American Indian Culture and Research Journal

Questions concerning the rights and legal and political standing of indigenous peoples have assumed a peculiar prominence in the world's juridical debates over the past quarter-century. Nowhere is this more pronounced than in North America, a continent presided over by a pair of Anglo-European settler powers, the United States and Canada; both of which purport to have resolved such issues-or to being very close to resolving them-in a manner which is not only legally consistent, but so intrinsically just as to serve as a humanitarian model deserving of emulation on a planetary basis. Indeed, the United States in particular has long been prone to asserting that it has already implemented the programs necessary to guarantee self-determination, including genuine self-governance, to the Native peoples residing within its border. Most recently, its representatives to the United Nations announced that it would therefore act to prevent the promulgation of an international convention on the rights of indigenous peoples if the proposed instrument contradicted U.S. domestic law in any significant way.

When Lyndon Baines Johnson took the oath of office on November 22, 1963, he inherited a fragile, ambiguous federal Indian policy. The Kennedy administration had instituted reforms and deemphasized termination, but missed its opportunity to elucidate a coherent vision of its own. Indeed, scholars characterize the entire period from 1961 to 1975 as one of policy in transition. Not until 1975, in the wake of Richard Nixon’s Indian message of 1970, would Congress replace House Concurrent Resolution 108, the termination bill, with the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act But simply to glance over the preceding years, and particularly the administration of Lyndon Johnson, would ignore a period of dynamic and controversial change both at the federal level and in Indian communities. This article explores the Johnson administration’s most provocative and contested innovation, the Community Action Program (CAP), and how its philosophy of ”maximum feasible participation” served as the harbinger of tribal self-determination.

Three generations of Navajo women respond to the vast historical change of the twentieth century with distinctive as well as common elements in their life course patterns. The lives of these women bear the imprint of major historical events such as stock reduction, the funding of on-reservation projects by the Navajo-Hopi Long Range Rehabilitation Act, and the implementation of the Navajo Family Planning Program. At the same time their education, wage work, marriage, and childbearing patterns maintain the unique stamp of a Navajo worldview. Navajo women confront challenges posed by a historically constructed reality with culturally constructed courses of action that arise from persistent pronatalist values toward children and their egalitarian position in a matrilineal society.

INTRODUCTION This study assumes that its subjects have multiple identities: as men, football players, members of distinct racial and socio-economic groups, Americans, sons, fathers, and husbands. It attempts to analyze only some of these roles in relation to the subjects' sporting experiences, which generated meanings that were interpreted by themselves and others. Furthermore, such meanings changed over time, and proved negotiable through human agency, Racial identity, a problematic construct, assumed physiological differences during the period of this study, which extends from 1890 to the 1960s. The practices of the dominant white culture defined the boundaries of racial interaction, and attempted to define the meanings of a collective racial identity. To that extent, non-white groups such as Native Americans and African Americans underwent similar experiences in their exclusion, then limited inclusion in the dominant society and in white construction of alternative groups' identity.

INTRODUCTION A tribal land base or homeland is the sine qua non of sovereignty. Tribal territories form the geographical limits of each tribe’s jurisdiction, support a residing population, are the basis of the tribal economy, and provide an irreplaceable forum for cultural vitality based on religious practices and cultural traditions premised on the sacredness of land. Today, fully functioning Indian nations possess four distinct yet interwoven and interdependent attributes of sovereignty: secure land base, functioning economies, self-government and cultural vitality. Some describe these attributes as geographic and political independence. In short, the tribes’ land bases are the linchpin to tribal existence and autonomy as sovereign nations. Moreover, a priority implicit in Indian land tenure is maintaining a homeland in which both present and future generations of the tribes may live and flourish, since tribal individuals and families reside on secure land bases which have supported and nourished their ancestors for thousands of years past, and continue to be the core and integral foundation of tribal existence.

Charlie Twiss, a mixed-blood Lakota from the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, enrolled in the Rapid City Indian School in 1909. Founded in 1898, the government boarding school existed to detribalize Indian children and prepare them for assimilation by teaching them English and basic vocational skills. When Twiss enrolled, Rapid City housed students from six to twenty years of age, including relative Dora Twiss, who entered Rapid City in 1903 at age six. His enrollment was against Indian Bureau regulations, for Commissioner of Indian Affairs Francis Leupp (1905-1909) had ruled earlier that year that Indian children were to go to day schools through the primary grades, and from the day schools graduate to reservation boarding schools. Only the most advanced students, ages fourteen and older, were to be enrolled in off-reservation boarding schools like Rapid City. Charlie Twiss nevertheless attended Rapid City until 1911, when overcrowding at the school led Superintendent Jesse F. House (1904-1922) to cut enrollment by sending home underage students. Twiss, eleven years old and in the first grade, was returned to Pine Ridge and enrolled in a reservation day school.

How Indianness is defined by American Indians and non-Indians, who claims to be Indian and why, and the anxieties among multi-heritage Indians are complex historical and present-day issues. While the politics of identity and the life experiences of Indians have been addressed more in recent years by scholars, activists, and novelists, there is little research addressing how and why American Indians make their identity choices. Unquestionably, the diversity of opinions over what it means to be American Indian renders the issue impossible to generalize and difficult to analyze. I am a historian, not a sociologist, but after historical study, self-analysis, observation, and much interaction with people concerned about what it means to be American Indian, it is obvious that any study of Indian identity will be complicated and that there are certainly more “types” of Indians than the ones proposed in 1964 by Clyde Warrior. Not all individuals claiming to be Indian ”look Indian,” nor were many born into tribal environments. Many are not tribally enrolled and others who claim to be Indian are not Indian at all. Some Indians who appear Caucasian or Black go back and forth assuming Indian, white, and Black identities, while others who have lived most of their lives as non-Indians decide to ”become Indians” at a later age. Some individuals are Indian by virtue of biological connection, but know little about their cultural mores either because of lack of interest; because there was no one to teach them; or because it was not (or is not) socially or economically profitable to pursue an Indian identity due to the time period, location, and degree of racism, prejudice, and stereotypes.