American Indian Culture and Research Journal

On 19 June 1916, one hundred thousand tourists gathered together in Rock Island, Illinois, to watch an “Old Indian Village” go up in flames. President Wilson foreshadowed this theater of genocide earlier that evening. From the oval office, Wilson pushed a button that resulted in the electrification of the Fort Armstrong Centennial Celebration. The following morning celebrants woke up from this awesome display of regeneration through violence and attended a historical pageant named Progress. Members of the Red Men of Davenport and the Ladies Auxiliary reenacted the 1780 battle in which George Rogers Clark descended on a Sac Indian village on the Rock River and destroyed it. After the 1916 reenactment, The Rock Island Argus reported that as the village smoldered, “an Indian prophet rose proclaiming the early close of the supremacy of the red man and the approach of the day when the white would rule.” The newspaper promoted the event with a headline that read: “Tribal Ceremonies Exemplified, After Which Whites Attack and Leave Place Mass of Ruins.” At first glance, the Fort Armstrong Centennial Celebration confirms the scientific racism of the age. But the Progress exhibit could not have taken place without the help of Meskwaki tribal members who were paid to build the Old Indian Village that later went up in flames. The Fort Armstrong Centennial Celebration was just one event in a series of field days, powwows, and pageants in which Native and non-Native worlds came together. Far from evidence of the inevitable decline of American Indians, Meskwaki participants used events such as the centennial celebration to make a case for community survival even as advocates of allotment and boarding schools sought to diminish tribal sovereignty. By 1916, the Meskwaki people had grown accustomed to hosting a range of Christian missionaries, anthropologists, hobbyists, and tourists who began traveling to their settlement during the last decade of the nineteenth century.

The protection of sacred sites—defined here as areas of religious significance to a group of people—remains a contentious issue in many world regions and a significant dynamic in the uneasy relationship between the US government and many American Indian tribes. Even the definition of sacred site and the establishment of defensible policy principles to be followed when sacred sites are affected or threatened by changing land uses have defied conscientious attempts to clarify terms; provide equal treatments of diverse ethnic, religious, and place-based communities; and apply lessons learned in one setting to other cases. Why do such problems persist? Sacred-site disputes, including the Arizona case discussed here, are embedded in continental-scale colonialist encounters, legal frameworks, and nationalist hesitancies to recognize and respect minority nations’ interests in carrying forward important and distinctive aspects of their heritage. The United Nations and governments at other levels have occasionally responded to pleas for the protection of both constructed and unmodified sacred sites.

Academic programs that focus on the histories, cultures, and contemporary issues of the peoples indigenous to North America, whether they are called American Indian studies, Native American studies, First Nations studies, or, for some as program ideologies evolve, indigenous studies, are not new pursuits. As Native studies continues to develop, administrators, faculties, staff, and students will face questions about theory and methodology and their practical applications. Perhaps inevitably, formulaic theorizing and concerns about methodology seem to evoke doctrinaire responses, compelling the discipline’s thinkers to codify the principles in their programs’ mission statements. Native studies has a continually growing body of critical literature recommending or implying how to theorize the discipline and develop methodological strategies. What this article will offer are ways to think about theory, method, and practice in Native studies from the perspective of the Certificate Program in Native American Indian Studies (CPNAIS) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass Amherst), a large public institution in the Northeast that draws from a regional population of Native undergraduates in contrast to private institutions like the Ivy League and “Little Ivy” schools, whose students largely come from western federally recognized tribes and whose programs emphasize western Native histories. From this vantage, the discussion will contextualize aspects of the philosophical and pedagogical challenges shared in general with Native studies programs anywhere but that are germane to the UMass Amherst effort. To set up this discussion compels some reference to struggles going on in the older interdisciplinary field of American studies. Similarities regarding theorizing American studies as well as questions about its viability to Native studies offer a useful comparison that cannot be fully covered here. But the coincidental timing of the younger Native studies facing similar structural and epistemological challenges long affecting the older discipline is too ironical to ignore.

Willard W. Beatty (1891–1961) lived most of his early life in San Francisco. As a teenager there, Beatty experienced the first philosophic influence on his life—a profound influence that he would later incorporate into much of his educational philosophy. As a high school student, Beatty attended the California School of Mechanical Arts, or the James Lick School—a secondary trade school for high school students “drawn from the whole state of California.” His son, Walcott H. Beatty, in a letter to this author noted, “I believe that it was his experience [at the James Lick School] which greatly influenced his thinking with regard to education.” The James Lick School offered an educational program that was vocational in nature and whose hallmark was a successful apprenticeship program. The founder of the school, James Lick, was a self-made millionaire and a piano maker by profession. A self-educated man, Lick never forgot his origin as a skilled mechanic. He continually sought to enhance his own education not as a means of escape for the laboring man but as a “means to enriched living.” Willard Beatty wrote in 1944 that “Lick thought of things of the spirit, not merely of material well-being. . . . In this he anticipated by a generation the philosophy of the British Labor Party.”

In September 1999, Martha Manuel Chacon and Pauline Ormego Murillo, two tribal elders from the San Manuel Reservation located near Highland, California, spoke of their experiences with field nurses and doctors contracted by the Office of Indian Affairs. During the course of the conversation, the eighty-seven-year-old Chacon reached into her purse and produced an old photograph from the 1930s depicting images of herself, Dr. John Evans, and field nurse Mabel Cowser. Chacon explained that the people of her tribe thought highly of both of these non-Native health care providers because of their concern for the good health of Native American children. Chacon agreed to talk at length about the relationship between the people at San Manuel and field nurses but at some future time. Unfortunately, shortly after this meeting, she became ill, was hospitalized, and ultimately died. Her remarks about the importance of Western nurses and doctors to the well-being of Indian children of the Mission Indian Agency left a lasting impression. On 30 March 2001, exactly a year after Chacon’s death, the people of San Manuel Reservation held a memorial service honoring Martha Chacon. During the course of that gathering, George Murillo shared that Dr. Evans brought Western medicine, or scientifically based medicine, to the people of San Manuel. Evans was devoted to good health and served the people from roughly 1902 until his death in 1943. When the people of the San Manuel Reservation learned of his death, they felt great sorrow and honored the good physician by assigning six young men from the reservation to serve as pall-bearers. Many Indians in Southern California held public-health doctors and field nurses in high esteem and never forgot their contribution to the health and well-being of Indian children. The work of the Office of Indian Affairs to improve children’s health developed slowly during the first two decades of the twentieth century and accelerated after 1924 with a national investigation into American Indian affairs.

Losing a Native language is like losing a relative. It is gone forever, never to return except in fond memories of words and phrases handed down by parents and grandparents but only scarcely used or understood by the current, bereaved generation. Gone the language, gone the tradition. The message is that memories of past speech are not enough to sustain a tribe, a tradition, a people. We need to talk. Voices resound on all the Lakota reservations: “We are losing our language. We are afraid because as goes the language, so goes the culture.” Is it really a dilemma? Yes. A recent one? Hardly. I heard these sentiments for the first time sixty years ago at Pine Ridge. Elderly men and women criticized the younger generation: “They don’t even know their language. They don’t even know their relatives.” A foreshadowing of the future, perhaps; a Lakota prophecy, maybe. But presently the reality of a Lakota Oyate without its own language has surfaced accompanied by a near hysteria over how to delay what is perceived to be THE END. Recently I received two announcements. The first was an invitation to a conference on language-immersion classes being held by the staff of Sitting Bull College, which is located on the Standing Rock Reservation. Sacheen Whitetail Cross, tribal education manager of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, heads the conference.