The Invented Indian

Cultural Fictions and Government Policies

James A. Clifton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351480666
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This is an explosive collection of essays, written by leading scholars of North American Indians, most of them heavily involved in service and applied work, often on behalf of Indian clients, communities, and organizations. In an area saturated with deadening, consciously politicized orthodoxy, these seventeen essays aim at nothing less than the reconstruction of our understanding of the American Indian-past and presentThe volume examines in careful, accurate but uncompromising ways the recent construction of the prevailing conventional story-line about ""America's most favored underclass."" The first eight essays introduce the volume and treat a variety of specific invented traditions concerning Indians. These are followed by four essays on broader, thematic issues related to the demographic, religious, cultural, and kinship elements in Indian studies. The final five chapters express a comparative perspective: from Anglo and French Canada, Europe, from inside the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and from a legal position.The Invented Indian explores how cultural fictions promote divisiveness and translate into policy. Throughout, the volume reveals a deep and abiding respect for Indians, their histories, and their cultures, saving its critiques for jaundiced academics and callow politicians. Representing years of cooperative effort, this work brings together a group providing breadth and balance. Far more than a critical collection, it is a constructive effort to make sense of a field displaying empirical confusions and moral muddles. The volume will be of interest to anthropologists, professionals in Indian studies, and policymakers.

1 Introduction

Memoir, Exegesis

James A. Clifton

Though the biography of this book is still incomplete, a sketch of its genesis is proper, to help readers understand its lineage and anticipate the temperament of our offspring. This vita must remain unfinished for now, since only others can decide the later career of what the authors and editor have produced. While the contributors all write from the basis of their own experience and expectations, as editor, merely one of the parents, I can speak mainly of my own thoughts about the whole and the experiences which propelled them, from the first arousal of desire through conception up to the point of delivery.

Thirty-two years ago, as an apprentice anthropologist, I was invited to participate in an interdisciplinary team study of the effects of “termination” on the Klamath Indian tribe of Oregon. The termination policy (one of the American state’s cyclical attempts to resolve its “Indian problem” by scrapping subvention and management of the affairs of these client communities) was then in flower; and the Klamath were one of the two largest such corporate groups where this plan was fully implemented. My host, exemplar, and mentor in this research was Professor Theodore S. Stern, who modeled for his students the highest standards of professional integrity, rigor in scholarship, disciplined truth-telling, humane concern for others, and personal generosity.

I then had no experience with Indians, personal or semi-professional, and was largely untutored in conventional anthropological knowledge about them. I was not driven toward identification with Indians by inner compulsion and harbored not the slightest conviction that I might or should act as their liberator. I had not set off to live with Indians in order to discover myself. I was not even interested in Indians per se. I was, however, much committed to studying people, especially their social-cultural dynamics and resistance to change, hopefully among the societies of the islands of Micronesia, not the ethnic insularities of North America. However, because the Klamath were then facing major, externally imposed alterations in their status and situation, the invitation to live and learn among them seemed to be a marvelous opportunity to pursue knowledge and to master some of the rudiments of my craft (see Stern 1966; Kamber 1989).

When a novice among the Klamath, with only scanty second-hand knowledge about and few convictions concerning Indians, there came the first glimmerings of intellectual passion—several puzzling, half-formed questions—long before there were means or opportunity for consummation. The causes for this were a few simple, on-the-spot observations. Among the wealthiest of North American Indians, for instance, their median family income much exceeded that of their neighbors and my own (the young Klamath men and women I knew best sometimes kindly expressed concern about my impoverishment). Yet a great many, about 40 percent, lived elsewhere, when there was no apparent, pressing economic need for them to do so. Within the reservation community, nonetheless, there were large differences in wealth and living standards, though overall they were an enterprising, prosperous, self-reliant population.

Moreover, in the late 1950s they were not a culturally homogeneous little community. Their indigenous ancestors did include mostly Klamath proper, smaller numbers of closely related Modoc, and fewer Northern Paiute; but their pedigrees also contained numerous forebears of diverse European and other not-native ancestry. Much of their history of interactions with outsiders, as Felix Keesing had perceptively said of the Menomini, was “written on their faces.” In the still popular old American folk nomenclature, many were called “halfbreeds” or “mixed-bloods,” labels of Euroamerican origin accepted and used regularly by the Klamath themselves. But in the anthropological thinking of the time the pronounced intracommunity variations in values and behaviors were said to represent differences in “level” or “degree” of acculturation.

