Issues in Native American Representation

Images and America’s Indians: Race, discrimination and stereotypes

Last time we looked at the power of words, and began a look at some of the images with the sports mascots issue.

Stereotype exercise:

Put two columns on your paper, and label them "positive" and "negative."

List images and stereotypes of Indians according to your judgement of the stereotype.

Examine each one for truths/untruths.

These should show you the complexity and confusion of the issues: do we understand 1) race, 2) ethnicity and 3) prejudice?

Race

What exactly is race to you? Skin color (redskin), religion (Jewish race), nationality (British), human species (human race)

Newman defines it as "a category of people who have been singled out as inferior or superior, often on the basis of physical characteristics such as skin color, hair texture, and eye shape."

It is a term that anthropologists don't like to use because they recognize that the nature of racial groupings is "silly."  All humans are essentially part of  a species continuum of physical characteristics that developed as part of adaptations to particular environments. We are one species, equally capable.

Still, anthropologists, but especially sociologists and political scientists, recognize that people categorize, rightly or wrongly, on these physical characteristics, often attributing positive and negative assessments to them.

Ethnicity

An ethnic group, as defined by Feagin and Feagin, is a collection of people distinguished, by others or themselves, primarily on the basis of cultural or national characteristics. Ethnic groups share five main characteristics:

  1. unique cultural traits, such as language, clothing, holidays, religious practices
  2. a sense of community
  3. a feeling of ethnocentrism (your culture as the "best")
  4. ascribed membership from birth ( you are born into it)
  5. territoriality (occupying a distinct geographic area by choice and or for self-protection

There s a tendency to use race and ethnicity interchangeably, but most believe the distinction between the two is significant.

How important are race and ethnicity in America?

Race permeates every institution, every relationship and every individual. It is part of our individual thought processes. We seemed compelled to think racially, to use racial categories and meaning systems into which we have been socialized.

Race and ethnicity are the basis of hierarchical ranking in our society, with dominant groups holding power over subordinate groups, with dominant groups having the best of matters.

Prejudice

It literally means to pre-judge, based on some set of criteria or characteristics, generally in a negative way. Gordon Allport defined it in a more formal way, "as a negative attitude based on faulty generalizations about members of selected racial and ethnic groups."

Think of how these stereotypes abound. We've noted several about Indians. We'll talk more about this, but think of the sports names: Atlanta Braves, Cleveland Indians, Golden State Warriors, Washington Redskins, Chicago Blackhawks, Kansas City Chiefs.  Think of the images, gestures, and attributes of the mascots.

Racial prejudice like this is often called racism, that is, a belief that some racial or ethnic groups are superior or inferior to others.

Racism may subtle or overt.

How do you measure prejudice?

Sociologists use the concept of social distance, that is, the extent to which people are willing to interact and establish relationship with members of racial and ethnic groups other than their own.

There are actual scale, using such variable as minimal contact or marriage. Some groups, interestingly, have less social distance than others.

Indians are one group that generally has a lower level of social distance from the dominant society. This may be the result of the fact that they are native to the land, not some sort of import like African or Asian Americans.

Social distance varies from time to time.

Now it's cool to be Indian or part Indian, but that has not always been the case.

Discrimination

Whereas prejudice is an attitude, discrimination involves actions or practices of the dominant groups members that have a harmful effect on members of a subordinate group.

Prejudice doesn't always lead to discrimination.

Severity of discrimination can vary, and this is well demonstrated by the history of the dominant society toward Indians.

Genocide is the most dramatic form and is the deliberate, systematic killing of an entire nation or people.

Individual discrimination consists of one-on-one acts by members of the dominant group that harms members of the subordinate  group or their property.

