American Indian Culture and Research Journal

During the 1970s, the majority of American protest efforts focused on the feminist, civil rights, and anti-government movements. On a smaller scale, Native Americans initiated their own campaign. Network television periodically broadcast scenes of confrontation ranging from the Alcatraz Occupation in 1969 through the Wounded Knee Occupation of 1973. The consistent objective was to regain treaty rights that had been violated by the United States government and private corporations. Little publicity was given to another form of Native American civil rights violations- the abuse of women’s reproductive freedom. Thousands of poor women and women of color, including Puerto Ricans, Blacks, and Chicanos, were sterilized in the 1970s, often without full knowledge of the surgical procedure performed on them or its physical and psychological ramifications. Native American women represented a unique class of victims among the larger population that faced sterilization and abuses of reproductive rights. These women were especially accessible victims due to several unique cultural and societal realities setting them apart from other minorities. Tribal dependence on the federal government through the Indian Health Service (IHS), the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW), and the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) robbed them of their children and jeopardized their future as sovereign nations. Native women’s struggle to obtain control over reproductive rights has provided them with a sense of empowerment consistent with larger Native American efforts to be free of institutional control. The following two situations are examples of the human rights violations committed against Native American women. Both reflect the socioeconomic climate of the 1970s that led to the overt and massive sterilization that irreversibly changed thousands of Native American families’ lives forever.

INTRODUCTION History, in any culture, may be conceived of as the narrative organization and interpretation of events completed in a recent or remote past. The kinds of events represented in a historical text as well as the pattern of narrative organization would naturally reflect and reinforce cultural beliefs, including notions of temporal order. The Lakota, or Sioux, of the nineteenth century and earlier preserved both tribal and band histories; there were many such records reported among different Lakota groups. Other tribes known to have kept yearly historical records include the Mandan, Blackfeet, Ponca, and Kiowa. The first reported European contact with the Teton Sioux on the Plains was by the French in the mid-1600s. Among the numerous reasons for the tribe’s westward migration from the Great Lakes region were war and economic pressures, for the Chippewa, the Teton’s longstanding enemy, had obtained guns early from French traders. Today, the political divisions and designations of the Sioux people correspond to their geographical location after progressive migrations: the Santee remain the farthest east, the Yankton ventured a bit west, and the Teton migrated still farther in the westerly direction. The dialects of the language also roughly correspond to these geographic divisions: Dakota is spoken to the east, Nakota in the center, and Lakota to the west. Traditionally, calendrical records of the year were textualized in a series of pictographs called winter counts or counting buck, which were kept by members of the tribe known as winter counters, a responsibility and honor generally passed from father to son. The use of the word winter instead of year stems from the fact that the Lakota calendar reckoned time differently than the Roman calendar, and so had no equivalent for the English word year.

In the depths of the Great Depression, Franklin D. Roosevelt repudiated the federal government’s traditional noninvolvement with the private housing market in an effort to revitalize the moribund construction industry. Under the auspices of the 1933 National Industrial Recovery Act, the Public Works Administration’s Housing Division purchased or condemned land and built a modest amount of low-income housing. With the passage of the Wagner-Steagall Act in 1937, the federal government assumed permanent responsibility for the construction of public housing by offering generous loans and grants to local housing authorities. By the early 1960s, concern for the poor led reformers to look beyond the nation’s big cities and to consider the provision of low-income housing for Native Americans on isolated reservations. This new use for public housing was due to a fundamental change in federal Indian policy that called for a greater commitment to the development of reservation land. Rejecting the policy of termination, whereby the government sought to dissolve tribal allegiances and foster assimilation, federal authorities attempted to improve housing as a key component of the effort to revitalize reservation life. After a halting beginning, public housing proliferated on reservations so much so that federal assistance became a crucial component of Indian housing on tribal land. By the 1990s, with public housing projects being demolished nationwide and privatization schemes being developed for the nation’s poor, the greatest success of the ill-fated public housing experiment could arguably be found on Native American reservations. In addition, public housing became a highly visible manifestation of the federal government’s endorsement of Indian self-determination. In the mid-twentieth century, reformers seeking to enlist government aid in the provision of low-income housing found some of the worst living conditions on Indian reservations. A Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) study conducted in 1962 placed the median annual income for Indians at $1,500- a figure several thousand dollars below the average in the United States- and the 360,000 Indians who lived on reservations at that time relied heavily on government support for their continued existence.

