Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Alexandra Harmon is Assistant Professor in the American Indian Studies Center at the University of Washington.

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Indians in the Making

University of California Press

In 1980 the Suquamish Indian Tribe brought suit to settle a long-standing dispute about the boundary of its reservation, which is visible from the city of Seattle, across Puget Sound. I took responsibility for the case two years later when I became the tribe's staff attorney. Since the claim derived from a 125-year-old treaty, it presented historical questions as well as legal ones. By arousing in me a desire to address some of the historical questions more fully than court proceedings allowed, the litigation tempted me into writing this book and ultimately into a new vocation.1

Our opponents in the suit?the State of Washington and several hundred holders of state deeds?responded in part by challenging our account of the tribe's history. The modern Suquamish Tribe, they argued, is not the entity that concluded the treaty but a recent creation of the federal government; the original Suquamish Tribe ceased to exist a few decades after Chief Seattle signed the treaty on its behalf. To prove this, they planned to call as witnesses a historian and an anthropologist.

If the judge had allowed the witnesses to testify as proposed, they would have stressed that most Suquamish Indians did not honor their promise to move onto the reservation but stayed in their scattered villages or hung around American towns. Thirty years after the treaty, when the government assigned tracts of reservation land to individuals, there were only fifty-one takers; and they were descendants not only of Suquamish but also of Snohomish, Skagit, Canadian, and other Indians, of white and black Americans, and of Chileans. Our adversaries planned to show further that no one formed a Suquamish tribal government until federal funding made it worthwhile in the 1960s. By that time tribe members not only lived among non-Indians, who far outnumbered them on the reservation, but also looked, spoke, and earned their livings like non-Indians.

How could such people claim historical continuity with the Indians who signed the treaty?

Answering this question to the satisfaction of a judge and jury would probably have entailed getting them to set aside stereotypes for more nuanced images of Indians. Afraid that such reeducation was not possible in a brief federal trial, we asked the judge to decide the issue as a matter of law, without testimony. He obliged, declaring himself bound by another court's ruling that the Suquamish Tribe in the lawsuit was the legal and political successor to the treaty party of the same name.2

I knew that the Suquamish boundary litigation was not the first test of a Washington Indian tribe's historical authenticity; nor would it be the last. A year before my clients filed suit, a different judge refused to recognize five groups as the modern incarnations of aboriginal tribes from the Puget Sound region. All five subsequently petitioned the Bureau of Indian Affairs for such recognition.3 Their quest was an outgrowth of the same history that prompted our opponents to dispute the present Suquamish Tribe's pedigree. Around Puget Sound for almost two centuries, native people and their progeny have had extensive and intimate relations with immigrants and their offspring, who now constitute the vast majority of the population. As a result, relatively little remains of the characteristics that distinguished indigenous people from Europeans when they first met. Descendants of Indians are inextricably tangled in the cultural, economic, and racial threads of a social fabric designed by non-Indians.

When those descendants nonetheless claim a distinct, enduring Indian identity, they raise intriguing historical questions. If they group and identify themselves in ways that neither their native ancestors nor their non-Indian neighbors would recognize as indigenous, why do they think of themselves as members of historic Indian tribes ? By changing their habits and the nature of the groups they affiliate with, have they lost their Indian identity or reinforced it? Have they claimed and maintained an Indian identity in spite of extensive relations with non-Indians or because of those relations? Are non-Indians responsible for destroying Indian communities or for creating and perpetuating them?

As much as I wanted to deflect these questions in litigation, I wanted to address them in another forum. I yearned to tell the story the judge had suppressed. It was my good fortune to begin indulging my desire, as a graduate student of history, at a propitious time. Scholars in several disciplines, I discovered, were confirming that racial and ethnic categories are mutable social constructions and therefore proper subjects of historical inquiry. This discovery bolstered the courage of my growing conviction: ahistory of Indians like the Suquamish could and should be a chronicle of change over time in Indianness itself.

The view that "primordial" sentiments determine ethnic identity has lost favor among anthropologists and sociologists. Drawing on historical data, they have shown that ethnic groups are born, change, and dissipate as the contexts of human relations change. Among other things, their studies confirm that changes in culture and membership do not necessarily destroy ethnic categories themselves. Concluding that we should conceive of ethnic and racial distinctions as a process rather than an essence, such scholars have concentrated on elucidating the dynamics of group differentiation (Fredrik Barth calls it "boundary maintenance").4

American historians have awakened recently to the possibility and potential rewards of taking racial and ethnic categories as their subjects. More often now, they are asking how such classifications have developed and endured. Aware that a sense of group affiliation depends on relations and comparisons with outsiders, historians are especially interested in encounters between formerly separate populations. And those who study the American West, where such encounters have been numerous, are staking a claim to a significant share of this new intellectual territory.5

On the other hand, scholars have barely begun to explore the implications of these insights for the history of North American Indians.6 Too often Indians' history is written as if protagonists, authors, and readers have no reason to wonder who is Indian (or Sioux, Cheyenne, or Cherokee). Since questions about the origins, continuity, distinctiveness, and membership of Indian groups have not been unique to western Washington, this pattern is surprising and disappointing. Arguably more than any other group, Indians depend on representations of history for their identification as Indians; and people who profess to be Indians have had to defend their claims with a frequency and rigor seldom demanded of people in other ethnic or racial classes.7 Yet scholars of Native America have rarely acknowledged that the definitions of Indian and Indian tribe have histories themselves.

Pioneering studies by James Merrell, J. Leitch Wright, and Richard White point the way that few others have taken. They show that indigenous nations or tribes?shredded by disease and thrown into a bubbling stew of European traders and colonists, African slaves, and displaced aborigines?often disintegrated and fused and dissolved again. But Merrell, Wright, and White recount events that took place east of the Mississippi River before whites subordinated Indians across the continent....