of Native Hawaiian Latter-Day Saints to illuminate the intersections of race, colonization, and religion, this book examines Polynesian Mormon faith and identity within a larger political context of self-determination.
University of Minnesota Press

Eating the Landscape
American Indian Stories of Food, Identity, and Resilience
By Enrique Salmón
Traversing a range of Indigenous communities, this book journeys through the southwest United States and northern Mexico. Salmón weaves historical and cultural knowledge with stories American Indian farmers have shared with him to illustrate how traditional Indigenous foodways are rooted in environmental stewardship.
University of Arizona Press

The Corner of the Living
Ayacucho on the Eve of the Shining Path Insurgency
By Miguel La Serna
Peru’s Indigenous peoples played a key role in the tortured tale of Shining Path guerrillas. Emphasizing the years 1980 to 2000 when 69,000 people lost their lives, La Serna asks why some Andean peasants chose to embrace Shining Path ideology and others did not.
University of North Carolina Press

Memories of Conquest
Becoming Mexicano in Colonial Guatemala
By Laura E. Matthew
Indigenous allies helped the Spanish gain a foothold in the Americas. This study of Cuidad Vieja, Guatemala places the Nahua, Zapotec, and Mixtec conquistadors of Guatemala and their descendants within a Mesoamerican historical context.
University of North Carolina Press

Red Medicine
Traditional Indigenous Rites of Birthing and Healing
By Patrisia Gonzales
Gonzales combines her lived experience as an herbalist and traditional birth attendant with in-depth research into oral traditions, storytelling, and the meanings of symbols to uncover how Indigenous knowledge endures with a focus on people with a legacy to Mexico.
University of Arizona Press

Reimagining Indian Country
Native American Migration and Identity in Twentieth-Century Los Angeles
By Nicolas G. Rosenthal
This book reorients our understanding of the experience of American Indians by tracing their migration to cities, exploring the formation of urban Indian communities, and delving into the shifting relationships between reservations and urban areas from the early twentieth century to the present.
University of North Carolina Press

Songs of Power and Prayer in the Columbia Plateau
The Jesuit, the Medicine Man, and the Indian Hymn Singer
By Chad S. Hamill
Exploring the role of song as a transformative force in the twentieth century, this book traces a cultural, spiritual, and musical encounter that upended notions of indigeneity and the rules of engagement for Indians and priests in the Columbia Plateau.
Oregon State University Press

Walking the Land, Feeding the Fire
Knowledge and Stewardship Among the Tlicho Dene
By Allice Legat
In the Dene worldview, relationships form the foundation of a distinct way of knowing. For the Tlicho Dene, Indigenous peoples of Canada’s Northwest Territories, as stories from the past unfold as experiences in the present, so unfolds a philosophy for the future and knowledge that is rooted in the land.
University of Arizona Press

Jane Hill puts it well when she writes, “Make no mistake about it: Language endangerment and loss, perhaps the most striking and significant phenomena of cultural change in our lifetimes, are taking place on a planetary scale” (Ethnographic Contributions of the Study of Endangered Languages, foreword).

This week linguistic experts from across the nation will converge on Portland, Oregon for the 86th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America. As LSA’s four-day long  program attests, many attendees will be focusing their attention on language revitalization, including scholar Janis Nuckolls, author of Lessons from a Quechua Strongwoman.  The meeting will also feature a screening of the award-winning documentary We Still Live Here – Âs Nutayuneân, which chronicles recent efforts of cultural and linguistic revival among the Wampanoag of Southeastern Massachusetts.

The University of Arizona Press, which will be at the conference in booth no. 25, has recently published several important contributions to the field, focusing attention on endangered languages and language maintenance in Indigenous communities:

We Are Our Language: An Ethnography of Language Revitalization in a Northern Athabaskan Community
By Barbra A. Meek

Now available in paperback, this important study provides an investigation based on local language renewal efforts. Meek reveals the subtle ways in which  different conceptions and practices—historical, material, and interactional, can variably affect the state of an Indigenous language, and she offers a critical step toward redefining success and achieving revitalization.

