[lbo-talk] "American Indians"

[joanna]

  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.