American Indian Culture and Research Journal

Congress exercised its plenary power over the Omaha and Winnebago tribes in 1910 and 1916 by passing legislation which authorized Thurston County, Nebraska leaders to assess a real estate tax against trust allotments on the Omaha and Winnebago reservations. Congress' tax direction to Thurston County violated a fundamental principle governing relations between the Indian tribes and the United States: that Indian country, which included trust land, was immune from state taxes. A result of this infringement of inherent tribal sovereignty was the eventual loss of Omaha and Winnebago lands through sale. Those who managed to save their lands paid land taxes to the country from 1910 until 1971. An ironic corollary to this unfortunate episode was that tax-paying tribal members did not receive state services because local leaders considered Indians to be wards of the federal government and therefore a federal responsibility. The local taxation of Indian allotments in Thurston County also demonstrated that the United States was unwilling to accept its trust responsibility to individual Indians or to protect tribal integrity. Even though the Omaha Treaty of 1854 specified a formula for the future allotment of Omaha lands, Congress authorized the first actual land allotments on either the Omaha or Winnebago reservations to select Winnebagos in 1871. These eighty-acre allotments were called "Learning allotments," named after the agent who issued them. Congress controlled these individual tracts and prevented local taxation through the instrument of a restricted fee instead of a trust patent. With a restricted fee, the Indian owned title to the land, but the United States imposed certain restrictions to protect the land against alienation. This differs from a trust patent where the United States owned the land but held it in trust for the individual Indian. Because these initial allotments made on the Winnebago reservation were exempt from future land taxes, the Learning allotments were not important in the tax issue. Instead, individual trust allotments carried the eventual burden of local land taxes because the 1910 and 1916 laws specified that only trust lands would be taxed.

Political factionalism in Native American communities has long proven a topic of interest to scholars. An observation by Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr., suggests one compelling reason for this enduring fascination. "[N]o student of Indian societies, " he writes, "doubts the ubiquity nor the importance of factions in Indian affairs past or present." As a political phenomenon, factionalism is central to much of Native American history. It occurs in numerous Native societies, at various points in time, and under a variety of social, political and economic conditions. Yet, as Berkhofer laments, "the study of . . . factionalism is little advanced beyond the superficial description given . . . in 1936." Factionalism, it seems, has been as poorly understood as it is important. One significant cause of the unsatisfactory understanding of factionalism is to be found in the theoretical framework with which scholars initially approached the study of factions. In their earliest formulations, scholars theorized that factions were a uniquely post-contact development. Edward H. Spicer, in summarizing this position, argued that Native American societies, their processes and principles of governance rooted in consensus decision-making, did not expect "as a constant feature of community life any basic differences of viewpoint." The permanent presence of Europeans or Euramericans "almost immediately introduced a serious issue for dissent." Simply by their presence, these outsiders introduced a second set of cultural alternatives to which Native peoples had to adjust. This challenge to cultural and political consensus struck Native societies at their weakest point. Native societies fractured over which European-derived elements they wanted to accept, or the degree to which they wished to become involved with the newcomers as trading partners or military allies. The one condition Native societies could not handle was diversity; the sustained presence of Europeans or Euramericans forced them into just this untenable situation. Factions erupted inevitably from this unresolvable dilemma.

The first European to meet and trade with the Native Americans of the Pacific Northwest Coast was the Spaniard Juan Perez, in July, 1774. He was followed four years later by the famed British explorer James Cook. From the beginning of this contact, Euro-American explorers and traders have noted and commented upon the readiness of Native Americans to acquire those non-native objects and goods which enhanced and expanded their traditional lifestyle. Shrewd traders, they obtained from the Euro-Americans iron, blankets and other materials which they incorporated into an already rich and elaborate culture. It is interesting to note that the Euro-American components although by far the most significant, was not the only culture with which these Northwest people came in contact nor the only source from which new objects were introduced. Evidence suggests that prior to Euro-American contact, the wreckage of Japanese vessels drifted on prevailing currents to the Northwest Coast some even with surviving crew members. As early as 1788, if not before that date, Polynesian people and material culture were known to at least some Native Americans and had begun physically to reach the Northwest Coast of North America. Although not a major influence on the development of Northwest Coast culture and history, the Polynesian presence has left its mark in a number of rather intriguing artifacts of Polynesian origin or derivation used or found on the Northwest Coast. A discussion of the historical background will precede a survey of a few examples of such objects, and one possible instance of the reverse phenomenon.

The dialogue of cultures . . . characterizes our age and . . . is incarnated by ethnology, at once the child of colonialism and the proof of its death throes: a dialogue in which no one has the last word, in which neither voice is reduced to the status of a simple object. -Tzvetan Todorov There is a great dialogical potential in social and cultural anthropology. I say potential, but the dialogue has been there all along in the very doing of anthropology, or at least the part of the doing that takes place in the field. Anthropology is in fact founded upon the very possibility of dialogues that might reach back and forth across rifts of linguistic, cultural, and social difference. But once the field is left behind and books are published, dialogue has a way of disappearing beneath forms of writing that keep anthropological voices and native voices segregated in separate volumes. In ethnographic monographs we mostly hear the voice of an omniscient narrator, declaring, in the third-person plural, what the natives think and do. If we want to hear a native voice for longer than the time it takes to utter what anthropologists call a "native term," we have to go to a separate book, a volume of "native texts," in which only the natives speak and the anthropologist all but disappears, as if no one had been there asking for texts, recording them, and responding to them. Considering these two kinds of books together creates a dialogue of sorts, but with a very long wait for the change from the anthropological to the native voice. And even then, after all that third-person anthropological narrative, we hear mostly third-person native narrative. In both cases the voices of individuals are subordinated to the voices of traditions.

The editor of the American Indian Culture and Research Journal has kindly given me the opportunity to reply to Dennis Tedlock's response to my essay-review of his book, The Spoken Word and the Work of Interpretation. I have been asked only that my "counter-comment should not be longer than his paper, [that I] . . . should avoid any personal comments, and should try to remain as close as possible to the points of contention that are discussed in his paper." I can surely be briefer than Tedlock, because there are very few real points of contention between his positions and my own; it is only his representation of what I wrote in my "Mythography and Dialogue . . . '' that produces the appearance of contention. Personal comment is another matter. My review article treats Tedlock's work with consistent praise, in a tone that is respectful throughout; there is nothing of the "innuendo and irony" of which I am accused. Tedlock responds to my work, however, by impugning not merely my scholarship but my motives, assuming that I am consistently engaged in "moves" familiar or recognizable, in a variety of "games" all of which are to be taken as aspects of "academic politics" (p. 70, 72, and passim). It is virtually impossible to defend oneself against a charge as vague and insidious as playing "academic politics," especially since Tedlock never does say what he actually means by the phrase. He and I are not members of the same department, nor even in the same discipline (he is an anthropologist, I am a professor of literature); we are not affiliated with the same institutions. I have no doubt he has something specific in mind, but what? I continue to believe that what I wrote can be judged entirely on its own terms, and that no speculation about motives is necessary to explain it. If one nonetheless feels compelled to look for outside explanations, it seems to me that the notion of a desire to play "academic politics" is among the more fantastic. It is much more reasonable to conclude that Tedlock has, here, quite simply projected his own concerns as mine.