Legislation 15 U.S.C. § 1052(a)

In recent news I came across an article that I thought all of you would find remarkable! The article can be found here and is definitely worth the read because a few weeks ago we watched a symposium on thse use of Native Mascots:

<http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2013/03/26/native-american-rights-fund-applauds-sponsors-proposed-offensive-redskins-trademark>

It turns out that The Non-Disparagement of Native American Persons or Peoples in Trademark Registration Act of 2013 was recently introduced on March 21.  This is a major step in promoting awareness of racism and discrimination through the use of racialized stereotypes. 

HOW AWESOME IS THIS LEGISLATION!!!!

It's even cooler after watching the symposium and knowing all the oppression Natives have faced.

It would bar all professional and nonprofessional sports teams from using mascots such as Natives.  BUT on top of that it prevents schools from engaging in acts such as pretending to kill natives at pep rallies and such. 

My mind is blown.  This is the first step in creating a new visual history for Natives, and I hope it gives inspiration for todays Native Youths.  It ultimately shows that Natives have made major progress in freeing their minds and bodies from the stereotypes that refuse to relinquish their hold on Native culture and life. 

Sorry fans, but say goodbye to images like these because they are offensive and racist and do not belong in Pop or sport culture:

One major step in the fight against Racism!!!

Indians of All Tribes: Searching for a Contemporary Meaning of Native Life

“They were anxious and bored, for all the right reasons.  Nothing was happening anywhere, and most days it seemed likely that nothing ever would. Indian kids of North America—anst-ridden, their moods swinging in a heartbeat from dreamy to despairing—waited with dramatic impatience, wondering if time had actually stopped, or if it just seemed that way. They weren’t even sure exactly what they were waiting for, or how they would recognize if it ever showed up.” (Smith 123)

The 1960’s, as we all know, was a significant time for social movements and subcultures of all kinds.  From the Vietnam protests to the Black Civil Rights Movement, many changes were made in the name of equality and justice.   Both the Vietnam protests and Black Rights movement were significant historical movements, and I remember learning about them in every history class since the 7^th grade.  The protests were enough to end a war, and create major changes to our own constitution.  But why is it that these are the only two movements that are accorded an honored place in our country’s great history.   

 Why is it I have never heard about Indians of All Tribes or any of the events that took place surrounding this group?  It happened in the 1960’s right?  How is it that the history of this movement got swallowed up in the other moments that defined this decade and the subsequent years that followed?  Whatever happened to NIYC and its followers?  Where have all the great nations and tribes gone? 

Paul Chaat Smith talks about the Indians of All Tribes as a group that didn’t gather enough momentum, but he still values the ideals and concepts that were raised through the movement they provoked.  So what was it about and what do Native’s do following a movement that failed its own people?

What happens when a magazine that misrepresents Indian interests gives Natives a purpose?

These are all questions that got me thinking as I was reading through Paul Chaat Smith’s essays Everything You Know about Indians Is Wrong.  I got the feeling that this book was more along the lines of What You Don’t Know about Indians, because after I finished it I felt all the heartache and longing of a culture trying to reclaim what was lost—I understood the meaning to the lines I used as an opening for this post.   I’ll be honest I have never heard of AIM, and I’m pretty sure it’s because American culture does everything to erase the meaning of Native culture.

 I’d like to focus on the chapter “Meaning of Life” because I think it provides the best answers to the ways in which Indians can take up the mantle of AIM and continue to resist the oppression and destruction of their culture. 

I took the liberty to look up the cover for Life: Return of the Red Man because I wanted to see it in color and because it played in a big role in influencing the Indian youth at the time according to Smith.

  Here is the image in all of its glory (UGH):

 

The Indian stereotypes are prevalent.  The stoic face is empty of feeling, staring straight in the eyes so why was it so important?  Because it started something…and it gave meaning all be it in the wrong direction.

I opened this post with the beginning sentences from Smith’s chapter because in the 1960’s the Indian youth were waiting for something.   The Life magazine that was printed at the time was supposed to provide a purpose and Smith says “The stories and pictures electrified Indian kids in Oklahoma and Montana and Los Angeles because Indians in 1967 were invisible and boring” (128).  

