Tag Archives: tribal sovereignty

Positionality & Poetics of the River

Agléška R. Cohen-Rencountre (PhD student in American Studies, U of Minnesota):

The Bdote, “where the two waters come together,” at the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers.

Questions to mull over:

What are the individual stakes or outcomes that each of us are envisioning (this might be in academic terms; in collaborative practices; in terms of our own art and activism; in terms of our institutional and public pedagogies, etc.)

This is a really special project to me because I have the opportunity to engage active healing in terms of my ancestral stories that I have just begun to learn about.

The stakes include insider/outsider positionality as a descendant of Dakota exile and Fort Snelling imprisonment, as well as an Indigenous researcher, and as an Ina (mother) to my Dakota children.

I envision both the academic and collaborative practices being paramount to my growth through this work. I want to further entangle myself within my Indigenous, Dakota and Lakota responsibilities and the opportunities that I can both create and receive through my home institution.

What are the conceptual stakes for each of us in a project that exists at the confluence of academic notions of the humanities and walls, and of Native notions of humanness as it is forged in relation to rivers?

I recall being at the headwaters and later talking within our group, questioning what significance the headwaters held and holds for Dakota and Ojibwe people. That question helped me de-naturalize the western ontological gaze of the cartographers who represent imperialism.

As far as Native notions of humanness and how it is shaped by rivers, this is the heart of what I will become further entangled in. I have heard that there is a place near Fort Snelling (presumably The Bdote—for there may be many such places), where during the winter the river freezes and you can step inside a tunnel of frozen water and listen to the river. If I have remembered correctly and this is something I will experience, it is a source of future humanness that I have yet to experience but already wish to share with others—especially my wife and our children. Growing up as kids we always had access to our local lakes and creeks. It was a given that one would familiarize oneself to them all every chance that there was – and we did thanks to my parents. When we got older, growing up during the winter meant knowing about death near the water, so for me the seasonal changes near the water were really stark. This new and important way to familiarize myself to the Mississippi, from season to season is a confluence of inter-tribal affiliation, intergenerational healing, and multidisciplinary collaboration. I know that sacred sites are not really for me say much about in terms of what the stakes are. Which is also to say that I am deeply invested in them but do not really need or have a way of writing about what this means in terms of humanness.

How are we as individuals and as collaborators conceiving of “changing climates”?

Changing climates means looking at the health of the ecosystems that each prospective agency of recreation, fishing, dumping, and extraction exact upon the overall health of the water. Changing climates due to reintroduction of native species (wolf), or protection of them (eel), are something that I am aware of but do not yet understand through the specific innumerable lifeways hosted by the Mississippi. Finally, climate change in terms of global warming remind me of a music video that Vince shared with us ‘Rise : From One Island to Another’. The anonymous author writes on the collective’s website an invitation to viewers that reads: “Watch this poetic expedition between two islanders, one from the Marshall Islands, and one from Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland), connecting their realities of melting glaciers and rising sea levels. Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner and Aka Niviâna use their poetry to showcase the linkages between their homelands in the face of climate change.”

The cinematography and poem have stayed with me. The imagery unhinged my land-based, ‘fly-over state’, mixed rural/urban positionalities. When I think of climate change I do not just see weary scientists defending their research in faraway lecture halls, or climate change deniers taking up where pro- Indian Termination fishing and hunting sportsman leave off. I now feel the call from all around, through the water right at my fingertips of my home, local areas and the ocean. All connected through prayer and activism. Through beautiful poetry that connects rather than disaggregates knowledge.

Three Infographic Reflections

By Bonnie Etherington (PhD Candidate in English, Northwestern)

This is a continuation of the observations made by participants in the Humanities without Walls grant: “Indigenous Art and Activism in Changing Climates: The Mississippi River Valley, Colonialism, and Environmental Change”

Shutdown in Indian Country

As the President and Congress spar over funding for a border wall as a condition for re-opening the Federal Government, Native citizens across Indian Country are experiencing major disruptions to their daily lives.

Indian Country Today reports, “Sen. Tina Smith, D-Minnesota, said on MSNBC this morning that the chairman of the Bois Forte Band of Chippewa told her that tribal police are not being paid because of the shutdown. Funding for tribal law enforcement contracts are on hold during the shutdown.”

