American Indian Culture and Research Journal

Virginia Sanchez, Western Shoshone National Council agrees that, yes, indigenous people do have a leadership role in global disarmament, because "[w]e know how to communicate other ways than with the. . . brain." In popular culture, images of peaceful, traditional American Indians characteristically evoke ecological sentiment; in one of the latest manifestations of that propensity, Dances with Wolveshas been hailed as a film that raises environmental consciousness. Ironically, though, and despite the existence of organizations such as WARN (Women of All Red Nations), C.A.R.E. (Citizens Against Ruining our Environment), the Native Resource Coalition, and Native Americans for a Clean Environment, many non-Indianssee only this symbolic association and do not heed the importance of contemporary American Indians as agents and theorists of environmental concerns, particularly around nuclear issues. Yet, throughout current American Indian writings, in the works of Paula Gunn Allen, Marilou Awiakta, Linda Hogan, Simon Ortiz, Wendy Rose, Martin Cruz Smith, Barney Bush, and Leslie Marmon Silko-to name only those who most immediately come to mind-we find a richly developed, diverse, and insightful attention to nuclear themes.

INTRODUCTION The aboriginal Snoqualmie tribe inhabited the Snoqualmie River valley between the present cities of Monroe and North Bend, Washington. They were basically a riverine tribe who traveled to the shores of Puget Sound to obtain seafood and across the Cascade Mountains to obtain products from eastern Washington. E. Huggins (3 February 1855), an early pioneer, reported that the Snoqualmie,under chief Pat Kanim, were "the most warlike on the Puget Sound, and the terror of the other tribes. Often in armed bands they made raids upon the other Sound Indians, and murdered, plundered, or made slaves of all those captured alive." Oral and documentary sources suggest that the Snoqualmie controlled a major trade route with the plateau Indians, that they had a monopoly on the trade in flint stones, that they had a good supply of horses by the nineteenth century, and that they were well equipped for defending themselves. Haeberlin and Gunther state, in their survey of the Puget Sound tribes, that "[f]lint arrowheads were bought from the Snoqualmie,who were the only tribe that made them." The majority of the Snoqualmie never moved to a reservation, and, in a 1919 survey by special Indian agent Charles Roblin they were identified as an off-reservation tribe. The historic Snoqualmie tribe has survived to the present as a distinct Indian community. In fact, they were selected to serve as the Washington State Centennial Indian Dance Group in 1989 by the Washington State Centennial Committee. This study seeks to ascertain how the Snoqualmie Indians were able, in the absence of government economic assistance or political protection, to persist as a landless tribe in the face of severe pressures to assimilate.

In the summer of 1942, the Japanese invasion of Attu and the bombing of American military forces at Dutch Harbor began the only military campaign of World War II fought on North American soil. The bloody battles that ensued, the ordeals of the soldiers, and the eventual American triumph in the Aleutian Islands have been well documented. Yet the tragic consequences of the American military presence for the aboriginal people of the islands has been largely ignored. After the Japanese attacks, the government took steps to protect the island's inhabitants by ordering the evacuation of all Aleuts west of Unimak Island. (See figure 1.) There was good reason to fear for the Aleutian Island residents, since forty-two Aleuts had been taken prisoner from Attu and would end up in Japanese concentration camps in Hokkaido. However, in trying to protect them, government officials took Aleuts from their ancestral homeland and denied their freedom, placing them in camps unfit for human habitation fifteen hundred miles from their home. Not only did this disastrous policy strip the Aleuts of their basic human rights; it caused the death of 10 percent of their number. More than 880 Aleuts taken were placed haphazardly in abandoned fish canneries on the mainland without proper medical treatment or adequate food. When the Aleuts finally returned home at the end of the war, their houses had been ransacked by American military personnel and their Russian Orthodox churches and icons and personal possessions had been looted.

