utions. We must continue to define what Native feminism might mean in our families, comm

men. However, we cannot afford to privilege nationhood and race over g

And honestly ... if I left feminism, I don't know how I would survive, where 1 could go, because seriously, femi- nism frames almost everything in my life. I do not see the world thru a feminist or gender lens, I see it thru a feminist eye implant. It's there and can't be rem

thing. Feminism the phi- losophy, transcends the bullshit and comforts

s: Must women of color renounce feminism in order for racism to be dealt with effectively by white women? This question reminds us of the fragility of feminist sisterhood and the per- vasiveness of racism in the United Stat

because the examination of colonial relationships and issues of indigenous sovereignty are included. While we are encouraged to think globally, many times it is at the expense of the local issues and the indigenous peoples and th

In academia, terminology can be used to exclude and disempower various groups. Obviously, this is damaging to indigenous people who struggle to maintain their sovereign powers

I am reminded that complex terminology can be devoid of meaning

academics. There are black feminism, liberal feminism, radical feminism, eco-feminism, postcolonial/postmodern feminism, social femi- nism, Chicana feminism, state feminism, feminist fundamentalism, global/ international feminism, an

to the resurrection of various Native women's societi

e. The next time that hap- pened was in 1989 at Northern Montana State Colle

hings. I wanted to be part of the larger women's movement, even though I felt the movement was racist. However, racism was everywhere and I considered that

During this time period, Native women were fiercely protective of Native men, which must be viewed in the context of colonialism. Native women were not about to turn their men over to a white criminal justice system

Remember that, at least where I'm from, if a woman had black eyes, it was referred to as "Indian love.

These retreats were for Native women only,- white women expressed that they felt left out and Native men expressed that they felt threatened. I was emotionally overwhelmed by this racism and sexism

women class. I began to incorporate images and stereotypes of Native women

There was clearly a split (actually, many divisions, including class) between the reservation and the urban Indian women. I imagined that we defined feminism differently, too.

I was a single mother of a two-year-old son and on welfare. I was des- perately poor and was beginning to wrestle with the fact that 1 had been sexually abused as a child, and violently victimized as a teenager and young adult

rn. I am one of six daughters raised predominately by a mother and grandmother in an extended family on the Flathead Indian Reservation in Montana. We were ra

mistaken belief that they were doing the native women a favor.

our lives

ed "Indian Wars" or "Indian up-risings" (an interesting ter

ering. Her book immedi- ately became a primary text in my class on Native

th a white feminist a

communities. In 1985, she published an essay, "Violence and the American Indian Woman," which appeared in a short-lived pub- lica

Then she bravely asks: Does being a feminist make her less India

ever, 1 was horrified when a Native man, in his lurch to introduce us, told her with great disdain that

june. Each scholar added a piece to the definition and practice of feminism for and about Na

"F" Word

The mass of Cherokee people navigated conditions as they always had; they relied on communal landholdings, extended kinship systems, and a communitarian ethic to provide for each other. Just as osdv iyunvnehi dictated that Cherokee people take care of one another, the nation-building process established institutions to advocate on behalf of and take care of Cherokee citizens

In 1826, the Cherokee National Council passed legis-lation that protected “lunatic[s]” or a “person insane without lucid intervals” from prosecution or a guilty verdict for a crime committed “in the condition of such lunacy or insanity.”

The legislation divided the Nation into eight districts and desig-nated fi ve days in both May and September for each district to hear its cases.

In the minds of many southern settlers, Cherokee lives and property did not have to be respected. State and territorial courts resisted fi ling charges against settlers who committed crimes against Cherokees. During the second decade of the nineteenth century, Agent Meigs expressed his frustration at the neighboring states and their courts’ unwillingness to hold whites criminally responsible for their actions. If charges were fi led, state and county laws prevented Cherokees from testifying against whites, and local juries were not inclined to fi nd whites guilty of crimes against Cherokees. The federal govern-ment used cash payments, referred to as “peace offerings” when applied to murder cases, as an attempt to ameliorate families’ legiti-mate hostility when southern states proved averse to holding their residents accountable for criminal activity.

