Reservation Politics: Historical Trauma, Economic Development, and Intratribal Conflict
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For American Indians, tribal politics are paramount. They determine the standards for tribal enrollment, guide negotiations with outside governments, and help set collective economic and cultural goals. But how, asks Raymond I. Orr, has history shaped the American Indian political experience? By exploring how different tribes' politics and internal conflicts have evolved over time, Reservation Politics offers rare insight into the role of historical experience in the political lives of American Indians. To trace variations in political conflict within tribes today to their different historical experiences, Orr conducted an ethnographic analysis of three federally recognized tribes: the Isleta Pueblo in New Mexico, the Citizen Potawatomi in Oklahoma, and the Rosebud Sioux in South Dakota. His extensive interviews and research reveal that at the center of tribal politics are intratribal factions with widely different worldviews. These factions make conflicting claims about the purpose, experience, and identity of their tribe. Reservation Politics points to two types of historical experience relevant to the construction of tribes' political and economic worldviews: historical trauma, such as ethnic cleansing or geographic removal, and the incorporation of Indian communities into the market economy. In Orr's case studies, differences in experience and interpretation gave rise to complex worldviews that in turn have shaped the beliefs and behavior at play in Indian politics. By engaging a topic often avoided in political science and American Indian studies, Reservation Politics allows us to see complex historical processes at work in contemporary American Indian life. Orr's findings are essential to understanding why tribal governments make the choices they do.
ISBN-13: 9780806153919
Media Type: Hardcover
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Publication Date: 02-03-2017
Pages: 256
Product Dimensions: 6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.10(d)
Raymond I. Orr is Associate Professor of Native American Studies at the University of Oklahoma. His research focuses on indigenous and ethnic politics.
American Indian Politics as Behavior and Variation 1.1 INTRODUCTION: BLACK HILLS AND TO TAKE THE MONEY OR NOT? Lakota communities in South Dakota are some of the poorest in the United States. On the Pine Ridge Reservation, 80 percent of tribal members are unemployed. In 2012, the median per capita income on the reservation hovered near $8,000 compared to the national median of $42,000 (U.S. Census Bureau 2012). Compared to the average American life expectancy of seventy-seven years, Lakota men and women on the reservation live an average of forty-eight and fifty-two years, respectively (Mitchell 2011; Schwartz 2006), which makes tribal members' lives the shortest in the Western Hemisphere, with the exception of those of Haitians. Though in poverty and despair — youth suicide is more than three times the national average (Nieves 2007) — along with several other Lakota tribes, the Pine Ridge Reservation refuses to accept $1,200,000,000 in reparations. This money comes from a 1980 Supreme Court decision that upheld a decision by the federal Indian Claims Commission in 1974 that offered compensation for nineteenth-century land seizures from several of the region's tribes. To accept the settlement would require that the tribes relinquish all possible claims to their ancestral lands. Known as the Black Hills, these lands span the Dakotas, Wyoming, and Nebraska and will almost certainly never be returned to the Lakotas under the conditions they demand because the lands are now privately owned by tens of thousands of individuals and have become national or state parks. The Lakotas have two choices: (a) take the money or (b) do not take the money. It appears that choice a is clearly preferable and the dominant strategy in the nomenclature of behavioral economics. By selecting to reject the money, choice b, the Lakotas are not engaging in a negotiation ploy, as no better propositions are created by rejecting the offer (Giago 2010). Thus, the Lakotas receive no material benefit from this refusal, but claim that it honors their ancestors' efforts to protect the Black Hills. To the Lakotas, the choice over the Black Hills is framed differently than that of a material perspective and might resemble something like this: choice a dishonors their ancestors and the land and choice b honors their ancestors and the land. It is likely that the Lakotas would be forced to accept a lesser deal than the one that exists. Under these conditions, the decision makes no rational sense if rationality is construed economically. Naturally, the question arises: why is it that such a destitute people refuse such a large amount of money? This book is broadly about such questions as they pertain to American Indian politics and how people — not just American Indians — respond to and frame such political decisions differently. Though most American Indian tribes and indigenous populations as polities — to speak globally — do not face as dramatic a choice as the Lakotas do about the Black