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 Clearing
a Path
THEORIZING THE PAST IN
NATIVE AMERICAN STUDIES

EDITED BY Nancy Shoemaker

Routledge
ROUTLEDGE

Taylor & Francis Group

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CONTENTS

INTRODUcrION
Nancy Shoemaker vii

Stories ORAL HISTORY, NARRATIVE STRATEGIES, AND

NATIVE AMERICAN HISTORIOGRAPHY:
PERSPECTIVES FROM THE YUKON TERRITORY, CANADA
Julie Cruikshank 3

THE STORY OF AMERICA: A TRiBALOGRAPHY

LeAnne Howe 29

Categorieso[Analysis CATEGORIES
NANCY SHOEMAKER 51

"SOME WOMEN ARE WISER THAN SOME MEN":

GENDER AND NATIVE AMERICAN HISTORY
Gunlog Fur 75

Political Economy MARXISM AND HISTORICAL MATERIAUSM

IN AMERICAN INDIAN HISTORY
Patricia C. Albers 107
PRIMARY SOURCES: INDIAN GOODS AND
THE HISTORY OF AMERICAN COLONIAUSM
AND THE 19TH-CENTURY RESERVATION
Jacki Thompson Rand 137

Tribal Histories, KEEP YOUR THOUGHTS ABOVE THE TREES:

Indigenous Histories IDEAS ON DEVELOPING AND PRESENTING
TRIBAL HISTORIES
Craig Howe 161

LIFE PROCEEDS FROM THE NAME: INDIGENOUS PEOPLES

AND THE PREDICAMENT OF HYBRIDIlY
James F. Brooks 181

NOTES ON CONTRIBUlDRS 207

INDEX 209
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INTRODUCTION

Nancy Shoemaker

" learing a path" is a metaphor appropriated from American Indian ritual

C and diplomacy. When northeastern Indians met other Indians or Euro-
peans in council in the 17th and 18th centuries, they talked about "clearing the
path" of brambles, fallen logs, and other obstacles so that trade and travel be-
tween their respective nations could flourish. As the title for this volume of es-
says, "clearing a path" has a different meaning, for it intends to suggest a
clarifying or opening up of ways to see the past. There are eight paths in this
volume, eight essays exploring ways to understand or conceptualize Native
American history.
The subtitle for this volume further defines its subject as "theorizing," a
choice of phrasing requiring explanation. Some fields of study, the social sci-
ences especially, make theory a requisite for scholarly research and writing. In
other fields of study, among many historians, for example, theory has about
the same standing as certain four-letter words. Few historians ever mention
the word theory, and only rarely do historians ask each other questions like
"What theory are you using?" And even though anthropology in general, as a
social science, mandates that research be grounded in theory, works in Ameri-
can Indian anthropology, and in ethnohistory in particular, can be purely de-
scriptive without others challenging them for lack of a theoretical framework.
To some, theory has positivist connotations and conjures up images of sci-
entific laboratories and computer spreadsheets. Or, in its most recent incarna-
tion as a tool for postmodern humanists, theory can seem a cacaphony of
incomprehensible jargon. In his introduction to The Blackwell Companion to So-
cial Theory, Bryan S. Thrner (2000:fr7) provides a useful overview of the role of
theory in scholarship that makes clear how theory can mean different things to
different people. Theory can be an empirically based "causal explanation," "an
interpretation of social reality which leads to understanding via adequate de-
scription," or even "a form of fictional writing which imaginatively recon-
structs meaning." All those possible roles for theory apply here. If you do not
care for the word theory, then think instead of these essays as dealing with
VIII CLEARING A PATH

models, paradigms, perspectives, ideas, narratives, research questions, or

analytical frameworks. At best, theories are devices for articulating research
questions and zeroing in on important issues. Theories trim away excess infor-
mation and coagulate details to form meaningful explanations. To fall back on a
handy cliche, theories make it possible for us to see the forest through the
trees. Even misguided, mistaken, and abandoned theories have done some ser-
vice by raising questions to ask about the past or by presenting us with differ-
ent possibilities for how best to portray what happened in the past.
Despite the benefits of thinking theoretically, theory has not figured promi-
nently in discussions of research, writing, and teaching about the past in Amer-
ican Indian studies. There have been efforts to describe and label a coherent
body of rules and practices, but I doubt anyone thinks of these efforts as con-
stituting theorizing. The most enduring of such attempts is ethnohistory, a term
commonly employed by anthropologists and historians but one that still
engenders debate (Axtell 1979; Trigger 1982; Meyer and Klein 1998). For an-
thropologists, ethnohistory usually means incorporating written, historical
documents as sources of information and highlighting changes over time. Since
such a definition would not distinguish what historians of Indian history do
from what historians do generally, ethnohistory in history circles often signals
an emphasis on culture as a force in explaining or influencing changes over
time. Ethnohistory's origins among anthropologists hired to research Indian
land claims in the post-World War II period has endowed it with the additional,
awkward legacy of appearing to focus first on North American Indians, then
colonial latin America, and sometimes Africa and parts of Asia-the peoples
Europeans colonized or, as Eric Wolf (1982) termed it, "people without history."
Ethnohistory survives in the American Society for Ethnohistory and its journal,
Ethnohistory. However, it is not generally considered a theory. Some might call
it a methodology. Most of us prefer not to call it anything at all. As with culture,
we prefer the luxury of using the word without having to state precisely what
we mean by it.
Another effort to conceptualize the field under a rubric was the "New In-
dian History" proposed by Robert Berkhofer in the early 1970s. Directing his
critique at other historians in Indian studies whose work concentrated on In-
dian-white relations, Berkhofer (1971:357) recommended instead that scholars
put "more of the Indians into it" and consider investigating such topics as In-
dian-Indian relations and internal divisions within Indian tribes. Of course, any
initiative claiming to be "new" cannot go on for 20 or 30 years and still be
thought of as new. In this case, Berkhofer's propositions became the accepted
standard by which much of Indian history would be judged; like ethnohistory,
 INTRODUCTION IX

with which it was compatible, the "new Indian history" summed up a perspec-
tive and advocated new topics for research.
Neither ethnohistory nor the new Indian history provided models or overar-
ching interpretations of past events. However, scholars avowing allegiance to
either of these schools have indeed engaged with theory, often without saying
so explicitly. For example, among historians in the 1990s, two influential theo-
ries have predominated and given titles to books: Richard White's (1991) The
Middle Ground and James H. Merrell's (1989) The Indians' New World. Both au-
thors, Merrell especially, might shudder at my claim that their books each cen-
ter around a theory, but the utility and adaptability of their main arguments to
other scholars' projects earn them that label. Both White and Merrell wrote
about the effects of European trade and settlement on Native communities in
two different regions, with White focusing on the Great Lakes and Merrell on
the Carolina Piedmont. Richard White described the Middle Ground as arising
at certain places and in certain times to form a kind of bridge between peoples,
where each party accommodated elements of the other's cultural practices and
forms but as a transitory mechanism designed to promote immediate objec-
tives. Part of the appeal of Merrell's The Indians' New World lay in its articulation
of a counterexplanation, a different story line for tracking the course of Indian-
European relations. In his account, Merrell placed the burden of accommoda-
tion on Native peoples by arguing that Carolina Indians continually found new
ways to adapt to the intrusive and expanding European presence. Both these
books had a tremendous impact on Native, frontier, and borderlands scholar-
ship in the 1990s as Middle Grounds and New Worlds sprung up all over North
America.
The Middle Ground and The Indians' New World are models of the past that
originated within the study of North American Native history. Other theories
scholars in Indian studies employ often emerge from the same theoretical im-
pulses wafting through other areas of academic inquiry. Thus in the 1970s,
Marxism became a popular locus for the ideas behind research in Indian studies
(see Albers's essay in this collection), just as Marxism was influential in inform-
ing the New Social History. The 1980s saw a wave of monographs organized
around one of several Marxist-influenced dependency or world-systems theo-
ries (Wolf 1982; White 1983; Hall 1989). And by the 1990s, scholars in Indian
studies were reading and responding to theoretical literature designated as
postmodern, postcolonial, deconstructive, and/or self-reflexive (Strong 1996;
Richter 1993; Brown and Vibert, 1996).
There are, therefore, plenty of theories within and outside of Native history
that have been called upon in the act of research and writing to provide ques-
x CLEARING A PATH

tions, possible explanations, and an understanding of complex historical

processes. Admittedly, however, Indian studies-and not just the history wing
of Indian studies-is a field tending toward skepticism about theory, and for a
good reason. The individuals who come to mind as the world's most significant
theorists are almost all European (Marx, Freud) and usually French (Foucault,
Derrida, lacan, Bourdieu). Even those theorists (Said, Fanon, Spivak, Bhabha)
writing from the perspective of the colonized, or postcolonized, seem foreign
and distant from North American Indian studies. The possibility of something
called "indigenous theory" is in the air, but at the moment it is not clear what
shape these discussions will take or what impact they will have (Smith 1999).
Another obstacle to recognizing a place for theory within American Indian
studies is that theory generalizes whereas Indian studies for most of the 20th
century has emphasized particularity. Franz Boas's early-20th-century promo-
tion of cultural relativism as an ideal established a set of values within Indian
studies that encourages us to look for differences and uniqueness and not to
position a research study within part of a larger global pattern or phenomena.
Moreover, the history of colonialism has constructed a perception of a world
divided into two types of people: the colonizers and the colonized, Western
and non-Western, advanced and primitive, civilized and savage, indigenous and
nonindigenous, industrial and nonindustrial, literate and nonliterate. Ideally,
theory should help us break away from such facile categorizations, but it is pre-
cisely these types of oppositions that underlie colonial power struggles. Ideas
in the 19th century about human societies and culture, which drew heavily on
evolutionary theory, found such categorizations useful in justifying an unequal
distribution of power and wealth among the world's peoples. At the same time,
the struggle of colonial peoples around the world for sovereignty and indepen-
dence could not challenge such constructs without drawing further attention
to them. Asserting grievances, demanding recompense, and protecting sover-
eignty lead to political acts, motivations, and strategies undergirded by a sense
of difference, not a sense of commonality (Churchill 1983).
This collection of essays intends to bring all of these issues in under the
light for full scrutiny and consideration. Although this volume is unique in what
it offers, it also fits within a larger tradition of books that survey American In-
dian studies historiography (Swagerty 1984; Calloway 1988), provide a multi-
disciplinary assessment of the state of Indian studies as a field (Thornton
1998), address the politics of research and writing in Indian studies (Mihesuah
1998; Martin 1987; Biolsi and Zimmerman 1997), or manage some combination
of all the above (Fixico 1997). The distinctive contribution Clearing a Path makes
is its evaluation of the role of theory in American Indian historical studies while
 INTRODUCTION XI

keeping one eye on the fruitful possibilities and the other eye on the limita-
tions. These essays are more suggestive than they are exhaustive.
The eight essays are paired so as to cover four general topics: narrative and
storytelling, social and cultural categories, political economy, and a section
dealing with frames of reference, the micro and the macro, tribal histories and
indigenous histories. By pairing the essays, I do not intend that they should be
seen as promoting opposing views; instead, they complement each other. Thus,
the anthropologist Julie Cruikshank and the creative writer LeAnne Howe both
regard narrative as a form of theorizing, a way to make meaningful sense out of
past events. Cruikshank describes how academic scholars and the Native
women in the Yukon who told her their stories influenced her thinking on what
narrative means and how people use stories to give shape to their individual
and collective histories. In the same vein, LeAnne Howe argues that narra-
tives-whether classified as mythological, scientific, historical, or fictional-all
share in their power to create truths to live by and through which to see the
world, as she says, in the past, present, and future.
Next, GunlOg Fur and I discuss the importance of social and cultural cate-
gories in understanding the past. My essay deals with categories in general and
reviews how anthropologists and linguists have tried to explain the inner work-
ings of categorization and whether these ideas have been and could be useful
to those of us studying American Indian history. Fur's essay focuses on gender
as a category of analysis, but she also emphasizes that limiting any study to
gender alone will miss the significance of age and individuality, gaps between
the ideal and the real, and other complexities.
The third section of the book, on political economy, has essays by Patricia C.
Albers and Jacki Thompson Rand. Albers weighs the pros and cons of the two
schools of thought that have prevailed in the last few decades: materialist theo-
ries heavily influenced by Marx and Engels and the more recent postmodern rel-
ativism. Albers articulates a necessary, sensible compromise between the two
perspectives. Jacki Rand applies a different body of economic theory-dealing
with the social and cultural meanings of economic exchange under colonial-
ism-to provide an alternative vision of the political economy of reservations.
Finally, the last two essays take us out of our familiar boxes. Craig Howe lib-
erates us from the written form and argues that other media-hypertext tech-
nology and museum exhibits-have the potential to recreate more fully the
experience and effect of Native ways of telling history. James F. Brooks posi-
tions his previous research on Indian-Spanish relations in the southwestern
borderlands within a comparative framework. He alerts us to how cultural mix-
ing and the emergence of new, fixed identities are recurring processes accom-
Xli CLEARING A PATH

panying the expansion and migration of peoples. Craig Howe emphasizes trib-
alism, the local and communal aspects of history. Brooks places American In-
dian history in a global perspective.
Although appearing within one of these four broad groupings, each of the
eight essays crosses those boundaries to speak to issues raised elsewhere in
the collection. Themes that emerge throughout the eight chapters are ideas
about how to discern what events meant to the people who lived through
them, how to make use of different types of historical sources, how to be open
to all possible interpretations, and the importance of trying to understand
American Indian history through the social and cultural forms of the peoples
whose history is being told. Clearing a path of brambles and logs is a job requir-
ing constant maintenance, and ideally this book will serve as a starting point
for further discussion of what role theories should have in studies of the past.

REFERENCES
Axtell, James
1979 Ethnohistory: An Historian's Viewpoint. Ethnohistory 26:1-13.
Berkhofer, Robert F.,Jr.
1971 The Political Context of a New Indian History. Pacific Historical Review 40:
357-382.
Biolsi, Thomas, and Larry J. Zimmerman, eds.
1997 Indians and Anthropologists: Vine Deloria, Jr., and the Critique of Anthropol-
ogy. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
Brown, Jennifer S. H., and Elizabeth Vi bert, eds.
1996 Reading Beyond Words: Contexts for Native History. Peterborough, Ontario:
Broadview Press.
Calloway, Colin G., ed.
1988 New Directions in American Indian History. Norman: University of Oklahoma
Press.
Churchill, Ward, ed.
1983 Marxism and Native Americans. Boston: South End Press.
Fixico, Donald L., ed.
1997 Rethinking American Indian History. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico
Press.
Hall, Thomas D.
1989 Social Change in the Southwest, 1350-1880. Lawrence: University Press of
Kansas.
Martin, Calvin H., ed.
1987 The American Indian and the Problem of History. New York: Oxford Univer-
sity Press.
 INTRODUcnON XIII

Merrell, James H.
1989 The Indians' New World: Catawbas and Their Neighbors from European Con-
tact through the Era of Removal. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture.
Meyer, Melissa L., and Kerwin Lee Klein
1998 Native American Studies and the End of Ethnohistory. In Studying Native
America: Problems and Prospects. Russell Thornton, ed. Pp. 182-216. Madi-
son: University of Wisconsin Press.
Mihesuah, Devon A., ed.
1998 Natives and Academics: Researching and Writing about American Indians.
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Richter, Daniel K.
1993 Whose Indian History? William and Mary Quarterly 50:379-393.
Smith, Linda Tuhiwai
1999 Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. New York:
Zed Books.
Strong, Pauline Thrner
1996 Feminist Theory and the "Invasion of the Heart" in North America. Ethnohis-
tory 43:683-712.
Swagerty, W. R., ed.
1984 Scholars and the Indian Experience: Critical Reviews of Recent Writing in the
Social Sciences. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Thornton, Russell, ed.
1998 Studying Native America: Problems and Prospects. Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press.
Trigger, Bruce G.
1982 Ethnohistory: Problems and Prospects. Ethnohistory 29:1-19.
Turner, Bryan S, ed.
2000 The Blackwell Companion to Social Theory. 2nd. ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
White, Richard
1983 The Roots of Dependency: Subsistence, Environment, and Social Change
among the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos. Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press.
1991 The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes
Region, 165~1815. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Wolf, Eric R.
1982 Europe and the People without History. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
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Stories
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Oral History, Narrative Strategies,
and Native American Historiography:
Perspectives from the
Yukon Territory, Canada
Julie Cruikshank

he place and meaning of stories and their contribution to how we think

T about the past are receiving fresh attention in humanities and human sci-
ences (Cronon 1992; Cohen 1994; Hinchman and Hinchman 1998). In North
America, as elsewhere, this development has consequences for oral histories,
once evaluated by historians and anthropologists primarily with reference to
questions about accuracy, objectivity, reliability, and verifiability (lowie 1917;
Malinowski 1926; Vansina 1985). A richer vein concerns how oral narratives in-
tersect with social practice, how they continue to provide a framework for un-
derstanding contemporary issues, and how stories are inevitably part of larger
social, historical, and political processes. Viewed from this perspective, narra-
tive authorizes ways of seeing and interpreting the world (de Certeau
1984:123), invokes a social system (White 1987:14), and provides a moral edu-
cation (Mcintyre 1981:114). Oral transmission of stories is a panhuman activity,
probably the oldest form of history making, and in many parts of the world has
a continuing role in the production and reproduction of history.
Theoretical attention to the actual work narrative accomplishes destabilizes
any simple idea that stories passed on as oral tradition transparently "speak for
themselves" or that there is a prescriptive, cross-culturally valid method for
evaluating their historical value. Facts, as Eric Wolf points out, cannot find their
voice without some help from a theoretical scheme (1999: 16). The notion that
oral traditions from the North American continent can be viewed as broadly ho-
mogeneous data from which facts about "what really happened" can be ex-
truded ignores substantial research on memory and forgetting now emerging
4 CLEARING A PATH

from post-Stalinist Russia (Khubova et al. 1992), sub-Saharan Africa (Hofmeyer

1993), Kentucky coal mining communities (Portelli 1997), post-Fascist Italy
(Passerini 1987), and elsewhere (Passerini 1992; Watson 1994; leydesdorff et al.
1996). Oral histories from indigenous North America are too frequently evalu-
ated with reference only to one another, and while the reasons are understand-
able, encapsulating them within a continental tradition sometimes partitions
these narratives from international debates to which they might contribute.
Storytelling may be a universal human activity, but the concepts communi-
cated in stories depend on close attention to local metaphor and local narrative
conventions. The Modoc writer and scholar Michael Dorris pointed out years
ago that national literatures (like national histories) come from coherent aggre-
gations of people who share an identifiable language and worldview; terms like
''American Indian" or "Native American," he suggests, homogenize one of the
most linguistically and culturally plural areas the world has ever known
(1979: 147). In recent academic writing, approaches to analysis of oral tradition
are converging. With our growing awareness that oral spoken performances
are always situated, anthropological attention to cultural categories, cosmolo-
gies, and symbols is merging with archaeologists' grasp of the material record
and historians' critical evaluation of written documents. linguists working col-
laboratively with indigenous storytellers make us aware of the variety of narra-
tive genres grouped under the broad rubric of "Native American literature"
(Hymes 1981; Dauenhauer and Dauenhauer 1987; Basso 1996). If there are
broad pan-North American similarities in storytelling traditions, they probably
have more to do with epistemology than with content. Indigenous people who
grow up immersed in oral tradition frequently suggest that their narratives are
better understood by absorbing the successive personal messages revealed to
listeners in repeated tellings than by trying to analyze and publicly explain
their meanings-an approach that contrasts sharply with protocols in many
academic disciplines (Morrow 1995:29).
What is too often missing from American Indian studies as a whole, Greg
Sarris (1993) suggests, is interruption and risk. Scholars frame the experiences
of others with reference to disciplinary norms. Yet unless we put ourselves in
interactive situations where we are exposed and vulnerable, where these
norms are interrupted and challenged, we can never recognize the limitations
of our own descriptions. Academic discourse, Sarris argues, has to be broadly
interrogated by other forms of discourse in order to make it clearer what each
has to offer the other. He carries on simultaneous conversations with his Pomo
aunts-Mabel McKay, Violet Chappell, Frances McDaniel, Anita Silva-and with
scholars whose work he admires-Mikhail Bakhtin, Walter Benjamin, Paul
 ORAL HISTORY, NARRATIVE SrRATEGIES, AND NATIVE AMERICAN HISTORIOGRAPHY 5

Ricoeur. and Edward Said. His goal is to convey something of that jarring "be-
tweenness" of cross-cultural understanding by showing how his aunts' stories
cause him to become as sharply critical of his own confident interpretations as
of the interpretations of other scholars.
This paper builds on long-term ethnographic work-talking with people
about issues and questions grounded in everyday experiences-in a particular
region of northwestern Canada. During the 1970s and 1980s, I had the oppor-
tunity to work with several elders from the Yukon Territory. speakers of Tag ish.
Tutchone. and Tlingit and English languages. who were interested in docu-
menting memories and having me transcribe their narratives for children.
grandchildren. and other family members. Framed as a collaborative project
from the outset. this work initially seemed to contribute directly to a larger
project of documenting social histories often marginalized in the written
record. My search for theoretical guidance grew as I came to see how elders of
First Nations ancestry in the Yukon Territory continue to tell stories that make
meaningful connections between past and present. Stories. like good theories.
make connections that may not at first glance seem straightforward.
In trying to understand issues surrounding transmission of oral narrated
histories in northwestern Canada. I have been drawn to questions about narra-
tive raised decades ago by scholars working independently in very different
parts of the world-Harold Innis. Mikhail Bakhtin. and Walter Benjamin. Each
was concerned about the role of oral storytelling in human history. and each
deplored the consequences when oral storytelling becomes marginalized by
more powerful knowledge systems. Each insisted that narrative is grounded in
material circumstances of everyday life and capable of addressing large ques-
tions about the consequences of historical events. Such ideas have relevance
for ongoing discussions and debates about history that are part of daily conver-
sation in Yukon aboriginal communities. Angela Sidney and Kitty Smith, Yukon
elders whose work is discussed in this paper. were contemporaries of Innis,
Bakhtin. and Benjamin, although they lived much longer and their worlds dif-
fered considerably. Their stories certainly do incorporate information about the
past, but, more important, the act of storytelling provides ways of making his-
torical changes understandable.
Approaches to analysis of oral narrative have become embroiled in broad
methodological and theoretical debates in the social sciences that I merely flag
here and return to later in the paper. Timeworn arguments about reliability of
oral history are familiar enough, but there are deeper issues. To begin with.
oral tradition is frequently situated at one pole of centurylong discussions
opposing universalist and particularist explanations. now usually framed in
6 CLEARING A PATH

terms of local versus global distinctions. My contention is that to relegate them

only to the local and the particular is to oversimplify the very real work that sto-
ries do. Second, oral narrative is frequently positioned on the "mentalist" side
of a philosophical divide distinguishing materialist from idealist approaches to
understanding power; again, I think this distinction is misplaced. Third, ap-
proaches stressing narrative understanding may seem superficially to strand
oral tradition on the shores of postmodern relativism when they actually ad-
dress hierarchies of power in very precise ways. Such troublesome dualisms
have a long history, but insights from Bakhtin, Benjamin, and Innis may guide
us through this thicket and back to a broader understanding of narrative's role
in exploring intersections among knowledge, power, and ideology.
I begin this paper by introducing writings that raised questions about the
potential of local oral narratives to engage with global issues long before such
issues were taken seriously. I go on to discuss how the shifting power relations
described by Innis, Bakhtin, and Benjamin speak to conditions in the Yukon dur-
ing the late 19th century and early- to-mid-20th century. I draw on work by An-
gela Sidney and Kitty Smith, briefly summarizing basic understandings about
local social organization that each would expect of an intelligent listener, and
then illustrate with two stories about their stories. I identify where I see conver-
gence among the approaches of these five writers and storytellers. I conclude
with a cautionary tale about the late-20th-century reification of oral traditions
in legal arenas. My thesis is that local voices from North American indigenous
communities provide more than grist for conventional disciplinary paradigms
and have the power to contribute to our understanding of historiography.
late in life, the Canadian economic historian Harold Innis developed an en-
during interest in oral tradition. Best known for his economic thesis that mer-
cantile capitalism inevitably produces margins in the process of exploiting
them, he attributed Canada's existence to profits it offered imperial Britain,
both as a source of unprocessed staples-furs, gold, cod, and timber-and as a
market for commodities manufactured in distant industrial centers (Innis 1930,
1940, 1956). Investigating how Empire manages the awkward problem of ad-
ministering far-flung territories, Innis was drawn to the history of communica-
tions. He pointed to the overweening imperial ambition to assert power during
periods of territorial expansion by monopolizing and categorizing information
and by routinely silencing local traditions that do not fit official categories. A
crucial feature of administration in the hinterland is classification and control
of activities and authorization of official observations, categories, and statistics
in written texts. While this process is conventionally rationalized as both pro-
ducing knowledge and serving the interests of those administered, it invariably
 ORAL HISTORY, NARRATIVE STRATEGIES, AND NATIVE AMERICAN HISTORIOGRAPHY 7

occurs at the expense of existing regional traditions. Innis came to see colo-
nialism as simultaneously economic and intellectual (1950, 1951).
Innis proposed that arctic and subarctic regions provide a visual template
for the modernist tendency to conceptualize time as spatially laid out, mechan-
ically segmented, and linear. Colonial projects, he observed, move forward by
devising and reinforcing categories-objectivity, subjectivity, space, time-that
encourage the annexation of territories and the subjugation of former inhabi-
tants (1956:12-14). Gradually, those at the center monopolize what comes to
be considered rational discourse and marginalize those who speak in a differ-
ent idiom. Innis admired the structural characteristics of oral tradition and saw
it as having potential to counterbalance mechanical segmentation of time and
space by insisting on the importance of qualitative time in human affairs. Oral
tradition, he argued, permits continuous revision of history by actively reinter-
preting events and then incorporating such interpretations into the next gener-
ation of narrative. Its flexibility allows a gifted storyteller to adapt a given
narrative to make sense of a confusing situation (1950:64-100; see also Stamps
1995:48-51).
Innis went on to investigate historical processes by which literacy has dis-
placed the authority of the spoken word, tracing the demise of oral tradition in
Egypt, Babylon, Greece, and Rome. He came to view Socrates as the last great
exponent of oral tradition and his death at the beginning of the fourth century
R.C. as coinciding with a shift from customary law to codified judicial codes
(1950:68-69,81-82: 1951:43-45). Until then, he maintained, oral tradition had
given vitality to the written word and had actively prevented concentration of
power because a society retaining a central place for orality could not be disci-
plined to the point of political unity (1951 :8-9). Innis was especially intrigued
by the ways oral tradition worked in conjunction with writing to provide a kind
of dialogue that he saw as a model for social action (Stamps 1995: 1.1). "My bias
is with the oral tradition ... and with the necessity of capturing something of
its spirit," he concluded. "The quantitative pressure of modern knowledge has
been responsible for the decay of oral dialectic and conversation" (1951: 190).
Innis's views about creative potential of oral tradition mirrored those of his
contemporary Mikhail Bakhtin, also writing during the 1930s and 1940s,
though from more constrained circumstances in Stalinist Russia. They wrote in
different languages and neither ever encountered the other's work, but their
approaches were similarly eclectic. Bakhtin, like Innis, was drawn to the open-
ended possibilities he saw in oral dialogue and the thoroughness with which
totalitarian regimes worked to suppress those possibilities. Observing the chill-
ing transformations occurring in 1930s postrevolutionary Russia, Bakhtin con-
8 CLEARING A PATH

cluded that there must be forms of resistance more effective than the violent
replacement of one set of leaders by another, and he looked to everyday spo-
ken language for inspiration. He sought out cases where narrative successfully
resists such domestication, marginalization, and erasure and was eventually
drawn to processes set in motion by conversational forms of oral storytelling.
He interpreted what he called its "dialogic," relational possibilities (especially
when laced with disruptive humor) as a model inherently opposing authoritar-
ian speech (Bakhtin 1984b).
Bakhtin, with his energetic appreciation of the destabilizing possibilities of
folk humor, struggled in 1930s Russia to imagine subversion in totalitarian
states. Any adequate reading of contemporary culture, in his view, required an
understanding of how ordinary people have used oral communication strate-
gies to resist arbitrary power. In terms applying equally to the capitalist frontier
of subarctic Canada and the communist frontier of subarctic Russia, Bakhtin
formulated the problem of history as its tendency to foster apparent random-
ness-for the order of events seemingly to disintegrate. And he saw narrative's
role as a constraining, countervailing one of holding things together. The
metaphor underlying his model of communication was that of a centrifuge with
two countervailing forces: authoritarian speech displacing local ideas to the
margins, and irascible, irreverent, brash orality magnetically straining to hold a
center (Clark and Holquist 1984:9). His larger point mirrors that made by Innis:
narrative challenges hegemonic institutions (Bakhtin 1984a).
A decade later and in another country, Walter Benjamin grappled with simi-
lar issues engulfing Europe during the early years of Hitler's ascendancy. He,
too, noted the insidious consequences of deteriorating dialogue in modern so-
ciety, attributing them at least partly to the diminishing role of the storyteller.
As communications technology proliferates, he argued, information becomes
fragmented and detached from the moral philosophical guidance we think of as
knowledge and might once even have called wisdom. Benjamin believed that
orally transmitted narratives develop in their hearers a capacity to listen, a de-
teriorating skill in an age of ever-fragmenting information. He probably would
have agreed with Bruno Latour's pithy observation that "information Ireferring
specifically to the Internetl is the enemy of civilized society."! The power of
narrative storytelling, in his view, lies in its capacity to interweave drama and
practical experience with moral content. Storytelling is open-ended rather than
didactic, allowing listeners to draw independent conclusions from what they
hear. Medieval storytellers recounted events without imposing an interpreta-
tion. and their practice had equally important consequences for the arts of
telling and the arts of listening. By the very act of telling stories. narrators ex-
 ORAL HISTORY, NARRATIVE STRATEGIES, AND NATIVE AMERICAN HISTORIOGRAPHY 9

plore how their meanings work; by listening, audiences can think about how
those meanings apply to their own lives. Stories allow listeners to embellish
events, to reinterpret them, to mull over what they hear and to learn some-
thing new each time, providing raw material for developing philosophy (Ben-
jamin 1969; Stamps 1995:23-40). Once interactive storytelling is replaced by
mechanical communication, he alleged, human experience becomes devalued.
What relevance have these ideas to understanding Native North American
oral histories from the northwestern part of the continent? Bakhtin's reference
point was Russian peasant culture and his target the increasingly authoritarian
Soviet state in which he lived, but he drew his examples from how medieval
French peasants used ribald, satirical humor to challenge authority through car-
nivals (1984b). Yet he never, in any of his translated writings, directly discusses
everyday storytelling from his own times. Likewise, Innis carried out his eco-
nomic studies in northern Canada and his historical investigation of classical
oral tradition without ever seeming to connect the two. Despite a prodigious
appetite for labor-intensive research that took him across northern Canada and
an open admiration for the work of his colleague Edward Sapir on indigenous
languages, he never seemed to encounter living oral traditions in his own coun-
try, reporting, regretfully, that "[WJe have no history of [oral traditionJ except
as ... revealed darkly through the written or printed word" (1951 :8-9). Had he
been aware of the intensity with which indigenous residents were drawing on
long-standing oral traditions to interpret the same events he was analyzing
near the Klondike gold fields, he might have observed dynamics similar to
those that so intrigued him in ancient Greece-the processes set in motion
when writing began first to overwhelm narrative traditions and then to actively
domesticate or suppress them.
Elsewhere. at greater length, I have illustrated intersections among the
ideas of these three scholars and the active storytelling practices that were oc-
curring in northwestern Canada during the decades when each was writing
(Cruikshank 1998). Forces bearing down on Yukon communities during the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were precisely those discussed by In-
nis in his account of the Klondike gold rush, by Bakhtin as he observed the me-
chanics of aggressive state expansion, and by Benjamin whose writings
documented the forces mobilizing Nazi Germany. Here, I outline briefly key
events experienced by the generation of indigenous men and women born near
the upper Yukon River at the end of the 19th century. If we bear in mind that it
is not "events" in history we are after but the processes that underlie and
shape events, the gold rush in 1896-98 and the construction of the Alaska
Highway in 1943 as part of the Second World War effort are worth noting be-
10 CLEARING A PATH

cause they incorporate processes that were already contributing to a globaliz-

ing world early in this century. Despite their widely differing life experiences,
Kitty Smith (b. 1892), Walter Benjamin (b. 1892), Harold Innis (b. 1894), Mikhail
Bakhtin (b. 1895), and Angela Sidney (b. 1902) were all contemporaries and
each experienced the early years of the 20th century as formative.
The 1890s brought to an end an intensive period of Tlingit-Athapaskan
trade that had long shaped human history in northwestern North America. Ear-
liest records of trade between coast and interior are obscured because ex-
changes largely involved perishables: coastal marine products traded for
tanned hides and tailored clothing from the interior. By the time Russian fur
traders arrived on the North Pacific coast during the late 18th century, they
found Tlingit traders already enmeshed in trading relationships with inland
speakers of Athapaskan languages. Following the rapid slaughter of Pacific sea
otters, European traders redirected their efforts beyond the mountains to the
fur-bearing animals on the upper Yukon River. Coastal Tlingit traders were able
to situate themselves as middlemen in this trade and effectively barred whites
from the interior even after the sale of Alaska to the United States in 1867. In-
evitably, Tlingit held the balance of power in arrangements with inland peo-
ples, using their intermediary position to establish and formalize lifelong
trading partnerships, often through marriage (McClellan 1981). As interior
groups adopted Tlingit-named clans and concepts of social ranking, prestige
came to inhere in Tlingit ancestry and adjacent Athapaskan peoples incorpo-
rated Tlingit themes into their storytelling traditions. On a global scale, at the
same time, the extreme Northwest was already becoming firmly situated within
broader layers of hierarchy centered in international Moscow-, Paris-, and lon-
don-based fur markets.
The influx of prospectors from Europe and the United States during the late
1890s dismantled the Tlingit trade monopoly. Coinciding with a world depres-
sion in 1896, the gold rush attracted more than 30,000 immigrants to one trib-
utary of the Yukon River within a few years, making Dawson City the largest
city north of San Francisco. Much of Harold Innis's work concerns this very
topic: the expansion of British interests in North America through the manipu-
lation of commodities like furs, forests, fish, and gold. The British Empire
reached its most northwesterly extension in the Yukon where furs and gold co-
incided, but as Europe spiraled into a depression at the end ofthe century, furs
were replaced by the more lucrative and liquid commodity, gold, as the staple
of choice. local men and women along the Yukon River, speakers of Athapaskan
languages, became involved in packing, guiding, and providing food for
prospectors and a few years later as deckhands on sternwheelers built to navi-
 ORAL HISfORY, NARRATIVE STRATEGIES, AND NATIVE AMERICAN HISfORIOGRAPHY 11

gate the Yukon River from its headwaters to Dawson City. As well as the disrup-
tion of indigenous trade networks, consequences that followed the gold rush
included decimation of Tlingit and Athapaskan families by epidemics of small-
pox and measles; the expansion of missionaries and the construction of Angli-
can and Roman Catholic residential schools; and the establishment of a federal
and territorial government infrastructure to administer the new territory, the
Yukon, as a northern colony of Canada. Following the non-Native exodus after
the turn of the century, the population dropped from 27,000 in 1900 to 4,000
in 1921 (Urquhart 1965:14).
What some older people still refer to as the "second rush" advanced during
World War II. Hastily constructed in 1942-43, the Alaska Highway was built to
deflect an anticipated invasion of North America by Japan. Again, more than
30,000 men, this time U.S. soldiers, arrived to participate in the construction
phase, then left as quickly as they had come. Once again, epidemics tore
through Yukon communities (Marchand 1943). The new road replaced the
Yukon River as the administrative axis of the territory, subjecting indigenous
peoples to ever greater bureaucratic surveillance as the "opening of the North"
proceeded. The highway acted as a kind of gravel magnet attracting people in
search of short-term jobs away from distant settlements (Cruikshank 1984). Its
short- and long-term consequences affected both long-standing social institu-
tions associated with kinship and the relationship between indigenous peoples
and lands that they had always considered exclusively theirs to use.
From the early 1970s until the mid-1980s, I lived in the Yukon Territory and
worked closely with elders engaged in the project of recording their life sto-
ries. They and their families wanted to see accounts written in their own words
and in the English language describing memories and experiences spanning al-
most a century. The stories we hear from two of these women, Angela Sidney
and Kitty Smith, shift the focus from well-known events to their everyday con-
sequences. Mrs. Sidney'S paternal uncles and her aunt were involved in the offi-
cial discovery of Klondike gold. Four of Mrs. Smith's maternal uncles were
charged with murder following an altercation between Tagish people and
prospectors and were brought to trial (Cruikshank 1998:71-97). Each woman
lost family members in influenza epidemics that accompanied both "rushes."
Kitty Smith lost her mother, who returned home in 1898 to comfort her own
mother when Kitty's uncles were arrested, and the young mother died of in-
fluenza. Angela Sidney watched a son go overseas during World War II and lost
a much-loved stepdaughter to influenza. The narratives they tell about those
years provide compelling evidence of how ancient narratives provide scaffold-
ing from which to interpret inexplicable events so that families can neverthe-
12 CLEARING A PATH

less carryon. The metaphors central to historical narratives told by Angela Sid-
ney and Kitty Smith are culturally distinctive, highly gendered, and rooted in
mid-19th-century matrilineages. These stories demonstrate how global forces
driving human history are always experienced in locally significant ways. Famil-
iar narratives provide ways to engage with historical events and expand our un-
derstanding of the social work that stories do.
In telling their life stories, these women make generous assumptions that
listeners or readers have a basic understanding of local concepts surrounding
kinship. Anthropologists use the term moiety (from the French "half") to de-
scribe a broad organizational principle found in many parts of the world
whereby everyone belongs to one of two "sides." In the Yukon, moieties named
Crow (Kajit) and Wolf (Agunda) are transmitted through matrilineal descent so
that everyone inherits his or her mother's affiliation. Moieties are also exoga-
mous, in that well-understood rules prescribe that one must always marry a
member of the opposite moiety. During these women's lifetimes, moiety and
clan relationships were expected to guide behavior at birth, the onset of pu-
berty, marriage, death, and other less formal occasions. This principle pro-
foundly influenced their interpretations of historical changes that have
occurred during this century.
By the time Mrs. Sidney and Mrs. Smith were born, some Athapaskan fami-
lies were incorporating Tlingit-named dans within moieties, for example,
Deisheetaan (a Crow clan) and Dakl'aweidi (a Wolf clan). The most important
clan property-songs, stories, and ceremonial crests-passed from one gener-
ation to the next through the maternal line, and appreciating the significance
of this provides insights into how stories and songs are performed, transmit-
ted, and interpreted by local audiences. Shared assumptions about family and
clan property underscore the broad utility of Pierre Bourdieu's concept of so-
cial capital (1991:7-8) and its embeddedness in social institutions. Social capi-
tal, Bourdieu argues, accumulates along with practical competence that
eventually reinforces who has the capacity to be listened to, believed, and
obeyed-the entitlement to speak and to be heard.
The life histories these women tell are also grounded in enduring narratives
learned in childhood and told as adults. As we worked, my understanding of
our objectives shifted significantly. Initially, I expected that by recording life
histories we would be documenting events and compiling accounts that could
be stored, like archival documents, for later analysis. I was interested in hearing
these women talk about events chronicled in written documents and tried to
steer our conversations in that direction. I always brought questions to our ses-
 ORAL HISIORY, NARRATIVE STRATEGIES,AND NATIVE AMERICAN HISIORIOGRAPHY 13

sions, but as I began to take increasing direction from the narrators, these
questions changed. In the beginning I asked about what might be called secular
history-stories they might have heard about the gold rush and about early-
20th-century fur trade, their experiences as children and as young adults. I
wanted to know about the changes brought by the construction of the Alaska
Highway and the subsequent interventions and control over women's lives that
followed as government programs expanded north.
Although older women responded patiently to my line of inquiry for a
while. they soon quite firmly shifted their emphasis to "more important" ac-
counts they wanted me to record. They would give brief answers to my ques-
tions and then suggest that I write down a particular story they wanted to tell
me. Usually these were narratives they had learned as youngsters and had
heard and told many times. but for an untrained listener they inevitably in-
volved a bewildering series of characters and episodes. At their insistence, I
continued on their terms, and it was only later when I saw how they were using
these narratives as reference points to talk about their life experience that I
came to appreciate what they were doing. Narratives about a boy who went to
live in the world of salmon, about a girl who married a bear. about men who
traveled to the "other world" in search of a lost sister. or about women who
went to live with stars provided pivotal philosophical. literary. and social frame-
works essential for guiding young and not-so-young people. framing ways of
thinking about how to live life appropriately. These narratives erased any dis-
tinction between "story" and "history." They were embedded in social life, and
in the words of one woman. Angela Sidney. they provided guidance about how
to "live life like a story" (Cruikshank et al. 1990). Gradually I came to see the
oral tradition less as evidence about the past than as a window on the ways the
past is culturally constituted and discussed. In other words. stories were not
merely about the past, they also provided guidelines for understanding change.
As an anthropologist, I think that theoretical discussions need to be
grounded in real cases about everyday life. and so I turn to two instructive
ways of history making demonstrated by these women. Each is discussed else-
where at greater length (Cruikshank 1998:25-44. 98-115). In one series of sto-
ries. Angela Sidney shows how a single story can do many different things. In
the other. Kitty Smith shows how apparently different stories can convey a uni-
fying message about the importance of matrilineal, matrilocal marital arrange-
ments in preserving continuity in social life. Both women test the boundaries
of narrative conventions even within their own culture in ways that would ap-
peal to Bakhtin and Benjamin.
14 CLEARING A PATH

ANGELA SIDNEY'S GIFT

Angela Sidney was born in 1902 in the southern Yukon to a Tlingit mother and
a Tagish father. Like their mother. Angela and her siblings were members of the
Deisheetaan clan. As the eldest daughter, she had many opportunities to hear
about her bicultural Tagish and Tlingit ancestry and her Deisheetaan clan his-
tory when, as a young woman, she took on the responsibility of caring for her
mother, La.oos Tlaa (Maria), who was plagued with ill health. A measles epi-
demic associated with the gold rush had robbed La.oos Tlaa of her four eldest
children, who all died before Angela was born. La.oos Tlaa never fully recov-
ered herself and eventually lost her eyesight. When Mrs. Sidney and I met in
the early 1970s, she was eager to work on the project of recording her life his-
tory for family members, and echoing Bourdieu's formulation of social capital
she remarked one afternoon, "Well, I have no money to leave to my grandchil-
dren; my stories are my wealth" (Sidney et al. 1977).
I was delighted to have the opportunity to work with Mrs. Sidney on this
project. However. after we had collaborated closely for several months and fi-
nally produced a 120-page booklet, typed and edited under her supervision, I
was somewhat disconcerted by the fact that only 10 to 15 pages had anything
to do with what I then would have called life "history." The rest seemed to fall
into genres of oral literature that I felt ill equipped to understand involving fab-
ulous characters whose dazzling exploits often eluded my understanding, com-
plex lists of toponyms, songs, and lengthy genealogical sequences interwoven
with references to historical events I had usually read about elsewhere. As I
continued to listen to and learn from Mrs. Sidney, it became clear to me that
she was using these larger narratives as reference points to reflect on her own
life experiences, as models both for choices she had made and for explaining
those choices to others (Sidney in Cruikshank et al. 1990:37-158). Here I sum-
marize just one story that encapsulates how she earned her reputation as a
community historian.
Early on, in 1974, one of the stories she asked me to record was about a
heroic ancestor remembered by the name of Kaax'achgook (Sidney in Cruik-
shank et al. 1990:139-45).2 Briefly, Kaax'achgook was a famous Tlingit ancestor
of the Kiks.adi clan. one of several Tlingit clans. One autumn. he went hunting
sea mammals with his nephews but almost immediately received a sign that
this was an inauspicious time for hunting and that he should return home. Re-
luctantly, he destroyed his spears and returned to his winter village, but even-
tually he could no longer bear the humiliation of having to send his wives to
 ORAL HISTORY, NARRATIVE STRATEGIES, AND NATIVE AMERICAN HISTORIOGRAPHY 15

beg for food and hearing about the disrespectful treatment they were receiv-
ing. Setting out to sea once again with his nephews, he was blown off course
and marooned on a small island. Kaa!'achgook spent the following months de-
vising ways to feed himself and his nephews and perfecting a way to plot the
sun's trajectory as it moved north to reach its zenith at the summer solstice. He
chose that moment to set sail for home, using the sun as a navigational guide
to chart his direction. "I gave up hope, and then I dreamed that I was home,"
he sang in his account of his travels. Despite his successful return, he faced the
difficult business of acknowledging how much life had changed during his
absence.
Mrs. Sidney told me this story first in 1974 when we were both primarily in-
terested in transcribing it for publication in a form that she considered accu-
rate. More than a decade later, in 1985, I was visiting her one day when her
son, Peter, and his wife arrived. The conversation turned to Peter's experiences
as a veteran of the Second World War. He was stationed overseas for a period
and Mrs. Sidney began to speak about how she and her husband had bought
their first radio "to hear where they're moving the troops so we would know
where he is" and her joy when the war ended and they received a telegram an-
nouncing his return. The remainder of her story concerned the plans she made
to welcome him back when he returned home after the war, hosting a commu-
nity feast and publicly giving him the most precious gift she could think of: the
song sung by Kaax'achgook on his return, a song she subsequently referred to
for the rest of her life as "Pete's song." As a member of his mother's Deishee-
taan clan, her son was entitled to receive the song as a gift from her, she
pointed out, and she saw it as accurately reflecting the feelings of a man forced
to spend an indefinite period away from home and ultimately able to return.
Songs constitute some of the most important property of Tlingit-named clans,
and she was clearly pleased when her husband complimented her on thinking
of such a culturally appropriate gift.
But she then went on to tell a third story about this story-concerning so-
cial processes set in motion by her gift. No sooner had she publicly given Peter
this gift in 1945 than she was formally challenged by elders from her father's
Dakl'aweidi clan who disputed her right to sing it, much less give it to a mem-
ber of her own clan. They argued that this song was the property of the
Kiks.adi clan and that her Deisheetaan clan had no right to use it. The remain-
der of her account is the story of how she proceeded with her own ethno-
graphic research to prove that she had acted correctly and had not
appropriated another clan's property. She traveled by the same train that had
16 CLEARING A PATH

brought her son inland down to the coast to Skagway, Alaska, to interview Tlin-
git elders about an incident that had occurred many years earlier, sometime
during the 19th century. A dispute had broken out between the Kiks.adi clan
and her own Deisheetaan clan and was finally resolved when Kiks.adi agreed do
give this "Kaax'achgook song" to the Deisheetaan. Her story about the story
confirmed, to the satisfaction of her elders, that she had acted appropriately.
Being able to tell this story 40 years later in the presence of her son (who knew
the story well after all and was by now a character in it) and to his non-T1ingit
wife and to me reconfirmed her competence in using stories in a socially signif-
icant way. By demonstrating the connections between a narrative, a song, and a
gift, she was also able to extend her abilities to juxtapose discrete historical
events--an ancient clan dispute and a contemporary international war. Missing
from this story were the more painful events she told me on other occasions--
the loss of an adopted child to influenza in the epidemics accompanying the
construction of the Alaska Highway during the war and the loss of another son
who died tragically about the same time.
A fourth telling was performed for a very different audience, most of them
familiar with Mrs. Sidney and her role as a well-known storyteller but few
knowledgeable about this particular story. When a college opened in the Yukon
in 1988, Mrs. Sidney was asked to participate in the opening ceremonies. This
was an important event for Yukoners because the college allows students to
complete part or all of an undergraduate university education without having
to leave the North. At the ceremony, Mrs. Sidney decided to tell the story of
Kaax'achgook, explaining in her own words, "The reason I sang that song is be-
cause that Yukon College is going to be like the Sun for the students. Instead of
going to Vancouver or Victoria they're going to be able to stay here and go to
school here. We're not going to lose our kids anymore. It's going to be just like
the Sun for them, just like for that Kaax'achgook" (Sidney 1988).
Very carefully, then, Angela Sidney was able to show how a single story can
do several different things. She also constructed an important link between a
story from long ago and discrete historical events from different periods of
time: clan ties that connected coast and interior more formally during the 19th
century, a war that caused painful losses ameliorated by the successful return
of her own son in the 1940s, the opening ofa college in the 1980s, and the
continuity provided by the exchange of a gift that weaves these events to-
gether. The story also tracks her emerging stature as a person of significance in
her community, one who repeatedly demonstrated during her lifetime that a
single story, well told, can transform commonsense meanings that "everyone
knows" and add significance to everyday life.
 ORAL HISfORY, NARRATIVE STRATEGIES, AND NATIVE AMERICAN HISfORIOGRAPHY 17

