Abstract: Ideas of spirit and spirituality are obstacles to better appreciation of Indigenous experience and culture among scholars trained in contemporary Euro-American philosophy. Part of the reason is not appreciating philosophy's own concept of spirit, which is a word for anything that endures, develops, or evolves; for instance, songs, stories, dances, aromas, speech, consciousness, feeling, memory, and the vital processes of life. The author's argument connects this metaphysical theme in European and Asian philosophy with an Indigenous understanding of spirit. Allen addresses the relation between spirituality and religion and distinguish two aspects of Indigenous spirituality. One is the fundamental idea of spirit as something existing and active, conscious and tending. This idea finds resonance in Asian and European thought. A second aspect of the Indigenous understanding recognizes these qualitative powers as persons and governs interaction by social norms. Here the Eurasian comparison collapses, but in a way that reveals something Euro-American traditions can learn from an Indigenous sacred ecology.
Abstract: Hopi activist, Ernest Naquayouma, was a co-founder of the American Indian Center in Chicago, which was the first urban, intertribal, Native-run community center in the United States (est. 1953). He is also well-known for the work he did with US ethnolinguist Benjamin Lee Whorf in the 1930s. Although the literature on these topics often mentions Naquayouma's name, the significance of his role in both of these stories has been largely overlooked. Recent scholarship has revealed a more in-depth picture of Naquayouma's biography. This has shed new light on the history of the American Indian Center and on Whorf's work. It has also invited a reappraisal of Naquayouma's significance as a historical actor. In this article Robert Edwards offers an overview of Naquayouma's life story to supplement the existing historical record. Edwards argues that Naquayouma's life illustrated three key features of the American Indian self-determination movement in the first half of the twentieth century: (1) the anti-colonial traditionalist politics of North American tribal nations; (2) the intertribal social networks that bridged reservations and urban centers across the country; and (3) the pan-Indianism social movement, which fostered a shared American Indian identity among diverse tribal groups. For these reasons, Naquayouma's story is relevant to the field of American Indian history. It is also relevant to American studies and science studies, insofar as it provides insight into the settler-colonial nature of US culture, and the subaltern politics of ethnographic consultants.
Abstract: Some of the most notable movements for social justice within the late 1960s and early 1970s involved efforts by activists to create one big coalition consisting of the poor of many “races,” typically labeled as “rainbow coalitions.” Although these rainbow coalitions attempted to bring together many races, most of these coalitions did not have large contingents of American Indians. The original Rainbow Coalition between the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party and other racial organizations in Chicago, for instance, did not have a group representing Indians. The 1968 Poor People’s Campaign (PPC), a Rainbow Coalition in all but name, did have a significant contingent of Indian activists. As part of the PPC, twelve caravans of buses left from around the nation converged on the National Mall in Washington, DC, in May 1968. One of these caravans, which departed from Seattle, Washington, consisted of mainly American Indians and became dubbed the “Indian Trail.” The PPC presents a unique historical moment where the difficulties of coalition-building between poor people of different races were entirely on display. Sometimes activists successfully bridged these differences, and sometimes they did not. Differences arose between the African American and American Indian contingents of the campaign, as the former rarely joined the latter in protesting the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Department of the Interior. Behind these negative experiences lay not only external opposition, the lack of coordination, and leadership disputes among campaign officials, but also the distinct histories that shaped each racial group.
Abstract: “Colonial Etiology: Globalism and the Debate Between Black and Native American Studies” outlines the debate between Black and Native American Studies. First, this article intervenes in this conversation by arguing that the debate is structured by a mutual misrecognition. In this mutual misreading, both fields interpret the other’s object of study and theoretical metaphors as providing the protocols necessary for transcending subjection and entering civil society as a subsidiary of whiteness, antiblackness, and settler colonialism. This misrecognition can sometimes result in etiology, where both fields ask: which came first, racial slavery or settler colonialism? This form of etiology reinforces the misrecognition between the two fields in tautological causation that begins and ends, in any case, with the colonial and viral spread of White Christian Europe and Greco-Roman culture. Second, the author argues that this shared etiological tendency nevertheless reflects a profound and unifying, un-flinching paradigmatic critique that attempts to hold the West responsible and culpable for significant global crimes. The author shows that when we view the theories and metaphors of Blackness and Indianness together, not as signs in friction but as two halves of a symbolic whole representing the Earth itself, these metaphors and the communities they represent reveal the telos of European philosophy as the desire to colonize and enslave the globe and life itself.
