A Reflexive Historiography
Over the past several decades, reflexivity has transformed the field of anthropology. It began as a critique of the ethnographic method, but I consider the concerns it raises applicable to any scholarly enterprise. Essentially, reflexivity refers to the process of consciously locating ourselves in the work we create. Reflecting on our positionality allows us to think critically about the intersubjectivity of the stories we tell—to recognize that there is an awful lot about “us” in what we write about “them” (no matter who the “us” or “them” happen to be). The importance of reflexivity to scholarship about the past has not been lost on historians. In fact, even Frederick Jackson Turner, propounder of the infamous “frontier thesis” in 1893, recognized that there’s a lot about “now” in what gets written about “then.” “When . . . we consider that each man is conditioned by the age in which he lives and must perforce write with limitations and prepossessions,” he observed in 1891, “I think we shall all agree that no historian can say the ultimate word.” One would like to think that this self-awareness would have injected Turner with a dose of humility. It didn’t.1
Indigenous people and scholars of American Indian and indigenous studies are well aware of the power of history—and of the need to understand the consequences of its being “conditioned by the age” of its authors. For too long a time, non-Indians like Turner wrote as though American Indian history began in 1492—set in motion, of course, by the “discovery” of the “New World.” From that point forward, at least according to these texts, indigenous peoples became supporting actors in the story of “America”—bit players in a “master narrative” that celebrated the founding and expansion of the United States. At worst, Indians were cast as treacherous villains and bloodthirsty savages; at best, as co-conspirators in their own undoing or “tragic heroes” who valiantly resisted before accepting the inevitability of their demise. “For Native people,” Paul Chaat Smith (Comanche) and Ann McMullen of the National Museum of the American Indian noted, “history itself became another battleground, another weapon of conquest.”2
Since the 1960s, revisionist scholarship has reimagined the historical and contemporary experiences of Native peoples by adopting a decidedly less “westward facing” point of view. At the heart of the new narrative rests a story of indigenous survival, which Chaat Smith aptly described as “one of the most extraordinary stories in human history.”3 The creation of this new narrative, however, developed unevenly. Most of the revisionist work focused on the early colonial period and carried through to the end of the nineteenth century. Stopping there unwittingly reinforced the very argument—epitomized by Turner’s frontier thesis—that the “New Indian History” had set out to complicate. Even during the years around the Quincentennary in 1992, a moment indigenous people seized upon to celebrate five hundred years of surviving colonialism, few scholars had much to say about how that story unfolded after 1900.4 The ethnohistorical research methodologies, analytical interpretations, and narrative constructions that so fundamentally recast our understanding of the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries just did not seem to reach very far into the twentieth.5
IT’S HERE THAT I would like to shift into a reflexive mode of historiography. I started my graduate work in 1996, right in the midst of this exciting, creative, and dynamic moment. As someone interested in the Native 1960s, I found myself puzzling over why historians framed twentieth-century American Indian history so differently from earlier times. The more I thought about it, the less sense it made to compartmentalize the years following 1887 into neat policy periods that corresponded with the actions the federal government took against Indians rather than its complicated relationships with or the actions of Native people. It didn’t make sense to settle for allotment, assimilation, reorganization, termination, and self-determination, when we could be thinking in terms of middle grounds, borderlands, diplomats, negotiators, playoff systems, and alliances. I found politics more compelling than policies. And I began to frame the preceding century of American Indian history as a continuation of the encounters that James Axtell had defined as mutual and reciprocal, temporally and spatially fluid, and generally capacious in his essay “Colonial Encounters: Beyond 1992.”6
My first attempt to imagine politics as continuing encounters focused on a case study of the 1960’s War on Poverty in Oklahoma. Looking at the people engaged in the politics of the Community Action Program, in turn, convinced me of a real need to think more broadly about activism during this era, which tended to be overshadowed by what came after it—the American Indian Movement (AIM) and its brand of Red Power. Influenced by the work of Loretta Fowler, James C. Scott, and Jean and John Comaroff, I conceived of activism as politically purposeful acts rather than just militancy. A few years after finishing my Ph.D. in 2003, I had the good fortune of coediting a volume with Fowler that took these ideas and applied them to the period from the late nineteenth century to the present. The contributors to Beyond Red Power effectively transformed policies into shifting contexts for rather than determinants of political action and decentered the militancy of the 1970s by situating it in the context of more than a century of activism.7
In looking at the generation of intellectuals, reformers, and radicals that preceded the American Indian Movement, I wanted to understand the Native 1960s on its own terms. For instance, as important as Paul Chaat Smith’s and Robert Warrior’s Like a Hurricane: The Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee was (and continues to be), I recognized a need to push back on the idea that the sixties “showed up in the Red Nation a few years late and mostly took place in the seventies.”8 Standing Rock Sioux scholar Vine Deloria Jr. critiqued this tendency to engage in history creep in an interview I conducted with him in 2001. “What you’re talking about really,” he said, “is moving everything that happened in the Seventies into the Sixties and pretending that it happened then.”9
In crafting an alternative narrative of Native activism during the 1960s, I wanted to demonstrate that it was part of a much larger story—and that, in fact, our understanding of the 1960s (and of “United States history”) was incomplete if American Indian stories remained on the periphery. In the end, I concluded that the people, ideas, events, and issues I wrote about in Native Activism in Cold War America were influenced by and shapers of the larger domestic and international histories of which they were a part—from the struggle for black equality and the War on Poverty to the youth movement and decolonization. In so doing, I contributed to the crafting of what historians Fred Hoxie, Peter Mancall, and James Merrell described as “an intellectual framework for understanding the distinctiveness—and the interconnectedness—of Indian and non-Indian history.” The contributors to Why You Can’t Teach United States History without American Indians have moved this important project forward.10
In a way perhaps only he could (and probably without even knowing it), Vine Deloria played a particularly important role in clarifying the intellectual intersections I had been investigating. It happened after I asked him about his role as executive director of the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) during the 1960s. “At NCAI,” he told me, “I was looking for some kind of intellectual format of how you would justify overturning termination and at the same time escape this big push for integration that civil rights was doing.” In 1966 he had the opportunity to make that distinction when the NCAI garnered media attention during an emergency meeting in Santa Fe, New Mexico, to protest against the Interior Department’s unwillingness to consult Indians on new legislation. “Well, what are we gonna say?” Deloria remembered a fellow NCAI member asking him. “I said, ‘Look, self-determination was a big cry after World War I. . . . If we’re gonna say we’re nations, and we got sovereignty, and our treaties are as valid as other treaties, then we gotta talk the language of the larger world—not just the Indian of it.”11 In my mind, these words epitomized the approach Native activists took during the struggle for sovereignty between the mid-1950s and late 1960s.