How could a magazine that propagated misrepresentations “electrify” Indian youth?   Simple, because it gave them false hope and made being Indian stylish, popular,and mainstream.

But it wasn’t the magazine that gave Native life meaning.  It was a movement that I have, and I’m sure many of my peers, have never heard of.  It’s a movement that deserves recognition for the thought and challenges that were made.

According to Smith in “Novemeber 1969, two years post-Life: boatloads of Indian college students staged a daring nighttime invasion of the abandoned federal prison on Alcatraz Island in California…The students bravely defeated a naval blockade, managed the intense press attention, and suddenly, realized that the media and even the federal government were taking them more seriously than they could ever have dreamed” (130).

Defeated a naval blockade, managed the media, and got the attention of the federal government? FUCK YEAH, these are the Natives I have known nothing about. 

But there’s more to what this movement did because as Smith says:

Alcatraz merits designation as the first Reservation X of the contemporary era.  It was Indian initiated and directed; it was pan-Indian and intertribal; it was democratic and unexpected. For the outside world, it was understood as protest, a demand for recognition, a stand for respect and justice and acknowledgement.  But it was also a place where Indians came for answers, to learn from people of different backgrounds, from different regions of North America of different spiritual beliefs….I believe the spirit that moved so many Indians during that time comes from the recognition that rebuilding our shattered communities requires extraordinary intervention, daring, and risk. (133).

This movement gave meaning to Native life and it was the first time since colonization that Indians made a movement for and of their selves.  Ultimately it raised “the question…[of] how we will live. It isn’t about battling dead icons like John Wayne but rising to the challenge of creating our own visual history” (Smith 136). 

I love this, but I wonder at the success of the visual history so far.  The success of the Alcatraz movement was that it proved Indians were a force to be reckoned with and it made them visual.  But seeing as this is the first time I have ever heard of any movement I wonder what it will take to raise the tribes again, to once again give meaning to Native life. 

How do Natives get over misrepresentations,  like this:

 

To true representations like this:

 

 

This is the Visual history Natives need to survive in contemporary Native America.

Rape and Native Women

It breaks my heart each day I see another headline that reads "Girl Raped." It blows my mind, and how can such a headline even convey the horrors that take place during such a horrific act.

When I was browsing the internet for a current topic I was watching TV, and the case of the Steubenville football players who raped an unconscious teenage girl.  I wondered to myself….How many Native women suffer such fates? How often? How much? By whom?  BUT then I thought to myself if Non-Natives are not subject to tribal law, how much do they get away with such sexually depraved acts?

I came across this article( http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/27/opinion/native-americans-and-the-violence-against-women-act.html?_r=0) by one of my favorite Native authors--Louise Erdrich.  There is some light being shed on the abuse against native women and I know that the new VAWA that was passed in court has in it an inclusive clause that protects Native Women from Non-Native abusers—as if justice can come in the form of a court trial.  Either way, it’s still a move forward in the protection of Native women, and women in general.

However, rape was and still is a major issue facing Native women.

The following paragraph really upset me:

The Justice Department reports that one in three Native women is raped over her lifetime, while other sources report that many Native women are too demoralized to report rape. Perhaps this is because federal prosecutors decline to prosecute 67 percent of sexual abuse cases, according to the Government Accountability Office. Further tearing at the social fabric of communities, a Native woman battered by her non-Native husband has no recourse for justice in tribal courts, even if both live on reservation ground. More than 80 percent of sex crimes on reservations are committed by non-Indian men, who are immune from prosecution by tribal courts. (Louise Erdrich)

1 in every 3 Native women is raped over and over again through her life time…..80% of the rapes take place by Non-Native men.  HOLY SHIT!! What the fuck is wrong with a society that can let this type of thing take place? It blows my mind, and truly breaks my heart.  NO woman should be raped, and given the small population of Native women left 1/3 is WAY to much of a margin to let go unnoticed. 

I hope in the years to come that the VAWA will help bring down that 80% of Rape by non-Native men.  Even though I know justice in the form of a trial can never help a woman heal from such abuse. 

So I leave you with a proposal.  Help raise recognition, so Native women will no longer feel demoralized for the abuse against their bodies they suffer from.

No woman, specifically in this case No Native woman, should go unheard.  

