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Brian Hosmer is associate professor of history and American Indian studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago and director of The Newberry Library's D'Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian History. Colleen O'Neill is associate professor of history at Utah State University and associate editor of Western Historical Quarterly.

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Native Pathways

University Press of Colorado

Contents

Donald L. Fixico Foreword.........................................................................................................................viiAcknowledgments...................................................................................................................................xiColleen O'Neill 1 Rethinking Modernity and the Discourse of Development in American Indian History, an Introduction...............................1PART I COMMERCE AND INCORPORATIONPaul C. Rosier 2 Searching for Salvation and Sovereignty: Blackfeet Oil Leasing and the Reconstruction of the Tribe...............................27David La Vere 3 Minding Their Own Business: The Kiowa-Comanche-Apache Business Committee of the Early 1900s.......................................52Jessica R. Cattelino 4 Casino Roots: The Cultural Production of Twentieth-Century Seminole Economic Development...................................66Nicolas G. Rosenthal 5 The Dawn of a New Day? Notes on Indian Gaming in Southern California.......................................................91Kathy M'Closkey 6 The Devil's in the Details: Tracing the Fingerprints of Free Trade and Its Effects on Navajo Weavers............................112PART II WAGE WORKTressa Berman 7 "All We Needed Was Our Gardens": Women's Work and Welfare Reform in the Reservation Economy.......................................133David Arnold 8 Work and Culture in Southeastern Alaska: Tlingits and the Salmon Fisheries.........................................................156Clyde Ellis 9 Five Dollars a Week to Be "Regular Indians": Shows, Exhibitions, and the Economics of Indian Dancing, 1880-1930.....................184Jeffrey P. Shepherd 10 Land, Labor, and Leadership: The Political Economy of Hualapai Community Building, 1910-1940...............................209William Bauer 11 Working for Identity: Race, Ethnicity, and the Market Economy in Northern California, 1875-1936..................................238PART III METHODOLOGY AND THEORETICAL IMPLICATIONSC. D. James Paci and Lisa Krebs 12 Local Knowledge as Traditional Ecological Knowledge: Definition and Ownership..................................261Brian Hosmer 13 "Dollar a Day and Glad to Have It": Work Relief on the Wind River Indian Reservation as Memory....................................283Duane Champagne 14 Tribal Capitalism and Native Capitalists: Multiple Pathways of Native Economy..................................................308Brian Hosmer and Colleen O'Neill 15 Conclusion....................................................................................................330About the Contributors............................................................................................................................335Index.............................................................................................................................................341

Chapter One

One afternoon several years ago I was browsing through the stacks in the library, and I stumbled on a book entitled Stories of Traditional Navajo Life and Culture. That book, published in 1977 by the Navajo Community College Press and edited by its director, Broderick Johnson, included stories from twenty-two Navajo men and women about their "traditional culture."

Traditional culture? My research was on twentieth-century labor and working-class history. I was interested in "the modern." So the book sat on my desk for weeks while I tried to sort out the "modern" evidence I'd found in the archives, stories that were at best fragmented snapshots. Most troubling were the absences, the invisibility of Navajo workers in the documents. Where were the Navajo workers? Surely Navajo men worked in the coal mines in Gallup, one of the most industrialized towns bordering the reservation in the mid-twentieth century. I pored over payroll and company housing records, newspaper accounts, and company correspondence and found little evidence that could help me describe the experience or even the existence of Navajo workers in Gallup in the 1930s and 1940s.

When I finally opened the book that promised, at least in my imagination, sacred stories of emergence and fables that stressed values of pastoral traditions, I found something that made me reexamine my assumptions: workers. Almost every narrator in the book told a story about some sort of wage work-working on the railroads, in the agriculture fields, for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, or at a trading post. They remembered the everyday struggles they faced in their jobs, as well as their ongoing efforts to fulfill customary kinship and ceremonial obligations. For these Navajos, "modernity" and "tradition" were overlapping, not mutually exclusive, categories. Navajo people met their sacred responsibilities as well as the demands of the capitalist workplace.

This research vignette illustrates how one's underlying assumptions about culture, tradition, and modernity shape modes of inquiry as well as the eventual narratives-large and small. The rigid modern/traditional dichotomy that too often marks historical writing is a by-product of a larger problem that renders American Indians invisible within the broad narrative of American history. That narrative, steeped in positivist assumptions, tends to embrace and naturalize a universalized notion of modernity.