Abstract: In Northern California’s San Francisco Bay Area, behind the façade of well-appointed homes, lie traces of a once thriving labor program. From 1918 to roughly 1942, the Bay Area Outing Program coercively recruited over a thousand Native girls and women from US Indian boarding schools to work as live-in housemaids in homes across the Bay. In exchange for room, board and meager pay, Native women and girls as young as twelve cooked, cleaned and lived in the private homes of their employers. This article examines the understudied facets of gendered Indian labor and carcerality in the context of Western outing by exploring early twentieth-century outing runaways and Native women’s experiences in California’s juvenile justice system. To this end, the author considers the powerful and painful stories of women and girls who expressed their dissatisfaction, ran away, stayed out past curfew and found themselves in Bay Area “detention homes.” Caitlin Keliiaa’s use of the term “runaway” considers a spectrum—women who had public departures and those who quietly absconded in the night—also considers those who left without permission. Ultimately, the article argues that outing functioned as a carceral force that sanctioned criminalization and incarceration of Native women. In turn, outing women resisted containment, constant control, sexual surveillance, and labor exploitation.
Abstract: This article examines the important role Indigenous archaeology plays in developing collaborative partnerships that practice the principles of consent, consensus, and collaboration in archaeological projects such as the Abiquiú Mesa Project (AMP) in Abiquiú, New Mexico. In the Society for American Archaeology's Principles of Archaeological Ethics, the phrase "informed consent" is not defined, and the word "consensus" is not found. As more projects like AMP collaborate with Native American communities, defining the concepts of consent, consensus, and collaboration is crucial when conducting collaborative projects that incorporate Native American voices and perspectives. In AMP, consent is achieved through communication, voluntary participation, and capacity. Consensus in AMP considers the local context and the distinct levels of agreement by all community partners. Last, collaboration serves to build capacity, develop reciprocity, and incorporate Native American community knowledge. Rethinking archaeology with these principles acknowledges historical narratives and knowledge-producing methods that include the voices of the people whose history we study while stepping toward decolonizing the practice of archaeology.
Abstract: This article offers a close analysis of the interventionary visual rhetoric and comic techniques in The 500 Years of Resistance Comic Book by Gord Hill (Kwakwaka’wakw). It positions Hill’s comic book as an act of discursive resistance that challenges imagery and narratives of colonial history using the affordances of comic arts. As a multimodal genre, as an audience-directed educational text, and as an account of warriorhood, The 500 Years of Resistance Comic Book is an important contribution to Indigenous studies.
Abstract: In the decades following the Civil War, hundreds of Cherokees living East of the Mississippi River were compelled to emigrate west. Post-war poverty, loss of land, and political struggles threatened the survival of Eastern Cherokee communities. Having received an invitation from the Cherokee Nation to be accepted as tribal citizens, many turned away from their eastern homelands after avoiding Removal and outlasting decades of pressures to emigrate. Though the Trail of Tears of 1838–39 is generally understood as the history of Cherokee Removal, this study draws from scholarship on the Long Removal Era to problematize the typical narrative. This postwar emigration phenomenon was a definitive challenge which shaped the newfound Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. Contrary to typical characterizations, their survival in the east was not a foregone conclusion, instead facing its gravest challenges in the Civil War era. A power vacuum resulted in divisive factionalism, with rival councils from Qualla and Cheoah competing for legitimacy. The emigration of leading Cheoah politicians signaled their defeat, galvanizing and consolidating the Eastern Band. This article offers a social history of this emigration process, investigating the phenomenon through memoirs and oral histories, tribal council minutes, and petitions and correspondence to Washington. Following the paper trail of emigrants, the study incorporates federal records alongside archival records from North Carolina, Oklahoma, and Arkansas. Interrogating the overlap of the Long Removal era and Long Civil War era, the study offers a new history of the Eastern Band in its harrowing formative years.
Abstract: The Midwest is typically defined as a site of Indigenous erasure. But citizens of the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma continue to live in their original homeland despite the official removal of their people from the Wabash River Valley in 1846. Myaamia families who stayed behind used fee simple family reserves as a tool to combat ethnic cleansing. Despite their keen understanding of American property law, settlers in the Hoosier state crafted “Red Codes,” laws and enforcement regimes targeting Indigenous peoples, to achieve their dispossession. Red Codes, akin to the more well-known Black Codes, reveal how state and local authorities designed laws to advance white supremacy. The appropriation and performance of Indigeneity grew out of the race-based legal regimes that defined the nineteenth-century Midwest.
