Category Archives: Uncategorized

Members of Congress, Senators Introduce Bipartisan, Bicameral STOP Act To Safeguard Tribal Items

 

Washington, D.C. – Today, U.S. House Assistant Speaker Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.), and U.S. Representatives Deb Haaland (D-N.M.), Don Young (R-Alaska), and Tom Cole (R-Okla.) reintroduced the bipartisan Safeguard Tribal Objects of Patrimony Act, a bill to prohibit the exporting of sacred Native American items and increase penalties for stealing and illegally trafficking tribal cultural patrimony. U.S. Senators Martin Heinrich (D-N.M), the lead author of the legislation, and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) introduced the companion bill in the Senate.

 

Source: Members of Congress, Senators Introduce Bipartisan, Bicameral STOP Act To Safeguard Tribal Items

Native Survivance and Visual Sovereignty: Indigenous Visual and Material Culture in the 19th and 20th Centuries

The Repatriation Files wants its readers to know of this special issue of Arts! Edited by Sascha Scott and Amy Lonetree. 

Crescencio Martinez, Two Drummers (1918). Courtesy of Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, Santa Fe, NM. 24157/13.

Special Issue in journal Arts: Native Survivance and Visual Sovereignty: Indigenous Visual and Material Culture in the 19th and 20th Centuries

Source: Native Survivance and Visual Sovereignty: Indigenous Visual and Material Culture in the 19th and 20th Centuries

Table of Contents

Scott, Sascha T.; Lonetree, Amy. 2020. “The Past and the Future Are Now.” Arts 9, no. 3: 77.
Stevens, Scott M. 2020. “Collecting Haudenosaunee Art from the Modern Era.” Arts 9, no. 2: 55.
Hawk Polk, Dyani W. 2020. “The Long Game .” Arts 9, no. 2: 67.
Scott, Sascha T. 2020. “Ana-Ethnographic Representation: Early Modern Pueblo Painters, Scientific Colonialism, and Tactics of Refusal.” Arts 9, no. 1: 6.
Moore, Emily L. 2019. “The American Flag and the Alaska Native Brotherhood.” Arts 8, no. 4: 158.
Shannon, Jennifer. 2019. “Trusting You Will See This as We Do: The Hidatsa Water Buster (Midi Badi) Clan Negotiates the Return of a Medicine Bundle from the Museum of the American Indian in 1938.” Arts 8, no. 4: 156.
Chavez Lamar, Cynthia. 2019. “A Pathway Home: Connecting Museum Collections with Native Communities.” Arts 8, no. 4: 154.
Penney, David W. 2019. “Siyosapa: At the Edge of Art.” Arts 8, no. 4: 148.
Burns, Emily C. 2019. “Circulating Regalia and Lakȟóta Survivance, c. 1900.” Arts 8, no. 4: 146.
Chavez, Yve. 2019. “Basket Weaving in Coastal Southern California: A Social History of Survivance.” Arts 8, no. 3: 94.
Deloria, Philip J. 2019. “T.C. Cannon’s Guitar.” Arts 8, no. 4: 132.

 

 

Opinion | This 19th-Century Law Helps Shape Criminal Justice in Indian Country

By David Heska Wanbli Weiden

from The New York Times

And that’s a problem — especially for Native American women, and especially in rape cases.

Source: Opinion | This 19th-Century Law Helps Shape Criminal Justice in Indian Country

Food Insecurity in Native Communities

In this post, The Repatriation Files offers links to some of the most recent reporting on the effects of the pandemic on food insecurity in Native American communities.

“Native communities (both urban and rural) are often invisible in “normal” times. This is exacerbated in times of crisis. Native communities are ripe for the effects of COVID-19 to intensify at extraordinary levels”

First Nations Development Institute

As the website Health Affairs reports:

Native Americans have many of the risk factors that put them at higher risk for severe illness from COVID-19. Heart disease, cancer, unintentional injuries, and diabetes are leading causes of death among AI/AN and lead to a life expectancy that is 5.5 years less than that for the US all-races population. Natives are twice as likely as whites to have diabetes. Native people die from diabetes at a rate that is 189 percent higher than that for other Americans. In addition, 28.6 percent of AI/AN under age 65 do not have health insurance.