Informed once again by the innovative work of historian Fred Hoxie—and bolstered by Paul Rosier’s Serving Their Country and David Martinez’s The American Indian Intellectual Tradition—I began exploring whether the approach described by Deloria might be considered part of a political and intellectual tradition. And that, in turn, led me back into the archives, to the voices of Native activists before and after the period I had focused on in my book, and to this collection of primary documents.12
Say We Are Nations showcases letters, congressional testimonies, interviews, excerpts from autobiographies, essays, formal lectures, and student writings to illustrate how, from the late nineteenth century to the opening decades of the twenty-first, American Indians asserted sovereignty by rhetorically and literally connecting issues they cared passionately about to larger domestic and international concerns, events, ideas, and movements. Talking the language of the larger world meant relating perennial concerns over treaty rights, land, and sovereignty to Reconstruction and the Paris Peace Conference, Christianity and civilization, civil rights and international law, nuclear waste and climate change. It also meant invoking “American” ideas of citizenship, consent of the governed, representation, rights, democracy, liberty, justice, and freedom—but investing them with indigenized meanings.
As delicate an ideational dance as this proved to be, it became still more complicated. If civil rights were a part of the larger world’s language, for instance, so was race. The same could be said of blood. These ideas may have originated outside of Native America, but they have also been internalized and made real by Native people. They continue to figure significantly in contemporary assertions of sovereignty and constructions of nationhood. And what of the issue of understanding? It is one thing to talk the language of the larger world; it is something completely different to have your audience make the correct translation. If ever there were continuity across centuries of political encounters between Natives and newcomers, it can be found in the disparity between what was said and what was heard (or, at least, written down).
COVERING MORE THAN one hundred years of political activism and protest in a space as diverse as Native America is no small feat. With that in mind, I would like to offer a few words about what this book is and what it is not. Say We Are Nations is a collection of fifty-five documents organized into five chapters that move chronologically from the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century. I have intentionally chosen documents that provide geographic, topical, temporal, and interpretive breadth. Many of them have either never been published or focus on individuals, communities, time periods, and ideas that are not discussed in depth in textbooks and other document volumes, including Native Hawaii, Alaska Natives, the 1960s, southern Indians, gender and sexuality, and hemispheric and global indigenous rights.13
Because of this, readers familiar with twentieth-century American Indian history may note the absence of some of the “usual suspects” in terms of personalities and documents. This was intentional. The book is not meant to be exhaustive or canonical. In fact, while I have chosen some documents that may be familiar, even those I have presented in ways that, I hope, make them seem unfamiliar. I want the documents to cast history in a different light—one that reveals new people, places, events, and ideas and alternative ways of thinking about these people, places, events, and ideas. I have also carefully selected illustrations that I hope will be read as documents in their own right. Perhaps there will be found in these documents new avenues for teaching and research.
While I do not intend for you to approach the pages that follow as comprising the great documents in American politics and protest since 1887, they do contain great documents. The ideas, issues, and insights they hold make them so. But it will be your job to do the work of intellectual excavation. In the spirit of reflexivity and intersubjectivity, I have explained how I came to this project, and why I framed it the way that I did. I have also provided enough contextual information at the beginning of each chapter and in individual introductions for you to begin making sense of the documents. I did not, however, want to fall into the trap of doing the interpretive work for you. Instead, I offer themes, implications, comparisons, and potential connections. The questions and considerations are meant to encourage you to engage with some of the things that I consider most important to think about. But I also know that the authors may have more to say to you—and that it depends on what you bring to the table.
Indigenous America, 2015. Indigenous nations are rising. During the 2010 census, 5.2 million people identified themselves as American Indian and Alaska Native. Another 1.2 million individuals identified as Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander. The United States recognized 566 tribes and administered 325 reservations.
A final note: the most significant decision I made in writing about the Native 1960s was to seek out, talk to, and learn from the people who made the history. The interviews I conducted literally changed everything. The individuals I spoke with allowed me to make sense of the documentary record in ways that would otherwise have been impossible—and they told me stories the archives could never have told. But it wasn’t just what people told me; it was how—the meaning was in their voices and in the inflections in their voices as much as the words. It was revelatory.
In preparing this volume, I used dictation software to do the first round of transcriptions. To check for accuracy, I then followed the resulting text as someone read the original documents in their entirety a second time. Suffice it to say that I did not go into the project thinking I would hear every word of every document read aloud not once but twice. But I am glad I did. As with the oral interviews I conducted, hearing the words afforded new insight. So, I would encourage you to try it. I think you will find, as I did, that literally hearing these men and women say they are nations will allow you to comprehend their words in a completely different and, I think, profoundly meaningful way.