Abstract: While the number of Native American women veterans continues to increase, they are often neither recognized nor honored as veterans. Over the last decade several Native American all-women veteran color guards have emerged, including the Kiowa Women Warriors (KWW). Wearing eagle feather war bonnets, white gloves, and matching dresses bearing their military insignia, the KWW have served as a color guard at powwows and events throughout Oklahoma and beyond. While receiving praise and approval from many tribes, including some Kiowa, their presence has also raised questions regarding how women veterans fit into existing Kiowa gender and ceremonial roles. Their formation represents a challenge and new catalyst in the evolution of veteran and gender roles occurring in Kiowa and other Native communities. This article examines changes in traditional Kiowa gender and martial roles through time in relation to the female military service and the formation of the Kiowa Women Warriors Color Guard–the first Native all-female veterans color guard in Oklahoma.
Abstract: The work of activists, researchers, and archivists to decolonize collections of documents that record indigenous land dispossession is complex and ongoing, not so unlike the process of land dispossession itself. The process of digitizing colonialist land records raises questions of privacy and access—to whom are these records accessible, and to whom should their access be denied—as much as questions about the categories under which records are archived. A sample of three late nineteenth-century colonialist land records belonging to Chippewa community members, now archived by the General Land Office (GLO) and available online, shows that the people who were allotted land do not mark the documents, and that the documents are cluttered with addendums and marginalia handwritten by colonialist bureaucrats. This article shows how Louise Erdrich’s Matchimanito saga, particularly the novel Four Souls , makes visible new ways of interpreting these nonfictional land records with a lens of what Emily Lederman calls “archival sovereignty.” Tracing the fictional land deed of one of the novel’s protagonists, Fleur Pillager, throughout her ongoing responses to colonialist land dispossession, the article identifies three literary devices that contribute to a fictional world of archival sovereignty: multiple and changing metaphors to describe colonialist bureaucracy, which is explored as a form of motion; Fleur’s persistence and decision-making that requires colonialist response, actions that shape the contents of the land record and are thus a form of co-authorship of that record; and a narrative world that disregards the bureaucratically imposed power of possessing land records, emphasizing instead the ongoing story that such records represent. The article shows how these literary devices make it possible to reread nonfictional land records with a lens that makes visible indigenous decision-making, stories, and sovereignty.
Reviewed by: Enduring Critical Poses: The Legacy and Life of Anishinaabe Literature and Letters ed. by Gordon Henry Jr., Margaret Noodin, and David Stirrup Adam Spry Gordon Henry Jr., Margaret Noodin, and David Stirrup, eds. Enduring Critical Poses: The Legacy and Life of Anishinaabe Literature and Letters. Albany: SUNY Press, 2021. 293 pp. Hardcover, $95.00. "It is time," the editors of Enduring Critical Poses declare in their introduction, "for Anishinaabe creative and critical leanings, often transposed through the technics of Western letters and media, to re-mark the larger intellectual topography with Anishinaabe perspectives" (2). This statement of intent, made more than two decades after the initial calls of Craig Womack, Jace Weaver, and Robert Warrior for more explicitly tribal-nationalist literary criticism, not only makes a case for continued relevance of such a project but also points to the ways in which the editors of Enduring Critical Pose seek to move beyond the debates about intellectual and cultural separatism that have marked it from its inception. As the editors argue: "To say simply that manifestations of culture, language, religion; forms of survivance; and experiences of colonialism differ from nation to nation . . . is to utter a truism that should not need echoing" (4). Rather than work to make the case for the specificity of Anishinaabe literature and nationhood, the contributions in Enduring Critical Poses each seek to show how "Anishinaabe writing does not merely represent but engages with and participates in critical cultural conversations," revealing the ways in which Anishinaabe literary expression has always been a project of tribe-centered criticism (9). The volume is organized thematically around four figures from Anishinaabe cosmology, the brothers Majikiwiz, Bakaawiz, Jiibayaaboozo, and Nanabozho, who each are made to represent multiple, overlapping modes of critical discourse. The first section, named after Majikiwiz, focuses on Anishinaabe historiography in the writings of Louise Erdrich, Maungwudaus (George Henry), and David Treuer. The second, named after Bakaawiz the performer, takes on questions of aesthetic form in the works of multiple of Anishinaabe poets, as well as in the juridical writings of Gerald Vizenor. The section named after Jiibayaaboozo (the manidoo of the