Anthropologists and Indians in the New South (Contemporary American Indians)

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Anthropologists and Indians in the New South

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Contemporary American Indian Studies J. Anthony Paredes, Series Editor



Edited by RACHEL A. BONNEY and J. ANTHONY PAREDES

The University of Alabama Press Tuscaloosa and London


Copyright © 2001 The University of Alabama Press Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380 All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 . 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 Typeface: AGaramond The maps on pages xi–xii were produced by the UNC– Charlotte Cartography Lab, December 2000. ∞ The paper on which this book is printed meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Science–Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Anthropologists and Indians in the new South / edited by Rachel A. Bonney and J. Anthony Paredes. p. cm. — (Contemporary American Indian studies) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8173-1070-3 (pbk. : acid-free paper) 1. Indians of North America—Southern States. 2. Anthropology—Southern States. 3. Indians of North America—Legal status, laws, etc.—Southern States. I. Bonney, Rachel A. II. Paredes, J. Anthony ( James Anthony), 1939– III. Title. IV. Series. E78.S65 A658 2001 975′.00497—dc21 2001001284 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data available


Contents

List of Figures and Tables

vii

Foreword ix Raymond D. Fogelson Southeastern Tribal Locations Maps

xi

Introduction 1 J. Anthony Paredes

I Changing Relationships between Anthropologists and American Indians 1 Anthropologists and the Eastern Cherokees Max E. White

11

2 “Are You Here to Study Us?” Anthropological Research in a Progressive Native American Community 17 Susan E. Stans 3 The Archaeologists’—and Indians’—New World Janet E. Levy

29

II Southeastern Indians and the Law 4 Federal Tribal Recognition in the South George Roth

49

5 Region and Recognition: Southern Indians, Anthropologists, and Presumed Biology 71 Karen I. Blu

III Anthropological Contributions to Native American Communities 6 Issues in Alcohol-Related Problems among Southeastern Indians: Anthropological Approaches 89 Lisa J. Le®er


Contents

vi 7 The Newest Indians in the South: The Maya of Florida Allan Burns 8 A Disaster: Hurricane Andrew and the Miccosukee Penny Jessel

108 126

IV Culture Preservation and Ethnic Identity 9 Celebrations and Dress: Sources of Native American Identity Patricia Lerch

143

10 From Mob to Snob: Changing Research Orientations from Activism to Aesthetics among American Indians 156 Rachel A. Bonney

V Culture Contact and Exchange 11 Mobilian Jargon in Southeastern Indian Anthropology Emanuel J. Drechsel

175

12 Hypergamy, Quantum, and Reproductive Success: The Lost Indian Ancestor Reconsidered 184 Michael H. Logan and Stephen D. Ousley 13 American Indian Life and the 21st-Century University: The “Playful Worldview” and Its Lessons for Leadership in Higher Education 203 Kendall Blanchard Conclusions 214 Rachel A. Bonney Comments 222 Clara Sue Kidwell Billy L. Cypress Larry D. Haikey Notes

235

References

241

List of Contributors Index

277

281


Figures and Tables

Figures 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 12.1 12.2

Map of the Seminole reservation 18 James Girtman’s photograph of cats 25 Holly Johns’ photograph of her aunt 26 Lance Tommie’s photograph of his grandmother 27 Mean fecundity and surviving children by quantum 192 Number of surviving children by age of mother and quantum

193

Tables 2.1 2.2 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 8.5 12.1

Population of Brighton Reservation, 1995 20 Languages spoken by adult sample at Brighton Reservation, 1995 Estimated damage of Hurricane Andrew to south Florida 127 Wish list from Dan Bowers, September 3, 1992 129 Damage of Hurricane Andrew to Miccosukee Reservation (BIA) Damage of Hurricane Andrew to Miccosukee Reservation (FEMA) Meeting at the Miccosukee Reservation 138 Mean fecundity and mortality by quantum in the Boas database

21

130 132 191



Foreword Raymond D. Fogelson

T

his welcome volume helps illuminate some dark spaces and times in Native American studies. In most survey courses and textbooks, the Southeast gets short shrift compared to the plenitude of plaintive Plains research, the surplus of salubrious southwestern work, and the fulsome fashions and fashionings of the ®amboyant Northwest Coast. Part of the neglect of the Southeast stems from the fact that this area felt the full brunt of the European invasion and was thought either to have been swept up into the dustpan of historical ethnology or radically and rapidly transformed into the liminal, if not oxymoronic, status of Civilized Tribes who were scarcely worth the attention of formative anthropology’s obsession with “otherness.” We are slowly coming to realize that the native peoples of the Southeast did not disappear totally through destruction, displacement, or detribalization. Just as we are beginning to link the richly textured lives of prehistoric moundbuilding peoples with protohistoric and historic groups through the combined efforts of archaeologists, ethnohistorians, comparative ethnologists, physical anthropologists, and linguists, so these same specialists are helping us to trace continuities and discontinuities between contemporary Native Americans and their direct and more distant ancestors. During the mid-19th-century post-Removal period, Indians remaining in the Southeast were considered by whites to be anomalous and to have dismal prospects. Strong pressure was exerted to encourage them to join their displaced kin in the trans-Mississippi West. Otherwise they seemed destined for disappearance through a combination of physical death as a result of disease and diminished birthrate or cultural death through missionization and assimilation. Despite, or maybe because of, their marginality, the survivors grimly clung to their separate identity by keeping a low pro¤le and staying out of harm’s way by seeking refuge off the beaten track in such places as the Everglades, the Carolina mountains, and other less spectacular but nevertheless out-of-the-way locales. The 20th century has witnessed the increased visibility and, indeed, vitality of the formerly forsaken Indians of the Southeast. They still suffer from the effects of poverty and various forms of social and physical disorder, yet their present circumstances and future prospects are improving. They are politically adept in redressing long-standing grievances and asserting legal rights as well as achiev-


x

Foreword

ing and maintaining tribal sovereignty and utilizing its real and sympathetic power. Serious efforts are afoot to preserve native languages through bilingual immersion programs. Along with training for the modern world by mastering technology, their revived pride in tradition is exempli¤ed, for instance, by renewed respect for elders and their wisdom. Modernity and tradition are no longer seen as antithetical. The New South has discovered not only that it has Indians in its midst, but also that their presence generates cultural and economic synergy by attracting new industries to the area; by promoting tourism anchored by tribal museums and such cultural events as folk fairs and festivals, outdoor dramas, and powwows; and, of course, by bringing lucrative gaming enterprises to Indian Country. The New South clearly needs and celebrates Indians! As this volume suggests, Native American communities are no longer the “happy hunting grounds” of patronizing, irresponsible, and sometime summertime anthropologists. Not only do anthropological projects now need to be vetted by human subjects regulations ultimately emanating from Washington, but ¤eld research also requires approval of tribal governments. In the spirit of self-determination, Indians today specify the type, direction, and duration of the research they want done, even to the point of hiring their own anthropologists, if need be. In response, anthropologists have taken the pragmatic turn of least resistance to become more responsible and responsive to the people they study and serve. This is not so much applied anthropology as an anthropology of mutual engagement. If such changes are not implemented, anthropologists rather than Indians will become the endangered species. This volume, opportunely appearing as we enter a new millennium, offers both a diagnosis of past relations between southeastern Indians and anthropologists and also a prognosis for the future. May the delicate dialectic continue to evolve.







Introduction J. Anthony Paredes

T

his collection began as an invited session at the 30th-anniversary meeting of the Southern Anthropological Society, held in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, February 17–20, 1996. The overall theme of the meeting was “a retrospective and futuristic view of studies in, of, and for the South,” according to organizers Patricia Beaver and Carole E. Hill. Such a theme lent itself very well to anthropological studies of American Indians in the southeastern United States. Hence the symposium’s title, “Anthropologists and Indians in the New South: A Retrospective for the New Millennium.” What is the “New South”? There are layers of meaning. What it is not is the “Old South.” According to my historian colleague William Warren Rogers (personal communication, January 28, 1996), the Old South is not simply the pre– Civil War South: “The Old South was really only the four (maximum ¤ve) generations before the Civil War, that is, approximately the ¤rst half of the nineteenth century when the South was an agricultural engine dependent on cotton as its fuel and slavery as its work crew.” Though slavery had existed much earlier, of course, to the historian that time frame is “colonial America.” From an ethnohistorical perspective, that colonial period and the early American period that immediately followed were the era of natural historians and proto-anthropologists such as William Bartram (1791), John Adair (1775), and Benjamin Hawkins (1848), whose observations on the native peoples remain so valuable in de¤ning the “contact-traditional” cultures of American Indians of the South. Thanks largely to the work of preeminent southern anthropologist Charles Hudson (e.g., 1997), scholars have now come to realize that those later contact-traditional cultures were very different from those of the peoples of the populous, complex chiefdoms ¤rst encountered by Spanish explorers. But that is another story. In its narrower meaning, the Old South was for American Indians a time of what we would call today “ethnic cleansing.” After centuries of warfare with


2

Anthropologists and Indians

competing European powers, debilitating economic entanglements in the deerskin trade, and land cession after land cession, the native peoples were at the mercy of postcolonial Americans. In the 1820s the United States began the relentless task of removing the Indians to make room in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, and Tennessee for the expanding system of slave agriculture. With the Indians out of the way (or so conventional wisdom held), “real” southern history could begin. From the beginning, however, such a view was greatly oversimpli¤ed. It ignores the slaveholding traditions of the Indians themselves and their own early economic involvement in “slave catching.” And the simpli¤ed view ignores the continuing presence of enclaves of unremoved Indians in the South, even though as late as the early 1900s the United States was cajoling Indians into leaving Louisiana and Mississippi for Indian Territory just before Oklahoma statehood. With the defeat of the Confederacy in 1865, the New South begins as a time period, but, as Rogers admonishes, “one should be aware of ‘the New South’ as a phrase combining economic and social meaning and laced with irony.” Following the forced political changes supported by federal troops during Reconstruction (1865–1877), enthusiastic New South boosters set out to balance agriculture with industry (even if ¤nanced from the North) and create a new era of prosperity. Henry Grady of Atlanta was one of the great promoters of the New South. The dream of an ascendant New South, however, ultimately was to ®ounder on Jim Crowism, the miseries of rural poverty for whites as well as blacks, northern opportunism, and the disproportionate aggrandizement of the few at the expense of the many. In time there came to be a certain ring of truth to the old saw that Grady’s Atlanta was “a diamond in a horse turd.” The New South of the 1880s also saw the beginnings of anthropology in the region. In this older New South, while the institutionalization of the discipline was still in the distant future, the South as a ¤eldwork location attracted some anthropologists (including archaeologists) from the very beginnings of the ®edgling discipline—James Mooney (e.g., 1890), Frank Cushing (e.g., 2000[1896]), Frank Speck (e.g., 1907), Frances Densmore (e.g., 1956). It was during this period also that John Swanton (e.g., 1946) prepared his magisterial volumes on the societies, cultures, and histories of southern Indians, combining seemingly every scrap of information available—from the Spanish chroniclers onward to the beginnings of modern ethnography in Oklahoma and in the South itself. This developmental era of southern anthropology remained for the most part focused on Indians, but a few visiting anthropologists (e.g., Hortense Powdermaker [1939]) were beginning to look at other populations. Nonetheless, archaeo-


Introduction

3

logical and ethnographic salvage work on American Indian cultures was the mainstay of anthropology in the South through World War II. In some ways, the works of such as Raymond Fogelson (1962) and William Sturtevant (1954) in the 1950s and early 1960s mark the end of the ¤rst era of New South anthropology. For some historians, World War II ushered in the New, New South. And so it was with anthropology. Only in the period following World War II did fullblown, multi-¤eld academic programs in anthropology become established at southern universities. Despite such notable early undertakings as John Gillin’s “cultures of the South” project at the University of North Carolina (e.g., Lewis 1955) and works such as Kimball and Pearsall’s study (1954) of Talladega, Alabama, the postwar South had a dif¤cult time recruiting anthropologists for its universities. As late as the 1960s, the South was a seller’s market for anthropologists. “Any place but the South” was said to be a common geographic preference in the questionnaires applicants submitted to the American Anthropological Association job placement service in those days. With the civil rights movement, with a growing number of “home-grown” southern anthropologists, and with regionally expanding economic and intellectual horizons, anthropology in the South was growing rapidly by the late 1960s, especially in the non-archaeological sub¤elds. The era of the New, New South had truly begun for anthropology. Moreover, with the sudden downturn in the demand for anthropologists everywhere in the late 1960s—but perhaps a little later in the South—anthropology in and on the South ®ourished. The Southern Anthropological Society was born on the cusp of that transition. It is perhaps no accident that a new surge of interest in the Indians of the South coincides with the civil rights movement. American Indians never ¤t well into the all-pervasive, bifurcated “white/colored” social classi¤cation of the postbellum South. In the traditional view, Indians ceased to be part of the historical landscape of the South after the Removal. The very existence of those who remained challenged easy “racial” classi¤cations. Where they remained in any numbers, whether supported by the federal government or not, those who would be neither black nor white developed their own institutional life through school and church. For those without governmental support, the racism of the surrounding society was perhaps as much a buttress of Indian solidarity as it was barrier to full participation in white society. With the coming of the civil rights movement, new fault lines became evident in the racial system of the South. Many Indians sought even more to distance themselves from any identi¤cation with blacks. Meanwhile, social programs aimed at alleviating the conditions of African Americans were a mixed blessing


4


for Indians. Some Indians—especially those of fair complexion—were to become early bene¤ciaries of federally mandated integrated employment policies, since Indians were often regarded as preferable to blacks in the workplace. Social programs like Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty brought new resources to some Indian communities as well as to blacks, but school integration sometimes served to undercut centers of community life for “unrecognized” Indians. Indeed, such negative consequences of the civil rights movement may well have been an impetus for southern Indians to seek federal recognition in the 1970s. For some Indians, however, the civil rights movement may have been just another historical storm to be weathered. Perhaps it is epigrammatic of the whole of southern Indian survival in the 100 years following the Civil War that, according to some accounts, the ¤rst people to encounter the burned-out automobile of slain civil rights workers Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman in the summer of 1964 were some Mississippi Choctaws, who salvaged what they could from the wreck and moved on without becoming involved in the incident. With the coming of the new anthropology to the New, New South, the anthropological gaze on southern Indians changed too. Perhaps it was Harriet Kupferer’s (1966) pioneering community study of the modern Eastern Cherokee in 1960—not published until 1966, the year the Southern Anthropological Society was founded—that marks the true beginning of ¤n de siècle Indian studies in the South. Ironically, Kupferer’s study appeared in one of the last publications of the old Bureau of American Ethnology, a series wherein Mooney had inaugurated the anthropology of the ¤rst New South era with publication of some of his Indian researches in the 1890s (e.g., Mooney 1894). (The Southern Anthropological Society awards a prize for anthropological studies of the South named in honor of Mooney.) Much has changed in the South for Indians since Mooney’s time, since Sturtevant’s and Fogelson’s time, since even the founding of the Southern Anthropological Society. In rapid succession since World War II, southern Indians have passed through the litigational testing ¤eld of land claims cases begun in the 1950s. They successfully negotiated through an era of very ambiguous Indian policy in the 1950s and 1960s. As noted, they played upon or retreated from the black civil rights movement of the 1960s and used to their advantage Great Society programs of the 1960s and afterward. In the 1970s, the tribes saw the proliferation of one of the country’s most fantastic arrays of “Indian wanna-be” groups. The adherents of these groups draw upon remote links to Indian ancestors—even if only genealogical fantasies


Introduction

5

—and adopt fanciful names to convince the public that they are genuine Indians. Many of these groups sprouted up following the establishment of administrative procedures for federal recognition of Indian tribes in 1978. Whatever might be the outcome for Indian people, all this newfound Indianness among southerners surely contains deeper historical meaning for the South as an idealized cultural type. Perhaps, as others have noted all along, the South was not so solid after all (Moreland 1971). Beginning in the late 1960s, the established tribes expanded their political clout through an intertribal organization, the United Southeastern Tribes— USET (subsequently expanded to include northeastern tribes as well and becoming the United South and Eastern Tribes). Later, the number of legitimate tribes expanded considerably through federal recognition under the 1978 procedures, even as bogus groups were being turned away. Southern Indians led tribes across the nation in creating innovative tribal enterprises—including high-stakes bingo and casinos—in the 1980s and 1990s. In those activities, such tribes as the Cherokee and the Seminole built upon and took control of their long experience in the seemingly endlessly expanding tourist industry of the South. Now, many southern tribes move toward a very modern cultural renewal through tribal museums, language preservation, and cultural heritage programs. The true signi¤cance of the role of the much ballyhooed success of casinos and the less noticed success of other tribal enterprises in underwriting cultural preservation and shaping contemporary southern Indian life is yet to be fully assessed. There is also rapidly growing rapprochement between southeastern Indians and their western kinsmen removed in Old South days. That coming together of East and West may have begun in some cases through joint land claims cases in the 1950s, but it is now further stimulated in part by the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990. Along with these pragmatic interactions have come important cultural exchanges and an ever more visible presence of the descendants of the removed peoples within the New South. Such trends promise even more dramatic changes in the 21st century. Anthropology in the South has changed, too. Archaeology is no longer the dominant sub¤eld in the South that it once was (at least in numbers of university faculty). Anthropology and anthropologists of the South have an ever more cosmopolitan ®avor, in part a measure of the region’s own burgeoning immigrant populations since the 1960s. Increasingly, sociocultural and physical anthropology in the South have taken an applied turn. Nonetheless, southern anthropology also has moved forward along the cutting edge of academic theory.


6


A few universities in the South have attracted from colder climes some of the leading ¤gures of the discipline and now move forward toward creating what will likely become some of the premier anthropology departments of the 21st century. Through all of this, the links between at least some anthropologists and Indians in the South have endured. But, they have changed. This collection is meant to re®ect both that which has endured and that which has changed in the anthropological embrace of Indians from the “Old, New South” to the “New, New South.” In this collection, we have tried to sample many kinds of anthropology in its various sub¤elds. Regardless of sub¤eld or theoretical persuasion, however, and whether dealing with a totally contemporary problem or applying new perspectives to old data, the authors were guided by such questions as how their work with American Indians in the South shaped their own intellectual development, how the changing nature of anthropology in®uenced their work with Indians, how southern Indians and Indian studies have affected anthropology, how anthropology has affected southern Indians, and how national and international developments have affected both Indians and anthropologists in the South. One of the article contributors is both an Indian and an anthropologist. The collection closes with the re®ections of a distinguished Florida Seminole and two prominent Oklahoma Indians un®inchingly gazing on what anthropologists have done in their ancestral homeland that is now the New, New South. Unlike the previous volume on modern southern Indians edited by Paredes (1992), this collection is not so much a collection of ethnographic snapshots as it is a series of studies in the stances from which such images of southern Indians have been taken. Perhaps sometimes these studies can seem professionally selfserving. Sometimes they might be embarrassingly intransigently politically incorrect by the standards of elitist humanists who have only of late “discovered” Indians and who may be oblivious to the close associations that anthropologists have had with southern Indians for decades. The essays in this volume assay the varied intertwinings in the peculiar symbiosis between Indians and anthropologists so characteristic of American anthropology. The relationship is well known (and caricatured) for the West but barely recognized for the South, despite some classic early anthropological works from the region. The ¤rst section of articles provides a glimpse of the evolving nature of some of the most long-standing links between anthropologists and Indians in the South. Studies of the Cherokee and Seminole, in different eras, laid the groundwork for later ethnographic work in the South. Beneath it all is the work of


Introduction

7

archaeologists that now becomes the framework for a new set of relations between tribes and anthropologists. The papers by White, Stans, and Levy, then, do much to put the work of southern anthropologists with Indians in broadest historical context. The papers by Roth and Blu, which follow, are an important reminder of the broader structure of United States law and policy that has provided the framework within which Indians and anthropologists have interacted, from the Dawes Act of 1887 to the federal acknowledgment procedures of 1978. Despite the suspicions and disdain of some academic anthropologists, in the post–World War II era applied anthropology has sometimes brought direct bene¤ts to the peoples anthropologists study (e.g., Peterson 1973; Paredes 1976). The increasingly applied bent of southern anthropology in the New South has sometimes provided surprising examples of the possibilities of an engaged anthropology for southern Indians. Le®er, Burns, and Jessel give us lively case studies of the relevance of anthropology to practical problems faced by a broad spectrum of Indian groups in the South, from one of the oldest and most widely recognized to one of the newest and barely recognized as “Indian” because of their Latin American origins. Continuing that theme in a more general way are the articles by Lerch and Bonney, which highlight the mutual relevance of Indians and anthropologists to each other for both cultural preservation and anthropological theorizing about identity and culture. Finally, Drechsel, Logan and Ousley, and Blanchard show us how the linguistic, genetic, and sociocultural exchange in the South that commenced almost from the beginning of European “discovery” of the Americas can continue its trajectory into the 21st century. It will no more be a one-way exchange in the future than it has been in the past. The currents of exchange may, however, be more dif¤cult to trace and follow as we all become engulfed in the “connected” world system that is the legacy of the ¤rst links in the global economy forged in the 15th century. The non-anthropologist reader may be perplexed by some of the far-reaching themes and comparisons that some of the authors pursue, but this is, after all, a work in anthropology. It is not a treatise on the empowerment of the oppressed. It is not an exercise in atonement. It is not a search for transcendental philosophical meaning in the continually unfolding story of the interaction of native (of whatever kind) and outsider. It is not an effort to reach some soothingly de¤nitive answers about identity—Indian or anything else—in the modern world. Whatever personal feelings these writers might have about Indians, no matter


8


what positive rewards may or may not have come to the Indians from the probings of one generation or another of ¤eldworkers, and regardless of whether the work described was “pure” or “applied,” these essays are part of the scienti¤c enterprise that is anthropology. If nothing else, anthropology is quintessentially comparative. It is grounded in the ¤rm belief that to know ourselves, to know humankind, we must not fall into the trap of overgeneralizing from too few cases. We must know ourselves in all the many forms and guises we humans take—constantly changing yet staying the same in still-to-be-understood ways that are the essence of our species regardless of our cultural raiment. This collection is in the spirit of the noblest “old-fashioned” quest for a true science of humanity. It is guided neither by smug antiquarian epistemological self-delusion nor by postmodernist nihilistic self-righteousness at being in the (temporary) condition of either the observer or the observed. We hope that readers will gain from this very eclectic mix of essays an appreciation for the complexity of anthropological studies of, and relationships with, Indians in the South at the end of the 20th century. We hope, too, that these re®ections will foster mutual human respect between southern anthropologists and southern Indians and will strengthen them both in the 21st century.


I Changing Relationships between Anthropologists and American Indians

O

ne of the major themes of this volume is how relationships between anthropologists and American Indians have changed over the past century as many anthropologists have altered their focus from “pure” scienti¤c research to “applied” research. The chapters in this ¤rst section examine or are examples of some of those changes. Anthropologists at the beginning of the 20th century were concerned with gathering as much data about “vanishing” tribes and their cultures as they could before those cultures had disappeared completely. They sought to write complete ethnographies or descriptions of the entire culture as it existed before the coming of the Europeans, or at least as complete as was possible in those days of rapid culture change and cultural loss. Many of these early anthropologists were students of Franz Boas, who stressed holistic data collection and letting the facts “speak for themselves”; little or no effort was made to address speci¤c research interests or to deal with issues of concern to the people under investigation. Research problems were identi¤ed by the researchers themselves, and the results and any possible bene¤ts of their studies rarely found their way back to the communities or subjects of investigation, a fact that became a source of resentment for many natives. This early approach and subsequent shifts in the research paradigm to proactive anthropology are discussed in Max White’s chapter, “Anthropologists and the Eastern Cherokees.” White discusses the early Cherokee studies of such scholars as Mooney and Olbrechts done in the Boasian tradition, shifting to studies focusing on narrow research problems and examining the present conditions rather than the past. His discussion of the more recent past illustrates the mutually bene¤cial relationship that can exist between anthropologists and Indians, as does Susan Stans’s chapter, “ ‘Are You Here to Study Us?’ Anthropological Research in a Progressive Native American Community,” which demonstrates a re-


10


search strategy oriented to bene¤ting the Seminole as well as herself. Although her research was centered on alcohol abuse and treatment, she offered to assist the Seminole community she was studying in a variety of ways. The reciprocity re®ected in her article re®ects a growing trend in current anthropology being done in American Indian communities, as well as an increased degree of sophistication and awareness of the people she intended to study. Janet Levy’s chapter, “The Archaeologists’—and Indians’—New World,” continues in this vein, as she discusses the changes in the relationships between archaeologists and the Indian communities that may be affected by their work. She points out that archaeologists now have to be “anthropologists” as well as archaeologists, that they have to deal with the living communities and sometimes sensitive political issues as well as with the remains of their ancestral cultures.


1 Anthropologists and the Eastern Cherokees Max E. White

A

s the ¤eld of anthropology has evolved, so has the relationship between anthropologists and the peoples being studied. Various paradigms and theoretical schools of thought have dominated the discipline of anthropology throughout its history. These paradigms and theories can be seen shaping the research carried out by anthropologists, and the history of anthropological research among the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians re®ects this. In this chapter I shall examine the changing aspects of anthropological research among the Eastern Cherokees and the impact this research has had on the Cherokees themselves. It is not my purpose to enumerate each and every individual who has conducted research on this group, for inevitably some names would be inadvertently omitted and feelings would be hurt. Rather, I shall mention the works of some selected anthropologists and examine some of the results of the research vis-à-vis the Eastern Cherokees. The Eastern Cherokees today number approximately 11,000 and represent descendants of those families and bands who were not caught up in the Removal of 1838–1839. The history of this Eastern Band is well documented from the time immediately following the Removal to the present. Although poverty is present, the Eastern Band of Cherokees has fared better economically than most other Native Americans because of their proximity to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. With the establishment of the park in the 1930s, tourism began and the Cherokee lands bordering the southern entrance to the park quickly became a major tourist attraction. More recently, casino gambling was established, bringing another major in®ux of capital to the area. For many years, few of the Eastern Cherokees attended college, but this too has changed with the establishment of an extension campus of Western Carolina University at Cherokee. The person generally acknowledged as the “father” of American anthropology


12


is Franz Boas. It is he who set the pattern for anthropology in this country for most of the 20th century, and his legacy is still apparent. His insistence on ¤eldwork, on learning the language of the group being studied, on taking detailed ¤eld notes on all aspects of life, and on collecting life histories from informants is still of central importance in anthropology. The ¤rst anthropologist to devote primary attention to the Eastern Cherokees was not a student of Boas, but his research was certainly in the Boasian tradition. This was none other than James Mooney. Mooney was employed by the Bureau of American Ethnology, and in 1885 he met Nimrod Jarrett Smith, principal chief of the Eastern Cherokees, who was in Washington on tribal business (Ellison 1992). Becoming interested in the Eastern Cherokees, Mooney visited them in the summer of 1887 and was most impressed by what he found. Traditions were rapidly disappearing, and he set about to record all he could before these cultural traditions became extinct. He befriended medicine men and with their assistance collected and identi¤ed medicinal plants. He witnessed the stickball game, studied the Cherokee language, collected crafts and artifacts, observed the last performance of the Cherokee Green Corn Dance in the 19th century, and avidly collected stories, myths, and legends. One of his primary informants was a medicine man named Swimmer, who con¤ded in Mooney and provided him with the sacred formulas used in traditional medicine. James Mooney worked among the Eastern Cherokees for several months. In 1891 he published “The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees,” a small part of the voluminous material he had recorded, most being obtained from Swimmer (Mooney 1891). In 1900 his Myths of the Cherokees was published, containing an excellent history of the Cherokees as well as the mythology he had collected (Mooney 1900). So insistent was Mooney on accuracy that he returned to the Eastern Cherokees prior to publication, bringing the printer’s proof with him, in order to con¤rm some information and to double-check other information (Ellison 1992). However, in keeping with Victorian ideas pertaining to certain subject areas, Mooney purposely did not collect stories and myths of a sexual or scatological nature. (One example is the story about the unpleasant smell of the groundhog’s head, which he mentions but states, “The story is a vulgar one, without wit enough to make it worth recording” [Mooney 1900:279]. Mooney also “cleaned up” a bit for publication the myth accounting for how the buzzard lost the feathers on his head [1900:293].) During the 1920s, Franz Olbrechts (a Boas student) lived among the Eastern Cherokees and gathered information on medicinal practices. This research was to


Changing Relationships

13

aid him in editing and organizing some material originally collected by Mooney. Published in 1932, The Swimmer Manuscript (Mooney and Olbrechts 1932) contains much lore pertaining to the curing activities of Cherokee medicine men and is largely composed of information collected by Mooney from his friend and informant, Swimmer. Olbrechts worked with Cherokees who remembered Mooney, and he wrote that Mooney enjoyed the highest regard among the Indians. Even in Mooney’s time, a complete ethnographical study covering all aspects of traditional Cherokee culture was no longer possible. Acculturation had begun early and had progressed rapidly, so that there had been a tremendous loss of traditional practices by the Removal period. However, an ethnography of the Cherokees was published by William H. Gilbert, Jr., in 1943. Gilbert spent a short time among the Eastern Cherokees gathering information, but most of his data were derived from documentary sources, particularly various manuscripts and early accounts. His work remains the best attempt at a description of traditional Cherokee culture (see Gilbert 1943). As the ¤eld of anthropology continued to expand and evolve, so too did the direction of anthropological research among the Eastern Cherokees. Anthropologists concentrated on certain aspects of Cherokee culture. Several works are exemplary of this trend, among them various articles by John Witthoft of the University of Pennsylvania. Witthoft spent time among the Eastern Cherokees intermittently for many years. He worked with Will West Long, Mooney’s interpreter, and published several articles on various aspects of Cherokee culture. In 1946 he published an article on the Cherokee Green Corn ceremony (Witthoft 1946), and in 1949 he included the Cherokee material in a much broader study of the Green Corn ceremony among Eastern Woodlands tribes (Witthoft 1949). This work is reminiscent of earlier trends in anthropology having to do with diffusion and the culture area approach promoted by scholars such as Robert Lowie, Edward Sapir, Clark Wissler, and Paul Radin. Witthoft has published several other articles on Cherokee topics over the last quarter-century. An approach new to Cherokee studies was that employed by John Gulick and his team of researchers during the late 1950s (see Gulick 1960). Community studies had been conducted earlier by sociologists and anthropologists, but no attempt of this sort had been made among the Eastern Cherokees. Gulick’s project represented an attempt to study this group in the contemporary sense, looking at various aspects of community life, including sociopolitical organization. Among those involved in this study were anthropologists whose careers are well known


14


and who have made signi¤cant contributions to the ¤eld of anthropology. They include Raymond Fogelson, Harriet Kupferer, Pendleton Banks, Hester Davis, Robert K. Thomas, and others. In the decades since Gulick’s publication, Cherokee studies have evolved to re®ect a more integrated character where various sub¤elds of anthropology may be combined in the study of a particular topic. Also, other disciplines, particularly history, may be employed to augment the study at hand. Exemplary of this trend is Sharlotte Neely’s work. Combining ¤eldwork with ethnohistoric research has enabled her to make some interesting observations on some aspects of life among the contemporary Eastern Cherokees (see Neely 1993). Her work has served further to reveal the often complex interrelationships of various groups and factions among these people (see Neely 1991). Finally, my own dissertation combined ¤eldwork, archaeology, and ethnohistory in studying late-prehistoric and early historic Cherokee subsistence and settlement patterns (see White 1980). But what has all this anthropological research meant to the Cherokees themselves? Several years ago, an elderly Cherokee remarked that “white men have come among the Indians, wrote down what the Indians knew, then went off and published a book and made lots of money, and the Indians were left just like they were.” The resentment implicit in this statement is not uncommon among Indians and reveals a rather widespread belief that Indians have been exploited for their information, while the whites have reaped all the ¤nancial rewards. I am not personally acquainted with any anthropologists who have enjoyed huge—or even substantial—incomes from books published as a result of their ¤eldwork. It is true that ¤eldwork is usually a requirement for an advanced degree in anthropology, and since it helps one to earn a graduate degree it could be said to bene¤t the anthropologist in this way. But what about the Indians? Do they realize any bene¤ts from the writings of anthropologists? Again, the Eastern Cherokees can serve as an exemplary group. They have dealt with anthropologists for over a century, and they have pro¤ted economically and culturally as a result. James Mooney was in the right place at the right time to get the information he sought from the Eastern Cherokees. He was a sympathetic listener who impressed the Cherokees with his sincerity and good intentions. It is true that he resorted to somewhat devious means in extracting esoteric information from the medicine men, pitting one against the other and playing on the pride of each one as a means of getting them to divulge information. However, if Mooney had not devoted himself so completely to his work, a wealth of information would have been lost. Speck and Broom (1983:xxi) state that Mooney inspired his interpreter,



15

Will West Long, to study Cherokee culture both for its own sake and as a source of income. Mooney paid him for his services, and for the rest of his life Long would ¤ll the role of informant or interpreter for numerous anthropologists. In 1953 the Oconaluftee Indian Village opened and became one of the primary attractions at Cherokee, North Carolina. Patterned after a Cherokee village circa 1750, it features local Cherokees who demonstrate traditional crafts and serve as guides by explaining Cherokee history and culture. This was the outgrowth of years of planning on the part of anthropologists and others interested in the Cherokees (see SEAC Newsletter 1995:3–4; Buchanan 1967:19). This attraction has bene¤ted the Cherokees both economically (it provides seasonal employment and helps attract tourists to the area) and educationally (employees and visitors alike learn about Cherokee history and culture). Indeed, employees must study a handbook on traditional Cherokee culture (see Lewis and Kneberg 1954). This handbook was compiled from information from a variety of sources, including 18th-century traders’ accounts, military records, and other sources that include descriptions of traditional practices of the Cherokees and other tribes. Even by the time of the Removal, acculturation had advanced to the point that knowledge of the traditional culture was only fragmentary. Tourists would be astounded to learn that the information they are given in the village does not represent ancient knowledge and practices handed down through generations of Cherokees, but rather is nearly all obtained from the handbook written by anthropologists. Another area in which anthropologists have been of bene¤t to the Eastern Cherokees is in the language program in the reservation schools. With the change in government policy toward the Indian languages during the 1960s, anthropologists were instrumental in getting Cherokee language classes started. As a result there seemed to be a renewed interest in the language, and classes were expanded and are now offered on a regular basis on multiple levels. Anthropologists, and in particular archaeologists, have done much to promote cultural heritage preservation vis-à-vis archaeological sites in the Cherokee area. Archaeologists and Indians have joined forces in protesting projects such as the Tellico Dam, which destroyed countless archaeological sites, including some historic Cherokee village sites. Archaeologists are now much more sensitive to Indian viewpoints, particularly relating to burials. A recent excavation in north Georgia encountered historic Cherokee remains, including burials, and a Cherokee (with a degree in anthropology) was sent by the tribal council as an observer. That this individual was very well received is indicative of the transformation in viewpoints of both archaeologists and Indians.


16


In my opinion, this all illustrates that relationships between anthropologists and Indians can be mutually bene¤cial. Granted, the relationship between anthropologists and the Eastern Cherokees has not been without controversy (see Olbrechts’s comments about his Cherokee informants in Mooney and Olbrechts 1932). Nevertheless, it seems that anthropologists today are more sensitive to the feelings and viewpoints of Indians, and the Indians (at least in some instances) are more appreciative of anthropologists.


2 “Are You Here to Study Us?” Anthropological Research in a Progressive Native American Community

Susan E. Stans

I

n the last 50 years, the Seminole Indians at Brighton Reservation in Florida have experienced rapid techno-economic, social, and ideological change. Most recent acculturation and self-determination place them on the cusp of yet another stage of cultural change. Native peoples now understand that information has value, and they want something in return for it. The anthropologist who once recorded reciprocity through observation of others now becomes the active participant with an exchange of services for information. This chapter addresses the nature of the most recent community changes, examines the ethical dilemma of remaining aloof from community problems, and describes how I legitimized my study by providing services that the community itself identi¤ed. “Indians have been cursed above all other people in history. Indians have anthropologists,” wrote Vine Deloria, Jr., author and American Indian, in 1969 (1988:8). How does an anthropologist improve his or her standing and achieve respect among tribal nations with this kind of a reputation? Anthropologists have been taught to be objective in their work, to avoid being agents of change, and to study human behavior in its purest form. The conundrum of research today is whether or not to be an active agent of change. Part of the ethical dilemma of carrying out anthropological research with today’s Native Americans can be understood in terms of reciprocity—in return for information, the anthropologist exchanges services.

The Change to Incorpor ation In the last century, the Seminoles of Florida have changed from scattered camps of hunters and small-scale farmers to a self-governed, sovereign nation with centralized communities sustained by tribal enterprises, especially gaming. In 1917 more than 99,000 acres of state land were set aside for the Florida Indians, yet not until 1938 did they begin moving onto the tribal lands from the neighboring



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Figure 2.1. Map of the Seminole reservation.

countryside. By 1999 the membership numbered approximately 2,600, possibly 13 times the number of people remaining at the end of the Third Seminole War in 1858. In 1957 the members of the Seminole Tribe lived on three noncontiguous reservations: Dania (later Hollywood, the tribal headquarters in Broward County), Brighton in Glades County, and Big Cypress in Hendry County. The Immokalee Reservation was added in 1979, Tampa in 1982, and Fort Pierce in 1996 (see Figure 2.1). Approximately 500 Seminole Tribe members lived off of the reservation system in 1995. Another group, the Miccosukee, who live along Tamiami Trail, obtained separate tribal status in 1962. The two tribes, Miccosuki and Seminole, have the same culture, and most members share a common language, Mikasuki.1 Some Seminoles, especially those at Brighton Reservation, speak Creek. Creek is the same language as the Muskogee language spoken in Oklahoma, but a different dialect.



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The two languages, Mikasuki and Creek, are mutually unintelligible but are from the same language family. English is generally used between the two language groups and in contact with outsiders by those Seminoles who can speak English.

Economic Change and Self-Government In 1957 the United States of¤cially recognized the Seminole Tribe of Florida as an autonomous Indian nation. Because they use no taxation to raise capital, the tribe turned to other enterprises for income: cattle raising, citrus production, turtle and hog farming, gaming, smoke shops, and even a hotel in Tampa. In 1995 the tribe broke ground on a $1 million aircraft manufacturing plant in Fort Pierce (The Tribune 1995:B1, B6). Bingo, gaming machines, and poker provide about 60 percent (Na-ga-tha-thi-ki ca. 1992:8) of the tribal income. Gaming generates large pro¤ts for the Seminoles, both as a group and individually. Besides ¤nancing infrastructure costs, group bene¤ts include production of local festivals and rodeos; workshops to build staff skills; improvements to rodeo arenas and fairgrounds; the construction of a museum to preserve culture and history; and purchase of additional lands. Bene¤ts that accrue to individuals are full scholarships; trips to powwows; support of tribal athletics; computer facilities for preschools, libraries, and tutoring; and ¤nancial assistance to pay bills or to provide low-interest loans. As a member of the corporation, each tribal member receives a monthly dividend from which federal income tax is deducted. This coincides with the traditional belief that resources are shared equally among community members. The dividend plus salaries from jobs combine to provide a middle-class income. However, this newfound wealth has not been without its de¤cits. As the communities prosper, former government positions and programs have closed because the tribe no longer quali¤es for government assistance. Programs affected include commodity foods, Head Start, the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program, and the senior citizen and infant day care programs. In almost all cases, however, the tribe has used its own funds to supplement or supplant decreased federal funding and to increase social programs.

Brighton Reservation The main focus of this chapter is the Brighton Reservation, where I conducted my research during 1994 and 1995. The reservation opened in 1938, when the Seminoles living around the northern shore of Lake Okeechobee were given land



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Table 2.1. Population of Brighton Reservation, 1995

in Glades County. The Creek-speaking people living in camps in the area would move onto the reservation over the next 30 years, and eventually they would control 35,805 acres of pastureland. In the 1940s a cattle program was inaugurated at Brighton to help the new residents make the transition from a hunting and gathering society to an agricultural/wage economy. Many residents over the age of 30 remember spending their early years living in chickees, the traditional open houses they have built since being pushed across Florida during the Seminole Wars in the 19th century. Now all reservation residents live in concrete block houses, manufactured housing, or mobile homes, with many maintaining a chickee in their yards for storage or occasional outdoor living.

Population A census taken on August 2, 1995, indicated 510 residents in the Brighton community. Of that number, 393 (77 percent) were registered members of the Seminole Tribe of Florida (Table 2.1). The other 117 individuals (23 percent) were nonSeminole members, including American Indians holding membership in other tribal organizations or people of Euro-American, African-American, or MexicanAmerican heritage. The non-Indian population living on the reservation included domestic partners of tribal members and their stepchildren, as well as children of tribal members whose blood quantum had fallen below one-quarter. Increasing interaction with the general population has led to intermarriage with



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Table 2.2. Languages spoken by adult sample at Brighton Reservation, 1995

outsiders, changing the population’s character by introducing different cultural attributes.

Ideology The yearly Green Corn ceremony maintains ties to traditional religion. The ceremony is central to keeping the sacred medicine bundles and a symbol of renewal and health for the people. Christianity has made a place alongside the ancient custom. The ¤rst permanent group of Christians was established on the reservation during the 1930s, with attendance peaking by 1945. After the introduction of the Southern Baptist religion, many converts abandoned the traditional Green Corn ceremony. Drinking alcohol has been a part of the Green Corn celebration for over 200 years (Bushwell 1972). Baptists believe that drinking is contrary to Christian “witness” and discourage participation in the dance and in drinking. The traditional Seminole medicine used in the Green Corn ceremony is still important to some Christians who visit the ceremony just to receive a part of the medicine for protection and healing. Other traditional medicine used in healing is part of community life, enjoying the support of both the medical clinic and the behavioral health services.

Language The Creek language spoken at Brighton is fading. Residents continually express dismay that the younger generation is not speaking the traditional language. Forty-six percent (Table 2.2) of the adults in my sample still spoke Creek ®uently in addition to English. Another 5 percent spoke Mikasuki and English, and 22 percent were trilingual. Some younger persons understand but do not speak the language; the youngest Creek speaker was a 27-year-old female. Most young parents do not speak Creek in the home.



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Education In 1939 two white teachers established a country day school on the reservation for the children. Because many parents were suspicious of white-run schools, they refused to send their children to the day school. In later years, before the integration of local county schools, Indian students were assigned to segregated local schools with black students in Hendry County. However, the Seminoles considered the education in those schools to be inferior and refused to send their children. Fighting to attend their county’s white schools, they found that even these schools discriminated against Indian children. As a result, the tribe contracted to send their children to schools in Okeechobee in the adjacent county. This worked well until the home county, realizing they would receive federal funds for each Indian child, sought to re-enroll the students. The Brighton residents would have no part of this switch. When the home county threatened to prohibit Okeechobee County school buses from crossing county lines to pick up Indian students, the tribe quickly purchased its own school buses to transport the children to the desired schools. These actions and increased schooling indicate a shift in attitudes toward education. Many residents have ¤nished high school, while others have gone on to receive a college education and advanced degrees.

Social Structure Traditional social structure was built around a matrilineal, matrilocal clan system similar to that of other southeastern Indian cultures (Garbarino 1986). The basic social unit was an extended family camp of the mother’s clan, with the mother’s brothers and uncles rather than the biological father serving as disciplinarians to the children. Today the role of the mother’s brothers in child rearing has lost much of its authority, yet the clan system persists in associations and weakly in residence patterns. Clan exogamy dictates that individuals marry someone from a different clan. Indoctrination into the European style of naming with its patrilineal surname system, the ambilineal descent inheritance laws of the surrounding culture, intermarriage, Christianity, and even the imposition of Western “planned” communities have changed the clan system, decreasing the structural roles of the matrilineal kinship system. Although Brighton housing is loosely allotted by matrilineal clan with kin adjoining each other, the closeness and openness of the former camp and chickee arrangement allowed the elder mothers and uncles to teach and discipline the children daily. Concrete block housing prevents such intimate contact now. New family units must build outside the family grouping if no space is available. The mother’s brother no longer has the



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position of authority within the family, and in many cases the father’s authority has not been ¤rmly established. At present, senior tribal members who were an integral part of the earlier household are likely to live alone, with children and grandchildren checking on their well-being during the week. Major clans still in existence are Bird, Panther, Deer, Otter, Snake, Big Town, and Wind. Traditionally, Bird clan members were the tribal leaders, and the Panther clan was responsible for the Green Corn ceremony and associated medicine bundles. The sacred medicine continues to be the duty of the Panthers. Although traditional leadership roles were the duty of the Birds, all clans participate since incorporation, but Bird members dominated tribal elections prior to 1976 (King 1976) and continue to prevail.

Social and Physical Concerns The welfare of the children is of primary interest to the members of the Brighton community. Receiving low grades, missing too many days, or dropping out of school causes concern. In 1994, parents faced a threat of drug and gang activities in school and on the reservation. Physical well-being is a community goal. Alcohol abuse and alcohol-related accidents touch the entire community. In response, prevention programs and the recovering alcoholics in the community promote alcohol-free activities. The tribe has renovated a house for the use of recovering substance abusers’ meetings, as well. Many Seminoles suffer from diabetes mellitis II (see Joos 1984). At the time of my research, for example, six to eight people were on dialysis for renal failure attributed to diabetes. Such problems do not prevent them from keeping a positive vision of the future. Brighton residents consider themselves progressive, with an appreciation of education, new technologies, and improved relationships with the non-native society. The members of the Seminole Tribe of Florida have witnessed many changes over the course of their lifetimes. They are survivors of a cultural upheaval that has blended the complex structures of an earlier life. Their recent acculturation and self-determination place them on the cusp of yet another stage of culture change—the economic and educational accoutrements of middle-class America.

The Anthropologist’s Dilemma A member of my doctoral committee, Dr. John Moore, cautioned me that working with Native Americans requires a lifetime commitment, not just a stop to gather information, graduate, and move on to something else. From reading Vine



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Deloria, Jr., I knew I would be neither a curiosity nor a revered authority to the community. I was questioned upon my arrival, “Are you here to study us?” This assured me that individuals were aware of anthropologists and their propensity to “study” American Indians. Native peoples understand that information has value and that they deserve something in return for it. Although gifts had been given in previous centuries for assistance and information, bringing trinkets seemed reprehensible, and as a graduate student I had little discretionary money to spare. I decided to exchange the skills I possessed for the privilege of “studying” there. Bernard Gert (1995:30–31) argues that anthropology can no longer be a valuefree description of societies. He raises three questions: (1) Where does the scholar’s responsibility to remain objective end and her contribution to a culture begin? (2) When simply the act of entering a culture changes it, how much should an anthropologist encourage that change? and (3) Whose societal values —outsiders’ or insiders’—will guide the change? Gert af¤rms that anthropologists cannot participate in improving the well-being of a people without the permission of those involved. Clearly, the researcher must respond to the community’s direction. I sacri¤ced remaining an “observer” to help them effect change.

The Anthropologist’s Contribution To counter Deloria’s criticism that the anthropologist/“expert” comes to prove theories, I framed my questions using emic values. The emic perspective refers to the insider’s view. I chose the approach of ethnoscience to discover individual views because it generates frequency lists of those items most salient to multiple individuals. From this inside perspective come the questions that are then framed in theory—in this case, social learning theory. I did not want to observe behavior with a notebook, so I wrote my observations at night and restricted verbatim accounts to those who had given written permission (Deloria 1988:95). With each respondent’s permission, I asked open-ended questions, taping and transcribing their responses to best capture their views. My structured interviews incorporated techniques from cognitive anthropology: frequency counts of cultural items; consensus analysis; decision modeling; and native taxonomic categories that elicit the normative values in the community (Werner and Schoep®e 1987:72–74; Bernard 1994:237–255; Gladwin 1989; Weller and Romney 1988). In this manner, the Seminoles’ worldview describes cultural values more faithfully than an outsider’s interpretation. I expanded my research methods in the role of participant observer. I actively



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Figure 2.2. Elements of the story by James Girtman, age ten, were translated into Creek by his father, Hosea, and his aunt Mary Johns. The Creek translation is: “Poshe. Akvpanet os. Lowacket. Pefoshet. Esherocet. Poshe cvmvleste tos.” This means: “Cats. They are fun. Soft. Fuzzy. Pretty. I like cats.”

engaged in adding to community activities when asked. I tutored in reading and math. During the summer, I held science classes with the help of the tribal librarian. The local school board employed me at the request of the Seminole counselor. As liaison, I conveyed parental concerns to teachers, answered parents’ questions, and helped parents understand school expectations. I assisted in organizing a program for the community in which school counselors and principals spoke to the parents about absenteeism and low grades. I presented graphs showing how students who attended regularly attained higher grades and how females performed better than males. I compiled handouts stating how other Seminole students said they achieved high grades and offered tips for parents from the teachers on improving grades. Young participants took the pictures shown here during a photography project that I initiated. The photography and writing project gave students a chance to present their culture as they wished it to be seen. I developed the activity from private grant monies to improve students’ creativity, communication, and writing skills. Students were given disposable 35 mm cameras and asked to photograph


26


Figure 2.3. Holly Johns, age eleven, wrote about her aunt: “My Aunt Helene. Helene is my aunt. She means a lot to me. I go places with her. She is my dad’s sister. She lets me play on the computer. She knows how to speak and to understand Seminole. She lets her grandson, William, come over and play with me. She takes me to aerobics with her.”

scenes that expressed “who they are” (Ziller 1990). When his or her pictures were developed, each student selected one for enlargement. Each student dictated a story about the picture, and we edited the story together to improve writing skills using the writing process techniques of Proett and Gill (1986). Some of the students’ relatives helped me translate parts of their story into Creek. The project was displayed at the local community festival. Examples of three students’ work may be seen on pages 25–27. Students were given an opportunity to express themselves, clarify their identity, learn something about English and their native Creek, and have pride in the completed product. In turn, I built rapport and learned about the culture through the eyes of the youth, imitating the approach used by Sol Worth and John Adair (1972) in their work with the Navajo 20 years ago. Deloria also said, “Many people writing on Indians today seem only to take; rarely do they seem to share with us” (1988:x). Anthropological ¤eldwork has been seen as a form of exploitation (Hymes 1974). To alleviate my concern about practicing “imperialist” anthropology and extracting from the community, I at-



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Figure 2.4. Lance Tommie, age nine, captured his grandmother in her traditional dress: “My grandma is standing all by herself. She is the only grandma I have. She is the only grandma I need. Grandma is wearing her Indian dress and beads. She made them herself. She is alone and doesn’t have anyone to play with.”

tempted to form partnerships with residents in authoring information. An elder asked me to provide the introductory chapter, organization, typing, and editing for a book she wanted to write about indigenous medicine. Since completion of my dissertation, she and I have coauthored papers for conferences. The education counselor and I prepared ethnographic papers and made presentations about the Brighton community, religion, and cattlewomen. Another native speaker and I facilitated a language class; she spoke Creek while I provided the material, organizational, and written support.2 Working with residents and sharing activities became a priority. Only the dissertation research on the community’s attitudes about alcohol would be exclusively mine. That information was shared with the community upon completion. The library, the tribal representatives, and others received copies of the dissertation. I presented my work to the attendees of the 1996 Brighton Youth Conference. Behavioral health counselors and local educators use this information to help them understand the community better. Community members sought my technical skills for computer problems,


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grant applications, outside resources, and even jelly making. Earlier anthropologists may have called this interference, but I contributed freely, calling it reciprocity—an exchange of services for information.

Change in the Anthropologist’s Perspective The works of Margaret Mead, Bronislaw Malinowski, Allen Holmberg, and Allyn Stearman lured me into the ¤eld of anthropology in the 1980s. After visiting the Seminole, I realized how my ideas about research needed to change. As with Holmberg (1958, 1985), conscience dictated an applied approach. Much of my approach was no more than what other anthropologists have done, but I saw myself as contributing to the change already rapidly accelerating in the community. I reserved my objectivity for the focus of my dissertation research, with its structured survey and verbatim accounts of individual beliefs regarding alcohol. For other activities, my strategy involved sharing my skills and actively promoting education with other Seminoles. Because of the extra projects, the research took 20 months instead of a year, but it was time well spent. I continue my work with the Seminole people by reciprocating—a mutual bene¤t to both the anthropologist and the community. My approach was not to apply my values to the community, but rather to experience the community’s values by asking, “How may I help you in return?”


3 The Archaeologists’—and Indians’— New World Janet E. Levy

Introduction I take my title and theme from James Merrell’s ¤ne history of the Catawba Indian Nation, The Indians’ New World. In his preface, Merrell lays out the core theme of his work: after Europeans arrived in the Americas, the native peoples were living in as much of a “new world” as were Europeans: “It seems logical to ignore Indians when examining these issues; after all they did not cross an ocean to inhabit some faraway land . . . [but] perhaps we should set aside the maps for a moment and think instead of a ‘world’ as the physical and cultural milieu within which people live and a ‘new world’ as a dramatically different milieu, demanding basic changes in that way of life” (1989b:viii). The second, and related, theme of Merrell’s work is that Indians did not react to this new world in any one way, nor did they experience any single trajectory of experience. Following historian Robert Berkhofer, he points out that Indian history in general and Catawba history in particular should not be viewed as a long decline and fall, but encompasses fall and rise, rebellion, compliance, revival, adaptation and ®exibility, and, most of all, survival. With these themes in mind, I want to discuss the relationships between archaeologists and Indians in the South at the turn of the millennium. I will emphasize my own experience as an archaeologist working with Indians in North and South Carolina, including the modern Catawba Nation, located near Rock Hill, South Carolina, just south of the North Carolina–South Carolina border. The concept of a new world focuses our attention on the single most in®uential public event in the recent history of American archaeology: the passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA; PL 101– 601) in 1990. NAGPRA created a new world for both archaeologists and Indians to adapt to. In addition, Merrell’s work reminds us that there are no monolithic



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or unidirectional developments or reactions to NAGPRA. How archaeologists and Indians are adapting to the new world depends on a multitude of factors, including the internal histories and cultures of the two parties and the nature of their interactions before NAGPRA. Ultimately, I hope to demonstrate that this new world can and should be one of fruitful collaboration between Indians and archaeologists, despite very real tensions and con®icts that have developed since the passage of NAGPRA.

A Little History Excavation of prehistoric Indian sites and burials in the southern United States goes back at least to the time of Jefferson, who, in the 1780s, supervised the excavation of a burial mound on his estate at Monticello. In the 19th century, archaeological interest in the South was dominated by discussion of the “Moundbuilders,” allegedly a sophisticated population that was claimed to have preceded Indians in North America and built the major visible mounds throughout the eastern United States. This myth was ultimately disproved within the scienti¤c community by the work of Cyrus Thomas, published in 1894 (see Feder 1999:133–158 for a full discussion). In the mid-20th century, federal programs such as the Works Projects Administration (WPA) had a major impact on archaeology in the southern United States. Numerous large excavations, often yielding large collections of human remains and burial goods, were conducted under the auspices of the WPA and other federal programs throughout the impoverished South; these collections were curated at several southern universities and studied by students and faculty right up to the present. From the 1960s onward, an important development in archaeology was the federally mandated projects in association with major dam and highway building. These also yielded very large collections of prehistoric artifacts, burials, and burial goods. More information about the development of archaeology in the southern United States can be found in Johnson (1993). Throughout this period, interactions between archaeologists and Indians were minimal at best. Some archaeological expertise was used in the 1950s in preparing documents for cases before the Indian Claims Commission (e.g., Fairbanks 1974), but this work was based largely on published research and not on contemporary interactions between Indians and archaeologists. By the 1980s archaeologists and Indians were establishing collaborative contacts in limited cases (e.g., see below for North Carolina), but in general, archaeology was conducted without acknowledging the interests of American Indians. Archaeologists in the



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South were signi¤cantly isolated from American Indians. This all changed after the passage of NAGPRA.

The Native American Gr aves Protection and Repatriation Act Gary White Deer, a member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, describes the impact of NAGPRA as follows: “NAGPRA was the landmark legislation that created the unique space Native America and archaeology occupy today” (1998:8). The law provides a series of protections to Native American (and native Hawaiian) skeletal remains, burial objects, and certain items of special cultural signi¤cance, and gives to Indian people more control over archaeological investigation of prehistoric sites than existed before. NAGPRA does not forbid excavation or analysis of prehistoric or historic Indian burials, but mandates consultation with relevant Indian groups during any excavation of Indian skeletal remains, granting ¤nal authority for the disposition of the remains to the af¤liated Indian group. NAGPRA also requires that all federally funded museums inventory skeletal remains and burial goods in their collections and consult with relevant Indian groups about the future disposition of these human remains and objects. Indians have the right to request repatriation and reburial of human remains and grave goods, but this is not required by the law. In practice, it turns out that different Indian groups have different wishes regarding disposition of materials in museums. For the purposes of this law, relevant Indian groups are federally recognized tribes (and native Hawaiian associations). This reality has its own potential for controversy because some Indian communities are recognized by states and/or by local tradition but not by the federal government. In addition, given the strong emphasis on private property in modern American culture, the law applies only to federal lands and to museums or other institutions receiving federal funds. Some states—including North Carolina, as discussed below—have passed similar laws pertaining to state lands and, rarely, to private lands. However, lack of protection for Indian burials on private lands remains a controversial point (White Deer 1998:8). Although NAGPRA became law in 1990, it was several years before written regulations were provided to guide its implementation. As of the fall of 1999, numerous consultations between museums and Indians have occurred and numerous repatriations have taken place. It is also true that NAGPRA still generates controversy and that various amendments to it have been proposed, but none have yet passed since its implementation. A fuller exposition of the law can be


32


found in Rose et al. (1996), and discussion of its implementation in several cases can be found in the papers in Swidler et al. (1997).

