American Indian Culture and Research Journal

INTRODUCTION Indigenous people living in the Americas have been dispossessed of large tracts of land since first contact with Europeans. Whereas some succumbed to the superior military power of the newcomers and others relinquished their territory in treaty negotiations, still others have seen their homelands diminished in favor of large-scale industrial developments, typically without their assent. Most contemporary First Nations consequently retain only small tracts of their aboriginal territory, and this is debilitating since maintaining a relationship with the land is vital to the continuity of each nation’s distinct way of life. Despite centuries of colonialism, genocide, and environmental degradation, “being out on the land” remains central to satisfying subsistence needs, preserving community solidarity, promoting the integrity of social institutions, enhancing spirituality, and establishing and maintaining an aboriginal identity. Under the circumstances, it is hardly surprising that several First Nations have undertaken cartographic research in order to demonstrate their wide-ranging uses of the land, frequently in conjunction with outside experts who help design and preside over the research. In Canada, for example, many First Nations have turned to Western academics to ensure that research design and data collection are undertaken in ways that are acceptable to a scholarly point of view, particularly if the resulting maps are to be used in cross-cultural negotiations or as evidence in legal proceedings. Yet as productive as this partnership may seem, it inevitably raises a significant methodological problem: how to conduct research in a way that simultaneously satisfies the demands of both academic and aboriginal communities.

American Indians and Alaskan Natives greeted the passage of the self-determination legislation of 1975 with cautious optimism. The law gave tribes and tribal organizations the ability to contract for the management of health care and other services previously managed by agencies of the federal government. The doctrine that motivated this shift toward increased Indian self-sufficiency determined that tribes would be more responsive to the needs of Indian people than the federal government bureaucracy. However, the law included many financial barriers to tribal management. Moreover, after years of being excluded from management decisions, many tribes lacked the resources necessary to manage these services successfully. Given these impediments and the continued under-funding of Indian health, some tribal leaders began to view the legislation as a way to rid the federal government of its obligations to American Indians once and for all. This study explores the tribal and environmental characteristics that may influence a tribe’s decision to switch to tribally managed health care resources. The findings of this study suggest that inadequate responsiveness by the local Indian Health Service (IHS), as measured by a lower percent of American Indian managers and fewer appropriations at the area level, is a crucial determinant in switching to tribal management. The issue of inequity in the responsiveness of IHS area offices and how it affects a tribe’s ability and desire to manage health care resources deserves further consideration.

INTRODUCTION In recent years the federal courts have been busy interpreting the Treaty of 1831 between the Menominee Nation and the United States, and what it means for relations between the Menominee and the state of Wisconsin. The Menominee Nation asserted a claim to off-reservation hunting and fishing rights based on article six of the treaty. After many years of litigation, the federal district and appeals courts, and the US Supreme Court ruled against the Menominee Nation and in doing so brought to a close a contentious dispute. The very same Treaty of 1831 also figured in a lesser-known court dispute in the 1990s between the state of Wisconsin and some Oneida Indian fishermen over access to netting on Duck Creek in Brown County by tribal members. Duck Creek runs parallel to the Fox River and bisects the Oneida Indian Reservation for twelve miles as the sluggish stream makes its way toward the waters of Green Bay. The creek once provided good fishing, particularly for sturgeon that swam up the creek from the bay, for Oneida Indians in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the 1930s the state of Wisconsin erected a dam astride Duck Creek, right at the extreme northeastern end of the reservation on the west bank and at Brown County’s Pamperin Park on the opposite east bank. An immediate effect of the dam was that it limited sturgeon and other fish from swimming upstream to the main settlements on the reservation. After the erection of the dam, tribal members moved their fishing to the dam site and fished there unhindered by the state, if not by pollution, until the early 1990s, when the state’s Department of Natural Resources (DNR) informed them they were fishing illegally.

The path-breaking documentary video, The Spirit of Crazy Horse, opens with a scene of Milo Yellow Hair walking on the prairie and singing. After offering tobacco, he narrates in a flat, matter-of-fact voice, “My people have not adapted well to the white man’s world.” As he speaks, the camera pans to an upturned car marooned in the middle of a field. Despite waving grass and other natural integration, the car remains alien to this setting. Turned on its head and abandoned, the car is useful now only as a den for enterprising animals. The car’s original function has been thwarted. Even its value as scrap metal is disregarded. Yet it does offer a metaphor for how acculturation and adaptation have always been key issues in Indian-white conflicts in the United States. The car is a valuable site of analysis because it has such vastly different significance for each culture. Its difficult fit within Indian cultures provides one entry point for understanding those differences and for better understanding the work of contemporary American Indian writers and filmmakers. Automobiles serve, in much Native literature and film, as expressions of characters’ differences from and relationships to the larger culture. The automobile has assumed near mythic proportions in mainstream American life. The federal government has actively supported the car industry in a variety of ways ranging from a subsidized highway system to deductible interest on car loans. Indeed, so much of US culture has developed as a result of and in response to the automobile that it would be difficult to determine the extent of its effects. These car-induced cultural developments include suburban living and the loss of small, tightly knit neighborhoods; interstate trucking that expands markets and delivers goods from all over the country; drive-through services at banks, restaurants, liquor stores, dry cleaners, chapels, funeral parlors, movie theaters, and video rental stores; chains of motor inns; the development of tourism; and, on the more negative side, the limitless air pollution and diminishment of fossil fuels.

