American Indian Culture and Research Journal

INTRODUCTION American Indian treaties and treaty law may seem to fall solely within the purview of legal methodology and critical analysis, yet the 367 American Indian treaties signed with the US federal government beg for the type of dissection and analysis generally associated with cultural and literary critical theory. The tools by which texts are dissected can elucidate the mutable nature of treaty discourse and cut to the core of the hierarchical power structures inherent in relations between the US government and American Indian nations. Treaties are discourses that have had, and continue to have, literal real-world impact. Moreover, treaties have created a paradoxical situation for American Indians who push for sovereign political autonomy from the United States: treaties grant and deny sovereignty. In this article, I examine the discourse of American Indian treaties, and subsequent twentieth-century treaty legislation, with a critical eye toward the sociopolitical contingencies, historical and contemporary, that determine how these discourses achieve meaning. Ultimately, I argue that treaties have become “fourth-world” texts that create this paradoxical notion of sovereignty. In understanding the nature of fourth-world texts, current American Indian activists and scholars can effectively influence how treaties create meaning in the twenty-first century. There are two primary texts for this essay. The first is the Treaty of Medicine Creek (1854) signed in western Washington between the US government and nine American Indian nations. It is the first of ten so-called Stevens Treaties, named after then governor Isaac I. Stevens, signed between 1854 and 1855 (the Medicine Creek treaty served as a model for subsequent Stevens Treaties).

With its roots in ancient rhetoric and medieval liturgy, the term trope now refers to a figure of speech that organizes a set of complex ideas into a kind of linguistic shorthand. A trope is thus a phrase or image that conveys more than its literal meaning. Those of us trained in the Western literary canon have learned to recognize a myriad of repeated tropes that underpin the major stories in that canon. For the purposes of the analysis to follow, two tropes are pertinent: the pastoral and the fortunate fall. The word pastoral comes out of the classical tradition and functions as a trope by conjuring up images of happy peasants peacefully herding their flocks in some bucolic countryside. But pastoral thereby also suggests itself as the antithesis of (or even refuge from) the ills of the crowded and hectic city. It is thus a kind of imaginative shorthand for an inherent tension between the urban and the rural. The second familiar trope comes from Christian sources. Originally, the fortunate fall referred to the idea that the sin of Adam and Eve—their disobedience to God, which resulted in the expulsion from Eden and the entry of death into the world—nonetheless set in motion a chain of events that ultimately led to the resurrection’s promise of salvation and eternal life. Over the centuries, moreover, the meaning of the trope expanded to connote any circumstance in which good eventually emanates from evil or error. Thus, as scholars trained in literary studies come to understand, literary artifacts—or imaginative texts of any kind—are inevitably structured by one or more of the tropes available within the reservoir of tropes that circulate in any culture. But as students of literature also understand, tropes are not universal.

INTRODUCTION Global deliberations of HIV/AIDS today increasingly describe social inequalities as conditions of the AIDS pandemic. Agencies and advocates address global public health by arguing that disease transmission and its effects are enabled by power relations such as homophobia and sexism, racism and poverty, and the colonial histories that foster them. Saying that such conditions enable HIV’s disproportionate spread surpasses tales from the disease’s first decade of risk groups, which Cindy Patton has read as a “tropical” logic that locates danger in the perverse embodiment of marginal sexual, racial, or national groups. Current claims also modify how some activists countered risk-group tales by addressing practice in arguments that risk arises not from who you are, but what you do. If such a shift invited harm-reduction approaches to HIV, it also could avoid considering how one’s choices are shaped by one’s locations in power relations, which can create illusions of choice. Early AIDS activists argued the pandemic’s power-laden social construction by critiquing public health institutions for complicity in the spread of AIDS or by mobilizing people affected by AIDS to alter conditions in their lives. A key mode activists used to address social marginality was the production of new media. AIDS activists recorded experiences, shared health information, and articulated agendas for change in creative texts, visual art, video, and performance that marked and challenged the power relations that marginalized people affected by AIDS. Thus, when Paul Farmer famously argued that “critical perspectives on emerging infections must ask how large-scale social forces come to have their effects on unequally positioned individuals,” he echoed theory already proposed by AIDS activists and their media.

