American Indian Culture and Research Journal

We live in an era of the proliferation of the use of apology and attempts at formal reconciliation by national governments and civil institutions, such as churches, to breach grievances with particular populations within the national borders. This is the case in Canada as well as the United States concerning indigenous peoples and other groups. Although these apologies are accompanied by various well-publicized ritualized events there is inadequate recognition by state officials of the preexisting and long-established cultural practices of apology in these indigenous communities. As a consequence, there can be a gulf between the practices of the state and local indigenous people’s expectations regarding how apology and reconciliation should properly occur. These issues have received little direct scholarly attention. My claim is that indigenous North Americans, and no doubt many others, already have ways of understanding how historical grievances should rightly be handled and that they have become less and less willing to put up with imposed, Western-derived models. In this text, I describe historic Coast Salish ritual practices and the concepts regarding wrongdoing and redemption that underlie them. I draw out the implications, particularly the associated dangers, derived from these existing rituals for ritual work conducted by outsiders engaging Coast Salish peoples. Finally, I consider the responses of Coast Salish peoples to recent apologies and reparations in Washington State and British Columbia. Despite the difficulties and potential traps, there can be positive benefits to considering existing cultural practices and incorporating them with top-down state-driven apologies. Over the last few generations, Coast Salish leaders have developed their own ways of incorporating representatives of government and industry within local rituals of reconciliation. But, as I have noted, the state’s use of rituals of apology to manage relations with constituent groups internationally creates the context for this development in North America, and so I briefly consider the insights and shortcomings of current scholarship on these issues.

The coast of British Columbia (BC) is host to runs of salmon that have been the economic, social, and cultural basis of Northwest Coast Native societies for millennia. Wild salmon hatch in streams and spend varying amounts of time there before migrating to the ocean. After spending up to several years in the ocean, these fish return to their natal streams to spawn once, then die. These spawning cycles facilitated productive Native fisheries over the centuries and, since the 1870s, industrial fisheries for global markets. Today, industrial salmon aquaculture sites can be found almost everywhere in the protected waters near shore, along the migration routes of what were once flourishing populations of Pacific salmon. Fish farms compound the destructive effects of more than a century of logging, overfishing, and urbanization on the wild salmon fisheries. The most direct and striking impacts of fish farms—ones that are directly observed by many local Native people—are the spread of fish diseases and waste materials into the surrounding habitat. Sea lice infestations of wild stocks are on the rise: these parasites and other disease organisms concentrate in the densely stocked net pens and appear to spread easily to passing wild salmon. Although a few fish farms are stocked with chinook salmon, a species that is native to the region, most farm sites contain Atlantic salmon. The reality of salmon escapes from net pens and the fact that Atlantic salmon originating from fish farms have been shown to spawn successfully in BC’s rivers have raised grave concerns about the ecological consequences of the invasion of local streams by this exotic species of salmon. Furthermore, the effects of the sewage emanating from fish farms are often noted by Native people using traditional clam digging and fishing spots.

Throughout the many years I have taught Native American traditions, I have encountered a plethora of colleagues who have been all too willing to dismiss a Native precontact intellectual tradition. Recently a colleague told me that, in spite of Native luminaries such as Black Elk and Tecumseh, there was no historic tradition of philosophy among American Indians. Qualifying his remarks, he quickly added that there was nothing similar to the philosophical discourse characteristic of the ancient Greeks present among precontact American Indians. Given that this arrogance is beyond reason, I was disposed to restraint in my reply. It is simply wrong to conclude that philosophy, the love of wisdom, is not intrinsic to all human intellectual traditions. So I suggested to my colleague that he was putting the cart before the horse, championing method over substance. The failure of Native elders to cast their wisdom within the genre of Platonic dialogue does not lessen the importance and value of their intelligence. Form is no substitute for value. This denial of Native American intellectual traditions is nothing new among Westerners and their repeated failure to acknowledge alternative, non-Western epistemologies and wisdom-centered traditions. What is disturbing, however, is the presence of this mentality among American intellectuals after thirty-plus years of embracing American Indian Studies within the academy. Although Native American philosophies are not ensconced in dialogues characteristic of Plato and his intellectual associates from ancient Greece, wisdom is highly evident and manifest in American Indian oral narrative traditions. In part, this disregard of Native wisdom is centered at the origin of Western philosophy and Plato’s response to the spoken word.