spirit-world) focuses on Anishinaabe critiques of anthropological discourse and its instrumentalization of Anishinaabe culture and physical bodies. The last section, Nanabozho, examines the subversive writings of Jim Northrup, E. Donald Two-Rivers, and Vizenor, as well as communal efforts to defy the imposition [End Page 291] of blood quantum on the White Earth Reservation in the early twentieth century. Taken as a whole, Enduring Critical Poses represents a remarkable testament to the breadth and diversity of Anishinaabe critical expression—giving equal space to well-known writers, as well as those like Northrup, Two-Rivers, and Henry who are often left out of broader discussions of Native literature. Framing their project around the ways in which Anishinaabe literature constitutes its own critical discourse, the editors are careful not to suggest that a tribe-centered approach isn't the only to understand Indigenous literatures. Rather they contend that Anishinaabe-centered analyses have often been overshadowed by critical discourses that universalize and instrumentalize Indigenous literatures for their own ends—oftentimes at the expense of the very communities that produced them. As such, the goal of Enduring Critical Poses is not to set the record straight by providing authenticizing analyses from cultural insiders, as much as it is to show how Anishinaabe literary expression works to engage with and ultimately counter the constricting narratives of primitivism, disappearance, or deficiency that have been imposed upon it from the outside. An excellent example of this critical approach can be seen in Carter Meland's essay, "Anishinaabe Being and the Fallen God," which reassesses the work of nineteenth-century anthropologist Daniel Brinton. Focusing on Brinton's efforts to find an etymological link between Nanabozho and Indo-European solar deities, Meland provides an incisive meditation on the perils of academic analyses that seek to universalize Indigenous cultures, rather than actually contend with "specific relationships to specific homelands and the specific peoples who call that land home" (189). Showing how Brinton's conclusions relied on the assumption that stories about Nanabozho were mere degenerations of an ostensibly pure Indo-European religious tradition, Meland...
Abstract: This article examines early relations between the Illinois nations and French explorers, traders, and missionaries in the late seventeenth century. Following their encounter in the Pays des Illinois (Illinois Country), French newcomers came to believe that the Missouri River possessed an abundance of flora, fauna, fertile soil, and easily cut through the heart of North America to the Pacific Ocean. This was no accident. The Illinois deliberately withheld, emphasized, manipulated, and conveyed details concerning their western geography to French missionaries and fur traders, whose novel technologies, trade goods, and spiritual power they sought to secure for themselves. By articulating a carefully crafted "myth of the Missouri," the Illinois sought to direct French commerce and proselytization toward themselves and their allies up the Missouri River, like the Osage and Missouria, rather than to see French manet8a (other-than-human power) in the form of trade goods and Christian prayer fall into the hands of their enemies on the lower Mississippi. The Illinois strategy to attract French alliance, commerce, and spiritual power ( manet8a ) may have contributed to the century-long European and Euro-American belief in an expedient Missouri River route from the American Midwest to the Pacific Ocean. By arguing that the Illinois confederacy shaped European newcomers' understanding and perceptions of North America to further their own economic, political, and spiritual goals, this article contributes to the historiography regarding the role played by rumors, falsehoods, and fabrications in early colonial encounters as well as in the European and later Euro-American misunderstanding of the American Midwest's geography.
Abstract: This article argues that sustainable and robust Indigenous philosophies of land on Turtle Island predate colonial impact and are characterized by active regard for land as a relative, as a material or maternal provider, as a person, and as an origin of identity, ethics, and religion. These philosophies continue to inform political resistance to settler colonialism today of radical resurgence and decolonizing praxis. Conceptual and experiential linkages between Indigenous philosophies convey strong intercultural values characterized by dovetailing yet self-determined "systems of responsibilities," illuminating the ability of Indigenous nations to live prosperously alongside each other and unite against the common threat of colonialism. Understanding the independent legitimacy of Native worlds is an initial step to meaningful listening within intercultural philosophical contexts. For Western philosophical research, which often fails to center the significance of land as a philosophical concept , understanding the sophisticated nature of Indigenous philosophies of land is pivotal for disrupting practices that further erase Indigenous nations, peoples, thinkers, and worldviews and approaching the possibility of "meaningful solidarities" and camaraderie in decolonizing action and resistance.