RENEWING HAUDENOSAUNEE TIES IN 1925 On 10 October 1925 a ceremony was planned for the scenic fields behind the former tribal school in Oneida, Wisconsin. The event was expected to accomplish a number of goals: it would assert political authority by a group of Oneidas, establish traditional leadership of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy locally, and affirm the Wisconsin Oneida’s ties to the Confederacy to tribal and nontribal members. The local newspaper described the ceremony in terms that stressed both the quaint and exotic qualities of this seemingly anachronistic event. “Chanting the sacred installation ritual originated by Hiawatha and Chief Deganawida more than six hundred years ago, Chief George Van Avery, law giver of the Onondagas Indian nation, will raise to Chiefhood at Oneida tomorrow eighteen Oneida descendants of ancient chiefs at what promises to be one of the greatest and most picturesque Indian ceremonials held in Wisconsin since the days when Indian law was supreme. . . . Elaborate preparations, seeking to make the scene as realistic as possible, have been made.” The newspaper account is one of several about the Oneida in Wisconsin that appeared in the early twentieth century—stories that conveyed a continual sense of surprise at the ways the tribe had managed to remain different from the surrounding non-Native community even while the overall tone confidently reassured its readers that the Oneida were assimilating into American society. Newspapers were particularly interested in Native ceremonies, for they captured the public’s fascination with what was regarded as the foreign customs of a people situated firmly in the past.

Inuit myths, folklore, and material culture are filled with examples of people who turn into animals. Margaret Lantis, a well-known Eskimologist of the mid-twentieth century, once commented that human-animal transformation in Inuit mythology had an “immediacy and a reality” that was unknown in other parts of the world. It is hard to discern from more contemporary ethnography, however, whether transformation still occupies a meaningful place in Inuit life. This article examines present-day Iñupiaq understandings of, and experiences with, human-animal transformation. I offer conventional wisdom on this topic, how such metamorphosis is accomplished, and the cosmological forces that still are believed to operate behind the scenes. This article departs from the customary preoccupation with shamanistic practices and instead focuses on how everyday Iñupiat explain the social and moral significance of turning into an animal. Through this discursive lens, I argue, one may appreciate how different generations of Iñupiat have integrated Christian cosmology and deities into their interpretations of both animals and human animal hybridity. Attention to animality in the context of transformation, rather than during the hunt (the context in which the majority of theories on Inuit-nature relations are generated), provides a unique perspective on how missionization has shaped Iñupiaq conceptions of human-animal relations. This research allows one to consider how today’s “Christianized” animals contrast with the “nonhuman persons” that populate anthropological literature and joins a broader anthropological concern with how indigenous religious practice coexists with world religions.

Over the past decade, a plethora of scholarly resources related to indigenous studies has appeared on free, open-access Web sites. The multidisciplinary nature of indigenous studies research has been reflected in the content of these sites, which feature resources in related disciplines such as history, anthropology, archaeology, law, literature, environment, sociology, health, and political studies. In many cases, the items that appear on these research sites include digital reproductions of the original print text, photographs, or audio/visual recordings. In other cases, the text is simply transcribed from print into an electronic format; newer resources have been created or “born” digital from the outset. Researchers have benefited from the emergence of Internet resources, but there are some significant challenges. The greatest advantage of digital and electronic resources on the Web is, arguably, access. The Internet’s visual and, increasingly, audio nature has made the wide range of formats used in indigenous studies much more accessible to researchers around the world who might otherwise not have had the opportunity to see them. Now more research is conducted online: researchers use online descriptions to prepare in advance of a research trip to make the most productive use of their time; sometimes, the resources required by researchers are located online and make a trip unnecessary. Digitization has been described by photo archivist Andrew Rodger as an excellent “transportation mechanism.”