The latter interpretation was based on the still commonly unrecognized assumption that these (and other) modern Indian groups are derived exclusively from culturally homogeneous ancestral, native North American populations. As novice anthropologist, at the time I was bothered by the uncritical use of what I saw as American racial labeling and ahistorical assumptions about collective ancestry and heritage that I suspected might be faulty. But I could not then plainly specify the underlying issues, much less think clearly about resolving them with data and ideas. It was a long time before I understood that at the heart of this conceptual quandary lay the confusion of anthropology’s favorite grand abstraction—Culture (in the partitive sense)—with the histories and heritages of a population. Thus, research observation and academic curiosity were accompanied by conceptual frustration, which bred a desire for intellectual resolution not easily or quickly sated.

Of more importance to my later thinking, in this period came a separate, provocative observation. As part of the legislative compromise laying out the details of the actual termination process, each adult Klamath had a choice, for self and for minor children. One option was to elect to “remain” as members of a reconstituted corporate (tribe-like) organization, with their per capita shares of collectively owned resources held in common in trust under state law. The second option allowed them to “withdraw,” to go their individual (more accurately, family) ways, to voluntarily disaffiliate themselves from association with the new social entity, and to collect and personally control their per capita shares of the reservation community’s joint assets, which were considerable.

The behavior of the Klamath at the time did not square with the political rhetoric of “tribalism,” which holds that “the Indian” has some sort of inherited, mystic compulsion to belong to a “sovereign” corporate organization under outside government protection. For of the Klamath only 3.5 percent voted explicitly for the protected joint membership option, that is, for the perpetuation of “tribalism,” a percentage swelled by the addition of the 19 percent who did not or could not vote (in addition to the many indifferent and fewer hard-case hold outs, mainly individuals deemed incapable of managing their own affairs—familyless elderly, orphaned children, the mentally disabled, etc.). The vast majority—77 percent—promptly withdrew and went their several ways, not without some anxiety about this major change in their status, which is not to say that the Klamath population, a Klamath identity, or their communities simply disappeared. Historically, I later learned, the Klamath were by no means either the first or the only Indian population to vote with their feet about remaining in “tribal” organizations, buffered from their larger social environment by a special, segregated status in the federal system. Indeed, in 1980 the “remaining” members of the Klamath tribe themselves cashed in their shares of joint assets for payments of $170,000 each.

After leaving Oregon, I spent two years living and researching among the Southern Ute of Colorado. I found these Ute a strikingly solidary group with a large, resource rich reservation, and an impressively efficient and successful system of government and economic management—with some inputs from federal authorities—about which there were then few strong, conspicuous complaints (Clifton 1965). The following year, in Kansas, I began a study of the Prairie Potawatomi, a small community transplanted over a century before from their old Great Lakes area estate, a group dramatically different from the Klamath and Ute. I was now well sensitized to some aspects of the plurality of differences between Indian communities.

These Potawatomi were dirt poor. For that matter they owned little enough of soil, and that consisted of some small scattered allotments on the remains of their old reservation. Unlike the Klamath and Ute, they exhibited almost no political-economic cohesion, except in violent opposition to any effort on the part of the federal government to deal with, even to deliver services to them. Internally, their affairs were disrupted by chronic, bitter, self-destructive infighting. They contrasted with the Klamath and Ute in other salient ways as well. They mostly still used their old language; in culture they were profoundly natavistic; and they deliberately shunned associations with the assimilated marginal people—the “mixed-bloods”—who lived elsewhere but stridently claimed rights as Prairie Potawatomi Indians (Clifton 1977).

First among the rights these outsiders claimed was access to per capita shares of the substantial Indian Claims Commission award the culturally conservative Potawatomi had for years been litigating. The latter when I met them were preoccupied with shaking the Great Treaty Tree to harvest a major windfall for themselves alone. Since these nativists were fewer than eight hundred, whereas the outside claimants numbered several thousands, they faced a considerable economic as well as a major political threat. Eventually, the insider-outsider conflict was resolved, externally, by fiat issuing from the Commissioner of Indian Affairs and his Assistant. These officials signaled the legitimacy of the outsiders as Potawatomi (by American racial definition), and approved the new Constitution they prepared. So far as I understood what was going on at the time (1964-1965), the culturally hard-shelled Potawatomi were having their political backs broken across the knees of others’ visions for their future.