Modernity, as a guiding social principle or state ideology, emerged during the eighteenth century. Enlightenment thinkers challenged the basic worldview and social structures of Western European society, rejecting the absolute power of kings and the association of knowledge with the realm of Christianity. They advocated a rationalization of power, ideas, and social relationships. As geographer David Harvey explains, "It was, above all, a secular movement that sought the demystification and desacralization of knowledge and social organization in order to liberate human beings from their chains." Part of that modernizing project involved seeking universal truths about human nature through scientific observation, logic, and reason. Proponents were, of course, assuming that there was a universal humanity to be revealed. In the search for a singular truth and the application of reason to political and economic realms, Enlightenment leaders generalized that which was "true" for Western European societies to the rest of the world. As states contested for power in Europe and in their colonial holdings abroad, the "appeal to reason" increasingly informed expansionist ideology, justifying conquest of indigenous peoples as well as provoking opposition from nationalists throughout Europe in the mid-nineteenth century.

"Rule by reason" had its price. As Eric Wolf argued in his final book, its practitioners became the "apostles of modernity," and up to this day they "readily tag others as opponents of progress." Wolf continues, "[T]hey have advocated industrialization, specialization, secularization, and rational bureaucratic allocation as reasoned options superior to unreasoned reliance on tradition." Modernity has become synonymous with capitalism, and that narrative, a history in which Indians are portrayed as irrelevant victims of military and economic conquest, pronounces the "cultural death" of indigenous peoples in twentieth-century America. It seems there is no room for tradition in a modern context.

Yet the lived reality of American Indians in the twentieth century proves otherwise and makes us rethink the kinds of analytical categories that for so long have rendered them invisible. Like historian David Roediger, who helped us recognize whiteness, we need to lay bare the assumptions of what constitutes modernity. The chapters in this volume help us recognize how American Indians transcended these rigid categories and created alternative pathways of economic and cultural change that were not merely static renditions of some timeless past or total acceptance of U.S. capitalist culture. American Indians in the twentieth century blended their modern and traditional worlds as a matter of course and in the process redefined those categories in ways that made sense to them.

This introductory chapter is an attempt to rethink the modern/traditional dichotomy and to consider how that construct has informed ethnohistorical thinking about American Indian economic development. It is an effort to stimulate a conversation that examines the relationship between American Indian culture and capitalism by suggesting ways American Indian histories challenge underlying assumptions about modernity itself. Revisiting the terms of the debate may inspire scholars and policy makers to see American Indian cultural and economic innovations as neither "modern" nor "pre-modern" nor even "antimodern." Instead, we are suggesting that American Indians have crafted alternative pathways of economic development that transcend linear analytical categories. This chapter will explore that intellectual history and raise questions that complicate our notions of modernity to reveal a much more complicated past-a past vividly described by the contributors to this volume.

Authors in Native Pathways represent a variety of disciplinary approaches and theoretical models, each engaging the literature on culture and economic development in critical new ways. They examine how class formation, gender, race, and cultural practices shaped capitalist incorporation of American Indian communities-a historical process that influenced the nature of wage work, the ways indigenous people produced "for the market," and how they weathered shifts in federal policy. We hope this volume inspires a meaningful dialogue among academics, activists, and policy makers, those who are developing new ways to understand American Indian historical struggles and who are initiating new pathways toward decolonization.

TRADITION AND MODERNIZATION

The categories "modern" and "traditional" have survived a long and sordid history of draconian and paternalistic federal policies, as well as internal debates among American Indian communities. Those categories describe a cultural position wherein American Indians define and are defined by their relationship to the American capitalist economy, with all its political, cultural, and economic features. "Tradition" acquires meaning in relation to the "modern." The modern is the benchmark against which tradition is measured. And at least since the Enlightenment, the concept of the modern has been linked to the notion of "progress."