Nation or Tribe?

Is it possible to promote a tribal awareness through the creation of a website?  I mean isn’t the internet a product of capitalism? Vizneor talks a lot about how the Native is often unheard through simulations of dominance, but it would seem that the two websites we were asked to look at this week were created for the purpose of overturning simulations of dominance.   

So the first website I looked at was the Osage Nation.  Upon first glance I thought it was rather modernized, influenced by colonial contact.  Yet, when one digs further and clinks on more links you get a better sense of what the website is for. It seems to me it is aimed at building a community through online networking and talking.  Talk about using the Master’s tool against him.   

There are plenty of links that help Navigate the many aspects of the Osage Nation.  If you click on the Culture link, it takes you to a page where there is a little blurb on the Osage Nation.  However, I am kind of taken aback by the use of Nation instead of Tribe.  Nation denotes independence, but doesn’t sovereignty represent tribe?  Can a tribe be independent but not sovereign?  When I think of Nation I think of Land titles and governing, but when I think of Tribe I think solely of a people. It is sort of ironic that the Osage people call themselves a nation and not a tribe. 

What’s interesting is that The Osage website has links to employment, the casinos, and above all a page dedicated to understanding the type of culture that surrounds both tribes.  Personally I got a better sense of tribal awareness from the Oneido website.  There are a lot more links that help building a community and it is more user friendly—inviting.  Not as tricky, maybe that’s what the Osage nation was trying to do. 

I found one more website that was completely different than the modernized Oneido and Osage nations. http://www.muckleshoot.nsn.us/default.aspx This link takes you to the Muckleshoot tribal page.  Whereas the other two websites were named after Nations, this website acknowledges the Muckleshoot is a tribe.  What a distinction, and the thing that states out the most is that I really don’t get any sense of what the Muckleshoot nation is or their culture.  Not too many links, but I was somewhat skeptical because the first picture on the homepage is a black and white picture of an Indian similar to Edward Curtis’s photographs.

What I wonder though about these websites is if they are put together by Natives or representatives of Natives?

Are these websites created for the purpose of subduing any inquires as to the real presence of tribal awareness? And which denotes tribal awareness the title of Tribe or the title of Nation?

Capital and Tribal Sovereignty

We have all faced, at one time or another, the system of capitalism that consumes individuals through the process of conformism.  I side on that of Marxists when it comes to capitalism in the fact that it reduces to nothing but a faceless worker—yet we’re fooled into thinking that everything we do is for our own possible gain.  The more we put into the system, the more we lose of ourselves.  The more money we get, the greedier we become.  Our fellow humans are nothing but mere competitors in this weird exchange of soul and capital. 

Money…Money…MORE money….God is Money. 

In the face of Capitalism Sovereignty is exchanged for slavery.  WE are all enslaved to something which we are conditioned from the time we are young to the time we draw our last breath, even if it is not our inheritance

 Let’s face it; if you work for corporate American you know what I’m talking about.  I work for a large corporate bank.  I have the lowest position in the company—I’m a bank teller.  Needless to say, the bank couldn’t function without workers like me.  THEY need us. Yet we can be fired, replaced, and interchanged by those above us.  I have to laugh because upper management says it has “our” best interest at heart.  BUT the moment you stop doing work that is profitable, that’s the moment you can kiss your job goodbye.  Therefore, I work as hard as I have to just to survive ignoring all my human qualities.

The moment you realize capitalism is a form of slavery is the moment your soul and body are liberated. But at the expense of what, because doesn’t freedom always come with a price?  Once you learn the rhetoric of Capital it is impossible to go back.

The bottom line is that NO one escapes recognition from capitalism, once you’re in its thrall it’s hard to let go or even escape its ability to make the individual conform to a certain social structure.

How does the concept of enslavement to capital apply to this week’s readings? How does capital undermine the concept of tribal sovereignty?

