On the Logic of Discernment

Nowhere are the interrelated logics of property and the claiming of land, identity, and culture more discernable, and nowhere are indigenous people required to be more discernable than in their contemporary struggles for political recognition. It is as if indigenous peoples have to say of themselves and their cultures: How are we to render ourselves as a thing, a thing that may be owned by us, but whose intrinsic value and worth may be determined by others? How may we be most like a thing so that our rights may be exercised and/or protected? Or more scopically, how may we prove that we are a thing that has been seen through time?¹ This is the struggle for indigenous claims to identity and the struggle, as well, of claims to culture—two seemingly constructed and yet grounded formations that require, in settler societies, that they be fixed, claimed, and then adjudicated—much in the manner of disputes over property.

This logic of property formation and the practice of claiming are the stuff of political recognition. Political recognition is a problem, writ large, of modern, democratic, state forms of governance and finds its home in the lives and lands of indigenous peoples, who in some cases must now claim the land that they issue from.² In order to access their land and, some would then argue, to retain their culture, they must then prove themselves at the level of themselves.³ Eva Garroutte's Real Indians: Identity and the Survival of Native America and Michael Brown's Who Owns Native Culture? are studies in claiming identity and culture. The claims of identity that Eva Garroutte deals with are also claims for rights and access to resources and so have the shadow of property upon them. Such is the case with the claims to cultural heritage that Michael Brown is examining in Who Owns Native Culture? Brown's book has as its central problem that of an originary moment of authorship, of discerning a beginning, of locating at what point cultural "heritage" begins and at what point it can be alienated or protected as property.

The work of Garroutte and Brown converge on the constraints to identity and cultural claiming, in Brown's cases, the "juridicalization" of those claims as they are sieved through the courts and in Garroutte's cases, the deliberation of those claims in institutional and conversational spaces. Brown's study is international and juridical, dealing with cultural property rights cases across the globe. Garroutte's is focused on identity claims and cases in North America. Who Owns Native Culture? and Real Indians deal with these issues in different territorial and discursive arenas, but both offer us reformulations of old debates around these issues. I will examine the central arguments in these books and discuss their methods as well as their findings and embed them within their family resemblance, the question of how the claiming practices detailed in these books enunciate this logic of property, the implications that these books have for related fields, and how they suggest avenues for further research.

Eva Garroutte's book, Real Indians: Identity and the Survival of Native America is concerned with forms of identity making and recognition among Native peoples in the United States and, in some moments in the text, Canada. Her data is drawn from secondary source material from the literature of Native American studies, sociology, anthropology, and history, as well as primary documents such as historical records, census data, and her own interviews, which were framed by the theoretical project and attendant methodology, "Radical Indigenism." In its concern with contemporary indigenous identity, this book articulates thematically to the recent single-nation ethnography of intranational recognition practices by Circe Sturm, Blood Politics: Race, Culture, and Identity in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. And in its treatment of the definitional...