Institutional discrimination consists of day-to-day practices of organizations and institutions that have a harmful impact on members of subordinate groups, but often is carried out by individuals:

  1. Isolate discrimination is harmful action intentionally taken by a dominant group member against a subordinate group member. Example: a judge who gives Indian defendants for drunk driving harsher sentences than white dwi's .
  2. Small-groups discrimination is harmful action taken by a limited number of dominant group members, outside the accepted norms of   community.  Vermillion sweat lodge example.
  3. Direct institutionalized discrimination is organizationally prescribed or community-prescribed actin that intentionally has a differential and negative effect on subordinate group. Exclusion of people from public accommodations. Still the case in certain towns in SD where Indians can't go into certain bars and restaurants.
  4. Indirect institutionalized discrimination refers to practices that have a harmful effect on the subordinate group members even though the organizational or community norms have no intent to harm. For Indians, this could well be the establishment and maintenance of reservations, but this is complex.

The biggest stereotype of them all is that Indians are all alike.

Where does that come from?

A prelude to real scholarship, really, filled with questions and armchair speculation about the origins of American Indians

a. Three trends

1. Latin American emphasis based on chronicles of the conquistadors, priests - administrative "spin-off" of the Conquest  largely in the 16th and 17th centuries

2. Explorer and traveler accounts of the interior of NA and Latin America

Object was to produce works of literary merit, but using a natural scientific tone, describing objects in detail-many detailed descriptions of mounds and earthworks, as well as ethnographic descriptions of Indian people that we still use today for our histories.

3. An almost ephemeral trend that began the next period:  efforts to undertake excavation and survey of archaeological sites as well as the first ethnography

Certainly all these trends overlap

Dominance of speculation as a mode of thought was due to a number of factors

1. Most important was the lack of reliable data

2. Acceptance of theological modes of explanation limited other possibilities

3. Non-existence of a tradition of scientific thought

4. A continuing sense of wonder at the exotic nature of the New World .

What we are talking about really, then, is non-scientific conjecture

Again, you have to understand what a shock the existence of Americans Indians was to Europeans

Of course, to say that Europeans discovered America must be an unbelievable joke to Native Americans

But, their existence had tremendous significance for European philosophical thought, politics and economics of the time

16th century intellectuals were profoundly excited, and their imaginations were stirred, raising a number of pressing questions

1. Who are the Indians? Varied and plentiful answers

2. Where did they come from? Were they children of God?

The historic Papal Bull of Pope Paul III in 1537 and the work of Antonio de Montesinos and Bartolomé de las Casas, Indians were declared to be human beings which must have been news to "the people"

Implication was that they should be missionized

Answers:

1. Favorite was the Lost Tribes of Israel

2. A close second was that they were survivors of Atlantis; Mu was also popular, proposed by Churchward, but has lost popularity

3. Several Dutch scholars , especially De Groot proposed what was probably the first of the Viking origins -- Indians were really Scandinavians

4. Asian origins were also proposed

As far back as 1590, José de Acosta suggested a slow overland migration from Asia, where he said " small groups of savage hunters" took an overland route with "short stretches of navigation," perhaps 2000 years before the Conquest

5. By mid 17th century, in 1637, a Bering Strait migration was being seriously considered, especially after Cook mapped the strait

In it all, as Edwin Wilmsen has pointed out, these writers had no concepts of time, space, or culture to handle the idea of what these first inhabitants were.

Forerunners of modern anthropology also appeared early, but sometimes at opposite ends of the spectrum.

Bishop Diego de Landa worked closely with the Maya, gave excellent descriptions Chichen Itza, hieroglyphs and calendrical system at the same time that he burned their codexes and other documents

Fray Bartolemé de las Casas worked in Chiapas, but was a champion of Indians, trying to seek fair treatment for them. He published two works that looked as Indians as part of a scheme of human development, almost rudimentary cultural evolution and looked at them in relation to the environment

Trends appeared that resulted in the so-called Moundbuilder Myth.