https://www.healthaffairs.org/do/10.1377/hblog20200331.659944/full/

Marlysa D. Gamblin, writing for Bread for the World, reminds her readers,

Although they were the first communities in what is now known as the United States, Indigenous communities in urban and rural areas are often the last remembered in public policy. This is true particularly in times of crisis, including the current COVID-19 pandemic. As of April 14, 2020, the Indian Health System had confirmed more than 1,100 cases of COVID-19 and more than 20 deaths. In addition, Indigenous people living in urban areas, including Salt Lake City, San Jose, and Seattle, are contracting the virus at high rates. These statistics are expected to continue to worsen.

https://www.bread.org/blog/race-hunger-and-covid-19-impact-indigenous-communities

Olivia Chan and Jamila Taylor of The Century Foundation write,

Although racial data on testing, hospitalizations, and deaths due to COVID-19 are still incomplete, early warnings and reports have shown that low-income, Black, Hispanic, and Native communities have been hit the hardest. Many in these groups are frontline and essential workers who are put at risk when they use public transportation or go to work. Many also live in multigenerational homes, where a working-age adult exposed to the virus could pass it on to seniors and others in their household.

https://tcf.org/content/commentary/covid-19-lays-bare-vulnerabilities-u-s-food-security/?agreed=1

Click this link for a PDF from First Nations Development Institute: https://www.firstnations.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/COVID19-and-Native-Communities-4.17.20_DIGITAL_IS.pdf

Click to access COVID19-and-Native-Communities-4.17.20_DIGITAL_IS.pdf

Powerful portraits of indigenous peoples of the Amazon and the sacred territories they defend

Photo: Pablo Albarenga

from The Washington Post

A photo essay underscoring the powerful bond between native peoples of the rainforest and the territories they are called to protect.

Source: Powerful portraits of indigenous peoples of the Amazon and the sacred territories they defend

Confluence/ Collaboration and Trans-Indigenous/ Relationality

By Bonnie Etherington

 

Three cultures
Choctaw-Biloxi, Louisiana Creole, and Creek
woven into my Grandfather –
his mother, my Great Grands.
Three is a sacred number for us:
three sisters, three worlds.
Three.
The number of strands it takes to weave.
Three.
The waters of Louisiana:
seawater
fresh water
brackish water.

Rain Prud'homme-Cranford and Carolyn M. Dunn

I come to our Humanities Without Walls project as a Pākehā (non-Indigenous) person originally from New Zealand. My main context for the Mississippi as a child was learning how to spell it in an international elementary school in Indonesia, where the children were from many different countries but the curriculum was all American. We learned nothing about the Mississippi’s Native histories. When my partner and I moved to Illinois for graduate school we drove from California. I knew that when we crossed the Mississippi we would be in Illinois. For me, then, the Mississippi River signaled the beginning of my graduate student life and the joining of that life with my ongoing research interests in waterways as sites of comparative Indigenous histories and relations. My primary research focuses on contemporary Indigenous literatures of the Pacific, which may, at first, seem distant from the Mississippi. However, all oceans are ultimately connected and the shipping routes of corn and grains downstream that are then exported to major markets like China, the transport of oil and other petroleum products upstream, the increasing ambiguity of where the river ends and the ocean begins in Louisiana, and the growing dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico caused, in part, by nitrates from fertilizer runoff that travels to the ocean via the Mississippi, suggests that the histories and futures of these large bodies of water are very much entangled with each other. The following keyword pairs are words that kept coming up for me through the project’s emphasis on these kinds of intermingling.

Confluence/ Collaboration

As a methodological term, collaboration asks that the members of our Humanities Without Walls team think about how we engage with Indigenous peoples invested in the river, and with each other as researchers, as artists, as teachers, and as members of university communities and communities beyond our institutions. It is also a term that necessitates thinking about how we engage with the river itself. The term “confluence” has been helpful for me when thinking about collaboration in the context of the river and its histories. Confluence refers to the merging of elements, or where rivers or tributaries meet. Collaboration, in its ideal form, does not mean a flattening of all the different things we bring to the table. We all come to the river project from different contexts and we also all bring different questions. As the river’s confluences tell numerous overlapping, converging, and accumulating stories that are connected but are also still very much about specific places and localities, so too does collaboration encompass the emphasis on multiplicity as well as specificity that I see emerging from the project.

