Tribal Worlds

Critical Studies in American Indian Nation Building

Brian Hosmer, Larry Nesper

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781438446318
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Native American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Tribal Worlds considers the emergence and general project of indigenous nationhood in several geographical and historical settings in Native North America. Ethnographers and historians address issues of belonging, peoplehood, sovereignty, conflict, economy, identity, and colonialism among the Northern Cheyenne and Kiowa on the Plains, several groups of the Ojibwe, the Makah of the Northwest, and two groups of Iroquois. Featuring a new essay by the eminent senior scholar Anthony F. C. Wallace on recent ethnographic work he has done in the Tuscarora community, as well as provocative essays by junior scholars, Tribal Worlds explores how indigenous nationhood has emerged and been maintained in the face of aggressive efforts to assimilate Native peoples.

I

Definitions

1

Tuscarora Political Domains

Anthony F. C. Wallace

When I was a young man, in 1948 and 1949, I stayed on the Tuscarora Indian Reservation with my wife Betty and two-year-old son Monty to do research for my doctoral dissertation. After Betty's death in 2003, I was invited back to Tuscarora by the Bissell family (descendants of the family we had stayed with fifty years before) to renew old ties, to see what had changed, to discover what I had missed the first time. As I was told to say, “I am old but I am still learning.” Much of what I have learned is an appreciation of aspects of the Tuscarora social system that I did not adequately perceive back then.

The Tuscarora Nation territory is located a few miles north of the city of Niagara Falls in western New York State. It is a little green oasis on the edge of an aging military-industrial landscape, overshadowed by spidery electric transmission towers marching across the fields like an invading army from Mars, and perched on the escarpment overlooking the largest dump-site for chemical and radioactive waste (left over from the Manhattan Project) still remaining in the northeastern United States. The Tuscaroras are one of the several Iroquois (Haudenosaunee) communities within the state. It is one of the smaller reserves, only nine square miles, with a population of about 1,000 souls. The landscape has changed: a 40-foot earthen dike looms over confiscated land on the western horizon, holding back the water of the reservoir that feeds the Niagara Power Station. There are a new brick elementary school and a new Baptist Church, a new picnic grove for the Nation Picnic, a new gymnasium, a new Nation Building, a new lacrosse courtyard. Most everybody has TV. Only one home is without electricity.

The Tuscaroras are an industrious people. There are a number of native business establishments on the Reserve, including four cigarette-and-gasoline stations owned by “Smokin' Joe” and his relatives, a few owned by his competitors including his former wife, two diners, a roofing and siding company and a general construction company, a lacrosse stick factory, a chiropractor, a paving company, an automobile repair shop, a junkyard, four mobile home parks, manufactories of Native crafts such as Indian dolls, a museum, a car wash, a grocery store, and a few vegetable stands in the summer. The economic basis of the community is no longer farming, which prospered in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but declined sharply after World War II. Most men and women make their living by wage work and professional careers off the Reserve.

The predominant language is English but there remain a few fluent speakers of Tuscarora and there is a growing number of adult learners. Tuscarora language and culture is taught in the Tuscarora Indian Elementary School on the reservation, grades pre-K to 6. Although the majority of the people attend the Baptist Church, the Mission Church, or the Holy Trinity Catholic Chapel on the Reserve, there is a small but growing number of adherents of the Handsome Lake Religion who attend meetings in the Longhouse either at Tonawanda Seneca Reservation nearby, or at the Six Nations Reserve in Canada. Much of the traditional system of belief in and respect for the spiritual forces of nature remains very much alive amongst all of the religions.¹ Almost all of the young people graduate from the Niagara-Wheatfield High School situated across the street from the Reserve, and a growing number go on to college; there are several persons who hold doctorates living on the Territory, and a respectable number of college-trained nurses and nurse practitioners, lawyers, artists, writers, and career military officers.

There are wealthy Tuscaroras and poor Tuscaroras living side by side, unlike White neighborhoods, which tend to be segregated by income in housing developments in the surrounding area. This intermixture of shabby and neat might give a casual visitor the impression that the Reserve's inhabitants are a class of poor people in comparison with the occupants of neat rows of White middle-class housing developments neighboring the Reserve. The variegated housing pattern on the Reserve is not the result of poverty but of an egalitarian social structure that encourages and supports diversity of life-choice. Small though it is, Tuscarora is a complex, complete, successful society.

