Conversations on Native American Cultural Sovereignty
Leaders of the Osage Nation had hoped to buy the land that contains the 1,000-year-old images. An auction bidder agreed to pay $2.2 million for 43 acres including the cave 60 miles west of St. Louis.
Source: A Cave With Ancient Drawings Has Been Sold, But Not To The Tribe That Hoped To Buy It
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
Kimberly Blaeser, author of Copper Yearning, and Wisconsin Poet Laureate 2015-16, writes that “Lydia Whirlwind Soldier’s Survival Songs opens and closes with echoes, reminding the reader of the whisper of ageless prairie grasses and all that is left in the wind. Filled with remembrances of family and with the voices of Lakota history, Whirlwind Soldier’s book becomes a strong heart song for survivors of boarding schools, federal mandates, the shadows of war, and ghosts everywhere. It weaves together an intimate knowledge of the landscape with traditional stories, showing through the craft of poetry their conjoined reality. She invites us into her homeland – an island of refuge in an alien world where eagles’ shrill cries still resound, sacred like Sundance whistles.”
Craig Howe (Lakota), who is the director of CAIRNS, writes, “Thank You, Lydia! Special thanks also to Charles Woodard, CAIRNS board member, for his careful and insightful editing of the book.”
Survival Songs is available on the CAIRNS website by clicking here.
In May 2019, the members of our Humanities Without Walls team for the project “Indigenous Art and Activism in Changing Climates: The Mississippi River Valley, Colonialism, and Environmental Change” met for the second time. We visited sites in Chicagoland, focusing on the tributaries of the Mississippi and their vast reach from the homelands of the Three Fires Confederacy (Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatami), as well as from the lands of the Menominee, Miami, and Ho-Chunk nations, which remain home to many Native peoples. We listened to Dr. Ashley Falzetti (Miami) and Dr. John Low (Potawatomi), who discussed Miami and Potawatomi alluvial histories, before viewing a Ralph Frese birchbark canoe and then going on the water at Skokie Lagoons. Dr. Margaret Pearce (Potawatomi) conducted a mapping workshop with us, and we also visited with Indigenous futurist artist Santiago X (Coushatta/ Chamoru) at one of the sites for his two earthwork projects in Chicago that he is creating in partnership with the American Indian Center. Drawing on this meeting as well as the previous one in Minneapolis, the graduate student team members came up with keywords that reflect the processes and methodologies we are engaging with and thinking through as this project continues.
In the next few posts on The Repatriation Files, we will share these keywords and use them to gesture toward how we see the project’s next steps unfolding. Shaped by the input of the artists/activists/scholars we’ve encountered, the keywords represent our take on concepts that have guided our understanding of Indigenous art and activism in the Mississippi River Valley. The accompanying digital maps help visualize the concepts of collaboration, place-based learning, and remapping on the one hand, and give visibility to Indigenous art and activism by highlighting the Native Midwest on the other.
Every November since 1990, cultural and educational institutions across the US recognize the Indigenous peoples of this country with programming dedicated to celebrating Native American History Month. For The Repatriation Files, it is a good time to reflect on the past year in Indian Country—this highs and the lows—and to reacquaint readers with news and events from the more than 500 Native Nations recognized by the federal government.
The year 2019 began with a confrontation between high school students wearing MAGA hats and Native activist Nathan Phillips—an event chronicled in a January issue of this blog (“Nathan Phillips: An Elder for All Americans”).
“as the non-Indian struggles in solitude and despair, he curses the Indian for not coveting the same disaster.”
August saw the last edition of News from Indian Country, a Native owned and operated news outlet from Hayward, Wisconsin. Longtime editor, Paul DeMain recalled the early days of the publication:
News From Indian Country started publishing in 1987 and all three of these men [Pipe Mustache, Archy Mosay, and Richard LaCourse], along with Indigenous women like Janet McCloud, Rose Mary Robinson and Wilma Mankiller, and even a young woman named Winona LaDuke could be found in the pages of our earliest newspaper, the one now putting its last hard copy to bed.
We have survived the controversies of the last 40 years, a written testament to opinions of the widest dimensions. Treaty rights, taxing authority, identity, spiritualism, healing, war, trauma, battles between relatives, nations and international personalities (“33 Years of Publishing”).
Out west, the Yurok Nation was successful in its quest to have the Klamath River, the lifeblood of the Yurok homeland, the rights of personhood under the law. Following the example of the White Earth Band of Ojibwe, who used the concept to designate wild rice (manoomin) as deserving the same protections as human beings.
