American Indian Culture and Research Journal

Anthropologists C. Hart Merriam and Samuel A. Barrett photo documented the Northern Sierra Mewuk village of Hechenu in the first decade of the twentieth century. More than half a century after Euro-American miners played havoc with the hills and the traditional lifeways of the native people, these photographs record the extraordinary tenacity of the Mewuk culture. Although Hechenu no longer exists, these images and the memories they evoke in the people who once saw the village leave a record of this important, sparsely studied period of Northern Sierra Mewuk culture history. The village of Hechenu is one of twenty-two Northern Sierra Mewuk ethnographic localities identified in the anthropological literature and field notes. Sierra Mewuk territory has been linguistically divided into three groups: Northern, Central, and Southern (figure 1). Northern Mewuk territory included portions of the Cosumnes, Mokelumne, and Calaveras river drainages.

Termination is something no Indian should ever dream about. It is like giving your eagle feather away. -Lucy Covington Colville tribal member INTRODUCTION Historians and scholars have interpreted the history of United States “Indian policy” in many ways: as a pendulum swinging between extremes of tribal sovereignty and tribal obliteration; as a roller coaster ride soaring and plummeting among programs calculated to assimilate Indian societies as abruptly as possible and those designed to cushion their transition into mainstream non-Indian life; as a steady march along that trail of broken treaties and irreparable cultural disintegration. Russel Lawrence Barsh wrote recently that rather than being ”a series of policy reversals driven by a dialectic of separation and assimilation,” federal Indian policy “has been marked by a diversity of forms, but a continuity of effect,” particularly in terms of land and resources. Barsh argues that the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act promoted by Indian commissioner John Collier was but a temporary slowdown of the bureaucratic push for assimilation of Indian peoples that was begun before the turn of the century; the disproportionate attention paid to Collier's ideas merely "strengthens the image of an heroic, Manichean struggle" and obscures the fact that the appropriation of Indian lands and the acculturation of Indian people have been the primary goals of the dominant society all along.

On a small reservation in rural San Diego County, tribal elders, progressive administrators, university librarians, and technical advisors have forged a collaborative partnership to preserve the Luiseño cultural heritage. In the 1970s, Luiseño elders and volunteers secured a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to fund a project involving the gathering of secondary information on Luiseño artifacts and information from a variety of museums, libraries, and private collections. Following up on the creation of the Luiseño Culture Bank, university librarians from California State University, San Marcos, are now engaged in a project that eventually will mount this “bank” onto a Hypercard database. The San Luiseño Band of Mission Indians derive their name from their association with Mission San Luis Rey in northern San Diego County. Established in 1798 by Franciscan fathers, Mission San Luis Rey is known as the ”king of the missions.” However, the treatment of the native peoples by Spanish missionaries was anything but royal. Contact between native peoples and Europeans had a devastating effect on the social, cultural, and economic life of the Indians. Within sixty-five years of the arrival of Junipero Serra in 1769, the population of California Indians was reduced by two-thirds as a result of disease, overwork, and capital punishment. Mission Indians under Franciscan control were usually malnourished. They were severely punished if they tried to escape, and the women often were raped. Subsequent periods of domination by Mexico (1821 to 1848) and then by the United States further diminished native populations and compounded cultural displacement.

Nearly eighty thousand California Indians were directly inducted into the Franciscan colonial labor and Christianization programs in Alta California. This study primarily focuses on the Kumivit, or Gabrielino, Indians of Southern California. This native group spoke at least four dialects of the Takic family of languages derived from the larger Uto-Aztecan linguistic stock. According to the United Stated Bureau of Ethnology's linguist, John P. Harrington, they were divided into the Gabrielino proper, whose territory embraced the watershed of the Los Angeles and Santa Ana river basins, the Fernandeño to the north, and the two dialects associated with Santa Catalina and San Nicholas islands. Encompassing several biotic zones, nearly 90 percent of their territory was in the extremely rich Sonoran life zone whose food resources included vast quantities of acorn, pine nut, small game, and deer. Sea resources such as fish, shellfish, and sea mammals were available for coastal groups and others through trade.

Citizens of the Six Nations have long been known as keepers of tribal histories. The Tuscaroran Reverend David Cusick probably wrote the first native tribal history, his Sketches of Ancient History of the Six Nations, published in 1848. Cusick “turned back to the blanket” after becoming disillusioned with Christianity, as did the Huron convert Peter Dooyentate Clarke, a missionary who later disappeared after writing The Origins and Traditional History of the Wyandots in 1870. Other examples include Tuscaroran chief Elias Johnson’s 1881 Legends, Traditions, and Laws of the Zroquois and Arthur Parker’s many works. The famous wampum belts, which served as mnemonic devices to help pass on cultural, historical, and ritual information by word of mouth, predated these written accounts. Contemporary poet Maurice Kenny’s unique combination of historic and poetic faculties is an excellent addition to this body of tribal histories as well as to American poetry in general. The author’s work, a twelve-year effort, is an example of incarnation: Kenny gives historical data a voice, a personality, a spirit. He demonstrates that what one can imagine is as real, as vital, as important as written history. The poet, through his creative vision, speaks to the silence of American history, which has reduced powerful women like Molly Brant, wife of Sir William Johnson and leader of forces against the Americans in the Revolution, to mere footnotes.

The National Commission on American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian Housing issued its final report in June 1992. After months of investigation and public hearings, the commission presented a “disturbing and urgent message. Simply put, the majority of this country’s first residents continue to live . . . in substandard housing.” This is a charitable conclusion. The commission was forced to rely on census data a decade out of date as well as Bureau of Indian Affairs housing inventories of questionable inclusiveness. According to Representative Henry Gonzales, chairman of the House committee that oversees much of Indian housing, “the situation in which Native Americans find themselves with respect to housing is beyond that of a destructive cycle; its genocidal, and it’s unpardonable.” The commission’s report is entitled “Building for the Future: A Blueprint for Change.” An overview of the report and the current status of Indian housing are the subjects of this commentary. The commission chairman, George Nolan (Chippewa), provided a comprehensive introduction. He noted that Native Americans are often denied effective access to the housing assistance- ”entitlements”-that is readily available to other Americans.

One of the objectives of the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 (IRA) was to provide Indian tribes with a modern system of government. However, the IRA governments differed radically from traditional Native American political systems and were contrary to traditional political culture. This paper suggests a reform of Sioux tribal government that accommodates two essential elements of traditional Sioux political culture: the tiyospaye and consensus decision-making. The revised system would establish proportional representation (PR) on the basis of the tiyospaye. By utilizing PR with a re-legitimized tiyospaye, tribal governments may be able to approximate traditional decision-making processes. While this proposal is generally based on the Sioux tradition, its practical application requires some adaptation to the unique historical political experiences of any modern Sioux tribal government. The tiyospaye is the traditional Sioux social and political unit. Mirsky describes it as an extended bilateral family group with no formal entry or exit procedures. According to Hassrick, the tiyospaye was a small, close-knit hunting group whose leader was generally the patriarchal family head. It was a clannish group, with loyalties directed toward the leader and devotion to kin. Under modern Sioux tribal government, the tiyospaye has become politically nonfunctional, because modern Sioux tribal government instead relies on the representation of communities and districts or on reservationwide election. Since familial responsibility, as found in the tiyospaye, is an important aspect of Sioux culture, the tiyospaye should be included in any effort to reform Sioux tribal government. Representation should be based on the tiyospaye rather than on anything else.