Headwaters of the Mississippi.

The project has made clear that collaboration does not mean homogenization or wholesale access to Indigenous knowledge and practices. Though the grant that funds this project is called Humanities Without Walls, it has also taught me some of the values of walls. For example, when we talk about public lands or a public stretch of water, such as that found in a national park, collaborating effectively with Indigenous communities in those areas who have been disenfranchised from their lands and waters necessitates thinking about who the “public” is and how something is made public. An image I keep returning to is a webcam set up by the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources at the Mississippi headwaters, designed to provide visual access to the headwaters at all times. However, when we visited the headwaters the webcam added a layer of government surveillance to the space that made multiple members of the group uncomfortable. Its presence reinforces narratives of common accessibility perpetuated by settlers that erase histories of those lands and the violent ways in which the U.S. government often acquired them. Similarly, if we view collaboration as simply “working together” or ignore the fact that Indigenous expertise has so long been erased or violently taken by non-Indigenous researchers and institutions, then we risk doing further harm. Collaborating in a methodological context thus requires attending to how settlers construct narratives that divide land into public or private property, and how concepts of “wilderness” as devoid of humans erase Indigenous presences. It also requires analyzing how such narratives disrupt already existing relationships that people have with their lands and waters. It means continually thinking critically about how a term like collaboration has been and can be wielded in ways that actually do not serve Indigenous peoples.

Effective collaboration in the context of this project is something that I think we need to continually negotiate and must center primarily on relationships—accounting for our own positions within those relationships and with our research, and asking questions about how best to enact those relationships. Relationships are not created overnight and are necessarily very dependent on context. Depending on what we working on, this could mean relationships with local community members, it could mean interdisciplinary relationships within our own institution and across institutions, and so on. Collaboration can also disrupt the idea of humanities scholars working in isolation and foreground the value of de-centering ourselves as experts or authorities in our research. Collaboration allows for this de-centering in ways that might hopefully lead to more equitable and ethical research systems.

Relationality/ Trans-Indigenous

The poem “Grandma’s Zydeco Stomp Dance: A Patchwork Poem” by Rain Prudhomme-Cranford (Louisiana Creole/ Choctaw-Biloxi/ Mvskogean) and Carolyn Dunn (Tunica/ Choctaw/ Biloxi), expresses, for me, some useful ways of thinking about collaboration in terms of trans-Indigenous relationality as well, in the context of the river and its entangled histories. The poem is accompanied by an image of a quilt art piece called “Intertribal” made with multiple overlapping elements and colors by artist Tony Tiger (Sac & Fox / Muscogee). The form of the poem itself is a “patchwork” poem, or one assembled by different authors coming together to make one unified work. A note at the end of the poem describes how it embodies collaboration, as it is a “found poem” created by “piec[ing] together writing by Dunn and Prud’homme-Cranford to form a new poetic conversation in call and response.” The structure of call and response is explicitly relational, as each part of the conversation emerges in relation to another. Additionally, the poem is not simply a collection of their different writings but forms something new out of their previous writing.

The authors state that the “traveling tributaries” of the river include “long varied stories” of “colonization and conquest.” But these tributaries also include the Native and Black cultural histories that they see “woven” into the “Mississippi red, / blood arteries” and therefore also woven into their own genealogies: these are moving histories, dynamic, and explicitly storied. In their poem, “the waters of Louisiana” are woven “strands” of “seawater/ fresh water/ brackish water” which do not allow them to forget the histories of slavery, Native expulsion, and genocide. But their description of the river’s waters also foreground trans-Indigenous and Black histories of persistence. The waters “carry our Grandma’s stories” and the “rhythms” of her dance, which are portrayed as living and active, despite genocide and enslavement.  The form of a patchwork poem, with its ability to incorporate different elements or “strands” into a whole, is able to hold all these histories and presents at once, in the same way that Dunn and Prudhomme-Cranford portray the river holding all these histories simultaneously with multiple forms of potential for vibrant futures.

