American Indian Culture and Research Journal

On 12 June 1971 United States Commissioner of Indian Affairs Louis R. Bruce journeyed to the Florida Everglades to meet with Miccosukee chairman Buffalo Tiger and members of the tribal business council. The purpose of his visit was to celebrate the signing of a contract on 14 May in Washington between the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida, allowing the tribe to operate comprehensive social and educational programs formerly administered exclusively by government bureaucrats. Under the headline “Florida Indians Assume Own Rule,” the New York Times reported, “The accord signed after six months of difficult negotiations, is the first such agreement reached between an Indian tribe and the federal government since President Nixon, in a 1970 message to Congress, announced that he favored a policy of Indian Self-determination.” Arguably this transaction placed the Miccosukee tribe in the vanguard of the Indian self-determination movement. The following is an account of the Miccosukees’ struggle to wrest control over their own economic destiny from conservative elements within the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) and Department of the Interior and is based heavily on recent interviews with former Miccosukee tribal chairman Buffalo Tiger, who engineered the groundbreaking agreement, and Washington attorney S. Bobo Dean, who represented the tribe in the negotiations, as well as Bradley J. Patterson Jr., an official in the Nixon administration who was intimately involved in framing the president’s 1970 message.

Readers will remember the pitch-perfect opening of Louise Erdrich’s revolutionary first novel, Love Medicine, when June Kashpaw wanders off to die in the barren fields outside Williston, North Dakota. The book begins with Kashpaw on her way to the bus station in Williston, intent on heading home, only to be seduced, if that’s the right word, by a “mud engineer” named Andy. They drink, eat Easter eggs together at the bar, and later have a sexual fumble in his Silverado pickup truck before he passes out and she decides to walk home clear across the state of North Dakota wearing nothing but a windbreaker, slacks, and high-heel shoes. The whole opening focuses very closely on June’s body and the way she moves, “like a young girl on slim hard legs”; on the Rigger bar in which she meets her paramour; and on the weather, which is overcast (but warm) for Easter weekend—all in all, on the tactile qualities of the stage set. The third- person voice, which will be abandoned for the most part in the rest of the novel in favor of revolving first-person narrators, is unhurried. The voice is patient, in control; the narrative eye wanders, but never very far past the surface. Only on page 4 does the voice veer toward the meaningful: “Ahhhhh,” she said, surprised, almost in pain, “you got to be.” “I got to be what, honeysuckle?” He tightened his arm around her slim shoulders. They were sitting in a booth with a few others, drinking Angel Wings. Her mouth, the lipstick darkly blurred now, tipped unevenly toward his. “You got to be different.” (4)

In 1890 a group of Croatan Indians, now called Lumbees, migrated from their home in Robeson County, North Carolina, to Bulloch County, Georgia. These families left voluntarily, walking the railroad lines, following the turpentine industry from North Carolina to southeast Georgia, where this community of approximately one hundred established a new home and built a school and church to solidify their place. In this period Georgia, and the South as a whole, legally encoded racial segregation and threatened to force Bulloch County Croatans into a black or white identity. But rather than assimilate into the larger black or white communities of Bulloch County, Croatans maintained an identity as Indians and eventually returned home to Robeson County in 1920. The story of their sojourn in Georgia raises questions about how Croatans perpetuated a sense of themselves as a distinct “Indian” people. That distinctiveness depended on markers we ordinarily do not associate with Indian communities. How did they maintain a distinctive identity, away from their homeland, in a region that countenanced only two racial categories, “white” and “colored”? Rather than claiming that an unbroken connection to a place sustained their Indian identity, Croatans used the segregation of the Jim Crow South to build social institutions—a school and a church—to distinguish themselves from non-Indians and reinforce their community ties. SOUTHERN INDIAN IDENTITY AFTER REMOVAL After Indian Removal relocated the large southern tribes west of the Mississippi, remaining Indian populations received little attention from white southerners. Most simply believed that Indians were gone or that traces of Indian blood existed in the free “mulatto” communities sprinkled throughout the South. But the remaining Indians suffered a different kind of removal, one that sought to obliterate their identity and curtail their legal rights.

Urbanization is a relatively recent (post–World War II) phenomenon for most Indian people, and it is only the current generation of elders who have chosen to remain in the city rather than return to their home communities on reservations. Urban American Indian elders are a population whose well- being has not been fully examined. This study focuses on a small convenience sample of urban Indian elders in the Rochester, New York, area who are active in the local Native community. Initially, we observed that many of these elders enjoy a high degree of physical, mental, and emotional well-being, despite some chronic health conditions. We suggest that their strong extended family support network, involvement in the community, and a sense of cultural continuity contribute to a sense of overall well-being. We have chosen to focus on wellness, looking at overall health, rather than simply at illness. Health in this sense refers to “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity,” as defined by the World Health Organization. Weibel-Orlando used a similar approach to look at Indian elders in Los Angeles, as did Blandford and Chappell to study Native elders in Winnipeg. Carstensen has urged researchers to focus on the strengths of elders, as well as the problems, noting that “we need to study not just the frail and sick senior citizens, but also people in the second half of life who are aging well, without an undue amount of illness and disability.” This model is increasingly used by the medical profession, including the World Health Organization, and is particularly important to a holistic Native view of health and well-being.

Energy efficiency (EE) is maximizing the effective utilization of energy while minimizing the costs of that energy. Implementation of energy-efficiency programs by a tribe can have many positive impacts. These include the reduction of energy costs and the associated freeing of significant financial resources for other important uses, improved electrical service, increased energy independence, improved air quality, reduction in environmental impacts, and others. Foremost among these benefits may be the potential for reduced energy costs. By employing EE measures, it is easily possible to save 10 percent on energy costs, and the potential exists to save in excess of 50 percent. Thus, if a tribe spends $100,000 annually on energy, it can expect a minimum energy cost savings of $10,000 annually and perhaps significantly more.