KITTY SMITH'S CARVINGS

Kitty Smith was born in approximately 1890, at least 12 years earlier than Mrs.
Sidney. She, too, was born into a bicultural family with a Tagish mother and a
Tlingit father. Orphaned as a youngster, she was raised by her Tlingit father's
mother-an unusual situation in a society where obligations of clan and kin-
ship are traced through one's maternal line. We also began working together in
1974, and, like Mrs. Sidney, Mrs. Smith insisted that I record many stories that
initially seemed distant from my understanding of "history." like Mrs. Sidney
she began with detailed genealogical information and only later began talking
about critical events in her own life: her mother's disappearance and subse-
quent death in an influenza epidemic when Kitty was seven or eight years old;
her own arranged marriage as a young woman; her decision to leave this mar-
riage some years later (a courageous choice but an unconventional one in the
early 1900s); and her eventual reunion with her "mother's people" members of
her own Tagish maternal kin group. In describing these events she, too, draws
heavily on more foundational narratives she learned as a child to provide expla-
nations for decisions she had made during her own life (Smith in Cruikshank et
al. 1990: 175-262). In the life story that emerged during our conversations over
the years, the reunion with her matrilineage becomes the pivotal event of her
life, and narratives about the dangers of distance from matrilineal kin and the
loyalty of clan members to one another dominate her account. In trying to
learn more about her mother's early death she was led to the tragic story about
the circumstances surrounding the arrest, trial, and subsequent execution of
her mother's brother, convicted of shooting a prospector in 1898 (Cruikshank
1998:71-97).
During the years we worked together, Mrs. Smith also sometimes referred
to carvings that she had made years earlier. Whenever I actually asked her
about them, though, she would shrug off my queries about where they might
now be-she had sold them or given them away, she said-and would move on
to tell the stories that she had carved. Shortly before she passed away in 1989,
some carvings in the local McBride Museum were identified as possibly hers.
Her granddaughter and another friend made arrangements with the museum's
director to bring Mrs. Smith to visit, and when the carvings were brought out,
she readily indicated the ones she had made. But nearly a century old by then,
she was more amused than surprised by the discovery and not at all inclined to
provide an elaborate explication of what they "meant." Instead, she examined
her favorite carving, renaming it Azanzhaya/ "it got lost" and enjoying the irony
of her own joke.
18 CLEARING A PATH

A few years later, in 1992, I asked her daughter, May Hume Smith, now an
elder herself, whether she had ever seen her mother's carvings in the museum.
Their continuing existence was a surprise to her, but she recalled childhood
memories of her mother carving and was very interested in visiting the mu-
seum with me to look at them. With the encouragement of museum staff, we
spent two afternoons examining carvings and tape recording May's commen-
tary. She immediately singled out those made by her mother and settled in to
talk about them. And then, like her mother, she retold the stories embodied in
the carvings. What struck me immediately was that these were the same narra-
tives Mrs. Smith herself had told, several years earlier, to describe critical turn-
ing points in her own Iife. 3
One carving and story concerns Dukt'ootl', an orphan whose marginal sta-
tus is vindicated when he is able to perform a task no one else in the commu-
nity can accomplish, saving both his own life and the lives of other members of
the group. The story reflects both the despair and the optimism Mrs. Smith of-
ten expressed about her own childhood as an orphan cut offfrom maternal kin.
A second is the story of Naatsilanei, "the man who made killer whales," one she
told me several times as she reflected on the dangers of distance from one's
maternal relatives when one is forced to live with affines. In this narrative, a
man is abandoned by his opposite moiety brothers-in-law and left to die on an
island. He saves himself by the transformative power of carving, fashioning
killer whales that carry him back to safety (Smith in Cruikshank 1983:62-65). A
third is a carving of the man who abandoned his wife to cohabit with Bear
woman, reflecting Mrs. Smith's distress when her first husband announced that
he was taking a second wife (Smith in Cruikshank 1983:37-39). Her carving
shows the man moving toward his bear wife while the human wife carries away
her child, leaving the lovers behind. 4

NARRATIVE AND HISTORICAL MEMORY

What do these narratives convey about the place and meaning of stories for
our understanding of Native American pasts? Sentient bears and whales who
encompass personhood and take their place as nonhuman actors in historical
dramas are more likely to be classified as "myth" than as historical evidence by
listeners raised in a Western tradition. But the issue of how much historical ac-
curacy Homeric poems, Icelandic sagas, Tlingit oratory, or Tagish life stories
contain is really beside the point if we understand their contribution as provid-
ing social memory, however adequate or inadequate. In the context of Native
 ORAL HISTORY, NARRATIVE STRATEGIES, AND NATIVE AMERICAN HISTORIOGRAPHY 19

American history, the narratives Angela Sidney and Kitty Smith tell make more
precise contributions. They directly confront familiar, commonsense categories
that take for granted clear distinctions between "nature" and "culture," but
they also challenge Euro-American myths that portray official Yukon history as
a narrative of frontier individualism.
Ray Fogelson coined the term epitomizing to characterize dramatic incidents
that condense complex cultural forces and make them easy to grasp in an icon
or symbol (Fogelson 1989). The discovery of Klondike gold in August 1896 and
the construction of the Alaska Highway in 1943 have both served as key epito-
mizing events in official Yukon history. Discovery Day, August 17, has long been
enshrined as a statutory holiday in the Territory. Both events were commemo-
rated in anniversary celebrations during the 1990s: the 50th anniversary of the
highway and the centennial of the gold rush. Individualism remains a cherished
self-characterization in Yukon settler society, but as symbols gold rush and
Alaska Highway convey quite different messages for indigenous people raised
hearing oral narratives from their own elders. The kinds of "freedom" embod-
ied in frontier narratives that portray humans in mortal combat with nature and
trying to shed connections in pursuit of individualism must surely appear to
Angela Sidney, Kitty Smith, and their contemporaries as the freedom of
ghosts-humans approaching the vanishing point (Mcintyre 1981: 118-119).
Angela Sidney's masterful account of how narrative can maintain human
connections across clan, gender, and generation in the face of enormous exter-
nal pressures demonstrates Benjamin's thesis that a story can do many things
and convey many messages. Her gift links events spanning more than a cen-
tury: the settlement of a conflict between clans through exchange of a narra-
tive; the use of that narrative to welcome a returning son; her public address
late in life expressing hopes for the futures of generations of grandchildren.
Her story also addresses an international war in the middle of this century that
brought a highway and epidemics and took away young men from the Yukon,
some of whom did not return. It demonstrates the complex process by which
oral history is publicly verified in communities where it is told: her own uncles
were prepared to denounce her until she proved to them that she had the right
to tell and to give this story, one of the most valued possessions of Tlingit
clans. It speaks to late-2Oth-century attempts to rebuild Tlingit and Athapaskan
relationships now severed by an international boundary but critical to bicul-
tural families like Mrs. Sidney's and Mrs. Smith's. If one of her themes is about
human connection, another reinforces the point that once things change, noth-
ing is ever quite the same again.
Mrs. Sidney's telling chronicles her expanding reputation in her own com-
20 CLEARING A PATH

munity as she persisted in using and reusing one powerful story to make peo-
ple understand a variety of larger issues. Her work blurs Walter Benjamin's dis-
tinction between the historian and the storyteller. "The historian," he suggests,
"is bound to explain in one way or another the happenings with which he Isicl
deals; under no circumstances can he content himself with displaying them as
models of the course of the world. But this is precisely what the chronicler
does .... Interpreting is not concerned with accurate concatenation of definite
events, but with the way these are embedded in the great inscrutable course of
the world" (Benjamin 1969:96). To live life "like a story," in Angela Sidney's
words, is to confront modernist global narratives with deeply held local ones
embedded in a social order in which human and nonhuman persons are deeply
interconnected.
Kitty Smith, too, has much to say about the well-lived life. While she knows
and tells stories about model lives, where everything proceeds as it should, her
own experience taught her that things seldom worked so smoothly. Real life,
she might say, is full of contradictions. Narrative gives us ways to think about
this. Rather than being clear-cut reflections of ideal life, oral narratives may
very well invert social behavior, because one purpose is to resolve symbolically
those areas that can't easily be worked out in the sphere of human activity. Or-
phaned as a child, raised by her father's clan, unhappy in her first marriage, she
was drawn to stories that dramatize contradictions and she found them, in
levi-Strauss's terms, "good to think with." Stories of Dukt'ootl', Kaats', and
Naatsilanei began as ancient narratives. They brought their explanatory power
to the dilemmas she experienced, and later she began to carve images from
those stories in poplar, then sold them or gave them away. Eventually, years
later, some reached their current destination as museum artifacts. Mrs. Smith
was amused to see them again, but only to a point: in her view, they had al-
ready accomplished their work long ago. Yet for young people from her com-
munity who continue to see her carvings exhibited in the local museum, they
commemorate a life, contribute to social memory, and reinforce a consistent
message: ties of kinship must not be torn apart by external pressures.
As noted in the introduction to this paper, oral narratives have become en-
meshed in larger cross-disciplinary debates: about the weight that can reason-
ably be accorded to ideas in the face of material power; about the need to
understand local experiences while keeping a sharp eye on the constraints that
global forces exert; about the shortcomings of postmodern relativism in the
face of modernist neoconservative economics. Yet stories like the ones Mrs.
Sidney and Mrs. Smith tell are not simply elaborate mental constructions. They
are as grounded in everyday, material conditions as they are in local ideas and
 ORAL HISTORY, NARRATIVE STRATEGIES, AND NATIVE AMERICAN HISTORIOGRAPHY 21

practices. Nor are oral traditions in any way natural products. They have social
histories, and they acquire meanings in the situations in which they emerge, in
situations where they are used, and in interactions between narrators and lis-
teners. The stories Angela Sidney and Kitty Smith tell have their roots in an-
cient narrative, but their telling emerges at the intersections of power and
ideas where larger forces impinge directly on local experience.
In the 1930s, '40s, and '50s, at the same time that Angela Sidney was devel-
oping her skills as a teller of clan histories and Kitty Smith was carving her nar-
ratives in poplar wood in the Wheaton River valley, the larger potential of oral
tradition to destabilize commonsense categories, to promote nonconfronta-
tiona I ways of reevaluating hegemonic concepts, and to encourage dialogue
rather than monologue was being imagined elsewhere. Harold Innis, shaken by
his experiences in the trenches of World War I, advanced a thesis about cultural
translation that began with economics and moved toward an exploration of
how oral tradition challenges imperialist conceptions of time and space.
Mikhail Bakhtin, writing from Stalinist Russia, was fascinated by human artistry
as communicative behavior and optimistic about the transformative potential
of folk culture to destabilize official culture. Walter Benjamin was concerned
about deteriorating dialogue under the Third Reich and attributed this in part
to loss of oral narrative forms with potential to interweave information, moral
content, and philosophical guidance. Each asked thoughtful questions about
the relationship between storytelling, cultural translation, and social action.
Each was concerned about the role of oral storytelling in human history, yet
each based his research on ancient and medieval texts rather than on exposure
to practicing storytellers. Their insights and questions provide contemporary
opportunities to investigate what this means now, when it is even clearer that
control of narrative representation, like transfers of land in contemporary land
claims settlements, carries clear material consequences.
In the end, postmodernism presents us with certain challenges by forcing us
to confront human life as something that seems always to be falling apart. Yet
over and over again, ethnography presents us with ways in which humans con-
struct continuity and integration in the face of disorder. The compelling ques-
tion, raised by Frederick Barth (1994), among others, is how people enmeshed
in this disorderly world create an identity that has continuity especially when
there is no script. We do this by working with those strands of tradition we
have at our disposal to produce and reproduce the idea that the world is still
continuous, and to go on to create those continuities, often by weeding out
the really incongruent portions. Culture does not produce itself; rather, images
like those ofKaax'achgook, Kaats', Dukt'ootl', and Naatsilanei resonate because
22 CLEARING A PATH

they become translation devices to explain new experiences that do not seem
to have cultural roots. The ways Mrs. Sidney and Mrs. Smith use these images
demonstrate their determination to achieve consistency between old values
and changing circumstances.

CODA: A CAUTIONARY TALE

In Envisioning Power, Eric Wolf directs his attention to situations where culture
is, in his phrase, "unmade," where old ideas are rephrased to fit different cir-
cumstances, and where new ideas are presented as age-old truths (Wolf
1999:275). Despite growing attention to social processes involved in narrative
performance, a textual emphasis in legal and cultural studies still reinforces a
century-old tendency to evaluate oral traditions as written words and to sieve
for literal meanings that might be compared with competing forms of evidence.
A recent Canadian legal case that shifts the legal weight of oral traditions in the
direction of such transparency highlights the difficulties. In the late 1980s, the
hereditary chiefs of two First Nations in northern British Columbia, the Gitksan
and the Wet'suet'en, brought to the British Columbia Supreme Court their peti-
tion for a settlement of land claims in a case that has become known as De/ga-
muukw v. British Columbia. They insisted on using long-standing oral traditions
as the foundation of their argument and publicly enacted narratives, songs, and
dances that had previously been performed only within a restricted ceremonial
context. They argued that these ancient traditions demonstrate linkages be-
tween people and place, that they are far more than literal history, and that
their case should not depend on literal accuracy to establish connections be-
tween social organization and land tenure. In 1991, the judge hearing the case
rejected their arguments and dismissed oral tradition as "beliefs" that he con-
trasted unfavorably with "facts" best exemplified in archival documents
(McEachern 1991:49,75). Six years later, in 1997, the Supreme Court of Canada
reversed this ruling, arguing that because aboriginal rights are constitutionally
protected"... the laws of evidence must be adapted in order that this kind of
evidence can be accommodated and placed on an equal footing with the types
of historical evidence that courts are familiar with, which largely consist of his-
torical records" (Delgamuukw v. British Columbia 119971 para. 87). By reinforcing
archival documents as the standard for evaluation, both decisions may once
again define oral tradition narrowly and in ways that reduce complex stories to
simple messages (Cohen 1989). The implications of this more recent judgment
are first being tested in Canadian courts in 1999 (Sieciechowicz 1999).
 ORAL HISfORY, NARRATIVE STRATEGIES, AND NATIVE AMERICAN HISfORIOGRAPHY 23

At a broad level, First Nations in Canada understandably welcome a judg-

ment that seems finally to give their histories legal weight. Nevertheless the
power of legal decisions inevitably drives social processes in communities
struggling to advance claims that must meet terms laid out by Western courts
(Culhane 1998). Again, Eric Wolf is helpful: "Culture is constructed in such en-
counters, but these are staged, prosecuted, and resolved through the exercise
of power" (Wolf 1999:275). A definition that equates oral tradition with
archival documents inevitably circumscribes what is heard because it prepares
the ground for hearing and assessing "data." Inevitably, certain kinds of oral
tradition, especially the disorderly parts that Bakhtin considered so central, slip
by-the debates, the silences, the commotion that is often a critical part of
oral tradition, as of history. If the court limits its definition to the rules nor-
mally followed by academics or lawyers, then official, institutional authority be-
comes further sedimented. Power inevitably involves deciding who can talk,
under what circumstances, in what order, through what discursive procedures
and about what topics, and with what credentials (Bourdieu 1991 :42, 131,134).
A definition that equates oral history with archival documents reinforces the
idea that what academics (historians, anthropologists, judges) write is "history"
and that local practices are "data" for those official histories. It ignores argu-
ments that equate oral tradition with historiography, the oldest form of histori-
cal practice or history making with its own rules and methods of verification.
Whether the courts will be willing or able to evaluate oral tradition and oral
history on its own terms (rather than as data or sources) remains to be seen.
Growing initiatives to formalize institutional guidelines for recording and
conserving oral history will inevitably be fueled by the court decision. In the
Yukon, one alternative to this procedure has involved creating structured
opportunities, spaces, and places for the public telling and hearing of oral tra-
dition-the creation of social occasions where stories can be told, interpreta-
tions debated, and disagreements aired. This occurs, for instance, at the Yukon
International Storytelling Festival, which has been held annually since 1988,
and at other forums like Elders' Festivals in smaller communities. Occasions
like these tacitly acknowledge that history is always located in a social and po-
litical universe. They invite different interpretations while enabling public vali-
dation. They challenge the authority of institutions like archives or courts
without conceding complete relativism. Preservation efforts, following this
model, might better be directed toward preserving commemorative spaces,
where people can tell stories, and significant objects, like Kitty Smith's carvings,
that act as aids to memory and contribute to the composition and production
of history. Social memories associated with such places and objects ensure that
24 CLEARING A PATH

"traces of the storyteller cling to the story the way the handprints of the potter
cling to the vessel." In such spaces, what is retained of the storyteller's art,
even after she is no longer living, is "that slow piling one on top of the other of
thin, transparent layers which constitutes the most appropriate picture of the
way in which the perfect narrative is revealed through the layers of a variety of
retellings" (Benjamin 1968:92, 93).

NOTES

1. Bruno Latour, Vancouver Institute lecture, University of British Columbia, Novem-

ber 8,1998.
2. This narrative is also recorded by Swanton 1909, nos. 67 and 101, pp. 225 and
321; and in Dauenhauer and Dauenhauer 1987:82-107 and notes 323-333.1 have dis-
cussed Mrs. Sidney's use of this narrative at greater length in Cruikshank 1998:25-44.
3. Tapes and transcripts of these interviews are filed with the McBride Museum in
Whitehorse, Yukon.
4. The story of Dukt'ootl' has been recorded in many versions, including Swanton
1909, No. 93; and Dauenhauer and Dauenhauer 1987:138-151 and notes 348-359. Ver-
sions ofNaatsilanei's story can be found in Swanton 1909, nos. 4 and 71; and in Dauen-
hauer and Dauenhauer 1987:108-137 and notes 334-347. The narrative about Kaats' is
inscribed on totem poles from Wrangell to Yakutat and recorded by Swanton 1909, nos.
19 and 69; and in Dauenhauer and Dauenhauer 1987:218-243 and notes 390-406. Ref-
erences to other recorded versions are cited in Cruikshank 1998:98-115 along with
photographs of Mrs. Smith's carvings following 128.

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This page intentionally left blank
The Story of America: A Tribalography

leAnne Howe

It doesn't end.
In all growing
from all earths
to all skies,
in all touching
all things
in all soothing
the aches of all years,
it doesn't end."
-SimonJ. Ortiz, Goingfor Rain, 1976

N
ative stories are power. They create people. They author tribes. America
is a tribal creation story, a tribalography.
As numerous as Indian tribes, creation stories gave birth to our people, and
it is with absolute certainty that I tell you now: our stories also created the im-
migrants who landed on our shores. I don't mean that Native people imagined
them as their God did, nor "formed man of the dust of the ground, and
breathed into his nostrils the breath of life" (Gen. 2:8). But our stories made
the immigrants Americans nevertheless.
When the foreigners arrived and attempted to settle in the upper North-
east, they had nothing to eat, nothing to sustain them but their faith in biblical
stories. Indigenous people told them new stories of how to live in our world.
One example of this is the Native story of the Three Sisters (Beauchamp
1897: 177). Natives told stories of how to plant their crops, corn, beans, and
pumpkins (squash), which sustained the newcomers and taught them how to
experiment with their daily diet by adding variety. As a result, Native foods
were traded internationally and changed the food cultures of the entire world.
According to the National Corn Growers Association's January 2000 statistics,
30 CLEARING A PATH

corn is grown in more countries in the world than any other crop, and the
United States produces and exports more corn than any other country in the
world. Thanksgiving is the holiday in which Americans give thanks to indige-
nous people for such extraordinary and versatile foods. But the most important
story the immigrants would hear from Natives was how to make a united na-
tion by combining people from various tribes. It is this eloquent act of unifica-
tion that explains how America was created from a story, hence my title: "The
Story of America: A Tribalography."
Before I continue with the scholarly account of tribalography, I want to tell
you a Choctaw story. My tribe's language has a mysterious prefix that when
combined with other words represents a form of creation. It is nuk or nok, and
it has to do with the power of speech, breath, and mind. Things with nok or nuk
attached to them are so powerful they create. For instance, rmkfokechi brings
forth knowledge and inspiration. A teacher is a mdifoki, the beginning of action.
~libisha is to be in a state of passion, and llllkficholi means to hiccup, or
breath that comes out accidentally.
My story begins in September. I was standing on the front porch of my
house in Iowa City, Iowa. The sky was bright blue, there was no wind. Rabbits
and ghosts of rabbits hopped in the front yard, playing tag with a couple of
gray squirrels. After a time I looked at the southern sky and saw what appeared
to be black specks of pepper floating in the upper atmosphere. As they glided
closer to the earth, I realized they were red-tailed hawks. There were so many I
couldn't believe they really were hawks, so I ran into the house and found my
binoculars. One, four, seven, twenty-two. Eventually, there were forty-four
hawks kettling together, heading for the Iowa River valley. As the first group
disappeared, another group of hawks flew into view, their red tail feathers
reflecting the midmorning sunlight. For the next 30 minutes, dozens more
appeared.
Red-tailed hawks are very special to Choctaw people. They can weigh up to
ten pounds, and their body feathers are variegated browns and whites, but
their tail feathers are a bright reddish-orange, the color of fire. As I stood in the
middle of my yard, their numbers began to dwindle until there were only fours,
sevens. Then it happened. One red-tailed hawk flew right over my head and
landed in a tree about 30 yards from my porch. He perched on a broken branch
and appeared to be looking in my direction. We regarded one another for a
while, and it was then that I realized my grandmother was trying to tell me
something: the hawks have returned.
Grandmother was a storyteller, and she taught me the power of story. When
I was growing up she was the one who told stories late into the night. Some-
 THE STORY OF AMERICA 31

times she'd say, "Do you hear what I hear? Listenl Ygiea-e-e." Then she would
begin a story.
"I don't know if you remember old lumjones," she'd say, cocking her head
in my direction. "One night, I was looking out my picture window when the An-
gel of Death walked down the sidewalk in front of my house. He went up on
lum jones's front porch next door. Before I knew what had happened, he was
carrying lumjones up through the tree tops," she said. "I'm telling the truth."
From her story, I could see what had happened. A large man-bird first
showed himself to her by gliding past her house. Then he slipped soundlessly
inside the walls of lum jones's house and carried the old man in his beak up,
up, up, through the loving arms ofthe gigantic elm in the front yard. Together,
the old man and the bird-man, winged their way toward the heavens. Of
course, everyone in my family agreed that right after Grandmother saw lum
jones being carried up through the tree, he was as dead as Andrew jackson. It
was a fact. Grandmother could see life and death, and she told me not to be
afraid of either one. That was the first lesson I learned from her.
Then one night while I was in the hospital with rheumatic fever, I overheard
someone saying that I was going to die. I had had a lot of heart problems, so in
a way I was not surprised, but I was afraid ofleaving my family. later my grand-
mother appeared to me, first as a huge brown hawk about the size of a person
hovering over my bed. I knew it was my grandmother because the bird had a
beak shaped like her nose. In the next moment, Grandmother was standing
next to me with her hand on my forehead. She had transformed herself from a
winged person back into a human person. She said a few words I couldn't un-
derstand, then she left. After a long while, I gradually got well. Much later,
Grandmother explained that she was the one who visited me as a bird. She said
she would always watch over me.
When Grandmother ended a story, she'd squeal in her high-pitched-old-
lady-voice: "Whee-e-e that's enough, I can tell you no more today." Then she'd whis-
tle at the canaries and parakeets she kept on her back porch. Then she'd have a
smoke.
There were always many varieties of birds around my grandmother's house,
and she worried constantly that their numbers were becoming thin. She told
me that when she was growing up at the tum of the century dozens of hawks
and eagles visited her house. She said that back in the old days it wasn't un-
usual to see them everywhere, but that wasn't the case in the early 1960s.
Hunters had killed a lot of game birds, hawks, and eagles during the first half of
the century. Then, farmers had sprayed pesticides that ended up killing all her
favorite songbirds.
32 CLEARING A PATH

Right before my grandmother died she said the birds never stopped talking
to her, telling her stories. She said that they kept her up all night, making her
ears ring, and it was their music that she died listening to, not our voices.
To some who read this story, it may seem like a family memoir. I loved my
grandmother and she loved me, and birds. But American and British behavioral
scientists have shown that birds have been found to have the same kind of
memory that enables people to recall where they left their house keys. A study
published in Nature (September 17, 1998) marks what researchers say is the first
demonstration of episodic, or event-based, memory in animals other than hu-
mans. Two researchers, Nicola S. Clayton and Anthony Dickinson (1998:272)
have shown that birds have memories much the same as humans. "The recol-
lection of past experiences allows us to recall what a particular event was, and
where and when it occurred, a form of memory that is thought to be unique to
humans. It is known, however, that food-storing birds remember the spatial lo-
cation and contents of their caches. Furthermore, food-storing animals adapt
their caching and recovery strategies to the perish-ability of food stores, which
suggest that they are sensitive to temporal factors" (Clayton and Dickinson
1998:272). So birds, like people (who bring their favorite snacks to eat while
watching a Saturday afternoon football game on television) can remember not
only when and where but what kind of food they've stored for the future.
This is big news to white people, or people educated in mainstream institu-
tions, but not to American Indians who have been telling stories of birds as cre-
ators, birds as tricksters, birds as healers, and birds with long memories. At last
it seems another group of storytellers, the scientists, have now "proven" that
birds demonstrate they too, have episodic, or event-based, memories.
I tell the story about my grandmother because it is a good example of what
I am trying to address: the power of Native stories. First, there was the event,
the birds, then Grandmother's story and her transformation into a bird, her life
and death, and the reappearance of red-tailed hawks. The story I am telling you
now is lllififokechi. It brings forth knowledge and inspires us to make the event-
fulleap that one thing leads to another.
Choctaws have many stories about birds. One story says that a long time
ago there came to the Choctaws an Unknown Woman. While it is the story
about how the Unknown Woman brought corn to the people, it also incorpo-
rates birds and their relationship to people. The woman is a stranger who ap-
pears in the moonlight atop a great hill. Two hunters see her as if in a vision.

Happening to look behind them in the direction opposite the moon they
Itwo huntersl saw a woman of wonderful beauty standing upon a mound
 THE STORY OF AMERICA 33

a few rods distant. Like an illuminating shadow, she had suddenly ap-
peared out of the moon-lighted forest. She was loosely clad in a snow-
white raiment, and bore in the folds of her drapery a wreath of fragrant
flowers. She beckoned them to approach, while she seemed surrounded
by a halo of light that gave to her a supernatural appearance. Their
imagination now influenced them to believe her to be the Great Spirit of
their nation, and that the flowers she bore were representatives ofloved
ones who had passed from Earth to bloom in the Spirit-land.ICushman
1899:2771

The Unknown Woman tells the two men that she's hungry, and they offer
her roasted hawk meat. This special meat of the hawk is all they have, so they
give it willingly. The woman eats only a small bite, then tells them to return the
following midsummer at the same place atop the mound. She promises she'll
be there. The next year, at exactly the same time, the two hunters return and
find corn growing atop the mound. From the hunters' initial gift of sacred food
to the Unknown Woman, Choctaws and other southeastern tribes received the
gift of corn. Today we celebrate in midsummer Green Corn Ceremony to mark
the coming ofthe future: corn, our ancient food cache. Another version of this
story explains how a black bird brought corn, tanchi, to a Choctaw boy.

EVERYTHING IS EVERYTHING

"Everything exists and everything will happen and everything is alive and
everything is planned and everything is a mystery, and everything is dangerous,
and everything is a mirage, and everything touches everything, and everything
is everything, and everything is very, very strange." This quotation is from a
painting by the late Roxy Gordon, painted in 1988. An author and artist, Gor-
don evokes, in a very Choctaw way, the basic principles of lynn Margulis's sci-
entific theory on symbiogenesis, which says that the merger of previously
independent organisms is of great importance to evolutionary change. Mar-
gulis is renowned internationally as a biologist for her research on the evolu-
tion of eukaryotic cells-cells with a nucleus. As a professor in the department
of geosciences at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst she was awarded
in March 2000, along with 11 others, the National Medal of Science by Presi-
dent Clinton. She has chaired the National Academy of Science's Space Science
Board Committee on Planetary Biology and Chemical Evolution, which aided in
the development of research strategies for NASA, and in 1981, she received a
34 CLEARING A PATH

NASA Public Service award. She has written many books on scientific topics,
both for children and adults, including What is Life? Essays in Gaia, Symbiosis, and
Evolution and Microcosmos: Four Billion Years of Evolution from Our Microbial Ances-
tors (coauthored with her science collaborator and son, Dorion Sagan).

The story of how a human-a being made of nucleated cells-evolves

from an ameboid being-a nucleated cell is bizarre. But even this story
has a preamble: the evolution of a cell with a nucleus. How did such a
cell evolve?
The quick answer is by the merging of different kinds of bacteria.
Protoctists evolved through symbiosis; twigs and limbs on the tree of
life not only branched out but grew together and fused. Symbiosis refers
to an ecological and physical relationship between two kinds of organ-
isms that is far more intimate than most organism associations. In
Africa, for example, plovers pluck and eat leeches from the open mouths
of crocodiles without fear. Bird and beast in this instance are behavioral
symbionts; crocodiles enjoy clean teeth in the company of well-fed
plovers. Bacteria live in the spaces between our teeth and in our in-
testines, mites inhabit our eyelashes; all these tiny beings draw nutri-
ment from our cells or our uneaten food, as cells are shed or as they
excrete organic excess. Symbiosis, like marriage, means living together
for better or worse, but whereas marriage is between two different peo-
ple, symbiosis is between two or more different types of live beings.
IMargulis and Sagan, 1995:96\

In other words, biologists like Margulis have adopted a Choctawan way of

looking at the world. "Everything touches everything, and everything is every-
thing," as Gordon phrased it. The theory of symbiosis advanced by Margulis
and her colleagues also suggests that evolution is the result of cooperation, not
simply competition. "Next the view of evolution as chronic bloody competition
among individuals and species, a popular distortion of Darwin's notion of'sur-
vival of the fittest,' dissolves before a new view of continual cooperation,
strong interaction, and mutual dependence among life forms. life did not take
over the globe by combat, but by networking. life forms multiplied and com-
plexified by co-opting others, not just by killing them" (Margulis and Sagan
1986: 14). Much like the Choctaw prefix nuk that when combined with other
words represents a form of creation, lynn Margulis's scientific theory is also
nukfokechi.
Consider another storyteller, Pisatuntema, a Choctaw woman who in 1909
 THE STORY OF AMERICA 35

told the story of the hunter who became a deer. Her story shows what Margulis
says that life does. One thing combines with another thing to form "life" the
verb, a process that is always in flux:

One night, a warrior kills a doe and soon afterwards falls asleep near the
carcass. The next morning, just at sunrise, the hunter was surprised and
startled to see the doe raise her head and to hear her speak, asking him
to go with her to her home. At first he was so surprised that he did not
know what to reply, so the doe again asked him whether he would go.
Then the hunter said that he would go with her, although he had no idea
where she would lead him ... IEdl .... Now all around the cave were
piles of deer's feet, antlers and skins. While the hunter was asleep the
deer endeavor to fit to his hands and feet deer's feet which they selected
for the purpose. After several unsuccessful attempts the fourth set
proved to be just the right size and were fastened firmly on the hunter's
hands and feet. Then a skin was found that covered him properly, and fi-
nally antlers were fitted to his head. And then the hunter became a deer
and walked on four feet after the manner of deer. IBushnell 1909:321

There are Choctaws, including myself, who consider Pisatuntema's story a bi-
ology lesson about creating kin with people and things who are different from
ourselves. But there are many possibilities in this story. When all the tribes in
the Southeast began to hunt deer to near extinction in the 18th century, a rela-
tionship evolved between Indian hunter, deer, and foreigner. This event is what
historians have called "the deerskin trade." As the scholar Kathryn E. Holland
Braund has noted, "Trade is a mutual affair" (Braund 1993:xiii). This does not
mean that all sides are equal, but rather all sides have agency and are network-
ing. "Between 1699 and 1705, Carolina shipped an average of over forty-five
thousand deerskins annually to London. And between 1705 and 1715, the trade
in deerskins was the most valuable business endeavor in the colony" (Braund
1993:29). She goes on to explain that Indian trading companies forged links to
Creek, Chickasaw and Choctaw towns: ''About one hundred thousand Weight of
Skins were shipped from Augusta in 1741" (Braund 1993: 97). Another event,
however, occurs among the Choctaw. In the town of Chickasawhay, a large
Choctaw community of the 18th century, hunters forgo the hunting season of
1764. The historian Richard White suggests they did this because deer were be-
coming scarce. "That the town suffered from a depletion of deer is also sug-
gested by its reputation as a collection of stock thieves and later, more
positively, as a center of stock raising in the nation" (White 1983:86). But stories
36 CLEARING A PATH

make connections. Choctaws would have been sensitive to being the cause of
the scarcity of deer, a source of food. A story of what may happen if the cycle
continues seems to hold creative solutions.
Pisatuntema's story explains that the deer are fighting back. Not only does
the doe talk, but she lures the hunter into the underground and transforms him.
Only through the intervention of the hunter's mother is the hunter's blood re-
turned to the earth and a ceremonial dance held. In the early Choctaw world-
view, not being returned to the earth by a bone picking ceremony would be a
kind of heresy. I wrote "Danse d'Amour, Danse De Mort" (Howe 1993:447-472)
about Choctaw bone picking and what it meant to the people in my story of
the 18th century who saw their bodies as food for the animals and earth once
they were dead. "Tchatak, the consumer. The animal, the consumed. Tchatak,
the consumed. The animal the consumer" (Howe 1993:469). Things are made
right when we are returned to the earth as food for the planet. Life continues.
Choctaws have another story to explain a relationship between hunters and
deer that also speaks to Margulis's theory of symbiosis. Kashehotep, half man,
half deer, is a character who will harass hunters if they come too close to his
camp where many: other animals live. People tell this story to explain what we
have learned about the onslaught of ecological disasters caused by the deer-
skin trade of the 18th and 19th centuries.
For early scholars who studied American Indian stories, and specifically
Choctaw stories, the hunter and the doe narrative has been relegated to folk-
lore or myth, a fiction. This troubles many American Indians. The Miwok author
Greg Sarris, in an interview for the 1994 film series The Native Americans, pro-
duced by TBS Productions, explains the prejudice inherent in the belief that Na-
tive stories are fictions.

A team of geologists happened to be working in the creek over here and

they unearthed whale fossils from the period of the last Pliocene. And
we said, according to the stories that during the time of the flood that
there was a whale in that creek. This was told from generation to gener-
ation for 10,000 years. They got very interested, these geologists, they
said, "these Indians have this myth that there's this whale in the creek
and we found the fossils." The Indians also say that during the time of
the flood that people went on top of that mountain and went into a
cave. Well, they went up to the cave and carbon-dated charcoal on the
walls from fire that dated to the same period. If that's a myth, you give
me some evidence of Noah's Ark. Do you have any splinters or wood
from that? [Sarris 19941
 THE STORY OF AMERICA 37

In the case of the whale story, bones were found to support the Indians'
story. Sarris is not arguing about the biblical flood or whether Noah's ark ex-
isted; rather he and other Natives in the film point out that no matter what
physical evidence Indians have, our stories are thought to be myth.
By this time, you may be asking yourself how my boastful opening remark
that America is a tribal creation story relates to Margulis's theory of symbiosis.
She suggests that the merger of previously independent organisms, or systems
(for the purposes of my article), is of great importance to evolutionary change.
I am suggesting that when the European Founding Fathers heard the stories of
how the Haudenosaunee unified six individual tribes into an Indian confeder-
acy, they created a document, the u.S. Constitution, that united immigrant Eu-
ropeans into a symbiotic union called America.

From an Indigenous Story the Europeans and Indians Unite

It is that, therefore,
that in ancient times
it thus came that the hodiyaanehshon,
the Federal Chiefs,
our grandsires,
made a formal rule saying
"Let us unite our affairs; let us formulate regulations."
IBierhorst 1974:1451

The above is an excerpted translation from Iroquoian of an archaic version

of the "Ritual of Condolence," a portion of what is also called the Condolence
ceremony. This Iroquois version of the oral drama is spoken by elders and is de-
signed to heal the community and make it a peaceful whole. As John Bierhorst
notes in Four Masterworks, the ritual drama was the Iroquois attempt to achieve
peace between differing tribes and thwart the cult of death and warfare by
forming a confederacy (Bierhorst 1974:109-111). The Iroquois Confederacy at
the time of contact with the immigrants was scattered over eastern North
America and across the contemporary U.S.-Canadian border. They occupied
most of New York State and parts of neighboring Pennsylvania, Ontario, and
Quebec. When the immigrants settled among them and wanted to create trad-
ing networks, the Iroquois told them stories of how their ancestors had
learned to live peacefully together: their story would serve as a kind of cultural
template for the New World. There are many versions of the story, and what
follows is not a direct quote but paraphrased from a variety of sources includ-
38 CLEARING A PATH

ing the Onondaga elder Oren Lyons's speech at the 1987 conference at Cornell
University's American Indian Program, and from his interview in the 1994 six-
part film series The Native Americans.
A long time ago there was a blood lust among the people. A great war en-
gulfed the land and the people were full of merciless killing and fighting one
another for supreme rule. Nations, towns, and families were destroyed and
scattered to the four winds. It was proof of the tyranny of which people at that
time were capable. Then along came a great visionary leader, Degenawidah,
who realized the killing must stop. He began a journey to establish peace, but
he knew he had a serious handicap. He stuttered. Since storytelling is an oral
art, Degenawidah knew he had to find someone who could speak for him.
Along his journey he met the powerful warrior, Ayonwatha, or Hiawatha as his
name is pronounced in English. Ayonwatha, an Onondaga by birth and a Mo-
hawk by adoption, was mourning the murder of his wife and children. He had
vowed to wipe out his enemies, including the man he saw standing before him.
But he knew Degenawidah had combed the snakes out of a powerful wizard's
hair, taking away the wizard's anger, so Ayonwatha decided to go with him. To-
gether the two men traveled throughout the land to establish peace. Through
Ayonwatha's mighty gift of oratory, Degenawidah proposed that the warring
tribes of the upper Northeast form a confederacy.
Degenawidah became known as the Peacemaker. He set up the families into
clans, and then he set up the leaders of the clans. He established a confederacy
wherein each clan would have a c1anmother, and political roles for men and
women would be in balance. He made two houses within each nation. One he
called the Long House and the other the Mud House. These two houses would
work together in ceremony and council establishing the inner source of vitality
oftheir nations. The Peacemaker also made two houses in the Grand Council,
one called the Younger Brothers, consisting of the Oneida and the Cayuga Na-
tions, and later (1715) enlarging to include the Tuscarora. The other was the EI-
der Brothers consisting of the Mohawks, keepers of the Eastern Door; the
Onondaga, the Firekeepers; and the Senecas, keepers of the Western Door.
Then Degenawidah named the united nations Haudenosaunee: The People of
the Long House.
The Haudenosaunee's story remains consistent. The confederacy was
founded on the core values the Peacemaker proposed: freedom, respect, toler-
ance, consensus, and brotherhood. Under the terms and spirit of the Ne-
Gayaneshogowa. or the Great Law of Peace, all parties pledged themselves to
the confederacy's body oflaws. United we thrive, divided we fall.
 THE STORY OF AMERICA 39

After hearing the Haudenosaunee spokesmen extol the values of unification

for over a hundred years, the colonists finally transformed themselves into 13
united states and eventually wrote a document to celebrate the event, the u.s.
Constitution. As the historian Robert W. Venables says, "the Haudenosaunee in-
fluenced both directly and indirectly the generation of the Founding Fathers
and their various efforts to achieve unity" (Venables 1992:68). The power and
persistence of a native story convinced the separate peoples of the Old World
to merge in their new homeland for their mutual benefit.
Modern scholarly stories place the formation of the Haudenosaunee, the
original event, sometime around A.D. 1500 (Ruoff 1990:23). Under these terms
a Haudenosaunee governance known as the Council of Fifty was created, and
this system gave all Five Nations, later called the Six Nations when the Tuscaro-
ras were included in 1715. Ever since, the Six Nations have gathered to resolve
their differences through common consent.
The historian Donald A. Grinde Jr. says that numerous colonial documents
exist to support the Iroquois story and its effect on the immigrants. "There is
ample scholarly opinion and factual data to conclude that the Founding Fathers
respected and used American Indian ideas as the American government
evolved" (Grinde 1992:47). Grinde points out that Indian confederacies were so
appealing to William Penn that he described the whole of Eastern America as
political societies with sachemships inherited through the female side. "Penn
was also familiar with the Condolence ceremony of the Iroquois which was cru-
cial for an understanding of their confederacy" (Grinde 1992:49). Again, the
ceremony was an oral drama, a story, that the colonists observed. The story
was about the unification of the Iroquois, and their aim was to achieve peace
and unity.
It is important to remember that the influence the Haudenosaunee had on
men like William Penn was derived from Penn's firsthand knowledge of their
discourse. In the case of the Haudenosaunee, they made wampum belts to
record events but never made written accounts. Rather, their spokesmen were
trained to speak and tell stories. The anthropologist Stephen A. Tyler says that
"discourse is the maker of the world, not its mirror.... The world is what we
say it is and what we speak of is the world" (Tyler 1987: 171). Tribal spokesmen
used allegory, metaphor, imagination, and inventiveness-all the techniques of
storytelling to make their demands come true.
In the case of the Haudenosaunee, their story was about unity. Although the
struggle for immigrant dominance was tumultuous, the Haudenosaunee's call
for unity in the Northeast remained steady, and it is little wonder why. In the
40 CLEARING A PATH

17th century the Haudenosaunee had to negotiate with seven white colonial
governments on the Hudson. "The inter-colonial context was equally stormy.
The Haudenosaunee had to deal with New England colonies to their east and
the English colonies to the south, which were rivals of the Dutch. After an Eng-
lish government replaced the Dutch in 1664, all the Haudenosaunee white
neighbors, except the French in Canada, were now under English rule from lon-
don" (Venables 1992:72).
In the summer of 1677, Haudenosaunee spokesmen such as Carachkondie
and Connondocgoo joined with English officials from New York, Maryland, and
Virginia to speak for a unified colonial policy. The Indians wanted to create a
foreign policy with the English in order to cement their trade relationship with
them (Venables 1992:72). The Haudenosaunee were major political and eco-
nomic partners of the English in what is now known as the Covenant Chain. Be-
cause the Indians were a counterbalance to French interest in Canada (and key
to the English colonists' survival), they often used the councils to retell their
origin stories and renew the Covenant Chain. This oratory benefited the Hau-
denosaunee in two ways. First, it presented a unified Indian image to the
colonists. Second, the act of storytelling inculcated what the historian Ray-
mond D. Fogelson (1989:143) calls an epitomizing event for both speaker and
listener. Whether the event in question ever happened matters very little to the
people who believe it. Therefore, story creates culture and beliefs, the very
glue which binds a society together.
In the Western intellectual tradition, the act of writing stories ("docu-
ments") has been given hegemony over the act of telling stories. This phenom-
enon led to a privileged view of text, so much so that written stories of the past
became labeled as "history" and their storytellers "historians." Currently, de-
bate persists among anthropologists, ethnohistorians, and literary critics about
what distinguishes story from history or ethnography. The anthropologist
James Clifford has said in his introduction to Writing Culture that much of what
is being written about particular cultures is "true fiction."

Ethnographic writings can properly be called fictions in the sense of

"something made or fashioned," the principal burden of the word's latin
foot, fingere. But is important to preserve the meaning not merely of
making, but also of making up, of inventing things not actually real. (Fin-
gere, in some of its uses, implied a degree offalsehood.) Interpretative
social scientists have recently corne to view good ethnographies as "true
fictions," but usually at the cost of weakening the oxymoron, reducing it
to the banal claim that all truths are constructed. IClifford 1986:71
 THE STORY OF AMERICA 41

What Clifford and others are saying is that a particular text within a discipline is
not false, but always interpretive, and, most important, the storyteller can
never undertake to tell the whole story. The histories of Indian and white rela-
tions are replete with documents of how Indians influenced Europeans to
unite, but the story remains only partially told. For example, onJune 24, 1744,
in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Canasatego, a Haudenosaunee spokesman, gave his
first speech on the history of the Covenant Chain and its success in creating
symbiotic trade relationships. His manipulation of the image of Indian hege-
mony in the region was considerable. Canasatego's speech was translated by
the interpreter Conrad Weiser. In his concluding remarks given onJuly 4, 1744,
Canasatego repeated the origin story of the Haudenosaunee (Venables
1992:76-81). "Benjamin Franklin printed Canasatego's speech as part of the full
record of the 1744 Lancaster negotiations. Franklin sent three hundred copies
to London to sell" (Venables 1992:81). Canasatego's story was read by London-
ers as well as colonists.
In 1754, Franklin made a proposal called the Albany Plan to unite the
colonies. On June 11, 1776, 22 years later, Franklin's revised Albany Plan was
given to the committee of the Continental Congress. That group later drafted
the Articles of Confederation. James Wilson, a delegate from Pennsylvania and
future author of the first draft ofthe U.S. Constitution, argued vigorously for a
confederation that was similar to the Haudenosaunee. He declared: "Indians
know the striking benefits of confederation ..." land we) "have an example of
it in the Union of the Six Nations" (Ford 1904-05:1078).
In reading the papers, memoirs, and diaries of influential colonists like the
historian Cadwallader Colden, Acting Governor of New York James DeLancey,
the Founding Fathers Benjamin Franklin,James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and
James Wilson, as well as the philosopher John Locke, it is clear that they noted
the social and political effects the Indians had on them. However, what is most
important to the Onondaga elder Oren Lyons is that his community's story re-
mains constant. Haudenosaunee existence predates contact with Europeans.
"This is no small achievement," he says. "We have faced off with the white man
for three hundred years and right from the beginning he has learned much from
us. He just doesn't want to admit it" (Lyons 1994).
I include this long discussion of the Haudenosaunee story, and the early
colonial writings, not because I want to enter the debate on whether the U.S.
Constitution exactly replicates Haudenosaunee governance. The Constitution,
although a kind of nationalist creation story, does not in intent or function imi-
tate Indian governance. Rather, it is my intention to argue that the Hau-
denosaunee's story o/their union created an image so powerful in the minds of
42 CLEARING A PATH

colonists that they believed if "savages" could unite they ought to be able to
do the same thing. That united image remained indelible in the minds of immi-
grants, so much so that Indians will forever be spoken of as one group. Today, it
comes as a surprise to college students that there are still over five hundred
federally recognized tribes, with distinct cultural practices.
What I suggest is that a native creation story was one of America's authors.
If not acknowledged in the "historical credits," American Indians are certainly
the ghostwriters for the event, the story of America. So far, I have consciously
used story, history, and theory as interchangeable words because the difference
in their usage is artificially constructed to privilege writing over speaking. All
histories are stories that are written down. The story you get depends on the
point of view of the writer. At some point histories are contextualized asfact, a
theoretically loaded word. Facts change, but stories continually bring us into
being.

WHAT IS TRIBALOGRAPHY?

I add my breath to your breath

That our days may be long on the Earth
That the days of our people may be long
That we may be one person
That we may finish our roads together
May our mother bless you with life
May our life Paths be fulfilled [Allen 1986:56)

Now I have come to the place where I must tell you what my term tribalography
means and how it achieves a new understanding in theorizing on Native stud-
ies. This is a tall order for a storyteller, but here goes. Native stories, no matter
what form they take (novel, poem, drama, memoir, film, history), seem to pull
all the elements together of the storyteller's tribe, meaning the people, the
land, and multiple characters and all their manifestations and revelations, and
connect these in past, present, and future milieus (present and future milieus
mean non-Indians). I have tried to show that tribalography comes from the
Native propensity for bringing things together, for making consensus, and for
symbiotically connecting one thing to another. It is a cultural bias, if you will.
The Choctaw/Cherokee author Louis Owens writes that the precedent for
this wholeness is the oral tradition of American Indians:
 THE STORY OF AMERICA 43

Just as significant is the fact that the concept of a single author for any
given text, or of an individual who might conceive of herself or himself
as the creative center and originating source of a story, or of the indi-
vidual autobiography, would have made as little sense to pre-Columbian
Native Americans as the notion of selling real estate. For the traditional
storyteller, each story originates and serves to define the people as a
whole, the community.IOwens 1992:91

The following two books are models of what I am calling tribalography.

From the Glittering World is by the Navajo author Irvin Morris. It is a collec-
tion of short stories that connect the Dine with their tribal history and con-
temporary lives. Throughout his book Morris makes no claims that the stories
he tells belong to him alone. The book's subtitle, A Navajo Story, shows that
the stories he is telling not only have been collected by his people but are
about his journey through his people's experience. In essence, he is saying
identity is determined by his history and the future.
The stories in the first section are the creation stories of the Dine, which
create dichotomies between man and woman, light and dark. Morris tells of a
cosmic struggle for survival through flood and drought, as well as tracing the
lineages of the original four clans of the Navajo. Following the introduction of
Dine cosmology, Morris provides the reader with accounts of his family mem-
bers. For example, Morris's great-grandmother witnesses the atrocities her
people experienced when they were forced off their lands and marched into
captivity. Therefore, Morris's stories transcend his own memories, to include
those of his relatives and tribal community.
The modern stories in the final section are how Morris connects himself to
the shiny and glittering world of the highways of the bilagaanaa, or white peo-
ple. He juxtaposes this against the other world, the traditional hooghan life of
his grandmother and great-grandmother. Often the telling is dismal. The aver-
age annual Dine per capita income for 1980 was only $2,400. Alcoholism takes
young men from their homes on weeklong binges. But in the last story, titled
"Meat and the Man," Morris offers a comedic version of Navajo life in the 1990s.
An older white man and his dog called "Grabs-the-Meat" come to visit a
Navajo family. They are uninvited guests. The bilagaanaa, a self-proclaimed
tourist, speaks a little Navajo, badly. His car is broken down and he's hungry, so
the family feeds him. Eventually he wants to hear stories, so the grandma in
the story tells the man about Skinwalkers. The story is so powerful that he ac-
tually sees a Skinwalker outside the hooghan and faints with fright.
44 CLEARING A PATH

"I told you not to tell those," said Jill, as they watch the man drive
away the next morning. "I think you just about scared that man to death.
What if he'd had a heart attack?"
"He was awfully nosy," said Grandma.
"But he talked Navajo," Jill's mother said.
"Barely," corrected Grandma.
"I'll bet he never forgets last night," said Jill.
"Yup," said Jim. "He nearly shit his pants. You should have seen him."
"Yaadila," said Jill.
"I thought he was nice-and rather good looking if you ask me,"
said Grandma. "What did you say his name was again?" [Morris
1997:256-2571

The story ends with Grandma thinking she might take the old white man as
a husband. So by the end of Morris's tribalography, another future connection
is possible.
What is most significant about Morris's work is that while he is telling
specific Navajo tribal history, culture, and his own revelatory stories, he also
regards this textual space as a contemplative reflection of identity. What does
it mean to be Navajo, but to connect with people who are not? The story
continues.
The Yanktonai author Susan Power's novel The Grass Dancer is another ex-
ample of tribalography. Like Morris, Power has written a series of stories that
are connected in a novel structure. The story is set in North Dakota on the
Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. Power steeps her readers in the connections
between Dakota ancestors and the present-day culture. She tells Dakota stories
through six central characters. Time travels counterclockwise, and there are
multiple narrators giving their versions of events. This creates a multigenera-
tional story that touches all the characters in the book. As each chapter un-
folds, the reader is taken backward in time until the final scenes of the book
complete the beginning.
One of the central characters, Evie, a Dakota Sioux, believes her father is a
Blood Indian from Calgary. Her mother, Margaret Many Wounds, has told the
story that she married Sonny Porter and gave birth to twins, Evie, and her sis-
ter, lydia. Evie has believed all her life that she inherited her father's looks,
mannerisms, and temperament. Her creation story is that of the Dakota peo-
ple. What we discover in chapter 4, called "MoonWalk," is that Evie's father is
Dr. Sei-ichi Sakuma, a Japanese surgeon from San Francisco. While it is impor-
tant for Evie to know the identity of her father, she is not destroyed by the fact
 THE STORY OF AMERICA 45

that he is Japanese because she has been raised with the Dakota, a people with
powerful creation stories.
In a lecture at Grinnell College in 1999, Power talked about the stimulus
that helped her create The Grass Dancer and her second novel, War Bundles. She
said she believes she is reclaiming American history in her novels of fiction.

