American Indian Culture and Research Journal

This article tells the story of healing from personal trauma and a tale of resistance to the cultural denigration experienced by women from the Northern Cheyenne and Fort Peck Assiniboine and Sioux reservations. The women's stories, obtained through in-depth and focus-group interviews, and participant observation, reveal how spirituality expressed in a variety of forms has been an important part of the resistance process. Through their spiritual practices and beliefs, these women have achieved desired changes in their personal lives and contributed to a renaissance of spiritual practices on the two Northern Plains reservations. These stories elucidate the specific experiences and perspectives of women, rather than the views of the clergy or institutional leaders of the religious groups to which the women belong. This article responds to the recent call made by Kathryn Ward to focus on the experiences and views of indigenous women and how they resist domination and reestablish political, social, and cultural rights. This article also contributes to recent research exploring the effects of history and generational experiences or changes in religious affiliation and spiritual expression. The imposition of the reservation system on Native peoples in the late 1800s brought social and economic changes and cultural loss, which required significant adaptations that have affected each subsequent generation. While each generation found ways to protect their traditions or challenge subordination, women in these two reservation settings provided the means to resist both personal dysfunction and further cultural loss.

The thing is, the events people pick out as magical don’t seem unreal to me. Unusual, yes, but I was raised believing in miracles and hearing of true events that may seem unbelievable. -Louise Erdrich One of the curious problems facing contemporary Native American fiction writers is how they learn about their people’s history, and one of the curious solutions to this problem is that these writers turn to non-Indian authors to fill gaps in their knowledge about the history and traditions of early Indian peoples. It is ironic that the colonialist attitudes that ultimately led to the near obliteration of early Native ways of life and living oral traditions provide later Indians with written sources of information to which they would otherwise have no access. Thus we find N. Scott Momaday reading Elsie Clews Parsons’ ethnographic report The Pueblo of Jemez and using it in his novel House Made of Dawn. We find Leslie Marmon Silko reading the ethnographic reports of the mythical history of the Pueblo people and using them in her story ‘Yellow Woman” and her novel Ceremony. We find James Welch immersing himself in the historical records of the Blackfeet, many of them written by white historians, as he builds his novel Foots Crow. And we find Louise Erdrich reading the pages of an autobiographical narrative by John Tanner, a white captive of the Ottawa and Ojibwa at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, as she develops some of the scenes in her novel Tracks, published in 1988 and set between 1912 and 1924, and, more recently, in her juvenile novel The Birchbark House, published in 1999 and set between 1847 and 1848.

Indian Peoples of the North American continent were, in the broadest sense, literate before books and other media came into their lives. Native Ammicans have always been gatherers of information, sharers of knowledge, skilled users of symbols, and transmitters of cultural heritage and experience. Like the Greeks, Indian People vested the world with elaborate meanings, told stories of courage and heroism, and passed the wisdom evolved from assimilated knowledge and experience to succeeding generations. -Bureau of Indian Affairs, Plan for the Improvement of Library/Media/Information Programs, 1977 From the mid-1970s to mid-1980s a series of federal grants, born of one woman's vision and determination, set the groundwork for the establishment of tribal libraries across this nation. The fertile political environment of the late 1960s championed initiatives designed to reach underserved populations. While libraries in the dominant culture were establishing outreach departments and finding ways to build bridges to neglected populations, educators Charles Townley and Lotsee Patterson lobbied and applied for federal monies to establish libraries on tribal lands. Townley and Patterson were among the first to take meaningful action toward the development of tribal libraries as Native American communities began to emerge from a totally oral tradition into one that sought to find ways to preserve, transfer, and disseminate cultural traditions through print and new media formats.