Hills, they make collective decisions that evoke competing moral or ideological commitments. How should we understand the Black Hills impasse? Is it strategic and are these American Indians holding out for better compensation? The Lakotas' strong opposition to any deal and the absence of an additional settlement for the last thirty years is clear evidence that the community is not looking for or expecting greater compensation short of the return of the Black Hills to its ownership (Giago 2010). Alternatively, we could examine the institutions involved in the settlement. Are there courts, congressional committees, state agencies, or tribal constitutions whose rules make the return currently impossible? For instance, why did efforts by U.S. senator Bill Bradley in the 1980s fail to resolve the dispute? Certainly the outcome is shaped by legal rules and institutional constraints. Perhaps even a powerful court or a committee might grant the Lakotas control of the Black Hills, and this would solve the dispute, but it would only get to the surface political question. Both strategic and institutional ways of approaching this issue would leave untouched perhaps the most fascinating feature of the Lakota example, which is behavioral; it is the striking desire of the Lakotas to control the Black Hills. Strategic and institutional analyses do not provide a legitimate explanation or capture why the Lakotas prefer something other than material resources. What people want and what they give up in order to achieve those wants are both questions with as much relevance to political outcomes as strategy and institutional constraint. If we are to look at the Lakotas' prevailing view of the Black Hills settlement, it is clear that in this instance, material maximization is not their highest political preference nor is it the tribe's defining motivation. When confronting a political puzzle such as the Lakotas' rejection, George Homans suggests, "It is seldom enough to ask whether or not [people are] rational. The relevant question is what determined their behavior" (1974, 81). The basic premise of this book is that the calculus behind how we decide, and the provenance of many key political behaviors, depends upon a great many things, but that our worldview is central to these decisions. A worldview is a broad term, but for this book's purposes, it is the interpretation about the world and our role in it — what Jürgen Habermas refers to as the "life world" (1984). More specifically, it is constituted from the intersection of our motivations and how we frame or perceive our surroundings, including our individual and collective experiences. As important components of worldview, these two terms, motivation and frame, are abstract so allow me to specify how these terms will be used. A motivation refers to our wants or desires. Often associated with motivations is the term preference, which is a selection among a limited choice of actions that seeks to satisfy certain motivations. These desires can be conscious or unconscious, material or emotive, helpful or harmful. In the case of the Lakotas' refusal, the motivation would be, at least at the surface level, to possess the Black Hills. A frame refers to our perception or ordering of the world. Such perception could be our place in what is around us, our views of others such as their motivations or character, our history (or their history), and even our moral outlook or sense of right and wrong (see Goffman 1974; Snow et al. 1986 for more detailed discussion of frame analysis). Worldview is a grander term often used to capture this system of perception. Framing, the act of using or creating a frame, is a type of cognitive organization that facilitates better sense of the world's complications and guides our decisions and actions. In the case of the Lakotas' refusal, how they frame the situation is unclear from the limited information provided, but rejecting the money is likely a function of how enough tribal members perceive the world. I have outlined frames and motivations somewhat separately, but perception and motivation are interrelated, mutually reinforcing and structuring our decisions along with helping us to establish goals and set permissible and desirable behavior. Why we might perceive choices a and b differently depends upon our worldview. Similar questions to what I have described in the Lakota Black Hills example, about the intersection of worldview and decision, have been approached in urban poverty research (see Small, Harding, and Lamont 2010 for descriptions of the "culture of poverty" debate). Compared to the long history of research around worldview (often referred to as "ideology") and material condition of urban and black communities (see Banfield 1970 and Young 2004 for examples of poverty and culture research; see Cohen 1999 and Dawson 2001 for studies of black political ideology and identity), the origin of American Indian belief receives less attention, particularly as it pertains to material "irrationality." Despite important works by Duane Champagne (1983, 1985), among others, the study of whether contemporary American Indian belief systems come from historical experiences has a limitation in how critical it might be. Perhaps there does not need to