American Indian Culture and Research Journal

Ojibway (Chippewa/Anishnabeg) myth and ceremony in relation to Louise Erdrich’s fiction has been the subject of seminal literary study of her works. James McKenzie’s tracking of “the traditional Chippewa trickster hero and powerful spirit, Nanabozho,” or Nanapush, in Erdrich’s Love Medicine was written in evident distress at the lack of comprehension by early reviewers. McKenzie concludes, The pattern of the novel’s development in the June-Gerry-Lipsha stories suggests not only the survival but also a renewal of Chippewa culture “in the wake of the catastrophe,” as Erdrich so aptly describes the case . . . . The novel knows and celebrates the human wealth of each of its separate characters as well as the collective wealth of the Chippewa nation, a culture still present in the face of several centuries of murderous opposition. Ann Braley has documented Ojibway myth and ceremony in Love Medicine (1984), Ojibway Mother Earth characters, a Weendigo (the insatiable one), Odaemin (the culture’s first medicine man), Geezhig (a voyager to the Land of the Dead), Sky Woman, widespread water imagery reflecting Ojibway myth, and turtle and deer myth. Moreover, McKenzie and Lydia Schultz have written about Erdrich‘s use of oral storytelling in Love Medicine.

Canada’s latest attempt at constitutional reform, the 1992 Charlottetown Accord process, saw aboriginal peoples involved in a high-profile debate. Representatives of four national aboriginal organizations were invited to participate in the first ministers’ conferences as the prime minister, the premiers, and the territorial leaders attempted to thrash out a constitutional package that would satisfy the province of Quebec. In the end, aboriginal leaders and first ministers reached agreement on constitutional amendments that would have, among other things, recognized aboriginal governments as an undefined ”third order of government” within the Canadian state. The Canadian electorate, however, rejected the package in an October 1992 referendum. Aboriginal communities that were enumerated separately (Indian reserves) likewise rejected the deal their national leadership had enthusiastically endorsed; moreover, the most prominent organization for aboriginal women was a key player on the “no” side of the debate. One of the important consequences of the Charlottetown process, therefore, became the advertisement to the general public of the numerous divisions within the Canadian aboriginal community. One of the most difficult questions for outside policy makers, partners, and other interested parties is how to respond to this factionalism.

INTRODUCTION Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS) has been reported in people of all racial identities. FAS is not an Indian problem per se; it is an alcohol problem. It is an Indian problem only to the extent that Indians have alcohol problems. FAS is a major public health problem in cultures that have problems with alcohol abuse. Many American Indian/Alaska Native communities have disproportionately high rates of FAS, both on and off reservations, both among children raised in their natural environments and those who have been adopted away and raised out of their communities. FAS is not caused by the environment in which a child is raised after birth, but by the toxic effects of alcohol prior to birth. It has been proposed that cultural, social, environmental, and biological factors may interact to increase the risk of FAS among American Indians/Alaska Natives. This paper focuses on what Indian communities can do to understand and prevent this disabling condition and to help the lives of those affected.

If there is an idol that the American people have, it is the school. If you don’t believe it, go out to Pine Ridge, where there are seven thousand Sioux on eight million acres of land . . . and find planted . . . thirty-two school houses, standing there as a testimony to our belief in education . . . . It is a remedy for barbarism, we think, and so we give the dose ...The school is the slow match. . . . [Ilt will blow u p the old life, and of its shattered pieces [we] will make good citizens. -Testimony of Miss Annie Beecher Scoville Annual Report of the Board of Indian Commissioners in the Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 1901 During the late nineteenth century, no solution to the so-called Indian problem was mentioned more often than education. Determined to remold Indians into models of white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant society, government officials seized upon schools as the best way to make such changes a reality. Confident that the classroom could transform Indian children more effectively than any other institution, policy makers sought to create a comprehensive school system that would provide a systematic, uniform standard of progress for those who entered it. Of the government's various programs, only education promised a complete metamorphosis for Indian children. Schools could be built anywhere and everywhere; they could accommodate students of all ages and both sexes; and they could act as the most powerful engine possible of the cultural reorientation that policy makers envisioned. Most important, schools targeted young children, those most vulnerable to change and least able to resist it. The Indian school system, Robert Utley has observed, "represented the most dangerous of all attacks on basic Indian values, the one most likely to succeed in the end because it aimed at the children who had known little if any of the old reservation life."

