American Indian Culture and Research Journal

INTRODUCTION Indian Country in the United States contains substantial commercial forest resources. The sixteen million forested acres on 214 reservations in twenty-three states generated over $465 million in revenue and supported forty thousand jobs in 1991, primarily through timber harvesting. Management of these resources is performed by three types of organizations: on- and off-reservation United States Department of the Interior-Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) forestry programs; joint BIA and tribal forestry programs that share responsibilities; and completely tribal forestry programs. Joint BIA-tribal programs are enabled by the “Indian Self-Determination and Educational Assistance Act of 1975,” P.L. 93-638, through which tribes can contract with the BIA to do part or all of the forest management work. So-called 638 contracts are constrained, however, at the same funding level as a solely BIA program and, further, by BIA rules and regulations. Totally tribal programs, permitted under the “Indian Self-Determination Act Amendments of 1988,” P.L. 100-472, may appear to be an attractive alternative to BIA or joint programs because self governance allows a tribe to design a program it chooses, pursue funding independent of ordinary BIA budgeting procedures, and seek waivers from regulations that are inappropriate. A tribe seeking greater control over its forest resources may ask, Is self governance a better way to do forest resource management?

INTRODUCTION The purpose of this study was to determine the kinds and amounts of information possessed by urban American Indians in Southern California regarding the effects of alcohol on the developing fetus. The identification of the nature and extent of American Indians' knowledge regarding FAS may assist in developing future prevention efforts. Since ancient times, a relationship has been noted between alcohol use by pregnant women and the occurrence of deformities in their offspring. However, it was not until 1973 that the pattern of facial characteristics, growth deficiencies, and developmental delays often observed in children of chronic alcoholic mothers was identified as fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS). Subsequent research established alcohol as a teratogen, a substance ”capable of producing death, malformations, growth deficiency, or CNS dysfunction depending on the dose and timing of prenatal exposure and the individual genetic endowment of mother and child.”

Many have observed that Indian and mainstream values differ, but few have spelled out the implications of these differences for economic development policy. This paper presents a characterization of Indian values, derives some implications for traditional Indian economic policy, and provides two examples of Indian communities that have adopted policies consistent with its analysis. As tribes continue to assert their sovereign powers to control their own communities, a consideration of the connections between traditional American Indian worldviews and economic development policy can assist tribes and others in examining and selecting among current development alternatives. Those studying economic policy in Indian communities recognize that Indians have different goals from those of the dominant society. What are these goals and do they help explain why economic policy has been different in Indian communities?This paper begins by listing a set of assumptions that many Indian communities share. It then proceeds to explore the implications of these assumptions for economic development activities and institutions. Not surprisingly, the implications describe rules profoundly different from what economic development usually means. For example, traditional Indian economic policy would place an upper limit on consumption.

From the point of view of fiction as it gives form to our inchoate visions, it is tragic that Native Americans are real, with real feelings and real heritages, rather than the elusive creatures of our imagination. . . .[T]he western uses the devices of fiction to speak to the inner needs of its viewers . . . and hence should be responded to inwardly. But the reality of Native Americans disrupts such a possibility. . . . History unwittingly crosses over to intervene in the fictive relationship between work and audience. -John Harrington It was on a night like this that ol' Coyote got on a plane to Ottawa to see the Prime Minister. "Boy are we happy to see you!" said the Prime Minister, "maybe you can help us with our lndian Problem.'' "Sure," said Coyote, "what's the problem?" -Lionel James in Medicine River Much work has been done by scholars to document and critique the long history of negative stereotyping of the North American Indian in film, especially the particularly virulent genre of the Hollywood Western. Fortunately, recent U.S. and Canadian films reflect a pronounced interest in Indians not as faceless savages who fire arrows at the good guys from unseen hiding places but as members of dynamic cultures. However, it is inevitable that new problems and issues of representation arise when the Indians “come out from behind the rocks.’’ An examination of these films can yield much information for those interested in North American Indian studies because they act as barometers of social attitudes toward Indian peoples and indicate to what ideological use the Indian subject is being put. The foregrounding of the Indian subject in such high-profile films as Dances with Wolves, Black Robe, Thunderheart, and Clearcut is in itself a step toward cross-cultural dialogue. However, these pictures can be seen to conform to the traditional pattern of constructing the “Indian” to embody mainly non-Indian concerns. More modest films such as Loyalties, The Company of Strangers, Where the Spirit Lives, Spirit Rider, Powwow Highway, and Medicine River explore new ways of representing Indian culture and attempt (at least partially) to free the Indian subject from its position of useful but ideologically fixed Other.

