Dear Chris,
I forwarded your question about Native American identities to a friend who is half American Indian.
His answer, below....I found his remarks about cultural identity to be fascinating -- it certainly shows who had the more sophisticated concept of identity.
Joanna
> __________________________________
>
> Just out of curiosity (and my well-known interest in
> comparisons of US and Russian history, in this case
> with respect to the respective country's indigenous
> peoples), to what extent do today's American Indians
> think of themselves as forming a single group?
> Obviously there was no such concept in 1500 -- there
> were Apaches, Mohawks and so forth, not AIs. AI-ness
> as far as I know would have made no sense to them. To
> what extent is there such a collective identity today?
> Does being an AI trump being a Blackfoot or a
> Cherokee, say? Is there much solidarity between the
> different tribes? Sorry if this question shows my ignorance/naivete.
---------------
Actually, I think this is very perceptive question, one that
most Americans do not think to ask. I am no kind of expert,
but I'll tell you what I know. In general you are correct,
there was no reason for native people to think of themselves
as one group. The names people gave themselves show
this. Most groups called themselves "the people," or a variation
of that. My group call themselves Haudenosanee, meaning
"people of the long house." (Interestingly, most of the names
used now, for example "Iroquois" instead of "Haudenosanee,"
are not the names people called themselves. The Europeans would
ask one group, "Who are those people over there?" and,
of course, they'd hear what tribe A called tribe B, not what
tribe B called themselves.)
People also changed their idea of their group in response to circumstances. For example, before Columbus, the five separate tribes now known as Iroquois developeded a formal confederacy. People's identity must have started changing from, "I'm a Cayuga," or "I'm a Mohawk," to "I'm Haudenosanee." But it never reached 100%.
There are some aspects of native identity that are interesting. In many groups, belonging wasn't always a matter of birth in the group and genetic belonging. Someone could arrive as a visitor, or a refugee or a captive and be adopted in; once adopted, they were part of the group. This thinking survived until pretty recently. When my mother grew up on a reservation, not far from Toronto, Canada, unwanted white babies were left on the reservation as foundlings. Of course these babies were brought up as Indian. My mother tells of a red-haired cousin who was found this way, adopted, grew up on the reservation, learned the Indian language as his native tounge, married a native woman. But of course the Canadian government, with a more Eroupean notion of identify, would not recognize him as Indian.
I think that this has changed in the last 50 or 60 years; some of the reasons are:
1) Living under legal system that is based on racial/genetic
concept of identity, rather than cultural.
2) Self-conscious desire to preserve identity, when there are many
attempts to appropriate native identity by people who have neither
racial nor cultural connection to native ways of living.
3) Migration of people to city, where members of different tribes
meet, develop urban, intertribal, version of native culture.
4) More children with parents from different tribes
5) Concerted attempts to organize different tribes into one political
constituency.
6) In many places, with the prosperity from reservation casinos, tribal
membership means a guaranteed income, and establishing the rules for
membership becomes a matter of tribal politics.
7) There are still traditional tribal rivalries; some live on mostly in jokes
about the others, some are still expressed in disputes over land or
water.
Some of these changes lead to exclusiveness, some to inclusiveness. Most Indians identities, I think, are now somewhere between a tribal identity and an Indian identity.