Native Diasporas: Indigenous Identities and Settler Colonialism in the Americas

15. From Tribal to Indian

Chapter 15 From Tribal to Indian American Indian Identity in the Twentieth Century Donald L. Fixico When I lived in Los Angeles and was shopping in a supermarket one afternoon, an elderly white woman approached me and said, “I just returned from a vacation from Asia and it was wonderful! I bet you are Chinese? Japanese? Korean?” I shook my head no each time; then I thought, she thinks I am a foreigner and she is actually the one that is the foreigner and my people have been here long before hers. This has happened more than once. Being Indian is hard. It is a personal struggle that is also waged in the face of being told what you are supposed to be by mainstream America. The core of Native identity had always been grounded within the communities, but this infrastructure changed during the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries . Explaining this transformation from community identity to tribal identity to Indian identity is the central focus of this discussion , which uses an internal-external model to illustrate how Native identity functions and how it has changed due to external influences. Being Indian in modern America is a personal experience often involving internal and external pressures. Since the late nineteenth century, outside pressures on Indians to assimilate into the American mainstream have played an important role in altering the identity of Native people from tribalness to a generic Indianness. Bureaucrats designed federal policies to colonize Native people, thereby undermining their identity. 474 fixico Being Indian is always finding one’s self outnumbered by the majority of society and frequently feeling lonely and surrounded. The Native person feels more like the Lone Ranger than Tonto. Learning how to cope is important for finding balance within one’s self and accepting one’s own Indian identity. Learning how to get along, often playing the white man’s game, can become critical, but learning the rules is of the utmost importance. A Native person struggles with the internal pressures inside himself or herself and faces rhetoric, historical stereotypes, and other outside influences that must be balanced. To understand one’s own inner self is essential before coping with such external pressures. The work of Edward Said in his Orientalism is helpful here for understanding how outsiders view a people and control the perception of the people’s identity.1 Being Indian is finding humor even during the most strenuous circumstances . The long history of American Indians and their suppressive relationship with the United States is not a pretty one; it is one that is filled with tremendous loss of lands, massacres, brainwashing in boarding schools, soul stealing by churches. Being Indian in modern American is often finding one’s self alone, the only Native person in a meeting, the only one on a team, the only one on an elevator surrounded by non-Indians. What it is like to feel surrounded is one case of “what to do in a difficult situation,” like when the Lone Ranger turns to Tonto and says “Tonto, we’re surrounded by Indians.” Tonto replies, “What do you mean ‘we,’ white man?” This is an Indian joke and Indians find it funny, but to others it may not be so humorous . To be Indian is to learn to laugh at one’s self, to not take one’s self so seriously. It is the circumstance that is humorous, so even nonIndians can laugh at the Lone Ranger joke. Furthermore, Tonto and the Lone Ranger had been partners for nearly twenty years and they shared many experiences. In such a relationship of an Indian and nonIndian , the latter sees himself or herself as being a part of the Indian experience or even being Indian. Originally Native people lived in communities, either sedentary or nomadic. These communities were also called towns, villages, bands, or camps. This community identity changed in the nineteenth century from tribal to indian 475 when bureaucrats began to hold treaty councils and grouped communities together because they spoke the same language and the communities had kinship ties to each other. For example, all the Muscogee Creek communities in the Southeast, which operated as separate towns, became recognized as the Muscogee Creek tribe. The exception occurred when the same linguistic communities spread over a very large area, such as the Ojibwas or Lakotas; hence, bureaucrats approached them as more than one tribe of...