American Indian Culture and Research Journal

Determining who are Sacagawea’s (or Sacajawea’s) descendants is a rather troublesome dilemma. The quandary lies in sorting out and understanding the claims that various tribal groups have made regarding this legendary woman. There are a large (and growing) number of American Indian oral traditions about Sacag/jawea’s tribal affiliation, cultural heritage, the pronunciation of her name and what it means, as well as about when and where she died. Sacag/jawea’s story is not opaque but a window into personal and tribal identity. I started to explore the history of this young woman as revealed in the journals of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark as well as in numerous Native oral traditions. In trying to make sense of the stories that generous people shared with me I began to understand how all histories are constructed. Additionally I came to comprehend how these constructions distill and clearly essentialize the worldviews of Native people, western historians, suffragists, and others. As complex constructions of social histories, these stories reveal connections between the past and the present. They are potent and they will (I hope) remain permanently ambiguous. This essay explores ways in which both public representations and private memories produce a sense of the past. There are acute differences between western conceptions of the past and American Indian ways of envisioning and interpreting their worlds. Subsequently, I will investigate how communities imagine and re-imagine a past that includes themselves as that imagined past relates to the life of Sacag/jawea, the teenage Shoshone interpreter who accompanied Lewis and Clark on their “Corps of Discovery” (1804–1806) to the Pacific Ocean and back. Native American history, like all history, is not static but represents a dynamic ongoing relationship between past events and the present. It is also primarily an oral history, unlike Western history, which is almost exclusively written.

Fred Mahone, recently sprung from Chilocco Indian School and just about to ship out for France, took time in the summer of 1918 to reflect on the past and think about the future. Whiling away his time at Michigan’s Selfridge Field, Mahone put pencil to paper in the language he had only recently learned to write, and announced himself to the world, “I am a full blooded born from ... Ancient descendent who has gained three fourth of an education.” But having no use for what would come to be called primitive anti-modernism—that tangle of ideas which celebrated the past, and often indigenous peoples, as repositories of authenticity, and used them as anodynes for the hurly -burly of modern life—Mahone was eager to jettison the Indian past he said he learned about at Chilocco. He urged: “Let us forget today the sole object of the mere early savagery of the passed period. Wearing apparel of peculiar specimens, long hair, feathers, blankets, moccasins are curiosity for to-day.” Shucking the hull of primitivism, however, did not mean growing the skin of a white man. Mahone, hoping to escape from underneath the weight of history—a weight pressed upon him, not a burden he chose to bear—implored “the redmen of the western hemisphere must make up our mind to be ... in the modern History of to-day.” After all, he said, the “ancestors of the redmen remains the same. But their present generations are aiming themselves toward the modern life.” And to help the Hualapai aim straighter, Mahone drafted an eighteen-page manifesto. Broken down into nine parts and thirty-seven sections, his letter from Michigan was a thoroughly modern and quite detailed blueprint for self-government and education, as well as a clear demand for citizenship and all its privileges and burdens, including the right to vote and the responsibility of paying taxes. When he came home to the Hualapai Reservation in northwestern Arizona after the war, a new tribal organization, “The Redmen Self Depentendent [sic] of America,” would carry out his plan.

Human societies, large and small, in the past and in the present, were shaped by worldviews that not only gave shelter, but also led the individual and collective mind into captivity. Efforts to secure sustenance, to maintain bonds between peoples, to shape religious, technical, and artistic practice, such strivings have all been ‘in-formed,’ that is, have been shaped by worldviews that underlie systems of thought claiming intrinsic validity and normative meaning and show the imprint of mostly hidden structures. THE MEANING OF WORLDVIEW STRUCTURE How may a worldview structure be understood? One must grasp what it is not. It is less than a worldview, although it shapes the arrangement of its contents. It is less than religion, although it forms its core, its rituals, theologies, and codes. It is less than ideology, understood as an ordered system of thought taken as normative and based on claimed self-evidence; although a worldview structure represents simultaneously its internal force and its distillation. A worldview structure is less than philosophy, understood as an interpretative system of what is, of how humans understand, and of what humans ought to do and what not; yet it hides behind the numerous interpretative systems, often formed in the solitude of a self, but within thought styles dominant at a given time and place. How do worldview structures differ from religions, philosophies, and ideologies? They are less a content than a form, less a visible entity than a hidden system, less a positive claim than a template employed as a matter of course.

Prescribed burning of the countryside was widely practiced by Native Californians. The application of fire as a tool of land management resulted in greater environmental resources that served as food, forage for game, basketry and other plant material products, and medicines. Fire provided many benefits to the environment by stimulating plant growth, providing nutrients to the soil, eliminating plant competition and insect infestations, and controlling overgrowth. Because of their fire management activities, California Indian groups were able to support larger populations and greater population densities than hunter-gatherer subsistence methods would have otherwise been able to accomplish. There is extensive literature on the subject of fire use in Native Californian land management reaching back to the 1920s, though the foundations for analysis of this topic were laid only in the 1970s. The more recent sources propose that Native Californians used fire as a tool of land manage- ment to sustain the populations that existed prior to Euro-American contact. Much of this work draws from ethnohistorical data and places significant emphasis on encouraging game populations. Ecological studies are also relevant to this study. Archaeological data further supports the hypothesis that Native Californian groups used fire as a means of environmental management. These studies offer scientific evidence showing that forests experienced frequent, low-intensity fires during aboriginal times which were likely attribut- able to human ignition, either through records of fire-scars, charcoal and pollen deposits in the earth, material remains, or environmental effects which could not have been produced otherwise.

Attend to the Indians. If the draft cannot proceed, of course it will not proceed. Necessity knows no law. —Abraham Lincoln, wire to Minnesota Governor Alexander Ramsey In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, civic leaders, military experts, and lay people are deciding what to do with the Taliban warriors and Al-Qaeda prisoners who were captured in the international war on terrorism. In November 2001, President George W. Bush startled some observers when he publicly announced the promulgation of an executive order for military tribunals, but a few months later the Department of Defense (DOD) made it clear that it was going to modify some of those rules in order to provide full and fair trials for defendants. The modified rules stipulated that any accused prisoners who appeared before potential tribunals would have the right to choose their own counsel, would have copies of the charges provided to them in their native language, and would have the right to obtain witnesses and documents needed for their defense. While the appellate review procedures established by the DOD guidelines would stay within the executive chain of command, the policy guidelines were written to balance the needs of military secrecy with the rights of individual defendants. Bush administrators made it clear that the guidelines ensured that suspected “terrorists” would receive the same legal protections given to any American soldiers who might appear before parallel courts-martial proceedings.