American Indian Culture and Research Journal

The decades after World War I saw significant shifts in federal Indian policy in the United States. During the 1950s, the federal government pursued a termination policy, which sought to assimilate Native Americans by abolishing special federal status and services for Indians. By the mid-1960s, federal officials had largely abandoned termination and replaced it with a self-determination policy. Self-determination involved the maintenance of special federal services and status for American Indians while allowing Native peoples and governments greater opportunities to shape policy. While there are numerous books and articles on the termination period, coverage of self-determination during the 1960s (at least prior to the emergence of the Red Power Movement) remains more limited. This study seeks to help fill this gap by examining the implementation of Indian health improvement policies and how those policies affected and were affected by two groups: the Five Tribes of Oklahoma and the Pueblos of New Mexico. More commonly known as the Five Civilized Tribes because of their willingness to incorporate aspects of white culture into their societies, the Five Tribes include the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole tribes or nations. The nineteen New Mexico Pueblos consist of Acoma, Cochiti, Isleta,Jemez, Laguna, Nambe, Picuris, Pojoaque, Sandia, San Felipe, San Ildefonso, San Juan, Santa Ana, Santa Clara, Santo Domingo, Taos, Tesuque, Zia, and Zuni. Admittedly, many factors influenced Indian health and the development and implementation of health care policies. Three key aspects of Indian health for the Five Tribes and the Pueblos during the period between 1954 and 1968, include gains in health levels, a continued gap between Indian health levels and those of the general population, and the expansion of Indian health services in response to these Natives’ demands. The improvements in Indian health resulted largely from changes made by Congress in the Indian health care system-changes Congress saw as a prelude to termination. Ironically, the improvements in Indian health brought about by those changes, in combination with other factors, prompted the Five Tribes and the Pueblos to demand expanded services and to exert greater say over the development and delivery of those services. In other words, policies designed to lead to the termination of federal services instead resulted in expanded federal responsibility and greater Native American self-determination.

There are whole disciplines, institutions, rubrics in our culture which serve as categories of denial. -Susan Griffin A Chorus of Stones In 1903, the United States Supreme Court opined that, as a racial group, we American Indians, like minor children and those deemed mentally deficient or deranged, should be viewed as legally incompetent to manage our own assets and affairs. Indians, the high Court held, were to be understood as perpetual wards of the federal government that, according to the Court, would act as a permanent trustee. With a deft circularity of reasoning, the justices then proceeded to assert that, since Indians are intrinsically incompetent, we should have no authority to challenge trustees’ authority over us. Thus did the United States formally and unilaterally assign itself plenary-that is, absolute and imperious-power over all Native lands, lives, and natural resources within the forty-eight contiguous states of North America, as well as Alaska, Hawai’i, and other external possessions such as Guam and “American” Samoa. The only curb placed upon the imagined prerogatives of the United States in this regard was and is an equally self-appointed fiduciary responsibility to act, or at least claim to act, in the best interests of those it has subjugated both physically and juridically. Although the basic proposition at issue has undergone almost continuous modification over the years, it remains very much in effect at present.

INTRODUCTION Forced relocation has become an affliction. The Navajo-Hopi land dispute has led to the relocation of 2,940 households, more than 10,000 Navajo people, with another 440 households certified but not yet relocated. This is the largest forced relocation of American citizens in the United States since the World War II-period internment of 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry-most of whom were American citizens. This paper describes the post-relocation experience of Navajo relocatees in Pinon, Arizona, a Navajo reservation community. For centuries, Navajo and Hopi peoples lived side by side in the Black Mesa region of northern Arizona. After Spanish arrival to the Southwest in the sixteenth century, white settlers, the slave trade, and the Navajo pastoral lifestyle compelled scores of Navajo to move closer to Hopi villages. Altercations between the two peoples over land increased in frequency after the 1882 formation of the Executive Order Area (EOA) for the “Hopi and such other Indians as the Secretary of the Interior may see fit to settle there-on,” as well as with the expansions of the Navajo Reservation. Navajos living on the EOA gradually outnumbered the Hopi, a factor that widened the scope of the initial land disputes. In 1962, a US. District Court in Prescott, Arizona ruled in Healing v. Jones that the Navajo and Hopi tribes have undivided equal rights to the surface and subsurface of the EOA with the exception of Grazing District Number Six (located in the heart of the EOA). This region (fig. 1 ) became known as the Joint Use Area (JUA).Following the court decision, the Hopi tribal council sought to protect the JUA’s grazing resources from further Navajo encroachment. The Hopi initiatives resulted in a series of federal actions having serious repercussions for the social and economic fabric of Navajos living in the JUA. On July 1, 1966, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) froze all residential, commercial, and infrastructural developments in the JUA unless the Hopi tribe approved them.

