Monthly Archives: December 2016

As America appears headed into an era of political oversimplification, stereotyping, and resentment, now seems like a good time to reflect on one potential casualty in the current war against the so-called “politically correct”—cultural patrimony.

That concept, which appears as a legal category in the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), is in danger because of its close association with the hot button phrase of 2016: cultural appropriation.

Cultural appropriation—the unsanctioned use of another person’s cultural practices—is currently under debate in the media, but federal Indian policy often draws very bright lines between fair use and cultural/intellectual property. Certain objects and activities are set aside and protected as part of the cultural legacy of the many indigenous nations of the present day United States.

Yet many Americans only know what they read in popular news outlets, and these sources—even some of the most respected—have often merely sensationalized the concept. In recent issues of the Huffington Post and The Atlantic, for example, cultural appropriation is treated as something of a fad, focused  on hairstyles and the inevitable “Indian” costume that a celebrity (in this case, Chris Hemsworth) has to apologize for wearing when caught by paparazzi while “playing Indian.”

In the Atlantic, Jenni Avins imagines cultural appropriation as a category of social faux pas: “Sometime during the early 2000s, big, gold, “door-knocker” hoop earrings started to appeal to me, . . . It didn’t faze me that most of the girls who wore these earrings at my high school in St. Louis were black, unlike me. And while it certainly may have occurred to me that I—a semi-preppy dresser—couldn’t pull them off, it never occurred to me that I shouldn’t.”

Still, her admission of guilt is followed by a robust attack on the notion of cultural appropriation:

“cultural appropriation” jumped from academia into the realm of Internet outrage and oversensitivity. Self-appointed guardians of culture have proclaimed that Miley Cyrus shouldn’t twerk, white girls shouldn’t wear cornrows, and Selena Gomez should take off that bindi. Personally, I could happily live without ever seeing Cyrus twerk again, but I still find many of these accusations alarming.”

While one can certainly debate whether or not things like cornrows and bindis rightfully “belong” to everyone who wants to wear them, we shouldn’t let the trivialization of cultural property creep into critical debates about public policy surrounding Native American regalia, artifacts, and language.

Indigenous peoples’ struggle to maintain cultural sovereignty in the face of mounting globalization—whose economic models encourage social homogenization and the kind of knowledge concentration the speakers at the recent Dartmouth symposium warned against—is no mere academic issue.

Moreover, like repatriation, appropriation has a very specific etymology, one which reveals the real issues as stake when Native community members take issue with outsiders’ neglect of proper protocols. At its root, appropriation refers to “taking (something) as private property,” and  “making [it] one’s own.”

It is, above all, the privatization of communal cultural property.

As with repatriation, there are laws on the books that define the limits of making certain indigenous things one’s own. Take, for example, the The Indian Arts and Crafts Act of 1990 (P.L. 101-644). The Department of Interior website calls it  “a truth-in-advertising law that prohibits misrepresentation in marketing of Indian arts and crafts products within the United States.” Thus, “it is illegal to offer or display for sale, or sell any art or craft product in a manner that falsely suggests it is Indian produced, an Indian product, or the product of a particular Indian or Indian Tribe or Indian arts and crafts organization, resident within the United States.”

Some might ask, how can a work of art be “Indian.” What right does the government have to prohibit me from creating my own “Indian-inspired” fetishes, jewelry, and paintings? The answer lies, as it does in NAGPRA, in the simple fact that Native American peoples, while citizens of the United States, have special standing under the law. Regulations like the Indian Arts and Crafts Act represent the retroactive attempt of the U.S. government to reverse centuries of encroachment on Native cultural practices (including the outlawing of ceremonials and other religious practices) and to support the efforts of indigenous communities to keep open one of the most important sources of wages on reservations since their founding—crafts. Major corporations like Disney and Ralph Lauren have been engaged in what some arts activists feel is cultural appropriation that violates the spirit, if not the letter, of this law (see Danielle Miller, “Pull Ralph Lauren Clothing,” and Vicente Diaz, “Don’t Swallow (or be Swallowed by) Disney’s ‘Culturally Authenticated Moana.'”)

