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Native Information [1]
joannemariebarker and Teresia Teaiwa
THIS IS NOT A TREATY!
I HAVE NOT SIGNED A TREATY
WITH THE U.S. GOVERNMENT
nor has my father nor his father
nor any grandmothers
We don’t recognize these names
on old sorry paper
Therefore we declare the United States
a crazy person
No this U.S. is not a good idea
We declare you terminated
You’ve had your fun now go home we’re tired
We signed no treaty
WHAT are you still doing here
Go somewhere else and
Build a McDonald’s
We revoke your immigration papers (Chrystos 71)
THIS IS NOT A TREATY! We’re not interested in making any treaties, smoking any peace-pipes, or shaking anyone’s hand across conference tables or over log-burning firepits. We’re not here to negotiate. We’re not here to sign our names on “old sorry paper.” And we’re certainly not here to amuse. We quite frankly don’t believe in treaties, treaty discourse, treaty politics, or (rather) in people who never intended to honor their treaties with indigenous peoples in the first place.
We’re tired of walking on the long trail of broken promises and well-known betrayals, especially as it leads to a people who claim that the word is sacred, even an embodiment of their god, the flesh of their beliefs, the beginning of time. We’ve learned from this history of making treaties, governments going back on their word after they’ve gotten indigenous peoples to move off lands valued only for material resources, and we’re simply not interested in playing this game with anyone, any longer.
We understand that our ancestors initially entered into contractual relations with European settlers because they expected the colonizers to keep their word, to keep their place. It wasn’t naivet*, it was trust. After all, inter-tribal discussions existed and worked quite well to the benefit of those who participated. But European settlers entered into such relationships with the “uncivilized Indian” because they anticipated that the Native would eventually disappear and thereby render treaties irrelevant.
Who would have ever thought that such an uncivilized race of barbarians would endure, let alone live to protest when assurances created in treaties were reneged upon? But indigenous peoples have survived. And they’ve learned English. And they’re protesting in courts for governments to be held responsible to the agreements that they have made in their treaties. And colonizers, waiting for the Native to perish, actively, and in various ways, circulate narratives of the Vanishing Indian in order to maintain the myth of the inevitability of the Native’s disappearance.
THIS IS NOT A TREATY! Because we refuse to disappear into those narratives. Indigenous peoples understand that there is no difference between the telling and the material. They understand how we all, in fact, live inside and through the narratives we tell and that the importance in telling stories is inseparable from the identity, community, and history they compose and the spiritual, economic and political realities on which they depend and which they subvert or preserve. Treaties tell a real and particular story, a story of disparate expectations and irreconcilable differences between indigenous peoples who believe in keeping promises made and colonizers who wait for the Natives’ disappearance. And so, THIS IS NOT A TREATY! And neither is it an entreaty.
Our aim is to interrupt the ways in which the narratives of the Vanishing Indian have intersected with our respective identities, communities, and histories as two mixed-bloods of American Indian and Pacific Islander ancestry. We do so in order to interfere with the logics and persistence of these narratives as we have encountered them within the academic spaces in which we have been and are located as Indian and Native. Our aim is to do so through a different kind of fictional production rather than merely telling you the usual story of our disappointment with the “white man’s betrayal,” and by doing so, speaking for all native peoples everywhere, and re-creating ourselves as a representational “we.” We do so because of the consequences we see these narratives having for us here: one, as Indian/Native we are made to represent an identity-as-authenticity of which we are not quite convinced; and two, even as we are present in the academy, we can only signify absence, the absence to which we have been reduced by the narratives of the Vanishing Indian. Neither of these consequences are acceptable and both of these consequences we attribute to the malleability of the Vanishing Indian narratives for social and political purposes that would want to continue to place indigenous peoples within dramas where they are indeed vanishing –authentic only when absent, romanticized to death. Simply put, we’re through with making treaties, telling and participating in stories of our disappearance, creating our absence in its re-telling. We are here to contest. To provoke. To inform. But not to sign up.
And so we begin with our readers. As all good “native informants” do, we assume that our audience is ignorant. We apologize to any of our readers who feel that this is an unfair assumption. But if you are one of those privileged with prior knowledge of the information we divulge, then we’re sorry for assuming that your knowledge has been over-determined by the disciplines of History and Anthropology (two disciplines through which colonizing treatymakers continue to circulate narratives of the Vanishing Indian and against which we write). Situated as our words are, in a collection of essays on women of color in collaboration and conflict, our words are directed to an audience which is both ignorant and “knowledgeable,” predictable and unpredictable.
Dear audience: People of color, women, white men, mixed bloods and indigenous readers: we realize that for some of you it is an awkward situation being addressed in the same breath as others. Please forgive us…but we know that you will all do what you will with this native information anyway.
