Editor's Commentary

This issue is about definitions. The definitions are the answers to the classic who, what, when, where, why, and how? The six questions can be worked around the living, the dead, and their grave goods.

Tom Holm, J. Diane Pearson, and Ben Chavis present a model of peoplehood as a more accurate and, most of all, a more functional definition that provides basic internally generated information as a core assumption to which any methodology can be applied. The term "peoplehood" is intended to include distinct languages, religions, land, and sacred history. The authors state that this concept meets the criteria of a disciplinary core assumption for American Indian studies.

Joanne Barker's "Indian^™ U.S.A." uses the Indian Arts and Crafts Act (IACA) of 1990 to get at the basic questions of who is an Indian, what is an Indian tribe, and how membership, affiliation, and nation areto be recognized, identified, and documented. She illustrates these questions with a discussion of the current dispute about the Black Seminole of Oklahoma. She also links the IACA to the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) of 1990 through the repatriation of and the trade in human remains and grave goods. Here she makes the very important point that NAGPRA is not legally applicable to privately held land or privately owned collections. She has some final commentary on how indigenous cultural perspectives and practices canbe used to develop politically responsible and historically informed agendas toward securing the means and abilities of indigenous peoples to exercise sovereignty.

Kimberly TallBear takes up the question of who is an Indian from a different perspective. She points out that biological tests using DNA analysis for certain genetic markers to determine who is truly Indian cannot prove cultural identity. Culture is not determined genetically. She goes on to discuss the blood quantum method of determining tribal membership. "That method is not as straightforward as the terminology might indicate." This is certainly true. There is a large supply of stories of just how untrue blood quantum can be for just about any tribe in North America.

Clay Dumont's impassioned article on the repatriation of American Indian dead through NAGPRA attacks the claims of the anti-repatriationsts to be the guardians of extracultural truth. He singles out instances of the oppositionists asserting that scientists, not Indians, are the legitimate narrators of truthful history: They award their own political construct an extracultural permanence. They refer to the archaeological record, but their archaeological record is a product of their own intellectual and political history. Dumont sates, "No Indian ever went to his or her grave with a sign on his or her forehead reading 'here lies the archaeologists' only hard evidence.'"

Mary Virginia Rojas, in "She Bathes in a Sacred Place," discusses an indigenous ritual.

Steve Pavlik addresses a topic that is a frequent source of dispute between indigenous and nonindigenous cultures: sacred animals, animals respected by indigenous cultures. Nonindigenous culture members are apt to regard the same animals, in this case jaguars, as targets. The glory of the living animal is transferred to the shooter; the rarer the jaguar becomes, the greater the glory for the shooter. Pavlik finds that attitude is changing; respect for jaguars is no longer shown by mounting the hide and head over a fireplace. This respect may not yet be comparable to the sacredness of the jaguar in the indigenous cultures, but at least a legal status as a protected animal has been achieved for it.