Vizneor recounts Luther Standing Bear’s narrative upon his arrival at the Carlisle Indian School where a strange event takes place.  According to Luther’s account, White people threw money at the Native Children who in turn threw it back (Luther Qtd in Vizneor 139).  Luther Standing Bear’s first experience with capital shows the naivety when first introduced to capital.  For one Bear, did not have the understanding of the rhetoric of Capitalism.  If he did he would have held the money tight in hand and realized that he would need it if he were to survive in the White man’s world. Nor Did Luther Standing Bear understand that the money in his hand was and would be the eventual destruction of tribal unity.  He cast the money back not out of fear of it but naivety of it.  In all theory he should have destroyed!  Sadly it didn’t work that way.

Ah the irony. Fast forward several generations, and we get what Vizneor calls a “weird contradiction” to Luther Standing Bear’s first naivety of the rhetoric of capital. 

Vizneor states that:

Five generations later many of the tribes that endured colonial cruelties, the miseries of hunger, disease, coercive assimilation, and manifest manners are now moneyed casino patrons and impresarios on reservations. The white people are throwing money at the tribes once more, but not to tribal children at the train stations; millions of dollars are lost each month at bingo, blackjack, electronic slot machines, and other mundane games of chance at casinos located on reservation land. The riches, for some, are new wampum, or the curious coup count of lost coins. The weird contradiction is that the enemies of tribalism have now become the sources of conditional salvation. (139)

 Several ideas stand and demand explication within this passage. 

First that Wampum was replaced with money (Capital).  According to Oxford Reference:

For many centuries, Native North Americans made beads from whelk and clam shells, which were strung together to make broad, patterned belts; both the beads and the belts are called wampum. The beads were held to symbolize inner qualities (e.g. harmony, contentment) and the belts had ceremonial importance. In societies without written language, they also had textual qualities; wampum belts, through the use of patterns and multicolored beads, conveyed stories, embodied treaties, and acted as a method of record-keeping to be passed down generations. (Oxford Dictionary Online, KU Lib)

This definition shows that Wampum didn’t represent money it represented a form of cultural, textual, and tribal history.  It also held a deeper meaning of spiritual harmony as well. 

Capital reduces humans to nothing.  Thus, it comes as no surprise that it destroys cultures. Let’s look at a simple formula.

 Wampum=CultureàCulture=SovereigntyàMoney=Capital

àCapital=CultureàCapital=Sovereignty

Therefore, Enslavement ≠ Sovereignty

Second thing that stands out within this passage is the sentence “Enemies of tribalism have now become the sources of conditional salvation” (emphasis added Vizneor 139).  Enemies become saviors.  Since, we know it’s not just the White man himself that is the enemy of Natives—it’s subversion through capitalism that is the enemy.  Yet, it is the Whiteman—enemy of tribalism—that conditions Natives to forsake Tribalism.  Conditioned for salvation through Capitalism, which I have already established, is a threat to tribal consciousness.  The Whiteman becomes the Capital that has enslaved his very own essence.

Europeans first introduced capitalism and enslaved Indian culture.  But once the American Government realized that Indian’s were surviving on their own, the Indian Regulatory Gaming Act was instituted.  This regulation took power out of tribal hands and forced a division of power among tribes (Vizneor 145).  Isn’t it bad enough that the Whiteman destroyed Native culture? Now it took back the very tool—capital—that the Indian was unconstrained by forcing Government regulation which in turn creates problems between tribes. 

The only way Natives can regain any tribal conscious is to reject the capitalist practices that were used as a form to control and appropriate Native culture.

I said it was impossible to decolonize one’s mind from the enslavement of Capital.  Maybe what I meant to say it’s impossible to be the same as one was before because of exterior physical circumstances.

It is possible to reject the enslavement of colonization.  Tribal consciousness just needs to remember itself through the process of decolonization.  We have to picture what Capital has done.

I leave you with a statment that echos Thomas King: Take this picture and do with it what you will, but don't say you would have lived your life differently if you hadn't seen it.

 

Images of Decolonization

When I took the opportunity to go to take a look at the art work of Tsinhnahjinnie and Curtis I was awed by one and a bit confused by the other. 

Then I immediately recognized what each was trying to accomplish.   Tsinhnahjinnie’s artwork struck me as an act of decolonization, where Curtis’s artwork struck me more as a way to preserve a certain image—the image of the Romantic Indian (If I am correct, I think King spoke at great length about what Curtis was up to when Photographing Native Americans). 