As a Native fiction writer I sometimes think of my work as consisting of

little more than pointing out the bloody obvious. Ideas that Native peo-
ples have been turning in their minds since the age of five can-once re-
leased into the mainstream discourse-find themselves plumped to the
status of profundity. For this reason, I don't for a second claim to be cov-
ering new ground with my new novel, War Bundles, rather following
trails familiar to a Native audience which sadly have proven to be revela-
tory to non-Natives exposed to early versions of the novel.
The message of War Bundles is incredibly simple. Native peoples, and
their stories and histories are not a social studies unit of an interesting
sub-category of American Literature to be haphazardly included in
courses such as "Literatures of the Outsider in America," ifat all. We are
American history, we are American literature. Every track and trace of
the American experience runs through our communities, our culture. We
have been the transformers so much more than we are ever credited to
have been. I am so tired of our image as the transformed-the lost, the
dead, always those who are acted upon, always those who have been
pushed to the edges, where we can be watched compassionately, nostal-
gically, seen as little more than a decorative fringe. I don't just want to
learn how the writing of Louise Erdrich was influenced by William
Faulkner, although that is a fascinating and necessary study, but addi-
tionally how so much of the material produced by white Southern writ-
ers and African-American writers reflects Native oral traditions. War
Bundles, then, is not the development of a specifically "Native" history,
but a reclamation of moments thought of as exclusively-peculiarly Amer-
ican. We (Natives) have participated in World Fairs and World Wars, wit-
nessed the destruction of cities we also helped to raise; we were
gangsters and outlaws, performers and writers. We were there. Always
there. Still here. [Power 1999[

While these two books are models of what I am calling a tribalography,

there are many others. Currently there are over two million American Indians in
the United States, and most of these people, give or take a thousand, are writ-
46 CLEARING A PATH

ing stories. The first thing you may think is: LeAnne you maniac, not every In-
dian in America is writing a book. I know it; some are making movies, or music
videos for MlY.
Every Indian I meet is writing a story. A couple of summers ago while I was
in Oklahoma conducting research and visiting family, I was invited to lecture at
OK Choctaws, a nonpolitical organization in the Oklahoma City area. Many of
the elder members of OK Choctaws gathered every day for lunch at the Salva-
tion Army's Native American Center in downtown Oklahoma City to share sto-
ries. After lecturing on some of the historical documents I had found
concerning Choctaws in the early 18th century, I was asked to come back to
help some of the elders who wanted to tell their histories. What I found was
that all of the elders were writing stories that had been passed down to them,
stories of how their ancestors had survived the 1831 removal from Mississippi
to Oklahoma. Our removal began what is known as the Trail of Tears. The
Choctaws I met were incorporating the oral stories of their families with the
written documents of our removal. They were writing how their ancestors had
created new lives in 19th-century Indian Territory, now called Oklahoma.
As we talked about their projects, their World War II experiences, of grow-
ing up Choctaw, I realized that they were doing what our ancestors had done
for millennia: they were pondering the mysteries of their experiences, telling
their stories, and creating a new discourse at the end of the 20th century.
Whether they were speaking them into audio tapes, writing them by hand, typ-
ing them into computers, or recounting them to future generations of story-
tellers, Choctaws were doing what the Ojibway author Gerald Vizenor
describes as " ... creatling! discourse with imagination" (Vizenor 1993:187).
They were integrating oral traditions, histories, and experiences into narratives
and expanding our identity. Not only are Choctaws and other American Indians
creating a future "literary past" for American Indians, but the textual space,
tribalography, creates a literary and literal past for non-Indians as well.
If indeed our world is what we say it is, as Tyler (1987) suggests, then I am
saying that a tribalography is a story that links Indians and non-Indians.
In conclusion, I am suggesting that America is a collection of stories. Teach-
ing the stories of Native authors along with stories of historians will be both il-
luminating and, at times, illusionary. One thing is certain: the landscape of
Native stories may remain just beyond the grasp of the reader if the stories are
pressed into narrow categories of what is fiction and what is historical truth.
I leave you with what my friend Craig Howe told me when I was a guest lec-
turer for a program called "Tribal Landscapes" at the Newberry Library in
Chicago. I want you to repeat these words after me, because like my ancestors
 THE STORY OF AMERICA 47

before me, I believe in the power of breath and mind. I am a nukfoki, teacher.
"Tribalism will not die, even if all the Indians do...
What I think Craig Howe is alluding to is that our stories are unending con-
nections to past, present, and future. And even if worse comes to worst and
our people forget where we left our stories, the birds will remember and bring
them back to us.
Whe-ee, that's enough. I can tell you no more today/

REFERENCES

Allen. Paula Gunn

1986 The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Tradition.
Boston: Beacon.
Barreiro. Jose, ed.
1992 Indian Roots of American Democracy. Ithaca. NY: Akwe:Kon Press. Cornell
University.
Beauchamp, W. M.
1897 The New Religion of the Iroquois. The Journal of American Folk-Lore 10. 38
Ouly-September): 175-190.
Bierhorst. John. ed.
1974 Four Masterworks of American Indian Literature. Tucson: University of Ari-
zona Press.
Bushnell. David I..Jr.
1909 The Choctaw of Bayou Lacomb St. Tammany Parish Louisiana. Bureau of
American Ethnology Bulletin, 48. Washington. DC: Smithsonian Institution.
Clayton, Nicola. and Anthony Dickinson
1998 Episodic-like Memory during Cache Recovery by Scrub jays. Nature. 395
(September 17):272-274.
Clifford. james. and George Marcus. eds.
1986 Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: Univer-
sity of California Press.
Cushman; H. B.
1899 The History of the Choctaws. Chickasaws. and Natchez Indians. Greenville.
TX: Headlight Printing House.
Fogelson. Raymond D.
1989 The Ethnohistory of Events and Non-Events. Ethnohistory 36(2): 133-147.
Ford. Paul L.. ed.
1904- The Works of Thomas jefferson. vol 6. New York: Putnam.
1905
Grinde, Donald A.• Jr.
1992 Iroquoian Political Concept and the Genesis of American Government. In In-
dian Roots of American Democracy. jose Barreiro. ed. Pp. 47-66. Ithaca. NY:
Akwe:Kon Press. Cornell University.
48 CLEARING A PATH

Howe, LeAnne
1993 Danse D'Amour, Danse De Mort. In Earth Sky, Song Spirit. Clifford E. Trafzer,
ed. Pp. 447-472. New York: Doubleday.
Lyons, Oren
1992 Land of the Free, Home of the Brave. In Indian Roots of American Democ-
racy.Jose Barreiro, ed. Pp. 30-35. Ithaca, NY: Akwe:Kon Press, Cornell Uni-
versity.
1994 Interview. In The Native Americans, part 1. The Nations of the Northeast:
The Strength and Wisdom of the Confederacies. TBS Productions.
Margulis, Lynn, and Dorion Sagan
1986 Microcosmos: Four Billion Years of Evolution from Our Microbial Ancestors.
New York: Summit Books.
1995 What Is Life? New York: Simon & Schuster.
Morris, Irvin
1996 From the Glittering World. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
Ortiz, SimonJ.
1976 Going for Rain. New York: Harper.
Owens, Louis
1992 Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel. Norman: Uni-
versity of Oklahoma Press.
Power, Susan
1993 The Grass Dancer. New York: Putnam.
1999 Formal lecture given at convocation in Grinnell College Chapel, November.
Ruoff. A. LaVonne Brown
1990 American Indian Literatures: An Introduction, Bibliographic Review, and Se-
lected Bibliography. New York: Modem Language Association of America.
Sarris, Greg
1994 Interview. In The Native Americans, part 2. The Tribal People of the North-
west: Living in Harmony with the Land. TBS Productions.
Tyler, Stephen A.
1987 The Unspeakable: Discourse, Dialogue, and Rhetoric in the Postmodem
World. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press.
Venables, Robert W.
1992 Choosing To Be Romans. In Indian Roots of American Democracy. Jos Bar-
reiro, ed. Pp. 67-106. Ithaca, NY: Akwe:Kon Press, Cornell University.
Vizenor, Gerald, ed.
1993 Narrative Chance: Postmodem Discourse on Native American Indian litera-
tures. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
Categories of
Analysis
This page intentionally left blank
Categories

Nancy Shoemaker

C
ategories are building blocks in the creation of knowledge and in the ap-
plication of knowledge to situations. Whether the categories are day and
night, self and other, men and women, friends and enemies, or east, west,
north, and south, people rely on categories to make a complex world manage-
able. By paying attention to how people in the past used categories, scholars
could better understand historical processes. How do categories come into be-
ing and change over time? How do people adapt categories to fit the context?
And what kinds of categorizing systems do people in any given society use to
comprehend the natural world and to organize the division of labor and the
distribution of material goods, rights, obligations, status, honor, respect? I
start with two examples from American Indian history that point to the signifi-
cance of categories in human experience. I then discuss how historians, an-
thropologists, linguists, and cognitive scientists have dealt with categories as
cultural constructions and as universal systems of human thought and how this
literature has been used or could be used to provide insights into North Amer-
ican Indian historical studies. I conclude by addressing methodological issues
raised by approaching Indian history from this perspective.

TWO CASE STUDIES

In southeastern Indian folklore, there is a story of a ballgame between birds

and animals. An eager bat shows up, all ready to play, but wreaks havoc by con-
founding the categories. The size of a mouse, with teeth, fur, wings, and four
feet-what is it? Bird or animal? Whichever side takes the bat (there are differ-
ent versions), that side wins (Mooney 1992:286-287; Swanton 1929:23). Most
obviously, this is a story about taxonomy, about how to apply order to a disor-
derly world by grouping like things together (Fradkin 1990:425-426). AI-
52 CLEARING A PATH

though the bat plays the role of protagonist in this story, it is as an exception
and as such serves to clarify how much easier it is to divide the rest of the nat-
ural world into categories based on observable criteria of difference: wings or
no wings, four legs or two, fur or feathers.
This story also provides information on southeastern Indian cultural prac-
tices because these animals act like humans. They playa ballgame. We know
from the documentary record that at least as far back as the 18th century, and
probably much earlier, the ballgame publicly displayed the Cherokees' and
other southeastern Indians' political organization. Towns played other towns.
Often, "red" (war-associated) towns played against "white" (peace-associated)
towns. The ball game thus expressed crucial political divisions (Fogelson 1971;
Gearing 1962:27; Hudson 1976:235-237,408-421). There is another anthropo-
morphic aspect to this story. No matter how the ballgame unfolds, whether the
bat joins the animals or the birds, the bat's odd physical features bring victory
to the side of which it is playing. Its ambiguous position between categories
was a source of power.
Finally, this story raises the issue of change. Some folklorists have proposed
that the ballgame story and other southeastern Indian folktales originated in
Africa and were products of African-Indian cultural exchanges in North America.
Indeed, there are African stories in which the bat's odd conglomeration of body
parts drives the plot, but the stories are not identical. There is no ballgame in
the African versions. Either southeastern Indians adapted an African story to
their own cultural setting, or maybe the bat is so anomalous in its appearance
that Native American, African, European, and Asian taxonomic systems have all
had to struggle to account for it (Dundes 1973:123; Lankford 1987:239-242). It
is difficult to draw definite conclusions about cultural similarities found
through comparative studies. Either changes occurred in southeastern Indian
oral traditions or there are common patterns to how people construct cate-
gories, or both.
A second example of categories' significance comes from 19th-century
Ojibwe (also Chippewa or Anishinaabeg) negotiations with United States treaty
commissioners. In 1837, the United States, seeking to acquire the rich pine
lands west of the Great Lakes from the Native inhabitants, invited Ojibwe head-
men to a treaty. From the perspective of U.S. officials, the Ojibwes then ceded
land to the United States, but the Ojibwes for the next 150 years protested this
interpretation of their agreement, arguing instead that they had retained rights
to use this land and had sold only the pine trees to the United States. The 1983
Voigt decision resolved the dispute in favor of Wisconsin's Ojibwe tribes. The
judge's decision hinged on transcripts and journal accounts of the negotia-
 CATEGORIES 53

tions, on Ojibwe elders' testimony about language and culture, and on legal
canons delineating that in contract and treaty disputes, courts should lean to-
ward the weaker, non-English-speaking party's understanding of the agreement
at the time of entering into the contract (Satz 1991).
The treaty transcripts and later court hearings of evidence abound with ref-
erences to categories. In his speech to the treaty commissioners, the Ojibwe
chief Magegawbaw, also known as La Trappe, divided the world into categories
when he said, "We wish to hold on to a tree where we get our living, and to re-
serve the streams where we drink the waters that give us life." Placing an "oak
sprig" on the treaty table, he explained that the tree they wished to reserve for
their own use was different from the trees "you wish to get from us" (Satz
1991:18,142). Magegawbaw's gesture risked being interpreted as a claim to
oak trees only, but in the official written transcript of the treaty's proceedings,
the secretary scoffed at interpreting this speech literally. Of course, Magegaw-
baw meant that they wished to continue to hunt, fish, and draw sap from
maple trees in the ceded territory. In an 1864 petition, that is how Ojibwe peti-
tioners recalled Magegawbaw's speech, claiming that they had offered to give
up the pine timber, but "Again this I hold in my hand the Maple Timber, also the
Oak Timber, also this Straw which I hold in my hand. Wild Rice is what we call
this. These I do not sell" (Satz 1991:27).
With this speech, Magegawbaw could have been stepping onto the murky
"middle ground" of cultural misunderstandings and contrived understandings so
eloquently explored by Richard White (1991), but cultural difference is not a pre-
requisite for mistaken meaning. That categories are contained within categories
increases the odds of speakers and hearers coming away with different impres-
sions of what was said, even when speakers and hearers share a common culture
and language. An oak sprig could refer to oak trees, to deciduous trees, to trees
in general, to all of nature. In this case, at least some Euro-Americans at the
treaty grasped the Ojibwe taxonomy of the Great lakes environment and real-
ized that Magegawbaw, to suit this particular situation, had constructed two
new categories from it: pine trees and those useful products of nature's bounty
that were not pine trees. In this context, the oak sprig was a metonymical prop
that stood for all Ojibwe subsistence needs, which they refused to cede.
Categories presented other problems at this treaty. The need to identify
which individuals belonged to which nation undergirded all negotiations in
which two polities, represented by authorized individuals, were to meet and
come to an agreement. Who had authority to speak for the group labeled
"Chippewa" by the United States? By Ojibwe accounts, only the headman of a
band could consent to deals regarding resources on that band's territory. How-
S4 CLEARING A PATH

ever, U.S. treaty commissioners insisted on conducting treaties with the

"Chippewa Nation" (Satz 1991 :37). Even today, there is no "Chippewa Nation."
Instead, many different Ojibwe tribes, some of which still use the word band as
part of their formal self-identification, joined in bringing to court the lawsuit
that ultimately restored, in a fashion, their treaty rights. Since Euro-Americans
themselves could be categorized by either cultural heritage or political identity,
we have to assume that their refusal to recognize that same distinction operat-
ing in Ojibwe society was prejudicial and instrumental. To expedite land acqui-
sition, U.S. treaty commissioners glossed a category based on cultural and
linguistic affiliation as a political category.
The treaty negotiations and subsequent dispute reflect some cultural differ-
ences in the construction of categories, the subtleties of which passed without
comment at the time. In the 1864 petition, the Ojibwes remembered having
stated at the treaty council, "I do not make you a present of this, I merely lend
it to you" (Satz 1991 :27). Although the Ojibwe headmen distinguished between
temporary and permanent land transfers, a construction of categories that they
may have shared with Euro-Americans, they termed a permanent land cession
a "present." Exchanges free from social obligations-"purchases"-may not
have existed as a category in Ojibwe thought in the mid-19th century.
Also important at this treaty was the recent emergence of new categories.
Magegawbaw or La Trappe, was he Ojibwe or French? Perhaps he was a "mixed
blood." U.S.-Indian treaties in the Great Lakes region in the 1830s and 1840s
granted or denied "mixed bloods" special payments and are therefore among
the earliest official records to group Indians by degree of blood (Kappler
1972:464-465,543,568,573). As Melissa Meyer (1994) has argued for the
White Earth Reservation in Minnesota, Ojibwes appear to have based the cate-
gories of "mixed blood" and "full blood" on cultural criteria such as dress, lan-
guage, and economic way of life: "full bloods" engaged in a seasonal round of
subsistence activities while "mixed bloods" brought capitalism to the reserva-
tion. In the late 19th century, special U.S. agents, hired to figure out which
Ojibwes were "mixed bloods," conceived of these categories as biological. To
determine who belonged in which category, they looked for differences in hair,
skin color, and skull size and charted genealogical descent (Meyer
1994: 168-170; Beaulieu 1984). Because some of these 19th-century treaties
with Great Lakes Indians treated "mixed bloods" as a distinct group, "mixed"
and "full" could be considered nascent political categories. In Canada, "Metis"
did become just such a category, a means to distinguish the rights of a body of
people within the larger polity. In contrast, in the United States, "mixed blood"
and "full blood" survived primarily as cultural referents in many Indian commu-
 CATEGORIES 55

nities. But since most tribes in the United States today use blood quantum min-
imums, commonly one-fourth, to determine eligibility for tribal membership, it
does look as though biological criteria have superseded all others as the basis
for tribes' political boundaries (Snipp 1989:361-365).
The stories about the bat and the 1837 "pine tree" treaty and every other
story or event in human history depend on intellectual constructs that take the
shape of categories. In both these examples, people taxonomized the natural
world; organized themselves or other people into groups bounded by cultural,
political, or biological criteria; and created new meanings by playing off old cat-
egories and inventing additional categories. They also faced the impossibility
of ever achieving a culturally constructed system of categories that was fixed,
unambiguous, and able to function, without disjuncture or exceptions, in every
situation. These processes deserve further study.

THEORIES ABOUT CATEGORIES

Before analyzing other people's categories, we should be aware of our own.

Scholars rely on categories, too, but rarely distinguish between categories used
by people in the past and their own use of categories as analytical tools. The
problem is especially visible in the history of sexuality, where scholars acknowl-
edge the difficulties of defining the boundaries of research projects without re-
course to anachronisms such as "gay" and "lesbian" and where the criteria for
classifying people by sexuality float uncertainly between sexual acts and sexual
identities. American Indian studies faces similar issues. Some ill-suited and con-
fining categories have been exposed and eliminated from academic discourse.
"Primitive" and "civilized" have faded in popularity to the point of becoming ar-
chaic language. David Rich Lewis (1991) challenged the labels "progressive"
and "traditional," which were common in 19th-century parlance and accepted
uncritically by 20th-century scholars as legitimate descriptions of reservation
populations. But the most unsettling and potentially divisive category is the
one that defines the field. Whichever term is used-American Indians, Native
Americans, First Nations, or indigenous peoples of the Americas-this category
of people does not have transparent, incontestable boundaries. As a contempo-
rary policy issue, the politics of categorizing are particularly pressing. Who de-
termines who is Indian? Tribes? The Bureau of Indian Affairs? Individuals? And
what criteria should be used? Blood quantum? Self-identification? Tribal mem-
bership? And what does it mean to be Indian? Is it a nationality, an ethnicity,
both at once, something else altogether (Thornton 1987:186-224)?
56 CLEARING A PATH

Most of us accept indiscriminately that certain individuals or communities

are Indian if our sources identify them as such. If the sources contradict, then
the question of categorization becomes explicit. Significantly, however, the
most influential scholarship also tends to probe the meaning of categories.
James Merrell (1989), for example, in his history of the Catawbas found that
"Catawba" as a political identity changed over time and to English users of the
term embraced a large group of people who, initially at least, identified them-
selves differently. In an article on the interpreter Andrew Montour, Merrell
(1997) investigated the boundaries of social organization and identities in
18th-century Pennsylvania by demonstrating the difficulty of putting Montour
in anyone ethnic or national category. Merrell does not take categories for
granted but, subtly and implicitly, contextualizes historical figures within their
own culturally constructed social and political categories.
Because categories are fictions relevant to particular times, places, and peo-
ple, it is no wonder that our own categories muddle what we study. One iII-con-
ceived solution to this problem was the anti essentialist fad of the 1990s.
Self-conscious about imposing themselves on the past, postmodernists accused
other scholars of being essentialists, of identifying people by an essential char-
acteristic, thereby presuming that boundaries between people were self-evi-
dent, fixed, and ascertainable. To avoid applying our own cultural constructions
to a past world now conceived of as wholly constructed, scholars tried to purge
the absoluteness of categories from academic discourse. Consequently, every
single word had to be put in quotation marks to show that when we used the
word "woman" or "race," we did not want anyone to think that we believed
there really was such a thing. However, we are all essentialists to a degree and
cannot process complexity or communicate with other people without boiling
abstract matter down into manageable categories (Landry and Maclean,
1996:7). The best solution is to be explicit about the origins and nature of cate-
gories as building blocks of human thought, to be aware of our own categories
as we study the past, and to purposefully seek to discover what categories peo-
ple in the past have used and Why.
One of the few historians to venture in this direction is Joan Scott who, in
her landmark essay "Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis" (1988),
explained why gender history was surpassing women's history as an area of
study. Gender is, of course, not itself a category but what I call a "system of cat-
egories." Gender consists, usually, of two categories: male and female. "System
of categories" is an apt phrase, for it captures the essence of Scott's thesis that
gender analysis, in contrast to women's studies, is relational in its emphasis.
 CATEGORIES 57

"Women" as a category only exists in juxtaposition to a category of people who

are not women-"men." That the term "gender" originated in linguistics and
spread to other fields is indicative of larger trends in history, anthropology, so-
ciology, and the newly emergent cultural studies, all of which have looked to
linguistics for theoretical insight. linguists, such as Roman Jakobson, have ob-
served that categories, especially oppositions, work as units. There is no "hot"
without "cold," no "day" without "night," no "short" without "tall" ijakobson
1990:235,316). Men must be present in women's history; to embrace gender
studies only makes this explicit. Similarly, "Indian" is a relational term, a cate-
gory that is part of a system of categories. Depending on the context, that sys-
tem might be Indians and non-Indians; Indians, Whites, and Blacks; Indians and
Europeans. For "Indians" to exist as a category, there must be people who are
not Indian.
Joan Scott and historians in general have most diligently pursued three sys-
tems of categories-race, class, and gender-but perhaps too diligently. One
should first ask if these were systems of categories in use in the societies under
study. For example, among the 18th-century Cherokees, gender, kinship, and
age appear to have most influenced daily activities, social relationships, and au-
thority in the community, while towns served as the locus of political identity
(Hatley 1993; Gearing 1962; Perdue 1998). Race was just emerging as an idea,
and there is no evidence of social c1asses-of material wealth serving to divide
Cherokees into subgroups-until the 19th century (Shoemaker 1997;
MCLoughlin 1986; Perdue 1979). The single-minded pursuit of race, class, and
gender that has preoccupied historians in the past 20 to 30 years was clearly
not designed with Indian studies in mind.
Anthropologists, linguists, and cognitive scientists have thought much more
about categories than historians, and it is to those disciplines' insights that I
now turn. First, I will review anthropological approaches to figuring out why
people classify and especially why dualistic oppositions are common classifica-
tion systems. This discussion will also address liminality, which could be
thought of as the gap between categories, and the problems posed by locating
structure in worlds that are changing over time. Second, I will discuss ideas
about classification originating in linguistics and cognitive science, including
theories about the nature of categories, particularly two characteristics: that
categories can be marked or unmarked and that categories have centers.
There is no denying that dualistic oppositions, or dichotomies, figure large
in the types of categorizing systems humans, including American Indians, have
created: red and white towns, mixed bloods and full bloods, men and women,
58 CLEARING A PATH

traditional and progressive, primitive and civilized. A major foundational work

on this topic is Rodney Needham's Right and Left: Essays on Dual Symbolic Classifi-
cation (1973). Several of the essays in this collection date to the early 20th cen-
tury when, writing independently, Robert Hertz and Francis La Flesche noted
that right and left were commonly used as symbolic opposites in daily custom,
ceremonies, and social organization. La Flesche discussed how dualistic divi-
sions-right and left, sky and earth, east and west-structured Osage cere-
monies. Hertz more generally summarized that "primitive thought" often
associated the right hand with goodness and sacredness, conceived of the left
hand as evil or profane, and linked that dualism to other forces of nature: east
and west, day and night, hot and cold. Hertz speculated that the shape of the
human body, the existence of two hands, might be the basis for binary thought
generally and that abstract notions ofthe right hand's superiority derived from
"slight physiological advantages possessed by the right hand" (Hertz
1973:20--21).
Despite these early investigations-Hertz's essay dates to 1909 and La
Flesche's to 1916-it was not until several decades later that anthropologists,
en masse, were swept away by structural analysis. The big wave came in the
1960s. (Tellingly, Needham reprinted the Hertz and La Flesche essays in 1973.)
Anthropologists' curiosity about classification schemes can be traced to the lin-
guist Roman Jacobson, who lectured on the oppositional relationship of
sounds, or phonemes, during World War II to a New York audience that in-
cluded Claude Levi-Strauss. Levi-Strauss went on to found a new field of
study-structuralism-based on Jakobson's principles but extending his ideas
about language to provide a logic for understanding societies and cultures.
Levi-Strauss's own work is, deservedly, considered incomprehensible, but
fortunately he spawned like-minded studies by more comprehensible writers
(Levi-Strauss 1963, 1969; Leach 1989). In North American Indian studies, for ex-
ample, Fred Gearing (1962) interpreted 18th-century Cherokee society as being
in a constant state of tension between "structural poses": young men and old
men, red and white towns, peace and war. Raymond Fogelson's (1971:329)
analysis of the Cherokee ball game elaborated on Gearing's argument by chart-
ing how the practice of the ballgame displayed these and other dualisms cen-
tral to Cherokee culture:

Peace: War
Passive: Active
Old: Young
Internal: External
 CATEGORIES S9

Plants: Animals
Tame/Cultivated: Wild
Female: Male

Structuralism came under a barrage of critiques and, like all theories, col-
lapsed as new ways of seeing rose to take its place. Criticism centered on the
seeming rigidity of structure: its incapacity to accommodate exceptions, its re-
sistance to analyses of change over time, and ultimately its incompatibility with
postmodernist conceptions of thought and communication as so infinitely var-
ied, relative, and situational that general rules cannot be discerned. Charts
summarizing systems of dualistic classification, such as Fogelson's, struck many
readers as claims to absolute truths despite their creators' insistence that, of
course, there were contexts and exceptions: the right hand was not always sa-
cred and the left hand not always profane (Needham 1987).
Unfortunately, in the rush to dump structuralism in favor of new theories,
some interesting ideas never reached fruition. Fogelson's chart, for instance,
does capture some of the underlying categories apparent in 18th-century
Cherokee thought, particularly the conceptual associations between
white/peace/female/old and red/war/male/young. The town of Chota, which
emerged as the capital center of Cherokee politics in the mid-18th century,
bore such distinctions as the "ancient town of refuge," "town of peace," and
"mother town," and was one of several "peaceable towns, which are called 'old-
beloved,' 'ancient, holy, or white towns'" (Payne n.d., 2:131; Cheves 1894:332;
McDowell 1958-70, 1:258; Williams 1930:166-167). Clearly, concepts such as
young and old, red and white-aligned in opposition to each other-were
mental devices for organizing political relationships. A structuralist analysis
might stop there. However, a more contemporary way to approach these 18th-
century references to Chota's status would be to ask who described Chota in
these ways and why. By depicting Chota as the head of a lineage of towns and
linking it metaphorically to the age, kin, and gender categories associated with
peace, certain Cherokees and their English allies may have simply been illumi-
nating Chota's acknowledged role within the larger Cherokee Nation. Or they
were using the rhetorical power of "white," "mother," and "old" to create a new
image of Chota and elevate its role in diplomacy as a peacemaking authority.
Perhaps the most enduring idea to emerge from anthropological investiga-
tions of structuralism was "anti-structure" (Turner 1969), more commonly
known as liminality. Victor Turner conceptualized rituals as liminal spaces that
marked transformations in social status or transitions in the life course,
processes that Arnold van Gennep (1960), writing in 1909, had identified as
60 CLEARING A PATH

"rites of passage." Rituals deliberately create an alternative world organized

around contrasts to the normal order but in so doing reaffirm existing social and
cultural categories. Akin to Turner's work and building on van Gennep's insights,
Mary Douglas (1966:96) argued that the threat of disorder generated beliefs
about corruption and pollution and that "Danger lies in transitional states, sim-
ply because transition is neither one state nor the next, it is undefinable." Cere-
monies bring into sharp relief the boundaries between categories, which are
liminal spaces, potentially wrought with confusion, mystery, and uncertainty.
As a concept, Iiminality is useful for explaining the role of ritual in any soci-
ety and the dislocations caused by people or objects who do not easily fall
within a category. In the aforementioned article on the interpreter Andrew
Montour, Merrell (1997) did not label Montour "liminal," but Greg Dening sug-
gested as much in his introduction to the collection in which Merrell's essay ap-
peared. Indeed, Dening (1997:2) characterized all of early America as "a place
of thresholds, margins, boundaries." A straightforward biography of Montour
might accept his contemporaries' account of him as unpredictable and untrust-
worthy, but the concept of Iiminality takes us beyond biography and into the
realm of social and cultural history, where Montour can serve as a window into
18th-century America precisely because he did not fit the accepted categories.
Another liminal figure is the bat in the Cherokee ballgame, which is empow-
ered precisely because it falls in between the categories so easily organized by
the physical features of the other animals.
Liminality also offers an explanation for the special status accorded
berdaches, the men who in some Indian societies adopted women's dress and
way of life. The lakotas called them winkte, believed they were wakan (en-
dowed with spiritual power), and assigned them special roles in ceremonies as
they also did for women who adopted men's ways (DeMallie 1983:244-245).
While some scholars have argued for the existence of a "third gender"
(WiIliams 1986; Roscoe 1998), berdaches could instead be viewed as liminal.
Recognized as exceptions to the norm, their existence in between categories
reaffirmed ideas about male and female difference. Liminality also accounts for
why men who take on the activities of women or women who take on the ac-
tivities of men might in some societies be considered polluting or corrupt and
in other societies be esteemed for having special access to spiritual power.
Across cultures and depending on the context, interpretations might vary as to
whether the space between categories is corrupting or transcendent.
Intrinsic to Turner's and van Gennep's treatment of ceremonies as demar-
cating stages of human experience is the idea that time can be cut up into cate-
gories. Societies periodize the life course. Historians periodize epochs.
 CATEGORIES 61

Significantly, Iiminality serves as a common narrative device for writing about

change over time. For example, Anthony F. C. Wallace's model of revitalization
movements, articulated in The Death and Rebirth o/the Seneca (1969), has a tri-
partite progression. The first section, "The Heyday of the Iroquois," is an
ethnographic description of Iroquois culture not fixed in time but suggesting a
precontact, "traditional" Iroquois culture. The book's middle section, "The De-
cline of the Iroquois," deals with the period following the American Revolution
when Seneca reservations, resembling "Slums in the Wilderness," degenerated
into a liminal, transitional stage of drinking, violence, depression, and chaos. In
the final section, "The Renaissance of the Iroquois," the prophet Handsome
Lake emerged with a religious message that was the basis for a new social or-
der. Structure gives way to Iiminality out of which a new structure emerges.
A more deliberate attempt to accommodate ideas about cultural structure
with change over time is Marshall Sahlins's (1981) articulation of "historical
structuralism." Using Captain Cook's 1778-79 misadventures in Hawaii as a
case study, Sahlins proposed that Hawaiians interpreted Cook's actions in light
of their ritual calendar and the expected behavior of certain deities within the
annual cycle of ritual events. Cook's arrival in Hawaii, his circling around the is-
land, and his unexpected return led the Hawaiians to treat him as the god Lono
and butcher him. At the same time, Sahlins argues, the events surrounding
Cook's death changed Hawaiian culture as Cook-lore became incorporated in it.
In Sahlins's model, Hawaiian cultural categories shaped their understanding of
Cook's actions while the events that unfolded as a consequence simultaneously
worked to change the cultural categories.
Of course, change does not really occur so neatly in stages, in discrete cate-
gories, but is much messier. As Roman Jakobson (1990: 199) wrote in reference
to studying historical changes in language, "The static viewpoint is a fiction; it
is only a scientific procedure to help us; it is not a particular aspe~ ofthe way
things are." While we might want to criticize Wallace and Sahlins for simplify-
ing complex changes into two categories divided by a liminal transitional stage
(in Wallace's case described as disorder, and in Sahlins's case as a ritual), the
pretense that change occurs in stages stems from our own cognitive predilec-
tion for turning abstract matter into tangible categories.
Cultural anthropologists wrote the seminal studies on classification, but lin-
guists, cognitive scientists, and cognitive anthropologists have been more active
lately at generating new theoretical understandings of classification. Their work
opens up entirely new questions for historical research. The linguist George
lakoff's writings have been instrumental in reinvigorating the study of classifi-
cation and its role in the construction of knowledge. His hefty Women, Fire, and
62 CLEARING A PATH

Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind (1987) and a slim volume
on metaphors, coauthored with Mark Johnson (1980), argue from the same
premise. The experience of the human body is a cognitive framework for creat-
ing abstract thought, primarily through metaphor. This idea has ancient roots in
Western science. Writing in the 18th century, Giambattista Vico (1968: 129)
noted that "in all languages the greater part of the expressions relating to inani-
mate things are formed by metaphor from the human body and its parts and
from the human senses and passions." Thus, we use expressions like the head of
an organization, a neck of land, the teeth of a comb, and footnotes.
Metaphors are usually classified as figurative language, but LakoffandJohn-
son see them operating everywhere. They point to underlying conceptual
metaphors that originate in concrete experiences such as the spatial orienta-
tion of the human body. Because we experience the body horizontally and ver-
tically, we have the concepts of up and down and often associate the word "up"
with activity, the word "down" with inactivity, with sleep or death. Abstract
mental states-good moods and bad moods-are metaphorically expressed as
feeling up or down. The body as a container is another basic metaphor from
which we imagine other objects having boundaries, even such seemingly un-
bounded objects as, to use Lakoff and Johnson's examples, mountains and
street corners. As they say (1980:25), "Human purposes typically require us to
impose artificial boundaries that make physical phenomena discrete just as we
are: entities bounded by a surface."
The idea that larger concepts underlie everyday speech promises to open
up new methods for mining written and spoken texts for insight into cultural
values and perspectives. For example, the metaphor I just used-"mining
texts"-implies that historical research is an economic enterprise in which raw
materials are gathered and processed. It is a revealing choice of metaphor and
yet so culturally engrained among academics that it probably slipped by most
readers unnoticed. Lakoff and Johnson's awareness of how such metaphors
send subtle messages constitutes a useful research methodology. In one of the
few applications of Lakoff and Johnson's ideas to a Native American studies
topic, linguist Jocelyn C. Ahlers (1997) found that in Hupa, as in English, many
commonly used expressions do indeed derive from basic metaphors such as
"more is up," "happiness is up," "life is a journey," "time is a landscape," "time
is a moving object," and "illness is a fight." Ahlers also noted differences be-
tween English and Hupa, primarily in the extent to which certain metaphors ap-
peared. Hupa speakers make much more frequent and varied allusions to
illness being like a fight or like an animal that eats or gnaws at its victim. Al-
though Ahlers does not give examples of how Hupa and English cognitive
 CATEGORIES 63

metaphors might differ, I suspect that my analogy equating history with mining
would not translate well into Hupa.
Lakoff's work on categories and metaphors offers compelling explanations
for why communication across cultures is possible. While Lakoff and Johnson
(1980:24) allow for cultural variation, their basic premise goes a long way to-
ward illuminating how Indians and Europeans were able to communicate as
easily as they did. Most of the historical literature on 17th- and 18th-century
cross-cultural exchanges in North America emphasizes a vast cultural divide.
The two works generally characterized as polar opposites in setting up a model
for the contact experience-Richard White's The Middle Ground (1991) and
James Merrell's The Indians' New World (1989)-actually agree on this point:
both start with the supposition that a great distance separated European and
Indian cultures. White and Merrell disagree as to whether this cultural divide
was ever overcome and an understanding of the other ever reached. Because
most research on early Indian-European relations assumes cultural difference,
scholars rarely consider the influence cultural similarities had on Indian-Euro-
pean interactions.
However, they did have similarities. Before they even met, Indians and Euro-
peans shared many ideas stemming from commonalities in their physical
worlds and identical cognitive processes for constructing abstract knowledge
out of concrete experience. The human body, by analogy, modeled abstract
thought. That people the world over tend to count in twos, fives, tens, twen-
ties, or occasionally by fours is no accident but comes from the experience of
using the body's appendages as counting tools: two arms and legs, five digits
on each hand, ten digits on both hands, twenty digits altogether ifthe toes are
included, and hands with four fingers and one thumb. Which body part served
as the original metaphor behind an abstraction is sometimes readily apparent
in the language. In English, "digit" and "foot" refer to both a body part and an
arithmetical abstraction. Many Indian words for numbers and measurements
similarly suggest origins in certain body parts being used as visual demonstra-
tions of size or quantity (Closs 1986; Denny 1986; Kupperman 2000).
Indians and Europeans also had an affinity in their perceptions of geogra-
phy. Even in their earliest encounters, when Indians and Europeans communi-
cated primarily by signs and with little knowledge of the other's language,
Indians easily fulfilled the role of guide to European travelers. In verbal descrip-
tions of a landscape or when drawing maps to show what route to take, Indians
and Europeans customarily highlighted the same topographical features travel-
ers would see along the way: mountains, rivers, oddly shaped boulders, and hu-
man settlements. For this reason, Indians could, upon request, draw maps that
64 CLEARING A PATH

were useful and comprehensible to Europeans. and Indians could read Euro-
pean maps and recognize and correct their errors (McWilliams 1981 :48. 60.
71-76; Pownall 1949:30. 126; Henry Bouquet to john Forbes. june 16. 1758. in
Stevens et al. 1951-76.2:95-96; Beauchamp 1916:40; lewis 1998:60-61; Fos-
sett 1996). Moreover. Indians and Europeans knew firsthand the sensory details
of travel. They knew what it was like to move physically through a landscape
made up of valleys. mountains. rivers. and boulders and could extend that ex-
perience metaphorically to describe other. more abstract situations such as life
being like a journey with a beginning and endpoint. obstacles cluttering up the
path. and rivers having to be crossed.
More significantly. they all experienced the rising and setting of the sun and
consequently conceived of the world as having the same four directions. in
English east. west. north. and south (Helms 1988:35). Early English settlers
john lawson (1967:213) and Roger Williams (1973:160) marveled at how Indi-
ans had the same eight points or "winds" as they did. The movement of the sun
from east to west combined with the shape of the human body-how the body
seems to have a front. back. and two sides-constituted raw experiential
knowledge from which more elaborate knowledge could be constructed.
Noting commonalities does not refute the simultaneous existence of cul-
tural differences. In the process of exchanging maps. two major differences be-
tween Indian and European geographical perceptions became evident. First.
Indians measured space in terms of time-the standard measure for long dis-
tance travel was one day-an experiential measure that Europeans understood.
though they themselves more commonly measured distance in purely spatial
terms. such as in miles. Although the Native maps that Europeans solicited
solely for the purpose of getting from one place to another marked the same
landscape distinctions that European travelers were likely to notice. Indians
also drew maps of the human landscape using circles to indicate nations and
lines to indicate paths of alliance. cartographic devices which Indian mapmak-
ers had to explain to Europeans (Warhus 1997:2. 104; Waselkov 1989). Because
imagination is at the heart of creating knowledge. cultures will develop myriad.
varied ideas. However. conceiving of the experience of the human body as a
core idea in the construction of knowledge does explain the apparent univer-
sality or near universality of certain ideas: the comfort of seeing better in day-
light gives rise to fears of darkness. the shape of male and female bodies leads
to the idea of two genders. and the symmetry of the human body contributes
to the appeal of dualistic classification.
The compulsion to categorize is easily recognized as a basic tool of human
cognition. but theorists have probed these processes further to arrive at some
 CATEGORIES 65

common characteristics of categories. One well-known attribute is that some

categories are marked relative to other, unmarked categories: in English, "man"
is an unmarked category; "woman" bears the mark "wo." Roman Jakobson
(1990:134-140) and other Prague School linguists laid the basic groundwork
for understanding markedness. Their interest was in grammatical constructs,
but they also noted how the hierarchical relationship between marked and un-
marked categories often had a broader social significance. For instance, the
English language captures a snippet of cultural information in implying that it is
women who are different from men, not vice versa. However, markedness pat-
terns vary depending on the context. In the female-dominated nursing profes-
sion, "nurse" has an unmarked, gendered connotation and it is the men in that
profession who are likely to be marked as "male nurses." Adding the "male"
mark to "nurse" informs us that male nurses are the exception to the norm
(Battistella 1990:24).
Markedness can thus reveal underlying values. My favorite example is close
to home. As I have discussed elsewhere (1996), academia is organized into
marked and unmarked categories, consequently reflecting the hierarchy of so-
cial groups in American culture. Many universities and colleges have programs
in women's studies but not men's studies. The same can be said for American
Indian, African American, Latino, and Asian American studies; these programs
often exist on college campuses, but there are no departments of white studies.
In history, the precedence of the Northeast is readily apparent because only
western and southern history exist as subfields with their own conferences and
their own journals. These marked areas of study emerged as challenges to the
unmarked dominance of men, whites, and the Northeast in research and course
offerings, but because they are still marked as different, they retain their mar-
ginality. We will know a revolution in American society has occurred when a re-
versal in markedness transforms relations between categories.
In Native history, reversals in markedness can serve as windows into
changes in culture and society. Just as Indian names for newly introduced Euro-
pean items tell us what Indians thought of these items-what categories they
put them into--<hanges in markedness indicate widespread acceptance of that
item (Witkowski and Brown 1983). For example, the Cherokees initially named
the European-introduced pig after the more familiar sihgwa (opossum), but at
some later point, as domesticated pigs became central to the Cherokee diet, it
was the opossum that came to be the marked animal, garnering the distinction
sihgwa ujetsdi (grinning opossum/pig) (Fradkin 1990:509). Marked terms are not
necessarily inferior to their unmarked opposites. In Cherokee, certain cere-
monies call for the use of tsolagayvli (ancient tobacco), instead of the more
66 CLEARING A PATH

mundane, unmarked tsola (Kilpatrick 1997:35). Thus, marked terms represent

the exceptions, the nonstandard, infrequent usage.
Another important characteristic of categories is that they have centers, or
prototypes, as conceptualized by the cognitive psychologist Eleanor Rosch
(1975; 1978; Rosch and Mervis 1975). Rosch studied people's responses in a va-
riety of tests aimed at understanding how people categorize. Her early work
expanded on Brent O. Berlin and Paul D. Kay's Basic Color Terms (1969), which
argued that as societies added new color terms, they did so following a com-
mon pattern. Languages with only a two-color scheme conceptualized those
two colors as light and dark; languages with three color terms always had red
as the third color, and then next came yellow and green, then blue, and eventu-
ally brown, purple, pink, orange, and gray. From her experiments, Rosch con-
cluded that while human perception could distinguish between different
shades of red, some reds were considered more red than others: color cate-
gories had a focal color that seemed to best represent all the colors falling
within that named category. Refining these ideas with experiments based on
birds as a category, Rosch found that robins and sparrows emerged as proto-
typical birds, or those birds that best encapsulated the attributes defining the
bird category. Instead of having fixed criteria for membership, categories are
"fuzzy" and without clear-cut boundaries. Penguins fall on the fuzzy edge of
the bird category. In lay terms, when we call up a mental image of a bird, we
are more likely to envision a robin than a penguin; however, if asked to put
penguins in a category, we would still put them in with the birds (also see
Lakoff 1987:39-57; D'Andrade 1995:92-121).
The idea that categories have centers appears in academic discourse even
among scholars unaware of Rosch's work. For decades, feminist scholars have
debated how to de-center women's studies, by which they mean the problem of
white, middle-class women often being treated as a prototype. However, like
theories of markedness, prototype theory could be employed more explicitly as
a window into underlying cultural values. In Indian studies, prototypes may be
particularly easy to ascertain if other Indian languages resemble Cherokee. In
Cherokee, there is a suffix "-ya" that actually means "true" or "real" (Feeling
1975:310). Interestingly, the Cherokee word for sparrow is tsisquaya (true bird),
suggesting that Cherokee speakers, similar to Rosch's subjects, view the spar-
row as a good representative of the bird category as a whole (Fradkin
1990:183).
Prototype theory also provides a framework for understanding the Chero-
kee phrase asgayaya, which appears in 19th-century documents. In The Cherokee
Phoenix Uanuary 21. 1829:2), editor Elias Boudinot translated the plural anis-
 CATEGORIES 67

gayaya as "real men" and associated it with "the young and middle aged of the
males," whooping, dressing in face paint, and going off "to a ball play, or a
meeting of similar nature." Asgayaya also could have been translated into Eng-
lish as "much of a man." Trial transcripts from late-19th-century Cherokee Na-
tion court records, which Cherokee clerks maintained in English, are rife with
witnesses testifying to some young man having said, "I am much of a man"
right before or immediately after having assaulted or killed another man (Chero-
kee Nation v. Dunawas Bullfrog 1884; Cherokee Nation v. Yartunna Vann and Mitchell
Squirrel 1884; Cherokee Nation v. John Blair 1887). In regard to an earlier murder
investigation, The Cherokee Phoenix (November 20, 1830:2) similarly reported
that the young man suspected of murder had bragged that "he was much of a
man for he had killed a man," to which a companion of his had responded that
"he had also killed a man ... of course they must all be brave men." In 19th-
century Cherokee society, '~re you much of a man?" apparently was a challenge
to young men to prove their manhood. The combination of "-ya" and the con-
texts in which Boudinot and other Cherokees used the expression asgayaya
point to bravery as behavior considered central to the "young and middle
aged" male categories.
While linguists and cognitive scientists have recently been more active than
cultural anthropologists at studying how categories work, the two different
strains of theory support each other. Robert Hertz's speculations on the promi-
nence of the right hand, in actual lived experience and as a metaphor for social
and ritual activities, serves as a good example of Lakoff and Johnson's argu-
ment about the body as a model for abstract ideas. And liminal spaces could
easily be called "fuzzy."

