Repositioning Indianness: Native American Organizations in Portland, Oregon, 1959––1975

2002 ◽  
Vol 71 (3) ◽  
pp. 415-438 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicolas G. Rosenthal
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
American Indians ◽  
The United States ◽  
Government Relations ◽  
Indian Identity ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Younger Generation ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
And Shifts

This article examines the processes of community building among American Indians who migrated to Portland, Oregon, in the decades following World War II, contextualized within a larger movement of Indians to the cities of the United States and shifts in government relations with Indian people. It argues that, during the 1960s, working-and middle-class Indians living in Portland came together and formed groups that enabled them to cultivate "Indianness" or to "be Indian" in the city. As the decade wore on, Indian migration to Portland increased, the social problems of urban Indians became more visible, and a younger generation emerged to challenge the leadership of Portland's established Indian organizations. Influenced by both their college educations and a national Indian activist movement, these new leaders promoted a repositioning of Indianness, taking Indian identity as the starting point from which to solve urban Indian problems. By the mid-1970s, the younger generation of college-educated Indians gained a government mandate and ascended to the helm of Portland's Indian community. In winning support from local, state, and federal officials, these leaders reflected fundamental changes under way in the administration of U.S. Indian affairs not only in Portland, but also across the country.

American Indian Activism after 1945

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bradley Shreve
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
American Indian ◽  
American Indians ◽  
Energy Resource ◽  
Well Being ◽  
The United States ◽  
Native People ◽  
Treaty Rights ◽  
1960S And 1970S

American Indian activism after 1945 was as much a part of the larger, global decolonization movement rooted in centuries of imperialism as it was a direct response to the ethos of civic nationalism and integration that had gained momentum in the United States following World War II. This ethos manifested itself in the disastrous federal policies of termination and relocation, which sought to end federal services to recognized Indian tribes and encourage Native people to leave reservations for cities. In response, tribal leaders from throughout Indian Country formed the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) in 1944 to litigate and lobby for the collective well-being of Native peoples. The NCAI was the first intertribal organization to embrace the concepts of sovereignty, treaty rights, and cultural preservation—principles that continue to guide Native activists today. As American Indian activism grew increasingly militant in the late 1960s and 1970s, civil disobedience, demonstrations, and takeovers became the preferred tactics of “Red Power” organizations such as the National Indian Youth Council (NIYC), the Indians of All Tribes, and the American Indian Movement (AIM). At the same time, others established more focused efforts that employed less confrontational methods. For example, the Native American Rights Fund (NARF) served as a legal apparatus that represented Native nations, using the courts to protect treaty rights and expand sovereignty; the Council of Energy Resource Tribes (CERT) sought to secure greater returns on the mineral wealth found on tribal lands; and the American Indian Higher Education Consortium (AIHEC) brought Native educators together to work for greater self-determination and culturally rooted curricula in Indian schools. While the more militant of these organizations and efforts have withered, those that have exploited established channels have grown and flourished. Such efforts will no doubt continue into the unforeseeable future so long as the state of Native nations remains uncertain.

scholarly journals The Construction of a National Identification in the Novel of N. Scott Momaday House Made of Dawn

2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (44) ◽  
pp. 72-93
Author(s):  
Huda Kadhim Alwan ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
American Indians ◽  
Military Service ◽  
The United States ◽  
Oral Traditions ◽  
United States Government ◽  
Traumatic Experience

The United States government allowed Native Americans to abandon their reservations in the 1950s and 1960s. The historical, social, and cultural backgrounds shaped the forms and themes of works by American Indian writers who urged people to refuse their culture's sense of shame. Moreover, their behavior corresponded with the restoration of individuals to their rituals after disappointment, loss of sense of life, and mental illness performed from the influence of mainstream American society. Among these writers, N. Scott Momaday and Leslie Marmon Silko participate in similar interest in portraying characters caught between indigenous beliefs and white mainstream standards. The construction of national identity in the first modernist Native American Novel, House Made of Dawn (1968) by N. Scott Momaday is tackled in this research. This novel illustrates the healing tale of a young Native American man who, after his return from military service in World War II, suffers from spiritual and psychological illness. The protagonist is isolated from his parents due to his traumatic experience of a foreign war and his problematic genealogy that stems from the orphanage. He is isolated from the land that offers his identity and his culture. In order to gain a consistent sense of identity with the aid of oral traditions and ancient ceremonials of Navajo and pueblo cultures, he begins a ritualistic journey that ultimately leads him to reintegrate with his people and culture. This research illustrates how the construction of national identity is a critical theme for American Indians and contemporary Native American authors.

scholarly journals American Indian Identity and Blood Quantum in the 21st Century: A Critical Review

2011 ◽  
Vol 2011 ◽  
pp. 1-9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ryan W. Schmidt
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
American Indian ◽  
American Indians ◽  
The United States ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Blood Quantum ◽  
Indian Identity ◽  
Legal Implications ◽  
American Society ◽  
Tribal Affiliation

Identity in American Indian communities has continually been a subject of contentious debate among legal scholars, federal policy-makers, anthropologists, historians, and even within Native American society itself. As American Indians have a unique relationship with the United States, their identity has continually been redefined and reconstructed over the last century and a half. This has placed a substantial burden on definitions for legal purposes and tribal affiliation and on American Indians trying to self-identify within multiple cultural contexts. Is there an appropriate means to recognize and define just who is an American Indian? One approach has been to define identity through the use of blood quantum, a metaphorical construction for tracing individual and group ancestry. This paper will review the utility of blood quantum by examining the cultural, social, biological, and legal implications inherent in using such group membership and, further, how American Indian identity is being affected.

