A snapshot of our time

First Peoples table

“English is tribalized,” says poet Esther Belin. “It is one of our languages. We’re recreating it within our own language,” she told attendees during the 2010 Native American Literature Symposium, held last week in New Mexico. Belin’s comments were made during just one of many well-attended panels touching on cinema, fiction, poetry, and performance.

At the First Peoples table, books by Simon Ortiz and Luci Tapahonso (both from UA Press), as well as Thomas King (UMN Press) and Celia Naylor (UNC Press) garnered strong interest from visitors.

Author Jennifer Denetdale with UA Press editor Patti Hartmann

Several press authors were in attendance, including Jennifer Nez Denetdale, Esther Belin, Simon Ortiz, Evelina Zuni Lucero, and Dean Rader. While Daniel Heath Justice, Thomas King, and Craig Womack weren’t able to attend, they were still a strong presence, their writings providing important frameworks for many panel discussions.

The packed room for the poetry reading by contributors to Sentence 7

Dean Rader chaired a popular session on a special issue of the journal Sentence, featuring contemporary American Indian prose poems. Contributors, including LeAnne Howe, Esther Belin, Sara Marie Ortiz, and Molly McGlennen, gave readings of their new work for a packed and enthusiastic room.

Finally, keynote speaker and film director Chris Eyre fueled conversations on film and literature that pervaded the three-day conference. “My job as a filmmaker is to make the story to lift off the page,” he said. He added, “There’s something about Native material that has a purpose.”

Hear, hear!

The First Peoples publishing initiative is headed to Albuquerque to attend the 2010 Native American Literature Symposium, which will be from March 4-6 at the Isleta Hotel and Casino. The schedule is packed with panels exploring cinema, fiction, poetry, and performance from both theoretical and pedagogical angles. To get ready for this three-day event, we’ve made a recommended reading list of books by panelists, as well as titles that will be the topic of sessions or readings:

Almanac of the Dead by Leslie Marmon Silko, 1992, Penguin Editions
Beyond the Reach of Time and Change by Simon Ortiz, 2005, University of Arizona Press
Blood Run by Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, 2007, Salt Publishing
The Last Report on the Miracles from Little No Horse, by Louise Erdrich, 2001, HarperCollins
Reclaiming Diné History: The Legacies of Navajo Chief Manuelito and Juanita by Jennifer Nez Denetdale, 2007, University of Arizona Press
Night Sky, Morning Star by Evelina Zuni Lucero, 2000, University of Arizona Press
A Radiant Curve: Poems and Stories by Luci Tapahonso, 2008, University of Arizona Press
Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism by Craig S. Womack, University of Minnesota Press
Shell Shaker by LeAnne Howe, 2001, Aunt Lute Books
The Truth about Stories by Thomas King, 2008, University of Minnesota Press

Grab your books and we’ll see you in Albuquerque. We’ll have a table of books from our partner presses, as well as information about our initiative. Please stop by and say hello. To view the complete conference program please click here.

Attorney and activist Robert Coulter spoke last Wednesday as a part of the University of Arizona’s Vine Deloria, Jr. Distinguished Scholar Series, sponsored by the American Indian Studies Department. Coulter has spent the past 35 years advocating for Native American rights and played a key role in the writing and passage of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

In an impassioned speech, Coulter spoke of some of the challenges that Indian nations continue to face. “We are still suffering under a legal framework that is discriminatory, unconstitutional, irrational, and inconsistent,” he said.

Coulter added that the laws that govern Indian nations today are “analogous to Jim Crow laws and the Separate but Equal doctrine” of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Coulter chronicled his years advocating for the passage of the UN Declaration, which spanned several decades until its adoption by the UN in September 2007.  He argued that, despite complaints about the Declaration’s inefficacy when it comes to enforcement, the document is powerful in its ability to be persuasive. The Declaration establishes a moral code and international norms for understanding “what the countries of the world agree is right.” However, he went on to say that he doesn’t believe the Declaration to be “anything more than influential.” In other words, it should inform the laws and policies of the U.S. and other nations, but is only a starting point for legal practice and governmental policy.

In an effort to help translate the codes set forth in the UN Declaration into U.S. law, Coulter and the Indian Law Resource Center, with support from the Indian Land Tenure Foundation, issued the Draft General Principles of Law as they relate to Native lands and natural resources. The 17 Principles are written both in technical and non-technical language to make them accessible to a broad readership. The non-technical version of the first five principles follow:

Principle 1
Native nations have complete ownership of their aboriginal lands – not some limited or partial right.

Principle 2
“Discovery” did not give the discovering country any ownership of Native lands. It only gave the discovering country the exclusive right to buy land from the Native owners.

Principle 3
Legal rules that deny, take away, or reduce ownership of their lands and resources are invalid, because they violate the United States Constitution.

Principle 4
Native lands of all kinds are protected against taking and other harm by the government – just the same as all property is protected. And, in addition, some Native land is protected by other legal rules that have been created by specific treaties, acts of Congress, or common law. In other words, Native lands and resources have at least as much legal protection against taking or other harm as other lands, and sometimes will have additional legal protections as well.

Principle 5
Congress cannot take any Native lands or resources, including aboriginal title lands, unless it is done with fair compensation, for a public purpose, and in accordance with the law.

Read the remaining principles here.

Coulter concluded his talk by encouraging collaborations between scholars and tribal communities as a way to make sure tribal concerns and needs are firmly established and accessible to policymakers through publications and other public discourse. “We need more consultation and discussion with Indian leaders,” he said. “We also need more scholarship on principles like these or new principles.”

