American Indian Culture and Research Journal

American Indians are often overlooked in the story of the struggle for marriage equality in the United States. Using anthropological approaches, this article synthesizes and extends scholarly knowledge about Native participation in this struggle. With sovereign rights to control their own domestic relations, tribes have been actively revising their marriage laws, laws that reflect the range of reservation climates for sexual and gender-identity minorities. Debates in Indian Country over the rights of these minorities and over queering marriage bring to the fore issues that help define the distinctiveness of Native participation in the movement. These include issues of “tradition,” “culture,” and Christianity.

This article analyzes Comanche elder LaDonna Harris's adoption of actor Johnny Depp as a response to the cultural politics of Disney's casting him as a Comanche Tonto in The Lone Ranger 2013. In addition to onscreen performers and characters like Depp's Tonto, in my reading “cinematic Comanches” also include offscreen cultural critics and social actors who, like Harris, maneuver through thorny layers of representing the indigenous. Focusing my inquiry on how Harris and other cinematic Comanches created opportunities to make kin with Depp, engage Disney, and expand the convoluted discourse on producing Comanche representation and cultural knowledge, I discuss Lone Ranger's hype and protest, Harris's reframing of the adoption as captivity, and post-captivity collaborations between Comanches, Depp, and Disney. I suggest that by recreating a traditional Comanche mode of kinship in the twenty-first century, Harris took Depp in as a son to honor his onscreen efforts, to express Comanche self-determination in kinship, and to increase the cultural capital of the Comanche Nation.

Although representations of Native Americans have frequently been used in advertising, historically Natives themselves have been ignored as a consumer market. This paper evaluates the Nike N7 Twitter campaign, which uses Native athletes and imagery to market to Natives, in the context of theory on marketing to ethnic minorities. Specifically, it explores whether the campaign is successfully reaching Native consumers, a historically difficult market to reach, whether advertisements must be granularly targeted to specific tribal cultures, and whether embedded ethnic cues within promotional images on the N7 account affect Twitter users' engagement with the post.

News discourse about treaty issues privileges postcolonial discourses about ownership and governance of land and excludes a wide range of indigenous voices. this paper explores how news items interweave the frame “indigenous peoples as a threat” into their coverage of two events, analyzed as separate case studies, that have significant implications for the control of land in British Columbia. The first case study event is the Nisga'a's 1998 referendum on the Nisga'a Treaty and the second is the 2002 British Columbia Treaty Referendum. Reportage of both events was highly racialized and organized around the presumed threat that indigenous peoples pose to settler values. Discourse orbits around several rhetorical arguments, including “‘our’ government is colluding with First Nations to impose race-based governments on British Columbians; and “the will of the majority must prevail over the political maneuverings of minorities and other ‘special interest groups.'” While news discourse focused on the potentially destructive impact of treaties on settler interests, any discussion of the enormous risks treaties represent for indigenous peoples was completely absent.

Tucked away in the Smoky Mountains of western North Carolina on the Cherokee Indian Reservation is a living tradition that predates the “discovery” of America: the game of stickball. Researchers have reported on the sport and the complex rituals that surround it since the early-twentieth century. Often referred to as the “little brother of war,” it is much more than a game. With the purpose of uncovering the reasons for playing the game and its larger meaning as part of players' Cherokee identity and culture, the primary investigator (a native of Cherokee and an enrolled member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee), interviewed eleven current and former stickball players about what stickball means to them and its importance to Cherokee culture. Three main themes emerged: (1) cultural preservation; (2) community reinforcement; and (3) ethnic identity affirmation. This study exemplifies the importance of sport as a tool for cultural preservation and explores the emphasis and integration of the game in the Cherokee community.

Narratives of innocence are stories born of the dispossession of bodies from lands that continue to serve as vectors of violence, reenacting the scene that created them. The term was introduced by Boyd Cothran to describe the cunning afterlife of conflicts between settler states and indigenous peoples: state violence yields stories that reiterate erasure, weaponizing memory to forget the lessons of colonization. In a situation of violence that produces silence, names resonate as instruments of clarity, cutting through erasure. Genocide is a name historians are now using to describe a process of erasure that created modern California, a process indigenous people have long discussed that narratives of innocence have silenced. Through a reading of Cothran's book Remembering the Modoc War and Benjamin Madley's book An American Genocide against an older literary genre on violence ranging from Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee to Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, I take California as an emblem of a profound alteration in the way the United States processes the trace memory of indigenous erasure. A historical reckoning is now underway as indigenous people reembody their occupied geographies, returning their stories to the land and, in the process, reconfiguring the national narrative.