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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