Monthly Archives: November 2016

Indigenous Archives in the Digital Age

On September 9-10, 2016, archivists and educators gathered at Dartmouth College to celebrate the launch of The Occom Circle, an online collection of manuscripts, books, and images that map out the social world of America’s first published Native author, Samson Occom. Our host, Professor Ivy Schweitzer, has served as the site’s Project Director since its inception. Drawing together Stephanie Fielding, Linguist of the Mohegan Tribe, Peter Carini, College Archivist, Rauner Special Collections, Dartmouth,
Christina Dulude, Web Architect/Engineer, Dartmouth College, and scores of others, Professor Schweitzer created a stimulating workspace for ideas about the repercussions of digital collecting for Native archives.

Over the course of those two days, we heard from many different practitioners of what administrators at education institutions like to call the “digital humanities.” Yet most of the speakers offered cautionary warnings about leaping into digital collections of indigenous materials without first considering the implications for community access, intellectual property rights, and the like.

On the first day of the gathering, Stephanie Fitzgerald, director of Indigenous Studies Program at the University of Kansas spoke eloquently about the dangers of archiving indigenous materials in general, and digital archiving in particular. She spoke of archives as “sites of concentrated knowledge,” whose access is often limited for indigenous community members. Such archiving of Native materials also may involve the improper circulation of privileged knowledge, stories, songs, ceremonials, and material objects that should never be told, sung, or used by outsiders to the traditions that originated them. The provenance of such materials is also problematic, and Professor Fitzgerald cautioned her audience to consider whether the items in any given archive had been “given or simply taken?”

Attendees at the Dartmouth Conference.

In many Native communities, information is gendered and distributed across a wide range of social groups—clans, medicine societies, families. The Euro-American conceptualization of archives, however, assumes that the centralization of information is best, and an archive is thus the archetypal site of knowledge concentration.

In asking what makes an archive indigenous, Fitzgerald hit upon something more important than its contents. Any archive of Native material would, by its very nature, embody kinship ties, and social relationships unique to the community from which it was collected. In her words, an indigenous archive is one that contains “the undervalued labor of many, many souls.”

Stephanie Fitzgerald’s recent book, “Native Women and Land” (University of New Mexico Press, 2015).

For Fitzgerald and several other speakers, the key to creating and maintaining an indigenous archive lies in finding ways to replicate the embodied nature of indigenous epistemologies and material practices in the architecture of the archive itself. It also involves reorienting the mission of archives from the concentration of knowledge to the curation of the pathways of knowing that the items in the archive trace out. Finally, it may also entail creating mechanisms for the restriction of knowledge circulation, something quite antithetical to the received practice of archiving for much of the past two centuries.

Jennifer O’Neal, who works at the University of Oregon and is a member of the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde of Oregon, offered a brief history of how Native archivists have gathered over the years to establish clear “shared stewardship protocols” to guide the handing of indigenous materials by non-Native collections. Beginning with the 1984 National Endowment for the Humanities Native American Archives Project, spurred in part by renewed efforts by tribes to achieve federal recognition, the trend over the years has been to move beyond mere custodial concerns and into questions of social justice. O’Neal participated in a conference dedicated to these issues at Northern Arizona University in 2006. There, Native archivist agreed to “stop simply wrestling with ideas” and to make real structural changes in archives around the country. Their manifesto looked like this:

(see http://www2.nau.edu/libnap-p/)

Protocols was deeply influenced by “numerous professional ethical codes as well as international declarations recognizing Indigenous rights and the ground-breaking Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Protocols for Libraries, Archives, and Information Services.”

At Dartmouth, the conferees revisited this subject with a goal shared by the archivists in Arizona: “to foster increased cooperation between tribal and non-tribal libraries and archives . . . “

In my next posting, I’ll describe a few of the presentations by other speakers, and by institutions like Dartmouth, who have begun to launch digital indigenous archives with similar protocols in mind.

Further Reading

http://www2.nau.edu/libnap-p/resources.html

Participants included:

Donna Moody, (Abenaki) Department of Anthropology, U of Massachusetts, Amherst; John Moody, The Winter Center for Indigenous Traditions, Hanover, NH; Josh Bartlett, (PhD candidate, English, SUNY Albany); Stephanie Fitzgerald (Associate Professor English and Indigenous Studies, University of Kansas); Alyssa Reichardt (PhD candidate, History, Yale University); Marie Balsley Taylor (PhD candidate, English, Purdue University); Hilary Wyss, (Hargis Professor of American Literature, Auburn University); Morgan Swan (Special Collections Education and Outreach Librarian, Dartmouth); Jennifer O’ Neal (Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, University Historian and Archivist, Instructor, Native Studies Program, University of Oregon); Gordon Henry (White Earth Chippewa, Professor of English, Michigan State University); Angela Calcaterra (Assistant Professor of English, University of North Texas); Melanie Taylor (Associate Professor and Chair of Native American Studies, Dartmouth); Alyssa Mt. Pleasant (Assistant Professor, Transnational Studies, SUNY Buffalo); Ellen Cushman (Cherokee, Associate Dean of Academic Affairs, Diversity and Inclusion, Northeastern University); Damián Baca (Assistant Professor of English and Modern Languages, University of Arizona); Jason Lewis (Professor of Computation Arts at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec); Jay Satterfield, (Rauner Special Collections Librarian, Dartmouth College); Kelly Wisecup (Assistant Professor, English, Northwestern); Patricia Marroquin Norby (Director of the McNickle Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies, Chicago, IL); Christine de Lucia (Assistant Professor, History, Mt Holyoke); Ridie Ghezzi (Head, Research and Instruction Services, Baker-Berry Library, Dartmouth); Thomas Peace (Huron University College); Alan Corbiere (M’Chigeeng First Nation); Susan Glover (Laurentian University); Bruce Duthu (The Frank J. Guarini Associate Dean of the Faculty for International Studies & Interdisciplinary Programs, and Samson Occom Professor of Native American Studies at Dartmouth); Rick Hill (Director of the Deyohaha:ge: Indigenous Knowledge Center at Six Nations Polytechnic in Ontario, CA); Tim Powell (Director of Center for Native American and Indigenous Research (CNAIR) at the American Philosophical Society; University of Pennsylvania).

Indigenous Peoples and the American Presidency

Since the founding of the United States, Native people have found themselves in the separate but unequal position of “domestic dependent nations [Cherokee Nation v. Georgia].” More often than not, that curious status has left the President of the United States to adjudicate congressional actions in respect to Indian affairs. That is because the Constitution, in Article II, Section 2, decrees that the President “shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two-thirds of the Senators present concur.” Native communities are nations separate from the U.S.; therefore, since the country’s founding, they have treated with the U.S. in much the same way that France and Mexico do, and because their citizens were not U.S. citizens until 1924, an individual native person’s place in American politics has been, at best, ambiguous.*

No wonder Presidential elections are viewed with great interest in Indian Country.

Barbara Alice Mann, “George Washington’sWar on Native America” (Nebraska, 2009)

A survey of presidential actions towards Native peoples in the U.S. presents a volatile history at best. George Washington, who fought against and alongside Haudenosaunee warriors in the American Revolution, entertained a profoundly ambivalent attitude toward federal Indian policy.

On the one hand, Washington needed Indian allies during the fledgling days of the republic. They were his main buffer against French and English interests in the Old Northwest and Great Lakes regions. On the other, Washington had palpable property interests in Native lands, especially those in upstate New York, and often sided with land companies against Native people in disputes over rights of way and development.

It was Thomas Jefferson, however, who really laid the groundwork for a century of presidential assaults on Indian sovereignty. Because he was a profoundly conflicted man when it came to race and American “genius,” Jefferson was simultaneous fascinated with Native Americans and pragmatically opposed to their survival. In the only book he ever published, Notes on the State of Virginia (1787), he went out of his way to praise the oratory of the Lenni Lenapi (Delaware) leader Logan, who delivered a famous speech decrying the wholesale slaughter of his family by whites. At the same time, he carefully crafted an imaginary American type, the Anglo-Saxon “yeoman farmer,” who would absorb all the good stuff in the Indian’s world—woodcraft, naturalness, democratic nobility—and then went about planning to rid the whole eastern U.S. of real Indians so that these imaginary ones could take their place.

The history of presidential stewardship of Indian Affairs within the U.S. largely follows Jefferson’s vision. Indian fighters became the staple of presidential campaigns, and slogans like “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too” (celebrating the defeat of the Shawnee leader, Tenskwatawa) rang out as political endorsements rooted in racial hatred and genocide.

The worst of them all, Andrew Jackson, pushed The Indian Removal Act through Congress in 1830. It declared

it shall and may be lawful for the President of the United States to cause so much of any territory belonging to the United States, west of the river Mississippi, not included in any state or organized territory, and to which the Indian title has been extinguished, as he may judge necessary, to be divided into a suitable number of districts, for the reception of such tribes or nations of Indians as may choose to exchange the lands where they now reside, and remove there; and to cause each of said districts to be so described by natural or artificial marks, as to be easily distinguished from every other.

On the face of it, this sounds downright gentlemanly—“exchange” of lands, which Indians “may choose.” The reality on the ground was altogether different.