It is a similar story for those Native communities who rely on the Indian Health Service (IHS), a federal entity whose services are often guaranteed by treaty. A recent report in the New York Times estimates that for one tribe of the Chippewa in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, the shutdown is costing “about $100,000, every day, . . . federal money that does not arrive to keep health clinics staffed, food pantry shelves full and employees paid.” Some 1.9 million Native people are being affected.

The same is true of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). Writing to officials in Washington D.C., Colville Business Council Chair Rodney Cawston, in recent article in the Tribal Tribune of Nespelem, WA, argues that the shutdown has had “a disproportionate impact to tribes’ related to land management, health services and other social service programs.” Cawston believes “the impact to the tribal timber industry alone is resulting in a tribal loss of approximately $400,000 weekly and the impact to federal direct and indirect support costs is resulting in a loss of $1.5 million weekly.”

“The trust responsibility that underlies the functions that the IHS and BIA serve makes them much different from National parks and traditional land management functions of the Department of Interior.”
Rodney Cawston

A visit to the IHS website this week displays the stark reality of the shutdown for indigenous communities.

“Dear Tribal Leader,” the message reads, “there will be no funding available from the HIS until such time as appropriations are enacted and available for such purposes. We acknowledge that this circumstance may result in insufficient funds to carry out the terms of the agreement (the Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act) and that the program may cease to operate.”

Coming on the heels of a year-long assault on Native land by the Department of Interior and the Trump administration, the shutdown of the federal government is yet another blow to tribal sovereignty and yet another example of promises unkept.

As Kevin Washburn, who served as the assistant secretary for Indian Affairs under President Barack Obama, explained to a reporter from the New York Times, during a shutdown, “Indian Country stops moving forward . . . and starts moving backward.”

It is time this administration started honoring its trust obligations to Native people.

Where North Dakota’s Voter ID Controversy Stands

The state is embroiled in a battle over Native Americans’ ability to vote under a law the Supreme Court just let take effect.

In a recent post, (Historic Moment) The Repatriation Files outlined how several court cases were in the works to dramatically improve the voting situation in Indian Country, where the right to vote has always been difficult to exercise. Unfortunately, a new decision by the Supreme Court threatens to make this November’s election yet another one in which Native voters are treated as second-class citizens.

“The state has acknowledged that Native American communities often lack residential street addresses. Nevertheless, under current state law an individual who does not have a ‘current residential street address’ will never be qualified to vote.”

Diné (Navajo) voters registering in 1948. Native voting was barred in several states until the Voting Rights Act.

Source: A Look at Where North Dakota’s Voter ID Controversy Stands

RE: Appropriation

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
Hal Niedzviecki

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.”
Jesse Wente

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

Adoption is not a passport to an Indigenous community

http://www.cbc.ca/beta/news/canada/toronto/jesse-wente-appropriation-prize-1.4115293

Zinke Embraces Depatriation

After several months of study, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke is said to have decided on substantially cutting down the area of lands that presidents since Theodore Roosevelt have protected through the Antiquities Act.

Two of the four monuments Zinke wishes to reduce are those established by recent Democratic presidents. Highest on the list: Bears Ears National Monument, set aside for protection by President Obama. If Zinke and the President get their way, places like Bears Ears in Utah and Gold Butte in Nevada may now be re-opened to commercial mineral and resource extraction.

In a previous post, I outlined how the Act has been implemented since Roosevelt’s administration (it was a Republican-sponsored piece of legislation) by presidents who have responded to the public’s desire to see places with culturally sensitive landmarks and archaeological features preserved for future generations.

“I want to ask you to do one thing in connection with it in your own interest and in the interest of the country—to keep this great wonder of nature as it now is.”
Teddy Roosevelt

Although recent monument designations have been characterized by some western politicians as “federal land grabs,” as the history of the Antiquities Act demonstrates, most are very much in keeping with the vision of its originator, T.R. Like the idea of repatriation (see “Iowa’s Place in Repatriation”), cultural preservation got its start in Iowa when Congressman John F. Lacey, a Republican representative, pushed to create the Antiquities Act. Republicans from Roosevelt to Lacey and Taft all saw that protection of western lands were a necessary part of legislating for “the greater good.” As Roosevelt said when he set aside parts of the Grand Canyon for protection: “I want to ask you to do one thing in connection with it in your own interest and in the interest of the country—to keep this great wonder of nature as it now is.”