METHODOLOGICAL ISSUES

By summarizing theoretical approaches to categorization, I hope to suggest

possibilities. I am certainly not advocating that structuralism be resurrected or
that we embrace the work of linguists and cognitive scientists unquestioningly.
When structuralists such as Levi-Strauss tried to dissect Indian cultural material
to expose the operative categories, they looked at myths. rituals. and patterns
of social organization without paying much attention to the effects of context
or change over time. And when Jakobson. Lakoff. and Rosch speculated on the
nature of human thought. they were working narrowly within their own lan-
guages and cultures. However. by considering what each of these theorists has
proposed. we could arrive at new. possible explanations for the intended
68 CLEARING A PATH

meanings and unintended consequences of people's actions in the past. Apply-

ing any of these theories to the study of Indian history entails analyzing written
texts or spoken language for subtle and perhaps mUltiple meanings.
While I hope to have offered here a sufficient number of examples to
demonstrate the methodological possibilities, I also see two big hindrances to
applying theories about categories to American Indian studies. First, few schol-
ars working in North American Indian studies learn Native languages. Since
English is the main language used by the majority of Indians living today, field-
work can proceed and oral histories can be collected, all in English. Moreover,
the sparse number of historical documents written in Native languages pro-
vides a compelling reason to avoid the painstaking, time-consuming task of
learning a new language. And finally, the resources for learning Native lan-
guages are scarce and highly dependent on one's location. Universities with an
Indian constituency might offer courses in a language from that region, or
equipped with audiotapes, grammars, and dictionaries, one could try to pick it
up on one's own. Despite these obvious disadvantages to learning Native lan-
guages, there is no denying that scholars would enrich their understanding if
they would do so.
I suspect that North American studies is about to be transformed in the
same way that latin American ethnohistory has been, where the most creative,
innovative research makes use of Native language materials. James lockhart
(1991), for example, traced changes in the Nahuatl language-in the frequency
and nature of Spanish loan words-to periodize the impact of Spanish coloniza-
tion on local institutions in Central Mexico. Similar attention to language as a
resource would enrich North American Indian studies as well. Moreover, acade-
mic research so often seems divorced from the concerns of Native communities,
but making language study a prerequisite for research in Native history could
add incentives to building course offerings in Native languages at colleges and
universities and help promote language preservation (Valentine 1998). While
one can analyze language using materials that have already been translated
into English-such as I did with the phrase "much of a man" in the English-lan-
guage Cherokee court records-translations will not capture every nuance of
the original. In addition, familiarity with Native languages could still add in-
sight into historical documents for which the translation from a Native lan-
guage into French, English, Spanish, or Dutch occurred hundreds of years ago.
A second and larger roadblock to applying theories about categorization to
American Indian studies is that all these theories-actually, any theory by defi-
nition-implies a universalism that is at odds with the cultural relativism that
serves as the basic premise underlying Indian cultural and historical studies.
 CATEGORIES 69

The very existence of "Indian" as a distinct category posits that there are defin-
able characteristics attributable to Indians that are not attributable to other
people. Since the topic of "Who Is Indian" is highly sensitive and the cause of
much contention, not many of us want to take a stand on what those character-
istics are or should be. Because tribal membership entails certain political
rights, tribes are in the awkward position of having to demarcate who is inside
and who is outside the category; whenever possible, the rest of us no doubt
feel comfortable with "Indian" as a category with fuzzy edges. But even if the
attributes of the category "Indian" are left indefinite and open to contextual-
ization, there is one attribute that is certain. "Indian" is part of a system of cat-
egories, and so Indian characteristics must differ from those of non-Indians. As
with right and left, hot and cold, east and west, we are drawn to oppositions.
And if we have this basic assumption that "Indian" has an opposite, we will
look for differences in cultures, not for the similarities.
The ideal would be to strike a balance and use theories to open up possibil-
ities but not as straitjackets limiting us to a single stance. Theorists have pro-
posed that categorization adheres to common patterns: people have a
penchant for dualistic categorization, uncertainty and mystery shroud the
fuzzy boundaries between categories, and the body and other sensory experi-
ences with the physical world can serve as the raw material for building ab-
stract knowledge and communicating meaning to others. Although people
around the world may share certain cognitive processes, that does not mean
that all cultural knowledge and ideas will be the same.

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Ahlers, Jocelyn C.
1997 Cognitive Metaphors in Hupa. American Indian Culture and Research Journal
21:63-73.
Battistella, Edwin L.
1990 Markedness: The Evaluative Superstructure ofLanguage. Albany: State Uni-
versity of New York.
Beauchamp, William M.
1916 Moravian Journals relating to Central New York, 1745-66. Syracuse: Dehler
Press.
Beaulieu, David L.
1984 Curly Hair and Big Feet: Physical Anthropology and Land Allotment on the
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"Some Women Are Wiser
than Some Men":
Gender and Native American History

GunlogFur

INTRODUCTION

I
s gender a useful category of analysis? Joan W. Scott (1988) asked a decade
ago. The question has been answered overwhelmingly in the affirmative
since then, but the use of gender analysis has also been criticized by women of
color, many from the Third World, as being a concept that perpetuates West-
ern ideas of identity and hierarchy, while clouding fundamental aspects of
Western domination and colonization as well as failing to offer valid interpre-
tations of non-Western societies.
It is my firm belief, however, that gender is an extremely useful analytical
tool particularly in historical studies of Native American societies and their in-
teractions with European colonizers. In this article I will draw on examples
from my research on Delaware (lenape) Indian history to demonstrate how im-
portant it is to ask questions about gender, sex, and sexuality. This is not a sur-
vey of the now vast number of books and articles dealing with gender in
human societies; rather it is hoped to be a retlective piece providing food for
thought for further considerations. Theories about gender and sex are compli-
cated and therefore the first part of the essay is devoted to an attempt at clari-
fying some of the issues that gender research brings to the fore. To exemplify,
I use four specific areas where I think gender analysis yields interesting and
significant results. The first of these concerns questions of invisibility in the
historical material and the consequences for our understanding of past events.
The second area, and in this essay the largest, deals with analysis of languages
and texts. Third, I discuss the importance of understanding and respecting the
76 CLEARING A PATH

significance of spirituality and religion within research in gender perceptions

and roles. Finally, I focus on sexuality, biological bodies, and ideas of multiple
genders as a challenge to binary thinking concerning sex and gender.
Before continuing I want to make a comment on why gender analysis is use-
ful in Indian history. Ideas and practices related to gender and sex have struc-
tured and influenced interactions between Indian peoples and Euro-Americans
from the first moment of contact, and to me it is obvious that Indian histories
simply do not make sense without both men and women. "Indian history" has
largely painted images of forests peopled only by men, momentous councils
visited only by white and red males, or battles in which warriors performed
feats of courage. This is barely more historically justifiable than an older tradi-
tion of "Indian history" in which every event had a European or white American
originator. We know now that the sources are one-sided and formed in a Euro-
pean patriarchal perspective and that this is a major reason why women are in-
visible (Perdue 1998:3-4). But it is not sufficient to note that. The theoretical
question must be, somewhat flippantly, What did women do when men made
history? Women were somewhere and they were decidedly active; they did not
exist suspended in a timeless vacuum awaiting the return of the men with the
meat and the treaty, or in anticipation of their singular, anomalous appearances
in a few sources. A great many studies have shown that women were fully occu-
pied growing maize and other food products, preparing skins, mining lead,
healing sicknesses and injuries, leading ceremonies and so on (see Albers and
Medicine 1983; Shoemaker 1995; Klein and Ackerman 1995). This knowledge
leads to the next theoretical question: What was the significance of men's and
women's roles and responsibilities for the whole of the Indian community, for a
more holistic understanding of Indian social and individual experiences? How
did men's tasks and the changes occurring in them influence women's and vice
versa? While some activities may in many societies be coded as either mascu-
line or feminine, the study of gender is not limited to these. It concerns both
what people thought about biology and social roles and what they actually did
in their lives and how they used gendered metaphors to explain other aspects
of social interaction. In all these areas, human beings of different biological
sexes, genders, ages, and experiences took part, and to understand the work-
ings of gender in human societies it is as significant to study that which is ex-
cluded or unseen as that which is clearly present. Joan Scott reminds us that
the knowledge of sexual difference is firmly present in politics or diplomacy
(Scott 1988:48-49). Gendered language is and was used to denote the home
territory and national identities, as well as to mock or chastise adversaries
within and between cultures. It is not the only social category historians must
 "SOME WOMEN ARE WISER THAN SOME MEN" 77

take into consideration, but it is one that cannot be left out if we want a multi-
dimensional picture of human societies and interactions of power.

TERMS AND THEORIES:

COMPLICATING WHAT WE ALREADY KNOW?

To many people, maybe most, their sex seems a rather uncomplicated biologi-
cal given and something that has little to do with culture or ideas. It is a card
we have been dealt, and in general not much is or can be done to alter it. That
certain expected behaviors and roles are attached to this biology is apparent,
but what these are is open for debate and negotiation. In Western research the
difference between what appear to be immutable bodies and changeable ex-
pectations and performances has led to the adoption of the term sex to refer to
the body, and gender to mean the social practices and thoughts. In the binary
model used in feminist research for the past 30 years or so, gender has thus
been understood as ideological concepts concerning social categories of male-
ness and femaleness while sex referred to (likewise) ideological and physical ac-
tualities of the body (Moi 1998; Nicholson 1998). This attempt to separate
gender and sex first developed in Western feminist writings in the 1960s as a
means of escaping the biologism of early-20th-century physiologists who
viewed femaleness as an inherent quality of the human female body and argued
from these biological assumptions concerning proper behaviors and roles of
women. One such female quality was that women by their very nature (that is,
biology) were nurturing and peace loving. While feminists in the early part of
the 20th century sought to elevate women's status by upgrading the value of
these allegedly female qualities, their daughters in the 1960s found that the bi-
ological derivation hid the many ways in which society socializes people into
behaviors and modes of thinking that are labeled as appropriately male or fe-
male (Moi 1998; Scott 1988:29).
Separation of physical sex and social gender has not turned out to be with-
out problems, however, in Western thought and practice. In reality, gender of-
ten becomes just the social manifestation of the biological sex, a derivative in
other words, and precisely the thing which the 1960s feminists sought to avoid
(Nicholson 1998; Roscoe 1998:125; Scott 1988:40). The question then arose: Is
this because gender and sex really are onto logically connected and the separa-
tion of them just a theoretical exercise seeking to confuse what we all really
know-that men and women are two distinct and separate categories? Post-
modern arguments, however, deny also the stability of the body, and identities
78 CLEARING A PATH

and designations, whether biological or social, are viewed as part of the ruling
and nameless discourse outside of which we cannot even conceive coherence
(Butler 1993: 18). The philosopher Judith Butler has taken another route to crit-
icize the gender/sex pair and the hierarchical relationship between them by
suggesting that sex is as much a socially constructed category as gender, and
that gender, in fact, is prior to sex (Butler 1990; Butler 1991).1 This, however, is
a difficult pill to swallow for most people. After all, we are constantly reminded
in painful or pleasurable ways of our bodies, and it appears incontestable that
they are, in most cases, either male or female. At the same time, it is evident
that much of our allegedly "natural" assumptions about bodies, sexualities, sex,
and gender are open to question, can be changed, and vary in different cultural
settings. Attitudes toward female athletes are a case in point, where ideas con-
cerning what women can and cannot do physically have changed dramatically
during the past century (Cahn 1994). However, studies from parts of the world
other than the West also raise powerful questions about the meaning of catego-
rizations and the foundations upon which they rest (Herdt 1996; Ramet 1996).
Tori! Moi speaks of the gender-saturated society of the modern Western
world. Everything, she argues, is "drenched" in gender, and perceptions of sex
and gender are present in all aspects of social and private life, even when it is
not apparent (Moi 1998:74-77). Such a presence of gendered notions is consis-
tent with ideas discussed by the anthropologist Igor Kopytoff as existential ver-
sus role-based social identities. Characteristics and behaviors attached to an
existential identity are perceived as immanent; that is, individuals do what they
do as a consequence of who they are. This means that gender and sexual iden-
tities are intrinsically tied to notions of individual identities, as when women
are thought to be nurturing, peace loving, and capable of doing several things
at once simply because they are female. Role-based social identities, on the
other hand, reverse the chain of argument and suggest that people are what
they are, in this case "women" or "men," because of their behaviors and actions
(Kopytoff 1990:79-80). Kopytoff found, in comparing Western (essentially
American) existential gender identities to African (Suku in Zaire), that among
the Suku few immanent features were attached to male or female identities. In-
stead the majority of tasks said to be women's or men's responsibilities were
circumstantial, or the outcome of social contracts, rather than "naturally" de-
rived from biological sex (Kopytoff 1990:83-84). He observes: "I could never,
however, elicit an identity-personality for either woman or man as such. Char-
acterologically, that is, males and females were not differentiated, the character
of a particular person being regarded as a matter of individual variation that
cross-cut gender" (Kopytoff 1990:88). By contrast, existential identities of
 'SOME WOMEN ARE WISER THAN SOME MEN' 79

Western (U.S.) women are associated with a vast number of inherent features:
"In America the existential identity is enveloped in a huge mantle of non-nego-
tiable roles" (Kopytoff 1990:93; cf. Amadiume 1987: 185-194). As a conse-
quence a woman may take on new tasks. not directly gender-coded (or for
which circumstantial gender-coding is changing)-such as becoming an execu-
tive for a business-but she cannot easily exchange it for one of the immanent
aspects-of nurturing mother or competent homemaker. This may be another
way of describing Western culture as gender-saturated.
The past decades have seen an explosion in scholarly studies devoted to
various aspects of gender and sex in different societies and times. Viewing the
world as divided according to gender and women constantly subordinated to
men has been a primary supposition in many of these studies (i.e .• Rosaldo and
Lamphere 1974).2 Then come. from non-Western directions. suggestions that
the questions concerning gender may be based on the wrong assumptions and
that these general principles of gender hierarchies impose Western characteris-
tics on other societies (for Native America. see Strong 1996; Maltz and Archam-
bault 1995). Oyer6nke Oyewumf writes concerning Yorubaland. in present-day
Nigeria. that none ofthe social categories used to define people are gender-spe-
cific. Instead. they are based on age. Oyewiamf asks: "If the human body is uni-
versal. why does the body appear to have an exaggerated presence in the West
relative to Yorubaland7 A comparative research framework reveals that one ma-
jor difference stems from which of the senses is privileged in the apprehension
of reality-sight in the West and a multiplicity of sense anchored by hearing in
Yorubaland" (Oyewumf 1997:14). Following this argument she then challenges
researchers that "a preconceived notion of gender as a universal social cate-
gory is equally problematic. If the investigator assumes gender. then gender
categories will be found whether they exist or not" (Oyewumf 1997:16). Her ar-
gument is succinct: "There were no women in Yoruba society until recently"
(Oyewumf 1997:78). With this she means to say that it would be false to apply a
general category of "women" to designate all anatomical females. as "females.
like males. have multiple shifting roles from one moment to the next and from
one social setting to another" (Oyewumf 1997: 160). The use of gender as a
foundational category for human societies imposes Western notions and or-
ders on non-Western cultures. and in fact obscures social and regional cate-
gories while proposing to make women visible (Oyewumf 1997:78. 175-179).
This is indeed a caution that should not go unheeded. Although it would be
a mistake. I believe. to throw out the concept altogether. it most certainly
needs to be both questioned within specific cultural contexts and historicized
in order to become useful for analysis.3 Let it be a challenge to ethnohistorians
80 CLEARING A PATH

to work out the critique in relation to the material in order to answer funda-
mental questions about Native societies and processes of colonization. The
questions taken from Oyewumi would be: Was gender a significant category
within a given society, and, if so, what did it stand for and express? How did
gender function in the cultural encounter, and how and why did perceptions
and practices alter in the process?
An ethnohistorian going to work on the issues of gender and sex in Indian
societies and their interactions with Euro-Americans must look in different di-
rections for inspiration and material. Will Roscoe is concerned with finding a
formula that may include gender, sex, and sexuality. He uses a multidimen-
sional model of gender and sexual difference, defining these as clusters of char-
acteristics, including expected behaviors, ideological concepts, actual
activities. and social responsibilities in specific historical settings. '~Ithough
each society has its own linguistic categories and associated meanings that can
be compared and contrasted. social science research is also concerned with
how people conduct themselves in daily life" (Roscoe 1998: 122). The challenge
is to work out both gender ideology-for lack of a better term!-and gender
practices as well as the relationship between thoughts and acts in specific his-
torical situations.
Joan Scott suggests that gender "means knowledge about sexual differ-
ence" (Scott 1988:2). Knowledge may be described as the manner in which hu-
man beings order and organize concepts concerning human sexual variation.
Scott reminds us that this is not produced freely and at whim according to indi-
vidual disposition and desire; rather, this knowledge is a matter of constant po-
litical contest and serves to establish and maintain relationships of power
(Scott 1988:2). This production of knowledge may be accessed through the
study of language, using methods of text criticism that identify the interplay
between that which is actually stated in the text and that which is not explicit.
but present through negations or repression.4 Since written sources are central
to the work of most historians. and texts receive a particular emphasis in this
article. Scott's approach is a useful one. At the same time it is important to re-
member that written sources are not the only kind available and deconstruc-
tion of discourses is only one of several necessary methods in developing an
understanding of the various ways in which societies in the past have lived and
thought out the concepts of sexual difference.
There is always the risk that gender becomes a shorthand for sex. The prob-
lem, simply put, is this: What should we do with physiological females or males
who do not conform to expected gender behavior and feelings despite soci-
ety's overwhelming normative influence from childhood and on? Or vice versa,
 ·SOME WOMEN ARE WISER THAN SOME MEN" 81

people whose gendered behaviors, feelings, and representations do not seem

to fit their actual bodies (Nicholson 1998:202-204). If gender is seen as a mir-
ror of sex, then these people are either abnormal or willfully deviant. Both con-
ditions can then be censured or cured to conformity. But if gender and sex are
seen as separate, then it is possible to conceive of more than two genders and
nonconformity with sex does not necessarily mean aberration. Roscoe cau-
tions: "The challenge, therefore, is to define gender without reducing it to a re-
iteration of sex. This can be accomplished by recognizing sex as a category of
bodies, and gender as a category of persons" (Roscoe 1998: 127). But he is
quick to point out that an understanding of the body as constructed does not
necessarily lead to "ambiguities of human categories" that "make stable identi-
ties and cultural continuity impossible" (Roscoe 1998:5). Rather, evidence from
North America suggests that "fluidity leads to the diversification of identities,
not their elimination" and that Native gender roles display remarkable histori-
cal depth and resilience in spite of centuries of Western domination (Roscoe
1998:5, 209-210). Roscoe's definition leaves the question of numbers open.
Bodies and genders need not come in twos, yet the assignation of individuals
to these categories may not be an arbitrary exercise dependent on the whim of
the moment or political pressures of the day. Instead, these can be identified as
continuous categories throughout long periods of time that may be linked to
metaphysical explanations and recognized everyday practices.

MAKING SENSE OF INVISIBILITY

Working with absences or lapses is a challenging and valuable approach to the

study of gender. Paying attention to gender often means focusing on women as
a category, as men are more frequently visible in the historical material. But
this focus may be seen as a device, as a means to developing methodologies
and theoretical frameworks that allow other groups and individuals to emerge
as actors in the past, such as older people, children, those with other gender
representations and responsibilities than male or female, refugees, prisoners,
mixed bloods, and so on.
We can never enter any research free from assumptions, which will be there
whether we acknowledge them or not. In my own research, I have therefore
chosen to focus on historical moments that seem to force a clarification of
viewpoints and cultural characteristics. The most fruitful approach has been to
look at encounters between representatives of different cultures, and a method I
have found useful is to investigate apparent anomalies. In the instances of
82 CLEARING A PATH

meetings between cultures, both sides often find themselves in situations

where they need to explain or defend their mode of doing things. At the same
time, the unexpected, the inexplicable, or the anomalous occurrences in the
sources may be paths into the workings of another culture. It must be remem-
bered, however, that as a historian researching the 17th and 18th centuries, I
work with completely one-sided material, most of the words having been spo-
ken by white men and nearly all of them written down by them. Strangely
enough, however, I believe this can be an advantage in certain circumstances
because it demands a stringent source criticism and thus attention to detail in
both that which is present in the texts and that which is noticeable by its ab-
sence. The religious historian Wendy Doniger suggests that in a comparative
situation knowledge of one of the languages involved can "inspire a proper
sense of caution and limited ambitions in the inevitable dealings with transla-
tions of texts from other traditions, an understanding of what one can and can-
not do with translations" (Doniger 1998:65). The constant reminder of the
limits of one's sources, as well as of one's own limited knowledge, can thus
serve as a useful and fruitful methodological tool.
My own discovery of the significance of analysis of gender in understanding
the history of Indian-white interaction began with an anomaly that intrigued
me, and the more I sought an explanation for it, the more I realized that this
was an aspect that altered understandings of historical events. A woman,
Notike, entered into Swedish and Dutch disagreements over land in the
Delaware Valley that both sides argued they had received as donations from
lenape (Delaware) chiefs. Notike, described as the widow of one of these
chiefs, supported the Swedish claim to land by stating that the man who had
"sold" land to the Dutch did not have the right to do so. The Swedes appeared
to have won this round, but what is interesting is how this singular appearance
by a woman in the diplomatic record affects the interpretations of the event it-
self. Notike's assertions were not left unheeded, and it is significant to note
that the man she charged as a usurper did not put his mark on the final docu-
ment drawn up by the Dutch. If Notike's presence is understood as a sign of an
internal Lenape political conflict concerning authority over land alienations, an
authority with both gender and kin associations, actions on both sides may be
explained. But if she is dismissed as a widow who just happened to link two
men (a deceased father and a son in his minority), her appearance awakens
more questions than it answers. Without attention to gender, some things sim-
ply do not make sense, even in the highly male world of diplomacy (Fur
1993:132-135; Fur 1998).
The invisibility of women in Indian history or, indeed, of other categories of
 'SOME WOMEN ARE WISER THAN SOME MEN" 83

members of Indian societies such as old people and children may also be a mis-
conception. The sources from which historians construct their stories must be
scrutinized using regular methods of source criticism in order to understand
why they are written the way they are, who the intended audience was, what
other information they might be dependent on, and so forth. But the theories
with which we work, consciously or less so, awaken questions through which
we approach, view, or listen to different sources. Attention to various aspects
of gender reveals a whole new universe of information contained in well-
known sources. And it may lead to the use of other sources. The material left
behind by the European side of the encounter is particularly rich in information
concerning gendered understandings and metaphors in Native societies (as
well as in various European cultures) and signals both pervading Native uses of
gendered divisions and profound European discomfort at gender practices that
differed from those acceptable to "civilized society."
In 1706 a man named Thomas Chalkley made a visit to the Conestoga town
on the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania. He and his company were treated
kindly, and the Indians called a council to discuss religious matters. Chalkley
noted how the Indians spoke one after the other "without any Heat or Jarring;
(and some of the most Esteemed of their Women do sometimes speak in their
Councils)." This observation prompted Chalkley to ask his interpreter "Why
they suffered or permitted the Women to speak in their Councils? His Answer
was, That some Women were wiser than some Men" (Chalkley 1751 :50). Much can
be made of this brief description, but I will use it here only to point out what I
have found to be a central aspect of gender perceptions among the Conestogas
and their close allies the Delawares, that performance, capacity, dreams, and
age were the important indicators of what position a person would occupy in
society, not biological sex, thus suggesting that Oyewumfs conclusions from
Yorubciland may be of at least theoretical interest also for students of Native
American societies (Fur 1998). But the comment does more than that. It
demonstrates how much biological sex made sense to the English Chalkley as a
definer of social responsibilities. This short meeting thus illuminated both cul-
tures, reminding the present-day historian, whether she is Indian or white. to
keep both eyes open for clues to gender in colonial encounters.

TEXTS AND LANGUAGE

Many of the sources to Native pasts are in the form of texts written down by
Euro-Americans as legal documents, council minutes, missionary reports, travel
84 CLEARING A PATH

accounts, letters and diaries, and so on. Almost all exist in a European lan-
guage, but sometimes translations of quotes from Indians are included. Fortu-
nately, it is possible to work with issues regarding texts and languages for both
the historian who speaks a Native language and the one who does not. Gen-
dered notions protrude into the language even when it is a translation of
Native speech, and both the context of the text and the translation must be
questioned. Who is speaking? What terms is the person using? Is it likely to be
a reasonable translation? For example, when a woman is called "he" in English,
this should raise questions about source criticism and about the purpose of the
text (Grumet 1980:52-53; Fur 1998; Oyewumf 1997: 100-1 07). What is the
topic of discussion and what does the nature of the questions reveal about per-
ceptions? As Joan Scott reminds us, there is a risk that the term language re-
duces its meaning to the instrumental activity of the utterances of words.
Instead, language "reveals entire systems of meaning and knowledge" that are
"the patterns and relationships that constitute understanding or a 'cultural sys-
tem"'(Scott 1988:59).
Languages differ in their constructions of gender, and there is nothing in-
herently natural about how different speech systems designate and name male,
female, and other categories, although it may seem so to the speaker of any
particular language. Grammarians distinguish between languages that have
"grammatical" and "natural" gender. In the first case, the linguistic division into
gender purportedly has nothing to do with sex, as in German, where das Miid-
chen (the girl) belongs to the neuter category, while die Sonne (the sun) isfeminine
and der Welt (the world) is a masculine noun. English, on the other hand, is a lan-
guage that uses "natural" gender, which means that a noun is categorized ac-
cording to its actual, biological sex (with a neutered category for nonsexed
things). Most Indo-European languages classify nouns according to gender in
one of these two ways, although the number of gendered categories may vary.s
But theoretically, gender is only one of many possible ways of classifying
nouns. Other common factors found in human languages are animacy and hu-
manness, dividing things into categories of living versus nonliving or human
versus nonhuman (Romaine 1999:66 ff.). In Algonkian languages, Lenape (or
Delaware) among them, the basic division is between animate and inanimate
categories and there are no personal pronouns (Romaine 1999:69; Kehoe
1995: 120-124).6 Many aspects of Delaware customs and ceremonies make a
point of establishing reciprocity and balance between women and men, yet
when speaking about the world this is not the primary distinguisher. Both men
and women are animate, and so from listening to a conversation you would not
know whether a man or a woman is discussed unless you knew the context. One
 ·SOME WOMEN ARE WISER THAN SOME MEN· 85

consequence of this difference is that the translations of gendered pronouns be-

come difficult. The Lenape sentence /enape hach nan can be translated as either
"is he a Lenape" or "is she a Lenape." From the grammatical structure ofLenape
it is not possible to argue anything regarding the person's biological sex.7 Con-
versely, imagine the problem of saying in Lenape, "He met her in the forest"!
This, however, does not mean that Lenape or other Indian languages do not
have gendered categories. They do and they are to an Indo-European ear quite
elaborate. But whereas in English it is possible to speak about an individual in
general by using the pronoun he or she, thus designating the sex of the person,
and conversely it is impossible to speak about a person without designating
him or her as male or female, in Lenape a person spoken about in general
terms would not be sexed, and when speaking about a specific person the
words used would designate not only sex but also age, and often the speaker's
relationship to the person as well. A recent glossary of Lenape terms for men
and women includes the following divisions: "people," "baby" (nonsexed),
"child" (nonsexed), "little boy," "boy," "young man," "man," "middle-aged
man," "old man," "extremely old and disabled man," "little girl," "girl," "young
woman," "woman," "middle-aged woman," "old woman," "extremely old and
disabled woman" (Dean 1980:22-23). Among kinship terms lenape words rec-
ognize the difference between uncle (father's brother) and uncle (mother's
brother), older brother and older sister, but for younger siblings the same word
is used regardless of whether they are male or female (Dean 1980:13).8
Such differences between languages beg the question of what the connec-
tions are between language and our patterns of thought and perceptions. Stud-
ies in this area do not suggest an exact coherence between the gender of
words and how we perceive them, but we do seem to associate grammatical
gender with our ideas of masculinity and femininity. and there are indications
that children form ideas oftheir own gender earlier if brought up in a language
system that employs grammatical gender (Romaine 1999:82-84).
A tantalizing example of how "language" conveys systems of meaning can
be found in the impressive document prepared for General Lewis Cass at the
American War Department in the 1820s in order to compile a thorough report
on all the Indian tribes. Part of it consists of an immense questionnaire filled in
from interviews with Delaware and Munsee Indian informants. Many of the
questions deal with the respective roles and responsibilities of the sexes, and
the questions are oftentimes more interesting and revealing than the answers.
Among the questions regarding "government" one was: '~t what age are young
men entitled to all their rights?" The recorded answer: "No particular age it
depends upon the growth and activity of the person" (Weslager 1978:93). The
86 CLEARING A PATH

standard against which Delaware and Munsee political life was measured was,
as we can see, the American system of democracy with (white) male voters and
political actors. Even so, the answer suggests an organization closer to that de-
scribed by Chalkley's interpreter, a system in which individual capacities and
experiences are more important in determining participation than any category
such as age or sex. The fact that the response does not reveal the gender of the
individual is likely to be a consequence of the lenape language and which func-
tions without personal pronouns.
In another section dealing with responsibilities in the household the as-
sumptions contained in the questions become quite obvious and one can imag-
ine the bewilderment among the Indian men trying to answer the queries. The
question was asked: "Does the manual labor fall upon the wife?"-bringing to
mind the image of the squaw drudge. The answer seemingly confirmed this pic-
ture: "It does in generaL" The interrogator continued: "Does all the trouble of
moving the camp, etc. devolve upon the women?" and then may have been as-
tonished to hear: "It does not the man and woman share in the fatigue accord-
ing to their ability." Here again, in answer to questions that clearly aim to
distinguish gender differences and household hierarchies, the answers suggest
the importance of individual qualities not connected to social gender. The fol-
lowing question contains an expected difference: "Does the woman ever exer-
cise any government over the children?" The answer does not support such a
division: "She does equally with the man" (the pronoun, of course, was added
in the English translation). The final question under the heading of "Family Gov-
ernment, Social Relations, etc" is loaded with expectations: "Is the woman ever,
in fact, at the head of the domestic establishment?" Such an arrangement
might suggest to the American interviewer an inverted gender hierarchy and
weak husband. Yet the Delawares responding are quite clear: "She is always and
the whole care devolves on the woman" (Weslager 1978: 105-1 06). Similar de-
scriptions have also been offered by Delaware Indians in interviews made in
the 20th century, and I suggest that it should be understood as a different un-
derstanding of gendered responsibilities than that contained in the idea of sep-
arate spheres that began to be elaborated during the first half of the 19th
century in white America (Fur 1998).9 The questions may also be understood in
the context of early-19th-century insecurities regarding the authority of the pa-
triarchal household (Shammas 1995: 133 f.). In Delaware country, as in most Na-
tive American societies, women truly controlled the home and her own
property in it, as well as the children. What looks similar on the surface-
women in the domestic sphere-must be analyzed in its different contexts and
then may reveal significant differences.
 "SOME WOMEN ARE WISER THAN SOME MEN" 87

let us look at a set of questions whose answers become quite confusing: "'s
it common for unmarried women to have children?" The respondents replied:
"It is frequently the case." The questionnaire continued: "Is it injurious to the
reputation of an unmarried woman to have children?" The answer again must
have appeared familiar to the interrogator: "It is very."IO So far, there seems to
be a similarity between white and red American perceptions of women's morals
and behavior regarding sex. However, the following exchange suggests that
maybe this was an illusion created by the order and shape of questions: "Does
it affect her chance of being married?" to which the response was: "Very little"
(Weslager 1978: 105). The conclusion here is that the whole context must be
considered before we analyze a material. In this case, the source is divided into
questions and answers, making it obvious how the exchange was planned to
develop and that the initiative came from white American men.
Equally significant is to ask oneself in what language(s) the interview was
carried out, who translated between the different tongues, and what the conse-
quences may be for the report in front of us. For example, what does it mean
that lenape language does not distinguish only men from women but ages as
well? Age is clearly as biological as sex-as undeniable. Moreover, a character-
istic of this classification is that it is always changing. A young woman in one
account would 20 years later have moved into another definable category alto-
gether. There are suggestions in the material of how responsibilities altered
with age, for instance, old women among the Delawares (and others) prepared
love medicines eagerly sought after by younger tribespeople (Zeisberger
1910:82-83; Tantaquidgeon 1972: 15-16, 45). While for the Cherokees it has
been suggested that this skill, by no means insignificant, was clearly linked to
women's postmenopausal state (Perdue 1998:36-37), the Moravian missionary
John Heckewelder mentions that among the Delawares both older women and
men had the knowledge to prepare love potions, making it necessary to ques-
tion assumed links between women's biology and these special abilities (Heck-
ewelder 1819:236). Kinship terms as well as terms designating the age of the
individual were often much more prevalent than in English, and this awaits
deeper exploration.
Paying close attention to language in its various forms and the formation of
texts is thus an important component in the study of gender. Just as ethnohis-
tory is a multidisciplinary approach, gender research necessitates combining
the specialties of several fields, but it can also question the foundations on
which we base our search for knowledge. My arguments so far have relied
heavily on written sources and texts, but colonial texts about the Other, in this
case, Indians, are at best ambiguous, at worst useless in conveying any kind of
88 CLEARING A PATH

information about Native societies. I I The spoken word as in oral traditions and
histories past and present is absolutely vital for an understanding of gender,
particularly since women's voices are so often obscured in colonial texts. Here,
I believe, are further challenges in which those of us who are non-Native should
step aside and listen to the emic perspectives on meanings conveyed in spoken
words and stories.

SPIRITUAL RESPONSIBILITIES AND GENDER

A third area in which I think it is of utmost importance to pay attention to gen-

der is within the realm of the spiritual. Any analysis of Indian societies must
take the spirit world into account. Material culture was not separated from
spiritual realities-as indeed it has not been for most people on this earth.
What then do myths say about the origins and perpetuation of the world? Do
male and female represent differing responsibilities and characteristics? How
are they defined? Are there mediating categories between male and female?
What can be known about rituals of regeneration and the like? Do Indians use
these stories in their attempts to communicate their worldview to Europeans?
let us look at four accounts of a major Delaware ceremony, taking place at
the end of the month of May. Three of the accounts are from the 1760s, the
fourth is undated but probably from the 19th century.12 Two are eyewitness ac-
counts of the same event, one is penning a secondhand observation, and the
fourth is apparently written (or recited) by someone with intimate knowledge
of the ceremony. From the point of view of gender they are interesting because
on a rising scale with the hearsay on one end and the knowledgeable, but
anonymous, account on the other, they report on the participation of both
women and men and responsibilities connected to gender in the ceremony.
James Kenny, Pennsylvania Quaker and Indian trader, reported in 1763 that
traders had told him about the yearly ceremony and recounted the importance
ofthe number 12, but in his version it was solely a male event: "They Choose 6
Men head Councilors & 6 Young Men 12 in Numr" and "Hear all of you & take
Good Notice that in this manner Your Grandfather's perform'd their Worship"
(Kenny 1913:197). The Moravian Christian Frederick Post, who together with
John Hays was present at one of these celebrations, noted the participation of
women: "Their Priests or Conjurers, with about 10 Women, went first into the
Woods to paint themselves according to their different Characters." But his ac-
count is otherwise quite unclear and presents a picture of a rather haphazard
event without discernible logic (Post 1760). Hays's account of the same event is
 'SOME WOMEN ARE WISER THAN SOME MEN" 89

more sympathetic although similarly vague about the purpose. He supplies

more details concerning women's participation throughout the ceremony in
ways which indicate that some women, at least, were indeed central to the con-
duct of the feast in all its parts: "There wase 3 men and Two Wemen and 2
men + 2 Wemen and two men and they had rat Bunches of Flours one there
heades and was Striped and pinted Belylond Neater Sume Had Grene Rodes in
thir hands and Snaks and Birdes + wonder full things Pented on them All colers
One mane was Rid + one Womean Black" (Hays 1954).13
The fourth account, unfortunately not dated and by an unknown author,
shows intimate knowledge of the ceremony and also provides a sense of conti-
nuity and reason to the ritual performances. It emphasizes the importance of
reciprocity between males and females and between corn and meat:

Every Morning & Evening during the hunt, one of these aged men,
would offer up prayers to the Creator of all things ... , for the fruits of
the Earth the Trees the Springs & Streams of water; for the growing veg-
itation, for Corn our Mother, & for the Thunder or Grandfather by which
our plants & vegitation are watered .... Whilst this hunt is going on,
the wife of the chief goes around the village, notifying the women to
prepare the Big House for the coming festival. [A.A. n.d.1

At the center of the house there stood an upright supporting beam "on one
side of it is carved the image of a Man, which they call their Grand Father, and
on the reverse side the image of a Woman, this they call their Grand Mother"
(AA. n.d.).
The point of the comparison is not to try to prove certain details but that a
source in many ways seeming reliable, such as the Indian trader Kenny's, can be
incorrect or ignorant when it comes to women's participation and responsibili-
ties in Indian communities and therefore the whole picture becomes skewed. '4
The fourth source quoted here presents gendered ritual roles as complemen-
tary and necessary for the correct procedures of the ceremony. A similar,
strictly complementary, description exists from a Munsee-Mahican ceremony
focusing on the bear. Throughout the event women and men played strictly de-
fined, complementary parts. When the people gathered in the Big House, the
women entered through the eastern door and sat on the east side, while the
men entered and sat on the west side. The chief sat on a bench between the
north wall and the center post, half of his body on the women's side and the
other half on the men's side (Rockwell 1991:165-172).15
Yet it is not enough to reveal these seemingly harmonious gendered respon-
90 CLEARING A PATH

sibiIities in the spiritual realm. Kenny, in his rendition ofthe information he had
received, noted a generational aspect that returns in the fourth account. Old
men, or grandfathers, and young men apparently had different roles to play,
and it is quite possible that a differentiation was made between old women, or
grandmothers, and younger women as well. This is particularly significant in
the light ofOyewumi's criticism of Western gender notions, as important ques-
tions need to be asked about the meaning of vertical relations in age and com-
plementarity between genders. What happens to rituals if some category is
denied or suffers extreme losses? That must have been the case when many old
people died as a result of infectious diseases or when young men and warriors
were exalted as a consequence of contacts with colonial administrations.
Ceremonial obligations tied to gender may suggest that ideas of gender sat-
urate Indian cultures as much as European. But the relationship between indi-
vidual experiences based on sex and gender and those based on visions and
spiritual experiences needs to be clarified. Bruce White concludes an article on
Ojibwa women by discussing these connections:

Scholars must take into account some of the Ojibwa beliefs about
women's spiritual power and the accounts of individual women's lives
and dreams discussed here. Though the Ojibwa did have a distinct divi-
sion of labor, one that may have changed at various times in response to
interaction with Europeans, women could make a distinct course for
themselves through their spiritual power. [White 1999:1391

Among the Delawares both men and women could name children but neither
gender nor age determined the distribution of this power (Weslager
1991 :71-72). Nora Thompson Dean specifically comments on the paramount
importance of spirit encounters when discussing the power of naming: "Age
didn't make any difference. Now my father was 90 some years old, and he has
often told me regretted he was unable to give names, even in his advanced age
because he was sent away to mission school so he did not receive a vision"
(Dean 1978). Perhaps the importance of classifications such as gender in Indian
societies is mediated, balanced, or stands in contrast to the individual's spiri-
tual guidance. Such a situation would again suggest a similarity with present-
day Western notions that must be scrutinized. The individuality of spiritual
visions must not be confused with the insistence on individual autonomy in the
West today. Although the meaning of spiritual experience and responsibility
varied across Native America. it appears to have been (and remains today)
firmly lodged in a communal context. In fact, the communities could not sur-
 "SOME WOMEN ARE WISER THAN SOME MEN" 91

vive well without the specific individual gifts, achievements, and experiences. If
such assumptions have validity, it would clearly mean that gender could be fun-
damentally important in dividing, defining, and organizing the world, while at
the same time biological sex did not prescribe any individual's life to the extent
presumed in the notions of a gender-saturated society.
For many generations of individuals in the Western world, the Bible has
stood out as the foundational text regarding the roles and proprieties and ex-
pectations of the sexes. It has ruled and influenced interpretations that are de-
cidedly misogynistic, but it has also inspired interpretations that lead up to
perceptions of equal values. This does not say, however, that every European
colonist thought like ancient Christian philosophers or aristocratic lawmakers.
But it does mean that interpretations of the creation texts in the Bible formed
the basis for legal statutes regulating and inhibiting females in the European
and American societies. It influenced marriage laws, property laws, and cer-
tainly laws regulating sexuality. Is there a similar correspondence between In-
dian creation texts and perceptions and regulations in Indian societies? If so,
what do they look like? It is an area of investigation well worth looking into as
many recent works demonstrate, even though it promises to be a controversial
task (Roscoe 1991:147-169; Kehoe 1995:116-120; Doniger 1998).

SEX, BODIES, AND SEXUALITIES

Anybody studying colonial or imperialist interactions between peoples and cul-

tures cannot avoid noticing that colonists were obsessed with the bodies of oth-
ers (McClintock 1995; Morgan 1997; also Green 1975). But the simple fact that
all humans are bodies does not mean that they are conceived of in the same way
nor that they stand in a similar relationship to concepts of gender in different
societies and settings (Oyewumf 1997:1-8,14-17; Nicholson 1998:202-204).
Thus, the body too, how it is understood and used, must be a focus for gender
research. As mentioned above, the connection between the body-biology-
and its manifestations-gender-has been a vexing problem for Euro-Ameri-
can theorists. Perhaps with a bit of a hope of having found utopia, Western
scientists turn to Native multigendered practices such as those first known as
"berdaches" or "hermaphrodites." Peeling away all the layers of expectations
and fascination and disgust heaped upon the berdaches throughout the cen-
turies, what remains of the idea of multiple genders among American Indians?
While some recent works have sought to claim the existence of not just three
or four but even up to eight different genders at work in Indian cultures
92 CLEARING A PATH

(Williams 1986: lang 1998: Roscoe 1998:]acobs et al. 1997), others have seri-
ously questioned the respect these studies allege adhered to individuals who
did not conform to the expectation of one sex, one gender. In fact, these stud-
ies claim American Indians were just as opposed to homosexual acts and gen-
der inversion as were the whites who encountered them (Gutierrez t 989:
Trexler t 995: also Sigal t 998). But homosexual practices were not necessarily a
trait connected to other gender roles, nor was it limited to them. 16 While the
romanticization of "traditional" Indian practices certainly needs to be ad-
dressed to make room for significant understandings of Native American expe-
riences in the past, the malleability of human cultural practices is a primary
assumption in gender theory and historians must take into account both simi-
larities and differences in seeking to describe cultural approaches to genders,
sexes, and sexualities.
The obvious fact of centuries offorceful white indoctrination on Indian com-
munities cannot be disregarded when we approach this issue, but there may be
other ways to look at the problem. If-again-the language does not distin-
guish between two genders, why would two then be the only possible number?
The anthropologist Jay Miller discusses three as a basic number in many Native
American cultures, with two extremes (such as male and female) mediated by a
third entity (Miller t 979; Miller t 982). There exists a large body of evidence from
all over Native America regarding gender variation, often recognized in terms of
special vocabulary. Sexual practices should not be romanticized, but neither
should they be reduced to binary genders or Western concepts of ontological
connections between sex, gender, and sexuality, nor should they be ignored be-
cause they are difficult to explain or understand. Some Native American percep-
tions of gender clearly indicate that gender need not be thought of as a mirror
image of biological sex and that there are different ways in which human soCi-
eties deal with the fact that the categories of male and female are not neat and
tidy and not all individuals belong to one or the other. Thus, the study of both
gender and sexuality leads us to question the binary division of malelfemale and
masculine/feminine. How different societies deal with boundary transgression
has much to say about how people perceive both gender and sex.17
The Indian body in its shapes, covers (or lack thereoO, and practices has
been of immense interest to white colonists and administrators from the begin-
ning of contact. Descriptions of physiognomies and physical attributes are
common, from early travel accounts, to government officials in the 20th cen-
tury. Colonists brought along classification systems based on clothing and hair-
styles that added an element of both class and gender consciousness to their
descriptions of and interactions with Native Americans. To their eyes, Indians
 "SOME WOMEN ARE WISER THAN SOME MEN" 93

displayed a lack of distinctions between social ranks and between men and
women, while the category of "hermaphrodite" represented a social and reli-
gious abomination (Kupperman 1980; Roscoe 1998:119-123). But Indians, too,
placed cultural significance on clothing, and this becomes apparent from nu-
merous exhortations for Indians to return to their traditional garb and cease to
use European-manufactured shirts and blankets (Dowd 1992:174).
Concentration on clothing and proper distinctions was not only a concern
in early modern contacts, as Tsianina Lomawaima's research on one off-reserva-
tion boarding school demonstrates (Lomawaima 1993). Disciplining the Indian
body was part of a process in which Indian children were to learn both their
proper subordinate place in the social hierarchy and the proper roles of the
sexes. The latter, it seems, involved a despiritualizing of the body that stood in
direct contrast to Native perceptions of the connections between bodies, gen-
ders, sexuality, and spirituality. "The body," Jo-Anne Fiske concludes in her arti-
cle about Carrier women in British Columbia and their experiences in religious
schools, "was transformed from the site of inherent mystical powers to the site
of sin" (Fiske 1996:674).
It would be hazardous to assume that Native practices and perceptions re-
garding sexuality were uncomplicated, not least since the tradition of suggest-
ing a liberated Native libido is so prevalent in Western colonial reports from the
earliest days up until the present. Human anxieties about the forces of sexuality
at work within and between individuals and within communities are ever pre-
sent, yet these too should be historicized. As I have argued earlier, a compara-
tive cross-cultural approach may yield the most provocative results. Apparent
similarities and differences need to be discussed and situated within their his-
torical contexts, and such analyses will point the way to further questions.
From the earliest colonial contacts, Europeans took what they saw as a lack of
proper marriages as a sign of uncivilized societies (Shammas 1995: 109-115;
Van der Donck 1841: 191). This involved notions of uncontrolled sexual prac-
tices. The Dutchman Isaak De Rasieres's comment nicely sums up the judgmen-
tal tone and openly sexual gaze of many European accounts: "The women are
fine looking, of middle stature, well proportioned, and with finely cut features;
with long and black hair, and black eyes set off with fine eyebrows .... They
smear their bodies and hair with grease, which makes them smell very rankly;
they are very much given to promiscuous intercourse" (de Rasieres 1909:106).
In sweeping comments, all the differences in practices and moral codes were
lumped together in strongly condemnatory phrases. Peter Lindestrom wrote in
the 1650s about the Lenapes that they "have their mixing together with father
and mother, brother and sister like soulless beasts, no one quite knowing, who
94 Q.EARING A PATH

is the father of the child" (Lindestrom 1962: 109). The lack of moral codes re-
garding sexual behaviors is a standard comment, yet when we turn to sources
that describe actual interaction it becomes obvious that they were not lacking
but often quite different. Such a situation occurred when Moravian missionar-
ies sought to arrange marriages that foundered on much more stringent Indian
rules against incest (GnadenhUtten Diary, May 31, 1755). Women's active roles
in taking sexual initiatives were often described as frightening and contrary to
civilized order, but also tempting. A most frustrated David Zeisberger thun-
dered against the Delaware women who had opposed him:

The women are much given to lying and gossiping. They carry evil re-
port from house to house. As long as they are observed they appear
modest and without guile. All the wrongs of which they are gUilty are
done in secret. That adultery, theft, lying, cheating are terrible vices they
know, having learned it from their ancestors as well as from the whites.
Fear of disgrace keeps them from open wrong-doing for they do not
wish to have a bad name. Secretly, however, they are given to all manner
of vice. Some are no longer sensitive to shame. There are traces of un-
natural sins among them, hardly known to any except to those such as
missionaries who have learned to understand the people well. IZeis-
berger 1910:124-1251

It is likely that Zeisberger's experience was colored not only by female opposi-
tion but also by encountering a village "where none but unmarried womenfolk
live, who do not want to take any husbands" (lagundo-UtenUnk Diary, May 3,
1770). With reports as well of lascivious female sexual behaviors in the Mora-
vian sources it is not difficult to imagine why Zeisberger considered this town
an unsuitable neighbor for a mission settlement (Shekomeko Diary, May, 1745;
Wellenreuther and Wessel 1995:556-558). But Delawares themselves most
likely viewed it differently. That women could choose to separate themselves
from their villages was neither unheard of nor necessarily indicative of certain
sexual behaviors. The missionary related how Indians critical of his message
told him that they had visited heaven to see what it was like. Among other
things they reported seeing two large towns "in one of which there were only
women, of extraordinary size" (Zeisberger 1912: 103). Delawares also told John
Heckewelder of a woman who had chosen to live as a hermit (Heckewelder
1819:200-201). In various ways, then, gendered practices, social organization,
and perceptions of morality and of bodies interlaced to produce generalized
descriptions as well as indigenous defenses.
 ·SOME WOMEN ARE WISER THAN SOME MEN' 95

The emphasis on Native peoples' bodies and sexual practices obviously has
much to say about colonists' anxieties and desires, but what does it reveal
about Indian perceptions and actions? Cross-cultural studies force us to ques-
tion all the categories which our various contexts present as "natural," such as
the dichotomous division of the world into male and female or the designation
of sexualities as synonymous with identities. Yet just as early colonists used
choice examples from other societies to question their own, the researcher
may be tempted to find in the study of distant lives (in time or space) examples
of differences that can bolster contemporary arguments. As always the chal-
lenge is to walk the tightrope between attention to actual differences in how
people organize their knowledge concerning gender, bodies, and sexualities
and the tendency to romanticize and exaggerate these. In many ways, the
study of Native recognition of multiple genders brings together the themes
that have been the focus of this essay: connections between genders, bodies,
and spiritual experiences; the problems of textual representations; the invisibil-
ity of all but certain recognized males.