“Maine appears out of the woods,” the editor of the Lewiston Evening Journal opined, after President Jimmy Carter signed the Maine Indian Claims Settlement Act in 1980. That sigh of relief was heartfelt. During the 1970s, two Native American tribes, the Passamaquoddies and Penobscots, had sparked a long, statewide nightmare when they asserted claim to more than twelve million acres of land in the Pine Tree State. To the Indians, their claim and the ensuing settlement represented long-delayed justice. For private-property owners, however, the controversy unleashed great anxiety about the future of Maine’s economy. To leaders in the Maine statehouse, Congress, and the White House, the matter was a conundrum pitting the demands of an aggrieved racial minority against the ire of an aroused white majority. When Congress, in 1980, granted the Passamaquoddies and Penobscots federal recognition and $81.5 million in cash, from which they could purchase up to three hundred thousand acres of land, all sides breathed easier. The land claims of these tribes form a compelling, albeit overlooked (by historians), story that illustrates three larger themes. The first involves the Native American rights movement, whose leadership and tactics proved quite diverse. Along with elected leaders located on federal reservations and urban-based “Red Power” radicals—the founders of the American Indian Movement (AIM)—it included a new generation of university-educated activists who worked with tribal officials to reclaim Indian land, fishing, and water rights through lawsuits. One columnist noted that “the trend among most of the Western tribes seems to be toward organizing for court action and away from violent protest.” It was a similar story in the East, where Indians, lacking both federal recognition and extensive reservations, had little to lose by suing in court.

INTRODUCTION This article provides a review and summary of six years of research on food assistance and nutrition issues on Indian reservations across America that was carried out by tribal college faculty, staff, and students. An assessment of the impacts and implications of this unique research program on the tribal colleges and communities involved is also included. The American Indian Studies (AIS) program at the University of Arizona, which provided administration and technical assistance for the research, is one of five small-grants research centers created by the Economic Research Service (ERS) within the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). Between 1998 and 2004, AIS provided funding to tribal colleges throughout Indian Country for thirteen projects. Research topics varied widely and included, for example, the impacts of food assistance policy and programmatic requirement changes on those utilizing federal, state, local, and tribal food assistance programs; the availability of healthy and nutritious foods at trading posts and convenience stores on reservation lands; and the documentation of the loss of traditional foods in Native peoples’ diets and the feasibility and attendant potential cultural, social, and health impacts of reintroducing those traditional foods into modern and socially complex tribal communities. The authors argue that the overall body of research developed through this small-grants program is unique, important, and groundbreaking when compared to previously available literature for several reasons, including research project design and implementation by tribal college faculty and staff, the utilization of tribal college students in the research process, and the unique and critical roles tribal colleges play in their communities.

INTRODUCTION Energy in the form of electricity is a hot topic among tribes within the Western Regional Air Partnership (WRAP). For too many people, energy is too expensive, not reliable, or even nonexistent. For many tribal members, up to 20 or 30 percent of income is spent on energy, which is unbelievably high compared to nontribal people in the same area. Many houses and buildings within Indian nations connected to the existing electrical power grid are at the end of these lines and far away from the power source. As a result, any interruptions throughout the line will disrupt power to these houses and buildings. Thousands more homes and buildings are not connected to the existing grid and have no electricity. Creating energy plans specific to the needs of the tribal members will help bridge the gap between the current energy situation and the energy system tribes envision. The initial critical step in establishing an energy plan is to have a complete and specific energy destination in mind. A stock of what is currently possessed needs to be determined in order to understand the resources needed to reach the destination. This destination must meet the common needs of members of the tribe and should go hand-in-hand with other tribal objectives, such as economic development, creation of jobs, and cultural values. It is necessary to define the baseline electrical energy profile for the tribe. This profile should include inventory of total current, expected, and peak load electricity use expressed in megawatts (MW) and megawatt hours (MWh). An inventory of renewable energy electricity-generation capacity and production needs to be determined. Also, the percentage of total electricity-generation capacity and production due to renewable energy needs to be established. This article provides an overview of the process for developing a tribal energy plan. The process includes the following steps: development of a tribal energy vision, energy efficiency (EE) programs, renewable energy resource development, electrification programs, and energy plan implementation. Working with the Hualapai tribe in Arizona, the workshop curriculum was presented and led to instantaneous EE projects. Tribes should begin the process of energy planning for economic development (cost savings, revenue generation, job creation, and profit creation), energy independence, cultural integrity, and to increase tribal sovereignty.