American Indian Culture and Research Journal

Reading and writing, often coupled, are really two separate skills and their effects can be dramatically different, especially within a colonial situation. Reading, particularly in the language of the dominant group, enables Native people to receive messages that the power-holders choose to channel to them. While not precluding Native people’s selection from among these available reading materials, literacy does in part serve to move information from the power center to indigenous communities. Writing, on the other hand, taught as a simple and natural accompaniment to reading, has the potential to reverse this information flow. It places in Native people’s hands the ability to express their own ideas and desires in such a way as to be comprehensible to bureaucrats and policymakers. Writing enables communication to travel up the political hierarchy. Colonialism worldwide, from the eighteenth century to the twentieth, included the promotion of literacy in European languages. Missionary schools, government agencies, and international aid programs, assumed that reading and writing constituted a substantial, unquestionable, and above all self-evident, benefit. The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) shared this belief and after the mid nineteenth century increasingly budgeted for boarding and day schools. That agency viewed literacy as both a component and a measure of “progress” and implied that “benefits” would accrue to Native people who learned these skills, such as access to wage employment. Early-nineteenth-century anthropological theorists followed the thinking of their times and interpreted literacy as a unitary and inherently beneficial phenomenon. By the 1970s and 1980s, however, analyses were more critical and proceeded to refine concepts and distinguish among various literacies.

One of the most important—and often most vexing—questions in Indian Country today concerns the creation of reservation economic bases, which produce necessary cash income while being culturally appropriate and sustainable. Casinos sometimes produce mountains of money as they transform parts of reservations into annexes of the non-Indian economy, with all of their imported artifices and vices. Thirty years ago, the New York Oneidas’ landholdings were down to thirty-two acres east of Syracuse, with almost no economic infrastructure. Three decades later, the New York Oneidas own a large casino, the Turning Stone, which has incubated a number of other business ventures. Many of the roughly 1,000 Oneidas who reside in the area have received substantial material benefits. There has been, however, a substantial dissident movement among Oneidas who assert that Ray Halbritter, “nation representative” of the New York Oneidas, was never voted into such an office. This group, centered in the Shenandoah family (which includes the notable singer Joanne Shenandoah and her husband Doug George-Kanentiio) believe that the New York Oneidas under Halbritter have established a business, called it a nation, and acquired the requisite approvals from New York State and the United States federal government to use this status to open the Turning Stone. The dissidents’ tribal benefits were eliminated after they took part in a “march for democracy.” To regain their benefits, those who had “lost their voice” were told that they would have to sign papers agreeing not to criticize Halbritter’s government, not to speak to the press, and to pledge allegiance to Halbritter and his regime.

This paper discusses an innovative, interdisciplinary two-year environmental studies program funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). The authors describe the program—its origins, foundation principles, curriculum, assessment, and recruitment—discuss student participation and achievements, and summarize the long-term prospects of the program. This article was prepared during the program’s second NSF-funding cycle.

The names at first are those of animals and of birds, of objects that have one definition in the eye, another in the hand, of forms and features on the rim of the world, or of sounds that carry on the bright wind and in the void. They are old and original in the mind, like the beat of rain on the river, and intrinsic in the native tongue, failing even as those who bear them turn once in the memory, go on, and are gone forever. —N. Scott Momaday When we were children we used to chant “Sticks and stones may break our bones, but names will never hurt us.” However, as we grew older we learned to put away childish things. Names are very serious undertakings! Names are rarely, if ever, neutral; they tend to point and push us in certain directions. The power to name something or someone, even against one’s will, is an expression of domination. In some Native American traditions: to name a being, for example an animal, is actually to conjure up the powers latent in that animal. Added to this is the fact that when we create words we use our breath and for these people and their traditions breath is associated with the principle of life. . . . It is because of this special feeling about words that people avoid using sacred personal names because they contain the power of the beings named, and if you use them too much the power becomes dissipated. So, names are very important inasmuch as they have the power to cast people and things in favorable and unfavorable lights. Thus, the ability to name one’s self is an act of liberation from semantic bondage.

Late in 1881, as third-term US congressman Thaddeus Coleman Pound was residing in Washington, D.C., the editorial writers at the Chicago Tribune opined on a not insubstantial problem then afflicting the nation. The “rapid development of the Pacific roads, North and South, as well as of other projected roads, is bringing white immigration into direct contact with the Indians,” the editorialists explained, “and they [i.e Indians] are in the way.” The dilemma was serious, as “railroads are bringing them as it were to our very doors, and in their present condition they are not welcome visitors to have round.” The resort to military force at times referred to as “extermination,” enlightened planners acknowledged at the time, was proving both a failure and an embarrassment; Indian peoples continued to resist the American onslaught, rendering the costs greater than the benefits, while the brutality of the US expansionist campaign was increasingly viewed as unfit for a self-professed civilized nation. The Tribune noted perceptively that “in almost every case it is only the non-laboring tribes that go upon the war-path,” and thus counseled, among other policy prescriptions, the concentration of Indians on several reservations, “where they can be more easily handled,” the performance of compulsory work so as to avoid “mischief,” the allotment of tribal lands, the subjection of tribal members to local laws, the severance of Indians from traditional institutions, and the education of youth in non-Indian ways. Taken together, it was a prescription for resolving what the editorialists, Pound, and others casually referred to as the “Indian question,” and its constituent parts gradually merged as the reformist assimilation strategy of the following decades.

One of the difficulties faced by those of us who teach Native American literature is that our students come to us forearmed with all sorts of generous stereotypes about Indians. Our students tend to think, for example, that virtually all Native Americans live close to the earth, are proud victims of white domination, and are spiritually superior to those who have colonized them. That Indians are humble people who worship a god of nature, peaceful people who love dogs and horses, reverent people who pay daily homage to their mother earth and their father sun. That Native Americans are strong and silent in the face of oppression. That they sit tall on horseback silhouetted against the setting sun. And so on. One of the things that teachers do—or let the voices of Native American writers do for them—is complicate these kinds of stereotypes. Of course, there is usually some truth to stereotypes. The trouble with stereotypes is that people want to be able to oversimplify a complicated subject by taking what may be true for one or two or many individuals and assume that it is true for everyone in a certain group.