INTRODUCTION The standing of women in traditional Native societies varied from tribe to tribe. In many tribes women held positions of political, social, military, and spiritual leadership. They had the right to choose marriage partners, divorce, own land and property, as well as take critical roles in trade, home life, acculturation, assimilation, and political activism. In sum, Native women have been found to have egalitarian roles within their societies. The role of Native women today remains vital in a variety of tribal communities with recent studies emphasizing that they are essential in forming the “very core of indigenous resistance to genocide and colonization” and in transmission of culture. The most important role of Native women, however, has been and continues to be that of mother. To bear and/or care for Native children is a position of honor and value throughout Native North America. Hence, the health and wellbeing of Native women is essential. Although elements of traditional standing are found in the lives of many modern Native women, times have changed. Like other women in the United States, Native women today have less economic, social, and political power than men. They are a silent and marginalized group often relegated to dependency upon male partners. And as women of color, Native women have a lower economic, educational, and social status. Their position in society impacts every facet of their lives, particularly their health.

If have to, I can look back and see where I came from and not to be proud, but to be confident, because that provided me the stepping stone to where I am going to. But yet, I don’t know where I am going to. And it's good because I have the confidence to know that when I get there, I know that I still have somewhere to go. That way I never rest. -Stan Rice, Jr. president of the board of directors, Yavapai Prescott Indian Tribe The degree to which any Native American group has remained “culturally intact,” in other words, has retained a Native American identity, has most often been measured by the group’s ability to cling to Native traditions in a modern world. Cultural change is usually interpreted as an assimilationist move. However, all cultures undergo constant changes as they adjust to new living conditions and attempt to keep cultural identity intact and successfully function in changing environments. This is especially true in the United States, where Native societies, more often than not, were on the receiving end of European and American policies of conquest. Here in particular, culture- the blueprints for everyday behavior-reveals its flexible nature. Culture is always in flux, accommodating identity with the ever-changing external reality. Ethnohistory can be credited for promoting these aspects of cultural change over time into the rewriting of Native American history. Older studies were generally concerned with entire regions or large North American tribal units. Until recently, few ethnohistorians studied smaller Native American groups, especially those in the American Southwest; even today, traditional historiographic approaches continue to dominate the research concerning these groups. The majority of these studies emphasize the confrontational aspects of Euro-American/Indian history and focus on the Indian frontier. Yet many smaller tribes did not vanish with the end of this frontier. They weathered the changes wrought by colonialism and continue to exist today.

INTRODUCTION At the center of many disputes among indigenous people and nation-states is the question of resource sovereignty. Control over and access to natural resources is critical to the economic, cultural, and political survival of indigenous peoples situated within the political boundaries of nation-states such as the United States and Canada. The power to define and command space or territory is fundamental to the ability of sovereigns, both indigenous and non-indigenous, to control access to natural resources and thus the use and development of these resources. Conflict between indigenous groups and nations-states is not only about different and often opposing cultural, economic, or biological visions of natural resource management and development, but also different understandings of who legitimately controls a particular space and territory. Struggles over resource use and claims of resource sovereignty are contests about locating political boundaries and delineating political jurisdictions. Because control over territory defines political sovereignty, the historical and contemporary efforts of the Wisconsin Anishinaabe to retain control over their reservation territories and to share control of off-reservation ceded territories may be understood as a geopolitical struggle to retain, protect, and expand Anishinaabe sovereignty. This struggle over territory and sovereignty has occurred in the face of persistent efforts by state government to diminish Anishinaabe territoriality and extend state territoriality to on-reservation space.

The process, particularly as a series of sequential timings, of creating an Indien person, according to accepted (“traditional”) beliefs, highlights the importance of fire, cooking, infusions, and, ultimately, dissolution. The same pan-human use of fire, distinguishing them from animals, also accounts for the gestation of a baby, suggesting that ontology here recapitulates cosmology. Indeed, the universal equation among the heart of a person, hearth of a house, beacon of a town, and sun of the sky underscores the importance of heat and light for all healthy, communal life. In stark contrast, the “dark” includes disease, harm, danger, and death. Though underreported, links between sparks, spirits, and life have been confirmed for the Ojibwa Shaking Tent, Delaware curings, Lakota Yuwipi, and, more universally, the flames, or tongues of fire, of Pentecost. Moreover, esoteric beliefs among Pawnee, Delaware, and Lushootseed equate the kindling of fire by friction with coitus. Each person is an especial instance of “mind”-that primordial vitality, force, movement, energy, and power deified by a high god or creator localized at the center of each tribal universe. According to southern California Luiseno, “All things that manifest or are suspected to possess ayelkwi [knowledge-power] are considered ‘persons.’ ’’