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Robert T. Coulter is an attorney who practices in the fields of Indian law and international human rights.  He is the founder and Executive Director of the Indian Law Resource Center in Helena, Montana and Washington, DC.  The Center provides legal assistance for indigenous peoples throughout the Americas.  He is an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation and a Justice of the Supreme Court of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation.

In The Color of the Land: Race, Nation, and the Politics of Landownership in Oklahoma, 1832-1929, historian David A. Chang examines understandings of nation, race, and land among what he calls “America’s historically foundational ‘races,’ ” who he defines as Indians, whites, and blacks. Chang begins by framing his discussion on land and how it can be racialized. This, he writes, had particular implications in the creation of the state of Oklahoma and the identities of those who lived there.

From the introduction:

“’Oklahoma’ means ‘red man’ in the Choctaw language, is run through by a ‘Black Belt,’ and has been claimed by some as ‘white man’s country.’ It has been termed an Indian homeland, a black promised land, and a white heartland. All these competing racial claims to one place seem extraordinary. This book suggests, however, that Oklahoma is really exceptional only because it encapsulates so much American history within its borders, revealing much about how the struggle over land has given shape to the way Americans – indigenous, black, and white – created and gave meaning to races and nations.

Phrases like the ones above mark Oklahoma with a race and tie that race to the land. Race is a way that we imagine differences between people and make hierarchies among them seem right and natural. So racializing a land (marking it with a race) really means tying it to a particular people, whether they be Creek Indians, African Americans, white Americans, or some other group we believe can be identified racially in some way. After all, speaking of “a land” is also a way of speaking of a country or a nation. The title of this book is an attempt to evoke this relationship between land, race, and nationhood. This book considers both the symbolic power people gave land in such terms as ‘homeland,’ ‘Black Belt’ or ‘white man’s country’ and the economic power that land possesses.”

Learn more about The Color of the Land: Race, Nation, and the Politics of Landownership in Oklahoma, 1832-1929 and author David A. Chang at the University of North Carolina Press website.

“Chang explores how Indians and white Americans used race and nation to control access to land and dispossess those defined as ‘other.’ His ambitious and groundbreaking book is deeply researched, broadly engaged with important debates, and thoroughly convincing.”
–Claudio Saunt, author of
Black, White, and Indian:
Race and the Unmaking of an American Family

Anthropologist Rachel Corr has spent almost two decades periodically conducting fieldwork in Salasaca, an Indigenous parish home to twelve thousand Quichua-speaking people in the Andean province of Tungurahua, Ecuador. Her new book Ritual and Remembrance in the Ecuadorian Andes is now available from the University of Arizona Press. Ritual and Remembrance in the Ecuadorian Andes is the first book in the First Peoples publishing initiative, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

How did you get involved in your research community?

My first trip to Ecuador in 1990 was part of a college semester abroad program through the School for International Training. Part of the program involved a weekend “homestay” with an indigenous family, and that was my first time in Salasaca. Toward the end of the semester, each student was required to do a three week independent study project, so I asked the Salasacan family I stayed with if I could return to live with them and learn more about their customs. During those three weeks I learned a little bit of Quichua, I learned about foods and medicinal plants, and I watched as the grandfather of the family, a shaman, diagnosed illness by using a guinea pig. But I was very surprised when I woke up one morning and the mother of the family I lived with was giving birth in the next room. Her husband, mother and five year old daughter were with her, and it all seemed very natural. Unlike people I knew in the U.S., the family did not have the same concerns about children being traumatized by the birth process, and the five year old was not sheltered. I began to think about how different cultural practices of child socialization affected growing up in different cultures. Jim and Linda Belote had written an article about the place of children in Saraguro society in the southern Ecuadorian Andes, and I wanted to study child socialization in Salasaca. When I returned for my senior year of college, I applied for a Fulbright grant to spend a year living in Salasaca to study child socialization.

You write about how Salasacan consultants served as important checks to your anthropological and linguistic interpretations. What was your process for getting their input and how did you incorporate that input into your work?

I immersed myself as much as possible into Salasacan life through participant-observation. Later, I would ask people if I could interview them formally about something I had observed, or some event that needed more explanation. Then I would ask people more detailed questions. After writing up my own analysis, I would then tell people what I thought and ask them if I was “right.” For example, after interviewing many people about the process of festival sponsorship, it seemed that a lot of money was flowing out of the community at festival time. I drew a chart in my notebook that showed cash flowing out of Salasaca into the nearby towns for the purchase of food, alcohol, music, and other items for the fiestas. I showed this to one of the men I had interviewed, and he clarified the situation from his point of view. He explained that many Salasacan men and women made their cash incomes from working at jobs in these towns, and only some of it goes back into making purchases for fiestas.

What role do you think this kind of collaborative research plays in Indigenous communities today?

Many anthropologists share their interpretations with people they interview, and write about people’s reactions to their interpretations. Anthropologists today recognize the dialogical nature of ethnographic fieldwork, and the need to present the multiple voices present in any society, so I made an effort to present different Salasacan points of view on the issues that I explore in the book.

You write that your advisor and mentor Norman Whitten taught you to be attentive to Quichua linguistic expressions, kinship networks, and social relations while also considering how local people engage with national and transnational cultural systems. How do these understandings manifest themselves in your work?

