Tribal Worlds: Critical Studies in American Indian Nation Building

Chapter 3: Kinship as an Assertion of Sovereign Native Nationhood

3 Kinship as an Assertion of Sovereign Native Nationhood Christina Gish Hill As I use [the term tribe] and as I understand other Indian people using it, it means a group of people living pretty much in the same place who know who their relatives are. Vine Deloria, Jr.1 As a concept, the nation is maddeningly difficult to define. Like “spirit” or “health,” the term “nation” encompasses a multiplicity of meanings that shift depending on the context. John Carlos Rowe has argued that the “. . . use of the word national . . . refers to a complex and irreducible array of discourses, institutions, policies, and practices which, even if they are in flux or in competition with other structures and allegiances, cannot be easily wished away.”2 Despite its fluid and constructed nature, the nation is nevertheless quite real and has had, since its inception, power to order the world.3 Because the word has such a multiplicity of meanings, I use the term in a broad sense, to refer to a collectivity with political autonomy recognized as such by others outside of the scope of its influence.4 Such a broad definition leaves room to explore the myriad of ways the term “nation” has been applied to Native peoples. 65 66 Christina Gish Hill In his discussion of the term “tribe,” Vine Deloria recognizes the centrality of both place and family to the sociopolitical organization of Native people. His definition indicates that Native communities are ordered quite differently from the nation-state that defines itself by a bounded territory and membership and represents itself as internally homogenous. Nevertheless, many Native communities historically fell under the broad definition of nation presented above. To distinguish autonomous Native sociopolitical organization from the nation-state, I use the term Native nation. This raises the question of how Native nations organize themselves if their most fundamental signifiers are different from those of the state. More importantly, I ask how Native nations have articulated and exercised their sovereignty before they adopted many of the mechanisms of the state. In his discussion of nationhood, Eric Wolf has critiqued notions of social groups as bounded and homogenous, even nation-states, noting that social practices, such as those associated with kinship, cut across group boundaries. I expand on his argument that kinship can be a mode of political economy, by suggesting that for Native nations, kinship is a central mechanism through which sovereignty is exercised and articulated. Exploring exactly how Native peoples understood their own collective sociopolitical organization sheds light on the multiple and often contradictory understandings that Europeans and Americans developed to define Native nations and the ambiguous actions government officials often took in relation to them.5 Euro-Americans recognized that Native people organized themselves as coherent political entities but interpreted these collectivities through Western political constructions. Although American understandings of Native nations have shifted over time, they have mainly been based on Western assumptions that all valid political formations mirror those of European nation-states. As the nationstate emerged in the West and took precedence over other political forms, Europeans and Americans began to view Native sociopolitical organization either as comparable to the nation-state in form, even ascribing it political autonomy, or as chaotic and formless and therefore opposed to the nation-state. Neither representation accurately reflected Native nationhood in its multiple forms. This paper explores Cheyenne sociopolitical organization historically as a case study in order to unravel the distinctions between the nation-state as it was first defined in Western Europe and North America and the nationhood found among Native peoples of North America. Assuming that Native sociopolitical organization and interaction mirrors the rigid constructions of the state both ignores the complexity of Native historical action and also glosses this complexity in a way 67 Kinship as an Assertion of Sovereign Native Nationhood that benefits the U.S. nation’s hegemonic narrative. According to such a narrative, if Plains peoples could be divided into clearly identifiable nation-like tribes with a unified membership and a bounded territory, then a successful military campaign against a tribe results in the capture of the territory and in control over the population.6 If tribes were bounded like nations, they could be conquered and controlled. Conversely, if Native peoples were chaotic with minimal or unbounded political organization, they required subjugation and assimilation under the civilizing structure of the state.7 The dominant narrative of U.S. history has...