American Indian Culture and Research Journal

THE VIEW FROM THE EDGE: A PERSONAL INTRODUCTION What seest thou else in the dark backward and abysm of time? If thou rememb’rest aught ere thou camest here How thou camest here thou mayst. --Prospero in The Tempest (I.ii. 59-64) Conjuring up William Shakespeare to assist in my project of challenging the academic cognoscenti is indeed an ironic gesture coming from a colonized individual. Yet in the context of my upbringing as a Pilipina operating in the circles of academia, this selective borrowing is all too appropriate. As Jessica Hagedorn observes, ”The Philippines spent four hundred years in a convent and fifty years in Hollywood. . . . I was taught that Filipinos are inherently lazy, shiftless and undependable. Our only talent, it seems, is for mimicry". In this introduction to ”dual” perception in the work of liminal artists, an act of appropriation, of mimicry, seems to be in order. It is a nod to my education-a reflex of good scholastic behavior in an attempt to substantiate the assertions cultivated by my colonizers’ gift of learning.

When I was going to high school I wasn't taught anything about my own [Stó:lo] history. But I was taught that there were Prairie Indians, and that to be lndian you lived in a tipi and had a long flowing head dress. . . . I wasn't taught about local native culture. And of course watching TV, and watching movies, and everything that was to be lndian was exactly what we were taught in school. Pan-lndianism . . . you take that one culture and one people and apply it to everyone. INTRODUCTION Children in the Stó:lo community of southwestern of British Columbia, Canada, face a confusing cultural paradox at school in the 1990s. In both B.C.'s public schools and in native-run classrooms, Stó:lo children learn more native history and heritage than ever before. Ironically, much of the native curriculum presents local native people as Plains Indians, and pan-Indian iconography dominates these classroom lessons. These mixed identity messages reflect a community distress caused by the increasing prevalence of Plains Indian cultural traits and activities in the Stó:lo's Fraser Valley territory. This influx of nontraditional cultural expression into Stó:lo society is one aspect of a more general debate concerning shifting claims on identity within the Stó:lo community. This paper describes local perspectives on the competing versions of Stó:lo identity. The most widely accepted identity is, however, neither that of a unique Stó:lo past nor fully pan-Indian. It is a blend.

INTRODUCTION While attending a meeting of a Saami organization in northern Sweden, I introduced myself to an older fellow during a coffee break. ”From America?”he asked and paused. “When do you go back?” I replied that I planned to return in a couple of months. He smiled. “You’ll go back,’’ he said, ”and we will forget you were ever here.” This remark from a Saami who was old enough to remember the era of segregation, the political mobilization of northern Europe’s indigenous people, the lawsuits, the endless negotiations and promises of the Swedish government, juxtaposed the ephemeral nature of my visit and the extended encounter of a colonial endeavor. Whose memories would become history? Here I would like to explore the significance of memory in the assertion of native claims. I turn to Canada, specifically British Columbia, where claims processes have been underway for a long time. Proving the existence of aboriginal rights in common law requires a reconstruction of a people’s past presented in a way that satisfies Western legal traditions. Evidence must be internally consistent, chronological, and documented. Crucial gaps in time or knowledge must be explained. Observers of the trial and readers of the decisions rendered in Delgamuukw v. The Queen have criticized the process and outcome as expressions of colonialism and ethnocentrism. This essay does not dismiss the criticisms, but analyzes the texts of the decisions issued by the British Columbia Supreme Court and the British Columbia Court of Appeal as representations of the state’s concept of itself in opposition to societies claiming to be whole, original, and sovereign.

There have always been the songs, the prayers, the stories. There have always been the voices. There have always been the people. There have always been those words which evoked meaning and the meaning's magical wonder. There has always been the spirit which inspired the desire for life to go on. And it has been through the words of the songs, the prayers, the stories that the people have found a way to continue, for life to go on. It is the very experience of life. It is the act of perception that insures knowledge. For Indian people, it has been the evolvement of a system of life which insists on one's full awareness of his relationship to all life. Through words derived from one's thoughts, beliefs, acts, experiences, it is possible to share this awareness with all mankind. -Simon Ortiz An indian identity is a tricky thing to define. It is perhaps debatable whether it should be defined at all. As a construct imposed on the indigenous peoples of the Americas, the conceptualization of the indian is fraught with problem. How does one determine who exactly is indian and, perhaps more importantly, who is responsible for that designation? Further, what is the distinction between, for example, a Sioux indian and a Cherokee indian? How can they both be indian yet not the same? The list of questions is infinite. Nevertheless, there are college courses on American indian studies and sections in bookstores on Native Americans that exist ostensibly to study this vague character. ”In spite of its wide acceptance, even appropriation, by Native Americans,” writes Louis Owens, “it should be borne in mind that the word Indian came into being on this continent simply as an utterance designed to impose a distinct ’otherness’ upon indigenous peoples. To be ‘Indian’ was to be ‘not European.’ Indigenous peoples, now Indians, are all the same by virtue of this “othering.” Pantribalism is based on this very concept of ”sameness”: In relation to the U.S. and its history of expansion, non-indians perceive native peoples as an undifferentiated whole, a view sometimes shared, though for different reasons, by indians themselves.