In 1838, a young non-Native private in the U.S. Army witnessed first-hand what the “exchange” looked like. Late in his life, John Burnett penned this short memoir for his family:

Being acquainted with many of the Indians and able to fluently speak their language, I was sent as interpreter into the Smoky Mountain Country in May, 1838, and witnessed the execution of the most brutal order in the History of American Warfare. I saw the helpless Cherokees arrested and dragged from their homes, and driven at the bayonet point into the stockades. And in the chill of a drizzling rain on an October morning I saw them loaded like cattle or sheep into six hundred and forty-five wagons and started toward the west . . . Many of these helpless people did not have blankets and many of them had been driven from home barefooted. On the morning of November the 17th we encountered a terrific sleet and snow storm with freezing temperatures and from that day until we reached the end of the fateful journey on March the 26th, 1839, the sufferings of the Cherokees were awful. The trail of the exiles was a trail of death. They had to sleep in the wagons and on the ground without fire. And I have known as many as twenty-two of them to die in one night of pneumonia due to ill treatment, cold, and exposure.

Here’s a bullet point list of some significant Presidential actions in Indian County

James Monroe–1823 framed a model of U.S. hegemony over the whole of the Western Hemisphere.
Called the Monroe Doctrine, it would have a disastrous impact on the lives of indigenous peoples in Central and South America.

Abraham Lincoln–1862 The President who would sign the Emancipation Proclamation, also signed the execution orders for 38 Dakota men who allegedly perpetrated atrocities during the Dakota War in Minnesota. This was the largest mass hanging in U.S. history.

Lincoln’s execution order.

Ulysses S. Grant tried to take the lead in stabilizing the “Indian Problem” after the Civil War by having his administration draft a nation-wide Peace Policy towards Native Americans. In it, he parceled out the various tribes to the several Christian missionary societies for help in their assimilation.

In 1871, Congress passed legislation that completely ended the practice of the United States entering into treaties with Indian tribes.

Between 1871 and 1890, the federal government tacked between the forces of Indian hating and assimilationism, passing laws that mandated schooling for Indian children (often by shipping them to far-off academies), the individual partition of formerly corporately held tribal lands, and the outlawing traditional religious ceremonies.

By 1890, the year of the Wounded Knee Massacre, Native American population figures were at their lowest since having been collected.

Teddy Roosevelt—In his 1903 book, The Winning of the West, wrote: “The truth is, the Indians never had any real title to the soil.” As President in 1909,” issued eight proclamations which transferred 15 million acres of Indian timber on reservations created by Executive Order to adjacent national forests. The reservations included Fort Apache, Mescalero, Jicarilla, San Carlos, Zuni, Hoopa Valley, Tule River, and Navajo.”*

The 1920s, however, witnessed a rebounding of indigenous populations and their political power.

Calvin Coolidge—In 1924 signed The Indian Citizen Act, spurred in part by the very active role Native men played in the U.S. military during WWI, and the efforts of the Society of American Indians, a national organization of Native activists.
Coolidge with Osage leaders in 1924.

Franklin D Roosevelt—The New Deal sponsored the Indian Reorganization Act in 1933, designed to return tribal governance to the tribes.

Dwight Eisenhower—1958, affirmed U.S. “Termination” policy, commenting, “I HAVE TODAY signed H.R. 2828 which provides for the method of terminating Federal supervision over the property and affairs of the Menominee Indian Tribe of Wisconsin on December 31, 1958. This bil, . . . is the first to be enacted into law as an outgrowth of the Congressional policy on Indian affairs which was embodied in House Concurrent Resolution No. 108 adopted last summer. That policy calls for termination of Federal supervision over the affairs of each Indian tribe as soon as it is ready for independent management of its own affairs.”

Lyndon Johnson—The 1965 Voting Rights Ac reaffirmed the enfranchisement of thousands of Native voters who had been turned away from the polls since 1924.
Diné (Navajo) voters registering in 1948. Native voting was barred in several states until the Voting Rights Act.
Richard Nixon—In 1970 issued a public renunciation of the termination policy. He also established the Environmental Protection Agency, which would be an ally in many tribes’ fight for toxic waste cleanup and environmental justice. In South America, however, the Monroe Doctrine would bolster the Nixon administration’s efforts to check communist expansion in the region, leading to the death and dislocation of many indigenous people.

Jimmy Carter—In 1978 signed The American Indian Religious Freedom Act, which stated the federal government would “protect and preserve for American Indians their inherent rights of freedom to believe, express, and exercise” their traditional religions. He also signed the Indian Child Welfare Act in The act, which came in response to a disproportionately high rate of Indian children being removed from their traditional homes and placed with non-Indian families, established jurisdiction for the placement of Indian children in foster or adoptive care.

Ronald Reagan— Signed the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act in 1988. Like Nixon, Reagan’s anticommunist covert activities in Central America led to the deaths of thousands of indigenous peoples in the region.

George H.W. Bush—Signed NAGPRA into law in 1990.

Barack Obama—Initiated a yearly Tribal Nations Summit at the White House, and President signed the Executive order 13592: Improving American Indian and Alaska Native Educational Opportunities and Strengthening Tribal Colleges and Universities.
President Obama receives the “Rhythm of the Land Blanket” and Cedar Hat from Brian Cladoosby, the leader of the National Congress of American Indians.