I was fortunate to have very skillful consultants in the field. I would record interviews in Quichua, but since most Salasacans are bilingual, they were willing to take the time to explain certain Quichua expressions, including the meaning of kinship terms, to me so that I could understand the implicit meanings. It is an ongoing process—I continue to learn new things every time I talk to Salasacans about their language and cultural practices, such as the role of ritual kin in people’s lives.

I did become very focused on local happenings within the community, and Norman Whitten pushed me to pay more attention to national transformations taking place in Ecuador. This was at a time when indigenous political movements were fighting for political and cultural rights in the nation’s capital. In the book, the interaction between local actors and global institutions such as the Catholic Church is seen most clearly in the chapters on religious history, as I try to understand how Salasacans transformed their culture through interactions with representatives of the Church.

During the course of your two decades of fieldwork, you witnessed both changes and continuity. What changes in your research community strike you now, looking back?

Out-migration is one of the biggest changes I have seen over the years. During my first year of fieldwork, I knew many men who had temporarily migrated to the coast of Ecuador or the Galapagos Islands for work, then returned home to their wives and children. Now, entire families have moved to the Galapagos Islands and have official residence there. There has also been much more international migration. When I return to Salasaca now, it is common for families I know to show me photographs of their young adult children in France, Spain, Germany, or the U.S. Communication technology has also enabled Salasacans to keep in touch with one another. When I lived in Salasaca from 1991-92, there was one telephone in the community, located in the central post office. Young women whose husbands or fiancées were serving in the army would wait there for phone calls. The last time I went to Salasaca (2008) almost everyone I knew had their own cell phone, and there were two internet cafes. Now I can keep in touch with the children of the families I am close to through email and internet websites. These changes provide insight as to what people consider important to maintain. For example, many Salasacans now have their own DVD recorders to record fiestas and other traditional events in the community. Also, returned migrants help to maintain some of the traditional fiestas by sponsoring them with money earned overseas. And whenever possible, people still return to the community to honor their deceased loved ones on the Day of the Dead.

Originally, you set out to look at child socialization, but through your fieldwork you became interested in Salasacan uses of sacred places on the landscape, especially mountains and crossroads. What caused you to shift your research focus? And where did the inquiry take you?

I only learned about the importance of sacred places after living for some time in the community. A person would casually mention that on a certain day they were going to leave an offering at a certain place or, in the process of recording a life history someone would attribute an illness to having rested at a certain spot. Furthermore, I observed several healing rituals in which shamans would sing out the names of places throughout Ecuador, so I began to see a pattern, and then I changed the focus of my interviews to questions about the use of the sacred landscape.

Research on religious practices raises questions for the researcher about what should be recorded and what should be kept private. How did you negotiate that issue in both your fieldwork and later when working on the book?

People knew that I was working on a study about sacred places and religious experience, so those who agreed to explain things to me did so in order to help me understand their point of view. There was one time when, during an interview, one person said “don’t record this part,” and said something that he felt should be kept private, so I never reported that information. But for the most part people fulfilled the role of teachers to the anthropologist by explaining things to me that I didn’t understand.

Your book explores both collective ritual and individual ritual. What for you is the relationship between the two and what does that understanding bring to your work?

My concern for individual practice grew out of a desire to really understand what people believed. I wanted to be careful not to exoticize people’s religious beliefs. For example, generalized statements about indigenous beliefs contribute to a stereotype of traditional, “superstitious” people. In graduate school I received some negative reactions about my choice to focus on local cosmology because it was considered by some to be an outdated topic, and, because it is difficult for the anthropologist to know what people really believe. By the time I did my dissertation research in 1997, I was sensitive to concerns about objectifying people, and perhaps I was worried that by focusing only on collective rituals I was inadvertently contributing to that objectification. But I also found it frustrating that some academics had decided that local level religious practices were no longer worthy of study. I had already done a year of fieldwork prior to starting graduate school and learned that collective and individual religious practices at sacred places were a significant part of Salasacan life. So I tried to understand the meanings of such practices to different individuals.

As an anthropologist, what do you feel your obligation is to your research community and what have you done to meet that obligation?

I tried to represent Salasacan points of view on their religious practices as accurately as possible and to protect people’s privacy, and I would like to have some of my writing translated into Spanish so that Salasacans can read what I have written. Since there are different points of view within the community, I don’t expect everyone to agree with all of my interpretations. Salasacans are aware of the uniqueness of some of their customs, and they are proud of their traditions. When I started doing fieldwork in 1991, several Salasacans expressed interest in having oral histories recorded, and since then some Salasacans have done their own studies and writings about Salasacan culture. Although I haven’t had my work translated into Spanish yet, I did explain the contents of one of my articles to some Salasacans. They said that what I wrote was good, but also corrected some of my information. So I look forward to future collaborations with Salasacans.

In the second half of the book, you write about your perceptions from social interactions, jokes, arguments, resolutions, and everyday life experiences of the people you lived with. And you acknowledge that you tried to avoid becoming overly “reflective.” Yet you write that there is an important place for an anthropologist who works in a reflective space. When do you think it is appropriate for anthropologists to be reflective and how do you think that should influence or play into work in the field and subsequent publications?

Anthropologists have recognized for some time now that there is no such thing as a completely objective outside observer, so it is important for an anthropologist to acknowledge how their subjective position might influence their study. But I don’t believe that an ethnographic study should be about the anthropologist. I write about myself insofar as my actions led me to learn something about Salasacan cultural practices, but the main point I tried to make is how I came about certain information that tells us important parts of Salasacan social life. Anthropologists often learn things when they make mistakes and people correct them, and explain why certain things should be done one way or another. Writing about such interactions shows how we came to know and understand certain values that people hold. I have been visiting Salasaca and staying with Salasacan families since 1990, and I am still learning many things about peoples’ customs and values.

