About the authenticity and unity of Indian American identity

Résumé du document

France Info, a well known French radio station, reported about the federal American Government's decision to grant 1.4 billion dollars as claimed by Elouise Cobell, from Blackfeet tribe, to compensate the native land dispossession since 1887. This news reset the question of Indian American dispossession, and, in relation with the distribution of money, the question of Indian American identity arises: who is a real Indian? As many researchers, officials and anthropologists wondered about this since the John Collier law (or Indian Reorganization Act, 1934) that restored the concept of tribe by federal acknowledgment, we interrogate what really is the Indian American identity, its boundaries and authenticity. We ponder about whether it possesses a global Indian American identity, and whether those identities are authentic or were altered.

Extraits

[...] This policy was based on the idea most of the natives were assimilated and integrated into white society, so that they hadn't a specific identity anymore, thus they were no longer “authentic Indians”. After the raise of activism that characterized the sixties, the Congress granted to natives their civil rights (by the Indian Civil Right Act in 1968) and started to change its Termination policy into a self- determination one. A good example of this change is the Menominee Restoration Act of 1975 that made the tribe exist again, while the Termination Act of 1954 had eliminated it. [...]

[...] However, the question of authenticity isn't also a governmental issue. It is also an important matter for the tribes themselves. As a matter of fact, from the moment tribes started to be somehow managed par the federal government (1934), they were given some financial and material (lands) resources which they had to share. The question of authenticity was thus a dramatically important economic issue, because the reality of this native identity permitted to get an access to those resources. Individuals thus had to prove their belonging to a tribe through the tribal rolls, then through their ancestors ethnic identity. [...]

[...] John Collier law put an end to this policy during the New Deal era, in 1934 by a law called the Indian Reorganization Act. It also restored the tribe concept, federally recognized tribes being granted some lands. To be federally recognized, tribes needed to prove they had tribe criterions, (which had been discriminated for centuries); It raised other tensions among native population, between the federally recognized tribes and the others (that hadn't the same rights), and between the “assimilated” Indians living in urban areas and the traditionalists still living in reservation (that faced different issues). [...]

[...] Finally, the question of authenticity also was raised by anthropologists. As a matter of fact, in 1925, the father of California anthropology, Alfred Kroeber, declared the "Esselen" and "Costanoan" Indians of the greater San Francisco/Monterey area extincts (in his highly influential Handbook of California Indians). In the 1950s, he retracted this "extinction sentence" saying "The survivors are there; they may even be full- bloods; racially or biologically the stock is not extinct; but they can no longer help the anthropologist acquire the knowledge about the group that he would like to preserve." The fact they assimilated and get more modern made them “nonexistent” as Indians for this famous anthropologists. [...]

[...] And, once again, the question of authenticity will prove to be a mainly economical issue, the real Indians meaning those deserving compensation. This law also ended the process created by the General Allotment Act in 1887, also called Dawes law (officials were even in charge to find lands for Indians). cf. Alexandra Harmon, Lines in Sand: Shifting Boundaries between Indians and Non-Indians in the Puget Sound Region; the author alludes to the intermarriages between the tribes in the Puget Sound region before contact. [...]