Lessons from a Quechua Strongwoman: Ideophony, Dialogue, and Perspective
By Janis B. Nuckolls

Nuckolls shows how ideophones are the core of Quechua speaker’s discourse and that they allow agency and reaction to substances and entities as well as beings. Nuckolls also shows that Luisa Cadena, who lives in the Amazonian region of Pastaza Province of Ecuador, uses talk that gives every individual, major or minor, a voice in her narrative, revealing a language system that allows for the possibility of shared affects, intentions, moral values, and meaningful communicative interactions between humans and nonhumans.

Ethnographic Contributions of the Study of Endangered Languages
Edited by Tania Granadillo and Heidi A. Orcutt-Gachiri

The editors of this volume insist that to understand language endangerment, researchers and communities must come to understand what is happening to speakers too. The eleven case studies assembled here strive to fill a gap in the study  of endangered languages by providing much-needed socio-historical and ethnographic context and thus connecting specific language phenomena to larger national and international issues.

In the third year of our Mellon-funded collaboration, the First Peoples initiative and our four partner presses have continued to build on the momentum of our first two years. Our partners published twelve books into the initiative, plus many other important titles in Indigenous studies. We circulated two full catalogs, attended ten conferences, and held our second successful dissertation revision workshop, pairing scholars together in an intensive afternoon of manuscript workshopping, among many other accomplishments. In addition to publishing books, we are so very grateful for our work with scholars, helping them create new opportunities for their scholarship. And we are grateful for you and your interest in and commitment to the field of Indigenous studies!

See you next year!

In November, author Joseph Genetin-Pilawa participated in a symposium on federal Indian affairs at the newly dedicated St. Louis branch of the National Archives. The panel coincided with the opening of a new NARA exhibit entitled “Documented Rights” (complete exhibit viewable online here) and included historians Flannery Burke and Frederick Fausz, in addition to Genetin-Pilawa. This was the second in a series of panel discussions addressing civil and human rights struggles of African Americans, Native Americans, immigrants from various parts of world, working class activists, and women as they relate to the exhibit. Here, Dr. Genetin-Pilawa, whose new book will be published by UNC Press into our initiative next fall, contextualizes the exhibit within broader Native American histories and illustrates some of the potential pitfalls of inclusion in a linear, multicultural archival exhibit.

“Documented Rights” and Representations of Indigenous History in the Archive
By Joseph Genetin-Pilawa

The online exhibit “Documented Rights” tells a story about the ways that diverse people have struggled “for personal rights and freedoms.” Its narrative is constructed using historical records held in fourteen National Archives locations across the United States, including digital facsimiles of photographs, telegrams, speeches, letters, court documents, ship manifests, congressional papers, and more.  The exhibit begins with the Civil War era–focusing on slavery, emancipation, and Reconstruction–then moves chronologically through time to address issues related to immigration, suffrage campaigns, working class activism, Japanese-American relocation, and the Civil Rights Movement of the postwar era. Within this timeline, the creators of “Documented Rights” have also attempted to incorporate the history of Native people.

Interestingly, visitors first encounter Indigenous people by viewing records related to the Indian Citizen Act of 1924.  These documents, along with a photo of Comanche Quanah Parker and the Constitution of the Mission Indian Federation, are situated between and among photographs of Susan B. Anthony and suffrage parades, enemy alien registration forms, a picture of Eugene V. Debs, and a brochure about World War II Japanese internment. Within the larger mosaic of records and images, the struggle and hardships experienced by Native Americans might appear to “fit.” After all, museums and public spaces have often simply omitted a Native presence. This exhibit, it seems, has made a conscious effort to rectify that omission. I have to wonder, though, is the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act really a good starting point for this inclusion? Should “inclusion” even be the goal for curators of an online exhibit such as this one?  And, could simply “fitting” the Native experience into a linear narrative of inclusion ever work?

When I was first asked to participate in a panel at the St. Louis National Archives branch, I had not yet viewed “Documented Rights.” Truth be told, being invited to speak in the hallowed halls of a NARA branch (albeit in this case a glistening new building on the west side of St. Louis) was exciting, while the prospect of critiquing the exhibit was somewhat anxiety provoking.  As an American of settler/immigrant ancestry as well as a scholar of Indigenous studies who spends a lot of time doing archival research, I often struggle with the archive as an institution. This is especially true of the federal archival system. It occupies problematic space. On one hand, it catalogs, organizes, and maintains records that the settler colonial government has used to make populations legible thus facilitating dispossession, extractive labor, and coercive assimilation policies. On the other hand, archives also, often unknowingly, preserve evidence of a colonial-settler state that allows Indigenous people to critique, shape, and resist oppression. Examining the exhibit itself illustrates both of these points.