VANISHING INDIAN: I do not have a reservation to go home to, a “native” language to speak, a uniquely “Indian” religion to practice: the Lenni Lenâpé (Delaware) people do not have a reservation, thanks to the aggressive U.S. land allotment program; it is estimated by the tribal manager that only six members speak the ancient language; [2] and long ago, religious practices (were) reformed (by) Christianity. Five hundred years of physical, social, and cultural migrations have changed what it means for American Indian peoples to have a place to return to (ok, there’s a mail order gift shop and the tribal offices in Oklahoma), a language to speak (ok, there are tapes to learn from), and an “Indian” religion to practice (ok, it’s my prejudice of Christianity’s specific history of colonialism). [3] And then there are the politics of being mixed-blood…
NATIVE-IN-FORMATION: After this, I’m going home. Yup, home in the islands. Lucky me, huh? Like the frigate bird, flying far and wide, but always knowing where to return. The United States of America–this “dream” land–could never be home for me. The blood, sweat, and tears of many ancestors saturate this soil; they give me wings to fly. I’ll never forget, but I’ll never stay. I belong elsewhere, I long to return elsewhere. I belong to kaainga on Banaba, Tabiteuea, and Rabi–my “native” lands. I long to return to Fiji, my “home” land. Like the frigate bird, flying far and wide, but always knowing where to return. After this, I’m going home. Yup, home in the islands. Lucky me, huh?
What brings us together? An American Indian and a Pacific Islander. It is often presumed that our reality is most determined by a relationship to “native” land and territory. But we are also subjects of history. Both of us are mixed-bloods and both of us have specific and complicated histories of geographical, cultural, economic and political displacement, and mobility. So while we may specify our identities as Delaware and l-Banaba respectively, neither of us grew up in our “native” lands. As “individuals” we have shared our different experiences, ideas, and visions of being “native” through conversations with each other. If all were told in detail, we might be able to explain how history brings us together. But more to the point, we are here.
Upon entering the hallowed halls of academia, our protagonist, our heroine, Native-in-formation, calls forth the spirit of her ancestor, Vanishing Indian. “Hey, dude! What’s going on?” Vanishing Indian does not answer. “Dude?” A disembodied voice booms, “Vanishing Indian does not answer to that name!” “Vanishing Indian, is that you?” “I am. Ay, I am,” the voice reverberates. “Uh-huh…” our heroine pauses to consider the situation.
Five hundred years of vanishing Indians. From the unfortunate Taino to the hapless Tasmanians. Five hundred years of vanishing… Going, going, gone? (To the highest bidder) Or going, going, still going? (Like the “Energizer” bunny)… Five hundred years.
Standing in the middle of the hallowed halls, our protagonist, our heroine, Native-in-formation, watches Professors and Students of Information hurry by. She calls out, “Hello!” The walls echo in response, “Hello-ello-lo-o!” “Hmmm,” Native-in-formation says to herself, “You know, that voice sounds familiar.” She walks further down the hallowed halls, where she comes upon a statue of Vanishing Indian standing at the center of a rotunda. “Hello?” No answer. “Well, what the hell am I supposed to say? ‘Oh, Great Ancestor hear the pleas of your humble daughter?!’ Goddamit Vanishing Indian! Give me a break!” “Okay, okay! I just wanted to see how creative you could get! Heh, heh.” Native-in-formation is stunned: did the statue speak? “Vanishing Indian?” “Yes.” And from the other side of the statue a woman steps forward. She looks familiar. “You’re Vanishing Indian?!” “Mm-hmm.” “But what about him?” “He really vanished, girl! And we’re all of us always vanishing, I guess. That is if you stick to that particular translation of our name.” “What do you mean our name?” “Heh-heh,” chuckles Vanishing Indian.
THIS IS NOT A TREATY! Even as we use the written word we refuse to be bound by it. Whiteimperialistcolonizers have perjured their own written words ever since they set foot on our shores. They made treaties with us that they would not honor and so we learn from this history. THIS IS NOT A TREATY! We make no promises, no deals. These written words do not bind us, they free us; they do not dispossess us, they empower us; what do these written words do for you? This is native information. THIS IS NOT A TREATY!
Native In Formation
The essential question is “What counts as Indian?”
For whites, blood is a substance that can be either racially pure or racially polluted. Black blood pollutes white blood absolutely, so that, in the logical extreme, one drop of Black blood makes an otherwise white man Black…white ideas about ‘Indian blood’ are less formalized and clear-cut…It may take only one drop of Black blood to make a person a Negro, but it takes a lot of Indian blood to make a person a “real” Indian. (Blu 3-4).
As “native” you are expected and required to represent not merely “your people” but the always already “Indian” to whom you are constantly speaking and to whom you are constantly referred and of whom you have not participated in the making. You are not convinced of this “Indian’s” authenticity but neither is He/She escapable. He/She stands before you. He/She walks with you. He/She interferes with the way of your steps, making you always backtrack, sideways, through the dramas of the Frontier and the stills of Curtis.
CHIEF BRAVE MEDICINE MAN WARRIOR PRINCESS SQUAW FRY BREAD MAKER PAPOOSE CARRIER insists on enclosing you within His/Her reserves of “Indian” identity and “Indian” territory engendered and racialized as the “primitive-native” (Minh-ha 67) Man-Woman absolutely fixed in a space within and time outside. Just once you’d like to get through a conversation without being coerced into commenting on Geronimo or Pocahontas, [4] the only real “Indians” whose identities you are expected to emulate while always already having been occupied by those who have given them their names and so have enclosed (reserved?) what counts as “Indian.”