INTRODUCTION In 1946, an elderly and respected member of the Bluebird clan and spokesman for the kikrnongwi (villagechief) of Shungopavi village announced in a meeting that, in the early days of his training and instruction as a religious leader, he was told that when a gourd of ashes fell from the sky, he was to tell certain teachings, traditions, and prophecies that had been previously secret. Leaders of other clans mentioned the same instructions. They agreed that the "gourd of ashes" specified in their oral traditions could be nothing else but the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Other meetings followed this one, in 1947, 1948, and 1949, and a social movement was in the making. The movement's leaders issued a series of manifestos, position statements, and petitions beginning in 1949 and continuing into the late 1980s. Its leaders and participants called themselves "Hopi Traditionalists," or simply "Traditionalists." From 1948 through the 1980s, the Traditionalists functioned as a coalition of Hopi leaders from several villages, plus a varying number of Hopi activists and sympathizers. Although Hopi Traditionalists are still active today, the movement has largely lost its coalition of leaders and is disappearing through institutionalization. The behavior of the movement’s participants and its sociopolitical character have resulted in its being designated a faction and even a party, but I think party and faction are less appropriate than movement. Although the movement’s history reflects strong goal-orientation toward very concrete political issues, there are also some messianic and millennial aspects in the movement’s ideology.

No film director has created as enduring an image of the American West as has John Ford. During a career that spanned more than fifty years, Ford directed approximately 135 films, of which close to sixty were Westerns. His depiction of American Indians has been especially controversial: While his adversaries bemoan the savage portrayals of American Indians in The Searchers, his defenders counter with the sympathetic images presented in Wagon Master. Still others call attention to Ford’s so-called reversal of Indian portrayals, pointing to the ferocious Apaches of Stagecoach and then to the Indian martyrs of Cheyenne Autumn. Any compromise between the opposing factions appears impossible. Several scholars have attempted to explain the director’s seemingly contradictory Indian portrayals. A few object to the description of Ford as a “cinematic racist”: Jim Weigert’s essay “John Ford and the Indians” argues that Ford actually pioneered a sympathetic attitude toward Indians long before it was fashionable to do so. Weigert cites, in particular, the more ”humanizing” portrayals of Indians in Fort Apache and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. Michael Nathan Budd’s dissertation develops a similar argument; he describes Ford’s Indians as becoming more individualized from Stagecoach to Cheyenne Autumn. Kirk Ellis’s article “On the Warpath: John Ford and the Indians” emphasizes the apparent intercultural conflict in Ford’s Westerns and the director’s inclusion of both noble and savage Indians.

In 1939, Gladys A. Reichard published Dezba: Woman of the Desert, a fictional account based on the author’s sixteen years of anthropological work among the Navajo. Although the characters were imaginary, the events and feelings portrayed in the book showed depth in understanding the struggles of a “traditional” mother. Shocked at the younger generation’s adaptation to Anglo-American culture and their growing unfamiliarity with Navajo customs, Dezba remained outwardly passive yet emotionally torn and frustrated as she watched the old lifestyle start to melt before her eyes. Reichard, through Dezba, outlined this dissolution when she wrote, “A reservation mother had no means to cope with white man’s customs which led girls first to change dress and personal appearance. Next, children began to scorn social customs and became fastidious about food and the Navajo custom of sleeping on the ground. At worst, they took to drinking and became loose in morals.”’ Since Dezba’s time, this process of change has intensified and assumed new directions, as contact with the dominant society has increased. Perhaps it was not by chance that this important character was named Dezba, translated as ”Going to War.”

The community life of rural Native Americans offers a formidable set of problems and contradictions involving the interaction of traditional cultural values with contemporary realities. For example, an abundance of coal and uranium on the Navajo Reservation compels the Navajo to reconcile their traditional reverence for the land with the need for economic development. The Mescalero Apache of New Mexico are split on the issue of allowing a nuclear waste site on their tribal land; in Hopi, traditionalists and modernists are arguing over a road-building project and other forms of development that would threaten snake habitat where, for centuries, tribal members have gathered serpents for the sacred ceremonies. The Lakota of South Dakota are divided over non-Indian participation in ceremonies that are becoming increasingly popular. The "sovereign" islands of native people have become enmeshed in the economic and political problems of the United States. That the tribes do not easily arrive at a consensus suggests the complexity of the problems and the presence of political factionalism that is a consequence of colonization. The cultural values and indigenous languages remain vital in many native communities, even though the traditional modes of education and social organization have been disrupted by Western influences. School experiences founded on Western European ideologies and values have resulted in disempowerment, making the formation of tribal consensus all the more difficult.

