“Alcohol and the Anishinaabeg”

By the early 20th century Anishinaabe Indians located in modern-day Minnesota faced considerable change as alcohol became more prevalent in and around their reservation land.  The 1905 court decision The Matter of Heff struck down prohibition for Indian citizens, and as a result the Bureau of Indian Affairs supported and then oversaw the implementation of The Burke Act of 1906, which it leveraged to impose prohibition on Indians and white citizens alike.  The BIA designed the Special Office for the Suppression of Liquor and operated the division until 1917.  Having used alcohol derived from berries and rice for centuries, the Anishinaabeg incorporated off-reservation saloons, including mixed-race environs, as a changed yet culturally significant method of using tobacco and alcohol in ceremonies, to cement relationships, and in social settings to help create bonds.  

In addition to these changes in social drinking behavior, there were several adverse effects from these intra-tribal and mixed-race drinking ceremonies and saloons.  After a night of drinking, Anishinaabeg men were reported to have returned to camps and engaged in domestic violence against their wives.  In fact, resistance to alcohol on the reservation, in lockstep with prohibition, manifested itself in the form of the White Earth women who petitioned the federal government to stop illegal liquor sales at the White Earth Village.  They were joined by male tribal members that similarly resisted the spread of alcoholism on the reservation.  Viewed through the lens of this event in Anishinaabeg history, a picture composed of cultural and historical nuances emerges that undermines the traditional stereotype of ‘the drunken Indian” in popular U.S. history.

“Blackfeet Nation’s Decision to Adopt the IRA of 1934”

By 1934 the Blackfeet Nation of Montana was emerging from the allotment period and ready to engage in management of its natural resources as it reformed internally under the Indian Reorganization Act.  In a continual cycle of resistance and renewal, the Blackfeet had developed resources including timber and coal, and, more importantly, a capable and skilled labor workforce working off the reservation part of the year, sustaining families and community members with their wages.  Decades of change under the General Allotment Act of 1887 had resulted in checkerboard-style ownership of land plots with varying degrees of value and resource counts, accompanied by another change in the personages of mixed-blood and wealthy landowners.  Both situations conspired to upset the traditional balance of civil relations in an otherwise egalitarian society typified by sharing and equality within the community.

Senator Burton Wheeler, sponsor of the IRA, considered Indian self-governance too confrontational for local white citizens, reducing the scope of the IRA envisioned by one architect, Commissioner of Indian Affairs John Collier, as extending rights of self-governance and increased self-determination in managing resources on reservation lands.  And although the scope was reduced by the Senate, the Blackfeet, advisors to the government on the IRA, were compelled to accept its provisions not so much as Indians oppressed as they were compelled by taking charge of more of their own internal economic affairs.  In these ways the IRA represented for the Blackfeet Nation a way of protecting their tribe members’ working strategies that allowed for broad support of the local community and worker’s families, and an opportunity to protect vital natural resources from further encroachment by white citizens.

“The ‘Making’ of the Navajo Worker”

For the Navajo of modern-day Arizona, New Mexico and Utah, early resistance gave way to adaptation as a mid-20th century American economy compelled many tribal members to move away from the reservation to seek work.  Rather than see their traditions erode over time, Navajo workers, mainly men during the 1940’s and 1950’s, taking advantage of war-time work opportunities that generated substantial income, in concert with their communities, incorporated these changed work and family patterns into their lifeways, redefining and reinforcing globalization as a beneficial resource for the tribe.  The BIA, for its part, reacted in a predictably contradictory manner to these new Indian work patterns and behaviors.  The 1950 Navajo-Hopi Rehabilitation Act was passed to rebuild infrastructure on the reservation, with the aim of encouraging returning workers to establish Americanized two-parent homes.  The government policy to keep Navajo (as well as other Indians) on their respective reservations was driven by the idea that, with newly erected infrastructure, Americanized Navajo families would begin to assimilate with white America by participating in a local economy much like those in nearby American cities.   Instead, the Act worked in a contradictory fashion, in that it simultaneously provided infrastructure creating a gateway for off-reservation workers, while also failing to stimulate a local economy on the reservation on which Navajo workers could rely for local employment.

In response, the BIA reached out to area agriculturalists, foresters, and mining operators, creating work agreements, circulating a Navajo calendar, and attempting to create a situation for off-reservation Navajo labor pools that acted as a program for its assimilation efforts.  Navajo remained committed however to traditional practices of stressing the importance of providing for the community over individual family units, preferring to pool wages, to the dismay of BIA officials.  Corporations were often reluctant to cooperate, as well, further diminishing the BIA’s goals by refusing, for instance, to create local Navajo communities close to agricultural and timber operations.  Interestingly, mining companies were able to reap benefits from the proposal to create local community's nearby operations, but Navajo customs made this a difficult proposition, as they continued to work seasonally and pool money on the reservation, despite government and business’ best efforts.

Over time wages from off-reservation work were incorporated into the Navajo lifeways and became a survival strategy.  By the mid-1950’s, some Navajo remembered the provenance of their trucks, bought with off-reservation wages, to the degree that their ancestors traced the lineage of their sheep.  Households in the Navajo community remained dedicated to the larger community as was the Navajo tradition, and incorporated the BIA efforts at assimilation only as far as the income generated from off-reservation work programs could be used to maintain the broader, kinship-based system that is their heritage.  In these ways capitalism and economy, as adopted by the Navajo tribe, represent a method of adaptation that was both useful in the way that traditional communal resources were shared by the tribe and significant in offering the tribe an opportunity to persevere in an ever-changing, white world, while retaining a part of its heritage that is critical to its culture.

References

Nichols, Roger L. The American Indian: Past and Present, 6th ed. Norman, Oklahoma. University of Oklahoma Press. 2008.