SUMMING UP

In this article I have argued and tried to demonstrate that paying attention to
sex, gender, and sexuality is indeed a fruitful approach to Native American his-
tory. History, and ethnohistory, is a scholarly practice located ambiguously
astride the boundary between theory and empiricism. How we view the past,
and time, and change or continuity inspires intense debate, while we seek to
relate these theoretical concepts to fragments of lives once lived. It is impor-
tant, therefore, for all scholars to do their own thinking about the intersections
between sources to past lives and perceptions of gender. On one level it is a
theoretical issue of defining gender and how awareness or lack thereof oper-
ates on different levels of human societies; on another it is an empirical ques-
tion to investigate what sex difference and similarities mean in specific
historical and cultural contexts.
While biological sex may not have been the primary determinant for what
an individual could or could not do, I have argued that gender as an organizing
principle was of paramount significance to most American Indian peoples.
Metaphorical and religious language was filled with gendered references that
need to be respected and analyzed in order to make sense of historic encoun-
ters. We come across these terms in descriptions of kinship and in the
metaphors used in diplomatic negotiations. They affect perceptions of power
96 CLEARING A PATH

and authority. practices and beliefs surrounding rituals. cosmology and spiritu-
ality. as well as production. reproduction. life and death. numbers. and media-
tions. I have emphasized four aspects as central to an understanding of gender
in the colonial encounter and in indigenous communities: paying attention to
lacunas or apparent invisibilities. to language and translations. to spiritual re-
sponsibilities. and to perceptions of bodies and sexualities. This reveals areas
of inquiry that are still insufficiently covered. What does it mean when only cer-
tain people are visible in the historical material7 Can absences in the material
be used to assert that women were excluded from certain situations. or do they
primarily raise issues regarding the sources7 Can anomalies be used as win-
dows into the workings of another culture and time period. or are they just
freak occurrences7 Could gender be a significant divider between people at cer-
tain times but not always. pivotal points in ceremony. for example. but not in
everyday Iife7 (Or perhaps the reverse would be more correct.) It is important
to look at humans not only through lens of gender but also in terms of what
constitutes common humanity. The tensions between oppositions need always
to be present in the historical analysis: men/women. gendered beings/common
humanity. hierarchy/complementarity. and so on. Yet Native American experi-
ences should also caution us against assuming too easily that constructing the
world in terms of binaries is the "natural" way to think and act. As in the case
with Native practices involving more than two genders. histories of gender re-
lations in Native North America may challenge other dualities as well.
A gendered analysis of Native American history involves a multifaceted ap-
proach that takes into account factors of words and translations. individual
spiritual experiences and capacities. age-related responsibilities. common lega-
cies of stories. myths. and accounts of creation and ideas concerning proper
roles of the sexes and sexuality. as well as actual possibilities and practices--
what we may know. in fact. about what human beings actually do.
The significance of studying gender for the understanding of Native history
cannot be overstated. It has a direct bearing on issues of cultural continuity. It
also sheds valuable light on the interactions and responses to colonization.
This is also where Indian history can turn a powerful searchlight on European
history. White responses to Indian gendered practices reveal European beliefs
and may help explain why Native practices seemed so threatening to civiliza-
tion projects. The consequences of the traumatic experiences of Indian tribes
take on new meanings when viewed through the lenses of gender and age.
What did it mean to lose many elder women7 What did it mean that Europeans
conferred power on younger men? What happened when children were lost?
How did such changes alter understandings and relationships to the spirit
 'SOME WOMEN ARE WISER THAN SOME MEN- 97

world? Few attempts have been made so far to assess theoretically the implica-
tions of gender for Native American history. It therefore appears to be an ur-
gent venture in which inspiration may be gotten from women's studies and
anthropology, while the bulk of the work must be based on Native American
lives and experiences.

NOTES

1. Judith Butler writes explicitly that "there are no direct expressive or causal lines
between sex, gender, gender presentation, sexual practice, fantasy and sexuality" (But-
ler 1991 :25).
2. The collection of essays in Woman, Culture and Society received much attention
particularly for the stance that Michelle Rosaldo, Nancy Chodorow, and Sherry Ortner
took on the universality of women's subordination to men. It had a major impact on
women's studies and history theorizing as well. However, critique came almost immedi-
ately from within anthropology, and the most influential were the arguments put forth
by Eleanor Leacock (Etienne and Leacock 1980 and Leacock 1981). See also Sherry Ort-
ner's discussions more than 20 years later (Ortner 1996).
3. This is Oyewilmf's conclusion as well. She writes: "gender cannot be theorized in
and of itself; it has to be located within cultural systems-local and global-and its his-
tory and articulations must be critically charted along with other aspects of social sys-
tems" (1997).
4. I use Scott's work and definitions because I find them well argued and her books
and articles have become foundational texts for historians working with gender. It is,
however, important to recognize her debt to earlier feminist scholars, in particular the
French feminists who formulated a critique ofthe historical canon and discovered the
power of discourses before Foucault and Derrida or Lacan began to influence social his-
tory. See Canning 1997.
5. Swedish, for example, has two linguistic gender systems, one of which is gram-
matical, the other semantic and essentially differentiating between animate/inanimate
categories (Teleman 1987).
6. Personal communication from jim Rementer, who has worked closely with Nora
Thompson Dean to preserve the Lenape language.
7. Personal communication from Jim Rementer.
8. Also Jim Rementer, personal communication. The Moravian missionary john Heck-
ewelder gives the following words for the concept woman in his glossary of Delaware:
ochque=woman, wusd6chqueu=young woman, virgin, ochquetschitsch=girl, quetit=fe-
male infant, gichtochqueu=aged woman, chauchschfsis=very old woman (Heckewelder
1819:363).
9. Oral sources corroborate this from the 20th century as well. Interview with
Leonard Thompson, june 6, 1991, Oklahoma Living Legends, 91.046, Oklahoma Historical
Society, Oklahoma City; Nora Thompson Dean, "Delaware Indian Reminiscences," Bul-
letin of the Archaeological Society of New Jersey, 35, 1978.
98 CLEARING A PATH

10. Moral condemnation may have fallen equally upon a man; see the following ex-
change: "Is adultery considered criminal in the woman7-lt is very much SO; Is it so, in
the man7-lt is equally criminal" (Weslager 1978:104).
11. References to the problem with colonial sources are numerous; important issues
for Native American studies are discussed in Martin 1987 and Mihesuah 1998.
12. The source is copied from the Timothy Pickering Papers at the Buffalo and Erie
County Historical Society, Buffalo, and contains no information concerning either au-
thor, date, or place. A note attached to it informs that John Witthoft judges it to be circa
1820, probably from Grand River Munsees, Ontario. He speculates that the text may
have been written down by one of the Moravian missionaries at New Fairfield. The in-
formation in it is consistent with a ceremony described from Munsee Delawares, as a
springtime annual ceremony (see Harrington 1913:230). But Peter Undestrom refers to
springtime ceremonies among the lenapes (it would have been people later designated
as Unami Delawares) already in the 1650s (Undestrom 1962:119, 124).
13. Both Post's and Hays's accounts have recently been published in Grumet
1999:58-61.
14. Those knowledgeable on Delaware and Munsee culture no doubt have more and
different questions to pose to these extracts. It is possible that Kenny was referring to a
Munsee tradition, while the others had observed an Unami Delaware ceremony. How-
ever, this would not alter the basic argument that attention to gender will yield other in-
formation and place the sources in a different light.
15. Usten also to oral testimony: "Interview with Anna Anderson Davis, Aug 5,
1968," T-298, The Doris Duke Collection, American Indian Oral History, Western History Col-
lection, Norman, Oklahoma; "Interview with Nora Thompson Dean, April 1968," T-296,
The Doris Duke Collection. American Indian Oral History, "Interview with Bessie Hunter
Snake. June 18. 1967," T-88, The Doris Duke Collection. American Indian Oral History; "Inter-
view with Mr. Edward Thompson. 13 Feb 1984." Oklahoma Living Legends 84.018.
16. Agreement is general concerning this; see. for instance. lang (1998: 208-212);
Trexler (1995:176); Jacobs et al. (1997).
17. An interesting discussion is found in Hopkins (1998). His article looks at how in
U.S. culture masculinity is an attribute that is seen as naturally founded in biology and at
the same time acquired through proper upbringing and behaviors.

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Political Economy
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Marxism and Historical Materialism In
American Indian History

F'atriciaC:. )\lbers

ecent deconstructionist, postmodernist, and postcolonialist turns in his-

R torical studies, with their emphasis on highly relativistic and culturally
constructed readings of American Indian history, appear to have cast aside
some of the more generalizing and comparative interpretations of history
grounded in material conditions and forces. Indeed, materialism appears passe
today whether its theoretical origins are traced to the classical models of lais-
sez-faire markets, the evolutionary paradigms of Darwinian biology, or the la-
bor theory of value in Marxian political economy.
As a mossback scholar with a decidedly materialist and neo-Marxian bent, I
am admittingly and unabashedly burdened by a lichenous perspective that,
while flourishing in an earlier era, seems to have little place to nest and spread
in the scholarly climate of the present. In reflecting upon why some of my own
theoretical proclivities are no longer in vogue in today's intellectual circles, I
thought it would be instructive to begin at the point of opposition-at the
place where the grounds of modern cultural interpretation stand the farthest
from some of the materialist places I have sat. By positioning my perspective
and historical materialism more generally in the face of its opposition, I hope
to be able to critically assess the limits and weaknesses of both. I also hope to
articulate their possibilities and strengths, and in the process, suggest how cul-
tural constructionists might meet materialists on common grounds in ways
that can enrich each other's work.

LABOR AND HISTORICAL MATERIALISM

One of the many conundrums of modern scholarship in American Indian his-

tory is how do we get construction and condition, agency and cause, the sub-
108 CLEARING A PATH

ject and its object, to properly dance with each other without overstepping the
movement of the other. How do we write histories of American Indian labor, as
one example, that simultaneously give expression to the voices and memories
of the workers and the forces and events surrounding their work? How do we
reveal the historical processes by which the cultural constructs of workers both
transform and are transformed by the material conditions under which they
work? Can we combine these perspectives, or in the end are we obliged to
write different sorts of histories?
Approaches to cultural constructions and material conditions typically meet
history on different grounds. On one side of the ledger are scholars who inter-
pret historical phenomena as constructed from human thought and imagina-
tion. Railing against empirical positivism and naive forms of realism, they deny
the ontological existence of an object world outside a universe of culturally
mediated signs and symbols. Human agency is heavily weighted by the cultural
memories that people bring to their action. It is relative and particularized. It is
grounded, contingent on the historically specific context of its creation, and in-
terpreted at the sites of its making. Essentialism in all of its forms is opposed
because agency is presumed to have no generic dimensions or eternal truths.
On the other side are scholars who interpret history as an epiphenomenon of
the material universe. Standing opposed to cultural idealism and conventional-
ism, they reduce all symbols and their meanings to a physical object base and
deny them a separate ontological status. Human agency is largely ephemeral,
impacted and conditioned by forces that reside in the recurring properties of
the material world. Generalized patterns and causal processes can be discov-
ered and explained for these properties through neutral and comparative meth-
ods of analysis that, idealistically at least, stand outside the historically situated
appearance of the phenomena under study and the vagaries of human subjec-
tivity. Of course, most historical scholars do not follow either extreme: they sit
somewhere in between and muddle (or should I say fudge?) their way through
the subjectivist/objectivist quagmire. What differentiates them is not whether
they displace a thing by its thought, or vice versa, but the prevailing direction
from which they enter and leave their historical studies. And this is certainly
true for most historical and ethnographic studies of American Indian labor, in-
cluding those which begin and end their work at the doorstep of materialism.
In its most generic sense, materialism identifies any of a variety of ap-
proaches that take it as axiomatic that the physical world and its myriad corpo-
real properties have an existence independent of the way we deal with them. A
book, a table, or a spoon has an object constancy. Except for alteration and de-
terioration, their appearances remain stable over time and space. For material-
 MARXISM AND HISTORICAL MATERIALISM IN AMERICAN INDIAN HISTORY 109

ists, the fixed conditions of these objects have a bearing on how they get con-
fronted, interpreted, and used, even in different culturally mediated settings,
and as such, these must be considered (although not necessarily privileged) in
the process of analysis.
How historical scholars travel a materialist path is quite varied, however.
But of all the different materialist road maps, the one that has had the most
profound and lasting influence on studies in American Indian history draws on
the insights and work of Karl Marx (1947,1963, 1967, 1970, 1973) and his as-
sociate, Friedrich Engels (1947). Both men were much influenced by the earlier
writings ofLewis Henry Morgan (1851,1871,1877) who was known not only
for his ethnographic research among the Iroquois but for his ethnological theo-
ries on kinship and evolution as well. Theoretical approaches that trace their
intellectual roots to Marx and Engels generally fall under the rubric of historical
materialism whose dialectical methodology differentiates it from the more
ahistoric and empiricist materialisms that have long dominated thinking in the
American social sciences.
Historical materialism entered studies of American Indian history in the
1940s, but due to the anticommunist and anti socialist sentiment of the times,
its Marxian intellectual origins went largely unacknowledged (Klein 1980;
Moore 1980, 1993; Leacock 1982). It was most evident in a body of studies, in-
cluding works by Oscar Lewis (1942), Esther Goldfrank (1945), and joseph
jablow (1951), that focused on various tribal nations in the Plains. In this and
later periods, writings on the Pueblo (Wittfogel and Goldfrank 1957), the Tlin-
git (Oberg 1973), Innu (Leacock 1954), Dene (Aberle 1967), and Anishinabe
(Hickerson 1960, 1967, 1971, 1973) extended the application of historical ma-
terialist theory to other regions of North America. And in 1971, Eleanor Lea-
cock and Nancy Lurie coedited a popular textbook that contained historical
materialist approaches to reconstructing tribal histories.
By the end of the 1970s, historical materialism began to take root in other
areas of American Indian historical study, and it did so largely in three different
but related bodies of scholarship. It held a significant position in the literatures
on the European trade where it was especially evident in the work of scholars
such as Rolf Knight (1978), Bruce Cox (1984), john Moore (1974), Alan Klein
(1977), and Adrian Tanner (1979). Eleanor Leacock (1978, 1981) was also instru-
mental in introducing Marxian theory to the newly developing field of feminist
studies, and many of the writings (Nowack 1976; Perry 1979; Rothenberg 1980;
Conte 1982; Albers 1985) about American Indian women from this and later
times reveal the influence of a historical materialist perspective. The writings
ofJoseph Jorgenson (1971,1972,1978) opened the door to historical material-
110 CLEARING A PATH

ism and dependency theory in studies of economic development and the mak-
ing of government policy in Indian country. Louise Lamphere (1976), Richard
Clemmer (1977), Gary Anders (1979), Lorraine Ruffing (1979), Cardell Jacobson
(1984), Thomas Biolsi (1992, 1993), Matthew Snipp (1986a, 1986b), and
Lawrence Weiss (1984) are among the long line of scholars whose work is tied
in one degree or another to this branch of historical materialism.
Whether scholars connect their work to Marx or not, it is clear that his
ideas have permeated a significant segment of the scholarly writings in Ameri-
can Indian history, especially those which touch on various facets of political
economy. What much of this writing shares in common is an interest in under-
standing the transformative power of material forces at the sites where they in-
tersect with society and ideology. The introduction of the horse, for example,
brought considerable change to tribal nations in the 18th- and 19th-century
Plains. The conditions of its material presence, including access to grazing
grounds, certainly affected how the animal became incorporated into the life of
the region as the determinists (Osborn 1983) claim, but they did so through the
engagement of human labor shaped by complex social relationships and ide-
ologies preexisting within the region's various modes of production (Albers and
James 1985, 1991). It is the socially and ideologically mediated articulations of
material forces at particular sites of production that draw the interest of histor-
ical materialists. Over the years, it has been common for critics (Churchill 1983)
to equate historical materialist approaches with economic determinism. And
while there is no question that some of the scholarship linked to Marx repre-
sents a crass, simplistic, and overly reductionist form of materialism, historical
materialist methodology is not unidirectional but dialectical (Hobsbawn 1980).
Human labor is the starting point for studies that draw on the theories and
methods of historical materialism (Hobsbawn 1980: 12-13; Wolf 1982:73-75).
Indeed for Marx, labor was a definitive and essential condition of the human
species. It consists of the actions, both mental and manual, by which humans
transform nature into products for their own use and exchange. Not only does
it include the various transactions, techniques, and knowledges by which na-
ture is transformed, but it also covers the communicative relationships through
which the transformations are enacted. As such, labor is implicitly a sociocul-
tural phenomenon, and for Marx (1970:31-32), it was at all times and places a
particularized phenomenon. Labor is the point at which the material (or nat-
ural) world is appropriated and mediated through human action and thought,
the point at which social relatedness is created and challenged in the making of
human existence. Historical materialism certainly favors the material world in
its analyses, but it does not equate or reduce human existence to that world.
 MARXISM AND HISroRICAL MATERIALISM IN AMERICAN INDIAN HIS1DRY 111

As Eric Hobsbawn (1980) writes in his introduction to Marx's Pre-Capitalist

Economic Formations. historical materialism is a multidimensional theory in
which the economic. social. and ideological dimensions of history are insepara-
ble and enfolded in certain elementary assumptions about human labor. Insofar
as historical materialist theory posits certain axioms about a universal dimen-
sion to human labor. it carries with it the burdens of many essentializing theo-
ries that "naturalize" a particular construction of humanness. But insofar as it
also entertains the idea that labor unfolds dynamically in the simultaneous and
dialectical engagement of the relations of production and forces of production.
it is not reductionist or deterministic. The social order is not a consequence of
the material order. or vice versa; the two have coevolved historically and
changed in tandem with the contradictions their relationship inevitably pro-
vokes. How the two get connected. however. is historically specific. There was
no universal history for Marx. but there were broader configurations. or modes
of production. that represented generalized constructs of the possible ways la-
bor gets realized in the engagement of particular social formations and mater-
ial forces at different points in history (Wolf 1982:21).

CULTURAL CONSTRUCTS

One of the most positive outcomes of the deconstructionist turn in modern

scholarship is that it has forced those of us interested in materialist histories of
American Indians to revisit and rethink some of the ways we have come to un-
derstand and represent this subject. One ofthe central weaknesses of historical
materialist theory has been its reliance on European-derived analytical cate-
gories. and its failure to fully describe and understand the cultural construc-
tions that have defined work and exchange for particular tribal nations at
specific times in history. It still surprises me how we know so much about the
material conditions and outcomes of various acts oflabor but understand so lit-
tle about the experience of performing labor and even less about the languages
and cultural constructs within which its agency gets expressed.
In the area of American Indian ethnography. there is an enormous literature
that focuses on the techniques. tools. and products oflabor. There are in-depth
descriptions of subsistence work from salmon fishing to the preparation of
acorn meal and from buffalo hunting to the cultivation of corn. There are de-
tailed accountings of the methods behind the making of baskets. canoes. bows.
and cradles. and even more comprehensive representations of the form and de-
sign of the finished products. In historical research. analyses oftraders' ledgers
112 CLEARING A PATH

yield solid data on the volume and types offurs, hides, and provisions traded to
Europeans, the identities of the producers, and the timing and location of their
production. By and large, the semantic and cultural frameworks within which
particular labors and their products are conceptualized and applied remain
largely uncharted. This is true for all types of labor whether it is a form of
waged employment, petty commodity production, household labor, or subsis-
tence work. And it stands in marked contrast to the "thick descriptions" of sys-
tems of naming and meaning associated with medicine, religion, ethnoscience,
and kinship. Although cultural constructionists have applied a great deal of ef-
fort to unraveling the language and logic behind these areas of knowledge and
experience, most have not been as eager to examine them in the flow of ordi-
nary life events associated with work and day-to-day provisioning.
With limited exception, the communicative context of labor and laboring in
American Indian history is unexplored. One of the exceptions is found in the lit-
erature on the fur trade where attempts (Tanner 1979; Brightman 1993) have
been made to identify and interpret the cultural perspectives that surround
hunting. The word respect, as one example, frequently appears in this literature
to gloss a particular cultural attitude that involves a special kinship and spiri-
tual reverence toward the taking of beaver, buffalo, white tail deer, and other
animals whose products entered the European trade. Its interpretation pro-
vides a way to make sense of the motivations and choices behind certain hunt-
ing practices and behaviors. And this has been especially useful in
understanding how the ideological and material worlds of American Indians in-
terfaced in complex and sometimes even contradictory ways to resist, chal-
lenge, and accommodate the intrusion of European modes of production.
The idea of respect certainly carries spiritual values, but it also embodies
other dimensions. Among the Dakota, as one example, it has a much broader
usage. The word ohoda (to honor or to respect), is a synergistic concept that
blends and weaves a single idea across many different areas of experience.
When speaking in English of their labors in quilt making, Dakota women use
the word "respect" to reveal a regard for the materials, skills, knowledge, and
inspiration required in making quilts of high quality and striking design. It also
expresses a reverence for the spiritual figures who enable the labor and an ad-
miration for the people who will be honored and gifted by its completion. The
word has many different but related applications that reveal not only a multi-
faceted relationship to quilt making but also an intrinsic sense of connected-
ness between the quitter and her social, material, and spiritual worlds (Albers
and Medicine 1983; MacDowell and Dewhurst 1997). As such, it provides a crit-
ical point of entry for following the threads of meaning, desire, and motivation
 MARXISM AND HISlDRICAL MATERIALISM IN AMERICAN INDIAN HISlDRY 11 3

that enrich a woman's labor and the cultural universe within which she works.
Understanding what words mean and how they get used can be a daunting
task because it requires a full-dress review of a language and the ability to hear
words at work, no pun intended, in the situations in which they are most likely
to be uttered. What does Dene sheep raising "talk" sound like, what about the
language ofYurok salmon fishing, the factory speech of Anishinabe assembly
line workers, or the Micmac conversations that surround potato picking. And
what about the various vernaculars of "reservation" English, French, or Spanish
in which a rich body of idiomatic expression surrounds economic activity that
is not easily equated with customary usage among other European language
speakers. Some may groan over what might be considered an excessively rela-
tivistic turn here. Yet it is safe to say that we cannot reliably discuss acts of his-
toric, much less modern, American Indian labor unless we can be sure we are
talking about the same thing from a Hopi, Haida, or Hochunk language per-
spective. Without prior linguistic and cultural knowledge, it is easy to essen-
tialize indigenous perspectives in terms of the categories and assumptions that
dominate mainstream economics.
Many may argue that while in-depth reconstructions of the semantic mean-
ings behind labor and their application in concrete work situations are an ideal
we ought to strive toward, at least in theory, they are hard to put it into prac-
tice especially when most of the documentary sources historians rely upon for
reconstructing the social economies of the past do not permit this. My re-
sponse is that if we have detailed knowledge of language practice, which can
be derived for a number of languages including Ojibwe, Cree, Dakota, Lakota,
Cheyenne, Cherokee, Navajo, Apache, and Shoshone, we can engage a practice
that Frederic Gleach (1996) has called "controlled speculation." In the face of al-
ternative interpretations, we can identify those which seem to make the best
fit or the most sense in relation to native language practice. Of course, lan-
guage usage today is not what it was two hundred years ago, but it's better
than nothing at all and certainly superior to using words such as "sharing,"
"gifting," "making," "hunting," "trading," and "hiring" without any appreciation
for subtle meanings and uses in Native languages much less Native vernaculars
of English, French, or Spanish.
Knowing what concepts are used for labor and its associated work activities
and understanding how these are applied contextually are more than an intel-
lectual exercise. They can have concrete bearing on the outcome of legal cases
where courts are required to interpret how American Indians understood the
language of treaties to which they were signatories. In an important fishing
rights case involving the state of Idaho and the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes, the
114 CLEARING A PATH

widely respected linguist Sven Ujeblad argued that the language that preserved
hunting rights in the Fort Bridger li"eaty of 1858 would have been understood
by Shoshone- and Bannock-speakers to include activities customarily labeled
fishing and gathering in English. In these Numic languages, the word glossed as
"hunting" is identified with a specific style of procural that can be applied
equally well to the pursuit of fish, plants, or game. As Ujeblad argued in the
trial proceedings (State a/Idaho v. Gerald Cleo Tinno 1970), the Shoshone and
Bannock who signed the treaty would have understood a more general reading
of "hunt" than is typically the case in English. By the way, the court ruled in fa-
vor of the Shoshone-Bannock litigant (State a/Idaho v. Gerald Cleo Tinno 1972).
As we know little of the particular cultural constructions or semantic ex-
pressions surrounding labor in a concrete or abstract sense, we also have a
long way to go in understanding the specific agencies, motivations, desires,
and needs that have drawn American Indian people to specific labors at differ-
ent times and places. Life histories and autobiographies represent a starting
point for these understandings, and there are some, including Guests Never
Leave Hungry (1969), which contain very compelling narratives about people's
involvement in work and the cultural reasoning behind particular kinds of la-
bor. There are also encouraging signs in some of the recent writings (Hosmer
1991, 1997, 1999; Littlefield and Knack 1996; Iverson 1997) on wage labor and
entrepreneurship that give voice to the workers and their experiences. Yet,
overall, a comprehensive knowledge of the cultural principles and sensibilities
surrounding work, either in a specific or general sense, is still lacking. What we
need to know is how do indigenous cultural perspectives shape the ways peo-
ple experience labor at particular work sites, and how do these perspectives
change and/or persist in the context of this work?
Above all, studies need to go beyond generalized lists (Vinje 1985; Trosper
1999) of value orientation, many of which fail to show how a cultural principle
or sensibility gets expressed in concrete worlds of discourse and experience.
For example, if the labor surrounding the acquisition and disbursement of
wealth is interpreted differently in American Indian cultures than it is in the
mainstream cultures of Euro-Americans, what does this mean in specific tribal
settings? Does it carry the same meanings for the Pequot as it does for the
Yakama? What implications does it have for tribal groups entering the world of
casinos and high stakes gambling? How do these new forms of wealth creation
get inscribed, experienced, and even contested on the casino floors where
tribal members work and play, in the offices of the tribal governments and
management companies that run high-stake gaming, and in the flow of tribal
life outside the bingo hall? What kinds of tensions and contradictions emerge
 MARXISM AND HISTORICAL MATERIALISM IN AMERICAN INDIAN HISTORY 115

when different expectations about the acquisition and disbursement of wealth

collide? For cultural constructs to be something more than vacuous abstrac-
tions, they need to be studied in concrete contexts. In the fashion of loretta
Fowler's work (1987) on the contested meaning of symbols among the Atsina,
we not only need to know the cultural constructs tribal communities actually
share around the acquisition and disbursement of wealth, but we also need to
understand how these are expressed, negotiated, and challenged in the places
where people actually produce and distribute their wealth.
Scholars who study labor in American Indian history have much to gain
from understanding the cultural constructs that express and give agency to a
people's economic activity, but there are dangers, too. One of these is the ten-
dency toward an exoticism that either overdetermines the cultural uniqueness
of what people are doing or misinterprets the cultural cues that govern certain
labor efforts and their associated exchanges. Above all, we need to ask whether
certain cultural representations really reveal any concrete tribal perspective or
are simply another European-based construction dressed in exoticized cultural
clothing. Attempts to interpret the cultural markers of work and trade some-
times imply, if not downright deny, the possibility that any sort of pragmatic
logic stands behind individual and group choices. All kinds of forces, from the
aesthetic to the spiritual, become driving influences in interpreting the motiva-
tions of American Indians without due weight given to material considerations.
But to say that practical knowledge and choice exist is not to say that these fol-
low the same lines of rationality present in mainstream economic thought, be-
cause they clearly do not. There is reason to be leery of certain constructionist
efforts to read the cultural content of economic activity, not because meaning
is unimportant but because we need to respect the difficulties involved in rep-
resenting things correctly. Not being able to do this, it is sometimes better to
acknowledge the inherent biases of using outside analytical categories rather
than pursuing reconstructions of Native discourse that end up being something
other than what the authors purport them to be.
Myopism is also a danger in cultural constructionist approaches. The in-
quiry gets so centered on the details that the larger conditions under which la-
bor unfolds and the structures within which it operates elude the researcher or
get discounted because they do not flow within the discourse of the inquiry it-
self. Although it has become fashionable oflate to dismiss the "reality" of social
arrangements outside and beyond the agency of individual actors, this denies
the possibility of history and the social weight that prior generations bring to
bear on the outcome of their successors' lives and future. like many oftoday's
postmodernists, I once dismissed the existence of superordinate structures, in
116 CLEARING A PATH

cultural constructs, social formations, or modes of production, seeing the gen-

eral as simply the totality of all its individual representations and transactions.
Over the past three decades, I have come to recognize that the cacophony of
individual agency, action, and expression is realized within the existence of a
series of shared constructs, albeit not always consensual, that make up not only
the languages and worldviews in which we think and voice our ideas but also
the social formations and material orders in which we realize and engage our
actions.
Language and ideologies do have their own structures and movements that
are dependent on the people who engage them but are independent of them as
well. Insofar as language, ideas, and symbols transcend individual lives and life-
times, they exist as abstractions and carry qualities that are not determined by
the agency ofsingle actors. These larger orders involve frames of reference that
differ, both logically and logistically, from those that focus on the discourse and
actions of individuals.
Historically, there were abstract and conventionalized expectations for as-
signing labor along gender lines in American Indian societies. These expecta-
tions were embedded in a series of complex cultural constructs about
personhood, age, kinship, and rank. They were also shaped by cultural ideas
about the conduct of work under particular circumstances and in relation to
specific tools and resources. Importantly, cultural constructs about the division
of labor are not always tightly wedded to the way things actually get enacted.
They do not follow immovable, formulaic paths. Nevertheless, they still exist as
a body of ideas that people share and engage when they conduct their work.
These constructs form a map: they are points of reference when negotiating
various domains of work experience. They are not, however, the territory
where the work actually unfolds.
The territory encompasses the social and material worlds that labor en-
gages. It involves the people.who collaborate in the act of production, the re-
sources that are transformed in the process, and the tools that enable the
transformation. The territory often contains features not easily read or even reg-
istered by a preexisting and culturally constituted map, and, indeed, the two
may even stand in contradiction to each other. When the historical settings un-
der which American Indian women and men worked were changed by coloniza-
tion, tribal nations not only confronted new material conditions and social
relationships for carrying on their labor but also new ideas and maps for engag-
ing their work. One of the most bitterly contested sites of colonial domination
stood and still stands on the back of gender and its relation to work (Leacock
1980; Shoemaker 1995; Perdue 1998). Colonization created grounds for innova-
 MARXISM AND HISTORICAL MATERIALISM IN AMERICAN INDIAN HISTORY 117

tion and change but also resistance and continuity in the way American Indian
people labored. Unless we see the maps and their territories as distinct. at least
heuristically. it is impossible to understand how the two intersected.
When theorists use cultural constructs to absorb the layers of social rela-
tionship and praxis in which labor is actually enacted. they enter what Margaret
Archer (1990) describes as the pitfall of conflationism. Lacking an independent
analytical status. action simply becomes a mirror of thought without its own
agency. Of course. action and thought are related and labor is both a mental
and manual process. but in order to understand how these pairings relate to
one another. they need to be disentangled in the course of analysis and inter-
pretation. Otherwise. the results are endless tautologies. Or else. they become
spurious distinctions where subsistence is identified as an economic act under
capitalism but a social one in indigenous economic settings. In both situations.
these acts engage labor that is socially constituted. and in both. nature is trans-
formed into products. goods. and commodities. The difference does not lie in
the relative sociality of the acts but in the particular social agencies from which
and to which production is directed. That economic activity appears to lack a
social or cultural referent under capitalism is only an illusion that hides the re-
lations of power in this particular mode of production.
Historic and ethnographic studies (Brightman 1993; DeMallie 1993; Kan
1993; Basso 1996; Schwartz 1998) with constructionist leanings have advanced
our understanding of the many-sided ways cultural knowledge and sensibilities
permeate and permutate local discourse and praxis. But the question that still
must be addressed is whether cultural interpretations are sufficient for repre-
senting the complex set of stories that make up American Indian history. The
answer depends. of course. on what kinds of knowledge are being pursued
through a particular inquiry. If the point of study is to determine how meaning
and agency interface. or how people invest their work with meaning. then
hermeneutic forms of interpretation are the most appropriate path to follow.
But when questions seek materialist forms of explanation. the lines of inquiry
travel different routes. Let me illustrate.
One of the most contested subjects in American Indian studies is the origin
of potlatching among the tribal nations of the Northwest Coast. In the 1960s.
several anthropologists (Suttles 1960; Vayda 1961; Piddocke 1965) explained
the potlatch. its associated labor and exchange. as a mechanism for redistribut-
ing resources in the face of environmental variation. Without question. the
constraints and opportunities for prestige giving were influenced by their ma-
terial contexts. including the character of local environments. population de-
mographics. and the wider economies of the fur trade and industrial
118 CLEARING A PATH

capitalism. It is problematic, however, to argue that any of these conditions ne-

cessitated, much less created, the complex cultural constructions that "caused"
potlatching in the first place (Drucker and Heizer 1967). Importantly, what mo-
tivates people to potlatch is different from what enables them to do so, and the
answer to one does not explain the other. Sergei Kan's masterful construction-
ist approach (1993) to the Tlingit potlatch reveals how this institution is em-
bedded in a complex series of symbols and beliefs that address the immortality
of individuals and the social groups to which they belong. In order to under-
stand why Tlingit hold these ceremonies and invest considerable labor in their
performance, historical interpretation requires a constructionist course. That
potlatches may have other intended and unintended outcomes, including the
redistribution of wealth, is beside the point because intentions and conse-
quences are not the same thing. On the other hand, a constructionist interpre-
tation begs the question of why the Tlingit have the capacity to perform the
potlatch in the particular ways they have done so in historic times or, to put it
another way, what conditions in the Tlingit's material and social universe allow
the potlatch and the cultural symbolism associated with it to reveal themselves.

MATERIAL CONDITIONS

Karl Marx's famous and oft-quoted dictum (1963:15) that "men make their own
history, but they do not make it just as they please" is relevant here. For while
the thick representations of language and cultural agency enlighten and bring
rich texture to our understanding of people's experience, they are still inade-
quate to the task of accounting for many of the conditions under which people
live and make their choices (Dirlik 1999). How labor is performed, what prod-
ucts it produces, and how these get exchanged are constituted in and consti-
tuted by universes of social relationship that include, but at the same time exist
beyond, the actors and the cultural meanings they bring to their experience. To
presume otherwise is to engage in a naive form of solipsism.
The universes of plants, animals, and minerals that humans transform for
use and exchange exist under conditions independent of any perceptions we
may have of them, and although we have a selective awareness of them and
even appropriate them through the legacy of our own cultural knowledge, their
presence in our lives is not totally determined by ours. Humans enter other
natural (material) worlds in mutually determined and dialectical ways. Some
studies (Bishop 1972; Feit 1988) clearly show this, and one of the ways they
have been able to do so is through materially based considerations of plant and
 MARXISM AND HISTORICAL MATERIALISM IN AMERICAN INDIAN HISTORY 119

animal ecologies. Even some of the most scientifically positivist approaches

(Hayden 1992) are useful here. By providing insights into the conditions within
which various species survive, flourish, and decline, we are in a better position
to see how a particular resource's existence enters into a tribal nation's ideas
and acts of production, and also to understand the variable ways in which
American Indian people were (and still are) able to engage these resources to
their own ends and purposes. Unquestionably, the fundamental conditions of
species survival have been altered by a human presence, including, as some
scholars (Cronon 1983; White 1984; White and Cronon 1988; Krech 1999) ar-
gue, by the approaches American Indians took to their environment. The uses
to which nature is put and the conditions of its appropriation clearly shape the
way it, exists both within and outside a world of human discourse and praxis.
But again to understand how the two affect and are affected by each other's
presence, each needs to have a separate analytical status.
It is not the conditions of the material world alone that participate in the
making of labor, because humans work within discursive spaces where their ef-
forts are also interwoven into far-reaching networks of social relationship. The
path of our individualized labors radiates out and is connected to others in lo-
cal, regional, and global landscapes. In the process, the patterns of these wider
landscapes return and exert an influence on both the position and course of
our individualized efforts. Making this claim in no way presupposes, or even
demands, any essentialist theory or canon. It dismisses neither the strength of
individual agency nor the press of particular meanings and desires; it only ar-
gues that these do not emerge in isolation divorced from other worlds of
agency and meaning.
More than any other place in American Indian historical studies, research on
the fur trade clearly reveals the press of wider forces on local lives and agency,
and it has done so in many different ways. Research on the fur and hide trades
(Knight 1968; Bishop 1974; Ray 1974, 1988, 1990; Klein 1977, 1993; Kay 1979;
Ray and Freeman 1978; Cox 1984, 1993; Krech 1984; Swagerty 1988) has given
evidence of how participation in European markets altered the technologies of
work, the prioritization of tasks, the sites and timing of production, and the re-
lationships that organized particular labor activities as well as managed access
to land and resources. It has also shown how involvement in the trade influ-
enced the locations and movements of tribes as well as the hostilities and al-
liances between them (Wishart 1979; Swagerty 1988; Albers 1993, t 996).
Studies (Knight 1978; Cox 1984, 1993; Foster 1988; Klein 1977; Moore 1996)
that follow a historical materialist approach have also attempted to document
patterns of dependency and to show how peoples' livelihoods were affected by
120 CLEARING A PATH

the forces and movements of markets beyond their borders and outside their
direct control. For historical materialists, American Indian labor and its associ-
ated modes of production were altered in fundamental ways under coloniza-
tion, not only through the arrival of new tools and other commodities but also
through the introduction of foreign institutions and relationships that made ac-
cess to these things possible.
In recent years, there has been a great deal of discussion and debate sur-
rounding the extent to which American Indians were able to press their own
cultural agendas and express their own agency in the face of economic institu-
tions with global power and reach (R. White 1983; Krech 1999). There is no
question that tribal nations exercised agency in negotiating their positions in
the European trade. They certainly shaped the social and cultural fields in
which the trade was conducted in their own communities, they demonstrated
discriminating taste in selecting what was offered at the trader's counter, and
they made decisions about the level and character of their participation in par-
ticular trades (8. White 1982, 1994; Anderson 1984; Merrell 1989). It is clear
that individual and collective tribal agencies played a role in directing the
course of fur trade history. And in some instances, these agencies might be
construed as "causal" or determinative of the directions that particular trade
formations took (Usner 1992). One would be hard-pressed, however, to deny
the fact that at a wider level most tribal nations, particularly in the eastern re-
gions of North America, had become dependent in some degree on market
forces and formations governed by mercantile capitalism, and that their depen-
dency unfolded as a result of conditions and terms of engagement outside their
direct or even indirect control. Recognizing its historical and regional peculiari-
ties, European mercantilism established conditions, structures, and processes
that had to be reproduced in order for its markets to survive and expand (Hick-
erson 1973; Wolf 1982). Unquestionably, these had an influence on the social
arenas within which tribal nations and trading companies were able to reveal
their respective agencies.
If attention to the structure offorces and formations beyond local agency is
required of scholarship for the fur trade era, it goes without saying that it is in-
dispensable for research in 20th-century history. It is hard to make sense of the
constraints and opportunities under which American Indian people exert their
cultural agencies in modern-day economies unless we understand how these are
also shaped by wider national and international conditions. Many of the forces
that impacted 20th-century American Indian agrarian enterprises demand ap-
proaches that consider how property, capital, and class intersect within and out-
side local reservation economies (Trosper 1978; Knack 1986, 1987; Mclaughlin
 MARXISM AND HISIDRICAL MATERIALISM IN AMERICAN INDIAN HISIDRY 121

1988; Carter 1990; Iverson 1997; lewis 1997; Sattler 1998). Without question,
many of the choices American Indian people made in their farming and ranch-
ing endeavors were motivated by their respective cultural agencies. Yet, at the
same time, these agencies generally unfolded under political economic condi-
tions that linked local affairs to national and even global interests.
Also, the conditions that push today's American Indians into particular la-
bor markets and force them out of others require a knowledge of broader eco-
nomic structures and processes, including patterns of labor force segmentation
and the workings of public versus private sector labor markets. Again, knowing
the character of wider market forces and their role in influencing labor force
participation does not deny the press of local cultural agencies. The ways in
which American Indian people negotiate employment opportunities is clearly
influenced by cultural attitudes about work, but the fact also remains that the
character of the markets in which this agency is exercised is also conditioned
by forces and formations outside their direct control (Knight 1978; Fairman-
Silva 1993; littlefield and Knack 1996). The fact that the labor markets Ameri-
can Indians enter are dominated by private sector work in Oklahoma while
those in North Dakota are predominately public sector helps us understand not
only the different ways women and men participate in these labor markets but
also some of the relative disparities in their incomes (Albers and Breen 1996).
Acknowledging the press of regional, national, and international market forces
requires perspectives radically different from those that focus their lens on sin-
gle events, eras, or tribal histories. It demands approaches that take a bird's-
eye view of their subject, that paint the broad strokes of history, that seek
answers through comparative analyses, and that draw on theories that make
the embeddedness of tribal nations in today's transnational modes of produc-
tion intelligible (Hall 1988; Moore 1989; Champagne 1992; Wilkins 1993; Jor-
genson 1998).
One of the problems with approaches that focus on determinative condi-
tions, structures, and forces is their steamroller effect. They tend to level every-
thing in their path to fit the agency and raison d'etre of an institution without
due consideration of the resistance, conflict, and contradictions it faces. Amer-
ican Indian labor history in California, for example, is not a one-sided story of
Spanish military power conquering Native peoples and forcing them into labor
servitude. It is also a story ofthe active resistance and rebellion of American In-
dian populations indentured to the Spanish (Swagerty 1984; Hurtado 1988).
The point to be made is that forces and formations that carry a "causal" weight
in particular situations do not do so in an unobstructed way. There are always
countervailing pressures, evoked and shaped by other conditions and struc-
122 CLEARING A PATH

tures and the agencies of the people who are affected by them. Recognizing
this does not demand, however, that we throw the proverbial baby out with the
bathwater.
If conflationism is a problem in constructionist approaches, then reduction-
ism is a flaw of many materialist forms of explanation. labor becomes little
more than a rote response to some condition or structure. It lacks not only au-
tonomy and agency but also a language, logic, and moral compass whose ori-
gins may be related to, yet independent of. the material universe in which it is
located. Today, the harvesting of wild rice for family use and market trade is an
important arena of production among the Anishinabe of Minnesota and Wis-
consin. In the 20th century, its commercial viability was increasingly challenged
by competition from agribusiness producers of cultivated "wild" rice (Vennum
t 988). As a result, Anishinabe earnings from wild rice production declined; and
just in the last decade, the price of hand-processed wild rice plummeted from
$ tOto $5 per pound. There is no question that various corporate market forces
are impacting the grounds and terms on which the Anishinabe are able to sus-
tain their own production for subsistence, ceremonial, and commercial pur-
poses, nor is there any doubt that some of these forces operate in circles
difficult for the Anishinabe to penetrate and transform. Nevertheless, alarmed
by the inroads of the cultivated varieties on their own production, and now by
corporately financed research on the wild rice genome, Anishinabe throughout
the upper Midwest are mobilizing to protect their control over and interests in
the integrity of the region's remaining stands of naturally occurring wild rice.
And they are launching their political and legal efforts through arguments and
actions that cannot be exclusively or even easily reduced to material terms. As
Thomas Vennum's history (1988) on the subject documents, wild rice is more
than a material means to make a living. It is a food heavily laden with social and
spiritual meanings, ends, and desires. Its historic and contemporary position in
Anishinabe life cannot be adequately understood without reference to its cul-
tural anchorings, and certainly the Anishinabe's labor investments in wild rice
production are motivated by cultural issues that may include but certainly tran-
scend the material value of wild rice either as subsistence or as a commercial
commodity. Understanding these issues clearly demands a perspective with
constructionist leanings. Yet, at the same time, knowledge about how and why
Anishinabe interests in wild rice are continually threatened in the modern
world requires a historical materialist approach that can make sense of the po-
litical and economic machinations of American agribusiness.
Again, the construction of labor and the condition of labor, though related,
are not the same thing. Understanding the cultural constructions behind peo-
 MARXISM AND HISlDRICAL MATERIALISM IN AMERICAN INDIAN HISlDRY 123

pies' intentions produces a knowledge that lends itself to forms of interpreta-

tion different from those that seek to account for the material base on which
people stand. Not only do the methodological and theoretical strategies differ,
but the way the questions are formulated differs. By extension, they lead to dis-
similar sorts of understandings neither of which needs to subvert or displace
the other. What happens in one arena of inquiry informs the other, but from an
analytical perspective neither can be reduced to the other (see Archer 1990).
These approaches are not irreconcilably antagonistic, as some scholars would
lead us to believe, but dialectically related positionings whose very presence is
revealed through the process of their mutual articulation.

HISTORICAL MATERIALISM REVISITED

In the past, tribal nations in North America represented what Eric Wolf de-
scribes as a "kin-ordered mode of production," which he defines as "a way of
committing social labor to the transformation of nature through appeals to fili-
ation and marriage, and to consanguinity and affinity" (1982:91). In other
words, kinship identifies and organizes the relationships upon which people
make claims to their material and social universes and through which they la-
bor in the making of their own existence.
In the 20th century, kinship remained central to the language of social rela-
tions that organized labor in many tribal communities and it also became a crit-
ical force in tribal survivance and autonomy (Lamphere 1977; Knack 1980;
Albers 1982; Hedley 1993). When I did fieldwork among the Dakota of the Mni-
wakan Oyate (Spirit Lake People) Reservation in North Dakota 40 years ago,
which I believe now qualifies as history, I wrestled with issues of construct and
condition especially as these related to understanding how kinship persisted as
a viable social formation for sustaining and reproducing the tribe's material
survival within a capitalist economy where most socially productive labor be-
comes alienated from kin-based relations.
Before I arrived at Spirit Lake in 1968, I knew the importance of various cul-
tural values that supported the importance of kinship, sharing, and generosity
among the Dakota from reading available ethnographies, oral histories, and lin-
guistic texts. Over the four years I lived there, I heard these values expressed,
and I saw them enacted in the flow of everyday life and over a wide range of
public events. People talked about their responsibilities to their kin; they spoke
about their own acts of sharing and generosity as a way to underscore their
identity as Dakota. Giving and sharing among kin were commonplace topics in
124 CLEARING A PATH

the conversations that Dakota held when they visited each other. I heard them
speak of their desire "to take care of their relations," "to help each other out,"
and to "be of use to people." I listened to stories about individuals whose ac-
tions illustrated generosity and also those whose behavior revealed its antithe-
sis in "stinginess." I watched parents admonish their children, "Don't be stingy"
or "Share that with brother." Indeed, ideas about kinship, sharing, giving, and
generosity entered discourse in such constant, seamless, and pervasive ways
that one could hardly doubt that these were at the heart of the Mniwakan Oy-
ate's scheme of values.
Not only did I hear these values expressed in countless conversations, but I
saw them enacted in a wide range of contexts. The sharing of food and cash
were routine among kin. Women often gifted each other with clothing, yard
goods, blankets, dishes, and a host of other domestic goods in the absence of a
special occasion. They gave up a nice shawl because a friend admired it, or they
gave a warm coat to someone who did not own one. Help in gardening, food
preparation, child care, wood cutting, automobile repair, and housework were
commonplace as well. Beyond the everyday acts of giving, generosity was re-
vealed in a host of public "doings" where people gave their time, money, and
goods to support a dance or a prayer meeting and where families came to-
gether to honor their own through elaborate feasts and giveaways.
Yet I also heard people express their reluctance to give, and I saw many sit-
uations where people did not share because they were unable to do so. I also
witnessed occasions when people were capable of meeting a request but failed
to honor it. I was witness to countless occasions where values were not upheld,
where fractures in social relationships even among close kin mitigated against
sharing, or where requests to give had become too burdensome to meet. Peo-
ple did make choices, often hard ones, about giving and sharing that some-
times conflicted with and contradicted their own espoused values. But this did
not surprise me because I did not expect that an "ideal" universe of values
would always be realized in a "real" world of lived experience.
What perplexed me more was the persistence of a larger pattern of kinship
and sharing. Why had it continued, albeit in an altered form, after the Dakota
were incorporated into a political economic formation governed by capitalism?
It would have been easy for me to appeal to a constructionist argument, in
which ideas are privileged in defining how people engage their worlds, how
they shape and resist outside influences, and ultimately how they persist with-
out destroying the integrity of their own cultural universes. There was no ques-
tion in my mind that the cultural constructs surrounding the Dakota's notions
of kinship and sharing had endured over time and changing circumstance. Nor
 MARXISM AND HISlORICAL MATERIALISM IN AMERICAN INDIAN HISlORY 125

did I have any doubt that the Spirit Lake Dakota's ideas held considerable force
in interpreting how they explained their actions and agency in everyday life. I
could have left my interpretation at that, but I did not do so because it begged
the question of why the ideas about kinship, sharing, and generosity still exer-
cised such a powerful presence in people's lives.
Ifl had made the assumption, as many scholars do, that kinship and sharing
are determined by the press of ideology, their persistence could have been ex-
plained as a form of cultural lag (the passive answer) or cultural resistance (the
active response). Here cultural constructs are conservative, that is, traditional,
elements that continue from one generation to the next largely through
processes of socialization and identity maintenance. The problem as I saw it
(and still see it) is that persistence gets enclosed in an ideological vacuum, sev-
ered from the social connections and existential conditions that give it life.
Instead, I took the position that kinship and the moral responsibilities it in-
spires remain vital because they have work to perform in the present (Albers
1982:253-254). More specifically, I argued that the particular manner in which
Dakota reservations were linked to the political economic formations of capi-
talism fostered the persistence of an attenuated arena of domestic provisioning
where a historically developed pattern of kinship continued to exist as the
dominant relations of production. The purpose of my analysis was to show not
only how this pattern of kinship dialectically engaged the material forces and
conditions that defined the Dakota's universe of work and provisioning three
decades ago, but also how it created a sense of cultural autonomy in a situation
where people had become dependent on transfer payments and transient wage
labor for their survival. In the end, I explained how this particular pattern of
kinship and sharing offered a workable solution for surviving the depths of
poverty that the wider economy and its federal policies had imposed on the
Dakota.
For Native North America, an important historical question is when and un-
der what conditions have kinship and its associated moral obligations been di-
minished rather than redeployed as was in the case for the Dakota at Spirit
Lake. One answer is offered by Max Hedley (1993) in his study of the Walpole
Island Reserve in Canada. His work shows that kinship cooperation and sup-
port were effective until World War II. After the war, when mass movements
into wage labor took place, customary patterns of collaboration among kin
were disrupted. Even though many kinship values continued to be upheld, at
least as ideals, the social relations through which these were realized in day-to-
day provisioning eroded as other agencies and interests laid claim to people's
labor and resources. But wage labor is not always erosive of kinship and its val-
126 CLEARING A PATH

ues. Kurt Peters's work (1996) on Acoma and laguna railway workers trans-
ported to California suggests that they recreated many aspects of their kinship
and domestic social formations in their new home as is the case with Mohawk
steelworkers in Brooklyn (Voget 1953; Hill 1987; Katzer 1988). That wage labor
does not always undermine kinship as a basis for organizing relations of provi-
sioning and support in American Indian communities does not mean, however,
that it should be ignored in understanding the persistence of kinship in its var-
ious forms. It only implies that the articulations between wage labor and kin-
ship are variable and need to be tracked and understood in relation to the
historically specific situations in which they are engaged.
Although many writings that draw on historical materialism as a theory and
methodology contain narrow, unidirectional, and even doctrinaire interpreta-
tions of what happens when kin-ordered social formations and modes of pro-
duction meet capitalism, these are not the inevitable and only result of this
approach. Quite the contrary, and notwithstanding some of Marx's own mis-
guided reconstructions of the place of kinship in various stages of history
(which most scholars now recognize were limited by the information available
to him in the 19th century), historical materialism is a perspective that can of-
fer much insight for understanding how labor is enveloped in the totality of re-
lationships connecting conditions, relations, and ideas and in the process
shaping the way history unfolds at particular places and moments in time.

