American Indian Culture and Research Journal

Historians who concentrate on studying Native Americans at the turn of the twentieth century have devoted much of their energy to analyzing the impact of the Dawes Act on Indian societies. The act, which mandated the dissolution of reservations, was without question the era's dominant policy initiative. Its primary intention, so its supporters claimed, was to dismantle supposedly archaic tribal bonds by apportioning reservation lands among the tribal population and encouraging Indians, by force if necessary, to become independent farmers, latter-day versions of Jefferson's yeoman farmers. Indeed, those who supported and administered the Dawes Act assumed that, within a few years, Indians would become self-supporting market agriculturalists. This process was supposed to instill in the Indian the notion of private property, stimulate the supposedly innate human desire to accumulate wealth and possessions, and finally lead to complete assimilation of natives into mainstream American society. Yet, while the principal thrust of policy during this period emphasized the creation of a self-sufficient Indian yeomanry, its application proved less than uniform. In fact, on the fringes of policy-making, another philosophy existed, significantly different and seemingly at odds with the agricultural imperative. This was the drive to extract and market natural resources found on or near certain reservations. While the predatory non-Indian interest in Indian wealth was hardly unique to this period, what was new was an evolving Indian interest in promoting economic development. In other words, there is evidence to suggest that some Indians, working in tandem with interested policymakers-so-called friends of the Indian-and sometimes with corporate interests, attempted to use these marketable resources as a means of generating wealth and, eventually, self-sustaining economies. Such efforts took a variety of forms, from commercial fishing to the extraction of petroleum and other minerals, to lumbering. Unfortunately, most enterprises of this nature fell victim to the familiar onslaught of white speculators, soaring production costs, competition from better-funded industries outside, and ill-advised and poorly managed federal programs. Indeed, it is a sad irony that policymakers' narrow interest in promoting Indian agriculture often blinded them to potentially more lucrative projects, thereby undercutting their own professed goal of raising the Indians' standard of living.

The Cherokee Female Seminary was a nondenomnational boarding school established by the Cherokee Nation at Park Hill, Indian Territory, in order to provide high-quality education for the young women of its tribe. The curriculum was based on that of Mount Holyoke Seminary in South Hadley, Massachusetts, and it offered no courses focusing on Cherokee culture. The seminary first opened in 1851, but in 1887, it was destroyed by fire. Two years later, a larger, three-story seminary building was erected on the outskirts of the Cherokee Nation's capital, Tahlequah. By 1909, when the building was converted into Northeastern State Normal School by the new state of Oklahoma, approximately 3,000 Cherokee girls had attended the seminary. A male seminary was built at the same time, three miles from the female seminary; it educated Cherokee youth until it burned in 1910. While the female seminary was indeed a positive influence on many of its pupils, there is much evidence to suggest that the social atmosphere at the seminary contributed to the rift between Cherokee girls from progressive, mixed-blood families and those from more traditional, uneducated backgrounds. Although many of the girls hailed from traditional families, the seminary did nothing to preserve or reinforce Cherokee customs among its students. But retention of ancestral Cherokee values was not the purpose of the school's establishment.

INTRODUCTION By definition, an American Indian art history is concerned with historic change. In addition to describing and documenting change that is apparent in the historic record of visual expression, such a history must identify the events and processes that contribute to change or, more properly speaking, innovation. In American Indian art, innovation would seem to oppose the notion of tradition when the latter term is intended to refer to the conservative retention of artistic ideas and techniques from one generation to the next. In recent years, the term tradition, when applied to American Indian art, has become loaded with additional implications, as Jonathan C. H. King has observed in a recent essay. Tradition, or traditional art, connotes authenticity reinforced by associations with cultural purity in the pursuit of time-honored practices. The term tradition, then, testifies to connections with the cultural legacy of an ancient past. In order not to threaten these connections, artistic innovation must reconcile tradition and change. When innovation is absorbed into prevailing practice, it becomes part of tradition. How and why is tradition modified by each succeeding generation to coincide with unique cultural and historical experiences? This larger question is addressed in this essay, if only by examining in detail the development of an innovative mode of clothing decoration and handiwork known as the floral style.

For several decades the peyotists within the Native American Church of North America have won numerous legal battles that have helped to ensure the continued existence of their religion. Beginning in 1960 with the landmark decision Arizona v. Attakai, a consistent set of state court decisions have supported the church's claim that the use of peyote is a reasonable and legitimate aspect of religion within the church. In 1964, for example, in People v. Woody, et al., the California Supreme Court overturned the drug conviction of church members, saying the state had no "compelling interest" to justify a ban on ceremonial peyote use. The Woody court concluded that a ban would remove the "theological heart of Peyotism" and that the government's need to fight drug abuse could not be used to deny religious freedom automatically to members of the Native American Church. Since the Woody decision, the United States Congress has taken legislative steps to clarify and enhance Indian religious freedoms by the passage of the Indian Civil Rights Act of 1968 and the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978.