POWWOW AND THE PERSISTENCE OF INDIAN ETHNICITY Indians and non-Indians alike have long viewed American Indians’ communal dances as a critical element and index of community solidarity. At the end of the nineteenth century, the US government sought to suppress traditional Indian dances because they were seen “as a great hindrance to the civilization of the Indian.” A century later the dancing continues, particularly in the context of the powwow, an emergent form of social celebration that incorporates traditions of dance, song, and dress from many Indian peoples. Richard Hill, an American Indian scholar, expresses sentiments shared by many powwow enthusiasts: “The dance circle draws us in. The powwow has now spread coast to coast, and while some see it as a pan-Indian fabrication, I now see that it serves a vital catalyst for cultural renewal.. .. No matter how we dance, how we dress, or how we live, for a few moments of the song we stand together as a people, united by tradition and connected in the certain belief that dance is essential to the expression of ourselves. Anthropologists in the 1950s regarded powwow as both an emergent and a dying social institution- a kind of last gasp of communal expression before the final assimilation of Indians into the mainstream. But powwows did not disappear. Instead they have flourished as one of the premier collective expressions of Indian identity amid what Joane Nagel has called the renewal of American Indian ethnicity.

The indigenous cultures and communities of North America are studied in many academic disciplines, geography among them. The number of geographers who work in this area is small compared to the figures that emerge from such departments as anthropology, history, or literature, mainly because geography itself is a small discipline. A surprisingly wide range of topics, methods, epistemological stances, and regional emphases are represented in recent geographical literature nonetheless. Our purpose here is to summarize the published books and journal articles written about North American Indian and Inuit geographies during the past ten years, following a brief look at earlier work. We do so to raise awareness of this diverse and somewhat diffuse literature, and to make it more accessible to readers of this journal.

Surely we are not stating anything either easy or difficult to prove when we suggest that the first European settlers along the Eastern seaboard must have been powerfully affected by the example of Indian peoples and that in these Europeans and certainly in their immediate descendants the apparently free life they saw must have contributed to the development of the individualism that made American democracy inevitable. But the question of just how Indian societies in general and the Iroquois in particular affected the development of American political institutions ought to be a matter of historical evidence. If there are documents that will settle the matter it ought to be possible to find them. Unfortunately, in his “Notes from the ‘Culture Wars:’ More Annotations on the Debate Regarding the Iroquois and the Origins of Democracy,” published in the American Indian Culture and Research Journal, volume 23, number 1, Professor Bruce Johansen has made the mistake that is usual in discussions of Iroquois influence by confusing two propositions: (1) that the Iroquois, generally speaking, contributed to the development of American democracy, and (2) that the political structure of the Iroquois League and, by implication, the structure and parliamentary procedures of its council specifically served as a model for the structure of government defined by the Constitution of the

Having now compiled roughly 1,325 items in my annotated bibliography of contentions regarding the Iroquois’ role in the development of democracy, I have become used to watching a large number of people bend the subject to fit their own biases as they accuse me of being a mythmaker. Professor Robert L. Berner seems irritated that I have acted as both advocate of the idea and compiler of a bibliography on the subject. Berner is welcome to tell me and the readers of the American Indian Culture and Research Journal just what my purported biases have compelled me to omit from my annotations. He has not identified any such faults in my account. Instead, he implies that I traffic in “dogma”while he dispenses objective truth. I have Berner in my record as a critic of my ideas, so he is probably as ideologically driven as he accuses me of being. Berner appears in my second volume of annotations as follows: 1992.002. Berner, Robert. “American Myth: Old, New, Yet Untold.” Genre: Fmms ofDiscourse & Culture 25:4 (Winter, 1992), pp. 377-389. Berner surveys the debate over Iroquois influence on the development of American democracy in the context of the intellectual ferment over the quincentenary of Columbus’ first landfall in America.

In pulling together these pithy citations from respected Americanist works, sometimes now called Indienology, this commentary attempts a comprehensive overview of notions relating to the person, in both cosmic and personal senses, of Native North America. It uses the European solution for distinguishing those indigenous to India from those of America by the expedient of a single vowel: a or e. Moreover, to clinch the argument, comparable Inuit data are included. This treatment is intended to be balanced, indicating features that both helped and harmed individuals and communities, using citations from scholars who convey statements in a Native voice upholding the interconnectedness of customs, taboos, demeanors, and their likely outcomes. Though reported as asides or seemingly obscure details for only a single tribe or instance, all these observations can be understood to have continent-wide distribution, providing a coherent worldview that was accepted, rejected, modified, or ignored depending on local conditions of terrain, history, customs, contacts, and inter-group hostilities. Local factors of population densities, social systems, and tending (foraging) or tilling (farming) lifeways are largely ignored here in the interest of tracing more generic patterns. Spatial orientations in worlds and homes are as significant as cultural rules since they provided the basic “staging area” for the active deployment of people and materials for larger tasks and activities.