An Essay in Quotes
Privilege in Practice
“only within anthropological study has it been able to convey the richness and diversity of Native societies” (Bea Medicine 2001, 28).
Privilege in Practice
“Anthropologists like Boas used Natives and women to gain access to information and took credit for that information” (Medicine 2001).
“Anthropology does nothing to help native communities while anthropologists make lots of money and get status and prestige from publishing and creating useless theory. All anthropological research is worthless when it does nothing to better the condition of Indians” (Deloria 1968).
“Academic jargon, confusing and labyrinthine language of anthropology does not allow Native societies to take part in the proceeds of research” (Deloria 1997),
“scientists are not performing their function in society, to return discoveries to the community” (Deloria 1995).
“Anthropologists do not always share their research and reports with their subjects” (Medicine 2001).
“sharing knowledge is a long-term commitment, not simply to share surface knowledge… but to share the theories and analyses which inform the way knowledge and information are constructed and represented. to assume that people will not be interested in, or will not understand, the deeper issues is arrogant. The challenge always is to demystify, to decolonize” (Smith 1999).
“Research within late-modern and late-colonial conditions continues relentlessly and brings with it a new wave of exploration, discovery, exploitation, and appropriation. Researchers enter communities armed with goodwill in their front pockets and patents in their back pockets…. their actions are always justified as being for the good of mankind” (Smith 1999).
Ethnocentricity
“history and anthropology researchers are engrossed in the golden-age natives of the past at the expense of contemporary cultures” (Medicine 2001),
“research designs based on romanticized images of the past” (Medicine 2001).
“many scientific theories are merely scientific folklore mindlessly recited, ex: Bering Strait theory” (Deloria 1995).
“tribal societies are in a fight to establish that they are the true experts on their own culture. The basic issue in the fight is to determine who represents the authority and who controls the definitions, Anthropology has control of the definitions of native people” (Deloria 1997).
“History is mostly about power. It is the story of the powerful and how they became powerful, and then how they use their power to keep them in positions in which they can continue to dominate others. It is because of this relationship with power that we have been excluded, marginalized and “Othered”” (Smith 1999).
“Many thousands of individuals are not counted as Indians, though they are quite as much Indian by inheritance and style of living as those officially enumerated. assumption that “assimilation of the American Indian into normal stream of American life is inevitable, that Indian tribes and communities will disappear.” The evaluation of this assumption was critically important, since practically from the beginnings of the nation official Indian policy, in its various phrasings through the years had accepted it as self-evident”
(McNickle 1962).
“any consideration of the ways our origins have been examined, our histories recounted, our arts analysed, our cultures dissected, measured, torn apart and distorted back to us will show that theories have not been sympathetical or ethical to us” (Smith 1999).
“Reference to the vanishing red man was common in song and story” (McNickle 1962).
“Indian persons are not counted as Indians by the Bureau of Indian Affairs unless they fall within certain categories. Usually this means Indian persons for whom the Federal government has some responsibility to provide services. The government prefers to limit rather than expand this number. Many thousands of individuals are not counted as Indians, though they are quite as much Indian by inheritance and style of living as those officially enumerated. assumption that “assimilation of the American Indian into normal stream of American life is inevitable, that Indian tribes and communities will disappear.” The evaluation of this assumption was critically important, since practically from the beginnings of the nation official Indian policy, in it various phrasings through the years had accepted it as self-evident” (McNickle 1962).
Pan-Indians
“Congress stopped treaty making, creating the trend to create policies unilaterally across all Native cultures, regardless of differences in culture and tribe. Anthropology does this as well” (Medicine 2001),
“research on Indian problems characterizes all Indians and all Native cultures under one category, does not differentiate the genders, nor cultures, nor tribes” (Medicine 2001).
“Research designs are created from a male perspective. Such design research models deal with “problems” that Indians have, other Research models ignore gender and women’s issues, and ignore Native perspectives in their design” (Medicine 2001).
“legislated entities which regulated who was Indian and who was not, who was metis, who had lost all status as an indigenous person, who had the correct fraction of blood quantum, who lived in the regulated spaces of reserves and serve the interests of the colonizing society” (Smith 1999).
