American Indian Culture and Research Journal

INTRODUCTION Stereotypes are overgeneralized beliefs that attribute certain characteristics to a particular group. Persons who hold these beliefs tend to perceive others on the basis of their group membership or ethnic identity. “Personal” stereotypes are perceptions of individual traits (such as “lazy”) associated with membership in a particular group. “Cultural” stereotypes are beliefs about the way of life associated with the group as a whole (e.g., “migratory”). The stereotypes of American Indians that are held by non-Indians are deeply embedded in American history; these attitudes reflect an historically competitive relationship between Euro-Americans and American Indians. Stereotypes about American Indians have tended to be negative and self-serving. For example, in Puritans, Indians, and Manifest Destiny, Segal and Stineback demonstrate how the Puritan view of Indians as a morally and spiritually inferior people living outside the domain of God and civilization served to justlfy the economic expansion of New England colonies and the expropriation of Indian lands. Further, Roy Pearce and, more recently, Robert Berkhofer have shown how notions of the Indian and the “savage” (whether viewed as noble or ignoble) were intellectual conveniences created by whites to map their own alleged superiority and progress. Even among American social scientists, crude evolutionary schemes and racial determinism were not rejected until the pioneering efforts of anthropologist Franz Boas and his program of cultural relativism pluralism in the early 1900s Berkhofer believes that the influence of the Boasian program has caused the racist and negative stereotypes held by non-Indians to give way in favor of more positive attitude. However, pockets of prejudice and ethnic racial stereotyping of American Indians still exist, particularly, Daniel Boxberger suggests, in areas where there is competition over economic resources.

Like most native North Americans, the Ojibwa people of Ontario -or the Anishinaabeg, as they prefer to be addressed-have a complex system of belief and ritual associated with thunderstorms. Included in this system are a number of names by which storms, or Thunderers, are not only invoked and propitiated but, at the most basic level, by which they are known. This paper establishes the importance of the name as symbol in the Anishinaabe context and explores the meaning of the most common thunder name-animikeek. Animikeek designates not just the storm, not just the Thunderbird manitouk, but the very sound of the thunder-its voice, if you will. Living, as they do, in a personalistic lifeworld, the Anishinaabeg-both traditional and contemporary-experience the action of the animikeek as speech events. These events signal the arrival of powerful visitors and initiate a kind of dialogue. Through verbal and ritual responses, the Anishinaabeg demonstrate their attention to, respect for, and relationship with highly powerful and individualistic manitouk. In order to meet these Thunder beings, or Thunderbirds, one must understand their names; one must learn how to call them. While anirnikeek is the most common and inclusive name given to the Thunder rnanitouk, they are also known as pinesiwak, pawaganak and atisokanak, depending upon both the area and the circumstances. In the Anishinaabeg lifeworld, one’s name is no arbitrary moniker. Among the traditional Anishinaabeg, a name was given to a child by a relative or tribal elder who had dreamed the name. This name had tremendous spiritual significance for its holder inasmuch as it partook of the power realm of dreams and signaled a close relationship between child and namesake. While each person might collect a number of names and nicknames over the course of her life, only this birth name and a name received during the vision quest were considered to describe the essential person. These names were always guarded, especially from real or potential enemies, for to know and speak a name was, in effect, to establish ownership, or at least influence over the one named.

Indian-white biological amalgamation, whether in or out of wedlock, is a subject well calculated to evoke spirited conceptions and feelings; certainly, it impinges upon the research of those who would probe more deeply into the labyrinth of Indian-white interaction in late nineteenth-century America. The tapestry of post-Civil War America is woven with many-hued Indian and white attitudes toward race-mixing. To unravel, illuminate, and interpret the complex and often antithetical views of authoritative white commentators on this issue is the purpose of this essay. The Anglo-American commentators whose attitudes will be surveyed include natural and social scientists, novelists, army officers, Christian reformers, Protestant missionaries, Indian Service personnel, historians, imperialists, and immigration restrictionists, among others. Of course, their personal fears, hatreds, prejudices, jealousies, aspirations, imaginations, sympathies, and emotions shape their views. Moreover, their attitudes represent a complex interaction among the prevailing ideas about race, gender, and class, a topic of considerable current scholarly interest. Because Indian-white race-mixing often has been associated with the more inflammatory Black-white variety, it is useful to begin with a glimpse of representative antebellum attitudes toward the latter as they impinge upon the former. Several abolitionists were prominent among those Americans who marshalled arguments in defense of Indian-white as well as Black-white intermarriage. Lydia Maria Child‘s Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans (1833) sought to abrogate a Massachusetts law prohibiting marriage between persons of different colors and maintained that Native Americans were no less capable of cultural advancement than Euro-Americans. Child’s An Appeal for the Indians (1868) cited Sir William Johnson’s cohabitation with the Mohawk woman, Molly Brant, along with less well known but “by no means rare” Indian-white sexual unions, to prove “as plainly as the complexions of mulattoes and quadroons, that the ‘antipathy of races’ is not a natural antipathy.”

INTRODUCTION In 1891, a shorthand version of the Cherokee syllabary was introduced which permitted rapid, accurate writing of the Cherokee language. This shorthand system, composed of various regular combinations of short lines and dots, was developed by William Eubanks (1841-1921), a Cherokee. Eubanks’s shorthand is strikingly similar to Pitman shorthand, a system then at the height of its popularity in America. The success of Cherokee shorthand was not great, yet it may have had some impact on the development of the equally unusual dot-notation variant of the Sac and Fox syllabary, as suggested by similar styles of construction. Biographical information on William Eubanks, or Unenudi, is sketchy. It is recorded that he was born in 1841 in the Illinois district of the Cherokee Nation, Indian Territory. During the Civil War, he fought for the Confederacy as a captain under the command of General Stand Watie4 and afterwards found employment translating between English and Cherokee for The Cherokee Advocate, the leading newspaper of the Cherokee Nation. In 1892, the year following introduction of his shorthand system, he translated the Constitution and Laws of the Cherokee Nation into the Cherokee language. He is reported to have been an accomplished amateur astronomer and was active in researching what he believed to be historical links between the Cherokee, Hebrew, Egyptian, Greek, and Sanskrit languages.

INTRODUCTION The following commentary was written to supply researchers, attorneys, tribal officials, and others involved in American Indian rights protection with information about a tool they can use to their advantage in securing these rights. The commentary promotes the use of geographic information systems (GIS) technology to help resolve American Indian water and land rights litigation. In a majority of water and land rights litigation cases, the conveyance of jurisdiction hinges upon the delineation and measurement of various spatial features (i.e., trust lands, allotted land parcels, reacquired lands, timber stands, practicably irrigable acreage and arable land). Since such litigation depends on geographic or spatial data, a tool that manages, analyzes, and displays spatial data would clearly be of value. The commentary will discuss how GIS technology is well suited to provide litigation support. In addition, examples will be provided that portray how a GIS can be and has been used to resolve legal conflicts over rights to land and water.