In a workshop on mapping held during our latest Humanities Without Walls meeting, Citizen Band Potawatomi geographer and Northwestern Center for Native American and Indigenous Research artist in residence Margaret Pearce stated that all maps are about relationality. Nothing is independent on a map, and a map is essentially thousands of tiny decisions replicated across a page—it is an accumulation of meanings. Dunn and Prudhomme-Cranford’s poem suggests that relationality in the context of the Mississippi River Valley requires paying attention to the many different trans-Indigenous relationships it facilitates, which are not necessarily made visible on maps created by non-Indigenous cartographers. Chadwick Allen (Chickasaw) defines the term trans-Indigenous as a way to read connections among different Indigenous peoples in a way that is “together (yet) distinct” (xiii). In other words, the term offers ways to talk about the long-held and ongoing relationships Indigenous peoples have had and continue to have with each other without homogenizing them and without reading their relational acts within colonially-centered frameworks.

“together (yet) distinct”

Chad Allen

The river and its tributaries allow for conversations about nodes and confluences of trans-Indigenous activism that it connects and facilitates. For example, in Chicago we heard from Indigenous futurist artist Santiago X (Coushatta and Chamoru) and his latest project to build two earthworks (mounds) at the bookends of the Northwest Portage Walking Museum for the Chicago Architecture Biennial in collaboration with the American Indian Center of Chicago.

Santiago X’s mound project, Chicago.

This project involves collaborations between several Native organizations, artists, and community members based on shared interests in highlighting historical as well as ongoing Native American presences in Chicagoland, but it is also a project that arises specifically from Santiago X’s Coushatta heritage that includes mound builders. The project is additionally guided by the properties of the sites Santiago X chose for his mounds along the river, and the wider Mississippi Valley’s history as a place of numerous earthworks created by multiple Native Nations since time immemorial. Santiago X’s mounds and “Grandma Zydeco’s Stomp Dance” act then as representations as well as continuations of the trans-Indigenous relations that the Mississippi River Valley facilitates.

 

See Dunn and Prudhomme-Cranford’s poem here:

https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2017/may/grandmas-zydeco-stomp-dance-patchwork-poem-rain-prudhomme-cranford-carolyn-m-dunn

 

More on Santiago X’s work can be found here:

https://santiagox.com/

 

The Indigenous Mississippi: Scholarly Identity, Kinship, Engagement

By Agleska Cohen-Rencountre

My ideas are a practice of honoring Indigenous identity on the water and Indigenous resilience while not attempting to fill in the erasures with one family history. Rather I name my own stakes in an acknowledgment of Indigenous resilience, diplomacy, and sovereignties. I am grateful to be in conversation with my diverse and dynamic group and am looking forward to what is ahead!

Please click on the link below to enter my project:

https://uploads.knightlab.com/storymapjs/cb62edc162ac89a80fcf7b9542abf0f5/contemporary-indigenous-spatiality/index.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Midwest and Mississippi: Keyword, RECREATION / RE-CREATION

By Andrew Freiman

Recreation: “the action or process of creating something again”

1.

The Living Webster Encyclopedic Dictionary of the English Language says that recreation is “[a]musement or diversion which gives enjoyment; refreshment of the strength of spirits, as after toil; anything providing entertainment or relaxation” (801). The Oxford Dictionary is more to the point, saying simply “[a]ctivity done for enjoyment when one is not working”, while quickly adding the second definition “the action or process of creating something again” as well as  “a re-enactment or simulation of something”.

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA

The term had a steady if shallow trend during the 19th century only to explode at the turn of the 20th as a reaction to growing trends in employment, labor, a slowly rising class consciousness, and the notion of leisure time–that free stuff, outside the confines of work, that allow some folks to further define who they are. Not just a tailor, but one who plays handball. Not just an investor, but one that enjoys motoring on the weekends and holidays. There were of course other uses of the word that sought to help individuals internally, to heal their bodies or bring peace to their minds. A midcentury anthology puts it this way: “Recreation is frequently used to help attain other ends such as healing the sick, rehabilitating the injured, and helping the delinquent” (Brightbill 51). Brightbill continues to stress his case by noting that “[a]s far as individual need is concerned, recreation is often the only outlet for self-realization and self-discovery. It gives to human beings the chance to create, to express, to serve, and to gain, and results in personality growth and development” (52). So, recreation is a reaction to labor, a utilization of free time, a way to define the self, even heal the self, maybe even foundational to the self in general. We cannot forget the second definition offered by the Oxford Dictionary “the action or process of creating something again” and “a re-enactment or simulation of something” these two ideas, related as they are, will become useful later on.