President-elect Donald Trump—With no record as either an elected official or a member of the military, there’s little information about how the President-elect will approach Indian affairs. In 1993, however, when testifying before a House subcommittee about corruption in Indian gaming, he made these comments:

Archaeology and Activism

Last year, when I interviewed John Doershuck—State Archaeologist of Iowa—he recalled entering the field as a professional just when NAGPRA was made the law of the land:

I was in grad school at the time [of NAGPRA’s passage] and it was very much on our minds as new PhDs going out into either the academic workforce or the consulting workforce, asking ourselves, “what was this going to mean?” I remember vividly one professor a year or two before NAGPRA was passed, who was just an absolute doomsayer, you know, “this is the absolute end of archaeology.” But then there were also others who very much saw it as an opportunity. The majority of the young professors coming into our grad program were embracing NAGPRA, saying “it’s going to happen, we need to make the best of this.

John’s Professor was no doubt a member of the Society of American Archaeologist (SAA), a professional organization that actively lobbied against NAGPRA.

What a difference a generation makes! In September of this year, the SAA—the very same group that 20 years ago predicted “the absolute end of archaeology” with the passage of NAGPRA—wrote a letter in support of the Water Protectors at Cannonball, ND.

In their statement of solidarity, the SAA spoke firmly and frankly about the Army Corps of Engineer’s apparently slipshod approach to green-lighting the pipeline:

“After review of many documents associated with DAPL (see below), we conclude that there are unresolved questions regarding whether the USACE has fulfilled their Section 106 responsibilities in relation to the NHPA.”

The letter does not make for light reading; it is grounded in a very detailed analysis of both archaeological impact and statute law.

Aerial view of Lynch Knife Flint Quarry. This North Dakota Site was surveyed and confirmed by Metcalf Archaeological Consultants, resulting in its nomination for becoming a National Historic Landmark.

Yet at its core it shares the SAA members’ genuine outrage at the events of September 3, 2016 (described in “Repatriation as the Whole Story”), which included “recent grading of previously surveyed land” that contained burial sites. To the archaeologists, it seemed clear that the DAPL contractors were in violation of the law:

. . . rare traditional cultural properties of singular spiritual value have been, according to the September 4, 2016 court deposition of cultural resource manager Tim Mentz, Sr., completely graded by Dakota Access as of September 3, 2016. The deposition, as well as tribal sources cited in the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s request for a preliminary injunction, note that these stone formations may not be apparent to archaeological surveyors who lack the benefit of complete tribal consultations. The USACE may not have taken the consultative requirements of Section 106 sufficiently so as to avoid such events as have been documented over the last two weeks.

They also expressed dismay that their review of the Corps’ application materials demonstrated what they called “an apparent clear conflict between the USACE’s finding of “No Historic Properties Affected” for ten of eleven crossings of waters” along the pipeline’s route.”

In his conversation with me, John Doershuck observed, “Native American empowerment kept expanding after NAGPRA.” The result was

the creation of tribal historic preservation offices (THPO, pronounced “Tippo”) which parallel the state historic preservation offices, and those THPOs more and more became the voice of tribes in the compliance activities that are governed by the NHPA What we’ve seen in the last ten yours is that, as more and more THPOs are out there, there are more and more people to go to and talk to directly about a particular discovery of ancient human remains.

At Standing Rock, the THPO did indeed protest the Army’s fast track plans, arguing that surveys suggested historic sites might be disturbed. The Corps plowed ahead anyway. This is what spurred the SAA to cite possible legal issues.

Water Protectors face off against grading equipment. Note the amount of damage to the area such construction causes.

In the twenty years since the passage of NAGPRA, preservation of cultural traditions have come full circle, with tribal officers leading the way for academic archaeologists to challenge indiscriminate development of sensitive sites.

The SAA letter concludes:

given the events of the last two weeks, SAA has concerns that it is possible that there may have been violations of the Archaeological Resources Protection Act, as well as North Dakota State Law 23-06-27 (the “Protection of Human Burial Sites, Human Remains, and Burial Goods” section of “Care and Custody of the Dead”). It behooves USACE to investigate whether development activities have violated these laws. As should we all, the USACE hopefully does learn from past errors in dealing with cultural heritage, human remains, and sacred traditional cultural properties. The SAA reminds the USACE that early missteps in following legally mandated procedures with regard to the Kennewick Man discovery continue to resonate to the detriment of the USACE decades afterwards. We therefore sincerely urge the USACE to consider how best to comply with all aspects of Section 106, as well as how to design large-scale projects such as DAPL so as to minimize the problems, delays, and unresolved concerns of descent communities so amply in evidence at Lake Oahe today.

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