be an American Indian version of Thomas Sowell's Black Rednecks and White Liberals (2005), which argues that much of urban black culture is residue of white rural culture (i.e., "redneck"). However, that decisions such as that of the Black Hills are taken at face value deserves consideration itself. In fact, the hermetical or interpretative suspicion seems rather shallow in the refusal of the Black Hills settlement. I believe this is less the case in scholarship on other racial and ethnic groups. A common and provocative theme in urban poverty research, and one shared with this work, is why marginalized communities seem to further their plight (hence, select choice b). An answer depends upon their motivations and perceptions, which in turn, this book claims, depend upon their experiences and the meaning found in these experiences — what will be called lived experiences. Such a dynamic, whereby we find meaning in our experiences, was identified by anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1973) over forty years ago. It is a sentiment echoed by anthropologist Audra Simpson, when she states, "The culture and issues of native peoples can best be examined in terms of the lived experience of nationhood" and "To appreciate that experience, one must take account of the shared set of meanings that are negotiated through narrations — through the voices" (2000, 127). This book follows an approach to American Indian political decisions recognized by Geertz and Simpson but does so through considering the historical processes of exploitation and traumatic events — abundant in American Indian history and the lives of contemporary American Indian peoples — and their role in providing experiences upon which meaning is derived, decisions are made, and intratribal politics is organized. We know lived experience is important, and this book seeks to add to that knowledge by considering these experiences comparatively in order to know, maybe only in rough estimation, what experiences do to meaning. On the surface, my question about American Indians' decision-making, as encapsulated in the Black Hills example, follows a similar path to how poverty is studied from a cultural analysis perspective, whereby decisions, and the worldviews they are grounded in, provide insight into larger social processes hewn from historical experience. This book also argues through its case studies of contemporary conflict in American Indian tribal politics that the provenance of worldviews should take place in an intellectual arena with deeper ties to political theory, political economy, historical exploitation, and social change. This book, therefore, seeks to extend the importance of intratribal conflict as an established theme in writing on American Indian history (see Blackhawk 2006; Dowd 1992; Foster 1991; Green and Perdue 2008; Hamalainen 2008; Lewis 1991; Wilson 1985 for a few of many historical accounts of this conflict) to the American Indian politics of the contemporary period where we find substantially less scholarly work — a body of literature which will be discussed in the next chapter. As distinct polities, American Indians are in a unique position to situate such analyses, as they add two features to the urban poverty research and cultural analysis that allow for a deeper intellectual discussion to take place. Unlike black Americans, whose choices and culture were the focus of urban poverty research, American Indians have tribes, which are formal polities that engage in communal decision-making and allow for examination at the collective level. Second, as polities, American Indian tribes can be traced historically with greater distinction and allow for linkages between experiences and perceptions in a way that is less apparent among other minority groups (Champagne 1983, 1985, 2007; Cornell and Gil-Swedberg 1995; Cornell and Kalt 2010). Examining American Indian tribal politics opens the potential for powerful comparative studies that link collective experience to contemporary beliefs. That American Indians have defined polities allows us to answer another question about worldviews: why are they dispersed the way they are? (My assumption is that American Indians might be sympathetic to choice b more than whites; if that is true, then why?) Certain motivations are more desirable and certain frames more accurate to some than to others. For instance, the Lakotas often say that whites are more likely to select choice a and take the money. This book examines how American Indians frame political choices differently from one another, not only compared to whites. At its core, this book rejects the notion that shared ethnicity, even at the tribal level, connotes a shared or agreed-upon worldview. Rather, it argues that a shared experience around distinct historical processes, which is often, but not always, located in ethnicity creates a commonality of worldview. This book's argument, not a provocative or novel one, is that worldviews are historically created or conditioned, and that such variations in worldviews — between those who would take the money and those who reject it or between those who perceive the choice materially and those who see it morally or ethically, for instance — are not random, but are the result of