Tuscaroras have a considerable antiquity of presence in New York State, whither they moved from North Carolina following the disastrous Tuscarora War of 1711–1713. Tuscarora would fit well into Edward Spicer's definition of “persistent cultural systems,” characterized by an ability to maintain a coherent identity, a sense of self as a society with a unique history, over long periods of time and in often changing and prevailingly hostile circumstances. Indeed, Spicer included the Tuscaroras' neighbors and sometime hosts, the Senecas, as an exemplar of such systems.² For over 300 years the Tuscaroras have maintained intact their participation in three traditional Native political domains: the Nation, the Community, and the Confederacy. This system of Native polity is not to be regarded as merely a dwindling survival of a former tribal status in North Carolina. One of the things I have learned is that what has kept the Tuscarora community alive in New York State is in fact their political system. The language has been largely lost, the Longhouse religion has been lost, their land base has been lost except for nine square miles, their population has been reduced by about 95 percent. But the political system survives: a system of life-chiefs chosen by matrilineal clans, a Chiefs' Council that “rules” loosely but “defends” the Nation strictly.

A basic feature of this Native political system, which distinguishes it from the European, is the absence of faith in and dependence on “the rule of law.” The Tuscaroras depend upon mutual respect, forbearance, and individual responsibility for social order. There are no police, no court, no jail, and the reservation is exempt from state and local government taxes and fees. Instead of paying taxes to the Nation for social services, Tuscaroras make voluntary donations of time, money, and goods to the Temperance Society, which organizes a variety of community activities, and attend the multitudinous “doings” held as benefits in response to death, illness, catastrophe, birthdays, marriages, school graduations, and observe a ceremonial calendar that includes such events as “Nu Yah,” the Nation Picnic, the Strawberry festival, and the various Christian holy days. Although Tuscarora has its problem of alcoholism and drug abuse, as do all American communities, there is a remarkable lack of visible public intoxication, there are no street gangs, no muggings, no spray-painted graffiti. One of the things that impressed me most on my return is that what I remember as “Lormsey's” general store, a wooden structure across the street from the school, empty, weather-beaten, unpainted, still after sixty years remained untouched by graffiti artists. Alas, the store burned down in 2011, under suspicious circumstances.

But from another perspective, turning aside from issues of cultural persistence and acculturation, the Tuscarora community can be seen as a prime example of what might be called a “holistic community,” comparable perhaps to other self-sustaining enclaves such as the Amish and other religious or ethnic groups, or experimental housing neighborhoods like those in Greenbelt, MD. These are to a degree self-governing residential oases within a larger region that maintains educational, medical, commercial, industrial, and governmental structures. Part of the holistic population works, plays, and trades by day outside the community, and withdraws by night to sleep and renew ties of family and community; but another part farms and plies various trades within the community. What makes the Tuscarora model so interesting is the demonstration that a Nation defined by ties of kinship rather than economic class, with minimal internal governmental apparatus, can function so well in a large complex society and global economy. It differs from the surrounding society in its egalitarian diversity and in the absence of a “rule of law” ethos.

Essential in this situation, however, is an informal compact (signified in the Haudenosaunee case by the recognition by the larger government of a concept of national sovereignty) that keeps the local town, county, and state police off the Reserve except when called for, or when in hot pursuit; and at the same time, the Nation can call upon the local agencies for fire and other emergencies via the 911 system. In return, Tuscarora residents volunteer their services and attend benefit gatherings for fire departments, schools, and other outside community institutions. It is a system of balanced reciprocity. The residents of the Reserve are exempt from paying state and local taxes on reservation property, from sales taxes on intra-reservation transactions, and although they are required to obtain hunting licenses, these are issued without fee as part of the understanding of treaty obligations. Tuscaroras, however, pay state and federal income taxes on money earned off the Reserve, sales taxes on merchandise purchased off the Reserve, property taxes on land owned off the Reserve, And, of course, there is the well-publicized issue over Tuscarora and other Haudenosaunee (New York Iroquois) gas stations and cigarette vendors collecting state sales taxes from off the-reserve customers.

The Nation

People from many Indian nations live on the Tuscarora Reserve, which has a total population of about 1,000. The Tuscarora Nation itself, however, consists of only enrolled Tuscaroras. Tuscaroras obtain eligibility for enrollment from the mother, who must be an enrolled Tuscarora. As they say, “You are what your mother is.” Complicating matters, however, the Nation now observes a “quantum” rule in evaluating eligibility for enrollment when the mother applies for her children. The mother, in addition to descent from an unbroken line of enrolled Tuscarora mothers, must also demonstrate a paternal ancestry that includes not more than a critical number of non-enrolled fathers, Indian or non-Indian. The actual computation of the appropriate quantum of Tuscarora ancestry can be a challenging genealogical task, however, and the rule can potentially leave a child who is 100 percent Indian ineligible for enrollment in any Haudenosaunee nation.