Hemispheric Studies

PMLA ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 124 (1) ◽  
pp. 234-250 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ralph Bauer
Keyword(s):  
American Studies ◽  
Presidential Address ◽  
The United States ◽  
Comparative Investigation ◽  
Western Hemisphere ◽  
Hemispheric Studies ◽  
Terra Incognita ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Previous Decade ◽  
The 1960S

When, in 1990, Gustavo Pérez Firmat asked, “Do the Americas have a common literature?” He was responding to a fledgling critical endeavor that had been pioneered during the previous decade in only a handful of studies, by such Latin Americanists and literary comparatists as M. J. Valdés, José Ballón, Bell Gale Chevigny, Gari Laguardia, Vera Kutzinski, Alfred Owen Aldridge, and Lois Parkinson Zamora (“Cheek” 2). Although “inter-American literary studies”—the comparative investigation of the “literatures and cultures of this hemisphere” as one unit of study—seemed to Pérez Firmat “something of a terra incognita” in 1990 (“Cheek” 1–2), the hemispheric conception of American studies had originated in the United States some sixty years earlier with the Berkeley historian Herbert Eugene Bolton (1870–1953), who argued, in his seminal 1932 presidential address to the American Historical Association, for an “essential unity” in the history of the Western hemisphere (472). Although the contributing historians in Lewis Hanke's 1964 collection of essays Do the Americas Have a Common History? gave this “Bolton Thesis” a decidedly mixed review, the thesis provided the inspiration for Pérez Firmat's landmark collection and a starting point for much subsequent hemispheric scholarship. Meanwhile, inter-American studies has had a strong tradition in Europe that is, in fact, older than Pérez Firmat's or Hanke's collection. As early as the 1950s, the eminent Italian Americanist Antonello Gerbi was publishing his groundbreaking works in comparative hemispheric and Atlantic history, which studied the early modern polemic about the degenerative influences the New World environments had on plants, animals, and humans. Also, Hans Galinsky, at the University of Mainz, was exploring the literature of the European discovery and aesthetic forms such as the baroque in the early Americas from a comparative perspective in the 1960s.

Dwight Eisenhower

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Policy Development ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
Nuclear Arsenal ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Nuclear Arms Race ◽  
American Society ◽  
The 1960S

Assessments of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s performance as the Supreme Allied Commander during World War II and the nation’s thirty-fourth president have evolved across the more than seventy-five years from the conclusion of World War II in 1945 to the dedication in 2020 of the Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial in Washington, DC. Historians have sought to explain Eisenhower’s unlikely rise from his modest upbringing in Abilene, Kansas, to his ascendance to command of western allies in the European theater. Selected over several senior officers in 1942 to command the invasion of North Africa (Operation Torch), Eisenhower initially experienced a series of setbacks and controversies resulting from inexperienced troops, incompetent subordinate leaders, a formidable enemy, and political deals with leaders of Vichy France. Although historians continue to debate his decisions regarding command and strategy in the European theater, they generally praise Eisenhower’s ability to maintain the western alliance amid national rivalries, professional jealousies, strong personalities, and competing political ambitions. Assessments of Eisenhower’s performance as president have undergone a remarkable transformation. Initially ranked in 1961 near the bottom in assessments of presidential leadership, he currently appears within the top tier. Initial accounts in the 1960s portrayed Eisenhower as a bumbling, docile president who appeared to be out of touch with the basic policies and operations of his administration. He appeared unwilling to address the major issues confronting American society, and to defer to his Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, on matters of foreign policy and national security. For his critics, Eisenhower perilously, inflexibly, and imprudently relied upon the superiority of the nation’s nuclear arsenal to contain communist expansion, then allowed the Soviet Union to beat the United States into space and create a missile gap. Scholars collectively labeled “Eisenhower Revisionists” assessing declassified documents beginning in the mid-1970s forged a revised consensus that Eisenhower was clearly thoughtful, informed, and firmly in command of his administration. Moreover, the nation’s nuclear arsenal retained and even strengthened its predominance of power. “Postrevisionist” analysts generally concur that Eisenhower was clearly the dominant decision-maker and developed an effective policy development process, but they question the efficacy of some of his decisions and policies, including his management of crises in this dangerous period of the Cold War, his increased use of covert operations and propaganda, his approach to decolonization, and his efforts to ease tensions and slow the nuclear arms race.