“From New Zealand to Colombia, the powerful idea that nature has rights is taking root in legal systems.”
Following the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, more tribal communities have sought to rethink how they might protect sacred sites and their environment. According to High Country Times, “Legal personhood provides a different framework for dealing with problems like pollution, drought and climate change, though no case has yet been brought to put the Whanganui, Manoomin or Klamath rights to the test in court. The crucial aspect to establishing these legal frameworks, Indigenous lawyers say, involves shifting relationships and codifying Indigenous knowledge — in other words, recognizing non-human entities not as resources, but as rights-holders.
2019 was also the year that the Ponca leader Standing Bear was honored as a civil rights pioneer with a statue in the US Capitol building. As the Washington Post and the Smithsonian Magazine have reported, the statue commemorates the efforts of Standing Bear to overturn US law that in 1879 ruled that “an Indian was neither a person nor a citizen.” Standing Bear, the first Native person to offer testimony in federal court, argued that he and his community had the right to remain in their homeland, rather than be removed to Oklahoma. The presiding judge eventually agreed, ruling that “an Indian is a ‘person’ within the meaning of the laws of the United States” and that “no rightful authority exists for removing by force any of the relators to the Indian Territory.”
“That hand is not the color of yours, but if I pierce it, I shall feel pain. If you pierce your hand you also feel pain. The blood that will flow from mine will be of the same color as yours. I am a man. The same god made us both.”
Read more: Standing Bear
In the next post, we will explore Native American history month from the perspective of a recent presidential declaration that has overlaid this commemoration with something called “National American History and Founders Month.”
Jingle Dress dancers, White Earth, 1925.
Published March 12, 2019 “Zibaaska’ iganagooday: The Jingle Dress at 100” will open April 3 at Mille Lacs Indian Museum and Trading Post ONAMIA, Minn. — The Mille Lacs Indian Museum and Trading Po…
Source: New Exhibit Explores the History of the Ojibwe Jingle Dress and Marks Its 100th Anniversary
Sara Černe (PhD candidate in English, Northwestern
As someone born and raised in Central Europe, I came to the Mississippi River via music: roots rock at first, the blues only later—a backwards trajectory for sure. I associated the river with the vastness of America; with Mark Twain and antebellum steamboats; with African American musical traditions; and with Tina Turner’s cover of “Proud Mary,” of course. Neither Native Americans nor the Upper Mississippi figured in that vision. Writing my dissertation on environmental justice in twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature and culture along the Mississippi at Northwestern University, I have now gone beyond the pop culture understanding of the river, but until recently, the Upper River and Indigenous populations remained conspicuously absent from my research.
In other words, I came to the Humanities Without Walls-sponsored research trip to Minnesota for a collaborative project on Indigenous art and activism in the Mississippi River Valley with very little background in American Indian Studies. I left with a much better understanding of the Dakota and Ojibwe history and present and the importance of the spaces we visited to Indigenous communities native to the area, humbled by the experience.
Wild rice and reflected skies at Lake Itasca, MN—Minnesota’s name is derived from the Dakota phrase ‘Mni Sota Makoce,’ translated as ‘land where the waters reflect the clouds.’
In taking photographs of these places—Lake Itasca in Northern Minnesota; Indian Mounds Park and Wakan Tipi in St. Paul; and the Bdote, the confluence of the Mni Sota Wakpa and the Hahawakpa rivers, the Minnesota and the Mississippi, on the edges of the Twin Cities metro area—I looked for ways in which Native presence, historically as well as presently, is seen, felt, and experienced. Instead of fixating on the myriad ways the US state has worked to disenfranchise and erase Indigenous populations, I wanted to focus on the many acts of perseverance I was witnessing all along the Upper Mississippi.
My first tobacco offering to the Mississippi River at the Headwaters, beginning its 90-day journey to the Gulf of Mexico
The various educators’ and activists’ efforts at regenerating, revitalizing, and reclaiming Native spaces establish firmly Indigenous presents as well as futures. Such actions include cleaning up sacred sites that had been reduced to toxic waste grounds; leading Nibi Walks for water; teaching about the places along the river from an Indigenous point of view using American Indian languages and place names; and marking the areas with Indigenous art.
Grant participants Prof. Jacki Rand (University of Iowa) and Agléška Cohen-Rencountre (University of Minnesota) wading in the Mississippi Headwaters at Itasca, MN.