We should stress what may already be obvious, recreation at the turn of the 20th century was something reserved for a specific group of Americans. White, some degree above the economic nomination of “lower class,” often male citizens enjoyed this form of self-realization. Others worked more often at more difficult jobs, or were banned from or physically and culturally removed from the places in which recreation could happen. Pools and parks were segregated. Racist practices on public roadways made motoring while a person of color difficult if not dangerous. Thanks to the Dawes Act of 1887 National Forests were cut out from already existing, legally documented tribal reservations. By the 1930’s “the amount of land owned by Indians had fallen to 46 million acres, a reduction of ⅔. Some tribes lost 95% of their reservation lands because of the Dawes Act” (McAvoy 82). These lands became mythologized in a national American identity attained through the recreational outlets of hiking, camping, and canoeing, among others. Non-white communities found it difficult not only to find the time for the processes of recreation, but also found it difficult if not impossible to find the space for such things to occur.

For many in Native American communities the idea of leisure time or recreation in general might not directly square with the larger understanding of the terms. This is because there is often little difference between work and leisure activities (McAvoy 81). Furthermore, there doesn’t seem to be much fragmentation of the human experience into distinct categories such as work, leisure, family, and spiritual. Instead, many of the activities, especially those that may be called leisure activities like hunting, fishing, and berry picking, seem to be wrapped up in a close association with sustenance, gathering activities, leisure, family, culture and tradition. Many of the activities American Indians participate in are closely related to traditional activities Indian people have done for centuries (81).

Ojibwe family, circa 1913 (labeled “Typical Indians” by the non-Native photographer). Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division LOT 12880 [P&P;]

When removed from their historical lands, when their government appointed lands are further reduced, when their foodways are disrupted by logging, white settlers, the draining of swamps or the rerouting of rivers, what then happens to the the re-creative tasks Native American populations depend on?

A few news clippings from the late 19th century may give us an answer, and later may lead us to new possibilities in the present moment. Here we will focus on canoeing as it was something very quickly and successfully appropriated from Indigenous communities by whites, who utilized it for recreational activities ignoring the concerns of sustenance, family, culture, and tradition. On June 19th, 1880 the New York Times ran an article titled “The Canoe ‘Boom’” that explained the new recreational craze of the moment. The author quickly informs us that “Canoeing had been for some years a very popular sport in England before it was introduced into the United States,” ignoring the Indigenous communities of North America which created the craft and taught whites how to pilot them. Later the writer doubles down on this erasure by stating that it was only 8 years before, in 1872, that canoeing “became naturalized [in New England] by the founding of the New-York Canoe Club,” as if it too, like all of white America, was a recent immigrant from the Old World. The author makes a stark distinction between Indigenous birch bark canoes and those used by the white canoers of New England, otherwise known as “the canoe of civilization”; in reality it isn’t that the canoe didn’t exist before 1872, but that the canoe, being so “primitive,” didn’t matter at all, was entirely inconsequential.

Frank Yielfs & Geo. Newhouse of U[…] Canoe Club at Regatta, [8/23/24]. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LC-F8- 31916 [P&P]

Of this brand new world of American Canoeing we are happily informed that “within the last two years [1888-1890] the number of American canoeists has grown to very respectable dimensions. There are now five flourishing canoe clubs, and a half dozen builders who find their time fully occupied in building canoes”. In Canoe and Canvas: Life at the Encampments of the American Canoe Association, Jessica Dunkin makes it very plain how the early canoe clubs were indebted to Indigenous realities:

Members of the ACA appropriated Indigenous technologies and practices as they camped and canoed at the annual meets. Occasionally, they acknowledged their debt to Indigenous designers, but mostly they claimed their boats and styles of camping bore little resemblance to the ‘crank’ craft and rudimentary living arrangements of ‘Indians,’ both having been improved, in their eyes, by modern materials and methods. The canoeists did not just benefit from the ingenuity of Indigenous peoples, they were also beneficiaries of the colonial system that sought to contain, assimilate, and eradicate the continent’s original inhabitants. In particular, colonial policies and structures worked to ensure that white folks had places to play that were free of Indigenous peoples (9).