When I first knew them, the elder Kansas Potawatomi leaders were obsessed by a few shared fantasies. They were dreaming (literally so, night and day) that soon an Indian agent would arrive with a buckboard laden with strongboxes overflowing with silver and gold coins, which he would then hand over to them to do with as they wished. They thought they remembered this had been the custom a century earlier. They envisioned also that, if only they persisted in resolute opposition, the United States government would leave them strictly alone to manage their own internal political affairs, except periodically to deliver additional boxes of coins and other services they demanded and expected. Although I did not then entirely understand it, there in the thinking of these Potawatomi elders—in starkly explicit, paradigmatic form—lay the fundamental, conflicting elements of the goals of most modern Indian groups. Whether authentically native and officially recognized, or feigned Indians of invented identity aspiring to federal recognition, legal status, and a key to the treasury, these central aims are few. Simply put, they are: obtaining absolute political autarchy while perpetuating utter fiscal dependence.

About this time I began pondering whether being federally recognized Indian (as in the instance of both the Potawatomi-by-definition and the Potawatomi-by-culture) and not being government-defined Indian (as in the case of the withdrawing Klamath) both had as much or more to do with something as mundane as money (and other, symbolic incentives) than with an innate proclivity for protecting and perpetuating ethnic heritage. Being Indian, I reasoned, likely involved periodic access to substantial bonanzas of various kinds. And at the heart of being Indian in this legalistic sense, I suspected, lay a profoundly ambivalent psychosocial dependency relationship.

In any regard, like other anthropologists of my generation, I quickly discovered that short-term ethnographic field studies had serious limitations for anyone interested in long-term social and cultural processes. The cross-sectional analysis of facts drawn from contemporary communities such as the Potawatomi raised questions that could only be answered with comparative, longitudinal, proper historical research. Eventually settling in Wisconsin, close to the old heartland of the Potawatomi and their neighbors I embarked on field and archival studies of other Potawatomi and kindred groups, a style of enquiry by then dignified with the new title of “ethnohistory.”

Following the historical tracks of the Kansas Potawatomi’s ancestors led me onto the trail of those peoples who had influenced them. My additional comparative historical research included studies of the Ojibwa, Ottawa, Wyandot, Shawnee, Emigrant New York Indians in Wisconsin, and other peoples of indigenous or European origin (or some mixture of all of the above), with whom the Potawatomi had been endlessly entangled for over three centuries in the complex and changing cultural-geographic matrix encompassed by the Great Lakes-Ohio Valley region.

I write at a time when public confession of serious anthropological lapses has become chic. Though unlike some others involved with Indians I have never tried out the part of messiah or prophet of doom, I will admit that on several occasions I have acted in the capacity of advocate of Indian rights. Educated in the old tradition of Roger Bacon’s aphorisms, I was convinced that if creating knowledge was worthwhile, finding some practical use for it was nearly as grand. At first I failed to recognize that what Bacon had in mind was improved navigation skills and increased crop production, not directly helping special-interest groups with social problems in competition with their adversaries.

By way of example, for the time they had given and the courtesy shown me, I felt an obligation to the culturally conservative Kansas Potawatomi, worse yet, a personal identification with their interests. Thus when called on for help in their efforts to fend off being overwhelmed by “newcomers,” I tried to intervene on their behalf by persuading federal officials of the superior merits of their case. This modest effort did the old conservatives little good, and myself less, especially so since the outsiders quickly became dominant insiders. What I ran up against in Washington, I saw later, was the beginning of a policy that has since been institutionalized as an integral branch of the developing Indian rights industry. Now an important sideline for underemployed applied anthropologists, geographers, historians, and federal administrators, this involves the forging by legal reincarnation of the maximum feasible number of Indians, however obscure and questionable their ethnic antecedents. These include contingents of individuals being recruited and enrolled in existing, officially long-recognized tribes (as happened to the Kansas Potawatomi), and hundreds of recently resurrected “forgotten tribes” or “lost nations” seeking “status clarification,” that is, the stamp of federal approval on and specially privileged political economic support of their resuscitated or contrived identities (Paredes 1974; Porter 1986).