How has your life changed due to the work you’ve undertaken during the last two decades?

Humanistic anthropologists have noted the uniqueness of our profession in that we often develop close relationships with people as part of our work. Of course there are often great differences in power and economic opportunities between (non-native) anthropologists and their close informants; I will not be able to reciprocate the hospitality of my host family because they cannot get visas to the U.S. to legally visit me. But nobody can deny that we often form friendships with the people whose cultures we are trying to understand. An anthropologist who is asked whether they are returning to do research or because they miss their friends might not be able to answer the question, because the research and the relationships are so intertwined. Young men who I have known since they were babies now fulfill the roles in festivals that their fathers performed when I first began doing fieldwork, and that impresses me; I feel as if everything is coming full circle. One thing I miss is the time spent talking with Salasacan friends in the evening, by the warmth of the fire. I once expressed to my anthropology class the alienation I often feel upon returning from the field, because I became accustomed to having neighbors drop by for coffee in the evening to chat and socialize. A Latin American student told me that she has the same feelings of estrangement whenever she returns from visiting her family. It is difficult to separate these human relationships from the topic of “research.”

In Ritual and Remembrance in the Ecuadorian Andes, Rachel Corr, a professor at Florida Atlantic University, combines new research from Church archives with years of ethnographic fieldwork to show how historical actors recentered Catholic rituals and symbols to serve as mediums for sustaining local collective memory. She presents individual testimonies of modern Salasacans who maintain cultural memory through private rituals at local sacred places. This book shows how Salasacans actively shaped and continue to shape their religion through ritual practices linked to the sacred landscape.

Arizona State University held its annual American Indian Studies Association (AISA) conference last week in Tempe. This dynamic conference brought together activists and scholars from across the U.S. and Canada to present sessions fitting with this year’s conference themes: “Sustainability, Indigenous Community, Activism.”

In his opening remarks, outgoing AISA president Simon Ortiz tied together the three themes by poetically reiterating what he referred to as his mantra: “land, culture, community.” With a speech heavily interwoven with his native Acoma language, Ortiz spoke of the importance of revitalizing language, highlighting the “importance of language in recognizing who we are” and encouraged speakers who are insecure about their language abilities by saying, “whatever level of fluency you have, let it be part of your consciousness”

There were dozens of noteworthy presentations, but the following speakers eloquently embodied the conference themes of sustainability, Indigenous community, and activism:

Sustainability

In a paper titled, Intellectual Colonialism: The ‘Mining’ of Traditional Knowledges, Doug West, Associate Professor of Political Science at Lakehead University, critiqued the co-optation of Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) in sustainability discourse. Dr. West called into question the current thinking on sustainability, suggesting that it seeks to sustain a capitalistic growth model that exploits Indigenous knowledge systems. Dr. West asked several important questions that should be taken seriously by tribes and advocates of sustainable development: “Is sustainability an apologetic practice?” and “Is the current [sustainability] discourse a viable building block for re-imagining Native/settler relations?” Finally, he challenged his audience to consider that “sustainability is the Western ethic of the new millennium, but what exactly are we sustaining?”

Indigenous Community

Eddie Brown, Director of American Indian Studies at Arizona State University, spoke of his work to create a Tribally-Driven Participatory Research Model in which tribal community partners would be involved at early stages of all research projects, research would require approval from the tribal community, tribes would be active rather than passive in the research process, tribes would develop Tribal Research Review Boards, and training for all researchers going into tribal communities would be required or strongly encouraged. As Dr. Brown works with the National Congress of American Indians, the University of New Mexico, and the University of Washington to develop this important model, the collaborators continue to look at what structural supports need to be developed and what existing structural and institutional barriers might infringe upon the model’s efficacy.

Activism

Tom Goldtooth, executive director of the Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN), gave an impassioned keynote address titled, Mother Earth, Piñons, and Apple Pie. Goldtooth brought a strong activist current to the conference as he discussed his organization’s history and current work, including demonstrating at and reporting from the COP15 conference last fall, leading a campaign to stop the tar sands oil mines on traditional lands in Alberta, Canada, and partnering with REDOIL to address the detrimental impacts of oil and gas development in Alaska.  Goldtooth hit upon some of the fundamental problems that face Native nations as they develop new economies: “People feel like they’re in ‘forced-choice’ decisions,” he says. “Too often Native nations are given false choices: poverty or economic development that destroys the Earth.” Goldtooth called this predicament a “forced choice” that, in his view, undermines sovereignty because tribal members “have no agency to really tell industry yes or no to development on tribal lands.” Goldtooth’s complete address to AISA will be published in issue 25-2 of Wicazo Sa, according to its editor James Riding In.

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There were many other presentations that exemplified the exciting new directions that work in the field of American Indian studies is taking and conference participants we spoke to were highly enthused by this seamless blending of scholarship and activism.

Simon Ortiz summed up the sentiments of the conference and gave attendees a motivational take-home message: “So much to say, so much to tell, so damn much – so just do it.”

From conference brochure Ongwehoweka: "Our Indian Way of Life" Peter Jemison, artist 1992 38/50'' Mixed media on paper

Last week the  “Repatriation at Twenty” conference at the Arizona State University Law School brought together Native leaders in American Indian rights law, scholars, and activists. Many of the panelists had worked for decades to lobby for the passage of the National Museum of the American Indian Act (1989) and Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act [NAGPRA] (1990).