Archaeological Experiences in the Carolinas It would be useful to have a systematic survey of archaeologist-Indian interactions throughout the South, but this chapter does not include such. Rather, I review my own experiences in North and South Carolina and limited information from elsewhere in the region. My own experiences are not special or even particularly intensive, but they provide a starting point to discuss important general themes. Let me start with some background information about archaeologists and Indians in the Carolinas. North Carolina has the largest Indian population in the eastern United States (approximately 80,000 people), including six state-recognized tribes and one federally recognized community, the Eastern Band of Cherokees. The North Carolina Commission of Indian Affairs, created in 1971 as part of the state’s Department of Administration, is the lead public agency for Indian issues. In 1973 the North Carolina General Assembly created the Archaeological Advisory Committee, whose membership included archaeologists, representatives of the Indian community, and representatives of the general citizenry. This group was intermittently active until the early 1980s, but it was eliminated later in a statewide move to simplify government. However, the important point here is that as early as 1973, it was recognized in North Carolina that archaeologists and Indians had mutual concerns. In 1974, Indian people protested at Town Creek Indian Mounds, a state historic site, about in situ displays of prehistoric skeletal remains. This display was closed until several years later, when it could be reopened with mannequins replacing the skeletons. Beginning in 1979, archaeologists, Indians, and legislators in North Carolina began negotiating the development of a law to protect prehistoric Indian burials. As might be expected, this was a somewhat rocky process, with divisions of opinion within both the archaeological and Indian communities (Burke 1986). Nevertheless, the North Carolina Unmarked Burial and Unmarked Skeletal Remains Protection Act went into effect in 1981, in advance of comparable laws in many other states and before any comparable federal legislation. The North Carolina “Burial Bill,” as it is known familiarly, allows excavation and analysis of human skeletal remains by appropriately trained individuals, mandates consultation between archaeologists and relevant communities over disposition of such remains, and allows (but does not require) reburial. The law also provides for penalties for unauthorized excavation of human skeletal remains, as



33

well as penalties for display and sale of such remains. The law is notable for applying to private as well as to state land. Although the law was originally drafted to respond to concerns about prehistoric Indian burials, it has been applied in a number of cases of historic-period African-American and EuroAmerican “unmarked burials.” Implementation of the burial bill in 1981 created a legal mandate for consultation between Indians and archaeologists; in practice, this was quite limited until the 1990s. The Indian population of South Carolina is much smaller than that of North Carolina. The largest community is the Catawba, in upstate South Carolina, only 25 miles from the North Carolina border. The Catawba were federally recognized in 1943, but that status was terminated in 1962. Federal recognition of the Catawba was regained in 1993 as part of the comprehensive settlement of a longstanding land claims case; just under 2,200 people are currently on the of¤cial tribal roll. The other Indian communities in South Carolina are not federally recognized, and they are small, dispersed, and relatively unorganized (Taukchiray and Kasakoff 1992); their total numbers are dif¤cult to discover but probably do not exceed the number of Catawbas. Prehistoric burials in South Carolina are protected under general statutes against desecration of graves, but not under a special law; the South Carolina Institute of Anthropology and Archaeology, located at the University of South Carolina–Columbia, takes the lead in negotiating excavation and reburial issues. It is likely that differences in state law between North and South Carolina are due to the differences in the size and political clout of local Indian communities. North Carolina has long had the largest Indian population east of the Mississippi River, which gave Indian communities more political clout there than elsewhere in the South. My original research focus in archaeology was on the European Bronze Age; before I came to North Carolina, I had participated in excavations in North America but had not been deeply involved in research here. When I arrived in North Carolina in the fall of 1980, archaeologists were in the midst of debating the merits of the proposed Burial Bill. There was considerable rancor in these discussions, which were rendered moot by passage of the bill in 1981; bitterness remained among some professional archaeologists for a number of years. In 1985, in collaboration with the Schiele Museum, Gastonia, North Carolina, a small natural history museum, I began long-term involvement in local prehistoric archaeology. We conducted excavations at two late-prehistoric sites in the region and uncovered a small number of burials. Although the museum already had cooperative relationships with individual members of the Catawba Nation, there was little or no involvement by them in archaeology. At that point, my own


34


“interactions” with Indians were limited to ful¤lling the mandates of the North Carolina Burial Bill when we discovered skeletal remains at the sites under excavation. In 1990, I took a group of students to participate in a rescue excavation at a late-prehistoric site in Yancy County in western North Carolina, within the region of traditional Cherokee in®uence. This site of a prehistoric village was within the grounds (and football ¤eld) of a junior high school and was threatened by expansion of the septic system for the school. (Parenthetically, it was an experience in archaeology as public entertainment; in the afternoons, local citizens came out to the football bleachers and watched us excavate.) A burial had been recovered at this site, and negotiations legally mandated by the 1981 Burial Bill had taken place. However, a group of individuals who identi¤ed themselves as Indians had gathered in the town to protest the excavation of the site overall, claiming it was sacred ground. In some statements, the existence of the excavated burial and the acknowledged presence of other unexcavated burial pits created the sacredness of the site. Other statements, it seemed to me, claimed that any Indian-occupied land was sacred. None of the protesters were Cherokee tribal members; some were from outside the state, and as far as we knew, none were members of another federally or state-recognized tribe. Nevertheless, they were quite successful in garnering positive media attention and support from some other, non-Indian, groups in the region. It is probably lucky for me and for archaeology in North Carolina that I was not the person responsible for interacting with the protesters. My anger and frustration levels were very high, and I was not at all sure of my ability to control my tongue. In fact, the lead archaeologist at the excavation was exemplary in his ability to talk calmly and repeatedly with all who visited the excavation, working to explain both the law and the archaeologists’ attitudes and goals to all inquiring parties. Although, during this encounter, various threats were made to stop archaeology in North Carolina forever, little came of those statements. None of the remaining suspected burials were excavated, and later the one excavated burial was reburied under the mandates of the Burial Bill, accompanied by a ceremony conducted by a traditional Cherokee religious practitioner. In 1995 another excavation in the North Carolina mountains, in Macon County, was interrupted by Indian protests. Again, some of my students were participating as weekend volunteers, although I never visited the site. This was an excavation in advance of possible industrial development of what turned out



35

to be a large, multi-period prehistoric site. There were features identi¤ed that archaeologists believed might contain burials, but these were not excavated. Before excavation, the tribal government of the Eastern Band of Cherokees was contacted and expressed no objection to the excavation. However, after excavation started, a traditional religious organization within the Cherokee tribe did present objections. Excavations continued but were interrupted and modi¤ed by ongoing demands and negotiations; again, there were some verbal challenges to excavators, many of them community and student volunteers. The situation was complicated by ongoing political competition within the Cherokee tribal government and by the political needs and concerns of the county government, which was sponsoring the industrial development. Ultimately, signi¤cant parts of the site were cleared and mapped, but not excavated. The site has been back¤lled, and as of 1999, industrial development has not occurred. Both of these experiences were frustrating and somewhat embittering for archaeologists. It is likely that Indians experienced the same emotions, though I am not in a position to say. But these encounters do not illustrate the full range of archaeologist-Indian interactions either in the state in general or with the Cherokee in particular. For example, one North Carolina university-based archaeologist has been visiting the Cherokee reservation since 1982, studying the language, and teaching Cherokee students in archaeological ¤eld schools. My other interactions with Indians have been with the Catawba Nation of South Carolina and have been uniformly positive. During 1991–1993, my students and I collaborated with staff from the Schiele Museum of Gastonia, North Carolina, the Museum of York County, South Carolina, and community volunteers to partially excavate a large archaeological site in northern South Carolina, with both late-prehistoric and early historic components. The early historic component probably represents one of the 18th-century Catawba villages, perhaps one that John Lawson passed through in his travels through the upcountry in 1701 (Merrell 1989b:1–7). During the three summer seasons of excavation, there were no Indian-archaeologist confrontations. Rather, at least one Catawba tribal member worked as an intern and volunteer at the site. Even more signi¤cantly, the head of the tribe’s cultural preservation committee, Dr. Wenonah George Haire, participated in the symposium at the 1993 Southeastern Archaeological Conference (SEAC), where we presented preliminary ¤ndings to the professional archaeological community (Levy 1993; Haire 1993). We think this was the ¤rst time an American Indian made a presentation at SEAC, although we do not have enough evidence to say so de¤nitively.


36


The relationship between the Catawba and regional archaeologists, including myself, has extended to several other events. In 1991 the Catawba Indian Nation held an all-day symposium on economic development, tribal legal issues, and history and archaeology. Participants included several Indian leaders from other southern tribes, Indian and non-Indian economic and legal specialists, six invited archaeologists, and one invited historian. The local member of the U.S. House of Representatives was in the audience, and the symposium was open to the public. The positive energy and joint excitement for the future among all the participants was striking. In addition, since 1990 the Catawba have held an annual public celebration and homecoming on the Saturday of Thanksgiving weekend. This event, called Yap Ye Iswa, has steadily increased in size and includes dancing, craft sales, traditional food, storytelling, archaeological exhibits, and demonstrations of pottery making, beadwork, and other traditional crafts. At the early festivals, professional archaeologists set up exhibits about local archaeology at the invitation of the Catawba Cultural Preservation Project (CCPP), the celebration’s organizers; in recent years the CCPP has taken over responsibility for the archaeological exhibits. The Catawba Nation now employs a four-person archaeological staff, including at least one tribal member. The Catawba tribal archaeologist and staff, joined in the ¤eld by tribal members, avocational archaeologists, student volunteers, and others, recently completed a survey of the reservation (Kenion et al. 1996). The survey identi¤ed and evaluated 18 historic-period sites. This is an essential ¤rst step for site conservation as the Catawba Nation begins major building and development projects funded by the settlement of the land claims case and rerecognition by the federal government. It is expected that both prehistoric and historic sites will be identi¤ed on lands the tribe will acquire in the region as part of the settlement. In addition, the tribal archaeologists participate in educational programs developed by the CCPP for local primary and secondary schools and for the public. My most recent interaction as an archaeologist with Indians returns us to North Carolina. In January 1997 the North Carolina Commission of Indian Affairs, the North Carolina Of¤ce of State Archaeology, and the North Carolina Archaeological Council (a voluntary organization of professional archaeologists in the state) cosponsored a day-long forum to discuss issues of mutual interest. Speakers included the executive director of the commission, representatives of several North Carolina Indian communities, and archaeologists from state government, federal government, and universities. Approximately 80 people



37

—archaeologists, Indians, state government staff, and others—attended. Discussion was substantive and nonconfrontational, although there certainly was not agreement on all issues. A striking aspect of this forum was the low pro¤le of reburial and repatriation in the discussions. Although some suggestions about reburial were made, the main focus of discussion was on education: the need for better public education, the need to educate Indian youth about their heritage, and the need for access to and display of artifacts in Indian communities. At the close, the participants endorsed 19 recommendations about Indian-archaeologist interaction that had been developed at an earlier collaborative meeting of archaeologists and Indians (see below). This is undoubtedly a wish list that will require funding and cooperation with other public units, and it will be slow and dif¤cult to accomplish. However, it is clear in these recommendations that Indians and archaeologists have a number of mutual concerns for which joint action—for example, in communicating with the state board of education and with county school superintendents—is desirable. Reburial and repatriation, while present, are clearly not the only—or even the central—concerns.

Recommendations of Archaeology/Indian Forum: Cosponsored by the North Carolina Commission of Indian Affairs and the North Carolina Of¤ce of State Archaeology 1. An annual archaeology summit should be held, including representatives from the North Carolina professional archaeological community, the North Carolina Commission of Indian Affairs, and the state’s Indian tribes and organizations. 2. Each Indian tribe and organization in North Carolina should form a repatriation/reinterment committee and explore the option of establishing/designating tribal burial grounds. 3. Presentations on the results of the Archaeology/Indian Forum should be made at the annual Indian Unity Conference. 4. The possibility of the establishment of a state cemetery for reinterment of Native American remains either within existing state property, such as state parks, or on land speci¤cally purchased for this purpose should be explored. 5. Archaeologists should sponsor more teacher workshops on Native American prehistory and history in North Carolina and on archaeology. 6. Curriculum supplements should be developed through the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction to include information on ethnic and minority groups, such as Native Americans, important in North Carolina history.


38


7. Archaeologists in North Carolina should respect Indian religion and the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, and there should be better understanding and communication between Native Americans and archaeologists on several levels—the value of religion is equal to the value of science. 8. There should be central coordination of educational efforts in the areas of archaeology and anthropology, and there should be a separate educational summit. The North Carolina Department of Public Instruction should be included in this summit. 9. Archaeologists in North Carolina should be encouraged to attend a “WisdomKeepers” program. 10. Archaeologists should make more of an effort to go into the Indian community to learn more about the existing Native American culture. 11. The State Board of Education and the county superintendents should be contacted with suggestions for improvements to curriculum and textbooks. 12. A legislative appropriation for implementation of the state’s burial legislation should be sought, and the state’s Indian and archaeological communities should provide a united front in this effort. The support of the North Carolina Department of Administration should also be sought in this effort.1 13. The North Carolina Of¤ce of State Archaeology, the North Carolina Commission of Indian Affairs, and the Department of Administration should formally contact the State Board of Education to discuss educational issues relevant to the state’s Native American prehistory and history and archaeology. 14. Grant sources should be identi¤ed for the repatriation and/or identi¤cation of objects of cultural patrimony, and these types of activities should be incorporated into other grants. 15. The constitution of the Archaeological Advisory Committee should be sought. 16. Archaeologists in the state should present a workshop for the North Carolina Commission of Indian Affairs and the state’s Indian tribes and organizations on how archaeology is done. This should be separate from the educational summit discussed in item no. 8. 17. The North Carolina Commission of Indian Affairs and the state’s Indian tribes and organizations should present a workshop to the North Carolina archaeological community on the present-day Indian population and culture of the state. 18. The North Carolina Commission of Indian Affairs and the North Carolina Of¤ce of State Archaeology should conduct presentations on the burial leg-



39

islation to the state’s District Attorneys Association and the County Sheriffs Association. 19. Archaeologists should make more of an effort to advertise employment opportunities through Native American associations and should make a concerted effort to hire Native American archaeologists. More effort should also be expended on recruiting Native American students into the study of archaeology and anthropology.

Discussion So, what is the general signi¤cance of these personal experiences in the archaeologists’ and Indians’ “new world”? They all take place after the passage of NAGPRA, yet none is directly about repatriation and reburial. There have been no burials excavated at the proto-Catawba site I worked at, and I curate no burials or grave goods in the archaeological collections under my charge. Other archaeologists in North and South Carolina (and, of course, elsewhere in the South) do curate burials and burial goods and have spent signi¤cant time in the past several years developing inventories, consulting with relevant tribes, and discussing repatriation and alternatives. In both North and South Carolina, archaeologists have extended repatriation discussions to some tribes that are not federally recognized (these are usually state recognized). This is not legally required by NAGPRA, but it is one of the developments from NAGPRA. It is also a potential source of con®ict with federally recognized tribes (within which there are diverse opinions about groups that are not federally recognized), although in the Carolinas that particular con®ict has not been expressed very often. In addition, other states in the South have expanded legal protection, at the state level, of Indian burials and grave goods since the passage of NAGPRA. For example, in 1992 the Georgia legislature passed new protective laws and established the Council on American Indian Concerns, whose members include Indians, scientists, and members of the public (the council’s excellent website can be accessed at www.ganet.org/indcouncil). NAGPRA shifted the distribution of power in the discipline of archaeology in North America. There has been discomfort and, in some cases, signi¤cant opposition (e.g., Meighan 1992; Clark 1996) among archaeologists to that shift for a variety of reasons. However, NAGPRA has not ended prehistoric archaeology, archaeological training, or osteological analysis in North Carolina or elsewhere in the South, as Meighan (1992:708) suggested would happen if archaeologists “give in to” Indians.


40


We have now worked with a reburial law in North Carolina for almost 20 years, and archaeology goes on. The practice of archaeology is different—and in some cases more dif¤cult—for archaeologists, but it ®ourishes nonetheless. Furthermore, the state Burial Bill has led to the arrest, guilty plea, and ¤ne of individuals for displaying and attempting to sell prehistoric skeletal remains vandalized from a North Carolina site (Wrinn 1989). It is likely that there will be more reburials in the foreseeable future, both through state law and through NAGPRA. The important point here is that NAGPRA does not affect archaeologists or Indians in the same way everywhere in the country. Furthermore, the effects of NAGPRA are not only on interactions related to burials. Those interactions are the ones most fraught with tension, but a number of other developments have occurred as indirect and, perhaps, unexpected results of NAGPRA, and these are, overall, positive developments. Rose et al. (1996) make a similar point regarding the ¤eld of bioarchaeology. Although NAGPRA is a federal law, its impact in daily life is very much in®uenced by the speci¤c conditions of Indian communities in each state and by preexisting laws and previous Indian-archaeologist interactions (a similar perspective is demonstrated in various papers about interactions between archaeologists and Indians in the West in Klesert and Downer 1990). An important factor in the Carolinas is the lack of federal recognition for many groups claiming Indian identity (Lerch 1992b; Taukchiray and Kasakoff 1992). In the abstract, NAGPRA allows archaeologists to ignore tribes that are not federally recognized; in practice, at least in the Carolinas, repatriation discussions have included some such communities. In North Carolina it is clear that such efforts were in®uenced by the preceding years of experience with the state Burial Bill, which incorporated both state- and federally recognized tribes. By the time NAGPRA came along, North Carolina archaeologists already had some experience (although relatively little in actuality) in negotiating with the Indian community about excavation, analysis, and reburial of prehistoric skeletal remains. NAGPRA expanded the ¤eld of concern dramatically, especially for institutions curating large collections of skeletons and burial goods, but it did not introduce something entirely new and unproved. NAGPRA also provided a mechanism to overcome the limits of state boundaries. Earlier repatriation or collaboration efforts that were directed by state laws were potentially limited by state boundaries, although Indian culture areas frequently crossed state lines. Small Indian communities, such as are most typical in the South, are in the position of struggling for public visibility and legitimacy. In these struggles, ar-



41

chaeology can be an important ally, a fact that has been recognized by several tribes. Furthermore, because many tribes constitute some of the poorest communities in their regions, their most important concerns are education and economic development. Again, Indians and archaeologists can potentially be allies in pursuing these goals; at the least, archaeologists are peripheral to the goals and left mostly alone while tribes struggle with economic issues. For example, while the Catawba pursued their land claim case through the court and political systems (ultimately successfully), they established their Cultural Preservation Program (incorporated 1989) and began a variety of projects to strengthen internal cultural pride and cohesion as well as external recognition. One of the ¤rst projects was the annual November festival, at which prehistoric artifacts and educational materials about archaeology have been exhibited since the beginning. By 1994 the tribe had engaged an archaeologist to conduct cultural resource surveys and testing of archaeological sites. These researches are important to the Catawba because they have started on a major building campaign since the settlement of the land claims case, because they want to learn more about their own history, and because they want to include archaeological and historical exhibits in various tourist facilities that are planned as part of economic development. In addition, the Catawba have a special interest in archaeology because of the continuing importance of traditional pottery making to tribal identity and economy. The history and prehistory of pottery is of signi¤cant interest to potters and other members of the tribe. This has resulted in a collaboration among several archaeologists, historians, and tribal members on a 30-minute video documenting the technology and cultural signi¤cance of Catawba pottery; the ¤rst public showing of the video took place in March 2000. One other local particularity that may at some point in®uence archaeologistCatawba interactions is that the majority of the Catawba are Mormons. This fact has not come into play in my experience, but it might in the future. So, the Catawba have good reason to work with archaeologists, although they also want to regain direct control of objects of cultural heritage that have been removed from them, as they declared in the Catawba Executive Committee resolution of February 1994. Equally, archaeologists have good reason to work with the Catawba. The establishment of strong, cooperative personal relationships is the best defense against con®icted encounters over excavation, analysis, reburial, and repatriation. We probably knew this at some level before NAGPRA, but that law made salient the importance of interpersonal and cross-cultural understanding for the future of archaeology. Ironically perhaps, NAGPRA has encouraged archaeologists to become better anthropologists, because we now have to struggle


42


to understand the cultural values, social organization, and political structure of communities other than our own. The importance of long-term, mutual relationships between archaeologists and affected communities (including, but not exclusively, Indians) is recognized in the Principles of Archaeological Ethics recently adopted by the Society for American Archaeology (Lynott and Wylie 1995; the full text of these principles is available on the society’s web page at http://www.saa.org/Society/Ethics/prethic.html). For some archaeologists, such cooperative relationships are possibly only instrumental—that is, something along the lines of “Well, let’s be nice so we can get on with our work.” But the ¤rst step toward developing such relationships, even if it is rooted in pragmatics, can be a foundation for richer, more humane, and ultimately more collaborative long-term relationships. There are a number of examples of such developing relationships in the South. For example, the Texas Committee for the Humanities provided funds for 40 members of the Caddo tribe to participate in the annual archaeological ¤eld school held by the Texas Archaeological Society (Caddos Participate in Field School Program 1992). Another example is the long-term relationship initiated between the Florida Museum of Natural History and the Seminole and Miccosukee tribes. Four tribal representatives are working with archaeologists and museum staff on the planning and design of a new Hall of South Florida People and Environments (MacMahon 1996). Tribal elders and others were also consulted in the planning process for this large exhibit, which will focus on the prehistoric Calusa chiefdom of south Florida. Billy L. Cypress (1997) describes the collaboration between archaeologists and members of the Seminole Tribe of Florida in the course of economic development on tribal lands. Members of several southern tribes hold public festivals on the grounds of archaeological sites, such as the Moundville Native American Festival, participated in by Choctaws, Cherokees, Seminoles, and Creeks at the major mound center near Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Tensions and dif¤culties certainly continue to exist. From the Indian point of view, I suspect that a few years of legal recognition in the realm of archaeology do not eliminate long-established suspicions of science and scientists (e.g., Cypress 1997:158). Furthermore, Indians may have problems with the complex overlapping jurisdictions of federal and state law and agencies and the bureaucratic decision-making style required by government agencies that frequently does not ¤t into the slower, more consensual decision-making style of most tribes. Tribes may feel they have to spend more time on economic development than on working with archaeologists. Also, Indians object to the frequent lack of respect given to oral tradition in making decisions about tribal af¤liation with sites or burials



43

(Anyon et al. 1997); these decisions are central to repatriations that take place under NAGPRA. Inevitably, however, I know more about the dif¤culties from the archaeologists’ point of view. From this perspective, the greatest problems arise because of factionalism within, and competition between, Indian communities, including local, non-local, and pan-Indian organizations (see also Dongoske and Anyon 1997; Swidler and Cohen 1997). This can cause intense confusion, misinformation, and misdirection within an evolving relationship between archaeologists and Indians. For example, in North Carolina the original establishment of the Commission of Indian Affairs and of the Archaeological Advisory Committee was hampered by con®ict between the Cherokee and other North Carolina staterecognized tribes (Neely 1992:34; Burke 1986). The events in Macon County in 1996 were signi¤cantly in®uenced by factionalism within the Eastern Band of Cherokees. And there are ongoing tensions in some situations between federally recognized tribes and state-recognized groups. Similarly, one of the most tension-¤lled recent encounters between Indians and archaeologists in the eastern United States developed over the GE Mound in southern Indiana. Although individuals who had looted the site in 1988 were successfully prosecuted under the federal Archaeological Resources Protection Act (ARPA), the issues of reburial and repatriation created extremely adversarial interactions between local archaeologists and a variety of Indian organizations ( Jeske 1994; Munson et al. 1995). The Indian parties included the Indiana Native American Council, which was established by state government after the ARPA prosecution and included members of both locally af¤liated Indian groups and members of non-local tribes now resident in Indiana. A second organization was the American Indian Inter-Tribal Council, a nongovernmental organization created after the ARPA decision by two self-identi¤ed Indian individuals. A third party consisted of members of the pan-Indian American Indian Movement (AIM), a national organization of Indians founded in Minneapolis in 1968, to unify members of different tribes to work together for political, social, and economic justice for Indians. The membership is primarily, but not exclusively, from western tribes. Some Indians object to the blurring of individual tribal identity encouraged by AIM; also, AIM includes members of both federally recognized Indian communities and those that are not federally recognized, which also contributes to tensions between AIM and some tribes. At the time of excavation of the GE Mound, in 1992, there was originally an agreement among the landowner (the General Electric Company), the archaeologists involved, and representatives of the local Indian community that the site



44

would be protected, the artifacts would be studied by archaeologists, and some artifacts would be displayed locally in order to educate the public about Indian history and culture (Munson et al. 1995:147). However, in 1994 the artifacts were all reburied during a ceremony conducted by Lakota/Mandan individuals. Leaders of the local Miami tribe were not invited to the reburial and apparently disagreed with other members of the Native American Council and with representatives of AIM about the disposition of the artifacts (Munson et al. 1995:151). However, the General Electric Company, apparently in the face of media attention, sponsored reburial of all of the artifacts, including rare organic items of wood, leather, and cloth, before archaeological analysis could be completed and despite disagreement by members of local Indiana tribes. NAGPRA did not come into play here directly because the looting occurred in 1988 and because the Miami are not federally recognized. These are the situations that create the greatest dif¤culties for archaeologists, cases that involve either factionalism internal to a tribe or con®ict among various Indian organizations, federally recognized or not, local or non-local. The question of “Who speaks for the Indians?” (Price 1991:14; see Neely 1992 for a North Carolina example) is a contentious one for both Indians and archaeologists. Despite claims in some literature about “the Indian point of view” on excavation, analysis, and reburial, in reality there seems to be a diversity of points of view (e.g., Klesert and Holt 1990). The role of the pan-Indian American Indian Movement is also contentious. Price (1991:14–18) seems to imply that pan-Indian organizations have an important role to play in debates over reburial, but he provides no clear rationale for granting greater legitimacy to pan-Indian organizations than to local Indian organizations. It is fair to say that archaeologists, in general, are not enamored of AIM and pan-Indian organizations. But diversity cuts both ways, and I cannot claim that such negative feelings are universal among archaeologists. Similarly, Indians hold diverse attitudes toward the Society for American Archaeology (SA A), the “pan-archaeology organization.” There are American Indian members of the SA A who have made major contributions to expanding collaboration between archaeologists and the communities of Indians. There are also Indian people who object greatly to any interaction with archaeologists.

Summary In the post-NAGPRA new world, archaeology will be more dif¤cult for archaeologists than it was before. Shifts in the distribution of power inevitably create resentment, opposition, and rebellion; such shifts take time to be integrated into



45

daily action. But it is a mistake for anyone to think that there exists either monolithic Indian opinion or monolithic archaeological opinion on NAGPRA, reburial, and repatriation. As the late Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Thomas “Tip” O’Neill, has said, “All politics are local.” The local history of Indian-archaeologist interaction before NAGPRA will have a signi¤cant impact on how archaeology is done after NAGPRA. The most fruitful Indianarchaeologist relationships will be those based on long-term, local communication and cooperation. Furthermore, the post-NAGPRA new world in archaeology is about more than just repatriation and reburial. The 1990 legislation mandated certain kinds of interactions between Indians and archaeologists; there are considerable tensions inherent in those interactions about repatriation and reburial. But NAGPRA also provided an opportunity to create collaborations between Indians and archaeologists. These collaborations have the potential to create potent alliances for historic preservation and public education. Will it be easy? No. Will it be possible? Yes. Is it worth it? I de¤nitely think so.



II Southeastern Indians and the Law

S

ince the arrival of the ¤rst Europeans in North America, Indian peoples have been subjected to legislation from the outside world, a practice that has increased with time. Many of the policies re®ected in the legislation of the 19thand 20th-century American government actually had their origins in the colonial period under British rule: compensable title to land, reservations, federal control over Indian trade, allotting and leasing of Indian lands, negotiation of treaties, and guardianship of Indians, for example. Most of the early legislation was concerned primarily with the promotion of Euro-American interests and rights rather than with the rights and needs of native peoples, even though some proponents of such legislation as the Indian Removal Act of 1834 (which had a profound impact on tribes in the Southeast), the Dawes Severalty or General Allotment Act of 1887, and the Wheeler-Howard or Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 professed a concern for the welfare of the Indian people who would be affected by the legislation. Indian peoples had virtually no control over the passage or opposition to such legislation, and equally little control over what happened to them as a result of this legislation. The establishment of the National Congress of American Indians in 1944 to lobby for or against proposed legislation that could affect Indian communities introduced a new era in relationships between Indian communities and the federal government. Grassroots organizations in Indian communities also worked on behalf of native communities in ¤ghting or promoting legislation; the restoration of the Menominee Indians of Wisconsin to federal status in 1972 was accomplished in large part because of the active role taken by Menominees in their effort to overturn the disastrous results of “termination.” The latter part of the 20th century has been characterized by increased legislation mandated or at least in®uenced by Indian communities, legislation concerning gaming on reservations, the return of objects of cultural patrimony or


48


burials to tribes, the prohibition of sales of arts or crafts objects as “Indian-made” unless made by “certi¤ed” Indians (members of recognized tribes), and the right to practice traditional religions. However, in order for tribes to bene¤t from this legislation of the 1990s—to have reservations or to receive various services from the federal government through the Bureau of Indian Affairs—they had to have federal recognition or acknowledgment, something many southeastern tribes lacked because their tribal organizations had been destroyed before the United States was established or because they had been “removed” from the Southeast. Thus, for many southeastern tribes, the most important legal issues are those concerning their efforts to gain federal recognition. George Roth’s chapter, “Federal Recognition in the South,” is an overview or historical survey of 20thcentury efforts of southern tribes to be recognized and is of particular value because much of the data contained therein have not been published before. Karen Blu’s chapter, “Region and Recognition: Southern Indians, Anthropologists, and Presumed Biology,” looks at the role of the anthropologist in helping southeastern tribes be acknowledged in the latter part of the 20th century and also addresses the genetic or biological issue of Indian identity as a criterion for recognition as opposed to cultural criteria.


4 Federal Tribal Recognition in the South George Roth

Introduction This chapter surveys the complex history of the expansion of acknowledged federal responsibility for Indian tribes in the South after Removal.1 Its review is limited to the history of recognition of tribes that are presently federally recognized.2 “Recognition” here means that the federal government had accepted or asserted a fairly broad jurisdiction over a group and a fairly broad responsibility for services and protection, within the context of the policies of the times. In practice, the status of a tribe was not always clear or de¤nable by a single word, and it often changed over time. Each case discussion looks at the speci¤c federal actions through which a tribe gained federal status and the judgments of tribal existence that were made, as well as the inseparable issues of citizenship and relationship to the state. The individual tribal histories focus on the application of the laws, policies, and other concepts on which federal Indian tribal status was granted, denied, and interpreted. They are not explanations of why some groups became recognized or not at a particular point in time, which would require a much more detailed historical study of the events, actors, and interests involved. Only some of the basic documentary record could be examined for each case, hence it is impossible to do more than brie®y characterize the history of the statuses of these tribal groups.

Background: Historical Requirements for Feder al Recognition A review of federal laws, federal and state court decisions, congressional statements, and executive-branch policy decisions shows that two conditions were necessary for a group of Indians to be a federally recognized tribe between the


50


1830s and the 1970s. The ¤rst requirement was that the federal government considered that the tribe existed as “a distinct political community,” that is, was a community that governed itself and was socially and politically separate and distinct from non-Indians. The second requirement was that the federal government had taken an action which acknowledged that it had both a political relationship with the speci¤c tribe and a responsibility for it. Qualifying actions included treaties, laws, presidential orders, and other acts that speci¤cally affected the tribe in question. It was not necessary for a tribe to have a reservation to be recognized. Both conditions had to be ful¤lled. Groups that were considered tribes were unrecognized if the federal government had not taken any speci¤c action acknowledging a relationship with them. Examples include some tribes in the 13 original states that were unrecognized because they had come under colonial control before the United States became independent and had never established a relationship with the federal government by treaty or otherwise. The federal government held that it had never accepted jurisdiction or responsibility for them and also that their members had become citizens of the states ( Jones 1899). Recognition policy changed as a result of, among other factors, the federal court decision in Passmaquoddy v. Morton (528 F.2d 370 [1st Cir. 1975]), which held that, contrary to the government’s past policy and past court decisions, there was no requirement to show a “speci¤c act” acknowledging a tribe. The court held that the 1834 and earlier Non-Intercourse Acts had established a federal trust responsibility for all tribes, regardless of whether there were speci¤c acts recognizing them. The decision left in place the requirement, for recognition, that the government determine tribal existence of groups for which a federal relationship and responsibility had not been acknowledged. In 1978 the present acknowledgment process, under which the Department of the Interior recognizes tribes based on this single requirement, was established by federal regulations (Department of the Interior 1978).3 The requirement that tribes maintain a separate political and social existence rested on the fundamental legal view of the status of Indian tribes which was established in the landmark 1832 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Worcester v. Georgia (31 U.S. [6 Pet.] 515). The Court stated that Indian tribes were “domestic dependent nations” within the borders of the United States and under its control, but not part of it.4 The 1894 federal report Indians Not Taxed summarized this view of tribal status, citing the court decision in Ex Parte Reynolds (20 Fed. Cas. No. 11719 [D.C.W.D. Ark., 1879]). It stated that “Indians who maintain their tribal relations are the subjects of independent government [the tribe] and as


Southeastern Indians and the Law

51

such not in the jurisdiction of the United States, because the Indian nations have always been regarded as distinct political communities” (Department of the Interior 1894). Thus, a tribe existed when its members as a whole kept up a political relationship with each other, that is, “maintained tribal relations.” It followed that the legal interpretation was that the federal government had no responsibility for groups whose members had assimilated into non-Indian society, were no longer a distinct community, and no longer followed a tribal leadership, because they were considered to have “given up tribal relations” (Smith 1906:725). This held even if the tribe had been subject to an act of federal recognition in the past (U.S. Supreme Court 1884:104).5

Citizenship As a consequence of this view of tribes in relation to the United States, citizenship and tribal relations were considered incompatible throughout much of the 19th century. Broadly, according to legal thought of the time, it was impossible for an Indian who was a citizen, voted, and generally associated with non-Indians to be simultaneously maintaining tribal relations (Commissioner of Indian Affairs [CIA] 1892:17–27, 37).6 The 1887 General Allotment Act, for example, conferred citizenship on any Indian who had “voluntarily taken up . . . residence separate and apart from any tribe of Indians . . . and has adopted the habits of civilized life” (U.S. Statutes at Large 1887). A prominent aim of various Removal and pre-Removal treaties that provided for Indians to take individual lands within their former tribal territory was that these Indians were thereby to become citizens of the state and subject themselves to state jurisdiction. They would no longer be part of a tribe and therefore no longer a federal responsibility. Being a citizen of the United States as a result of taking land as an individual under a treaty or otherwise remaining behind after removal did not, in practice, automatically make an Indian a citizen of the state in which he or she lived. Throughout much of the 19th century the southern states mostly resisted, in law and/or in practice, giving state citizenship to members of either recognized or unrecognized tribes, regardless of treaty provisions, even after the 14th Amendment made state citizenship automatic with federal citizenship (see Cohen 1942:157–158). Racially based laws persisted and limited, or even sometimes barred, full citizenship. Status also was in®uenced by the fact that the contemplated separation from tribal relations and tribal jurisdiction very often did not occur in fact, even after the members of the tribe had nominally become citizens (see section below on Eastern Cherokee).


52


Rationales for Extending Tribal Recognition Discussion and debate over whether to extend recognition to these tribes focused more on how this was to be justi¤ed than whether a tribe existed.7 Discussions sometimes hinged on whether taking on new federal responsibilities helped or hindered the goal of “civilizing” the Indians and ending tribal existence. Arguments favoring extending recognition (and with it education and other services) and/or adding trust land were that this was a necessary step to help make Indians self-supporting citizens. Advocates argued that landless Indians could never become self-supporting. Thus, the United States should protect existing lands, if any, or provide protected land to give the tribe a secure land base so that its members could make the contemplated economic and cultural transition. Opponents argued that making “wards” of supposedly successful “citizen” Indians was a step backward and would destroy their self-reliance (e.g., Congressional Record 1918; Edwards and Kelsey 1904). One factor considered was the tribe’s degree of economic success and how “advanced” they were in comparison with their non-Indian neighbors (CIA 1912:46–47). In some of the southern cases, it was argued by some that the Indians, though poor, were no poorer than many whites and blacks in the same area. The commissioner’s annual report for 1911 stated, concerning the Catawba and several other southern tribes, that investigations had been made of “several detached groups of Indians who have long been more or less independent of Government supervision.” It noted that “in many cases these Indians have worked out for themselves problems which the service has still to meet in other parts of the ¤eld.” Consequently, it recommended against adding them as a federal responsibility (CIA 1912:46–47). Studies of Louisiana Indians in 1913 and 1920 reached similar conclusions concerning the Coushatta (Indian Service 1942:3–4). There was a federal reluctance, from at least 1900 to 1931, to extend federal recognition or assistance where a state could be induced to take, or had already taken, responsibility for non-federal Indians. This policy was applied widely in the South. An Indian Service of¤cial in 1914, in recommending against federal assistance for the “Croatan” Indians (now known as Lumbee) of Robeson County, North Carolina, stated that federal policy was to require states having an Indian population to assume the burden for their education. He noted that North Carolina had such a plan in place and feared that a federal appropriation for the Croatan would “establish a precedent” for the Catawbas, AlabamaCoushattas, New York Indians, and others “now cared for by the various states” (Pierce 1914).



53

One argument for extension of recognition was that the federal government had an unful¤lled treaty or other legal obligation. If no legal obligation was recognized, the reformers held that the Indians had been ill-treated and not received what the treaties promised, regardless of the legal status of their claims (e.g., Mississippi Choctaw and California Indians). The reformers’ hand was strengthened by shifts in policy beginning in the late 1890s and continuing into the 1920s (see Carlson 1981). Originally, some of the reformers who had pushed the 1887 General Allotment Act believed that once land was allotted, civilization, citizenship, and tribal dissolution would come quickly. By 1900, “gradualists,” who held that it would take longer, were gaining in®uence (Dippie 1982:179–185). So, also, were those who rallied public opinion against the impoverishment of non-reservation Indians who had lost their lands. Increasing land pressure on non-reservation Indians, recognized or not, resulted from expansion of non-Indian populations into non-reservation land where Indians were living but for which they often did not have a secure title. Pressures grew to provide secure lands to help these “landless Indians,” as they came to be called (CIA 1889:18). The result was a steady, if not strong, trend to recognize additional tribes as a federal responsibility, to establish new Indian reservations, to add to existing reservations, and to make other increases in federal Indian landholdings such as Indian homesteads and public domain allotments. The trend was strongest between 1900 and 1920. Additions were made in the West, notably in California, and a few were made in the South. The Chitimacha and Mississippi Choctaw became recognized. Two of the 17 reservations established between 1900 and 1920 are in the South, for the Seminole and Chitimacha, in addition to establishment of non-reservation trust land for the Mississippi Choctaw (U.S. House of Representatives 1952). The policy shift between 1900 and 1930 also led to consideration of a substantial number of other southern groups that were not granted recognition at that time. Southern tribes considered during this period, but only later recognized, are the Catawba, Poarch Creek, Jena Choctaw, and Tunica-Biloxi, as well as the Alabama-Coushatta in Texas. Other groups that were also reviewed but never recognized are presently seeking federal acknowledgment.

Case-by-Case Rev iew of the Recognition of Southeastern Tribes Six presently recognized southeastern tribes—Seminole, Miccosukee, Eastern Cherokee, Mississippi Choctaw, Jena Choctaw, and Poarch Creek—are portions



54

of historic tribes that resisted removal in the 1830s. The removal treaties of the Creek, Choctaw, and Cherokee provided that some Indians could remain but made different provisions for their status and landholdings. The Seminole treaty made no provision for tribal members to remain. The United States considered that the tribal body had removed west and with it the tribal rights and most treaty obligations. Those Indians who remained behind had separated from the tribe and were not a federal responsibility. The number that remained and their social and political character varied substantially from tribe to tribe. Each eventually became recognized as a tribe separate from the tribal body that removed, following a different course because of the idiosyncratic character of the laws and treaties affecting each tribe and the particular circumstances of each tribe. A second group of southeastern tribes, not subjected to removal, was not regarded as recognized from the latter half of the 19th century on, under the federal policy which held that the United States had never accepted responsibility for them. Those discussed here are the present-day Coushatta, Chitimacha, Catawba, and Tunica-Biloxi.

Chitimacha The Chitimacha had no federal relationship during the 19th century, and no evidence was found of signi¤cant federal contact. However, their title to a portion of land they held under a 1777 Spanish grant was con¤rmed by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1853 (Hoover 1975:45). Litigation in state court in the early 1900s over the land led to a 1915 judgment against the remaining land for attorney costs. The loss of the land was prevented by a friendly local non-Indian who paid the judgment and agreed to assign ownership of the land to the United States (Hoover 1975:51–52). These events led to federal interest in the band, and in 1916 the Chitimacha were recognized legislatively by a section of the Indian Service appropriations act for that year. Documents were not located that describe the rationale for this legislation other than the immediate need to protect their land from loss (U.S. Senate 1916:81). The 1916 act provided for “clearing title to lands owned or possessed by the Chitimacha, for purchase of such lands as may be required to place them on a basis of self-support and for such other relief as may be needed in the discretion of the Secretary of the Interior” (United States 1916). The 1916 and 1917 Department of the Interior appropriations acts each appropriated $1,500 for the Chitimacha, part of which was used to repay the Chitimacha’s benefactress. The lands



55

were placed in federal trust as a reservation in 1919, under the authority of the 1916 act which provided the secretary of the interior discretion to require that the legal title to the land be “in the name of the United States, for the use and bene¤t of the Indians” (Hoover 1975:52). Federal services were received for some time after that point, with speci¤c appropriations being made for the Chitimacha in 1919 and 1920 (U.S. House of Representatives 1952:776–777). In 1931, however, the commissioner of Indian Affairs stated that the “Indian Service has at the present time no jurisdiction over the Indians of Louisiana” (Rhoads 1931a). In a second letter, he stated that the Chitimacha were not “ward” Indians, notwithstanding the trust land, and that they were the responsibility of the state (Rhoads 1931b). This position was reversed under Commissioner John Collier after the Indian Service made an examination of the legal status and character of Louisiana Indians in 1934, about which it apparently was not entirely sure. An Indian Service memorandum on the status of southern Indians concluded that the Chitimacha were “already de¤nitely recognized by the United States government and in fact, are located on a reservation of 267 acres, the title to which is in the United States government.” It stated further, “These are unquestionably Indian people . . . a de¤nite Indian group living on untaxed Indian land, the federal government clearly has a responsibility for their education” (Ryan 1934).

Coushatta The Coushatta originated in Alabama, where they were part of the Creek Confederacy ( Johnson 1976:4–5). Coushatta chiefs signed at least one Creek treaty with the United States (Butler 1973). In 1795, however, Chief Red Shoes took part of the Coushattas out of the Creek Confederacy—and also outside of the then boundaries of the United States—to Louisiana ( Jacobson 1960; Kimball 1991:5). There was little evidence of a federal relationship after that point except for an 1831 federal report which stated that the Coushatta were included under the Caddo Indian Agency ( Jacobson 1960:105). This was the last federal contact mentioned in Coushatta histories until 1913. Around 1807, after the Louisiana Purchase, many of the Louisiana Coushattas, including Red Shoes band, moved farther west, into Spanish territory in Texas (Kimball 1991:7). Troubles in Texas in the 1830s led many Coushatta to return to Louisiana. They settled on the Calcasieu River, where others from Texas subsequently joined them over the following 25 years (Kimball 1991:9). Jacobson (1960:105) reports that in 1884 land purchases by whites caused most


56


of the Coushatta to move to Bayou Blue, near Elton, Louisiana, about 17 miles away. A group of them homesteaded land with the help of friendly local nonIndians. At least one of these homesteads was granted in 1898 under the 1884 Indian Homestead Act and remained in trust until the 1950s.8 This was the most important example of use of the Indian homestead law by a southern tribe. The Indian Homestead Acts of 1875 and 1884 provided that Indians could utilize the Homestead Act of 1862 (United States 1875, 1884), with the land being taken into federal trust (Cohen 1942:259–60). No Indian Service role was necessary.9 The federal government, in theory, had responsibility for the trust land and its holder. In practice, even in western states with well-established Indian agencies, the agency frequently had little or no contact with the holder (Hauke 1919). No federal role is evident among the Coushatta, who were not considered recognized at the time. Indian Service visits to the Coushatta in 1913, 1920, and 1931 as part of investigations concerning whether to extend federal status to Louisiana Indians did not result in federal services or recognition (Indian Service 1942:3–4). In 1931, Special Agent Roy Nash concluded that complaints that the Coushatta were “starving Indians” needing federal attention were untrue and that “without special consideration they maintain their economic independence” (Nash 1931:8). He concluded further that although the Coushatta were “desperately poor,” other Louisianans of Indian descent were much worse off and that “to single out the Louisiana Coushattas for special favors would be to turn the clock backward” (Nash 1931:9). Finally, he noted that they were recognized as “full-®edged citizens, tax-payers” whose children freely attended white schools. The Collier administration initially concluded that the only federally recognized tribe in Louisiana was the Chitimacha (Zimmerman 1936). Possibly as a result of its subsequent review of Louisiana Indians, by 1940 the Louisiana Coushatta were treated as a federal responsibility, probably on the basis that there was nontaxable trust land (the homestead) (Fickinger 1940a). For some years, beginning in 1941, the Bureau of Indian Affairs provided medical and other services (Butler 1973). It operated an elementary school for Coushatta children from 1941 until 1951 (U.S. House of Representatives 1952:1248). No reservation was established. In approximately 1953, a decision by the Department of the Interior effectively determined the Coushatta to be outside the scope of Indian Service responsibilities, leading to the withdrawal of federal services (Butler 1973). The decision re®ected the termination-era policy that there was no federal responsibility for



57

tribes without reservations (Hill 1956). The Coushatta regained federal status in 1973 by administrative decision of the secretary of the interior (Franklin 1973).

Tunica-Biloxi The Tunica-Biloxi had limited of¤cial contact with or attention from the federal government before the 1930s and consequently little federal comment on their status. After the Louisiana Purchase, the Tunica sought to con¤rm their title to certain lands they claimed to hold under a title from the Spanish Crown. The federally established board that adjudicated claims to titles predating the purchase rejected their claim in 1826 on the grounds that they were supposedly not using the lands for farming and thus “were not reclaimed from the savage mode of life” (Assistant Secretary—Indian Affairs [ASIA] 1980b:8). The Louisiana Supreme Court in 1896 ruled against state jurisdiction over the Tunica land, based in part on stipulations that the Tunica had maintained tribal relations and that the Tunica land at Marksville, Louisiana, was a federal reservation (Supreme Court of Louisiana 1896).10 The court reversed itself after receiving a reply to its inquiry of the Department of the Interior concerning the tribe’s relationship with the federal government. The department stated that “it had no knowledge of any land set apart for the Tunica or any other Indians for an Indian reservation” (Browning 1896b). It went on to state that “the Federal government does not have jurisdiction over any Indians in Louisiana.” The department’s letter did not comment on whether the Tunica were maintaining tribal relations. In 1920 a state court ruled, in the course of a private lawsuit, that the Tunica tribe had “no of¤cial recognition that would segregate [them] from the rest of the population of the state” (ASIA 1980b:12). The Tunica were brie®y noted in Indian Agent Nash’s 1931 report on Louisiana Indians. Nash concluded, in a fashion similar to his views on other Louisiana Indians, that there was no federal responsibility for them, and also that they were too scattered and too small a group to merit federal action to take responsibility (Nash 1931). There was a ®urry of requests for federal aid between 1931 and 1934, but these were rejected without investigation on the basis that there was no federal authority to serve the Tunica (ASIA 1980a:13, 1980b:18). In 1938 the Collier administration sent anthropologist Ruth Underhill to make a ¤eld visit (ASIA 1980b:13). The Indian Service, consistent with Underhill’s report, concluded that the Tunica were too acculturated to merit seeking authority from Congress to provide services to them (Daiker 1938). An investigation by the superintendent of the Mississippi Choctaw Agency in 1948–1949 concluded, by contrast, that



58

they were “more Indian than many recognized tribes” but that the secretary of the interior would have to take action if services were to be provided (McMullen 1949). No further action was taken, apparently for lack of authority. Tunica efforts to gain acknowledgment in the early 1960s were unsuccessful (ASIA 1980b:21). The Tunica-Biloxi were acknowledged as a tribe in 1981 through the present acknowledgment process (ASIA 1981).

Catawba Although the Catawba had a relationship with Great Britain that included a treaty, their relationship with the federal government after the formation of the United States was limited. The tribe did have a relationship with the state of South Carolina that has continued to the present day (Damann et al. 1979:40– 48). In 1782 the state acknowledged their rights to 15 square miles reserved to them by a 1763 treaty with Great Britain and soon after appointed an agent to deal with their affairs. In 1840 the Catawba concluded a treaty with the state to cede all their lands (Scaife 1931:7586). The Catawba were to remove to North Carolina, near the Eastern Cherokees, on lands to be purchased by funds provided for in the treaty. This plan was never completed, in part because of antipathy between the Cherokee and the Catawba and opposition by North Carolina (Finger 1984:47–8). Consequently, in 1843 the state purchased 632 acres for a reservation in the area previously occupied by the Catawba (Damann et al. 1979:49–50; Scaife 1931:7586). The Catawba were recognized by the state as a tribe under its jurisdiction rather than the federal government’s.11 They were not considered citizens of the state, and it does not appear that they voted or paid taxes on their lands, although state criminal laws apparently applied (Browning 1896a; Of¤ce of Indian Affairs 1911:5–6).12 Until the 20th century the only signi¤cant federal action was the inclusion, in an 1848 act concerning Eastern Cherokee removal, of funds “for the removal of the Catawba Tribe of Indians, now in the limits of the State of North Carolina” (Hauke 1911).13 An 1854 act renewing the 1848 act designated the funds for “the removal of the Catawba Indians to the west of the Mississippi” (Hauke 1911). The Catawba, however, never removed as a tribe, although a few individuals did go west. In 1904, and again in 1908, the Catawba unsuccessfully sought federal assistance to pursue a claim against South Carolina to recover the reservation lands ceded to the state in the 1840 treaty and not restored in 1843. They claimed that the treaty was invalid under the 1834 federal Non-Intercourse Act because



59

the federal government had not approved it. The Department of the Interior responded that the 1834 act did not apply to the Catawba, in part because they were state Indians not under the protection of federal law (Damann et al. 1979:52–53). The rejection was not based on a denial of tribal existence. The claim’s efforts triggered an investigation by an Of¤ce of Indian Affairs agent in 1911. The agent’s report reviewed the character of the group in some detail and concluded that a tribe existed (Of¤ce of Indian Affairs 1911). The agent remarked that they were “clearly Indians” and had maintained a “tribal organization” (i.e., political leaders) for a long time. He noted that some language had been maintained. The agent also stated, in support of his conclusion of their tribal character, that the Catawba had “kept themselves aloof from the colored population” in the area. The Department of the Interior rejected proposals made at this time that the federal government take over jurisdiction of the Catawba from South Carolina, citing the policy of the government to ¤t Indians for self-support as quickly as possible and turn them over to the states. The commissioner’s annual report for 1911 concluded that if the state would provide land, “these Indians may become self-supporting without aid from the United States” (CIA 1912). Further attempts to gain federal services for the Catawba were made in the 1930s during the Collier administration, through both the Department of the Interior and legislation. An internal Indian Service memorandum concluded that the Catawba existed as a tribe, citing as important evidence that they probably still had a “suf¤cient degree of Indian blood” and that the tribal government had never ceased functioning (McNickle 1937). It indicated that there were, however, disagreements within the Indian Service over whether there was a previous act of recognition that would provide a basis for federal services. At the same time, the department apparently opposed legislation in 1937 and 1939 that would have provided recognition, apparently in favor of a more limited federal role in cooperation with the state (Damann et al. 1979:55–58). Eventually a change in position by the department resulted in an agreement between the tribe, the state, and the federal government that established federal status in 1943 (Spratt 1993:165–166). Under the agreement, the state purchased approximately 3,400 acres of land near the existing state reservation, and these new lands were placed in trust by the federal government for the Catawbas. In 1944 the Department of the Interior reviewed the status of the Catawba in connection with determining their eligibility to adopt a constitution and to organize a tribal government under the Indian Reorganization Act (IRA) (Harper 1944a, 1944b). A legal opinion of the department’s solicitor concluded that the



60

1848 and 1854 acts that authorized funds for the removal of the Catawba constituted previous recognition. It also found that a “tribal organization” had been maintained for a long time and that “the Indians have done business as a tribe[,] and the relationship between the tribal organization and its members conforms to the usual tribal pattern” (Harper 1944b). The opinion is a ¤nding that the Catawba were a recognized tribe, not an act of recognition. The Catawba’s federal relationship was terminated in 1962 as a result of 1959 federal legislation (25 U.S.C. 931). They were subsequently restored by legislation in 1993 (U.S. Statutes at Large 1993).

Eastern Cherokee Treaties of 1817 and 1819 ceded a major part of the Cherokee Nation’s land and provided for removal of part of the Nation to lands in the West. The treaties also provided for individual reservations of land to each head of an Indian family residing within the ceded territory “who choose to become citizens of the United States” (U.S. Statutes at Large 1817, 1819). The main Cherokee removal treaty, signed at New Echota in 1835 (U.S. Statutes at Large 1835), ceded the rest of Cherokee lands, making provision for some Indians to remain behind, take up individual lands, and become citizens of the states of Tennessee, North Carolina, and Alabama, subject to the state laws. The nucleus of the present Eastern Band was conservative Cherokees from western North Carolina who remained outside the boundaries of the Nation when their area was ceded in 1819 (Finger 1984:10). They remained after Removal and settled around Quallatown along with some refugees from other settlements, totaling about 700 people (Finger 1984:29). The Qualla Indians were nominally citizens of North Carolina at the time of the main Cherokee removal, but they did not seek to exercise any of the rights of citizenship. In turn, North Carolina did not immediately acknowledge them as citizens. Their state citizenship in the ¤rst three decades after Removal was ambiguous, with shifting declarations and court decisions by the state over whether they were citizens and whether they could stay in North Carolina permanently. Despite these questions, the Eastern Cherokee paid state taxes but generally avoided attempting to vote (Finger 1984:50). In 1868, Congress recognized the Eastern Cherokee as a separate tribe (United States 1868). The act stated that “hereafter the Secretary of the Interior shall cause the Commissioner of Indian Affairs to take the same supervisory charge of the Eastern or North Carolina Cherokees as of other tribes of Indians.”14 Congressional debate on the act noted favorably the service of the Eastern Cherokee



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on the Union side in the Civil War (Congressional Globe 1868:3853). In 1869 the commissioner of Indian Affairs offered the explanation that Congress had acted because the Cherokee had requested recognized status, a request growing from their impoverished status and having suffered much during the Civil War as a result of siding with the Union (CIA 1869:41; see also Finger 1984:105). The limited record of congressional debate on the act contains no reference to their tribal character, which appears not to have been an issue. Because by 1868 the state of North Carolina had extensive involvement with the Cherokee and the Cherokee had extensive social and economic interaction with neighboring non-Indians, de¤ning the relationship between federal versus state authority, and between state citizenship versus federal “ward” status, was dif¤cult. The result was a mixture of federal and state authority. In 1868, the same year the Cherokee were federally recognized, North Carolina adopted a constitution that made it possible for the Cherokee to vote, and they voted much of the time after that. An 1868 state law provided that the Band could operate under a state corporate charter, which they proceeded to do. An 1889 state act authorized the Eastern Band, under its corporate charter, to sue and be sued and exercise all other powers belonging to corporations operating under state laws (U.S. v. Wright et al. No. 3176, CCA, 4th Circuit, October 12, 1931, 53 F. [2d] 304). An 1897 amendment to this law speci¤cally provided for a tribal government, under state charter (Finger 1984:172). A tribal timber sale that the secretary of the interior refused to approve led to an arbitration board ruling in 1874 that the title of the Band’s lands was vested in the tribe in common (technically in the state corporation) rather than in the federal government in trust for the Cherokee, as was the case with most tribes (Finger 1984:143–144, 149, 169–174). An 1897 federal appeals court decision in United States v. Boyd et al. con¤rmed that the state corporation held title to the Cherokee common lands but provided that the commissioner of Indian Affairs exercised the same supervisory power over the land as he did over that of any other recognized tribe (U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals 1897:556). However, the Indian Service paid state taxes on the lands from Cherokee funds from 1892 to 1924, when the land was conveyed to the United States in trust for the tribe (United States 1924; U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals 1931:304). In 1895 a federal court rejected a challenge to the 1868 act, holding that it had restored the Band “to their former tribal relations as wards of the government, subject to its control, and entitled to its care and protection” (U.S. Circuit Court, Western District, North Carolina, 1895). In 1897 an appeals court ruling in Boyd held that it could ¤nd no law that had made the Eastern Cherokee citizens of



62

the United States or of the state. It noted that Congress had repeatedly treated the Eastern Band as recognized and that the courts deferred to the Congress in such matters (83 F. 554). Whether or not Congress had the authority to recognize the Eastern Band separately from the Western Cherokee was not fully resolved until the 1931 federal court decision in United States v. Wright et al. The circuit court stated: “The fact that the [Eastern Band] had surrendered the right to their tribal lands, had separated themselves from their tribe, and had become subject to the laws of the state of North Carolina, did not destroy the right or duty of guardianship on the part of the Federal government” (U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals 1931:306). These court decisions af¤rmed the primacy of federal laws relating to Indians over state laws, while holding that state laws did apply. The decisions ruled that the Cherokees’ voting, taxpaying, and other partial attributes of citizenship did not rule out their maintenance of tribal relations and continued recognized tribal status.

