Conversations on Native American Cultural Sovereignty
The authors are among the founding members of WomenOfBearsEars.org, which supports restoration of Bears Ears National Monument.
Will sacred lands protected by President Obama be protected once again?
Source: Opinion | Women of Bears Ears Are Asking You to Help Save It
By
from The New York Times
And that’s a problem — especially for Native American women, and especially in rape cases.
Source: Opinion | This 19th-Century Law Helps Shape Criminal Justice in Indian Country
Every November since 1990, cultural and educational institutions across the US recognize the Indigenous peoples of this country with programming dedicated to celebrating Native American History Month. For The Repatriation Files, it is a good time to reflect on the past year in Indian Country—this highs and the lows—and to reacquaint readers with news and events from the more than 500 Native Nations recognized by the federal government.
The year 2019 began with a confrontation between high school students wearing MAGA hats and Native activist Nathan Phillips—an event chronicled in a January issue of this blog (“Nathan Phillips: An Elder for All Americans”).
“as the non-Indian struggles in solitude and despair, he curses the Indian for not coveting the same disaster.”
August saw the last edition of News from Indian Country, a Native owned and operated news outlet from Hayward, Wisconsin. Longtime editor, Paul DeMain recalled the early days of the publication:
News From Indian Country started publishing in 1987 and all three of these men [Pipe Mustache, Archy Mosay, and Richard LaCourse], along with Indigenous women like Janet McCloud, Rose Mary Robinson and Wilma Mankiller, and even a young woman named Winona LaDuke could be found in the pages of our earliest newspaper, the one now putting its last hard copy to bed.
We have survived the controversies of the last 40 years, a written testament to opinions of the widest dimensions. Treaty rights, taxing authority, identity, spiritualism, healing, war, trauma, battles between relatives, nations and international personalities (“33 Years of Publishing”).
Out west, the Yurok Nation was successful in its quest to have the Klamath River, the lifeblood of the Yurok homeland, the rights of personhood under the law. Following the example of the White Earth Band of Ojibwe, who used the concept to designate wild rice (manoomin) as deserving the same protections as human beings.
“From New Zealand to Colombia, the powerful idea that nature has rights is taking root in legal systems.”
Following the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, more tribal communities have sought to rethink how they might protect sacred sites and their environment. According to High Country Times, “Legal personhood provides a different framework for dealing with problems like pollution, drought and climate change, though no case has yet been brought to put the Whanganui, Manoomin or Klamath rights to the test in court. The crucial aspect to establishing these legal frameworks, Indigenous lawyers say, involves shifting relationships and codifying Indigenous knowledge — in other words, recognizing non-human entities not as resources, but as rights-holders.
2019 was also the year that the Ponca leader Standing Bear was honored as a civil rights pioneer with a statue in the US Capitol building. As the Washington Post and the Smithsonian Magazine have reported, the statue commemorates the efforts of Standing Bear to overturn US law that in 1879 ruled that “an Indian was neither a person nor a citizen.” Standing Bear, the first Native person to offer testimony in federal court, argued that he and his community had the right to remain in their homeland, rather than be removed to Oklahoma. The presiding judge eventually agreed, ruling that “an Indian is a ‘person’ within the meaning of the laws of the United States” and that “no rightful authority exists for removing by force any of the relators to the Indian Territory.”
“That hand is not the color of yours, but if I pierce it, I shall feel pain. If you pierce your hand you also feel pain. The blood that will flow from mine will be of the same color as yours. I am a man. The same god made us both.”
Read more: Standing Bear
In the next post, we will explore Native American history month from the perspective of a recent presidential declaration that has overlaid this commemoration with something called “National American History and Founders Month.”
As the President and Congress spar over funding for a border wall as a condition for re-opening the Federal Government, Native citizens across Indian Country are experiencing major disruptions to their daily lives.
Indian Country Today reports, “Sen. Tina Smith, D-Minnesota, said on MSNBC this morning that the chairman of the Bois Forte Band of Chippewa told her that tribal police are not being paid because of the shutdown. Funding for tribal law enforcement contracts are on hold during the shutdown.”