Separated from his childhood home, his traditional classrooms, and the laboratories of his intellectual breakthroughs, Sequoyah removed west of the Mississippi to the Arkansas Territory around 1822.

s late as 1849, offi cials in the state of Tennessee claimed that women lacked independent souls and were therefore unable to own property.

In contrast to their U.S. counterparts, Cherokee women exercised autonomy as it related to their sexual decision making and marital choices, which in turn led to intermarriage with white and black men. But as Cherokee people quickly realized, women’s relationships with men of African descent left their children susceptible to enslave-ment within the United States with very little legal recourse.

That at least some Cherokee people turned to veterans familiar with governmental affairs, the English language, and the ability to legally act on their behalf suggests that Cherokee people did not trust the fede ral government or the Indian agent to dispense pensions fairly when it involved traditional Cherokee family systems.

Pensions created a situation where children became the legal and economic pawns of Cherokee men who favored men’s economic dependence and potentially shared no social or familial responsi-bility for the children.

Based on their service to the war, someone should receive those resources.

and the Cherokee nation set a precedent of using treaty negotiations to advocate for federal entitlements to aid Chero-kee people

For still others, it was a means of expressing their discontent with the changes thrust upon them by U.S. policy and their anger toward illegal encroachment.40 Cherokee men struggled to fi nd a place in a system that expected them to disrespect the rights and privileges of their grandmothers, mothers, and sisters. Horse theft provided them with a means to avoid the domestic economic violence that was necessary to that process. If men took up farming as the civilization policy dictated, they usurped their mothers’ and sisters’ rightful eco-nomic and symbolic place in Cherokee society, thereby undermining their ability to fulfi ll social service obligations.

When Agent Meigs faced a shortage of blacksmiths in the Nation, it did not occur to him that Cherokee men were in a position to perform the duties. Rather than use the blacksmiths to offer apprenticeships to Cherokee people, the agency controlled the services of blacksmiths. When the blacksmiths’ services failed to meet the demands, the agent and Cherokee leaders offered other non-Cherokee blacksmiths work permits and land use for cultivation in exchange for services. In 1816, Meigs reported the presence of fi fteen blacksmiths, “5 of which are Cherokees, self taught.” Only after Cherokees taught themselves the skills did it occur to the agent to use a tinplate worker in a teaching capacity.

his law failed to acknowledge the roles and responsibilities of Cherokee kin embed-ded in traditional social welfare systems.

Cherokee offi -cials defended the execution to U.S. offi cials based on the fact that Doublehead’s execution fell under new legal provisions that forbade local chiefs from making land cessions.

After Doublehead enriched himself through 1798 treaty negotiations, Cherokee people questioned his worthiness as a leader. Cherokees The Ridge, James Vann, and Charles Hicks understood the designs of the United States on Cherokee lands and the danger that Doublehead’s actions could have on communal land-holdings. It is likely that all three men also worried about their own fi nancial interests if individual Cherokees could dispose of land. Less clear is how Cherokees who were not leading men viewed Dou-blehead’s actions

The Pine Log community reminded The Ridge that he was answerable to the grievances of kin and communities and that a warrior’s life was unsus-tainable and inappropriate in a world that sought to be in balance.

The plantation was made possible by the labor of enslaved people, an endeavor viewed by other elite southern whites as the most civilized and profi table pursuit for men.

All three lived in close proximity to the U.S. Indian agent and benefi tted from insti-tutional services provided by the agency. All three came of age in an era of nation building and anomie, and over time they came to repre-sent the growing class divides evident in the Nation. Also, they each benefi tted from the increasing infl uence and offi cial political author-ity that men were acquiring within and outside the Nation.

were willing to defer to the care of traditional healers

Cherokee people con-tinued to apply traditional remedies while seeking additional sources of healing power.

