American Indian tribe ponders tourism vs. cultural mores
WOUNDED KNEE, S.D. • The Oglala Sioux Tribe occupies a seemingly prime piece of South Dakota — a vast, scenic reservation that stands near a crossroads for tourists visiting Mount Rushmore, the Badlands, the historic Old West town of Deadwood and other popular sites.
But don't look for museums, hotels, restaurants or many restrooms here on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. The Lakota make little effort to attract visitors or tourism dollars, despite the fact that they are one of the nation's poorest tribes.
A generation after many other American Indians sought to harness their history for profit, the Oglala Sioux are still debating how much culture they are willing to share.
"When you take a community of people where at one point our language was outlawed and parts of our culture were outlawed, it's hard for us to, I guess, open up to the idea of sharing that in a way to make money off of it," said Nick Tilsen, executive director of Thunder Valley, a nonprofit group on Pine Ridge set up to keep traditional Lakota culture alive among young people.
Tourism is big business for some of the country's best-known Indian tribes, which reap a fortune from casinos and other business ventures.
The Navajo Nation in the Southwest welcomed some 600,000 visitors who spent $113 million last year. In Oklahoma, nearly 45,000 people visited the Cherokee Nation's Heritage Center museum.
But the Oglala Sioux stand apart in southwestern South Dakota. They have just one tribally run casino-and-hotel complex, the Prairie Wind, on the western side of the reservation and recently opened a smaller casino in Martin, a town near the reservation's eastern edge.
The tribe, Tilsen said, is not "totally against" development. "I think we're at the stage of, 'What parts do we want to protect, and what parts are we willing to share, and what does that look like?'"
Some tribal members think the site of the Wounded Knee Massacre, where more than 250 men, women and children were killed by the 7th Cavalry in 1890, should be turned into a tourist attraction with a museum. Others are fiercely opposed to development, saying it would be disrespectful to the dead.
The talk of development "hasn't matured yet," said Ivan Sorbel, executive director of the Pine Ridge Chamber of Commerce.
That doesn't stop people from coming. On a recent afternoon, two carloads of visitors from Texas and Iowa stopped within a 20-minute span to walk through the site, a National Historic Landmark.
The massacre is "one of the greatest crimes in U.S. history," said Gary Bishop, who traveled with his wife from the Dallas area.
But the couple's trip was unlikely to help the reservation much. They were staying at a hotel in Rapid City, about two hours northwest of the site.
Brianne Hawk Wing, an Oglala Sioux tribal member, arrived with her nephew and sister as soon as she saw visitors. Hawk Wing said she has been unable to get a job in tribal government, so she sells trinkets such as dream catchers for $20 to tourists at the site.
The tribal and federal governments are the largest employers on the 2.7 million-acre reservation, which includes some of the poorest counties in the U.S. The unemployment rate can be as high as 80 percent. Attracting investors is difficult because tribal members are often suspicious of outsiders.
It's unclear how many tourists visit the reservation or the Wounded Knee site. No one keeps accurate records. Still, many tribal members such as Hawk Wing want the site to remain as is.
"See, it's free. No one has to pay for anything," she said as she pointed out where her great-grandfather is buried.
A museum commemorating the massacre was ransacked and its contents lost in 1973. Another museum dedicated to the massacre draws thousands of people annually, but it's 100 miles north of the reservation in Wall, S.D. — also home to Wall Drug, a famous cluster of stores and tourist attractions offering Western kitsch.
The Wall museum is not affiliated with the Oglala Sioux, although co-founder Lani Van Eck said the facility had the blessing of Wounded Knee residents when it opened in 2003. She and the other co-founders decided to build it along busy Interstate 90 to attract more visitors.
Maps are available for anyone who wants to go to the actual site. But the museum doesn't bring revenue or jobs to the reservation, two things the Oglala Sioux are desperate for.
Also beyond the reservation's borders is the Crazy Horse Memorial, which honors the famed Lakota warrior and leader who played a key role in the 1876 defeat of the 7th Cavalry at the Battle of Little Bighorn in Montana. The memorial was started in 1948 and has yet to be finished, but it still draws more than 1 million visitors annually to a site about 20 miles from Mount Rushmore.