Mississippi Choctaw Under the 1830 Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek, all remaining Choctaw lands in Mississippi were ceded and the Choctaw Nation agreed to remove to the Indian Territory (U.S. Statutes at Large 1830). The treaty provided that those remaining in the East could claim individual land and were to become citizens “of the States.” Although the federal government worked actively to remove the Choctaws, far more than anticipated had remained and tried to get land under the treaty. Kidwell estimates that 1,000 remained in 1860 (1986:77–79). These she characterizes as “generally the most traditional members of the tribe” (1986:80). The land program was thoroughly mismanaged and corrupted, and in the end most of the Choctaw that remained did not get land (Satz 1986:9–13; Kidwell 1986:65, 67, 70). The landless Choctaw lived as squatters, with many becoming sharecroppers after the Civil War (Kidwell 1986:80–81).15 The Choctaw who remained did not become citizens of Mississippi despite the treaty. The 1832 Mississippi constitution provided that the state legislature could establish criteria to admit Indians to “all the rights and privileges of white citizens” (Satz 1986:15). A few mixed-bloods gained these rights by petitioning the state, but most of the Choctaw did not.16 A new round of federal dealings with the Mississippi Choctaw and an extended examination of their status came between 1893 and 1907 as a result of the establishment of the Dawes Commission (United States 1893) and the Curtis Act (United States 1898). These, together with subsequent laws, were intended to



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provide for individual allotment of the tribal lands of the Choctaw and the other civilized tribes in the Indian Territory and the cessation of their tribal governments. A “¤nal roll” of the tribe was to be made by the Dawes Commission of all those entitled to allotments and shares in annuities. The commission ruled that under the 1830 treaty and a subsequent 1866 treaty, the Mississippi Choctaw had rights to an allotment and to Choctaw citizenship but that they had to move to and reside within the Nation to exercise those rights (see discussion in Satz 1986:20–21 and Roberts 1986:97). Extensive federal efforts were made to remove the remaining Choctaws in Mississippi and also in Louisiana and Alabama to the Indian Territory. As of 1907 about 1,500 had been removed and about 1,100 remained (Roberts 1986:94, 108; see also Kidwell 1986:87). The efforts of claimants in Mississippi who were excluded from the Dawes roll apparently helped to focus attention on the poor economic and educational conditions among the “full-blood” Mississippi Choctaw. In 1916 Congress appropriated $1,000 to enable the secretary of the interior to “investigate the condition of the Indians living in Mississippi” and to report to Congress “as to their need for additional land and school facilities” (United States 1916). A House committee held hearings in Mississippi in 1917 to explore the desirability of providing federal services (U.S. House of Representatives 1917). The investigations focused on economic conditions and educational needs to determine if any federal action was justi¤ed. In a 1918 House debate concerning appropriations for the Mississippi Choctaw, opponents argued that establishing federal services would turn independent, self-supporting Indians into miserable wards dependent on the federal government (Congressional Record 1918:1142). They also argued that, unlike the western Indians who received “federal support,” the Choctaws had had long opportunity to learn “civilized ways.” Some supporters of aid argued that an obligation was owed to the Choctaws because they had ceded their lands to the United States, while others viewed it as an act of charity to people who were still “wards” (Congressional Record 1918:1142). Commissioner Cato Sells, after a visit to Mississippi in 1918, stated that he was “persuaded these deserving people should receive kind, prompt and substantial consideration from the government” (quoted in Satz 1986:23). The tribal character of the “full-bloods” the department and Congress focused on was not argued. The Interior Department’s 1916 report made what it called a “sharp distinction” between the full-bloods and the “so-called Mississippi Choctaw ‘claimants’ ” whom it considered to be assimilated non-Indians with some Choctaw ancestry (Reeves 1916:25).17 The federal reports noted brie®y that the



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full-bloods lived in separate settlements, maintained their language and some tribal customs, and had leaders (Congressional Record 1918:1138–1139). It was noted that they were distinct from Negroes, and refused to attend Negro schools, but were barred from white schools (Reeves 1916:2). The appropriation in 1918 of $75,000 for the “relief of distress among the full-blood Indians of Mississippi” (United States 1918:58) was, in effect, a recognition of the Mississippi Choctaw as a separate tribe from the Choctaw Nation. An agency and Indian schools were established, and land was purchased for individual Indians. Apparently following congressional intent, no reservation was established (Congressional Record 1918:1139). Mississippi Choctaw tribal status was modi¤ed in 1936. In 1935 the tribe had been considered eligible to vote whether to accept the IRA, a clear demonstration that the Indian Service considered them a recognized tribe (Haas 1947:17). However, in 1936 the solicitor of the Interior Department declared that the Choctaw in Mississippi had severed tribal relations from the Choctaw Nation when they did not remove to Oklahoma under the 1893 Dawes Commission Act and that they therefore were not a tribe (Margold 1936). The department recognized them as a tribe and provided services by organizing them as a community of “halfblood Indians” under section 16 of the IRA,18 supported by a 1939 act giving the Indians authority to use the lands purchased under the earlier acts and the IRA as a tribal land base (U.S. Statutes at Large 1939). The department declared the land a reservation in 1944, and the tribe adopted a constitution under the IRA in 1945 (United States v. John et al.: 12–13).19

Jena Choctaw Some of the Choctaw in Mississippi migrated to various locations in Louisiana both before and after Removal. The present-day Jena Choctaw are derived from a portion of these populations. The presence of Choctaws in Louisiana was noted in various post-Removal federal actions affecting the Mississippi Choctaw, including an 1853 census (Kidwell 1986:79) and an 1866 treaty that called for noti¤cation of Choctaw in the state if allotment was made of Choctaw Nation lands (U.S. Statutes at Large 1866). The Choctaw at Jena were identi¤ed as Mississippi Choctaw by the Dawes Commission. A number of families moved to Oklahoma around 1903, and others moved in 1916 (ASIA 1994:25–28). The situation of the Choctaw remaining at Jena received federal attention during the Collier administration in the course of its review of the status of Louisiana Indians. At the urging of the state education department and interested citizens, the Indian Service, between 1934 and 1938, provided funding for a



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school for the Jena Choctaw that a private citizen had begun a few years earlier. It used funds appropriated for public school tuition for individual Indians. By 1940, however, the Interior Department concluded that there was not suf¤cient legal basis to continue this funding, apparently on the grounds that, unlike the Coushatta, the Jena did not occupy federal trust lands that were exempt from taxation (Fickinger 1940a, 1940b). In 1938 the Indian Service proposed that the Jena Choctaw could be provided for by moving them to Mississippi and settling them on lands being purchased at that time under the IRA for the Mississippi Choctaw. This proposal may have been based on the department’s view as of 1936 (see above) that the Mississippi Choctaw were not recognized except as a community of Indians of one-half blood or more. It was felt that the Jena, as Choctaw, fell within the de¤nition of this community (Hector 1937). The proposal was never carried out, however, in part for lack of suf¤cient lands in Mississippi, and consequently the Jena did not become part of a recognized tribe (Stewart 1938). The Jena Choctaw were recognized through the federal acknowledgment process in 1995 (ASIA 1995).

Creek The only substantial settlement of Creeks that remained in the East after Removal was a community of “half-bloods” on the Tensaw River in southwestern Alabama. This community formed in the early 1800s as wealthy Creeks—often the children of marriages between Upper Creeks and white traders—established plantations and other holdings in the area. It was considered a distinct community within the Creek Nation (ASIA 1984a:8–10, 1984b:3–5). The Creek War (also called the “Red Stick” War) broke out within the Creek Nation in 1813, when the “Hostile Creeks,” a faction antagonistic to cultural changes resulting from contact with Europeans, attacked the “Friendly Creeks,” a pro-white group. This led to American intervention on the side of the Friendly Creeks. Despite this apparent alliance, a large amount of the lands of the Friendly Creeks (including the Tensaw River area) was ceded to the United States under the 1814 Treaty of Fort Jackson, which ended the war (U.S. Statutes at Large 1814). The treaty provided that Creeks friendly to the United States during the war could obtain one square mile of land, including their improvements, within the ceded area. A treaty with the Creeks in 1832 (U.S. Statutes at Large 1832a) ceded the balance of Creek Nation lands and provided for the removal of the Creeks to the West. The treaty called for establishing individual landholdings in fee patent for the Creeks who wanted to remain.


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Both treaties were silent concerning the status and rights of these individuals taking up lands as either tribal or U.S. citizens, but by implication, those remaining in what became U.S. territory (within the state of Alabama after 1819) came under U.S. jurisdiction and eventually under state jurisdiction. Nonetheless, special acts of the Alabama legislature were required in 1852 and 1854 to give several individually named members of the Tensaw and the head of the Perdido River communities standing as citizens of Alabama (ASIA 1984a:26–27). Most of the Tensaw community, already outside the Nation and at least somewhat secure in their lands by the 1814 treaty, did not remove after the 1832 treaty. In the 1840s and 1850s a portion of the poorer families from the Tensaw community took up land about 15 to 20 miles to the south in a relatively isolated area near the head of the Perdido River (ASIA 1984b:5–8). This gradually evolved into a separate Indian community, tightly knit and quite poor. There was little federal action toward the eastern Creeks during the balance of the 19th century, probably because there was not the same recognition that there was a body of Creek Indians remaining as a community in the East as there was for the Choctaw, Cherokee, and Seminole. There was some continued pressure and assistance for individuals to remove westward. Alabama Creeks continued to remove in small numbers as late as 1891 (ASIA 1984a:34). For the most part, the western group was willing, sometimes with quali¤cations, to accept their eastern cousins as tribal citizens if they moved west. The Dawes Commission and the Curtis Act applied to the Creek Nation. A few Alabama Creeks applied for and were accepted for inclusion on the “¤nal roll” of Creek Nation citizens that was prepared by the Dawes Commission (ASIA 1984a:37, 1984b:14–15). In 1906 the acting commissioner of Indian Affairs stated that any Creeks remaining in Alabama were not under federal jurisdiction (Larrabee 1906). The acting commissioner’s letter stated that the Indian Service did not know of any band of Indians in southern Alabama but that any descendants of individuals who “chose to remain” were, so far as the department was concerned, citizens of the state of Alabama and “entitled to no consideration not due to other citizens who may be of white blood.” The comment was a pro forma statement, done without any apparent investigation. Written in the context of the closure of the Final (Dawes) Roll of the Creeks a few months earlier, it stated that any such Indians would have “voluntarily separated themselves from the Creek tribe” and thereby surrendered any rights in the tribe (Larrabee 1906). In 1931, in response to a missionary’s request for government help for the Alabama Creeks, the assistant commissioner of Indian Affairs indicated that the government had no knowledge about the Indians in southeast Alabama. He said that



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land could not be purchased without congressional authorization and an appropriation (Scattergood 1931). Subsequently, during the Collier administration, the Indian Service sent anthropologist Frank Speck, among others, to visit and investigate. Recognition through the “half blood community” process was considered but was apparently rejected (Strong 1935; McNickle 1941; Ryan 1935). The group, now called the Poarch Band of Eastern Creeks, was federally recognized through the federal acknowledgment process in 1984 (ASIA 1984c).

Seminole The Seminole tribe evolved during the 18th and early 19th centuries from Creeks who moved south into Florida, away from the frontier and outside the then boundaries of the United States, and amalgamated with other, diverse Indian populations. These gradually emerged as politically and culturally distinct from the Creek Confederacy. Many of the conservative, nativistic Creeks, after their defeat in the 1813–1814 Creek War, joined the Seminoles (Sturtevant 1971:101– 107). The ¤rst treaty with the Seminoles separate from the Creeks was the 1823 Treaty of Fort Moultrie, which followed the First Seminole War (1817–1818) and the United States’ purchase of Florida from Spain in 1819. The 1832 Treaty with the Seminole at Payne’s Landing provided for the cession of all of their Florida lands (U.S. Statutes at Large 1832b) and for the Seminole to remove to Indian Territory to “rejoin” the Creeks. The Seminole strongly resisted removal, leading to the Second (1835–1842) and Third Seminole Wars (1855–1858). Most of the Seminoles, about 4,420, were removed as a result of the Second Seminole War, leaving about 500 (Sturtevant 1971:108). In 1858, at the end of the Third Seminole War, the United States gave up further attempts at removal by force, leaving perhaps 200 Seminoles, who by then had moved south and taken refuge in the Everglades. The subsequent treaties with the Seminole were made with the leadership in the Indian Territory in 1845 and 1856. The treaties’ primary reference to the Florida Seminole concerned enlisting western Seminole assistance in “inducing their bretheren to remove” to the West (U.S. Statutes at Large 1845, 1856). The treaties dealt with the western Seminole leadership as representing the entire tribe. From the 1870s on, federal responsibility for and jurisdiction over the Florida Seminole as a tribe seems to have been assumed without much examination. Although removal continued to be discussed, reports did not suggest that the Florida Seminole had abandoned their tribe by refusing to remove, unlike federal views of the Eastern Cherokee and Choctaw in Mississippi. Indian Service re-


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ports of the 1860s and 1870s indicate a federal view that a responsibility existed for the Florida Seminole, beyond seeking their removal. The commissioner of Indian Affairs’ annual report for 1867 reported an almost total lack of information about the Florida Seminole, who were beyond the effective limits of white settlement (CIA 1868:26–27). The commissioner sent an agent to Florida in 1872 in order to “determine satisfactory information concerning number, condition and means of support” of the Seminole (CIA 1872:25–26). In 1875 the commissioner urged that public lands be set aside for the approximately 350 Seminoles while there were still good lands to be had (CIA 1875:87). Instructions for an 1879 study for the commissioner of Indian Affairs indicated that the Florida Seminole were eligible to rejoin the western Seminole but also contemplated that the department would undertake measures, such as education, to “civilize” them, indicating that even if they refused to remove, the government continued to have a responsibility toward them (Brooks 1879; Nash 1930:60). Actual federal contact remained minimal until the late 1880s. The ¤rst concrete action was the inclusion in the 1884 Indian Service appropriation act of funds to “enable the Seminoles in Florida to obtain homesteads upon the public lands of Florida, and to establish themselves thereon” (CIA 1884:liv). This appropriation was renewed regularly, though little occurred, in part because the lands the Indians were cultivating were owned either by the state or by land improvement companies (CIA 1888:lxxv; Nash 1930:60). Later in the decade, lands were acquired for the Seminole for the ¤rst time (although they did not settle upon them), and permanent employees began to be appointed to be stationed in Florida to work with the Seminole (Nash 1930:61–64).20 The ¤rst lands that permanently became a reservation—a small parcel at Dania (now called Hollywood Reservation)—were purchased in 1894. In 1911 an executive order established a reservation (Big Cypress) that included lands purchased under appropriations made beginning in 1894 (U.S. House of Representatives 1952:1561; Nash 1930:App. A). The Big Cypress and Hollywood Reservations were not occupied until the 1930s, however (Kersey 1979:184). In the 1890s the Interior Department made extensive efforts to preserve some semblance of Seminole rights to lands in the Everglades that were being transferred to the state. The department’s view was that even though the Seminole may have ceded their lands under the 1832 treaty, the Florida Seminoles retained a right of occupancy, which the Interior Department sought to preserve, at least on paper (Duncan 1898; Van Devanter 1898). An 1898 opinion by the Interior Department’s legal division stated in passing that the Florida Seminoles had become separately recognized (Van Devanter 1898). While noting that the govern-



69

ment recognized those in Indian Territory as the Seminole Nation, it went on to say that in “later years, however, some recognition has been given those remaining in Florida by the appropriation of money for their education and civilization” (1898:cci). The removal treaty made no provision for any Seminoles to remain in Florida, as citizens or otherwise. State citizenship does not appear to have been an issue in the 19th century, probably because the Seminoles lived apart in the Everglades, resisted any government relationship or education, and had limited contact with non-Indians except for trading relationships (Kersey 1979). Nonetheless, the state of Florida made frequent efforts to deal with the Seminoles. The 1868 state constitution made provision for schools for the Seminoles and even representation in the legislature, though neither of these provisions was implemented. The documents examined did not describe what legal status the tribe had in relation to the state. In 1889 the legislature set aside 36 townships for a Seminole reservation (Spencer 1913:5; CIA 1914:31), and in 1891 the state donated over 5,000 acres of swamp and over®owed lands to the Seminoles and appointed three trustees to select the land (Duncan 1898:ccvi). In neither case were these land transfers actually implemented. The state legislature, under federal and Indian activist pressure, established a reservation of 100,000 acres in 1917 (CIA 1917:63).21 Part of the Seminoles, largely those who had moved to the reservations, “organized” as a tribal government under the IRA in 1957 as the Seminole Tribe of Florida (an action sometimes erroneously characterized as tribal recognition). Organization of the Seminole Tribe left a substantial non-reservation population that refused to join and was then treated as unrecognized.22 In 1961, however, the Department of the Interior agreed to organize them under the IRA, as a separate tribal government, as the Miccosukee Tribe of Florida, giving them recognized status again (Carver 1962). A small off-reservation group calling themselves “Traditional Seminoles” refused to join either formally organized tribe and presently are not recognized. They petitioned for federal acknowledgment as a tribe in 1983, but to date they have not completed their petition and consequently have not been reviewed through the federal acknowledgment process.

Conclusions Six of the currently recognized tribes in the South are portions of recognized tribes that remained behind after Removal. Four others are tribes not subjected to Removal. Of these ten tribes, three were not recognized until the present administrative process for recognition was established by federal regulations in 1978.


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The remnants of the Removal tribes, with the possible exception of the Seminole, were considered to have left their tribe by remaining behind and therefore no longer to have been a federal responsibility, unless they rejoined their tribe. For other tribes, the United States concluded that no federal act had taken federal responsibility for them. Judged from the perspective of the history of the tribes that have gained federal status, tribal recognition in the South from the 1830s to the 1970s was based on the same fundamental requirements that applied elsewhere in the country. These were a conclusion by the federal government that the tribe continued to exist as a separate political community and that a speci¤c federal action had recognized responsibility for that tribe. Beyond these general similarities, the tribal histories reveal differences in status, differing application of the concepts of recognized tribal status, and differing rationales for granting or withholding recognition. These differences result from the great variation in particular histories and circumstances from tribe to tribe. Discussion and debate over whether to extend recognition to these tribes focused more on how this was to be justi¤ed than on whether a tribe existed. Opponents often argued that adding a tribe as a federal responsibility was counter to the federal policy of having Indians separate from their tribes, become citizens, and assimilate into the body of non-Indian society. Proponents of federal assistance argued that the Indians needed federal protection and land, at least until they were ready for assimilation. Proposed recognition was sometimes rejected on the ground that the tribe was already cared for by their state or, if not, that their state should take up this responsibility. Following the basic concepts underlying the federal view of tribal status, the fundamental issue in establishing tribal existence was whether the group had maintained tribal relations and was still a political community separate and apart from non-Indians. From the documentation reviewed here, the evidence used to judge this included whether the group had an identi¤able system of leaders, had maintained their language and culture, and had not intermarried extensively with non-Indians, especially African-American populations. Until after 1900, citizenship was viewed as the antithesis of separate political existence. Consequently, state resistance to granting Indians citizenship, which was common, supported arguments for their continued tribal existence.


5 Region and Recognition Southern Indians, Anthropologists, and Presumed Biology

Karen I. Blu

I

n 1978, under President Jimmy Carter’s administration, when it became possible for American Indian peoples to obtain, renew, or revamp a relationship to the federal government that acknowledged the existence and native rights of their groups, a revolutionary change began that had an especially strong impact on Indians and their neighbors in the South. Now, more than 20 years later, is a good time to look for unexpected and unanticipated changes that have come in the wake of this reopened opportunity for Indian people to obtain the federal acknowledgment that vitally alters status and af¤rms the possibility of obtaining special services and funding. Two consequences of the relationship between anthropologists and Indians in the South and elsewhere are particularly striking: ¤rst, an increase in the control Indian people have over anthropologists and their research, combined with increased needs for anthropologists and other “experts” in gaining acknowledgment; and second, a reemergence or reworking of older essentialist conceptions of Indianness as based “in the blood.” Ironically, the very administrative process of federal acknowledgment that offers promise of a remedy for long-denied status increases Native American peoples’ dependence on anthropological and historical “experts,” who are needed for the successful negotiation of recognition. The attendant changes in power relations and in identity conceptions produce unease all around, discom¤ting and unsettling anthropologists and American Indians alike, although for different reasons. That is why it is important to explore the changes further, as they raise not only moral and ethical issues but also profoundly intellectual ones that go to the heart of anthropology as a discipline and will affect its future direction. I do not want to enter a discussion about the nature and workings of the federal acknowledgment process here. A number of people have already written excellently, eloquently, and from a variety of points of view about it.1 What in-


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terests me is what the process can show us about the changing relations between anthropologists, their research, and the way they relate to the people with whom they work. In that way, the connections among the federal acknowledgment process, southern Indians, and anthropologists who work with them have implications for anthropological roles and research more generally. The issues debated so vigorously in congressional hearings on acknowledgment and in the preparation of acknowledgment petitions by Indian tribes are writ large, thrashed out in a direct way on American territory, yet they resonate wherever anthropologists work. For Indian people, there is an enormous difference between having federal status as a group or “tribe” (“acknowledged,” as the Bureau of Indian Affairs usually terms it, or “recognized,” as most Indians usually put it) and not having that status. Problematic as the concept “tribe” may be for anthropologists, it is the central term used in law and regulation. When a group, or tribe, lacks federal status, its identity as Indian can be, and often is, questioned in the wider world, and the survival of the group is made much more problematic. What determines federal status is often an accident of history. The way the United States and, before it, the various American colonies forged or imposed relationships with indigenous peoples changed over time. It became increasingly dif¤cult, if not impossible, for Indian groups or tribes to obtain federal status if they did not already have it through arrangements such as treaties or acts of Congress. Usually such arrangements came about because the colonial or federal government developed an interest in a tribe’s behavior, its lands, or other resources. For those tribes that were not deemed relevant to earlier historical events, that escaped colonial and federal gaze, acknowledgment became harder and harder to obtain, particularly when various federal administrations sought to “get out of the Indian business.”2 Why was federal recognition so desired? Many have pointed to the economic bene¤ts that can accrue to federal status: access to housing, education, and health care funds set aside for Indians only, never mind that the set-asides have always been relatively meager. More recently (since 1988), the possibility of negotiating a gaming arrangement with the state, which might net great riches for a group (if they could manage something like the Mashantucket Pequot’s Foxwoods Casino enterprise), has become an attraction. The possibility of certain kinds of relief, especially on lands set aside under special arrangements for the group at large, can seem an advantage. But I believe an equally strong, perhaps even stronger, motivation in many



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cases is a desire on the part of the people seeking recognition for an unquestionable, determined, and once-and-for-all autochthonous, Indian, status: an external validation for their own traditional knowledge. Many want a legal status that enables them to ¤ght local, state, and national doubts about their “authenticity,” their “genuineness” as Indians. This motivation is not a mere gloss for “deeper” or “true” interests that are economic, but can be, and often is, a motive in its own right. “I just don’t want anyone ever to be able to tell me or my children that I’m not really an Indian because I’m a Lumbee,” one middle-class woman told me in 1984. “I don’t think we people should get any money for it, there are so many other Indians who need it more,” she continued. She well knew, of course, that recognition would not stop people from saying whatever they were determined to say, but for her the legal recognition would help assuage the pain of any statement about inauthentic Indianness, would render it socially, and possibly even psychologically, impotent. I hasten to add that not all Lumbees share this particular woman’s view about not needing funding, although it was a sentiment I heard expressed more than once. There is much hardship among Lumbee Indians that federal funding could alleviate if not erase. Some other Lumbees with whom I talked in 1984 were not even aware that there might be funding made available if they were properly recognized. But the Lumbees most active in the recognition process knew, of course, that acknowledgment would mean at least an opportunity to negotiate or apply for funding and services available only through the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) of the Department of the Interior. Being denied federal status can be galling as well as impoverishing, demeaning as well as disinheriting. Stimulated in part by the American Indian Policy Review Commission’s ¤ndings in 1976, the Department of the Interior in 1977 formulated a new administrative process by which Indian tribes previously overlooked or squeezed out (but not terminated) could petition the department through the BIA’s Branch of Acknowledgment and Research (BAR) to obtain acknowledgment. The process began in 1978. In order to be acknowledged administratively, an Indian people have to prove themselves a “tribe” descended from a historically documented earlier tribe and possessed of a recognizable social and political organization since they were ¤rst documented. The applying tribe also has to be a residential community and to maintain a membership roll. These are criteria that many already-acknowledged tribes might ¤nd hard to meet. By looking into the acknowledgment process, we can see how the two consequences of reopening the federal rolls—the power shifting between anthropolo-


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gists and Indians and the heightened biologizing of Indianness—are intertwined. Anthropological arguments about the cultural and social constructedness of ethnicity and race have clashed with deeper-seated popular American notions about “blood” relations among kin, ethnic group, and race (what I earlier called “folk biology” but perhaps should have labeled “pseudo-biology” [Blu 1980, 1979]). Many Indian and non-Indian Americans use the biological language of blood, and sometimes even genes, to talk about tribal or “ethnic” or “racial” relations, just as they do about kinship (see Barsh and Henderson 1980:241–256). I have focused on these two consequences because they involve, on the one hand, changing roles of anthropologists (and, for that matter, historians and genealogists) and their relations with Indian groups and government, and on the other hand, a struggle over ideas about how best to understand some of the ways in which humans are seen as similar to or different from one another. As someone who has consistently argued that “race” and “ethnicity,” as the concepts are popularly used, are “actually” fundamentally social and cultural categories rather than scienti¤cally biological ones, I have been dismayed at what seems to me to be a resurgence of arguments cloaked in biological language (making them “essentialist” or “racial”) about the validity or legitimacy of any particular person’s or tribe’s Indianness. A biologized version of authentic Indianness is one many anthropologists have argued against for years (see, e.g., Sturtevant and Stanley 1968), yet it has reemerged in the process of federal acknowledgment, despite attempts to keep it out.3 Among those trying to keep it out have been some Indians and some anthropologists, both inside and outside the BAR, whose relationships with Indians have undergone signi¤cant changes with the reopening of the federal registry. There have been radical role reversals—Indians have searched for an anthropologist to work for them in place of the more traditional situation in which anthropologists have searched for Indians who would allow an anthropologist to reside and work among them. In the more traditional situation, the immediate goal of the anthropologist was often to do work that would result in a Ph.D. degree, a career-enhancing professional license, or in a publication to further academic promotion and reputation. But then the terms changed. Anthropologists, historians, and genealogists, while still seeking to validate their professional status, were potentially for hire and could be seen by at least some Indians as being possibly useful, even necessary, in building a case, in making a petition to the federal government that would ultimately result in federal recognition.4 The research a hired anthropologist undertakes is guided heavily by the needs and de-



75

sires of the tribe that hires him or her. This question of “Whose research is it anyway?” illuminates an area of tension classically couched as that between “basic” and “applied” research, an outmoded distinction that badly needs rethinking. Anthropologists, then, together with historians and genealogists, can be used as hired guns, as “expert witnesses” and researchers, by Indian groups seeking acknowledgment as well as by those opposed to it (one Indian commentator wryly transformed this into “hired hands”). Anthony Paredes (1992) provides an unusual but welcome openness and speci¤city about his role and sometime employment by the Poarch Band of Creek Indians in their ultimately successful quest for federal recognition. Through various phases of his research, some of it contracted by the Poarch Creeks after Paredes spearheaded grant applications for funding, he shows the intricate interplay between federal and more local politics as well as the changing research needs of the tribe. His own earlier writings have had rami¤cations he could not have anticipated at the time, and his later research was crucial for gaining acknowledgment. But relations between researchers and tribes are not always so harmonious, as the 1977 Mashpee Indian trial in a federal court in Massachusetts shows. The trial became anthropologically famous through James Clifford’s disturbing account of it, in which each “side”—the Mashpees seeking recognition as a tribe so that they could claim lost land and those seeking to block them—had its own hired-gun anthropological and historical witnesses (Clifford 1988; compare Hutchins 1979, Campisi 1991, and Sturtevant 1983). Anthropologists and historians used their expertise to uphold opposing positions. The Mashpees lost, despite an impressive array of experts who testi¤ed on their behalf. After exhausting the possibilities of litigation they turned to the administrative acknowledgment process to obtain federal tribal status (Campisi 1991:xii). Jack Campisi, the main anthropologistresearcher hired for the Mashpee side, could conduct only limited research because of a lack of adequate funding (Clifford 1988:318; Campisi [1991:19] says only that he was hired to present and interpret data for the contemporary period, while James Axtell, a historian, was to do that for the earlier periods). This serves as a reminder that many tribes can ill afford expertise and that anthropologists and historians rarely are able or willing to work for very long without being paid. So applications for grants to pay experts for their work usually must be made, sometimes to federal agencies outside the BIA, sometimes to private philanthropic organizations. More recently, funding has also come from big gaming interests in hopes that, if successful at gaining federal recognition, the group they back will be able to negotiate an arrangement with the state for a


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gambling casino that includes them as partners. Then, too, there are the experts who work for the federal government. In the BAR itself there are professional anthropologists, historians, and genealogists who have been seen sometimes as supportive friends and sometimes as obstructive enemies, depending upon which Indian group at which time is doing the looking. In any event, the terms of relationship between anthropologists and Indians have altered. Some Indian people have decided to become anthropologists, political scientists, or historians themselves. At any rate, opportunities for collaborative research increase when anthropologists and Indian tribes work together toward commonly accepted goals. Occasionally tribes do not quite get what they pay for in the way of professional expertise. In a quietly sardonic way, Larry Haikey, an archaeologist and a member of the Muskogee Nation in Oklahoma, who works for the U.S. Forest Service, wondered, “What would happen if tribes paid for results instead of up front?”5 But even if quality is sometimes a problem, Indian people now have considerable control over what kind of work gets done and by whom, although the work may be highly contested. The federal acknowledgment process also has stimulated changes in relationships among Native American groups, with some previously recognized tribes (and some always recognized ones) either supporting or opposing tribes involved in the acknowledgment process. There have been some realignments of older alliances and oppositions. In disagreements among Indian peoples and among experts about who should or should not be recognized, we can begin to see when, where, and how biological language creeps into the discussion. We also can see how essentialism, and reactions against it, are embedded in the heart of the bureaucratic process itself and even in some professional presentations, just as they are in ordinary, everyday life in the United States. Neither experts nor Indians are immune. To illustrate some of these points, let me turn now to materials with which I am most familiar, those concerning the Lumbee Indians of southeastern North Carolina, who are by far the largest tribe (around 44,000 enrolled members) to seek federal recognition (Blu 1980, 1994, 1996).6 Like most other Indians who remained east of the Mississippi River after the Removals, the Lumbees never made treaties with the federal government and never had a reservation. They have long spoken English as their ¤rst language and practiced Christianity. As southerners, Lumbees experienced heightened racial discrimination before and during the Civil War and later during the Jim Crow period. They have struggled against it in various ways at different periods. The struggle continues.



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Since 1885 the Lumbees have been recognized as Indians by the state of North Carolina, and they have had a limited kind of federal recognition since 1956. The trouble is that the 1956 congressional legislation that designated the Lumbees as Indians also explicitly prohibited them from gaining any bene¤ts through the BIA. It was this restriction, this half hearted recognition of their Indianness, giving with one hand and taking back with the other, that the Lumbees have been trying to undo ever since. In seeking redress through the federal acknowledgment process, the Lumbee Regional Development Association (LRDA), on behalf of the Lumbee tribe, wrote the BAR in 1980 to petition for recognition. They then had to document their case. Over the next several years, experts were hired to work on the petition, including anthropologists Gerald M. Sider and Jack Campisi. Campisi wrote the petition that ¤nally was submitted in 1987. But then, before the BAR had a chance to complete its technical assistance review of the documents (the ¤rst stage of review), the Lumbee petitioners were noti¤ed in 1988 that they were not, after all, legally eligible to proceed through the administrative acknowledgment process. The 1956 congressional legislation recognizing them as Lumbees was interpreted in 1988 as barring them from administrative acknowledgment. The tribe had spent many years paying for research and the preparation of a voluminous petition, only to be told, once they had completed it, that they were ineligible after all. The associate solicitor for Indian Affairs, William G. Lavell, pointed to what he took to be a disabling phrase in the original acknowledgment criteria, §54.7(g): “The petitioner is not, nor are its members, the subject of congressional legislation which has expressly terminated or forbidden the Federal relationship” (FAP Criteria n.d.:17). Despite the fact that the interpretation originally put forward for this criterion discusses termination,7 not a disquali¤er in the Lumbee case, when it came to making a recommendation about acknowledgment the Department of the Interior’s legal staff produced the argument that this criterion applied to the Lumbee by virtue of the 1956 legislation (see Congressional Record 1991:H6894–6895).8 It should be noted that this took the researchers in the BAR by surprise, too. George Roth, an anthropologist who has worked for many years at the BAR, stated that they had already begun to analyze the petition but stopped when the solicitor’s ruling came down (Hearings 1991:54).9 At that point, the Lumbees returned directly to Congress to ask for the removal of the “no bene¤ts” clause in the 1956 legislation and for proper, full®edged acknowledgment. In seeking congressional legislative acknowledgment,


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Lumbees both received support and met opposition. Their efforts are publicly recorded in a series of hearings before the Senate and House over the next several years, as the legislation they desired came frustratingly close to passage but never quite made it through both houses of Congress (see Hearings 1988, 1989, 1991, and Reports 1993).10 Partly because the Lumbee tribe, at around 44,000 enrolled members, is so much larger than any other unacknowledged Indian tribe (the next largest is under 20,000)11 and is quite large even among already-acknowledged tribes, some other Native Americans have expressed concern about what would happen to their resources and budgets with the inclusion of so many newly acknowledged Indians. Nevertheless, some have supported Lumbee efforts.12 Others have opposed them.13 It is the terms in which the discussion has been couched that are of interest to me because they are relevant to the issue of biological language and thinking. Perhaps the issue of membership exposes problems of biologizing better than any other. Vine Deloria, Jr., at the time a professor of law and political science at the University of Arizona and an enrolled member of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, testi¤ed on behalf of the Lumbee tribe in 1988 before the Senate Select Committee on Indian Affairs. In his oral presentation he characterized the con®ict between original, indigenous ideas about group membership and the nonIndian notions encoded in policy they were forced to cope with: Now, if you are to look at the Indian population at almost any point in American history you would ¤nd that the Indian political and cultural pro¤le, the way Indians kept track of who is in their tribe, is more akin to the unrecognized tribes, the tribes who are not presently recognized by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, than it is to presently-existing Federal Indian tribes. The reason you have membership lists is that you have rolls ¤rst for annuities, and then for allotments. No Indian tribe paid very much attention to its membership until the Federal Government said that it had to in order for the Government to estimate how ef¤cient it would be in providing services. (Hearings 1988:26)

Thus, formal membership lists can be seen as a response to conditions imposed by non-Indians. In practice, membership lists for Indian tribes reckon eligibility by degree of Indian “blood.” “Blood quantum,” the amount of Indian “blood” a person is presumed to have on the basis of parentage, quali¤es or disquali¤es that person



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for tribal membership. Tribes differ in the amount and kind of Indian blood they require for membership. M. Annette Jaimes, “a federally recognized Juaneño and a federally unrecognized Yaqui” who holds a doctorate in education and policy studies, has argued that “the blood quantum mechanism . . . is as racist in its form as any conceivable policy” and that it has marginalized and excluded more Indian people from their heritage than it has maintained (1992:130, 330). Representative Ben Nighthorse Campbell, an enrolled member of the Northern Cheyenne Tribe, discussed just this issue in his opening statement during the 1989 House hearing on the Lumbee Recognition Act: I am not particularly opposed to the bill, but there is some food for thought. I think the last time we had hearings on this bill Interior opposed it, and I think primarily from budgetary reasons. When you talk about enrolling a number estimated to be 40,000, when there is apparently no blood quantum requirements and, therefore, the enrollment may grow by leaps and bounds, and you have a limited budget, then obviously that limited budget has to go a long way further in supplying demands for services. (Hearings 1988:2)

Campbell brought the issue up again in the 1991 Joint House and Senate hearings: We had people testify [in hearings on Indian arts and crafts] that were eighteighths Indian. That is 100 percent Indian, but were not legally on anybody’s roll because every one of the eighths was from a tribe that required a fourth or more to be on its roll. We had other people testifying, including the chairman of the Hopis, who said if you were half Indian and the half came through your mother’s side, you could be enrolled. If the half came through your father’s side, you couldn’t, even though the blood quantity would be exactly the same. . . . So when you talk about blood requirement, it gets to be an absolutely confusing issue. (Hearings 1991:50)

So “Indian blood” must not only be present in the right amounts (quanta) but also must have been inherited from the correct parents and grandparents. Sometimes only mother’s “blood” entitles, sometimes only father’s, sometimes either— it depends on the tribe. But “blood” repeatedly surfaces as an issue, despite the implications of Deloria’s statement. Principal Chief Jonathan L. Taylor of the Eastern Band of


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Cherokee Indians of North Carolina argued against the Lumbee recognition for a variety of reasons at the 1989 House hearings. In his written statement, he, like Representative Campbell, expressed concern about Lumbee membership criteria: While we believe it is the prerogative of a tribe to determine its own membership criteria—and have so advocated before the Congress—we have never seen a situation like the Lumbees are proposing whereby every person identi¤ed in 1910 as “Indian” . . . in any one of ¤ve counties in North Carolina, two counties in South Carolina, four other documents or any one who was added to the above lists by the Lumbee Elders Review Committee as recently as 1987, will all retroactively be declared to be full blooded (4/4) Lumbees and their descendants, regardless of degree of Indian blood, all determined to be tribal members. (Hearings 1989:144)

Yet enrollment always has to start somewhere. The Lumbees have a precedent in Poarch Creek and other relatively recent federal acknowledgments for using a 1900/1910 baseline date and a full blood quantum assumption in their membership criteria. Moreover, Cherokees themselves trace their membership back to allotment rolls of the 1890s. Opposition to the Lumbee recognition bill came not just from certain congressmen and distant Indian tribes, but also from several small Indian groups within the Lumbee tribal area.14 The Lumbees who testi¤ed termed the groups political factions within the greater Lumbee group. The groups characterized by Lumbee leadership as factions claimed their own distinct tribal identities. Several groups claimed Tuscarora ancestry but disclaimed each other. Vermon Locklear, chairman of the Hatteras Tuscarora Tribe, and his wife, Leola Locklear, appeared in person in 1989 to testify in opposition to Lumbee recognition. When Congressman Campbell questioned Vermon Locklear about connections between Lumbees and Hatteras Tuscaroras, he replied, “Well, I call them my blood brothers.” Campbell persisted, asking, “To your knowledge, are there blood relatives that are Tuscarora and Lumbee, or one or the other?” To which Locklear’s answer was, “Well, there is some related in the blood line.” Campbell then established that there are cousins among them (Hearings 1989:194). Despite his group’s opposition to Lumbee recognition, reasonably fearing that it would make federal recognition of the Hatteras Tuscarora tribe impossible, Vermon Locklear did not use differences in blood to distinguish the tribes. Instead, he talked of it connecting them through the image of “blood brotherhood.” If blood can be used to divide and to make discriminations, it also can be used to connect.



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In the long and tangled quest for Lumbee federal acknowledgment, not just Indians have talked about Indian blood. When Phillip Martin, tribal chief of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, wrote a 1992 “Open Letter to Members of the Senate,” he asked for a vote against the legislation to grant federal recognition to the Lumbees.15 His stated objections were twofold: that the Lumbees should be required to go through the ordinary federal acknowledgment process as other groups had done (leaving aside for the moment that they had tried this route and been told it was closed to them), and that the bill was an attempt to revise the history of the Lumbee. He questioned their claim to be a historic Indian tribe (Martin 1992). As evidence, he distributed with his letter “Comments on the Lumbee of North Carolina,” a seven-page, single-spaced, typed manuscript by Kenneth H. Carleton, listed as “Tribal Anthropologist/Ethnohistorian” of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians. In these “Comments,” which were distributed widely to relevant senators in the spring of 1992, Carleton (1992:3–5) repeatedly interwove cultural differences and a discussion of blood and genetics. Although he acknowledged the Lumbees to have been a distinct community for a couple of hundred years, he claimed that they cannot have been a tribe because of their mixed genetic heritage, which also accounted, in his view, for a lack of “Indian” cultural and social characteristics. He thereby confounded pseudobiology with culture and society and also rashly assumed that there are some agreed-upon characteristics that ¤t all American Indian peoples. The combination here of biological language, replete with references to “genetics” as though there were racial “genes,” together with a notion of culture as a laundry list was used by an expert hired by one Indian people to prevent another from gaining federal acknowledgment. In a rebuttal of Carleton contained in a letter to Senator Daniel K. Inouye, then chairman of the Select Committee on Indian Affairs, I advanced a different but widely accepted view of culture when I stated: Continuities with the past have been maintained by the Lumbee in the face of many changes. Indian identity for them and for other Native Americans is profoundly cultural, a piece of a moral universe for those who hold it. It is not carried on a gene, it is not lost when Indians change their ways of making a living or use a different language. It is a way of seeing, a mode of understanding, a way of being in the world. (Blu 1992:2)16

To date, the worst example of miscarried science applied to Lumbees comes from what would seem to be the safely distant past. But pasts have a way of


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echoing and re-echoing. First, the story in the written statement of Claude Lowry given as congressional testimony in 1991, when he was more than 90 years old, his health not good enough for him to travel to Washington, DC: My name is Claude Lowry and I live in the Pembroke Community. I was born in 1899, the son of Druscilla Lowry, here in Robeson County. I am an enrolled member of the Lumbee Tribe. I am a direct lineal descendant of James Lowry and Sarah Kersey who occupied this land in the 1700s, along with other families in the tribe. . . . Mr. Felix Cohen, the Assistant Solicitor of the Interior in 1936, outlined a plan for establishing the blood quantum of the tribe. Under his plan, a Commission from Washington DC would take sworn testimony from tribal members on their ancestry and history. He also advised that “It would be an excellent idea, I think, to have one or more Indians sitting on this commission and to utilize a special jury of local Indians to decide disputed questions of fact which might be presented by the commission.” Mr. Cohen went on to say that his feeling on this was “a commission should not attempt the task of preparing an exhaustive roll but should pass only on the case of persons applying for land or educational privileges under the Indian Reorganization Act that the group selected for occupancy of land to be acquired should serve as a nucleus which could make additions from time to time to its own body, with the approval of the Secretary [of the Interior].” The Indian Of¤ce then developed its approach to determining the Indian blood quantum of the tribe. That plan called for an anthropometric study and individual histories of tribal and family tradition. In 1936, Dr. Carl Seltzer, an anthropologist appointed to the “Eastern Siouan Indian Commission,” visited Robeson County and began to take physical examinations of our people. I was one of those who participated in this blood-testing. He examined our skin pigmentation, hair, ears, eyes, nose, lips, teeth, and head; obtain [sic] data on blood type and body measurements. My personal viewpoint is that this examination was one of the worst forms of humiliation ever in®icted on our people. Dr. Seltzer examined 209 members on two separate occasions. The summary of his study was that 22 of those examined were £ or more Indian blood, with the balance being “borderline” half blooded Indians. Some of those recognized as £ of blood had full siblings that were rejected as £ or more Indian blood. (Hearings 1991:152–153).

As the 1993 House Report says, “What had started out as a reasonable plan of Cohen’s quickly became a ludicrous exercise in pseudo-science. The disreputable anthropometric data were without merit and meaningless” (Reports 1993:133). The data were scienti¤cally meaningless but socially and emotionally scarring.



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The memory of humiliation remains, even as that hideous science project of the 1930s became the basis for a legal breakthrough in 1975 with the case of Maynor v. Morton (510 F.2d 1254). For many years the Seltzer report was locked away in the ¤les of the BIA, unavailable to researchers, an embarrassment to anthropology and the Department of the Interior. But it surfaced after the 1972 takeover of the BIA by Indian activists and now has been turned to different use. Maynor v. Morton established that Maynor, who was one of the 22 Indians Seltzer designated as being of onehalf or more Indian blood, and the other surviving members of the 22 were eligible for bene¤ts under the Indian Reorganization Act, despite the later 1956 legislation that, according to the BIA, prohibited such bene¤ts. However, legal attempts to build a case for bene¤ts for the wider community, the whole tribe, failed. The legacy of bad science and racial thinking continues. There is a terrible attraction in the scienti¤c-sounding language of genes that now sometimes replaces the older language of blood and sometimes just reinforces it. The language of genes sounds so precise, so attractively certain, when blood, as Congressman Campbell noted, is so confusing. Talking about genes instead of blood seems to make racial talk more acceptable—people think it is scienti¤c and therefore unbiased. If a researcher writes of “tri-racial isolates,” it sounds so much better than talking about “half-breeds” and “mixed-bloods.” It suggests that something ¤rm is known about biological parentage and the ®ow of genes. In fact, it inaccurately and simplistically represents a complex social and biological situation. The language of pseudoscience is used as a weapon in a real social drama. What is wrong about the assumptions that “culture” is “diluted” through “intermarriage” with people who are “genetically” different? First, it confuses biology and culture, which, since the days of Franz Boas, we have recognized as separate matters that vary independently. Second, it omits the tremendous importance of community, of the reality that a child is reared by more than his or her parents or immediate family and lives in a world wider than a dwelling shelter. Still, the illusion of solid scienti¤c knowledge lures many. The literature on “tri-racial isolates,” an oxymoronic concept if ever there was one, persists and continues to be cited by researchers.17 “Genetic” has become a synonym for “blood” relations, which are thought to create rather than represent important similarities within families, clans, races, and ethnic groups and important differences between them. But where blood suggests warmth and intimacy and “thickens” relationships when shared, genes suggest clinical distance and impersonal functioning. One does not “share” genes—


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one carries replicas of someone else’s. And even though Franz Boas taught us that race, language, and culture could vary independently, we still ¤nd that group identities are characterized in terms of assumed biogenetic linkages in addition to cultural and social heritages. We have not superseded the language of “blood” relationships; we have simply added the jargon of genes to it, reinforcing what was already there rather than challenging it. Despite scienti¤c knowledge about gene ®ow and the complexity of genetic expression and interaction, it is assumed that somehow “genes” account for our seeing and marking differences between one person and another and between one group and another. Essentialist biologistic thought is as pernicious and misleading when applied to family relationships as it is when applied to group relations. The view that the contribution of a sperm or an egg makes the contributor a more pertinent father or mother than someone who has nurtured a child is rampant in our American legal system. This is the same kind of pseudobiological essentialism I have talked about in the Lumbee examples applied to a different social situation. When people like Donald Trump complain that the Mashantucket Pequot are not really Indians, he is stimulated by the competitive social and cultural success of a group of people and responds by questioning their ancestry. He knows his audience. Let me raise one last area of concern that goes to the heart of federal status, be it newly or long recognized. Everyone with federal status is required to keep a tribal roll, a list of members who are considered legitimate. Even when such a list initially is highly inclusive and based on everyday practices of group interaction, over time the list becomes driven by pseudobiology. Thus parentage, which often is assumed to correspond to genetic contributors, quali¤es or disquali¤es a person from enrollment, whether or not there are shared social and cultural values and practices (compare with Neely 1992:37, 42, on Eastern Cherokee). This is a profoundly Euro-American, legalistic, essentialist scheme, not an originally Indian one. The Lumbee Tribe speci¤es as one of its criteria for membership that “eligible descendants who have failed to maintain tribal af¤liation” (Hearings 1991:90) and community ties can be purged from the rolls through the decision of the Tribal Elders Review Committee, which sifts this evidence (Hearings 1989:90). This would apply to Lumbee descendants not resident in the homeland areas. Community counts. Before blood quantum came to dominate discussions of legitimacy, community counted for more. At least some Indian groups used to adopt outsiders, sometimes in large numbers, integrating them through marriage and socialization or enculturation into the group and treating their children as



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they would any other member of the group. With acknowledgment there is only one mode of claiming af¤liation: through the assumed biology of birth. This makes me want to undertake thought experiments, to try to raise what philosophers call “counterfactual” examples. What would the membership status be of a person born of the egg of an enrolled Navajo woman that was fertilized by an enrolled Sioux man’s sperm and subsequently transplanted into the uterus of an enrolled Cherokee woman who then married an enrolled Omaha man? The more we know about the real biology of reproduction, the more social dif¤culties we encounter if we use an essentialist frame.



III Anthropological Contributions to Native American Communities

M

ax White’s chapter in the ¤rst section quotes a Cherokee who felt that the Indian people were not deriving any bene¤ts from the anthropological studies of their communities. White gave some examples of how the Cherokees had bene¤ted from work done by anthropologists from the mid-20th century on. However, these bene¤ts were peripheral to the focus of most of the research being done in Indian communities at that time; anthropologists chose their research topics on the basis of scholarly need or interest rather than on the needs of the Indian community. Rarely were the needs of the communities the focus of the research, nor was the relationship between the anthropologist and the community a reciprocal relationship. However, at about the midpoint of the 20th century a new approach to anthropology began to emerge, in part an outgrowth of the application of anthropological knowledge to the war effort during World War II. The sub¤eld of “applied anthropology” was born, and “applied anthropologists” used their knowledge of cultures to introduce planned change and development into Third World countries and cultures. Some anthropologists working with American Indians began to use the applied approach in their work with Indian communities, as well. The applied anthropologist may work as a “culture broker,” acting to bridge the gap between two different cultures and facilitate relationships between the two cultures. Three chapters in this section re®ect the reciprocal relationship of the applied anthropologist/culture broker working in Indian communities today. Lisa Le®er’s chapter, “Issues in Alcohol-Related Problems among Southeastern Indians: Anthropological Approaches,” Allan Burns’s “The Newest Indians in the South: The Maya of Florida,” and Penny Jessel’s “A Disaster: Hurricane Andrew and the Miccosukee” all deal with the new anthropological role in the Indian community. Le®er’s doctoral research among the Cherokee was based on the study of


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alcohol abuse, but at the same time she was able to help them develop an alcohol treatment program. Burns discusses the migration of displaced Mayas to Florida, their problems of adjustment, and how he was able to assist them in program development. Jessel, herself a Native American, worked as a representative of the state government of Florida to assist in the recovery programs of the Seminole after the devastation by Hurricane Andrew, acting as an intermediary between various governmental agencies and the Miccosukee tribe. All of these cases demonstrate the application of anthropological knowledge and skills to assist the native communities.


6 Issues in Alcohol-Related Problems among Southeastern Indians Anthropological Approaches

Lisa J. Le®er

A

nthropology, as a comparative and holistic discipline, has contributed a great deal to the understanding of drinking behaviors. The impact of this holism is evident not only in the contemporary research concerning alcohol use among American Indian populations but also in the work of anthropologists studying alcohol use globally. The anthropological contributions in this ¤eld have re®ected a concern with issues of both biology and culture. Work on the variability of drinking styles and alcohol-related morbidity among American Indians and Alaskan Natives has also informed the debate on appropriate intervention strategies for various tribes.

A Brief Survey of the Research This section presents samples of anthropological analyses concerning this important behavioral topic. The references include a spectrum of approaches to better understanding the historical and cultural uses of alcohol and the perceptions of alcohol use and abuse. It is not a de¤nitive list, but a selection that is representative of how anthropologists have contributed to alcohol studies, particularly in relation to indigenous populations. Alcohol use has long been of ethnographic interest among anthropologists. However, only recently has alcohol abuse become a topic of interest for anthropology, and even more recently (particularly within the past decade) an area for the application of anthropological method and perspective in intervention strategies. As a re®ection of this interest, the number of articles written by anthropologists concerning Indian alcohol abuse has increased signi¤cantly since the mid1980s. MacAndrew and Edgerton (1969), Leland (1976), Marshall (1979), Mail and McDonald (1980), Heath and Cooper (1981), and Heath (1976, 1983, 1987, 1988, 1995) have contributed important historical and cross-cultural reviews and bibliographies of anthropological research concerning alcohol use among


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American Indian and Alaskan Native populations. Other anthropologists whose names are associated with alcohol-related research include Joseph J. Westermeyer, Jerrold E. Levy, Edward P. Dozier, Jack O. Waddell, Michael W. Everett, Irma and John Honigmann, Theodore D. Graves, Linda A. Bennett, Genevieve M. Ames, and Mac Marshall. T. Kue Young (1994), a physician who has written extensively about health issues among indigenous populations, has drawn on the results of a compendium on alcoholism to group theories of causality into three categories: biological (i.e., genetic predisposition theories), social (i.e., anthropological/cultural models), and psychological (i.e., social learning or modeling theories). In The Health of Native Americans (1994), Young argues for the importance of all of these and de¤nes this combination as “biocultural.” Heath, echoing Young, says that alcohol use is a “biopsychosocial phenomenon, and ignoring that complexity can only result in partial understandings, or even misunderstandings” (1995:2). MacAndrew and Edgerton’s Drunken Comportment (1969) and Joy Leland’s Firewater Myths (1976) present cultural and historical information that refutes the “drunken Indian” stereotype. This stereotype is, by de¤nition, an image that has been created by the dominant society and perpetuated historically by various media channels to present an entire ethnic population as less respectable than the dominant group. As Westermeyer points out, “perhaps no stereotype has been so long-lasting and so thoroughly ensconced in our social fabric” (1979:110). The idea that Indians “can’t hold their liquor” or that there is some racial proclivity to alcohol abuse for Native Americans has been solidly embedded into our society’s collective consciousness. Philip May, in his article “The Epidemiology of Alcohol Abuse among American Indians: The Mythical and Real Properties” (1999), furthers the discussion of the perpetuation of this stereotype. Alcohol researchers may unwittingly present their research in a way that confuses the issues and misrepresents rates of use and abuse of alcohol as those of alcoholism. Various biomedical studies involving alcohol absorption rate, metabolism rate, and other factors have generally been inconclusive. For a selective survey and summary of the biological research and issues, see Young (1994) and Heath (1983, 1987). As May and others have pointed out, scienti¤c evidence does not support these stereotypes or the notion that native people are more biologically predisposed for alcoholism. Because American Indian populations and cultures are so diverse, several anthropological studies in various regions of North America have highlighted differences in drinking styles and norms associated with drinking behavior, as well as demographics concerning related health issues and social pathologies. For an-


Native American Communities

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thropologists, these differences amplify the need for more qualitative work to provide insight into why communities, even in close proximity, re®ect vastly different rates of alcohol abuse and dissimilar drinking behaviors. For example, notable empirical work already has been done concerning southwestern groups such as the Navajo and Hopi. Kunitz and Levy bring a holistic approach to understanding this complex issue in Drinking Careers (1994). As their 25-year study of Navajo and Hopi drinking behaviors shows, even though these two American Indian groups are similar to each other socioeconomically, their drinking styles are quite different. The authors suggest that this may be attributed in part to factors such as population density and social organization. A 1960s survey by Kunitz and Levy indicated that the Hopis, who had not been seen as heavy drinkers in the way the Navajos had been portrayed, had a far higher rate of chronic cirrhosis (Kunitz 1994:138). The drinking behavior of the Hopis was different in that even when some started drinking on the reservation, clans pressured those who abused alcohol to leave the village. For those who stayed, there was a trend to move to less traditional or “procouncil” villages. These constituted “those who accepted the legitimacy of the federally instituted tribal council” (1994:137–138). In the procouncil villages, residents did not have to adhere to traditional marriage laws or “traditional mechanisms of social control” (1994:137–138). As a result of the less traditional upbringing, many of the children from these “unapproved marriages” also grew up drinking heavily. Also, Hopi drinking patterns and norms tend to differ from those of their Navajo neighbors. The “®amboyant drinking behavior among groups of young [Navajo] men particularly has not been discountenanced as it has among Hopis” (Kunitz 1994:138–139). The authors argue that “the setting, or environment, is the key in the explanation of the patterns of alcohol use we have observed” (Kunitz and Levy 1994:231). Kunitz and Levy also conclude that there are differences in drinking patterns within the Navajo population. Drinking style, frequency, duration, and corresponding legal and health consequences vary between men and women and between younger and older age groups. “For both women and men, the kind of community in which they were raised seems to have strongly in®uenced the way they learned to drink” (1994:8–9). They continue: “Moreover, much unconstrained drinking behavior is based on dysfunctional social networks, a lack of knowledge of the deleterious health consequences of heavy drinking, and an exposure to a regional culture in which heavy drinking is the norm. . . . Our research suggests that there are several patterns, some with a greater likelihood of


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causing serious problems than others, but that none is associated with an inevitably catastrophic outcome” (1994:11). Waddell and Everett’s edited volume, Drinking Behavior among Southwestern Indians (1980), provides another illustration of the internal complexity of drinking behaviors within American Indian communities. In this text, drinking behaviors of the White Mountain Apache, Navajo, Tohono O’Odham, and Taos Pueblo are compared and contrasted. The history, cultural traditions, perceptions of drinking, and drinking styles of these groups vary greatly. Not only can drinking itself be classi¤ed as appropriate or inappropriate, but in each of these aforementioned societies, norms that are perceived as traditional, as well as age and gender categories, are described in terms of drinking behavior. “While there are occasions for all ages and both sexes to mingle, and perchance to drink, many events are age-limited and the standards and expectations vary.” These groups also “seem to de¤ne drinking behavior in categorically different ways along sex lines” (Waddell and Everett 1980:233). In many studies of alcohol use among American Indian populations, destructive drinking patterns are associated with lack of opportunity and low income. As Robbins summarizes from an earlier study by Beauvais et al. (1989), “One study classi¤ed 53% of Indian youth ‘at risk’ from their drug involvement, compared with 35% of non-Indian youth. . . . [Beauvais] reported no clear explanation for the higher rates of drug use among Indian youth, ‘although one can speculate that conditions of poverty, prejudice, and lack of opportunity found in many Indian communities create social conditions that encourage substance abuse’ ” (Robbins 1994:153). Kunitz, Young, and others have also indicated a close correlation between high prevalence of alcohol use among native youth and their socioeconomic conditions. It has been said that these peoples are members of Fourth World societies, “submerged by an invading society” (Kunitz 1994:22). American Indians have the highest unemployment rate, the lowest percentage of high school and college graduates, the highest percentage living below the poverty line, and the lowest per capita income. “That socioeconomic status (SES) and ill health are associated is beyond dispute,” writes Young (1994:21). (For additional discussion of research that correlates SES with ill health see Nancy E. Adler et al., “Socioeconomic Inequalities in Health: No Easy Solution” [1997].) Anastasia Shkilnyk produces a moving account of the devastation that can occur when the economic base and the traditional lifeways of an Indian community are taken away. In A Poison Stronger Than Love: The Destruction of an Ojibwa Community, Shkilnyk (1985) writes of a people who, through the use of alcohol,



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escape the reality of hopelessness, poverty, and the despair of fragmented families and cosmology. Weibel-Orlando (1985) and Robbins (1994) provide illustrations of the spiritual issues involved in alcohol use and recovery. As documented in these works, some American Indians who completely abstain characterize their “conversion” from drinking as occurring through a “spiritual experience.” These individuals often attend some type of church, Alcoholics Anonymous, and/or revitalization ceremonies (Weibel-Orlando 1985; Le®er 1995). In my ¤eldwork experience of 1991–1996 among the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, I learned that many Cherokees who attend sweat-lodge ceremonies, vision quests, traditional dances, and so forth are doing so as a part of their healing journey since sobriety. They are seeking out and learning their traditions and ceremonies and are active in providing these mechanisms for wellness to share with others. Carl Hammerschlag, a physician who has worked among native peoples, summarizes this commitment to participation in ceremony. “Ceremonies reconnect us with our spiritual selves,” he relates. “We believe that true healing requires the participation of one’s spiritual self ” (1997:8–9). Native Americans who drink frequently in Indian bars or in other group settings may be using this opportunity to bond socially and share resources as part of an “in-group” association. Another example of a group setting where drinking often occurs is provided by Weibel-Orlando’s spatial model of powwows (1985). Located in the center of the concentric rings of the powwow activities are the more sacred activities by drummers, singers, elders, and dancers. In the circles of space that move farther out one can ¤nd participants, spectators, and more secular activities taking place, such as vending. Even farther out (sometimes as far out at the parking areas), one can ¤nd drinking and, in some cases, solicitation for gang membership (Margaret Jenks, personal communication, 1998). Heath provides an important survey of anthropology and alcohol studies in the 1987 Annual Review of Anthropology. In addition to a review of the ethnological data, he offers an overview of research methods and ways that the sociocultural emphasis of anthropology can frame alcohol studies. He writes, “researchers often recognized that alcohol use—like kinship, religion, or sexual division of labor—can provide a useful window on the linkages among many kinds of belief and behavior” (1987:102). Heath (1999) contributes an extended discussion on the importance of understanding the role of culture in drug and alcohol studies. His article is an essential contribution, both in its push for a more sociocultural model of substance abuse research and in its emphasis on qualitative methods. In the light of this varied and interesting body of research, it is surprising to


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¤nd so little work being done on southeastern Indians.1 Among the 58 tribes and regions listed in Heath’s (1983) overview, only two are southeastern groups, and both of those are in North Carolina. However, the southeastern studies included by Heath were conducted by sociologists, not anthropologists. French and Hornbuckle (1980) documented the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians’ development of a treatment program that emphasized ethnic pride, and Beltrame and McQueen (1979) examined whether or not there was a correlation between job dissatisfaction and problem drinking among the Lumbee. In a 1994 review of 400 social scienti¤c studies of alcohol use among Native Americans conducted over the past three decades, I found none that contained detailed descriptions of drinking patterns or sociocultural analysis of alcohol abuse among southeastern Indian groups. The only ¤eldwork that I am familiar with, other than my own, that has been done since that review is the recent work of anthropologist Susan Stans, who conducted extensive ¤eldwork among a Seminole community in Florida. Her 1996 dissertation, The Cultures of Drinking within a Native American Community, emphasizes the roles of cultural values, attitudes, and beliefs in shaping perceptions of drinking behavior. This is an important contribution in understanding more about inter- and intracultural differences in alcohol use, as well as gendered use of alcohol among American Indian populations. Why are anthropologists extensively involved in alcohol studies in every other region but the Southeast? Could it be that many southeastern tribes either have just recently been recognized or are in the process of being recognized by the federal government? This may be signi¤cant, since many of the grants that support anthropologists’ work are federally funded. Is it that evidence of alcohol abuse is not clearly visible and therefore serious alcohol research is not undertaken among these tribes? Are researchers expecting the more stereotypical “drinking behaviors” of western tribes and therefore failing to look for evidence of alcohol use and abuse among the historically labeled “civilized” tribes of the Southeast? Or are they ignoring drinking behavior because it does not manifest according to their expectations among these tribes?