Certainly Secretary Zinke is right when he says, “No President should use the authority under the Antiquities Act to restrict public access, prevent hunting and fishing, burden private land, or eliminate traditional land uses, unless such action is needed to protect the object.”

The law states: “the limits of [monuments] in all cases shall be confined to the smallest area compatible with proper care and management of the objects to be protected.” But also says that private land may be caught up in the process: “When such objects are situated upon a tract . . . held in private ownership, the tract, or so much thereof as may be necessary for the proper care and management of the object, may be relinquished to the Government.”

Yet several of Zinke’s statements regarding his decision seem to ignore this provision and suggest a highly politicized process. Instead of simply acknowledging that many citizens have written to protest the changes to the boundaries of places like Bears Ears, Zinke interpreted their disagreement as some sort of conspiracy:

Comments received were overwhelmingly in favor of maintaining existing monuments and demonstrated a well-orchestrated national campaign organized by multiple organizations (Washington Post, 8/24/17).

Where else are everyday Americans who want to preserve sacred lands and archaeological wonders to turn? We don’t have as many lobbyists on K Street. Plus, much of our lobbying is done in the open, in letter writing campaigns and blogs like this one. We don’t have access to the golf clubhouses where deals involving the public interest are now routinely made.

“When such objects are situated upon a tract . . . held in private ownership, the tract, or so much thereof as may be necessary for the proper care and management of the object, may be relinquished to the Government.”
Antiquities Act

This debate is about much more than balancing environmental protections with the needs of local farming and mining interests. The Antiquities Act is all about protecting those “objects of cultural patrimony” that inhere in the land itself—pictographs, earthworks, human remains, artifacts.

Petroglyphs at Gold Butte. Photo by Terri Rylander.

These objects need the special protection a monument designation provides precisely because they do not easily fall under the guidelines of NAGPRA, especially if the land in question is not federal land. Those who would claim that their rights to “improvement” are being violated by such monument designations often claim an ancestral right to the land. The problem with such claims, however, is that much of land use in the west is predicated upon ignoring earlier treaties the U.S. made with Indian tribes in the nineteenth century.

In an ideal world, those of us who wish to see sacred sites and objects of cultural patrimony be protected would simply write our representatives and eventually have legislation written to that effect. There would be compromises, to be sure, but in the end, both the rancher and worshiper would have land enough to peaceably coexist.

But we live in an era of legislative “under-reach” that almost guarantees nothing will get done in this regard. The U.S. Senate couldn’t even find a way to hold hearings for a Supreme Court nominee, something the Constitution lists as part of their job. How could they possibly act on something like this, an issue that requires careful thought, historical knowledge, and cultural sensitivity?

Although it is being marketed under the guise of local autonomy, this executive action is simply a disguised form of depatriation—the clawing back of Indian homelands into the maw of corporate interests. Repatriation law is founded on the right of peoples to declare sovereignty over those objects of cultural patrimony that have been unjustly alienated from them. More fundamentally, it posits a homeland to which such items may be returned.

Under Mr. Zinke’s plan, American Indians will have fewer places to worship and less land to spare for the bones of their ancestors.

Violence and Resistance: A Symposium

On May 12 and 13, the D’Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian History at Chicago’s Newberry Library hosted scholars and community members from around the country to discuss the central role violence has played in European colonization of indigenous homelands, and the innovative modes of resistance Native communities have employed to fend off the destruction of their ways of life.

Supported by funding from Michigan State University and the University of Oregon, the two-day event featured talks and workshops by 30 participants representing disciplines ranging from literary studies and history to linguistics and anthropology.

Historian Susan Sleeper-Smith of Michigan State University, and one of the symposium organizers, offered a retelling of George Washington’s tactics in the Ohio River Valley during his presidency that crystallized the centrality of violence to federal Indian policy. In a letter to the militia he had sent to the Ohio, Washington was blunt: “assault the said towns, and the Indians therein, either by surprise, or otherwise, as the nature of the circumstances may admit— sparing all who may cease to resist, and capturing as many as possible, particularly women and children.”

Throughout the symposium, speakers recounted the pervasiveness of such tactics, not only in the U.S., but also in Oceania, Central America, and Canada. In every case, however, participants found that indigenous peoples were very rarely passive victims. Rather, they mobilized to counter this aggression with innovative strategies of resistance. Their pushback was both large and small. In 1675, Wampanoag Confederacy leader Metacom launched a full scale assault against the English colonies of New England. In Los Angeles at the present moment, Maya women defy verbal abuse in the streets of the city by proudly wearing their traje (traditional woven, multicolored blouse called a huipil, a corte, a woven wraparound skirt that reaches to the ankles, and is held together by faja/sash at the waist) in public places.

