A Necessary Evil: Framing an American Indian Legal Identity

2013 ◽  
Vol 37 (4) ◽  
pp. 115-140 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dwanna Robertson
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
American Indian ◽  
Indian Policy ◽  
Federal Indian Policy ◽  
Indian Identity ◽  
Native Identity ◽  
The Us ◽  
Legal Identity ◽  
Necessary Evil ◽  
Indian Blood

This study examines the emergence and application of what I conceptualize as an American Indian Legal Identity (AILI). AILI is an individual identity created by structural forces. Most importantly, a person can have an AILI without having either racial identity or ethnic identity. It stands on its own as proof of Indianness even though it was created in the discourse of federal Indian policy. The tribal reification of this federally defined authenticity birthed a racialized collective Indian identity. Furthermore, it has resulted in the internalized racialization of Native identity. AILI relies upon the verification of a degree of Indian blood as documented in the form of a Certificate of Degree of Indian Blood (CDIB) card issued by the US Department of the Interior and through membership within a federally recognized tribe. By focusing on historical social construction of AILI and its current implications within Native populations about who qualifies to be Indian, I analyze semi-structured, in-depth interviews of thirty Native American participants, all of whom ethnically identify as indigenous but only half of whom possess a legal identity. I find participants frame and rationalize AILI's existence by justifying that it is needed to preserve tribal sovereignty.

American Indian Migration and Economic Opportunities

1986 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-68 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gary D. Sandefur
Keyword(s):  
American Indian ◽  
Labor Force ◽  
Race Relations ◽  
Labor Force Participation ◽  
The Other ◽  
Indian Policy ◽  
Interstate Migration ◽  
Federal Indian Policy ◽  
White Couples ◽  
White American

This article examines interstate migration and labor force participation among White, American Indian and intermarried Indian/White couples. The results show that endogamous American Indian couples are much less likely to change states of residence than are the other two groups of couples. The effect of interstate migration on labor force participation does not vary across the three groups of couples. The implications of these results for the assimilation and internal colonial models of race relations and for federal Indian policy are discussed.

Bent, or Lifted Out by Its Roots: Daves’ Broken Arrow and Drum Beat as Narratives of Conditional Sympathy

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Józef Jaskulski
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Indian Policy ◽  
Contrastive Analysis ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Federal Indian Policy

Józef Jaskulski examines Broken Arrow and Drum Beat, considering the perspective that the latter perpetuates the very Native American stereotypes that the former attempted to amend. He links these two narratives through a contrastive analysis of their respective Native American protagonists: firstly, the noble, articulate Cochise and the obstinate, inarticulate Modoc, Captain Jack; secondly, the female characters of Sonseeahray and Toby. Though it is easy to discard Drum Beat as an essentialist step back in Hollywood’s century-long struggle with the so-called ‘Indian problem’, Jaskulski suggests that Drum Beat serves as a latent supplement to Broken Arrow, which can be read as an important document of Hollywood’s conflicted sentiments toward Native Americans in the late-Truman/early-Eisenhower eras. In particular, reflecting a critique of the major about-face in Federal Indian Policy during the 1940s.

Sol Tax and Tribal Sovereignty

1999 ◽  
Vol 58 (1) ◽  
pp. 108-117 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy Lurie
Keyword(s):  
American Indian ◽  
Expert Witness ◽  
Applied Anthropology ◽  
State Courts ◽  
Indian Policy ◽  
Tribal Sovereignty ◽  
Ongoing Research ◽  
Federal Indian Policy ◽  
Indian Reorganization Act ◽  
Public Museum

Nancy Oestreich Lurie is curator emerita of anthropology, Milwaukee Public Museum (MPM). This article draws upon her first-hand knowledge of the American Indian scene including ongoing research with the Ho-Chunk Nation (formerly Winnebago) that began in 1944; lasting friendships made with Indian people across the country while serving as assistant coordinator to Sol Tax during the American Indian Chicago Conference; and association as an action anthropologist in the founding of the Wisconsin Winnebago government under the Indian Reorganization Act, the Menominee's drive to repeal their termination, and the establishment of the Milwaukee Indian Community School and the Potawatomi Bingo-Casino enterprise in Milwaukee. Her work as an expert witness in cases before the U.S. Indian Claims Commission and federal and state courts familiarized her with the history and effects of federal Indian policy. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 1998 meeting of the Society for Applied Anthropology, where the results of discussion enriched and helped to clarify the present version. In addition to published sources cited, this account rests in large part on personal recollections, particularly of the American Indian Chicago Conference, and on the Indian affairs file of newspaper clippings and tribal and intertribal newspapers maintained since 1972 in the Anthropology Department at the Milwaukee Public Museum.

