“We Wanted Those People to See That Indians Aren’t Stupid”: Identity, Representation, and Resistance in the Cultural Tourism of the Wapato Indian Club

In the 1970s a group of American Indian junior high school students requested that their public school, located on the Yakama Reservation, provide them with opportunities to learn traditional Yakama and powwow-style dancing. They found an advocate in their school counselor, a Yakama woman who helped them form the Wapato Indian Club dance troupe, a form of cultural tourism that sought to bring intercultural understanding and increased self-esteem among American Indian youth through the club’s performances. The club became a vehicle through which students learned ethnic pride and leadership and how to be cultural ambassadors to largely non-Native audiences in the Pacific Northwest and across the United States. In this article, I draw from qualitative interviews with club alumni, parents, and advisors who have participated in the Wapato Indian Club from its founding in 1973 to 2011. I analyze interview data to articulate the lessons about identity, representation, and resistance contained in the narratives about participation in the Wapato Indian Club. I discuss the study findings utilizing the theory of historical trauma and argue that the Wapato Indian Club represents a community-based educational effort that seeks to heal the soul wounds of colonialism.

Background

The theory of historical trauma is useful for understanding the ways in which contemporary social problems within indigenous communities are rooted in the violent legacy of colonialism.¹ American Indians have endured many forms of epistemic violence, including within US educational systems.² However, indigenous peoples continue to resist policies that are rooted in genocidal and assimilationist agendas and are reclaiming their cultural traditions and demanding that educational systems recognize the importance of indigenous sovereignty. As part of these resistance movements, Native peoples are actively shaping curricular and extracurricular opportunities for Native youth to develop a strong sense of indigenous identity and cultural pride. This article articulates the importance of one such effort, the Wapato Indian Club, based out of the Wapato Middle School (formerly the Wapato Junior High School) in Wapato, Washington, on the Yakama Reservation. The Yakama Reservation is home to the fourteen Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation and was established by the Treaty of 1855. The reservation is a remnant of traditional Yakama homelands, as over 90 percent of traditional lands were ceded during forced treaty “negotiations” with the governor of Washington Territory.

Fig. 1.

Map of Yakama Reservation. Originally published by the Yakama Nation Wildlife Program and reprinted here by permission of the artist, Christopher Andersen.

In this article, I argue that the Wapato Indian Club is an important example of grassroots indigenous activism that revitalizes the cultural traditions of dancing and intergenerational teaching and learning. Cultural revitalization activism and indigenous resistance go hand in hand.³ The Wapato Indian Club teaches Native youth a vision for social change that is rooted in cultural traditions and intergenerational teaching and learning. Wapato Indian Club members are expected to internalize the positive messages about their indigenous identities and to emerge as leaders who are grounded in important cultural teachings. As such, the Wapato Indian Club carries on a tradition of cultural tourism that challenges long-standing negative stereotypes of marginalized communities and resists assumptions that disempowered communities have nothing to offer to the “outside” world.⁴ As indigenous peoples, our collective well-being depends on the restoration of our traditional cultural practices to guide our leaders and daily practices. Cultural tourism allows indigenous peoples the opportunity to carry on traditional practices in a contemporary way, resisting notions that indigenous peoples and cultures are fixed in a previous historical era and instead claiming and revitalizing cultural practices in a way that can benefit both the performers/artists as well as their audiences.⁵

I argue that the Wapato Indian club provides a model of education that is represented as a “gift” to all those involved teaching youth, and their audiences, about a cycle of reciprocity that is at the core of indigenous traditions and elders’ explicit...