Staff members at the memorial and other South Dakota tourist attractions have begun taking part in training led by the Pine Ridge Chamber of Commerce.
The goal is to help teach employees about Lakota history so they can share that information with tourists, who might then drive to the Pine Ridge reservation.
Washington State Wants Schools to Ban Native American Mascots
http://bit.ly/WashintonStateMascot
If the Washington State Board of Education has its way, high schools across the state will no longer count Warriors, Braves, and Redskins among their mascots.
The state board passed a resolution last Wednesday encouraging districts to stop using Native American mascots, according to ABC affiliate KOMO-TV, in Seattle.
The resolution, which is similar to resolution passed by the board in 1993, cites research conducted by Dr. Stephanie Fryberg, a member of Tulalip Tribes in Washington State and an associate professor of Social and Cultural Psychology at the University of Arizona.
Fryberg and the American Psychological Association presented their research on the psychological consequences of using Native American mascots before the Senate Indian Affairs Committee in May, 2011. Other findings include an increased achievement gap between Native American and other students and negative effects on race relations in the United States.
In the past decade, 10 Washington State high schools gave up their Indian-named mascots, including Eatonville Middle School, which went from the Warriors to the Eagles, and Eisenhower Middle School in Everett, which went from the Warriors to the Patriots.
But 50 more, including some tribal schools, haven’t given up their nicknames. And despite the resolution, the board doesn’t have the authority to require schools to comply with the change, board spokesman Aaron Wyatt told KOMO. However, he added, there will be no adverse consequences for schools that don’t voluntarily choose a new mascot.
The Native American mascot controversy — that is, whether to ban the names from school sports teams — has been hotly debated for decades.
In February, 2006, the National Collegiate Athletic Association beganbanning 18 colleges and universities that had Native American logos, mascots, nicknames from hosting post-season competitions. Fourteen schools ended up removing all references to Native American culture. But other schools — among them Florida State University Seminoles, the University of Utah Utes, and Central Michigan University Chippewas — were allowed to continue using their nicknames because Native American groups endorsed them, ESPN reported.
The University of North Dakota, home of the Fighting Sioux, wanted to continue using its moniker and had received permission from the nearby Spirit Lake Sioux Tribe. But the neighboring Standing Rock Sioux Tribe never voted on the matter, and the NCAA insisted the school remove its mascots and logos.
The school refused, and the NCAA then banned UND from hosting post-season tournaments. A committee of tribal members brought on a federal lawsuit trying to save the moniker, but the suit was thrown out in May.
In early 2011, the North Dakota Legislature passed a bill requiring UND to use the Fighting Sioux nickname and Indian head logo. But in June, North Dakota voters chose to dump it altogether.
Under a new agreement between the NCAA and the state’s attorney general, thousands of logos depicting an American Indian warrior will be allowed tostay in the school’s hockey and basketball arenas, although six signs saying “Home of the Fighting Sioux” must be removed.
In May, the Oregon State Board of Education voted to ban Native American mascots, nicknames and logos from eight of its high schools. The schools have Oregon five years to comply, or they will risk losing their state funding.
Other Washington communities have had vicious battles over removing the mascots. For example, in 1997, The Colville Indians asked the Colville High School Indians to use another name, but the school refused, saying the mascot was part of its legacy.
"Christopher Columbus is a symbol, not of a man, but of imperialism. Imperialism and colonialism are not something that happened decades ago or generations ago, but they are still happening now with the exploitation of people. ... The kind of thing that took place long ago in which people were dispossessed from their land and forced out of subsistence economies and into market economies -- those processes are still happening today."
-- John Mohawk, Seneca, 1992
Columbus Day Links
http://www.indians.org/welker/columbu1.htm
http://members.aol.com/MrDonnLessons/USHolidays.html#COLUMBUS
http://teacherlink.ed.usu.edu/tlresources/units/Byrnes-celebrations/columbus.html
http://education.shu.edu/lessonplans/social_studies/united_states/high/inaccuracies.html
http://www.thehomeschoolmom.com/columbusday.html
http://www.atozteacherstuff.com/themes/ColumbusDay.shtml
http://www.cyberlearning-world.com/lessons/ushistory/lpcolumbus.htm
http://www.teachervision.fen.com/lesson-plans/lesson-3024.html
From the Los Angeles Times
Huntington Library Database Tells the Stories of 100,000 Mission Indians
The computerized repository is available to the public.
