Browsing by Subject "Native American studies"

In my dissertation, I interrogate the ways blood influences identity construction and how it shifts into a paradigmatic story, known as a blood narrative, that further determines belonging. In five chapters, I argue that the use of a blood narrative undermines sovereignty as well as the creative evolution of nations. I move from an examination of a blood narrative throughout American literature (chapter 1), through a study of legislation and science (chapters 2 and 3). In these latter two chapters, I turn to the Cherokee Nation's expulsion of Freedmen and the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians' new membership requirement of DNA testing, which demonstrate influences of a blood narrative upon policy and legislation, and how biotechnology maintains this narrative through DNA and genomics. Finally, I explore novels from Gerald Vizenor (White Earth Anishinaabe) and Thomas King (Cherokee) that offer alternatives to a blood narrative (chapters 4 and 5). I use the term alternarrative here instead of counternarrative to focus on original alternatives, particularly from the alter position of the Native, not on reactionary or countering stories. The alternatives to this blood narrative emerge in both the modern and traditional stories of Native American peoples, providing recourse to understanding identity in ways other than blood. This new sense of belonging is especially important in a world where so many identities are determined by national boundaries, and limited by blood. These alternative narratives provide a new way of moving forward by embracing a survivance for the future, not just reacting to the past.

This dissertation explores the history of the Assemblies of God's Home Missions to American Indians, the development of an American Indian leadership in the denomination and the development of a Pentecostal Indian identity. The history that is told in this work is that of a century-long struggle by American Indian Pentecostals for autonomy, leadership, and recognition within the Assemblies of God. I argue that the AG's efforts to establish indigenous churches in its home missions work to American Indians bore two important and largely unanticipated consequences. The first was that it prompted American Indian Pentecostals to forge a new identity: fully Indian and fully Pentecostal. The second was that it forced white Pentecostals to own up to their belief in the indigenous principle: that God's Spirit fell equally on peoples, without regard to ethnicity or social standing. I focus mainly on giving voice to the Pentecostal Indian actors in this history, in order to fill in the gaps on a group of modern Pentecostal believers that were almost never written about in the histories of the movement.

I have rooted this work in the history of American religious history, as well as Native American history and the history of American Pentecostalism. The majority of the sources come from the Assemblies of God's archives, chiefly, ministerial files, Pentecostal periodicals, letters, tracts, meeting minutes, and self-published autobiographies.

This dissertation research explored how indigenous peoples have responded to increasing conservation and development pressures in Suriname using two case study communities. One, in West Suriname, faced a proposed protected area and large-scale mining operation on the communities' traditional lands. The other community, in East Suriname, has been involved in a long-term co-management arrangement over an existing protected area. Community responses to these protected areas and development projects were considered through the important influence of a national indigenous rights organization and its multi-scalar networks. A total of 68 in-depth interviews with indigenous community leaders, indigenous rights organization leaders, conservation NGO personnel, company, and government representatives were conducted over a period of 9 months. In addition, 13 documents including conference proceedings, editorials, letters, and presentations were collected and analyzed. Results showed that strategies in the form of scalar politics, information politics, accountability politics, and cultural politics that drew from international legal instruments, guidelines, and the larger indigenous rights movement were used. These strategies enhanced the power, knowledge, and negotiating ability of the communities and NGOs, leading to the eventual rejection of a protected area and a stronger role in the mining project. However, the larger goal of land rights for indigenous peoples in Suriname has not yet been realized, and remains the focal point of indigenous struggles there.

The visual representation of Indigenous North American peoples in contemporary visual culture continues to rely on romanticized images drawn from early twentieth century salvage ethnography surveys, presenting Indigenous American nations as part of the continent’s storied past while denying their active presence in contemporary society. This dissertation explores a body of conceptual art photography, created between the 1990’s and the present, that responds uniquely to the persistence of romantic ethnographic visual tropes. Focusing on the work of artists who are members of Native American nations situated within the United States, this study explores the relationships among anthropological visual conventions, Western philosophies defining what it means to be human, Western academic theories of photography, and settler-colonial history in North America. It delves specifically into the links between the foundations of anthropological visualities and later twentieth century theory positing the photographic image as a mode of death, popularized by scholars including Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, and Martha Rosler, among others. I consider how the contemporary artists addressed intervene in these theoretical discourses of photography by way of interjecting elements of performance into photography. I identify and analyze strategies including the appropriation and physical manipulation of historic images; a reimaging of the photographic act; performative interventions into the still image; the use of satire and affect; Indigenous Futurisms; storytelling; and a radical collapsing of the boundaries between performance action and photography.

