American Indian Culture and Research Journal

In the 1960s an increasing number of Native Americans began to express the need for an Indian college or university. Three major developments of the decade inspired them. The first was the rise of Indian activism in the 1960s. Although Native people had always been politically assertive, their activism became more frequent and visible. In part, the larger societal protests and the civil rights movement molded Indian activism in the 1960s. Tribal people intensified their already existing grievances against the larger dominant society, and this included their opposition to the American government’s age-old assimilationist policies for Native Americans, including the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs’ (BIA) 1950s termination policy that dissolved various tribal governments and Indian reservations across the nation. Tribal people wanted cultural pluralism, and one way to express Indian cultural preservation was through an Indian college or university. The second major development was the socioeconomic reforms of the Great Society, inaugurated by President Lyndon Johnson beginning in 1964. Under the Great Society the federal government provided financial support to help economically disadvantaged people develop programs to improve their quality of life. It was in part Johnson’s larger domestic battle against the war on poverty. Native Americans, along with other racial minorities, became the recipients of the various programs and federal funds, especially the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO). Indian activism and the Great Society—which were two unrelated entities that shared some common goals—thus encouraged increasing numbers of Indians to push for an Indian college or university in the 1960s.

INTRODUCTION As one of the most recognized social problems, crime represents a constant focus of many media accounts in television, movies, and newspapers. Crime stories are a staple of day-to-day newspaper reporting; thus the media may profoundly shape the public’s stereotypes and beliefs toward crime and perpetrators of criminal activity. Individuals’ notions of crime may be influenced by the media practice of emphasizing serious crime and overreporting crime relative to the actual crime rate. Of special interest to social scientists is the media’s portrayal of racial/ethnic minorities in crime reporting. It is possible that simply identifying a suspect’s racial/ethnic minority status may contribute to the maintenance of certain “minorities as criminal” stereotypes and could impact the readers’ perceptions about the threat posed by minorities. This problem could be exacerbated if certain contextual or situational forces influenced the overrepresentation of racial/ethnic minorities as perpetrators in crime articles. Involvement in crime, an increase in minority populations, and periods of racial/ethnic conflict may heighten displays of prejudice and discrimination that could result in differential racial/ethnic identification in crime reporting. Although a growing body of research has examined racial/ethnic minority characterization in media images of crime, the primary focus has been on television and movies. Less research has concentrated on how the print media, specifically newspapers, portrays minorities in crime news. These analyses of media accounts largely ignore American Indian populations, which is some- what surprising given that American Indians are impacted by crime at a higher rate than most other racial/ethnic groups. For instance, American Indians are subjected to rates of violence twice that of the general US population and possess the highest victimization rate of all racial/ethnic groups. American Indians are incarcerated at a rate 38 percent higher than the national rate. However, recent research has indicated that this overrepresentation may be the result of continued discrimination due to the unique historical and political status of American Indian groups. Previous research on American Indians and crime has been criticized for ignoring the importance of these contextual factors. Thus, the question remains whether the bias toward American Indians in the past has continued into the recent era as a result of their identification in crime articles.

“I can still remember walking with my mom to Longview Elementary School for the first day of school,” said Martha Sadongei, thinking back to her childhood in the 1960s. “I remember seeing all these kids, all these parents,” she recalled. “It was crowded, and it was noisy, with the echoing little hallways— they were short hallways but there was still a lot of noise. And I remember my mom taking me to the classroom. I don’t remember being scared. I just remember her taking me and finding the room, and that was it. She just said, ‘This is where you’re going to start school, so just listen to what they say, and I’ll be back. I’m not leaving you. I’ll be back, but you need to go to school.’” Reassured by her mother’s words, Martha Sadongei took her seat in her new classroom and prepared to listen to what her teacher had to tell her. In one sense, Martha Sadongei’s story is like the story of almost every American child in the twentieth century. In other ways, however, it is different. Martha Sadongei is an American Indian, the child of a Kiowa father and a Tohono O’odham mother. Yet her story is not only different from that of non-Indian children but also from that of many Indian children. Instead of attending a federal boarding school or a reservation school, as did many Native youths in the twentieth century, Sadongei attended a school in the heart of a large city: Phoenix, Arizona. Even though there were tens of thousands of Native Americans like her who attended urban public schools between 1945 and 1975, historians have been rather slow to learn their stories. They have now produced several good studies of federal boarding schools and federal Indian education policy, but they have almost completely over-looked urban Indian school experiences. This is no small oversight, for by 1970 the number of urban Indians in the United States was nearly the same as the number of reservation Indians. Phoenix, the focus of this essay, is an especially good place to start listening to urban Indian schooling stories, for it emerged in the post–World War II years as a city with one of the largest urban Indian populations in the nation.