You’re really Indian? What’s it like to be an Indian? How much Indian are you, anyway? A half? A quarter? What? You know, you don’t look anything like an Indian. What kind of fellowship did you say you were on? I don’t mean to be rude, but you really don’t look anything like an Indian.
For mixed-bloods, the burden of proof is all (y)ours. You had better walk and talk and look and sound “like an Indian” through the manners and customs that the whiteeducatedcolonialists have so carefully documented in their anthropological and other literary texts that function like documents of indisputable evidence (field notes) in whose presence you can merely prostrate yourself (for their omniscience) if you ever hope to appease their anger over your being here-there where you have deviated from what counts as “Indian” by speaking, smiling, writing, authoring. You even begin to anticipate the questions and catch yourself making yourself over into that “Indian,” being (in)formed by His/Her authenticity. And in time, as absurd as it may seem, you actually begin to imagine that people see you as CHIEF BRAVE MEDICINE MAN WARRIOR PRINCESS SQUAW FRY BREAD MAKER PAPOOSE CARRIER and you are relieved.
As an undergraduate, I worked as a word processing consultant at the university’s office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, under whose administrative umbrella the Office of Graduate Studies (including Admissions and Fellowships) was located. I was at work the day that the Office of Graduate Studies at UCSC called to verify whether or not I was “really an Indian”; assuming I suppose that the graduate office of my undergraduate institution (or my place of employment?) would be able to tell. After receiving the phone call from UCSC, the director of graduate admissions came running up to me with a bright smile on her face, “They’re calling to check up on you.” It was good news. It wasn’t the only place that they had called that morning.
And so we are expected to justify our existence in the locations we have chosen to reside in if they deviate from the “Indian” before us: the Vanishing Indian, the last true informant to knowledge already formed. Or we must remain silent. Or we must confront. Always. The legitimacy of the questions that ask us to validate our authenticity.
Let, me see I think that was 73.89%. No wait. I was never any good with math. I think it’s 37.521%. No. That doesn’t sound right either How’s xxx?
Or we must come up with a different set of questions than the ones posed to us, making an other place from which to speak. We must not allow them to tell us that we don’t belong here as though this were the location of the sacred and we were the desecrators. We must insist that they defend the History that incessantly erases us, displaces us, occupies us, and continues to remove us from the locations in which we have chosen to inhabit and in which we have buried our dead. Remember, we can decide what to allow them to see of our worlds. Our dreams. Remember also, they are easily deceived. We must be careful. But this time the decision is ours.
And so I will give you information. Carefully selected information so that you can trust it. And you can learn what it means to be native, and I will be your informant, and you will see who is really being observed and who is really participating–this time around–in what is going to count/be written as Indian. Get out your notebooks. Details are important.
Native Information
I was involved in a teaching program for Pacific island mental health workers. Some of the students were Pacific island physicians and some were mental health counselors. They were asked to make presentations to the class about the social and cultural organization of everyday life in their home villages. The teaching faculty of the program was astonished to find that the students would only talk about their social and cultural structures in terms of the established and published ethnographies. The problem for us was that we wanted to have the trainees and ourselves think about the contemporary social interaction in the village, how routine topics in everyday conversation were related, played a part in structuring events to current mental health problems in the village population, e.g. adolescent suicide, schizophrenia, depression, and violent behavior. Try as we might, we could not get the trainees, or the majority of the faculty, for that matter, to think of village social structure as sequentially produced, moving through time and space as of the symbolic interaction that made structure visible.
What we received were formal reports on kinship systems, land tenure, traditional political structure and religion, mythology, indigenous fishing, agriculture, and transportation technologies. The reports were largely paraphrased versions of recognizable anthropological publications. The publications were often recited verbatim, frequently without attribution. The trainees and many of the faculty were astonished that we were insisting on descriptions of the mundane or ordinary; they could not see anything interesting or “worth telling” (as in tell a story) in everyday life. Focusing instead on the monumental, generalized descriptions of the past (Robillard 10-11).
What is native information anyway?
Accounting for the Native
Question Number 4 on the 1990 Census requested that participants “Fill ONE circle for the race that the person considers himself/herself to be.” The options included: White; Black or Negro; Indian (Amer.); Eskimo; Aleut; Asian or Pacific Islander; or Other race. If participants were Indian (Amer.), they had to write in the name of the enrolled or principal tribe.” If participants were Asian or Pacific Islander, they had to print one group’s name. If participants were Other race, then an arrow merely pointed to a blank space in which they were to write down the name of the race to which they identified.
Question Number 7 on the 1990 Census asked “Is this person of Spanish/Hispanic origin?” Participants were told to “Fill ONE circle for each person.” The options were: No (not Spanish/Hispanic); Yes, Mexican, Mexican-Am., Chicano; Yes, Puerto Rican; Yes, Cuban; Yes, other Spanish/Hispanic. If yes, then “Print one group, for example: Argentinean, Colombian, Dominican, Nicaraguan, Salvadoran, Spaniard, and so on.”
Of the 1,959,234 people who identified themselves as Indian (Amer.), Eskimo, or Aleut in the 1990 Census (1,783,773 not of Spanish/Hispanic origin), almost 40% belong to only four tribes: Cherokee, Navajo, Chippewa, and Dakota. The ten largest tribes accounted for 56% of the total indigenous population. Two-thirds of the 542 tribes counted have fewer than 1,000 persons each. (This was the first U.S. Census release of tribal population counts which I imagine have until now resided with Tribal Governments, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation [Population Today].)