Perceived Native bias
“elders can have an impact at sources of information” (Medicine 2001),
“while anthropology marginalizes such information. histories from the Indian point of view are now criticized as being ethnocentric” (Medicine 2001).
“ignore Native perspectives in their research design” (Medicine 2001).
“those who speak from a more traditional indigenous point of view are criticized because they do not make sense… or our talk is reduced to some nativist discourse, dismissed by colleagues in the academy as some modernist invention of the primitive” (Smith 1999).
– “the fact that indigenous societies had their own systems of order was dismissed through what Albert Memmi referred to as a series of negations: they were not fully human, they were not civilized enough to have systems, they were not literate, their languages and modes of thought were inadequate” (Smith 1999).
Anthropology and Colonization
“anthropologists do not include the study of the effects of colonization upon Native societies” (Medicine 2001, 29). See Malinowski, and Memmi,
“Anthropology is a deeply colonial science” (Deloria 1997).
“in their foundations, western disciplines are as much implicated in each other as they are in imperialism. Some, such as anthropology, made the study of us into their science, others were employed in the practices of imperialism in less direct but far more devastating ways” (Smith 1999).
“past colonialism is viewed as the convenient invention of western intellectuals which re-inscribes their power to define their world” (Smith 1999).
“imperialism frames the indigenous experience, imperialism cannot be struggled over only at the level of text and literature” (Smith 1999).
“Manifest Manners are the course of dominance, the racialist notions and misnomers sustained in archives and lexicons as “authentic” representations of Indian cultures” (Vizenor 1994).
Objectification: non-human
“anthropologists has treated Native people and culture as objects, causing an objectification of Natives as experimental objects” (Medicine 2001),
“experimentation on Indians produced phenomena of grave robbing, military theft of massacred Indians to Smithsonian, use of unsanctioned drugs and medical experimentation on tribal communities” (Deloria 1995),
“anthropology has taught to its students the need to collect objects from Indians and place them in museums” (Medicine 2001),
“sub-human status created by anthro public presentations created racist treatment in American society” (Deloria 1995).
“unreliability theory of Indian perspectives creates a public perception of sub-human status. And public presentations of Indian culture are like those of wildlife” (Deloria 1995).
“how often we read in the newspaper about the death or murder of a native man, and in the same paper about the victimization of a female native, as though we were a species of sub-human animal life? …everyone else gets to be called a man or a woman” (Smith 1999).
“there is a very rich history of research which attempts to legitimate views about indigenous peoples which have been antagonistic and dehumanizing. Discussions about the concept of intelligence, on discipline, or on factors that contribute to achievement depend heavily on notions about the “other”” (Smith 1999).
“- researchers gather… remedies… and remove them for analysis…[and] collect…belief systems, ideas about healing, about the universe, about relationships, and ways of organizing and practices and rituals….a global hunt for new knowledge, new materials, new cures, supported by international agreements…brings new threats to indigenous communities” (Smith 1999).
“It was a process of systemic fragmentation which can still be seen in the disciplinary carve-up of the indigenous world: bones, mummies and skulls to the museums, art work to private collectors, languages to linguistics, ‘customs’ to anthropologists, beliefs and behaviors to psychologists” (Smith 1999).
“Western classification systems are out of touch with the American Indian worldview. Indeed, even the terms, art, art work, sacred, and secular, as non-Indians use them, embody concepts foreign to Native American societies. Among many Indian peoples, all man-made objects are grouped together and referred to as that-which-has-been-made. Distinctions between aesthetic objects, sacred objects, functional objects, public objects, and commercial objects simply do not exist. In a holistic society there are no such lines” (Strickland 1997).
the Static Indian
“ethnologies create an image of the pristine past, from this is created the current biforcation among Natives of traditionalists and non-traditionalists. Native take up these models and want to be traditionalists” (Medicine 2001).
“Native societies use published data to change the moral, ethical and legitimacy picture of their society” (Medicine 2001, Deloria 1968).
“Native militants are creating contrived Native cultures” (Medicine 2001).