3 Descent and Genealogy: The Changing Landscape of Tribal Membership Governance in the United States

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gover Kirsty
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Indian Policy ◽  
Federal Law ◽  
Blood Quantum ◽  
Federal Indian Policy ◽  
Law And Policy ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Indian Blood

In the United States, the modern period of tribal constitutionalism began in the 1930s. This chapter illustrates the ways in which tribes have altered their membership governance to maintain and repair continuity during shifts in federal Indian policy and tribal demography. Tribes are increasingly likely to use lineal descent and blood quantum rules after 1970, in place of apparently ethnically-neutral rules, such as parental enrolment or residence. Tribes also increasingly prefer tribe-specific measures of blood quantum, in contrast to the pan-tribal concept of Indian blood quantum used in federal law and policy. Together these changes suggest that tribes are becoming more ‘genealogical’ in their approach to membership governance, favouring descent rules over racial measures.

4. From artifact to intellectual

2018 ◽  
pp. 51-67
Author(s):  
Sean Teuton
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
American Indians ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
Indian Policy ◽  
Indian Removal ◽  
Verbal Art ◽  
Federal Indian Policy ◽  
Indian Wars ◽  
Counter Narrative ◽  
Indigenous Lands

‘From artifact to intellectual’ describes the nineteenth-century Indian Wars and the numerous Native American autobiographies that provide a glimpse into indigenous patterns of living, ways of knowing, and verbal art. These autobiographies also deliver a powerful counter-narrative of US entitlement to indigenous lands during Indian removal. In an era of reform, from around 1890 to 1934, Native and non-Native activists sought legislation to “uplift” the Indian, though reformers’ goals often conflicted. Natives and whites actively collaborated through the Society of American Indians (SAI) to influence federal Indian policy. The SAI helped save Native American writers for the twentieth century, scattering the cultural seeds for later Native literary flourishing.

scholarly journals Hidden in Plain Sight: The American Indian Movement and the Revival of the Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape, 1969-1982

Perceptions ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ashton Dunkley
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Native American ◽  
New Jersey ◽  
American Indian ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
East Coast ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Driving Factor ◽  
American Indian Movement ◽  
Native Identity

This paper explores the resurgence of the Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape of New Jersey in the latter half of the 20th century. This thesis argues that the American Indian Movement, with its strong advocation for Native existence and pride, along with Pan-Indianism, unity amongst all tribes, acted as a driving factor in the revival of the Eastern Woodland tribe, the Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape. From the eighteenth century, tribes on the East Coast were forced westward and north, but the Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape people remained hidden in plain sight on their native lands, to which they had been tied to for over 10,000 years. Parents taught their children to hide their native heritage in hopes that they would not be forced from their home as well. Generation after generation, fewer and fewer children were aware of their “Nativeness.” The Lenape traditions, language, and cultural practices which had only been passed down orally were beginning to fade away. By the 1960’s, what started off as a survival tactic to cope with white encroachment metamorphosed into an everyday part of life and as a result, this tight-knit community’s Native identity had been displaced. In the early 1970’s, a number of inspired Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape families worked to reverse the loss of their community’s traditions and identity, unify, and retain a collective recognition of being Native American and a pride in that ancestry.

scholarly journals The Case for a Native American 1968 and Its Transnational Legacy

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 49-70
Author(s):  
György Tóth
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Native American ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
American Indian ◽  
American Indians ◽  
The Us ◽  
Native American Activism ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War

Partly as a result of compartmentalized academic specializations and history teaching, in accounts of the global upheavals of 1968, Native Americans are either not mentioned, or at best are tagged on as an afterthought. “Was there a Native American 1968?” is the central question this article aims to answer. Native American activism in the 1960s was no less flashy, dramatic or confrontational than the protests by the era’s other struggles – it is simply overshadowed by later actions of the movement. Using approaches from Transnational American Studies and the history of social movements, this article argues that American Indians had a “long 1968” that originated in Native America’s responses to the US government’s Termination policy in the 1950s, and stretched from their ‘training’ period in the 1960s, through their dramatic protests from the late 1960s through the 1970s, all the way to their participation at the United Nations from 1977 through the rest of the Cold War. While their radicalism and protest strategies made Native American activism a part of the US domestic social movements of the long 1960s, the nature of American Indian sovereignty rights and transnationalism place the Native American long 1968 on the rights spectrum further away from civil rights, and closer to a national liberation struggle—which links American Indian activism to the decolonization movements of the Cold War.

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