Organizers hoped the gathering would establish counter-narratives on repatriation. Said Suzan Shown Harjo, scholar, president of the Morning Star Institute, and an activist in repatriation since 1967, “This conference is an establishment of the oral history of what happened because what is written is only the stipulated truth.”

Here is a snapshot of panelist statements from the day-long gathering:

“The facts we have been taught about Native people are wrong.”—Kevin Gover, Director Smithsonian National Museum of American Indian, during his lecture “Will the White Man’s Indian Ever Die?”

“Never once do you see an image of an Indian that is smart, funny, and clumsy. Trust me. Some of us are.”—Kevin Gover, Director Smithsonian National Museum of American Indian, during his lecture “Will the White Man’s Indian Ever Die?”

“Where we are right now is O’odham country, O’odham territory. This is true not only because oral tradition says so. Archeology tells us. I have no doubt about that because out of NAGPRA, tribes know.”—Diane Enos, President of the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community

“As we reached the twentieth anniversary of repatriation, we saw that across the nation people were touting new partnerships between Native people and museums. And it struck us as a very odd narrative that didn’t match up with what the people working with these thing were telling us.”—Rebecca Tsosie, Executive Director, Arizona State University Indian Legal Program

“One thing that is so important with repatriation is the fact that people still do the ceremonial events. People know what [objects in museum collections] look like, they know what they do. When they are returned, they go back into their place in ceremonies.”—Suzan Shown Harjo, President, The Morning Star Institute

“We should have a definition of history because we need to define ourselves rather than other people defining us. But a problem with history is that it gives the written word power over oral tradition.” –W. Roger Buffalohead, on the history behind the NMAI Act and NAGPRA

“They say Indian discourse is unbelievable. But why should we believe them?” –Robert Cruz, Tohono O’odham Nation, on the history behind the NMAI Act and NAGPRA

“The battle is still on-going to protect our rights [against people] who have a money interest in collecting dead Indians.”—Alan Parker, Director, Northwest Indian Applied Research Institute

“Even though we can get discouraged by the abuses still taking place, it’s important to step back and see where we have made progress.”—Alan Parker, Director, Northwest Indian Applied Research Institute

“One of the biggest discussions [in repatriation] is ‘how do we do it?’ For a lot of tribes, there isn’t a way to rebury people.”—Dr. Manley Begay, Jr., Native Nations Institute, Board of Trustees of the National Museum of the American Indian

“It was hoped that NAGPRA would bring about a new era between museums and Indian Country. With NAGPRA, the hope was that teaching would happen together—for [Indigenous] students and museums. It was hoped it would usher in a new era of mutual respect. But it didn’t happen that way. It was hoped that NAGPRA would be a way for restitution for museums. Many items were taken under duress—or outright stolen—in the early twentieth century.”—Dr. Manley Begay, Jr., Native Nations Institute, Board of Trustees of the National Museum of the American Indian

“To this day, there is not a single federal agency that is in compliance with the law. There is no oversight.”—Permina Yellow Bird, Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation, founder North Dakota Intertribal Reinternment Committee

“NAGPRA is the correction of a vast moral wrong.”—W. Richard West, Jr., Founding Director, National Museum of the American Indian

“Even if still a work in progress, the NMAI is a very good place in terms of repatriation. Following the trustees mandate, the importance of repatriation is Native-generated knowledge.”—W. Richard West, Jr., Founding Director, National Museum of the American Indian

“I think we have to understand that physical anthropologists and some museums are playing an insiders game to block regulations.” –Walter R. Echo-Hawk, Counsel, Crow & Dunlevy

“What are we supposed to do? Those prayers were already made. We’re forced to change our traditions. But I’ve been told ‘don’t be afraid of the unknown.’”—Mervin Wright Jr., Chairman for the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe

“We’re hearing from the Indian community that things are getting worse, and we’re hearing from the scientific community that it’s getting better.”—Allison Binney, Staff Director/Chief Counsel, Senate Committee on Indian Affairs

“NAGPRA diminishes the inherent nature of sovereignty by giving museums the right to determine cultural affiliation. I believe it should be the tribes that determine this.” Dr. James Riding In, Professor, American Indian Studies Program, Arizona State University,

“Self-determination suggests to me that Native people are at the center and should drive the repatriation process. I don’t know that that’s the way it has been done for the last twenty years.” –Christine Zuni Cruz, Professor of Law, University of New Mexico School of Law

“I hope that ‘Repatriation at 40′ will really be celebratory.”—Dr. Manley Begay, Jr., Native Nations Institute, Board of Trustees of the National Museum of the American Indian

Water is at the heart of one of the most controversial tribal resource debates in the Southwest. Last week in Tucson, a panel of activists, journalists, and environmentalists gathered for “Power Struggle: A dialogue on energy, environmental activism and the role of the media on the Navajo and Hopi Nations.”

The panelists included members of the press as well as environmental and community activists: Marley Shebala of The Navajo Times, Andy Bessler of the Sierra Club, Dennis Wagner of The Arizona Republic, Wahleah Johns of the Black Mesa Water Coaltion, Tony Skrelunas of the Grand Canyon Trust, and Vernon Masayesva of Black Mesa Trust. (Representatives from the Navajo and Hopi governments and from Peabody Coal were invited to participate, but unable to attend). In a dynamic debate, the panelists discussed the implications of tribal sovereignty, environmental justice, and coalitions between tribes and outside environmental groups.

