American Indian Culture and Research Journal

During the summer of 1896, the Queen City of the West experienced the Wild West. That June, eighty-nine intrepid men, women, and children from the Sicangu Lakota Sioux band traveled more than a thousand miles by train from Valentine, Nebraska, a small town near their home on Rosebud Reservation in western South Dakota, to Cincinnati, Ohio, a mid-western city of German heritage located on the Ohio River. The Sicangu packed their fine Plains clothing and large tipis, boarded their horses onto the train, and departed for the unknown. They had just signed contracts with Cincinnati Zoological Society officials agreeing to camp on the Zoological Garden’s grounds for three months and participate in a series of educational programs illustrating frontier and pioneer life for Cincinnati’s citizens. The zoo’s summer program imitated William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody’s Wild West shows that were capturing the imagination of awestruck crowds nationwide. Many people believed that these spectacles, promising to be realistic reenactments of frontier life, had deleterious effects on the Indians in the show. At least one Indian and numerous whites, including federal officials, humanitarians, and educators, claimed that these shows only reinforced the stereotype of Plains Indians prevalent at that time. Others maintained that Wild West events encouraged Indians to retain their culture at a time when government administrators preached that civilizing Native Americans and encouraging them to farm was critical to their survival. Still others felt that show Indians were exposed to undesirable elements of white society. Worse yet, some show owners abruptly abandoned Indians in out-of-the-way places, fueling the prevailing attitude that these shows were bad for Indians. Buffalo Bill was probably the only authority who, at that time, maintained that these frontier reenactments benefited Indians by educating the participants about white society. John M. Burke, Buffalo Bill’s general manager and press agent, publicly endorsed the zoo’s 1896 program.

In decolonization, there is the need of a complete calling in question of the colonial situation. If we wish to describe it precisely, we might find it in the well-known words: “The last shall be first and the first last.” Decolonization is the putting into practice of this sentence. That is why, if we try to describe it, all decolonization is successful. —Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth Anishinaabe politician, author, and activist Winona LaDuke is one of the most recognizable tribal figures in modern America. Attaining minor fame as Ralph Nader’s vice-presidential candidate on the Green Party ticket in 1996 and 2000, LaDuke has often been assigned the role of Native spokesperson by non-Natives in both mainstream and leftist media. The attention given LaDuke is focused overwhelmingly on her land reclamation and environmental work, which are detailed in All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life. Although LaDuke’s status as a notable Indian is well established among non-Indian Americans, it is considerably more nebulous within Native Studies itself. Also, despite—or perhaps because of—her notoriety as an activist and environmentalist, LaDuke’s work as a novelist has gone virtually unnoticed by either American or Native critics. Only a handful of reviews met the publication of her 1997 novel, Last Standing Woman, which has received scant critical attention. This essay attempts to address that deficit by looking in detail at Last Standing Woman, placing emphasis on the interplay between white settlers and indigenous Anishinaabeg. While the multivocal, nonlinear structure in Last Standing Woman has been employed often in Native letters—and, more specifically, in the fiction of LaDuke’s Anishinaabe contemporary Louise Erdrich—the novel offers readers and scholars valuable textual features for consumption and critique. One difficulty of examining the book, in fact, lies in the wide range of themes LaDuke presents: religious, feminist, activist, environmental, tribal, historical, colonial, decolonial, postcolonial, biographical, autobiographical. This ambitious groundwork, coupled with the large number of characters in the book, challenges the reader and complicates the task of the critic. It is clear that when setting out to construct her first novel, LaDuke intended to avoid the comforts of conventional fictive expression by representing myriad voices in as many contexts as the scope of the project could accommodate.