Recent years have witnessed an expansion of culturally relevant education programs for American Indian youth. These programs, which are a response to underachievement in scientific and technical fields, focus on curricula and methods that render science more accessible to Indian students. They do so by adapting to the "learning styles," the interactional and social patterns, the common knowledge, and the community needs that may distinguish Indian students from their non-Indian classmates. Many of the resulting programs are impressive, showing monumental dedication and tremendous creativity on the part of their staff. Indian science education has taken a giant step. Now, however, there is an opportunity to take another step. This article, while applauding the achievements of culturally relevant science programs, suggests that many such programs may carry with them unintended consequences. In order to clarify this assertion, I first examine some assumptions which tend to characterize mainstream science classrooms and some of the contrasting assumptions which may appear in various American Indian traditional thought systems. I discuss some specific examples of culturally relevant science programs, showing that the tendency is to overlook or deemphasize the differences just explored. I then argue that the outcome of such neglect is likely to be that American Indian traditional knowledge is severely damaged, even destroyed. I close by considering what science programs might look like if they pressed innovations in culturally relevant programming toward a second and more dramatic step that more explicitly insists upon the legitimacy of traditional American Indian models of inquiry into the natural world.

At a time when Baja California was thought to be an island, a group of Jesuit priests launched a mission there to educate its Natives. Several sites were established, beginning in 1697, on what came to be recognized later as a peninsula. These missions were initiated thanks to private solicitations, rather than the royal patronage that had underwritten the missions in New Spain before. Perhaps for this reason the mission was subject to one of the characteristic institutions of the Catholic Church: the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith (Congregatio de Propaganda Fidei). The Propaganda, for short, also held ecclesiastical jurisdiction over countries with non-Catholic governments, such as England, from 1622 to 1908. The Propaganda was not a sort of Vatican department of missions. It was, in fact, an effective response to conditions of doctrinal and moral confusion faced by counter-reformation Rome. The Propaganda evolved its own educational institution in Rome in 1627, known as the Collegium Urbanum, named after its founder Pope Urban VIII. Students were accepted from all lands under the Propaganda’s jurisdiction, which included the Native peoples of Baja California. The courses ranged from basic grammar to advanced studies in theology. One of the original reasons for the college’s establishment was the hope that students would share their differences throughout their lives. Whether from Scandinavia, the Balkans, the United States, Africa, or Asia, students related different cultures, languages, customs, and personal experiences to each other. While Pope Alexander VII required that students take vows to return to their homelands, where they would act as evangelists, he also insisted that they stay in lifelong correspondence with their alma mater. Throughout the last three quarters of the nineteenth century, the college maintained about 120 students at one time in various stages of preparation for missionary careers all over the world. Their native languages ranged from English to the aboriginal language of northern San Diego County, known in mid-nineteenth-century Rome as Californian.

In a recently published paper, Barbara A. Mann and Jerry L. Fields make a simple, but arresting, assertion: “the Haudenosaunee [Iroquois] League was founded on the pleasant afternoon of August 31, 1142.” This statement’s precision-and, even more, its methodology-would, if justified, have profound implications not only for the founding of the Iroquois League, but also for the longstanding debate about the chronology of oral tradition and the ability of oral societies to retain such details accurately over countless transmissions. My intention in this paper is to speak generally to this issue by using Mann and Fields’ extensive effort as a symptom of the larger issue. Mann and Fields arrive at their conclusion by arguing that a solar eclipse occurred at the very moment the League was formed. They then proceeded to determine which eclipse best suited this hypothesis. This paper argues that this claim is not true, or rather that there is no serious evidence that it is true, for it can hardly be asserted categorically that the Iroquois League was not founded on this day or any other day before its first mention in contemporaneous sources. In developing this argument I will consider first the ways in which Mann and Fields establish a specific eclipse date; that is, the process by which they eliminate all other possibilities. I then discuss their use of sources, which, I argue, falls well short of the critical canons that are widely accepted by historians for tying together evidence and argument. I conclude by suggesting that the particular foundation story of the Iroquois League is a story that began to evolve at some point, probably around the turn of the nineteenth century, to account for the League and to strengthen its purpose in the face of continuing white aggression.

For several weeks in 1994, I observed a federal court case held to determine the treaty rights of Washington state tribes to take shellfish-broadly defined to include all marine life other than fin fish. Having been an expert witness in other subproceedings of this same United States v. Washington (also known as the Boldt Case), I was particularly interested to watch and examine an important case as a non-participant. I was also a known quantity to the Native, or plaintiff, side and thus was able to overcome the great suspicion, or virtual paranoia, characteristic of such trials. Having seen and overheard racially charged expressions by non-Natives in the courtroom, I realized how justified these psychological defenses are. Herein, my aim is simply to present an ethnography of the trial, as I understood it with the help of friends and legal advisers, giving special attention to the terminology and ideology used throughout. Description and discussion of the event is divided into three parts. The trial led to the court’s memorandum decision and order of 20 December 1994, a week-long hearing on the decision’s implementation. Later, the court’s decision on 28 August 1995 turned on the issue of equity, or equitable factors, and compromised tribal hopes. Until that time, the judge had scrupulously upheld the priority of treaty over other rights, giving tribes a sense of fair hearing. Of particular note was a statement by the judge, in which he summarized his understanding of the legal issues, an unheard of revelation.