The controversy discussed by the panel stems from the Peabody Coal mining operation situated on Black Mesa, home to both Navajo and Hopi tribal members. In order to slurry the coal, Peabody drew from the N-aquifer, a large reserve of water beneath Black Mesa that feeds sacred springs on the Hopi reservation and acts as the sole water source for the entire region.

In 2006, Hopi and Navajo grassroots organizations, primarily the Black Mesa Water Coaltion and Black Mesa Trust, along with outside organizations such as the Sierra Club and the Grand Canyon Trust successfully lobbied for the close of the mining operation. The closing was seen as a victory for the grassroots groups, environmentalists, and other members of the Hopi and Navajo tribe concerned about water and air quality issues. However, the closing of the mine was not a welcome development for the 230 mineworkers who lost jobs and other tribal members who saw the mine as an important source of revenue and employment in a cash-strapped region.

In the aftermath of the closing, tribal governments blamed environmental groups for causing the economic turmoil resulting from lost revenue. The Hopi tribal council voted unanimously to ban environmental groups, including the Sierra Club and Grand Canyon Trust, from the reservation stating that they posed a threat to the tribe’s economic development and their right to self-govern. Their resolution encouraged “all Indian nations across the country to evaluate their relationships with environmental groups and possibly reconsider those alliances in order to protect tribal sovereignty.” Navajo Nation president Joe Shirley issued a statement supporting the decision of the Hopi tribal council: “I stand with the Hopi Nation. Unlike ever before, environmental activists and organizations are among the greatest threat to tribal sovereignty, tribal self determination, and our quest for independence.”

Some of the panelists argued that the tribal government ban of environmental groups didn’t reflect the sentiments of the entire tribe, some of whom identified very deeply as environmentalists. Panelist Vernon Masayesva, former Hopi tribal chairman and the founder of the Black Mesa Trust, said that the move to ban environmental groups was hypocritical. “The word Hopi means to be an environmentalist because we have a covenant to care for the Earth.” Masayesva told the audience last week that to ban environmentalism is to ban an ethic that has traditionally been a unifying force in Hopi ideology. There are different degrees of sovereignty, he said, and while tribes do have the right to self-govern, “we still haven’t learned to do it very well, but we need to exercise our right to control our resources.”

In the case of the Peabody Coal mine, the hard fact remains that jobs and revenue were lost when the mine shut down. Groups like Just Transition have organized to help “transition tribal economy, employment, and energy off fossil fuel extraction and onto a sustainable renewable energy path.”

Discussions about tribal resource use and the search for pathways towards sustainable development will continue next month when Arizona State University hosts the conference, “Tribal Energy Economies: Investing in a Sustainable Future.”

For Further Reading:

The suggestion that environmental groups pose a threat to tribal sovereignty raises important questions about the nature of sovereignty and self-governance in the post-colonial era. For more on this topic, see Kevin Bruyneel’s The Third Space of Sovereignty: The Post-colonial Politics of U.S.-Indigenous Relations (University of Minnesota Press, 2008):

“In resistance to this colonial rule, indigenous political actors work across American spatial and temporal boundaries, demanding rights and resources from the liberal democratic settler-state while also challenging the imposition of colonial rule on their lives. This resistance engenders what I call a ‘third space of sovereignty’ that resides neither simply inside nor outside the American political system but rather exists on these very boundaries, exposing both the practices and the contingencies of American colonial rule.”

See also, Mining, the Environment, and Indigenous Development Conflicts by Saleem H. Ali (University of Arizona Press, 2003).

Indians, since their first encounter with Europeans, have been more defined by others than by themselves, according to Kevin Gover, Director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. Gover will deliver the Third Annual William C. Canby Jr. lecture, “Will the White Man’s Indian Ever Die?” this week at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at Arizona State University.

“It is the human inclination to dominate that is so troublesome,” Gover said. “And defining another, well, I can’t imagine a more complete domination, at least psychologically.”

The talk is the keynote for the conference, “Repatriation at 20: A Gathering on Native Self-Determination and Human Rights,” which will continue at the College from 8:30 to 5 p.m. on Friday, Jan. 29.

The gathering is intended to commemorate and acknowledge the significance of repatriation to Native sovereignty, self-determination and human rights.  This is not a conference celebrating laws, such as the 1989 National Museum of the American Indian Act or the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). Rather, this is a gathering intended to elicit the core principles of cultural survival that led to the enactment of these laws. This gathering will evaluate the implementation of the laws, from the perspective of the peoples and communities that they were designed to serve.  Speakers intend to focus on the agency of Native peoples in sustaining the cultural and political rights at the center of repatriation law.

The lecture, presented by the College of Law’s Indian Legal Program, will start at 4:30 p.m. on Thursday, Jan. 28, in the Great Hall of Armstrong Hall on ASU’s Tempe campus. Free tickets are available at http://community.law.asu.edu/event/REPATat20. The lecture will be available live online at: http://online.asu.edu/events/canby/canby.htm.

Kevin Gover wrote the forward to The Land Has Memory from The University of North Carolina Press. The book offers essays by Smithsonian staff and others involved in the museum’s creation. The essays examine Indigenous peoples’ long and varied relationship to the land in the Americas and the ways that relationship is depicted at the museum.

