FOUR ARGUMENTS OF POSTINDIAN SURVIVANCE

/ SURVIVANCE / 1 FOUR ARGUMENTS OF POSTINDIAN SURVIVANCE REMARKS FOR PRESENTATION TO 5th Annual 5 Colleges Native American and Indigenous Studies Symposium: "Survivance Stories: Indigenous Struggle, Resistance, and Innovation" March 28 – 29, 2019 University of Massachusetts /Amherst; Amherst, Smith, Mt. Holyoke, and Hampshire Colleges By Peter d'Errico Emeritus Professor of Legal Studies, UMass/Amherst Native American Indian Studies is a mouthful of a name. We chose it because we want people to think about names. We want to provoke a critical awareness of history and culture. We don't want to slide by, to be taken-for-granted. From a 1998 statement about the name used by the UMass Certificate Program and elsewhere in the Five Colleges. We're too busy trying to protect the idea of a Native American or an Indian but we're not Indians and we're not Native Americans. We're older than both concepts. We're the people. We're the human beings. John Trudell, "Reel Injun," Rezolution Pictures (Montreal, Canada: 2009). / SURVIVANCE / 2 Gerald Vizenor Anishinaabe White Earth Ojibwe Gerald Vizenor in the 1990's repurposed an old legal term — "survivance" — to define a combination of survival and resistance of Native Peoples. Vizenor deployed the term in conjunction with a new phrase of his own making — "postindian"— to mount an assault on conventional discourse about Native Peoples. He proposed that the dominant discourse about Native Peoples is a discourse of domination. He attacked "Indian" as a rhetorical trope inextricably tied to subjugation, assimilation, and simulation, which he called "manifest manners." He said that to speak of "Indians" is to participate in colonialism. The term "Indian" expresses a tragic view that presumes absence rather than presence. It partakes of a sense of victimhood. To call one (or oneself) an Indian perpetuates manifest manners and impedes postindian survivance. Vizenor's discourse of postindian survivance opposes the catastrophic rhetoric of Indianness. To use Vizenor's own words, "survivance stories are renunciations of dominance, tragedy, and victimry."1 In a volume of essays edited by Vizenor in 2008, Narratives of Native Presence, Karl Kroeber wrote ironically "Why it’s a good thing Gerald Vizenor is not an Indian."2 Kroeber said Vizenor's work …aims to repair a peculiarly vicious consequence of genocidal attacks on natives of the Americas: an inducing in them of their destroyer's view that they are mere survivors. By accepting this white definition of themselves as victims, natives complete psychologically the not-quite-entirely successful physical genocide. Survivance rejects this imposed internalizing; it offers natives modes of personal and social renewal attained through welcoming unpredictable cultural reorientations. With these thoughts in mind, let us look at the project to decolonize Native Studies discourses and, by extension, discourses emanating beyond classrooms. 1 Gerald Vizenor, Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994, 1999), vii. 2 Karl Kroeber, "Why it’s a good thing Gerald Vizenor is not an Indian," in Narratives of Native Presence, edited by Gerald Vizenor. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008.), 25.} / SURVIVANCE / 3 Four arguments I suggest four arguments every student in Native Studies must encounter if we are to continue to move away from manifest manners and toward survivance, struggle, resistance, and innovation. ARGUMENT 1: "INDIAN" There is no such entity as "Indian" except in the context of the Indian subcontinent and its peoples. The original inhabitants of this continent are also not "Native Americans." The word "Indian" is a "simulation in the literature of dominance,"3 though it has what Vizenor calls a "curious sense of legal standing."4 ARGUMENT 2: "TRIBE" "Tribe" is a derogatory term arising from statist political, anthropological, and legal discourses. In so-called federal Indian law, "tribe" is a trope of diminution, subordination, and domination. In this framework, so-called "government-to-government relations" between the US and "tribes" are a form of colonial indirect rule. ARGUMENT 3: "GENOCIDE" Genocidal efforts directed against the original inhabitants of this continent are an ongoing activity, not events in the past. Under Richard Nixon, the US disavowed "termination" policy; but a continuing series of court decisions, administrative regulations, and statutes attack Native self-determination. ARGUMENT 4: "NATIVE RIGHTS / CIVIL RIGHTS" Native rights are not the same as civil rights. Conflating the two undermines a proper understanding of Native self-determination. Participation by Native persons in US elections is an ultimate form of assimilation, the culmination of Richard Henry Pratt's 1892 program to "kill the 3 Manifest Manners, 10-11. Vizenor adds that the same is true for "most other tribal names" that supersede the real names of the peoples. 