Lelooska: The Life of a Northwest Coast Artist

5. “A Kind of Hunger”

5 / “A Kind of Hunger” A search for identity—cultural and political—was arguably one of the key features of Native American struggles in the twentieth century and continues to be so in the twenty-first. Yet identity is a tricky, elusive matter. What choices individuals and groups have and how differences are given meaning make identity formation particularly political . This was certainly the case for Don. Aside from his family upbringing and his appearance, over which he had little choice, there were few “official” items to which he could point to claim a specific tribal, much less Indian, status. Yet he never doubted he was Indian. In many respects, Don’s life was very much like that of the Métis or “mixed-blood” people whom Native American author, literary critic, and academic Gerald Vizenor speaks of as “Earthdivers”: those beings who dove to the depths of the seas and retrieved the lumps of clay from which they shaped new worlds. For him, these peoples are “compassionate tricksters ” and “uncertain creator[s].”1 Vizenor’s visions stand in stark contrast to the much dated but frustratingly persistent social science tradition that seeks to salvage “authentic” Indians before they “vanish.” Proponents of this tradition argue that modernity inevitably erases “premodern” cultures or, by implication, that intermarriage with non-Indians or even members of other tribes makes each successive generation “less Indian” than that before it. 121 Other schools of thought explain this supposed demise as the triumph of civilization over savagery. In the past generation, this vision has been inverted. It now shows a not-so-pleasant Western imperialist juggernaut that inevitably destroyed Native cultures. For all of its recognition of the inequities of power and the role of diseases, this newer vision is a romantic victimization in which Indians play no real role. Following on the heels of this victimization narrative is an even more recent argument, that the cultures of Native Americans (indeed, “minorities ” in general) persist. “Ethnics” offer up resistance to assimilation and refuse to change. Some may find merit in this heroic model, but it still falls into an easy either/or fallacy. The scholar Arnold Krupat argues that those who analyze societies as being either purely “modern/progressive” or “traditional” engage in an ineffectual “ethnocriticism.”2 Even recent attention to identity formation among American Indians such as that proposed by Vizenor does have its critics. An emphasis on “mixed blood” literature and histories, they argue, is unconnected to the politics—cultural and especially economic—of being “tribal” and denies the reality of material oppression and the fierce resistance to it. Don’s experiences, however, suggest that scholars need to not only think beyond the older dichotomies—civilized or savage, modern or premodern—but also take care in drawing stark lines between “mixed blood,” non–federally recognized Indians on the one hand and “full blood,” “tribal,” federally recognized Indians on the other.3 It is true that the promise of and positioning for federal moneys reinforce, even dictate , a need to make those lines clear,4 but in the process, it is too easy to lose track of those important, even critical links between reservation and off-reservation lives. It is time to take up the question of how they interact, how they can be mutually beneficial. It is important to allow Indian peoples the opportunity to be complicated, to be full of the very human contradictions that make up who we are as individuals and groups. Still, politics make a difference. The 1960s and 1970s marked another sea change in federal Indian policy, one that dovetailed nicely with the decades-old drive by Indian peoples for self-determination. Much as in the 1930s, the federal government turned its attention and resources back to reservations. In education, it promoted Head Start programs on reservations , encouraged and supported conferences regarding K–12 and colLelooska • 122 lege and university programs and curricula. In economic realms, it gave much attention to finding ways to bolster reservation economies, usually trying to focus on resource management and industrial development. It also took up arts and crafts programs with renewed vigor, and though it tended to see such efforts as only marginally remunerative, federal officials argued that support of cultural efforts raised self-esteem and gave Indians a place for their talents in a modern world. Paternalistic as those constructions may have been, they nonetheless helped swing the balance toward greater self-determination. Those same decades also marked...