Strangers to Relatives: The Adoption and Naming of Anthropologists in Native North America

8 Tell Your Sister to Come Eat

Making relatives is a common, creative activity in American Indian communities. It is important work because one’s family is one’s foundation ,one’swealth,one’spower,andapersonwithoutrelativeshasno “home,” no secure place in the community. Marriage and childbirth are but two of the many ways in which relatives may be made. In English , we classify all the other ways of making relatives as “adoption,” but adoption is not a unitary phenomenon. Minimally, adoption in Indian communities must be distinguished as tribal or familial, formal or informal. On every reservation and in every Indian community, non-Indians as well as Indians from other tribes/communities have married into the community, had children, and raised their children as community members. There is no “pureblood” Indian community. Likewise, in every Indian community, “outsiders” have become relatives through adoption. These are not rare or surprising occurrences, nor are they recent or even postcontact phenomena: the process of turning strangers into relatives has been going on a very long time in Indian communities (Hall 1997). Adopted members of a tribe or community may become key players in that community. During my early (1970s) fieldwork on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation, Teddy Wooden Thigh made this abundantly clear. Mr. Wooden Thigh was a respected elder in the tribe. He lived on the reservation and was married to a tribal member; he had children and grandchildren there. He spoke the old Cheyenne 175 8 Tell Your Sister to Come Eat Anne S. Straus language, with little or no inclusion of English, and he was widely recognized within the tribe for his knowledge of Cheyenne history and traditions. He was a singer, a handgame player, and a “traditional” man. He was also white. According to the story, he was left in the proverbial basket at the door of the St. Labre Mission some 75 years ago, adopted by the Wooden Thigh family in accordance with long-standing tradition, and raised as a tribal member. Teddy Wooden Thigh’s adoption was a tribal adoption and must be distinguished from the kind of adoption experienced by anthropologists on the Plains. Formal adoption by the tribe must be sanctioned in the tribal constitution and determined by the tribal government. Such adoption confers enrollment and thus the legal and moral rights and responsibilities of tribal citizenship as well as “Indian” status vis- à-vis the federal government. Tribal adoption allows Indian communitiestorecognizelegallythosewhohavelivedasmembersofthecom munity but do not meet the “blood quantum” requirements of the tribe. It should perhaps be noted here that, despiteSanta Clara v. Martinez (Supreme Court of the United States, 1978, 436 U.S. 49), which affirmed tribal jurisdiction over membership, the federal government has typically taken a pretty dim view of adoption clauses in tribal enrollment articles, refusing in at least one clear case (Grand Traverse) to ratify a tribal constitution because it allowed for the adoption of resident Native members of that community. Formal adoption by a tribe is politically charged, motivated, and mediated. It is an arduous process , unusual for Indian people and extremely rare for non-Indians. Teddy Wooden Thigh is the solitary exception in my own experience. The adoption of anthropologists into Plains Indian families is speci ficallynot tribal adoption; it does not grant formal tribal enrollment or Indian status. Those of us with extended family on some reservation or in some urban Indian community are not now and will never become “Indians” as a result of those relationships. Some of us have certainly suffered the throes of wannabe fantasies. Most of us have recovered . Perhaps the most common adoptions into Indian families are those which function to fill a void: a mother has lost her son in Vietnam and she adopts his best friend to fulfill his role and perpetuate his place and his memory; a child is orphaned by a car wreck and becomes “child” to his mother’s sister and her family. Adoption of anthropologists into Indian families occasionally follows this pattern, 176 | straus but it is understood by everyone that the anthropologist is not really equal to the job. Anthropologists working in Indian communities, at least since the late 1960s, have done so with a good deal of trepidation and a burdensome self-consciousness regarding their outsider status. We are already —as anthropologists—self-selected marginals. We arrive in the field, especially in the first fieldwork experience, very worried. The weight of history and political conflict sits heavily upon...