In 1760, when British victory was all but assured and hostilities in the northeastern colonies of North America came to an end, the future of the southeastern colonies was not nearly so clear. British authorities in the South still faced the possibility of a local French and Indian alliance and clashed with angry Cherokees who had complaints of their own. These tensions and events usually take a back seat to the climactic proceedings further north. I argue that in South Carolina, by destabilizing relations with African and Native Americans, the Cherokee Indians raised the social and political anxieties of coastal elites to a fever pitch during the Anglo-Cherokee War. Threatened by Indians from without and by slaves from within, and failing to find unbridled support in British policy, the planter-merchant class eventually sought to take matters into its own hands. Scholars have long understood the way the economic fallout of the French and Indian War caused Britain to press new financial levies on American colonists. But they have not understood the deeper consequences of the war on the local stage. Using extensive political and military correspondence, ethnography, and eighteenth-century newspapers, I offer a narrative-driven approach that adds geographic and ethnographic breadth and context to previous scholarship on mid-eighteenth century in North America. I expand understandings of Cherokee culture, British and colonial Indian policy, race slavery, and the southeastern frontier. At the same time, I also explain the origins of the American Revolution in the South.

How do the weak win political victories? The dissertation answers the question of how, why and when very weak groups are able to win concessions from the strong. Specifically, the research offers an understanding of how indigenous peoples have been able to gain recognition and extension of their land rights. Through comparative case study analysis, the first section explores why the governments of Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States have begun to recognize and return rights to land for the same indigenous populations whose rights have been denied or ignored for centuries. The second section further tests the proposed explanations in relation to specific claims outcomes and land transfers in 17 American Indian land claims cases in the United States.

The research concludes normative changes following World War II led to new attention to the rights of minority groups. Indigenous peoples were redefined as deserving of limited rights and protections from the state. At the same time, the growth of cohesion among indigenous peoples on a national and international scale and the success of other minority groups encouraged them to bring their claims against the state. Economic, demographic, and political trends established that indigenous peoples were no longer a threat to the security of the dominance of the strong. This made it possible for elites to recalculate the costs and benefits of concessions to indigenous peoples, which were now seen as more affordable. Similar forces are at play in the outcomes of individual claims to for the return of land in the United States. The calculations of elites include the normative pressures to act (in this case, often legal pressure), the tangible and economic costs for transfers, whether or not the dominant population sees the recipient group as deserving, and whether or not the claim itself challenges the legitimacy or moral authority of the state.

The Organic Citizen investigates an underlying environmentalist sensibility that links texts and discourses from varied realms and disciplines - Indian reform, environmental policy, social reform, ecology, sociology and legislation. I contend that, taken together, these works narrate an ecological vision of national affiliation: a concept of the nation as an ecological, natural zone of interdependence and its citizens (or non-citizen inhabitants) as members of this environmentally-conceptualized nation. This shared narrative of natural collectivity gives rise to what I call an "organic citizen" - the literary-political figure of an individual imagined to be a natural member of an ecological national body. I show that this concept of eco-citizenship both informs and is informed by contemporaneous concepts of indigeneity (what it means to be native) and by the actual political positioning of the American Indian in the U.S. citizenry throughout the century.

In five chapters, I argue that environmentalism is a site in which subjectivity is shaped, initially establishing modes of assimilative collectivity at the turn of the last century and later providing a realm in which the terms of subject affiliation may be analyzed and revised. I show how environmentalist discourse is profoundly connected to democratic practice and membership and how it formulates models of citizen collectivity. I contend that this discourse encompasses significantly more than a narrowly defined set of conservationist concerns for ecological entities, and can be used as a site of activism. Certain forms of stories - narratives that question these terms of national affiliation- expose the nuances of environmentalist thought. This type of storytelling offers a means through which environmentalist thought can become a realm of citizen engagement or activist possibility, opening access to and agency within a participatory democracy. An examination of this eco-narrative, I suggest, provides useful insights into how land use and rhetoric give definition to the way U.S. citizenship is socially imagined, legally adjudicated, and independently or communally practiced in a democratic system.

The first chapter examines the simultaneous emergence of wilderness narratives with the science of ecology and discourses concerned about national and geographical assimilation of communities and individuals of ethnic difference. I draw upon the writings of social reformers, particularly Jane Addams, ecologists Henry Chandler Cowles and Frederick Clements, and environmentalists John Muir and Gifford Pinchot. Together, I argue they demonstrate how immigrant and impoverished subjects living in urban zones were rhetorically imagined and physically and metaphorically associated with natural entities. I contend that this literal naturalization makes immigrant presence less threatening to a national collective by converting these bodies and places into natural resources to be consumed for nationalist purposes. This version of citizenship imagines collectivity as a form of organicism, a process by which foreign subjects and non-citizens can be incorporated into a citizenry as natural resources while not necessarily legally constituted as citizens of the nation.