Studying Indigenous history in light of federal policy and United States development is wrought with unique pitfalls that make fitting it into a multicultural national narrative problematic, especially when that story is depicted as a celebratory and linear march toward universal inclusion. Historian Donald Fixico sees federal Indian affairs as an oscillating pendulum, not a linear timeline–policymakers shifting between full inclusion on one end and complete marginalization/exclusion on the other. Fixico argues that, while this paradigm allows for an easy periodization of federal policy development, the wide sweep of that pendulum has often obscured as much as it has revealed.[1] Author Kevin Bruyneel suggests that this polar paradigm is a reflection of “American colonial ambivalence,” an inability on the part of policymakers to allow Indigenous people to exist in contemporary political time and space.[2] It would seem, then, that “fitting” Native American history within a linear narrative of inclusion is a bit like fitting a square peg into a round hole.

“Documented Rights,” like so many other museum/archival exhibits, unfortunately seems to fall into this trap. United States citizenship rights were no doubt profoundly important to former slaves and new immigrants. And voting rights were of utmost significance to the white female activists and male labor leaders who appear in the exhibit. Yet, Indigenous history does not weave so easily into this larger tapestry of “inclusion.”

Section 3 of the exhibit, with the unintentionally ironic title, “This Land is Your Land,” focuses on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and asserts, “New immigrants and long-term residents struggled to assimilate as well as overcome social inequalities and injustices.” For Native people, the exhibit states, “inherent rights were not recognized until the 20th century…[when] Native Americans became citizens of the United States.” This implies that only U.S. citizenship could confer rights for Native people. And this is a tenuous implication, especially considering the fact that every one of the nearly 400 treaties that U.S. officials signed with Native nations recognized sovereignty and the inherent rights of Indigenous people (many of these treaties are even housed in the federal archives). Citizenship within the U.S. body politic factored nowhere in this equation, and when it did become a factor, it often required Indigenous people to forego or denounce citizenship rights within their own nations. I’m not saying that the 1924 Citizenship Act wasn’t important, but instead, I’m suggesting there is a danger here of flattening the contours and complexities of the Indigenous experience so that it “fits” within a celebratory multicultural American narrative, rather than pushing to change the narrative fundamentally to reflect the deep and rich landscape of Native American history. I think we can do better.

It’s important to remember that “Documented Rights,” even as a virtual exhibit, is presented in a linear form–its stories told through a chronological narrative. Breaking that narrative seems easier in written scholarship, where authors are able to present complicated ideas through prose and literary conventions not typically employed in the physical space of a museum. In my own work, I focus attention on Indigenous and non-Indigenous reformers after the Civil War who envisioned a relationship between Native communities and the U.S. in which U.S. citizenship was not necessarily an endpoint, or even a goal. I call these men and women “alternative reformers” because they presented viable, genuine policy alternatives within mainstream systems of government. These individuals often exist at the margins of current historical literature because they don’t easily fit into narratives of inclusion. My book, (tentatively entitled) Contested Characters and the Crooked Paths to Allotment, upends the conventional story by moving them to the center and by investigating both the campaigns they won and lost. “Documented Rights,” as a virtual exhibit rather than a physical place, could have employed similar conventions and reordered time and space. On the walls of museums or in the cabinets of exhibits, linearity works (and perhaps it’s even necessary to usher an audience through an orderly physical space that requires a beginning and an end), but cyberspace is different. The visitor has the ability to navigate alternate paths and stories. So why has it been so difficult to upend the structures that have driven museum design and form?

As I was reading through Chickasaw theorist Jodi Byrd’s new book The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism, I thought about how the ways she writes and thinks about Indigeneity might relate to the exhibit. Byrd offers a sophisticated and thoughtful exploration of the problems associated with conflating Indigeneity and racial identity. Building upon work by Kanaka Maoli Scholar J. Kehaulani Kauanui and Ojibwe scholar Jean O’Brien, Bryd writes that when Indigenous identity becomes simply another racial category, Native assertions of sovereignty and land rights disappear. In place of sovereignty then, citizenship within the colonizing state, as seen in “Documented Rights,” fills the void.[3]

