American Indian Culture and Research Journal

Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them. A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. . . . The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants. —Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands: The New Mestiza One night, in Louise Erdrich’s novel, The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, the main character, Father Damien Modeste, now more than one hundred years old, begins one of his final letters to the pope, this time to reveal the secret of his identity. In it, he recalls the flood that swept Agnes DeWitt away from her deceased lover’s farm and the idea that carried her north to the reservation at Little No Horse, confessing, “I now believe in that river I drowned in spirit, but revived. I lost an old life and gained a new.” Even before the flood, Agnes had contemplated the “absurd fantasy” of a new missionary life after meeting the other priest—the first Father Damien Modeste—who was traveling to his resented assignment to “missionize the Indians,” where, he says, “the devil works with shrewd persistence” and God must enter “the dark mind of the savage.” When she emerges from the flood to find the priest’s dead body caught in a branch, Agnes “already knew.” She puts on the priest’s clothes, cuts her hair with a pocketknife, buries the body with her shorn hair (“the keeper of her old life”), and “begins to walk north into the land of the Ojibwe.” For the next eighty years, Father Damien marks the day of his arrival on the reservation as the beginning of “the great lie that was her life, the true lie . . . the most sincere lie a person could ever tell.” That “true lie” is an identity that transgresses the boundaries of mainstream gender norms, an identity that is accepted and honored in the unrestricted territory of the Ojibwe culture.

It is perhaps ridiculous for Indian people to challenge a multi-billion dollar industrial operation, but if our right to an existence as a people is threatened by corporate greed, we have nothing to lose. —National Indian Youth Council News Release, 1975 In the spring of 1977, members of the National Indian Youth Council (NIYC), along with the Coalition for Navajo Liberation, barraged the Secretary of the Interior and the chairman of the Navajo Nation with petitions calling for a halt to the proposed construction of several coal gasification plants on the Navajo Reservation in northwestern New Mexico. The petitions stated that the billion-dollar industrial venture would lead to “the inevitable genocide” of the local Navajo people whose culture and livelihood would “once again [be] trampled and ignored.” In the words of NIYC Executive Director Gerald Wilkinson, the issue was “quite literally a question of life and death.” The NIYC-led campaign to stop coal gasification began in 1974 and lasted through most of 1977. The story was an archetypal David and Goliath bout—a local, relatively powerless people pitted against massive corporate and governmental might. More specifically, NIYC activists represented the interests of “the grassroots people” who resided in the Burnham chapter of the Navajo Reservation, the region where the proposed plants would be constructed. Their struggle was against not only the multinationals seeking to build and profit from the plants, but also the governments of both the United States and the Navajo Nation, which ignored the interests of the Burnham residents in their legislative wrangling over gasification.

The Indian fair is that rare example of a government program for Indians gone terribly right. Implemented by the Office of Indian Affairs on reservations in the early 1900s, Indian fairs allowed Native people to exhibit their crops, livestock, and domestic handiwork in competition for prizes much the same way whites did at their numerous county and state fairs. The Indian Bureau hoped that such competition would inspire more Indian men to take up farming and raise better crops and help Native women become better housewives. In addition, the organization believed that reservation fairs would cut down on the amount of traveling Indians did during the summer months. Instead of attending dances, feasts, and county fairs, government officials reasoned, Native peoples would be content to hold a single large fair in the fall after crops had been harvested. Commissioner of Indian Affairs Robert G. Valentine enthusiastically supported Native fairs as a way to derive some benefit from Indians’ love of dancing and visiting. Valentine recognized that although the Indian Bureau could not prevent Indians from dancing, by “combining Indian amusements and ceremonies with an educational exhibit, some practical benefit must result.” Valentine also liked the fact that Indian fairs were conducted under the watchful eyes of the Indian Bureau’s own agency superintendents. He believed little could go wrong with bureau agents firmly in control of such events. From a single government-sponsored Indian fair on the Crow Reservation in Montana in 1905, Native fairs spread rapidly across the country. Little more than a decade later, fifty-eight reservations and agencies could boast of holding one or more of them on a yearly basis. The proliferation of Indian fairs occurred because all parties involved in their operation—Indians, the