“We were rounding a curve,” recalled Luther Standing Bear, Sioux author, interpreter for the Indian members of Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West, and casualty of the Melrose Park train wreck of 1904, ”when suddenly I saw a train behind us, coming at lightning speed. Then came a terrific crash. There was no time even to cry out. When I opened my eyes again, the seats were piled on top of us and the steam and smoke from the engine were pouring in on us in great clouds. My legs were pinned down, and I was perfectly helpless . . . . Blood was everywhere.” Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West, a depiction of the American frontier experience, traveled and performed throughout the United States and Europe. By 1904, it was a well-established and well-known entertainment attraction in its twenty-first year of operation. Train wrecks were among the greatest dangers faced by the members of traveling shows around the turn of the nineteenth century. One of the most dramatic but unpublicized accidents of Cody’s Wild West happened near Melrose Park, Illinois, on 7 April 1904. According to Luther Standing Bear, the Indians were riding in the last car of the train, which, in effect, segregated them from the other passengers, when another train traveling behind them at ”lightening speed” plowed into the back of the Indians’ car. Standing Bear was one of the more seriously injured, sustaining three bruised and two broken ribs, cuts above both eyes, a severe gash on the back of his head, dislocation of both hips, and a broken left arm, left leg, collar bone, and nose.

The outbreak of the Hantavirus illness in the early summer of 1993 brought more than death to the Navajo people of the Four Corners area of the Southwest. It also brought the media, and with the media came stereotypical reporting and invasions of privacy. From ”Navajo Flu” to “Four Corners Illness” to Hantavirus-Associated Adult Respiratory Distress Syndrome, the national news media reported on the viral infection that by summer’s end had appeared in ten states and taken more than two dozen lives. Now, almost a year later, it is clear that the media’s experience in covering the initial outbreak of the disease in the Southwest can be instructive, not only as a historical case study but also as a guide to current and future issues of coverage. For what began as a local-and then regional-story, has assumed national proportions. Since the end of the first chapter of the Hantavirus story, the number of confirmed cases nationally has swelled to at least sixty, including thirty-five deaths. By the spring of 1994, only a minority of the total number of cases (twenty)and deaths (eleven)had been documented in New Mexico. Also, although at first no cases were reported east of the Mississippi River, in January 1994 a Florida man was diagnosed with the Hantavirus, and in the same month a forty-eight-year-old Indiana man died from the disease, a case confirmed by the state Department of Health. Clearly, the national media will be faced with Hantavirus stories this year and probably for years to come. One measure of this perspective occurred in October 1993 when the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention changed the official name of the disease from Four Corners Hantavirus to Hantavirus Pulmonary Syndrome.

As far as the eye can see and beyond, the hills and mountains, the deserts, even the coastal islands-all was once part of aboriginal territory. Then came Europeans and Americans. The rest is history, as they say. Today we are witnessing a small uprising, in that American Indians (or Native Americans, as many prefer to be called) have become increasingly proactive with respect to indigenous land and cultural resources. Local Indian communities again and again protest the lack of access to, or protection of, sacred places, burial grounds, and historic sites; assert claim to various aboriginal locales; and act as watchdogs during site developments. Opponents of these continuing Indian land claims either fail to comprehend law and policy, misread history, or just refuse to acknowledge that indigenous rights are thwarted because of inequities in the “system.”They do not want to accept the fact that land still remains the crucial issue in linking Indians to their past, their religions, and their lifestyles. Perhaps these opponents presume that land claims litigation is an event of the past; that the retirement of the Indian Claims Commission (ICC) in 1978 closed the books forever on virtually all land matters. True, two California claims cases-both known as Indians of California vs. United States-were successfully litigated by the Indians of California, a legal entity, and monetary awards, however meager, were made to Indians up through the early 1970s. Indian and non-Indian critics alike suggest that this litigation did far more to assuage our feelings of guilt than it did to restore any landed status to Indians. Also, as a point of fact, most Indian reservations were established in the last century; in Southern California, their final establishment occurred between 1875 and 1892. For most people, the bases and the methods employed to establish reservations are lost in the past. Why, then, have these events of justice and administration not ended the Indian land question locally?