The Sacred Dish by Duane Goodwin At Indian Mounds Park, St. Paul, MN.
In this last category of public art, I would like to highlight two sculptures of Native women—standing rocks, so to speak—that mark their respective spaces as Indigenous even when no one else is around. The first is the 2005 bronze Headwaters—Caretaker Woman by Jeff Savage, a member of the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, at Itasca; the second is the 2006 dolomitic limestone The Sacred Dish by Duane “Dewey” Goodwin, a member of the White Earth Band of Ojibwe, in Indian Mounds Park.
Emphasizing Native American feminine cosmology in which women are seen as the custodians of water and earth, the two sculptures pay tribute to the ancestors and speak to the importance of traditional knowledge and practices for the health of the planet and future generations. They also serve as beautiful and unequivocal reminders that these places I was lucky enough to visit are Indigenous—yesterday, today, and tomorrow.
Headwaters—Caretaker Woman by Jeff Savage in Itasca State Park, MN .
A photo project that captures the complex history of portraiture of the tribe.
Thomas Ryan RedCorn is a photographer, designer, filmmaker, founding member of the 1491s and a resident of Pawhuska, Okla., Osage Nation Reservation.
Source: Perspective | Putting Osage women in control of their own images
For First Nations writers in Canada, the past two years have been bruising ones. In 2016, serious questions emerged about Joseph Boyden, a Canadian writer who has long claimed indigenous roots, but in reality has none. Then early this year, an editorial in Write, the flagship journal of the Writers Union of Canada published an editorial that flippantly suggested the establishment of an Appropriation Prize to encourage writers of all backgrounds to “imagine other peoples, other cultures, other identities.”
Hal Niedzviecki
The editorial, by Hal Niedzviecki, quickly became a lightning rod for years of pent-up anger in the First Nations literary community over what they perceive as an attitude toward appropriation of indigenous materials by non-Native writers that blithely ignores their communities’ rights to intellectual property of the kind involved in traditional storytelling, iconography, and indeed the persona of the author him- or herself.
I’d go so far as to say there should even be an award for doing so — the Appropriation Prize for best book by an author who writes about people who aren’t even remotely like her or him
On CBC radio, Jesse Wente (Ojibwe) reminded listeners that stunts like this merely cloud the issue by employing “rhetorical arguments that conflate notions of free speech with cultural appropriation while disguising the very distinct histories of these two things.” Those histories are no joke for First Nations people, who know all too well the truth of Wente’s words: “We have to understand that cultural appropriation is institutionalized, it is the very foundation of what Canada is built on.”
Niedzviecki’s “joke” went over especially badly because it seemed part and parcel of the non-indigenous writing community’s rush to Boyden’s defense.
Many went so far as to argue that geneology is not as important as Boyden’s “enthusiasm” for Native issues. But, as Alicia Elliott observes in a recent article on the controversy, this sort of argument misses the point. For Elliott, as well as many other indigenous writers, the question is “why do these columnists and so many other non-Indigenous people care about blood quantum in Boyden’s case, but not in any other Indigenous person’s case? Why aren’t they lobbying for non-status Indians to finally be recognized by the Canadian government?”
For Elliott, the answer is simple. Boyden is a “good Indian.” Sure, he’s a wannabe, but he is the darling of the non-indigenous media and literary communities precisely because he doesn’t rock the boat. He speaks in generalities about reconciliation, a concept he reduces to a simple apology “we’ve made mistakes in the past.”
“We have to understand that cultural appropriation is institutionalized, it is the very foundation of what Canada is built on.”
Boyden’s defenders also seem not to understand that the concept of “Indian Blood” that they are so quick to dismiss as insignificant in this case is really at the center of cultural appropriation. It is an idea that has its roots in a governmental policy of dispossession (blood quantum rules established in Canada’s Indian Act of 1876) with genuine membership in an indigenous community and all that it entails. With the Indian Act, indigenous women and their children had their status taken away for marrying non-indigenous men. Boyden’s detractors wonder why his supporters are so quick to excuse his lack of status and yet blind to the fate of some many First Nations people who have been denied their cultural heritage. Why should a well-intentioned fabricator of indigenous culture have more right to cultural property than a tribal member stripped of her status by arbitrary statute?
Then there is the issue of market share. Boyden’s fake traditionalism, supported by public acclaim and lots of press coverage, took away potential readers from indigenous writers rooted in their communities and cultural traditions.