Filling the Void in American Indian Alcohol Studies Clearly, more alcohol-related work is needed in the Southeast. This new work will give us the opportunity to reconceptualize our approach to alcohol studies. I feel that ¤ve areas should receive particular attention: (1) we should take an ethnohistorical approach that recognizes the impact of modeling alcohol use at early contact and the conquest and removal of indigenous peoples in North



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America; (2) we should recognize the impact of multigenerational trauma; (3) our approaches to research and treatment interventions should be culturally and developmentally appropriate; (4) our research should emphasize not only the social and medical pathologies that are associated with alcohol abuse but also the creative responses and solutions of individual communities; and (5) our research should re®ect the internal complexity (e.g., gender differentiation) of the societies we study. What follows is a brief sketch of some of these issues as they affect the study of southeastern Indians.

The Ethnohistorical and Cultur al Context of Alcohol Use among Southeastern Indians Modeling cultural norms should be considered a major component of either reinforcement or repression of drinking behaviors. As MacAndrew and Edgerton note in Drunken Comportment, “persons learn about drunkenness what their societies impart to them, and [in] comporting themselves in consonance with these understandings they become living con¤rmations of their societies’ teachings” (1969:172). American Indian drinking behavior must be considered within both the historical context of a dominant society and the cultural context of each tribe’s varying norms, perceptions, and expectations concerning substance use. These historical and cultural variables create a complex set of issues that researchers must consider in obtaining a holistic understanding of why individuals may abuse alcohol. We must get a clearer and more realistic picture of how people live and what is part of the equation in their decision-making processes as it affects them and their families and, ultimately, communities. As Raymond Fogelson has pointed out (personal communication, 1995), southeastern Indians most often used consciousness-altering substances such as tobacco and the caffeine-based “black drink” (described by Hudson 1979) during ceremonial occasions. It was the spiritual context of ritual that controlled one’s behavior under the in®uence of these drugs. At European contact, however, distilled alcohol was introduced into the American Indian environment. The Indians had no rituals in place with which to govern behavior when using alcohol. Conversely, tobacco was introduced into Europe from the New World, with equally long-lasting, devastating health effects (Fogelson, personal communication, 1995). Tobacco has a long history of traditional use in the Americas. Its use has been transformed to include a secular category as well as a sacred one. In a 1995 article entitled “Tobacco, Culture, and Health among American Indians: A Historical Review,” Christina Pego et al. analyze the prevalence of tobacco use


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among American Indians today. The authors review ritualized tobacco use historically, placing its use in various controlled or sanctioned roles. However, “centuries of aboriginal sacred use of tobacco, combined with increasing commercial use since the fur trade, may have provided a residual base of susceptibility for later secular use—an old form with a new meaning” (1995:143). The use of both alcohol and tobacco became integrated into the early trade relationship between American Indians and Europeans. The consumption of Western civilization’s alcohol was modeled by sea-worn adventurers and traders with mercantilistic motives. Ethnohistorical records concerning American Indians’ early exposure to alcohol use are quite extensive. William Unrau’s (1996) White Man’s Wicked Water: The Alcohol Trade and Prohibition in Indian Country, 1802–1892 and Peter Mancall’s (1995) Deadly Medicine: Indians and Alcohol in Early America reference early accounts of Euro-Indian exchanges involving alcohol. R. C. Daily’s discussion of “The Role of Alcohol among North American Indian Tribes as Reported in The Jesuit Relations” (1979) also provides an interesting analysis of ethnohistoric data concerning the initial introduction of alcohol to North American Indians. Around 1610, “the Hurons began to develop a taste for alcohol—which then became a prime item of trade. French-Canadians quickly taught the Indians how to engage in public and exuberant binges. Although both church and state prohibited the sale of alcohol or its use in the trade, natives were already starting to experience the addiction and disruption” (Miller 1993:164). By the mid-1600s, references by missionaries to the destruction of native religious, political, and social institutions because of “sinful” consumption of alcohol by Indians became increasingly common (Axtell 1985). Indulgent drinking behavior was often encouraged by Europeans as a means to facilitate unfair trade and outright theft of goods. As Francis Paul Prucha has stated, “the fundamental policy of Indian affairs was to make the Indians dependent on the English in their trade” (1984:8). Further, by 1745 this was clearly evident in Chief Skeagunsta’s plea to the governor of South Carolina: “I . . . have always told my People to be well with the English for they cannot expect any supply from any where else, nor can they live independent of the English. What are we red people? The cloathes we wear, we cannot make ourselves. They are made [for] us. We use their ammunition with which to kill Dear. We cannot make our Guns, they are made [for] us. Every necessary Thing in life we must have from the white People” (McDowell 1958:453). Some in the colonies were concerned about legislation supporting the rum trade prior to 1755, and many leaders of Indian tribes were also. Jacobs (1967) cites one colonial report in which Indians themselves complained about the



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amount of alcohol brought into their communities and asked that the alcohol trade be stopped. Not until 1832 was the buying and selling of alcohol to Native Americans prohibited, even though alcohol-related problems had been escalating for tribes since contact ( Jacobs 1967). Many non-natives began exploiting Indian communities via bootlegging and smuggling. Repeal of the federal Indian liquor laws came in 1953, yet “the ill effects of the introduction of distilled beverages into a socially unprepared society and resultant measures at control by a dominant society have played an important role in the formation of destructive drinking patterns by Indian people” (American Indian Policy Review Committee 1976:2). This is a particularly important point considering that the drinking behavior of the dominant society itself provided negative modeling for those to whom alcohol was being introduced. In Rorabaugh’s The Alcoholic Republic: An American Tradition, the chapter discussing the annual consumption of alcohol in the 18th and 19th centuries in the United States is entitled “Nation of Drunkards.” In this chapter he documents that “between 1800 and 1830, annual per capita consumption increased until it exceeded 5 gallons, a rate nearly triple that of today’s consumption” (1979:8). He continues: A comparison of the annual per capita intake of alcohol in the United States with that in other countries during the early nineteenth century shows that Americans drank more than the English, Irish, or Prussians, but about the same as the Scots or French, and less than the Swedes. The nations with high consumption rates tended to share certain characteristics. . . . These nations were agricultural, rural, lightly populated, and geographically isolated from foreign markets; they had undercapitalized, agrarian, barter economies; they were Protestant. (1979:10–11)

Also included in early references to drinking behavior in the United States are accounts of intratribal aggression, behaviors that adversely affected both family and community. It is important to note that because use of native hallucinogens was restricted to spiritual ceremonies, traditional tribal laws did not include penalties for civil or social transgressions committed while under the in®uence of alcohol. Therefore, individuals often were not penalized of¤cially under such circumstances, however socially unacceptable their behavior may have been. The introduction of distilled liquor into native North America ¤ts well with Young’s idea of “epidemiologic transition.” He points out that most populations progress through three periods: “one of pestilence and famines, one of reced-


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ing pandemics, and one of degenerative and man-made diseases” (1994:49). In American Indian disease patterning, there has been a “decline (yet persistence) of infectious diseases,” an increase in chronic diseases, and, more recently, the advent of serious social pathologies such as alcohol abuse, suicide, accidents, and violence (1994:52–53). An understanding of the evolution of social pathologies such as alcohol abuse within the context of a novel environment gives temporal depth to cross-cultural use of the introduced item outside the constraints of ritualized behavior. Consider Rorabaugh’s (1979:10–19) description of drinking behavior as it was modeled during America’s early history: Half the adult males—one-eighth of the total population—were drinking two thirds of all the distilled spirits consumed. . . . White males were taught to drink as children, even as babies. I have frequently seen Fathers, wrote one traveller, wake their Child of a year old from a sound sleap [sic] to make it drink Rum or Brandy. As soon as a toddler was old enough to drink from a cup, he was coaxed to consume the sugary residue at the bottom of an adult’s nearly empty glass of spirits. . . . Children grew up imitating their elders’ drinking customs. . . . Men encouraged this youthful drinking. . . . The male drinking cult pervaded all social and occupational groups. . . . The middle class were scarcely more sober. . . . Even more shocking was the indulgence of clergymen. (1979:10–19)

One clergyman, Presbyterian parson Gideon Blackburn, was both a missionary to the Cherokees and a whiskey maker. His relationship with the Cherokees disintegrated in 1808 after he was found responsible for illegally shipping over 2,200 gallons of whiskey through Cherokee and Creek territory (McLoughlin 1979). “Blackburn’s actions con¤rmed the widespread belief that the missionaries had other motives for entering their nation than saving their souls” (McLoughlin 1994:80). The push for prohibition among the Eastern Cherokee began early. Some village headmen requested as early as 1755 that trade in alcohol be prohibited, but the request fell upon deaf ears (Hatley 1993:50). Alcohol was not only used to grease the wheels of trade, but it became a conduit for altered states of consciousness. Then, as now, it was used to self-medicate and/or numb its consumers. Hatley also suggests that it “loosened inhibitions of political behavior” and that “among the Cherokees, drink was called the same name as physic, Nawohti, and the consumption of both ritual potions and alcohol was a part of preparation for war” (1993:49).



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Alcohol consumption continued to be a problem; often it was associated with societal instability and violence and was an issue of concern for those with political clout. In the early 19th century, Chief Yonaguska (Drowning Bear) battled with binges of hard drinking himself. After one three-day stupor, he awakened and denounced the white man’s evil drink, demanding that the Cherokees sign a “temperance pledge.” His adopted white son and legal counsel, William Holland Thomas, wrote up the pledge, which was said to be the ¤rst of its kind in the United States2 (William L. Anderson, personal communication, 1987). Several years later, Reverend Samuel Worcester attempted to develop a temperance program among the young men who were attending a boarding school. The “Cold Water Army” was established at the Male Seminary, and “the majority of the boys [at the seminary] signed the pledge” (McLoughlin 1984:493). As recent memories of forced removal, war, and assimilation policies affected Cherokee lives, alcohol continued to be a problem into the 20th century. Some Cherokees found ways, like their white neighbors, to make a little money during the hard economic times of the depression (which came earlier and stayed longer in those parts of southern Appalachia). Some made liquor, while others “ran” (bootlegged) it. Moonshine was made on and off the reservation (Finger 1991:66). In a 1986 interview with Game and Bessie Walker by the Fading Voices Project, Mr. Walker was asked what he did to make it through the depression. Well, we had milk and butter, chickens, ducks, hogs, and plenty of hog fat. For something to eat we made it good. But the clothes wore out—no money. You just had to patch them. For about two years there was no church held on Panther Creek. Everybody was needy; half of them didn’t have shoes. I ¤nally got to where I just didn’t care. Young and stout and couldn’t get jobs. I’d been all around South Carolina—just hitch-hiking everywhere trying to ¤nd a job. Finally, I came back home in the fall. We’d made a crop; I’d left it with the old lady. And I started making liquor. I had to have some money. I’d take it to Bryson City and back home if I couldn’t sell it. There were plenty of people who wanted it, but they didn’t have ¤fty cents. . . . Finally I got me an old car, but I never did boot-leg much. You couldn’t do that and make whiskey. You’d get caught. So I sold mine all around Bryson City and up on Cowee Mountain. There was a tourist out¤t up there, and I’d sell about ten gallons a week. I got two dollars a gallon to deliver. . . . I just didn’t let anybody know my business. Back then anybody fooling with liquor had a territory, and nobody better go in there. If they did they’d carry a little shot back out! I didn’t go to their territory, and they didn’t come to mine. (Journal of Cherokee Studies 1991:63–64)


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For many who made moonshine or bootlegged whiskey, there was a rebellious feeling of outwitting authority, of victory against the oppressors, that rewarded those who engaged in such outlaw behavior. Many young men spent years running across the mountains, avoiding “getting lawed”3 by local and federal law enforcement, or seeing how fast they could drive on winding mountain roads without getting caught or killing themselves. There was indeed a young warriorlike feeling associated with surviving the making and drinking years of their life. Many were not so lucky. They died in the chase or on a cold, cold mountain night on the walk home.

Multigener ational Grief and Tr auma among Southeast Indians Many counselors who are themselves Native Americans have identi¤ed multigenerational grief and trauma as a critical issue that must be considered in substance abuse causality, treatment, and research with indigenous populations. Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart and Lemyra M. DeBruyn provide a good overview of this phenomenon along with a survey of literature on this and related issues of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and disenfranchised grief. In their article “The American Indian Holocaust: Healing Historical Unresolved Grief,” they also include suggestions and strategies for clinicians for addressing “massive losses of lives, land, and culture from European contact and colonization resulting in a long legacy of chronic trauma and unresolved grief across generations. This phenomenon, labeled historical unresolved grief, contributes to the current social pathology of high rates of suicide, homicide, domestic violence, child abuse, alcoholism, and other social problems among American Indians” (1998:60). Multigenerational trauma resulting from colonization and assimilation policy, compounded with years of negative imaging and stigmatization, has provided American Indian populations with large obstacles to overcome and few tools with which to make the task possible. However, one of the consistent themes I have encountered in community activities to combat alcohol abuse has been that the Indian community has to resolve social issues from within. The government, the churches, the other agencies have not found solutions in the past, nor can they provide solutions competently today.

Cultur al Norms and Modeling For many present-day American Indian youths, alcohol was ¤rst introduced by a relative or family member, and, on average, by the age of 10 (Le®er et al., n.d.). As Grobsmith’s study of incarcerated Indians in Nebraska prisons reveals, for



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many of these youths, drinking behavior has been modeled for three to ¤ve generations. She writes: “All of the forty-¤ve inmates I interviewed in 1986–7 claimed that they suffered from alcohol and/or drug addiction and had begun their substance abuse as small children. As one informant stated: ‘You don’t have to tell a six-month old baby what a beer can is; they already know. You see kids drinking whiskey. Their mom knows they’re doing it but she doesn’t do anything because she is drinking too’ ” (Grobsmith 1994:104). Modeling a “drink until you get drunk” behavior and internalizing stereotypical images of the “drunken Indian” can have a detrimental impact on the selfimage of young American Indians. As Kunitz and Levy point out, Most Navajos surveyed by May and Smith (1988) have come to believe the commonly held lay Anglo explanation for Indian drinking, namely, that Indians have a physiological susceptibility to intoxication not shared by nonIndians. They also seem to share the Anglo belief that Indian alcohol use and abuse are widely prevalent despite there being fewer Navajo adults who drink than adults in the general population. . . . Thus, as Navajos adapt to the world around them, they inadvertently internalize negative Anglo views and thereby suffer lowered self-esteem. (1994:190)

Christene Eber’s insightful ethnography, Women and Alcohol in a Highland Maya Town, provides an informative framework for her research among indigenous women. She writes, During the colonial era Indigenous people soon learned the not-so-divine qualities of distilled spirits. They also learned new drunken comportment from colonists and internalized at least some of these outsiders’ views of them when they became drunk. . . . As the wounds of colonialism festered and the pain of separation from their families, their lands, and their traditions deepened, Indigenous people turned more and more to drinking. Many Native people continued to drink in out of control ways, and almost everyone concluded that Indians can’t hold their liquor. (1995:6)

A concern today among many Native American counselors is that heavy drinking and binge-drinking have been “normalized” in pockets of their communities. More action is needed on the part of those who model abstinence or moderate drinking to provide youth with positive role models and support and to bring


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with them the tools to heal and to make better life decisions. As Yellow Horse Brave Heart and DeBruyn suggest, Individuals can continue the healing process through group, family therapy as well as attending to their own spiritual development. American Indian tribes will need to facilitate communal grief rituals, incorporating traditional practices. Some tribal programs are incorporating elders and teaching storytelling skills about tribal history to youth which further serve to heighten historical awareness, germane to our model of healing. Our underlying premise in this healing model rests on the importance of extended kin networks which support identity transformation, a sense of belonging, recognition of a shared history, and survival of the group. (1998:70)

Rev italization and Community Response The words quoted above are the words of revitalization, and as Wallace (1966) and Thornton (1993) point out, this phenomenon often arises from cultural stress. In revitalization movements, traditional, Christian, and other ideologies often fuse to form a new type of belief system or philosophy. The revitalization of culture, tradition, ceremony, and strong ties to family and identity are only some of the clear indices of Native American resiliency. Revitalization movements in the past have explicitly rejected drinking, and as I have encountered in cultural revitalization among the Eastern Band, the use and abuse of alcohol are seen as contributing to a loss of culture and as inhibiting a vision for future Cherokees. Programs and research should focus more on the resiliency and positive characteristics of Indian communities. Joan Weibel-Orlando refers to the importance of spiritual beliefs and ceremony for American Indian people as a mark or “presentation of ethnic self.” She postulates that Indian peoples have three ethnic postures or stances, each one “intrinsically in®uenced by strong and con®icting beliefs about alcohol use and its meaning for Indian people” (1985:204). One stance is sacred separation, which is characterized by expressing various forms of spirituality via thought and practice that incorporate abstinence from alcohol. On one of my ¤rst visits to a stomp dance in Cherokee, North Carolina, the elder cautioned that those seeking to participate could not have used alcohol for four full days before dancing, nor was any alcohol permitted on the stomp grounds (Le®er 1995). A second stance is profane separation or deviant solidarity, which is characterized by the “®agrant misuse of alcoholic beverages in a collective and public



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context” much akin to Lurie’s (1979) “longest on-going protest movement” concerning American Indian drinking behavior. This stance appears to be re®ective of an “acting out” behavior in response to assimilation, discrimination, and the historic oppression of federal Indian policy. The third ethnic stance re®ects moderation or “maintaining” by having the ability to “self-monitor one’s own drinking behavior” (Weibel-Orlando 1985:205– 206). At this point I would reemphasize that American Indian cultures have always utilized mind-altering substances, which were integrated into ritual contexts, whereas Western substances such as distilled alcohol were not integrated. Consciousness-altering substances such as tobacco and “black drink” were used within the traditional ceremonial boundaries in culturally appropriate contexts. There was a unity of traditionality and spirituality that provided boundaries concerning substance use. Many native people today think that this same unity is the key to overcoming abuse of alcohol and other substances. For many in the Cherokee community, having a spiritual identity is synonymous with having an Indian identity. For those in recovery, often it is a synthesis of the Western and traditional worlds that provides coping mechanisms in dealing with addictions. Whether returning to more traditional forms of Cherokee identity, associating with Christianity, or adopting the 12-step philosophy of Alcoholics Anonymous (A A), many feel that a spiritual component is essential for sobriety because mind, body, and soul are inseparable. This was clearly exempli¤ed by the Native American A A Convention I attended in the Cherokee community. Participants referred to and addressed the Creator, grandfather, or grandmother spirit, engaged in spiritual rituals such as smudging,4 and witnessed traditional and/or “fancy” dancing and drumming, in addition to engaging in the standard Euro-American A A program. The layering of these worlds and philosophies was also experienced in sweat-lodge ceremonies where A A slogans such as “One Day at a Time” or reference to one’s “higher power” alternated with traditional prayers (e.g., to the Creator). Again, these are clear signs of the resiliency and adaptability of a strong and courageous people.

Ethnogr aphic and Applied Research among the Eastern Band My formal ¤eldwork among the Eastern Band of Cherokees went from early 1990 through 1996, with continued annual visits during the summers when I returned home to Jackson County. My family has lived just off the Cherokee Boundary for several generations, and our shared history involves having sold land in the Soco area back to the Cherokees via William Holland Thomas; maternal great-


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grandparents who ¤rst settled on Tow String, now part of the National Park; grandparents who worked in the tourist and lumber industries on the reservation; and parents who worked for a period of time in a factory on the Boundary and have long-established friendships with Cherokees. In talking with community members in Cherokee, I learned of their personal experiences with and perceptions of alcohol use and alcoholism. In the course of my participant observation, I had the opportunity to attend a variety of events and ceremonies and meet with many participants who had previously dealt with alcohol issues. The vast majority of those I spoke with attributed substance abuse to a “spiritual void.” As mentioned earlier, for many, a “spiritual experience” was necessary to initiate and maintain sobriety.5 This experience varied, but most who were interviewed were in recovery and were involved in attending stomp dances, puri¤cation ceremonies, Native American A A meetings, church services, and community events that promoted sobriety such as the local Sobriety March, the Native American A A Convention, and the annual Indians in Sobriety Campout. Much of my understanding of local alcohol issues comes from participant observation in these events and from extensive contact and interaction with Native American alcoholism counselors at the local treatment center for adolescents. My ¤rst contract at the center involved the creation of two education manuals concerning chemical dependency. One was designed for counselors and the other for counselor aides; both were to provide culturally speci¤c lecture materials for Indian clients about chemical dependency and life skills issues. During this project I approached the director of the facility about the potential for establishing a mentoring program to reduce the probability of relapse among discharged clients. With the director’s cooperation, the hope of institutionalizing such a program and the use of data generated by it for research became a reality. Soon thereafter I wrote several more grants to fund a variety of projects for the center. With the help of dedicated staff from the treatment center, as well as from members of the community, a number of local research and service opportunities were made available. These have included a mentorship project that has involved tribal elders and youth who are striving to stay sober; the funding of an epidemiological in-house database that includes over 114 sociocultural, psychological, and outcome variables taken from client case histories (variables that will aid in baseline measures, treatment evaluation, and planning); a culturally appropriate nutrition education program for the center; workshops that provide counselors with culturally sensitive information regarding chemical dependency; community projects for heightening awareness of alcohol-related issues; and eth-



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nographic research concerning revitalization movements and types of intervention strategies being used by members of the community to combat the stresses of alcohol abuse. Members of the treatment center staff and I are currently planning research projects that involve developing a culturally and developmentally appropriate chemical dependency curriculum for computer use and a project that examines youth in treatment, stress, and exposure to violence. In each of these projects, staff and community members were asked for input in planning and development. The mentoring program, for example, was developed on the basis of the expertise and concerns of counselors and clients. Counselors and clients identi¤ed the need for additional extended familial and community support for adolescents who found such support absent when they most needed it to continue their healing journey after treatment. The project to produce a more appropriate chemical dependency curriculum is ongoing. Over the next several years, this project will entail ethnographic interviews with all of the counseling and support staff who will assist in the production of interactive webbased chemical dependency lessons that youth in treatment can relate to and understand.

Conclusion It is not hard to document that alcohol abuse is a serious problem for many American Indian and Alaskan Native communities. Mortality rates for these populations indicate that the greatest potential for loss of life occurs before the age of 44 (Kunitz 1994). Most of this risk is attributed to alcohol abuse and related risk behaviors (Kunitz 1994:17). The two leading causes of death among native youth age 15 to 24 are accidents and suicide, of which an estimated 75 percent are alcohol related (Indian Health Service 1994:46; Robbins 1994:152). The age-adjusted alcoholism mortality rate of 52.6 per 100,000 was 674 percent higher for American Indians and Alaskan Natives than for the overall U.S. population (6.8 per 100,000). It is important to note, however, that rates varied greatly among Indian Health Service (IHS) reporting regions, from a low of 9.2 in Oklahoma to 89.3 in the Aberdeen service area, which includes North and South Dakota, Iowa, and Nebraska (IHS 1995:5). For American Indians and Alaskan Natives, the clear relation between mortality rates and alcohol abuse re®ects an urgent need for continued prevention and intervention research and programs. Data for alcoholism, accidents, and suicide, as reported in IHS publications for 1994 and 1995, show a signi¤cant increase in each of these three areas as compared to the U.S. population. In the 1994 report, mortality rates for alcoholism were 430 percent greater for American


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Indians and Alaskan Natives than for the U.S. “All Races” population. This ¤gure increased to 674 percent in the 1995 IHS report. Mortality statistics related to accidents showed that the rate of mortalities due to accidents was 165 percent greater than the U.S. rate in the 1994 IHS report and increased to 265 percent greater in the 1995 report. Suicide mortality statistics were 43 percent greater than the U.S. rate as reported in 1994 and almost doubled to 85 percent greater by 1995 (IHS 1994:5, 1995:5). There are many important new research directions for the study of adolescent addictions.6 In a publication from the Commission on Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education of the National Research Council, Losing Generations: Adolescents in High-Risk Settings, a concluding statement from the panel on high-risk youth suggests the following: The panel’s ¤ndings point to a clear and urgent need for research on the social contexts of young people in contemporary U.S. society. These are, at least, the family, the school, the neighborhood, and the systems of health care, welfare, and justice. . . . Research has traditionally focused on adolescents as individuals and has given far less attention to the settings in which adolescents live. From the panel’s perspective, however, the highest priority for future research should shift to studies of the contexts and settings of daily life, especially for adolescents from low-income and disadvantaged backgrounds. (1993:249)

Anthropologists have been trained to do just that. Studies re®ect a growing need for continued research in these communities. As the literature shows, the holistic training of anthropologists encourages a wide range of perspectives and provides health care professionals and cross-cultural counselors with insight into these heterogeneous populations. As a social science discipline whose legacy among native populations has not always been positive, anthropology should place greater emphasis on the anthropologists’ responsibility to provide practical and useful service for their study populations. There are at least three elements that I consider essential in a responsible approach to research in Indian communities. The study design must (1) honor tribal sovereignty, (2) substantially involve and include native voices, and (3) be applied and of practical application for the study population. I asked the director of the treatment center7 where my research took place how anthropologists could be useful to American Indian communities. She responded by saying:



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Anthropologists need to take a proactive role in communities in which they are working. They should not be used solely to describe the culture and community. Rather they need to be part of the assessment and, more importantly, development of concrete action plans that address community problems. They can be valuable members of the community as they assess community norms, and use these values to develop community-based approaches to major morbidity and mortality issues. Anthropologists could be used from a health perspective in the following fashion: To collect baseline community epidemiology on disease incidence and prevalence; To develop community-based approaches to diseases of lifestyle such as smoking, diabetes, substance abuse, excess trauma rate, etc.; To examine cultural strengths in order to combat excess morbidity and mortality. I think the projects generated at the center are good examples of this type of approach . . . such as the mentorship program. (Mary A. Farrell, M.D., personal communication, 1995)

Very little anthropological work on alcohol use among southeastern tribes has been conducted. This is a shame, because the potential for applied anthropological and ethnographic contributions is vast. Working with members of American Indian communities and local practitioners, anthropologists could be helping to generate clearer understandings of the issues facing these populations and assisting communities in addressing the problems they themselves identify.


7 The Newest Indians in the South The Maya of Florida

Allan Burns

T

he Maya of Florida are the newest Indians of the South. They brought with them a condensed history that began with their exodus from the Guatemalan civil war in the early 1980s. During this time, a few Guatemalan Maya began a chain migration to the United States that included the creation of new communities in California, Arizona, Texas, and Florida. By the end of the 1990s more than 20,000 Guatemalan Maya had settled in Florida. These Maya Indians created a new community, one that included the evolution of a pan-Mayan identity stretching from Florida to Guatemala. At the same time, the Maya adapted to life in small-town Florida, where discrimination, racism, violence, and wide disparities in income were much more common than these people were accustomed to seeing in the remote highlands of Guatemala. Mayan Indians from Guatemala started a process of becoming the newest Indians of the South in 1982 when migrant worker contractors, or coyotes, brought a few refugees to Florida to work as migrant farmworkers. These refugees from burned-out villages and destroyed ¤elds in Central America ¤rst settled in south Florida as seasonal farmworkers. As more stable work became available, they quickly put down roots and became permanent residents with homes, gardens, and a community organization (Burns 1993). Their ¤rst point of entry into the culture and society of Florida was the agricultural community of Indiantown, a town named after an old Seminole camp on the eastern shore of Lake Okeechobee. While the Maya did not choose Indiantown for any symbolic connection to American Indian life, the name of the town seemed to them appropriate as a destination point—in Spanish, it was “El Pueblo de los Indios.” This was an ironic name to these new immigrants, as the term “Indio” still carries derogatory meaning in Guatemala. The name “Indiantown” was easy to remember and had a self-deprecating, humorous ring to it. The Mayan immigrant community went through a process of initial concen-



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tration in Indiantown in the early 1980s, then dispersal into nearby communities such as West Palm Beach, Jupiter, and Lake Worth. Most recently, south Florida became a point of a larger dispersal of Mayan people to other small communities throughout Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas. Their needs—jobs, education, health, shelter, language, and social, political, and cultural legitimacy—have drawn many students and professional anthropologists into long-term collaborative research relationships with them. The goal of this chapter is purposefully re®ective; it considers how an immigrant community made up of indigenous Mayan people changed along with the changes in the discipline of anthropology, especially the applied anthropology of the University of Florida. It is also re®ective of my own career as it has been in®uenced by working with Mayan people in Mexico and Central America since 1970, and more recently with the “newest Indians of Florida,” the Guatemalan Maya. One of the ways in which the Maya have distinguished themselves from other ethnic groups in south Florida has been through their self-conscious recognition that they are American Indians. Anthropology and anthropologists have been part of their community, but the Mayan Americans have been more than subjects of reports and investigations. Mayan people we have met have been initiators of projects, collaborators in research, and teachers of collaborative anthropology. Long-term ¤eldwork has always had profound effects on anthropologists (Foster 1979), and this experience of working in south Florida likewise has been more than just ¤eldwork. Far from becoming “just another ethnic group” put to the gaze of anthropology, the Mayan immigrants we worked with became friends, fellow students at the University of Florida, and co-authors to our academic reports. Working in my home state of Florida also meant that the Maya learned about anthropologists like myself in their quest to establish a new strategy for surviving in Florida: they used our home in Gainesville, on Interstate 75, as a stop-off point on their way north or south. They planned conferences and meetings, made news announcements, and called on students, colleagues, and myself to help. But the practice of anthropology is not a one-way street; the Mayan community also affected how I and others think about and do anthropology, not just at the local level but also at the disciplinary level. One example of this is the in®uential career of Victor Montejo, a Jacaltec Maya who received his Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Connecticut. Montejo has written several books on Mayan literature and anthropology (Montejo 1987, 1991) and began the committee on human rights in the American Anthropological Association as well. Montejo was not a resident of Indiantown, but his visits there, his friend-



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ships with other refugees there, and the comparisons between his experiences and those of others in Indiantown have served to bridge academic anthropology with my work and that of students of the University of Florida as well as the community of Indiantown.

Are the Maya American Indians? One question that immediately arises with the Maya is whether they are American Indians or Central American refugees. The answer is that they are both. They are the “living Maya,” heirs to the 3,000-year-old civilization, and they are also living in the United States alongside other Native Americans. As living Maya, they draw upon a legacy of architectural monuments, agricultural innovations such as the domestication of corn and other vegetables, and aesthetic and political traditions of the Mayan people in Guatemala, southern Mexico, and Belize. They are also Central American refugees, and their national identi¤cation as Guatemalans often blinds people to their identity as indigenous people. The term “Indian,” as mentioned, still evokes tremendous meaning prejudice and discrimination in Guatemala, so few of the Maya of south Florida say that they are “Indian” when they are asked their identity. A more digni¤ed response to “Who are you?” is to reply with the name of a town or perhaps one of the different Mayan languages. Identity, as De Vos and Romanucci-Ross (1982) de¤ned it, is both a shield against hostility from outside a group and a badge that is shared within a group. Identity includes the self-deprecating humor of Mayan people noting that they live in a U.S. community called “El Pueblo de los Indios,” and it also includes the quiet resistance that meets outsiders who see them only as another group of Spanish-speaking migrant workers. There are over six million Mayan people today, even though many people assume that the Maya disappeared after the abandonment of their cities around the tenth century. Counting the number of people in the Mayan diaspora in places like Florida is especially dif¤cult when reactions are strong against immigrants, both legal and illegal. In the years of the ¤rst violence in Guatemala, 1980–1982, Mexico recognized 42,000 Guatemalans as refugees, even though more than 500,000 people ®ed Guatemala during this same period (Manz 1988). The number of Guatemalan Mayan people in Florida at the end of the 1990s is about 20,000, and the total number in the United States is about 200,000. Another way the Maya can be de¤ned as American Indians is through their language. They still speak one of 31 different Mayan languages that have connections to Athabascan and other North American Indian languages. Although the different Mayan languages are related and share a common vocabulary, they are



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not mutually intelligible. Because of this, Spanish (and increasingly English) has become a lingua franca, especially among the immigrant Mayan communities. I was once at a meeting of a Mayan cultural organization in West Palm Beach that included ten people; around the table we counted ¤ve different Mayan dialects as well as English and Spanish. This is reminiscent of the history of many Indians of the southern United States who resorted to using trade and Creole languages such as Timucua and later English when different bands were brought together under the refugee conditions of the 19th century. While a “Creole Maya” has not developed, a bi- and trilingual sociolinguistic arena has emerged among the Mayan refugees. Because the Maya, unlike native people of the United States, have never been placed in reservation status, their political structures have not had a history similar to that of native peoples of the United States, who have had to deal with issues regarding treaty legitimacy, tribal governments, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and federal recognition. Their political structure in Guatemala was strongest at the local community level, where roles and statuses for different leadership, judicial, and policing positions had been developed out of a mix of pre-conquest Mayan and European—especially Catholic—systems of authority and power. The community held title to land until several decades ago, when private ownership became legal. Land appropriations by non-Maya and land pressure have been singled out as primary causes of the violence of the 1980s in Guatemala (C. Smith 1990). But now that the Maya are here in the southern United States in relatively large numbers, questions about land rights will undoubtedly begin to be asked by community members who have met with Native American activists. In the late 1970s, American Indian tribes from New York developed cultural exchange programs with the Maya of Guatemala. One of the principal community activists of Florida, Jerónimo Camposeco, came to Florida at the request of the Indian Law Resource Center (ILRC) in Washington, DC. The ILRC took special interest in a group of Q’anjobal Maya who had been brought to Florida by a farm labor contractor, then detained by the Immigration and Naturalization Service in Miami. These ¤rst pioneer Maya to Florida spoke no English and very little Spanish, so the ILRC sent Mr. Camposeco to serve as a translator at their immigration hearing. Mr. Camposeco ®ed to the United States in 1980, after his name appeared on a death list. As a result, he was one of the ¤rst Guatemalan Mayas to achieve of¤cial refugee status in the United States. His connection with American Indians in the United States dated back to the early 1970s, when he helped set up cultural exchanges between Mohawk and other groups and Guatemalan


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Mayan communities. He describes his friendship with an American Indian he met in Guatemala in the introduction to Maya in Exile: On one of my trips to an Indian nation in the north of New York state, I met the mother and sister of my Mohawk Indian friend Kayuta Clouds, with whom I had worked in Guatemala on an organic agriculture project and in a school of Maya culture, science, and philosophy for the Cakchiquel Maya of Poatquil, Chimaltenango. One day in October 1980, after class, Kay had gone to the market to buy his food. On his way back, as he passed in front of the Chimaltenango city park, six heavily armed men suddenly approached him, grabbed him, hit him, shoved him into a car, and took off down an unknown route. The face of Kay’s mother re®ected a profound sadness. Still she smiled when she saw me. Her greeting and her pleasure at seeing me gave me strength to continue my struggle and to denounce the injustices and the true causes of the violence, in the name of her son, who valiantly sacri¤ced his life for the Maya cause. In February 1983 the Mohawk chiefs and editors of the Indian newspaper Akwesasne Notes unexpectedly called me and asked if I would accompany them to Florida to help lawyers of the Florida Rural Legal Services and those of the American Friends Service Committee, who were defending some Q’anjobal people from San Miguel Acatan. (Burns 1993:xliii)

The connections between the Maya and Indian nations of the United States have the possibility of triggering new concerns about land rights, as well as the need for social programs, protection from exploitation, and political action against summary deportation. Land issues are also important for two other groups of people in Mayan society—those who are repatriating after living in refugee camps in Mexico (Stepputat 1994), and the larger group of those who have established a transnational life, sometimes living in Florida and at other times in Guatemala. The Guatemalan Maya are by de¤nition North American Indians because they are indigenous people living on their traditional lands on the North American continent. They are also North American Indians through their cultural experiences, both their history and their subordination to a conquering European nation-state (Wolf 1982). Their identity as immigrants to Florida is formed by these histories as well as through their interaction with anthropologists and the ¤eld of anthropology. I will turn now to several very visible ways in which anthropology has been part of the development of Mayan identity in Florida.



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Culture Brokers One of the sociological statuses of Mesoamerican society that has played an important role in relationships between indigenous people as well as between indigenous people and others is the culture broker, or, to use a well-known Nahua name for it, the pochteca. People known as pochtecas in Aztec times were cultural intermediaries, ambassadors, translators, culture brokers, and merchants who had their own towns and neighborhoods, and perhaps even their own political system at the time of conquest. They were equally at home in Mayan and Aztec political arenas and had diplomatic and linguistic skills of considerable breadth. Although she is often thought of as a courtesan or prostitute, Cortez’s interpreter, “La Malinche,” was most likely from the pochtecal tradition; she spoke several languages and has not been associated with any one particular Mesoamerican tradition. Although the pochteca as a well-de¤ned and labeled social class has disappeared from societies in Mesoamerica, individual culture brokers like Jerónimo Camposeco continue to ®ourish and become important in intercultural exchanges and the creation of a new American Indian community in Florida. Camposeco’s interest in Mayan society was based on an appreciation for how culture is used to de¤ne identity. As a result, he developed exchanges with other North American Indian nations during the 1970s. But his skills as a culture broker were developed in his home community in Guatemala. He was born into a merchant family in northern Guatemala, where he learned the language of his community, Jacaltec, the language spoken in San Miguel Acatán, Q’anjobal, as well as Spanish. He became a schoolteacher and then studied anthropology in order to implement literacy education in native communities, as he discusses in the autobiography he published in Maya in Exile (Burns 1993). It was as a rural schoolteacher that he made contact with Indian nations from the United States and Canada. He traveled through Canada and the United States in the mid-1970s with a cultural group that gave lectures, played the indigenous marimba music of northern Guatemala, and discussed common concerns of North American Indians. Once Camposeco and his family escaped Guatemala and moved to Florida, he continued to be an important culture broker. He quickly learned English, contacted human rights anthropologists like Shelton Davis and others at the advocacy center Cultural Survival, and came to the University of Florida at the request of several people involved in the sanctuary movement for Central American refugees during the 1980s. I met Jerónimo at the University of Florida when



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he asked to give a guest lecture in one of my anthropology courses in 1983. He had heard that I spoke Maya and so was interested to know if I could help him with his work as a translator for the increasing number of Q’anjobal people who were settling in Indiantown to do seasonal and year-long farmwork. My knowledge of Maya was limited to that spoken in the Yucatán of Mexico. The 26 or so Mayan languages have differences between them at the same level as European languages, so that a speaker of Jacaltec like Mr. Camposeco would have as much dif¤culty understanding a speaker of Yucatec as a person from Italy would have in understanding someone from France. While I could not offer help as a legal or paralegal translator, Mr. Camposeco and I discussed ways that students from the university could help the Mayan refugees to south Florida.

The Birth of Corn Maya One of the things that made work with the immigrant Mayan community possible was the establishment of Corn Maya, an indigenous club in Indiantown. The association was attached ¤rst to a social service of¤ce of the local Catholic church in Indiantown, as that of¤ce provided a place for Camposeco to work when he and his family moved to south Florida in 1983. “El Centro” was a referral of¤ce, an emergency assistance of¤ce, an of¤ce for organizing the community, and a place where farmworkers could come for legal assistance. The idea of having a club just for the Mayan immigrants re®ected the need for this new community of people to have a visible identity, as well as a need for myself and others to have a point of contact for grant writing, education, and other activities. Camposeco and others organized the club in Florida as well as one in California, named Ixim, the Mayan word for corn. The Florida organization, Corn Maya, was a slight modi¤cation of an acronym for Committee on Refugees of Mayan People. Both names re®ected the importance of corn in Mayan cosmology. The development of Corn Maya was one of the ways in which the Mayan community was in®uenced by anthropology. The initial idea for the club came out of a discussion between Mr. Camposeco and Shelton Davis, an anthropologist with the World Bank who had done his dissertation ¤eldwork in the highlands of Guatemala. After two years, Corn Maya broke away from the local Catholic church and became an independent organization. I helped it become incorporated as a nonpro¤t organization through the assistance of colleagues in the University of Florida College of Law. Students in the graduate program of anthropology began to volunteer their time in Indiantown, and the Corn Maya of¤ce became their connection to the community. Grants were written to sustain the organization, projects such as conferences on immigrant health and housing



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were organized, and the club sponsored the annual patron saint’s festival, the Fiesta of San Miguel, in Indiantown, an event that attracted thousands of Mayan and non-Mayan people to the town each September. The association performed other functions within the community as well, including serving as a way to develop, practice, and sustain leadership positions within the Mayan community, as a way to educate the larger Indiantown community about the immigrants, and as an organization of mutual assistance.

Conflict in the Community Of course, there were con®icts and factions within the Mayan community (Burns 1993), and Corn Maya and, by extension, students and practicing anthropologists became part of these con®icts. While it is appealing to think of the Maya of Florida only in romantic terms as a new American Indian group in the United States, their Indianness is also characterized by the community factionalism that has long been noted among native peoples in the United States. Factionalism in this case, as in other cases within American Indian communities, is very much the result of the stresses of domination and con¤nement and the frustrations of living in a bicultural (and in this case binational) world. Factionalism in Mesoamerican communities was well described by Foster (1967), who saw competition over the “limited goods” of local resources reason enough to bring out intra-village con®icts. The “limited good” in Indiantown certainly became a point of contention. Economic betterment and success among some people such as Jerónimo Camposeco led to allegations of corruption in Corn Maya and other organizations. As a result, new clubs sprang up and put on competing festivals, and pushing and shoving broke out between rival club members as each organization vied for a position of authority in the community. Such con®icts and factions of the community have not been unique to the Mayan immigrants. However, it is instructive to look at those that have characterized the Mayan community, especially as these included Corn Maya, as this was the point at which the anthropological work that has been carried out in the community intersected with the direction in which the community evolved. Some of the con®icts were over the legitimacy of the organization. Because Corn Maya began as a part of the Catholic Church, those Maya who were not Catholic (some 40 percent of the community) felt that the club neglected their participation. The indigenous nature of the organization was another point of con®ict over legitimacy. Many of the immigrants to Indiantown either were not Maya or preferred to identify themselves as Guatemalans rather than as indigenous people. The use of the term “Maya” in the title of the organization was


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disturbing to them because of the deep prejudice against Indian people in Guatemala. In addition, there was a strong political association of the Maya with the leftist guerrilla movement of the 1980s. As with the Zapatista movement in Chiapas that broke onto the world stage in 1994, Indian identity in Guatemala had been woven into political statements by guerrilla participants. A ¤nal issue of legitimacy of the organization was based on which Mayan group controlled the association. The ¤rst pioneer families to Indiantown were Q’anjobal Maya, but later immigrants included Kiché, Jakaltec, and people from other Mayan language groups. Con®icts over these differences escalated as representatives of these other groups became involved in the association. A second arena of con®ict involving Corn Maya was based on the social structure of leadership in Indiantown. Mr. Camposeco founded the association and used traditional ties of friendship and compadrazgo (ritual godparenthood) to recruit members and develop leadership skills among other immigrants. People who were not in Mr. Camposeco’s extensive kinship network created several of their own organizations in opposition to what they saw as a club that was more of a re®ection of Mr. Camposeco’s family than of the community. A third arena of con®ict was between the association and non-Mayan people who were in the social service community of Indiantown. Corn Maya was funded through donations, a few grants, and charges for assistance in ¤lling out government forms, writing letters, and so forth. Financial record keeping was dif¤cult for the club, as few of its members were skilled in bookkeeping or knowledgeable about U.S. regulations. The organization was accused of improperly using money by people in Indiantown, especially by church workers who saw the charges that Corn Maya levied for things like ¤lling out tax or employment forms as unnecessary since they did these things for free. All of these arenas of con®ict in®uenced the collaboration that students from the University of Florida and I had with the community. While we maintained as much neutrality as possible, we could not help but be associated with the organization in some way or another. As a result, our work was criticized as being helpful and useful to only one part of the community. I attempted to overcome this by purposefully developing programs with other groups in the community (Haitians, African Americans, Mexican Americans), as well as by encouraging other anthropologists to work through the schools, clinics, or other institutions of the community. While these activities were successful in broadening the work we did, they also re®ected a multicultural perspective that ¤t the community well. Indeed, this plural perspective was brought into the community festival for several years.



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Representatives from different ethnic groups in Indiantown were invited to perform during the “cultural night” of the festival. Dances by Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and Haitians, and even a jitterbug done by a local Anglo barber and his wife, made up the entertainment at the festivals. Later on, as the community became more dispersed, local ethnic-group representation was replaced by invited semiprofessional folklore dancers from Guatemala and Mexican farmworker communities in Florida.

Changing Research and a Changing Community, 1982–1996 The research done in Indiantown changed as the community itself evolved through the years of the Mayan diaspora to Florida. Much of the work in the ¤rst ¤ve years was concerned with documenting and explaining why Mayan people had come to Florida and how they were adapting through developing an economic niche in the labor markets of south Florida. At this time Corn Maya was being created as an organization, and the applied work we did at the University of Florida concentrated on providing assistance in ¤ling the paperwork for nonpro¤t status, helping with grant writing and of¤ce management, and assisting the organization in making contacts with other similar organizations. The other major activity of the community and the University of Florida during this period was the production of two 30-minute video documentaries that were shown on Florida public television stations and sold as a way to help support Corn Maya (Burns 1993). The goal of the ¤rst program, Maya in Exile, produced in 1985, was to explain who the Mayan immigrants were and why they were coming to Florida. In 1988 a second video, Maya Fiesta, was produced, based on the yearly festival of San Miguel that had become a key event in the annual cycle of life in Indiantown. Both videos were aimed at presenting Mayan people as both farmworkers and as immigrants from a part of Guatemala with primarily an indigenous population that happened to be working now in the agricultural and construction industries of south Florida. Applied video anthropology became a major focus of our work in Indiantown because it was useful to the community and gave our collaboration a clear focus. One of the ¤rst things Jerónimo Camposeco asked when we ¤rst met was whether we could collaborate on a video program. He was being asked to give talks at schools, churches, and other civic groups around the state and thought that a video that could explain the predicament of the Mayan immigrants would help in his and others’ public education work. We made the videos with the help of several University of Florida television production directors and engineers, borrowed and rented equipment wherever we


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could, and relied on the interest and commitment of the television crew to produce the videos on minimal budgets. Both videos met with success. They were shown at ¤lm festivals and anthropology meetings and sold to departments of anthropology across the country for use in their classes. The Mayan community found the videos useful as well. At one point the ¤rst video was sent to a grant agency along with a grant proposal from Corn Maya. The funding agency accepted the proposal on the basis of the video. However, the videos never sold enough copies to become anything more than a small supplement to the budget of Corn Maya. I had envisioned something of a small cottage industry developing in the community that would include things like the videos, postcards and greeting cards featuring the artwork of Mayan refugee children, and local craft production (weaving, basketry, sewing) that would help sustain the activities of the Corn Maya organization. Other people in Indiantown started many of these. The local Catholic church supported a clothing cooperative where Mayan weavings were added to Western-style dresses and sold at a local clothing store. One family opened a store that featured Guatemalan handicrafts, imported foods from Mexico and Guatemala, and music. One year Catholic nuns also sold Christmas cards produced by Mayan children showing drawings of their homeland and the violence that affected them there. Hope Rural School, the church-sponsored school for migrant workers in Indiantown, began a cooperative garden for families of schoolchildren. While my own vision of a community uni¤ed along the lines of small cottage industries was not realized, many of these activities did evolve along different social lines than those centered on one organization like Corn Maya. This dispersal of activity makes sense, given both the complexity of the community of Mayan people who came to Indiantown and the complexity of Indiantown itself. Most likely my own view of the classic “closed corporate communities” (Wolf 1957) of Guatemala led me to expect a more centralized organization of sustaining cottage industries than could exist in an immigrant setting such as Indiantown. By the late 1980s, Indiantown, and the Mayan presence in it, was changing rapidly. The initial interest in and hospitality toward the Mayan immigrants by long-term residents of the community soured. By the late 1980s the migration of families from Guatemala was replaced by a migration of young, single men to whom Indiantown was one of many stops along a diaspora route that included places like Cancún in Mexico, the oil¤elds of Tabasco in Mexico, Los Angeles, New York, and the farmworker communities of the U.S. migrant streams. The increasing numbers of young men gave the Guatemalan Mayas a different identity. They came to be seen as just another in a long line of immigrants to the



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United States, working hard but also causing problems because of public drunkenness and overcrowding of the limited housing available in the community. Indiantown never received any special assistance to deal with the Mayas or other seasonal migrant workers. As an unincorporated community, it was eligible only for grants that went to the county as a whole, a county whose main focus of interest was on the prosperous coastline, the “Treasure Coast” of Florida, not on the agricultural towns of the hinterlands. Some block grants were given for improving migrant housing and medical care, but the non-Mayan population of Indiantown felt more and more overwhelmed by the increasing numbers of Guatemalan Mayan young men who were more and more visible around the convenience stores of the community. One resident told me that the immigrants should all be deported because they had turned his community from “Indiantown” to “Guatemala town.” Of course he did not consider the irony of the expulsion of other American Indians from the Okeechobee area by the Anglo population at an earlier time period. The Mayan population began to divide itself between the “pioneer” families who came to the community in the early 1980s and the young “adventurers” who were coming through the community by the late 1980s. Some of the ¤rst wave of immigrants began to buy houses and settle permanently in the community, while others left to ¤nd better housing and social conditions in other south Florida communities, most notably in the area around Lake Worth, south of West Palm Beach. A Catholic priest active in south Florida once referred to the Maya who settled in this latter area as the “country club Maya” because of their relatively higher economic level compared to the Indiantown Maya. A new Mayan dispersal was occurring in Florida by the late 1980s. As families and individuals gained legal immigration papers through political asylum or work permits under the immigration policies of the United States, they moved to surrounding communities, to west-coast communities such as Tampa and Immokalee, or to small towns throughout the Southeast. By the early 1990s the Mayan dispersal from Indiantown was well established. Indiantown had become something of a receiving community where people went for their initial adjustment to the United States and to Florida. After getting their bearings, they then moved out to work in a variety of labor markets: chicken-processing plants in North Carolina, home construction in Miami, vegetable ¤elds in Homestead, and golf course construction and maintenance in West Palm Beach. A third documentary made about Indiantown portrays this dispersal. Filmmaker Olivia Carrescia’s Mayan Voices: American Lives (1994) shows Indiantown from the perspective of Mayan teenagers and the choices they make as they “be-


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come American.” The ¤lm is especially interesting because Carrescia worked with Mayan families who had become very ®uent in English. Their interest in adapting and assimilating to the social world of the United States, as well as the ambiguity of their identity as Indians, Hispanics, Guatemalans, Mayans, and Floridians, makes this excellent ¤lm a most important document for understanding issues that confront the Maya of Florida. The labor markets that the Maya found open to them were in the vegetable ¤elds, especially harvesting bell peppers, tomatoes, and other winter vegetable crops in south Florida; greenhouse labor in the huge ornamental ®ower industry; day labor in housing construction in the coastal areas of south Florida; and landscaping, especially the booming golf course construction industry east from Indiantown in the West Palm Beach area. Citrus picking attracted the ¤rst immigrants to the area, but they quickly learned that the Mexican and MexicanAmerican farmworkers had better skills at quickly harvesting citrus. Women found work in the ¤eld preparation phase of the winter vegetable industry. Often they were hired to roll up the plastic after the ground had been covered with fertilizers and pesticides. This, as could be expected, led to many farmworkrelated illnesses, such as skin rashes and headaches, as well as fear of the effects that such work would have on children. It is hardly possible to work with people engaged in migrant labor without developing an interest in health issues. One of the ¤rst telephone calls I received at the University of Florida was from a physician who was treating a Mayan baby a few months old after a heart operation was performed. No one at the hospital could help the young mother understand what she had to do when she returned to Indiantown with the baby. The hospital of¤cials, who thought she was unable to speak either English or Spanish, called me because of my ®uency in Mayan. When I got to the hospital I introduced myself to the mother in quiet Spanish, as the particular Mayan language I spoke was not the same one she spoke. She understood me perfectly but had been frightened by the whole experience of a large university hospital and the rapid-¤re Cuban Spanish of the nurse who had tried to talk with her. We talked a little about how long she had been in Florida and what kind of work she had been doing. She asked me if the baby’s heart problem was due to the pesticides of farmwork. I replied that I did not know. Then she looked at me and asked in a matter-of-fact voice, “The baby has to die, doesn’t he?” I told her that it need not and then proceeded to explain the changing of bandages, medicines, and special care the baby would need for the next several months. “You know what it is like in Indiantown, don’t you?” she asked. I did; the need for housing and money drove many people to divide up their



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houses into small eight-by-ten areas and rent them out to newcomers. Women who were not working in the ¤elds rose at 4 a.m. to begin cooking and preparing lunches for the people who worked in the ¤elds, then continued the day babysitting as many children as might be in the household. I never found out if the child lived or not, but the moment she talked to me about him I felt some of the anguish that she and others felt living in a situation where there were so few options available. Ten years later I received a call from an of¤cial from the March of Dimes in the community asking me if I knew if Guatemalan babies were especially prone to having heart dysfunctions. I checked with a Guatemalan physician and found that, although infant mortality was high in Guatemala, intestinal illnesses and malnutrition accounted for most infant deaths. Because a fairly large number of young babies with severe heart problems requiring surgical treatment had been born over the years to Guatemalan women in south Florida, the March of Dimes worker was concerned about what might be causing the alarming number of cases of babies with heart problems. In the late 1990s I was called again by a local hospital, as a Q’anjobal mother had given birth to a baby with severe brain malformation. She and her husband were driving up the interstate and had no address, little command of Spanish, and no friends or family to turn to. When I interviewed her for her medical history to ¤nd out if this birth defect was congenital, she said that her parents were killed during the violence in Guatemala when she was a small child. She had been brought up an orphan, and coming to the United States with her husband was a chance to leave 15 years of tragedy behind her. Her baby did not live, but she and her husband continued up the migrant stream, looking for a way to survive. It was not possible to work with the community of Mayan immigrants to Florida without being drawn into these and similar issues of health. Although I was not a medical anthropologist, I could not ignore the requests for help from people in the community, from people like those at the local March of Dimes, and from physicians at the University of Florida hospital who called on me for assistance. Fortunately, I was able to call on students who were combining medicine, public health, and anthropology in order to develop several projects on health and illness in Indiantown. One of these students, Maria Miralles, wrote her master’s thesis on the community in 1986, a thesis that was then published as a book, A Matter of Life and Death: Health Seeking Behaviors in a Maya Immigrant Community (1989). Miralles went on to receive her Ph.D. in pharmacy and continued to work in public health at the national level. Another colleague, Randi Cameon, worked in Indiantown as part of her master’s degree in public health.


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She was able to produce a video on prenatal health through funding from the March of Dimes and to set up a women’s health group in the community. These and other health projects were developed outside the earlier connections students from the University of Florida and I had made with Corn Maya. The health projects were situated conceptually between the community and the public and private health clinics and nearby hospitals in the area. But we learned that applied work in this area was likewise susceptible to con®icts and factions as health care providers all had strong ideas about how to serve the new immigrant community of Guatemalan Mayas. The overriding identity that the Maya had been given as “Hispanic farmworkers” guided medical personnel much more than their particular history as refugees from a civil war or American Indians from Guatemala.

