Wampum

Calle de los Helechos

The radicalization that swept up Indian Country and manifested in the 19 month long occupation of Alcatraz in 1969-1971 hadn't reached California. First, California wasn't "Indian Country", the treaties negociated after annexation had not been ratified by Congress. In fact they were creatively "lost" until the early 20th Century. There were Mission Indians and Mexican-era Racheria Indians, and Indians where there never were Spanish Missions or Mexican Rancherias, but none were "American Indians". Second, the American Indians that were in California were post-War BIA relocatees -- mainly Lakotas and Diné or like my family, pre-War Tsalagi Okies -- and all living in Los Angeles or Oakland or San Francisco or Sacramento. My enduring memory of wonderment was the sight of a woman in an elevated glass booth as my school bus passed through some part of San Francisco, in route from northern Monterey County to Berkeley -- a gogo dancer in a mini, not brooding Alcatraz -- then, in early 1970, California's first bit of "Authentic Indian Country".

AIM has never seemed to me to truely "pan-tribal", it never made sense to the Esselens or the Ana Matsuns or any other Band of Mission Indians, or the Awahnee just recently kicked out of Yosemite Park and it didn't quite jibe with the relocatee culture of Los Angeles. From my point of view it was Eastern. Disconnected from California, whether looked at from the perspective of urban relocatees, or from the perspective of the indigenous. Then it was simply Minneapolis Indians, and Northern Plains Indians. Not California Diné, not California Cherokee, not California Indian, and definitely not Mexican Indians living in California either. Maybe Seattle Indians felt connected to "it", but "it" wasn't any kind of "indian" that made sense, even though it was styled as "High Indian".

Now that I've lived in Waban aki, AIM again seems about as foreign as England. A decade of contributing to, and several years being responsible for, the TribaLaw list, and AIM is, and remains, irrelevant to Federal Indian (US) and Aboriginal (CA) Law, as well as States and Provincal Law. Those are my opinions. To my mind there is Alaska under the Territory, Statehood and Settlement Acts, Hawai'i under plain piracy, California, Oregon and Washington under the hidden and unratified Treaties, Basin and Plains and the Old NorthWest under "ordinary" FIL, Oklahoma under "Indian Territory" FIL, New York under the Non-Intercourse Act, and the rest of the Eastern Tribes not dislocated to Oklahoma and Wisconsin, like the Lumbee and the Abenaki, under modern Settlements or not yet Settled. Overlayed over all of these regional differences in circumstance and law there is the historical policy epochs of the War Department, later the Interior Department, from extirpation to relocation to assimilation to termination to self-determination. Underlying it all are the absence of boarders between the zones administered by the Washington and Ottowa colonial governments, and the more complex syncratic government of Mexico, and the mobility of Indians within colonial society, even in the 17th century, and certainly in the 19th and 20th centuries. Atop that layer of mazes are the PL 280 jurisdictions, and beneath it all is identity and culture. The Quantum. The Roles. The Proof of Descent. The spaces in between -- the well-known exceptions. And Identified within the Community as Indian.

The unsurprising controversy about Ward Churchill's unsuprising observation that there is causation for effect has several critical subtexts, and as MB learned from Martin Wobst -- that where garbage is absent is as revealing as where garbage is present -- not all are present in their presence -- some are present in their absence.

The freedom of speech issue is covered elsewhere, and better, since it rises from the conception of colonial individualism, divorced from clan and band affinities and responsibilities and outside of the scope of aboriginal law.

The tenure issue is covered elsewhere, and better, since it too arises from the conception of individualism in the ecclesiastical European context, a life-appointment of an individual to a particular ritual office, not of a clan to a particular song or duty to sing or speak.

True, under IRA (Wheeler-Howard) imitations of individual rights are imposed upon Tribal Governments, but not if one looks carefully under the covers. Pueblo v Martinez is really about the right of Santa Clara women to control the allocation of tribal resources, reaching deeper into the bedroom than any modern "values" Republican to control reproduction and identity. Don't let moderns or feminists confuse you -- matrilineal authority over water and land was affirmed in Pueblo v Martinez, not some daffy notion that Santa Clara males can marry non-Santa Clara females and their children inherit patrilineally standing to communal water and land (they can't), and therefore that Pueblo v Martinez affirmed male privilege and sexual discrimination. Thats only how it looks above the smoothed covers, not between the gritty sheets.