By Larry Gordon
Times Staff Writer
August 8, 2006
Reclaiming a neglected part of California's past, historians Monday unveiled an immense data bank that for the first time chronicles the lives and deaths of more than 100,000 Indians in the Spanish missions of the 18th and 19th centuries.
In an eight-year effort, researchers at the Huntington Library in San Marino used handwritten records of baptisms, marriages and deaths at 21 Catholic missions and two other sites from between 1769 and 1850 and created a cross-referenced computerized repository that is now open to public access.
The Early California Population Project, its creators hope, will help bring the state's Spanish colonial and Mexican eras from out of the long shadows cast by the 13 English colonies on the East Coast.
"What we are trying to do here is to say these people have a history, and it's not a history that can be caricatured," said the project's general editor, historian Steven W. Hackel. "It's a history that emerges from a deep native past and a deep Spanish past and shows how the two came together for better or worse."
Huntington officials say scholars and amateur genealogists will be able to track, among other things, how many descendants of a Miwok Indian survived into the era of U.S. statehood, how many people died in an earthquake or a measles epidemic, how frequent intermarriage was between Spanish soldiers and Indian women, or how many Indians worked in farming or became skilled artisans.
The database does not offer judgments on the long debates about whether the Franciscans forced Indians into the missions and treated them brutally or whether Father Junipero Serra, founder of the California mission system, deserves to be, as he is now, just one step from sainthood in the Roman Catholic Church.
However, it does document the Franciscans' obsessions with converting Indians to Catholicism and its bans on polygamy and illegitimacy. And, death by death, it shows an extraordinarily high mortality rate as Indians became exposed to European diseases such as measles, influenza and smallpox.
"People who think the missions were places of cultural genocide and terrible population decline can look at this database, and they'll see that people came into the missions and died soon after," said Hackel, a history professor at Oregon State University. "People who want to see something else in the missions can look here too. It also shows tremendous Indian persistence and attempts to maintain their own communities within the missions."
The public can gain access to the database through an Internet link at http://www.huntington.org . Conducting searches on the site can be complicated at first because of the many choices involved.
The project, which cost $650,000, used records mainly taken from microfilm of the originals. They overwhelmingly concern Indians in the coastal regions from the San Diego to Marin County areas, perhaps as many as half of the Indians within the current state borders. Some Spanish soldiers and Mexican settlers are included through the turbulent times of Mexico's independence from Spain in 1821 and California U.S. statehood in 1850.
There are some gaps in the documents as the missions declined, the Franciscans were stripped of their authority and Indians revolted. After the San Diego mission was burned down in an insurrection in 1775, the priests re-created the logs from memory, Hackel said.
Still, the Franciscans remained good record-keepers. They assigned numbers to each baptism and carefully noted parents and godparents, village of origin, ethnic background and trades. As a result, many people can be traced with astonishing specifics through life and, with computer links, their progeny.
For example, a 2-day-old Indian boy, given the name Francisco, was baptized Aug. 11, 1786, at Mission San Diego, the project shows. The information links to his marriage at 18 to a woman named Maria Loreta, also 18 (a spinster by that era's customs) and her death five years later with no children.
Francisco married again the next year to Antonina, who died childless 10 months later. He married a third time, to Thomasa (she was 13 and he was 26) and had a baby girl, Ynes, who died at 6 months. Francisco died April 4, 1817, apparently held in high regard by the Franciscans because he was given a deathbed communion, not just an anointing.
Thomasa married twice more and had 10 more children, two of whom are recorded as dying in infancy.
The causes of deaths in that clan were not given, but other records reveal risks of Western life beyond disease. Some people died from bear and snake attacks and others drowned in wells. The 1812 San Juan Capistrano earthquake killed 39, all buried in the ruins of the mission church.
"It tells us one heck of a lot about the people of California before 1850," said Robert C. Ritchie, the Huntington's director of research. "It has an enormous amount of detail that sits below the big story we know: the dying of so many native people along the coast."
Although surveys of smaller groups of missions were done in the past, none pulled together populations from across what was known as Alta California, scholars say. Plus, no other project on this topic was designed for the average person, not just experts, to navigate.