It is a similar story for those Native communities who rely on the Indian Health Service (IHS), a federal entity whose services are often guaranteed by treaty. A recent report in the New York Times estimates that for one tribe of the Chippewa in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, the shutdown is costing “about $100,000, every day, . . . federal money that does not arrive to keep health clinics staffed, food pantry shelves full and employees paid.” Some 1.9 million Native people are being affected.
The same is true of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). Writing to officials in Washington D.C., Colville Business Council Chair Rodney Cawston, in recent article in the Tribal Tribune of Nespelem, WA, argues that the shutdown has had “a disproportionate impact to tribes’ related to land management, health services and other social service programs.” Cawston believes “the impact to the tribal timber industry alone is resulting in a tribal loss of approximately $400,000 weekly and the impact to federal direct and indirect support costs is resulting in a loss of $1.5 million weekly.”
“The trust responsibility that underlies the functions that the IHS and BIA serve makes them much different from National parks and traditional land management functions of the Department of Interior.”
A visit to the IHS website this week displays the stark reality of the shutdown for indigenous communities.
“Dear Tribal Leader,” the message reads, “there will be no funding available from the HIS until such time as appropriations are enacted and available for such purposes. We acknowledge that this circumstance may result in insufficient funds to carry out the terms of the agreement (the Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act) and that the program may cease to operate.”
Coming on the heels of a year-long assault on Native land by the Department of Interior and the Trump administration, the shutdown of the federal government is yet another blow to tribal sovereignty and yet another example of promises unkept.
As Kevin Washburn, who served as the assistant secretary for Indian Affairs under President Barack Obama, explained to a reporter from the New York Times, during a shutdown, “Indian Country stops moving forward . . . and starts moving backward.”
It is time this administration started honoring its trust obligations to Native people.
Further Reading
http://www.tribaltribune.com/news/article_92a5690a-12b6-11e9-aafc-57f1d70299a4.html
The state is embroiled in a battle over Native Americans’ ability to vote under a law the Supreme Court just let take effect.
In a recent post, (Historic Moment) The Repatriation Files outlined how several court cases were in the works to dramatically improve the voting situation in Indian Country, where the right to vote has always been difficult to exercise. Unfortunately, a new decision by the Supreme Court threatens to make this November’s election yet another one in which Native voters are treated as second-class citizens.
“The state has acknowledged that Native American communities often lack residential street addresses. Nevertheless, under current state law an individual who does not have a ‘current residential street address’ will never be qualified to vote.”
Diné (Navajo) voters registering in 1948. Native voting was barred in several states until the Voting Rights Act.
Source: A Look at Where North Dakota’s Voter ID Controversy Stands
While events in Indian Country sometimes make the front page of major newspapers and online news outlets, many important items remain buried in the back pages or distributed only on specialized web sites. Here are just some of things that happened over the summer in the lives of indigenous people in the Western Hemisphere:
The News Tribune of Tacoma, WA reports that the Puyallup Tribe of Indians welcomed some 120 canoes from a variety of tribal nations to the Salish Sea this July as part of the Tribal Canoe Journey event that takes place every year, featuring an itinerary that begins in the Puget Sound and ends at the Strait of Georgia in British Columbia.
Canoes from more than 108 tribes and nations make their way through Commencement Bay.
Since 1989, when only 20 boats participated, the event has grown steadily, representing the many tribes’ contributions to the region. This year canoe from as far away as Alaska made the trip to Tacoma. The theme of this year’s journey, “Honoring our Medicine,” was chosen to underscore the tribal communities’ efforts to heal both their own nations and the environment that share with non-Native peoples in the coastal Northwest.
ReadMore: https://www.thenewstribune.com/news/local/article215683535.html
On August 1, 2018, Eleanor Spears Dove turned one hundred!
“After more than two years of legal uncertainty, the U.S Department of the Interior on Friday found that it could not keep land in trust for the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe “
“We did some research and thought maybe we could use it as a positive tool to help us strengthen language, knowledge and cultural identity.”
https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2018/09/15/anaanas-tent-inuktitut-english_a_23527607/
After several months of study, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke is said to have decided on substantially cutting down the area of lands that presidents since Theodore Roosevelt have protected through the Antiquities Act.