While the rhetoric surrounding land use began to take new political, constitutional and sociocultural form in the first wave of a formal environmental movement, there simultaneously was a dramatic jurisprudential shift in Indian status in the U.S. This chapter explores how the formulation of an "organic citizen" at the turn of the century draws upon circulating concepts of indigeneity. I bring together Indian reform policy, specifically the Dawes Allotment Act, environmental policy, particularly the Antiquities Act, and fictional writings by Mary Austin and George Bird Grinnell. These narratives demonstrate the consistency with which American Indians were imagined as organically connected to natural lands. I argue that the result is a concept of indigenous organicism that is predicated upon the Indian being publicly, although uncomfortably, imagined as a natural constituent of a citizenry and Indian land as a natural part of a national body. Chapter Three examines the fictional and political writings of Zitkala-Sa and Charles Eastman to consider how they use stories and their public roles to analyze the legal and discursive connections between an environmentalist sensibility and concepts of indigeneity. I contend that Eastman and Zitkala-Sa begin to use a language of rights and democracy within this eco-discourse as a way to insert the native as a rights-bearing citizen in the U.S. nation, putting forth a race analysis that ultimately disrupts the idea of ecological assimilation prevalent at the time. Reading their work alongside key environmental policies, like the Organic Act of 1916, Indian reforms, like the Citizenship Act of 1924, and Willa Cather's novel The Professor's House highlights the persistence of a concept of natural indigeneity that continued to be narrated even after American Indians are given legal citizenship.

Eastman's and Zitkala-Sa's use of the environmentalist/native link as a means for race critique falls out of environmentalist thought and practice in a critical moment of transition in the environmental movement. Their use of storytelling and sense of political right, however, lays the foundation for the type of environmental narrative that emerges with the second stage of the environmental movement. My fourth chapter shifts to this moment, focusing on Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac (1949) and Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962). I argue that both authors use an environmental narrative, particularly storytelling, as a means to imagine citizen engagement in a participatory democracy. However, while Leopold and Carson incorporate a language of political rights, they do not carefully factor into their versions of national/ecological belonging and action the ways in which race and class identities affect the social, political, and legal standing of various subjects within the eco-nation.

My final chapter explores how a race and class critique in environmentalist thought and politics returns in the last quarter of the twentieth century. I draw from significant legislation and Supreme Court opinions that explicitly defined the political rights of ecological objects and species, such as Sierra Club v. Morton, the Endangered Species Act, and a series of legal battles that emerged around the construction of the Tellico Dam, particularly the Cherokees' resistance to its development. These documents and cases deliberate over the political standing and rights of natural, non-human entities, but they circumnavigate engagement with questions of political standing for geographically and socially marginalized human citizens in the U.S., although this issue is implicitly present and strategically drawn upon in their arguments. This lost component takes shape and political articulation in the following emergence of the environmental justice movement. The politics of voice - "speaking for oneself" - that emerges particularly out of indigenous environmental justice movements highlights the use of storytelling as an activist practice. In their careful novelization of environmental activism, Linda Hogan's Solar Storms (1995) and Ruth Ozeki's All Over Creation (2003) not only pinpoint the interconnections, but also the injustices that arise out of the way human and ecological subjectivities are legally and culturally constructed. I argue that both authors use the literary form to model how stories and the act of storytelling allow for the articulation of and/or resistance to certain terms of national affiliation. Both Hogan's and Ozeki's novels bring forth an expanded sense of environmentalism, showing that storytelling can redefine our roles as U.S. citizens and position ourselves as active agents in democratic discourse, policy-making and change.

We are living in another pivotal moment of environmentalist thought as new attention is given to the way environmental conditions are deteriorating and as popular culture begins to take interest in these issues. It is crucial that Literary Studies rigorously engage with these issues to examine the kinds of narratives being generated. While Ecocriticism and Native American Studies have remained somewhat marginalized from the core of Literary Studies, this project (particularly in this moment) argues that these types of criticism and theory have an imperative role to play in illuminating narratives of identity, nation, and citizenship.

This dissertation analyzes the relationship between bondage and conquest along the Upper Mississippi between the War of 1812 and the U.S. Civil War. It connects the range of unfree labor practices that flourished on the Upper Mississippi, in defiance of federal and territorial law, to the political geography generated by settler colonialism and slavery’s expansion. In the mid-continent, where U.S. sovereignty was stretched thin, the law was not the only factor that determined a person’s status. The few federal representatives in the Upper Midwest—Indian agents, army officers, and Christian missionaries—pursued the work of national expansion by illegally holding African Americans in bondage. Simultaneously, they acted to mold Native people into a racially segregated underclass of agrarian workers. The region’s trafficked subjects exploited the limits of federal power to ensure that this labor regime was never complete. Drawing on research conducted across fifteen archives, Unfree Soil finds that free labor could not exist on stolen land.

This research recasts the history of what has often been understood as the free North and West. U.S. historians have demonstrated that westward expansion was a driving force in the nation’s conflict over slavery, but they have paid less attention to the labor and power relations that were already established in the center of the continent prior to the arrival of Anglo-Americans. Recent scholarship examining slavery in the Upper Midwest either ends with the War of 1812 or overlooks the region’s history of Native labor and unfreedom. The colonial archive, however, is rife with sources describing both Native labor and slave labor well into the nineteenth century. This dissertation engages the methods of legal history, Native American history, environmental history, and labor history to contextualize the archive’s fleeting references to the region’s colonized and enslaved inhabitants. In its focus on Native work, Unfree Soil collapses the land-labor binary that has traditionally divided Indigenous Studies from Black Studies. On the Upper Mississippi, the labor of enslaved Black people was central to the expropriation of Native land, and white Americans extracted not just Native land but also Native labor.