Table
(Data from: Population Today and U.S. Census Bureau 1990 Reports.)
There are over 25,000 islands in the Pacific Ocean. Anthropologists have determined that few of these islands have never been inhabited. The island Pacific is generally recognized as lying within the boundaries marked at its northernmost by the Hawaiian archipelago, by Belau at its westernmost, by New Zealand in the south, and French Polynesia in the east. Since the 1830s the islands have been categorized according to three geo-cultural groupings: Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia. There are over 1,228 languages among these groups. In 1986 the total population of the Pacific Islands (excluding Hawai’i and New Zealand) was 4,952,470. (Papua New Guinea accounted for 3,000,000 out of this total.) Those Pacific Island groups historically and politically linked to the United States are Belau, the Federated States of Micronesia, the Marshall Islands, the Northern Marianas, Eastern Samoa, Guam, and Hawai’i. (Wanna know how they got mixed up with the U.S.? Go to the library!)
The 1990 United States of America population census categorized Pacific Islanders with Asians. Why are Pacific Islanders and Asians counted together? The Census made a special distinction, however, for Asian Pacific Islanders (API) of “Hispanic origin.” In 1990 the total API population in the U.S. was 7,273,662; those not of Hispanic origin totaled 6,968,359. There are more APls in California than in any other state, but only county-level census reports distinguish between Pacific Islanders and Asians; furthermore, county reports provide statistics for different Pacific Islander ethnic groups. For instance, in Santa Cruz county, which has a total population of 229,734, there were 225 Hawaiians, 433 Samoans, 1 Tongan, and 4 “other Polynesians”; 42 Guamanians, and 11 “other Micronesians”; 13 Melanesians; and 10 “unspecified Pacific Islanders.” What are the political and cultural significances of this relatively small islander presence in the continental U.S.?
And then there are the graduate school and Fellowship application forms. On the graduate admissions form for UCSC applicants are asked to fill out an “Ethnic Survey”: “This information is useful to us for statistical purposes but you are not required to provide it.” The options for an applicant’s ethnic identity are:
American Indian/Alaskan Native (with tribal affiliation)
Black/African-American
Chicano/Mexican-American
Latino/Other
Spanish-American
Philipino/Filipino
Chinese/Chinese-American
East Indian/Pakistani
Japanese/Japanese-American
Korean/Korean-American
Pacific Islander
Other Asian
White/Caucasian
Other, Specify
Applicants select one.
Conversations
We will not analyze the reasons why so few native peoples are in the academy or why so few are graduate students or Ph.D. recipients. Our point is that the relative absence of native peoples from the institutions of “higher education” and the narratives of the Vanishing Indian combine to produce a very specific place for natives to occupy–to appear- -within the academy. Our work is to simultaneously name that place, identify some of the ways that it is constituted by the Vanishing Indian narratives (and thereby demonstrate its constructedness), and finally to reconstruct it. Not merely to produce another place–a “third” place less inhabitable than the first–but to produce our appearance away from the authentic/absent subjectivity created for us by the Vanishing Indian. In other words, to be formation/information is to refuse History’s accounts/accounting of us. It is to produce another place that is not a silence made voice, which is a move too familiar to colonial-anthropological forms of knowledge that we refuse to inhabit, but is rather a place in which we are the clerks, writers, and curators of our records, artifacts, identities and histories. THIS IS NOT AN (EN)TREATY! This is a conversation, in spite of and because of our differences and struggles as indigenous peoples and mixed-bloods, in which we engage your participation outside the narratives of the Vanishing Indian as natives who have literally survived.
Table
(Digest of Educational Statistics, 1992.
Nonresident alien doctoral degrees conferred: 23.4 (8,875). All student and graduate student figures unavailable.
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In an article on the language and discourse of defense intellectuals, feminist scholar Carol Cohn described the process by which she infiltrated this powerful and dangerous elite culture. Defense intellectuals go about their business in a language which has no reference to human beings, let alone the third world and indigenous peoples on whom weapons are routinely tested. Cohn’s task involved listening to, learning to speak and dialogue in the language of technologic strategy in order to achieve a critical position from which to create alternatives. This path to the “critical” position which Cohn promotes has much in common with an ethnographic project. I find that discomfitting because an ethnographer chooses which languages to learn and may leave at any time the places in which those languages predominate. It seems to me that the burden of learning new languages, the languages of the more powerful, is placed every day on the shoulders of the already dispossessed.
If I have a critical positioning it is not achieved through ethnographic methods. For inherent to the ethnographic position seems to be a fantasy of authority–over language–which allows dialogue. I may have listened to and learned to speak languages to which I am not native, but I doubt that I have achieved the proficiency to “dialogue.” Rather, I monologue. I monologue, never quite sure if I understand or am understood. I monologue, you monologue, we monologue…and maybe our monologues will coincide. But we have no expectations, make no promises. After all, this is not a treaty, it is native information.
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“Morning, Rita. How are you?”
“So so. And you?”
So, so. Where’ve you been?”