After a long and arduous trip to the Northwest where he battled “superstition” and “savagery” with the civilizing words of God, Jesuit missionary Father Pierre Jean De Smet’s convictions remained more resolute than ever. Mulling over his missionary efforts, he concluded, “The Blackfeet, especially, have something hard and cruel about their features. You can read in their faces words written in blood. There is hardly one innocent hand in the whole nation. But, of course, the Almighty can bring forth sons of Abraham from the hardest of rocks.” De Smet’s determination to convert the western tribes to the Catholic faith represented not only a daunting task, but one fraught with uncertainty. While a few authors have dealt with the conversion of the Blackfeet to Christianity, scholars have ignored the ambiguity of relations between the Blackfeet and the Black Robes. Many analyses have taken a limited approach to a key question of Christianization: God or the Great Spirit? A lack of scrutiny on this core inquiry—whether God meant something, nothing, or something different for the Blackfeet—has obscured our historical understanding of the confrontation between the tribe and the Jesuits. Historical inquiries have failed to address fully another crucial issue: whether the tribes’ connections to Christianity were syncretic or pragmatic, a combination of new and old beliefs or a decision based on practicality. In essence, did their actions in the presence of the Jesuits reveal “cultural brokerage,” or rationality, or both? The keys to unraveling this puzzle lie in the symbolic language and acts of the Blackfeet themselves. The answers reveal a cultural dexterity far beyond what the Jesuits expected or recognized. While some tribes, such as the Flathead, took more quickly to Catholicism, the devotion of the Blackfeet proved much more difficult to develop. For the Jesuits, the Blackfeet took on a dual nature. The missionaries saw them as worthy converts, while describing them as cunning, conniving, and evil. A vision of the Blackfeet as Christian soldiers conflicted with the reality of their violent warfare against other tribes. This duality and the uncertainty of the Jesuits’ views of the Blackfeet colored every interaction between the two, ultimately contributing to a Christianization effort that fell short of its designed intentions.

The struggle for the validity of indigenous knowledges may no longer be over the recognition that indigenous peoples have ways of viewing the world which are unique, but over proving the authenticity of, and control over, our own forms of knowledge. —Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodology American Indian Studies (AIS), or Native American studies (NAS), arose as a field in the late 1960s and 1970s as part of the “new Indian” movement and the revitalization of Indian culture and identity. By 1999 there were many colleges and universities offering programs or majors in AIS/NAS, thirteen with graduate degrees, and at least four with Ph.D. programs. Although multidisciplinary in nature, and drawing from the humanities, history and the social sciences, AIS/NAS is informed by its own paradigm. Thus, the question remains: Is the whole greater than the sum of its parts? Is American Indian studies a legitimate discipline, with its own unique perspective and methodological concerns? Or is it solely an area of concentration within the established disciplines? I subscribe to the first view, that AIS/NAS has its own perspective or paradigm. I term this “academic Indianismo.” Alexander Ewen (Perepeche) has coined the term Indianismo as a counterpoint to indigenismo, a concept promoted by Lazaro Cardenas, the Mexican proponent of Indian rights. Cardenas, however, despite his humanistic concerns, saw indigenismo as a means of assimilating Indians into the body politic of Mexico with its mixed-blood population and mestizo culture.