"The goal is democratic and open access to records that previously were, if not inaccessible, very, very hard to get," said Hackel, whose 2005 book, "Children of Coyote, Missionaries of Saint Francis," examined Indian-Spanish relations in that period.
The raw records can be difficult to read, interpret and put into context, he added.
The project involved eye-straining work that took the equivalent of between two and four full-time employees since 1999. Their job was to take hundreds of thousands of bits of information from the microfilm of sometimes damaged and illegible mission books and put them into easy-to-read computer formats.
Anne Marie Reid, the inputting team leader, recalled feeling ill sometimes after long days staring at dark microfilm in Spanish and Latin and entering names and dates into computer logs.
But she said she also gained a feeling of fellowship with the Indians and priests as she recognized their names in various references. "You come to know these people," she said recently in her small workroom with consoles and screens.
In all, statistics were gleaned on an estimated 120,000 people, including some with incomplete records and some mentioned just once as a parent. Included are about 101,000 baptisms, 28,000 marriages and 71,000 burials at all 21 missions and from the Los Angeles Plaza Church and the Santa Barbara Presidio.
Partly because of the size, the project experienced some delays this summer because of software glitches.
The Huntington has a few original and very valuable mission records, including a page in Serra's very legible hand about three baptisms on Dec. 1, 1783, at Mission San Luis Obispo. Missions and other Catholic archives hold most of the surviving books but usually allow scholars to see only microfilm copies, some made 50 years ago.
Among the institutions lending microfilm for the project were the Santa Barbara Mission Archive-Library, the archdioceses of San Francisco and Los Angeles, and Santa Clara University. John R. Johnson, curator of anthropology for the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History, and Randall Milliken, a Davis-based anthropologist and mission expert, helped with planning.
The largest financial support for the project came from the National Endowment for the Humanities ($294,000), the California State Library ($163,000) and the John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation ($110,000).
The Dan Murphy Foundation and the Giles W. and Elise G. Mead Foundation were among other donors.
Anthony Morales, tribal chair and chief of the Gabrieleno/Tongva Band of Mission Indians of San Gabriel, said he thought the project would "really catch the interest of all kinds of people like educators and researchers and just average folks who are interested in their families."
Some people, he said, will search for evidence of brutality in the mission system such as forced conversions and labor, while others will look for a more positive picture, such as "what did happen after my great-great-grandmother got converted and baptized."
Robert Senkewicz, a Santa Clara University historian who is an expert on early California, said the accessibility of the database is its "great virtue."
"It will make genealogists feel like they died and went to heaven," he said.
Valerie Taliman, Indian Country Today Media Network’s west coast editor and writer, received a Native American Women in Leadership Award during the 45th Annual California Native American Day celebration in Sacramento today, September 29.
Taliman, was notified on September 5 that she would be among nine outstanding Native women to be honored at this year’s celebration.
‘Our theme Honoring Native American Women in Leadership was chosen to honor Native American women with outstanding commitment and leadership for Native American communities and future generations,” wrote Olin C. Jones, the chair of State Tribal Liaisons of California. “On behalf of the State Tribal Liaisons of the State of California, I am happy to inform you that you have been selected to be recognized for your many years of service to the Native American community. You specifically embody the theme of our program, which is to honor Native American Women in Leadership for their outstanding commitment and tireless work for tribal communities and future generations. We are proud to bestow this honor upon you as an individual and as a representative of your tribal community.”
An award-winning journalist, Taliman received the Richard LaCourse Award from the Native American Journalists Association last year for her groundbreaking investigative series on missing and murdered First Nations women that was published by Indian Country Today in 2010. She continues to highlight violence against women and the racism inherent in violence against Native families in her articles for ICTMN.
Taliman posted a special message on her Facebook page on the morning of the awards ceremony. “Up early, making prayers of gratitude, and looking forward to all the festivities today for Native American Day at the Capitol,” she wrote.
