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Native Pathways

University Press of Colorado

Contents

Donald L. Fixico Foreword.........................................................................................................................viiAcknowledgments...................................................................................................................................xiColleen O'Neill 1 Rethinking Modernity and the Discourse of Development in American Indian History, an Introduction...............................1PART I COMMERCE AND INCORPORATIONPaul C. Rosier 2 Searching for Salvation and Sovereignty: Blackfeet Oil Leasing and the Reconstruction of the Tribe...............................27David La Vere 3 Minding Their Own Business: The Kiowa-Comanche-Apache Business Committee of the Early 1900s.......................................52Jessica R. Cattelino 4 Casino Roots: The Cultural Production of Twentieth-Century Seminole Economic Development...................................66Nicolas G. Rosenthal 5 The Dawn of a New Day? Notes on Indian Gaming in Southern California.......................................................91Kathy M'Closkey 6 The Devil's in the Details: Tracing the Fingerprints of Free Trade and Its Effects on Navajo Weavers............................112PART II WAGE WORKTressa Berman 7 "All We Needed Was Our Gardens": Women's Work and Welfare Reform in the Reservation Economy.......................................133David Arnold 8 Work and Culture in Southeastern Alaska: Tlingits and the Salmon Fisheries.........................................................156Clyde Ellis 9 Five Dollars a Week to Be "Regular Indians": Shows, Exhibitions, and the Economics of Indian Dancing, 1880-1930.....................184Jeffrey P. Shepherd 10 Land, Labor, and Leadership: The Political Economy of Hualapai Community Building, 1910-1940...............................209William Bauer 11 Working for Identity: Race, Ethnicity, and the Market Economy in Northern California, 1875-1936..................................238PART III METHODOLOGY AND THEORETICAL IMPLICATIONSC. D. James Paci and Lisa Krebs 12 Local Knowledge as Traditional Ecological Knowledge: Definition and Ownership..................................261Brian Hosmer 13 "Dollar a Day and Glad to Have It": Work Relief on the Wind River Indian Reservation as Memory....................................283Duane Champagne 14 Tribal Capitalism and Native Capitalists: Multiple Pathways of Native Economy..................................................308Brian Hosmer and Colleen O'Neill 15 Conclusion....................................................................................................330About the Contributors............................................................................................................................335Index.............................................................................................................................................341

Chapter One

One afternoon several years ago I was browsing through the stacks in the library, and I stumbled on a book entitled Stories of Traditional Navajo Life and Culture. That book, published in 1977 by the Navajo Community College Press and edited by its director, Broderick Johnson, included stories from twenty-two Navajo men and women about their "traditional culture."

Traditional culture? My research was on twentieth-century labor and working-class history. I was interested in "the modern." So the book sat on my desk for weeks while I tried to sort out the "modern" evidence I'd found in the archives, stories that were at best fragmented snapshots. Most troubling were the absences, the invisibility of Navajo workers in the documents. Where were the Navajo workers? Surely Navajo men worked in the coal mines in Gallup, one of the most industrialized towns bordering the reservation in the mid-twentieth century. I pored over payroll and company housing records, newspaper accounts, and company correspondence and found little evidence that could help me describe the experience or even the existence of Navajo workers in Gallup in the 1930s and 1940s.

When I finally opened the book that promised, at least in my imagination, sacred stories of emergence and fables that stressed values of pastoral traditions, I found something that made me reexamine my assumptions: workers. Almost every narrator in the book told a story about some sort of wage work-working on the railroads, in the agriculture fields, for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, or at a trading post. They remembered the everyday struggles they faced in their jobs, as well as their ongoing efforts to fulfill customary kinship and ceremonial obligations. For these Navajos, "modernity" and "tradition" were overlapping, not mutually exclusive, categories. Navajo people met their sacred responsibilities as well as the demands of the capitalist workplace.

This research vignette illustrates how one's underlying assumptions about culture, tradition, and modernity shape modes of inquiry as well as the eventual narratives-large and small. The rigid modern/traditional dichotomy that too often marks historical writing is a by-product of a larger problem that renders American Indians invisible within the broad narrative of American history. That narrative, steeped in positivist assumptions, tends to embrace and naturalize a universalized notion of modernity.

Modernity, as a guiding social principle or state ideology, emerged during the eighteenth century. Enlightenment thinkers challenged the basic worldview and social structures of Western European society, rejecting the absolute power of kings and the association of knowledge with the realm of Christianity. They advocated a rationalization of power, ideas, and social relationships. As geographer David Harvey explains, "It was, above all, a secular movement that sought the demystification and desacralization of knowledge and social organization in order to liberate human beings from their chains." Part of that modernizing project involved seeking universal truths about human nature through scientific observation, logic, and reason. Proponents were, of course, assuming that there was a universal humanity to be revealed. In the search for a singular truth and the application of reason to political and economic realms, Enlightenment leaders generalized that which was "true" for Western European societies to the rest of the world. As states contested for power in Europe and in their colonial holdings abroad, the "appeal to reason" increasingly informed expansionist ideology, justifying conquest of indigenous peoples as well as provoking opposition from nationalists...