[lbo-talk] "American Indians"

[joanna]

I did not know anything he described. I was never taught any Native 
American history in school, and the few anthropological essays I read 
always discussed Native American tribes in isolation from other tribes. 
I also read touchy-feely accounts of edenic Native American cultures, 
but these were obvious projections.

Other than that, I have been invited by Americans to participate in 
"native spiritual ceremonies" and have declined.

Joanna

jthorn65 at sbcglobal.net wrote:

>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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