INTRODUCTION Economic and social problems on Indian reservations in the United States and in other countries are well documented. Hundreds of reports generated by government entities, private research firms, and Indian groups provide a detailed litany concerning poverty, alcohol and drug abuse, juvenile delinquency, inordinately high crime rates, inadequate educational facilities, and a myriad of other problems. Tribal governments continue to press for change and greater Indian self-determination in an effort to deal effectively with the problems confronting their people. The argument, of course, is that tribes are sovereign entities and, by definition, are responsible for their own affairs without interference from other governments. Self-determination-the ability to determine one’s own destiny-is a central component of sovereignty. The passage of the 1988 Indian Gaming Regulatory Act (IGRA) is viewed by some as one vehicle whereby at least a small amount of self-determination can be realized. Others argue, however, that federal legislation permitting gaming on reservations amounts to yet another intrusion into tribal sovereignty.

Piudy, a member of a Northern Paiute band often designated as ”Snakes,” is said to have told the following story in the summer of 1930: Almost everything was Coyote’s way. The Indian planted the apple. When he planted it, he said for all the Indians to come and eat. When he told them that, all the people came. The white man was a rattlesnake then, and he was on that tree. The white people have eyes just like the rattlesnake. When the Indians tried to come to eat the apples, that snake tried to bite them. That’s why the white people took everything away from the Indian, because they were snakes. If that snake hadn’t been on the tree, everything would have belonged to the Indian. Just because they were snakes and came here, the white people took everything away. They asked these Indians where they had come from. That’s why they took everything and told the Indians to go way out in the mountains and live. What interests me most about this myth is what most anthropologists at the time would have called its “inauthenticity”; that is, it is clearly a product of postcontact Paiute culture, as seen in the devastating critique of Anglo culture by means of Piudy’s reconstitution and deployment of one of Christianity’s foundational myths. For that very reason, most anthropologists at the time excluded such myths from their collections, even though, as Jarold Ramsey points out, “it [is] precisely at the moment when [the storyteller] beg[ins] to invent and borrow stories and adapt them to [his or] her native tradition (proving its vitality and no doubt revealing its formal ’rules’) that the ethnographer should have been most alert-and most grateful. He could have been studying mythology-in-progress.”

Efforts by Native Americans to control their own public image result, in part, from a desire to counteract five hundred years of white people's imagery of Indians, including consistent misreprsentation in Hollywood Westerns. This paper, which focuses on Native American responses to Westerns, relates to a larger research project that examines the representation of Indians by natives themselves in film and video documentaries. Although I present native responses to portrayals of Indians in recent Westerns, I do not pretend to "speak for" Native Americans in this paper. Rather, I have researched the topic in order to discover some of the potentials and pitfalls of the role of visual communication in intercultural relations. Because the paper concerns general issues of representation, I often refer to Native Americans (and whites) in general terms. Both of these populations are, of course, quite diverse. Therefore, exceptions exist for each of the general statements that I make, but the issue of cross-cultural represesentation is so important in native media and scholarship that a general discussion seems warranted. Issues in cross-cultural visual representation are part of the broader problem of racism. Euro-American culture has incorporated negative attitudes toward many ethnic groups, subcultures, and other nationalities. The process has been systematic alienation: Cultural resources are used to make poor people and those of non-European ethnicity feel inferior and separate. Several consequences emerge from this estrangement between ethnic minorities and Euro-American culture. Negative attitudes lead to deleterious treatment of members of other cultures. Frequently, the negative beliefs themselves contradict fact, but the danger is that these beliefs will be internalized by the members of the ethnic minority; for example, some Indians internalize white stereotypes of the “drunken,” “savage,” or ”lazy” Indian. Alcoholism and unemployment result from cultural dislocation and economic deprivation, but the process of systematic alienation shifts the responsibility for these socially unacceptable behaviors to the victims themselves.