American Indian Culture and Research Journal

“We tried to run,” Louise Weasel Bear said, “but they shot us like we were a buffalo. I know there are some good white people, but the soldiers must be mean to shoot children and women. Indian soldiers would not do that to white children.” —Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee Social images of Indian/white relations, so typically born and nurtured in fiction, frequently seem impervious to fact, circumstance, perspective, or even argument. Despite a public that in record numbers consumed descriptions like the one that closes Dee Brown’s 1971 book, for instance, official accounts of the massacre at Wounded Knee—like nearly all official images of Indians— persistently reproduce a Manichean narrative that pits good against evil, White against Red, civilization against savagery. Why and how this is so continues to confound. The obvious, albeit simplistic, explanation is that “the winners write the histories.” A more complete understanding of how and why intercultural relations and images have sustained a moribund and at times even morbid bearing requires a more comprehensive explanation, however. In what follows we provide an explanation that merges Todorov’s concept of “finalism” with rudiments of social memory and an analysis of two days of hearings before the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary in February 1976. Our central thesis is that finalism serves as a mechanism that greatly aids the development and maintenance of social amnesia about Native identities and accomplishments, on the one hand, and the calcification of social memory, on the other. Together, these elements render Indian voices not simply irrelevant but also fundamentally anti-American.

The phrase excluding Indians not taxed appears in both Article I and the Fourteenth Amendment of the US Constitution. This essay examines the phrases excluding Indians not taxed and subject to the jurisdiction of sections 1 and 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment as they apply to Indians. This essay, through analysis of constitutional and legislative history, will demonstrate that tribal Indians were purposefully excluded from citizenship. The drafters of the Fourteenth Amendment clearly defined tribal Indians as “Indians not taxed,” as not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States. This essay delineates the jurisdictional links between taxation and citizenship and discusses how the courts have repeatedly misconstrued the pertinent phrases. Solid arguments will verify that acts which imposed citizenship on all Indians, contrary to the Fourteenth Amendment prohibition against tribal Indian citizenship, are unconstitutional. Finally, this essay substantiates that “Indians not taxed” was defined to mean that tribal Indians are not taxable as long as they remain subject to the jurisdiction of their tribe in any degree and hold tribal allegiance in any degree. The only place these phrases are defined in a constitutional setting is in the 1866 debates related to the Fourteenth Amendment as recorded in the Congressional Globe. Extensive quotations, in context, are necessary to assure authentic representation of the drafters’ intent.

We are in constant rapport with an intelligence in which all experiences remote and proximate, “trivial” and “important,” are held like waving reeds in the sensitive transparency of a brook. —Edward Sapir, Left-Handed, Son of Old Man Hat Much has been written from ethnographic, linguistic, and ethnopoetic perspectives concerning Native American oral poetry. Far less, however, has been written from these perspectives concerning written or “orthographic” poetry. For example, many literary critics describe Native American written poetry as inspired by oral tradition (namely storytelling). This seems a vacuous claim unless one can set out the features of the oral genre (tradition) and the written form, and establish a baseline for comparative purposes. It is not enough to claim that poetry is storytelling based on oral tradition; rather, we should have more specific criteria. The aim of this article is to examine a set or genre of Navajo poetry as an emergent literary tradition, employing linguistic and tropic devices that create poetic identities. I will focus on a set of poems concerning Coyote that have links to oral tradition and will investigate how each poem connects with and diverts from that tradition. I will also investigate the codes or languages used in these poems and the language ideologies that motivate such decisions as which language, which mode of expression is appropriate. In an important article Edward Spicer discusses the notion of hidden states. He points out that the hidden states are not in fact hiding but rather have been erased from the consciousness of the dominant nation-state. He uses the example of Irish literature to show how this works. In late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century England, it was widely assumed that there was no such thing as Gaelic literature. This assumption, however, ignored or denied centuries of Gaelic literature (the Bible, for example, was translated into Gaelic before it appeared in English).

Anyone familiar with the literature of the Vietnam War should be aware that it depicts the racial tensions that were felt so intensely overseas and at home during that era, but that the literature also frequently goes to great lengths to depict the dissolution of racial tensions in the face of a more immediate threat: the North Vietnamese enemy. One of the methods of overcoming the racial (and other) differences that potentially divided the soldiers has dire consequences, both in reality and in literature: Male soldiers can erase their differences by identifying with each other against the difference of women. The literature creates a connection among men by excluding women but also by denigrating and often demonizing them. Red Earth, a novella written by a Dakota/Salish veteran of the Vietnam War, Philip Red Eagle, manages to resolve its racial and gender tensions in a different way, however. In part by relying on Sioux notions of the feminine rather than on those produced by the dominant patriarchy of the United States, Red Eagle is able to avoid such misogyny and offer constructions of masculinity more healthy than those found in much of the literature.

Visitors to the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument on the Crow Indian Reservation in southeastern Montana quickly learn that the tragic violence that occurred between US cavalrymen and Lakota and Cheyenne families in late June 1876 was a clash of cultures. This catchy phrase serves as the title of historical summaries printed in the monument’s brochures and as a major theme in park rangers’ interpretive talks. Considering the sizable number of visitors to the monument each year (more than four hundred thousand in fiscal year 2002), the prominence of “Custer’s Last Stand” in American mythology, and the widespread use of the phrase clash of cultures to explain historical conflict between Indians and non-Indians, a careful examination of the phrase as currently employed at the Little Bighorn is necessary. The Little Bighorn monument is a site of great controversy, a centerpiece in the nation’s late-twentieth-century “culture wars,” and park personnel have been in a seemingly no-win situation. Still, the historical interpretation currently offered at the park should not be above critique—even if it feels like piling on. The intent here is to deconstruct clash of cultures to show how it hides more than it reveals, to consider why the phrase is used, and to evaluate the implications of such language. Finally, this article suggests an alternative way of framing the Battle of Little Bighorn, one that might better fulfill the congressional call “to encourage peace among peoples of all races.”