"The Proper Way to Advance the Indian": Race and Gender Hierarchies in Early Yakima Newspapers

Native Peoples and Racialized, Gendered Hierarchies

Native peoples are often relegated to the bottom of race and gender hierarchies in society, and because of their low status, Native peoples often do not have the political connections or resources to effectively resist ongoing disasters within Native communities. On the Yakama Reservation, the site of our research, observations of contemporary reservation life reveal political struggles that involve the health and environmental problems stemming from cattle feedlot operations and other forms of development. ¹ These typically white-owned economic enterprises are sometimes illegal according to both county and tribal codes, but since the businesses are operating on reservation lands, white business owners do not feel they need to account for their practices. ² In short, whites still widely view the reservation as the "Wild West," where anything goes; that is, individual white capitalist rights are privileged over tribal sovereignty. The Native women who are fighting these illegalities claim that their drinking water, fishing subsistence, and air quality have all suffered, and they have linked it to a broader trend of rising asthma rates among Native children. ³ In public forums about these issues, the white business owners construct the Native women as emotional and irrational. The tribal government, headed primarily by men, has spoken out against the illegal enterprises. The white business owners construct these Native men as greedy and corrupt (for wanting to impose fines on the businesses) and lazy (for not doing more studies that would support the white business owners' perspectives).

We use these contemporary examples to understand the ways in which race and gender hierarchies operate. Race and gender intersect in ways that generally relegate Native peoples to the bottom and white peoples to the top of hierarchies during Indian-white interactions. However, individual interactions, while important as points of evidence, are best understood as part of a system of race and gender in the social order. The contemporary examples we use to open this paper help reveal the racialized and gendered social order one encounters today. In our paper, we ask the following questions: Is this social order a new phenomenon? Are the narratives of Native women as emotional and irrational new? What of the narratives of Native men as greedy and corrupt? And, finally, what about the narratives that assume white males (rendering white females invisible) belong at the top of economic hierarchies? We argue that these narratives and hierarchies are in fact deeply rooted in history, and to help answer these questions, we examine the inaugural year of the Yakima area's longest-running newspaper, the Yakima Herald.

Our paper seeks to make the connections between popular cultural discourse and the gendered and racialized hierarchies it reflects, maintains, and advances. Our analysis of an important historical time period, the late 1800s, provides a critical indigenous counternarrative in which we draw from Yakama tribal histories and Plateau cultural teachings. Since "time immemorial," Yakama peoples have contested hierarchies that undermine their culture and political sovereignty. ⁴ Evidence of such resistance exists in tribal oral histories, cultural center exhibits, and contemporary tribally owned media, all of which are sources upon which we draw to inform our critique of historical newspaper accounts. At the center of this critical indigenous perspective is a dedication to a politics of change. Contemporary Yakama peoples and allies continue to work toward protecting the homeland, culture, and people of the Yakama Nation.

Critical social science theorists are also concerned with un doing a history of injustice. Our analysis draws from two bodies of literature: feminist scholarship that examines the intersectionality of race, class, and gender; and bodies of work that take a decolonized approach to scholarship. Because women of color have made important contributions, feminist scholarship now recognizes that "gender is racialized and race is gendered." ⁵ Native women in particular have done analyses that help reveal not only the gender and race hierarchies in the United States but also the oppression that Native people face as indigenous peoples who are trying to protect their sovereign status and...