CONCLUSION

Reading American Indian history with a heavy culturally relativistic hand often
creates an overly conventionalized view of human labor that conflates cultural
constructions with lived experience. It can lead to spurious and overly exoti-
dzed separations between the experiences of American Indian people and
those of European American, African American, and Asian American origins. On
the other hand, reading with a materialistic grip that is too tight often ignores
the culturally distinct and conventionalized ideas that mold and shape the ways
people confront their historical circumstances. It can create monolithic, unidi-
rectional models overdetermined by the weight of material conditions and
forces in history.
Historical materialism offers one methodology for bridging the divide be-
tween cultural constructs and material conditions, even though it is often mis-
understood and read in reductionist terms as a form of economic determinism.
Insofar as it understands material conditions as having a profound press on the
 MARXISM AND HlsroRICAL MATERIALISM IN AMERICAN INDIAN HlsroRY 127

human condition, it does give priority to the concrete corporeal world. But it is
not restricted to this. Good historical materialist work engages dialectically and
dynamically the conditions under which labor is engaged with the construc-
tions that shape its outcome--just as the poetics and politics of good cultural
theory dialectically and dynamically engage the constructions fashioning labor
against the conditions that serve as limits and possibilities to its final unfolding.

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Primary Sources: Indian Goods and
the History of American Colonialism
and the 19th-Century Reservation

Jacki Cfhompson Rand

"Culture" is never separate from, and cannot be understood apart

from, politics and economy.
-Micaela di leonardo, Exotics at Home, 1998

~hroughout the last half of the 19th century, American Indian tribes
1 throughout the Great Plains signed treaties and moved onto reservations
carved out of traditional Native homelands. Through their scholarship, histori-
ans and anthropologists alike have made reservation boundaries synonymous
with a now standard break in the periodization of American Indian studies.!
For historians, the time before reservation boundaries involved a great strug-
gle between westward expansion and tribal retention of political autonomy
and homelands. 2 Anthropologists write of the time before reservations as one
of cultures untainted by the radical changes imposed on tribes during the
reservation period. Following reservation treaties Native history becomes one
of economic, political, and cultural decline in the wake of individual tribal
struggles and failures to stop the American advance across the Plains (Mooney
1979:ix-x, 218).
Through more recent reservation literature runs a common thread that in-
directly challenges the reservation boundary as a fixed and impermeable tem-
poral marker, as well as a social, cultural, and political barrier (Asher 1999;
Hoxie 1995). Was the reservation boundary impermeable? Did it function in
the ways treaty documents described? What place did the reservation bound-
ary have in daily life? The quick answer is that reservation boundaries affected
13 8 CLEARING A PATH

Native American lives in different ways. In some. the significance of the bound-
ary is not whether it kept people in or out but how daily life required them to
transcend it. For others. the reservation boundary imposed a segregation from
mainstream American society that only reinforced tribal cultures and identities.
This essay participates in the inquiry that revisits the reservation period in
American Indian history. Taking material objects and the pathways they follow
as a point of exploration. it complicates the history of a more or less purpose-
ful and progressive "rational plan" of American hegemony over Native tribes.
the outcomes for Native peoples. and the idea of the reservation as a final
chapter. Following Nicholas Thomas's work on colonial culture. Arjun Appadu-
raj's study of the social life of things. and other theoretical sources. this essay is
taken from a larger project focused on the Kiowa tribe of the southern plains
that challenges the presumed inevitability of conquest. The question "What en-
dures?" frames the ironic consequences of peoples' daily lives. the social lives
of things that contribute to and interact with human practice. and the histories
of peoples joined to the objects with which their lives were intertwined.
Colonialism. Thomas argues in Colonialism's Culture: Anthropology. Travel and
Government (1994). has been misunderstood as a static. transhistorical condi-
tion, the product ofimposed hegemonic control by a metropolitan society over
peoples who are organized along tribal principles. This model is characterized
by primarily unequal economic and political relationships based in a Western
ideology of racial hierarchy and European quest for empire. Control over in-
digenous peoples was a key function of colonial governments. according to this
interpretation of colonialism. which they carried out through the deployment
of effective. consistent. and unified policies and goals. The structure and pur-
pose of colonialism were rational, progressive. and replicated from one locale
to another.
Thomas challenges the conventional concept of colonialism as an artifact of
the 19th century and its binary opposite of a postcolonial world. Rather. he of-
fers a model of an ongoing cultural process that creates and is created by eco-
nomic, social. and political relationships between the colonized and colonizers.
In addition to relegating colonialism to the distant past. scholars. Thomas ar-
gues. have exaggerated historic colonial power and granted it a consistency
and uniformity of purpose and action that is assumed rather than an accurate
reflection of local conditions. As a consequence scholars discount indigenous
noncompliance (ranging from rebellion to covert retention of cultural prac-
tices), diplomatic ingenuity, and other various strategies as temporary obsta-
cles to an inevitable conclusion. Colonizers were exploitive and destructive.
 PRIMARY SOURCES 139

but they also exhibited anxieties, limitations, and inadequacies that interfered
with the rational plan. It was not necessarily the best and brightest who peo-
pled the front lines of expansion, carried out colonial administration, fought
tribes, and implemented policies. Colonizers could be dependent on the peo-
ples they aspired to overcome, and even, at times, at their complete mercy. Ex-
cept in cases of total genocide, brute force was an option that frequently failed
as a means to establishing long-term total control. Rather, indigenous agency,
colonial compromise of its own mission, local conditions, and collaboration
based frequently on antithetical motives tell other complicated histories that lie
beneath the narratives of official colonial administrations and national histories.
The Kiowa reservation period, the subject ofthis essay, is a history of war
(Nye 1968), but it is also a history of conspiracy between the environment and
politics that brought starvation to the Kiowas' feet. In the face of American ex-
pansion, food and other goods continued to circulate, now across reservation
boundary lines. This activity provides a glimpse of the early reservation econ-
omy and Kiowa society, particularly involving relations between young men and
on- and off-reservation leaders. Young Kiowa men, archetypes of warrior cul-
ture and youthful audacity, maintained Kiowa social conventions and values
that shaped them, and challenged a weakening resolve among band leaders to
reject the reservation.
Negotiators of the 1867 Treaty of Medicine Lodge Creek, which defined the
Kiowa reservation, had verbally promised rations for the Indians if the leaders
signed the agreement (Kappler 1972:977-984). Rations were crucial to a transi-
tion from Plains to reservation as envisioned by the United States government
for the Kiowa people. The government proposed, however, to supplement, not
replace, the Indians' traditional diet with rations as they embarked on the
hoped-for transition to agriculture. The ill-conceived plan reflected the govern-
ment's failure to recognize the implications of the Kiowas' dwindling tradi-
tional sources of nutrition. A decreasing buffalo population in the southern
Plains reduced an important food source, requiring more time and labor to sus-
tain subsistence levels. Meanwhile, the reservation plan would divert the Indi-
ans' hunting and trading time and labor to agricultural start-ups. The combined
diversion of Indian labor to farming and delimited hunting territories reduced
the Indians' subsistence sources drastically.
The offering of food and annuities was consistent with the prereservation
history of diplomacy on the southern Plains. Gifts had long played an important
role between the tribes and earlier colonial occupiers. 3 Kiowa and Comanche
leaders first grew accustomed to receiving annuities and rations in the form of
140 CLEARING A PATH

gifts during the Spanish and Mexican colonial occupation of the Southwest and
Texas. After the 1820 Mexican revolution, levels of gift giving in New Mexico
and Texas became uneven and sporadic, but shortly thereafter the American
presence on the southern Plains introduced another source of gifts, while the
Texas Republic also used gifts in its political relations with the southern Plains
tribes (Anderson 1999).
The 1853 Treaty of Fort Atkinson between the United States and the south-
ern Plains tribes provided an $18,000 annuity as payment for the tribes' coop-
eration, and "for the better support and the improvement of the social
condition of the said tribes" for a period often years (Kappler 1972:600-602).
The government used the annuity payment for its purposes, the acculturation
of Native tribes, rather than turn the funds over to the Kiowas for their own
use. Thereafter, the Kiowas, Comanches, and Apaches gathered on the Arkansas
River for the annual distribution of goods paid for with their compensatory
funds. The tribes' experience with the Americans insinuated a suggestion of de-
pendency in their relationship, which the Kiowas routinely rejected by "auda-
cious and insolent" behaviors during the distribution of goods (Cumming
1856:72; Manypenny 1856:11).
Kiowa aggression was evident the following year, when annuity goods ar-
rived at Fort Atkinson on July 8 from Westport, Missouri. Again, the Kiowas
confidently displayed their usual contempt for the agent, Robert C. Miller, and
disregard for the authority he tried to exert. When he attempted to delay the
distribution until all the bands had arrived, the Kiowas left in great displeasure
only to return with armed young men who threatened to take the goods by
force. The Comanche contingent's intervention prevented violence, but the
Kiowas claimed the upper hand, the agent reported: "They said they knew their
Great Father sent them presents because he feared them; that he was no brave,
or he would not talk so much, but would act; would send the soldiers ...."
Agent Miller could only lament what he perceived as a practice of rewarding
the Kiowas with "presents as if they had done no wrong, and this regularly
every year" (Miller 1857:143). The wrong Agent Miller alluded to was Kiowa ag-
gressions against American travelers and settler homesteads in violation of
their agreements with the government.
The initial reports to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs from the Indian
agent of the Upper Arkansas attested to the changing face of southern Plains
diplomacy and economy as a result ofthe American presence. Dohausen, the
highly respected headman who was probably the last to command recognition
of his leadership from all Kiowa bands, described it himself as quoted in the
agent's report for 1857.
 PRIMARY SOURCES 141

The white chief is a fool; he is a coward; his heart is small-not larger

than a pebble stone; his men are not strong-too few to contend
against my warriors; they are women. There are three chiefs-the white
chief, the Spanish chief, and myself. The Spanish and myself are men; we
do bad towards each other sometimes, stealing horses and taking
scalps, but we do not get mad and act the fool. The white chief is a
child, and like a child gets mad quick. When my young men, to keep
their women and children from starving, take from the white man pass-
ing through our country, killing and driving away our buffalo, a cup of
sugar or coffee, the "white chief" is angry and threatens to send his sol-
diers. I have looked for them a long time, but they have not come; he is
a coward; his heart is a woman's. I have spoken. Tell the "great chief"
what I have said. IMiller 1858:991

Dohausen rightly recognized that the Americans did not conform to the spirit
of the old southern Plains economy. The establishment of the Santa Fe Trail in
the 1820s, the annexation of Texas in 1846, and a growing number of military
posts brought American settlers into the region. Demands to protect these
fledgling commercial links from hostile tribes guaranteed a growing federal
presence on the southern Plains. In 1857, as the Kiowas observed, the military
presence on the southern plains was indeed small and ineffective, a situation
favorable to the Kiowas, who found isolated American settlers inviting sources
of stock and captives for trade.
Ten years later, the Kiowas, Comanches, and Apaches signed the 1867
Treaty of Medicine Lodge Creek. From the outset, irregularities in the delivery
of rations strained relations between the reservation agent,Jesse Leavenworth,
and the Kiowa leaders. One account described a confrontation between Stum-
bling Bear and other Kiowa leaders and Agent Leavenworth. They charged the
agent with requiring Kiowa horses, mules, and cattle in exchange for the
promised rations. Stumbling Bear, speaking for the other leaders, said, "It is a
better thing to trade Ilndian goods) then Isicl take them by force" explaining
the Kiowas' willingness to exchange their animals for food (Stanton 1867).
Stumbling Bear's indictment of the agent's activities calls attention to the
distinction between Indian goods and trade goods. The term Indian goods, com-
monly found in primary government documents, is a polyvalent category and
object of exchange, that is, one defined by a process of circulation that desig-
nates the receivers and the givers as Indians. Indian goods might refer to trade
goods such as horses (stolen or traded), blankets, buffalo robes, hides ofvari-
ous game animals, and other masculine objects of exchange. It might also
142 CLEARING A PATH

signify goods, including cloth, beads, German silver, and rations presented by
the authorities to Indian negotiators during treaty talks. Indian goods, there-
fore, can be synonymous with other terms that appear in government docu-
ments. Trinkets or goo-gaws and curios may refer to items produced mainly by
Indian women, such as beaded moccasins, beaded bags, and jewelry, using In-
dian goods or manufactured goods such as Czech beads, metal studs, silver
buttons, and the findings required for the production of trinkets.
Indian goods, in treaty parlance, signified rations and annuity goods; trade
goods referred to horses, mules, and cattle, as well as manufactured goods that
circulated among tribes and traders. Stumbling Bear's admonition to the agent
made clear the Indians' awareness of the distinction. They were not inter-
changeable. Indian goods were a payment for ceded lands and cooperation.
They were not a gift, nor charity, but rather the government's obligation to the
Kiowa people for their signatures to the treaty of Medicine Lodge Creek. But
Stumbling Bear, and apparently other Kiowa headmen, were willing to provide
their trade goods for the Indian goods although they were not bound to do so
by treaty. According to Stumbling Bear, it was a "better way to trade for our
own goods, then take them by force," suggesting that the Kiowas had trade
goods and the means of force available to them, but chose the path of ex-
change over confrontation with the authorities.
The objects and the pathways they followed help to recover the histories of
people who are not so apparent in conventional sources. As Arjun Appadurai
reminds us:

Even if our own approach to things is conditioned necessarily by the

view that things have no meanings apart from those that human transac-
tions, attributions and motivations endow them with, the anthropologi-
cal problem is that this formal truth does not illuminate the concrete,
historical circulation of things ... even though from a theoretical point
of view human actors encode things with significance, from a method-
ological point ofview it is the things-in-motion that illuminate their hu-
man and social context. (Appadurai 1986:51

Subjects may endow objects with significance, but we locate it along the path-
ways objects follow from production through exchange(s) to destinations far
from their production points. When objects divert from conventional path-
ways, that, too, is significant (Appadurai 1986:26).
Objects of indigenous trade or of trade between colonized and colonizers
are entangled in ideas about the nature of indigenous economies. Prereserva-
 PRIMARY SOURCES 143

tion "subsistence" economies have been viewed as something outside and infe-
rior to Western market forces. In this paradigm, trade becomes a means by
which Western forces impose external economic pressures and thereby sub-
sume Native peoples into dominant markets. Those market forces have power
to degrade, overwhelm, and destroy Native economic systems. Tribal exchange
patterns (barter, gift, and so on) are presumed to escape rational calculation,
while Western trade is driven by calculation (and devoid of "culture"). Appadu-
rai sees calculation and "culture" in both (1986: 11). To recognize calculation in
indigenous systems we need to observe the exchange of goods over a longer
period to accommodate reciprocity. Scholars have categorized reciprocity in
precapitalist exchange as a cultural convention, significant to social rather than
economic relations.
Further, Appadurai argues that the context in which exchange takes place
determines the value of goods exchanged. Colonial exchange contexts were
characterized by unequal power relations among trading peoples in which a
higher value was attached to the goods of colonizers than the goods of the col-
onized. The most famous example is the "sale" of Manhattan by the Indians to
the Europeans for manufactured beads. Presumably at the time of the exchange
of land for beads (if that indeed is what occurred), each party came into the
transaction with its respective ideas as to the value ofthe land and beads. Con-
cerned with wanting to complete the exchange, each side was unconcerned
with trying to understand the other side's rules of the game, in which exchange
is carried out with varying degrees of common agreement, producing alterna-
tive values in exchange. This allows us to consider the cultural dimension and
distinctive calculations and strategies of exchange. Suspending the determin-
ing themes of hierarchy and power allows exchange to become an economic
and cultural meeting ground where desire and sacrifice can come together re-
gardless of whether the traders involved possess a shared value of goods or not
(Appadurai 1986:15).
On its face, the transactions that propelled Kiowa horses and other stock
along this new pathway amounted to a simple story of white corruption and
exploitation of Indians. The agent acted in violation of promises made at Medi-
cine Lodge Creek. Stumbling Bear, speaking on behalf of the other half dozen
leaders, told Leavenworth as much when he said "Indian goods" and "trade
goods" were different. But, he went on, "The only way we can get our goods
(government rationsl is to give him our ponies, our robes, and our furs. He kept
them (rationsl from us. The great Father sent them to us. He thinks his time will
be short and he wants to make a good bargain." And, indeed, Leavenworth did
make a good bargain from the sale of government rations. He and business
144 CLEARING A PATH

partner William Matheson sold the Kiowa livestock to Arkansas City, Kansas,
traders and pocketed the profit (McCusker 1868).
Stumbling Bear and the others traded with Leavenworth not out of fear of
him but out of a desire to avoid force, and because they had the means, horses
and mules, to do it. "But it is a better way Ifor usl to trade for our own goods,
then Isic\ take them by force. The braves Iyoung men\ that bring him most
horses get most goods, more than one third of our tribe gets none Irations\ at
all for they have not any Ihorses\ to give" (Stanton 1867). But the statement
also raises the possibility of constricting resources. Perhaps the off-reservation
bands were unable to sustain themselves and reservation bands from the buf-
falo hunt, and therefore improvised to gain access to rations.
This exchange context reflected antithetical systems, motivations, bases of
calculation, and outcomes all resulting from the exchange of goods dispersed
by and received by Indians. The agent's demands for further payments for ra-
tions represented exploitive colonial calculation expressed as rational ex-
change with a view to individual profit. But it also reinforced conventional
Kiowa practices in the acquisition of trade goods and social relations within
Kiowa bands. The theft of horses, mules, and cattle, the distribution of govern-
ment rations, and the sale of stolen stock-activities involving off- and on-
reservation Indians and government authorities-constituted a new arena of
exchange that transcended the reservation boundary and rendered it irrelevant
to the containment of Indians.
At the center of this new irregular trade network were off-reservation
young men, vilified with their band leaders as outlaws (Nye 1968:204). For the
most part, the young men were anonymous, known to us only in specific cir-
cumstances, such as the occasion of the death of the son of Lone Wolf, a princi-
pal headman. The primary sources represent them as a criminal element
outside a normalized reservation system that, over time, became increasingly
aberrant (Sheridan 1872; Beede 1873). Although their junior status and
anonymity went hand in hand, young men held significant roles in Kiowa soci-
ety. Organized into autonomous residence groups or bands led by more senior
men, a gendered division of labor characterized Kiowa life. Women accompa-
nied their husbands on expeditions and provided camp-based support, princi-
pally focused on childbirth and childrearing, food and hide production,
clothing and shelter production, and preservation of craft traditions, such as
beadwork. Men's energies were organized into group activities such as hunt-
ing, raiding, trading, and carrying out revenge against enemies.
In this context, young men were a significant source of labor. By participat-
ing in raids and hunting parties, they trained to be accomplished senior men,
 PRIMARY SOURCES 145

potential leaders, and full members of the realm of adult males. Until such
time, young men occupied a cusp that reflected the mUltiple demands of a suc-
cessful transition to manhood (Mishkin 1992:41,45-47). Young Kiowa men
were most commonly known to have great capacities for risk-taking and audac-
ity, which earned them recognition for bravery and martial skills such as riding
and shooting. Too much audacity earned them reputations for being arrogant
and foolish, reflecting a kind of vanity that could imperil themselves and oth-
ers. Their training included an emphasis on generosity and concern for band
members. Young men needed both kinds of skills-individualistic daring and
courage, as well as a spirit of communal responsibility-to earn the esteem of
family and band leaders. Their training, then, continued traditions of social in-
terdependence by providing both material support, including food production,
and signs of respect to community members. Thus, we may understand an el-
derly woman's comment that young men were then required to be "kind-
hearted, thoughtful, willing, helpful, dependable to be respected," because
they guaranteed the tribe's future. 4
The work of food production was divided between men and women in the
prereservation period. Kiowa bands of extended ki'1 bore responsibility for the
band's collective well-being, including feeding its members. For much of their
history Kiowas had relied on the buffalo herds of the Plains to feed and clothe
themselves and to provide housing. Men and women made up hunting parties,
whose leaders determined the timing and location of the collective hunt. Male
members organized the effort to bring the animals down. The tribes' adoption
of the Spanish horse had improved their proficiency in hunting, and old meth-
ods of corralling and driving buffalo off cliffs fell away. Women controlled
butchering the animals and dressing valuable hides. Both men and women par-
ticipated in the distribution of fresh meat. Back in the individual camps, how-
ever, women assumed complete control over the food, including preparation,
storage, and distribution. Women's control of camps pertained whether on
fixed sites or on the move with raiding, trading, and hunting parties. Food ac-
quisition and production, therefore, were the shared work of male hunters and
female processors from the hunting of the animal to the distribution of pre-
pared food to relatives attached to individual camps. Young men and women
constituted a significant portion of a band's labor force, and both must have felt
acutely the pressures of disappearing resources and reduced hunting territory.
Military societies offered young Kiowas the company and example of adults
whom they would emulate in their growth to maturity. There, too, young peo-
ple were inculcated with values identified with community obligations, includ-
ing feeding the people, an aspect of their history that scholarly preoccupation
146 CLEARING A PATH

with the war complex has overshadowed. There have been eight Kiowa military
societies since the late 18th or early 19th century, the most recent of which,
the Ohomo, being introduced in the late 19th century. From a very early age,
Kiowa children have held a place in the military society membership, beginning
with the Polahyup, or Rabbits (Meadows 1999:40-41). As children mature into
young adulthood and beyond, other societies are available for those who
demonstrate skill, character, and accomplishment along the way. The military
societies reinforced the ranked nature of Kiowa social organization based on
kinship, achievement, and status.
Military societies by their very name connote the war complex with which
the Kiowa people are so strongly associated in the historical literature (Kracht
1989; Meadows 1999). While achieving respected warrior status was probably
paramount, young men were immersed in Kiowa knowledge, which included
cultivating life values integral to individual good character and the well-being
of the community. Underlying all activities that a young man might excel at,
even warfare, was an ethic of community service (Mishkin 1992:42,48). The
training began not only with young Rabbits but within the circle of all adult mil-
itary societies as well (Meadows 1999:40-41). Each society included young
male assistants to the aljoqi. Aujoqi (those who keep things handy) and ijeqi (dis-
tributors or rationers, in reference to serving during feasts) were usually aude-
taly; (favored boys). These young members were adopted into the society and
granted kin status to every other member. The boys and the regular society
members used reciprocal kin terms for each other's relatives. The boys' labor,
which included maintaining the fire, serving food, heating the dance drum, run-
ning messages, and providing general assistance, thus became an obligation to
relatives and things to be done well to avoid bringing shame on his family
(Meadows 1999:51). labor, obligation, and service to a broader network of rel-
atives beyond immediate family were interwoven.
The duty to feed relatives was powerful enough to cause a man to disregard
band law regarding policed hunts, a punishable offense. Wolf Appeared and
two of his male relatives tried to obtain fresh meat for his sick sister, wife to
Kicking Bird (the reservation leader). Their actions violated the no-hunting
rules then in effect, requiring the Jaifegau military society to mete out a pun-
ishment. While the two relatives ran away to escape sure punishment, Wolf Ap-
peared remained. The punishers struck him with bows, killed his horse, and
broke his bows and arrows (Meadows 1999:86). Even a Ten Medicine Keeper
such as Wolf Appeared could not circumvent the laws with impunity, but nei-
ther could he ignore the obligation to feed his relative. He chose to break the
no-hunting rule to obtain food for his sister, and to accept the Jaifegau's sanc-
 PRIMARY SOURCES 147

tions. Wolf Appeared did have the last word, however. Subsequently, in his role
as war party leader he gained a reputation for abusingjaifegau members whose
fear of his powers as a Ten Medicine Keeper kept them from retaliating (Mead-
ows 1999:86).
Despite a prickly disposition that he exhibited frequently, Wolf Appeared's
actions illustrate the values inculcated in young Kiowa men. Properly socialized
young men, and later as older men, balanced a fierce individualism that underlay
their quest for war honors such as counting coup with responsibility to the
larger network of relatives, whether on the battlefield or hunt. Through war
honors young men gradually built up their credibility as warriors, the demands
of which were arduous and risk-filled. But it was only by building up credibility
as warriors that a young man earned others' trust with their well-being, indeed
with their lives. The competing claims of intense individualism and broader so-
cial commitments were reconciled in the Kiowa value system (Mishkin 1992:39).
The unique dual roles of young Kiowa men were pointedly memorialized in
the case of one fallen young warrior. Set-angya (Sitting Bear) set out with a few
followers in the spring of 1870 with the intention of raiding settlements in
Texas. He was shot and killed during one of the attacks on a house and his fel-
low raiders hid his body in Texas. later, after the last Kiowa Sun Dance, the
young man's father by the same name went with some friends to recover his
son's body from Texas. Set-angya the father returned with the bones wrapped
in a bundle atop a led horse. Back in his band's camp he built a tipi with a
raised platform inside. He hosted a feast in his son's honor and invited all his
friends, "telling them, 'My son calls you to eat.... Thereafter he left food and wa-
ter for the son he claimed to be only sleeping, not dead. The son's remains
atop a led horse accompanied Set-angya the father whenever he went out on
marches. In these ways-the tipi, the feast, the march-the father memorial-
ized Set-angya the young man until his own death at Fort Sill in 1871. Friends
of Set-angya the father interred the remains, but the son, his death, and his fa-
ther's memorial to him are preserved in Kiowa history through the winter
count of 1870-71 (Mooney 1979:325).
Set-angya the father was leader of Qoichegau (Sentinel Horse) at the time of
his death. Qoichegau was one of six Kiowa military societies at the time and
was distinguished by rigorous battle obligations (Meadows 1999:40-43). Com-
posed of ten sash wearers, ten assistants, retired members, and young "colts,"
Qoichegau members were known for being the first society into battle and the
last to retreat. The society formally obligated members to stake themselves
down (by an arrow through the sash) while the other warriors were in retreat
and to continue fighting until they themselves were slain. Only ode, or those
148 CLEARING A PATH

born of the highest rank, whose status was reinforced with many war honors,
could gain membership to Qoichegau. Sons did not inherit the father's position
in Qoichegau, but they were taken in as colt members and were expected to
rise through the ranks by war honors. The highest war deed, even higher than
counting coup, was performed by the warrior who fell back to divert the enemy
or take more enemies as his comrades retreated, thereby protecting the escap-
ing party members. In a march, be it a revenge or raiding party, the brave war-
rior who was not Qoichegau but undertook such a role did so voluntarily
(Mishkin 1992:39), but the Qoichegau were obligated to do so (Mooney
1979:285). When Set-angya died in 1871, he was a prisoner of the United
States government. The United States Army was transporting him to a federal
penitentiary in Texas when he sang his death song, leaped from the wagon, and
was shot down by soldiers (Mooney 1979:329).
The year before he died, Qoichegau friends and followers would likely have
attended the father's feast for his son. A family's honoring of a son's achieve-
ments in battle was expected in Kiowa ranked society. Typically, an account was
spread throughout the camp to create public awareness of the young warrior's
deed, enhance a growing reputation, and increase the young man's status
(Mishkin 1992:41). A more elaborate honoring might involve the giving away of
a horse and other gifts in the name of the young warrior. In this case, female
relatives of the two Set-angya's probably prepared the meal, which in 1870
might not have resembled feasts of earlier days when meat was plentiful. Nev-
ertheless, the meal was the focal point of the honoring. There are no references
to a public giveaway. Set-angya the father spoke the son's invitation to eat, to
come and be with him and share a common meal. In his death the young man's
dual responsibilities as "rationer," or provider offood, and warrior were recog-
nized simultaneously. Set-angya the father fulfilled his responsibilities to his
son in multiple ways. Following his retrieval of the bones, he took revenge for
his son's death by killing a white settler and honored his son with the feast. But
the meals of meat and water left for the son by the father went further, ac-
knowledging and memorializing the obligations between warriors and the peo-
ple as well as providing for the life that follows death.
Between 1867 and 1870 food acquisition, storage, and distribution prac-
tices were undermined by environmental changes, unfulfilled promises of insuf-
ficient rations, and a federal policy of buffalo extermination. The developments
combined with a military strategy of targeting Kiowa winter camps, destroying
food, and keeping the Kiowas on the move affected both reservation and off-
reservation bands and their leaders. Kiowas responded in multiple ways with
 PRIMARY SOURCES 149

varying results. Headman diplomacy carried on for the most part by Kicking
Bird and other reservation leaders consisted mainly of ineffective promises to
rein in the off-reservation bands. Those bands moved in and out of the reserva-
tion and continued to raid, primarily against Texas settlers, Indian tribes of
eastern Indian Territory, their old enemies the Navajos and Utes, and travelers
on the Santa Fe lrail. Food acquisitions came from rations distributions, contin-
ued off-reservation hunting, and the old practices of raiding and trading.
The Kiowas' subsistence in this period required utilization of all sources.
Both on- and off-reservation bands had access to resources that the other
needed. Kicking Bird's people by their presence ensured the continued distrib-
ution of rations, no matter how irregularly or inconsistent in quality. The off-
reservation bands continued to acquire cattle, horses, mules, and trade goods
through raiding. While the government and military made efforts to herd all In-
dians onto the reservation, the boundaries were indeed porous and ineffective.
Off-reservation bands came and went at will, effecting an exchange of goods
acquired in ways consistent with the old southwestern economy for rations and
annuity goods. A succession of Indian agents and military authorities expressed
exasperation with the off-reservation bands' access to rations. They either
showed up for distributions or relied upon relatives to divide their rations with
them (Tatum 1870).
Relations between young men and older leaders showed signs of strain
from the effort to exploit the reservation and the old, now outlawed, Plains sys-
tem. In july of 1870, as Set-anya retrieved the bones of his young son from his
hidden grave in Texas, the young men challenged the reservation leader Kick-
ing Bird to join them in a raiding party. Kicking Bird, stung by their accusation
that he had become soft and "like a woman" and perhaps mindful of the griev-
ing Set-anya, helped lead a party of 100 raiders into Texas in july following the
Sun Dance. Later. leaders employed harsh rhetoric to denounce the young
men's activities. For example. Lone Wolf promised to punish the young men for
their raids by humiliating them. taking their horses and making them walk
home (Horse Back 1870; Haworth 1873).
The point of the young men's experiences is not that colonialism was easy
to subvert and therefore not so bad. Nothing less than the tribe's survival hung
in the balance because the pressures on the Kiowa people at this time were
enormous. Drought. a buffalo slaughter of incomprehensible proportion. a mil-
itary policy bent on cutting the Kiowas and Comanches off from Texas. New
Mexico. and Colorado-all traditional lands. and a federal policy designed to
break down the old southern Plains economy together created an odd conspir-
150 CLEARING A PATH

acy of weather and American politics against the Kiowa people. The exchange
of horses and mules for rations countered a federal policy of starvation to force
Native compliance. It was not a game; it was a matter of life and death.
American government authorities saw trade with the Indians as a means to
break down Native culture and, eventually, clear the pathway for Indian assimi-
lation into the mainstream culture. While at first inept at interactions with the
new economy, Natives, American policymakers, reformers, and missionaries
hoped, would follow a pathway to a civilized state through their forced accul-
turation into the American economy and society. Hence, federal bureaucrats
and reformers of various stripes emphasized a need to introduce Native people
to white notions of work, individualistic profit seeking, earned wages, and the
ideology of producerism associated with the yeoman farmer ideal. Subse-
quently, the conventional scholarly wisdom has been that Native peoples be-
came quickly dependent on superior foreign goods but lost indigenous
production knowledge and, as a direct result of their dependency, became en-
snared in Western market forces. The result was loss of Native culture, but
without the hoped-for uplifting result. Rather, tribal economies were deci-
mated without benefit of Western market values filling the void.
However, the very structure of the reservation was predicated on a plan not
to build local economies but to exert control over western tribes such as the
Kiowas by depriving them of resources that the tribe required to maintain polit-
ical autonomy. Government-distributed rations and trade cloth replaced the
quickly diminishing buffalo and other game; annuity goods such as farming im-
plements replaced the horse as a means of production; and per capita payments
and indebtedness to licensed Indian traders replaced the indigenous trade sys-
tem. Land became a resource targeted for exploitation through farming and
grazing oflivestock. All well and good, but rations were withheld, annuity goods
and payments were inferior and inadequate, and indebtedness became more or
less permanent. In addition to a lack of knowledge about farming and grazing,
and profiting from either, Kiowas were doomed to fail in a region where rainfall
was irregular and insufficient for farming. Confinement to the land within reser-
vation boundaries interrupted organized band raids, hunts, and trade practices.
The reservation did not fail because of Indian inferiority or misguided policy.
Rather, the federal policy succeeded in creating and superimposing an artificial
economy on a small-scale society in order to destroy its political autonomy. Up-
lift might have existed in the minds of some as a desirable outcome, but for the
most part it served to merely rationalize American hegemonic aspirations.
The trade of horses and mules for rations challenged the American govern-
ment's project on three fronts. The reservation opened up an additional outlet
 PRIMARY SOURCES 151

for Kiowa goods, not only during the administration of the corrupt Agent Leav-
enworth but during subsequent administrations when rations continued to be
inferior, inadequate in volume, and irregularly delivered. Quaker successors to
Leavenworth were ill equipped to impose control on the outside bands, evi-
denced in the ongoing conflict between Kiowas, Comanches, Texas settlers, and
state and federal authorities that lasted to 1875. Second, the exchange of Kiowa
horses and mules for rations attests to the stability of social relations among
Kiowa leaders and young men. Despite strenuous efforts on the part of military
and Texas authorities to cut the tribes off from the Staked Plains in west Texas,
drought, and buffalo losses, all of which represented enormous threats to
Kiowa subsistence and autonomy, the Kiowas, evidenced by the ration trade,
did not descend into chaos. Rather, social relations held across generations and
among reservation and nonreservation bands. Finally, the combination of sta-
ble social relations and continued exploitation of resources through raiding
and trading outside the reservation bridged the economic past and present.

COMMERCE AND CULTURE: KIOWA WOMEN'S

BEADWORK AND THE RESERVATION ECONOMY

The material world of Kiowa women offers other possibilities for understand-
ing the reservation and postreservation economy and its implications for
Kiowa society. Kiowa women figure most prominently in prereservation trade
relations as tanners of buffalo hides. For the Kiowas, buffalo hides were per-
haps second only to horses and mules as high-value trade items. Hide prepara-
tion was laborious, averaging some two to three days of labor per hide (Weist
1980). The skill of individual women increased the value of hides and the
stature of women. The decimation of the buffalo eliminated this area of work
and trade, but women continued to make significant economic contributions.
In the post-1875 world of the reservation, Kiowa women's production was
consistent with their prereservation period roles as material and cultural
providers for their families. Despite the disappearance of the buffalo and the
limitations of a reservation economy that turned on distributions of rations,
annuity goods, and payments, continuities are evident. Most obviously, Kiowa
women's domestic roles in childrearing, food production, and management of
home life continued, albeit in the context of daunting poverty and deprivation.
Kiowa women also took up the informal exchange of their beadwork for cash
and credit at the local licensed Indian trade store. While trade store records
merely suggest the existence of this important component of the reservation
1 52 CLEARING A PATH

economy, local museum collections, such as the Museum of the Great Plains in
Lawton, Oklahoma, attest that Kiowa women were actively engaged in bead-
work production in the reservation period. Women's output followed two
tracks: tourist arts and beadwork for community or family utilization (Schnei-
der 1980).
On the Kiowa reservation, the licensed Indian trader played a pivotal role in
the circulation of women's tourist beadwork. The 1905 records of the Red
Store in Lawton, Indian Territory, document in some detail a trade in beaded
moccasins, bags, and other items that was practiced in southwestern Indian
Territory, if not documented, throughout the last quarter of the 19th century
(Sneed 1957; Sneed 1886).5 Traders received the goods in return for cash or
credit to the individual's account and sent them out on consignment to a vari-
ety of small shops throughout the United States. The trader's role was more
than economic. He was the communications gatekeeper between Kiowa
women and the world of small American businesses, providing a kind of cul-
tural interpretation, particularly for the curio shop owners. Shop owners
learned from the Indian trader that Kiowa women did not produce to specifica-
tion, ever. Women controlled their production pace and aesthetic decisions.
The trader positioned himself as guarantor of authenticity, which he used to in-
crease the value of his "genuine" Indian goods (Lawrence 1908).
It is not clear at all that Kiowa women were concerned about shop owners
or consumers' tastes. They made minor production adjustments in obvious re-
sponse to the American market. In the late 19th century, beaded watch fobs be-
came very popular, for example. Beaded fobs typified the kind of amusing
adaptation in beadwork that continues to the present, evidenced in beaded
sneakers, baseball caps, and key chains. Such adaptations were very limited in
the 19th century.
Claims for economic significance of tourist art production and exchange can
only be cautious ones. In fact, the records are so scant and irregular that it is
difficult to arrive at any aggregate figures such as totality of output. Rather, it is
the richness of museum collections that demonstrates that Native women were
producing steadily through the worst of times, perhaps driven by necessity,
perhaps lured by opportunity. However, the production of tourist art appar-
ently did not divert Indian women entirely from more traditional areas of artis-
tic output. Ceremonial garb and regalia from the period also fill museum
collections. And it is only the combination of both tourist art and ceremonial
goods that might possibly account for the documented large quantities of
beads and findings that traders were purchasing for their Indian customers on
 PRIMARY SOURCES 153

the KCA reservation. The beadwork trade was important enough to the traders
to invest in quite large inventories of manufactured Indian goods, and to invest
time in marketing the goods to individual shop owners in the United States.
In this period, women's beadwork production was an important source of
resistance to federal government efforts to destroy tribal cultures. The policy
of the time aimed to eliminate Sun Dance, traditional dress, and other observ-
able vestiges of Kiowa culture. 6 Kiowa women's successful preservation of their
arts under a regime dedicated to the deracination of their people did not go
unnoticed by government officials, who sought to inculcate in them white Amer-
ican notions of domesticity.7 Once again, an entrepreneurial spirit, this time of
the local licensed Indian trader, colluded in the subversion of the civilization
project promulgated by distant Washington policymakers and reformers.

CONCLUSION

Kiowa women and young men are perhaps most visible in the reservation pe-
riod in this politically loaded realm of exchange. Their experiences give evi-
dence that Native people engaged with colonialism variously with significant
consequences for the preservation of Kiowa cultural autonomy, if not political
autonomy. The experiences of Kiowa women and young men also reveal the
disorder of the reservation and American hegemony and the inventiveness that
emerged out of the common realm of daily life. Kiowa women and young men
formed important economic and social relationships with the dominant society
that transcended an externally constructed segregation. They breached the so-
cial wall that many policymakers viewed as key to the ideology of acculturation
and assimilation. Native people were expected to embark on the journey to cul-
tural transformation. Separation from community, from relatives, from the past
was critical to the success of this first phase, and to the ultimate outcome: In-
dian absorption into American society. Exchange has been viewed as an effec-
tive means of acculturation among indigenous peoples. Cultures believed to be
static and authentic only in some undisturbed form from earlier times are vul-
nerable to Western goods. But in this case, the inventiveness that arose in daily
life, without necessarily intending to subvert this process, did so.
Exchange affirms that colonial projects, as Thomas suggests, are never pre-
cise, never completely successful. Kiowa women and young men exploited
breaks in the boundaries that surrounded them through which they negotiated
their own relationships with the hegemonic society. And there they located and
154 CLEARING A PATH

experienced colonialism in other domains, and contested it on very different

terms. They waged a war of trade and material production that was as signifi-
cant as the battles fought between reservation leaders and the United States
government.
Colonialism, multifronted and not content merely to subdue militarily, is
drawn to every sign of vitality and autonomy with a view to asserting its con-
trol over those threatening life pUlses. The culture must, too, be subdued. But
Americans, like other colonizers, had their own conflicting motivations and
goals. By the late 19th century, twin desires to showcase American progress by
way of comparison with the primitiveness of its first peoples and to preserve a
chapter of the national heritage-the conquered indigenous-blended with
the ever-present acquisitiveness. Taking possession of land and other valuable
resources was not enough; the Americans turned their eyes upon the material
culture, the Indian goods. Entrepreneurs exploited Indian goods for profit in
the rising curiosities trade and other commercial realms. Scholars made careers
in the nascent professional field of ethnology. Whether for scientific inquiry or
for personal possession or for turning profit, American acquisition of American
Indian material culture continued steadily throughout this period of imposed
Indian segregation. Native things were appropriated by various means and
channeled into the tourist trade, collecting circles, and public cultural institu-
tions, such as the National Museum in Washington, D.C., and the Georg Gustav
Heye Foundation in New York City.
The ironies of this story are present reservation history of the Kiowa peo-
ple, although there are many similar examples. At a time when the goal of the
United States government and American society generally was to reduce con-
tact with Native people through segregation and anticipate their eventual dis-
appearance through absorption into Anglo society, they provided the means for
Kiowas to perpetuate themselves in exploiting American desires for Indian
goods. This is no small irony for a history that attributes Native decline to In-
dian dependence on European goods.

The author thanks jeff Anderson. Colby College; Robert Nye. Oregon State University; Fred
Hoxie. University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana; and johanna Schoen. University of Iowa for
their criticisms and suggestions. Also, a note of appreciation for the intellectual company of the
University of Iowa material culture reading group whose members include Rudi Colloredo-Mans-
field. Mark Peterson. Ben Kaplan. Laura Rigal, julie Hockstrasser. Bruce Scherting. Vicki Rovine,
and Paul Greenough.
 PRIMARY SOURCES 155

NOTES

1. The standard for the periodization of American Indian history in the colonial and
American eras is found in Prucha (1986).
2. Historians' treatment of 19th-century Kiowa history typify the stark before-and-af-
ter effect of the reservation on Native people. See Nye (1968:178), Mayhall
(1962:316-317).
3. The presentation of gifts to Native tribal representatives is addressed in the Trade
and Intercourse Act of 1802, which formalized the practice of gift-giving as a means of
stabilizing Indian relations with the United States government, counteracting settler vi-
olence on the "frontier," which undermined that stability, and preventing war with the
tribes. Act of Mar. 20,1802, ch. 13,2 Stat. 139.
4. "Kiowa Field Notes," box 9, folder 10, Alice L. Marriott Papers, Western History
Collection, University of Oklahoma.
5. Archives of the Museum of the Great Plains, Lawton, Oklahoma.
6.ln 1883, the Department of Interior created the Court oflndian Offenses, which
established reservation courts on which sat male tribal representatives, and which crim-
inalized many aspects of Native cultural practices, including dancing, Native marriage
practices, and traditional medicine. The language of the act, however, suggests a
broader assault on tribal cultures as a necessary first step to civilizing the Indians (Ha-
gan 1966:107-108).
7. The subversive potential of beadwork is attested to in numerous letters between
Washington and the local Indian agent. Even reformers who promoted Indian civiliza-
tion worried about the ill effects of beadwork. As the president of the American Medical
Association noted in his annual address, reservation family members were in the prac-
tice of sending goods to their relatives at the Hampton Institute, where some of the Fort
Marion prisoners boarded after their release from incarceration. The students, appar-
ently, sold the goods to tourists and collectors of Indian goods for pocket money. This
practice, warned the physician, would only undermine efforts to make the students self-
sufficient (Southern Workman 8, no. 2 IFebruary 18791: 15).

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 Cfribal Histories,
Indigenous Histories
This page intentionally left blank
Keep Your Thoughts Above the Trees:
Ideas on Developing and Presenting
Tribal Histories

Craig Howe

A
merican Indian history is a conflation of at least two distinct avenues of in-
quiry concerning the pasts of indigenous peoples of North America. The
majority of inquiries examine the interactions on this land between indigenous
peoples and immigrants from foreign places, usually following the immigrants
and their descendants as they systematically explore this continent's vast land-
scapes. As these histories progress through time, they focus on the immi-
grants' encounters with Native "others" and often on the subsequent policies
that were implemented to regulate future relationships between "immigrants"
and "Indians." This is Indian history. It implicitly defines Indian as a collective
term for all indigenous peoples and history as an objective, chronological nar-
rative that has a temporal dimension beginning with the appearance of immi-
grants on these lands and an analytical model requiring the presence of both
Natives and non-Natives.
A smaller number of inquiries seek to examine the remembered pasts of
particular groups of indigenous peoples. These are tribal histories,! of which
there are two dominant perspectives. The conventional academic perspective
on tribal histories is linear, or sequential, in that it is written. Western Euro-
pean languages are read left to right, top to bottom, beginning to end. The re-
sult is a "beginning-top-Ieft" to "ending-bottom-right" narrative predicated
upon the written word. This sequentiality generally causes these histories to
be organized temporally, though sometimes authors use nonchronological de-
vices, such as flashbacks or dreams, to organize their narratives. Typically, the
author's intent is for the reader to begin at one point in time and end at an-
other point, say, from 1750 to 1890. Similar to Indian history, this perspective
162 CLEARING A PATH

also tends to be organized around abstract themes that guide readers through
the vast amount of historical data along a carefully defined and tightly con-
trolled pathway.
The indigenous tribal perspective on tribal histories, on the other hand, is
more likely to be recited in relationship to specific landscapes, waterscapes,
and skyscapes. This perspective is event-centered: here something happened
and a particular person or being was present. The trigger for the recollection of
traditional oral narratives might be a place in the landscape, or a particular
word, or someone's name, even a song or a picture. Often, as the storyteller is
reciting an account of an event, another trigger is tripped and another narra-
tive begins. Narrators-rather than an abstract theme or predetermined se-
quence-stand at the center of these histories. The narrators make
connections between narratives on the spot. Instead of following a fixed se-
quentiality, they use their imaginations and creative abilities to produce oral
histories that are full of "permutations, additives, chance, and mortalities"
(Vizenor 1984:27, quoted in Albers 1994). In addition to transmitting their ac-
counts orally, tribal historians also employ another system of communication
to recall past events: drawing. So whereas the conventional academic perspec-
tive on tribal histories is grounded in the written word, the indigenous tribal
perspective is grounded in two interrelated systems of communication that
predate the written word: drawing and speaking.

Imagine: somewhere in the prehistoric distance a man holds up in his

hand a crude instrument-a brand, perhaps, or something like a daub or
a broom bearing pigment-and fixes the wonderful image in his mind's
eye to a wall or rock .... In our modern, sophisticated terms, he is
primitive and preliterate, and in the long reach oftime he is utterly with-
out distinction, except: he draws. And his contribution to posterity is in-
estimable; he makes a profound difference in our lives who succeed him
by millennia. For all the stories of all the world proceed from the mo-
ment in which he makes his mark. IMomaday 1988:51

In this imaginative reconstruction, N. Scott Momaday-the quintessential

"man-made-of-words"2-suggests that before the word-whether it was writ-
ten or spoken-was the picture. In so doing, he draws our attention to the pos-
sibility that pictures constitute a system of communication independent from
words. But whereas drawings can communicate to countless communities
spanning centuries and continents, a community's oral tradition is far more
specific as a communication system. Oral tradition is "the cornerstone of every
 KEEP YOUR THOUGHTS ABoVE THE TREES 163

tribal society," according to Michael Dorris, and is "the vehicle through which
wisdom is passed from one generation to the next and by which sense is made
of a confusing world. It is responsible in large part for the education, entertain-
ment, and inspiration of the community" (Dorris 1979: 156--57). As part of their
function of "making sense of the world," the oral traditions of tribal communi-
ties focus on events that are important within their cultural contexts.

For most Native Americans time is marked by events, and these events
are more than the temporary surface disturbances that French social his-
torians disdainfully dismiss. Occurrences that take place in myths, in folk
narratives, and in native historical traditions are often what I term epito-
mizing events. Epitomizing events bring several forces together in dra-
matic combination; they condense various subtle changes into a single
transformative act. Whether such events actually took place or not is im-
material; they are explanatory mnemonics of the mind and emotional
engrams of the heart and, as such, are "real" for members of the culture.
IFogelson 1984:841

Communities, then, made sense of their worlds by recounting events that in

some fundamental sense related them to their surroundings-to other hu-
mans, to plants and animals, to landmarks and constellations. Such narratives
recognized and reinforced webs of relationships that connected all entities of a
community's spatial domain, and then related that domain to their cosmos.
During the 17th century, at least five peoples of the Great Plains-Blackfeet,
Kiowas, Mandans, Poncas, and Lakotas--developed unique documents that or-
ganized drawings of important events experienced by their communities.3 An
event that was experienced within a given duration (most commonly a year)
was chosen by each community as its name for that period of time, and an indi-
vidual respected for his wisdom and artistic abilities was charged with record-
ing the event in pictographic form on a tanned hide document. Those
individuals were tribal historians, and the documents they created recorded
events that embodied the values of their tribes and imbued the lives of com-
munity members with meaning and purpose. Following a prescribed schedule
and a conventional pattern, each historian added a new event-pictograph to
the sequence of pictographs that he and previous historians had drawn on the
document. The historians also memorized the name for that year (or other pe-
riod of time) and the story associated with the event.
At appropriate times, a historian would unwrap the document and invite his
community to gather and see it. On these occasions, he enlivened the drawings
164 CLEARING A PATH

by recounting the stories of the events they represented. Using a complex cal-
culus that considered community values and situational circumstance, the his-
torian began by reciting an account of a selected event-pictograph. Combining
oratorical prowess and creativity, the historian would then jump to accounts
depicted by other event-pictographs, weaving together diverse narratives into
a discourse performance tailored to the "education, entertainment, and inspi-
ration"-to use the words of Dorris above-ofhis audience.