Shadowing all of these talks was the one word no one who studies these histories can avoid: genocide.

It is a hot button issue, and often in the news. Just two years ago, at Sacramento State University in California, a Native university student, Chiitaanibah Johnson (Navajo/Maidu), took her history professor to task because he refused to acknowledge that what happened to Native peoples in the Americas was indeed genocide (Read more). She was initially suspended for her dissent, but reinstated when the incident became national news.

genocide . . . includes the criminalization and displacement of survivors as well as the destruction of their livelihoods and lives
Alicia Ivonne Estrada

Among the speakers at the Newberry symposium, there was a general consensus that genocide was indeed embedded in colonial policies towards indigenous peoples, that it is a structural, and that it is still an issue today. Dr. Alicia Ivonne Estrada of California State University, Northridge, cited the stark statistics from Guatemala: “170,000 Mayas killed in Guatemala during the armed conflict [of the 80s and 90s]. The militia Washington sent to the Ohio Valley “marched across the Ohio River and north into Indian Country, where they enthusiastically leveled all the villages surrounding Ouiatenon, torched the adjacent cornfields, reduced every house to ash, uprooted vegetable gardens, chopped down apple orchards, killed the Indians who attempted to escape, and captured and forcibly transported fifty women and children to Fort Steuben at the Falls of the Ohio.” Richard Henry Pratt, the man who set up the U.S. Indian boarding school system, demanded his teachers “kill the Indian,” in the cultural sense—that is, take away his language, his religion, his family.

But genocide is more than raw killing. As Dr. Estrada observes, casualty numbers “indicate one aspect of genocide, but not its entirety, which includes the criminalization and displacement of survivors as well as the destruction of their livelihoods and lives.” Professor Sleeper Smith summed it up this way: “We have spent too long focused on Indian demise. If we stopped focusing on the plow agriculture of settler colonists and stopped imagining settler societies as peaceable places but more closely examined places like the Ohio River Valley we could better understand how violence became embedded in social formation during the Early Republic.”

We have spent too long focused on Indian demise.
Susan Sleeper Smith

Although most speakers expressed how difficult it has been to pursue research on these topics, given the grisly accounts and archives they have had to face, most expressed hope and cited significant signs of rebuilding in the many Native communities that have been subjected to this violence. In the Yakama Nation, new speakers of the language are being trained in the schools, and the ethical lessons of traditional storytelling rekindled for a new generation. All of the scholars seemed to agree that the ugly history of colonial violence need to be told—to raise awareness in policy makers, teachers, and the general public. That is because with the violence came resistance, and with resistance, new ways of community building that have benefitted Native and non-Native peoples alike. Just take a look at the final image from the event.

Audience members and participants gather for a group photograph at the conclusion of the symposium.

The Laissez Faire Ethics of Global Culture Brokers

Investors in indigenous art anxiously awaited last week’s auction of the Rainer Werner Bock collection of Native Hawaiian materials. Gathered over a twenty-year period, it numbers some 1000 items, ranging from pounding stones to medicine bundles.

A visit to the online auction catalog of the esteemed French auction house Aguttes yields page after page of objects, each within its own little well-lit, immaculately photographed rectangle. Here, a huge run of grinding stones dating to the 18^th century; there, a “stone medicine bowl,” its dating and method of “collection,” uncertain. The sale last week contained items of great historic interest as well, including a spear said to have been collected by Captain Cook during his third expedition in 1779/80, and a flag from the Hawaiian monarchic period.

Hawaiian flag, Monarchy Period (c. 1795-1893).

But where the avid collector of “antiquities” sees bargains and objet d’art to decorate a home, others find evidence of a forced diaspora of the stuff of Kanaka Maoli life.

One item in particular caught my eye, a “ceremonial bundle” from the nineteenth century. Is a religious utensil art? How was it acquired? If one community wishes to treat their religious objects as museum pieces, must all others?