“The pow wow has developed out of the invasion of Indian country by large numbers of researchers who are looking for spectacular ceremonial events” (Deloria 1968).
“anthropological and ethnographic publications about Natives has created a static image of Native, corrupting the image of the ethnographic present” (Medicine 2001).
“Indians are labeled as non-technological, with the vantage point of this definition being European society” (Medicine 2001).
Stereotypes
“anthropologists have created the images of native peoples that we have today” (Medicine 2001),
“continuous scientific theorizing of Indians dehumanizes and objectifies Indians and provides an environment where public believes they have the right to question authenticity of Indians and are confused when Indians act up against racial treatment” (Deloria 1995).
“The anthropological conceptions of the world are a prison to Indians” (Deloria 1968).
“self-righteous colonized new age Indians demand that everything be spiritual when it doesn’t have to be and whether everyone involved understands it or not” (Deloria 1997). “Indians are the actual absence- the simulations of the tragic primitive” (Vizenor 1994).
“they never owned a foot of land. They were roving savages. They never owned and could not own land. They could not understand the title to land” (McNickle 1962).
“The Indian is seen as Savage Sinner or Redskin Redeemer and often simultaneously as both. It is the Indian as exotic. The Indian as other. The Indian as strange, romantic, demonic, dangerous, and deceptive. The Indian as virile barbarian. The Indian as the devilish, anti-Christ. The Indian as Tonto-figure, serving his white master in the preordained task of westward expansion, The Indian offering hope of an earlier natural age to the white man enslaved by technology. On one side we see the noble redman, the faithful Tonto-like companion. On the other side we see the Indian as ruthless pillager. We see his primary occupation as plunderer; his principal recreation as rape; and his greatest pleasure the torture and seduction of the innocent, particularly the devil incarnate, offset against the new age redskinned redeemer of attuned spirit and sound ecology. The duality dominates”(Strickland 1997).
Cultural evolution
“the survival of Native societies and cultures is still a surprise to American integrationalists” (Medicine 2001).
“anthropologists are entrenched in cultural evolutionary theories” (Deloria 1997).
“Reference to the vanishing red man was common in song and story. Few Indians Tribes have disappeared completely …, and while this is a surviving fact to most Americans, it indicates that these people are not being absorbed or assimilated into the dominant American culture. Indeed, American Indian groups still retain many aspects of their own distinctive ways of life and have in only rare instances become “Americanized”” (McNickle 1962).
“the generalized picture of Indian tribes today is of a people that has survived in numbers, in social organization, in custom and outlook, in the retention of physical resources, and in its position before the law. The situation may be described as a survival of fragments, of incomplete entities… but … any people at any time is the survival of fragments out of the past. The function of culture is always to reconstitute the fragments into a functioning whole. The Indians, for all that has been lost or rendered useless out of their ancient experience, remain a continuing ethnic and cultural enclave with a stake in the future” (McNickle 1962).
Problems with Research designs
“issues of problems in Native societies overshadow adaptive strategies that have allowed for cultural continuity” (Medicine 2001).
“funding in Native issues is focused on fixing the pathological problems with native societies” (Medicine 2001).
“having been immersed in the Western academy which claims theory as thoroughly Western, which has constructed all rules by which the indigenous world has been theorized, indigenous voices have been silenced” (Smith 1999).
The Natives Write Back
The Native Perspective
“ethnographies are not seen as possessing the truth, Natives are writing their own histories to counter those written by non-natives” (Medicine 2001).
“elders can have an impact at sources of information” (Medicine 2001),
“while anthropology marginalizes such information. Native interpretation and rationales regarding revitalization movements are absent from ethnographic literature” (Medicine 2001).
“histories from the Indian point of view are now criticized as being ethnocentric” (Medicine 2001).
“Every issue has been approached by indigenous peoples with a view to rewriting and rerighting our position in history. Indigenous peoples want to tell their own stories, write our own versions, in our own ways, for our own purposes. …a powerful need to give testimony to and restore a spirit, to bring back into existence a world fragmented and dying” (Smith 1999).