“Tenting on Historic Ground” (New York Times, July 15th, 1894) retells this story in ways that accentuate the violence of this cultural appropriation and cultural erasure. In describing the area where the American Canoe Club is held, the article describes the first encounter between Native populations and Hendrik Hudson and his crew of explorers  in 1609. Anchored off Verplanck’s Point on the  Hudson River,

Hudson was visited by some of the Indians, who were struck with wonder at the superiority of his craft to their own canoes and marveled at the peculiar weapons of the strangers. One of the Indians lingered in a canoe beside the vessel with evidently thievish intent, and, although warned away, watched his opportunity, and, climbing up the rudder into the cabin window, stole a pillow of a few articles of wearing apparel. He was discovered by the mate with his plunder and shot. The other Indians fled in alarm, some of the them in their terror leaping into the river. The ship’s boat was sent out to recover the stolen articles, when one of the Indians in the water seized hold of the boat with the intention, as was believed, of overturning it. A stroke from the sword of the cook cut off his hands, and he was drowned. This was the first Indian blood shed during the voyage.

This “Indian blood” serves to consecrate the ground on which “the American Canoe Association has pitched its tents.” An act of violence has rendered this location “historic ground, and a place which for the purposes desired [canoeing] cannot be surpassed anywhere.”

So, what happens to Native American populations when their recreational ability is erased from history, and they themselves are erased from the space where recreation happens? A possible answer could simply be that whites put themselves in the fabricated absence. Where agency is taken away by Native American hands, all that remains are the hands of the whites that stole the agency in the first place.

Still, we cannot forget that our keyword is of two parts, two definitions. The second definition of recreation should offer us hope: “the action or process of creating something again,” “a re-enactment or simulation of something”.

2.

The Chicago Canoe Club was created under the auspices of the Chicago American Indian Center in 1964 (AIC), eighty-four years after the American Canoe Association. Instead of being exclusionary, the Chicago Canoe Club was not only inter-tribal, but also welcomed and worked with white Americans; Ralph Frese a local canoe builder (and co-founder of the club) worked closely with group members to create a fleet of fiberglass birch bark canoes. The birch bark canoe, the same feared as primitive by the white hobbyist of the late 1800s, was the traditional canoe of the Potawatomi Indians in and around the area of present day Chicago. For the Potawatomi it wasn’t a tool for recreation but instead was an integral part of survival. John Low (Pokagon band of Potawatomi Indians) details the cultural importance of the canoe when he writes that “[t]he birch bark surrounded its occupants and carried them safely from village to village and facilitated friendships, social interaction and inter-tribal circulation. In a region of numerous, streams, lakes, and rivers, the canoe served the native vehicle on indigenous highways” (Vessels 7). The importance of birch bark canoes are not only immediately material but are also vital parts of the oral histories of the Odawa, Ojibwe, and Potawatomi people (6). The canoes even have a profound historical importance: “Some oral histories recount that they were the mode of transport for their great migration west at the behest of prophets five hundred years ago or more from the Atlantic Seaboard to the land where food grows on water (wild rice).”

Dr. John Low (Potawatomi) and William Derrah introduce the group to the Ralph Frese fiberglass reproduction canoe.

A birch bark/fiberglass canoe may give some pause, but in terms of re-creation there is a certain poetry to the material. According to Low,

[Leroy] Wesaw [a founding member, Pokagon Band Potawatomi]  and the Canoe Club favored the craft designed by Ralph Frese to represent the Algonquin canoe because of its style of their vessels; it was a celebration of Indian technology and Indian heritage. Frese’s fiberglass canoes, complete with simulated pitch, the texture of birch bark, and decorative etchings, were purposefully designed to represent the past. However, the material was contemporary and practical. Fiberglass enabled the production of enough canoes for the club members. Wesaw and the rest of the Canoe Club membership made good use of the opportunity afforded by Frese’s canoes. 