It is important to have discussions about cultural appropriation. No conversation about these important issues should be preemptively cut off before many points of view have been aired. Calling these conversations “political correctness” only stifles genuine debate, and for every sensational or “silly” example cited by politicians and the media, there are hundreds of others that demand serious thought.

Take the issue of Native sports mascots. They have been roundly criticized by members of Native communities around the country. Native and non-Native people have written and spoken against them for the better part of 40 years. Yet the major NFL franchise in the Nation’s capitol still bears a name offensive to just about anyone who knows American history. In the debates about mascots, one hears the specious language of cultural appropriation and political correction being extended to apply to many other “Indian” things—costumes, jewelry, ceremonials (especially sweats), casinos, and yes, oil pipelines.

Arguments like these are simply not about political correctness—they are about historical accuracy.

There are still facts in this world, even if its seems like some Americans have turned their back on them. The dead still lie beneath the grass at San Creek, a reminder that, as the Acoma poet Simon Ortiz once wrote,

This America
has been a burden
of steel and mad
death,
but, look now,
there are flowers
and new grass
and a spring wind
rising
from Sand Creek.

http://www.uapress.arizona.edu/Books/bid1303.htm

Facing the facts is the only way we will find peace.

Sources

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/2016-is-the-year-of-celebrities-apologizing-for-cultural-appropriation_us_581b9331e4b0aac62483017b?utm_hp_ref=cultural-appropriation

Vicente Diaz’s essay: Read more at http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2016/11/13/dont-swallow-or-be-swallowed-disneys-culturally-authenticated-moana

https://www.doi.gov/iacb/act

At its heart, repatriation is all about sovereignty. The Army Corps of Engineers’ December 5th decision to halt drilling at Oahe Lake is a recognition, albeit a belated one, of the sovereignty of the Standing Rock Sioux Nation. For a time, the Missouri watershed that provides sustenance to thousands of people and an ecosystem supporting not only bison and prairie grasses—but also wheat, barley, oats and flax—has been repatriated to all who depend upon it. But, most importantly, the stretch of land that fronts Standing Rock, in dispute since the 1851 Laramie Treaty, is once again Indian Country.

Water Protectors celebrate the news of the Army’s decision.

Sadly, there are good reasons to doubt that this recognition of sovereignty will last.

The same state and federal policies that led to the standoff over the pathway of the Dakota Access Pipeline remain. As law professors Jen Hendry & Melissa Tatum point out,

Although the media has framed the dispute as one focused on property and treaty rights, it is vital to note that the issue at the core of this standoff goes much deeper – it is at its heart, a fundamental clash of cultural perspectives regarding the use and valuation of land. Each of the parties views the landscape through a different cultural lens. (Contested Spaces and Culural Blinders: Perspectives on the Dakota Access Pipeline) http://lcbackerblog.blogspot.com/2016/12/jen-hendry-melissa-tatum-contested.html

These fundamentally antagonistic views of land and its stewardship will not go away, in the parlance of Washington, “with the stroke of a pen.”

Just the other day on NPR, Steve Innskeep, host of “Morning Edition,” asked Congressman Kevin Cramer (R) of North Dakota whether the decision to halt construction of the pipeline under Lake Oahe was the result of a last minute decision “to accommodate protesters.” Cramer responded,

Well, it was rerouted 141 times as the result of consultation with tribes just in North Dakota alone. This is the preferred route because, Steve, one of the stories that rarely gets told is that this is an energy corridor that it’s in. That’s why it was chosen. There’s a natural gas pipeline that already crosses the river there. There’s a high-voltage electric transmission line that crosses the river there. It’s by far the least intrusive, least imposing on – on people and cultural resources and waterways. So they can look at other routes again if they want, and they’ll find that any other route is far more imposing and intrusive and less environmentally friendly than this one.  http://www.npr.org/2016/12/05/504395577/north-dakota-congressman-addresses-pipeline-controversy

One of my co-workers heard this segment in her car on the way to work and asked me, why, if this was indeed the case, I was supporting the protesters.

My answer: Just because the area had once been declared an “energy corridor,” didn’t mean the locals didn’t have the right to draw the line somewhere, sometime. Maybe they were tired of being the throughway for all manner of toxic materials. Maybe the easements for the gas line and the electrical towers had taught them a lesson.