“From there.”
“And where are you going?”
“Over there.”
“What for?”
“Oh, I’m just going to do something. What are you doing?”
“Just this. How’s Oilei?”
“So so. And how’s Tevita?”
“He’s a bit so so.”
“Oh. That’s a pity.”
“Yes…. I hope Oilei’s so so’s not too so so. Bye.”
“Yeah, bye.” (Hau’ofa 15-16)
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Most of the time it doesn’t matter to me if I’m understood or not. Talking, writing, and being understood can be so banal, familiar and boring sometimes. It can seem so exciting, exotic, and promising to be misunderstood, not to understand. But being obscure is too easy; it takes responsibility and maturity to be clear. Who should rescue all this native information from its obscurity? Who can make the native information clear? You? Me? That man with the notebook? The woman with the camera? Who?
Naming the Place: The Proof of Burden
The Vanishing Indian is not merely a reference to the Warrior on horseback shot by the U.S. soldier or the diseased Indian dying in a teepee on some obscure prairie or the Princess who died from a broken heart in a foreign land. The Vanishing Indian is a more complex figuring of Native American peoples that historically, physically and symbolically names and so forms them as always already dead while at the same time frozen on a reservation–America’s Third World ghetto [5]–drunk and dirty, unemployed and uneducated. This figuring has a History not worth repeating; for here mere episodes provoke:
ANTHROPO-LOGICAL knowledge: “Into each life, it is said, some rain must fall. Some people have bad horoscopes, others take tips on the stock market…. But Indians have been cursed above all other people in history. Indians have anthropologists…. Indians are certain that Columbus brought anthropologists on his ships when he came to the New World. How else could he have made so many wrong deductions about where he was?… You may be curious as to why the anthropologist never carries a writing instrument. He never makes a mark because he ALREADY KNOWS what he is going to find. He need not record anything except his daily expenses for the audit, for the anthro found his answer in the books he read the winter before. No, the anthropologist is only out on the reservations to verify what he has suspected all along…” (Deloria 78-80)
INDIAN: “Why do you call us Indians?” [6] The Trivial Pursuit Answer. The Faulty Geography of Christopher Columbus. (Who else?) The specific term Indian as a designation for the inhabitants of the North Americas begins with Columbus: under the impression that he had landed among the islands off Southeast Asia, he called the peoples he met in Central America los Indios. Even after subsequent explorations corrected Columbus’ error in geography, the Spanish continued to use the term Indios for all peoples “found” to inhabit the “New World.” The rest is, as they say, History.
DELAWARE: The name Lenni Lenâpé has been translated and so rendered into various meanings, such as “original people,” “men among men,” and “men of our kind;” but len means “common” and âpé means “people.” The word Lenâpéstanding alone can be translated as “common people” and the addition of Lenni is a redundancy which reinforces the signification: Common People. After the English arrived, the Lenni Lenâpé peoples living in the now Delaware and New Jersey areas were given a new name, which was derived from the third Lord de la Warr, Sir Thomas West, who was appointed governor of the English Colony at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1610. One of his followers, Captain Samual Argall, took a voyage up the coast in search of provisions and on his return sailed into a bay that he named in honor of the governor. As time went on, the Lenni Lenâpé peoples living on the shores of the “de la Warr Bay” and along the banks of the river that emptied into it became known as the Delaware Indians (Weslager 1972, 31-32).
MIGRATION (RECORDED): The Delaware begin moving from the areas of their original settlement to the Susquehanna River area in mid-western Pennsylvania to avoid war with the settlers (1709); the Walking Purchase fraudulently claims lands away from the Delaware for settlement by the British (1737); the remainder of the Delaware move to the Susquehanna River valley under the protection and government of the Six Nations, on the specific lands managed by the Cayuga and Oneida tribes (1742); the Delaware begin moving to the Ohio and Allegheny River valleys in western Pennsylvania in order to exercise self-determination, and eventually align themselves with the Shawnee to do battle against the British settlers (1752); war is declared on the Delaware by the Pennsylvania government (1756), the Ohio River valley Delawares are massacred for “crimes” their warriors allegedly committed against the British settlers (1756); the Delawares are moved by the U.S. government from Ohio to Indiana Territory (by 1800) [7]; the St. Mary’s Treaty with the U.S. government forces the Delaware to move to Missouri Territory (1818-1822); they are further removed to Kansas Territory (1830); through treaty, the Delaware are “officially” merged with the Cherokee Nation, loosing all independent rights and sovereignty (1867); the Delaware are forced to cede all lands in Kansas and are moved to Indian Territory in Oklahoma where they purchase lands from the Cherokees (1868)… (Weslager 1978). Today, the Delaware Tribe is not recognized as a separate and sovereign nation apart from the Cherokees and is currently negotiating with the Cherokees for support of their legal efforts to obtain separate Federal Recognition (Delaware Indian News 1). RESERVATIONS: The effects of five hundred years of migration and colonial forms of knowledge have done their well-known violence to native peoples. And yet it is within this History that the paradox is constituted: how can I as a mixed-blood Lenni Lenâpé Delaware-Cherokee /European-American return to an “Indian” identity and culture, to a reservation where traditional and spiritual practices are preserved and continued and my native language spoken and nationalism defined and celebrated, and return here to speak from that place when it has been–and I have been–so removed? And how can I interrupt, without reservation, the narratives of the Vanishing Indian when my family and tribal history would suggest that, for all probabilities, I am?