If trying to fit the Native experience into a broader framework that includes immigrants, labor activists, freed peoples, internment victims, and suffragists is so dangerous, what’s a historian, archivist, or curator to do? And here it is: I think we have to acknowledge that complexity, not shy away from it. As author Paul Chaat Smith (Comanche), one of the curators at the National Museum of the American Indian (a space that has attempted to rethink what a museum does), writes in his thought-provoking book Everything You Know About Indians is Wrong, “Simply reversing bogus binaries doesn’t get us anywhere. The project isn’t about the good guys being bad, and the bad guys being good, but about finding new ways of seeing and thinking about the history that is all around us.”[4] I think “Documented Rights” gives us a chance to acknowledge this complexity, that’s part of why it’s important and worth a look. The Mission Indian Federation Constitution and Adam Castillo’s 1925 letter regarding internal sovereignty serve as clear indications that there were alternate ideas that diverged from the artificial binaries we’ve constructed. For example, the Mission Indian Federation met and negotiated with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, but at the same time, took as their slogan “Human Rights and Home Rule.”

The virtual exhibit “Documented Rights” raises some interesting challenges for scholars and museum professionals alike. It also reminds us that the struggle “for personal rights and freedoms” means something different for Indigenous people. While NARA should be congratulated for its attempt to do some justice to representing the Native experience, “Documented Rights” sheds light on the difficulty of doing so without replicating settler-colonial/archival patterns of organizing, categorizing, and flattening those histories. Rather than “documenting” rights—a process that privileges the kinds of written records held in archives—a better starting point might be “defining” what a healthy relationship between Native communities and the federal state might look like and seeking input from Indigenous nations while departing from linear models of representation.

An alternate approach to presenting Indigenous histories in cyberspace can be seen in the new exhibit “Indians of the Midwest,” hosted by the Newberry Library and curated by D’Arcy McNickle Center Director Scott Stevens. It contextualizes its stories within a United States national narrative, but puts the Native perspective at the center of the visitor experience. Viewers are encouraged to navigate the exhibit across time and Native histories are situated in the present, as much as the past. This exhibit, I believe, offers an excellent model for representing Indigenous histories in a digital environment.

–

Joseph Genetin-Pilawa is an assistant professor of history at Illinois College. His book, currently titled Contested Characters and the Crooked Paths to Allotment, will be published by the University of North Carolina Press in Fall 2012.

We recently received very sad news about one of our forthcoming authors, Deanna Paniataaq Kingston. After several years struggling with cancer, she passed away last week. Dr. Kingston, who was an associate professor of anthropology at Oregon State University, was in the process of finalizing the manuscript for her book “Niglarugut Ugiuvangmiuguruagut: We King Islanders are Wolf Dancing” (Oregon State University Press).

Deanna Kingston, who taught anthropology at Oregon State University, died Dec. 2 of cancer. Image courtesy LIFE@OSU.

OSU Press acquisitions editor Mary Elizabeth Braun said, “Working with the OSU anthropology department, we plan to continue moving forward with this important project. Deanna was a gifted and innovative scholar who spent much of her career working for her community, including creating a website for the King Island Placenames Project and many long-term efforts in documenting traditional ecological knowledge.”

Oregon State University recently posted a tribute to Professor Kingston, which starts:

“Oregon State University faculty member Deanna Kingston, an anthropologist, died Friday (Dec. 2) after a long battle with metastatic breast cancer. She was 46.  Kingston’s family is Inupiat from King Island, Alaska, and she dedicated her career to studying and honoring the culture of her ancestors, including exploring their rich traditional ecological knowledge. She was an associate professor at OSU.

Her work included research on traditional kinship patterns, songs, and hunting dances. She interned at the Smithsonian’s Arctic Studies Center, and worked on a film collection of last-century King Island life, now housed at the National Museum of Natural History. In 2003 she received a National Science Foundation grant to document and compare scientific knowledge with traditional knowledge of King Island.”

See the complete tribute to Dr. Deanna Kingston.

Learn more about the King Island Placename Project.

In August 2000, José Antonio Kelly began his research in Ocamo, a Yanomami village in the Upper Orinoco of Venezuela with the intention of examining Yanomami integration into the Venezuelan state. Within three weeks of arriving, Kelly witnessed firsthand the dire health situation in Ocamo and decided to shift his focus toward studying the health system among the Yanomami. Today on our blog, we feature an excerpt from Kelly’s new book State Healthcare and Yanomami Transformations: A Symmetrical Ethnography (University of Arizona Press, 2011) in which Kelly sets out how Yanomami describe becoming napë and the tensions that arise between Yanomami and the doctors in their communities.