Needless to say, not everyone was happy with the proposed sale. Native Hawaiian Edward Halealoha Ayau took a day off from sightseeing with his family on a European vacation to picket the auction house. When reached by phone on Hawaii’s KITV Island News, Ayau explained, “All we are asking is for the sellers to provide us with documentation that demonstrated that these were legitimate Hawaiian objects that were collected lawfully. . . . All we asked them to do was to prove the provenance of these items, ‘prove that you had informed consent to collect them, and if you have then you are free to do with them as you please.’”

All we are asking is for the sellers to provide us with documentation that demonstrated that these were legitimate Hawaiian objects that were collected lawfully
Edward Halealoha Ayau

This is not the first time that a prestigious Paris auction house has been embroiled in controversy over trafficking in indigenous cultural objects.

Back in 2013, the Néret-Minet Tessier & Sarrou auction house in Paris put into bidding a collection of rare Hopi and Navajo ceremonial masks whose provenance was unclear. When concerned tribal members tried to take the auctioneers to court, French legal authorities held that the Hopi tribe had no legal standing in France. From the point of view of some outside observers, this ruling meant that the Paris market in antiquities had become “a safe haven for any indigenous cultural property.” The auction netted $1.2 million. 70 of these masks remain in private hands.

Later that year, another Paris dealer offered yet another set of masks, but this time, as the LA Times reported, “the L.A.-based Annenberg Foundation phoned in anonymous bids, landing 21 Hopi masks and three sacred Apache headdresses for $530,000, in order to return them to the tribes.” http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/culture/la-et-cm-native-american-hopi-sacred-mask-auction-paris-20140627-story.html

In 2016, Indian Country Today featured an interview with Tlingit Athabascan artist Crystal Worl, who was in Paris for an exhibition of her work. Once again, art dealers in the French capital were auctioning off Hopi masks. Among the lots were also a set of Haida and Tlingit ceremonials items. Worl joined other protesters outside the auction house, explaining to ICT reporter Dominique Godrèche,

My grandmother wanted me to be there; she knew what the Tlingit items meant. So I joined the protest, standing outside, holding signs. Hoping that this protest would reach the buyers, and they would give back the pieces to the community. We want them, because we are striving, as a culture . . . . [S]tanding there, at the auction, and seeing my ancestors was frustrating . . . I went to the Northwest coast room to see the objects, and they saw me: I wanted them to know that we are there for them, and we will wait for them. Their cultural value is essential to us: stories are related to each object, passed on to the next generation. All the pieces contain the spirits of the ancestors who created them. There is no Tlingit word for art, as our ceremonial objects are living beings. So this event was unfair; the items are our ancestors, they belong to our communities.

https://indiancountrymedianetwork.com/culture/arts-entertainment/ceremonial-objects-trickster-skateboards-and-protesting-an-auction-tlingit-artist-crystal-worl-in-paris/

I went to the Northwest coast room to see the objects, and they saw me: I wanted them to know that we are there for them, and we will wait for them.
Crystal Worl

Chrystal Worl (second from left) and others protesting in Paris. (Indian Country Today, Csia-Nitassin)

Yet amidst this seemly wholesale disregard for indigenous cultural sovereignty, there is still some good news to report. The April 5-7 auction did not go well for Aguttes. As Thomas Admanson of the Associated Press reported last week, “only two of the least valuable lots sold for 10,455 euros ($11,134). The auctioneers believe “buyers apparently were scared off by a protest . . .”

Because the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) does not cover items in private collections, and is not recognized outside the U.S., Article 31 of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People offers guidance on how these issues should be handled in the global art marketplace:

Indigenous peoples have the right to maintain, control, protect and develop their cultural heritage, traditional knowledge and traditional cultural expressions, as well as the manifestations of their sciences, technologies and cultures, including human and genetic resources, seeds, medicines, knowledge of the properties of fauna and flora, oral traditions, literatures, designs, sports and traditional games and visual and performing arts. They also have the right to maintain, control, protect and develop their intellectual property over such cultural heritage, traditional knowledge, and traditional cultural expressions. 2. In conjunction with indigenous peoples, States shall take effective measures to recognize and protect the exercise of these rights.

When courts and ethnics guidelines fail, it becomes the work of everyday people like Edward Halealoha Ayau and Crystal Worl—really all of us—to remind others of their responsibilities to the living cultures of the indigenous world.

Canaries in the Coal Mine

Among the flurry of executive orders signed by the President over the past few weeks, several targeted Native American communities. From the infamous border wall project to the ill-conceived Dakota Access Pipeline, the President affirmed his commitment to assaulting tribal sovereignty and environmental justice.