“why then has revisiting history been a significant part of decolonization?…Our colonial experience traps us in the project of modernity. …there is unfinished business, that we are still being colonized (and know it), and that we are still searching for justice” (Smith 1999).
“assumption that the center does not have to be the imperial center. – Native writers can appropriate the language of the colonizer as the language of the colonized- which speaks to an audience that has been colonized.- native writers can write in their native languages, because language carries culture and the language of the colonizer becomes a means of dominating the mental universe. The use of the colonizer’s language results in the alienation of children from their history, geography, and other aspects of culture” (Smith 1999).
“Postindian storiers observe natives, the chance of totemic associations, conversions, and reversions of tribal cultures, as postmodern survivance and vivancy” (Vizenor 1994).
“the once bankable simulations of the savage as an impediment to developmental civilization, the simulations that audiences would consume in western literature and motion pictures, protracted the extermination of tribal cultures” (Vizenor 1994).
“The process of literary annihilation would be checked only when Indian writers began representing their own culture” (Vizenor 1994).
“the Native American is, in fact the only source of accurate and meaningful interpretation of the traditional aspects of Native culture” (Strickland 1997).
“feminism and the application of more critical approaches to research have greatly influenced the social sciences” (Smith 1999).
Decolonizing the Mind
“problem of being trained to read this way….We begin to write about ourselves as indigenous peoples as if we really were out there, the Other, with all the baggage that this entails. another problem is that is that academic writing is a form of selecting, arranging and presenting knowledge. It privileges sets of texts, views about the history of an idea, what issues count as significant; and by by engaging in the same process uncritically, we too can render indigenous writers invisible or unimportant while reinforcing the validity of other writers” (Smith 1999).
“This means recovering our own stories of the past and recovery of language, epistemological foundations. decolonization is centering our concerns and world views and then coming to know and understand theory and research from our own perspectives and for our own purposes” (Smith 1999).
“Survivance is an active sense of presence, the continuance of native stories, not a mere reaction, or a survivable name. Native survivance stories are renunciations of dominance, tragedy, and victimry. Survivance means the right of succession or reversion of an estate, and in that sense, the estate of native survivancy” (Vizenor 1994).
“tribal imagination, experience, and remembrance, are the real landscapes in the literature of this nation; discoveries and dominance are silence” (Vizenor 1994).
“Native Americans who attended boarding schools are living archives of information. Their experiences shape Native culture today and also have helped intensify their ethnic identity” (Lomawaima 1994).
“we should be cautious about inserting Western ways of thinking into the way we perceive knowledge. This is not an argument against science per se; it is an argument for developing a critical perspective on science in order to expose its colonizing potential” (G. Smith 2002).
“native leaders must aspire to embody traditional values. The challenge before us is to recognize the common elements in the indigenous tradition of governance and develop them into a coherent philosophy- a bulwark against assimilation to foreign values” (Alfred 1999).
Native Anthropologists’ goals: decolonizing anthropology
“often it is implicit that our research empowers people….means teaching and researching issues of race, class, gender, and power relations in ways that can be understood and utilized by target populations… as applied anthropologists, we should do more participatory research and not use Native people as consultants but as co-directors of research projects. Thus, they can learn research techniques and initiate and implement their own needs assessments and application strategies to improve the quality of life in their own communities” (Medicine 2001).
“imperialism cannot be struggled over only at the level of text and literature, Decolonization is a process which engages with imperialism and colonization at multiple levels” (Smith 1999).
Decolonizing Research
“What are the real issues facing native communities and who should research and answer these questions?” (Deloria 1968).
“Native women need to begin formulating their own research hypotheses (Medicine 2001). older generations of anthropologists have passed enabling newer generations to begin focusing on a larger arena of human activities” (Deloria 1997).
“significant spaces have been opened up within the academy and within some disciplines to talk more creatively about research with particular groups and communities-women, the economically oppressed, ethnic minorities and indigenous peoples” (Smith 1999).
{critical questions} “whose research is it? Who owns it? Whose interests does it serve? Who will benefit from it? Who has designed its questions and framed its scope? Who will carry it out? Who will write it up? How will its results be disseminated” (Smith 1999)?