The time has come to leave Joseph Boyden and Hal Niedzviecki to their own devices and to concentrate instead on the many more writers from First Nations backgrounds who have great literature to share.
Jesse Wente has offered a list of indigenous writers who readers ought to be reading instead of Boyden. Here are few.
Left to Right: Alicia Elliott, Richard Van Camp, Gord Grisenthwaite, Tanya Roach, Joshua Whitehead, and Louise Bernice Halfe.
Sources:
https://www.thestar.com/opinion/commentary/2017/05/18/the-emotional-exhaustion-of-debating-indigenous-views.html
https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2017/07/31/medias-indigenous-coverage-has-always-been-slanted-and-its-still-scant-says-writer-hayden-king.html
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/the-cultural-appropriation-debate-is-over-its-time-for-action/article35072670/?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=Referrer%3A+Social+Network+%2F+Media&utm_campaign=Shared+Web+Article+Links
http://www.cbc.ca/beta/news/canada/toronto/jesse-wente-appropriation-prize-1.4115293
Incised Tablet. Date: ca.1450–1700 Medium: Catlinite (red pipestone). Sanford Museum and Planetarium, Cherokee, Iowa (521-69-m)
Even as questionable auctions of indigenous art continue unabated in Paris, some American museums have begun to make an effort to “mainstream” similar (but responsibly collected) objects into their exhibits. New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art has led the charge, making it a top priority “to display art from the first Americans within its appropriate geographical context” alongside artworks by non-Natives (NYTimes, 4/6/17).
In the fall of 2018, the Met will debut a major exhibition of indigenous art that will be shown in conjunction with its Euro-American counterparts in the museum’s American Wing. The show was made possible by a generous gift of some 91 Native American works by Charles and Valerie Diker, New Yorkers who have been collecting American art—both Native and non-Native—since the 1960s. This year they loaned a few pieces of their collection to be arranged among the more typical works found in the American Wing as a preview to this fall’s unveiling of the whole exhibit.
19th-century Iroquois/Haudenosaunee pouch donated by the Dikers and displayed in the Met’s American Wing. Credit Joshua Bright for The New York Times
The Dikers’ generous gift is part of a trend that really got underway in 2015, with the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s show The Plains Indians: Artists of Earth and Sky. The New York Times’ reviewer, Holland Cotter, called it “an exhibition that has to be one of the most completely beautiful sights in New York right now.”
But the exhibition also raised many questions about the ethics of displaying uprooted objects (the show was comprised of items collected from mostly European institutions) without proper context. In her review for Hyperallergic, Ellen Pearlman traced this flaw to what she called “the cult of the aesthetic object.”
Patricia Marroquin Norby, Director of the D’Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian History and Indigenous Studies, and C. Joseph Genetin-Pilawa, assistant professor of history at George Mason University wrote an in-depth analysis of the Plains exhibit’s reviews and concluded, “taken together, these reviews show the persistence and power of that language. They tell us that as a society, we’ve made little progress in moving beyond worn out stereotypes bequeathed from centuries past.” Their essay, “How We Still Look At and Talk About Indians and Their Art,” explores the language of romanticism that still pervades how such works of art are discussed by reviewers and the public at large. Time and again, Marroquin Norby and Genetin-Pilawa uncover phrases that could have appeared in 19th-century dime novels of the American West, leading them to conclude: “To accept outdated language is historical laziness that does broad damage. It’s a cavalier attitude, one that helps explain prevalent cultural appropriations like hipster headdresses, Hollywood Indians, and the dogged support for racist professional sports mascots.”
To accept outdated language is historical laziness that does broad damage. It’s a cavalier attitude, one that helps explain prevalent cultural appropriations like hipster headdresses, Hollywood Indians, and the dogged support for racist professional sports mascots.
Robe with Mythic Bird, ca. 1700–40. Mid-Mississippi River Basin, probably Illinois Confederacy. Eastern Plains. Musée du quai Branly, Paris, France (71.1878.32.134)
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To be clear, neither writer is taking to task the museum’s efforts to display Native material culture and fine arts in conjunction with other work produced in the United States. They recognize that we are in an early stage of a process that will take some time to develop. After all, offering indigenous artifacts, easel painting, performance art, and digital imagery to the public view carries with it an ethical imperative. The display of indigenous arts with a clear and forceful assertion of the simple fact that underlies all efforts at repatriation— Native peoples are still here.