Obscured by the invasive expansion of an aggressive Iroquois confederacy, there exists today a remnant population of eastern Siouan peoples known as Tutelos amid the Six Nations Reserve at Grand River, Ontario. While there is a general dearth of source materials for the Tutelo Indians of Virginia, there is an interesting correspondence between a Native elder at Grand River and Dr. Frank G. Speck that took place during the years 1934 and 1935. These letters, composed for Chief Samuel Johns, reveal insight concerning the enduring complexity of American Indian identity. In noting this ethnohistorical puzzle, it is the purpose of this article to explore and examine the Tutelo initiative and voice in asserting a unique ethnic identity amid the Hodenosaunee, or Great League of the Iroquois. For far too long, the collaborative and self-motivated participation of Native Americans in anthropological fieldwork has been ignored because their role has usually been characterized simply as “informants.” In his correspondence with the noted University of Pennsylvania anthropologist Frank Gouldsmith Speck, Chief Johns reveals his Tutelo ancestry and makes an inquiry concerning that ethnic heritage. By this standard, the Johns letters stand out as an inquiry of scholarly interest in Native ethnohistorical criticism and research. Chief Johns initially writes Speck from Middlemass, Ontario on 4 September 1934. In his first letter, Johns reveals his Tutelo ancestry and requests historical information regarding the tribe. On 31 December 1934, Johns again writes Speck informing him of historical findings that report the Tutelo country along the east branch of the Susquehanna River

In the past five years, there has been a surge in the attention shown to community and community-based health programs among Native Americans, particularly for chronic health problems such as diabetes. New Mexico’s Native American Diabetes Project, a diabetes education and gardening project in the American Northwest, and the Daya Tibi health center in Poplar, Montana are just a few of the programs to report outcome success using a community-based model. What do these projects have in common, and to what does community-based refer? Is community participation, as Bell and Franceys declare, just a euphemism for unpaid labor? Community participation in health programming—from the efforts of community health workers (CHWs), to participatory research, to the impact of politics on community health programs—has been a popular approach in anthropology and public health since the late 1970s and is now a hackneyed expression in health programming. As part of a comprehensive edited volume on the subject, Barbara Israel et al. declare community participation to be not a method but an orientation based upon nine principles such as the facilitation of collaborative, equitable partnerships in all phases of the work; promotion of colearning and capacity building among partners; and the involvement of systems development through a cyclical and iterative process. This discussion offers a view of community participation from Indian country. One major impetus behind this resurgence of “community”-developed programs for Native Americans is the momentum of self-determination. The era of tribal self-determination, stemming from the 1975 Self-Determination Act among other pieces of legislation, is nascent in its capacity to produce novel, culturally relevant, and community-minded programs in health. Tribal councils and other governing bodies have increasingly demanded participatory methods of research, health care, and education from both Native and non-Native professionals. It is little wonder, then, that these terms fill the titles of public health, medical anthropology, and even diabetes care literature on tribes. Tribes have motivated this transformation.

The National Museum of the American Indian shall recognize and affirm to Native communities and the non-Native public the historical and contemporary culture and cultural achievements of the Natives of the Western Hemisphere. NMAI Mission Statement This essay interrogates the politics of representation, expectation, and responsibility at the new National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) in Washington, DC. We explore the interpretive contests (between and among Natives and non-Natives) provoked by the museum’s representational strategies. Flushing out some of these complexities, we point to the culturally contingent bases of visitors’ disappointments, confusions, and pleasures. We suggest that the NMAI pushes visitors to take responsibility for the familiarity and ignorance (and often these are part of the same interpretive package) that they bring through the doors of the NMAI. The power-laden politics of recognition, identity, and narration—as played out in the cross-cultural and intracultural exchanges at work in the museum—are shown to be fundamental to any interpretive possibility. As Indians who are also academics, our own—sometimes tumultuous— reactions to these productive difficulties structure the analysis.