Curtis’s artwork reminds me of the traditional story of colonization, and the black and white images of Native people makes me think of the unheard that Vizneor talks about in “Shadow Survivance.” All his pictures show Natives as unmoving, cold, and somewhat stoic in there bearing—I kept thinking of the way that these “pictures” served as a voiceless narrative, inauthentic and artificial.  They were fictitious pictures that showed a fake history.  *Sorry I didn’t include pictures, but I am really uninterested in pictures that do nothing for the people they are supposed to represent.

Thus it comes as no surprise that I was in heaven as soon as I clicked on the link to Tsinhnahjinnie’s page.

I was blown away by the images that greeted me because they spoke of power, the power of representing self and individuality.   Yet, they are witty and somewhat tricky to understand—they are pure representations of Trickster hermeneutics that Vizneor says is vital to any Native narrative of survivance.

Out of all Tsinhnahjinnie’s these two pictures stood out the most, and convey a certain rhetoric of survivance.  The message is clear, and the audience that the pictures are made for is clear as well.  The first picture says “They will take everyone’s tongue and replace it with a consumer lang” and below it says “the idea that history is about us.”  The second picture says “The idea that the story of history can be told in one coherent narrative.”   AHHH! Am I wrong in assuming that these are totally anti-Capitalist in their nature?  If it’s one thing I know about Capitalism it strips people of their individuality—colonization WAS definitely a product of a desire for Global Capitalism.  There is something else these images speak of—the danger of a Single story.  If I am correct, then this would be why these pictures are from the group called “Double Vision.”

I was so interested in this concept of Decolonization in Artwork.  That I found another artwork whose is FANTASTIC and beyond anything I have ever seen.

The artist that I found is called Bunky Echo-Hawk.  First off, I find him SO brilliantly kick ass.  His artwork demonstrates his sense of individuality by deconstructing everything image particular to American Culture.  What better way to decolonize, than to appropriate and distort the images that have taken one’s own culture in the first place?

His work is worth the look because he uses the rhetoric and voice of the colonizer to flip the process of colonization on its head. 

Here’s a link to his current works on his Facebook page:

http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.287838087915255.74815.180456158653449&type=3

Here’s a link to his website:

http://www.bunkyechohawk.com/

This picture is perhaps one of my favorites.  The message is clear. 

 

A picture of decolonization is worth a million Native thoughts.

The Rhetoric of Abrogation

Up to this point, the readings I have read so far have dealt with cultural appropriation.  I linked this closely to how the Native voice has been, or was, colonized—for Natives voice=culture, so due to colonization the Native voice was appropriated as a result of hegemonic colonial rhetoric.

 I’ve covered the basics of cultural appropriation, and argued that that the question that most Native writers face when it comes to post-Indian survivance is whether to overcome cultural appropriation—through acts of re-appropriation—or to completely severe colonial ties through the processes of  decolonization.  

I’ve also tried to understand how Natives are considered “paracolonial” But the question I keep coming back to, which is also linked to my question of post-Indian survival, is HOW do Natives reach a state of post-colonization?  Is it possible, or should we stick with the concept of post-Indian?  Wouldn’t the “post” signify that the Indian no longer exists?  Is it possible to occupy a space of cultural purity after colonization has taken place?

For me the answer is simple—cultural purity is a form of hegemony. I don’t find anything wrong in two cultures coming into contact. Aimeé Césaire says that “It is a good thing to place different civilizations in contact with each other; that it is an excellent thing to blend different worlds; that whatever its own particular genius may be, a civilization that withdraws into itself atrophies” (Postcolonialisms 61).  This is perhaps one of my favorite lines written by any poco theorist.  I love it because Cesaire talks about cultural contact which I associate with the concept of hybridity.

 I find empowerment and beauty in cultural hybridity.  

Yet, colonization does not allow for hybridity, nor does it particularly cater to those who are cultural hybrids. Hybrids undermine the binary that establishes the other.  In fact most cultural hybrids are scorned by both cultures they belong to.   Ultimately, colonization results in the marginalization of certain people and voices—language is often used a tool to marginalize others.

Language is used as the marker of division.  We have the language of the colonized and the language of the colonizer.  Eventually these two meet in conjunction with one another.