TRIBAL HISTORIES

Event-centered histories that aspire to achieve an indigenous tribal perspective

must be composed of at least four dimensions-spatial, social, spiritual, and
experiential-that conceptually define tribalism 4 from its origins in the Ameri-
can Indian Old World to its resurgence in the American Indian New World of to-
day.s
The spatial dimension of tribalism encompasses an implicit hierarchy
whereby the land has primacy over human beings; but at the same time it rec-
ognizes that peoples and lands are intimately interconnected. Though the
earth predates the presence of people on its surface, its substance is in part
composed of the dust of the bones of generations of peoples. Tribal lands,
therefore, are not perceived as distant and objectified, but rather immediate
and personal: "The story of my people, and the story of this place, are one sin-
gle story. No man can think of us without also thinking of this place. We are al-
ways joined together" (Rollins 1992). In discussing the connection between
tribal peoples and their lands, Vine Deloria Jr. states that "every location within
leach tribe'sl original homelands has a multitude of stories that recount the mi-
grations, revelations, and particular historical incidents that cumulatively pro-
duced the tribe in its current condition" (Deloria 1994:122). Tribal lands are
thus enriched by accounts that link events to places rather than to a chronolog-
ical narrative. "American Indians," continued Deloria, "hold their lands-
places-as having the highest possible meaning, and all their statements are
made with this reference point in mind." He contrasted this tribal perspective
with that of Western European immigrants who "review the movement of their
ancestors across the INorth Americanl continent as a steady progression of ba-
sically good events and experiences, thereby placing history-time-in the
best possible light" (Deloria 1994:62). Events take place in space, and event-
centered tribal histories are centrally concerned with those events experienced
by community members within their known geographic universe. These ethno-
 KEEP YOUR THOUGHTS ABOVE THE TREES 165

geographies extend far beyond the political boundaries of contemporary reser-

vations and often beyond the conceptual limits of environmental ecosystems. A
community's known geographic universe, then, is the spatial domain of its
members' historical experiences.
The social dimension of tribalism relates land and identity to the concept of
"peoplehood," a unique community identity differentiated from other tribes
and from individual Indian persons. The relationship between a specific people
and a particular landscape is not a relationship between an individual and the
land or between "Indians" and the land. Instead, it is a relationship between a
distinct community and their remembered landscape, a relationship often en-
coded in stories about particular past events that their ancestors experienced.
The multitudes of communities collectively labeled "Indian" by Europeans each
have their own history-their tribal histories. 6 Event-centered tribal histories
are based on the idea that "Identity is a conception of and feelings about the
events which a people have lived. It is the meaning of events in which one's an-
cestors took part, in ways that make one proud, which differentiate people into
ethnic groups" (Sawyer 1976:203). The distinctive identity of each tribal com-
munity is fundamental to tribalism. A focus on "the people," as opposed to in-
dividuals, all Indians, or abstract themes, recognizes that tribal histories are
community-based and tribally specific. Therefore, tribal histories from an in-
digenous tribal perspective focus on historical experiences that are meaningful
to each community as a whole and on the places where a community's epito-
mizing events occurred. Furthermore, the communication of these experiences
rests firmly on the foundation of oral tradition in general, and specific tribal
languages in particular.
The relationships between tribal peoples and their lands are guided by the
spiritual dimension of tribalism. According to Deloria (1984:8):

The idea of the people is primarily a religious conception, and with most
American Indian tribes it begins somewhere in the primordial mists.
In that time the people were gathered together but did not yet see
themselves as a distinct people. A holy man had a dream or a vision;
quasi-mythological figures of cosmic importance revealed themselves,
or in some other manner the people were instructed. They were given
ceremonies and rituals that enabled them to find their place on the
continent.

We see in this statement the important interrelationship between the spatial,

social, and spiritual dimensions of tribalism. Deloria goes on to say, "When
166 CLEARING A PATH

lands and peoples are both chosen and matched together in a cosmic plan, the
attachment to the land by the people becomes something extraordinary and in-
volves a sense of identity and corresponding feeling of responsibility" (Deloria
1992:31-32). Viewed in this light, tribal communities are guided by spiritual in-
structions that embody the moral and ethical standards by which tribal mem-
bers conduct their interactions not only with the land but also with each other
and with outsiders. Within these communities, individuals have differential ac-
cess to special powers and esoteric knowledge. The social transmission of
morally sanctioned tribal knowledge is performed by respected tribal members
at particular places, or during certain times, or to properly prepared persons.
Because tribal histories encompass the historical experiences of a community's
members, such histories necessarily begin at least as early as the earliest ap-
pearance of a community's ancestors on this earth. As long as community
members exist, such histories are ongoing. Furthermore, if a community is
aware of future events-perhaps through prophecy or ceremony-then their
historical experience extends beyond the past and present. Tribal histories thus
minimally stretch the temporal duration of "history" from the origin of a peo-
ple to their disappearance from this earth. As such, tribal histories are inextri-
cably linked to spiritual traditions.
Lastly, the experiential dimension of tribalism recognizes that tribal com-
munities perpetuate ongoing relationships with their higher spiritual powers.
These relationships are based not on what the people believe to be true but
rather on what they experience as being true. The experiences of each tribal
community are unique and are "primarily a matter of participation in terms of
the real factors of existence-living on the land, living within a specific com-
munity, and having religious people with special powers within that commu-
nity" (Deloria 1994:291). Here we see the coalescence of all four dimensions of
tribalism. Tribal historians traditionally created multisensory settings within
which they presented their tribal history performances. According to the
Lakota historian and spiritual leader Black Elk, "Mostly the history tellers were
medicine men. They have the power and they know ... The medicine men were
the learned class, the scholars of the tribe" (quoted in DeMallie 1984:334). Of
primary importance were their memories and the pictographic documents,
both of which they drew from to educate, entertain, and inspire members of
their communities. The pictographic documents are similar to Paleolithic art
that "is the residue of what was a planned multimedia event designed to im-
pose upon individuals unforgettable patterns of tribally essential knowledge
and explanation" (Dissanayake 1988:154). Communal activities such as eating,
drinking, smoking, singing, and dancing frequently accompanied tribal history
 KEEP YOUR THOUGHTS ABOVE THE TREES 167

performances. Community members were not merely hearing and seeing these
performances; they were also smelling and tasting and feeling them. By incor-
porating multisensory sensations, tribal historians facilitated the transmission
and retention of tribally essential knowledge through multimedia perfor-
mances during which community members participated experientially.
Tribalism thus includes spatial, social, spiritual, and experiential dimensions
that must be incorporated into those event-centered histories that aspire to
achieve an indigenous tribal perspective. Can written histories fulfill this re-
quirement? No. History from an indigenous tribal perspective cannot be pre-
sented solely through the written word. Though it is possible to write histories
that integrate spatial, social, and spiritual dimensions, it is impossible for writ-
ten histories to be "read" nonsequentially or for "readers" to experience them
using mUltiple senses. Therefore, histories from an indigenous tribal perspec-
tive must be presented in a format that can accommodate multimedia data and
structure it in a nonsequential order. Two such formats are digital hypermedia
applications and museum exhibitions. An indigenous tribal perspective, how-
ever, is not inherent in either; each merely possesses the potential to incorpo-
rate the four dimensions of tribalism.

PRESENTING TRIBAL HISTORIES

Since the release of HyperCard in 1987 it has been possible for tribal histories
from an indigenous tribal perspective to be created outside of community set-
tings and to be presented in digital format on personal computers. This early
and widely available computer program was "an implementation of a concept
originally christened hypertext and more recently expanded in scope and
dubbed hypermedia" (Vaughan 1988:23). Both terms refer to electronic texts
that can combine visual, aural, and textual media and that can be "read" in a va-
riety of ways. Hypertext is writing that "provides the ability to link related con-
cepts and jump from place to place as information needs warrant" (Vaughan
1988:30), whereas hypermedia extends "hypertext's nonsequential concept to
include all forms of stored information-graphic, films, video, music, etc. as
well as the written word" (Vaughan 1988:25). The technical capabilities of pio-
neering computer products such as HyperCard were quickly surpassed by
newer and faster hypermedia applications, including the ubiquitous web
browsers that enable users to access hypermedia information on the Internet.
Whether the hypermedia information is stored on a personal computer or an In-
ternet server that is accessible to many different digital devices simultaneously,
168 CLEARING A PATH

two central attributes remain the capacity to store data in multiple media and to
provide access to that data in sequences determined by individual "readers."
Museum gallery exhibitions similarly incorporate multiple media that may
be accessed in a nearly infinite variety of sequences. They feature a broad spec-
trum of media that visitors access primarily through their sensory organs. For
instance. museum visitors are in the physical presence of "real" objects. They
are aware of scents. Air temperature. humidity. and movement can be felt. as
can surface textures and whether or not a floor plane is flat and level. The pri-
mary method visitors use to access these forms of stored information is to
move from one point to another. In other words. they determine their se-
quence by where they move and stop. We see. then. that both hypermedia ap-
plications and museum exhibitions have the potential to store multimedia
information and to provide access to that information in sequences that are not
predetermined.
But there is a difference in how a hypermedia application (hereafter referred
to as "the digital project") and a museum exhibition (hereafter referred to as
"the gallery exhibition") incorporate the four dimensions of tribalism in their
presentations of tribal histories from an indigenous tribal perspective? In both
the digital project and the gallery exhibition. the spatial dimension provides
the initial entry portal to a number of event-centered tribal histories. In the
digital project. a spatial domain defined by geographic features demarcates an
area within which tribal histories are mapped; for example. an area bounded on
the west by the Rocky Mountains. on the north by the Saskatchewan River. on
the east by the Mississippi River. and on the south by the Red River. Though this
geographic area. on the surface. falls within the conventional anthropological
construct called the "Plains culture area." from the perspective of the digital
project. it is quite different. Culture areas are used to organize and reference
"information about contiguous groups that are or were similar in culture and
history" (Washburn 1988:viii). Implicit in culture areas is the concept of envi-
ronmental determinism: the notion that tribal peoples' histories and cultures
are determined by their surrounding environments. The geographic area of the
digital project. however. simply provides a common ground for mapping tribal
histories. Whereas culture areas are concerned with the temporal and cultural
similarities of tribal peoples who are conceptualized as statically located in
space. the digital project maps the locations of epitomizing events in the his-
torical journeys through space and time of specific communities.
The gallery exhibition. on the other hand. focuses on a distinct geographic
location. such as the headwaters or mouth of a river. a small island or lake. a
freshwater spring. or a prominent landmark. The distinctiveness of that place is
 KEEP YOUR 'THOUGHTS ABOVE THE TREES 169

represented in the gallery exhibition. but not as experienced at one particular

time. Instead. the ambience of that place during various hours ofthe day and
night. and throughout the course of a year. is evoked experientially in a con-
stantly changing setting employing a variety of media. The flora and fauna in-
digenous to that place are presented. as are its geological and archaeological
histories. Whereas the spatial dimension of the digital project encompasses a
vast geographic area (e.g .• the northern Plains). the spatial dimension of the
gallery exhibition is one particular place in the landscape (e.g .• headwaters of
the Yellowstone River).
What differentiates the social dimension of the digital project from that of
the gallery exhibition are the criteria for selecting tribes whose histories may
be presented. In the digital project. the geographic area of the base map estab-
lishes the spatial domain within which event locations are mapped. Therefore.
only those tribes whose epitomizing events all occurred within the geographic
area and whose tribally controlled lands are still within that area may be in-
cluded. The distinct geographic place in the gallery exhibition. on the other
hand. represents a particular place in indigenous ethnogeographies. As such.
only those tribes whose known landscapes encompassed that place at some
time in their histories may be included. Whether or not the tribes are similar in
culture or history or currently occupy that area is irrelevant-just so long as
that particular place was known at some time in each of their histories. even if
it was not simultaneous.
It is fitting that of the four dimensions of tribalism. only the spiritual dimen-
sion is the same for the digital project and the gallery exhibition. For both for-
mats the temporal span of tribal histories extends from the beginning of time
to the end of time-two temporal poles that are grounded in the spiritual tra-
ditions of specific communities. The capacity to encompass this extensive tem-
poral dimension is inherent in both formats.
The two formats once again differ considerably with regard to the experien-
tial dimension. Though both are in some sense multimedia. the digital project
can only present information digitally. At present. the technological capabilities
of hypermedia applications are limited to digitized images. sounds. and written
texts. In the digital project. multimedia information pertaining to epitomizing
events for the tribes is digitized. then linked to events whose locations are
marked on a common base map where "buttons" are placed over them. By
clicking on an event location button. information that pertains to that place
and the event that happened there is made accessible. Since the event location
buttons may be clicked in any sequence a "reader" chooses. and the informa-
tion about the event may likewise be "read" in any order. the project positions
170 CLEARING A PATH

the "reader" at the center of historical inquiry. As such, "readers" become the
creative decision makers as they weave their way through the web of informa-
tion, linking to digitized information in a sequence they determine. The gallery
exhibition, on the other hand, incorporates images, sounds, and written texts
in their original formats. Moreover, visitors to the gallery exhibition may expe-
rience smells, tastes, and textures, none of which are possible in the digital
project. Although all of this multimedia information is still linked to epitomiz-
ing events, in the exhibition each event occupies its own spatial location within
the gallery. So whereas "readers" navigate the digital project by manipulating a
cursor on a computer screen, "visitors" make their way through the gallery ex-
hibition by literally moving on the museum floor from one event display to an-
other, and from one tribal history space to another. Though "readers" and
"visitors" seemingly simulate the role of tribal historians, their individual, non-
sequential inquiries are conceptually unrelated to the communal responsibili-
ties and nonsequential performances ofthe historian.
The digital project and the museum exhibition are both composed of three
types of modular components that are hierarchically nested. At the highest
level is the spatial component. Within the spatial component are tribal compo-
nents. And then within each tribal component are event components. Each
epitomizing event is represented in the project/exhibition by an event compo-
nent. A set of event components constitutes a tribal history component or
module. Though the digital project and gallery exhibition share this module de-
sign, the cumulative and ongoing aspect of the experiential dimension is differ-
ent in the two formats. If digital storage space is sufficient, it is relatively easy
to add new data to the digital project. These data may relate to an existing
event presented in the project, it may be a new event and related information
in the history of one of the tribes presented in the project, a new tribal history
module may be incorporated into the project, or an entirely new geographic
area module may be developed. The gallery exhibition is cumulative and ongo-
ing as well, but in a different way. Because the floor space available for a gallery
exhibition is fixed, the inclusion of additional materials must be facilitated by
rotating out existing materials. These rotating materials may relate to one of
the events presented in the exhibition, an entire tribal history module may be
rotated out, and the geographic place module itself may rotate out. This is the
built-in changeability of the gallery. Tribal history modules may be developed
ahead of their appearance on the exhibition floor, yet still be available digitally,
both in the museum and throughout the world, before and after they are on ex-
hibition. They may also function as traveling exhibitions, again either before or
after they are incorporated into a museum exhibition.
 KEEP YOUR THOUGHTS ABOVE THE TREES 171

DEVELOPING TRIBAL HISTORIES

The above discussion of tribal histories from an indigenous tribal perspective

advocates a reorientation in the presentation of tribal histories and a reevalua-
tion in the process of developing them. The development of tribal histories
should be undertaken in a good way, a respectful way, a way that acknowledges
the inherent expertise, value, and rights of tribal communities. Such histories
are about living peoples and ongoing communities. They are complex and re-
quire considerable thought to develop and present in a respectful and mean-
ingful manner.
The conceptual-methodological process for developing tribal histories out-
lined below is not necessarily new or unique, but it has been used with some
success in developing digital projects and gallery exhibitions that incorporate
more than one tribal history. Its underlying premise is that the process is a col-
laborative effort on the part of numerous partners, each with its own expertise,
value, and rights. Moreover, each partner brings something of benefit both to
the process and to its collaborators. One set of partners is the tribal communi-
ties. Each community has its own indigenous framework for structuring its
past, and organizes and presents its tribally specific history according to
unique principles. Putting these unique tribal histories together in a coherent
framework and presenting them to the nontribal public is the goal of the re-
maining partner. This partner, for lack of a better term, will be referred to as
"the mainstream institution." A partnership of tribal communities and a main-
stream institution undertakes this process, not tribal and nontribal individuals
acting independently. Benefits accrue to the partners, and commitments and
responsibilities extend beyond the particular individuals participating in the
process at any given moment.
On the basis of the spatial dimension criteria mentioned above, the main-
stream institution identifies a list of tribal communities that fit those criteria
and then selects from that list the tribes it will approach to develop tribal his-
tories. For each tribe, the institution conducts background research on tribal
history, develops a preliminary list of epitomizing events, compiles a tribal bib-
liography and an inventory of institutional resources from or relating to the
tribe, and identifies an academic scholar. The academic scholar is someone who
has conducted extensive research pertaining to the history of that tribe, knows
the location and general holdings of repositories with tribal materials, and has
personal contact with tribal members. The academic scholar reviews the mate-
rials the mainstream institution has produced, and recommends a number of
individuals who might serve as the tribal liaison for the tribal history module.
172 CLEARING A PATH

The tribal liaison is a tribal member who lives in the community, speaks both the
tribal language and English, is knowledgeable of community protocol, and is
comfortable taking on a leadership role in developing the tribal history module.
Once formal contact between the head authorities of the mainstream insti-
tution and a partner community is established and agreement has been
reached to proceed, a five-phase iterative process is set in motion. The five
phases are characterized by an important meeting between representatives
from both the tribal community and the mainstream institution. These meet-
ings punctuate the continuous process offieldwork and research that goes into
developing a tribal history and represent moments of decision making and
work review. The locations of these meetings alternate between the two part-
ners; the first, third, and fifth are in the community, the second and fourth are
at the institution.
In phase one, mainstream institution staff travel to the tribal community and
in a public meeting, organized by the tribal liaison, present the concept of the
project/exhibition and invite the community to participate in the process of de-
veloping and presenting their community's history module. It is critical that the
event-centered concept is clearly articulated at this meeting and that everyone
participating consents to work within that framework. Equally important is that
the process of developing and presenting the tribal history is explained. Subse-
quent to the meeting, a small number of community members are selected who
will serve as community representatives throughout the developmental process.
These individuals, along with the tribal liaison, are primarily responsible for
choosing their community's epitomizing events and for selecting the objects,
photographs, and other media through which the events will be presented. They
also assist in gathering oral narratives. or community accounts. of those events
from knowledgeable tribal members. These representatives, along with the
tribal liaison. travel to the mainstream institution for the phase two meeting.
The phase two meeting might more appropriately be described as an ex-
tended workshop lasting three or four days. The community representatives
and tribal liaison travel to the mainstream institution where they are afforded
the opportunity to see all of the materials from and about their community that
are in the possession of that institution. These are the primary materials from
which they will select to illustrate their chosen epitomizing events. Before re-
turning to their community, the representatives and liaison meet with the digi-
tal project programmer or gallery exhibition designer to discuss the
epitomizing events. the selected materials. and ideas for presenting their tribal
history. On the basis of these conversations, the programmer/designer begins
to design the tribal history module for that community.
 KEEP YOUR THOUGHTS ABOVE THE TREES 173

When the tribal history module is at a preliminary stage-schematic draw-

ings of the gallery exhibition or an alpha version of the digital project-institu-
tion staff return to the community and present it at a public meeting. At this
phase three meeting community members see the results of the phase two
workshop attended by their representatives and liaison, and have an opportu-
nity to comment on that work and to suggest revisions. Feedback from this
meeting is incorporated into the evolving design of the tribal history module.
The phase four meeting is held at the mainstream institution and lasts one
or two days. Tribal liaisons from each of the tribes associated with a spatial
module attend this meeting, thereby having an opportunity to meet their peers
from other tribes and to see how those tribal histories are being presented.
Furthermore, they also see how their tribal histories are linked to the spatial
module. By this point in the process, the programmer/designer has completed
work on the spatial module (e.g., the northern Plains, or headwaters of the Yel-
lowstone River). The tribal history modules also are highly refined by this meet-
ing, but not to such a degree that recommendations, substitutions, deletions,
or additions from the tribal liaisons cannot be incorporated.
After implementing the tribal liaison's suggestions, a final design of the
tribal history module is produced by the programmer/designer. This design is
rendered as completely and accurately as possible, and then taken to the com-
munity for the phase five meeting. At this public meeting, to which the entire
community is invited, the tribal history module is presented and the commu-
nity is asked for their approval. Upon approval, the design of the module is set.
Should changes to the module be undertaken by the mainstream institution,
staff members return again to the community for another approval. In other
words, when community members sign off on the design, they should experi-
ence no surprises when they eventually have the opportunity to use the final
computer program or visit the museum exhibition.
Again, this is not necessarily a new or unique developmental process. Many
individuals and institutions conceive of the work they do with Indians and
tribal communities along similar lines. This process does, however, clearly artic-
ulate the functions of the collaborating partners. The institution is responsible
for developing the overall conceptual framework for the digital project or
gallery exhibition, and for funding the processes of developing and presenting
each tribal history. Though the conceptual framework of an indigenous tribal
perspective on tribal history is grounded in the four dimensions of tribalism, it
transcends the idiosyncratic organizing principles of any single tribal commu-
nity. The framework is. however, void of content. Working within that frame-
work. each community has the responsibility to make their tribal history
174 CLEARING A PATH

module uniquely theirs. In other words, to share those important events that
they and their ancestors alone experienced.

COLLABORATING ISSUES

There are a number of issues that arise when tribal communities and main-
stream institutions set in motion the iterative process of developing and pre-
senting tribal histories. One is that a moral and ethical relationship is
established between tribal communities and the mainstream institution. It has
been my experience that almost without exception, community members find
the iterative process exciting. This is due in part to the fact that it respects
their knowledge and decision-making abilities, but also, one suspects, because
it sets up an ongoing relationship between their community and the main-
stream institution. The institution is not just coming into their community
once and appropriating what it needs and then going away and doing with that
information what it wants. Rather, the institution is committing itself to an on-
going collaboration with community members, a partnership wherein commu-
nities exert a considerable amount of decision-making authority with regard to
their tribal histories. Working within the overall framework of either the digital
project or the gallery exhibition, community members decide which events to
present, what information to share about each event, who within their commu-
nity will share the information, which objects and images to use to illustrate
the events, and in the case of the gallery exhibition, even the shape and design
of the space within which their history is exhibited. They are telling their own
histories from their own perspectives using their own words, instead of being
studied by nonmembers who then tell an outsider's version of their history.
This level of community involvement and authority is rare.
It is a very potent experience for community members to revisit many of
the important events presented in their tribal histories. In some instances, they
are sharing their experiences and stories with outsiders for the first time. And
their stories are properly their intellectual property. They do not want to invest
their time, efforts, and emotions if the process is not going to be done right or
if the final product is not going to be good in their eyes. So the mainstream in-
stitution has moral and ethical commitments to the communities with whom it
works. And that's the issue: Are the commitments going to be honored? Or are
they going to be like so many other promises made by outsiders that are cast
aside when the institution finds it convenient to do so? The history of relations
between tribal communities and outside institutions suggests to community
 KEEP YOUR ThOUGHTS ABOVE THE TREES 175

members that they judge the mainstream institution on its actions instead of
its words. History is replete with good intentions from institutions gone awry.
Therefore, the process is necessarily iterative, takes place over a period of
time, and considerably decenters the traditional authority of the mainstream
institution.
Another issue that arises from the developmental process is that related
processes are set in motion within the communities themselves. Though these
intracommunity processes result from the developmental process, they operate
independently from the mainstream institution. In many instances, the public
meetings to which the entire community is invited are the first times that com-
munity members have gathered together to discuss tribal history. Aside from
the political machinations that often accompany such gatherings, deep-seated
issues within the communities are brought into these discussions. Questions
concerning authority to speak, personal character, information dissemination,
and loss of tribal knowledge are not uncommon. A recurring theme is that
knowledge of the "old ways" passed on with the last of the generation who
were educated by the community instead of by formal schools. With a deep
sense of loss, community members repeatedly say that these projects are too
late, that the old men and women who knew the stories have all passed on.
Ironically, after having said this, tribal members are identified who do know the
stories. And this is one of the benefits of the process that accrues solely to the
community: the collective knowledge of the community is recognized. In dis-
cussing their tribal history in public formats, individuals share stories and opin-
ions that other community members are keenly interested in hearing. One
outcome of this is that the communities themselves wish to retain copies of all
the information gathered during the developmental process, and to make it
available to community members.
The developmental process described earlier outlines a different way for in-
stitution staff to work with community members. The community people in-
volved are not the usual "Rolodex" Indians; they may not be widely known in
the institutional world, or even beyond their own communities in some cases.
Most of the people participating in this process are embedded in the day-to-
day lives of their communities and often have limited experience working with
mainstream institutions. They become deeply invested in the process. They
were born and raised in their communities, and they live there now and they
will remain living there until their time on this earth is up, at which point they
most likely will be interred in their homelands. Many of their ancestors played
prominent roles in their community's history. and most of the participants to-
day play leadership roles of one sort or another: political official, spiritual
1 76 CLEARING A PATH

leader, artist, elder, or apprentice. Their reputations are on the line. Similarly,
institution staff begin working intensively with community members whom
they had not previously known and working with them in new ways. The rela-
tionships between staff and community members develop in both the commu-
nity setting and the institution's urban milieu. During the community-based
phases, the relationship resembles somewhat that between ethnographer and
ethnographic "subject." During the institution-based phases, however, the rela-
tionship more closely resembles that between inside professional and outside
consultant. Both of these types of relationships entail obligations and responsi-
bilities that require a lot of time and commitment to maintain.
A fourth, but certainly not the final, issue is that the developmental process
requires people to have good thoughts. This is a concern that may be easily
overlooked in the institutional world. It tends to sound a little new-agey, but I
believe it is essential to successfully developing and presenting tribal histories
in a respectful manner. These tribal histories are not merely histories of tribes.
They are intimately bound up with the indigenous spiritual traditions of their
tribe: tribal history and spiritual tradition are inseparable. To tell the history of
their tribe, community members inevitably begin with the appearance of their
ancestors on this earth. And some share what the end oftime on this earth will
be like for their people. So tribal history in this context stretches from the
beginning of time to the end of time. And the stories about those two points
of time rest firmly within what many people would categorize as spiritual
tradition.
When dealing with things spiritual, one is usually admonished to have good
thoughts and to conduct oneself in a good way. This is often stated as having a
good mind and a good heart. It may also be referred to as keeping one's
thoughts above the trees. s When dealing with an important matter-which
characterizes the developing and presenting of tribal histories-individuals fre-
quently ask for guidance and protection, give thanks, and cleanse themselves.
Therefore, prayer and ritual are integral parts of the process. And if we ac-
knowledged that tribal spiritual traditions are ongoing and that they are effica-
cious, then it seems imperative that the work of developing and presenting
tribal histories be conducted in a respectful manner, that it be done in a good
way. Not only because it is proper but also because there is a relationship be-
tween thoughts and actions, on the one hand, and the quality of completed
projects and exhibitions, on the other.
It is evident that even though digital projects and gallery exhibitions have
the capacity to incorporate an indigenous tribal perspective on tribal histories,
neither replicates the fundamental function of those histories. This chasm is
 KEEP YOUR THOUGHTS ABOVE THE TREES 177

further widened when those histories are presented outside of the tribal com-
munities by mainstream institutions. Whereas tribal histories were intended
for the "education, entertainment, and inspiration" of community members,
histories presented at mainstream institutions are overwhelming "read" and
"visited" by nontribal members. That is their primary audience. But that does
not mean that those histories are better organized into a mainstream "Indian
history" or a conventional academic perspective on tribal history. Quite the
contrary: the organizing principle for tribal histories should be an indigenous
tribal perspective. Though the function of the histories has changed, it is possi-
ble-by keeping our thoughts above the trees-for mainstream institutions
and tribal communities to collaboratively develop and present tribal histories
from an indigenous tribal perspective.

NOTES

1. Harvey Markowitz has been a collaborator in the development of these ideas for a
number of years. His highly developed theoretical orientations and extensive fieldwork
experiences are indispensable in our efforts to articulate the inherent qualities of tribal
histories and to develop tribal histories in collaboration with tribal communities. Spe-
cial thanks to him for commenting on this paper.
2. Not only is N. Scott Momaday a preeminent author and winner of the Pulitzer
Prize. he also wrote a wonderful essay touching on the longevity and frailty of oral tra-
ditions titled "Man Made of Words," reprinted in The Remembered Earth (Hobson 1990).
3. These visually distinctive documents are commonly called "winter counts." One of
the earliest articles on winter counts appeared as chapter 10 in Picture-Writing of the
American Indians (Mallery 1972 118931:265-328). The British Museum Winter Count
(Howard 1979) provides a good overview of winter counts and also includes an appen-
dix of published and unpublished winter counts.
4. As used herein, tribalism refers to the inherent sovereignty of tribal communities.
a sovereignty that predated the arrival of non-Indians by millennia. This sovereignty is
intimately bound up with tribal spiritual traditions and will continue to exist as long as
those traditions survive. Nationalism, on the other hand, refers to a political sovereignty
that is recognized as such by treaty negotiations and Supreme Court decisions.
5. "American Indian Old World" refers to the collective land base oftribal communi-
ties before nontribal interventions. Essentially it is the Western Hemisphere. The ''Amer-
ican Indian New World," on the other hand, is based on control of decision-making
opportunities within a land base and is therefore not a static domain. As land passed out
of control of tribal communities, the American Indian New World likewise contracted.
Today, tribally controlled lands represent the American Indian New World: essentially
federally recognized Indian reservations.
6. Though writing about Indian literature, Michael Dorris illustrates how the term
1 78 CLEARING A PATH

"Indian" negates the concept of "peoplehood": "If there had been a North American lan-
guage called 'Indian,' the mode of communication within a society called 'Indian,' then
there would undoubtedly be something appropriately labeled 'Indian literature'" (Dorris
1979:147). Similarly, "Indian history" is a generalizing and homogenizing term, one that
obfuscates the particularities of individual tribal histories.
7. This discussion is based in part on experiences during the process of conceptual-
izing and developing the Hypermedia Tribal Histories project at the University of Michi-
gan and at the Newberry Library's D'Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian History,
and the "Our Peoples" tribal histories exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution's Na-
tional Museum of the American Indian.
8. Thanks to Mr. Jerry Wolfe for suggesting this phrase.

REFERENCES
Albers, Patricia C.
1994 Thoughts Have Power, Words Have Privilege: Some Reflections on Social Sci-
entific Observations and Categories of the Ojibwe People. Occasional Papers
in the Curriculum Series, 16. Teaching and Writing local History: lac Courte
Oreilles. D'Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian History, Newberry li-
brary, Chicago.
Deloria, Vine,Jr.
1978 A Conversation with Vine Deloria,Jr. 29-min. videorecording. Words & Place
Series. Tucson: University of Arizona Radio-1V-Film Bureau.
1992 American Indians. In Multiculturalism in the United States,J. D. Buenker and
L. A. Ratner, eds. pp. 31-52. New York: Greenwood Press.
1994 God is Red: A Native View of Religion. Golden, CO: Fulcrum.
Deloria, Vine, Jr., and Clifford M.lytle, eds.
1984 The Nations Within: The Past and Future of American Indian Sovereignty.
New York: Pantheon Books.
DeMallie, Raymond, ed.
1984 The Sixth Grandfather: Black Elk's Teachings Given to John G. Neihardt.
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Dissanayake, E.
1988 What Is Art For? Seattle: University of Washington Press.
Dorris, Michael
1979 Native American Literature in an Ethnohistorical Context. College English
41, no. 2 (October): 147-162.
Fogelson, Raymond
t 984 Night Thoughts on Native American Social History. Occasional Papers in the
Curriculum Series, 3. The Impact oflndian History on the Teaching of U.S.
History. D'Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian History, Newberry
Library, Chicago. Pp. 67-89.
Hobson, Geary, ed.
t 990 The Remembered Earth. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
 KEEP YOUR THOUGHTS ABOVE THE TREES 179

Howard,James H.
1979 The British Museum Winter Count. London: British Museum.
Mallery, Garrick M.
1972 Picture-Writing of the American Indians. New York: Dover.
Momaday, N. Scott
1988 The Native Voice. In Columbia Literary History ofthe United States. pp.
5-15. New York: Columbia University Press.
Rollins, Njemile, producer
1992 America's Heritage: Preserving Our History. In Spirits of the Present: The
Legacy from Native America. Radio Smithsonian at the Smithsonian Institu-
tion, Washington, DC, and the Native American Public Broadcasting Consor-
tium, Lincoln, Nebraska.
Sawyer, Thomas E.
1976 Assimilation versus Self-Identity: A Modem Native American Perspective. In
Contemporary Native American Address. John R. Maestas, ed. Pp. 197-205.
Provo, lIT: Brigham Young University.
Vaughan, Tay
1988 Using HyperCard. Carmel, IN: Que Corporation.
Washburn, Wilcomb, ed.
1988 History of Indian-White Relations, volume 4. Handbook of North American
Indians. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.
This page intentionally left blank
Life Proceeds From the Name:
Indigenous Peoples and the
Predicament of Hybridity

James F Brooks

My name is Tsoai-talee. I am, therefore, Tsoai-talee; therefore I am.

The storyteller Pohd-Iohk IOld Wolt] gave me the name Tsoai-talee.
He believed that a man's life proceeds from his name, in the way
that a river proceeds from its source.

'f
he Kiowa novelist, poet, and painter N. Scott Momaday begins his mem-
oir The Names (1976) with these spare sentences. In a single name we see
woven ascription, acceptance, being, narrative, force, and constraint-the
logic of operation that gives names their extraordinary salience in life and
memory. Yet we also see in Momaday's memoir the way in which names and
naming foreshorten and refashion the complexity of history in the process of
identity creation. His work revisits five generations of family history through
their names, migrations, and places. We come to know that Momaday, the
Kiowa, Tsoai-talee embodies a genealogy that includes Cherokee, French,
Scots, Anglo, Mexican, and Kiowa progenitors, a densely entangled vine of in-
dividual lives and identities that stretch from the mountains of North Carolina
to "the knobs" of Kentucky, from the dry sierra of northern Mexico to the plains
of Oklahoma, and, finally, to the sand-rock canyon of the Jemez River, where to-
day he writes and paints in the adobe home once owned by his parents.
This centurylong migration of names and places, a toponymic narrative
etched with the strands of life's strange detours and unified by the organizing
power of kinship and culture, condenses in the power of the story to the sin-
gle, sacred designation of a name for an infant boy in the summer of 1934. His
182 CLEARING A PATH

parents-of Cherokee, French, Scots, Anglo, Mexican, and Kiowa descent-had

taken him to the very center of the Kiowa cultural universe, the chimney of vol-
canic rock rising on the north slopes of the Black Hills of Wyoming, to be held
before the "Tsoai" (Rock-tree) of the Kwuda (the people coming out). At Devil's
Tower, "Pohd-lohk affirmed the whole life of the child in a name, saying: Now
you are, Tsoai-talee IRock-tree Boy/." And yet to accomplish this act of naming,
of establishing a course for the river that stirred inside the boy, Pohd-lohk
"spoke, as if telling a story, of the coming-out people, of their long journey. He
spoke of how it was when everything began, ofTsoai, and of the stars falling or
holding fast in the sky." In making a name for the infant cradled in his arms, Old
Wolf began his story in a time before names (57).
Thus names and places find union in the people who link them, and in the
linkage one kind of history comes into conversation with another. Keith Basso
elucidated similar phenomena in his acclaimed Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape
and Language among the Western Apache (1996a). When Apache men and women
"drink" from places through their place-names, names derived either from a
mythic past or from specific historical events, Basso writes that "like their an-
cestors before them, they display by word and deed that beyond the visible re-
ality of place lies a moral reality which they themselves have come to embody"
(Basso 1996b). Compressed into dynamic metaphors, Apache toponyms pre-
scribe specific behavioral solutions for individuals in moral crisis. Yet in sum-
moning one moment from the past while letting others lie unspoken, Apache
place-names are themselves acts of voice and silence, of narrative assertion and
omission, of inclusion or exclusion in the interest of indigenous identity main-
tenance. The effectiveness of the place-name resides almost entirely in the lin-
guistic and cultural fluency of the listener: outsiders by birth, generation, or
diaspora may find themselves beyond the constituting power of the metaphor.
The name becomes, in the words of the critical theorist Charlie Shepherdson,
"productive, as having effects within history itself" (Shepherdson 1999: 17).
But names and history are also very different things. however much they
may be intertwined and mutually constitutive. Momaday's sensitive and ele-
gant family history lies centrally within the question I address in this essay:
How might attention to names and naming, powerful acts of assumption and
ascription alike. provide one point of entry into the complexity of representing
the pasts of indigenous peoples in North America and other regions of the
world as native societies engaged with the Western imperial world? Extending
this even further, how does "naming the past" in the form of assumed, as-
cribed, and discovered historical narratives continue to shape the lives and
identities of Native peoples today (Cornell 2000)7
 LIFE PROCEEDS FROM THE NAME 183

My specific interest is with peoples who, like Momaday's progenitors,

found themselves by force or volition biologically and culturally mixed with the
agents of intrusive imperial powers, yet worked their identity narratives to re-
tain or claim an indigenous stance. I look at peoples of mixed descent who oc-
cupied 19th-century pastoral borderlands in the American Southwest, the
Russian Caucasus, the Canadian West, and Southern Africa, for across these
vast spaces profound socioeconomic change proceeded only lightly mediated
by state-level institutions like schools, churches, modern armies, and labor sys-
tems, the apparati by which names came to be sedimented in popular imagina-
tion and scholarly praxis. Thus the names they gave themselves, and the names
by which they were known to intruders, worked with a degree of autonomy ab-
sent in the 20th-century world, yet one that I argue is forcefully reasserting it-
self in the 21 st century. The indigenous and imperial peoples who shared
common landscapes prior to the formation of 19th-century nation-states
sorted themselves internally and interactively into names meant to define, in
some sense, the nature of their relationships. For a good portion of the 19th
century in each of these regions Native and intrusive peoples inhabited non-
dominant frontiers, volatile cultural borderlands in which no one group could
assert a monopoly of power. This uncertainty in the nature of power found re-
flection in an uncertainty of names. Group survival often meant the creation of
a flexible cultural matrix by which sameness and difference were interwoven in
processes of inclusion and exclusion, often violent, yet always conditioned by
the need to maintain some form of socioeconomic interdependency. By the late
19th century the formative states in which these mixed-descent peoples lived
began to gain the capacity to dominate on-the-ground relations and narrative
production, with diverse and unexpected consequences for these borderland
peoples. The ability of names to straddle constraint and opportunity began to
slip away (cf. Adelman and Aron 1999).
The 20th century saw this flexibility largely lost-however much local peo-
ples worked to hide or disguise their alternative and oppositional transcripts,
modern nations like the United States, the Soviet Union, Canada, and South
Africa all crafted political hegemonies by gaining monopolies on violence and
historical production (Watson 1994; Scott 1999). In this essay, however I pro-
ceed on the assumption that our long century just ended has become, for the
21st century, an analytical obstacle. Stable national borders, homogeneous na-
tional populations, monopolies of violence, cultural and political hege-
monies-all seem to be vanishing in the solvent of global capitalism. And yet
the sociopolitical handmaiden of our new capitalism, a neoliberalism meant to
emancipate individual subjects from national, tribal, or ethnic passions, seems
184 CLEARING A PATH

to have inspired the very opposite. As Peter Geschiere and Francis Nymanjoh
have recently argued for Africa, in an insight nearly universal to the 21st-cen-
tury world, "democratization seems to trigger a general obsession with au-
tochthony and ethnic citizenship invariably defined against 'strangers'-that is,
against all who 'do not really belong'" (2000:423). The capacity to claim an in-
digenous social and moral priority, even if one's descent is largely hybrid, has
become hugely more powerful in a world in which the sociological and moral
justifications beneath Western imperialism and nation-states lie in ruins. This
"dialectic of flow and closure" cannot be entirely resolved by the stories that
follow, but might be illuminated by them. My method is to set aside the 20th
century and look back to the 19th, when notions like Natives and newcomers,
indigenes and imperialists, or nations, tribes, and colors were as yet in the
process of evolution. I offer several stories about names that place the tensions
between 19th-century identity narratives and those emerging in the 21 st cen-
tury in high relief, and, for the most part, let the consonance and incongruity
among them do the work of creating a wider critical vision.
This approach entails an experiment in narrative strategy. I wish first to pro-
pose that borderland stories speak in several ways-as histories complete
within themselves, as historical dialogues with the potential for mutual enlight-
enment, and as forecasts for phenomena yet to come. I therefore employ a his-
torical poetics invoking metonym and metaphor. Like Western Apache
place-names, metonymic stories pack tremendous richness of detail into dense
packages that expand in the listener's mind to stand for even more complex
narratives. Lest they stand entirely alone, however, I ask these metonymic tales
to engage with their neighbors in a metaphoric relation. By this I mean that
metaphors should do more than simply suggest comparison. They ought to
work by analogy toward linking domains in unexpected and creative ways and
allow a radical shift in perspective through which one particular reality appears
wholly different when approached from different angles. I place stories from
19th-century cultural borderlands in discontinuous dialogue with those from
our own time and await what Kenneth Burke (1954:90) once called the
"glimpse of incongruity-hitherto unsuspected connectives which we ... note
in the progressions of a dream ... Iconnections thatl exemplify relationships
between objects which our customary rational vocabulary has ignored." Craft-
ing dreamlike progressions of incongruity in the interests of analytical insight is
a far cry from the conventional approach to comparative history, but just might
yield a depth-of-field heretofore lacking in our efforts.
The risk is obvious. Whether or not the strategy succeeds is-like the effi-
cacy of the Apache place-name-entirely up to the audience. But we can only
 LIFE PROCEEDS FROM THE NAME 185

know by trying. let us consider a series of stories organized around names--of

individuals, families, and communities. We can begin with one name, or more
precisely, two names that have become so conflated in the popular minds that
they pretend to engage in explanation by simple proximity.

INDIVIDUALS

Many of us spent the winter months of the turning century transfixed as the
ghastly battle for control of the city of Grozny in Chechnya unfolded. Amid the
images of blackened armored personnel carriers, of young men displaying list-
less bravado or wounded and weeping for their mothers, and the blasted build-
ings and leaden faces of Grozny itself, two names found constant, symmetrical
mention: Shamil 8asayev and Shamil, the imam of Daghestan. Shamil 8asayev,
of course, was the leader ofthe Chechen forces besieged in Grozny, the strate-
gic culmination of his ten-year career as a Chechen nationalist and military
commander. His travels had taken him from Abkhazia to Karabakh to
Afghanistan and back to Chechnya for a key role in the first war that brought the
two sides to a temporary truce in 1996. It was his decision to export revolution
to neighboring Daghestan in the fall of last year that resulted in the Russian
siege of Grozny. That action ended in February with the Chechens' nightmarish
retreat from the city, in which 8asayev had the front half of his foot blown away
by a butterfly mine. In a different register the conflict continues today.
Hardly a news report went by that did not find some way to mention that
Shamil 8asayev shared a name with the Imam Shamil, leader of "the tribes of
the north Caucasus" in their first holy war against Russian expansion. Their ji-
had lasted from 1834 to 1859, when Shamil surrendered himself and his forces
at a fortress near Vedeno, Chechnya-Shamil 8asayev's birthplace. The master
narrative in this evocation of names wished to convince us of the undying and
irredeemable hostility between Russians and Chechens and the inscrutable
depth of Chechens' ethnoreligious commitment to tribal, if not national, auton-
omy. In some cases, Western reportage even set aside religion as a causal vari-
able and dwelt instead on the martial culture of Chechens, presumably
traceable from the dawn of time through the imam to 8asayev without inter-
ruption. For example, the American strategy journal Military Review offered this
assessment:

The Chechens are a warrior people, one ofa number of fiercely indepen-
dent tribes within the mountainous regions of the Caucasus. living
186 CLEARING A PATH

along an invasion route between Europe and Asia, a deep and enduring
warrior tradition evolved among these peoples. The Chechens gained
the reputation of doggedly resisting any foreign domination. Whether it
was the Mongols in the 13th, the Turks in the 16th, or the Russians in
the 19th and 20th centuries, the Chechens have never accepted foreign
rule. Though the Russians managed in the 19th century, after more than
thirty years of fighting, to seize most of the Chechen territory, they were
never able to fully incorporate the Chechen people into the Russian Em-
pire.IFinch 1997:331

No student of American Indian history would find the foregoing "warrior race"
trope unfamiliar to the ear, nor the way in which such discourse elides the pres-
ence of stable and enduring civil societies within "martial peoples" (Enloe 1979).
For his part, Shamil Basayev (2000) does not shy away from the associations,
noting on his website that he "honors the memory of the Imam." Unlike the
Western emphasis on primordial military culture, however, his explanation for
the war in Chechnya is entirely religious: "It is the Islam of the Chechens that
fanned the flames of hatred among the Czarists, the Bolsheviks, and the Com-
munists ... anyone who wants to know about the truth should study history
to find out how long the Russians have been taking revenge against the Mus-
lims ofChechnya."
What happens if we take this call for a resort to history seriously and look
at the savagery of21st-century Chechnya from the perspective of the 19th? Do-
ing so casts both Western and local interpretations into some doubt. Indeed,
the Russian Empire and the peoples of the Caucasus did engage in protracted
violence for the better part of the 19th century, a conflict that ended formally
with the imam's surrender in 1859 and the wholesale deportation of holdout
Circassians to Turkey in 1864. Unlike the Interior Ministry troops that prose-
cute the current war, however, the 19th-century Russian advance was spear-
headed by local militaries, generally known as the Terek Cossacks, after the
Terek River that bisects Chechnya just north of Grozny. In the Russian imagina-
tion, these and other Cossacks represented the inexorable advance of Russian
civilization through the process of the "gathering of the peoples (nardony)"-a
cultural construct that allowed any peoples of Slavic descent and peasant
lifestyle to exemplify the essence of Russianness however distant they lived
from Muscovy (Barrett 1994, 1995; Barrett in Brower and Lazzerini 1997; Bar-
rett 1999).
But in actuality the Terek Cossacks fell far from the cultural hearth of Russia.
Instead, they emerged out of a conglomeration of refugees and brigands from
 LIFE PROCEEDS FROM THE NAME 187

backgrounds as various as Caspian pirates, Kuban princes, Circassian nomads,

Okochesnkii Tartars (either Chechens or Ingushi), and migratory Georgians.
Thus the "intrusive" agents of Russian expansion were drawn in part from in-
digenous peoples. Their confessional status seems equally diverse: Old Believ-
ers whose primitive gnosticism saw greater danger in the secularizing thrust of
the Russian Orthodox Church than in Islam and who managed to live side by
side with no small number of Muslim Cossacks; or Orthodox Russian colonists
whose commitment to Christianity was more instrumental than heartfelt, adja-
cent to nomadic "idol-worshippers" who quietly ignored the conversion efforts
of Christians and Muslims alike. What they shared was a landscape of grassy
foothills and timbered mountains well suited to transhumant pastoralism, a
willingness to pledge nominal allegiance to the Russian Empire when doing so
met local ends, and an even greater willingness to ignore or subvert Russia's at-
tempts to create cultural quarantines around their regional identity. Indeed,
the very gradualness of the Russian conquest may have been due as much to lo-
cal inertia as to the ferocity of the "hill tribes." For every pitched battle fought
between Terek Cossacks and the mountaineers of the Caucasus there took
place dozens offace to face negotiations in which products of the steppes were
exchanged for those of the mountains. In fact, Thomas Barrett has argued that
"trade relations between the Cossacks of the Terek and the peoples of the Cau-
casus did not diminish Iwith Russian expansionl, but were vital to the Cossack
economy into the 19th century, even during the period of the most intense
warfare of Russian against Chechen" (Barrett 1997:228). And however many
fleet horses were bartered for Circassian cloaks and sheepskin caps, the endur-
ing glue in this borderland's exchange economy lay in human beings.
We can never know the numbers of captives, slaves, fugitives, and deserters
who passed from Cossack stanitsi into the auls of the hill peoples (or vise versa),
but their presence in anecdotal sources and Russian literary production sug-
gests a degree of ethnic mixture that today seems staggering. Forcible cross-
cultural marriage unions certainly drove the initial phase of exchange-the
gender balance in Cossack communities first censused in the late 18th century
stood at three men to everyone woman, where by the mid-19th century the
sexes were equally represented. Russian cossackification policies placed high
emphasis on the need for men to marry and raise families, in part to root their
loyalties more firmly in their homes but also because in Cossack settlements
women farmers produced virtually all of the wheat and wine that provided
their economic mainstay. Russia occasionally exported women convicts from
the Russian interior to the Caucasus, and Cossacks had first claim on female
prisoners taken in military campaigns. State sponsored bride theft even in-
188 CLEARING A PATH

cluded Russian authorities turning a blind eye to Cossack wife-stealing raids

into the Russian provinces of Penza, Samara, and Voronezh. But non-Christian
women of the mountains presented the preferred targets for both local men
and authorities in Moscow, who offered 45 silver rubles to any Terek Cossack
who would convert and marry a captive woman. For Muscovites. such a mar-
riage represented the triumph of Christianity over Islam. For the Cossack hus-
band, however, a captive wife from a hill tribe brought with her the cultural
repertoire of language, custom, kinship, and religion that would allow her hus-
band (and family) to tap into resources otherwise beyond their reach (Barrett
1999:129-145). For the question at hand, such captures and assimilations dis-
rupt any easy designation of the Terek Cossacks as allochthons or "outsiders"
to the cultural world of the north Caucasus.
This violent and vital system of cross-cultural exogamy did not reside solely
with the Cossacks. In addition to extensive intermarriage among the several
score of Muslim "ethnic" groups in Daghestan and Chechnya, through which
the imam worked to substantiate a shared future for his inclusive Islamic re-
public, Imam Shamil used marriages to create kin-linkages across the Christian-
Muslim divide of the Caucasus line (Gammar 1994). Cossack and Russian
deserters found brides awaiting them in Shamil's camps, since he had issued a
regulation that abolished punishments for local girls convicted of premarital
sex if they would marry a converted Russian fugitive (Barrett 1999: 132). Shamil
himself was a practitioner of the trade. His favorite wife, Shuanet, had begun
her life as Anna Ulykhanova in the city of Mozdok. Abducted as a teenager, she
refused several ransom attempts by her brothers. Twelve years later she played
the gracious hostess to two Georgian princesses held captive in Shamil's house-
hold, whose published account of their captivity became wildly popular in
Moscow. Thus the imam's domestic arrangements reflected outward into his
broad, multiethnic vision of an Islamic republic that would unite Daghestan and
Chechnya. As objects of Russian literary imagination and as tangible threats to
Russian control in the Caucasus, captives and fugitives who "crossed over" (and
often back again, several times in a single life) do much to unsettle the essen-
tializing and distancing discourse we see in Western and Chechen accounts of
the region's history (Layton 1994:81-99; 1997, 175ff).
When Shamil Basayev claims to "honor the memory" of his predecessor, we
might also wonder what portion of that memory he intends7lndeed, the imam
did on several occasions defeat Cossack and Russian armies, sometimes re-
soundingly. He did at times also torture and execute his prisoners. But his sur-
render in 1859 hardly proved a humiliation, since he (and Shuanet) became the
toast of Moscow, were feted by the tsar, painted and photographed endlessly,
 LIFE PROCEEDS FROM THE NAME 189

and received the gift of an estate in Kaluga. During his 12 years in Russian
hands he worked tirelessly to defuse the conflict in his homeland, and helped
to negotiate several local truces. In 1870, his captors even permitted him a pil-
grimage to Mecca, where he remained until his death in 1871 (Barrett 1994).
For his part, Shamil Basayev might do well to place the imam's more complex
history next to his own. Basayev, the bearded lion of Chechen nationalism, was
in Moscow when the Berlin Wall fell, pursuing a lackluster career as a computer
salesman. He first took up arms not to free Chechnya from the Soviet embrace
but to defend Boris Yeltsin in the Parliament Building against the army coup of
August 1991. It was only with the declaration of Chechen independence later
that year that he returned home to organize his elite '~bkhaz Battalion." Even
today he admits that he maintains no plans toward "the establishment of a
Chechen state that fulfills legal and financial aspirations," beyond a call for the
Islamic world to provide "massive financial support and the presence of Islamic
scholars" (Basayev 2000). In retrospect, the 19th-century imam of Daghestan
seems much more the modern nation builder, and Basayev more the oppor-
tunistic tribalist. Further vexing to the exclusivist indigenous stance taken by
Basayev and other ethnic nationalists in the Caucasus is the ongoing effort-
sanctioned by the Russian Federation since 1990-by descendants of the Terek
Cossacks to assert themselves as an indigenous "nationality" within the new
federation (Holquist 1988). Among the new identity symbols they flourish is
the slogan-of tortured logic given their diverse origins-KAZACHEMU RODU
NYET PEREVODU (The Cossack bloodline will never perish). As Cossack ataman
Vladimir Shevtsov, founder of the volunteer Yermolov Battalion formed to fight
Basayev's Chechens in 1996, recently told a visiting journalist, "You can use
names in many ways" (Karny 2000:38, 49).
What are we to make of this story of the two Shamils7 It certainly falls in
line with the ongoing work of progressive scholars to undercut narratives of
"primordial hatreds" and "blood politics" throughout the 21st-century world
(et: Bringa 1995; Daniel 1996; Karakasidou 1997; Besteman 1999). It does much
to point a causative finger toward the role of 20th-century states like the Soviet
Union in creating ethnically defined political blocs that were vulnerable to eth-
nonational entrepreneurs like Basayev and Siobodan Milosevic after the col-
lapses of 1991. But it also casts unsettling light on local identity dynamics
where assertions of autochthony may be manipulative and instrumental,
thereby tainting the authenticity of more just claims. My goal in looking back-
ward to 19th-century patterns of interethnic conflict and accommodation, of
names and naming, is to also seek meaningful commonalties and divergences
in those relationships, to take the shape-shifting essence of names in the bor-
190 CLEARING A PATH

derlands as a place of entry into more complex levels of analysis. In this case
(and those to come), the question of names leads us directly into the realm of
gendered power.
I have written elsewhere about the peculiar structures of constraint and op-
portunity that some women found in the captive-exchange system of the
Southwest borderlands, wherein Indian and colonizing men vied to seize and
assimilate each other's women and children in a broadly shared contest over
patriarchal prestige and community honor. This issue lies at the center of my
monograph Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest
Borderlands (2001), where I looked at several centuries of interaction between
indigenous and Euro-American peoples in the American Southwest. I argue
there that a "borderland political economy" organized much of interethnic life
across that region, wherein through the seizure and exchange of human cap-
tives and livestock Indian groups and Euro-American settlers came to share an
understanding of the production and distribution of wealth as conditioned by
social relations of power. This mutual understanding depended much on the
ability of colonizing and indigenous men to agree that their women and chil-
dren were at once their most cherished relations and their most contestable of
resources. This gendered universe of emotional, cultural, and material ex-
change produced a history by which the peoples of the Southwest-Co-
manches, Kiowas, Apaches, Utes, Navajos, Pueblos, and Spaniards-were drawn,
in the words of the poet A. D. Hope, "closer and closer apart" (1986:20-21).
Valorized as objects of contestation, yes, but more than a few such captives
found their multilingual and multicultural skills valued and respected in their
"host" societies. Some attained through their victimization social status and
economic autonomy they might never have dreamed possible in their natal
homes. Marfa Rosa Villalpando crossed from Comanche captivity through
Pawnee slavery to marriage with the French fur trader Jean Sale, after whose re-
turn to Europe she became Marie Rose Sale, the matriarch of a prosperous
mixed-blood mercantile family in St. louis. Juana Hurtado Galvan crossed from
Spanish servitude through Navajo captivity to a freehold near Zia Pueblo,
where she amassed a small fortune in the Indian trade and resisted all efforts
by Spanish padres to reform her free-wheeling conjugal lifestyle (Brooks 1996).
Others remained with their captors. Ten-year-old Andres Martfnez became
Andele, fully accepted and thrice married among the Kiowas (Methven 1997
118991). And Momaday's great-great-grandmother, her Mexican name unknown,
moved through captivity and slavery to marriage with the Kiowa Ah-kgoo-ahu,
and in doing so gained her enduring name, Kau-au-ointy. Many other women
and children simply settled into the kinship nexus of their capturing society,
 LIFE PROCEEDS FROM THE NAME 191

whether Indian or Spanish, and in time achieved full cultural enfranchisement.