Two of the four monuments Zinke wishes to reduce are those established by recent Democratic presidents. Highest on the list: Bears Ears National Monument, set aside for protection by President Obama. If Zinke and the President get their way, places like Bears Ears in Utah and Gold Butte in Nevada may now be re-opened to commercial mineral and resource extraction.
In a previous post, I outlined how the Act has been implemented since Roosevelt’s administration (it was a Republican-sponsored piece of legislation) by presidents who have responded to the public’s desire to see places with culturally sensitive landmarks and archaeological features preserved for future generations.
“I want to ask you to do one thing in connection with it in your own interest and in the interest of the country—to keep this great wonder of nature as it now is.”
Certainly Secretary Zinke is right when he says, “No President should use the authority under the Antiquities Act to restrict public access, prevent hunting and fishing, burden private land, or eliminate traditional land uses, unless such action is needed to protect the object.”
The law states: “the limits of [monuments] in all cases shall be confined to the smallest area compatible with proper care and management of the objects to be protected.” But also says that private land may be caught up in the process: “When such objects are situated upon a tract . . . held in private ownership, the tract, or so much thereof as may be necessary for the proper care and management of the object, may be relinquished to the Government.”
Yet several of Zinke’s statements regarding his decision seem to ignore this provision and suggest a highly politicized process. Instead of simply acknowledging that many citizens have written to protest the changes to the boundaries of places like Bears Ears, Zinke interpreted their disagreement as some sort of conspiracy:
Comments received were overwhelmingly in favor of maintaining existing monuments and demonstrated a well-orchestrated national campaign organized by multiple organizations (Washington Post, 8/24/17).
Where else are everyday Americans who want to preserve sacred lands and archaeological wonders to turn? We don’t have as many lobbyists on K Street. Plus, much of our lobbying is done in the open, in letter writing campaigns and blogs like this one. We don’t have access to the golf clubhouses where deals involving the public interest are now routinely made.
“When such objects are situated upon a tract . . . held in private ownership, the tract, or so much thereof as may be necessary for the proper care and management of the object, may be relinquished to the Government.”
Petroglyphs at Gold Butte. Photo by Terri Rylander.
These objects need the special protection a monument designation provides precisely because they do not easily fall under the guidelines of NAGPRA, especially if the land in question is not federal land. Those who would claim that their rights to “improvement” are being violated by such monument designations often claim an ancestral right to the land. The problem with such claims, however, is that much of land use in the west is predicated upon ignoring earlier treaties the U.S. made with Indian tribes in the nineteenth century.
In an ideal world, those of us who wish to see sacred sites and objects of cultural patrimony be protected would simply write our representatives and eventually have legislation written to that effect. There would be compromises, to be sure, but in the end, both the rancher and worshiper would have land enough to peaceably coexist.
But we live in an era of legislative “under-reach” that almost guarantees nothing will get done in this regard. The U.S. Senate couldn’t even find a way to hold hearings for a Supreme Court nominee, something the Constitution lists as part of their job. How could they possibly act on something like this, an issue that requires careful thought, historical knowledge, and cultural sensitivity?
Although it is being marketed under the guise of local autonomy, this executive action is simply a disguised form of depatriation—the clawing back of Indian homelands into the maw of corporate interests. Repatriation law is founded on the right of peoples to declare sovereignty over those objects of cultural patrimony that have been unjustly alienated from them. More fundamentally, it posits a homeland to which such items may be returned.
Under Mr. Zinke’s plan, American Indians will have fewer places to worship and less land to spare for the bones of their ancestors.
Cedar Mesa Moon House, Bears Ears National Monument.
American Indian history is littered with euphemisms masking atrocities committed by the federal and state governments under their cover. Beginning with “removal,” that benign-sounding word for forced marches and starvation, the settler communities that invaded Indian Country have deployed a wide array of terms to describe what are now generally acknowledged to have been policies aimed at destroying tribal communities and their traditions—the Dawes Act, Relocation, Termination.
The latest word to enter the vocabulary of those who would carve out more sacred grounds and treaty land for their personal use is perhaps the most galling. That word is sovereignty.
