American Indian Culture and Research Journal

“What is history but a fable agreed upon.” So wrote Napoleon Bonaparte, a man considered by many to be a tactical genius and by others to be a bloody butcher. Reality lies somewhere between, part of the fable. Defined as “a narrative making a cautionary point . . . a story about legendary persons or exploits . . . [or] a falsehood,” the term fable characterizes, in a positive and a negative sense, the treatment of many historic episodes, including the Navajo Long Walk period. Much has been written of this time when the Navajo people, following what appears to be a fairly short resistance, surrendered in droves to the US military, collected at Fort Defiance and other designated sites, then moved in a series of “long walks” to Fort Sumner (Hwéeldi) on the Pecos River in eastern New Mexico. There was much that preceded these events. Stretching back to the beginning of Euro-American occupation of the Southwest, the Spanish initiated a slave trade against the “wild” or unsettled (non-Puebloan) Indians that pitted various groups against their neighbors. Two major players in the arena were the Utes and Navajos. They shared relatively few years of peace, remaining gener- ally in a state of warfare that simmered somewhere between hostility and open conflict. As with so many colonial wars, the beginning of these tit-for-tat reprisals is lost to history, but its constancy is not. Spanning the Spanish, Mexican, and early territorial period of the American Southwest, the slave trade was a prime source of fuel for intertribal conflict and provided the owner of captive Indians with labor to enhance comfort and spur economic development. Much of what characterized this period of history and Navajo/Ute relations is comparable to what happened to other peoples in different settings.

Academia has long grappled with the relationship between filmmaking form and content. Film history courses are driven, in part, by aesthetic innovation, and it is not uncommon to study the editing advances made by D. W. Griffith and the silent-era Soviet filmmakers, the exploration of deep focus photography by Orson Welles and Gregg Toland, the shift to location shooting by the Italian neorealists, the implementation of jump cuts and freeze frames by the French New Wave, and the long-take sensibility of experimental filmmaker Michael Snow. The interest in formal innovation is complemented by skepticism toward conventional Hollywood form. Playwright and theorist Bertolt Brecht has impacted academia, and in his theoretical essays, he took dead aim at the naturalist theater co-opted by Hollywood, in which characters must establish their names, relationships, problems, and the play’s themes through seemingly casual conversation. Brecht felt that the logically built, well-made play in which a problem snowballs into a nail-biting drama of high suspense and then culminates in a cathartic climax engaged the viewer’s emotions without touching the intellect. His alternative approach (“epic theater”) sought to block emotional identification while provoking thought. The destruction of stage illusion, he believed, would create a distance between audience and characters, enabling a detached, critical attitude and a better understanding of the human condition. Brecht’s theories have helped shape race- and gender-related film theory. By destroying conventional filmmaking form, one also destroys the unfortunate race, class, and gender bias tied to that form. “New meanings have to be created by disrupting the fabric of the male bourgeois cinema within the text of the film,” Claire Johnston wrote in the 1970s. “Any revolutionary strategy must challenge the depiction of reality; it is not enough to discuss the oppression of women within the text of the film; the language of the cinema/the depiction of reality must also be interrogated, so that a break between ideology and text is effected.”

The federal policy of termination against Native Americans was on a high roll from 1946 to 1954. The policy received explicit expression in House Concurrent Resolution 108, passed in 1953, which stated that “Indians should be made subject to the same laws and entitled to the same privileges and responsibilities as are applicable to other citizens of the United States” and that “at the earliest possible time, all the Indian tribes should be freed from federal supervision and control and from all disabilities and limitations specially applicable to Indians.” The policy culminated in 1954, when the Senate and House Indian Affairs Subcommittees organized joint sessions on the termination of twelve reservations, including the Flathead Indian Reservation in western Montana, home to the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes (see fig. 1). Historians have generally argued that the termination policy ended either in the 1960s with the civil rights movement or at the latest when President Richard Nixon publicly declared the end to the policy in his address to the US Congress on 8 July 1970. By that time federal Indian affairs had moved toward self-determination policy, whereby American Indians could and should obtain more responsibility for running their own reservations with reduced federal input. This article proposes to present a reevaluation of termination by using the Salish and Kootenai as a case study and specifically focuses on the internal dynamics of the tribal politics from the early 1970s to the 2003 referendum on the linear descent proposal, which to many tribal members meant diluting tribal “blood” so significantly that it would parallel termination of the Salish and Kootenai tribes.

During the past century, dramatic changes have occurred in the way death is experienced in the United States. A death in 1900 typically occurred as a result of sudden illness and injury among the young at home. Today, Americans are more likely to die from long-term, chronic illness in later life, often in institutional settings. In addition to the many cultural transformations and medical advances that occurred during the last century, new philosophies and responses to end of life (EOL) have also evolved. For example, the health care community may be more apt to approach death as a natural part of life instead of as the enemy or a sign of failure. Palliative care encompasses physical, psychosocial, and spiritual dimensions to promote quality of life at EOL, and by using a team approach, hospice care is typically provided during the last six months to terminally ill people and their families, whether in the home or an alternate setting. Previous research has been conducted to understand Americans’ preferences for EOL care. A nationwide study, A Means to a Better End, reported that 70 percent of Americans would prefer to die in their homes, free of pain, and surrounded by their loved ones. However, only 25 percent of Americans (and 19.3% of South Dakotans) actually die at home under these preferred conditions. It appears that what Americans want at EOL is not what they are getting.

Literary �giants� are� sparked� by �evolutionary,� even� revolutionary �cultural� shifts— from� societal� emancipation� to� progressive� change,� breakaway� civil� chaos �to� the� rebirth� of� a� nation.� Scholars� trace� the� 1855� American� Renaissance� to� locally� rooted� writers,� Herman� Melville� and� Ralph� Waldo� Emerson� across� to� Edgar� Allan �Poe� and� Walt �Whitman, �in� full� stride� to� define� themselves �as� emancipated� natives �of �a �new �land. �Euro-American �modernism� sprang �from� 1920s �armistice� relief� and� wasteland� angst fueled� by� the� maverick� vigor� of� Ezra� Pound� and� company.� The �antiwar �1950s �Beats �triggered �a �literary� revolution� that� catalyzed� writers �from �James �Baldwin �to �Adrienne� Rich�and� cultural �callouts� everywhere.

Vine Deloria Jr., named in 1974 by Time Magazine as one of the twelve most important religious thinkers in the world, passed away 13 November 2005. The many accolades after his death, ranging from the obituary in the New York Times (“Champion of Indian Rights”) to the conference held one year after his passing at the University of Arizona (“Where do we go from here? The legacies of Vine Deloria, Jr.”), attest to the monumental contributions he made during his life in so many areas (for example, law, Indian studies, spirituality, political organization, metaphysics, and history); he was a Renaissance man. Deloria wrote numerous books that deal with spiritual themes: God Is Red comes to mind as one of the first. His recent book that deals with spirituality, The World We Used to Live In, was published in the spring of 2006, several months after his death. Deloria and I discussed spiritual and religious themes for almost three decades (from the time I took a graduate seminar with him until the summer before his passing). We engaged in an ongoing dialogue about religious freedom (in particular the free exercise clause) as well as the role of images of God in Western and non-Western traditions. This commentary’s primary purpose is to begin to examine how Deloria deals with the divine in particular and the holy in general. It was only during the last year of his life (through correspondence and conversations) and the year after his death (by reading his works and an unpublished manuscript