American Indian Culture and Research Journal

The texts of treaties and the journals of treaty negotiations are major sources both for historians and for attorneys engaged in present-day litigation of American Indian rights and land claims. These sources are available in a field largely devoid of documentary evidence on the thoughts and motivations of American Indians. Yet, as Francis Jennings has shown, these documents must be evaluated very critically because white men’s “. . . pens could be as forked as [their] tongues.” Since few Indians could actually read a treaty, Jennings argues that the question to ask is not what a treaty text said but what the white interpreter told the Indians it said. In addition, white treaty commissioners frequently used misleading rhetoric or ignored issues entirely in order to postpone confrontations until such time as their governments chose to enforce a treaty. Diplomatic relations between the English and the Abenaki Indians on the Maine frontier prior to the Seven Years War (French and Indian War) offer a fascinating illustration of these deceptive practices and their effects on Indian-white relations. The foundation of Anglo-Abenaki diplomacy during this period was Dummer’s Treaty, negotiated at three conferences from 1725 to 1727. This agreement was renewed at every subsequent conference during the next three decades and was consistently cited and praised by both the Abenakis and the English as the basis of their relationship. The Abenakis’ favorable, even reverent, attitude toward the treaty contrasts with their repeated refusal to honor their promises as recorded in its text. Their failure to meet its terms contributed to the image of “Barbarous and Perfidious” Indians that was widespread among colonial leaders and was adopted later by historians.

The late 1960s and early 1970s saw a major change in American Indian education. This change was the advent of self-determination in education for some western American Indians. Rough Rock Demonstration School (1966) and Ramah High School (1970), located on different sections of the huge Navajo Reservation, were the first modern American Indian controlled elementary and secondary schools. At the higher education level, the founding of sixteen tribally controlled colleges on western reservations between 1968 and 1978 has initiated self-determination in American Indian post-secondary education. Little research has been done on these schools; in fact, they are unknown to many persons in the field of higher education. Other than persons who have worked at these colleges, few educators know of their importance in American Indian education. This article has been written to inform interested persons about the present status of these tribal colleges, their progress and problems, and to speculate about their future. The first tribally controlled college, Navajo Community College, was chartered by the Navajo Tribe in 1968. Classes were first offered in 1969 at the small reservation town of Many Farms where NCC shared facilities with the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ secondary school. The motivation for founding Navajo Community College was the realization by many Navajos that existing off-reservation White institutions were not meeting the postsecondary education needs of most Navajos. There were too many dropouts, wasted human resources and the preservation and transmission of the Navajo language and traditional culture was discouraged. The Navajo wanted their own college, planned and controlled by their people. They believed that an American Indian controlled college on the reservation would provide services to the tribe and would encourage educated Navajos to return to their homeland where they would provide resident expertise in a number of fields.

Mythography and Dialogue in the Study of Native American Literature The Spoken Word and the Work of Interpretation. By Dennis Tedlock. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983. 365 pp. $35.00 Cloth. $14.95 Paper. Arnold Krupat With this book Dennis Tedlock establishes (or perhaps confirms) his position as one of the handful of indispensable commentators on Native American literatures. Not merely honorific, such an estimate means that it would be hard to imagine any important developments in this field, for the immediate future, that did not take account of Tedlock's work for its wide range and for the excellence of its particular parts. The Spoken Word contains four sections, "Translation and Transcription, "Poetics, "Hermeneutics" and "Toward Dialogue, " each of which contains four essays. Such an arrangement would seem both to invoke a widespread Native American pattern number, and a widespread Euroamerican pattern of disciplinary distinctions. The materials of Part 1, for example, are usually considered the province of social scientists; those of Part 2, of literary theorists; of Part 3, the philosophers; and Part 4-? Part 4 precisely calls into question the preceding distinctions as well as, most importantly, the presumptive distinction between the knower and the known that has founded Western anthropology from its inception until well into the twentieth century. Everywhere there are specifically valuable observations on the narrative practice of the southwestern Zuni, and the Quiche Maya of Guatemala, as there are subtle and finely argued observations on what it means to "do" anthropology-to study an-Other culture-in our post-colonial period.