Their names, or course, changed with their movements across cultures, are
nearly lost to us today.
I caution in that work, however, that their stories must always be viewed in
the context of a highly militarized and masculinized borderlands economy that
rested on what Maria Mies has termed a "predatory mode of appropriation"
(1988). The obvious extension here is to current cases of interethnic conflict in
which women and children remain objects of male contestation, but brutally
so, in that "kin-building violence" offorcible adoption and exogamy is replaced
with "exclusionary violence" of rape and murder. The successful 1998 prosecu-
tion of Rwandan Hutu rapists under UN genocide codes--and movement to-
ward the same in the former Yugoslavia-is an important breakthrough in
humanitarian law but does not solve the analytical challenge. As in Veena Das's
(1990, 1998) work on the gendered violence of Hindu-Muslim conflict along the
Indo-Pakistani border, I wish to grasp the particular sets of historical forces and
circumstance that account for transpositions in these two faces of the patriar-
chal construction and preservation of local communities. Answers lie in careful
contextual study of cases in which transformations in cultural meanings of pat-
rimony, property, citizenship, and territoriality become manifest.
The Southwest borderlands suggest at least one story. I argue that certain
families and communities found prosperity amid this constellation of predatory
and appropriative exchanges. Operating within a political economy of mutually
held respect for patriarchal honor and pastoral wealth, poor or landless Spanish
colonists and neighboring Indian groups like Utes, Navajos, Kiowas, and Co-
manches elaborated a captive-and-livestock raiding economy that brought real
power to both sides as they plundered resources from each other's societies.
They did not do so gently. Driven by parallel desires for emotional retribu-
tion and economic redistribution, settlers and their indigenous neighbors
waged two hundred years of what contemporary observers termed a "ceaseless
and predatory war" but that in actuality may be better encompassed by Clifford
Geertz's phrase "a low-intensity peace" (2000:260). The real bloodshed and dis-
location occurred in the process of American "pacification" of the Southwest.
Military conquest, civilizing missions, and ethnological systemization disrupted
a flexible and locally negotiated social formation. Conquest imposed in its
stead new categories of racialized and second-class citizenship for mestizo
New Mexicans and "tribal" membership for Indians, both of which were "exclu-
sive identities" whose security lay all too heavily in dependence on a none-too-
sympathetic state (Brooks 1999, 2000).
One key to the earlier pattern of long-term, agonizing "peace" lay in the
192 CLEARING A PATH

forceful assimilation of women and children from the other society, an exercise
of "community as violence" that whatever its amorality, must be analyzed as
constitutive of enduring social formations. Shared codes of patriarchal and pas-
toral honor were probably crucial to the creation of widespread communities
of violence that-while they terrorized and alienated women and children-
seldom raped or killed them. This seems congruent with studies in other cul-
tural borderlands, like David Nirenberg's (1996) work on early modern Spain,
Deborah Poole's (1988, 1994) on the Peruvian Andes, and Steven Caton's (1990;
1998) work with the poetics of gendered power among Yemeni tribesmen. Each
suggests communitywide understandings of the role of culturally sanctioned vi-
olence in producing social stability, a "sensible violence" rendered insensible to
us from our particular frames of reference today.
Other elements were necessary as well. Seasonal coresidence on hunting
and grazing lands created a spacious middle ground whereon "identity-as-terri-
toriality" was seldom invoked, a no-man's-land that was in fact all-men's-Iand.
(And I do mean men.) Populations damaged by epidemic disease nurtured a cus-
tomary cultural openness to the creation of cross-cultural affinal and fictive kin
ties. And the presence of "portable" wealth like stolen sheep, horses, and cattle
provided ample opportunities for "communities of interest" to form irrespective
oftheir "ethnic antagonisms." In this latter aspect the imam Shamil's mixed
racial and ethnic "republic" in the Caucasus stands as anomalous only in its size
and durability. Many similar raiding bands roamed other borderlands, lesser in
size and at a greater distance from intrusive state power. Even when severe hos-
tility or judgment might be directed against any specific act on their part, the
unfolding fabric of violent interaction "produced a shifting but coherent real-
ity" that liberated some peoples from class, gender, and racial SUbjugation (Cal-
houn 1998). Others, both innocent and complicit, it punished. It seems clear
that like their 19th-century counterparts, 21 st-century borderlands redirect so-
cial patterns offlow and obstruction in unexpected and sometimes opportunis-
tic ways for peoples formerly fixed in the lower strata of a given society. While
borderlands are often places of terror, they are places of possibility as well.

FAMILIES

If the tale of two individuals bound by a single name leads us to one perspec-
tive on the intricacies of indigenous identity across the centuries, another
story, this time of one family and their experience in the borderlands of west-
ern Canada, leads us to quite another. A less dramatic story, yet for its protago-
 LIFE PROCEEDS FROM THE NAME 193

nists just as emotionally complex and politically confounding. We can take it up

simply enough, in a letter from James Douglas to his youngest daughter,
Martha, attending boarding school in England in the 1850s. "I have no objec-
tion," he wrote, "to your telling old stories about 'Hyass,' but pray do not tell
the world they are Mamma's" (Van Kirk 1980:237).
In certain respects Martha's mother, Amelia Connolly, is a mirror image of
Anna Ulykhanova (or Shuanet), yet in a far more humble and less celebrated
form. Like hundreds of other mixed-descent children in Canada, she was born
around 1810 of a marriage d la fafon du pays between William Connolly, chief
factor of the Hudson's Bay trading post at New Caledonia, and a Cree woman,
Suzanne Pas-de-Nom (I need not point out the awful silence in her "name").
Raised in the multilingual, multi ethnic society of the Canadian fur trade, Amelia
seems to have absorbed the best of the myriad influences surrounding her. In
1828 she married James Douglas, second-in-command to Connolly at the post,
again in the fashion of the country (Brown 1980:90-92; 215).
Within months of that union she saved her husband's life through her
awareness of local Carrier Indian culture. Douglas had arrested and executed a
Carrier man for a murder committed at the Fort George post, after which the
Carrier's kinsmen seized and threatened to kill him in compensation. Amelia
rushed into the post's warehouse and began throwing trade goods to the angry
crowd. Since the "throwing of gifts" was, according to Carrier custom, a mark
of deference and submission, the Indians accepted her restitution and departed
(Van Kirk 1980:111-113).
James Douglas and Amelia Connolly would move on to the governorship of
Vancouver Island, and later, after his elevation to the British nobility, Amelia
wore the title Lady Douglas with grace. Yet in their retirement they returned
closer to her mother's people's homeland along the shores ofJames Bay, where
Amelia found greater comfort among her Cree kinspeople than she had amid
the social scene of the British colonial elite. James too felt more comfortable
there, for he had grown bitter about the increasingly racist attitudes that the
company (and British Canadians in general) held toward Indian peoples and
mixed-descent wives of officers like himself. He had attempted to quiet some
of the gossip by inviting Amelia to wed him in 1837 in a Church of England cer-
emony, but the increasing migration of British women as officers' wives created
an atmosphere of constant racial invective. Spurning the example of his own fa-
ther-in-Iaw, who had repudiated Suzanne Pas-de-Nom in 1832 and quickly mar-
ried his British cousin,James spoke often in defense of the honor oflndian and
mixed-blood women who "lived chastely with husbands of [theirl choice, in a
state approved by friends and sanctioned by immemorial custom" (Van Kirk
194 CLEARING A PATH

1980: 156). But his retreat under the assault of racist ideology is clearly evident
in his letter to Martha, a symbolic surrender and conclusion to a long joint ef-
fort to "throw" some alternative family conception to a world unwilling to ac-
cept the gift.
The Connolly-Douglas family is just one element a larger story I am pursu-
ing across the expanse of the Canadian West. Here I focus on Amelia's Indian
kinspeople, known to contemporaries as the Home Guard Cree. Unlike the
French-Indian mixed-descent peoples generally referred to as Metis, who have
attracted much attention in recent scholarship, the Home Guard Cree remain
little understood, perhaps because they represent a maddeningly ambiguous
case of borderland community formation. Where the Metis, or at least their fa-
mous Red River variant, achieved a cohesive and relatively firm identity as
ethnogenetic "New Peoples" by the early years of the 19th century-and would
in later years raise two rebellions to retain the right to that autochthonous
identity-the Home Guard Cree are hard to pin down. Descended not from
French but British fathers and Cree mothers, they were probably every bit as
"mixed" as their Metis counterparts, yet they followed various and divergent
trajectories across the century. Some, like Amelia, found assimilation into colo-
nial society, despite its many discomforts. Others migrated south to the Red
River and took up residence in the Church of England parishes just north of
their Metis counterparts. But whereas the Metis elaborated a classically syn-
cretic culture of market-based bison hunting, the Red River Cree settled to be-
come earnest Anglican farmers. Others remained very much Indian despite
their mixed blood and became the progenitors of numerous Cree communities
inJames Bay, Manitoba, and Ontario today (Foster 1975,1976,1978,1985,
1994; Ens 1996).
Their case interests me in that they, more than many such groups, main-
tained a clear and relatively unproblematic dependency on the Hudson's Bay
Company (HBC) and the later British colonial state. While the Terek Cossack
"tribe" and Sham iI's mixed ethnoreligious "nation" in the Caucasus depended
in part for their cohesion on mutual antagonism, the Home Guard Cree seldom
rebelled or complained. Even when economic crisis and adjustment within the
Hudson's Bay Company shifted their role from that of hunters and couriers to
institutionalized "servants" of the firm, the "Country-born" (as they were called
to distinguish them from the Metis) adopted the status with relative ease. They
developed parallel conceptions of rank and status to their Hudson's Bay Com-
pany counterparts and pursued mobility within those ranks in manners similar
to the careers of company officers.
Again, it seems that gender and kinship relations provide one important
 LIFE PROCEEDS FROM THE NAME 195

clue to these durable relations of coexistence. The simple fact that European
women were absent from the Hudson's Bay trading system prior to the 19th
century dictated an impulse toward cross-cultural sexual unions. British men
were allowed to consort with Cree women only in the context of Native mar-
riage relationships, however. This constraint quickly led to a locally constructed
system of polyandry, in which a Home Guard Cree woman would maintain a
Cree husband and children but also wed a British man with whom she might
live for varying periods of time. Children born ofthe latter union, like Amelia
Connolly, were raised within the Cree community but had special access to the
Hudson's Bay forts and employment therein. From the perspective of the Cree
husband, the British husband was a "brother," and a valuable asset to the family
and band. In fact, it appears that Cree families engaged in much maneuvering
to acquire "brothers" with the best access to HBC storehouses. If their British
"brothers" failed to behave and perform within the Cree definitions of recipro-
cal kin relations, violence was applied to restore proper comportment.
It was only in the 1830s, with significant immigration of British women into
Canada and new HBC policies that prohibited mixed marriages d la fafon du
pays, that this remarkable system ran aground on the shoals of institutional
racism. The "many tender ties" (to quote Douglas again) that linked British and
Cree in a successful borderland negotiation were thereafter sundered, and the
divergent paths of the Home Guard Cree noted above would begin to unfold.
The Red River community would move in the direction of "whiteness" and as-
similation to the British imperial mold, while those who remained in the hinter-
lands would shade toward "redness"-and treaty recognition in 1980 as "First
Nations" within the Canadian national federation-two paths to color and cul-
ture that shaped their remaining histories (Flanagan 1999; Niezen 2000).
The kin-and-gender aspects of community formation in the Caucasian and
Canadian borderlands seem to affirm levi-Straussian notions of exchanges of
women as the cauldron of culture, as well as those feminist critiques and ex-
tensions offered by theorists like Gayle Rubin and Jane Collier (levi-Strauss
1969119491; Rubin 1975; Collier 1988). But to simply dispense with these as
yet further examples of how women and children serve as "floating signifiers"
in patriarchal negotiations overlooks the unexpected elements of structural op-
portunity afforded women and children in the cross-cultural event. Jacqueline
Peterson (1988) has argued that at least some of the Indian women in mixed
Canadian marriages had, in childhood, experienced powerful dreams that set
them apart from culturally sanctioned vision roles available to Indian women.
Mantled with dream power that in some sense alienated them from their natal
communities, they undertook the task of subduing and acculturating danger-
196 CLEARINGAPATH

ous outsiders. A too romantic view? Perhaps. But it confirms our need for
deeper and more culturally specific understandings of the gendered experience
of trans border exchanges in the creation of cultural melange amid formative
states, as well as the extraordinary risk some women were willing to take when
they challenged "primordial divides" in the interests of family, community, and
the heart (Carter 1997).

COMMUNITIES

We have now explored two stories of the indigenous experience in 19th-cen-

tury borderlands-first, the life story of two individuals writ large for the Cau-
casus, and second, that of the Connolly-Douglas family writ large across
western Canada. Let us now consider a third at the more inclusive level of com-
munity. Here I draw your mind's eye to the sweet grass of the high veld north
of the Orange River in South Africa, where by 1800 a conglomerate community
of refugee peoples would soon designate themselves as "Griqua." Over the
course of the century they would provide perhaps our best example of a suc-
cessful plural community, only to serve as a grim illustration of just how wlner-
able such an experiment can prove in the long term. From a people with
sufficient economic and military power to challenge Trekboer suzerainty in
Transorangia, and to buffer the Cape Colony from the regional conflagration of
Zulu expansion, they were by century's end landless and had disappeared into
the stigmatized status of "Cape Coloureds." Their history is a lengthy and tor-
tuous one, but a glance at one unremarked aspect of that story reveals another
contribution border studies may make to questions about the intersections of
local and global processes.
Like the mixed communities of the Caucasus and Canada, these too were
the product of imperial intrusion. The Dutch colony on the western Cape
struck the local Khoikhoin peoples with such force that their pastoral economy
and social organization were effectively destroyed. Those who were not en-
slaved became stockless hunters, gatherers, and cattle raiders in the hills, or
took service with Dutch farmers. Their debilitation included forcible capture
and concubinage of their women among the invaders. from which unions
emerged socially marginal peoples on the fringes of the colony. termed "Bas-
taard-Hottentots," relegated to bound labor or slavery on colonial farms or
squatting as small subsistence farmers along its frontiers (Elphick 1977).
In a sense, however. the concentric waves of disorganization radiating out-
ward from the Cape would be their salvation. especially as imperial wars for
 LIFE PROCEEDS FROM THE NAME 197

control of the colony between 1795 and 1814 destabilized its internal power as
well. By the latter quarter of the 18th century a gradual accretion of refugee
Khoi and Bastaard peoples commenced along the Berg River under the leader-
ship of a manumitted slave named Adam Kok. Community memory claims that
Kok there married "a chief's daughter" among the indigenous Chariguriqua
peoples, probably paying the bride-price from the large herd of (stolen) cattle
he drove along in his migration. Kok died in 1795, but it seems his Chariguri-
qua kinspeople accompanied his son, Cornelis, on a long pastoral migration
across Namaqualand and into the interior along the Orange River (Marais 1939;
Ross 1976:14-17).
This region, known today as Griqualand West, had long been a borderland
itself, where the northernmost extension of Khoikhoin peoples met the south-
ernmost expression of Bantu speakers, the Tswana, and the eastern fringes of
San hunters and gatherers. Lacking adequate rainfall for settled agriculture
without irrigation, it was prime grazing land, and the Kok patriline, with their
Bastaard allies, made the most of the opportunity. At the fountains around
K1aarwater they established a base that gave them not only control of the re-
gional pastoral economy (and its supply-side variant, cattle raiding) but near-
monopoly control of the interior ivory trade as well. Over the next several
decades they would add more diverse members to their mixed community. By
1813 it was reckoned that the subjects of Adam Kok II (Cornelis's son) con-
sisted of some 1,200 Chariguriqua and Bastaards, 150 Tswana, 1,300 Kora, and
30 families of Sotho. Even some San peoples found assimilation, but in their
case as deracinated servile herders and laborers. Other San became victims of
Griqua slavers supplying the ready, if surreptitious, market for slave children
south of the Orange River (Legassick 1989).
This last reference sounds a familiar refrain: the willingness of mixed bor-
derland communities to exploit weaker indigenous groups with whom they in-
teracted. No case among the five borderlands I'm studying is without this trait.
Even the Home Guard Cree took pleasure in exercising their military advantage
over neighboring Assiniboines in the Canadian interior, taking captives or occa-
sionally supplying victims to a regional captive-and-slave trade with Lower
Canada. But in all these cases there also existed avenues for adoption and as-
similation that enfranchised, if not the first generation of victims, their mixed-
blood descendants. In this sense, mixed communities always embodied an
egalitarian impulse that pushed against the stratifying tendencies of pastoral
patriarchy or colonial emulation.
This paradox provides a place of entry into the last theme developed here:
borderland communities as sites where local culture and exogenous force inter-
198 CLEARING A PATH

sect in an imaginative community politics. Across their first several decades

these mixed communities had operated under a loose clan structure wherein
ties of kinship and clientage remained paramount. Adam Kok II and Berend
Berends, his Bastaard ally, wielded classic patriarchal power over their ex-
tended kin groups, affirmed from afar when the Cape government recognized
them as '~oint Kaptyns over the nascent polity" in 1804 (legassick 1989:380).
But the very success of their borderland adaptation invited instability. As
center people in the regional economy, with a virtual monopoly on horses and
firearms, they were attractive allies to neighboring indigenous groups and the
Cape Colony alike. The colonial government had greater resources with which
to entice their alliance (especially gunpowder) but demanded in turn that they
supply young men for service in the Cape (Hottentot) Regiment. Kok and
Berends saw this as a slap at their hard-won autonomy. A solution lay in pursu-
ing relations with the london Missionary Society, first invited to K1aarwater by
Berends in 1801. Missions served as conduits through which Christianity,
firearms, colonial citizenship, and collective representation flowed in equal
measures. They also acted as magnets for the in-migration of Xhosa and San
bands who settled at mission stations as informal dependents of the Kok and
Berends clans, thereby swelling the latter's social wealth (legassick
1989:374 ff.).
Commercial power, Christianity, and immigration combined in a volatile ma-
trix of political tensions within and outside of the community. Internal friction
sparked in various ways: between junior men of the two principal clans and
their patriarchs, especially over the former's wish to continue the traditional
commando economy of trading and raiding, as against the elders' plans to de-
velop sheep ranching and commercial farming; between recently arrived peo-
ples who desired full enfranchisement and the foundational clans who wanted
subordinate dependents; and between the patriarchs and the missionaries over
the political structure of the community in general. External tensions lay in the
community's contradictory expectations of colonial citizenship and political in-
dependence, both of which had to be mediated by missionaries like William
Anderson and John Campbell, themselves viewed as suspicious by authorities
in Cape Town.
How could the heterogeneous and contentious community at Klaarwater
loosen this Gordian knot of antagonisms? With a creativity of mind equal to the
creativity of practice that had brought them there in the first place. In the
course of one year (1813-14) these mixed peoples conceived and asserted two
interwoven identities. that of a "tribe" and that of a "nation" within an "em-
pire." Casting back to a seemingly minor historical moment, John Campbell re-
 LIFE PROCEEDS FROM THE NAME 199

ported that "on consulting among themselves they Ithe peoples at K1aarwaterl
found a majority were descended from a person ofthe name of'Griqua"'- that
is, from the nameless Chariguriqua woman whom Adam Kok I had "wed" on his
migration toward the Orange River. In a purposeful act of strategic remember-
ing, they renamed her, and themselves, in the interests of community. An act of
imagination as well, at least for a great number of its diverse members, but it
was effective nonetheless. By "becoming indigenous" they became, however
implicitly, culturally autonomous within the world of colonial southern Africa.
And in "becoming Griqua" they also shed former indigenous identities like
Khoikhoi, San, or Xhosa that bore the stigma of defeat and tlight. After cen-
turies of colonial dispersal and denigration, they reinvented themselves as a vi-
tal community amid a landscape widespread with devastation and sorrow
(Legassick 1989:382-383).
But to have simply "gone native" was only half of the creative act, for they
also needed recognition as colonial subjects and citizens to maintain their
rights to land, representation, and military resupply. The Griqua now, in collab-
oration with Campbell, became a "nation" by drafting a formal constitution,
which in turn formalized their capacity to negotiate with the Cape Colony as a
nominally self-governing state within the colonial sphere. Their constitution
also sought to redress some of the community's internal tensions. Adam Kok II
and Berend Berends were to remain as "chiefs and kaptyns" (itself a contlation
of two cultural categories) and with the missionaries would act as a court of ap-
peal. But the document also called for the open election of nine magistrates re-
sponsible for the daily enforcement of its 13 clauses, thus opening the political
process to junior men and recent immigrants alike. In doing so, the "indige-
nous" Griquas simultaneously claimed a "national" identity, modeled on the lib-
eral politics then emerging in the Euro-American world. They seem to have fully
expected to receive its associated rights and privileges (Legassick 1989: 384 ff.).
Of course, we know that it did not unfold that way, although the creative
moment of 1813-14 would provide the basis for Griqua "democratic oligarchy"
under which they functioned for the next two generations. Almost immediately
junior men under the leadership of Andries Waterboer, a San-descended Gri-
qua, seized the egalitarian initiative and expelled the Kok and Berends clans
from K1aarwater, renaming it Griquatown. The long-term consequence of their
rebellion, however, was that the expelled clans would establish new Griqua
centers of power at Philippolis in the Orange Free State and Kokstad in Griqua-
land East, thereby extending their "tribe" and "nation" across some four hun-
dred miles of cultural borderland. But with each successful settlement came
undercutting pressures from an expanding "white" settler population moving
200 CLEARING A PATH

into the hinterlands, and the funnel toward "Cape Coloured" status became
narrower and faster (Ash forth 1990).
Griquas were not alone in finding inventive solutions to complex pressures
erupting from colonial expansion across the 19th century. Nor are they helpless
in the 21 st century. Since the remarkable power reversal of 1994 in South
Africa, dozens of indigenous African groups have demanded a place at the po-
litical table of that new pluralistic state. So too have some Griqua descendants,
as the "Griqua National Conference." The irony here lies in their claim-almost
as tortured as that of the Terek Cossacks, but toward which sympathy would
extend were it not to erase history so completely-to represent "the last ves-
tige of unbroken and uninterrupted Khoi heritage and identity" (Upham quoted
in Morris 1997). Similar predicaments face transborder indigenous peoples to-
day. The Griqua case extends seductively, if not seamlessly, to modern settings
where local custom and contention are inextricably enmeshed with global
processes. If intergenerational tension, racial politics, market penetration,
Protestant evangelism, and immigration were crucial factors in their case, we
need only look to Highland Chiapas, the Southern Sudan, or Eastern Europe to
see their contemporary influence in midplay. The end game is not in sight, and
while we cannot predict from the past, we may certainly find inspiration in its
resonance. We can try to cultivate a sensitivity by which particular stories
speak to each other, across boundaries, in a poetic, if not an analytical, sense;
to find a way by which the distinct is preserved and the shared is enhanced,
and to have these stories, at once as hybrid and discrete as their subjects them-
selves, become mutually embedded metaphors for each other; and to continue
the work of names.

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

PATRICIA C. ALBERS, Ph.D. in Anthropology, University of Wisconsin, Madison,

is currently chair and professor of the Department of American Indian Studies
at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. Over the past 30 years, she has pub-
lished numerous articles in the areas of gender, political economy, intertribal
relations, and visual representation. Her most recent publication, "Symbols,
Souvenirs and Sentiments: Early Postcard Imagery of Plains Indians," appeared
in the book Delivering Views, coedited by Christaud Geary and Virginia Webb.

JAMES F. BROOKS is assistant professor of history at the University of Califor-

nia, Santa Barbara. He has held National Endowment for the Humanities Fel-
lowships at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and the School of
American Research in Santa Fe. His essays have received the joan jensen-Darlis
Miller Prize for western women's history (1997) and the Arrell Morgan Gibson
Award for Native American history (2000). Most recently, he authored Captives
and Cousins: Slavery. Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands (2001)
and edited Confounding the Color Line: Red-Black Relations in Multidisciplinary Per-
spective (200 1).

jUUE CRUIKSHANK is a professor of anthropology at the University of British

Columbia. For more than a decade, she lived in the Yukon Territory, northwest-
ern Canada, where she worked with the elders of Athapaskan and TIingit an-
cestry recording oral traditions and life stories. She wrote Life Lived Like a Story:
Life Stories of Three Yukon Native Elders (1990) in collaboration with Angela Sid-
ney, Kitty Smith, and Annie Ned. Her book The Social Life of Stories: Narrative and
Knowledge in the Yukon Territory (1998) discusses how changing historical and
social circumstances continue to acquire storied meanings.

CUNLQC FUR, associate professor of history at Vaxjo University, Sweden, re-

ceived her Ph.D. from the University of Oklahoma in 1993. Her publications in-
clude articles on Saami-Swedish relations, the comparative colonial
208 CLEARING A PATH

experiences of Saami and Lenape peoples, and Lenape women's history, the
last of which is also the subject of a larger work-in-progress. She has received
fellowships and grants from the Sweden-America Foundation, the American As-
sociation of University Women, and the HSFR (the Swedish equivalent of the
National Endowment ofthe Humanities).

CRAIG HOWE, an enrolled member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, is a fellow in

American culture studies at Washington University in St. Louis. While deputy
assistant director for cultural resources at the National Museum of the Ameri-
can Indian, he conceived and developed the inaugural exhibitions for the Mu-
seum on the Mall. Prior to his Smithsonian appointment, he was director of the
D'Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian History at the Newberry Ubrary in
Chicago, where he initiated an innovative hypermedia tribal histories project.
He has taught architecture and Native American studies courses in both the
United States and Canada.

LEANNE HOWE is enrolled in the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. An author and

playwright, her work appears in over a dozen anthologies as well as literary
and scholarly publications. Her plays have been performed throughout the
United States. In January 2000, she received her M.F.A. in creative writing from
Vermont College of Norwich University. She has taught at Carleton College,
Grinnell College, and Wake Forest University. She is a mother and grandmother.
Her first novel Shell Shaker is being published by Aunt Lute Books in 2001.

JACKI mOMPSON RAND is an assistant professor at the University of Iowa with

a joint appointment in history and American Indian and Native studies. She
earned a Ph.D. in history from the University of Oklahoma in 1998. She is cur-
rently working on a book that focuses on connections between Kiowa society,
reservation economy, and American hegemony in the late 19th century.

NANCY SHOEMAKER, associate professor of history at the University of Con-

necticut-Storrs, is the author of American Indian Population Recovery in the 20th
Century (1999) and editor of Negotiators of Change: Historical Perspectives on
Native American Women (1995). She has held research fellowships at the New-
berry Ubrary and most recently at the Huntington Ubrary. Her current project
is a comparison of 18th-century American Indian and European ideas.
INDEX

Ahlers, Jocelyn c., 62 Canasatego's speech, 41

Alaska Highway, 9, 11, 13, 16, 19 Captive-exchange system, 190
Albany Plan, 41 Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and
Albers, Patricia c., 107 Community in the Southwest Border-
Anders, Gary, 11 0 lands (Brooks), 190
Anderson, Jeff, 154 Categories, 51, 53; see also Gender
Anishinabe's rice business, 109, 122 centers/prototype theory of, 66
Apache place-names, 182, 184 common characteristics of, 65
Appadurai, Aljun, 138, 142-143 hierarchical relationship and, 65
Archer, Margaret, 117 metaphors and, 63
Articles of Confederation, 41 political categories, 54
Asgayaya, 66-67 theories of, 55-67
Athapaskan peoples, 10-12 Caton, Steven, 192
Ayonwatha (Hiawatha), 38 Ceremonies/rituals, 60, 88-90
Azanzhaya carving, 17 Chalkley, Thomas, 83, 86
Chappell, Violet, 4
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 4-10, 13,21 Choctaw hawk myth, 30-32
Ballgame myth, 51-52,60 Choctaw worldview, 33-34
cultural dualism of, 58-59 Clan property, 12
Barrett, Thomas, 187 Clan relationships/social capital, 12
Barth, Frederick, 21 Classification, knowledge and, 61
Basayev, Shamil, 186 Clayton, Nicola S., 32
Bas;c Color Terms (Berlin and Kay), 66 Clemmer, Richard, 110
Basso, Keith, 182 Clifford,James, 40-41
Benjamin, Walter, 4-6, 8-10,13,19-21 Colden, Cadwallader, 41
Berdaches, 60, 91 Collier, jane, 195
Berlin, Brent 0., 66 Colloredo-Mansfield, Rudi, 154
Bierhorst, john, 37 Colonialism, 7,138,154
Biolsi, Thomas, 110 control function of, 138-139
Borderland communities, 190-191 , exchange contexts, 143
197-198 gifts/annuities of. 139-140
Boudinot, Elias, 66-67 Colonialism's Culture: Anthropology. Travel
Bourdieu, Pierre, 12, 14 and Government (Thomas). 138
Braund, Kathryn E. Holland, 35 Communities. 196-200
Brooks, James F., 181 Condolence ceremony, 37. 39
Burke,Kenneth,184 Condolence ritual. 37
Butler, judith, 78 Connolly-Douglas family history. 193-194
210 CLEARING A PATH

Constructivism, 115 Douglas, Mary, 60

Controlled speculation, 113 Dukt'ootl' myth, 18,20-21
Cook case studies, 61
Com crop, 29-30 Economic determinism, 110
Covenant Chain, 40-41 Economic exchange, 139-140, 143
Cox, Bruce, 109 Elders' Festivals, 23
Crow (Kajit), 12 Engels, Friedrich, 109
Cruikshank,Julie,3 Entrepreneurship, 114
Cultural differences, 53 Environmental determinism, 168
categories and, 54 Envisioning Power (Wolf), 22
Indian-white encounters, 63, 81-83 Epitomizing events, 19
"mixed blood," 54 Essentialism, 108
Cultural relativism, 68 Ethnography, 111
Cultural translation, 21 ethnographic writings, 40-41
Culture vs. history, 40
commerce and, 151-153 Ethnohistory, 87
hunting and, 112 Event-centered tribal histories, 165
Culture areas, 168 Event-pictographs, 163-164, 166

Dakl'aweidi' (a Wolf clan), 12 Families, 192-196

Dakota kinship values, 123-125 Fishing rights case, 113
Das, Veena, 191 Fiske,Jo-Anne,93
De Rasieres, Isaak, 93 Five Nations, 39
Dean, Nora Thompson, 90 Fogelson, Raymond D., 19,40,58-59
The Death and Rebirth of the Seneca (Wal- Fort Bridger Treaty of 1858, 114
lace),61 Four Masterworks (Bierhorst), 37
Deerskin trade, 35 Fowler, Loretta, 115
Degenawidah myth, 38 Franklin, Benjamin, 41
Deisheetaan (a Crow clan), 12, 14 From the Glittering World (Morris), 43-44
Delancey, James, 41 Fur, Gunlog, 75
Delgamuukw v. British Columbia, 22 Fur trade, 119-120
Deloria, Vine, Jr., 164-165
Dening, Greg, 60 Gearing, Fred, 58
Di Leonardo, Micaela, 137 Geertz, Clifford, 191
Dickinson, Anthony, 32 Gender, 75
Digital project, 168-170 bert/aches, 60, 91
collaboration issues, 174-177 ceremonies/rituals and, 60, 88-90
development of, 172-173 existential vs. role-based social identi-
experiential dimension, 169-170 ties, 78-80
social dimension of. 169 household hierarchies, 86
spatial dimension of. 168-170 Indian history and, 76
spiritual dimension of, 169 labor role expectations, 116
Discovery Day, 19 languageltexts analysis, 75-76, 84-85
Dohausen, 140-141 multidimensional model of, 80
Doniger, Wendy, 82 Native history and, 96
Dorris, Michael, 4, 163-164 past events and, 75
 CLEARING A PATH 211

sex, bodies, and sexualities, 76, 91-95 Identity, 21

spiritual responsibilities and, 88-91 community identity, 165
spirituality/religion and, 76 Identity-as-territoriality, 192
as system of categories, 56-57 Identity creation, 181
terms and theories of, 77-81 Identity narratives, 184
"Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Incest, 94
Analysis" (Scott), 56 Indian-European relations, 63
Genocide, 191 geography/travel,63-64
Geschiere, Peter, 184 Indian goods, 141-143
Gitksan,22 The Indians' New World (Merrell), 63
Gleach, Frederic, 113 Individualism, 19
Goldfrank, Esther, 109 Innis, Harold, 5-7, 9-10, 21
Gordon, Roxy, 33 Interethnic conflict, 186-189
The Grass Dancer (Power), 44 Iroquois Confederacy, 37-39
Greenough, Paul, 154
Grinde, Donald A.,jr., 39 jablow, joseph, 109
Griqua national identity, 199-200 jacobson, Cardell, 110
Guests Never Leave Hungry, 114 jakobson, Roman, 57-58, 61,65
jefferson, Thomas, 41
Handsome Lake, 61 johnson, Mark, 62-63, 67
Haudenosaunee's history, 38-41 jorgenson,joseph, 109
Hays, john, 88
Heckewelder, john, 87, 94 Kaats', 20-21
Hedley, Max, 125 Kaax'achg60k myth, 14-16,21
Hermaphrodites, 91, 93 Kan, Sergei, 118
Hertz, Robert, 58, 67 Kaplan, Ben, 154
Heye (Georg Gustav) Foundation, 154 Kashehotep myth, 36
Historian vs. storyteller, 20 Kay, Paul D., 66
Historical materialism, 107-111, 123-126 Kenny, james, 88-89
cultural constructs of, 111-118 Khoikhoin people, 196-197
economic determinism, 110 Kin-ordered social formations, 123-126
Historical memory, narrative and, 18-22 Kinship, 123-125, 194
Historiography, 23 Klein, Alan, 109
History vs. ethnography, 40 Klondike gold rush, 9-10, 19
Hobsbawn, Eric, 111 Knight, Rolf, 109
Hockstrasser, julie, 154 Koiwa reservation period, 138-141,
Home Guard Cree, 194-195 148-149
Homosexuality, 92 community service ethic, 146
Hope, A. D., 190 failure of, 150-151
Howe, LeAnne, 29 food production work, 145
Howe, Craig, 46-47, 161 Indian goods vs. trade goods, 141-144
Hoxie, Fred, 154 individualism vs. social commitments
Hunting, cultural perspectives of, 112 of, 146-147
Hupa language metaphors, 62-63 military societies of, 146-147
Hypertextlhypermedia, 167 off-reservation young men, 144-145,
151
212 CLEARING A PATH

starvation policy. 150 Madison. James. 41

women's beadwork and economy. Magegawbaw (La Trappe). 53-54
151-153 Mandans. 163
Kopytoff, Igor. 78 Margulis. Lynn. 33-34. 36-37
Marriage. 93
La Flesche. Francis. 58 Marx. Karl. 109-111. 118. 126
Labor Materialism; see Historical materialism
American Indian ethnography and. Matheson. William. 144
110-112 Medicine men. 166
colonization and. 120 Mercantile capitalism. 120
conceptsllanguage of. 113 Merrell.James. ix. 56. 60. 63
cultural perspective of, 112-113 Metaphors. categories and. 62~3
environment/material world and. "Metis." 54. 194
118-119 Meyer. Melissa. 54
exoticism of, 115 The Middle Ground (White). ix. 63
food production work. 145 Military societies. 146-147
gender expectations of, 116 Miller. Jay. 92
historical materialism and. 107-111 Miller. Robert c.. 140
kin-ordered mode of production. "Mixed blood." 54. 194
123-126 Moi. Toril. 78
life histories/autobiographies. 114 Moiety. 12
Native Americans and. 121 Momaday. N. Scott. 162. 181-183. 190
Lakoff, George. 61~3. 67 Montour. Andrew. 56. 60
Lakotas. 163 Moore. John. 109
Lamphere. Louise. 110 Morgan. Lewis Henry. 109
Language. gender and. 84-85 Morris. Irvin. 43-44
Latour. Bruno. 8 Museum gallery exhibitions. 168. 170
Lawson. John. 64 collaboration issues. 174-177
Leacock. Eleanor. 109 development of, 172-173
Leavenworth.Jesse. 141. 143-144. 151 experiential dimension. 169-170
Lenapelanguage.84-87 social dimension of, 169
Levi-Strauss. Claude. 20. 58.67. 195 spatial dimension of, 168-170
Lewis. David Rich. 55 Myths
Lewis. Oscar. 109 ballgame myth. 51-52. 58-60
Liminality. 59-60 Dukt'ootl' myth. 18.20-21
Lindestrom. Peter. 93 Kaax'achg60k myth. 14-16.21
Ujeblad. Sven. 114 Naatsilanei myth. 18-21
Locke. John. 41 Pistuntema's hunter myth. 34-36
Lockhart. James. 67 social memory and. 18-19
Lomawaima. Tsianina. 93 three sisters myth. 29
Lurie. Nancy. 109 unknown woman myth. 32-33
Lyons. Oren. 38. 41
Naatsilanei myth. 18-21
McBride Museum. 17 Nahuatl language. 67
McDaniel. Frances. 4 The Names (Momaday). 181
McKay. Mabel. 4 Naming. act of, 182
 CLEARING A PATH 213

Narratives; see also Oral history Political identity. 57

historical memory and. 18-22 Political relationships. 59
history vs. ethnography. 40 Poncas.163
identity and. 21 Poole, Deborah. 192
social histories and. 20-21 Positivism. 108
social memory and. 19 Post. Frederick. 88
well-lived life and. 20 Postmodernism. 21
National Museum. 154 Potlatching. 117-118
Native American studies. 4. 19 Power. Susan. 44-45
categories theory. 67 Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations (Marx).
gender studies and. 96 111
historical materialism and. t09 Pueblo. t09
Native languages and. 67
power of, 32 Rand. Jacki Thompson. 137
Native languages. 67-68 Realism. 108
Needham. Rodney. 58 Reservation boundary. 137-138; see also
Neoliberalism. 183 Kiowa reservation period
Nirenberg. David. 192 control function of. 138-139. 150
Notike narrative. 82 segregation by. 138
Nye. Robert. 154 Respect. 112
Nymanjoh. Francis. 184 Revitalization movements. 61
Ricoeur. Paul. 5
Ojibwe tribes. 52-54. 90 Rigal, Laura. 154
Oral history; see also Tribal histories Right and Left: Essays on Dual Symbolic Clas-
analysis of. 4-5 sification (Needham). 58
beliefs vs. facts. 22-23 Rites of passage. 60
communication as resistance. 8 Rosch, Eleanor. 66-67
as event-centered. 162 Roscoe. Will. 80-81
formalization of. 23 Rovine. Vicki. 154
Innis's views of. 6-7 Rubin. Gayle. 195
local vs. global issues. 6 Ruffing. Lorraine. 110
moral education. 3
place and meaning of. 3 Sagan. Dorion. 33
role of. 5 Sahlins. Marshall, 61
social practice and. 3 Said. Edward. 5
Ortiz. SimonJ .• 29 Sapir. Edward. 9
Owens. Louis. 42 Sarris. Greg. 4. 36-37
Oyewilni. Oyeronke. 79-80. 83. 90 Scherting. Bruce. 154
Schoen. Johanna. 154
Penn. William. 39 Scott. Joan. 56-57. 75-76. 80. 84
Peters. Kurt. 126 Sex
Peterson. Jacqueline. 195 bodies and sexualities. 91-95
Peterson. Mark. 154 terms and theories of, 77-81
"Pine tree" treaty. 52-54 Shepherdson. Charlie. 182
Pistuntema's hunter myth. 34-36 Shoemaker. Nancy. 51
Place-names. 182. 184 Sidney. Angela. 5-6. 10-16. 19-22
214 CLEARING A PATH

Silva, Anita, 4 mainstream institution and, 171-172

Six Nations, 39, 41 oral tradition of, 162-163
Smith, Kitty, 5-6,10-13,17-23 spiritual traditions and, 166, 176
Smith, May Hume, 18 tribal perspective on, 161
Snipp, Matthew, 110 Tribal liaison, 171-174
Social capital, 12, 14 Tribal membership, 69
Social histories,S liibalism, 164, 167
Social identities, role-based, 7~0 digital project, 168
Social institutions, 12 experiential dimension of, 166
Social memory, 18-19 social dimensions of, 165
Spirituality, gender and, 88-91 spatial dimension of, 16+-165
Storyteller vs. historian, 20 liibalography, 29, 42-47
Storytelling, 4 Morris' example, 43-44
power of, 8 Power's example, 44-45
Structuralism, 58-59, 67 Thrner, Victor, 59-60
historical structuralism, 61 Thtchonelanguage, 5
Stumbling Bear, 141-144 'tYler, Stephen A., 39, 46
Symbiogenesis, 33-34, 36-37
U.S. Constitution, 41
Tagish people,S, 11, 14, 17 U.S. War Department, 85
Tanner, Adrian, 109 Unknown Woman myth, 32-33
Thomas, Nicholas, 138
Three Sisters myth, 29 Van Gennep, Arnold, 59-60
TIingit people, 11-12, 14, 109 Venables, Robert w., 39
TIingit potlatch, 118 Vennum, Thomas, 122
TIingit traders,S, 10 Vico, Giambattista, 62
Tourist art production, 152 Vizenor, Gerald, 46
Trade goods, 141-143 Voigt decision, 52-53
Trader's role, 152
Trail of Tears, 46 Wage labor, 114
Treaty of Fort Atkinson (1853),140 Wallace, Anthony F. C., 61
Treaty of Medicine lodge Creek (1867), War Bundles (Power), 45
139, 141-142 Warrior race, 186
Tribal communities, 165-166 Wealth,115
Tribal exchange patterns, 143 Weiser, Conrad, 41
Tribal historians, 163 Weiss, lawrence, 110
Tribal histories, 161, 16+-167 Wet'suet'en,22
collaboration issues, 174-177 White, Bruce, 90
conceptual-methodological process White, Richard, ix, 35, 53, 63
for, 171 Williams, Roger, 64
development of, 171-174 Wilson, James, 41
digital presentations of, 167-170 Winkte, 60
dominant perspectives of, 161 Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Lan-
as event-centered, 165 guage among the Western Apoche
hypertextlhypermedia of, 167 (Basso), 182
intracommunity processes and, 175 Wolf (Agunda), 12
 CLEARING A PATH 215

Wolf, Eric, 3, 22-23, 123

Women
beadwork production, 153
captive-exchange system, 190
cultural transmission and, 195
forceful assimilation of, 192
Kiowa's beadwork and reservation
economy, 151-153
Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What
Categories Reveal about the Mind
(lakoff and Johnson), 62
Writing Culture (Clifford), 40

Yukon International Storytelling Festival,

23
Yukon Territory, 5

Zeisberger, David, 94