Read an Excerpt
Cross-Cultural Collaboration
Native Peoples and Archaeology in the Northeastern United States
University of Nebraska Press
Copyright © 2006
University of Nebraska PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0-8032-7817-9
Foreword
JOE WATKINS
American Indian issues have always been interwoven with politics, and
even American holidays are not exempt. Think about your earliest
memories of Thanksgiving. Remember the stories of how the
Pilgrims, starving that very first winter, were saved by the Indians? Remember
the story of Squanto, the Indian who taught the Pilgrims to plant
corn kernels and fish in the same mound-the fish serving as fertilizer to
help the corn grow better? If you remember those stories, you have probably
come to realize how large a role American Indians played in helping
the Pilgrims survive and flourish.
But there are other stories that are rarely told, stories about how some of
the Pilgrim explorers, in search of the inhabitants of the land, happened
across a grave. They dug into it and found the bones and skull of a man,
and the bones and head of a little child along with some cultural material
placed with the bodies. One of the discoverers wrote that they took some
of the prettiest things away and covered the corpse up again. In November
1620, only days after the Pilgrims had anchored off Cape Cod, American
Indian graves had already been plundered for their contents (Heath
1963 [1622]).
The Indians of the northeastern United States bore the brunt of the
European colonial expansion. Even while the English settlers "treatied"
with the Indians as separate nations, they continued to play one group
against the other in the quest to dominate the environment and to establish
a nation apart from England. With independence from England in
1776, the fledgling United States government continued to maintain formal
relationships with American Indians through treaties. In the early
days of the United States, when it was still a small country, the government
entered into treaties with the tribes to gain land, friendship, and
military allies against the French to the north and west and the English
to the south and east.
While generally the relationships between the federal government and
Indian tribes were good, there were often conflicts between local nonindigenous
populations and tribal groups at the individual state and local
level. With the continued movement of American citizens into westward
lands, there came to be more conflicts over Indian rights and the need for
more land for non-Indians. As both the population in the east and the
need for arable land grew, the United States entered into more and more
treaties with the tribes for land. Some tribes signed treaties whereby they
agreed to give up tracts of land in exchange for promises of protection, for
money, and for other lands to the west, while others continued to fight to
maintain control over their homelands.
In the 1830s, Samuel J. Worcester, a missionary residing within the Cherokee
country lands in Georgia, was placed in a Georgia jail for refusing
to take an oath of allegiance to the state and for failing to obtain a permit
to allow him to reside in Cherokee country. The case went all the way to
the U.S. Supreme Court, and in 1832 the Court decided that the Cherokees
(and all Indian tribes, by extension) were sovereign nations not under
the jurisdiction of the states. The decision, written by Chief Justice
John Marshall, is important in that it established the idea that American
Indians were "domestic dependent nations"-separate nations that exist
within the borders of the United States but that rely on the United States
government for particular benefits.
This decision should have been enough to establish a firm relationship
between the states and the Indian tribes, but the president of the United
States at the time, Andrew Jackson, supported the State of Georgia over
the Supreme Court and refused to enforce Marshall's decision (Prucha
1962:245).
With the precedent set by the removal of the southeastern tribes, federal
policy pushed many other tribes out of their homelands and to faraway
places in Indian Territory. Many of the tribes that had once existed
in the Northeast were forced farther and farther west. The Lenni-Lenape
(also known as the Delaware), for example, moved from the East Coast
to Ohio, then on to Missouri and Kansas. One band moved to the Brazos
River in central Texas, where they stayed until being moved to western
Oklahoma along with the Caddo, Wichita, and other affiliated bands
of Indians in 1859. The remainder of the Lenape remained in Kansas until,
following the Civil War and continuing encroachment onto tribal land
by whites in Kansas, the tribe moved to Indian Territory, where it aligned
itself with the Cherokee Tribe. They were subsumed under the Cherokee
Nation in 1867 (Wright 1979).
During the remainder of the 1800s, Indian tribes continued to be pushed
to the limits of American "civilization." Some coped with the demands for
their land by agreeing to treaty stipulations, while others chose to withdraw
from the public eye. Tribes signed treaty after treaty, each treaty
promising to protect their new lands and their boundaries. By the end of
the 1800s, as treaty after treaty was broken or as tribes moved farther and
farther from encroaching populations, Indian tribes no longer had free
access to the land that was once theirs.
As a result of the stream of treaties made between the U.S. government
and Indian tribes, most Indians chose to move westward to newer lands.
Since the treaties called for Indian people to give up their lands in their
traditional homelands, it was easy for people in the East to believe that Indians
no longer existed in the northeastern United States. And while some
tribal people did remain in the East, their earlier withdrawal made it easier
for state and local governments to ignore their continued presence.
Thus, throughout the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries,
people in the northeastern United States grew complacent in the
incorrect knowledge of the vanished Indian. Sure, everyone knew Indians
still existed in places like Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Arizona, but
no one believed there were still Indians where the Pilgrims had established
their dominance over the land, since, by treaty, the Indians had
supposedly moved from the area. While the bulk of the Lenni-Lenape,
as described above, did journey west, many chose to stay on their traditional
lands and "hide in plain sight," as Cara Blume put it to me (personal
communication 2003). They publicly hid their "Indianness" but privately
maintained their Indian way of life so that they could remain on the
lands their families had owned and controlled rather than being forced
westward with the others.