The Changing Mayan Community and Changes in Anthropology How has the anthropological work that was carried on in this community affected it? How has working with the Mayan people in the community affected the kind of anthropology I do as well as the discipline of anthropology in general? Mayan people in Indiantown certainly responded to the regular presence of anthropologists in the community. In addition to several M.A. and Ph.D. theses that were done with the community, Indiantown became known as one of the major Mayan centers in the United States (the others were Houston and Los Angeles). Anthropologists who had worked with Q’anjobal and Jakaltec communities in Guatemala came to Indiantown to witness the evolving MayanAmerican community. Filmmaker Olivia Carrescia was one of these scholars: she had made two earlier ¤lms about Mayan people in the Cuchumatan mountains of Guatemala and then came to ¤lm in Indiantown, as many of the people she knew in Guatemala had moved there. Colleagues from other universities added to the anthropological presence in the community. Anthropologist Laura Martin from Cleveland State University, who had done linguistic work in Jacaltenango, where many of the Indiantown Maya were from, organized a yearly ¤eld school in Indiantown in the early 1990s. She worked through the migrant school system and had an effective and useful ¤eld school for advanced undergraduate students in anthropology from Cleveland State University. Perhaps the greatest in®uence of anthropology in the Mayan community was through our interest and commitment to the Corn Maya organization. While



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Corn Maya was not liked by all people in the community, it did serve as a model, either positive or negative, of community organization. In the late 1980s the organization rented out a storefront on the main highway and so became the most concrete and visible symbol of the Mayan community in Indiantown. A less visible but still important way that anthropology and the anthropological work we did with community members in®uenced the community was the development of several marimba music groups as cultural emissaries of the community. Marimba music is the national music of Guatemala, and Mayan communities take great pride in their marimba groups. The marimba players of Indiantown were especially fortunate, as Jerónimo Camposeco was both a player and a tireless promoter of marimba performances both within and outside the community. My own interest in music led me to help promote the marimba bands of the community throughout Florida and other states. In 1992 I was asked by the Nobel Peace Prize committee from Stockholm to bring the marimba band to play at the reception for Nobel Prize winner Rigoberta Menchu. Unfortunately for the players from Indiantown, she brought a group with her from Guatemala for the ceremony. Mr. Camposeco and I had purposefully encouraged the recognition of the Maya as musical artists, in part to counter the reduction of their identity to either illegal immigrants or farmworkers. The pride and recognition the marimba players received at concerts offered a tremendous antidote to the prejudice and discrimination they received in other aspects of their lives. Much of the in®uence of anthropology and anthropologists on the community has occurred at a level that is personal and individual. Friendships developed between the Maya and students. Each year I received a special invitation to bring students to the festival, in part because people welcomed their genuine interest. As one leader of the community said once, “All of the people in Indiantown want us to be just like them. I don’t understand why they think we all have to be like them. That’s what’s different with you and your students, Allan, you aren’t always telling us to become like everyone else in Florida.” Work with the Maya of Florida has also brought about profound changes in my practice of anthropology. The applied anthropology that I have carried out in Indiantown has had to be ®exible as the community itself has changed and as new issues have confronted the immigrant Mayas. Political asylum issues gave way to employment issues; health and illness arose as important issues and compelled me to include medical anthropology in my work. One issue that the Maya have in common with other Native American groups is pan-Indianism, or in this case, pan-Mayanism. As more and more Mayas arrived in south Florida, speaking different Mayan languages, local and language


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identities were forged into wider identities of what Mr. Camposeco often referred to as a “new Maya nation.” The Chiapas uprising in southern Mexico in 1994 added to pan-Mayanism, even to the extent that newspapers in Guatemala were openly discussing the possibility of a Mayan nation containing parts of Guatemala and southern Mexico during the early months of that uprising. My own background with the Maya of the Yucatán peninsula became part of an evolving discussion of pan-Mayanism with the Maya of Indiantown. Once it was known that I spoke a Mayan language, much time was spent trading words and marveling at the similarities of the core Mayan vocabulary. In 1994 I organized a conference on “The Wisdom of the Maya” at the University of Florida that featured representatives from Mayan groups in Guatemala, Chiapas, and Yucatán as well as from south Florida. The conference included a Mayan theater group from Chiapas and several ¤lmmakers, as well as academics interested in the world of the Maya. The keynote speaker at the conference was Victor Montejo, a Jakaltec Maya who, like Jerónimo Camposeco, had received political asylum in the early 1980s. His address to the conference was a review of scholarship on the Maya, and, taking his cue from Anderson’s The Imagined Community (1990), he discussed how national borders between Mexico and Guatemala had limited scholarship and knowledge about the Maya by focusing on the uniqueness of each community (and nation) to the exclusion of pan-Mayan issues. Montejo presented an indigenous agenda of scholarship which he elaborated on throughout the conference. It included developing local libraries in Mayan communities so that work done on the Maya would not only be sent to university and other government institutions but could become useful to people in local communities. Montejo was not from Indiantown, even though he counted Mr. Camposeco and many other people in the community part of his diaspora community. His work shows how the Maya here in the United States have in®uenced the ¤eld of anthropology as a whole, not just the way it is practiced by someone like myself or students at the University of Florida. In addition to his indigenous agenda for scholarship and the creation of local libraries, Montejo also has been active in the American Anthropological Association. He began the ¤rst committee on human rights and anthropology and was instrumental in making human rights a theme of one of the annual meetings. His in®uence goes beyond the ¤eld of anthropology to Native American studies as well. He is currently a professor in the Native American Studies program at the University of California at Davis. The Maya of Florida are the newest Indians in the Southeast. Their history is “condensed” because they grew from a small group of a dozen refugees to a major



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community of over 20,000 people in less than 15 years. Their connection with other Indian groups has been more at a pan-Indian level than a local or even regional level. From the ¤rst contacts between Maya and Mohawk and Canadian Indians in the 1970s, through the work of Mr. Camposeco, through the Indian Law Resource Center, the Maya of Florida have been in®uenced more by tribes outside Florida than those within the state. The Maya have even been invited to participate in powwows. In the late 1980s I accompanied a group of Florida Maya to North Carolina, where we participated in a Lumbee powwow. The marimba band rehearsed all night so that they could play something that was in some way similar to the fancy dancing that was the highlight of the event. The next day they played “This Land Is Your Land,” a tune composed by the late Woody Guthrie, and then a long version of the sacred deer dance of the highlands of Guatemala. The Maya of Florida have established a community that changed from a central place of immigration in the early 1980s to a point in the dispersal by the late 1990s. While their lives have changed and adapted to the conditions of Florida, so too has the long-term work of anthropologists who have worked with them. One of the current Ph.D. projects with the Maya is being carried out by a Guatemalan-American student who is comparing health issues in south Florida, Chiapas, and Guatemala. The discipline of anthropology has been fortunate to have access to the genius and wisdom of people like the Maya of Florida as they have become the Mayan Indians of the United States.


8 A Disaster Hurricane Andrew and the Miccosukee

Penny Jessel

Introduction This chapter uses an interpretive, multidisciplinary approach to examine the efforts of extra-community and extra-tribal organizations in the aftermath of Hurricane Andrew. Helping agencies that customarily hasten to the aid of nonnative disaster victims are de¤ned here as extra-tribal. I have approached this topic from three perspectives: as an applied anthropologist, as a bureaucrat (state employee), and as an American Indian. Studies about a variety of communities during and after disasters exist; however, none have been found that deal speci¤cally with North American Indians. The studies that examine disaster and community organizations, however, do offer insights into communities similar to the one in question. The Miccosukee community appears to have reacted in the manner any human community might react to a natural disaster in terms of fear and stress. Two principal factors appear to have affected the community’s response to Hurricane Andrew. First is the extended kinship system, described by Dynes (1970:102–103) as a closely related set of circumstances preventing feelings of isolation, which could also be regarded as tribal solidarity. Second is the community’s status as a tribe with federal recognition. Although the Miccosukee Tribe began its bid for economic success later than the Seminole Tribe, they have been progressing at an accelerated rate. More than 100 Independent Miccosukees still live in separate camps in the Everglades and refuse to enroll in either federally recognized tribe, although the federally recognized Miccosukees incorporate the Independents in all aspects of their lives. The Independents maintain the traditions, religion, and lifestyle of the rest of Florida’s Miccosukees and Seminoles. It was the physical sanctuary of this self-segregated,



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Table 8.1. Estimated damage of Hurricane Andrew to south Florida

self-reliant, and stubbornly independent Miccosukee community that the hurricane affected. The devastation of Hurricane Andrew (see Table 8.1) forced the Miccosukees to relax their tradition of independence and isolation. Sociological disaster studies de¤ne this type of reaction to disaster as system stress. System stress is said to exist when a system (community) cannot respond to all of the demands placed upon it without additional resources. Stress also initiates a set of coping responses or strategies (Haas and Drabeck 1970). For several centuries the Miccosukees’ coping strategies or responses to disaster, whether natural or man-made, have been dominated by their spirit of independence. The Miccosukees were in a dif¤cult position: on the one hand, they did not want to ask for help so as to prevent


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interference and retain their long-sought-after independence; on the other hand, the circumstances of the storm forced them to seek aid. Robert Bolin and Patricia Bolton, in their study Race, Ethnicity, and Disaster (1986:7), view social support systems as part of the coping mechanisms used by disaster victims in order to reduce the stresses placed on them. Bolin and Bolton equate social support systems with the therapeutic community, which can provide victims with types of aid that formal organizations cannot and which can increase the willingness of support networks to help victims in necessary ways. Their conclusions are based on their research of the 1982 Hurricane Iwa in Hawaii. They also found that both emotional and economic recovery rates for those ethnic groups that placed a high cultural value on self-suf¤ciency were signi¤cantly higher than those without that value. Roy Clifford’s study of the Rio Grande ®ood of 1956 demonstrates that communities which assign positive value to self-reliance showed greater dependence on advice and help from those related by kinship than on outside aid (Clifford 1986). In the experience of the Miccosukees, a closely knit community with a long history of distrust of outsiders, and especially of the U.S. government, the natural social and kinship network between the Miccosukees and the Seminole Tribe of Florida was activated in the aftermath of the storm. The Seminoles searched for their Miccosukee kinsmen in the devastation of the Everglades and hammocks. Dan Bowers of the Seminole Tribe of Florida took over the dispatching of manpower, food, and water to the Miccosukee Tribe. The support of American Indians expanded as Indians statewide contacted the Florida Governor’s Council on Indian Affairs, whose staff responded to the deluge of inquiries. Across the state, Indians gathered food and other essentials and sent them into the Everglades. Barbara Bailey and the Florida Governor’s Council staff, working with Dan Bowers, established an account at the Barnett Bank for donations from all over the state. The Governor’s Council staff contacted the Miccosukee Tribe for a list of items urgently needed by the tribe. Their requests, outlined in Table 8.2, consisted primarily of staples such as ®our, cornmeal, and cooking oil. The request for mosquito coils was a response to the conditions in the hot Everglades. Barbara Bailey provided the list to all who requested it. The suburban residents of Dade County also were unable to provide for themselves as long as electricity and water were unavailable. A constant fear of looting prevailed in metropolitan areas. In contrast, the Miccosukees immediately built communal cooking facilities. Using staple foods, they could feed the members of the community meals of fry bread, beans, and rice. One American



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Table 8.2. Wish list from Dan Bowers, September 3, 1992

Indian woman, a Lenni-Lenape, who delivered several truckloads of supplies from the Orlando area stated that “seeing the Miccosukee taking care of themselves makes you proud to be an Indian” (Anna Helms, personal communication, 1992).

The Effects of the Disaster The Bureau of Indian Affairs’ (BIA) Damage Assessment Team and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers were on-site before the onslaught of the storm. Table 8.3 outlines the BIA’s assessment of needs immediately following the storm. The BIA team returned to Washington, DC, upon completion of the assessment and there began the effort to gain funds through congressional appropriation. Prior to their departure from the Miccosukee Reservation, the BIA team was author-


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Table 8.3. Damage of Hurricane Andrew to Miccosukee Reservation (BIA)

ized to issue $80,000 in emergency funds to the Miccosukee Tribe. Although they needed and appreciated the assistance, the tribal government already had issued a relief grant of $250 to each of its 550 members, which depleted tribal funds. Actually, the $80,000 was a reimbursement that was $57,500 short. The state of Florida was required to submit a formal request for assistance to the federal government on behalf of the state’s citizens. Governor Chiles declared the area a disaster area and requested federal assistance. This action by the state brought the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to Florida. Headquartered in the former Eastern Airlines Terminal in Miami, FEMA is the federal agency sent to major disaster areas to assess damage, determine eligibility for federal emergency funding, and distribute funds for rebuilding efforts. It has two branches, Individual Assistance (IA) and Public Assistance (PA). The IA branch assesses the needs of individuals, while the PA branch assesses the needs of public entities such as public works, of¤cial buildings, and infrastructure. Each branch generally sets up a Disaster Assistance Center (DAC) in various locations throughout the disaster area in order to provide a centralized location to receive applications for assistance. By mid-September the PA unit began its assessment of Andrew’s damage to the Miccosukee Reservation. The completed PA assessment is outlined in Table 8.4. The fact that FEMA assesses public and private needs separately explains the difference between the BIA and FEMA assessments. The BIA included both public and private needs, whereas FEMA’s assessment shows only public needs.



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FEMA’s IA branch established a DAC, independent of the PA branch, at the Miccosukee tribal of¤ce to receive applications for aid from individual tribal members. These applications were for small business loans and grants, home repairs, housing replacement, temporary shelter, and replacement of household contents. A number of federal agencies, volunteer organizations, and charitable entities, such as the Red Cross and the Salvation Army, “descended upon” the Miccosukee Reservation. In the midst of all this assistance, the Miccosukee tribal government was attempting to assess the damage, determine people’s needs, reestablish economic enterprises, and restore an ordered way of life. During the ¤rst week in October, the interagency situation became tense. One member of FEMA’s IA staff arrived to deliver mobile homes and insisted upon examining the houses he was replacing. Another staff member decided, without asking, to go to the reservation for assessment purposes, intimating that the Miccosukees were ¤ling multiple claims, or “double-dipping.” Some tribal members who had received IA checks either were afraid to cash them or returned them to FEMA out of fear of government repercussions implied in the letters that accompanied the checks. Tribal staff members were concerned that FEMA PA and IA had overlooked certain things in assessments, such as the water tower, individual pumps, septic tanks, and drain ¤elds. The fear of cholera was palpable. Billy Cypress, tribal chairman, was forced to halt all interaction between the tribe and all extra-tribal organizations. The Florida Department of Community Affairs, which includes the state’s Emergency Management Division, was on full alert. The department established a 24-hour Emergency Operation Center in Tallahassee. Department staff operated telephones around the clock, trying to answer questions from all over the state and the country. They sent assessment teams to assist the FEMA staff and to set up state DAC of¤ces. My particular job was research and technical assistance for affordable housing within the Division of Housing and Community Development. Pat Pepper, director of the Coordinating Of¤ce for Recovery, instructed me to travel to the Miccosukee Reservation and to write a report on the tribe’s recovery status. Fortunately, I made an appointment with Marie Osceola Brant, Miccosukee grants coordinator. I say “fortunately” because I arrived on the day affairs reached a critical stage. The extent of the damage was a shock. Giant trees looked as though bulldozers had pushed them over. Huge road signs lay on the ground, their metal poles twisted, crumpled, or snapped. There were, in fact, no road signs to direct me.


Table 8.4. Damage of Hurricane Andrew to Miccosukee Reservation



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Electrical wires hung haphazardly. Shaken by human inferiority to the powers of nature, I got out of the car at the Miccosukee tribal headquarters, where I saw a mountain of clothing. I thought it was odd that people would send clothing to the Miccosukee; didn’t they know that the Miccosukee do not wear clothing worn by others? I was to discover that people know very little about the Miccosukee, their way of life, or, indeed, about any American Indians. The meeting with grants coordinator Marie Osceola Brant and ¤scal of¤cer Mike Hernandez revealed that the tribe had not received ¤nancial aid from any source, one month after Andrew. I also learned of the shaky state of affairs and about the various problems the tribe had had with FEMA. After meeting with the public works staff, who informed me of the inconsistencies in the assessment reports, it appeared that recovery on the Miccosukee Reservation had reached a standstill. For a complete understanding of what was happening, it was important to view the situation from all perspectives. Coworkers in Miami arranged for me to meet with FEMA staff the next day. Denise Yandle, a member of the PA unit, provided a tour of the operation and explained that although the PA unit had completed its assessment of the damage on the Miccosukee Reservation, they were reluctant to release funds. FEMA was requesting that the tribe produce


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a list of the total dollar value of all funds received from local governments and charitable and other organizations, at which point the insinuation of doubledipping became clearer to me. I briefed Ms. Yandle on the status of the account established at the Barnett Bank, the amendments to the Community Services Block Grant, the Housing Incentive Program, and the BIA Social Services Grant. I pointed out that no appreciable amount of funds had reached the tribe, and I informed her that although electricity and telephone service had been restored to the reservation, the loss of sewage and potable water remained a life-threatening situation. Curious about FEMA procedures, I asked Ms. Yandle about the delivery of the mobile homes, and she introduced me to the FEMA IA staff member who had attempted the delivery. He was very animated as he described the “big chief ” who threw him off Indian land. The chief had informed him that the FEMA staff person had no jurisdiction on the reservation. He was shocked when he realized that the chief was an educated man and that Indians lived in palmthatched huts rather than tipis. He honestly could not understand why he should have to ask the Indians what they wanted; after all, he assumed he knew what they needed. I tried to explain that he was reacting on the basis of the stereotypes of Indians taught by the dominant society. Billy Cypress was not a chief but the elected chairman of the tribal council, the governing body of the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida. Comparing Billy Cypress to Governor Chiles, the elected representative of state government, I tried to demonstrate that the Miccosukee Tribe is a legal, sovereign government. I explained that the Indian lands are held in trust by the federal government and therefore are exempt from many things most Americans take for granted. The housing units he referred to as “some kind of grass huts” are called “chickees” by the Seminole people and are their traditional homes, designed speci¤cally to maximize ventilation in the hot, humid climate of the Everglades. I wanted him to understand that only a few Indians lived in tipis, even in the historic past, and that a great deal of diversity exists in the traditional structures used by American Indians. Finally, I wanted him to understand that the U.S. government has been telling American Indians what they need for a very long time, rather than asking them what they want. I was relieved that Ms. Yandle was interested in what I had to say. She asked me to stay in Miami to write my report and to act as liaison between FEMA and the Miccosukee Tribe. Since I was authorized to travel for only four days, I had to get permission from the director of the State Coordinating Of¤ce for Recov-



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ery, which was granted. In fact, I was to act as a representative of the executive of¤ce of the governor, a position to which I did not aspire. However, it did facilitate a government-to-government link between the federal government (FEMA and BIA) and the Miccosukee Tribe of Florida, with another government, the state of Florida, acting as intermediary.

The Anthropologist Erve Chambers states (1985:26) that the anthropologist’s major activity is to mediate knowledge. He divides this activity into four roles: culture broker, facilitator, informant, and mediator. My ¤rst task as culture broker was to raise the consciousness of the FEMA staff. I spent two days easing the culture shock they experienced, which involved sharing as much knowledge about the Miccosukee culture as was available to me to help them understand why none of the things typically associated with pan-Indianism were visible on the Miccosukee Reservation. Chambers’s second role for the anthropologist is as a facilitator, which “requires activities directed toward making something happen in a relationship between two or more groups” (1985:28). In this instance the relationship was between governments. Although the FEMA of¤cials had not contacted either the BIA or the formal tribal government of the Miccosukee, they were indignant that they had been denied access to the reservation. As Rosen (1980) has stated so aptly, for over 200 years tribes with federal recognition have been subjected to legislation and judicial decisions that have been both contradictory and uncertain, particularly regarding their control of their own reservation lands and resources. Challenges to the tribes’ ability to control their own affairs leads to such questions as those of tribal sovereignty, Congress’s plenary power, and the nature of jurisdictional claims. This sense of indignation experienced by FEMA staff resulted from a lack of knowledge about the legal status of reservation tribes. They did not recognize that the status of federally recognized tribes is distinguished from, and unlike that of, state and private lands. Further, they did not realize that the status of tribal lands removes them from the range of ordinary property and constitutional law. The reasonable solution was to create a dialogue between the BIA, which bears mandated responsibility to American Indians, and FEMA. To reach this goal, I arranged a telephone conference between Bill Ott, superintendent of the Eastern Region for the BIA, and Mel Schneider, disaster recovery manager for the PA branch of FEMA; I attended as state representative. The


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conference, held on October 6, 1992, in Miami at FEMA headquarters, resulted in a clari¤cation of jurisdictional issues and a consensus about a course of action to be taken by the two agencies. Mr. Ott informed us that on October 5, 1992, Congress approved an allocation of $5 million for recovery assistance to the Indians of Florida and Louisiana. The Miccosukees were to receive $3 million of those allocated funds. The proposed agreement between the BIA and the Miccosukee Tribe was to be signed on October 6, 1992, and the funds should reach the tribe early the following week. Mr. Schneider indicated that the state should release the $221,000 that had been set aside by FEMA for the Miccosukee as soon as possible so that it could be used elsewhere. The release would have to come from the state of Florida. My only request at the meeting was that we confer with the tribal representatives to ascertain the full extent of their needs before requesting a withdrawal letter from Governor Chiles. They agreed to delay the letter until the Miccosukee Tribal Council rendered a determination of need. The third role of the anthropologist is as an informant. The anthropologist acts as a “conduit in transferring knowledge about one sector of humanity to another, usually the dominant one” (Chambers 1985:29). Because of the failure of extra-tribal organizations to communicate the Miccosukee tribal government’s responsibility for the health and well-being of tribal members, the activities of FEMA’s IA branch were not coordinated with tribal of¤cials. (The DAC established on the reservation received applications for assistance such as small business loans and grants, home repairs, housing replacement, temporary shelter, and replacement of household goods.) Because the activities of the IA staff were not coordinated with FEMA PA, the BIA, or the tribal government, some people who had received checks returned them to FEMA and others were afraid to cash them, behavior the FEMA staff was unable to understand. The lack of cultural understanding on the part of FEMA staff meant that they did not realize that the letters accompanying the checks were perceived by some recipients as threats. For example, the letters required annual audits for small businesses, which would be costly endeavors for small businesses selling handmade crafts. Annual audits are commonplace for agencies receiving federal or state funding, but they are alien in the world of cottage industry. The letter also questioned the lack of homeowner’s insurance and implied that the government would take legal action against those who did not report homeowner’s insurance bene¤ts to FEMA. Homeowner’s insurance is not a top priority for the Miccosukee people. First and foremost they look to their tribal government to provide for their health and well-being and to act on their behalf with the federal government.



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The tribal government did not have access to the applications received by the IA staff. The response to their request for a list of those who had applied was that distributing that information constituted an infringement of the Privacy Act. The danger of tribal members naively placing themselves in a fraudulent situation was a legitimate concern, as was the well-being of the 100 or so independent Miccosukees who are not enrolled members of a federally recognized tribe and therefore are ineligible for BIA assistance. FEMA IA therefore was the only assistance available to them. The intake for the Independents required the assistance of someone who could speak their language and knew where to ¤nd them. None of the FEMA staff met these requirements. Had these concerns not been brought to the attention of the FEMA of¤ce, they would not have addressed them. The ¤nal role Chambers describes for the anthropologist is that of mediator. The anthropologist must be looking for “possibilities of détente in which various special interest groups can agree on a course of action” (1985:32). This activity requires a commitment to the solution of a particular problem and usually deals with con®icts in society. Considering the time I spent informing FEMA staff about the various aspects of the Miccosukee situation and the success of the conference between Mr. Ott and Mr. Schneider, I was con¤dent that we could arrange a meeting between tribal and FEMA of¤cials at tribal headquarters. The meeting was held at the Miccosukee Tribal of¤ce on October 7, 1992. Table 8.5 lists the various areas of discussion and solutions from the meeting and illustrates the positive application of mediation in the resolution of con®icts.

Conclusions This chapter demonstrates that the most common problem associated with disasters is not equipment but inadequate communication between people. Heide calls the problem the “Robinson Crusoe Syndrome,” or “We are the only ones on this island” (1981:81). A natural disaster is a time of great crisis. It would be unrealistic to expect FEMA of¤cials to know all there is to know about a culture before executing their lifesaving responsibilities. In this instance, should not the BIA, whose special charge is American Indians, have been working intimately with the FEMA of¤cials rather than assuming that they understood the legal status of an Indian tribe? The frustration that occurred on the Miccosukee Reservation clearly displays the result of that assumption. Frustration was experienced not only by the FEMA employees, who were genuinely attempting to render aid, but also by tribal of¤cials who were trying to reorganize a community. None of the organi-


Table 8.5. Meeting at the Miccosukee Reservation



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zations anticipated or had time for the standoff that occurred on the Miccosukee Reservation. Valuable time was lost, and unnecessary expenses and hardships were incurred by the tribe and the U.S. taxpayer. The relationship between communication and coordination during times of disaster is best left to the experts, of whose number this author is not one. However, based upon the fact that FEMA was staffed with employees who spoke Spanish and who were familiar with Hispanic cultures, we must ask why FEMA was not also staffed with employees who were knowledgeable about and competent to work with American Indians. It was common knowledge that two federally recognized Indian tribes were in the path of the destructive winds. I do not claim to be an expert on the Miccosukee culture or lifestyle. Experts in the ¤eld of disaster relief should develop a system to facilitate communication


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between a community in crisis and organizations outside that community. It stands to reason that in a country with considerable cultural diversity, a federal agency sent to major areas to assess damage, determine eligibility, and distribute funds for rebuilding efforts should hire persons who are well versed in those cultures. This chapter demonstrates the need for an anthropologist as a mediator of knowledge during times of disaster. Anthropologists trained as objective observers of cultures have the ability to serve as culture brokers, facilitators, informants, and mediators. This chapter captures a moment in time after a barrage of extracommunity agencies had descended upon the Miccosukee Reservation in the aftermath of Hurricane Andrew. The social disaster, precipitated by the arrival of extra-community organizations following the hurricane, manifested a de¤cit in the relationship of communication to coordination by disaster experts. Actions taken by anthropologists during times of crisis should be examples of the responsible use of knowledge.


IV Culture Preservation and Ethnic Identity

D

espite four centuries of European and Euro-American pressures to eliminate or assimilate Native American nations, native groups persist in the United States. Admittedly, the number and sizes of those tribes have been reduced considerably since the ¤rst Europeans set foot on North American soil, and the native cultures are considerably different from what they were 400 years ago, yet Native American groups have managed to maintain institutions and boundaries to keep their membership and identity separate from those of the dominant society. Fredrik Barth, in his introduction to Ethnic Groups and Boundaries (1969), discusses factors that contribute to the persistence of boundaries separating ethnic groups or categories, the social boundaries that de¤ne the ethnic groups. Such boundaries are maintained by speci¤c criteria for determining membership, signals that show membership in speci¤c ethnic groups, and different behaviors. Among the overt signals or signs that show identity or membership in a particular ethnic group are clothing, house form, language, and general lifestyle (Barth 1969:14–15). These signals may be a part of an overall lifestyle or may be limited to special occasions in which ethnic groups come together to celebrate their ethnicity, such as the Indian powwow. The origins of the powwow can be traced to the early reservation period in the Great Plains, when tribes were denied the opportunity to hold traditional religious rituals or victory celebrations for success in warfare. Tribal members were permitted to hold secularized forms of traditional dances at dominant-society holiday gatherings approved by traders and missionaries; over time these dance events evolved into the modern pan-Indian powwow, which today can be found among most tribes all over the United States. Although dance forms, regalia, songs, and the tipi encampment are derived from the Plains tradition, they have undergone change over time as new forms have evolved. Participation in powwows is largely Indian, although non-Indians may participate in certain dances;


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the dances, songs, drumming, tipi camp, and regalia act as overt signals of Indian identity in a special situation, as Patricia Lerch discusses in her chapter, “Celebrations and Dress: Sources of Native American Identity.” Ethnic identity is based in part on cultural traditions and on keeping those traditions alive. Powwows help to preserve cultural traditions at the same time they develop new traditions that continue to distinguish the Indian community as a distinct ethnic group. Art forms also can do this, both in recording the old ways and maintaining traditional crafts, as well as in developing new art forms. Among the Catawba of South Carolina, the cultural tradition of pottery making was kept alive during the historic period as women made pottery to sell to settlers and later to collectors; in this way they not only preserved an artistic tradition but also kept alive a culture and ethnic group. Rachel Bonney discusses the role of art in preserving culture and ethnic identity in “From Mob to Snob: Changing Research Orientations from Activism to Aesthetics among American Indians.” Although she discusses a number of tribes and art forms, Bonney’s emphasis is on the development of a new art form among southeastern Indians that preserves and sometimes romanticizes the old ways, the miniaturization of traditional art forms.


9 Celebrations and Dress Sources of Native American Identity

Patricia Lerch

Introduction In 1981, while a new faculty member at the University of North Carolina in Wilmington, I met the people who call themselves the Waccamaw Sioux. In the fall, two representatives from the Waccamaw community entered my of¤ce on campus and explained who they were and why they had come to see me. They needed an anthropologist (or a sociologist, since I was in a joint department) to help them research their history for a federal acknowledgment petition. After they left, I remembered a book that a former colleague at Hiram College in Ohio gave me before I left to come to Wilmington. That book, by Karen Blu, was entitled The Lumbee Problem (1980), and upon re®ection, it seemed almost prophetic of my future involvement with the Indians of North Carolina. Over the years, my own research interests and those of the Waccamaw have led me to investigate a variety of topics. First, between 1982 and 1985, my research focused on ethnohistory and community (Lerch 1988, 1992a). Later, in 1985, family genealogy became important to the Waccamaw. Then, in 1989 and 1990, I examined the 1990 federal census of the Waccamaw for the Center for Survey Methods Research. From 1990 to 1992 my attention turned more closely to the powwow (Lerch 1992a, 1993; Lerch and Bullers 1996), and ¤nally in 1998 to the Waccamaw’s desire to research the history of their community and its links to surrounding communities. The powwow intrigued me from the beginning. In 1982 the Waccamaw invited me to sit on a panel of judges for the princess contest. Having outsiders (white people) on this panel was not unusual, but it made me a bit uncomfortable at ¤rst. I had to overcome my own bias against “beauty contests” and my reservations about how to judge the standards of beauty and talent in their community. It was clear that being a judge was an honored position, so I accepted it and


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then did the best I could, although I never really felt quite legitimate in this role. However, this experience made me aware of just how important the powwow was to the Waccamaw. Since 1982, I have collected information on every powwow I attended (all but two) through participant observation and conversations with dancers, organizers, and visitors. A survey in 1990 collected data on the meaning of the powwow to a sample of the Waccamaw (Lerch and Bullers 1996).

Purpose and Goals An anthropologist’s background and interest direct him or her toward certain perspectives and interpretations of ¤eld data, and I ¤nd that I am no exception. Thus, the purpose of this chapter is to explore how my previous ¤eldwork on umbanda, a Brazilian spirit possession/trance religion, can lead to another way to interpret the powwow in the Waccamaw community. In order to provide the necessary background for this comparison, I begin with a brief history of the Waccamaw and their adoption of the powwow. Then I review the work of my mentor, Erika Bourguignon, professor emeritus at Ohio State University, showing how she has in®uenced my thinking. Next, I compare ¤eld notes on a typical umbanda trance dance and spirit impersonation to notes on a typical powwow dance featuring fancy dance regalia at a Waccamaw powwow. My intent is to offer a comparative perspective and an outsider’s interpretation that can point toward some important research questions for the future. I do not intend to imply that this interpretation does or should hold up for other southern Indians generally (although it might do so), or that this is the only way to explain these events.

Pow wows among the Waccamaw Sioux Today, Native American powwows are common events from the southern Plains (Gelo 1999) to the East Coast. In North Carolina, these public celebrations of Indian heritage and identity have drawn many tourists and visitors for more than 20 years. What is a powwow? A powwow refers to a festival held and sponsored by one or more tribes or communities. It can occur at any time of the year and for any occasion. Most powwows include secular dancing, last a few days to a week, and include “games, craft displays and sales, giveaway ceremonies, and other features, along with the main attraction, costumed dancing” (Lurie 1971:450). In 1976, anthropologist Rachel Bonney observed that from the earliest days, the Waccamaw powwow generally followed this pattern. Communitysponsored powwows, as Paredes (1965:1) says, promote solidarity through participation in a uniquely Indian event. Whether locally sponsored or jointly spon-


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sored by several Indian tribes and communities, powwows, as Gelo (1999:40) points out, “blend” Indian and non-Indian traditions. This blending of traditions, called “pan-Indian” by some (Howard 1955), introduces new cultural features to local groups. But while these cultural features may be new, over time they may become woven into the older traditions. Local tribally sponsored powwows may also be intertribal and still reinforce local Indian identity (Lurie 1971:450– 451). Sometimes, in more acculturated communities, “they may be one of the very few open and explicit statements of Indianness” (Paredes 1965:1). The Waccamaw hold their powwow in October, and though members of other tribes attend and compete in the dance contest, the Waccamaw alone ¤nance, organize, and sponsor it. They have ¤ve acres of land owned communally by the tribe, located within the heart of the Waccamaw area where the Waccamaw Siouan Development Association, Inc., of¤ces are located. Doubling during the year as the parking lot for the association and the day care center that sits next door, this tract of land is transformed each October into the dance ground. Preparations begin in early spring when the tribal board assigns tasks to the major standing committees: food, dance contest, princess pageant, powwow booklet, traders, games, and parade. The two events that highlight the powwow are the Indian princess contest and the competitive Indian dancing. A “little” Miss Waccamaw Sioux as well as a teenage Miss Waccamaw Sioux are chosen from among the young Indian girls. The older contestants compete in four areas: talent, street wear, formal wear, and Indian wear. The Indian wear, designed and made by the girls with the help of their mothers and aunts, generally conforms to a Plains Indian style of costume. The Indian-wear out¤ts are often the same ones worn for the Indian dance competition, as many of the pageant contestants are also members of the dance team. The regalia for dancing feature the “traditional” or “straight” dance style and the “fancy” or “war” dance style. The traditional dances are said to be those of the particular tribes represented at the powwow. Bonney (1976:9–10) noted that at the early North Carolina powwows, dancing was not the featured event it was to become later. For example, group leaders who interpreted Indian dancing for the spectators presented the traditional dance as a special feature of the program. A few select dancers who demonstrated their skills for those present also performed the war dance. Bonney predicted that Western-style dancing and traditions would be a greater in®uence on the powwows as they became more familiar to the Indian communities in North Carolina. From my observations at the North Carolina powwows of the Waccamaw and others over the last 18 years, it appears that she was right.


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This in®uence is clear in the space and time dimensions at the powwow. The same “concentric circles of attentiveness” described by Gelo (1999:44–45, who also cites Young 1981:315; Gilbert 1991; and Schweitzer 1983:158–159) as a feature of the southern Plains Indian powwows also structure time and space at the Waccamaw powwows. The north-south-east-west pattern roughly frames the “concentric circles of attentiveness.” These circles move inward from an outer circle for camping and general parking, to a walkway with optional concession stands, to spectator seating on erected bleachers, to an eastward-facing entrance to the dance circle, to a dance circle that is surrounded by benches reserved for the dancers. The major difference in structure of time and space is in the position of the drum and singer group. At the Waccamaw powwow it is located to the north of the circles, placed under an arbor or shelter, near to where the emcee stands or sits. The role of the emcee closely conforms to Gelo’s (1999:49–53) description for the southern Plains Indian powwow, although there are fewer Indian jokes. The emcee at the Waccamaw powwow is usually a Lumbee Indian. Contestants are drawn to the powwow dances by the cash prizes, and dancers from other North Carolina Indian tribes, such as the Lumbee, Coharie, HaliwaSaponi, and Tuscarora, are often present. Dancers from Oklahoma or Florida tribes occasionally participate, as do the Cherokees of North Carolina. The dance competition thus is intertribal. The dances performed at the powwow are described as “customary” or “Indian” in origin, although not necessarily original to the Waccamaw speci¤cally but rather to Indians generally. They feature intertribal dance traditions. The dance regalia also conform to a pan-Indian style closely associated with Plains Indian culture (Thomas 1965). The women’s dance costumes are white, tan, or dark-brown suede and decorated with colored wooden beads attached to rows of fringe that hang down from the bustline, front and back. A popular variation on the “square tail” skirt with an even hemline is the uneven hemline in which one side is cut higher. Fringe hangs from the sleeves, back, and hem of the dress. All female dancers wear suede moccasins during the dancing, and some of the older women carry decorated shawls over their arms. The decorations may include shells, beads, acorns, dyed corn, colored feathers, and ankle bells. These ornaments are purchased at craft shops, and the entire costume is handmade by local Indian women for about 40 dollars. The men’s dance regalia is more expensive than the women’s and averages around 75 dollars. The male dancers order their regalia materials from Cherokee, North Carolina, where there are Indian stores specializing in the manufacture of feathers, head roaches, and arm, shoulder, and rear bustles of feathers. Many male dancers wear choker necklaces, bone breast-



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plates, breechcloths and leggings, knee bands with bells, and angora anklets and moccasins. Participation in the powwow as an Indian dancer or as a contestant in the princess pageant demonstrates a high level of commitment to Indian heritage and ancestry. The styles adopted may be originally blended with those of the Plains, but the Indian identity being celebrated is local (e.g., Waccamaw). The powwow activities provide a way for the tribal community to demonstrate publicly its own commitment to its Indian identity and heritage. The Waccamaw have adopted the powwow complex with its intertribal features as a way to communicate their presence to their neighbors, but as in the past, they have chosen to do so through the explicit expression of their image of themselves as Indian people. The intertribal or pan-Indian character of the powwow has led anthropologists and others to disparage its acceptance among traditional Native American cultures because they fear it may replace culture-speci¤c traditions. Others view it as the only Indian pattern visible in the life of many highly acculturated tribes (Howard 1955; Paredes 1965; Rynkiewich 1980; Siegel 1983; Thomas 1965). Visitors to North Carolina are often unaware that more than 80,000 people reported their race as American Indian, Eskimo, or Aleut in the 1990 federal census. Out of this number, about 45,000 people have state recognition. Most of these are Lumbee Indians. The state of North Carolina recognized the Waccamaw in 1970, and in 1990 they numbered about 1,300. Their ancestors ¤rst appear in the historic records in the late 18th century, and it is likely that their ancestors include people from the Siouan-speaking tribes that once inhabited the coastal plain (Lerch 1992a). The Waccamaw remained fairly obscure and little known outside the southeastern region of North Carolina until after 1970, when they organized their ¤rst annual powwow. However, “being known as Indian,” or recognition in both a formal and an informal sense, has always been important to the Waccamaw (Lerch 1992a). As social scientists and other outsiders tried to classify the Waccamaw in the category of “free people of color” or just “colored people,” they continued to emphasize their Indian ancestry. Thus, their leaders tried to get public funding for Indian schools between 1910 to 1964. Federal recognition occupied their leaders from 1949 to 1950 and again in 1982 when they initiated efforts to submit a federal acknowledgment petition to the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The powwow entered North Carolina in the mid-1960s, just as the civil rights movement required the desegregation of public places and institutions. One institution that changed was the local Indian school. In 1964, North Carolina moved toward the complete integration of its public school system by closing


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the Indian schools in the Waccamaw community. The Waccamaw leader Clifton Freeman and his daughter Priscilla Freeman Jacobs, the current chief, made plans to introduce the intertribal powwow as a way “to revive the culture.” My suggestion is that it also replaced the school as a unifying symbol of their community. Thirty years later, Priscilla Jacobs recalled those early powwows: “[Their purpose was] to revive our Indian culture. This was a way of doing it—letting other people see. . . . It was our intention to bring [Indian] people together for fellowship, to see what each other was doing, to share our arts and crafts with one another, [to share] the progress” (Lerch 1992a:28). In the 1990s the powwow is closely associated with the traditional Waccamaw values of family, heritage, parentage, and community as an expression of a way to be Waccamaw Indian (Lerch and Bullers 1996:395). The Waccamaw powwow provides a place and a time to express oneself as Indian. As all people do to some extent, they consciously select and construct their self-presentation by choosing clothing styles, habits, body language, and facial expression.

The Work of Erik a Bourguignon Erika Bourguignon’s work on Haitian voodoo in the 1940s led her to analyze how people construct their self-identity by drawing upon the resources of their environment. She applied Hallowell’s theory of the self and the behavioral environment to her interpretation of the Haitian data (Bourguignon 1965:39). The Haitians express themselves through spirit impersonation. This usually occurs during a trance in which it is believed that a spirit, known as a loa, takes over the person by replacing the personal self with that of a spirit self. Since a loa may be male or female, there is often a discontinuity between the person’s gender and the possessing spirit. Indeed, possessing spirits may change the gender and many other behaviors of their medium. This is quite normal, Bourguignon says, because “discontinuity in personal identity, the temporary substitution of other ‘selves’ in the context of a belief in ritual possession by spirits,” is part of the “reference system of Haitian culture” (1965:57). Individuals bene¤t by having the “opportunity for acting out certain positively evaluated social roles” and gaining “a wider ¤eld for social action and effectiveness” (1965:57). New social roles become available to those who impersonate spirits. My study of the Brazilian religion known as umbanda continued this approach (Lerch 1980, 1982). Umbanda is a popular religion in Brazil today. Its members come from all social classes and groups. As in the Haitian case, the belief in spirit possession during a trance state is central to umbanda ritual. In this fashion, Brazilian mediums routinely experience identity changes as spirits in a variety of categories possess them during trance. The caboclo spirits, described later in this chapter, are



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believed to be spirits of dead Brazilian Indians. Caboclos exhibit stereotyped behavior, including displaying “protruded lips, furrowed brows and eyes which slowly open and close, staring into space. A few may beat their chest and jump into the air landing in a position ready to shoot an imaginary arrow. They like to puff on a cigar while drinking beer” (Pressel 1971:60). Caboclos are approached by people seeking help for problems that demand strength and quick, decisive action. The spirit medium possessed by a caboclo behaves in the stereotypical fashion. Role-playing (but not in the sense of putting on an act) allows the medium to experiment with a wide range of behavior, expanding his or her ¤eld of social interaction. The medium and those around him or her sincerely believe in spirit possession. The freedom to express oneself by adopting certain characteristics of the possessing spirit is something like the effect a mask or costume has on the dancer at a powwow. The costumed dancers may be using the dance and regalia to communicate some very basic aspect of their self-identity that they may not be able to get across as easily when not in costume. Role-playing, spirit impersonation, and masking are the subjects of Bourguignon’s book Trance Dance (1968), in which she surveys dance and trance in the Americas, Asia, and Africa. Dancing is usually associated both with wearing masks or costumes and with spirit possession/trance. Masking and spirit possession/trance seem to be two ways to accomplish a similar goal. Bourguignon found that where people use spirit impersonation to change their identity or to express some aspect of themselves that they normally keep hidden (e.g., assertiveness) or cannot show, they usually do not use a mask or a costume (1968:12).

Powwow Dancing Masking and spirit impersonation offer people ways to express aspects of their personal identity. First, I describe a typical powwow dance at an annual Waccamaw powwow from ¤eld notes of October 1992. I observed the same scene many times between 1982 and 1992. This is followed by a description of a typical caboclo spirit possession/trance dance recorded in ¤eld notes of May 1975. The notes of my observations reveal some important similarities in the two experiences. The following notes describe a dance performed in October 1992 on the ¤rst evening of the annual powwow by male dancers in fancy dance regalia. The dancers have assembled and are preparing themselves to enter the powwow dance circle. The dancers assemble just outside the entranceway into the powwow circle. The evening air is chilly and the wind is brisk. Some dancers pause to check


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their regalia, looking for loose items that may detach and disqualify them from the competition. Their bodies are adorned with brightly colored feather bustles, which gather bursts of colorful feathers at their shoulders, arms, and heads. Faces are painted with dark brown, black, red or yellow that in the evening light seems to transform them, hiding their identity. Ankle bells jingle as they move into place. The drums begin and the dancers move forward, stepping in time to the beat. They crouch and dip, moving their bodies up and down as they respond to the drums. From the serious, intent look on their faces, they appear to be self-absorbed, concentrating on the rhythmic singing and beating of the drums. With their movements, they, I am told by a dancer later in the evening, are acting out some feature of the dance. The dancers explode with energy moving around the powwow circle. Then, stopping on the last beat of the drum, they leave the dance circle. This pattern of dancing will continue throughout the evening, and late into the night after most of the tourists and day visitors have left for home. (Field notes, 1992)

Umbanda Spirit Possession The second example comes from my Brazilian ¤eld notes that describe the caboclo (“Indian”) spirit possession/trance as it occurred at an umbanda center I visited occasionally over a four-month period. The music, drumming, and dancing observed at this center represent a very common mode of trance induction observed at 32 umbanda centers in Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, over ten months in 1974 and 1975. The room is hot and stuffy as visitors push forward to look for seats on the benches that run parallel to the dance area where very soon the mediums will begin receiving their caboclo spirits. Incense burns in a censor and shortly the hot air is ¤lled with exotic smells. The opening songs, accompanied by singing and drumming, ¤rst honor Pai Ogun, Santo Antonio, Oxala, Ogun, and Oxoce before Tupinamba, the chief spirit of the mae de santo, descends and possesses his medium. Soon after others enter possession trance. We know that the caboclo is present by the behavior of the medium. The caboclo stands with head cocked to one side, slightly bending the body at the waist. He raises one arm, keeping it bent at the elbow; the other arm is held behind him with the ¤ngers pointing down toward the ®oor. He moves back and forth shifting his weight from one foot to the other. One leg is forward. Occasionally, the caboclo twirls around a few times. He greets other caboclos by walking up to them, bumping opposite shoulders. Quiet sounds that resemble a whistle and sometimes grunts and groans can be heard. Assistants bring cigars and light them upon request. (Field notes, May 1975)



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A Comparison The ¤rst similarity to be observed is that both the masking (powwow regalia) and the spirit possession/trance (umbanda) give expression to aspects of selfidentity in the participants. The masking effect of the regalia follows detailed and careful preparations that begin much earlier in the evening. After they arrive, the powwow dancers slowly separate themselves from others as they register their tribal af¤liation with the organizers of the powwow so they can qualify for the dance competition. Non-Indians (people who dance as hobbyists and who are not registered tribal dancers) may dance with complete regalia only in the noncompetitive dances. After registering, the participants retire to change into their dance regalia. The regalia transform the dancers with their distinctive dress and dance movements as it visually connects them with American Indians for the audience. Masks can bring out aspects of a person that were formerly hidden. They can emphasize aspects of the dancer’s heritage that may not be obvious to others. For the Indian dancers, the regalia, through the movement of the dance, allow them to express themselves visually and physically as Indian. Umbanda spirit possession also allows mediums to express themselves, but in this case they become identi¤ed with spirits. In order to accomplish this, each spirit medium must authenticate the possession by adopting the stereotyped behavior that others attribute to the possessing spirit. This must be done without elaborate costumes. Since it is a spirit that transforms one’s identity, the medium’s behavior during possession must be convincing. In both of our examples, we get a hint at the meaning of the experience, both public and private. The second similarity is that the public is witness to this expression of identity. The spirit medium must demonstrate to the audience that the spirit is present, since they are the witnesses to the transformation (Bourguignon 1968:15). The visitors to the powwow act like an audience, witnessing and validating the public expression of self-identity of the powwow dancers and hosts. Audience and dancers participate in an experience, perhaps sharing a sense of “communitas” at being together, witnessing and presenting. “Communitas” is a brief and often ®eeting awareness that, despite the presence of individuality, hierarchy, or structure, there can be “oneness,” or “anti-structure,” that is, a world free of individuality, hierarchy, or social structure (Turner 1982:47). The dancers perform for a multicultural audience of Whites, African Americans, and Indians from other communities. African Americans and Anglos may experience a kind of communitas since they were drawn to the powwow as


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Anthropologists and Indians guests and sought out the experience. Perhaps seeking to “learn about Indian culture” they came to more clearly de¤ne themselves. Sharing the powwow experience with Indians may also communicate to African Americans and Anglos that harmonious race relations are possible. If this possibility is evident, even for a moment, then the potential exists for the powwow to affect and rede¤ne race relations. (Lerch 1993:89)

The third similarity is that there is no clear secular/sacred contrast at either event. The powwow has several dimensions to it, ranging from the spiritual with its opening prayers and petitions to the Great Spirit or God, to the commercial aspects of charging fees, selling food, and trade items, to entertainment with the beautifully dramatic dancing and sometimes country/gospel singing during breaks. Umbanda is clearly spiritual, but less obvious are the organizational, counseling, and people skills that the spirit mediums acquire as they “work” to heal their clients. Masking and possession trances share the important goal of identity expression. However, three interesting contrasts can be drawn. First, the place is different. The powwow is an outdoor event held at a powwow ground (or a place that is transformed into a powwow ground for the occasion), whereas the umbanda ritual takes place inside of a building known as a center. As we have already noted, an audience is present at each event. Second, there are gender differences. The majority of Waccamaw powwow dancers are men, although young girls and women dance in special dance competitions. Formerly, the powwow prizes awarded greater amounts to male dancers than to female dancers, suggesting that male dancing was more honored and emphasized than female dancing. Today the prizes are equal. But more importantly, the masking effect of the female regalia is absent. The gender difference is not unusual. As Bourguignon (1968:13) says, women “very rarely wear masks; this is generally the privilege of adult men.” On the other hand, the majority of possession trance mediums are women (Lerch 1982). Third, there are contrasts in external/internal preparations. The powwow dancer’s external preparations are elaborate and more obvious. The regalia hide the personal physical characteristics of the dancer. It is a mask—it transforms the person visually. However, I do not want to downplay the important mental preparation that dancers go through before they enter the dance circle, the mental focus required for a ®awless performance, or the personal emotional involvement that can occur for powwow dancers (Lassiter and Ellis 1998:490). For example, Kiowa Gourd dancers discuss the “feel” of songs after they dance.



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The dance experience is “subjective, intimate, and personal” (Lassiter and Ellis 1998:490). This feeling and the internal preparation, however, are of a slightly different nature from the kind of intense mental preparation that is required to successfully enter a trance state. The umbanda medium’s preparation is primarily internal and mental. Her regalia or costume is almost of no importance to the identity change she is about to go through. All the mediums wear the same uniform dress. She is not recognized as becoming the spirit until she enters trance, is possessed by her spirit, and displays the proper stereotypical behavior. Referring to the differences between wearing a mask or a costume and spirit possession/ trance, Bourguignon writes: “Through spirit possession public proof and demonstration of the reality of the spirits and of their intervention in human affairs is given. Thus, no mask is needed. The mask, then, represents an external transformation, a change in the appearance of the actor. Possession trance, on the other hand, represents an inner transformation, a change in the impersonator’s essence” (1968:14).

The Self and the Behav ior al Env ironment Demonstrations of self-identity through masking or possession trance are linked directly to the answer to the question, “Who am I?” Part of who we are is a product of our experiences and our culture. In her book Possession, Bourguignon writes that the “conceptions of the self are cultural products, as are other beliefs, and these may be expected to make sense in terms of the total way of life of a people” (1976:46). The “total way of life,” derived from Hallowell’s behavioral environment concept, de¤nes acceptable transformations of self-identity. For the Haitian or Brazilian culture, altered states of consciousness are added to a list of “psychological resources,” as Hallowell says, that people use in making positive adjustments to their environment (Bourguignon 1991:422). For the Waccamaw dancers who wear the mask, regalia, or costume, the experience appears to offer them a similar chance to adapt. The behavioral environment will open some avenues of self-expression and close others. In this sense, powwow dance regalia and spirit possession/trance give people the opportunity to claim or to emphasize their own identity choices and to resist those imposed on them by others. Masking gives them the chance to make a bold statement of resistance. The behavioral environment model offers some insight into why some Waccamaw participate in the powwows as dancers. First, the Waccamaw dancer receives positive rewards and recognition for his or her performance. Some win cash prizes. Children start to dance at a early age, reinforcing their self-identity as Indian. The father of one young Indian dancer explained that there was never


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any talk of money with his son, who had been dancing since he was thirteen months old (he is now seven years old). Early experiences with powwow dancing help children express their self-identity as Indian. The young boy is selfmotivated to watch videotapes of powwow dances. His efforts are encouraged by the important people in his life, such as his father, his schoolteachers (for whom he performs at assemblies), and the audiences at powwows who watch him compete. He is praised and is made to believe that he is special. By wearing the regalia, the boy demonstrates his connection to his American Indian heritage. The behavioral environment of North Carolina Indians has included resistance by the white majority of their claim to Indian identity. Masks and costumes make a strong statement of counter-resistance or rejection of the racial categories and hierarchies imposed by the dominant white society on “people of color” (Lovett 1998:210–212). Out in the ordinary, everyday world, Indians may experience rejection, ridicule, and racism, or they may be ignored. Let’s look again at the kinds of Indians who are portrayed in the powwows. The Indian imaged at powwows is not a contemporary Indian, dressed in everyday street clothes. Rather, the Indians depicted in their regalia retain some traditional dress style, dance, and behavior, symbolizing their resistance to assimilation. The Indians portrayed at powwows are not modern Indians who are often powerless in the white-dominated world, but those who had power in another era, time, and place. An aspect of this power is demonstrated in the deference shown toward eagle feathers at Waccamaw powwows. The eagle feathers used in the regalia are believed to have power. If an eagle feather is dropped because it has become loosened from a dancer’s regalia, only veterans, with power from real wars, can go near it, ritualize it, and then proceed to pick it up. It then remains in a taboo state, with dangerous power, until it can be neutralized. In powwows, dancers and audiences participate together in a shared experience of beautifully attired dancers creating a culturally constituted behavioral environment, where the dancers are esteemed for their Indianness, their dance, their enactment of their private, collective image of themselves, which involves expressing their Indian identity. Then this private image becomes public and has a real impact on the behavior of observers/audience, television crews, students from universities, artists, and anthropologists. Powwow dancing and umbanda possession trance give expression to certain aspects of a person’s identity and personality. There is a dramatic quality to both spirit possession and powwow dancing. The performance aspects are important to authenticating these expressions of identity. Why are they needed? These ex-



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pressions of identity, through wearing a mask or a costume on the one hand or through welcoming the possession of a spirit on the other, are normal consequences of cultural environments that make such choices and options available to people. Each experience enhances the self and, as Bourguignon demonstrates, provides greater opportunities for social choices. People need ®exibility in their cultural environment in order to balance out the limitations of ascribed statuses or identities that are never lacking in any culture. These two very different human experiences have been brought together by the analytical approach to the study of possession trance developed primarily by Erika Bourguignon and by my relationship as an anthropologist with two different research sites, one in southern Brazil and the other in the southern United States.


10 From Mob to Snob Changing Research Orientations from Activism to Aesthetics among American Indians

Rachel A. Bonney

Introduction During the late 1960s and early 1970s, many anthropologists interested in contemporary Native Americans focused their attention on the current political developments in Indian Country, including education, treaty rights, restoration of terminated tribes, supratribal interaction, and the activism that became prevalent at that time. Most of these anthropological concerns were also issues with which native communities were dealing. Over the last 20 to 30 years new tribal issues and concerns have appeared, while others have disappeared from the scene. Contemporary Native American concerns continue to re®ect current issues and legislation affecting Indian Country: tribal rolls and “blood” requirements for enrollment, tribal development (particularly with respect to gaming), federal recognition or acknowledgment as Indian tribes (the Lumbee of North Carolina, e.g.), restoration to tribal status (the recent restoration of South Carolina’s Catawba to both federal status and a land base), repatriation of both skeletal remains and tribal artifacts, and the de¤nition of who may sell art and craft objects as “Indian” art. As an anthropologist, my interests over the last 20 or so years have undergone a shift similar to those of Indian communities. Like the research of many anthropologists during the late 1960s and early 1970s, which focused on the current political developments in Indian Country (including supratribal interaction and the activism which became prevalent at that time), my dissertation dealt with forms of supratribal interaction among Native Americans in the United States (Bonney 1975). The theoretical approach involved was the process of revitalization; data were drawn from a variety of supratribal activities, including recreational interaction such as powwows, professional and political associations, and



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such activist organizations as the American Indian Movement and National Indian Youth Council. When I began teaching at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, my interaction with the local community continued in this area of interest. I served as an ex of¤cio member of the Charlotte parent advisory committee for the Title IV Indian Education Act and worked with the Metrolina Native American Association in a variety of capacities, including advising high school students in developing a powwow-style dance group. I became the adviser for an Indian student organization on the UNC-Charlotte campus, and I applied for and received a grant from the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare to develop a multi-ethnic curriculum guide for North Carolina, using the local Native American cultures and groups as the model unit and using local Native Americans as teachers in the program. In short, my life revolved around my job, anthropology, and the North Carolina Indian communities, with no break from a ¤eldwork situation. With no hobbies or outside interests, I “burned out.” Eventually I turned to a childhood love, miniatures, and a more active involvement in the local art and museum community. I established and coordinate a Museum Studies program at UNC-Charlotte and have become increasingly involved in the study of anthropology and art, speci¤cally Native American art, and work with local museums and Native American artists, some of whom encouraged me to combine my interest in miniatures and Indian art by studying miniaturized forms of Indian art. Initially I was dubious about the plausibility of studying Native American miniatures—I did not think there would be much to study—but, encouraged both by my departmental colleagues and Indian artist friends, I started looking for—and at—miniatures in Indian art and realized, as this chapter will show, that the subject is much “bigger” than I had anticipated. Indian arts have undergone a tremendous resurgence, with innovation and individual creativity the hallmark of much of contemporary Indian art. Many Indian artists want to be recognized as artists ¤rst and Indians second, and the innovative styles they are adopting express that identity as artists, although the subject matter of much of their artwork remains traditional. This innovation in art forms corresponds to recent legislation affecting Indian arts, the Indian Arts and Crafts Act of 1992, and the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), passed in 1993. Some tribal members are engaged in efforts to preserve or revive lost or disappearing traditional arts, sometimes because of actual or promised repatriation of “cultural patrimony.”