The act of creation in the Mayan Popol Vuh, as in the Judeo-Christian Bible, begins with language. Words are spoken and the world is created. So intricately is language tied in with spirituality in the Popol Vuh that the gods created humankind so that humans could, through language, pray to the gods and “keep their days.” A culture’s religious practices evolve along with its language, and the language absorbs the nuances of that particular religion. A culture’s language is filled with the inextricable subtleties of its particular worldview. In a sense, it is hard to discern where religion begins and language ends. In regard to Tlingit culture of southeast Alaska, Nora and Richard Dauenhauer have noted in their introduction to Haa Kusteeyi (Our Culture): Tlingit Life Stories a type of “spiritual malaise” within Tlingit communities. Perhaps this spiritual malaise is directly related to the impending death of the Tlingit language and the worldview sustained by the language. One of the most destructive and long-lasting effects of colonization is the purposeful devaluation and destruction of Indian languages and, by extension, of traditional Indian beliefs. By focusing specifically on the situation of the Tlingit language and examining past attitudes toward the language, it can be demonstrated how the now nearly moribund Tlingit language fell to such a state. Since language is the carrier of culture, the implications of impending language death on Tlingit culture and the prospect of English filling the resulting void, are matters of grave concern. Language sustains a culture’s religion, its ethics, and its particular world- view. Even a worldwide religion such as Christianity evolves as it embraces a new language; for example, the Christianity of first-century Aramaic Palestine or of fourth-century Roman Italy, differs greatly from the Christianity of English-speaking America in the twentieth century. Though modern-day American Christians may not want to admit that their beliefs differ greatly, or at all, from the initial beliefs of Christianity’s founders, the truth is that a contemporary American Christian ceremony would be as foreign to a first-century Christian as modern English would be to his or her ancient Aramaic, Greek, or Latin counterparts. Because of the unique relationship that religion and language have within a culture, religion adapts to time and place in a similar fashion to language.

If comprehensive findings would turn speculation into fact, and those facts would identify an important scientific reality, then a wider, more diverse audience should be better apprised. By revisiting a less well-known published study, this brief review article has just this in mind. Its focus is on the linkage between language and migration as related to the place of origin of the Indians of central California. I would point out that this journal is not the obvious outlet for studies in Indian language and linguistics; to date, only a half dozen articles have been published. Thus I would not expect that linguistic scholars would turn to this journal to report their findings. Yet a larger readership should be informed because The Discovery of California is more than a linguistic treatise, for it demonstrates how comparative historical linguistics as the paramount research tool, supplemented by ethnography, archaeology, and field investigation, has ascertained that contemporary indigenous Asian peoples in Siberia are relatives of Penutian stock in central California. Keep in mind that I am not a linguistic scholar and must leave the final evaluation of this work to others. But the book needs to be put “out there”, as it were, so that its findings receive appropriate evaluation. Over the decades—indeed, since the nineteenth century—there has been considerable speculation, debate, and published theories and findings as to the Asia-to-North America migrations of the ancestors of contemporary Native Americans.

There is hope; and it is in hope that we have written The Good Red Road for the children, as the Elders who have spoken to us have asked. We have delivered ourselves of a burden writing these things, that the people may be free, and live. —Allogan Slagle, Keetoowah Cherokee He reminded me of the great white rabbit Wakdjungkaga, a Winnebago creator divinely tricky and amicably randy—always a bit frumpy, a cotton plaid shirt and baggy jeans before grunge was in, squeaky tennis shoes. He had a turned-in, tip-toey walk, as though on eggs or ice, and a wild bright alertness to edges and corners. I thought of a bird’s quickness to spot danger, a mouse curiously scurrying. Logan walked right out of The Hobbit with a shuffle and mutter to himself, wrinkling his nose, squinting behind seriously thick glasses, and looking down at the ground like Wordsworth’s leech-gatherer. Only this boy was an advanced high school student in my first freshman honors class at UCLA, winter 1970. Eyesight grounded, he found playing cards, jokes, tarot images, stones, bits of wood, bones, and all matter of debris that proved interesting. Think of a blackbird gathering flotsam for a nest. Logan had deep dark eyes behind coke-bottle lenses, thick black eye- brows, and curly cobalt hair always disheveled. His skin was powdery, rice paper gentle with a disarming humility. No roughness about him, no calloused knuckles—he had artist’s hands, a doctor’s touch. He moved with his elbows turned in, his knees bent like a slow-motion jogger, a slightly forward tip to his walk. All this made sense when he told me he had minus 1400 visual myopia and deteriorating retinas. Doctors said he would go blind by twenty-five. There was no time to lose. If I could see this thing, if I knew where it was, a Southern Cheyenne warrior said of cholera, I would go there and kill it.