During the 2015 armed occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon, members of a group called Citizens for Constitutional Freedom invoked sovereignty in the form of state’s rights to justify their actions. They said the federal government’s management of western lands was illegitimate because their own “ancestral rights” to cattle grazing usurped any federal claims (Read more).
Over the course of the protracted negotiations to end the Malheur occupation, the Burns Paiute Tribe, which once held land that included the refuge, called on the militants to end the standoff. From the point of such tribal communities, this bastardization of the concept of sovereignty is absurd. Yankton Dakota Sioux writer Jacqueline Keeler put it this way:
As a Native American, I find [their] late-nineteenth-century claims of “ancestral rights” presumptuous, since by law all remaining pre-emptive rights in [the states] belong not to late arrivals like [them] but to tribes that have lived in the region for thousands of years (Read more).
Unfortunately, the “ancestral rights” types have the ear of the new president. During the Obama administration, more lands were returned to the Native nations than in the terms of the three previous presidents. Now, the current Commander in Chief has signed an executive order instructing the Interior Department to review all national monument designations, paying special attention to the Bears Ears National Monument in San Juan County, Utah.
Members of Utah’s congressional delegation started lobbying the new administration soon after November’s election, asking it to reverse course on Bears Ears. Indian Country Today reported at the time that “a White House official justified this action, saying, ‘Past administrations have overused this power and designated large swaths of land well beyond the areas in need of protection.’”
The term I would use for these efforts is depatriation.
That is because repatriation and the renewal of cultural protocols presupposes a homeland where remains may be re-interred and ceremonies restored. The word’s etymology suggests a post-classical Latin reference to returning something or someone to the homeland, the country of one’s father. Yet it is given in a feminine form—patria—and thereby refers to a motherland as well. Thus, the word is, first and foremost, about land. It represents a landed definition of ownership, consanguinity, identity, association.
There is also the question of power. About 50 percent of San Juan County is Native American, yet just nine percent of business owners are Indian, according to the U.S. Census. It is also one of the poorest counties in the state. “It’s all about control,” said Mark Maryboy, a member of the grassroots Utah Diné Bikéyah, which initiated the effort to make Bears Ears a national monument.
Of course, not all tribes or tribal members agree. Darren Parry, Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation vice chairman, has said that the designation is not in the best interest of the Shoshone. Navajo Republican County Commissioner Rebecca Benally agrees, and has formed a group called Stewards of San Juan County. Ms Benally feels that the tribes are being “used” by environmentalists and that the monument’s boundaries extend too far into county lands that could he used by tribal members for grazing.
While these complaints deserve a proper hearing, it is also worth noting that the most outspoken supporters of rolling back President Obama’s designation are no less suspect of manipulating tribal politics and “using” Native people than the environmentalists Rebecca Benally opposes.
It’s all about control.
San Juan County Commissioner Bruce Adams, a Republican rancher, is a case in point. As part of his support of the rollback, Adams distributed cowboy hats emblazoned with the message: “Make San Juan County Great Again.” It’s a witty take on the president’s campaign slogan, but just 200 days into this administration, it is a phrase that should give us all pause.
Bruce Adams (“Indian Country Today,” Kim Baca)
We have now experienced what “great” means for the new president, and it does not appear to have anything to do with helping rural counties like San Juan. It does, however, promise corporate interests more access to extractive resources, tax breaks, and relaxed environmental regulations. None of these would seem to offer farmers and ranchers any shot at “greatness.” More mining and drilling means less grazing land. Less oversight means more tainted ground water, more erosion. Nor are the corporate interests at all local. If they employ locals, they do so only sporadically, as suits their immediate needs. They rarely reinvest in the local infrastructure or participate in community activities. They build temporary roads to and from their mines and wells, hire itinerant workers, and cut and run when the mines are payed out and the wells run dry. Their profits go to place like Panama and the Cayman Islands, while rural people like those of San Juan County, both Anglo and Indian, are left to clean up the mess.
This is not sovereignty, it is fealty, a word that should strike fear in the hearts of anyone with a desire for freedom and local control. It is not at all euphemistic. It means exactly what it says: “a feudal tenant’s sworn loyalty to a lord.”