Amidst all the hype and excitement surrounding James Cameron’s new film, Avatar, many have critiqued its use of Indigenous imagery and innuendo and have charged that it is a thinly veiled colonialist fantasy that perpetuates damaging stereotypes. We asked First Peoples advisory board member, Daniel Heath Justice, to weigh in with his own thoughts on the film and its allusions to indigeneity, colonialism, and other pertinent issues.

Justice is a Colorado-born Canadian citizen of the Cherokee Nation. He is associate professor of Aboriginal literatures and Aboriginal Studies at the University of Toronto, and has written extensively on Indigenous North American literary expression. He also teaches a regular course in fantasy and horror literature and is the author of The Way of Thorn and Thunder, an Indigenous fantasy trilogy.

James Cameron’s Avatar: Missed Opportunities
By Daniel Heath Justice

Apologies for spoilers!  And thanks to Kent Dunn, Jim Cox, and Kirby Brown for their comments on early drafts of this blog.

In the past few weeks, I’ve chatted with a number of friends, colleagues, and students about the phenomenon that is Avatar. Certainly this particular community tends to be quite conversant about prominent themes in the film, such as Indigenous sovereignty and spirituality, colonization and decolonization, other-than-human kinship, traditional ecological knowledge and environmental destruction, so although we’re a diverse group we do have some values that align pretty closely across our differences. And given the fact that the film has already met with some pretty blistering critique online and in print from both the right and the left for its handling of many of these themes, I’d initially thought that the underlying perspective emerging from these conversations would be sweeping dismissal, or at least substantial indignation.

That’s not how it turned out, not even for me. Our responses ranged from guarded optimism (given that a huge international audience is clearly so engaged with a film that confronts the horrors of colonialism and resource exploitation) to thoughtful frustration (it’s powerful in so many ways, but why do we need yet another story about Indigenous struggle told through a non-Native’s voice and perspective?), but no one dismissed it. On the whole, the overwhelming sense was, “Well, it’s flawed, but at least it’s getting people talking.” That there’s so much commentary in the blogosphere on the film’s underlying current of “white guilt” indicates to me that something is happening with audiences and critics; it’s probably too early to tell yet what that is, but there’s probably a good opportunity here to engage an audience on Indigenous issues that might not otherwise have been interested or receptive.

To be honest, I went in expecting to hate the film. I’d already heard that it was pretty much Dances with Wolves in outer space, and the heavy-handed parallels to Pocahontas and Last of the Mohicans were readily apparent even in the first half-hour. The minute I saw Michelle Rodriguez as the tough-talking pilot Trudy Chacon, I knew that her character was going to die, die heroically but die nonetheless–this is the almost inevitable fate of most Latinas in science fiction films. For all the amazing 3D effects, the characters were simplistic caricatures, much of the dialogue was leaden and cliché, and the storyline was surprisingly predictable for a $300 million epic. To my surprise, there was enough in terms of world-building and interest around the Indigenous Na’vi to keep my attention; indeed, I would have liked to have seen much more of the Na’vi and their world and much less of the generally obnoxious and self-absorbed human invaders.

The film didn’t annoy me so much as make me sad, largely because it promised to be much more substantial than it actually was. That Cameron chose the least interesting and most consistently obtuse figure in the film (Jake Sully, a paraplegic ex-Marine, performed by Sam Worthington) to be the point-of-view character is, I think, symptomatic of the most significant failures of Avatar, namely, that for all its visual sophistication, the story suffers from low narrative expectations, and it regretfully fulfils them. Complexity and ambiguity are surrendered for expedient moralizing; the possibility of richly realized and multidimensional characters is tossed out in favor of stock heroes and villains. Cameron drives home the relevant political concerns with the subtlety of a sledgehammer; the good guys are very good, the bad guys are very, very bad, and there is little overlap between the categories. The Na’vi are exotic and intriguing, but their narrative function is to serve as the redemptive influence on a disillusioned white guy; they’re more interesting than the humans, but ultimately only to show what qualities the good humans will attain. It’s all part of the “white guy goes Native” Western film formula–the only real difference is that these whooping, warlike natives have blue skin and ride oddly limbed alien horses or fly giant bat-beasts.

This is, I think, where my primary disappointment lies: because the characters and their motivations are so clumsily handled, because the story is so formulaic, because the imaginary setting is so unimaginatively derivative of this world, the potential for actual critical commentary is diminished, and the audience is left with a self-congratulatory feeling of having grappled with major issues without having actually dealt with any of the real complexities of colonialism, militarism, reverence for the living world, or environmental destruction.  (Nor does it deal much with dis/ability, in spite of Jake’s injuries and their effects on his sense of self–that he ends up not only ambulatory but immensely powerful in his Na’vi body at the end is another narrative cheat. Is it so hard to imagine in a science fiction film that a paraplegic can be an adventurous hero in his own ways and with his own body and do so in a way that doesn’t ultimately require him to be something other than he is?) The film is a journey into a not-so-strange world that neither disorients nor dislocates viewer expectations; indeed, it asks very little of its audience aside from a willingness to be enraptured by its own spectacle. That’s good for entertainment, but that’s not asking for much these days.