Becoming Napë and the Interaction of a State Health System with Yanomami Communities
By José Antonio Kelly

José Antonio Kelly is a lecturer in anthropology at Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Brazil

The Yanomami interest in the biomedical state health system is not driven solely by their experience of constant epidemics and high mortality rates with which their medical resources alone cannot cope. Ever since the establishment of more permanent relations with whites in the early 1950s, the Yanomami have been tentatively interested in transforming their body/habitus; procuring and circulating manufactured objects; experimenting with whites’ foodstuffs; using clothes and soap; learning to speak Spanish and becoming literate. Because the arrival of whites intensified the incidence of epidemic diseases, access to their medicines also became crucial. Later in this process of contact, Yanomami interests began to broaden, as did their desire to have more control over the sources of knowledge and objects that they had begun to consider necessary to sustain their transformation. In the Upper Orinoco this ongoing transformation can be referred to as napëprou, meaning “becoming napë” in Yanomami. In Spanish they say they are “civilizados.”

Yanomami speak of becoming napë as a historical transformation and a trajectory into the future. They speak of it as a progression, but one that has also brought the onslaught of epidemic diseases that they call shawara in its train. The health system is thus fundamental because the worthiness of becoming napë as a historical choice and option for the future rests partially on its good functioning.

Becoming napë involves a constant assessment of ways to put white culture at the service of reproducing Yanomami society while minimizing the downsides of the intensifying exchange with whites. In other words, in this indigenization of modernity (Sahlins, 1997), whites’ objects and knowledge are subservient to the making of Yanomami kin and communities. The uneven distribution of white goods and services among the hundreds of Yanomami communities also gives becoming napë an important differentiating potential, deployed among Yanomami themselves to different political effect.

The Yanomami’s relationship with whites is imbued with ambiguity in all contexts. In matters of health, whites are simultaneously seen as disseminators of disease and as keepers of knowledge capable of curbing its effects. Whites are called napë—foreigners or others—a term that, according to Yanomami socio-political theory, connotes distrust, potential enmity, and anti-sociable (non-kin-making) behavior. Whites have thus become the epitome of alterity as it is conceived in Amerindian sociocosmological regimes, dangerous but necessary (Overing, 1983–84). Thus, the sustenance of a civilized life, the effort to benefit from both white and Yanomami worlds, demands a good measure of white domestication. The health system is part of this history and web of understandings. Doctors and health authorities are unknowingly inserted in this Yanomami trajectory of transformation that has a momentum and direction of its own.

White field doctors and those higher up in the health system are also interested in providing health care for the Yanomami. This requires an expansion of the network of services available in other parts of the country across Yanomami land and, concomitantly, the establishment of rules of engagement with communities and the management of resources under territorial-administrative criteria. A civilizing process of sorts is inherent in the state’s project of providing healthcare, for it unavoidably advances the systematicity of an expanding state apparatus. It also promotes specific forms of social, economic, and political relationships with the state. In this regard, the health system is one agent among others to which the integration of Indians into society at large has been delegated in what constitutes a shifting and incoherent civilizing effort.

The encounter between whites/state and the Yanomami can thus be described as the articulation of these motivations that I have loosely called “projects” or “trajectories.” The articulation itself revolves around the homonymy of “civilization” and, within that frame, a number of other homonymic affinities of interest such as “health.” (Homonymy here involves words or projects that sound or look the same but actually mean different things for whites and Yanomami.) Motivation stems from both the desire to advance the party’s project and to resist the interests of the opposition.

What are the typical points of friction between the non-congruent aspects of Yanomami and health system projects? Which are the issues that, according to Yanomami and doctors, encumber their smooth articulation?

From the Yanomami perspective, common complaints include the following: the high rotation rate of white personnel that prevents the establishment of convivial relations; the negotiations about the place and type of patient treatment in which Yanomami hope to maximize the benefits of simultaneous biomedical and shamanic therapies; the need for doctors to show concern for patients resulting in quick and in situ attention; the access to and use of health post resources like boats, motors, gasoline, and the distribution of a handful of salaried posts; the difficulty of managing the pressures of kin and political obligations, given the kind of institutional relations the system demands from its Yanomami workers.