Yet, it is from that “impossible” place of foreknowledge and migration that I speak, that I insist on speaking from, as a way of contesting the authentic-as-absent, authentic as particularly seen, Indian within the Grand Narrative: I refuse to disappear/appear as the “heroine” of a Vanishing Indian plot. Rather, l want to claim an alternative for us so that we might speak to one another within the academy outside of the roles as observed/informants and “primitive-native(s)” frozen in some anthropological past from where we cannot speak or write “always stand[ing] on the other side of the hill, naked and speechless, barely present in [our] absence” (Minh-ha 67).
A Slice of Life
May 14, 1993. 7:15 am, alarm goes off and I turn on the radio. DJ promotes Discovery Channel’s forthcoming series “How the West Was Lost,” the American Indian perspective. 7:45 am, breakfast of rice and an over-easy egg; cuppa de-caf coffee as I print out a draft of my paper “Between the Traveler and the Native: The Traveling Native as Informative Figure.” 8:30 am, deliver the paper to my professor’s box. 9:00 am, check e-mail: my mom mentions an indigenous women’s conference to be held in Fiji sometime in August or September; my friend Cristina, a graduate student in anthropology at Stanford University, tells me about her M.A. thesis on Native American organizing around and against the celebration of Columbus’ Quincentennial. 10:00 am, pick up tickets for Pacific Rim Film Festival Sunday screening of Eddie Kamae’s new film on slack-key guitar called “The Hawaiian Way.” 10:30 am, grocery shopping. 11:30 am, lunch of yogurt, kiwi fruit, and vanilla cookies as I prepare for my 2:00 pm meeting with Joanne to figure the layout of this paper. 2:00 pm, Joanne arrives; snack of tortilla chips and salsa, with coca-cola. 4:45 pm, check mailbox: postcard from my sister holidaying in Brisbane, Australia. 5:00 pm, ceremony to name Oakes College D-Block after Hawai’i’s last sovereign monarch Queen Lili’uokalani, and Bay Area attorney and Asian Pacific Islander rights advocate Dale Minami; dinner of barbecued chicken, rice, and noodle salad. 8:00 pm, “Qwe.ti: Tales of the Makah Tribe,” a performance by the Northwest Puppet Center at Porter College Dining Hall. 10:00 pm, home agai–sleep!
An Abbreviated History
1804 A British vessel chances upon Banaba and charts it on Admiral T maps.
1900 A subject of the British Empire ascertains that Banaba is practically solid phosphates.
1901 The island is annexed and included under the colonial administration of the Gilbert Islands. Leases negotiated by the mining company with the islanders provide mining rights to the Pacific Islands Company for 999 years and payment of 50 pounds sterling a year to the land owners.
1928 After islanders demonstrate increasing tenacity to land, British colonial government passes a mining ordinance to permit the companies compulsory acquisition of land. The government compensates the islanders by setting up trust funds for them.
1941 Japanese attack British colonial headquarters on Banaba; British flee and Japanese occupy the island, relocating most of the islanders to Tarawa in the Gilberts and Kosrae in the Carolines.
1945 British return.
1946 After convincing the scattered Banabans that their island was uninhabitable after the war, the British begin a project of resettling islanders. Money from the Banaban trust funds is used to purchase Rabi island in Fiji. After two years, the islanders decide to stay on Rabi while maintaining their land rights on Banaba.
1970s Mid-1970s. Mining winds down as island becomes little more than a jagged rock.
1977 Banabans sue the British Phosphate commissions for just compensations for the exploitation and destruction of their ancestral home. The matter is settled out of court and ten million pounds are added to the islanders trust fund.
1979 The Gilbert Islands become the independent Republic of Kiribati and Banabans make some demands for their own independence from Kiribati but nothing comes of these.
1990s After more than a decade of mismanagement of funds by some of their own leaders, Banabans on Rabi are in financial and social crisis. The Fiji government appoints a three member commission to administer the islands affairs until things get better.
Vanishing Indian Speaks
It seems clear that the favorite object of anthropological study is not just any man but a specific kind of man: the Primitive, now elevated to the rank of the full yet needy man, the Native… The “conversation of man with man” is, therefore, mainly a conversation of “us” with “us” about “them,” of the white man with the white man about the primitive-native man (Minh-ha 64-65).
What happens when “them” chooses to be located within the academy as a subject of study, as a speaker without translation, on the other side of knowledge production? “Them” arrives at the university, born of a history of territorial-identities already marked and occupied by the settler, anthropologist, film maker, and cowboy novelist. [8] The first place “them” are made to reside within when they arrive is quite simply that of the observed/informant, made to reaffirm and reform the authenticity of colonial forms of knowledge by being made into embodied testaments of its validity, made to speak to its History–how much Indian did you say you were?–and thus to an immobility within its systems–you really don’t look anything like an Indian. In other words, the relative absence of “them” within the academy and the narratives of the “Vanishing Indian” combine and “them” are made to be native informants not of their cultural and political identities, which are both historically constituted and specifically changing, but of the “primitive-native man” frozen in the past that Anthropology and History have created in their greater schemes of Evolution.