Then there was the fact that the Congressman was playing fast and loose with the notion that “tribes were consulted.” I told her about the Society of American Archaeologist’s letter of protest, written in September, which clearly challenged the congressman’s claim. (See “Archaeology and Activism”) https://www.the-repatriation-files.org/?p=1218 

I also cited a map of the proposed route of the pipeline that pre-dated these cursory “consultations:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/a-nodapl-map_us_581a0623e4b014443087af35

The dotted line to the north was part of the original plan. It too crosses the Missouri. But, importantly, it skirts an urban area. That city, Bismark, is home to more than 75, 000 people. Its citizens, according to census data, is 92% self-identified “white.” The gray area to the south, where the pipeline is now, is 92% Native American.

But what precipitated the protest is not simply out and and out racism, although there is no doubt that race plays a big part in this controversy.   This is also a classic case of rural versus urban political power, and unlike the recent presidential election, rural voters were outgunned by the city dwellers.

It is also clear that the pipeline through the treaty lands was a rush job. The red lines show the section that was hurriedly constructed once the protests got organized, suggesting something less than the cautious consultation the NPR interviewee asserted. Moreover, the pipeline crews appear to have gone out of their way to damage sensitive cultural sites, detailed in the SAA’s letter, in full view of protesters on a Saturday afternoon, luring them into a confrontation with private security officers armed with attack dogs and mace. This occurred in the area outlined by a red rectangle just west of Lake Oahe.

Let’s be honest. The DAPL struggle is about taking advantage of Indians. Similar things have been going on since the reservations were set up in the nineteenth century.  Jen Hendry & Melissa Tatum are not alone is seeing clear parallels between the North Dakota protest and what occurred

at Black Mesa on the Navajo Nation, where the mining techniques used by Peabody Coal have caused significant and long-lasting damage to potable water supplies, not to mention the horrors at Tar Creek on the Quapaw reservation in northeastern Oklahoma. The waters of Tar Creek run a nuclear orange color, and contaminated chat piles present health hazards to the community, especially the children who climb and play on them. Indeed, Tar Creek is one of the oldest Superfund sites and is today still listed as “undergoing clean up” three decades after its listing.   http://lcbackerblog.blogspot.com/2016/12/jen-hendry-melissa-tatum-contested.html

If it isn’t racism, then it is flawed public policy, still beholden to an outdated belief in Manifest Destiny that ignores not only nineteenth-century treaty agreements, but also 20th-century trust law and universal environmental standards that apply to all Americans.

As early as the 1880s, Euro-American progressives recognized that much of federal Indian policy was directed by what they called an “Indian Ring”—a crony capitalist assemblage of Indian traders, investors, and politicians. In those days, it was furs, commodities, oil, and timber that lured “entrepreneurs.” Most of all, it was the land itself. Millions of acres of unspoiled land, “wasted” on Indians.

With a new man in the White House, a real estate developer and an investor in the pipeline project, it’s beginning to seem like deja vu all over again.

We’ll know soon enough. January 20, 2017 is just around the corner.

The speakers at Dartmouth’s Indigenous Archives symposium offered suggestions and provided digital archiving models that went far beyond simply adding Native voices to pre-existing archival architectures.

Although they agreed that we must continue with collaborations and protocols already established between non-Native and Native stakeholders, their ultimate goal is a fundamental structural change in information management.

Ojibwa writer Gordon Henry explored how fellow White Earth author Gerald Vizenor’s Summer in the Spring, a creative depiction of an “Indian in the archives,” actually models an indigenous archival methodology.

Gordon Henry, author of “The Light People” (1994).

In Vizenor’s book, Henry argued, the Native visitor to an archive of Ojibwa language material sifts through through sheafs of Ojibwe songs, by turns inspired and dejected. Only fluent bilingual speakers and writers of Ojibwe could completely absorb the archive’s meaning. But, Vizenor asks, does that mean that they must remain unheard?

Characterizing many indigenous archives as “agonistic” in their relation to modern Native peoples, Gordon Henry charted Vizenor’s creative tacking between loss and accretion, showing how Summer in the Spring models a methodology of curation as literary production, employing what he calls “tribal hermeneutics” (rather than Euro-American empirical accumulation and concentration) to release the archived songs into a new context of modern Ojibwa life.