Japanese Commemorations of World War II in the Mariana Islands

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keith L. Camacho
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
The United States ◽  
Mariana Islands ◽  
World War ◽  
War Memories ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
A Site

This chapter examines the creation and contestation of Japanese commemorations of World War II in the Mariana Islands. As an archipelago colonized by Japan and the United States, the Mariana Islands have become a site through which war memories have developed in distinct and shared ways. With respect to Japanese commemorations, the analysis demonstrates why and how they inform and are informed by Chamorro and American remembrances of the war in the Mariana Islands. By analyzing government, media, and tourist accounts of the war from the 1960s to the present, I thus show how we can gain an understanding and appreciation for the complex ways by which Japanese of various generations reckon with a violent past.

Who Can Say They Are Apathetic and Listless Now?

2019 ◽  
pp. 42-67
Author(s):  
Douglas K. Miller
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Federal Government ◽  
The United States ◽  
American People ◽  
World War ◽  
Standards Of Living ◽  
And Migration ◽  
War Production ◽  
Migration Experiences

Roughly 65,000 Native American people enlisted for overseas service or contributed domestically to war production industries during World War II. Expansive off-reservation work and migration experiences created a historical precedent and network for subsequent waves of Native peoples who moved to cities for new opportunities and better standards of living after making significant contributions to the United States’ victory in World War II. Meanwhile, paying attention to Native American patriotism and urban labor, the federal government began envisioning an urban relocation program.

From American Exceptionalism to the Great Compression

2021 ◽  
pp. 323-350
Author(s):  
Jon D. Wisman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Economic Growth ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
American Exceptionalism ◽  
The United States ◽  
Living Standards ◽  
World War ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
First Time

The United States was an anomaly, beginning without clear class distinctions and with substantial egalitarian sentiment. Inexpensive land meant workers who were not enslaved were relatively free. However, as the frontier closed and industrialization took off after the Civil War, inequality soared and workers increasingly lost control over their workplaces. Worker agitation led to improved living standards, but gains were limited by the persuasiveness of the elite’s ideology. The hardships of the Great Depression, however, significantly delegitimated the elite’s ideology, resulting in substantially decreased inequality between the 1930s and 1970s. Robust economic growth following World War II and workers’ greater political power permitted unparalleled improvements in working-class living standards. By the 1960s, for the first time in history, a generation came of age without fear of dire material privation, generating among many of the young a dramatic change in values and attitudes, privileging social justice and self-realization over material concerns.

Reverberations for American Indians, Native Hawai’ians, and Group Rights

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martha Minow
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
American Indians ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
Equal Opportunity ◽  
The United States ◽  
Cultural Traditions ◽  
The Government ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Individual

Usually left out of discussions of school desegregation, the historic treatments of American Indians and Native Hawai’ians in the development of schooling in the United States was a corollary of conquest and colonialism. As late as the 1950s, forced assimilation and eradication of indigenous cultures pervaded what was considered the “education” of students in these groups. The social, political, and legal civil rights initiatives surrounding Brown helped to inspire a rights consciousness among Indian and Native Hawai’ian reformers and activists, who embraced the ideal of equal opportunity while reclaiming cultural traditions. Between the 1960s and 2007, complex fights over ethnic classification, separation, integration, and self-determination emerged for both American Indians and Native Hawai’ians. Their struggles, crucial in themselves, also bring to the fore a challenging underlying problem: are distinct individuals or groups the proper unit of analysis and protection in the pursuit of equality? The centrality of the individual to law and culture in the United States tends to mute this question. Yet in this country as well as elsewhere, equal treatment or equal opportunity has two faces: promoting individual development and liberty, regardless of race, culture, religion, gender, or other group-based characteristic, and protection for groups that afford their members meaning and identity. Nowhere is the tension between these two alternatives more apparent than in schooling, which involves socialization of each new generation in the values and expectations of their elders. Will that socialization direct each individual to a common world focused on the academic and social mobility of distinct individuals or will it inculcate traditions and values associated with particular groups? Even in the United States, devoted to inclusive individualism, the Supreme Court rejected a statute requiring students to attend schools run by the government and created exemptions from compulsory school fines when they burdened a group’s practices and hopes for their children. In Pierce v. Society of Sisters, the Court respected the rights of parents to select private schooling in order to inculcate a religious identity or other “additional obligations.”

Something Has Changed

2020 ◽  
pp. 185-192
Author(s):  
Jack Reid
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cross Section ◽  
The United States ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
Personal Safety ◽  
Conservative Movement ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Ride Sharing ◽  
National Values ◽  
The 1960S

The epilogue summarizes key arguments in the book and reflects on ideas about ride solicitation in contemporary society—noting the intersections between hitchhiking and modern ride-sharing apps like Uber and Lyft. Hitchhiking was common for decades in the United States, because it complimented the transportation needs of a cross-section of Americans while also meshing with the nation’s values—whether it be during the Great Depression, World War II, or the “hitchhiking renaissance” of the 1960s and ‘70s. The practice lost traction when thumbing rides fell out of touch with national values amid the rise of the conservative movement, increasing transportation regimentation, and growing concerns for personal safety.

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