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Today, also, an increasing number of individuals, many with varying degrees of Indian ancestry, are seeking documentation to prove that heritage, while at the same time they are trying to learn about what they believe are their cultural pasts and traditions. Many join Indian organizations in urban areas and on college campuses to facilitate these efforts, often learning “traditional” crafts such as beadworking as a part of their activities in such groups. Some perceive artistic expression as both a preservation of their cultural heritages and as an expression or af¤rmation of their Indian identity. The growth of Native American arts and crafts also corresponds to an increasing interest and popularity of native art forms among non-Indian collectors and the buying public. Such an interest has been evident for a long time in the Southwest, where large numbers of shops handle Native American art, and artists participate in large supratribal juried art shows, such as the annual Santa Fe Indian Market, sponsored by the Southwestern Association on Indian Affairs, where tribal membership or being “registered” as an Indian is a requirement for eligibility to enter the show. Other juried art shows include the Scottsdale and Sedona (Arizona) shows, the Museum of Northern Arizona show in Flagstaff, and the annual Eight Northern Indian Pueblos Artist and Craftsman Show held in early July in New Mexico. Although most of the exhibitors are from the Southwest, southern tribes also were represented at the 1994 show, including Oklahoma Cherokees and Louisiana Coushatta. Today, larger numbers of intertribal shows are appearing in the South and the Southeast. One of long standing is the Cherokee National Historical Society’s annual Trail of Tears Art Show, held since 1971 at the Cherokee museum in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. Participation here is also intertribal; while most artists come primarily from Oklahoma and southern tribes, other areas and tribes also are represented. Since 1991 an intertribal art show called Kituwah has been held in Asheville, North Carolina, with exhibitors from the Southwest and Northeast as well as from southeastern tribes. One only has to look at the listing of tribal and intertribal art shows, fairs, and festivals in the January 1996 issue of Native Peoples magazine to see the large number of shows in the South. This chapter will examine the trends in southeastern art over the last 30 years, looking for stability in the cultures expressed through the continuity of traditional art forms and subject matter and for the innovation and change that demonstrate a culture’s vitality. Speci¤cally, the chapter will focus on an art form that represents both continuity and change, the miniaturization of art objects. It is suggested that reasons for working in miniature scales include cultural or ethnic



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pride and awareness, pleasure from working in miniature, and the fact that miniatures sell easily.

Native American Art and Miniatures Artistic expression has been an important part of Native American culture from prehistoric times to the present, although in the past most art forms were decoration of utilitarian items or religious in nature; art was not created solely for aesthetic reasons. Anthropological studies of Native American art have focused on styles and symbolism (Boas 1955; Witherspoon 1993), form and change in form (Brody 1993; Dockstader 1961; Feder 1965), and, more recently, on the context of Native American art forms (Parezo 1993). One largely unstudied Native American art form is miniatures, which have been present in many tribal cultures (including Native American) since prehistoric times. As an art form, miniatures have a long, worldwide prehistoric and historical tradition. In its purest de¤nition, “miniature” refers to the style of painting that originated in medieval illuminated manuscripts, coming from the Low Latin miniare (red paint, referring to the red lead paint used in the manuscript paintings). Those who used this method of painting became known as miniatori (Middeldorf 1969:170). Art historians use the term “miniature” today to refer to “very small portrait painting” (Middeldorf 1969:170), but it also has been applied to all works of art in “miniature” or small scale, including dioramas and models of ships, planes, cars, railroads, rooms, houses, furnishings and household accessories, and dolls. The cross-cultural and historical importance of miniatures has been recognized by archaeologists working with materials from the tombs of ancient Egypt and China. Details about Egyptian life and technology are known today because of the carved wooden miniatures made for service to the dead found in tombs dating back as far as 4000 b.c., which show scenes of everyday life (Akers 1983:8; Zarchy 1969:283). By the beginning of the Renaissance, miniaturized household items in scaled-down rooms were displayed in cabinets owned by the wealthy, and model houses that were accurate representations of architectural styles and furnishings began to appear after 1691 (Akers 1983:19–20; Culff 1969:35). Ethnographic miniature materials also come from native cultures of Latin America and North America; miniature household utensils in kitchen cupboards come from Ecuador and Mexico, and in some areas of North America miniatures appear to have been one of the forms of native art. Art forms and styles varied among North American tribal groups and geo-


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graphic regions and are, as Dockstader (1961:13) has pointed out, “limitless and complex.” In pre-contact times most Native American art was either decorative (the decoration of utilitarian objects, such as pottery, basketry, household utensils, and clothing) or religious in intent or origin (masks made for use in rituals or ceremonies or objects created in a ritual context, such as the decoration of war shields based on supernatural visions among some Plains tribes). Prehistoric miniature artifacts—primarily pottery—are particularly common in the Southwest, although some miniature polished stone axes and adzes as well as “diminutive” and “miniature” pots (Cole 1951:16, 324) have been found with burials in Hopewell and Mississippian sites in the East. Usually these miniature artifacts are mentioned only in passing in site reports or artifact analyses. Rarely are dimensions or descriptions given, yet the quantities of miniatures recovered indicate that they were of some cultural signi¤cance. Often the miniature forms, though sometimes crude, replicate the larger forms and also re®ect stylistic changes over time. In the past, Native American art has tended to be conservative and to allow little scope for individualism, but change did occur, primarily in the materials used and usually as the result of intertribal trade (Feder 1965:43). The most signi¤cant changes in Native American art have occurred since the ¤rst contacts with Europeans. Traders and settlers introduced new materials (metal tools, cloth, glass beads) and household items whose shapes or patterns were incorporated into native art forms. Missionaries had a more negative impact on native cultures and arts, manifest in the destruction of much of the ritual paraphernalia they regarded as pagan and satanic and in the prohibition of traditional rituals. Some ceremonial activities continued to be performed in secular and intertribal contexts, and many of the art forms associated with them underwent change. While the production of many traditional art forms, particularly art associated with spiritual beliefs and rituals, was banned, native artists were encouraged to create souvenir items for sale to travelers visiting Indian Country or for collectors in the East. Commercialization of native arts led to what some have called a “decadence” in art forms, as tourists seemed to prefer trinkets such as “gewgaw”: earrings, dolls, lapel pins, and tiny pieces of pottery or basketry (Feder 1965:51). Such souvenirs from the late 19th and early 20th century found today in a number of museum collections remain largely unstudied—Pueblo, Maricopa, and Mojave pottery; Pima and Tohono O’odham baskets made expressly for the tourist trade in the Southwest; and miniature beaded items such as lapel pins, tipis, and dolls and cradleboards in the Plains. Generally, Native Americans were not encouraged to produce any art forms



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other than those for the tourist market. Older women, skilled in a variety of traditional art forms, were not allowed to practice their arts, and younger women were not given the opportunity to learn the old arts either at home or in the schools they were forced to attend. The only schools that encouraged any development of Native American art in the early to mid-20th century were the Santa Fe Indian School, where the Santa Fe School of watercolor painting emerged, and Bakon College in Muskogee, Oklahoma. More recently, the Southwest has continued to be in the forefront of innovation in Native American art, due in part to the encouragement of faculty and staff at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe (formerly the Santa Fe Indian School) with its intertribal student body, and partly due to the large intertribal art shows and markets such as the annual Santa Fe Indian Market, mentioned earlier. Although most collectors of Indian art prefer “traditional” art forms, a number of contemporary Native Americans are exploring art forms that are not “de¤ned or restricted by tradition” (Villani 1991:72). The subject matter continues to be traditional, but new styles of painting, sculpture, pottery, jewelry, and weaving are evolving as Native American artists attempt to present and interpret their cultural heritages with greater creative freedom. Among the innovative art forms are increasing numbers of miniatures1 made by artists from tribes with prehistoric or ethnohistoric traditions of miniatures (Cherokee, Creek, Kiowa) and in a variety of new forms (house models, rugs, tools, weapons, sculpture) as well. These miniature arts appear to represent both continuity of old traditions as well as change. Although new styles of painting, sculpture, and jewelry are reported in popular periodicals such as Native Peoples, American Indian Art, Arizona Highways, and New Mexico and in books such as Babcock and Monthan’s The Pueblo Storyteller, only one book on Native American miniatures has been written for a general audience (Schiffer 1991), and that book deals only with southwestern miniatures. To date, no scholarly studies on miniatures as a form of Native American art exist, particularly in the Southeast. Recently, Native American art and artists also have been affected by federal legislation and by the growing number of tribal museums. The Indian Arts and Crafts Act requires that any art labeled “Indian-made” must be produced by an artist registered or certi¤ed to be on a tribal roll. This has had a severe impact on many southeastern artists who are not on current tribal rolls, often because ancestors who participated in forced removal chose not to be enrolled for fear they would lose what lands they had managed to retain. Not only are they not permitted to sell their work as Native American art, such artists also are not eligible


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to participate in tribal and intertribal shows such as the Cherokee Trail of Tears Art Show in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, and the Santa Fe Indian Market. The second piece of legislation affecting Native American art is NAGPRA, which affects not only Native American human remains but also cultural materials that are funerary objects, sacred objects, and items of “cultural patrimony.” The latter includes “cultural items having historical, traditional, or cultural importance central to the Indian Tribe itself,” such as tribally owned property (often religious art) “of such central importance that they may not be alienated, appropriated, or conveyed by any individual tribal member . . . [and which] must have been considered inalienable by the culturally af¤liated Indian Tribe at the time the object was taken” (U.S. Government 1993:31126). As tribes ¤rst lost traditional items to both museums and private collectors and now are recovering such cultural patrimony, tribal museums have been developed to store and exhibit certain traditional artifacts and art objects. Tribal museums thus contribute to a revival of traditional art forms as older tribal members attempt to create artifacts based both on their traditional knowledge and on copying ancient items restored to the tribe, creating collections and exhibits intended to represent the continuity of tribal cultures over time (Patt 1995:51).

Tr aditional Southeastern Art Forms The antecedents of the predominant forms of traditional southeastern art of the 20th century (basketry, pottery, sculpture, and weaving) generally are related to prehistoric, speci¤cally Mississippian, traditions. A number of early design motifs also have survived into the present: circle motifs on plain backgrounds and geometric designs of strings of simple diamonds, and V’s and W’s, which are found in historic Creek, Seminole, and Yuchee woven textiles such as ¤nger-woven belts and garters. The circle motifs consist of a double scroll design (two scrolls or circles connected by a diagonal line) and rosettes or circles, with the circles enclosed in diamonds or alternated with X’s and other ¤gures (Hudson 1976:378). The distinctive art style of the Southern Death Cult or Southeastern Ceremonial Complex does not appear as frequently as other prehistoric designs in the contemporary and ethnohistoric design motifs.

Basketry Among some tribes, basketry is the primary medium of artistic expression. In the past, the most popular form of basket making among southeastern peoples was twilling, “in which the warp and weft are ®at ¤bers . . . of equal thickness and pliability,” consisting of both the simple checkerwork (over-one, under-one



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weaving or plaiting) and more complex variations that pass weft ¤bers over two or more warps, creating a diagonal twill effect (Beals and Hoijer 1959:355). Bark, basswood, or thin pieces of the outer covering of river cane were used to make twilled baskets, although some tribes made coiled baskets out of pine needles as well. Baskets and mats usually were decorated with angular, geometric, and curvilinear designs created by using natural cane and pieces dyed black, red, and brown. These baskets included baskets with handles; sieves and fanners for processing hominy meal; large burden baskets; small and large hampers, some of which were made with tight-¤tting lids; small baskets with conical bases; and large twilled cane mats used as ®oor and bed coverings, as seats on the square/ ceremonial ground, to cover walls and roofs of houses, or as burial wrappings (Hudson 1976:384–385). Today the Chitimacha and Cherokee are considered the ¤nest basket weavers; the double-weave baskets with a smooth, glossy surface on both the interior and exterior of the basket are regarded as especially ¤ne examples of their basketry (Hudson 1976:385). Contemporary basketry also is made by other southeastern tribes such as the Choctaw, Seminole, and Coushatta. The Eastern Cherokee today are best known for their basketry (Leftwich 1970:9). Prehistoric evidence of basketry comes primarily from mounds and cave sites, in impressions left on pottery and other clay surfaces, although some baskets have been preserved in dry caves or by being in direct contact with copper salts. Most baskets of the prehistoric and early contact periods were made of white-oak splints and split river cane. With the more recent introduction of honeysuckle to North Carolina, dried honeysuckle vines have become an important material for making baskets for sale to tourists. Basket weavers also have begun making miniature baskets, usually “market” or “shopping” baskets, out of plaited honeysuckle vines and white-oak splints, with round bodies, ®at bases, straight sides, and handles. They range in size from half an inch to slightly more than one inch in diameter and from one-half to one and one-half inches in height, including the handle. Other forms include oval sifters made of tiny whiteoak splints, measuring about half an inch high by seven-eighths of an inch long. The sides of these baskets are tightly plaited, but the bases are loosely woven to create tiny openings for “sifting.” Decoration consists of traditional design elements of X’s woven around the rim. Oklahoma Cherokee basket weaver Nancy Basket has revived what she calls a traditional and prehistoric form of basket weaving among Georgia Cherokees. Her conviction that coiled baskets were made is based on archaeological records. She makes these baskets by coiling long-leaf pine needles into bowl-shaped bas-


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kets, made with and without handles, in both miniature and full sizes; she has even made coiled basketry cradleboards in both sizes. Choctaw basket weavers also work in miniature scales, and coiled pine-needle baskets decorated with tiny colored ®owers on the sides and lids are made today by the Coushatta of Louisiana. One Coushatta artist, Abriane Sylestion, makes miniature versions of the typical round baskets with ®at bases and lids, measuring about 1.0 centimeters in diameter and 1.2 centimeters in height.

Pottery The antecedents for southeastern pottery come from the prehistoric Mississippian tradition (Hudson 1976:388). Utilitarian pottery was made from buff, gray, brown, or black clay and either was left plain or was decorated by brushing, cord marking, or incising. Prehistoric ceremonial forms were made of blue or white clay tempered with ¤ne sand or crushed freshwater shells. Shapes of pottery included cooking pots, jars, bowls, shallow pans, and water bottles, the latter most clearly an art form, according to Hudson (1976:390). In addition to the usual globular water bottles with necks and small mouths, ef¤gy forms of seated or kneeling human ¤gures and animals (owls, frogs, opossums, and dogs) were made. Some human ¤gures even show details of hairstyles and tattooing (Hudson 1976:392). Some pieces of miniature pottery come from prehistoric southeastern and Mississippian sites as well as from peripheral areas. At the Kincaid site in southern Illinois, where pottery and architectural styles were related to the TennesseeCumberland aspect of Middle Mississippian, “diminutive” or miniature pottery was found in burials as grave offerings (Cole 1951:16, 314). The miniature forms were small-scale replicas of the ¤ner-ware vessels, including several styles of jars, bottles, bowls (some tripodal), and plates. Bottles and jars ranged from 2.5 to 6.0 centimeters in mouth diameter, from 4.0 to 7.0 centimeters in height, and from 6.0 to 8.8 centimeters in body or maximum diameter (Cole 1951:326–344). Another Mississippian site, the Peachtree site, yielded a number of small pottery vessels ( Jane Rogers, personal communication, 1996). Pottery continues to be made by tribes such as the Catawba, Cherokee, and Choctaw. Although it is traditionally a woman’s art, in some tribes today both men and women are involved in making pottery for sale. Historically, as far back as the 1770s, Catawba women made and sold pottery, an important economic activity that sometimes provided the only income for a family. Women kept alive both the art and a sense of cultural heritage and identity. Even in the early 20th century, when other traditional crafts were dying out, Catawba potters were in-



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troducing “new” forms such as animal ¤gurines, especially turtles and frogs (Merrell 1989a:76, 88). By the 1970s, when the Catawba became involved in an active effort to restore their land base and to revive and/or preserve their cultural heritage, elders Doris Blue, Georgia Haire, and Arzada Sanders, among others, began teaching pottery classes to pass the ancient skill on to the next generation. Since that time the appreciation for Catawba pottery has grown, and men have become involved in the art as well, some of them making extremely large vessels. Contemporary Catawba pottery is distinctive, made from a combination of two types of clay obtained from limited sources along the Catawba River in South Carolina; these clays give the pottery a unique gradation of shades from blacks and grays to tan coloration. The basic forms are vases and water jugs, sometimes with constricted necks and ®aring rims. Surfaces generally are smoothed and polished; additional surface treatment is rare. In 1992 some Catawba potters began making miniature vessels in addition to the larger ones; the evolution of this trend has been documented, beginning with my request of potter Mildred Blue to make some miniatures to be used in a diorama of pre-contact Catawba culture. Mrs. Blue’s success in selling the small pieces has led a number of other potters to make miniatures as well. Today it is not uncommon to ¤nd a number of miniature pots mixed in with the larger pieces on the sales tables at Yap Ye Iswa, the Catawba festival held each November on the reservation in Rock Hill, South Carolina. The Catawba Cultural Center Gift Shop also has an entire case of miniature pottery pieces for display and for sale. Some of the ¤nest miniature pieces, which replicate the large pottery forms, are made by men. Most contemporary Cherokee pottery is made by the Eastern Band of Cherokees in North Carolina and shows a high degree of diversity in form and decorative techniques. Ef¤gy pots usually are made in animal and bird forms, and vases and jugs may have smoothed exterior surfaces with a stamped design or exterior decoration made by rolling a dried corncob over the leather-hard pot. The pottery made in Oconaluftee Village, a “living” museum at Cherokee, North Carolina, tends to replicate traditional forms of pottery and decorative styles and may be purchased in some of the shops at Cherokee. Some Eastern Band of Cherokee potters, such as Louise Maney, are beginning to work in miniature scales as well, again replicating larger forms such as the double-spouted wedding jug, pitchers, and bowls.

Sculpture Southeastern men were the sculptors of their societies, working with both native woods and with stone, particularly the soft steatite or soapstone. Wooden items


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were either for such utilitarian purposes as bowls, spoons, and bread-dough bowls or intended for ceremonial use, particularly masks. Wooden masks date back to prehistoric times: among the expertly carved and painted masks found at Key Marco in Florida were masks of humans and animals (a wolf and a deer), some with eyes of shell inlays, which may have been worn by dancers or performers in rituals. Full-sized and miniature masks carved from red cedar and including details such as eyes and teeth were found at Spiro Mounds in Oklahoma (Hudson 1976:380, 384). Key Marco also yielded small wooden tablets and a small statue of a cat with realistic facial features. Historic documents also indicate that the wooden statues were kept in temples (Hudson 1976:397). Prehistoric carved stone pieces include celts and axes, some made for ceremonial use; polished stone discs with serpent and hand-eye engraved design motifs; stone ef¤gy pipes; and statuettes of animals (owls, frogs, and bears) and humans, lying down, in a kneeling posture, or playing chunkey (Hudson 1976:392– 397). The materials used most commonly were sandstone, hematite, and soapstone. Some of the statues were “miniature,” only several inches high (Hudson 1976:397). Some miniature polished hematite adzes and celts from the Prehistoric Burial Mound I cultures of about 1000 to 300 b.c. are in the collections of the University of New Mexico’s Maxwell Museum of Anthropology in Albuquerque. These tools measured no more than 3.9 centimeters long and 2.7 centimeters wide and probably were intended for ceremonial use. Wood carving and stone carving are still viable art forms among some southern tribes. Kayser Wilnoty and Going Back Chiltoskey are well-known woodcarvers of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, and a growing number of Eastern Cherokee are involved in preserving this ancient art form, carving animal and human ¤gurines, booger masks,2 and bowls and other items of a more utilitarian nature. Stone carving also is an art form undergoing revival, with a number of artists creating large steatite pieces. Some artists are also working in miniature scales, but because of the dif¤culty of carving small-scale items in the traditional hardwoods or steatite, several Eastern Cherokee artists have turned to working with Minnesota catlinite or pipestone. The subjects of most carvings are usually traditional, both human and animal forms (bear, deer, and turtle), but sometimes nontraditional Plains-style bison are made. These pieces are minuscule, usually no more than half an inch in height.

Innovative Art Forms in the Southeast In addition to the traditional art forms of the Southeast, which appear both fullsized and in miniature, new forms of artistic expression have appeared over the



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last 30 years, some of which include miniature paintings, dolls, models, and souvenirs.

Paintings Paintings were generally not a traditional art form in most Native American cultures, particularly in the Southeast. Today, however, paintings in a variety of media (watercolors, oils, acrylics, pastels, gouaches) are a form of artistic expression that has become increasingly popular among all Native American cultures, including some southeastern tribes, particularly those in Oklahoma. Traditional crafts continue to be made by North Carolina Cherokee, but generally the Western Cherokee have followed the example of their Plains Indian neighbors and have taken up painting. In the early 20th century, paintings usually were done in the stylized Santa Fe or Bakon College traditions, in which watercolors were the primary medium and subjects dealt with traditional aspects of native cultures. While many southeastern artists continue to paint in this style, today some artists are experimenting with other media and with a variety of styles, although subject matter often remains traditional. Guthrie, an Oklahoma Cherokee artist, creates threedimensional “paintings” using a special handmade paper he developed, made of, among other materials, pineapple ¤bers that give the white paper a shimmery quality. Another Oklahoma Cherokee, Ron Mitchell, uses traditional Native American subsistence activities or warfare as the subject for much of his art, which is distinguished by the inclusion of miniature spears or bows and arrows in a special inset in the matting of the paintings. Originally he bought these miniatures from Creek artist Bernie Nichols of Oklahoma City, but currently his son, T. R. Mitchell, makes the miniatures, casting them in pewter and painting them to resemble wood. Another innovation is the creation of miniature paintings, particularly by some artists in the Plains, the Southwest, and southeastern tribes in Oklahoma. Recently both the Trail of Tears Art Show in Tahlequah and the juried art show at the Five Civilized Tribes Museum in Muskogee, Oklahoma, added miniature paintings as a category. In the 1991 Trail of Tears Art Show the number of miniature paintings was relatively small; by the 1994 show about 35 artists entered approximately 40 miniature paintings (1£ inches by 3 to 4 inches) in this category. Of these 35 artists, 29 came from such southeastern tribal backgrounds as Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, and Seminole. The subject matter of these miniatures was universally traditional, although a number of the paintings by southeastern artists dealt with Plains tribes and contemporary powwow scenes.


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An older example of a “miniature” painting (in the original use of the word) is a portrait on ivory of Alexander McGillivray, principal chief of the Creek Nation from 1759 to 1793. This portrait, added to the collection of the Creek Council House Museum, in Okmulgee, Oklahoma, in about 1990, is believed to be the only existing likeness of McGillivray.

Toys Documentary evidence indicates that in many tribes children learned their adult gender roles partly through observation and partly through play with toys, some of which are now in museum collections. Girls were given dolls and cradleboards, and boys were given small bows and arrows. Among some tribes, dolls were used as puppets in performances, as trade items (even before the arrival of the Europeans), and as a means to control supernatural forces (Lenze 1986:11, in Downs 1995:211). Many of the older dolls of southern tribes are made of cloth and resemble the European settlers’ “rag dolls,” although they are dressed in the historical clothing worn by the men and women of the individual tribes, clothing that demonstrates both changes over time and tribal differences. Among such historic dolls in the collection of the Museum of the Five Civilized Tribes in Muskogee are Cherokee or Creek dolls with acorn heads and painted faces; male and female Cherokee or Chickasaw cloth dolls with painted faces and cotton clothing typical of the 19th century; and a Choctaw doll with a cloth body and a head carved from a hickory nut. Many dolls are made today for sale to collectors. Cornhusk dolls with nut heads and cornhusk clothing, possibly Choctaw, were for sale at the Five Civilized Tribes Museum. Oklahoma Cherokees make small peyote-stitch bead dolls in the Zuni style for sale to tourists, and as early as 1918 Florida Seminoles were making souvenir female dolls of palmetto bark with embroidered facial features, hair of braided black yarn, and dressed in the “traditional”-style patchwork dress. Eastern Cherokees make mostly rag dolls dressed in 18th- and 19th-century clothing, carrying a baby on the back, for sale to tourists, but until recently Cherokee artists Richard and Berdina Crow made more elaborate wooden dolls for collectors. Called “mortar and pestle” dolls because they hold pestles in their hands and are grinding corn in traditional wooden mortars, these dolls have wooden bodies and heads, with carved and painted facial features. The dolls are dressed in 19thcentury clothing and carry babies (also made of wood) on their backs. Miniature bows and arrows seem to have served several functions. Sometimes these were included with burials as items the deceased would need in the afterworld, while others were intended to teach hunting skills to children. The quality



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of such toys made today for tourist souvenirs has declined, but a few artists are making detailed miniature replicas of tools and other traditional items such as ball sticks and mounting them in shadow-box frames. Bernie Nichols, an Oklahoma Creek, makes miniature spears, bows and arrows with quivers, stickball game sticks, gourd dance rattles, and “tomahawks” or axes, mounts them on colorful backgrounds, and places them in frames for sale to tourists and collectors.

Models House models in the collections of several museums may have been made as toys (“doll’s houses”), although the records do not indicate their function. Several models of Wichita grass houses in Oklahoma museums were made of bundles of reeds laced together to form conical houses with circular bases. A great deal of attention was paid to the accurate reproduction of the details of the construction of the large grass houses. Among the exhibits of the Five Civilized Tribes Museum in Muskogee are models of buildings, including an Oklahoma Cherokee “dog-trot house” made in two different sizes and a model of Sequoyah’s log cabin at Sallisaw. “Dogtrot” houses or cabins were typical Indian Territory houses. They were made of squared logs and composed of two separate square rooms connected by a common roof; the space between the rooms was called a “dog trot.” Each room had a separate ¤replace and chimney, and a front porch extended the entire length of the cabin. Back rooms could be added as needed to serve as the dining room and kitchen. Gilford Garrett, a Cherokee from Muskogee but born at Sallisaw, built the models of Sequoyah’s log cabin and the models of the dog-trot cabins in memory of his grandfather, whose cabin was located south of Sallisaw, Oklahoma. Also on display at the Five Civilized Tribes Museum is a set of simple models of four boarding school buildings by a Chickasaw student from Vaness Boarding School. Made of blocks of balsa wood with painted doors and windows, each building is about six inches wide by ¤ve inches high. A model of a Chickasaw brush arbor where ceremonial dances were held or that served as an outdoor church for services during the hot weather is made of small sticks covering four rows of wooden benches.

Souvenirs Sometimes miniature tools, dolls, and toys are made speci¤cally as souvenir items. Tiny axes or war clubs are made into earrings by the Eastern Cherokee for sale as souvenirs, and items such as beaded white buckskin purses, made by East-


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ern Cherokee artist Ruby Owl, also are intended to be worn as earrings. Tiny beaded dolls may be worn as pins or earrings. Such souvenir items are low in price and colorful, designed to attract the attention of the souvenir-seeking tourists visiting reservation and recreational areas.

Conclusions It is apparent that Native American art forms are changing and that one rapidly growing art is in the area of miniatures. The topic of miniature forms of Native American art is broad, and this chapter only begins to examine the topic. Not only was the use of miniatures in the prehistoric and historic past widespread, but contemporary Native American miniature art is a rapidly developing art form that seems to parallel or be a part of the innovations in Native American art in general, a trend re®ecting both stability and change in Native American cultures. While a number of Native American artists work in both full-size and miniature forms, many are focusing exclusively on miniature forms of weaving, pottery, painting, and sculpture. These miniature baskets, rugs, carvings, pottery, tools, weapons, and house models have both economic and historic value to tribal members. The development of Native American miniature art forms could be divided into three stages, for convenience: prehistoric, historic, and contemporary. During the prehistoric stage, miniatures probably were intended for ceremonial/ burial use, for such educational functions as toys to teach children skills they would need as adults, or to represent children’s efforts to learn crafts. (In some tribes children learn to make pottery by making small “pinch pots” by pressing the thumb into a ball of clay to form the mouth.) Items from the late 19th and early 20th century were intended either as souvenir gewgaws (small-scale pots and baskets) or as items made for their own use. At this time master Pomo basket weavers in California made tiny feathered baskets as ceremonial gift items and to demonstrate a basket maker’s skill. The miniature baskets in the collection of the Colorado River Indian Tribes museum at Parker, Arizona, were made by Chemehuevi women in the late 1800s in a friendly competition to see which artist could make the smallest baskets. Indian artists today appear to work in miniature scales for a variety of reasons, including economic ones. Any artist wishing to support him- or herself in the competitive art world must create works that appeal to the non-Indian collector, and miniatures are salable. Although they are made with commercial intent, contemporary miniatures also re®ect pride in cultural heritages and artistic skills. According to some artists, they also attempt to communicate tribal heritages and



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values to non-Indian audiences and collectors. Tourist “kitsch” and inexpensive gewgaws such as beaded war bonnet key chains or night-lights and incense burners shaped like tipis or pueblos continue to be made to appeal to nondiscriminating tourists, who often base their purchases on inaccurate stereotypes of Indians. Some miniatures seem to be made for the pleasure that working in miniature gives to the creator; possibly some Indian artists create miniatures for the same reason as non-Indian miniaturists: working in miniature scales allows one to have things that one cannot have in real life or to return to a perhaps idealized past re®ected in the miniature creations. Others are sold because of the artist’s pride in his or her cultural traditions; some are intended for serious art collectors, such as the miniature baskets made by Apache Tu Moonwalker and Coushatta Abriane Sylestian and the miniature sgraf¤to pottery of the Lonewolf family of Santa Clara Pueblo in New Mexico. The latter represents an innovative art form based on strong cultural traditions. These items are made for the aesthetic pleasure of both the artist and the collector, and the Lonewolf pieces in particular are sought worldwide by collectors of Indian art as well as by miniaturists. A great deal of the miniature art appears to be directed toward the specialized audience of “miniaturists,” hobbyists and collectors who collect and/or work in small scales (1 inch to 1 foot; £ inch to 1 foot; ¥ inch to 1 foot). A growing number of miniaturists are interested in collecting Native American art, and the proliferation of forms of miniature art may be partly in response to requests from collectors for miniature baskets or pots or for speci¤c miniature projects. Since quality workmanship and accuracy of scale and detail are important to miniaturists, many contemporary miniature art objects exhibit both as well as a high level of technical skill. Indian art today is a viable and dynamic expression of native creativity and the vitality of Native American cultures and traditions. As Villani has pointed out, “the growing trend among creative people of Indian heritage is to pursue careers in the arts that are not de¤ned or restricted by tradition” (1991:72). Contemporary Indian artists are “rede¤ning and expanding the conceptual and actual boundaries of their media” (Villani 1991:71) at the same time they are demonstrating the stability and continuity of many of their cultural traditions—in both full and miniature scales.



V Culture Contact and Exchange

A

s the two chapters in the preceding section demonstrate, not all anthropological research is applied, even today. A number of anthropologists continue to research “traditional” topics, testing hypotheses or researching speci¤c, focused topics, as we ¤nd in Emanuel Drechsel’s chapter on “Mobilian Jargon in Southeastern Indian Anthropology” and in Michael Logan and Stephen Ousley’s “Hypergamy, Quantum, and Reproductive Success: The Lost Indian Ancestor Reconsidered.” While most of the chapters on applied or proactive anthropology in this volume show how the relationship between anthropologists and Indians may bene¤t Indian communities, the relationship actually goes both ways, and anthropologists may bene¤t from their work with Native Americans as well. Kendall Blanchard’s chapter, “American Indian Life and the 21st-Century University: The ‘Playful Worldview’ and Its Lessons for Leadership in Higher Education,” illustrates this anthropological bene¤t as he discusses how his work with southeastern Indians has affected his policies as an academic administrator.



11 Mobilian Jargon in Southeastern Indian Anthropology Emanuel J. Drechsel

Introduction Just as linguists have frequently ignored the sociocultural context of language in their preoccupation with linguistic structure, anthropologists have avoided linguistic questions, however central to their own extralinguistic concerns; historians have generally demonstrated even less interest in matters relating to language. Yet a linguistic phenomenon of southeastern North America known as Mobilian Jargon bears several sociohistorical implications of signi¤cance for Americanist ethnology, ethnohistory, and possibly archaeology, with some important consequences for our understanding of southeastern Indian societies and the South at large. The discussion of Mobilian Jargon’s relevance in a broader anthropological context begins best by clarifying what it was and what it was not. This essay explicitly does not deal with Mobilian, the language of the Mobile Indians. We know next to nothing about this language, presumed Muskogean at various times, and instead deal with an indigenous lingua franca named after the post and town of Mobile or its residents. However, we can con¤dently assume that Mobilian Jargon was very different from vernacular Mobilian on the grounds of its particular sociolinguistic nature, whence it is inappropriate to draw any inferences from one about the other. Alternatively known as the Chickasaw-Choctaw trade language, Mobilian Jargon was a Muskogean-based pidgin, that is a linguistic compromise in multilingual contacts that drew on Muskogean languages as its prime models but that developed its own grammar from its use by southeastern Indians of diverse linguistic backgrounds. Although fundamentally Muskogean in its syntax, Mobilian Jargon exhibited a reduced morphology in comparison with southeastern languages (including presumably Mobilian proper), and exhibited a grammar quite


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different from that of its sources, such that it was mutually unintelligible with Muskogean languages, including Chickasaw and Choctaw. Mobilian Jargon undoubtedly differed from Mobilian proper also in terms of its primary functions. The Muskogean-based pidgin was in use among alloglossic Native Americans of the greater Mississippi River valley in multilingual environments and in longdistance contacts, when knowledge of the language(s) spoken by immediate neighbors was insuf¤cient and, moreover, came to be adopted by Europeans, Africans, and their American descendants in contact with native peoples. If Mobilian Jargon was subject to few restrictions of use, historical and ethnographic documentation from 1700 until the mid-20th century has attested it principally in the following interlingual contexts: multilingual kin groups and politics; the fur and hide trade; intertribal and international political alliances; European explorations and colonization, including the proselytizing of the indigenous population by Christian missionaries; and the enslavement of native peoples and their employment by Europeans in various functions. Yet the pidgin did not serve exclusively communicative purposes, but developed various forms of poetic expression in narration and songs. Historical attestations since the early 19th century and modern ethnographic observations have also documented Mobilian Jargon as a sociolinguistic buffer, which permitted southeastern Indians once threatened by slavery and frequently misidenti¤ed as “colored” to maintain their native identity and their privacy against prying strangers such as traders, missionaries, immigrant settlers, government of¤cials, and anthropologists.1 The Muskogean pattern of Mobilian Jargon’s grammar, its wide range of indigenous functions next to colonial uses, and its geographic distribution overlapping with much of the Mississippian Complex provide strong indications for a pre-European origin and a speci¤c role as a lingua franca of pre-Columbian Mississippian societies, which probably included speakers of all major language families of eastern North America such as Muskogean and isolated Gulf languages, Algonquian, Siouan, Caddoan, and perhaps Iroquoian (for a comprehensive linguistic and sociohistorical description of Mobilian Jargon plus analysis, see Drechsel 1997:57–294; for a lexicon of Mobilian Jargon, see Drechsel 1996b). Most signi¤cantly, Mobilian Jargon remained a second language throughout its attested history; as far as we know, children never acquired it as their ¤rst language, which would have entailed a structural and perhaps functional expansion known to linguists as creolization and would have introduced other innovations. Typologically, Mobilian Jargon rather compares to Chinook Jargon of northwest-


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ern North America and less well attested Delaware Jargon of northeastern North America (Goddard 1995; Thomason 1980, 1983; see Drechsel 1981, in press). The distinction between ¤rst and second language is one between language acquisition and second-language learning, which has several important implications of a social and historical nature with direct bearings on our understanding of the anthropology of southeastern Indians at large.

Presence of Native Peoples in Southeastern North America and Vitality of Their Languages and Other Tr aditions First, Mobilian Jargon constitutes indisputable evidence for the presence of Native Americans in the Southeast today. This point would seem to be trite, even absurd, were there not a quite widespread misconception in the social sciences that southeastern Indians are “gone” now; with a few recognized exceptions (such as the Cherokee of North Carolina, the Seminole of Florida, and the Choctaw of Mississippi), the area’s native peoples accordingly all have been victims of genocide, westward removal, or else acculturation and full absorption into the larger population.2 On repeated occasions, fellow Americanists have expressed surprise at the survival of Native American communities in Louisiana in spite of a well-established tradition of anthropological research (such as that by John R. Swanton, Frances Densmore, Frank G. Speck, Morris Swadesh, and Mary R. Haas among others) and recent research (see, e.g., Kniffen et al. 1987). At a conference at the University of Michigan several years ago, a senior anthropological linguist and specialist in the study of the indigenous languages of eastern North America expressed disbelief when he learned about the survival of Native American languages in Louisiana. Similarly, some anthropologists who have worked in native communities in southeastern Oklahoma indicated little awareness of Muskogean relatives in Louisiana, let alone traditions of theirs. Another Americanist ethnologist with expertise in the study of southeastern Indian societies did recognize the existence of Louisiana Indians, but derided them as “Government Indians,” although he could not draw on any ¤rsthand ethnographic observations or other supportive evidence. In his opinion, these people did not show any evidence of native traditions but just claimed Indian identity and ancestry in an attempt at gaining illegitimate recognition from the federal government as Native Americans and, with it, special bene¤ts and reparations. All these views clearly prove to be serious misconceptions in the light of modern evidence for Mobilian Jargon. The pidgin’s existence also offers indirect con¤rmation of the vitality of south-


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eastern Indian languages and, by extension, their speakers’ native traditions. Although not all of its last speakers were Native Americans and it is a community’s ¤rst language rather than a pidgin that determines its identity, Mobilian Jargon obviously could not have persisted without the presence of the area’s Native American languages (such as Koasati, Alabama, Choctaw, and others), which provided continuing linguistic and sociocultural reinforcement and new resources for the pidgin’s own survival. As a sociolinguistic buffer, Mobilian Jargon yet is a salient example of Native American resilience reminiscent of revitalization movements, that is conscious and organized attempts at reviving native traditions while adapting to new sociopolitical conditions (see La Barre 1971). If Mobilian Jargon served in such a role among southeastern Indians, it came about only in colonial times, perhaps as late as the American takeover of greater Louisiana in 1803, and was not the original cause for the pidgin’s development.3

Greater Linguistic and Social Diversity, with Questions of Interpretation for Early Linguistic and Ethnogr aphic Records Mobilian Jargon next provides direct historical-sociolinguistic evidence for greater linguistic diversity among southeastern Indians than often is recognized. Various purported documents of Choctaw, Chickasaw, and other related Muskogean languages show beyond a doubt that they do not describe any of these languages, but instead reveal examples of the pidgin as determined by its distinct morphological and syntactic structure as well as by extralinguistic clues. With Mobilian Jargon’s role as a second language, these documents then leave unidenti¤ed its speakers’ ¤rst languages. They could have spoken Choctaw, Chickasaw, another Muskogean language, or by equal chance any unrelated or unknown indigenous language as their mother tongue. In reverse, an uncritical interpretation of historical Mobilian Jargon data with their apparent Muskogean features has often led to the unfounded conclusion that Mobilian proper, for which no independent linguistic evidence exists, was Muskogean (see, e.g., Swanton 1946:151). The identi¤cation of Muskogean linguistic data thus cannot rely solely on word lists, but must seek con¤rmation in syntactic data to avoid the potential confusion of an indigenous vernacular with Mobilian Jargon or vice versa.4 Manifestly, the buffer function of Mobilian Jargon with lexical similarities to its Muskogean source languages camou®aged some of the linguistic diversity of southeastern Indians who spoke it. Recognition of the pidgin’s true linguistic and sociocultural role allows us to argue for a greater linguistic variety among southeastern Indians than Americanists acknowledged until recently (see, e.g., Crawford 1975 and Haas



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1979), even if the available evidence no longer permits a reconstruction of the full sociolinguistic complexity of southeastern North America. Recognizing greater diversity among southeastern Indian languages, moreover, entails a more complex classi¤cation for them. Conversely, a close examination of Mobilian Jargon in light of areal-typological characteristics may provide clues to current classi¤catory problems—such as the debated subdivision of Muskogean languages (see Hardy and Scancarelli 1993 and Nicklas 1994) or the precise position of Apalachee within that language family (see Kimball 1987, 1988)—by helping to sort out areal from “genetic” features in the interplay of diffusional cumulation and archaic residue in language and culture change (see Drechsel 1996a). As an indicator of societal multilingualism and in its functions as a sociolinguistic buffer, Mobilian Jargon further implies greater social diversity and, accordingly, more complexity in language-and-culture relationships among southeastern Indians than is conventionally recognized. Foremost, the pidgin calls into question the simplistic one-to-one identi¤cation of a language group with a particular society, still customary in much of Americanist anthropology. Instead, it suggests, as standard, bi- and multilingual communities with rather diverse sociolinguistic arrangements, whose members did not necessarily share a single ¤rst language. Prime examples of such communities are the Tunica-Biloxi, who once spoke a Gulf isolate and a Siouan language, and the Coushatta, in whose community one could hear three Muskogean languages (Koasati, Alabama, and Choctaw) until recently. Ethnohistorical research indicates similar bi- and multilingual native communities among the Creek and their af¤liates (see Booker et al. 1992), who in multilingual environments spoke a Muskogee-based contact medium probably interpretable as an eastern variety of Mobilian Jargon (see Drechsel 1983).

A Sociolinguistic Model for Multilingual Tribes and Chiefdoms, Including the Mississippian Complex By its nature as a pidgin, Mobilian Jargon clearly functioned as a highly adaptable medium in sociopolitically rather fragile societies, as was the case with the chiefdoms and paramount chiefdoms of southeastern North America in colonial as well as pre-Columbian times. The pidgin was not only a direct re®ection of partnerships among larger kin groups such as clans and moieties (Knight 1990), which often crisscrossed linguistic boundaries, but also mirrored the sociopolitical phenomenon of non-kin-based alliances such as twin and multiple towns, which brought together different southeastern Indian groups in response to di-


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sasters (crop failure, epidemic diseases, and defeat in con®ict) and which resulted in bi- and multilingual communities in recent history and apparently in pre-Columbian times (Willis 1980). Cognizant of Mobilian Jargon’s historical role, William S. Willis has already suggested that “twin towns helped spread pidgin languages. If so, the popularity of Mobilian [ Jargon] as a lingua franca in the eighteenth century need not be explained entirely in terms of commercial and political relations between Indians and whites. . . . If ethnic and sociopolitical unity did not exist in multiple mound sites, then these prehistorical settlements also encouraged the linguistic processes of diffusion, bilingualism, polylingualism, and pidginization” (1980:100, 102). In other words, Mobilian Jargon was an instance of linguistic peer-polity interaction, that is regular and systematic relationships between politically more or less autonomous, alloglossic groups across a larger area. As such, the pidgin apparently was the re®ection of a sociopolitical phenomenon that is characteristic of chiefdoms in particular and that is signi¤cant in our understanding of the development of complex sociopolitical organizations leading to the formation of states (see Renfrew and Cherry 1986). These sociohistorical observations lend indirect support to the hypothesis of Mobilian Jargon’s pre-Columbian origin as suggested by its unique grammatical pattern, its wide range of indigenous functions, and its geographic distribution matching closely with that of the Mississippian Complex. By this reasoning, Mobilian Jargon had a much longer history than is evident from historical records; its invariable word order of object-pronominal subject-verb (OsV) and loanwords like bayou in French and English (< Choctaw bayuk ‘creek, river’ via Mobilian Jargon) thus would be as much survivals of the Mississippian Complex as pre-Columbian archaeological remains of conch shells, pottery, and mounds with their distinctive ceremonial motifs (for a survey of Mississippian cultural traits, see Howard 1968). The proposed model of Mobilian Jargon’s pre-European existence also offers an elegant solution to a long-standing but frequently disregarded puzzle in the ethnology of southeastern Indians—a great linguistic diversity (Crawford 1975:1– 2), yet substantial cultural uniformity from the Atlantic Coast to the western rim of the Mississippi Valley when viewed from a macrosociological perspective (see Hudson 1976 and Swanton 1946). How did the native peoples of southeastern North America come to adopt a full range of common cultural traits but maintain numerous mutually unintelligible, even unrelated languages? Why was there no more linguistic uniformity corresponding to the comparatively homogeneous nonlinguistic traditions of southeastern Indians? The answer to this apparent enigma is in Mobilian Jargon. While enabling native peoples to retain different



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languages and, with them, separate social identities, the pidgin served as a convenient medium of interlingual communication and sociocultural diffusion for everything ranging from material culture to beliefs, as James Mooney (1900:235) already suggested for mythology. Interpreted as the major lingua franca of the Mississippian Complex, Mobilian Jargon thus provides a model of how alloglossic member groups interacted with each other and with neighboring communities —still a poorly understood topic in need of systematic attention, as is evident from surveys of the area’s infrastructure (Tanner 1989) and long-distance interregional trade (Brown et al. 1990).

Greater Role by Indians in the Recent History of the South The use of Mobilian Jargon by non-Indians and its survival into the mid-20th century further give credence to a greater role of the native population in the recent history of the South and especially that of Louisiana than social scientists, including anthropologists and historians, have traditionally acknowledged or than is evident from the Indians’ present-day economic and sociopolitical marginality. This inference applies irrespective of whether one postulates a preColumbian or colonial origin for Mobilian Jargon. In the ¤rst case, the colonists simply adopted from the native population a medium that was already part of an existing infrastructure, if for no other reason than convenience; in the second instance, European colonists deferred to indigenous ways of communication in linguistic compromises with Native Americans because the latter had still maintained the upper hand well into the colonial period, as was indeed the case with the Choctaw. In either scenario, the pidgin re®ects a history of the colonial South that involved mutual concessions as well as unresolved con®icts—a history not to be reduced to one of Removal and Civil War and one in dire need of revision to include the native population in a systematic fashion. To interpret the postColumbian history of southeastern Indians principally in terms of southern plantation culture (see, e.g., Perdue 1988) presents a skewed picture. If presumably southeastern Indians had been just irresponsive victims of racist southern society, they would have adopted some European language in pidginized or nonpidginized form in place of Mobilian Jargon and their native languages. Instead, the pidgin presents suggestions for an alternative, more complex perspective that assigns an important role to the native population and that matches a more differentiated picture of southern colonial history as recently developed for instance by Daniel H. Usner (1992) for greater Louisiana in the 18th century. At closer inspection, Mobilian Jargon actually appears to mirror inter-ethnic sociopolitical realities surprisingly well, as do other pidgins.5


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Need for the Reintegr ation of Linguistic Inquiries into Southeastern Indian Anthropology As a distinctly sociolinguistic phenomenon, Mobilian Jargon corroborates the need for Americanist anthropologists and other social scientists to reintegrate linguistics into their inquiries of southeastern Indians, as already recognized in the keynote symposium “The Southeast at the Time of Columbus: Evidence from Linguistics and Archaeology” of the 1992 Southern Anthropological Society meetings (Kwachka 1994). With the increasing specialization of anthropology’s sub¤elds over the past decades, cultural anthropologists, ethnohistorians, and archaeologists regularly have overlooked language as a major part of culture and history. Sadly, many recent anthropological publications on southeastern Indians, while emphasizing their interdisciplinary nature, have neglected to incorporate ¤ndings from linguistics (see, e.g., Dye and Cox 1990; Emerson and Lewis 1991; Galloway 1989; Paredes 1992b; B. D. Smith 1990; and Wood et al. 1989). Also, the discussion of a topic as eminently sociolinguistic as that of interpreters (see, e.g., Galloway 1987 and Kawashima 1989) often has overlooked multilingualism, indigenous contact media, and other phenomena of language contact, and has paid surprisingly little attention to the particular languages spoken by the interpreters, the native population, and colonists beyond recognizing obvious language barriers. The problem of linguistic naïveté in anthropology has only worsened in recent years, as postmodernist discussions regularly have raised the subject of discourse, but few participants have even the barest understanding of language, its structure and functions or of linguistic description and analysis, including pragmatics. By considering linguistic ¤ndings in their research, nonlinguistic anthropologists can not only obtain answers to some of their own questions, but conversely anthropology may help resolve linguistic problems that rely on extralinguistic, sociohistorical evidence. Historically oriented anthropologists—in particular, ethnohistorians and archaeologists—could help develop different sociohistorical scenarios for language contact, which are not limited to colonial explorations and trade, but include indigenous peer-polity interactions as evident in interregional commerce and multilingual paramount chiefdoms. In particular, a better understanding of the sociopolitical complexity of pre-Columbian southeastern Indian societies should specify the conditions by which Mobilian Jargon could or could not have developed as part of the Mississippian Complex. Ultimately, the above arguments for reintegrating linguistics in anthropology



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would not seem limited to Mobilian Jargon and southeastern North America, but extend by analogy to Delaware Jargon and Chinook Jargon as primary indigenous lingua francas of the continent’s northeastern and northwestern parts, thus drawing on a comparative dimension and calling for an even wider cooperation between linguists and other social scientists.


12 Hypergamy, Quantum, and Reproductive Success The Lost Indian Ancestor Reconsidered

Michael H. Logan and Stephen D. Ousley

Str ategies for Surv ival Throughout the long and complex history of Indian-white relations (see Washburn 1988), Native Americans have been forced to employ diverse strategies for cultural survival. These ranged from armed con®ict, migration, and concealment, as was the case for the Seminoles who sought refuge in the swamps of southern Florida (Wright 1986), to pleas for supernatural intervention and salvation, as exempli¤ed by the Ghost Dance Religion of 1890 (Mooney 1896; see also DeMallie 1982 and Utley 1979). More recent endeavors for betterment have centered around Indian-controlled education (Szasz and Ryan 1988), litigation in state and federal courts (Deloria and Lytle 1983), and increased political activism (Olson and Wilson 1984:157–178). Even legalized gaming on reservations should be viewed as a quest for empowerment—and for tribes such as the Pequot of Connecticut it certainly has been a successful quest. Earnings from their Foxwoods Resort Casino are reported to be $480 million annually (Moore 1996:1A). There is a commonality found in each of these reactions to white domination: they are, or were, collective phenomena, frequently involving hundreds, at times thousands, of individuals (see Champagne 1989). Many Native Americans, however, pursued another avenue for maximizing their self-interests, one that was extremely personal in nature and one typically restricted to women. The strategy in question, of course, was that of marriage. Signi¤cant social and economic gains could be achieved by marrying non-Indian men. This was especially true during the 19th century, when public opinion concerning Native Americans probably reached its lowest ebb. The intensity of racial hatred some whites harbored for Native Americans is revealed painfully in the published remarks of L. Frank Baum, the author of the beloved children’s classic The Wizard of Oz. On January 3, 1891, Baum, the editor of the Aberdeen Sunday



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Pioneer, called for “the total extirmination [sic] of the Indians. Having wronged them for centuries,” Baum declared, shortly after the slaughter at Wounded Knee, “we had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth” (Venables 1990:37). Of course, not all Euro-Americans of his day, or earlier, shared Baum’s hatred. Many men, in fact, eagerly sought Native American wives. Most often their motives for intermarriage were legitimate (e.g., respect and romantic attachment). Yet some unions arose solely out of greed, whereby whites took Indian wives to gain resources these women controlled. This was particularly true for the oil-rich Osage in Oklahoma (Huff 1993; Wilson 1982, 1985). While intermarriage conferred certain advantages upon individual Native Americans, such unions greatly undermined their ability to perpetuate longstanding cultural traditions. And the number of Indian women who married white men, irrespective of their motives, was not small. By 1910 nearly 80 percent of the 29,610 Cherokees in Oklahoma had a non-Indian ancestor (Dixon 1915:33). This trend of increasing admixture continued throughout the 20th century for the Cherokee and other tribal nations. And for some tribes, such as the Catawba of South Carolina, intermarriage was nearly universal: 96 percent of their marriages involved a Euro-American spouse (Moore and Campbell 1995:504). The U.S. Congress recently estimated that by the year 2080 only 8 percent of the Indian peoples living in the United States will have a quantum level (proportion of American Indian ancestry) of one-half or more (Bordewich 1996:46). Aside from social and economic rewards, another bene¤t arose from Indianwhite marriages, although it probably remained unknown to the couple. As will be demonstrated momentarily with data collected by Franz Boas and his coworkers, admixed females at the close of the 19th century enjoyed greater reproductive success than their full-blood counterparts. Interestingly, as quantum level declines, the fecundity (number of births) of adult females and survivorship of their offspring increase. And the correlation between quantum and reproductive success is highly signi¤cant statistically. This ¤nding makes the frequently heard claim that someone’s great-grandmother was an Indian all the more understandable (Logan 1990; Thornton 1990:172–174).

Hypergamy The term hypergamy means that marriage serves as a vehicle for upward social mobility for either the bride or the groom. The more common variant of hyper-


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gamous unions is hypergyny, in which a woman realizes social, economic, and political gains by marrying a man whose status is higher than that ascribed to her family or group of origin. In the opposite pattern, known as hyperandry, a man of low status takes a bride who enjoys a higher social position. Hypergyny occurs most frequently in cultural settings marked by pronounced internal social strati¤cation, where groups of people are hierarchically ordered based on their membership in a particular social unit. These units can be racial or ethnic groups, as well as subcastes, economic classes, and religious denominations. Regardless of the criteria upon which the social hierarchy is de¤ned and maintained, an individual’s status position is, in large measure, ascribed. However, in many cultures females have managed to elevate their social standing through marriage. That females have an almost exclusive hold on this option for upward social mobility has to do with their greater reproductive value or worth compared to low-status males, most of whom secure a mate from within their own natal group. Some males, however, are forced into perpetual bachelorhood due to their inability to gain a wife (e.g., Cronk 1989a:230). Aside from social strati¤cation, one ¤nds several other traits associated with hypergyny. For example, there is usually an uneven distribution of wealth throughout the population, where membership in a particular social unit either confers or denies access to scarce resources. This becomes even more crucial if local marital custom involves bride price or dowry (Borgerhoff Mulder 1995). Quite frequently there is also a skewed childhood and adult sex ratio within low-ranking groups, where females signi¤cantly outnumber males. Patterns of parental investment in children of one sex or the other are strongly affected by the parents’ social position in a hierarchically strati¤ed society and by the relative degree to which children of one sex will more likely reproduce than siblings of the opposite sex. The Trivers-Willard hypothesis (1973) has been tested widely and in diverse cultural settings (e.g., Boone 1988; Cronk 1989b, 1993; Hill and Kaplan 1988; Mealey and Mackey 1990; Robinette 1991; Sieff 1990; Voland 1988). As Trivers and Willard predicted, parents of low social standing typically favor daughters over sons because daughters generally experience greater reproductive success than their brothers. Simply put, securing a mate is easier for low-status females than for low-status males. When parents enjoy high social status, sons are favored because they experience greater reproductive success than daughters, of whom a signi¤cant number never marry due to the costly requirements of bride price and dowry. This preference for sons can lead to tremendously skewed sex ratios. In northern India, for example, certain high-ranking Rajput subcastes were found to have three males for every female; and in a sample of 2,000 fami-



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lies within a priestly subcaste there was not a single female child (Dickemann 1979:333, citing Cave-Browne 1857)! Infanticide had apparently claimed them all (see also Van Willigan and Channa 1991). Wherever hypergyny is found, it typically coexists with status ascription, social hierarchy, inequities in the distribution of resources, skewed sex ratios, and either dowry or bride price. Native Americans living in the United States during the 1800s faced many of the same conditions generally associated with hypergyny. As a class of people they were stigmatized, impoverished, and ascribed to the lowest position within the social order of the day. For some native women, though, hypergyny represented an avenue for social, economic, and political advancement. Among the Creek and Cherokee, for example, high-ranking individuals tended to be “the descendants of British and especially Scots-Irish traders, whereas full-bloods were mostly of lower rank” (Moore and Campbell 1995:515). In her study of gender and ethnic relations among 18th- and 19th-century Cherokees, Perdue notes that “trade or diplomacy could enhance the status of a woman only if she married a European; by doing so she possibly provided her lineage with an important patron, but the source of her own status and identity came to derive from her husband rather than her mother, brother, lineage, or clan” (1998:83). However, when an Indian man took a white wife, as some notable Cherokee leaders did, the marriage was received less warmly, especially by af®uent whites. In fact, riots in New England occurred in 1826 in response to the news that two white women from Cornwall, Connecticut, had married Cherokee men who were enrolled in a local missionary school (Perdue 1998:147). It is undeniable that many Indian women purposefully chose to marry outside their natal group. One case clearly documenting the validity of this point is found in Mihesuah’s 1991 study of Cherokee women enrolled in a seminary school in Oklahoma during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Mihesuah notes that of the “212 graduates, at least 189 eventually married. Most of them married white men or men who had a smaller amount of Cherokee blood than they had. Clearly, the more white blood the woman had, the more apt she was to marry a non-Cherokee” (1991:46). This is a classic example of hypergyny. And the children produced by these marriages were also likely to “marry well.” Moreover, mixed-bloods had the language and cultural skills needed to succeed in the white world (Hyde 1956:211).

The Boas Database Between 1888 and 1903, Franz Boas oversaw the collection of a vast amount of anthropometric and demographic data from over 18,000 subjects representing


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more than 200 tribal societies found throughout the United States, Canada, and Siberia (see Jantz et al. 1992; Jantz 1995). Several tribes native to the Southeast were included in these surveys (e.g., Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Catawba, Chitimacha, and Biloxi). Much of the work in this unparalleled effort to document biological and cultural diversity among indigenous peoples was done to prepare exhibitions for the 1892 World’s Columbian Exposition. This event, held in Chicago, celebrated the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of America. The Boas database, which was generated with the assistance of over 50 coworkers, was certainly the most exhaustive of its day. It also can be argued that these materials remain among the most important of their type concerning North American Indians. Ironically, however, very little was done with these data. The original data forms upon which Boas and his colleagues recorded physical measurements and biographical information fell into obscurity, and many later anthropologists did not even know of their existence. For all practical purposes, this uniquely rich database had been lost. One of our colleagues, Professor Richard L. Jantz, followed up on an obscure reference to American Indian data collected by Boas contained in Stewart (1973). In 1982 Jantz contacted David Hurst Thomas, then chairman of the anthropology department at the American Museum of Natural History, to determine whether the Boas data sheets were there. Jantz received word from Thomas that the Boas materials were indeed housed at the museum. Shortly thereafter, Jantz traveled to New York to inspect personally the long-forgotten data sheets, and after further inquiries he learned that some 3,000 additional sheets were stored at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia. Collectively the Boas data forms contain valuable information on over 16,000 Native Americans (and some 2,000 Siberians). Jantz soon secured a loan of these materials to the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where they are kept currently. The data sheets were copied onto micro¤lm, and with the assistance of several graduate students, the data were entered into computer ¤les. Having the Boas data computerized greatly increased their potential value. Researchers interested in Native American biology and ethnology now have complete access to an incredibly rich database, one that had lain idle in storage for decades. To date, a large number of theses, dissertations, and scholarly publications have been based on the data forms completed by Boas and his associates a century ago (see Jantz 1995). Each data sheet contains a range of questions. Fieldworkers recorded the date and place of the interview, as well as the subject’s name, sex, tribe, place of birth,



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father’s and mother’s tribal or ethnic af¤liation, and marital status. Also noted for many females was the number of children they had given birth to, as well as how many of their children were still living. Fertility data were not recorded for male subjects. In addition to the above, 12 anthropometric measurements and a number of phenotypic observations were recorded (e.g., hair color and type, nose shape). A note on “mode of life” was also entered (e.g., “farming,” “housewife”). In all, each form had 43 queries in addition to a subject identi¤cation number and the name of the recording ¤eldworker. An example of an original data sheet can be found in Jantz et al. (1992:438). Because most Boas data forms contain information about ethnicity and marriage, the individuals surveyed could be grouped by admixture or quantum. Fullblood Indians were clearly de¤ned, as were quarter-bloods, who all had one Indian grandparent. Half-bloods were delimited by blood quantum in the range of .5–.625 (mean = .51), and three-quarter-bloods were de¤ned by blood quantum between .75 and .875 (mean = .78). Because Boas and his coworkers also recorded the number of children living and dead, the relative fecundity and childhood survival rates could be determined for women in each quantum group. In this study we limited these statistics to women between 30 and 75 years of age. In this manner a question of fundamental importance could be tested: Did reduced quantum resulting from hypergyny confer a reproductive advantage? In other words, did admixed females have signi¤cantly more children than their fullblood counterparts? And did more of their children survive?