Each enrolled Tuscarora also takes clan membership from the mother, joining her clan. The Nation, in effect, is composed of a set of exogamous matrilineal clans whose origin goes back into remote antiquity and whose future rests with the seven generations, at least, whose faces as they say are still unborn. The Haudenosaunee recognize nine clans: three of air, three of land, three of water. Each Nation has traditionally selected its own unique set of clans from this list. There are at present seven clans at Tuscarora: Turtle, Beaver, Bear, White Bear, Wolf, Snipe, and a seventh clan whose name is still in dispute, as either Deer or Sand Turtle. There used to be a Tuscarora Eel Clan but it has become extinct. It is sometimes alleged that the roster of clans does change somewhat over the years as a result of various circumstances: a single clan dividing into two, each of which bears the generic name of the original (an original Bear Clan, for instance, long ago divided into White Bear and Black Bear). In any case, these matrilineal clans are active political entities. They meet separately on various occasions to discuss and form opinion on public issues (such as a pending contract with the New York Power Authority), or to reach agreement on who should serve as the new “clan mother” after the death of the former incumbent. They may present their views on public issues to the Council of Chiefs. And, in classic Iroquoian form, the clan mother, after consultation with her clan, is responsible of nominating (“putting up”) the clan's candidate for a vacancy on the Council of Chiefs. Each clan is entitled to two chiefs, a Sachem Chief and a Sub-Chief (formerly called a “runner”). Such a nomination, if accepted by the Council, is transmitted to the Grand Council of the Confederacy at Onondaga, who if they accept will dispatch a delegation from the Elder Brothers (Seneca, Onondaga, and Mohawk) to Tuscarora to “condole” the new Chief (i.e., install him in office as the legitimate chief, recognized by the League). Recently, Christian nominees have not been condoled.

The Chiefs' Council convenes to discuss many issues such as issuing passports, paving roads, setting regulations for the school and clinic, opposing outside taxation and federal census taking, and settling land and inheritance disputes. The Council may pass “laws” such as a prohibition against bringing alcohol onto the Reserve, against certain interracial marriages, and against operating gaming establishments (such as bingo halls and casinos). Generally the state and federal governments support the authority of the Council to regulate such internal matters, although federal legislation has given the state of New York both criminal and civil jurisdiction over the state's Indian reservations, leaving the sovereignty of the Nation (officially recognized by the United States) in the perennial state of uncertainty that has endured since the Treaty of Fort Stanwix in 1784 at the end of the Revolution, despite the assurances of sovereignty contained or implied in the Treaty of Canandaigua in 1794, upon which reliance has been placed by generations of Hodenosaunee. The Council is recognized by state and federal authorities as the body that represents the Nation in dealing with outside governmental agencies, such as the courts, and with major corporations. The Council alone has the authority to negotiate the sale of any of the Nation's land to the Ogden Land Company (which holds a preemption right that goes back to 1797) on behalf of the Nation as a whole, whose enrolled members are the true owners. The Council also has jurisdiction over the use of the timberland on the Reserve and over the use of the land by commercial establishments. Although it respects private property rights of enrolled Tuscaroras, it reserves the power to settle inheritance disputes and allocate unused land or tracts needed for firewood. It controls the reserves of communally held National land. But the Council does not attempt to regulate domestic relations, automobile traffic, lawn care, and all the myriad “rules of law” that so much more closely constrain the private lives of White folks off the Reserve in apartment buildings, housing developments, and the streets of Niagara Falls. Thus, there is considerable freedom and diversity in the course of private lives, free of local government interference. And yet there seems to be no more street crime, or drug and alcohol abuse, or vandalism than one might find in nearby middle-class White communities. At public gatherings that I have attended, I have never seen a visibly drunken man or woman. And, although there is no ordinance, the people do not smoke in the public buildings on the Reserve, out of mutual respect. With order growing out of popular consensus, there is no entrenched bureaucracy to draw salaries or routinely attract bribes and pay-offs.

There has always been a background noise of criticism of the chiefs for alleged corruption and faulty judgm...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: Definitions
• Part II: Manifestations
• Consolidated Bibliography
• Contributors