For their part, doctors’ situations are marked by constant efforts to organize the activities of the health post and establish rules of engagement with the Yanomami as individual patients and political collectivities or communities. A sense of negotiation pervades all aspects of their work: determining the place and type of patient treatment; deciding where and how long to stay when visiting upper river communities; disentangling the health crew’s institutional objectives from kinship ones; fending off requests for personal goods and health post resources; holding seemingly repetitive meetings; dealing with the experience of having their medical interventions controlled by patients and their relatives.

The congruous side of their projects finds Yanomami and doctors calling for the expansion and improvement of the health system. These initiatives include building posts in distant areas, increasing the frequency of medical visits, and improving regularity in the supply of medicines and logistical resources, as well as establishing better infrastructure and communications, better salaries, better treatment in the Puerto Ayacucho hospital, and better training of Yanomami health personnel.

The harmonization of Yanomami and state projects in terms of the health system is, indeed, possible, and the Yanomami Health Plan has taken important steps in this direction in its consideration of the Yanomami conceptual and practical articulation of the biomedicine and shamanism, in its concentration on training Yanomami health workers, and in its efforts to stabilize the system’s logistics. This challenge involves articulating Yanomami and criollo, or white, potential in a complementary way that maximizes the capacities and minimizes the limitations of each party. Only trained Yanomami health personnel have knowledge of their language, cultural conventions, and history, and they can live and travel comfortably in the forest. Their status as fully moral human beings within kinship is a key asset that no doctor, in the conventional position of napë, can attain. Criollo health personnel, for the time being, have knowledge of biomedicine and epidemiology both to provide a service and to train Yanomami. Moreover, their institutional and generalized relationship—their status as napë potential affines—imposes on them none of the Yanomami kinship and intercommunity political exigencies.

Each party’s limitation can thus be offset by the other’s potential. The establishment of long-term relations within consistent and constant policies fosters the interchange of capacities: criollos are domesticated, morally indigenized, and Yanomami are trained, napë-fied knowledge-wise. The delicate art of articulating the health system with Yanomami communities consists of fostering the flow of medical cultures—the exchange of objects, practices, and knowledge between biomedicine and shamanism—while minimizing the friction that stems from distinct forms of conceiving of and reproducing a society. Biomedicine is part of a state ministry of health, a conventionalizing system envisioned as a linear progression toward an end—better health. Shamanism operates within a differentiating society that conceives its reproduction in dialectical terms.

From State Healthcare and Yanomami Transformations: A Symmetrical Ethnography by José Antonio Kelly. © 2011 The Arizona Board of Regents. Reprinted by permission of the University of Arizona Press. José Antonio Kelly is a lecturer in anthropology at Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina. State Healthcare and Yanomami Transformations is now available from the University of Arizona Press.

As we observe World AIDS Day today, First Peoples authors and blog contributors remind us of the different ways this disease and sexual health in general are experienced by Indigenous peoples. Last year, Jessica Yee, Executive Director and founder of the Native Youth Sexual Health Network, wrote a guest post for us in which she argued for the importance of a culturally informed approach to sexual health programs:

Similarly, Scott Morgensen calls attention to the ways in which settler colonialism serves as a structuring condition for diseases like HIV/AIDS and the importance of building transnational alliances to address the role of these settler colonial structures:

“My research continues to be inspired by Indigenous HIV/AIDS organizers, whose work focuses my book’s last chapter. Their transnational activism challenges Indigenous peoples’ marginal location in global health governance by exposing ongoing colonialism and connecting activists worldwide who share this critique. Currently I am writing essays that examine how transnational Indigenous HIV/AIDS activists specifically explain settler colonialism as a structuring condition of pandemics and of international governance. Here, we learn that settler colonialism extends far beyond the landed relations of specific settler states and Native nations, even while it always remains tied to that relationship. Their activism also calls for comparative studies of settler colonialisms and for global alliances to address them. I am continuing to investigate possibilities for long-term research in collaboration with Indigenous HIV/AIDS organizations worldwide that will document how they expose the settler-colonial conditions of global health.”

We’re grateful for the continued work of scholar activists like Scott Morgensen and Jessica Yee who offer paths for decolonizing HIV/AIDS awareness and prevention.