From 1800 to 1829, Cherokee people moved from a nation made up of autonomous towns governed by the rules of kinship and con-nected together through seven matrilineal clans to a constitutional republic comprised of citizens operating under a constitution that administered pensions from a national treasury. The decisions that led to institutionalized centralization occurred in tandem with the shift in U.S. policy

For Cherokee people, charging fees for services stood in direct opposi-tion to the practices of local adonisgi, local healers who diagnosed and treated individual physical and spiritual conditions and carried out community ceremonies. They expected no compensation for fulfi lling a community obligation, though Cherokee people offered generous gifts ranging from agricultural products, baskets, jewelry, pigs, or horses in gratitude for their aid. This monetary expense for McNeil’s medical services compounded the view that treatment was more costly than bypassing vaccination.

n a subsequent letter, Cherokee local chiefs The Glass, Dick Justice, and John Bogs, writing through interpreter Charles Hicks, who would later serve as second chief, asked the agent to pay the doctor’s $150 fee and “charge it to the nation.” The letter stated that the chiefs “had not expected to see the doct[o]r here, as [they] had never sent for one.” As the letter makes clear, neither Pathkiller, nor Lowery, nor Ross shared their request, nor did they seek the consent of the other local chiefs before making a unilateral decision to secure medical services. The Glass, Justice, and Bogs described Cherokee people’s resistance to the services offered by Dr. McNeil not as arising from suspicion of new treatment but “owing to the impossibility of the patients attending to the doctor’s directions.”

and moved toward removal policy, or what today would be termed “ethnic cleansing.”

As the fl edgling United States extended its civilization policy and dangled the possibility of “citizenship” just out of reach of Indian people, Cherokees chose to debate social and public health policy internally as community rules dictated.

23CHAPTER 1Taking Care of Our Own, 1800–1829In February of 1806, when a smallpox outbreak struck the Chicka-mauga towns around present-day Chattanooga, Tennessee, Cherokees Pathkiller, John Lowery, and intermarried white trader Daniel Ross asked U.S. agent to the Cherokees Return J. Meigs to “procure some of the cowpox” and obtain the services of a local doctor to administer the inoculations.1

'You don't really hear so much about the good cases,' says Raff."

"The politics of bone gathering in Africa are notorious ... and one shudders to imagine what might happen if activists could convince modern Africans to claim early human skeletons as their ancestors, so that they too could be reburied."

She also suggested that such regulations — which increased around the world in the wake of NAGPRA — can have a chilling effect on scientific research: "Consider having dedicated a large part of one's life to unearthing the materials that are now being examined. Even casts and other important works — such as videotapes, photos, and excavation records — are in increasing danger of confiscation. Some scientists have expressed fear that their federal grants would be in jeopardy if they objected too openly to current policies. Under such circumstances, most scientists do not even begin 'high-risk' projects. Finds that could threaten Native American origin beliefs are especially likely to be targeted. Defendants could become embroiled for years in expensive lawsuits that neither they nor their institutions can afford ...

scientists have been reflecting on ways to work with indigenous communities when these kinds of conflicts come up:

"Kennewick Man spent a lot of time holding something in front of him while forcibly raising and lowering it; the researchers theorize he was hurling a spear downward into the water, as seal hunters do. His leg bones suggest he often waded in shallow rapids, and he had bone growths consistent with 'surfer's ear,' caused by frequent immersion in cold water. His knee joints suggest he often squatted on his heels. ... Many years before Kennewick Man's death, a heavy blow to his chest broke six ribs. Because he used his right hand to throw spears, five broken ribs on his right side never knitted together. This man was one tough dude."

Femur bones would go missing under unexplained circumstances.

dug up corpses and even decapitated dead Indians lying on the field of battle and shipped the heads to Washington for study.

They thought they'd found a murder victim

"We do not believe that our people migrated here from another continent, as the scientists do."

; if the faithful always got their way, we'd still think the E

None of these clashes exists in a vacuum; they often come on the heels of decades, if not centuries, of genocide and erasure aimed at indigenous peoples and their ways of life. And so an object of scientific interest, be it a bone or a mountain, can come to stand for an entire civilization.

It also means that scientists will probably never get another chance to study him, though ancient human remains from North America are incredibly rare, and forensic technology gets better all the time.