Gerald Vizenor’s subtitle suggests his archival method: “re-expression.”

Vizenor teaches us to treat curation as survivance, to practice (as Henry puts it) “curation without jurisdiction.”

Other speakers emphasized indigenous-centered methodologies for the initital encoding of material into a digital setting. Ellen Cushman, Professor of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures at Michigan State University (and co-editor of Research in the Teaching of English), spoke about her work on digitizing Cherokee Syllabary texts. Cushman, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation,  is currently working with a “team in digital humanities, language translators and teachers, linguists, and librarians to create an online space for translating archived manuscripts.” Cushman and her group are working to produce a set of “de-colonized” translations of Cherokee texts, exploring older versions of Cherokee usage written in the 19th Century, and linking word-for-word literal translations with an online dictionary.

Alyssa Mt. Pleasant (SUNY Buffalo) introduces Ellen Cushman, Damian Baca, and Jason Lewis

During the Q & A, Cushman admitted that some Cherokee “formulas”—special prayers written in syllabary script—had been singled out by the Eastern Band of Cherokee in North Carolina as improperly posted in public during her research. She and her team, although also Cherokees, were bound to respect the wishes of other Cherokee groups as part of the protocols of indigenous archiving. Once the project is complete, Cherokee language learners and teachers will have an amazing digital resource at their disposal.

Alan Corbiere (M’Chigeeng First Nation), shared his own digital experiments with language revitalization in his home community on Mantoulin Island, Ontario. Like Cushman, Corbiere has found the digital a very useful tool in recovering dormant usages and in creating more effective orthographies. As an example, he discussed a story about Birch trees told in many variants among community members. When the English language versions were digitally compared with extant 19th-century transcriptions and more modern recordings of Anishinaabe speakers, Corbiere and his students discovered fascinating new linguistic formations as well as important cultural knowledge about the local forest system that had lain dormant with these texts for generations.

Other speakers focused on creating digital environments that might replicate indigenous epistemologies, inviting their users to think and write in new ways. Damián Baca (Assistant Professor of English and Modern Languages, University of Arizona) outlined his work in creating a digital platform for producing interactive glyphic codices along the lines of the ancient Mixtec texts that were largely destroyed by the Spanish invaders. Baca, who is the author of Mestiz@ Scripts, Digital Migrations, and the Territories of Writing (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), envisions a site that will offer visitors a suite of software tools allowing them to interactively participate in the creation of non-alphabetic texts.

Jason Lewis (Professor of Computation Arts at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec) rounded out the discussion with an exploration of the fundamental root of the digital “problem” for indigenous users—”The Stack.” Lewis, who formerly worked in Silicon Valley, explained that a “stack” refers to a set of protocols used to establish a hierarchy of software layers in any application, moving up from the zeros and ones of the wiring and into the user interface with the application itself. Calling this fundamental system of digital organization “an orderly assemblage of biases,” Lewis shared work he and others are doing to upset the monocultural predisposition of both computer hardware and software, especially in the area of gaming.

The symposium also included presentations by several digital archive teams whose work is pushing the envelope on how indigenous materials appear online:

The Occom Circle: Ivy Schweitzer (Professor of English and Editor of The Occom Circle), Laura Braunstein (Digital Humanities and English Librarian); The Yale Indian Papers Project, Paul Grant-Costa (Executive Editor), Tobias Glaza (Assistant Executive Editor); Digital Atlas of Native American Intellectual Traditions at Amherst College, Mike Kelly (Librarian, Amherst College) and Kelcy Shepard (Digital Public Library of America).

The weekend concluded with a keynote “conversation” about the proper treatment of sacred objects in the digital world between Tim Powell (Director of Center for Native American and Indigenous Research (CNAIR) at the American Philosophical Society; University of Pennsylvania) and Rick Hill (Director of the Deyohaha:ge: Indigenous Knowledge Center at Six Nations Polytechnic in Ontario, CA), who appeared via digital video recording.

See (http://sites.dartmouth.edu/indigenousarchives-conference/) for more details.