Quantum, Fecundity, and Surv ivorship In analyzing his data forms, Boas (1894) came to realize that half-bloods had more children than full-bloods. He also noted that full-bloods were experiencing higher rates of infant mortality, which would help to explain why the full-blood Indian population was increasing so slowly. Another difference he noted was that half-bloods, especially males, were taller on average than full-bloods or contemporary Euro-Americans. Because Boas believed that all the groups grew up in very similar circumstances, he felt that these differences by quantum could not be explained by the environment alone. A later study of all American Indians using U.S. census data from 1910 also showed that half-blood Indian women had more children than full-blood women and that more of those children survived. Dixon, for example, noting a population increase among the Oklahoma Cherokee since 1875, wrote that “The increase is due to the mixed-bloods who now form nearly 80 percent of the total population” (1915:83; see also Hrdli9ka 1931; Thornton 1987:175–182).


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Table 12.1 shows comparisons of several measures of fertility among quantum groups in the Boas database. The data demonstrate statistically signi¤cant correlations between quantum and reproductive success. First, among quantum groups, more full-blood females had not parented at the time they were interviewed (p < .005). Of the women within this quantum category, 28 percent remained childless. In contrast, all of the quarter-blood women from whom fertility data were recorded had parented at least one child. The half- and threequarter-bloods show intermediate values. It is clear that admixture had a signi¤cant impact on female fertility. It is unlikely that this can be the result of a different age composition of each sample, as the quantum groups have mean ages very close to each other. Full-blood women had signi¤cantly fewer children than all other quantum groups (p < .001). Quarter-blood females had almost twice as many children as full-blood females (7.3 vs. 4.2). Even when families with at least one child born are compared, full-blood women gave birth to signi¤cantly fewer children than quarter-bloods (p < .05) and half- and three-quarter-bloods (p < .02). Compounding the effects of fewer total births, full-blood children experienced higher mortality than admixed children (p < .005). The result was that full-blood women also had signi¤cantly fewer surviving children than admixed women (p < .001). Quarter-blood mothers had, on average, 5.1 children alive at the time of the survey, compared to 1.9 for full-blood mothers. While the sample size for quarter-bloods is small (n = 16), the difference is nonetheless signi¤cant (p < .001). As Table 12.1 shows, the Boas data clearly demonstrate a signi¤cant correlation between quantum and reproductive success. Also, as Mihesuah (1991) found among Cherokee women in Oklahoma, admixed females married outside their tribe more often than full-blood females. Full-blood females in the Boas database married other full-bloods 86 percent of the time, but only 41 to 46 percent of admixed Native American females married full-bloods. By virtually any measure—percent of females with children, fecundity, childhood survival rates —admixed Indian women certainly enjoyed greater biological rewards than fullbloods. Moreover, the correlation between quantum and reproductive success was progressive, in that the greater the degree of non-Indian admixture, the greater the biological rewards: ease of securing a husband, parenting larger families, and having more children who survive the risks associated with infancy and early childhood. The results shown in Table 12.1 are represented graphically in Figure 12.1. A similar trend is seen when adult females are placed into age cohorts. As


Table 12.1. Mean fecundity and mortality by quantum in the Boas database. Figures in bold indicate signi¤cant differences (maximum p < .02) compared to all other groups You are reading copyrighted material published by the University of Alabama Press. Any posting, copying, or distributing of this work beyond fair use as defined under U.S. Copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. For permission to reuse this work, contact the University of Alabama Press.

Figure 12.1. Mean fecundity and surviving children by quantum


Figure 12.2. Number of surviving children by age of mother and quantum


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quantum drops, fecundity increases regardless of age, and the mean number of surviving children also increases (Figure 12.2). This rise in childhood survivorship cuts across all age groupings. Full-blood females, irrespective of age, consistently had fewer living children than were recorded for their increasingly admixed counterparts.

Explaining Differential Fertility Explaining why reduced quantum had such a strong impact on a woman’s reproductive success is, to say the very least, a complex and problematic issue, one laden with a diverse set of probable causal agents or factors. The most basic of these is genetic. For virtually any species, inbreeding (mating between related individuals) is detrimental for many traits related to reproduction and overall ¤tness, lowers genetic variability (heterogeneity) in a population, tends to increase morphological asymmetry, and brings about the expression of rare recessive genes that are often deleterious to the individual. These effects are called “inbreeding depression.” In contrast, crossbreeding or outbreeding (mating between ancestrally separated individuals) can restore normal levels of genetic heterogeneity in inbred groups and often produces heterosis or “hybrid vigor,” especially in inbred family lines (Falconer 1989). The Boas data may provide an illustration of hybrid vigor: Sioux full-bloods, for example, were taller than contemporary whites (Boas 1894; Prince 1995). However, half- and three-quarterblood Sioux (n = 55) were on average almost three-quarters of an inch taller than full-bloods (n = 454; p < .06). This pattern is not true for all Native American tribes, and the Sioux may have had some nutritional advantages over other tribal populations (Prince 1995; Prince and Steckel 1998), so the greater stature of the admixed Sioux may be partly a result of genetic-environmental interactions (Falconer 1989). Most researchers ¤nd that inbreeding has a detrimental effect on human fecundity and childhood mortality (Freire-Maia and Elisbao 1984; Hann 1985; Reddy 1985), while some report little or no apparent effects on either (Edmond and De Braekeleer 1993a, 1993b). Some differences between ¤ndings are due to different degrees of inbreeding tested in each study. Couples having greater levels of consanguinity show more dramatic effects than others, and recurrent inbreeding increases the mean level of consanguinity. For example, the Havasupai of Arizona went through a population “bottleneck” in 1906, where disease-related mortality reduced the tribal population to only 166 members. Genealogical data on the Havasupai over the last century reveal a high correlation between level of



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inbreeding and measures of fetal asymmetry, representing developmental instability. However, children of marriages to whites showed signi¤cantly reduced levels of asymmetry, even though these couples lived in the same environment as endogamous couples (Markow and Martin 1993). Low genetic heterogeneity in American Indians would have contributed to lower fecundity as well. Genes for the major histocompatability complex (MHC) are involved in many aspects of an individual’s immune response, and they code for speci¤c antigens that help the body’s immune system recognize foreign molecules present on bacteria and viruses. American Indians show from one-quarter to one-half the MHC allele variants of Europeans or sub-Saharan Africans (Black 1992). There is ample evidence from animals and humans that parents with similar MHC alleles—as would be the case among related couples, and especially among American Indians—have an elevated risk of spontaneous abortion and fetal loss. In such cases, the mother’s immune system does not enhance implantation or protect the fetus, and with each embryonic/fetal loss the immune system protection for the next fetus is further diminished (Beer et al. 1983). Embryonic or fetal loss in utero, which may or may not be detected, is likely a major factor in longer birth intervals and lower fecundity (Wood and Weinstein 1990). In a study of Hutterites, where marriage between ¤rst cousins is common, Ober et al. (1983) found that parents who shared more than one variety of MHC alleles had greater intervals between births and that the birth intervals increased over time, resulting in lower fecundity than those who did not share as many alleles. The same results were found in a large sample of unrelated Michigan couples (Beer et al. 1983). The effect of genetic heterogeneity on fertility is suggested by the Boas data on full-bloods. In a comparison of fertility for native couples from the same tribe (n = 1,349) with tribally exogamous couples (n = 55), the same general pattern for admixed females was observed. Cross-tribal couples may show a slight advantage in fecundity compared with their tribally endogamous counterparts (4.8 vs. 4.1 children born, p < .09), and the difference in the percentage of women with no children (within tribe: 28 percent; exogamous: 16 percent) was signi¤cant (p < .05). When postnatal mortality is considered, full-blood couples of the same tribe had on average only 1.8 surviving children, compared to 2.4 living children for cross-tribal couples (p < .05). Thus, tribally endogamous marriages at this point in time could not sustain the population even at the replacement level (at this rate of reproduction [1.8] the number of full-bloods in a tribe would be halved in only seven generations). Although the individuals in these marriages were all


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full-bloods, as were their children, heterosis would be expected to be greater in children sired in cross-tribal marriages (e.g., Cherokee-Potowatomi or CreekOsage). Apparently, tribal exogamy did indeed confer a reproductive advantage. Low genetic heterogeneity in American Indians may have also placed them at greater risk of death from contagious diseases. Black (1992) singles out the genetic homogeneity of American Indians as the major reason for the high Indian mortality rate during epidemics, rather than any particular genes they did or did not possess. As Black (1992) noted and Gareen and Aaby (1990) discovered in rural Senegal, a measles infection from a close relative is more than twice as likely to cause death than an infection from an unrelated person. This increase in virulence results from the rapid mutation of the measles virus RNA, even within an individual, that preadapts it for infecting another person with similar MHC genes. With each successive “generation” of infection the mean mortality doubles, and secondary infections also contribute signi¤cantly to mortality. By the time measles has reached the fourth “generation” of infected persons who are related, the odds of dying are 16 times higher than for the ¤rst person infected. Large families and polygyny contributed to a higher mortality from measles in Senegal, and low heterogeneity, tribal endogamy, and polygyny would contribute to higher mortality from measles among American Indians. An eyewitness account illustrates the devastating effects of contagious diseases on the Pine Ride Sioux reservation: “To white people measles seemed a small matter and whooping cough was nothing specially bad, but among the Indians these childish complaints assumed a deadly form, and they often attacked adults and killed them” (Hyde 1956:236, citing Bishop Hare 1889). As Black noted, “Intermarriage between populations reduces the problem, but an unfortunate consequence of intermarriage is often the loss of indigenous culture” (1992:1740). A wealth of cultural and economic variables can be identi¤ed that most likely had a direct effect on differential fertility and childhood survivorship for fullblood and increasingly admixed Native Americans during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Perhaps the most obvious disparity between full-blood families and admixed families was access to basic resources, where women of reduced quantum enjoyed a distinct advantage. Many had Euro-American husbands who were, in a comparative sense, economically well-to-do (Mihesuah 1991:46; Moore and Campbell 1995:504–505). The magnitude of this economic disparity has recently been documented by Riggs (1999) for the Cherokees just prior to their removal to Oklahoma. By virtually any measure, admixed Cherokees enjoyed a more prosperous life. Moreover, non-Indian husbands were not faced with clan-



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based requirements, responsibilities shouldered by Cherokee men, to help support the clanmates of their mother and sister. In this way, resources controlled by white husbands could be kept exclusively within the nuclear family. For Cherokee men, a signi¤cant part of their wealth went to members of an extended kindred based on matrilineal descent. The domestic economy for many full-bloods, however, was truly bleak. On reservations, many individuals were forced into total dependency on government rations and annuities (Campbell 1993; Prince 1995). For tribes without such “privileged” federal support, individuals fared as best they could. One thing is certain, though: the quality of a family’s domestic economy has a strong impact on childhood nutrition, which in turn affects the body’s immune system, growth rate, disease load, and risk of premature death (Scrimshaw 1968). Many fullbloods at the close of the 19th century were confronted with living conditions that placed them, and especially their children, in a social realm of hardship and disadvantage (Hyde 1956:235–238). The mortality data presented here clearly demonstrate this point. Aside from the political economy of ill health that ravaged many full-blood families, likely claiming the majority of infant and childhood lives, other variables also may have contributed to the elevated mortality of offspring born to full-blood couples (see Becker et al. 1990; Kennedy and Deapen 1991). These include maternal age at ¤rst birth, maternal diabetes, relative risk of contracting tuberculosis and other infectious diseases, access to medical care, and personal and domestic hygiene. Certain cultural practices, such as wrapping an infant’s cut umbilical cord with nonsterile material, a practice that can lead to infantile tetanus, could have contributed to full-bloods’ high mortality rate (see McConville 1991). Other cultural traditions may have also adversely affected fertility rates for full-blood couples. As Clara Sue Kidwell suggests (personal communication, 1996), adherence to postpartum and other sexual taboos (e.g., Axtell 1981:22–23; Driver 1969:382) would lead to increased spacing between births, thus thwarting a woman’s reproductive potential. Among the Lakota, for example, “After a woman became pregnant, she was supposed to refrain from sexual relations.” DeMallie goes on to note, “It was expected that the couple would not resume sexual relations until the baby had stopped nursing; this could be a period of four or ¤ve years” (1983:256). Such abstinence, however, did not characterize hypergynous marriages between Indians and whites. A reduction in the time of breastfeeding may have also contributed to higher fertility among admixed women.


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Much of the rapid growth in today’s Native American population can be attributed to changes in infant feeding practices, notably the use of formula and bottles (Romaniuk 1981). Population loss within traditional tribal communities would have provided a motivation for the taking of captives: children for adoption, women for wives, and adult males to replace slain warriors. John Norton, a Mohawk who visited relatives in the Cherokee Nation in 1810, was struck by the number of adopted tribal members he saw. Perdue makes reference to Norton’s reaction: “. . . so many captives were adopted into the Cherokee nation that the Cherokees lost any distinctive appearance they might earlier have possessed” (1998:98). Some of those adopted into Cherokee society were from neighboring tribes; others were African slaves (e.g., Molly “Chickea” Tucker; see Perdue 1998:150–151). Many whites adopted into Cherokee clans gained this privilege through marriage to Cherokee women. And the children from such unions were considered members of the tribe, despite their admixture. Regardless of the causal factors that produced the highly skewed fertility and mortality rates seen in the Boas data, one thing remains abundantly clear: admixture resulting from hypergyny conferred signi¤cant biological rewards. Native women with Euro-American husbands enjoyed, as did their children, an immense reproductive advantage over full-blood couples, especially those who secured a mate from their own tribe of origin. This long valued tradition of tribal endogamy carried, in the changed environment of the 19th and early 20th centuries, signi¤cant costs: reduced fecundity and elevated infant and childhood mortality.

The Indian Ancestor Reconsidered Being af¤liated with public institutions, we are frequently approached by individuals who voluntarily divulge, and with considerable pride, that they are part Indian. Most typically go on to say that this Indian ancestor of theirs was a woman, usually a great-grandmother, who was also a Cherokee princess (Logan 1990; Thornton 1990:172–174). This phenomenon of the long-lost Indian ancestor is not restricted to the South. Russell Thornton, analyzing 1980 U.S. census data, reports that 6,754,800 Americans claimed some degree of Indian ancestry (1990:189). This ¤gure is nearly ¤ve times greater than that recorded in the same year for Native Americans (n = 1,366,676; 1990:151). Interestingly, among the more than six million respondents who claimed partial Indian ancestry, 76.6 percent also identi¤ed their race as white (1990:189). This sizable population of admixed individuals is



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the product of hypergynous marriages some three, four, or more generations ago. How many of these claims are valid remains unknown, but we suspect there is some degree of “ethnic forgery,” something Simmons (1977) observed in his study of self-reported Indian identity in Denver, Colorado. Perhaps a more signi¤cant question concerns the gender of the Indian ancestor. Put simply, why is a female most typically identi¤ed? For several semesters the senior author has asked students enrolled in his courses if anyone is part Indian. The results of this informal survey are certainly instructive. Depending on the class, approximately 10 to 15 percent of those enrolled claimed some degree of Native American heritage. More interestingly, though, the vast majority of these students (90+ percent) traced their ancestry back to an Indian woman. Additionally, when tribal af¤liation was given, reference to the Cherokee greatly outnumbered all other tribes, with a ratio nearing 20 to 1. Why should the Cherokee be cited so frequently? Four reasons can be identi¤ed. First, the Cherokee—unlike some other groups, such as the Puebloans, who adhered strongly to tribal endogamy—have a long tradition of marrying outside their tribe (see Moore and Campbell 1995:505; Perdue 1998). Second, the Cherokee have become our nation’s largest tribe (Thornton 1990:145), one that is highly dispersed, with primary concentrations in North Carolina and Oklahoma and a smaller grouping in California. Third, as Thornton notes, the “Cherokees are probably the best known of all contemporary American Indian people. People believing they have Indian ancestry might simply de¤ne it as Cherokee for this reason” (1990:173–174). Fourth, they were also a “civilized” tribe, becoming quite successful in the ways of the whites. This fact may have made it more socially acceptable for many who claim partial Indian ancestry to have a Cherokee ancestor rather than a distant relative from some other tribe that was less known or less acculturated. The question as to why so many trace their heritage to an Indian woman, rather than a man, can also be addressed from a variety of perspectives. It is well known, for example, that the adult sex ratio for Indian peoples during the 1800s was strongly skewed in favor of females (e.g., Ewers 1985:212; Moore 1990:326). Many men of marriageable age had been killed in intertribal wars or in con®icts with the U.S. government. Others had been imprisoned. The requirement of clan exogamy further reduced the number of potential mates from which a female could secure a husband (Gearing 1962:21). This left a surplus of women, many of whom married non-Indians. Another reason why so many people trace their Indian heritage to a female has to do with descent. For matrilineal tribes such as the Cherokee, children of


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marriages with a member of a different tribe (including non-Indians) inherited the ethnicity and clan membership of their mother (Thornton 1990:173). If she was considered Cherokee, so, too, were her children, regardless of the ethnic af¤liation of their father (Perdue 1998:98, 150). But if a Cherokee man was married to a non-Indian woman, any children produced would be judged by other Cherokees to be non-Indian. In Canada’s Indian policy, however, just the opposite was legislated by the Canadian government: children inherited the ethnic membership of their father (see Price 1979:217). In 1825 the Cherokees broke from traditional custom and recognized the children born of Cherokee men and white women as “citizens” of the tribe, although their clan membership was problematic. To us the most signi¤cant reason why so many lost Indian ancestors were females pertains to hypergyny. Women enjoyed this avenue for upward social mobility much more so than Indian men. This reality in the complex arena of gender and inter-ethnic relations serves well to explain why so many Americans who claim some degree of Indian ancestry trace their partial Indian heritage to a female.

Conclusions Franz Boas was truly a remarkable scholar. His eclecticism, drive, and insight remain unparalleled, and he has bequeathed to all contemporary anthropologists having an interest in Native American culture and biology an invaluable legacy in his data forms. Collectively these data serve as a window for glimpsing into the past, but with analytical tools and theoretical perspectives not available to Boas or his coworkers. In a variety of settings and historical periods, hypergyny has served as an avenue for female upward social mobility, and America at the turn of the 20th century was certainly no exception. Several conditions collectively favored Indian-white marriages at this point in American history. These include a relative shortage of Indian men of marriageable age, discrimination against full-bloods, the growing number of single whites who interacted with native tribes, and, most signi¤cantly, the economic and social rewards that Indian women—especially admixed women—could gain through marriage to a non-Indian. As the Boas data so boldly demonstrate, there were also signi¤cant biological rewards associated with hypergyny and heterozygosity. It should be noted once again that admixed females were more likely to secure a mate and to parent than full-bloods, 28 percent of whom had not parented at the time of the Boas survey. Admixed women also enjoyed greater fecundity and reduced childhood



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mortality than their full-blood counterparts. And the observed disparities in birth and death rates were sizable and statistically signi¤cant, frequently at the .001 level. Reduced quantum carried many bene¤ts, both biological and socioeconomic. Such bene¤ts, however, eroded many tribal customs. With admixture it became increasingly dif¤cult to maintain aboriginal languages and longhonored customs. In their critique of the Boas database, Moore and Campbell (1995) correctly note that these materials collected a century ago contain certain biases. For example, adult males were over-represented, while relatively few children were surveyed. Additionally, much of the information was collected at Indian agencies and schools, something that favored the inclusion of mixed-bloods. These and other sampling biases are identi¤ed by Moore and Campbell, who go on to note (1995:515) that the Boas data for any tribe were not randomly drawn from the entire tribal population at that time. Because of the non-random nature of the database, these authors strongly urge against the quantitative testing of any continental or pan-tribal hypotheses using the Boas data. Better sampling, as well as controlling for tribally speci¤c ethnohistoric factors (e.g., Were mixed-bloods more often socially esteemed or stigmatized?), must be completed, they argue, before any quantitative analyses are begun (1995:516). While the methodological issues raised by Moore and Campbell deserve greater commentary than we can provide here, we should point out that anthropologists rarely use truly randomly drawn samples. This was certainly not something that Boas and his coworkers could accomplish. In fact, no truly random samples of Native Americans living at the turn of the century exist. Any data collected at that time will contain sampling biases. There certainly is some bias in the relative sizes of the tribal samples collected by Boas and his coworkers. For example, only four Seminoles were measured and interviewed. Moreover, not all North American tribes were surveyed. However, the Boas database is the largest of its kind, and it is likely the most representative of any collected. Boas was one of the few anthropologists to collect signi¤cant amounts of data from women and children, partly because of his belief that fewer data should be collected from more persons rather than vice versa, in anticipation of future research, and partly because of his interest in human growth (Boas 1892, 1894, 1895a, 1895b, 1897, 1899). Although data were indeed collected in schools and agencies, only 18 percent (2,767) of the 15,149 locations listed on the data forms are an agency, school, institute, institution, reservation, reserve, or education home. Including data collected at forts (1,069) increases the proportion to 25 percent. The majority of the Boas data (75 percent) were collected in residences, villages, towns, and cities.


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Rather than rejecting the value of the Boas database for quantitative testing of continental hypotheses, we should recognize this unique set of materials for what it is: the largest cross-tribal survey of its day. Hypotheses such as the one examined here should be tested further using the Boas data, as well as other ethnographic data, and retested using other data sets, including ones that are tribally speci¤c (e.g., the James R. Walker data on the Teton Sioux; see Hrdli9ka 1931; Prince 1995; and Prince and Steckel 1998). Regardless of the original source of data and its possible sampling errors, we remain con¤dent that the ¤eld materials collected by Franz Boas demonstrate that hypergyny and decreased quantum had a direct and strong impact on reproductive success among Native Americans. During the 19th century, native females who intermarried with whites and admixed tribal members enjoyed a decided reproductive advantage. The number of women who made this choice was by no means small. Many thousands married non-Indian husbands. This fact serves well to explain why so many mainstream Americans today claim a longlost Indian ancestor, and why, in the vast majority of cases, this genealogical tie is to an Indian woman several generations removed.


13 American Indian Life and the 21st-Century University The “Playful Worldview” and Its Lessons for Leadership in Higher Education

Kendall Blanchard

Introduction Anthropology is unique among the social sciences in that it typically recruits from among the marginalized, those of us uncomfortable with conformity, suspicious of rituals that others take for granted, and frequently uneasy around people whom history has dictated as being like ourselves. Anthropology as an academic enterprise, whether one views it as a science or one of the humanities, is a window on the opportunities provided by diversity, a perspective for understanding one’s own marginalization, and ultimately a quest for meaning and search for self. In many ways the anthropologist in the ¤eld can be seen as a troubled soul seeking for a new identity, a supplicant in a pith helmet, or a novitiate seeking truth in the guise of phonemes and kinship terms. I am convinced that this uncertainty is what is most genuine about our curiosity, what leads us to ask the right questions, and what helps to ensure a certain level of objectivity. It is this sense of not having answers that generates an interest in the answers of others. The marginalization is the unarticulated motive behind the anthropological quest. The uncertainty is the will to learn. In this regard, the anthropologist is predisposed to be a true student of culture—a learner ¤rst and myth-teller second. For this reason, I agree with Halperin (1996:4) that one of the weaknesses inherent in anthropology’s current preoccupation with the other as victim of political and economic suffering is that it diminishes or supplants the thrill, the satisfaction, or the astonishment of enlightenment. It is the experience I sometimes describe as “the moment of Aha!” As Halperin suggests, anthropologists should be about the “search for new perspectives to individual and cultural problems through exploring societies beyond their own” (1996:4). Subsequently, as we, the anthropologists, tell our stories, either by design or by default, we internalize the lessons and reshape our own lives. The experience


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of living the other, of recording the details, and of describing that experience for others gives new meaning to our marginalization. It also arms us with new ideas, new answers, and new solutions. In so doing, the experience prepares us—and, by extension, our students—for leadership in a world made smaller by communication technology yet larger by the new immediacy of its diversity. My quest as an anthropologist began in the library. Late in my undergraduate career, I discovered the works of Teilhard de Chardin, Loren Eiseley, W. W. Howells, and Weston La Barre. From here it was to my ¤rst class in anthropology with Ron Spores at Vanderbilt. Several years later I found myself at the end of my graduate course work at Southern Methodist looking for a ¤eld setting and problem for my dissertation research. I had assumed I would be working with my adviser, Ben Wallace, on a project he was directing in the Philippines. However, the funding that would have supported me on that project did not materialize. I still had some of my National Defense Education Act fellowship, was intrigued by the work of the Ramah Project, and with encouragement from Jack Roberts and Robert Rapoport struck out on my own for Navajo country to follow up on Rapoport’s (1954) studies of religious change that he had conducted in the early 1950s (Blanchard 1977). After completing my graduate work, I moved to Tennessee and my ¤rst full-time teaching position. Subsequently, I was asked to serve on the board of an organization headquartered in Nashville called the Southeastern Indian Antiquities Society. Phillip Martin, tribal chair of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, was also a member of that board. He invited me to Mississippi. I went. Over the next few years, with help from members of the Choctaw community, assistance from tribal employees such as Marty Gamblin, and encouragement from anthropologist John Peterson and others, I got involved in the life of the Choctaw community (Blanchard 1981). During my years in higher education, my work with various special-interest groups has provided many opportunities to visit, work in, and experience the Native American community. These groups have included the Tennessee Indian Association, United Southeastern Tribes, the Save the Children American Nations Program, the Sequoyah Institute, and the Institute for First Americans. In sum, these experiences, particularly those in the South, have had a profound impact on my life, my worldview, and my approach to leadership in higher education.

Public Higher Education Public higher education in America is under siege. It is underfunded yet overcommitted. It frequently is cited as illustrative of the country’s major ills, yet perhaps as often it is viewed as the regimen for its healing. Increasingly, the in-



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stitution is expected to do more, yet to do it with less. It now stands in a long line at the state funding trough behind corrections, law enforcement, welfare, health care, and K–12 education. Basic research at our colleges and universities has been the principal force behind the technology revolution, yet frequently these same colleges and universities cannot afford the technology needed to keep pace with business and industry. Competition from private for-pro¤t ¤rms that offer shop-at-home educational alternatives (“virtual universities”) threatens to make the traditional college experience obsolete. And throughout all of this the institution constantly must fend off the ill-informed suggestions and schemes of self-made educational experts, ambitious politicians, would-be reformers, and meddling boards of trust. These are dif¤cult times for the institution. Still, today’s public university has never been more vital. Despite the rapidity and magnitude of change, the mission of the public university remains virtually unchanged: to provide education and training for America’s workforce and to prepare an enlightened citizenry ready to assume positions of responsibility and leadership in a democratic society. Liberal education continues to be the linchpin of the university’s mission. It is the principal mechanism by which higher education ful¤lls its obligations to both the student and the taxpaying public that funds the institution. Anthropology is central to a responsive liberal education in the 1990s. It is a model for learning, an avenue for discovery and innovation, a perspective for understanding and appreciating diversity, and a language appropriate to the de¤nition and articulation of the common culture that unites all Americans. Having been in positions of leadership at ¤ve regional state universities in the past 20 years, as department chair, arts and sciences dean, chief academic of¤cer, and now president, I have had the opportunity to guide program development, shape policy, provide leadership in the de¤nition of university goals and objectives, and articulate institutional visions. At one level, anthropology as a distinctive perspective and methodology has in®uenced those activities. At another level, the lessons learned among American Indians, particularly those in the South (speci¤cally, the Choctaws), have in®uenced my administrative style, my philosophy of education, and my vision for the future of university education. The nature of that in®uence as it relates to the issue of leadership in today’s public universities is the subject of this chapter.

The American Indian Experience Obviously, one must be careful that efforts to generalize about the American Indian experience do not mask, minimize, or underplay the diversity of that ex-


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perience. That diversity notwithstanding, there are cultural traits or patterns that seem to run across tribal boundaries. These may be manifested with varying levels of intensity in any particular setting, but the net effect is a common, overarching ethos or level of shared experience that links together the many varieties of lifeways that characterize aboriginal America. Perhaps it is a vestige of the common heritage of Native Americans and their adaptation to the distinctive environment of the Western Hemisphere. Another danger one faces in trying to articulate the Native American experience for oneself and for others outside the Indian community is the tendency to rewrite culture in a way that distorts the subject itself. In telling the myth, the myth becomes as much ours as theirs. Our subjects are transcribed into creations of our imaginations or products of our extrapolation from some educated assumptions about the past. They become aboriginal Americans in the way we have consciously or unconsciously come to believe they should be. It is the danger of confusing the ethnographic present with poetic license. Nevertheless, I would argue that this idealization, the presentation of a particular Indian nation’s experience as both a present reality and a vestige of what was, is in itself a valuable perspective for understanding. It is also a tool for learning lessons that have the potential to reshape our lives. The process of writing the experience of others is the process of articulating the ethic that lies behind the obvious. It is in most cases an ethic in which ideal and real, past and present, observed and presumed are woven together in ways that make unraveling dif¤cult. It is in the process of trying to understand and articulate that ethic (e.g., themes, principles, premises) that we learn our most valuable lessons. Often our lives, outlooks, and behaviors change, not so much by what we have observed but from what we come to know ought to be in a world made perfect on its own terms.

Playful Worldv iew One trait that seems to be tied to the fundamental ethic de¤ning life in individual American Indian groups and which may be common to the Native American experience in general is something I have described as a “playful worldview” (Blanchard 1986). It is tied to what seems to be a distinctively Native American environmental adaptation, quite different from that characteristic of traditional Euro-America. It is perhaps most adequately described as “playful adaptation.” Playful adaptation is an effective survival mechanism. Play, like work, has important functions and consequences. The critical distinction in the comparison of adaptive styles is not between work and play, but rather between levels of



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playfulness. More playful systems (e.g., Native American) re®ect a distancing style that is indirect, ®exible, curvilinear, and often circuitous. Less playful systems (e.g., Euro-American) tend to operate with a direct, in®exible, linear, confrontational mode. Both styles ultimately lead to the achievement of adaptive goals, at least ideally, but in different ways (Blanchard 1986:86). The manifestations of this distinctive worldview are many. They are evident in the types of games played by American Indians, their fascination with gaming, the playful approach to subsistence activities and environmental relations, cosmologies, religious systems, political life, sense of time, and types of humor (see Blanchard 1986 for details). The playful worldview is presented here as a comprehensive paradigm that encompasses and, to a certain extent, explains a wide range of behavioral patterns and cultural practices that characterize Native American life. This playful worldview has helped to shape my administrative philosophy and style and has the potential for helping to reshape the way we think of leadership in American higher education as it prepares to face the challenges of the 21st century.

Higher Education and Leadership Indian-Style University communities are by de¤nition fractious, from a management perspective dif¤cult to lead (“herding cats”), and typically slow to change (“more dif¤cult than moving a cemetery”). Yet this is to be expected. Scholars and artists are, by de¤nition, independent, creative, and freethinking. The university environment invites, indeed must invite, debate, criticism, and controversy. The institution of tenure protects one’s right to be different while simultaneously lending itself to a type of entrenchment than can impede change and institutional responsiveness. At the same time, universities are distinctive among organizations in general in that they bring together as equals people who rank among the world’s brightest and most accomplished. Effective administration in this environment is one that ¤nds ways of making full use of those talents in the planning, budgeting, and management process. Collegiality and real faculty governance are essential in this environment. The complexity of administration in today’s university has been exacerbated by the new uncertainties of postmodern thought, the realities of chaos (theoretical or otherwise), and the information glut created by the new technology. Easy answers have become even more elusive, and communication problems have been compounded. Ironically, in an age blessed with more sophisticated machinery than ever to facilitate communication, it seems that real communication has


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never been more dif¤cult. I think this is particularly characteristic of life on a college campus. It is as though the plethora of information, data, and factoids forces us to be more selective than ever in distinguishing the essential from the nonessential. The human mind can handle only so much information at a time; modern technology has forced us to tune out more than we are prepared to tune in. Unfortunately, in this process we simply do not have time for all the correspondence that is designed for our attention. E-mail messages go unread, web pages are left unopened, memoranda are trashed, and crowded bulletin boards are ignored. Communication gaps seem at times to be more obvious than ever, perhaps because rather than in spite of the new technology. The American Indian experience speaks to the dilemmas of administration in higher education in the 1990s. Typically, when I am asked about my administrative style, I cite my training as an anthropologist and my experience in the Native American community. These ingredients were relevant to the realities of campus life 20 years ago; I am convinced they are even more applicable now. The lessons learned have been many, but of most importance are the following: 1. A playful approach to administrative planning and decision making is in¤nitely more effective than its non-playful counterpart. In today’s climate of multiple points of view and competing authorities, a circular approach to problem solving is more likely than the linear approach to get positive results, particularly on a university campus. An administrator is ¤rst and foremost a facilitator and discussion leader. Administrators pose general questions and present ideas in such a way that the ideas are viewed as belonging to everyone privy to the discussions. They talk around ideas and in many ways let the discussions shape themselves. They keep the major issues on the table but bracket their egos. They circle debates like boxers pacing the perimeter of a ring, looking for an opening. And they wait until they sense that the collective wisdom of the group has opened the appropriate doors. Then they walk through those doors. When the process works it is as though the Fates have predetermined the institution’s destiny. It is a circuitous process, it is time-consuming, and it is playful, but it works. In the fall of 1995, for example, I opened the academic year at the University of Tennessee at Martin with a special presentation on technology and teaching (“Cybernetics and Higher Education: Revolution or Evolution?”). Subsequently, I scheduled a series of such presentations by other members of the faculty. I also wrote a position paper (“Technology and Multimediation at UT Martin: A Proposal for Responsive Planning and Budgeting”) in which I attempted to pull together and create a singular focus for the several planning efforts currently



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under way on campus. It was my intention to get the entire campus community thinking and talking about the implications of technology for higher education in general and for the University of Tennessee at Martin in particular. Out of the many perspectives and points of view that were brought to this discussion came a shared commitment to a set of objectives designed to increase the effective procurement, utilization, and integration of instructional technology. Throughout this whole exchange, I saw myself as guiding the discussion, but from the perspective of a grand context rather than from that of my personal vision for the future of the institution. I think of it as a style and an approach not uncommon to traditional leaders among native societies such as the Navajo natani or the Choctaw mingo. 2. The Native American worldview and approach to science and understanding can be viewed in many ways as more conducive to an effective scienti¤c agenda and the demands of the 21st century than is the traditional Euro-American worldview. I have referred to this approach in other contexts as “playful pragmatism” (Blanchard 1999). The themes of this worldview have obvious application to the challenges that higher education in general and science in particular face as they enter the next millennium. These themes include the following: • Openness

to collaboration, lengthy discussion, and multiple explanations. This openness does not impose arti¤cial absolutes and tends to move the discussion in the direction of what makes sense and what is in the best interest of the many rather that of the few. • Environmental sensitivity. The cooperative relationship between human beings and nature and the recognition of their mutual dependency is essential to saving human life and the world as we know them. Modern science can be well served by developing a clear sense that the relationship between people and nature is a symbiotic one: humans need nature, and nature needs humans. • Sense of holism. The Native American perspective is one that understands and appreciates the interconnectedness of all things. Nothing can be understood apart from its total context. This perspective is of particular importance in today’s high-tech world where computer networks and integrated systems must be approached from such a holistic perspective. • Sense of time. Technology is changing our sense of time. Consider for example, the recent development of a technique that slows signi¤cantly the speed at which light travels. The net effect is that time is becoming increasingly relative and that Americans are becoming less dependent on the traditional clock. The Native American tendency to understand time in relationship to events may be


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an ideal model by which Americans rethink the relationship of their daily lives to time. • Ability to integrate science and oral tradition or history. Native America is not uncomfortable with story, metaphor, and humor as ways of speaking to fundamental issues of scienti¤c import. Indeed, “nativization” is a way tribal groups integrate innovations into their cultural worlds. A new origin myth, for example, can aid the introduction of new ideas or technology, in essence making the novelty legitimate by placing it within the tribe’s oral tradition (R. Wheelock, personal communication, March 22, 1999). • Integration of sacred knowledge and practical knowledge. Rather than impeding or clashing with scienti¤c understanding, the sacred traditions of Native America are actually interwoven with scienti¤c understanding. 3. Leadership by example on a college campus is more effective than leadership by ¤at. Such a style features persuasion rather than strong-arm tactics, reason rather than intimidation. Such leadership is the prevailing norm among those native groups with which I have worked (e.g., Blanchard 1981:136). It is consistent with the circularity of the playful approach to management. It is a leadership that communicates, albeit quietly, this simple message: I expect nothing from you that I do not also expect of myself. And it is a style of leadership that lends itself to a sense of academic community on a college campus. This is why I think it is important that those who assume positions of responsibility as academic leaders at today’s public universities continue to teach, stay involved in professional organizations appropriate to their training, and maintain a credible level of scholarship. Only then can they speak with the authority necessary to provide real leadership in today’s academic community. 4. Talking to consensus, though dif¤cult on a college campus, is a mode of dialogue appropriate to today’s academic community. It is the nature of the political process among many Indian groups, in the South and elsewhere. I have watched, sometimes long into the night, as tribal councils have talked and talked and talked, only to adjourn without action to return the next evening to continue the discussion. It is a slow and often tedious process, but it is effective. It is a process whereby the collective wisdom of the group is articulated and in which any action taken is, by covenant, the responsibility of everyone in the group. This is what makes it effective and worth the frustrations that come with what can seem like never-ending debate. It is at the heart of real participatory democracy (Weatherford 1991:181–194). It is also most appropriate to a college campus. A



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faculty that can come together and as a group reach consensus is one that can change the world. 5. Flat management models are more appropriate to today’s college campus than are the hierarchical models generally associated with a Euro-American industrial tradition. Technology is changing the way the world does business and the way individual companies are organized to do that business. Increasingly, hierarchical models of management are being replaced by models that feature more selfmanaged work groups and teams. The gap between the managers and the managed is shrinking, and everyone in the organization is becoming part of the decision-making process. Higher education should be providing leadership in the move toward and adoption of such models. These models are consistent with the way faculties work most effectively and with the playful worldview characteristic of Native America. Speci¤cally, American Indian cosmologies tend to “limit categorical distinctions between ‘this world’ and ‘other world,’ are more circular than hierarchical in nature, and emphasize harmonious relationships between parts rather than unilateral dominance and submission” (Blanchard 1986:84). Cosmologies have implications for the organization of social life and the distribution of authority. Similar to citizens of traditional Native American nations, faculties work best in organizational environments that feature collegiality rather than the power of position. 6. Face-to-face communication remains important in higher education, despite the many alternative communication modes we now have at our disposal. I call it the honesty of presence. Talking directly to a student or colleague brings with it a candor and a total communication experience that cannot be reconstructed completely by telephone, e-mail message, or video transmission. It is a means of ensuring the quality of transmission, conveying the context of intent, and allowing the courtesy of immediate response. As a university administrator, I have always made sure that whenever I am forced to make a negative personnel decision (e.g., denying tenure or promotion), I hand-deliver the letter to the appropriate faculty of¤ce, inform the faculty member regarding my decision, explain why I made that decision, and give the person an opportunity to ask questions and protest my decision. 7. Playfulness is important to civility in relationships among colleagues in today’s institutions of higher learning. There is something to be said for humor, particularly the self-deprecating humor characteristic of many American Indian groups, and the way humor is used to facilitate discussion, decision making, and social control. Using humor is consistent with a circular discourse that reduces


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the friction of con®ict, minimizes damage to egos, and avoids public humiliation, yet still gets the job done. It is also important that effective administrators always be ready to laugh at themselves. It is essential to survival in the mad, mad world of today’s university. Taking oneself too seriously is a shortcut to failure.

Conclusion and Summary Never before in the history of the human race have so many talked so much yet said so little about the subject of leadership. The topic has spread like kudzu over the entire academic world, business community, and public life arena. It seems there are more publications, organizations, seminars, workshops, classes, training sessions, and courses on leadership than beads at Mardi Gras. Despite all of this attention, leadership in America remains in crisis. So, as one might expect, much of the work of would-be leadership gurus focuses on the problems of leadership and its limitations in the world of the late 20th century. Many of the ideas coming out of these discussions are new but of little relevance to the realities of organizational life in contemporary America. In many ways, leaders can no longer lead because they are relying on a traditional authority that may no longer exist. Position in itself is not a motivator, in part because the myths and rituals that once provided the props for position have been exposed. Traditionally, authority of position has been tied to the control of information. As long as information was a scarce commodity, the myths that sustained authority were safe. However, the information era in many ways has demythologized position by undermining the bases of traditional authority. The new technology, while increasing the gap between those who have access to information and those who do not, is at the same time reducing the gap among those who do. As a result, management styles are changing in response to the technologies. Teams are replacing bosses. Decision making is being diffused across the organization. Leadership is taking on radically different meanings. Ironically, technology is in many ways creating organizational environments that lend themselves to those nonlinear models of leadership and thinking endemic to the traditional life of America’s Indian community. A playful worldview, along with decision-making, strategizing, and communication styles consistent with that perspective, has never been more appropriate. It is as though the new technology and the mood created by postmodernism are moving the American psyche from its linear modes of thinking to the circularity characteristic of Native America. It is suggested here that organizations in general, and institutions of higher education in particular, would pro¤t by learning and applying the



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lesson of the Navajo, the Choctaw, the Chickasaw, the Sioux, and the other aboriginal peoples of this continent. Theirs is a legacy of valuable lessons. Thus it may be that what the country in general and public higher education in particular need is not a new model of leadership but rather a rediscovery of that legacy: the lessons of leadership that remain a valuable part of America’s Indian heritage.


Conclusions Rachel A. Bonney

T

he chapters in this volume, intended to be a retrospective of the relationships between anthropologists and Indians in the New South over the past 30 years, actually are a retrospective of the past century and a glimpse of what the new millennium will be, a “new world” for both anthropologists and Indians. These chapters represent work with a number of southern tribes (Catawba [ Janet Levy], Cherokee [Max White, Lisa Le®er], Choctaw [Kendall Blanchard], Lumbee [Karen Blu], Maya [Allan Burns], Seminole [Penny Jessel, Susan Stans] and Waccamaw Sioux [Patricia Lerch]) and present an interesting array of topics and approaches as well as a re®ection of the relative ages and experiences of these scholars. Despite their diversity, a few themes are pervasive in all these essays: change and history, anthropological methodologies and perspectives, federal recognition or acknowledgment of tribes, and Indian identity. To some extent, these themes are interwoven as well.

The Past and Change As anthropologists and scholars studying Indian communities, we are continually engaged in the study of cultural change—changes re®ected in the archaeological record, changes resulting from contact with European cultures and later with the American culture, and changes in lifestyles and value systems, to name just a few. However, sometimes we become so immersed in our study of change in other cultures that we tend to forget that we are also experiencing change in our own culture—and our own discipline—as well as in the Native American cultures that we study. Change in federal policies toward Indians—speci¤cally, recognition or acknowledgment—is the focus of George Roth’s chapter. This article is signi¤cant because it presents hitherto unpublished information on the acknowledgment process of tribes such as the Chitimacha (recognized and reservation established


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in 1917), the Mississippi Choctaw (recognition and reservation by land purchase in 1918), and the Catawba, as well as failure to grant acknowledgment to certain tribes (Coushatta), the former criteria of the federal government for recognition, and rationales for the actions taken by the government. Of interest in Roth’s chapter, as well, is the fact that while relationships with tribes in the West were being terminated through allotment policies, and later, in the 1950s, through the Termination Act, the government was acknowledging southeastern tribes and buying land for them to establish reservations. Because Roth’s chapter goes through only the 1970s, he does not discuss, although he does mention, the reacknowledgment and restoration of the Catawba to federal status in 1993. Change in the discipline of anthropology is also re®ected in several chapters. When anthropology was getting its start as a scholarly discipline, the New South —the post–Civil War South—was emerging. Anthropologists such as Mooney, Speck, and others were working in the Boasian tradition of ¤eldwork and participant observation in southern tribes. These early anthropologists concentrated on recording what they could of traditions that were disappearing, emphasizing observation rather than participation, and attempting to describe traditional cultures before they had disappeared completely. Max White’s article on the scholarly research and orientations of anthropologists working with the Eastern Cherokee clearly shows this orientation in the work of early scholars such as James Mooney and Franz Olbrechts. Michael Logan and Stephen Ousley’s chapter on hypergamy in the South also re®ects the Boasian tradition, drawing on a database of more than 16,000 Native Americans collected by Boas. These data are fairly comprehensive, including the names, sex, tribe, place of birth, parental tribal/ethnic af¤liation, marital status, and, for females/mothers, fertility information, yet to date they have been utilized by only a few scholars and offer a potentially valuable database for future research. By the middle of the 20th century, anthropological research was focusing on studies of contemporary communities and ethnohistorical concerns. White’s article refers to the changes in the “theories and paradigms” by such scholars as John Gulick, Raymond Fogelson, Harriett Kupferer, Pendleton Banks, Hester Davis, and Robert K. Thomas. Generally, anthropologists continued to pursue “scholarly” topics which they themselves chose and entered the Indian communities as participant observers; the role of the people under investigation was basically that of passive “subjects” of study. Applied anthropology at the time was emerging as a comparatively new approach, sometimes referred to as “Sol Tax’s action anthropology,” but comparatively few researchers were interested in applying anthropological knowledge and skills to the communities they were studying.


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The 30-year period intended to be the focus of this retrospective demonstrates a shift in the research paradigm, as the chapters in this volume demonstrate. This paradigmatic transition to more applied anthropology and ethnoscience approaches corresponds coincidentally with the emergence of the New, New South. This has been triggered, in part, by such political trends as the civil rights movement. Simultaneously, the development of the “ethnoscience” (“emic”) approach to anthropological research—learning native languages and perceiving the world through the eyes of the natives rather than through the outsider’s perspective (“etic”)—re®ects changes in the attitudes of both anthropologists and Indians. Some 30 or 40 years ago, anthropologists chose the topics they wanted to study, dealing with issues de¤ned as important by the scholars, such as political concerns, problems of adaptation to urban environments, environmental issues, and alcoholism. They went into native communities for their research, which may have developed into Ph.D. dissertations, papers appearing in scholarly journals, or books. Often the communities studied never saw the ¤nished products, and they rarely bene¤ted from the studies. White’s quotation of one Cherokee complaint shows clearly that the Indians felt that the anthropologists who studied the Indians bene¤ted while the Indians did not: “White men have come among the Indians, wrote down what the Indians knew, then went off and published a book and made lots of money, and the Indians were left just like they were.” The midcentury political climate in the South, with the development of the civil rights movement, had an impact on Indian Country, Indian perceptions, and acceptance of anthropologists. Supratribal Indian organizations such as the National Indian Youth Council and the American Indian Movement borrowed strategies from the Black Panthers and others involved in the civil rights movement as they struggled for recognition and a greater voice in Indian affairs and legislation. Indeed, legislation from the 1970s on re®ects the more active role played by Indians in effecting changes bene¤cial to their communities, including Menominee restoration, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), and legislation pertaining to Indian arts, among others. Anthropologists have become accountable to Indians for the research undertaken in Indian communities; Indian communities have bene¤ted from anthropological research. White’s article shows some of the cultural and economic bene¤ts Eastern Cherokees have derived from dealing with anthropologists for over a century, including the development of tourism and such tourist attractions as Oconaluftee Village; the development of an instruction manual for docents in Oconaluftee Village written by anthropologists from the University of Tennessee; and the development of the Cherokee language program in reservation schools.


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The Present Research topics and methodologies have shifted from Indians as being passive objects of study to Indians as active participants in the research, sometimes in®uencing the direction of the research in their efforts to obtain federal recognition or acknowledgment as Indians or addressing the developmental needs of their communities. Today topics for study often are emic, chosen by the native communities because they have a pragmatic or functional value for the community, and scholars are contracted to research those topics (e.g., Kendall Blanchard’s invitation to work with the Mississippi Choctaw and Allan Burns’s work with the Maya in south Florida). Today, a good deal of research in native communities revolves around matters of federal legislation. For some Indians the passage of NAGPRA involves more than the repatriation of native objects of cultural patrimony; Janet Levy points out in her article on archaeologists and Indians in North Carolina that southeastern Indians see a greater need for education than for reburial and repatriation. For others, gaining federal recognition or acknowledgment requires the intervention and assistance of anthropologists as expert witnesses and planners. Karen Blu’s chapter on the issue of Lumbee acknowledgment demonstrates how Indian tribes today have a greater need of anthropologists in gaining acknowledgement (recognition). Levy’s chapter also points out the differential effects of NAGPRA by region—how archaeologists are working to help tribes in North Carolina gain recognition, particularly when federal recognition, or lack of recognition, is an important factor in matters related to NAGPRA and other issues. Tied to acknowledgment or recognition is the persistence of Indian identity, keeping Indian traditions alive, and Indian identity distinct from that of the dominant population. Acknowledgment is an important factor in maintaining a sense of Indian or ethnic identity, validating, as Blu points out, their “authenticity” as “Indians.” Indians in the Southeast today are engaged in a variety of activities directed toward expressing their ethnic identity, including participation in powwows and production of art forms. Patricia Lerch uses the concepts of spirit impersonation, transformation, and possession trance as the basis for her discussion of how powwow participation can contribute to a positive self-image and sense of Indian identity through the “masking effect” of the dance regalia. Through the regalia and the dance, Indians express a pride in an Indian heritage that re®ects a positive self-image and image of Indian peoples in general, Indians with real power in a world not dominated by whites (most powwow dances are based on traditional dance styles from the pre-reservation period). For many In-


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dians in the Southeast, participation in the powwow, though not a native tradition, is crucial to their identity as Indians. Rachel Bonney discusses the evolution of new styles of art (painting, sculpture, pottery, jewelry, and weaving) as attempts of Native American artists to present and interpret their cultural heritages with greater creative freedom. Such artistic expression can be seen as both the preservation of their cultural heritages and as an expression or af¤rmation of their Indian identity. Indian identity and acknowledgment are important for Indian artists, as well, since recent federal legislation, the Indian Arts and Crafts Act, requires any artist labeling his or her work as “Indian-made” to be registered as or “certi¤ed” to be a member of a federally recognized tribe. Lisa Le®er’s discussion of Cherokee alcohol use demonstrates the relationship between Indian identity and Indian spiritual identity/sobriety. Emanuel Drechsel’s article also has implications for identity, particularly the persistence of ethnic identity during the pre-contact and contact periods. He explains how linguistic diversity persisted despite the uniformity of sociocultural traits throughout the area: the separate languages made possible the retention of separate tribal or ethnic identities in the Southeast. The chapter by Logan and Ousley also deals with native strategies for survival in a white world and the relationship between these strategies and Indian ethnicity. One survival strategy restricted to a limited number of native women —women who might bene¤t socially and economically from hypergyny—was marriage to white men. The authors suggest that some Creek and Cherokee women in the 1800s, facing conditions of poverty and low social position, chose to marry outside their tribes as a way to survive and that, in fact, 96 percent of the Catawba marriages involved Euro-American spouses. Tied to the question of identity is the number of persons today who claim some degree of Indian ancestry, usually basing that ancestry on an Indian woman, frequently Cherokee. Drawing on data from both students and 1980 U.S. census ¤gures, they attribute such identity to the fact that the Cherokees were a “civilized” tribe who happen to be both the best-known to contemporary Americans and the largest tribe; the claim to a female ancestress is attributed to the practice of southern matrilineality and a surplus of women in the 19th century. Issues of tribal development, health, and education also are becoming important areas of research both to native communities and to anthropologists. Burns’s work with the Maya in south Florida demonstrates how anthropologists have acted as culture brokers in helping the Maya adapt to life in the United States, develop programs for their people, and write and administer grants for develop-


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ment. Penny Jessel’s chapter on the Miccosukee shows how anthropological assistance in dealing with federal agencies expedited recovery from the disaster of Hurricane Andrew. The chapters by Lisa Le®er and Susan Stans re®ect the importance of anthropological research in developing alcohol intervention and abuse programs for the Cherokee and Miccosukee, respectively. Stans’s work with the Miccosukees involved an exchange of anthropological skills for information. She tutored reading and math, served as liaison between the school and the reservation, and organized a student photo project; in exchange, she was able to conduct research to write a dissertation on alcoholism, which, in its complete form, can be used by the tribe to develop treatment and intervention programs for alcoholism. Le®er’s work with the Eastern Cherokee was similar. Through the application of anthropological methods, she was able to assist the Cherokees in developing appropriate intervention strategies for alcohol abuse, educational manuals about drinking, and a mentoring program that became her dissertation. Her study was signi¤cant in several regards; one is the fact that few studies of alcohol use in the Southeast exist, but the theoretical implications of placement of the study (showing that alcohol use in the spiritual context of the controlled behaviors associated with “drug” use, i.e., the “black drink,” were not present with alcohol use) and the historical perspective (that alcohol dependency and abuse are not new problems but that no tribal penalties existed for alcohol consumption) should help in the development of further intervention strategies for the Cherokee and other tribes as well. Reciprocity is implicit in applied anthropology; the anthropologist provides knowledge, skills, and services in exchange for information from the Indian community that can be used both professionally and, as Blanchard’s chapter demonstrates, personally. In his discussion of how his activities as a university administrator have been in®uenced by anthropology and by the lessons he learned from southern Native Americans, speci¤cally the Choctaw, Blanchard also suggests that what we, as anthropologists, learn reshapes our lives and gives new meaning to our “marginalization.” His administrative style, philosophy of education, and vision for the future of university education have been shaped by what he calls the Indians’ “playful worldview,” a distinctively Native American ®exible, curvilinear, circuitous survival mechanism or way of achieving adaptive goals. Speci¤cally, he suggests some goals for future university administrators: a circular rather than linear approach to things; leadership by example; consensus as mode of dialogue; ®at management models rather than hierarchical ones; face-to-face communication; and playfulness or humor.


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The New Millennium and the New World Following Levy’s use of Merrell’s concept of the Indians’ “new world,” the new millennium seems to be a new world confronting both Indians and anthropologists. While Levy’s article deals speci¤cally with archaeology, the new world she envisions is shared by cultural anthropologists as well. Virtually all of the articles in this volume indicate that the wave of the future is one of applied anthropology and that this new world will be based on a relationship between Indians and anthropologists that is signi¤cantly different from that of the 20th century—one based on cooperation and collaboration as anthropologists are more participants than observers in the cultures they are studying. Levy shows how NAGPRA has shifted the distribution of power in the discipline of North American archaeology to the Indians and points out that archaeologists have had to become anthropologists, interacting with native communities and learning their values. Blu’s chapter concurs with this perspective, pointing out that today Indians have greater control over anthropologists and their research but also have a greater need for anthropologists in gaining federal recognition. As Indians search for anthropologists to work for them, the roles of anthropologists, historians, and genealogists and their relations with Indian groups and government are changing. Allan Burns’s chapter also focuses on applied research, re®ecting on the evolution of his research from documentation and analysis (of the reasons for the Mayan diaspora to Florida) to applied anthropology and the development of an economic niche for the Maya in south Florida’s labor market, which was useful to the community and gave collaboration a clear focus. “Anthropology and anthropologists have been part of their community,” Burns writes, “but the Mayan Americans have been more than subjects of reports and investigations. Mayan people we have met have been initiators of projects, collaborators in research, and teachers of collaborative anthropology.” This trend can be seen in the articles by Stans, Le®er, and Jessel as well. Stans demonstrates the shift in anthropological values—a shift from avoiding being an agent of change to the applied approach and experiencing the community’s values—by asking, “How can I help?” This view is re®ected also in Jessel’s chapter on disaster relief and assistance by anthropologists and Le®er’s article on the Cherokee, in which she points out that anthropologists should take a proactive role. She sees a broad future for applied anthropologists as they help generate solutions to problems facing Indian communities. While applied anthropology appears to be the wave of the future, a need for


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basic research still exists. Logan and Ousley see a future where hypotheses can be tested using the Boas database and other ethnographic sources, just as they explored the question of hypergyny based on the Boas data. Drechsel points out the need for the reintegration of linguistics into anthropological studies of southeastern Indians. While his view for the new world or millennium is the reintegration of linguistics into anthropological studies in the Southeast to help to answer questions for anthropologists and historians, the focus of his research tends to be more basic than applied. His study of Mobilian Jargon leads him to believe that the jargon is pre-contact in origin because the area of use corresponds with the Mississippian area; because of its unique grammatical pattern; because of its wide range of indigenous functions; and because of its geographic distribution. White’s chapter also demonstrates the continued value of basic research— research that bene¤ted the Cherokees. Since Indian cultures are vital and viable, they are undergoing continual change—change that needs to be documented through such basic research as Lerch’s documentation of the “new” southeastern ceremonies in the powwow complex or Bonney’s documentation of innovative art forms in southeastern tribes. The future may be a synthesis of basic research and applied anthropology, each supporting the other. Perhaps the future—the new world and the new millennium—can be summed up in Max White’s statement: “Nevertheless, it seems that anthropologists today are more sensitive to the feelings and viewpoints of Indians, and the Indians (at least in some instances) are more appreciative of anthropologists.”