Dance itself is a prayer. . . . The spiritual comes with you wherever you dance. —Nez Perce powwow dancer If I did not sing or dance, I would not have a culture. —Kwakwaka'wakw potlatch dancer LIVES LIVED DANCING In collaboration with the Kwakwaka'wakw First Nations’ U’mista Cultural Centre and the Nez Perce Tribe’s Cultural Resources Program, our research addresses aspects of the recent history and contemporary roles of dance in their societies from the dancers’ perspectives. The social science literature commonly documents the cultural history of dances and their performance within one or associated Canadian First Nations and Native American societies or considers broader issues of Native peoples’ sociocultural identity and politics that event participants and attendees may be expressing. We have focused on dance from the dancer’s experiential level, while their bodies become the locus of complex levels of meanings. This study includes two groups from very different cultural and linguistic backgrounds, and the contexts of Nez Perce powwow and Kwakwaka'wakw potlatch also are quite distinctive. However, addressing what is meaningful to the dancers reveals commonalities as well as variation in issues of Native peoples’ cultural maintenance, adaptation, and innovation, while contributing insights on identity issues as the dancers’ individual experiences are embedded in wider sociopolitcal contexts.

Recently some writers and scholars have complained that the academy, particularly American Indian Studies (AIS) programs, gives too much attention to American Indian literature while ignoring scholarly works that focus on the pressing needs of American Indian communities in the areas of economic development, social justice, and sovereignty, among others. For example, in the preface to Indigenizing the Academy: Transforming Scholarship and Empowering Communities, Devon Abbott Mihesuah and Angela Cavender Wilson write: “Awards are seemingly presented to . . . poets and novelists. . . . Not enough is being written about tribal needs and concerns, but an inordinate amount of attention is focused on fiction.” Almost every person teaching in AIS programs probably would agree that attention needs to be focused on tribal needs and concerns. However, as a professor of American Indian literature, I must respectfully disagree with Mihesuah and Wilson’s assertion that too much attention is focused on fiction. It seems that quite the opposite is true. Intelligent people of good faith will disagree on this issue, but one way of testing the validity of the claim that too much attention is given to American Indian literature to the detriment of writing that emphasizes tribal needs and concerns is to examine the situation through three different lenses: 1. coursework offerings in AIS programs and departments and course concentrations chosen by students in AIS programs 2. the representation of literature and writing about literature versus scholarly writing in the main peer-reviewed journals that publish American Indian articles 3. awards given for literature and nonfiction scholarly writing

Southern California Indian concepts of illness and healing (the causality, prevention, and treatment of illness) have evolved over thousands of years. These concepts and spirituality were closely related, important components of the precontact Southern California Indian worldview, a well-covered topic in Michael Kearney’s World View (1984). Indians’ current beliefs and practices, including their endorsement of biomedical health care, have major effects on their lives today. The varied theoretical perspectives of medical anthropology lead to understanding the past and present influences on their concepts and practices, and the collaboration of applied anthropologists with biomedical practitioners is seen increasingly as crucial to optimizing their care. This article summarizes written material on illness and healing concepts among Southern California Indians and related Northern Baja California tribes from the prehistoric era to the present, primarily for use by social science researchers and teachers. The article’s secondary objective is to provide a background for public health workers and health care practitioners on important prehistorical, historical, and contemporary cultural features. The bibliographic comments begin with pertinent publications on the anthropology of medicine and are followed by archaeological and ethnographic works and contemporary studies of importance in understanding the Indians’ current health-related concepts and practices, which should be considered in organizing and providing their care. Although beliefs and practices are usually associated with geographical or tribal groupings, it is important to realize that there are important intragroup and intergroup variations in these cultural traits.