Therefore I’d like to introduce a new term which is extremely applicable to the Chapter Vizneor calls “Shadow Survivance.”

Abrogation.

According to Key Concepts in Post Colonial Studies—by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin:

Abrogation refers to the rejection by post-colonial writers of a normative concept of ‘correct’ or ‘standard’ English used by certain classes or groups, and of the corresponding concepts of inferior ‘dialects’ or ‘marginal variants’…Abrogation offers a counter to the theory that use of the colonialist’s language inescapably imprisons the colonized within the colonizer’s conceptual paradigms—the view that ‘you can’t dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools’. Abrogation implies rather that the master’s house is always adaptable and that the same tools offer a means of conceptual transformation and liberation.

Abrogation then is the argument that the use of colonial language doesn’t always imprison the colonized, and by using it one is not subjected to colonial concepts.  Instead it can function as means of transformation and adaptation—language is the rhetoric of survival.

So how is Abrogation a key theme in this week’s readings?

We know that Natives are rooted in oral traditions, where as European’s are rooted within written traditions—as Vizneor recounts in the Chapter called “Shadow Survivance.”

But the passage I am most interested in and hint at the power in Abrogation is pages 96, 97, and 98.  This passage is concerning Pronouns—a prominent part of speech within the English language and a part of speech that has a profound effect on Natives.

Vizneor talks about universalisms and communal identity and says “The suspicion seems to be that there are communal representations, but not universal, and memories that cannot be heard in certain pronouns; the translations of unheard pronouns have never been the sources of tribal or postindian consciousness” (96).  There are several things that are important in this opening passage.  FIRST, the “unheard pronoun” does not, nor will it ever, represent tribal consciousness.  Nor do certain pronouns represent the whole of Indian consciousness—thus the term universalism.  Unheard—implies unspoken—but there’s more.  Vizneor says that “pronouns are the difference that would be unheard in translations” (96). Pronouns represent difference in the fact that they respond to individual experience—You, Me, I, They, Us, Them, We, He, She, and It.  ALL pronouns represent difference, and as Vizneor put it, are the absence of the heard. Names give meaning, pronouns take meaning away and reduce people to universalisms—subjects with no memories, names, or consciousnessImagine if I were to take out all the first person nouns and noun in this post and replace them with pronouns.  None of my sentences would have meaning, nor would you understand unless I had given you background context when referring to a given pronoun.  Pronouns often follow nouns.  The problem arises, when the noun no longer exists—the individual becomes unnoticed or unheard. Colonization takes the Noun—the colonized/indigenous—and turns it into a pronoun—an “it” if you will.

Kind of reminds me of Althusser concept interpellation of the subject—if someone walked down the street and said “Hey you!” you would automatically turn around and think that person was talking to you. Yet , that person reduced you to nothing but a pronoun.  You’re significant because you’re insignificant. We’re conditioned by pronouns!  Pronouns condition us, and the more they are repeated the more we think that we’re the subject that such pronouns refer to. 

 SO how does Vizneor propose making these unheard pronouns heard, and which are ultimately a product of the English pronoun?

He says:

We must need new pronouns that would misconstrue gender binaries, that would combine the want of a presence in the absence of the heard, a shadow pronoun to pronounce remembrance in silence, in the absence of postindian names, nouns, and deverbatives. The pronounance combines the sense of the words pronoun and pronounce with the actions and conditions of survivance in tribal memories and stories. The pronounance of trickster hermeneutics has a shadow with no person, time, or number. In the absence of the heard the trickster is the shadow of the name, the sound, the noun, the person, the pronounance (97-98). 

THIS is the beauty of Abrogation.  I get a sense from Vizneor that being Native, the thing to fear the most is to be unheard—in the English language pronouns take an image and reduce it to a mere object.  So combining oral, pronounce, with the written pronoun you get an adaptation that reduces the marginalities of a single language or vehicle of communication.

Natives must re-conceptualize language, and must do so by transforming the tool of the colonizer—the English language.  Natives must be able to see the lost memories, taken by simple signifiers like pronouns.  Natives must break the silence of the unheard, and be heard.

Destroy the difference.

Use the language, change the language, adapt the language.

Be heard, Listen with Ears and Eyes.

Above all, Abrogate.