Our not-generous suspicions of Anthropology as the first occasion of colonial forms of knowledge (of us) come with us when we enter institutions of “higher” education. We are here as still-suspicious intellectuals, interrupting the usual practices of knowledge production: Observed/Informant Anthropologist Text/ Knowledge. We refuse to be the passive recipients and practitioners of knowledges not ours in formation, submitting to the ideologies of “us.” Rather, we insist on taking up an interruption of the “conversation of man with man,” “a conversation of ‘us’ with ‘us’ about ‘them,'” that ends up proving to be no conversation at all and instead calls attention to its very constructedness as knowledges belonging to U.S. colonialism, nationalism, modernism, evolutionism, et cetera.
A conversation of “us” with “us” about “them” is a conversation in which “them” is silenced. “Them” always stands on the other side of the hill, naked and speechless, barely present in its absence. Subject of discussion, “them” is only admitted among “us,” the discussing subjects, when accompanied or introduced by an “us,” member, hence the dependency of “them” and its need to acquire good manners for the membership standing. (Minh-ha 67)
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Excerpts from the appendix of my report to the Fiji Association of Women Graduates on the International Federation of University Women’s 1992 Conference at Stanford University:
- Throughout my attendance at the conference, white women (mostly American) would initiate conversations with me. Although my badge clearly stated that I was a delegate from Fiji, I had to correct them repeatedly when they asked me about Fuji.
- As I was browsing through the quilt exhibit American Association of University Women said “Bula” to me. I said “Bula” back with a tight smile. She told the woman next to her that she’d been to Fiji and the people there were very friendly. I was tempted to walk away then and there without another word, but I smiled saying, “Enjoy the rest of the exhibit,” and walked away just as she opened her mouth to say something else to me. I hate being a “friendly, smiling native” on demand.
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I get kinda scared here in Santa Cruz when I’m invited to speak “as a Pacific Islander” at events where I’m the only Pacific Islander. But you know what’s scarier? The idea of going back to the islands and being asked to speak at events of all Pacific Islanders!
Conclusions Forming
The Natives Informing
Everybody wants to be an Indian. l don’t want to be an Indian anymore.
–James Luna
UCSC performance, 1993
The conversation envisioned herein works to transform the possibilities for native peoples within the academy. It allows us to speak to one another in our differences and thus (hopefully) towards a collaboration between them. We are then interlocutors. Not romanticized storytellers of the Frontier attesting always and only to dead ancestors, but interlocutors in parity with claims and rights to writing and curating the terms of the discourse in which we travel (remember) and are traveled (remembered). We see possibilities there for (in)forming other narratives than the Vanishing Indian as other conversations are insistently reproduced and engaged that allow for our co-habitation within our individual and collective histories and identities without one being at the expense of the other. Conversations that form and sustain collaboration and not narratives that produce Subjects and Histories and Creation Stories to which we are always expected and anticipated to return as the speechless and naked “primitive-native man” on the other side of information/knowledge. Conversations that allow us to tell other stories than the one of our death. Conversations that allow us to dance, and pray, and sing, and transpose the histories in which we really live. The histories that are mixed within the blood.
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Our protagonists, our heroines, Vanishing-Indian and Native-in-formation walk through the hollow halls of the academy. They pass some closed doors, some doors that are wide-open, some doors that are ajar. They exchange knowing glances as they pass rooms in which their ancestors’ bones are numbered and catalogued. They exchange knowing glances as they pass rooms in which their contemporaries are the centerpieces on the smorgasbord at glamorous receptions. “l was invited to that party,” Native-in-formation whispers. “I know,” nods Vanishing-Indian, “they’ve already numbered and catalogued me.” At that moment, Native-in-formation feels a sense of loss. She turns to her companion for reassurance, only to find that Vanishing-Indian has disappeared. In a panic, Native-in-formation runs down the hall. She runs past the glamorous receptions. She runs past the rooms with her ancestors’ bones. She runs past the doors that are ajar. She runs past the doors that are wide open. She runs past the closed doors. And then, Native-in-formation freezes. “What’s happening?”
Table wax. Playdoh. Steam. Ice. Sun sets. Lava. Ozones. Land fills. Ice Spotted Owl. Portable nuclear weapons. Vanishing-Indian, Native-in-formation: the point is that how the name is pronounced makes all the difference between our vanishing and our formation. The name itself will not change to protect the innocent.
Native-in-formation relaxes. She realizes she is in the rotunda again. Then she remembers, as she looks at the statue–the one she saw when she first arrived. Yes, she remembers.
Native-in-formation turns and notices that Professors and Students of Information continue to hurry by. But with what she knows now, she can tell the difference between the ones who will hear and the ones who will listen. The ones who will look and the ones who will see. The ones who will touch and the ones who will feel. And there in the hollow halls of the academy, Native-in-formation smiles.
