[lbo-talk] "American Indians"

[jthorn65 at sbcglobal.net]

This makes me wonder, is any of the below not just part of the body of knowledge that most whites have 
concerning Native American's? Other than the specifics concerning his family is there anything here that 
people on this list did not know? Almost all of the whites I know seem to pretty well know almost all of this 
but a few don't know everything noted below.

I just imagined for some reason that leftists would be at least this knowledgeable but I can't exactly say why 
I believe this. Personal experience most likely.

John Thornton



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.

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