American Indian Culture and Research Journal

Western New York’s Allegany Seneca Reservation was a troubled place. John Peirce, one of many Allegany chiefs, could only lament in 1821 how a political situation had spiraled out of control: “war had risen amongst them.” Within a span of a few years, Quakers operating a schoolhouse on Seneca lands had ripped apart the Allegany people. For Allegany, problems with Quaker-run schools were nothing new. In 1798, Philadelphia Quakers began to offer Allegheny River Senecas some acculturative assistance, including resident schoolteachers. Cornplanter, a chief of mixed Dutch-Seneca ancestry who secured a grant from Pennsylvania in 1791, promoted Henry Simmons Jr.’s education program on his lands. Nonetheless, Simmons’s efforts faltered under the weight of opponent pressure. Another school at Allegany from 1811 to 1815 eventually closed in spite of the labors of an eighteen-year-old school- master, Joseph Harlan. Two unsuccessful schools along the Allegheny River did not halt a third attempt by members of Philadelphia’s Yearly Meeting Indian Committee. In 1816, weighty Quakers dispatched the twenty-two-year-old Joseph Elkinton. Elkinton had some experience educating African Americans but none teaching Indians. Even while lacking knowledge of Seneca language and culture, Elkinton took initiative on the reservation to have a successful school; his work, while benevolent, almost resulted in Senecas killing him. The problems Quakers faced to school the Allegany Senecas in earlier decades, to say the least, were tame in comparison to the chaos that Elkinton’s reservation-based efforts unleashed. Between 1816 and 1822, Elkinton meddled in reservation affairs, and in multiple diaries, he chronicled the tumultuous period during which he tried to build his schoolhouse. This study adopts a community-centered perspective with respect to the Allegany school-related debate—an approach advocated by scholars such as Richard White and Joshua Piker. Fortunately, Elkinton’s uncommonly rich diaries yield a unique local-level perspective on Allegany Seneca politics, which has remained largely unavailable until now, when analyzed in light of ethnographic, ethnohistorical works and other historical evidence. Elkinton devised categories for the groups vying for power as the school-related debate took its shape: “supporters of improvements” versus “those opposed to improvements.” Closer examination of Elkinton’s many diaries shows that both Allegany school coalitions were the work of specific leaders with specific clan and village ties.

“If slavery made race, its larger purpose was to make class,” historian Ira Berlin argues, “and the fact that the two were made simultaneously by the same process has mystified both.” The European and Euro-American conquest of Native American peoples and lands is analogous. Conquest did create a race; the English names—Indians, First Peoples, and Native Americans—are evidence. However, race was not the motivation for exploration and expropriation even if racism was a key enabling factor. Although the cultural consequences were devastating, the goal of that devastation was primarily economic: the acquisition of land. Elizabeth Cook-Lynn makes a similar claim when she states, “The oldest racism in America was about the economically motivated, government-sponsored theft of lands occupied by others.” With a similar focus on economics, Bill Mullen asserts that slave narratives such as Frederick Douglass’s are texts about social class, particularly the working class. He argues that “the value of Douglass’s economic analysis and critique is often obscured for literary critics by the phenomenon of its subjectivity.” I see a related pattern in interpretations of modern Native American literature. Critics have given more attention to identity and culture than economics and social relations. Without recognizing the structural hierarchies that shape Native Americans’ lives, critics who analyze identity in isolation can only develop “a reading bled dry of its most troubling and contradictory meanings.” A number of factors militate against the development of socioeconomic readings of Native American literature. Critics and teachers often share the dominant cultural ideology, which evades structural problems with individualistic rhetoric. Having found liberal humanism a satisfying standpoint from which to view the world, too often we have used critical approaches that give little recognition to characters’ (or our own) socioeconomic situations.

Scientific and technological expertise are needed to address many of the problems and possibilities faced by American Indian communities and individuals. Indian cultures, traditional knowledge, and Indian individuals’ alternative perspectives and unique ideas could aid the advancement of science. Indian access to scientific skills and expertise is insufficient, however, and the potential for Indians to contribute to science is going largely unrealized. This is the case in large part because technological and scientific skill attainment by American Indians has been limited. This article reports results of a study of how Indian students’ subjective cultural identities and internalized specific cultural values affect their views of scientific and technological products and professions. The results indicate that strength of subjective identity as an Indian shapes values in such a way as to negatively impact views of science and technology as they are currently practiced. I argue that the basic methods, knowledge, and techniques of science can be taught and applied in many ways, and that alternative approaches to science education and practice can be devised that would increase Indians’ scientific achievements and make it more likely that indigenous perspectives would influence scientific research and scientific application.

In many indigenous cultures, health is seen as the maintenance of balance among mental, physical, and spiritual well-being rather than the absence of disease. Life out of balance and in conflict with values and protocols—whether through one’s own behavior or intrusive forces—is often seen as a cause of disease and loss of vitality. For example, some see trauma-induced susto, “soul loss” or a sort of soul displacement, as a serious illness (with symptoms akin to post-traumatic stress disorder [PTSD]) that requires a restorative treatment with herbs or, if it is more serious, ceremonial healing. Medicine man George Walking Bear Gillette of the Tubatulabal tribe stated simply that one reason so many people had diabetes was because life was no longer sweet enough. Other illnesses are attributed to neglecting ceremonial obligations, unfulfilled dreams, or immoderate or disrespectful actions. Healing—whether through bone-setting skills, herbal treatment, steam baths, or spiritual practices—is an act of reestablishing balance. Hot and cold balance evenly. Bones are realigned to work together again without pain. Reciprocity between patient and community and/or natural and spirit worlds is set back in harmony and souls are recentered in their bodies. In this system it is rare that a symptom or a part of the body is treated in isolation; mind, body, spirit, environment, and community are all involved. If Native community development could be approached this way and be framed as improving and maintaining integral well-being for the collective, then, ideally, holistic community development could heal deep injuries and fractures, boost internal strengths, balance mental-physical-spiritual needs, and even restore the community’s soul. For example, a community that has been exposed to overwhelming violence or traumatic events could collectively show symptoms similar to those of susto and require a community plan for healing that could be approached in a holistic way, much like traditional approaches to individual health. This approach would have to address more than economic or political development and include the relationships among economy, environment, culture, knowledge, family and society, education, and spirituality in order to restore and maintain the whole community body.

INTRODUCTION Because of news coverage and television publicity, visitors and other observers might think that Indian Country in Southern California is synonymous with “Casino Country.” To be sure, nearly two dozen tribal casinos currently operate here or are being considered for construction in the near future. California ranks first in the nation for the number of Indian casinos; however, the largest single Indian casino complex is in Connecticut! But the casino phenomenon is a unique change on the trust landscape. When I was researching Mission Indian land tenure in the 1960s, nothing suggested that local bands and tribes would come to possess the option to run casinos. Today only a small Indian population identifies with gaming and, by rough computation, a very small amount of tribal acreage is so utilized. Putting it into perspective, trust lands represent about 350,000 acres—mostly in the three counties of Riverside, San Bernardino, and San Diego—of an aggregate regional acreage around 22.6 million. These lands are within an enlarged Southern California region that extends from the Pacific coast, east to the Colorado River, south to parts of northern Baja California, and north into the Mohave Desert, Owens Valley, and Death Valley. That works out to be less than 2 percent of the land in Southern California. In aggregate, casinos exist on less than two hundred acres.