Then there is the question of identity. As usual Clyde, Vern and the rest of that gang are first to fire, and if you are without a playbook you may not know what civil war being shot out in the street you've just stepped through a screen door and into. The bullets are real. Ducking is prudent. And this is where I pause for bit image identification.

The bits that make up the image above is a work that covers the period from 1969 to 1973. Before the whole weight of the Nixon political police and some very overt assassinations broke the force of the movement. A time when the misogony of the males in the leadership of AIM was a luxury that could be afforded. Later things got a lot worse. There was "bad jacketing" and eventually over 100 Indians were killed in that multi-way civil-and-colonial war.

At the end there was Clyde and Vern Bellecourt and their bozos holding the "Grand Council" stick, and Ward Churchill and Russ Means and their bozos holding the "Autonomous Chapters" stick, with the two camps vigorously exchanging blows anywhere in Indian Country an audience can be found to enjoy the spectacle. These were, and remain, all deeply flawed people. Years later I remember finding AIM and NAIM partisans at the Stanford Mother's Day Powwow being bitchy to anyone who looked as if they might be on the other side of an invisible fence.

That was the one. The one when the future loomed out of the fog. The organizers -- Stanford schoarship Indians from the East -- Diné and Lakota and ... invited Pomos to dance, and covered in clay, dressed in dry grass, faces half-hidden by grass, and most amazing of all, bare foot, they danced. They danced unlike any Indians at any Powwow in California. Not Northen fast or slow, not Southern fast or slow, not prize dancing with a bustle made of dyed turkey feathers and dayglo yarn, in painted or standard Keds or Genuine Mocs, but Pomo round house dance, feet caressing the grass. That was when mid-Coast California Powwows started to transition towards Big Times, and being open to California Indians.

Being a perverse lot, our choice was to hold our Big Time at the same time and place as the Rodeo, so the Salinas Powwow and Rodeo features Western Cowboys and Coastal Indians.

I'm sympathetic towards Ward's attempt to find a working definition of his sense of Indianness. It seems to me that if one takes the culture-defines route, all the lost birds, all the hundreds of thousands of Indian children adopted-out or assimilated, are not Indian. If one takes the Quantum-defines route, all the hundreds of thousands of Indian children will have children who will have children who will ... not be Indian. There are full-bloods now alive who are not "Indian", not meeting the BQ for any of their four grandparent's tribes, a consequence of a different kind of pan-tribalism -- in bed. We frequently discuss the realities of Tribal Enrollment critieria and the obligations of TE clerks on TribalLaw, under each of the basic regimes -- the Blood Quantum, the Roles, and Lineal Descent. It isn't easy.

I'm also certain that everything Ward has written could have just as well have been written in Rome, Madrid, Lisbon, Paris, or London, as anywhere in North America, and by the natives of those places, not the natives of this place. A critique of colonialism can (and should) be made by anti-colonialists. It is not a monopoly of the colonized, that lies elsewhere, in being not-colonized. And that brings me to my second pause for bit image identification.

The bits that make up the image below is a work that covers two writers, John Joseph Mathews and Vine Deloria Jr. And that is what is present in its absence. Ward writes banal polemics and has tenure. Robert Allen Warrior wrote the staggering Tribal Secrets and was denied tenure at Stanford. More generally, Indian linguistic curios are taught at just about every major university in North America, but Indian languages as living languages are taught about as frequently as Klingon or Esperanto. Everybody loves Indian cultural productions, so long as they are "authentic" and "Indian". But being "authentic" and "Indian" could just as well mean lecturing mathematics at Oxford as holding sweats on Pine Ridge, or as simple as slippng off the zoris and going barefoot.

I hope you've enjoyed this piece. I've never enjoyed the AIM/NAIM food fight, I don't have an opinion about Ward's identity since I don't know his mother, and a man who played with my children and who would have represented one in a toxic tort case flew part way to his future life in Los Angeles with Mohammad Atta. But there was causation.

Posted by EBW at February 14, 2005 08:13 AM | TrackBack