On Valentine’s Day, 14 February 1882, former-Indian-superintendent-turned-reformer Colonel Alfred B. Meacham related a recent premonition of death to his friend Dr. Thomas A. Bland. Believing his earthly mission nearly fulfilled, Meacham implored Bland to continue publication of his monthly periodical devoted to Indian reform, The Council Fire. Two days later, Meacham died at his editorial table, and Bland became editor of the journal. Bland used The Council Five and the National Indian Defence Association, which he founded in 1885, as vehicles for his particular philosophy of Indian reform. Bland largely accepted the goal of Indian assimilation as outlined by humanitarian reformers of his generation. However, in his view, proponents of coercive allotment of reservation land had mistaken the end for the means. He insisted that successful assimilation demanded a gradual and voluntary conversion and not compulsion. Convinced that sudden change was detrimental, Bland began a crusade to protect tribal institutions and property rights. As a critic of forced assimilation, he clashed with reformers in the Women’s National Indian Association, the Indian Rights Association, the Board of Indian Commissioners, and the Lake Mohonk Conference of ”Friends of the Indians,” who campaigned vigorously to make severalty compulsory. Indeed, Bland’s outlook and struggle against rapid assimilation provides significant insight into a critical era of reform. Clearly, Bland was not a sentimental romantic who simply exalted the qualities of the “noble savage”; nor does the evidence suggest that he represented early notions of cultural pluralism or relativism. Yet his position as champion of Indian self-determination during this period was certainly unusual. He represented not only the most persistent but perhaps the only voice crying for retention of Indian rights against an onslaught of allotment advocates. This paper seeks to explicate Bland’s considerable efforts to block measures that forced rapid assimilation on the tribes.

The recent publication of Trucks provides the background for understanding the connections and histories of many of Louise Erdrich’s characters in her previously published novels, Beet Queen and Love Medicine. In addition, by creating intricate connections between her characters, Erdrich seems to be emphasizing the importance of continuity in native culture. Native American writers, Erdrich says, ”must tell the stories of contemporary survivors while protecting and celebrating the cores of cultures left in the wake of the catastrophe.” The catastrophe is, of course, the genocide of the Native Americans by Euro-Americans. Erdrich, part Chippewa and an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Chippewa tribe of North Dakota, takes this task seriously. Characters in her fiction illuminate the continuing struggle of Native Americans to survive and maintain their culture. By tracing the connections of the characters in Erdrich’s three fictional books, Tracks, Beet Queen, and Love Medicine, and two stories, ”The Island” and ”The Bingo Van,” the reader can see the ways she connects destruction, survival, and continuity. In Erdrich’s longer fictional works, the voices of different characters “tell the story,” along with an occasional omniscient narrator. However, the veracity of narrators must always be in question. Pauline and Nanapush narrate the events in Trucks. Nanapush insists several times that Pauline does not always tell the truth.

INTRODUCTION The 1890 Ghost Dance originated among the Tovusidokado, a food-named band or multifamily group of Northern Paiute (Numu) living in Smith and Mason valleys, Nevada. James Mooney wrote the monumental study of this religious movement. Privileged to interview its prophet, Jack Wilson, or Wovoka (”The Wood Cutter”), Mooney nonetheless focused on the spread of the 1890 Ghost Dance to the Plains and its relation to the Wounded Knee massacre. In the century that has passed, Ghost Dance has joined totem pole, potlatch, tipi, counting coup, and powwow in our common fund of recognizable Native American cultural terms. Yet Wovoka’s religious innovation typically is viewed through the form and meaning it assumed on the Plains, when on theoretical grounds alone-diffusion-this short-lived phenomenon should have been expected to differ “on the road.” And still no reconstruction of the 1890 Ghost Dance in its homeland exists. This paper attempts to redress that situation. In reconstructing the sitz im leben of the 1890 Ghost Dance, I argue that, following a series of visions, its Numu prophet achieved initial local fame as a weather-control shaman during a regional drought; that Wovoka’s doctrine was not only otherworldly and pacific but Presbyterian-influenced; that he demonstrated additional culturally compatible”powers”at Round Dance-like social gatherings we call the 1890 Ghost Dance in Nevada, and might as well have been attempting to emulate Protestant camp-revival type meetings; and, finally, that 1890 Ghost Dance ceremonies might have altered following the arrival of Lakota, Cheyenne, and others, soon after Wovoka’s Great Revelation, a process aborted by Wounded Knee.