Comments Clara Sue Kidwell

I

n the winter of 1973 I attended my ¤rst professional anthropology meeting, that of the Southern Anthropological Society. I am a historian, not an anthropologist, and I participated in a session at the request of a colleague of mine at Haskell Indian Junior College in Lawrence, Kansas. I presented a paper in which I commented on the irony of Indians’ being held up as symbols of the environmentalist movement while their rights to control hunting and ¤shing on their reservations and to have access to sacred sites had been severely restricted or were under legal and public attack. My submission to the proceedings of the meeting was rejected as being so far out of line with the other papers in the projected volume that it would be doing a disservice to include it. I ¤nd it ironic that I am now asked to comment upon a session of the Southern Anthropological Society, but it is gratifying to be included in this excellent session on anthropologists and Indians in the New South. The papers in this collection raise very interesting questions about the relationship between Indians and anthropologists, questions that center on issues of authenticity and legitimacy, which in turn re®ect the emic and etic perspectives that scholars bring to the study of Indian communities and gain from their subjects. Karen Blu puts these issues in the broad perspective of federal recognition, the legal process the federal government has established for identifying groups as Indian tribes de¤ned under federal law. Identi¤cation and historical continuity depend on proof of descent that forces Indians into a kind of essential identity based on blood, an identity often at odds with contemporary notions of Indian community as a source of identity. Federal recognition is particularly problematic in the South, where historical contacts, disease, warfare, and intermarriage disrupted Indian communities early in the course of American history. A number of scholars represented here focus on what constitutes contemporary Indian identity. Arts such as basket making, pottery, and clothing design become markers (Bonney), as do powwows with dance and tribal regalia (Lerch). Bonney and Lerch both, however, point out the issues of authenticity that arise in the production and display of goods. The Indian Arts and Crafts Act of 1990 makes it a federal offense to promote and sell items as Indian art unless the maker is a member of a federally recognized tribe. The act requires legal legitimacy in


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a way offensive to people who maintain their Indian identity despite not being enrolled in a tribe. Lerch comments from a more theoretical perspective on how the Waccamaw Sioux, a state-recognized group in North Carolina, act out an Indian identity through the powwow, dressing and dancing in a performance they have adopted from other Indian sources. The power relationships between Indians and anthropologists constitute another theme in these papers. Indians rely upon anthropologists to provide testimony of historical and cultural continuity for the federal recognition process (Blu), and they rely on negotiations with archaeologists to recover remains of ancestors and grave goods under the provisions of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) (Levy). The power relationship has shifted, however, from Indians as subjects of study to Indians as participants in consultation with anthropologists and archaeologists under legal mandate. Levy also raises the point that intratribal divisions of groups can affect the consultation process. The issue becomes, who can speak for Indian groups? Where factions within a tribe divide opinions about identity and legitimacy, the federally mandated process of consultation can readily break down. The role of Indians as participants in the process of knowledge formation leads to interesting implications in the papers by White and Stans. White describes differences between earlier ¤eldwork among the Eastern Cherokees and more recent studies which he maintains are more sensitive to Indian concerns. Stans’s paper on her ¤eldwork among the Seminole on the Brighton Reservation in Florida re®ects how, in a community subject to past ethnographic research and a growing sophistication about anthropologists, she found herself exchanging her services to the community for information from its members. The traditional role of impartial participant observer is transformed into one in which the anthropologist participates in a process of social change. Le®er’s study posits that in relationship to studies of alcohol, anthropologists must not just describe but should take an active role in promoting community efforts to alleviate the deleterious effects of alcohol abuse. Anthropology moves beyond scholarship to active intervention in community life. Le®er’s review of the literature on alcoholism suggests that in some ways alcohol has become an integral part of Indian cultures in some areas. Its use deadens what she describes as the pervasive despair caused by poverty, discrimination, and lack of opportunity for change. The despair caused by loss of culture becomes a “spiritual void” that recovering alcoholics can ¤ll by participating in traditional cultural activities. The association of alcohol with Indian lifestyles, however, raises one of the prob-


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lematic issues that all of the papers in this volume touch upon in one way or another—what constitutes the unique cultural identities of Indian people in the Southeast today? Whether from the federal perspective of recognition of Indian tribes (Blu, Roth), from the ethnographic perspective with which Burns describes the formation of a Mayan community in Florida, or from the historical linguist perspective of a Mobilian trade jargon that shaped a group identity (Drechsel), each paper contributes to the understanding of how Indians have expressed cultural identity. In re®ecting upon their own experiences in Indian Country, however, several of the scholars also have shown that the discipline itself is changing. The power relationships between Indians and anthropologists are complicated by legalistic demands for authenticity and historical continuity. If I am still around, I shall hope to be invited to comment on the 60th year of the Southern Anthropological Society meeting to see where the dialogue between Indians and anthropologists goes.


Comments Billy L. Cypress

I

n the conclusions, Rachel Bonney identi¤es a few themes that are pervasive in all of these papers. My comments will center upon Indian identity and federal recognition or acknowledgment of tribes. I will follow and end with some thoughts on the relationships between anthropologists and Indians in the Southeast. As a member of a federally recognized tribe, I would have hoped that the issues of identity and recognition would be lucid and clear-cut, but as Karen Blu has pointed out, there is a problem even in tracing one’s Indian roots through the “bloodlines.” She leans toward social and cultural in®uences. Even that recourse becomes a complicated and knotty affair. In a preferred world, there would be no question of Indian identity and, therefore, no need for recognition. During the ¤rst half of the 20th century, members of the Seminole Tribe of Florida experienced something very close to this state of affairs. The Seminole children would be born into a particular clan, which would tell them who they were. The parents, grandparents, uncles, and cousins would be full-bloods (with few exceptions). The children would be born into a Seminole social and cultural world. Social mores and cultural lifeways would be automatically taught to the children by the parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and clan elders. Spiritual leaders would teach the children their spiritual and religious values. The Seminole spiritual leaders would talk about the purpose of the Green Corn Dance, tribal laws, and tribal practices. Not only would the children learn the teachings, they would actually live them. I fully realize that those days are mostly gone. Our Seminole spiritual and cultural traditions have been diminished and changed by contact with EuroAmerican in®uences. Our blood has slowly but surely been reduced by contact and intermarriages with Euro-American, African-American, Hispanic, and other tribal and ethnic groups. The face of the Seminole Tribe has changed and will continue to change. But I still believe that the “bloodline” is one of the major factors in determining who you are. It is unfortunate that membership in a federally recognized tribe has been reduced to bickering about what little Indian blood is left in a person, but that has become a harsh reality. It is a necessary evil to use blood quantum, but that’s the way it is. We cannot have a discussion about Indian ancestry without talking about genetics.


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In a related matter, Michael Logan and Stephen Ousley tell a revealing and scary story about “the lost Indian ancestor reconsidered.” The research reminds us that the jokes we Indians used to tell about non-Indians and their Cherokee princess ancestors are not funny at all, couched in this context. Logan and Ousley sketch a scenario whereby the erosion of Native American cultures started early on with the ¤rst intermarriages between Indian women and non-Indian men. The number of children of full-blood parents also would be diminished. It seemed to me that in this scenario, the only positive outcome of the crossbreeding or outbreeding would be “hybrid vigor.” We can only hope that some form of Native American cultures would survive in these “hybrid” families, if at all. The authors state that anthropometric and demographic data come from over 18,000 subjects representing more than 200 tribal societies found throughout the United States, Canada, and Siberia. This work by Franz Boas was done about a century ago, and it would be interesting to do a follow-up on today’s subjects. Of course, today’s subjects would have to agree to the study. There were fewer data on mixed marriages than on marriages between full-bloods. After 100 years, there certainly has been a very signi¤cant rise in the number of mixed marriages. That would further give a revealing look at and understanding of the loss of Native American culture. And these research results would have a direct link to today’s Native American identity and recognition. Patricia Lerch explores sources of Native American identity in celebrations and dress. The practice of powwows came generally from the West and spread to most tribes all over the country. Most southeastern tribes had a tradition of stomp dances, which were different from the powwow as practiced by most tribes today. The stomp dances normally remained secret to outsiders or were not done publicly. Selected dances and songs of the stomp dance are performed today for the public at powwows. The powwow format has been accepted, adopted, and practiced by most of the southeastern tribes today. It is characterized by a form of pan-Indian celebration and dress. More often than not, the dress and celebrations of the powwow are not those of a particular southeastern tribe (e.g., Seminole). In order to ¤nd its own identity, a southeastern tribe that has lost its dress and celebration must ¤nd and relearn them. A western powwow tradition cannot legitimately take the place of a southeastern tribe’s own lifeways and traditions. Of course, if a western powwow tradition is all a tribe has, that is better than no tradition at all. In the area of recognition, George Roth has done a yeoman’s job in summarizing the history of federal tribal recognition in the South. It seems that tribes were at the whim and fancy of federal laws, federal and state court decisions,


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congressional statements, and executive-branch decisions. Those remnants of tribes who were removed from the Southeast were not considered recognized until later (e.g., the Eastern Cherokees and the Florida Seminoles). Tribes that were not removed from the Southeast had to ¤ght similarly for their recognition through the U.S. government’s labyrinthine policies, policy changes, and plain neglect. Nevertheless, I believe that the present federal acknowledgment program may be the best avenue for southeastern tribes who are bidding for recognition. Southern anthropologists have become helpful and essential in a variety of ways. Max White states that “the relationships between anthropologists and Indians can be mutually bene¤cial.” His relationship has been with the Eastern Cherokees of North Carolina. The Oconaluftee Indian Village, located on the Cherokee reservation, uses a handbook written by anthropologists for its employees. The Cherokee employees study the handbook on Cherokee arts and crafts and history and culture of the 1750 Cherokee village. The handbook helps the exhibitors and tour guides educate the public about the village and its people. Penny Jessel recounts her role as a mediator of knowledge during a time of disaster, Hurricane Andrew and its aftermath in south Florida in 1992. She represented the state of Florida in talks with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida. Incredible as it may sound, it seems that FEMA had very little knowledge of tribal governments and how they operate, tribal constituents, and the federal/state laws under which they live on federal reservations. It is providential that Jessel was there to smooth the communication and help clarify the misunderstandings between FEMA and the tribe. As an anthropologist, Jessel was cognizant of Miccosukee lifeways and cultural nuances. Another example is the work of Susan Stans, who chronicles a symbiotic relationship with a Seminole community on the Brighton Reservation in Florida. She tells of exchanging her services to the community for information. She seems to have been well received, and she was able to do her doctoral dissertation on the community’s attitudes about alcohol. Lisa Le®er decries the fact that, in comparison with other parts of the country, “very little anthropological work on alcohol use among southeastern tribes has been conducted.” Anthropologists who work with members of American Indian communities and local practitioners, she writes, “could be helping to generate clearer understandings of the issues facing these populations and helping communities to solve the problems they themselves identify.” Relations between southern anthropologists and southeastern Indians have improved whenever good communication and applied anthropology have been


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of some bene¤t to the Indians. It has been noted that much more research needs to be done for the bene¤t of both anthropologists and Indians. These studies can be done only with enlightened critical approval from the subjects being studied and increased cultural awareness and sensitivity by the anthropologists. These papers show that southern anthropologists made a good start toward the end of the 20th century. That bodes well for the new millennium.


Comments Larry D. Haikey

T

his collection of papers accomplished Dr. Paredes’s intention to “re®ect both that which has endured and that which has changed in the anthropological embrace of Indians from the Old, New South to the New, New South.” It indeed provides a variety of perspectives, from the more traditional approach of quantifying behavior of a study group to an application of anthropological techniques to a short-term event. Other papers offer insights into the shift of present-day relationships between anthropologists and American Indians in the Southeast. Increasingly, there is the recognition that the science and discipline of anthropology has something to offer the tribes. In their continuing exercise of sovereignty, the tribes will de¤ne the products desired and the types of data that can be gathered. I found something of interest in each paper; however, I have not offered comments on each. Blanchard brings full circle the anthropologist identifying techniques used in the Choctaw political system and internalizing them in his occupation. This type of leadership typi¤es most successful American Indian political leaders. The leader serves at the pleasure of the people. In order to hold a position as long as Phillip Martin, Mississippi Choctaw tribal chairman, has, a technique of listening and encouraging full discussion is necessary. Each tribal member and council member is aware of the right to speak his or her opinion. This open exchange of opinions matches the new management styles of today. A sense of empowerment and teamwork are common traits found in many successful Indian political systems. It would appear Blanchard has, in a limited way, “gone native.” But, perhaps more accurately, he is practicing “reverse applied anthropology,” applying knowledge gained from ¤eld experience to work outside the culture area. Blu’s “Region and Recognition: Southern Indians, Anthropologists, and Presumed Biology” and Lerch’s “Celebrations and Dress: Sources of Native American Identity” re®ect a unique southeastern phenomenon: the proliferation of selfidenti¤ed American Indian groups. It appears that the Southeast, more than any other portion of the country, is rife with “wanna-bes.” During the 1980s, Alabama conferred so-called “state recognition” status on seven groups that claimed to be Indian, many of them little more than social or-


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ganizations. Achieving state recognition enabled the groups (I cannot use the term tribes) to apply for certain federal grants that were earmarked for state-recognized groups. For the state, conferring state recognition status was a means to increase the amount of federal funds available within the state. This illustrates brie®y a means by which many groups within the Southeast achieved a status apart from the state’s general population. This status, coupled with the increase in the number of anthropologists within the region, in turn gives rise to an increased number of articles focused on state groups. Other groups, particularly in North Carolina, have had state recognition status for a number of years. The state groups and their anthropologists enjoy a symbiotic relationship. The groups need anthropologists to legitimize their claim to “Indian” status, since anthropologists study Indian cultures (i.e., “We have an anthropologist studying us, therefore we are Indian”). At the same time, the anthropologists need the groups in order to practice their craft. This relationship is most apparent in the federal recognition process. George Roth encapsulates the bureaucratic and administrative convolutions the present Indian tribes in the Southeast have been through to have their status as selfgoverning tribes acknowledged by the federal government. For the non-recognized groups, the achievement of recognized status once and for always de¤nes who they are. From the time of recognition forward they will be on equal footing with tribes that have never had their legitimacy as American Indians questioned. In order to meet the requirements of the federal acknowledgement process, the groups have to demonstrate their continued separate social and political existence from non-Indians. Anthropological research methodologies are useful in demonstrating the historic social and political workings of the groups. Hence there is an increased “need” for anthropologists to provide the information required by the petition process. Many anthropologists engaging in this type of work have likened themselves to “hired guns” ready to ride into the face of the Interior Department’s band of “ologists” ¤ring missives of historic documents and sociological and demographic data in defense of any perceived attack upon the “brand” (the status the group claims). The alternative view of these undertakings is that the anthropologists in fact become “hired hands.” Cast aside is the objectivity for which the discipline is noted. To these hired hands, the independent assessment of whether the group is an American Indian tribe or social/ethnic isolate is not made. It becomes their charge to ¤nd and report the information necessary to accomplish a speci¤c task, federal recognition. Research for a petition is a laborious process that requires many hours of


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search through historic documents. In recognition of this, there are grants available—which are augmented by other fund-raising efforts—to employ an expert to prepare the petition. The future status of the groups depends upon the quality of research and the ability to adequately address the recognition criteria. The question is raised, how many of these self-professed “hired guns” would undertake the projects if they were only paid for results—the group’s achievement of federal recognition? Lerch touches upon parts of the function powwows play within the Southeast. It is the means for local groups to express openly their identity. The group that makes the claim to be an Indian organization has an obligation to demonstrate its “Indianness.” Through the powwow, they are able to engage in activities that are almost universally associated with Indians. While Lerch’s analysis is oriented toward the individual, future analysis of the powwow phenomenon may be most rewarding if directed toward the role it plays within the Southeast. It appears that both Indian tribes and state-recognized groups host and participate in powwows. Since the powwow is not traditional to the Southeast, an understanding of the powwow’s function in the culture maintenance of the group would be interesting for future research. Levy touches upon a theme that is apparent in almost all the articles, the shifting of power from the researchers to the study group. The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act very clearly establishes ownership of human remains, burial items, and items of cultural patrimony. The archaeologists’ claim to the data is now subservient to the tribes’. Likewise, in other articles the study group establishes the reciprocal relationship before the anthropologists begin ¤eld research. The two articles on alcoholism (Le®er and Stans), along with Levy, demonstrate that anthropological research (writ large to include archaeology) is of interest to the tribes. Archaeology offers the means for the tribe to understand portions of the tribal past that have been forgotten. Applied anthropology offers a means to develop culture-based programs the tribe is interested in developing. In each instance the tribe recognizes that there is information they are lacking and utilizes the expertise of the anthropologist to provide that information. White’s “Anthropologists and the Eastern Cherokees” appears to be a departure from the general theme of acknowledging a changing relationship due to the shift in perception of power between southeastern Indians and anthropologists. It rather offers a defensive justi¤cation for the traditional pure research methods of anthropology. There is no denying the information gathered and assembled by Kneberg and Mooney and Lewis is useful to the Eastern Cherokee. However, it


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is self-serving to imply that the Eastern Cherokee would not be able to operate the Oconaluftee Indian Village without anthropologists. The sensitivity of anthropologists toward American Indian viewpoints and feelings, and the latter’s consequent appreciation of anthropologists, mentioned in White’s ¤nal statement, result from American Indians’ exercising control of the information sought by the anthropologists. The anthropologists’ approach to the tribes had to adapt. Once anthropologists demonstrated a willingness to give something tangible and of direct bene¤t to the tribe, attitudes toward the anthropologists changed. It was Jessel’s skills at developing rapport, coupled with knowledge of sovereignty, that enabled her to bring about a cooperative relationship between the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the Miccosukee. Mitigation of the standstill between FEMA and the tribe could not have been achieved had she chosen the role of an objective observer exploring a theoretical concept. I am glad Logan and Ousley offer an explanation for the multitudes of people descended from “Cherokee princesses.” It appears that the older Cherokees directed their daughters to “Go forth and multiply. Marry a non-Indian—the tribe will ®ourish with your multiple births. Have your children and their children marry other non-Indians. Through this manner, the tribe will increase their numbers. In the far-distant future the Cherokee will be everywhere. As numerous as beer cans alongside the road” (a corruption of a Ross Swimmer joke). Logan and Ousley’s interpretation of portions of the Boas database adds a perspective to understanding some of the social dynamics taking place in the Southeast today. Hypergyny would appear to be a one- or two-generation practice, thereby limiting its interpretive value to the individuals. The proliferation of self-identi¤ed Indian groups and the change in cultural practices of the remnant tribes in the Southeast may have a relationship to the practice of outmarriage. By the authors’ own admission, there is further research to be done to understand more thoroughly the results of fecundity due to outmarriage. At ¤rst glance, a follow-up of a random sample of the descendants of the informants could provide information concerning any tendency to remarry into the tribe and the present cultural identity of the descendants. The Boas database can provide an insight into the question of whether biological survival alone is important to cultural survival or whether it is the process of inmarriage (with a consequent decrease in births) that contributed more to cultural continuity. Several other social factors would need to be considered in the analysis, such as the degree of acceptance of the children by the culture groups. The cultural education of the children by the two families and relatives


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would contribute to their consequent self-identi¤cation and functional membership in a culture group.

Summary Throughout this collection we ¤nd references to change: change in status, in expectations, and in theoretical approaches. The dynamics of the relationship between American Indians and anthropologists are indeed changing. This change is bene¤cial to the discipline. The increased necessity for anthropologists/archaeologists to get the permission of the study group contributes to a greater openness and willingness of informants to cooperate in the studies. This openness can contribute to alleviating the dilemma of trying to determine if the helpful informant is a knowledgeable sage or the village idiot who is glad to have someone, even an outsider, to talk to. Further, the tribes’ contribution to de¤ning research goals ensures that the research and products are relevant and useful. By achieving this status, the research accomplishes much more than being a topic of debate at cocktail parties. The discipline and anthropologists then become important to the study group. While this change is taking place, the methodologies and analytical fundamentals of the discipline are still very important to both participants in the anthropological process. The very tenet that contributed to the perception of being exploited is what is most valuable to the discipline’s being able to be relevant to the tribes. The tribes need an objective assessment of the data, whatever form it may take, to be able to use the research products most effectively. Adherence to the objective, holistic nature of the discipline is necessary for the anthropologist to be a “hired gun” rather than a “hired hand.”



Notes

Chapter 2 Fieldwork was supported by a grant from the National Institute of Health called the National Research Service Award. 1. Mikasuki is the linguistic spelling for the language, a variation on the tribal spelling. 2. A method was devised using the Laubach (1991) method of reading.

Chapter 3 My thanks to Anne Rogers, Rita Kenion, Ann Tippitt, Alan May, David Moore, Steve Claggett, Wenonah George Haire, Jon Leader, the Catawba Cultural Preservation Program, the North Carolina Commission of Indian Affairs, the Schiele Museum of Natural History, Gastonia, North Carolina, and the Museum of York County, South Carolina. 1. The burial legislation, in place since 1981, is something of an “unfunded mandate.” Any salvage and analysis of unmarked burials or skeletal remains uncovered accidentally by construction, erosion, or other factors, and any expenses of contacting and consulting relevant communities and of reburial, must be undertaken out of existing allocations to the Of¤ce of State Archaeology (or other relevant state agencies, such as the Department of Transportation). No budget allocation has ever been made to support state-mandated activities under the Burial Bill (see Burke 1986:158).

Chapter 4 1. The conclusions and views expressed in this chapter are the author’s alone and do not re®ect the views of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. They do not re®ect the results of a study of the history and tribal character of any groups discussed in terms of the criteria in 25 CFR 83, the federal acknowledgment regulations, except for three that have been acknowledged since 1978 under those regulations (Department of the Interior 1978, 1994). 2. A number of other southern groups, presently unrecognized, sought and were denied federal status beginning as early as the 1880s. The history of their efforts would make a useful addition to this study of federal recognition policy. 3. Congress has also recognized tribes since 1978, but none in the South. 4. This fundamental view was repeated regularly in federal court decisions throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. Examples are Kansas Indians (72 U.S. 737 [1866]), Elk v. Wilkins (112 U.S. 94 [1884]), United States v. Kagama (118 U.S. 375 [1886]), and United States v. Nice (241 U.S. 591 [1916]). 5. Changes in tribal customs due to in®uence by whites were not in themselves suf¤cient grounds legally to show the end of tribal existence (Smith 1906:725). 6. The U.S. Supreme Court’s 1916 Nice decision held that an Indian allotted under the 1887 General Allotment Act, even though thereby a citizen, was still under the juris-


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diction and guardianship of the United States as long as the allotment was still in federal trust. 7. The review of speci¤c tribes below describes some of the characterizations of “tribal existence” that were applied to them. However, without more detailed research it is impossible to state here, to more than a limited degree, what kind of investigation was made, how thorough it was, and whether the conclusions about tribal character were accurate. 8. A 1950 federal lawsuit on behalf of the Coushatta indicates that more of the homesteads were ¤led under the Indian Homestead Act but were recorded in local land records as ordinary homesteads, not in federal trust status (U.S. District Court, Western Louisiana 1950). 9. Neither act de¤ned “Indian,” and no regulations or policy statements were found that de¤ned “Indian” for these purposes or indicated whether the applicant had to be, or to have been, a member of a recognized tribe. 10. The land was, in essence, a nontaxable reservation under county authority, as a result of litigation in state court in the 1840s (see ASIA 1980b:8–11). 11. A similar status was held by other tribes in the Northeast and in Virginia which had state relationships and reservations that predated the adoption of the U.S. Constitution. 12. This remained true for some time after the 1924 federal act making all Indians citizens (U.S. House of Representatives 1930:7359). 13. A few Catawba had joined the Eastern Cherokees. 14. The act was prefaced on a supposed broad responsibility of the secretary of the treasury for the Cherokees, which it transferred to the secretary of the interior. However, the treasury secretary’s responsibility had been limited to responsibility for funds for the removal of Eastern Cherokee. Nonetheless, the act clearly restored the Eastern Band to federal status (see CIA 1875:41). 15. At least a few apparently later obtained trust land under the Indian Homestead Act (Amis et al. 1927). There was no indication of Indian Service involvement. 16. The post-Reconstruction Mississippi constitution made all residents citizens, presumably including the Choctaw, though their rights in practice were still limited (Meritt 1916). 17. The department’s report noted that the “full-blood” Indians were divided locally into named bands and that 90 percent lived within a 50-mile radius of Union, Mississippi (Reeves 1916:23). The “claimants” were noted as scattered as far away as Arizona, with “no physical resemblance to real Indians,” and as not returned on the 1910 census as Indian, unlike the “full-bloods” (Reeves 1916:25). 18. This section of the IRA was interpreted by the Department of the Interior to allow recognition of such communities of Indians by purchasing land for the tribe as a reservation and establishing a government under the IRA. It was used to extend federal recognition and services to unrecognized tribes (Collier 1935; Haas 1947). 19. In 1978 the U.S. Supreme Court in United States v. John et al. denied a challenge to the recognized status of the Mississippi Choctaw. It held that they were a tribe and that the federal government had the power to recognize them, even though the Choctaw Nation had removed west.


Notes

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20. The Indian Service avoided characterizing these agents as “in charge” of the Seminole because of the Indians’ “suspiciousness of the intentions of the Federal government” (CIA 1914:31). 21. The chairman of the House Committee on Indian Affairs suggested in 1919 that providing land for the Seminole ought largely to be a problem for the state to solve (Carter 1919). 22. Kersey (1992:116) considers these to have been more culturally traditional at the time than those who became the Seminole Tribe of Florida.

Chapter 5 I am exceptionally indebted to many people for enlightening discussions, comments, and suggestions that have altered the ¤rst version of this paper presented in Baton Rouge: Rachel Bonney, Raymond D. Fogelson, Anthony Paredes, Holly Reckord, and George Roth. 1. I have in mind especially Locklear 1981; Greenbaum 1985; Porter 1986; Barsh 1988; Quinn 1990; Starna 1991; Paredes 1992; Roth 1992; Wilkins 1993; and McCulloch and Wilkins 1995. 2. In the 1890s the federal government released itself from its former responsibilities through the allotment of common lands to individuals, abrogating its trust relationship to certain tribes. In the 1950s it did the same thing by an outright termination of the trust relationship of selected tribes with the federal government. Even during administrations that encouraged Indian groups to organize formally, as during the New Deal in the 1930s, ¤nancial considerations kept larger Indian groups from obtaining federal status. 3. For an excellent more general discussion of the ongoing signi¤cance of racial conceptions and acts and their cultural, political, and economic implications, couched as a review of the literature, see Harrison 1995. 4. Greenbaum 1985:362 notes that 1979 guidelines from the BIA recommend that a petitioning tribe seek the assistance of “a trained anthropologist.” 5. The question was posed in his discussion at the meetings of the Southern Anthropological Society in Baton Rouge on February 17, 1996. 6. Numerous other publications on Lumbees by anthropologists, historians, and political scientists and by Lumbee and non-Lumbee authors exist. Some of the better known are Dial and Eliades 1975; Dial 1993; Evans 1971; Sider 1993; Wilkins 1993; and McCulloch and Wilkins 1995. 7. “The petitioning group should submit a statement that they have not been terminated by Congress and that their membership does not belong to terminated tribes” (FAP Criteria n.d.:17). 8. See also an earlier memorandum from the solicitor to the secretary of the Department of the Interior signed by Martin L. Allday and dated by stamp November 20, 1989. The memo makes clear that earlier discussions with LRDA and their attorney indicated that the Lumbee tribe would be eligible for the federal acknowledgment process. Fear of lawsuits from other tribes if the Lumbees were acknowledged administratively played a role in the change of opinion (Hearings 1989:218–221). 9. The 1956 legislation recognizing the Lumbees and barring them from bene¤ts was


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passed during the period when of¤cial Indian policy was that all tribes eventually should be terminated from a special trust relationship with the federal government. Congress was not inclined to put more Indians on the bene¤ts roster at a time when many were being removed from it. 10. David E. Wilkins, himself a Lumbee, is a political scientist who works in American Indian studies. He has traced the formal legal aspects of Lumbee recognition attempts (1993) and, together with Anne Merline McCulloch, also a political scientist, has compared the Catawbas’ quest for acknowledgment with that of the Lumbees in an attempt to explain why one succeeded and the other (the Lumbees) so far has not (McCulloch and Wilkins 1995). 11. Holly Reckord, head of the BAR, told me in February 1996 at the Southern Anthropological Society meetings in Baton Rouge that only three petitions for federal acknowledgment had been submitted by groups numbering more than 1,000: the Lumbees at roughly 44,000, the Houma at 18,000, and the Miami at 4,000. None of these has been recognized yet. 12. Among them, the executive board of the National Congress of American Indians, the Menominee Tribe, the Wisconsin Oneida, the Penobscot Nation, the Mashantucket Pequot, the Narragansett, and the Tunica-Biloxi tribes. 13. Among them, the Eastern Band of Cherokee, the Southern Pueblos Governors’ Council, the Colorado River Indian Tribes, and the Big Pine Band of Paiute/Shoshone. 14. In 1991, Ruth B. Locklear, director of the LRDA Tribal Enrollment Of¤ce, listed ¤ve separate Tuscarora groups and their leaders and noted that there are also two Cherokee groups (Hearings 1991:95–96). The number and formality of these organizations have ®uctuated, sometimes rather wildly, over the years. The ¤rst Tuscarora group was formed in the political turmoil that began over the loss of Indian-run schools in 1970. The others formed after that. 15. Peterson (1992) provides an understanding of Martin’s key role in the modernization of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw and an indication of his educational experiences in North Carolina. 16. It should be noted that other anthropologists, among them Raymond D. Fogelson, William C. Sturtevant, Jack Campisi, and William A. Starna, also responded to Carleton’s “Comment” by writing to Senator Inouye at about the same time. 17. See Beale 1957, a series of articles on “The American Isolates” edited by B. Eugene Griessman appearing in the American Anthropologist in 1972, and more recently DeMarce 1993, who uses the “genetic veri¤cation” of outdated and oddly conceived physical anthropological studies to support genealogical ¤ndings. I mention DeMarce because she works at the BAR, although she began work there after the article cited was already in press.

Chapter 6 Earlier versions of portions of this chapter appeared in Le®er 1996. 1. For the sake of geographic clarity, the native peoples of the Southeast, as identi¤ed in Duane Champagne’s Native America (1994), include 20 tribes in “North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas,


Notes

239

and Louisiana.” They include Alabama Biloxi, Catawba, (Eastern) Cherokee, Chitimacha, Choctaw (Mississippi), Coharie, Coushatta, Creek, Edisto, Haliwa, Houma, Lumbee, Miccosukee, Santee, Saponi, Seminole, Texas Kickapoo, Tunica, and Waccamaw. In Oklahoma, with a population of over 200,000 Native Americans, more than 30 tribes are represented. While ancestors of many of these tribal members originally came from one of the ten states in Champagne’s Southeast culture area, these Native Americans are identi¤ed as simply “Oklahoma Indians.” For the purpose of this chapter, the Southeast culture area will include only those native populations currently residing in the aforementioned ten states. 2. Also see Finger 1984:65–66. 3. A local expression that means getting arrested and convicted. 4. Smudging involves burning sweetgrass or cedar, often in an abalone shell. The smoke of the sacred plant is then wafted by an eagle feather over one’s body, space, or artifacts to cleanse or purify. 5. Bender (1996) discusses a common co-occurrence among Cherokees, at about age 30, of “getting saved,” ceasing to use alcohol, and developing an interest in Cherokee language and literacy. 6. For additional references on what has been done, see Lobb and Watts (1989), Native American Youth and Alcohol: An Annotated Bibliography. 7. I would like to acknowledge the ¤nancial support of the Indian Health Service for the mentoring and epidemiological research that I was able to conduct at the center, and to thank the center staff for their continued support, wisdom, and cooperation. I would also like to thank the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians tribal council for their resolution and approval of research on such a sensitive yet important topic. The courage and resiliency of the Eastern Band will forever be an inspiration.

Chapter 10 The research for this chapter was made possible by two Faculty Research Grants from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, 1991 and 1994. 1. Classi¤cation of objects as “miniature” depends in part upon the museum where such objects are found, sometimes as the result of storage problems. For collectors of miniatures, objects made to scale (particularly 1 inch to 1 foot, £ inch to 1 foot, and ¥ inch to 1 foot) are sought as the most desirable. 2. Booger masks are worn during a “bawdy . . . Cherokee dance . . . [that] was more a dramatic occasion than a dance.” Sexually suggestive masks were made of gourds, though most masks were carved from wood and painted with colors made from vegetable dyes. The booger performances were distinctive because they were not bound by the normal rules of sexual restraint; some of the rule breaking was evident in the nature of the masks themselves (Hudson 1976:407–408).

Chapter 11 This chapter draws substantially from the ¤nal chapter, entitled “Methodological and Theoretical Implications,” especially section 13.4, of my book Mobilian Jargon: Linguistic


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and Sociohistorical Aspects of a Native American Pidgin (1997), material that is reprinted here with the permission of Oxford University Press. 1. The sociolinguistic buffer function was not unique to Mobilian Jargon, but applied also to a Seminole-based contact medium of Florida (Sturtevant 1971:112), which may have been no more than a Muskogee-based variety of a greater Muskogean pidgin including Mobilian Jargon (Drechsel 1983). Sarah Thomason (1980:185) has recognized a similar function for another Native American pidgin, Delaware Jargon of northeastern North America. 2. In no way should we interpret this point in revisionist political terms. Recognition of Native American communities surviving in the Southeast does not reduce the historical debt of the United States or any of America’s former colonial powers toward the indigenous population, which indeed has suffered from genocide, removal, and racism, but has survived against all odds in many instances. 3. If one argues that Mobilian Jargon already existed in pre-Columbian times, my reasoning does not by extension lend support to the unfounded hypothesis that the Mississippian Complex, alternatively known as the Southern Cult, was a revitalization movement (see Brown 1976:130–131). 4. Nonetheless, many Americanist linguists and anthropologists have nonchalantly continued referring to the pidgin as Mobilian as if it were identical with the language of that name (see, e.g., Crawford 1978; Haas 1975; Munro 1984; Silverstein 1996:124–126; Taylor 1981:175, 184–185; Willis 1980:100; and York 1982). 5. A classic example is Hawaiian Pidgin of the 19th century, usually described as an English-based pidgin. Recent ¤ndings by Julian Roberts (1995), drawing on extensive historical research, have necessitated a total reinterpretation of Hawaiian Pidgin as a Hawaiian-based medium; it did not undergo English relexi¤cation until the 1890s, which corresponds closely to the American takeover of the Hawaiian Islands.

Chapter 12 The authors wish to thank Richard L. Jantz for granting us access to the Boas database, as well as for his helpful commentary on an earlier version of this chapter. Douglas Schmittou, Brett Riggs, Gerald Schroedl, John Finger, and Hector Qirko are also to be thanked for their critical reading of our manuscript. We also bene¤ted from the helpful suggestions of the two anonymous reviewers.


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Contributors

Kendall Blanchard is President and Professor of Anthropology at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado. He received his education at Olivet Nazarene College, Vanderbilt, Southern Methodist, and Johns Hopkins Universities. Blanchard’s research specialties include native North America, the anthropology of sport and play, the anthropology of religion, and organizational culture. His publications include The Anthropology of Sport: An Introduction (1995), The Mississippi Choctaws at Play: The Serious Side of Leisure (1981), and The Economics of Sainthood: Religious Change among the Rimrock Navajos (1977). Karen I. Blu, Associate Professor of Anthropology at New York University, earned her Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of Chicago in 1972 and has long-term interests in the southeastern United States and in the ways native peoples, their non-native neighbors, and anthropologists interact politically and economically. Her concerns are contemporary as well as ethnohistorical, as indicated by such publications as The Lumbee Problem: The Making of an American Indian People (1980), “ ‘Where Do You Stay At?’ Homeplace and Community among the Lumbee” in Senses of Place, ed. S. Feld and K. H. Basso (1996), and “ ‘Reading Back’ to Find Community: Lumbee Ethnohistory,” in North American Indian Anthropology, ed. R. J. DeMallie and A. Ortiz (1994). Rachel A. Bonney, Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, earned her Ph.D. from the University of Arizona in 1975, with a specialization in American Indian culture. In addition to American Indian studies, her interests include American ethnic groups, the anthropology of art, Native American art in miniature, and museum studies. Allan Burns is Professor and Chair of Anthropology at the University of Florida. He works with Mayan culture and identity in the United States, Mexico, and Guatemala. He is ®uent in Yucatec Maya and has published two books and over eighty articles and book chapters on the Maya, applied anthropology, and related topics. His work with the Maya of Florida has been published in Maya in Exile (1993), and he has produced two video documentaries on the Maya of Florida for PBS. He is Director of the Yucatan Exchange program and is the Fulbright Awards Advisor at the University of Florida. Burns regularly consults with the National Park Service’s Tribal Heritage program, where he develops oral history and video skills with different tribes.


278

Contributors

Billy L. Cypress, a member of the Seminole Tribe of Florida and Director of the Seminole Tribal Museum Authority, is primarily an educator whose interests as an educator and whose work in developing the of¤cial Seminole Museum have provided him with the opportunity to work with anthropologists and anthropological issues. Emanuel J. Drechsel, a trained anthropologist and linguist, is Professor of Liberal Studies at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa in Honolulu, and has long been interested in an integrated historical sociolinguistics. Larry D. Haikey is a member of the Mvskoke Nation of Oklahoma (formerly known as the Muscogee [Creek] Nation of Oklahoma). He is a member of Tahlahvse Ceremonial Ground, serving in the capacity of Henneha for the Ceremonial Ground. He holds a B.S. in Anthropology from the University of Tulsa and an M.S. from Florida State University. Larry is presently employed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture as Heritage Resource Program manager for the Oklahoma Districts (encompassing 350,000 acres) of the Ouachita National Forest. Penny Jessel is an enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, Shawnee by heritage. She received her undergraduate degree from the University of Wisconsin at Green Bay in Humanism and Cultural Change (Humanistic Studies); her graduate studies were in Anthropology at Florida State University. Ms. Jessel is currently the Senior Associate and Director of Social Investment for Cornerstone Housing, L.L.C., a private, national affordable housing development ¤rm. Clara Sue Kidwell is Director of the Native American Studies Program at the University of Oklahoma. She received her B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. in the History of Science from that institution and has taught at Haskell Indian Junior College, the University of Minnesota, and the University of California at Berkeley. Her current research interest is in the Choctaw Nation, from which she is descended on her father’s side. She is enrolled at the White Earth Chippewa Reservation in Minnesota. Lisa J. Le®er is a Medical and Applied Anthropologist, receiving her Ph.D. from the University of Tennessee in 1996. She is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Western Carolina University in North Carolina and an Adjunct Assistant Professor in both the Department of Anthropology and the School of Public Health at the University of Oklahoma. She is currently the primary investigator for the ¤rst extensive ethnographic study of American Indian fatherhood. Her primary research has been related to the social consequences of negative stereotyping, stress, violence, and substance abuse issues among native adolescents, and father-


Contributors

279

hood among American Indians. She has lectured on counseling native youth, gender issues, a variety of native health and wellness issues, and suggestions for non-native health practitioners working in native communities. Patricia Lerch is Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. She graduated from Ohio State University in 1978, earning her doctorate in Cultural Anthropology. Her interests include identity, tourism, religion, and gender. Janet E. Levy earned a Ph.D. in Anthropological Archaeology from Washington University–St. Louis in 1977. She has taught at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte since 1980. Her research interests include the later prehistory of western Europe, southeastern U.S. prehistory, archaeometallurgy, gender, and ethics in archaeology and anthropology. From 1999 to 2002 she served on the Executive Board of the Society for American Archaeology. Michael H. Logan. A native of Denver, Colorado, Logan received his anthropological training at the University of Colorado (B.A.), San Diego State University (M.A.), and Pennsylvania State University (Ph.D.). He is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. He has published widely on medical anthropology and ethnomedicine, with a focus on Latin America. He also has a long-standing interest in native North American cultures. He curated, along with Douglas Schmittou, an award-winning exhibit on Plains Indian art for the University of Tennessee’s Frank H. McClung Museum. Stephen D. Ousley earned his B.A. in Biological Anthropology at the University of Maryland, College Park, and his M.A. and Ph.D. at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He is currently Director of the Repatriation Osteology Laboratory at the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution. His research interests include skeletal biology, quantitative genetics, threedimensional morphometrics, and primate evolution. J. Anthony Paredes is Chief of Ethnography and Indian Affairs, Cultural Resources Stewardship, Southeast Regional Of¤ce, National Park Service. He taught for many years at Florida State University. He is a graduate of Oglethorpe University and the University of New Mexico. His research experience includes studies of Chippewa Indians in northern Minnesota and the Poarch Creeks of Alabama. He has been a consultant for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the North Carolina Indian Cultural Center, and the Association on American Indian Affairs. Paredes is past president of the Southern Anthropological Society and of the Society for Applied Anthropology. George Roth received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from Northwestern University in 1976. He has been staff anthropologist with the Branch of Acknowl-


280

Contributors

edgment and Research of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) since the inception of the federal acknowledgment process in 1978. He prepared the anthropological studies for the BIA reviews of the petitions for federal recognition of the Poarch Band of Creeks of Alabama and the Tunica-Biloxi of Louisiana as well as two southern groups denied acknowledgment. He has specialized in the study of American Indian political systems and the history of federal Indian policy. Susan E. Stans graduated from the University of Florida in 1964 in Political Science. She received a degree in Anthropology from the University of Central Florida in 1987 and applied to graduate school at the University of Florida in Anthropology. In 1994 she began her twenty-month dissertation residency at the Brighton Seminole Reservation at Okeechobee, Florida, living with a Seminole elder, Alice Snow. She graduated in 1996 with a Ph.D. in Anthropology. Her dissertation was based on the Brighton Seminoles’ attitudes about alcohol use. She began her visiting professor position at Florida Gulf Coast University (FGCU) in February 1997. Since that time she has become Assistant Professor in Social Sciences (with an anthropology focus). Her appointment is through a partial grant from the Seminole Tribe of Florida, which allows her to teach half-time and to spend the other half of her time as mentor to Seminole students and university liaison to the education department. She currently conducts the summer school program Emahakv Vpelofv at the Brighton Reservation. In the program, FGCU student teachers are paired with Seminole teachers to instruct Seminole students from the second to sixth grades through integrating the native culture. Her current interests are native education and traditional medicine. The University Press of Florida will publish Alice Snow and Susan’s book on Seminole Indian medicine in the spring of 2001. Max E. White, a faculty member at Piedmont College in Demorest, Georgia, received his B.A. and M.A. from the University of Georgia and his Ph.D. from Indiana University. He has worked with Native Americans for 30 years.


Index

admixture. See blood quantum; hypergamy; hypergyny AIM. See American Indian Movement Alabama-Coushatta Indians. See Coushatta Indians Alabama (state), recognition of Creek Indians, 65–67 alcohol abuse, 89–107; among Hopi Indians, 91–92; among Huron Indians, 96; among Navajo Indians, 91–92; among Seminole Indians, 23; attempted prohibition among Cherokee, 98–99; bootlegging, 99–100; cultural norms and modeling, 100–102; “drunken Indian” stereotype, 90; historical use, 95–100; introduction to North America, 95–96; moonshine, 99–100; mortality rates, 105–6; theories of causality, 90 Alcoholics Anonymous, and Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, 103 The Alcohol Republic: An American Tradition, 97 alcohol studies: in Annual Review of Anthropology, 93–94; in Southeast, 94–95 “The American Indian Holocaust: Healing Historical Unresolved Grief,” 100 American Indian Movement (AIM), 43–44 anthropologists: and federal recognition process, 71–85; roles of, 135 Archaeological Resources Protection Act (ARPA), 43 arts and crafts: basketry, 162–64; carving, 166; development of, 157–60; dolls, 168; education and training, 161; Indian Arts and Crafts Act, 161–62; intertribal art shows, 158; legislation, 161–62; Mayan, 118; miniatures, 161; models, 169; paintings, 167–68; pottery, 164–65; sculpture, 165–66; souvenirs, 169–70; and tourist trade, 160–61; toys, 168–69 art shows, 158, 167

Bailey, Barbara, 128 BAR. See Branch of Acknowledgment and Research Basket, Nancy, 163–64 basketry, 162–64 baskets, miniature, 170 Baum, L. Frank, 184–85 BIA. See Bureau of Indian Affairs Big Cypress Reservation, 18, 68 Black, Francis L., 196 Blackburn, Gideon, 98 blood quantum, 83, 84; and ethnicity, 74; and Lumbee recognition process, 82; and tribal membership, 78–81. See also hypergyny Boas, Franz, 12, 187–94, 200, 201, 202 Boas database, 187–94 Bolin, Robert, 128 Bolton, Patricia, 128 bootlegging, 99–100 Bourguignon, Erika, 148–49, 153 Bowers, Dan, 128 bows and arrows, miniatures, 168–69 Branch of Acknowledgment and Research (BAR), 73 Brant, Marie Osceola, 131, 133 Brazil, umbanda ceremony, 148–49, 150, 151 Brighton Reservation, 17–28, 19–23; population ¤gures, 20–21; social structure, 22–23 Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA): and Creek Indians, 66–67; Damage Assessment Team, 129–30; and federal recognition process, 73–74; and Miccosukee Indians, 130, 135 Caddo Indians, 42 Cameon, Randi, 121 Campbell, Ben Nighthorse, 79, 80 Campbell, Gregory R., 201 Campisi, Jack, 75, 77


282 Camposeco, Jeronimo, 111–12, 113–14, 116, 117, 123, 124 Carleton, Kenneth H., 81 Carrescia, Olivia, 119–20, 122 carving, wood and stone, 166 Catawba Cultural Preservation Project (CCPP), 36 Catawba Indians, 33; celebrations, 36; federal recognition, 52, 58–60; involvement with archaeological research, 35–36, 41; pottery, 164–65 Chambers, Erve, 135, 136, 137 Cherokee Indians: con®icts over excavations, 43; Green Corn Ceremony, 13; and hypergyny, 187; language, 15; pottery, 164, 165; and Removal, 60. See also Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians Chickasaw-Choctaw trade language. See Mobilian Jargon Chitimacha Indians: basketry, 163; federal recognition, 53, 54–55 Choctaw Indians: basketry, 164. See also Jena Choctaw citizenship, 52–53 clan system, Seminole Indians, 22–23 Clifford, James, 75 Cohen, Felix, 82 Colorado River Indian Tribes museum, 170 Commission of Indian Affairs (CIA), recognition of Seminole Indians, 68–69 Corn Maya: and community con®icts, 115– 17; development of, 114–15; documentaries of, 117–18; in®uence upon by anthropologists, 122–23 Coushatta Indians: basketry, 164; federal recognition, 52, 55–57; use of Mobilian Jargon, 179 crafts. See arts and crafts Creek Indians: federal recognition, 65–67; and hypergyny, 187; language, 18–19; treaties with, 65–66; use of Mobilian Jargon, 179 Creek War, 65 Croatan Indians. See Lumbee Indians Crow, Berdina, 168 Crow, Richard, 168

Index culture brokers, 113 The Cultures of Drinking within a Native American Community, 94 Curtis Act, 62–63, 66 Cypress, Billy, 134 DAC. See Disaster Assistance Center Daily, R. C., 96 dance: regalia, 146–47; at Waccamaw powwow, 145, 146–47 Dania Reservation, 18, 68 Davis, Shelton, 113, 114 Dawes Commission: and Choctaw Indians, 62–63; and Creek Indians, 66 Dawes Commission Act, 64 Deadly Medicine: Indians and Alcohol in Early America, 96 DeBruyn, Lemyra M., 100, 102 Deloria, Vine, Jr., 17, 26, 78 Department of Interior: recognition of Catawba Indians, 59; recognition of Choctaw Indians, 63, 64; recognition of Seminole Indians, 68–69 Disaster Assistance Center (DAC), 130, 131 Dixon, Roland B., 189 documentaries, of Maya of Florida, 119–20 doll houses, 169 dolls, 168 Drinking Behavior among Southwestern Indians, 92 Drinking Careers, 91 Drunken Comportment, 90, 95 “drunken Indian” stereotype, 90 Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, 11–16; alcohol use, 93; community studies of, 13–14; economic status, 11, 15; federal recognition, 53–54, 60–62; introduction to alcohol, 98–100; involvement with excavations, 35; language program, 15; and Lumbee recognition process, 80; Oconaluftee Indian Village, 15; pottery, 164, 165; prohibition attempts, 98–99; and Removal, 60; sculpture, 166 Eber, Christine, 101 Edgerton, Robert B., 90, 95


Index education: current problems of, 204–5; leadership skills, 207–12; Seminole Indians, 22; use of playful worldview, 207–8 English language, 19, 21 “The Epidemiology of Alcohol Abuse among American Indians: The Mythical and Real Properties,” 90 Everett, Michael W., 92 Ex Parte Reynolds, 50–51 federal acknowledgment. See federal recognition Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), 130; damage assessment of Miccosukee Reservation, 130–33; meeting at Miccosukee Reservation, 138–39 federal recognition, 49–70, 69–70, 71–72; administrative process, 73–74, 76; and citizenship, 52–53; economic advantages of, 72–73; extension of, 52–53; historical requirements for, 49–51; National Congress of American Indians, 47; and role of anthropologists, 71–85; of Waccamaw Indians, 147 FEMA. See Federal Emergency Management Agency Firewater Myths, 90 Five Civilized Tribes Museum, 169 Florida Department of Community Affairs, 131, 138–39 Florida Emergency Management Division, 131 Florida Governor’s Council on Indian Affairs, 128 Fogelson, Raymond, 95 Fort Pierce Reservation, 18 gaming industry, 19; support of federal recognition efforts, 75–76 Garrett, Gilford, 169 GE Mound, 43–44 General Electric Company, 43–44 genetic heterogeneity, 195–96 Gert, Bernard, 24 Gilbert, William H., Jr., 13 Green Corn Ceremony: Cherokee Indians, 13; Seminole Indians, 21

283 grief, multigenerational, 100 Grobsmith, Elizabeth S., 100–101 Gulick, John, 13–14 Guthrie (artist), 167 Haikey, Larry, 76 Haire, Wenonah George, 35 Halperin, Daniel, 203 Hammerschlag, Carl, 93 Hatteras Tuscarora Indians, 80 Havasupai Indians, 194–95 The Health of Native Americans, 90 Heath, Dwight B., 93–94 Hollywood Reservation, 68 Hopi Indians, alcohol use, 90–92 house models, 169 Huron Indians, 96 Hurricane Andrew: damage estimates, 127; effects on Miccosukee Indians, 126–40 hybrid vigor, 194 hypergamy, 185–86. See also hypergyny hypergyny: reasons for, 186. See also blood quantum ILRC. See Indian Law Resource Center Immokalee Reservation, 18 inbreeding depression, 194 Indiana, GE Mound, 43–44 Indian arts. See arts and crafts Indian Arts and Crafts Act, 161–62 Indian Homestead Acts, 56 Indian Law Resource Center (ILRC), 111 Indians Not Taxed, 50–51 Indiantown, Florida, 108, 118–20 intermarriage. See hypergyny Jacobs, W. R., 96–97 Jaimes, M. Annette, 79 Jantz, Richard L., 188 Jena Choctaw Indians, 53–54; federal recognition, 64–65 Kidwell, Clara Sue, 197 Kunitz, Steven J., 91, 101


284 languages: Cherokee, 15; Creek, 18–19, 21; English, 19, 21; Mayan, 110–11; Mikasuki, 18–19, 21; Mobilian Jargon, 175–83 Lavell, William G., 77 Leland, Joy, 90 Levy, J. E., 91, 101 linguistics, and anthropological research, 182–83 Locklear, Leola, 80 Locklear, Vermon, 80 Long, Will West, 15 Louisiana Coushatta Indians, 55–57 Lowry, Claude, 82 LRDA. See Lumbee Regional Development Association Lumbee Indians, 84; federal recognition, 73; and federal recognition process, 76–82 Lumbee Recognition Act, 79 Lumbee Regional Development Association (LRDA), 77 MacAndrew, Craig, 90, 95 major histocompatability complex (MHC), 195, 196 Mancall, Peter, 96 March of Dimes, 121, 122 marimba music, 123 Martin, Laura, 122 Martin, Phillip, 81 Mashpee Indians, federal recognition, 75 A Matter of Life and Death: Health Seeking Behaviors in a Maya Immigrant Community, 121 May, Philip, 90 Maya Fiesta, 117 Maya in Exile, 113, 117 Mayan Voices: American Lives, 119–20 Maya of Florida, 108–25, 112; areas of employment, 120; changes in migration, 118–19; and culture brokers, 113; Guatemalan political structure, 111; health care issues, 120–22; historical use of culture brokers, 113; languages, 110–11; migration to United States, 108–9; and pan-Mayanism, 123–24; political structures of, 111; relations with other Indian

Index tribes, 111–12; self-identity, 110; status as American Indians, 109, 110–11. See also Corn Maya Maynor v. Morton, 83 McGillvray, Alexander, 168 Merrell, James, 29 MHC. See major histocompatability complex Miami Indians, 44 Miccosukee Indians: federal recognition, 53–54, 69, 126; and Hurricane Andrew, 126–40; kinship network with Seminole Indians, 128; language, 18–19, 21; social support systems, 128; and system stress, 127–28 Mihesuah, Devon A., 190 Mikasuki language, 18–19, 21 miniatures: bows and arrows, 168–69; historic development of, 170; history of, 159–60; paintings, 167–68 Miralles, Maria, 121 Mississippian Indians, use of Mobilian Jargon, 180–81 Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, 62– 64; federal recognition, 53–54; and Lumbee recognition process, 81 Mitchell, Ron, 167 Mitchell, T. R., 167 Mobilian Jargon, 175–83; and modern Native American culture, 177–78, 181; preColumbian origins, 176, 189; as second language, 176–77; as sociolinguistic buffer, 178–79; use by colonists, 181 models, house, 169 Montejo, Victor, 109–10, 124 Mooney, James, 12–15 moonshine, 99–100 museums: Colorado River Indian Tribes museum, 170; Five Civilized Tribes Museum, 169 music, marimba, 123 Myths of the Cherokees, 12 NAGPRA. See Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act National Congress of American Indians, 47 Native American arts. See arts and crafts


Index Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), 29–30; history of, 31–32 Navajo Indians, alcohol use, 90–92 Neely, Sharlotte, 14 Nichols, Bernie, 167, 169 North Carolina Archaeological Council, 36 North Carolina “Burial Bill,” 32–33, 40 North Carolina Commission of Indian Affairs, 36–39 North Carolina Of¤ce of State Archaeology, 36–38 North Carolina Unmarked Burial and Unmarked Skeletal Remains Protection Act, 32–33, 34 Oconaluftee Indian Village, 15 Olbrechts, Franz, 12–13 Ott, Bill, 135–36, 137 Owl, Ruby, 170 paintings, 167–68 pan-Indianism, 123–24; and powwows, 146, 147 Paredes, Anthony, 75 Passmaquoddy v. Morton, 50 Pego, Christina, 95–96 Perdue, Theda, 187 pochteca, 113 A Poison Stronger Than Love: The Destruction of an Ojibwa Community, 92–93 pottery, 164–65 powwows: origins of, 141–42; spatial model, 93; use of alcohol at, 93 prohibition, attempted, 98–99 Prucha, Francis Paul, 96 quantum. See blood quantum Race, Ethnicity, and Disaster, 128 racism, 184–85 Red Shoes, Chief, 55 “Red Stick” War, 65 Removal, 60 Robbins, Mary Lee, 92, 93 “The Role of Alcohol among North Ameri-

285 can Tribes as Reported in The Jesuit Relations,” 96 Rorabaugh, W. J., 97, 98 Roth, George, 77 SA A. See Society for American Archaeology Schneider, Mel, 135–36, 137 sculpture, 165–66 Seltzer, Carl, 82, 83 Seminole Indians: clan system, 22–23; development of self-government, 17–18; economic status, 19; education, 22; federal recognition of, 53–54, 67–69; housing, 20; migration to Florida, 67; population ¤gures, 18; relationship with archaeologists, 42; religion, 21; reservations, 18; social structure, 22–23; treaties with, 67; tribal government, 17–19 Seminole Wars, 67 Shkilnyk, Anastasia, 92–93 Sider, Gerald M., 74 Sioux Indians, and blood quantum, 194 Skeaqunsta, Chief, 96 Society for American Archaeology (SA A), 44 souvenirs, 169–70 spirit possession. See umbanda ceremony Stans, Susan, 94 Swimmer (Cherokee medicine man), 12, 13 The Swimmer Manuscript, 13 Sylestion, Abriane, 164 system stress, 127 Tampa Reservation, 18 Taylor, Jonathan L., 79–80 temperance pledge, 99 Thornton, Russell, 102 “Tobacco, Culture, and Health among American Indians: A Historical Review,” 95–96 tobacco, introduction to Europe, 95–96 tourism: and Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, 15 toys, 168–69 Trance Dance, 149 Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek, 62 Treaty of Fort Jackson, 65–66


286 tribal recognition. See federal recognition Trivers, Robert L., 186–87 Tunica-Biloxi Indians: federal recognition, 57–58; use of Mobilian Jargon, 179 umbanda ceremony: caboclo spirits, 148–49, 150, 151; comparison to powwow, 151 United States v. Wright et al., 62 Unrau, William, 96 Waccamaw Sioux Indians, 143–55 Waddell, Jack O., 92 Walker, Bessie, 99 Walker, Game, 99 Wallace, Anthony F. C., 102 Weibel-Orlando, Joan, 93, 102 White Man’s Wicked Water: The Alcohol Trade and Prohibition in Indian Country, 1802–1892, 96

Index Willard, Dan E., 186–87 Willis, William S., 180 Witthoft, John, 13 Women and Alcohol in a Highland Maya Town, 101 Worcester, Samuel, 99 Worcester v. Georgia, 50 Works Projects Administration (WPA), 30 worldview, Native American: description of, 206–7; themes, 209–10; use in modern leadership, 208–12 worldview, playful. See worldview, Native American Yandle, Denise, 133–34 Yellow Horse Brave Heart, Maria, 100, 102 Yonaguska (Drowning Bear), Chief, 99 Young, T. Kue, 90, 92, 97–98


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