American Indian Culture and Research Journal

Leadership studies in mainstream American research have become a major focus in business, psychology, philosophy, education and economics. The research literature most often examines leadership independent of cultural context. In this analysis, the author contends that Native ways of leading have much to contribute to the study and practice of leadership in both Native and non-Native communities. This paper considers leadership in American Indian communities as reflected in the leadership literature published from 2003-2008. While there is a paucity of research that focuses on American Indian leadership, there are three leadership models that emerge from the analysis. Woven throughout each model is the significance and power of the proper relationship between the leader and the community. The traditional model stresses the importance of shared responsibility dependent on the changing needs of the community. The studies of Native women as leaders emphasize their collaborative role as co- creators within their communities. The third model considers the development of Native leaders within educational institutions, most notably the tribal colleges. Examination of the three models reveals a re-iteration of Native values which include spirituality, respect, sharing, reverence for the spoken word, silence, leading by example and recognition of accountability based on relationality.

Literary critics have given considerably more attention to Native identity and culture than economics and social relations. Yet from its first sentence, Love Medicine is saturated with economic details that entail class conflicts. Also, with traditional work mostly destroyed, characters must participate in alienating forms of modern labor. This essay uses two reading strategies to analyze how economic structures, class hierarchies and work cultures shape characters’ lives both on and off the reservation. The first emphasizes the ways socioeconomic status impinges on characters’ sense of identity. Here we see June Morrissey’s struggle to maintain her dignity when facing the crushing economically inflected ethnic hierarchies in reservation border towns. We also see Marie’s lifelong struggle to gain acceptance transform her lowest-class status as a “dirty Lazarre.” The second reading strategy uses class as an occupational position to consider Lipsha and Lyman in their work settings. No other contemporary Native novel has as much to say about work and work culture. Lipsha experiences the exploitative conditions of the industrial workforce when the tomahawk factory becomes the new community center, yet he also makes his living as a healer. He offers some hope that tribal traditions can survive, even under the conditions the novel depicts. Lyman as entrepreneur and bureaucrat extraordinaire is more thoroughly lost within the capitalist values of modern work culture. Love Medicine shows the oppressive quality of this work, yet in the end its critique is absorbed into personal solutions. Louise Erdrich imagines no structural remedy. While these two approaches emphasize different aspects of class analysis, they both understand its hierarchies as forms of domination and exploitation. Erdrich sensitively represents her characters’ painful struggles to find well being within systems of oppression.

American Indian/Alaska Native pupils continue to lag behind their white counterparts in the STEM sciences. This gap is attributed to a disjunction between western and Native epistemologies and pedagogies; it also leads to an over-reliance on outside experts and technicians when addressing science related issues on tribal lands. This paper describes an informal science education project for Ojibwe middle-school-age children that is placed entirely within an Ojibwe domain. The project, in which the authors collaborated, incorporates an Organic Video Approach (OVA) that embraces traditional storytelling, Ojibwe epistemologies, and culturally relevant resources. Program participants explore community science issues within a Traditional Ecological Knowledge system and create Ojibwe-centered science videos. Students demonstrate media fluency and accurately reposition important science concepts within the community epistemology. The authors offer it as a portable model that can be adapted for use by diverse Native communities.

Indigenous peoples in Canada have engaged in hundreds of collective action events. The media are the key means through which the general public learns about these actions. However, the media do not simply mirror events. Instead, coverage tends to emphasize certain aspects of indigenous peoples’ collective action events while overlooking others. While early research emphasized the tendency of the mainstream media to portray these events as violent and militant, more recent scholarship has focused on nationalism and the ways that coverage of these actions creates an “us” vs. “them” binary. In this paper we build on this latter work by identifying the specific characteristics associated with each side of this binary. We analyze several hundred Canadian newspaper articles about a key set of events that took place during the 1990s. We find that the media repeatedly draws on frames that portray Indigenous peoples’ protest as criminal, divisive, and expensive. These assessments are made in implicit contrast with non-Indigenous people, or “good” citizens, as law-abiding, peaceful, and tax paying. Media stories therefore frame Indigenous challengers in a way that make them appear to be less deserving citizens of the nation.

Self-rated anti-American Indian attitudes were examined for the influence on domestic violence culpability perceptions when the domestic violence actors’ race (American Indian or European American) and alcohol use (intoxicated or not) were varied. Those higher in anti-American Indian attitudes produced more negative culpability ratings concerning American Indian women involved in domestic violence than those low in American Indian bias. This has implications for health system treatment and legal interventions and processing. Education concerning American Indian cultural issues and biases against them is needed for those working with American Indian health and justice systems.

Communication patterns and explanatory processes are culturally specific and not often compatible with research data gathering approaches. Given the opportunity to engage in a communication style that is comfortable, understandable, and culturally appropriate for American Indians, the researcher may find that respondents participate fully and more openly. Learning how to ask the questions and understanding the process of engaging the research participant is essential to obtaining research data among American Indian participants. This paper presents a discussion on utilizing storytelling to collect research data from American Indians and posits that engaging the respondent is just as significant a step in the process as the questions asked. Reflections on utilizing storytelling as a data collection methodology and recommendations on the process of engaging the research participant by learning how and when to ask the question are provided.

Although many excellent examples of literary-style American Indian humor exist, they are also often limited by mainstream conventions and tastes regarding both form and content. As a result, they only get us so far in understanding certain realities of Native life, such as those found on reservations. Finding ways to add examination of forms of joking that may be less familiar to the mainstream, such as those often found in tribally specific, nonfiction, and journalistic humor can help provide better balance.