Other tribes throughout the United States have had to deal with governmental
programs aimed at helping them disappear and "melt" into the socalled
American melting pot. In the 1930s, the United States government
tried to change the ways that American Indians' relationship with the U.S.
government was structured. The Wheeler-Howard Act, better known as
the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, encouraged the creation of tribal
councils and constitutions in an attempt to allow the Indians to govern
themselves, to change the existing injustices on the reservations, and to
point the Indians on the road to "progress." Some headway toward creating
better tribal control of their affairs was made, but a new policy came
into being that seemed to stop those gains.
In 1953, with the passage of House Current Resolution 108, Congress indicated
its intent to "terminate" federal relations with tribes and to allow
Indians to assimilate into the mainstream of the American public. This
act, in effect, would simply have allowed the U.S. government to ignore
all the treaties it had entered into with the Indian tribes. This proposed
program was met with resistance by the tribes, although some (such as
the Menominee) actually chose to "terminate" and divide their holdings
among tribal members. Finally, however, in 1958 the government ceased
trying to terminate Indian tribes and reinstated programs aimed at providing
care and support to them.
The Mashantucket Pequot situation is another example of the "disappeared"
Indian of the Northeast. While once a prosperous nation under
the English, after the founding of the United States the tribe's fortunes
grew thin. The move by the Connecticut General Assembly in 1855 to sell
off all but 86 ha of tribal land was intended to provide the tribe with funds
to help the tribe endure, but it seemed to produce the opposite result by
furthering the erosion of the tribe's land base and forcing tribal members
away from the reservation. According to a tribal Web site, by 1935 only 42 people lived on the Pequot Reservation. In
1975, with the election of Richard "Skip" Hayward as tribal chairman, the
Pequot began the lengthy process of regaining federal recognition, which
was finally regained in 1983. While the Mashantucket never "disappeared,"
they were required to go through the lengthy recognition process in order
to "reappear" within the federal Indian affairs process. This seems to be
true for many Indians in the Northeast. They never disappeared, but no
one seemed to see them as they "melted" into their surroundings.
There are other stories-of the Stockbridge or Housatonic, the Munsee,
the Lumbee-stories of people recognized as different from the general
population around them yet no longer recognized as "Indian" by that
same population. They were people without a country, to a great extent,
and people without standing within the Indian affairs that separated them
from their ancestors and their ways of life.
Federal law has, in some regards, acted to place blinders on many archaeologists
and anthropologists involved in cultural or heritage resource
management by legislating the standing of Indian tribes within the historic
preservation process. While federal law has decreed that projects undertaken
with federal monies or requiring federal permits must involve a cultural
resources inventory to document the impact of that action on historic
properties, it has done so at the expense of those groups of Indians that are
not federally recognized as Indians under federal law. The 1992 amendments
to the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 have allowed increased
tribal participation in the federal historic preservation program,
and the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA)
of 1990 has given tribal groups standing to participate in the repatriation
of human skeletal remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, and objects
of cultural patrimony. These laws, however, do not grant equal standing
to federally recognized and non-federally recognized tribes. Non-federally
recognized tribes have no greater standing within the historic preservation
process than that of an "interested party," equal to the standing of
the Sierra Club, for example; under nagpra, museums and other parties
can repatriate materials to non-federally recognized tribes only if federally
recognized tribes do not protest the proposed repatriation.
Who speaks for the non-federally recognized groups of Indians that,
by all accounts, are Indians, have suffered the fate of all Indians, but who
stayed behind rather than migrate west? In the past, I have argued that
staying behind and "hiding," rather than openly being "Indian" and moving,
was "copping out." But who among us should judge people whose fear
of removal coupled with their love for their land or their religious duty led
them to tacitly deny their "Indianness" by not openly admitting to it?
Since federal law does not require consultation with these non-recognized
Indians, many archaeologists do not feel it necessary to consult with
them. While it may not be legally necessary to consult with them, is it not
ethically necessary to do so? Shouldn't we involve these groups in the federal
preservation process to the greatest extent possible rather than bury
our heads in the sand and claim legal freedom not to do so?
I think it important that archaeologists in the Northeast-where colonial
and later U.S. relationships with Indians were forged-work with
all Indian people to gain a greater understanding of the culture history of
their areas. I feel that the need for collaboration among all parties in the
Northeast is greater than in other parts of the country where there is a
strong and active Indian presence. Indian life and culture are experiencing
a rebirth in the Northeast. Some local populations are afraid of that
rebirth, while other groups, as represented by the chapters in this volume,
recognize and embrace the opportunities that rebirth offers. Those of us
who have been outsiders watching from a distance are far from neutral
about the burgeoning growth of American Indian activities in the Northeast,
and I do believe all of us will benefit from it.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Cross-Cultural Collaboration
Copyright © 2006 by University of Nebraska Press.
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