The long suppression of traditional Indian spiritual practices was, in part, overcome when the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community of Washington State constructed its long-anticipated ceremonial smokehouse. The celebrated resumption of smokehouse activities, however, presented new environmental health threats that were not adequately anticipated and that required remediation. This article examines how the community was able to reduce the associated health risks by adapting appropriate technologies that respected the importance of privacy in ceremonial practice. In sharp contrast to historic federal Indian policies that disrupted the fabric of Native American communities, current federal policies now encourage tribal governments to reconstruct their political systems, economies, and cultures to achieve sustainable community improvement. Beginning in the late 1960s and early 197Os, tribes began programs of political and community reconstruction. As a result, their once-suppressed spiritualism quickly rebounded from the effects of federal assimilation that sought to diminish Indian identity by prohibiting the use of traditional languages and spiritual practice. For many Coast Salish Indians, the reconstruction of the traditional smokehouse, also called longhouse- the ceremonial place of worship- became a centerpiece of their community redevelopment. The Swinomish Indian Tribal Community sought to reestablish its ceremonial smokehouse to stimulate the revival of cultural and traditional spiritualism known as Seowyn.

The historic 1999 declaration signed by the leaders of the National Congress of American Indians from the United States and the Assembly of First Nations from Canada identified areas of common concern, including: “Protecting and promoting the right of our citizens to move freely across the borders of Canada and the United States while retaining full recognition of their status as members of indigenous cultures.” State borders continue to be the focus of conflict between Native peoples and dominant societies internationally. The fragmentation that the nation-state imposes on indigenous nations and peoples is a result of conflicting constructions of space, culture, and identity. The dominant discourse, as Michael J. Shapiro argues, has sought to take the legitimacy of the sovereignty of the nation-state for granted as a natural situation, even though the borders themselves may shift and prove to be unstable. But the idea of the national state is itself unstable once “the construction of national stories that legitimate the state boundaries of inclusion and exclusion” are identified for what they are-“a primary normalizing strategy.” Matthew Coon Come, grand chief of the Assembly of First Nations in Canada, explained how borders have functioned to fragment Native nations in Canada: Actually, most Aboriginal peoples have been artificially split by the imposition of Provincial and various other boundaries across this land, whether in the M‘est, the East, the Prairies or the North .... And where we were not split by boundaries, the provisions of the Indian Act have seen to it that our peoples were divided into hopelessly small, but conveniently manageable, local units the government calls “bands.”

The wolf was long an important factor in Navajo life. With the destruction of the wild wolf in the American Southwest, a vital link to the past-and perhaps the future-has been lost to the Navajo people. In recent years, however, an effort has been made to restore wolves to their native habitat. If the wolf recovery program is successful,what effect will it have on the Navajo people? Will the return of the wolf help restore the balance and harmony that once existed? THE WOLF IN THE SOUTHWEST AND NAVAJO COUNTRY Sometime shortly after his arrival into the Southwest in 1917, US Forest Service biologist Aldo Leopold participated in the killing of a wolf somewhere in the White Mountains, which stretch across the borderlands of south-central Arizona and New Mexico. Leopold and a number of companions were eating lunch on a high rimrock position overlooking a river when they spotted a female wolf and her six grown pups playing in an open area below. Immediately, the men pulled out their rifles and “with more excitement than accuracy,” began blasting away at the family. When the rifles were empty and the shooting stopped, only the female wolf was down and one pup was seen dragging its leg into a rockslide. Leopold, who would go on to become perhaps the most famous conservationist in American history, described the death of this wolf-and his own personal transformation-in one of the most quoted passages in the literature of wildlife conservation: We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes-something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.

In September 1998 the US Department of Interior reached a comprehensive negotiated agreement with the Timbisha Shoshone tribe in Death Valley, California. It thereby resolved a grievance it had ignored since 1933 when President Herbert Hoover seized the tribe's ancestral lands and created the Death Valley National Monument. At the time of this land seizure, the federal government made no provision for the tribe whose lands these had been for hundreds and perhaps thousands of years. Government officials hoped the tribal members would pack up their meager belongings and disappear quietly. To their surprise and frustration, fifty of some 275 people refused to go. For the next sixty-five years, under almost continuous agency pressure to leave, these remaining tribal members lived as virtual squatters on the outskirts of the national park headquarters in Furnace Creek. They clung stubbornly to the hope that they would live to see the day when the federal government would acknowledge the injustice done and restore their tribal homeland.