The awards ceremony will take place on the south steps of the State Capitol. California’s Native American Day honors the valuable historic and cultural contributions made by American Indian leaders in California. The event is sponsored by the California State Tribal Liaisons and the California Indian Heritage Center Foundation.
http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2012/09/28/california-native-american-day-honors-ictmns-taliman-136479
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/30/opinion/sunday/kill-the-indians-then-copy-them.html?_r=0
JUST over a week ago, a handful of Senator Scott P. Brown’s supporters gathered in Boston to protest his opponent, Elizabeth Warren. The crowd — making Indian war whoops and tomahawk chops — was ridiculing what Mr. Brown, Republican of Massachusetts, called the “offense” of Ms. Warren’s claim that she has Cherokee and Delaware ancestry.
To mock real Indians by chanting like Hollywood Indians in order to protest someone you claim is not Indian at all gets very confusing. Even more so because early Americans spent centuries killing Indians, and then decades trying to drive any distinctive Indianness out of the ones who survived. Perhaps we’ve come a long way if Americans are now going around accusing people who don’t look or act Indian enough of appropriating that identity for personal gain. But in fact, the appropriation of Indian virtues is one of the country’s oldest traditions.
Indians — who we are and what we mean — have always been part of how America defined itself. Indians on the East Coast were largely (but never completely) deracinated, and tribes like the Delaware were either killed or relocated farther west. At the same time, their Indianness was extracted as a set of virtues: honor, stoicism, dignity, freedom. Once, in college, an African-American student shook his head when I told him that I was Indian and he said he was jealous. Why? I asked. Because you lived life on your own terms and would rather have died than become a slave. That sentiment — totally at odds with the reality in which many tribes were indeed enslaved and a few owned slaves themselves — seemed a very wistful expression of what being an Indian meant.
In any case, the mythic Indian virtues of dignity and freedom adhere less to real Indians than they do to the very nation that deposed them. Just think of how much the ultimate American, the cowboy, has in common with the Indian: a life lived beyond the law but in accordance with a higher set of laws like self-sufficiency, honor, toughness, a painful past, a fondness for whiskey and always that long, lingering look over his shoulder at a way of life quickly disappearing. Contrary to the view held by a lot of Indian people, America hasn’t forgotten us. It has always been obsessed with us and has appropriated, without recourse to reality or our own input, the qualities with which we are associated.
BEGINNING in the late 19th century, assimilation of the remaining American Indian population was official federal policy. This was around the time that the American frontier was considered closed: the West Coast had been reached and there were no more lands or peoples to conquer. And yet Indians still held on to much of our land and our identity. So at the behest of the federal government, thousands of Indian children were removed from their homes and sent to boarding schools. Indian languages and native religions were suppressed.
Even as late as the 1950s, the federal government ran a relocation program that promised American Indians housing and job training if they left their rural communities for cities like Cleveland, Chicago and Los Angeles. (Very few of these programs provided anything close to what the brochures handed out door to door on many reservations had promised.)
Meanwhile, Indians themselves found work or didn’t, left their communities, or didn’t. Fell in love and married — sometimes other Indians and sometimes not. Had children. Got hired, got fired, found Jesus or went to a sweat lodge. For many of us, our Indianness was more than a heritage or an ancestral tale about who our great-great-grandparents were; our cultures remained central to who we were. For others, not so much. In states like Oklahoma, where Elizabeth Warren is from, it’s almost unusual not to grow up hearing stories about your Indian heritage. So many tribes were moved there, there was such a saturation of Indians who worked and were educated and lived alongside other Americans and such pressure to assimilate, that to have such heritage was, in some ways, to be an Oklahoman.
Growing up as I did, on the Ojibwe Leech Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota, it was patently obvious to me that Indians came in all different shapes and colors. I’m fairly light-skinned and have been told many times that, looking the way I do, I can’t be an Indian, not a real one. I’ve heard this from colleagues, writers, neighbors. Once I was told I couldn’t be Indian because we’d all been killed. And yet I am. We are bound by much more than phenotype or blood quantum; we share a language, history, religion, foods, the bonds of family.
Only someone like Mr. Brown, who hasn’t spent any time around us or has only passing acquaintance with us, could say, as he did during a debate: “Professor Warren claimed she was a Native American, a person of color. And as you can see, she is not.” After the video of the tomahawk-chopping protesters emerged on the Internet last week, Mr. Brown apologized for their behavior. But he also explained that Ms. Warren had “claimed something she wasn’t entitled to.”