Verlon Jose, the leader of the Tohono O’odham Nation on the Arizona/Mexico border spoke for many people in Indian Country when he said, “over my dead body will a wall be built.”

Although some might think of the border wall and the Dakota Access Pipeline as “Indian” issues, it and others like it affect all Americans. That’s because what happens in Indian Country does not stay in Indian Country.

We have a vital concern with Indian self-government because the Native American is to America what the Jew was to the Russian Czars and Hitler’s Germany.
Felix Cohen

For nearly two centuries Native communities have been the staging area for federal policies and practices that would later be turned on the nation as a whole. Educational ideas were tried out on Native children—the Lancastrian monitorial method, the industrial school model. National water projects flooded Indian valleys.

Toxic runoff on Ft. Berthold Reservation, Montana.

National forest clear cutting denuded Indian hillsides. Nuclear weapons testing irradiated indigenous dunes and mesas; uranium mining for those same weapons scarred Indian Country’s mountains and poisoned its water.

Last summer, Duane Champagne, Professor of American Indian Studies and faculty member of UCLA’s School of Law, recalled Felix Cohen’s famous comment (made now a half-century ago) that Indians were like the canaries in the coal mine of American democracy. Given the events of the past few weeks, Cohen’s observation seems especially prescient.

Even more startling than his canary analogy is the context in which he made it.

Margene Bullcreek, opponent of toxic waste dump.

It was in the Yale Law Journal, in an article titled “The Erosion of Indian Rights, 1950 – 53” that Cohen forged this startling connection:

We have a vital concern with Indian self-government because the Native American is to America what the Jew was to the Russian Czars and Hitler’s Germany. For us the Indian tribe is the miner’s canary, and when it flutters and droops we know that the poison gases of intolerance threaten all other minorities in our land.

Intolerance. That’s the extra something that sharpens federal policy into the point of the spear in Indian Country. In North Dakota, the federal government was very slow to acknowledge and protect the civil rights of protesters. It essentially turned a blind eye to intolerance. Native people were denied hotel rooms because of their ethnicity. They were gassed and beaten in a way that no middle class white American has been. They were showered with rubber bullets, freezing water, and set upon by attack dogs all while the Obama administration did little on their behalf. It was only in the waning days of his presidency that Obama instructed the Justice Department to take a closer look at what was going on in Morgan County. Although Attorney General Loretta Lynch did eventually send Justice officials to the field to survey the situation, with the new administration, even those slim protections have been lifted and an aggressive BIA police force installed at Standing Rock to intimidate its residents.

BIA policeman beating a man on the Cheyenne River Reservation, February, 2017. [http://nativenewsonline.net/currents/cheyenne-river-sioux-tribe-reacts-bia-police-brutality/]

With the protection of state’s rights as its new role, the federal government has turned a blind eye to state legislation that is clearly, and maliciously, directed at Native people—with no other policy goals than intimidation and intolerance.

A case in point is North Dakota House Concurrent Resolution 3017. In January, when the new president took office, North Dakota legislators attempted to pass a bill that essentially made the old 1950s federal policy of “termination” (exactly the law Felix Cohen was discussing when he made his canary analogy) a model for the state’s relationship with its indigenous citizens. Like most Indian-directed legislation, it pretended to have the best interests of Native people at heart:

A concurrent resolution urging Congress to modify the Indian reservation system by vesting the states with the ability to engage in relations with Native American tribes and with the responsibility of developing plans to improve the failed Indian reservation system, advance and elevate the quality of life on Indian reservations, promote and increase literacy on Indian reservations, and help Indian reservations to achieve economic stability and independence.

The events in North Dakota, along the border of the Standing Rock reservation, on the Cheyenne River reservation, and in the Tohono O’odham homeland should worry non-Indians. Its is a short step from Indian Country to the “inner city,” and from there to suburbs and shopping malls. Native Americans are once again seeing the sweeping suspension of civil rights that happens when the government promotes the interests of the few over the objections of those it brands as alien, un-American, other. They know, perhaps better than the rest of us, that being Indian is just the beginning. Ask the Nisei, American citizens who, in the 1940s, found out they too were “Indians” and that they too could be herded into reservations “for the duration.”

Fracking in Indian County, North Dakota.

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