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Go away now
We don’t know you from anybody
You must be some ghost in the wrong place…wrong time
…Pack up your toys…garbage…lies
We…who are alive now
…have signed no treaties…
Go so far away we won’t remember you ever came here
…Take these words back with you. (Chrystos 71)
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THIS IS NOT A TREATY! This is native information: autobiographical, fictional, anthropological, political, comical, statistical, governmental, theoretical, historical, ethnographic. Some of it you’ve solicited. Some of it we’ve given up. Some of it is meant to provoke. Some of it is meant to inform. And so here it is. And you will do with it what you want.
THIS IS NOT A TREATY! This is native information: as we have been informed by, as we are informing, as we are in-formed. It’s about process, not status. It’s not about romanticizing the dead of our history onto the sides of defaced mountains carved up for all time. It’s about the way we move with time and with each other.
THIS IS NOT A TREATY! This is contestation, a conversation. This is not an entreaty for your signature. We’re not looking for converts. We’re not going to ride off into the sunset. We’re not going to wrap things up for you or for us. And we’re not going away.
THIS IS NOT A TREATY! Because we don’t promise that the next time we meet you will find us here, still, waiting for what has become our inevitable removal to other places, waiting for our extinction.
Rather, we have taken up the work of interruption which is not necessarily a “native” thing to do but is necessary for our purposes at this time. And so we have intentionally constructed a place for us to speak from (to you, to each other) with the aim of denaturalizing the political subjects we have been created as by the Vanishing Indian. And hopefully, we have created the possibility for something else to say, on our terms, next time around: these words do not bind us, they free us. What do these words do for you?
Notes
1. We would like to thank “HISC217B” and Donna Haraway for their thoughtful comments and editorial suggestions on a much abbreviated draft. We would also like to thank other readers for their participation in the process of native in/formation: James Treat and the Inscriptions editorial board. Though we might not have incorporated all of their advice, they gave us pause to consider the responses we were in for. Back to main text
2. This was reported to me in a personal letter from the Principal Researcher at the Native American Language Preservation Project funded at the Anthropology Department at the University of Oklahoma (February 16, 1993), who had had personal correspondence with the Delaware Tribe’s manager. I have subsequently written to the Delaware main office but as yet have not received confirmation or denial. It seems plausible but I’d be willing for it to be refuted. Back to main text
3. This is not to suggest that the Delaware are void of traditional cultural practices or are not organized by a tribal government but that these activities are not centered or located within what would be recognized as “Indian” by the unbreakable links created by historical and anthropological knowledge between land, language, and religion. Back to main text
4. Geronimo and Pocahontas are, actually, two Indians I wouldn’t mind seeing vanished for their use within the American Romance for dead Indians. Which is to say, haven’t we tired of the way that Geronimo and Pocahontas are made to be representative of the quintessential Indian experience and then reduced to colloquialisms–“Geronimo!”–and used to further historical ignorance? Pocahontas has, just within the last year, returned in yet another novel of the tragic “Indian Princess” story that carries her name in the title. And I hear that Disney is working their next “Little Mermaid”/”Beauty” feature on her. Somewhere in between the slang and the animation, the real material conditions of indigenous histories are lost, or at least perpetually distorted. Back to main text
5. ‘We’ve got the Third World smack in the middle of America” from the film Thunderheart. Michael Apted, Director. TriStar Pictures, 1992. Back to main text
6. Unnamed Native American (of course) to missionary John Eliot in 1646 as quoted by Robert Berkhofer in The White Man’s Indian. (New York: Vintage Books, 1978) 4. The remainder of this paragraph is a paraphrase of that which follows the “anonymous” quote. Back to main text
7. Territories were lands that the U.S. government set aside for Indian relocation. These lands were never given to native peoples for permanent settlement (despite treaty obligations), but were always eventually taken back in the name of “manifest destiny’s” westward expansion. Back to main text
8. I am indebted to Louis Owens’s discussion of the relationship between American Indian territories and identities during a graduate seminar in which he was a guest lecturer and I was a participant (UCSC, Winter 1993). His argument, as I remember it, was that territories and identities belonging to “American Indians have always already been desired for occupation, and so constructed. For even when it could be said that the American Indian was living there, there has always belonged to the mythology of the Frontier in which lands lie in waiting for the settler’s discovery and possession. Like the land, Owens posited that American Indian identities have been mapped out, discovered, and tended by everyone, particularly the Euro-american colonizer, but the American Indian. Back to main text
Comments may be directed to: TEAIW_JM@usp.fj or jmbarker@cats.ucsc.edu. Or, you can write c/o History of Consciousness, UCSC, Santa Cruz CA 95064.
Works Cited
Blu, Karen I. The Lumbee Problem: The Making of an American Indian. Quoted by Louis Owens, Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992.
Chrystos. Not Vanishing. Vancover: Press Gang, 1988.
Delaware Indian News [Bartlesville, OK.] April 1993, 1.
Deloria, Vine, Jr. Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988.
Hau’ofa, Epeli. Kisses in the Nederends. Auckland: Penguin, 1987.
Minh-ha, Trinh T. Woman Native Other. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989.
Population Today (February 1993).
Robillard, Albert B. Social Change in the Pacific Islands. London: Kegan Paul, 1992.
U.S. Census Bureau 1990 Reports
Weslager, C. A. The Delaware Indians: A History. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1972.
—. The Delaware Indian Westward Migration. Pennsylvania: Middle Atlantic Press, 1978.