For example, if Cameron had still decided for whatever reason that the viewpoint character couldn’t be one of the Indigenous Na’vi, Sigourney Weaver’s character, the scientist/teacher Dr. Grace Augustine, would have been an immeasurably more interesting (and inherently more complicated) choice than Jake, the pouting and resentful soldier/jock.  (That Weaver’s fine performance is both multilayered and compelling in spite of the weak script demonstrates once again that she’s an extraordinary but sadly underappreciated talent.)  While the film offers some muted critique of academic colonialism, the decidedly mixed blessings of Grace’s work as a teacher of human ways to the Na’vi are almost entirely obscured by the fact that she’s not a murderous military thug like Colonel Quaritch (Stephen Lang). Because she’s not a sneering, cardboard villain, and because in spite of her bristly personality she obviously has good intentions, the dangerous legacies of her interference in the world of the Na’vi are ultimately erased, and she remains a hero. Yet many of the devastations visited upon Indigenous cultures have come from well-meaning teachers, preachers, and scholars, many of whom have believed that their actions are for the good of the peoples whose cultures they’re working to undermine.

And such shallow attention to motivation doesn’t begin or end with Dr. Augustine. Colonel Quaritch is despicable, vindictive, and brutal almost entirely for the sake of efficient brutality. There’s nothing sophisticated about his evil, nor is there anything about him that would elicit audience empathy–he’s meant to be entirely a murderer, an ecosystem killer, and an all around monster. Yet how much more complicated a story might this have been had he been a good man of personal integrity who proudly did his duty in spite of the horror he felt at decimating a people and their world?  How much of the evil in our contemporary world is created by people whose sole purpose is destruction and devastation?  Not as much as is done by those who believe that what they’re doing is a good thing, or who know it’s wrong but feel that a higher duty compels them to act against their own moral qualms.  Much more could have been done with this, and with the fact that, although Quaritch and his other fighters now work for a private corporation, their self-concept is still very much within the military honor code of fighting on behalf of God and country.  Therein lies the makings of true tragedy.

Following that line, what if, instead of the hackneyed convention of a cruel white man assaulting Indigenous peoples on another world, he was instead a world-weary Native warrior grappling between empathy for the Na’vi and fulfilling his (or her) duties as a soldier? Having numerous family members (both Native and non-Native) who’ve served in the armed forces, and knowing something of their complicated relationships to service, I’m a little less willing than Cameron to simply dismiss them as brutes and bigots; given that American Indians have the highest rate of military service of any demographic in the U.S., and having seen the U.S. flag carried proudly by Native veterans at many powwows and community gatherings, I think it’s fair to say that all kinds of people join the military for all kinds of complex, sometimes problematic reasons, mostly because of a mixture of love for their people, nation, and country, the search for adventure in another land, and a hunger for opportunities that are otherwise limited or denied. None of these are neutral, and none are without their dangers or moral complications, but none are categorically evil, either–people can be sensitized to the beauty and humanity of other cultures through military service, just as they can be turned into xenophobic killers.  This is the horror, and the tragedy, of war–and this is a much more poignant but ultimately less comfortable perspective, one that finds many degrees of good and harm in an entire range of characters, one that indicts the viewer as much as the character.

There are some impressive moments of depth and narrative brilliance in the film, as when Zoe Saldana’s warrior-woman Neytiri saves a stupidly unprepared Jake from being killed by feral hyena-panther creatures, then chastises him for his casual response to the destruction of life his rescue required; the soul-crushing horror of Hometree’s destruction and the survivors’ disorientation and exile; and the adoption ceremony that remakes Jake into a full Na’vi, with both the rights and responsibilities that such a ceremony necessitates, and his subsequent betrayal of the Na’vi and Neytiri’s anguished response. Yet for all its good intentions, for all its visual spectacle and effecting sentiment (yes, I got teary-eyed a couple of times), it’s still ultimately a story about “those bad guys who aren’t us.” Sadly, as we know from example after example in the past, distant and immediate, the bad guys, all too often, are us. It’s a comforting lie to believe that only those big bad guys with the superweapons or the white hoods and burning crosses are the only ones who do nasty racist things, but it’s a lie nonetheless.

In distancing the audience from any complicity with these evils on our world, the film actually fails to take seriously what would really be required of the audience to effect real and lasting change. The genocide perpetrated against the Na’vi is undeniably evil and despicable, yet genocide isn’t enacted only by wicked, bloodthirsty soldiers–mundane, ordinary people participate in all kinds of atrocities at home and abroad, knowingly and unknowingly, every day. Indeed, as Hannah Arendt might remind us, it’s usually the ordinary people whose actions are most responsible for such horrors, made all the worse because of their seeming banality.

Yet because no audience member is expected to take the side of Colonel Quaritch or of Parker Selfridge (Giovanni Ribisi), the insipid and cowardly corporate sycophant, audiences can only claim the righteousness of the Na’vi for themselves. In so doing, they — or rather more often, we –are exempted from the hard work that actually accompanies the struggles for decolonization, social and environmental justice, and peace.  There’s no real sense that good intentions can actually be far more destructive to a people (and have much more lasting impacts) than shooting napalm into the Hometree; there’s no acknowledgment that people can do terrible things out of a sense of misplaced obligation rather than simply because they’re sociopaths.

Ultimately, Cameron’s beautiful, evocative, and deeply flawed epic falls prey to the surprisingly limited ambitions of its characters: by exchanging complexity and narrative nuance for heavy-handed, simplistic political evangelism, Cameron misses the opportunity to make a real statement about injustice and more thoughtful relationships with one another and the natural world.  He had the opportunity to be as profound in substance as in spectacle, to ask difficult and unsettling questions of his audience that might not have been as popular or lucrative but would have been more meaningful.  Instead, he settled on feel-good, self-congratulatory pop progressivism, and wasted, or at least diminished, the chance to make a difference.