Similarly, I was later called on to act as “expert” witness on behalf of the Michigan and Wisconsin Potawatomi in their appeal before the Indian Claims Commission. My inclination to be helpful, to put knowledge to practical use, again got me in some difficulty. At stake were millions of dollars: the attorneys for the Oklahoma and Kansas Potawatomi wanted all of it for their clients, leaving none for the smaller eastern communities. Convinced that the historical and anthropological facts led to a different conclusion, I soon discovered that being a witness under such circumstances was rather like the predicament of Christians in a Roman arena: pugnacious gladiators on the one side, ravenous lions the other. Striving to hold to academic standards of truth telling did my reputation no good among the Kansas Potawatomi, now suddenly quadrupled in population, since the commission’s decision cost them part of the spoils. And my testimony greatly annoyed an Indian Claims tribunal commissioner. One of North Carolina’s born again “Lumbee Indians,” a man like his multitude of kin deeply committed to diluting and broadening the federal definition of Indianness, he had a particular stake in recognizing the rights of “Indians by blood” (see Henige 1984).

However, this and several later ordeals in federal courtrooms where Indian treaty rights cases were at issue provided me with an opportunity for “field” observations not ordinarily available to an academic. In these trials by history (i.e., law office history), watching the highly skilled, forceful attorneys serving the Indian cause at work was a thoroughly eye-opening experience. From them I learned much about the selective use and suppression of historical and anthropological evidence, systematic distortion of facts in support of a preconceived “theory of the case,” the dexterous manipulation of judicial and public sentiments, perfectly astounding hyperbole, and the most outrageous fabrications. Watching some “experts” approach the witness stand with hats in hand, and others demur when caustically coached about how and what they should testify to, balking myself when pressed to distort or suppress interpretations and sources, I concluded that in Indian treaty rights cases the standards of evidence and logic are not what they are elsewhere, especially so in scholarly work.

The paramount aim, at last I had explained to me by an unusually impetuous counsel, was not veracity but to win at all costs. These particular attorneys were interested in neither truth nor social consequences, except those of obtaining for their clients the largest shortterm benefits attainable—money and power. Rather than a quest relying on reasoned probity and a careful array of all relevant evidence in search of justice, these were purely political contests, I concluded (Clifton 1987). Over the past twenty-five years, the federal courtrooms have been arenas for many such exciting, generally unbalanced duels on behalf of Indian clients, mostly victorious. About the tactics used in similar struggles before state legislatures and in Congress I have only secondhand knowledge, never having served as anyone’s lobbyist, but the legions of advocates for Indian prerogatives have been at least equally successful in these other political arenas.

Along the way, between 1971 and 1976, I had another, longer round of experience in a helping role, attempting to service the expressed needs of Indians. In this period I organized and administered a University Year for Action program throughout Wisconsin—mostly health, education, and economic development projects in nine of Wisconsin’s ten Indian reservation communities. Managing this university-based VISTA/ Peace Corps-like program brought me into prolonged contact with the several parties then battling for control of the future of the eleventh Wisconsin Indian community, the Menomini, who like the Klamath had been the other major Indian group “terminated” several years earlier. When I first visited them, someone had erected a billboard alongside the major highway leading into the new Menomini County. It read, “We Will Make It!” Some years later, after the party lobbying for “restoration” had achieved victory in Congress, this sign was taken down, and a new one erected in its place to confront travelers through the newly reestablished Menomini Reservation. It read, “We Didn’t Make It!” This suggests that Indians are not incapable of either large aspirations or self-irony.

Watching this process of Menomini retribalization, while trying to deliver some basic development and social services, was always instructive and often stormy. Having learned some lessons the hard way, with some special knowledge of the pitfalls laying in wait for strangers in situations of embittered factionalism, I tried to maintain a neutral, even-handed stance as regards the cabals and their corrosive, violent infighting. Avoiding earlier mistakes, I discovered that I had to find some intellectual profit when committing new ones. So with my anthropological eyes open I learned much more—of the political-economic relationships between Indian factions and outside interests, for example.

The leaders of the large “restorationist” camp (mainly educated, middle-class, off-reservation women...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The Indian Story
• 3. Pride and Prejudice
• 4. Squanto and the Pilgrims
• 5. A Sweet Small Something
• 6. The United States Constitution and the Iroquois League
• 7. Mother Earth
• 8. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity
• 9. Their Numbers Become Thick
• 10. Primal Gaia
• 11. A Legacy of Misperception and Invention
• 12. Validity Is Not Authenticity
• 13. Ethical Advocacy Versus Propaganda
• 14. Inside BIA
• 15. When Fictions Take Hostages
• 16. Europe’s Indians
• 17. White Ghosts, Red Shadows
• Appendix Criticisms of Nonconformers
• About the Authors
• Index