Whether or not it was fiberglass made to look like birch bark or actually birch bark that kept canoe club members afloat, the effect was the same–pride, happiness, connection. According to club member Louis (Bird) Traverzo (Lac Courte Oreilles Band, Ojibwe), the Chicago Canoe Club “promoted strong families within the Chicago Indian community by fostering a sense of community and camaraderie. ‘It reinforced a pride in family and being Native’” (Imprints). The Chicago Canoe Club’s main concern wasn’t a technical authenticity, but Indian pride and dignity. Leroy Wesaw, the club’s lifeblood, described the purpose of the club simply “Canoeing serves not only as good exercise and fun for the participants […] Like almost everything an Indian family does, it is aimed at preserving our Indian heritage.” Existing from 1964 to 1972 “the Chicago Canoe Club was not only the most popular sport and recreational activity sponsored by the AIC, but it also became the public face of Indians thriving in Chicago.”

Leroy Wesaw
“Canoeing serves not only as good exercise and fun for the participants […] Like almost everything an Indian family does, it is aimed at preserving our Indian heritage.”

The re-creation of Indigenous water-based recreation does not end here. Vicente Diaz (Filipino-Pohnpeian) is doing important trans-indigenous work in and out of the classroom in Minnesota. Diaz is presently working on a project that “involves a long-term program of cultural revitalization of canoe voyaging and knowledge of land, water, and skyways in the Caroline islands and in Dakota homelands in Rural western Minnesota (Diaz 11). Diaz is connecting indigenous people through water and the use of their specific craft and star maps, while also bringing the canoe and those that would be re-created through it into virtual reality (Tynjala). On the Pacific coast there is the Healing of the Canoe project, a “collaboration among the Suquamish Tribe, the Port Gamble S’Klallam Tribe, and the University of Washington Alcohol and Drug Abuse Institute (ADAI)”. The Healing of the Canoe project is “based on the traditional Coastal Salish canoe journey, [which] was identified as the backbone of the intervention” which involves a curriculum centered on Indigenous knowledge and traditions seeking to prevent drug dependency in indigenous youth  (Healing). And, of course, there are still other examples not covered here.

We should stress that indigenous recreation/re-creation takes on many forms. Every pow-wow, every stickball game, in fact every iteration of Native American life in the present day is a re-creation of white settler colonialism set out to and still seeks to destroy. It is in this way that recreation in Native American communities battles some of the same demons that white recreationists fought against at the turn of the 20th century — alienated labor, industrialization, a growing consciousness of self, a desire to mend the spirit that the predominate culture sought to destroy. The differences are many, for our purposes here, where white recreation erases and reframes a white hegemonic mythos, Native American recreation re-creates and re-affirms lifeways, bringing all different types of communities together.

 

Works Cited

Brightbill, Charles K. & Harold D. Meyer. Recreation: Text and Readings. New York: Prentice

Hall, 1953.

Diaz, Vicente M. “Oceania in the Plains: The Politics and Analytics of Transindigenous

resurgence in Chuukese Voyaging of Dakota Lands, Waters, and Skies in Mini Sota

Makhoche.” Pacific Studies, Vol. 42, No. ½–April / August, 2019.

Healing the Canoe Training Center, https://healingofthecanoe.org/suquamish/, Accessed 20

October 2019.

Low, John N. Imprints: The Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians and the City of Chicago.

Kindle Edition, Michigan State U P, 2016.

McAvoy, Leo, Paul Shirilla & Joseph Flood. “American Indian Gathering and Recreation Uses

of National Forests.” Proceedings of the 2004 Northeastern Recreation Research

Symposium, 2004.

“Recreation.” The Living Webster Encyclopedic Dictionary of the English Language, 1974.

“Recreation.” https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/recreation, accessed 17 October 2019.

“Tenting on Historic Ground: American Canoe Association’s Romantic Surroundings at Croton

Point.” New York Times, 15 July 1894.

“The Canoe ‘Boom’.” New York Times, 19 June 1880.

Dunkin, Jessica. Canoe and Canvas: Life at the Encampments of the American Canoe

Association, 1880-1910. U of Toronto P, 2019.

Tynjala, Kate. “Canoes: Indigeneity, Relocation, and Maintaining Tradition,” American Indian

Studies, https://cla.umn.edu/ais/news-events/story/canoes-indigeneity-relocation-and

-maintaining-tradition