Thankfully, we American Indians are no longer forced to assimilate to accepted American culture. Instead, as the senator from Massachusetts suggests, we’re expected to assimilate to accepted Indian culture, a stereotype perfected in Boston way back in 1773, when protesters tossed tea into the harbor dressed as Mohawks in war paint. By going after Ms. Warren’s claim, Mr. Brown is appealing to an American narrative just as old as the one where Indians are noble and dark and on horseback, and just as divorced from the textured complexity of the American experience; one where the good guys are broad-chested and the villains twirl their mustaches; one where the only differences that are allowed are those that serve to reinforce American fantasies; one where Americans persist in eradicating problem Indians, so that they can wear our feathers.
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Native American studies program continues to grow after 40 yrs.
By Emily Brigstocke And Jasmine Sachar, The Dartmouth Staff
Published on Thursday, September 27, 2012
In 1972, then-College President John Kemeny established Dartmouth’s Native American studies program, the only one of its kind in the Ivy League. This year, the department, which currently has nine faculty members and offers over 25 classes, will celebrate its 40th anniversary with a Native American Studies Symposium on Friday.
Although the program has made significant progress since its inception, when one half-time professor was hired and two classes were offered, parts of the program can still be improved, according to former department chair and history professor Colin Calloway.
“It’s an occasion to pause, look back and think, ‘OK, that’s how far we’ve come,’ and see the opportunities for future growth and future development,” he said.
Department chair Bruce Duthu ’80 is currently working to establish an off-campus program for Native American studies that would work with Pueblo communities, which Calloway said would add a “new dimension” to the academic field.
Over 10 years ago, Calloway proposed an addition to the Sherman House, home to the Native American studies program. While the project was approved, it was never executed due to economic concerns, he said.
The department has also begun a search process for a Native American art professor.
“It’s a gap in our curriculum, especially since we have such a relationship with the Hood Museum, which has such a great collection of Native American art,” Calloway said. “It’s a shame to not have a faculty member who can take advantage of those kinds of things.”
Michael Hanitchak ’73, one of the first students to take Native American studies classes at the College, said that the program was initially controversial because some critics did not consider Native American studies to be a legitimate academic discipline.
“There is a certain amount of remembering how difficult it was to be involved during a time when it was controversial and a certain amount of satisfaction that it has been very successful,” Hanitchak said.
Yale University history and American studies professor Ned Blackhawk, who will speak at the symposium, said that many scholars regard the College’s program as the best undergraduate Native American studies department in the nation.
“Dartmouth’s program is really one of the jewels in the crown of the Ivy League,” Blackhawk said. “The program is very well-known — visiting professors, museum, lots of faculty members, far more Native American studies faculty members. These all contribute to the flourishing community.”
When Calloway became department chair in 1997, only two of the program’s faculty members were Native American, Calloway said. Now, seven out of the nine professors identify themselves as Native American.
Monica Stretten ’15, a member of the Chickahominy tribe and a Native American studies and Romance languages double major, said she came to Dartmouth specifically for its Native American studies department and community.
“I’m glad that I’ve had the opportunity to study these things because it exposes me to new ideas, and it also reaffirms what I’ve been feeling,” Stretten said. “It’s sad that sometimes people don’t take Native Americans studies very seriously. It’s very important in terms of social context, and you can apply it to whatever field you want.”
Adria Brown ’15, a member of the Chickasaw tribe, said she appreciates the Native American studies major for its interdisciplinary nature. When the program was founded to rededicate the College to its mission of educating Native students, opportunities opened for Native American teenagers thinking about pursuing college educations.
“Dartmouth has been wonderful at recruiting Native American students from across the nation, giving them the opportunity to experience an Ivy League education,” Brown said.
Native American students also feel the need to be recognized in contemporary society because they have had few opportunities to express themselves and their opinions in the past, according to Stretten.
“The first thing you think of when you think of Natives is Indians from the 1800s with headdresses,” Stretten said. “You don’t think about someone like me who is in your classroom or your friend. You don’t think of them in a modern context, as doctors, lawyers or politicians.”
Ignoring Native American history, philosophy and cultural experiences creates a one-dimensional view of American history, Calloway said.
“Native American studies is an area that allows people glimpses into a deep and incredibly varied human experience on this continent,” he said. “I think having [this] department opens the opportunity for American education.”