Today we - America’s half million Indians - stand at a fork in the trail. The time has come for all of us to choose the way we will travel. In one direction is the downhill trail we have followed since our lands were invaded more than a century ago. This way, marked by the laws of an often-blind government, leads to ignorance, poverty, disease, and wasted resources. The new trail - the way of self help - leads toward a better life, toward adequate education, decent income, good health, and wise use of our precious natural wealth. -Clarence Wesley, former president of the NCAI, undated In November 1944, nearly eighty delegates from twenty-seven states, representing fifty tribes, met at the Cosmopolitan Hotel in Denver, Colorado. Out of the Denver deliberations came the first successful national organization controlled by Indians, the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI). Although it was established by Native Americans, the NCAI’s founders patterned it largely after the Indian reorganization constitutions and by-laws of the Indian New Deal. Many of the founders had gained important political experience from IRA tribal governments. Recent wartime experiences also led a new generation of Indian leaders to demand equal voting rights, adjudication of land claims, increased veterans’ benefits, and the full benefits of American citizenship.

In the Second Treatise Locke remarks that ”in the beginning all the world was America,” viz., “uncivilized.” Roy Harvey Pearce contends that during centuries of native dispossession, ”virtually all Americans were, in the most general sense, Lockeans,”primarily in their attitudes toward land and private property. James Tully argues that Euro-Americans are at present Lockeans in the sense that Locke provides “a set of concepts we standardly use to represent and reflect on contemporary politics." Tully, Michael K. Green, and an increasing number of historians accord Locke’s Second Treatise a prominent role in American Indian dispossession. Richard Drinnon, Francis Jennings, Russell Thornton, and David E. Stannard do not assign the Second Treatise as influential a role as Tully, but place it in a context, unlike Tully, of historical genocide, an American Holocaust. In this paper I address two different interpretations of Locke’s social and political work: first, the generous interpretation that Locke did not have disparaging things to say with regard to American Indians and that his works do not exhibit ethnocentric arguments; second,the interpretation popularized by James Tully that Locke’s agricultural argument was developed with the intention of taking American Indian land without consent, that Locke’s work is in large part responsible for the dispossession of the American Indian. I argue that a generous reading of Locke does not adequately portray his attitude toward American Indians. At the same time, however, interpretations placing Locke’s political arguments as central to the history of dispossession are not entirely warranted. Most commentators focus exclusively on Locke’s Two Treatises of Government. I present a more comprehensive analysis and argue that, considering the religious and political aspect of Locke’s theory of knowledge, it is the Essay that has had a more lasting influence for American Indians.

INTRODUCTION The powwow is often cited for its importance in contemporary Indian life as a constituent of tribal and Indian identity, and as a unifying force in Indian life. Although each of these testimonies may be true, each tells an incomplete story. Each downplays or ignores entirely the disagreements and conflicts that occur within the powwow grounds and that swirl around powwow practices. Each erases the multiple differences among Indians and implies that Indian identity and commitments are simply reinforced and reproduced through powwow practices, rather than debated, negotiated, and changed. Each also erases the constitutive presence of power and politics within the powwow arena. Powwows are constituents of identity and a unifying force in contemporary Indian life, but they are also arenas of conflict and disagreement in which power plays an important role and in which Indians implicitly and explicitly debate their identity and mutual commitments. In this article I will argue that the powwow can best be understood in these dual, paradoxical terms: It plays a unifying role in Indian life while providing a public arena for negotiation of differences and disagreements. The unifying role played by powwows is especially significant in light of the diversity within and among tribes. Although others have argued that the powwow plays a unifying role in this context of diversity, much can nevertheless still be added to our understanding of the specific practices that foster this unifying role. In the first part of this article, I will examine specific powwow practices in light of their unifying role. I will interpret the powwow as a communicative arena in which common experiences help create and sustain a common ground of memory, experience, identity, and commitment out of disparate experiences and identities.