“Indigenous peoples must set the agenda for change themselves, not simply react to an agenda that has been laid out for us by others” (G. Smith 2002).
Native VS Native discrimination
“even when their own communities have access to an indigenous researcher, they will select or prefer a non-indigenous researcher. Belief that they may never be good enough, divulge confidences, have some hidden agenda” (Smith 1999).
“The problem is this distrust is also directed at Indigenous academics…. Some Indigenous academics become ivory tower intellectuals, disconnected from Indigenous communities and concerns, mere functionaries for the colonization of our peoples. …I do not think it serves the interests of Indigenous peoples to build a divide between our Native academics and our communities” (G. Smith 2002).
Natives within the Academy
Discrimination
“low-blood quantum natives are taking Indian identity because there is something to gain” (Medicine 2001).
“Indians of convenience, vs, Indians who have been Indians their whole lives, generally get the fellowships” (Medicine 2001).
Counterpoint?
“individual Indians who dress and speak and act like any contemporary Americans, still play ordained roles as clansmen, as members or even as heads of ritualistic societies and as upholders of an older social order” (McNickle 1962).
Access
“American society is not willing to open academia to entry by natives who are considered too biased” (Deloria 1997).
“social sciences are resistant to having Indians become professors and few Indians are able to translate the Indian perspectives in a way that Anglo academics consider worthy of consideration” (Deloria 1997).
“community involvement and activism is not taken into account for Native seeking professorship roles and may even work against them” (Medicine 2001).
Tracking
“education of Indians is aimed at conformity of their roles into American society” (Medicine 2001).
“this model (agricultural school) of civilized living for American Indians was already outdated compared to white society of the 1920s and 1930s. Mainstream society had already shifted from the agrarian lifestyle of a previous century to urban centers with a vigorous industrial economic base, but school were clearly not intended to produce the same kind of citizens as schools for whites” (Lomawaima 1994).
“Indian boarding schools trained the Indians to accept their proper place as a marginal class, and not for assimilation into the American melting pot. Indians were not welcomed into American society but were being systematically divested of their lands and other bases of an independent life” (Lomawaima 1994).
Readings
Alfred, T. (1999). Peace, Power, Righteousness: an Indigenous Manifesto. Ontario, Oxford University Press.
Asad, T. (1975). Introduction. Anthropology & the colonial encounter. London,
Atlantic Highlands, N.J., Humanities Press, Ithaca Press;: 281.
Deloria, J., Vine (1969). Custer Died For Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto. New York, Macmillan.
Deloria, J., Vine (1995). Red Earth, White Lies: Native Americans and the Myth of Scientific Fact. New York, Scribner.
Deloria, J., Vine (1997). Conclusion: Anthros, Indians, and Planetary Reality. Indians and anthropologists : Vine Deloria, Jr., and the critique of anthropology. T. Biolsi and L. J. Zimmerman. Tucson, University of Arizona Press: x, 226.
Lomawaima, K. T. (1994). They called it prairie light : the story of Chilocco Indian School. Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press.
McNickle, D. A. (1962). The Indian tribes of the United States : ethnic and cultural survival. London ; New York, Oxford University Press.
Medicine, B. and S.-E. Jacobs (2001). Learning to be an anthropologist and remaining “Native” : selected writings. Urbana, University of Illinois Press.
Memmi, A. (1965). The Colonizer and the Colonized. New York, Orion Press.
Smith, G. H. (2002). Protecting and Respecting Indigenous Knowledge. Reclaiming Indigenous Voice and Vision. M. Battiste, ed. Vancouver, UBC Press.
Smith, L. T. (1999). Decolonizing Methodologies : research and indigenous peoples. London ; New York, Dunedin, N.Z, Zed Books, University of Otago Press.
Strickland, R. (1997). Tonto’s revenge : reflections on American Indian culture and policy. Albuquerque, University of New Mexico Press.
Vizenor, G. R. (1994). Manifest manners : postindian warriors of survivance. Hanover, Wesleyan University Press.