1. Explorers who were used a natural scientific approach which is still reflected in the fact that Indians and archaeology tend to be in natural history museums instead of history museums

2. Most were not directly on the scene or as involved Armchair explorers using a literary approach

Moundbuilder Myth

Well documented by Robert Silverberg in The Moundbuilders of Ancient America: The Archaeology of Myth, (1968, New York Graphic Society)

The myth can be traced back to 1785, but its real heydey was in the 19th century

Held that the many mounds or ruins found all over eastern North America could not have been made by the "savage" who were living in the area. Therefore, they must have been built by a civilized race that disappeared. Silverberg suggests reasons:

1. The need for an heroic past that would resemble that of Europe --  reasons are complex

2. Second reason is the relative comparison of the mounds and earthworks to the pyramids of Mexico. How could the Indian people they saw have built such thing?

In one sense you can understand this. They were seeing a people who had been moved out of homelands, decimated by disease, a mere "shadow" of their former cultures.

3. Little attention paid to the traditions of the people themselves -- that would come later --  that showed a long tradition of moundbuilding

What followed, and is well covered in Stephen Williams' Fantastic Archaeology, is in some ways almost hysterically funny.

Cultural Ecology, Adaptation, and Cultural Evolution

By the 1930s, most anthropologists were beginning to realize that human cultures were a product of adaptation to their environments.

Earlier notions of cultural evolution from the late 1800s, especially Unilinear Evolution, were discarded.

In unilinear evolution, cultures evolved from savages to barbarians to civilized.

The notion of progress was associated with it. Somehow Indians were labeled in the savage category.

It was also associated with the ideas of Social Darwinism and became part of "Manifest Destiny."

With the ideas of Julian Steward, based on his work with Shoshoni Indian peoples of the Great Basin, a more reasonable understanding of cultural evolution developed.

Multilinear evolution said that cultures change at different rates based on adjustments to environments.

Cultural ecology, a related concept, says that cultures adapt to the changes in the natural and social environments in which they live.

Cultural ecology is probably the dominant viewpoint of most anthropologists and many other social scientists.

There are related principles that help us account for the extreme diversity  of   American Indian cultures.

Form, Function and Meaning

Just because something is present in two or more places does not mean it is the same

Form: an object's physical characteristics, capable of being measured; morphology
Function: an object's use; the purpose it serves for those who use it; a position or role in a system
Meaning: what the object and its function means to those who use it

These are very deceptive. The electric chair in Ethiopia.

In diffusion arguments, these are crucial.

Diffusion

Diffusion: the spread of objects or ideas from one place to another

Complex diffusion: a whole complex of objects, their functions and their meanings are transmitted.

Rarely happens except in cases of conquest or colonization

Single Trait diffusion: a few or a single item is transmitted

Frequently happens, mostly in trade

Stimulus diffusion: an idea or concept, but not a physical object, is transmitted

Frequently happens in culture contact, imitation of ideas, but with local execution

Independent Invention

Independent Invention: roughly the same ideas , concepts or physical forms appear in different places without contact between the places

Occurs more often than people realize

Similar situations of ecology, modes of production, social organization lead to similar solutions to similar problems

However, even though form may be similar, function and meaning can be very different. As well objects can have the same function or meaning, but vastly different forms

Time of appearance may be very different, and if so, this must be explained

Too often in speculation, few of these ideas are considered and people easily assume diffusion.

These problems led many during the Speculative Period and many of the contemporary period who engage in "hyperdiffusionism" such as Barry Fell in his many books.

Oral Tradition

Historicity -- Just how historical is it?

Does it contain temporal information that we can use?

Does it contain information about geography we can use?

Does it contain material "markers" that are archaeologically recoverable?

Oral tradition's advantage is its immediacy, but that causes you to think in terms of a "present" past

The Culture Area approach

Alfred Kroeber, Clark Wissler  and others, generally found similar cultures areas living in similar environmental zones.

Seems intuitive now, but was not so clear in the 1920s-1940s.

Most categorized peoples by subsistence methods, but tied in a range of other cultural practices.

There have been several different categories but most now agree on:

See the typical culture area map in the Classroom Materials section. Also read the sections on culture areas in Native North America.

Actually, these categories have entered into the popular culture in a big way. They are now the main descriptors of Indian groups.

One needs to question whether it is still a useful concept.