Recognition Odysseys: Indigeneity, Race, and Federal Tribal Recognition Policy in Three Louisiana Indian Communities
404
Recognition Odysseys: Indigeneity, Race, and Federal Tribal Recognition Policy in Three Louisiana Indian Communities
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Overview
Klopotek describes the varied effects of the recognition process on the social and political structures, community cohesion, cultural revitalization projects, identity, and economic health of each tribe. He emphasizes that recognition policy is not the only racial project affecting Louisiana tribes. For the Tunica-Biloxis, the Jena Band of Choctaws, and the Clifton-Choctaws, discourses around blackness and whiteness have shaped the boundaries of Indian identity in ways that have only begun to be explored. Klopotek urges scholars and officials from the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) to acknowledge the multiple discourses and viewpoints influencing tribal identities. At the same time, he puts tribal recognition in broader perspective. Indigenous struggles began long before the BIA existed, and they will continue long after it renders any particular recognition decision.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822394082 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/30/2011 |
| Series: | Narrating native histories |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 404 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
About the Author
Brian Klopotek is Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of Oregon.
Read an Excerpt
RECOGNITION ODYSSEYS
Indigeneity, Race, and Federal Tribal Recognition Policy in Three Louisiana Indian CommunitiesBy Brian Klopotek
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2011 Duke University PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4984-6
Chapter One
The Origins of Federal Acknowledgment Policy
Prelude
The passage of the Indian Reorganization Act (IRA) in 1934 marked a substantial turn in federal Indian policy. Rejecting and condemning the antitribal policies practiced by previous administrations of the Office of Indian Affairs, as the BIA was formerly known, the newly installed administration of John Collier successfully lobbied Congress to legislate a new policy that supported Indian tribalism, as Collier saw it. The act professed to serve "all persons of Indian descent who are members of any recognized tribe now under federal jurisdiction, and all persons who are descendants of such members who were, on June 1, 1934, residing within the boundaries of any Indian reservation, and shall further include all other persons of one-half or more Indian blood." The wording created a problem for bureaucrats in the Office of Indian Affairs, since they took it to mean they had to decide who was or should be under federal jurisdiction and just how to make that determination. Though such a distinction had existed previously in practice, as certain Indian groups had extensive relationships with the federal government while others were ignored, the IRA articulated the divide in fixed terms. Without a determination of recognition from the federal government, tribes would not be eligible to access the IRA'S provisions.
According to this clause, however, members of federally non-recognized tribes had the opportunity to receive benefits as Indians if they could prove they were half-Indian or more, a provision that offers an interesting prelude and parallel to the modern practice of determining tribal eligibility for federal services. Collier, who considered the issue of how exactly the office would make this determination "an administrative problem of some complexity," outlined procedures for the office to follow:
The evidence upon which a determination of blood degree may be made divides naturally into five classes (1) tribal rolls ... accepted [by us] as accurate ... which record the percentage of Indian blood; (2) testimony of the applicant, supported by family records, ... showing blood degree; (3) affidavits from persons who know the applicant's] family background; (4) findings of a qualified physical anthropologist based on examination of the applicant; (5) testimony of the applicant and supporting witnesses, tending to show that the applicant has retained a considerable measure of Indian culture and habits of living.... burden of proof on applicant.
Usually, however, investigation of the applicant's claim will be required. ... Where the available evidence is insufficient to establish degree of blood, the Commissioner may appoint as a member of the [investigating] committee a competent physical anthropologist to examine the applicant.
... In reviewing the findings of the investigator or investigators, the Commissioner of Indian Affairs will exercise administrative discretion in determining what comparative weight shall be given to the various kinds of evidence. Where the genealogical or biological data still leave doubt as to the applicant's claim, the commissioner will consider whether or not the attitude of the applicant and his manner of living tend to show the inheritance of Indian characteristics.
Following these procedures, in 1936 Collier sent Carl Selzer, a professor of physical anthropology at Harvard, to investigate the applications of 209 Lumbees, then known as "Siouan Indians of Robeson County" by the Office of Indian Affairs, and make determinations regarding who among them displayed the appropriate physical characteristics to be considered one-half or more Indian in ancestry. While there were thousands more in the area who might have asked to be recognized as Indians, Selzer examined only those who had actually applied. After various tests and measurements of the hair, teeth, skin, blood, skull, and other physical features, Selzer decided that twenty-two of the applicants had the appropriate physical characteristics to qualify as at least half-Indian. Predictably, among those rejected were several full siblings of those who had been accepted.
Similar tests to determine precise Indian ancestry were conducted in other Indian communities around the country, with similar results. Most notably, Albert Jenks and Ales Hrdlicka performed tests on residents of the White Earth Chippewa reservation in northern Minnesota in 1917 to determine who among them was "full-blooded." The results of their examinations not only invalidated tribal social categories and genealogical understandings but also contributed to precipitous land loss by declaring certain individuals mixed-blood and therefore "competent" to sell their allotments. The reservation was reduced from its original 837,000 acres to less than 10 percent of that at present, in part because of the anthropologists' racial (re)classification of hundreds of members who had lost their land patents to con artists and timber barons. The impact on the White Earth band has been devastating.