4 Id., 14. / SURVIVANCE / 4 Indian…and save the man"5 and the fulfillment of an 1889 promise to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs that the "rising generation" will become "patriotic citizens of the great Republic."6 ⇔ I offer these arguments as entry points to critique manifest manners – the "notions and misnomers that are read as the authentic"7 representation of Native Peoples. This is not a matter of political correctness, but of survivance. Following Vizenor, we find reasons to avoid the Iword and the T-word just as other investigations have banished the N-word. But we need to do more than remove offensive terms. For example, political correctness substitutes "Native American" for "Indian," but leaves untouched a multitude of ongoing dominations in law, politics and economics. As John Trudell remarked, "They change the name but treat us the same." "Native American" actually amplifies domination by promoting an assimilationist agenda of inclusion. How can Native Peoples be "natives" of an entity they preexist? Opportunities for argument Opportunities to raise these arguments are inherent in the subject-matter of every Native Studies course. In addition, moments to raise these arguments are close at hand in current events. REPARATIONS: The topic of US reparations to Blacks and Native Peoples has repeatedly surfaced in American discourses. It rises again as candidates jockey toward the 2020 US elections. But three key points distinguish Native from Black reparations discourses: 1. Reparations for Native Peoples begins not with the past but with present changes in US law: specifically, rejection of Christian Discovery, the doctrine that Native Nations do not hold title to their lands and are subject to a US claim of domination. Unlike "separate but equal," the doctrine to dominate Blacks, the doctrine of Native domination in US law has never been overruled. It was cited by the US Supreme Court as recently as 2005 by none other than the 5 "Official Report of the Nineteenth Annual Conference of Charities and Correction (1892)," 46–59. Reprinted in Richard H. Pratt, “The Advantages of Mingling Indians with Whites,” Americanizing the American Indians: Writings by the “Friends of the Indian” 1880–1900, ed. by Francis Paul Prucha, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973, 260–271). 6 United States Office of Indian Affairs, Annual report of the commissioner of Indian affairs, for the year 1889. Report of M.A. Leahy, US Indian Agent, La Pointe Agency. 305. http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/History.AnnRep89 7 Id., 5-6. / SURVIVANCE / 5 liberal icon Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.8 The legal root of the word "survivance" becomes relevant here: it means the right of ownership of an estate. 2. Reparations for Native Peoples includes recognition of existing Treaty relationships and negotiation of new treaties to establish true government-to-government relations. The US Department of the Interior Bureau of Indian Affairs is not a proper party for nation-to-nation relations. 3. Reparations for Native Peoples intersects with reparations for Blacks only at the moment of compensation for "past" wrongs. Moreover, monetary obligations to Native Peoples as a result of persistent and present wrongs intertwine with land and treaty issues. GENOCIDE: The US amicus brief in Royal v. Murphy,9 a case currently under review in the US Supreme Court, presents a history of actions by the US to "disestablish" the Creek Nation. The US brief argues that its efforts to destroy the Creek Nation have been successful and should be the basis for the court's decision!10 The actions meet the international law definition of genocide coined by Raphael Lemkin, international law advisor to the Nuremberg War Crimes Chief Prosecutor. The Creek lawyers have not called out this genocide but have said it is not yet complete. The formal legal issue in the case is whether the 1866 territorial boundaries of the Creek Nation within the former Indian Territory of eastern Oklahoma constitute an “Indian reservation” today under US law.11 The case is part of the court's October 2018 term and a decision will likely be forthcoming in 2019. TRIBE: In September 2018, the US Interior Department informed the Mashpee Wampanoag that they “do not satisfy” the federal law definition of “Indian” and are therefore not eligible to hold 8 City of Sherrill, N.Y. v. Oneida Indian Nation of New York, 544 U.S. 197 (2005). https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/544/197/ 9 Docket No. 17-1107: https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/royal-v-murphy/ . The case was originally filed as Carpenter v. Murphy. 10 Peter d'Errico, "United States admits to genocide in Supreme Court case," Indianz.com: December 3, 2018. https://www.indianz.com/News/2018/12/03/peter-derrico-united-states-admits-to-ge.asp 11 18 U.S.C. § 1151. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1151 / SURVIVANCE / 6 "reservation trust" lands, despite the fact they continue to live in the very lands they have held since time immemorial. The decision reversed a 2015 approval of Mashpee reservation lands.12 A bill in the US House filed in January 2019 would "reaffirm" the 2015 approval.13 MASSACHUSETTS STATE SEAL: Proposals to change the Massachusetts state seal adopted in 1780 have surfaced repeatedly over the last four decades. In January 2019, two bills were introduced into the Massachusetts legislature proposing a special commission to investigate the seal.14 The commission would focus on "features of the seal…which potentially have been unwittingly harmful to or misunderstood by the citizens of the Commonwealth." The investigation would ensure that features of the seal "faithfully reflect and embody the historic and contemporary commitments of the commonwealth to peace, justice, liberty and equality and to spreading the opportunities and advantages of education." Even before any commission is formed, the language of the bills already provides material for critical analysis: Where is evidence that Massachusetts authorities acted "unwittingly" or that the Commonwealth has maintained "historic commitments" to peace and justice with Native Peoples? NATIVE CANDIDATES FOR US POLITICAL OFFICES: The National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) and the newspaper it now operates, Indian Country Today (ICT), in line with a trajectory of inclusion, typically refer to themselves as part of the "we" of the US. In Vizenor's terms, this rhetoric represents "manifest manners"— simulations and assimilation of Natives, rather than authentic Native presence. NCAI and ICT campaign to support Native persons as candidates for US offices and encourage Natives to vote. The campaign mixes civil rights of political participation under the US Constitution with the entirely distinct matter of international rights of Native Nations as self-determining Peoples.15 12 Peter d'Errico, "Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe falls victim to anti-Indian law," Indianz.com: November 26, 2018. https://www.indianz.com/News/2018/11/26/peter-derrico-mashpee-wampanoag-tribe-fa.asp 13 H.R. 312: https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/312/ . 14 H. 2776: https://malegislature.gov/Bills/191/H2776 ; S. 1877: https://malegislature.gov/Bills/191/S1877 15 NCAI President Jefferson Keel's 10th Annual State of Indian Nations Address was entitled "Our America." It opens with thanks to "Native service members serving today to protect the sovereignty of the United States and the tribal nations of North America" and calls for "the highest Native turnout ever" in the upcoming US elections. "Remarks by Jefferson Keel, President National Congress of American Indians (NCAI)," Thursday, January 26, 2012, Newseum, Knight Studios, Washington, DC. / SURVIVANCE / 7 They explain they want a “Native voice” at the US dominator’s table to help decide what the US will do to Natives. In contrast, Native Nations struggling to end US domination in their own lands constitute an effort to take Native lands and lives off the dominator’s table altogether. MASCOTS: "Indian" mascots are critiqued as cultural stereotypes. From Vizenor's perspective, these mascots are stereotypes of a stereotype. Critique of mascots without analysis of the underlying simulation posed by "Indianness" extends manifest manners in representations of Native Peoples. Conclusion These arguments raise politically charged issues rooted in historical conflicts. One may be tempted to present them in a bellicose manner or with a high serious tone. But Vizenor warns us stories of survivance are "comic, not tragic." They involve "an aesthetic restoration of trickster hermeneutics." They arise from "wonder, chance, [and] coincidence."16 Vizenor says "Laughter over [the] comic touch" in trickster stories heals children and undermines manifest manners at the same time. Trickster humor liberates wisdom gained from tragedy and is "more effective…against terror…than a response that is solemn or tragic."17 When Secwépemc Shuswap George Manuel presented his thesis of The Fourth World in 1974, two decades before Vizenor's Manifest Manners, he called for "a genuine leap of imagination" to speak about Indigenous realities "easily, quietly, and comfortably."18 His criticism of the Christian colonial state called them to give up their claims of dominion and join the "dance of life."19 The arguments call for what Vizenor described as "wild incursions of…warriors of survivance [to] undermine…simulations of the unreal in the literature of dominance."20 http://www.ncai.org/attachments/Testimonial_HPYReLYaRNhvWCrNaWVzrrdLgWWocZkrZCvYIRYOstrfQPiixgf_1%2026% 202012%20SOIN%20-%20final%20-%20as%20prepared%20for%20delivery.pdf 16 Manifest Manners, 14. 17 Id., 83. Vine Deloria, Jr., said of Native humor, "The more desperate the problem, the more humor is directed to describe it. …[P]ossible solutions are drawn from the circumstances that would not make sense if presented in other than a humorous form." Custer Died for Your Sins (New York: Avon Books, 1969), 149. 18 George Manuel and Michael Posluns, The Fourth World: An Indian Reality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019 [reissue of 1974 edition], 224. 19 The Fourth World, 264. 20 Manifest Manners, 12.