The recent and laudable interest in expanding the canon of American literature has elevated certain works to prominence. One of these is Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine. This fine novel has it all-a Native American woman writer, a challenging cast of characters, most of whom have at least some Indian blood, a reservation setting, an honest look at the poverty, suicide, and alcoholism that abound in Indian communities, a frown at the policies and practices of the dominant Anglo society, a wonderfully subtle humor, and, finally, a positive and reassuring focus on the power of love. Love Medicine is an ideal novel to teach, not only because it contains all that and more, but because it works both as a novel and as a series of short stories. Many of its pieces, after all, appeared originally as short stories. Teachers who do not have time to teach the whole novel can assign certain portions of it for class discussion and leave students to read the rest on their own. Unfortunately, however, Love Medicine does not always make a good impression on readers who encounter it for the first time. It strikes them as being made up of a vast sea of partially delineated characters taking part in a wild array of events that span a too-long period of time. Furthermore, because the telling is not consecutive, students find that what plot there is tends to whip confusingly from before 1920 to after 1980. In short, beginning students tend to find the characters confusing, their family trees impossibly contorted, the plot disconnected.

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are computer systems that link large sets of data with spatial representation in maps. Much of the data utilized in governmental decision making has a spatial component, and the ability to map data and organize information spatially can be extremely valuable in governmental decision making. The application of GIS within tribal governments is an important process that can help empower tribes, particularly with regard to natural resources management and land and water rights litigation. Recognizing this potential, the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1983 established a Geographic Information System (GIS) officially titled the Indian Integrated Resource Information Program (IIRIP). This project grew to offer a training program in 1986 and provided a demonstration project for ten tribes across the nation to create American Indian applications of Geographic Information Systems. A national office, here called the National Center, was established in Golden, Colorado, to staff and support the development of a GIS database using ARC/INFO for each of the ten tribes and to promote the effective development and application of GIS management within each of the tribal governments. ARC/INFO is a specific software package capable of sophisticated mapping and analysis of spatial information and is recognized as "state of the art" GIS technology.

Exemplar of Liberty: Native America and the Evolution of Democracy, by Donald A. Grinde and Bruce E. Johansen, is a thoroughly researched book that expands on the suggestive papers presented by Grinde and Johansen at the April 1992 Organization of American Historians meeting in Chicago. In a discussion of both the papers and the book, I will concentrate on the book, because it offers broader arguments. Let me begin by giving an opinion about the existing controversy, about who said what and what should be said about American Indians legacy of freedom and liberty for all Americans. While we cannot prove that good old John Locke had a copy of the Iroquois constitution at his elbow when he wrote the second essay on civil government, some of us who study ethnohistory might take the position that his ideas are exceedingly familiar. One recalls the historic fact that Sir Isaac Newton and Baron Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibnitz discovered calculus at about the same time but independently of each other; therefore, it is not impossible that Hiawatha and Deganaweda on one side and John Locke on the other discovered and commented on representative institutions of government, and that all three made substantial contributions to our democratic institutions of government. It is true, I believe, that the Iroquois executive, the great war chief, had a role similar to that of the American president in spite of the fact that the Indians and the early Americans had different lifestyles. It is also true, I am convinced, that North American Indian tribes respected the individual (possibly excepting the Tlingit, who had a form of slavery, and certain other tribes that mistreated women) and loved freedom. Further, I have found that there were checks and balances and elements of a parliamentary form of government among many Indians, particularly the confederated tribes of the East Coast.