Editor's Commentary

This issue looks at the concept of indigenous sovereignty from a variety of viewpoints, all of them basically political, framed in the perspective of time from the past to the present and the variations in the imperialism that has colored that perspective. "Lewis Cass and the Politics of Disease" tells of the official decisions to vaccinate American Indians or not as played out in the 1830s. This was a significant effect of imperialism; tribes were forced to move from their homelands for trans-Mississippian exile and to travel across territory where immigrants had brought smallpox to the inhabitants and polluted the water sources with cholera-infected sewage. Tribes not yet forced into this ethnic-cleansing removal but deemed hostile to the interests of the United States were denied vaccination. The sovereignty of all of them, those being marched into exile and those who had been labeled hostile, had been denied. J. Diane Pearson has drawn these shameful histories of imperial medicine, imperial land theft, and forced marches from the archives of official records to keep these events in mind in the twenty-first century.

Archie Phinney, writing in the 1940s, gives the readership a study of who staffed the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the mid-twentieth century. Those he labeled "White Indians" were people who used their Indian ancestry to secure employment in the BIA but had no involvement in American Indian issues beyond that—people whose involvement was as ephemeral as some recent political appointees to that same agency.

Then there are a triad of articles about California indigenous people trying to achieve federal recognition as American Indians: Philip Laverty's "Ohlone/Costanoan-Esselen Nation of Monterey," Les Field's "Unacknowledged Tribes," and "What Must It Have Been Like!" by Les Field and Alan Leventhal. These three articles are histories of the twists and turns of the process that recognizes the sovereignty of indigenous communities, which have existed since the events of their origin myths played out in the sacred landscape of their places of origin long before the aliens appeared to make their doctrine-of-discovery claims of title to the land. These particular California tribes were small populations without wealth, powerful political supporters, or the possession of exotic cultures to attract the favorable attention of more influential ethnologists than the eccentric, quarrelsome John P. Harrington. They had been not just marginalized but declared extinct by the prominent ethnographer Alfred Kroeber. Harrington was an ethnographic field worker for the Bureau of American Ethnology who was utterly absorbed in recording languages on the brink of disappearance. He collected "an enormous, mostly unpublished archive" of stories in the Californio Spanish language, an archive that is an invaluable resource for those who can work their way through the material.

Lawrence Gross's article is similar to the California triad. The Anishinaabe, like the Ohlone, had experienced the interpretation and translation of their sacred stories by ethnolinguists with their own notions of how they should be presented, ways that didn't necessarilymatch Anishinaabe traditions. Gross presents the ways in which Anishinaabe sacred stories can serve the interests of present-day native sovereignty. Now there is no need for non-Anishinaabe to translate or interpret.

Bruce Miller moves the readership on into the development of a Salish common law that can provide Salish communities in the United States and Canada with information on a common body of legal decisions, decisions that may be recent rather than historic. There is a lot of developmental work going on in common law, beyond federal Indian law, that should be taken note of by everyone concerned with tribal law. Miller has published other work along this line that is well worth perusing. There is considerable accumulation of information on tribal court decisions, which Joanne M. Barker, Eileen M. Luna-Firebaugh, David E. Wilkins, and Rennard Strickland have called to my attention: a project to get all the Cherokee tribal court decisions published; Jo Carillo's edited volume, Readings in American Indian Law: Recalling the Rhythm of Survival (Philadelphia...