interplay between two types of experiences that exert a strong influence over such divergence in motivations and frames. In essence, worldviews arise from experiences and these experiences differ from one experiential group to another. That historical experience shapes current action is neither a new perspective nor provocative. Yet what this book offers that is new and potentially theoretically provocative is the selection of experiences that matter. The first historical experience to profoundly shape worldviews was incorporation into market economies and new forms of wealth. We might refer to this experience as a process of economic development, a softer and less abrasive term for wealth. Economic development promotes what I call the rise of self-interest or the rise of the self-interested worldview as materially construed. Economic development or wealth creation is the experience, and the rise of self-interest is the associated behavioral change in motivation, perception, or frame (i.e., worldview). The second of these historical experiences, and the admittedly controversial thesis of this book, is that of historical trauma. Historical trauma promotes what I call the rise of melancholia or the rise of the melancholic worldview, which is a drive to reject self-interest in favor of furthering individual and collective mourning. The more specific claim made about historical trauma throughout this book is that the behaviors associated with traumatized individuals emerge and persist at the collective polity level decades and even centuries after the initial traumatizing events. Traumatic events are recognized in American Indian communities as creating terrible ruptures and needing healing (Brave Heart 2003, 2007; Duran and Duran 1995), but trauma has been less understood as shaping collective political behavior. Let us return to differences in preferences, motivations, values, attitudes, moral outlooks, worldviews, and ideologies — just a few of the many concepts scholars employ to discuss why people act and decide the way they do. Our motivations and perceptions might arise randomly or be entirely irrelevant or trivial to the study of politics. Why some people prefer apples to cranberries, red to blue, burgundy to periwinkle, and so on and so on might be random or not, but these preferences are certainly beyond what is worth predicting for our interest in politics. However, there are certain types of preferences that may be less random and more worth our inquiry. Why one community might accept an offer of redress or reconciliation, another reject an offer, and another be completely un-inclined to barter over an issue are differences worth thinking about. Needless to say, these elemental inclinations would be more important for political life than selection of color or taste in fruits. Few claim that the past does not matter. That the past shapes motivation and perception is accepted from Freud to Geertz. At the individual level, motivations typically involve the future and what we want in that future, but frames are often historically formed and our available preferences politically limited. If our history, and the experiencing of it, creates patterns in our worldviews, then are there experiences that are strong enough to make claims about — in a broad sense — vis-à-vis such an experience's impact on motivation and, ultimately, preference? Yes, with the caveat that my claim is not that experience with market incorporation and historical trauma explains every motivation or perception but rather that much of the behavior we see in American Indian communities would not make sense without understanding their histories and especially the role of wealth and trauma. I advocate an approach where the experiences of historical trauma (especially relocation and genocide) and economic incorporation were significant enough to create a pattern in the alteration of worldviews. This is referred to as the pain and profit approach, and its evidence is borne out in the discussions and disagreements that American Indians have between each other within their own tribes. Such disagreements might be about what a tribe is for, whether to accept or reject a specific policy, or what tribal history and identity means. These are worth sustained inquiry because these show fissures in worldviews and also the behavioral terrain that tribes draw upon to make decisions. Read an Excerpt
Reservation Politics
Historical Trauma, Economic Development, and Intratribal Conflict
By Raymond I. Orr UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS
Copyright © 2017 University of Oklahoma Press
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ISBN: 978-0-8061-5871-6
CHAPTER 1
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List of Illustrations ix Acknowledgments xi 1 American Indian Politics as Behavior and Variation 3 2 The Reservation of Common Secrets: The Suppression of Intra-Ethnic Conflict 25 3 Categories, Logics, and Causal Mechanisms in "Pain and Profit" 49 4 The Politics of Nostalgia: Potawatomi Acrimony and Oklahoma Oil 79 5 Blood / Fear / Harmony: Pueblo Politics 112 6 Melancholic Logics and Communities of Survival: The Rosebud Lakotas and Their Loss 155 7 Conclusion 195 Notes 203 Works Cited 207 Index 243Table of Contents