Racial anthropometry such as that practiced in these years has since been characterized as a product of the racialized and racist value systems of the eugenics movement, masquerading as impartial, objective science. Within a single lifetime the absurdity of these "scientific" evaluations of Indians and biological measures of "race" has become evident. Yet the BIA'S Office of Federal Acknowledgment, which is currently responsible for determining whether groups can be counted as Indian tribes, deploys many of the same misguided ideas about race and identity as Collier did in the 1930s. The same racial and colonial logic informs federal recognition policy, irrevocably damaging Indian communities now just as it did then. The BIA is still attempting to use academic assessments to draw a powerful, federally enforced line between tribal and nontribal people, but it will be instructive to remember earlier attempts to "have the illusion provided by expert opinion that all decisions, however complex, are fairly and logically made."
The Development of Federal Recognition Policy and the Federal Recognition Movement
The federal-tribal relationship has evolved through more than two centuries of treaties, legislation, policy, and case law, but for present purposes the important point is that once the federal government acknowledges the existence of a tribe, tribal sovereignty is assumed, and a set of laws and policies governs the way the United States interacts with that tribe, though the federal government has historically failed to uphold most of its own rules that could be interpreted to protect tribal sovereignty. Through the years the relationship between sovereign Indian nations and the sovereign United States government has been consistently revamped and redefined, but the basic characterization of the relationship as sovereign-to-sovereign remains the guiding principle from the tribal point of view.
From the point of view of the federal government, the relationship has been more ambiguous. While the sovereign-to-sovereign principle remains, the federal government has consistently whittled away the boundaries of indigenous tribal sovereignty in much the same way as it has carved away indigenous lands. Various doctrines, policies, and Congressional acts impede tribal sovereignty at all levels, which is how tribal sovereignty arrived at its current muddled state. Policy shifts and court decisions have persistently altered the contours of tribal sovereignty and thus the desirability of federal recognition for Indian people.
While federal Indian policy occupies many uneasy spaces between tribal sovereignty and plenary federal power, the significant issue to contemplate is the implication of semi-sovereign trust status for tribes trying to achieve recognition. Trust status, which implies that the federal government is entrusted with protecting the small nations within its borders, carries a contradictory assortment of implications. It simultaneously recognizes tribal sovereignty and asserts its lack; seeking federal recognition suggests tribal resistance as well as tribal acquiescence to federal authority. Recognition entitles Indian tribes to funding and social services and protects tribal political authority and trust land against state and local governmental intrusion, and each of these benefits help tribes to survive by making it feasible for people to live decent lives in their home communities, maintaining important relationships with other tribal members. Federally recognized tribes have limits, however, on how funding and land can be used and the extent of tribal authority, which diminishes the tribe's ability to make culturally appropriate decisions. They have less flexibility in determining community membership, and they must develop and administer formalized legal codes to ensure that they are meeting formal federal standards rather than using informal ideals to regulate community behavior. Moreover, even a brief survey of federally recognized tribes reveals that trust status is hardly a panacea.
Unrecognized tribes, with none of the benefits of federal recognition, lead different struggles. They exist within the same colonial and racial order as recognized tribes, but they have little formal recourse for protection of their culture, values, or sovereignty aside from whatever internal authority they can exert. They have fewer resources available to fight social ills, and they have trouble maintaining organizations and securing and maintaining a land base. In most cases it matters little that the federal government does not limit unrecognized tribes in their exercise of power, since they have virtually none in the first place. It seems as though they can only gain by petitioning for recognition, but the negative effects of recognition on a tribe's internal sovereignty and cultural integrity, along with the inherent acquiescence to federal authority, are often forgotten in the effort to secure funding for health, social, and economic programs.
What might be called a recognition movement emerged from the wreckage of the termination and relocation era of the 1950s, when the federal government sought to erase tribalism and indigenous political status altogether. Federal and nonfederal tribes alike responded to this era of repressive assimilationism and conformity by reasserting their sovereignty at the local and national levels. Nonfederal tribes have continually sought to establish individual relationships with the United States government, even through the termination era, and occasionally regional efforts were made, but it was not until the 1960s that federally nonrecognized tribes began to consider themselves an interest group on a national level and to work together on shared issues of nonrecognition. The American Indian Chicago Conference (AICC), a gathering of more than five hundred Indians that included at least twenty nonfederal Indians and produced the "Declaration of Indian Purpose" in 1961, was an important forum in several ways for developing a national recognition movement, just as it was for Indian activism across the country. First, it provided moral support and some validation from other Indians and from anthropologists for the federally nonrecognized groups represented at the conference. Second, it put nonfederal Indians in touch with each other and with federal Indians, and they were able to encourage one another and develop new ideas together. Chief Calvin McGhee, a longtime activist from the Poarch Band of Creeks of Alabama, then federally nonrecognized, stated that he had no idea there were "so many Indians in the same boat" before he attended the conference. Seeing recognition as a matter of broad historical circumstances rather than the shortcomings of an individual tribe was of immeasurable value.
