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Margaret Provost and Wilma Crowe: Our Great Leaders are Passing

Today, September 7th, 2018, is the funeral of Margaret Provost. Margaret is perhaps the most important leader of the Grand Ronde tribe for the past 50 years. She began the contemporary tribe. She was the spark, the initiation of the idea that “maybe we could be restored” as a tribe because “our people are poor and suffering” and no one else would do anything about it. Margaret above all, of the many leaders in the tribe, began the discussion, gathered the supporters, collected the people, found the support, and with other tribal leaders initiated the eleven year process of restoring the Grand Ronde community as an federally recognized community of native people. She is the reason we tribal members are immersed in politics, social services, education, economic development, and cultural revitalization. In many ways, Margaret is our Rosa Parks, our Phil Knight, our George Washington. She took all of these roles at the tribe and devoted her life to the

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Are Tribes Ready for Termination, Again?

Are Tribes Ready for Termination, Again? In the past few weeks a number of federal administration officials have made statements which suggest that a concerted effort is underway to again terminate tribes in the United States. In April, the Health and Human Services department suggested that tribes should not have an exemption under Medicare and not have a requirement that their members have a job to receive the health care. If this decision is allowed to stand this could begin to unravel Tribal sovereignty in the United States. The administration assertion that tribes are a race, not sovereign tribal people suggests that the administration does not want to any longer uphold its longstanding fiduciary responsibility guaranteed to tribes under hundreds of tribal treaties, thousands of Indian case laws, and the U.S. Constitution, that collectively create laws and institute policies regarding how tribes are to be treated by the federal government, what rights tribes have, and assures some measure of sovereignty

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Decolonizing Anthropology: Comprehensive Exam Practice

Describe what is meant when anthropology is labeled “colonial.” Anthropology has aided colonization by dehumanizing and stereotyping Natives, by causing an erasure of Native history and identity, by helping the colonial authorities manage native peoples, and by appropriating Native culture and knowledge. This essay will serve as a definition of the colonial effects of anthropology and provides an articulated Native theory of “Native Studies” called for by Warrior (1994). In the absence of an articulated theory and accompanying body of literature, Native and non-native scholars have sought to be critical and at times decolonizing in their reviews of anthropology and other social sciences.  Sherry Ortner (2001) offers a view of anthropology from the Sixties and describes the Seventies as a time when everything that was part of the existing order came into question. Before establishing the need for decolonization of anthropology we need to outline the colonial nature of anthropology. As a science, a part of the canon of Western

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Foundations of American Ethnography of the Northwest Coast: Comprehensive Exam Practice

Area 2: Ethnographic Accounts of Pacific Northwest Native peoples   This subject entails the discourse and dialogue between Native peoples and societies and ethnographers on the Pacific Northwest Coast. What is intrinsically part of the discussion is an analysis of the history and progress of ethnography, and of the interactions between ethnographers and Native peoples. Thus the subject may be broken into several different areas, the ethnography, how it progressed, and how it is changing, the ethnographers, how they did their work, and all that entails, and the Native peoples themselves, their interaction with ethnographic research, their contributions, and their reactions as to how ethnography has characterized their culture and societies. Within this is the potential for ongoing analyses of persistent and one-time critical issues regarding all aspects of ethnography, its impact on Native societies, and the potential for the current and future use of this manner of research, within academia and within Native society.   Question 1.  Who are

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A Stable Kalapuyan Anthropogenic-Environmental Model?

It is noted that humans have had an extreme effect on the environment everywhere they have lived. These changes became much more radical some 12,000 years ago when agriculture was developed. In the Willamette Valley the tribes did not develop agriculture. They did instead participate in seasonal anthropogenic fires, and seasonal harvesting of foods, at least as far back as 8,000 years. The Kalapuyans divided their year in half with the summer season for the tribe began in the spring with movements to gathering camps for early vegetables and fruits. Their year began in autumn as stated on the 1877 Gatschet Calendar collected from the Tualatin people. Presumably, they were too busy gathering food and traveling about their lands in the spring, summer and early fall to notice the passage of the days. The winters in Oregon can be dull, grey and extremely wet with rain and drizzle. So from October to  March or April people remained indoors and made

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