While it is fair to say that the AICC catalyzed a growing federal recognition movement, the movement actually began with various regional efforts that had been initiated by tribes in North Carolina, Virginia, New England, and elsewhere through the years. In Louisiana, the Tunicas took a leadership role in the 1920s, when Tunica subchief Eli Barbry attempted to form a coalition of tribes in an effort to secure federal assistance. The 1930s saw a flurry of activity in the state, with Houmas, Tunicas, Choctaws, and Coushattas repeatedly seeking federal assistance for Indians. "Recognition" was not the term used, but the goals and concepts were the same. What the AICC provided to the Indian people who had been working on these issues for several generations was a larger forum in which to network and strategize with other tribes, especially those who were similarly situated, and the movement continued to grow from there.
By the time Vine Deloria Jr. published Custer Died for Your Sins in 1969, the nationwide recognition movement had grown considerably. Deloria mentioned the surprise appearance of the federally nonrecognized Tiguas (Ysleta del Sur Pueblo) at the convention of the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) in 1966 near their land in El Paso as an eye-opening event. Their persistence for three hundred years in the middle of El Paso, with only occasional federal recognition, convinced attendees that tribes were not doomed to vanish, as termination rhetoric had begun to suggest to many of them. Heartened by the concept "that tribes were really entities that had no beginning or end, ... the NCAI set its sights to contact as many groups as possible in the eastern portion of the United States," including the Tunicas.
Deloria asserted that the Bureau of Indian Affairs had also begun "to push for recognition of bands which had always been eligible for federal services but which had been caught between reservations during frontier days." Though he does not offer examples of the groups they had reached, the BIA extended recognition to seven tribes between 1962 and 1974, including the Coushatta tribe of southwestern Louisiana, while Congress extended recognition to an eighth and restored one terminated tribe, confirming Deloria's notion that there was some attempt under way at the federal level to respond to requests for recognition that had been ongoing for a number of years.
Tribes in the 1960s and 1970s sought recognition from the federal government through the "informal" administrative channels supposedly available to federally nonrecognized tribes (as opposed to Congressionally terminated tribes, who can only have their federal recognition restored through an act of Congress), but not all were able to achieve it. Since there was no formal process for tribes to follow until 1978, the decision over whether to recognize a tribe was generally at the discretion of key BIA personnel. The bureau had standards for evaluating whether to acknowledge that certain groups should be served by the federal government as Indian tribes, despite claims that no formal procedures were ever drawn up. These standards were somewhat similar to the criteria that would eventually become codified as the formal recognition procedures, since both were supposedly based on definitions of Indian tribes sketched in the 1930s by Felix Cohen in his capacity as solicitor for the Department of the Interior, but there was not a significant consistency of practice in applying these criteria to petitioning tribes.
Cohen noted that eligibility for federal services as an Indian tribe first became an issue when the Office of Indian Affairs attempted to determine who was eligible to organize under the Indian Reorganization Act (IRA) of 1934, which he had helped draft. The defining legislation for the "Indian New Deal" under the commissioner of Indian affairs John Collier, the IRA limited benefits to "recognized" tribes and individual Indians of half or more blood, as mentioned earlier. The executive branch decided that because of this phrasing, it needed a way to decide who was eligible for services or protections under acts passed by Congress. After Cohen determined that the political branches of the federal government (Congress and the executive branch, including the secretary of the interior) both had authority to acknowledge tribes, the Office of Indian Affairs in 1937 extended recognition to the Mole Lake Band of Chippewas of Wisconsin, a federally nonrecognized group at the time, so that it could organize under the IRA, setting a clear and unchallenged precedent allowing the BIA to recognize a tribe as long as Congress had not specifically terminated it.
While the BIA had recognized a string of tribes from 1962 to 1974, it began reconsidering its authority to recognize tribes sometime after extending recognition to the Sault Ste. Marie Chippewa tribe in February 1974. By August of that year an attorney from the solicitor's office reconfirmed the authority of the BIA to extend recognition, but this did not resolve the matter of how and when this authority would be exercised. The bureau still needed to establish consistent procedures for making recognition decisions.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from RECOGNITION ODYSSEYS by Brian Klopotek Copyright © 2011 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
About the Series viiAcknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
1. The Origins of Federal Acknowledgment Policy 19
2. The Tunica-Biloxi Tribe's Early Recognition Efforts 41
3. Tunica Activism from the Termination Era to the Self-Determination Era 61
4. Treasures: Tunica-Biloxis in the Federal Recognition Era 83
5. Tribal Enterprise and Tribal Life 97
6. Jena Choctaws under Jim Crow and outside the Federal Purview 127
7. Jena Choctaw Persistence from the Second World War to Recognition 147
8. Jena Choctaw Recognition 165
9. On the Outside, Looking In: Clifton-Choctaws, Race, and Federal Acknowledgment 197
10. Conclusions and Implications 239
Appendix 273
Notes 275
Bibliography 351
Index 375