The modern and traditional dichotomy is a product of modernization theory, a linear way of thinking about economic change that has shaped ideas about development as well as our understanding of dependency. Embraced by development "experts" in the post-World War II era, its underlying assumptions about culture and economic development date back to the mid-nineteenth century. "Building on positivist notions of Western Enlightenment and 19th-century conceptions of evolution," according to historian Kathy Le Mons Walker, at the heart of modernization theory are the social evolutionary notions "that all cultures follow unilinear and evolutionary stages of development." Infused with ideological notions of the "white man's burden," modernization theory linked the expansion of capitalist relations into nonstate, indigenous societies as a measure of progress. It was a self-congratulatory embrace of capitalist values and logic that legitimized the expansion of Western imperialist powers worldwide.

Modernization theory has had a lasting impact on development policy, shaping intellectual paradigms and policy initiatives well into the twentieth century. Scholars and policy makers concluded that the "neoclassic modeling of economic behavior that described the logic of incentive, disincentive, and growth in the advanced West could also describe the logic of economic backwardness and felicitous take-off in non-Western regions." Developing countries would have everything to gain and nothing to lose from following the example of the West. In fact, these theorists argued that clinging to those "archaic and outdated structures" kept American Indians poor and at the margins of the U.S. economy. Clearly ethnocentric and, at best, paternalistic, modernization theory shaped the foundations of American Indian policy from the development of the first boarding schools and reservation land allotments to the Indian New Deal and Termination. The central thread that connected these sometimes contradictory policies was that success, or, for that matter, survival within the capitalist economic system, required cultural change. Western society became synonymous with the "modern" and therefore was not only desirable but also the ultimate cultural destination on the road to economic development.

DEPENDENCY AND THE DISCOURSE OF DEVELOPMENT

Dependency theory emerged as a counterbalance to modernization theory as the debates over development and modernization were taking shape in the midst of the decolonization struggles in Africa and Latin America. Instead of viewing the inevitable capitalist transformation as a purveyor of prosperity, dependency theorists saw the extension of the capitalist economy to developing regions as one of the causes of poverty and cultural degradation.

Underdevelopment was more than an early stage of capitalist progress. Impoverished regions in the Third World were not just lagging behind the industrialized West. Borrowing from Latin American critics of dependency theory and incorporating the core-periphery concept, Andre Gunder Frank argued that capitalist development and underdevelopment were part of the same process. Coining the phrase "development of underdevelopment," he called for a global analysis of the historical development of capitalism, suggesting that capitalism's success hinged on the underdevelopment of peripheral countries. Feudal relationships in Latin America were a product of capitalist expansion, not a "backward" stage of economic development. Capitalist world markets had determined Latin American class relations ever since the Spanish arrived on American shores in the late fifteenth century.

The use of dependency theory to explain Native American history in the United States has had extraordinary staying power for American scholars, activists, and officials. Drawing on the work of Latin Americanists and African scholars, dependency theory offered intellectuals, policy experts, and community activists an explanatory model for understanding why Native Americans suffered such extreme poverty on Indian reservations in the United States. They found that, like African and Latin American peasants, American Indians suffered from a legacy of colonial exploitation. For example, dependency theorists argued that unequal trade restrictions between countries at the "core" and those in the "periphery" undermined the development of Latin American economies. Advanced capitalist countries siphoned the financial surplus from developing nations, preventing them from accumulating sufficient capital to develop an internal industrial base.

In 1971 anthropologist Joseph Jorgensen incorporated Frank's dependency model to show that incorporation into the U.S. political economy created desperate economic conditions on Indian reservations. Writing against the functionalist paradigm, an anthropological approach primarily concerned with American Indian assimilation, Jorgensen stated that "Indian poverty does not represent an evolutionary stage of acculturation." Contrary to what the functionalists assumed, incorporation into the U.S. market was not a solution. It was the root of the problem.

Jorgensen described the relationship between the United States and American Indian communities as a history of super-exploitation. Drawing from Frank's metropolis-satellite model, he applied his analysis of the relationship between developing nations and advanced industrial states to the relationship between the United States and its Native American environs. Jorgensen argued that "the conditions of the `backward' modern American Indians are not due to rural isolation nor [to] a tenacious hold on aboriginal ways, but result from the way in which United States urban centers of finance, political influence, and power have grown in expense of rural areas." The growth of the metropolis, Jorgensen explained, depended largely on the wealth farmers, ranchers, railroads, and mining companies expropriated from Indian lands. Although rural people of all races suffered from the underdevelopment of the countryside, Indians remained formally disenfranchised, under the tutelage of a bureaucratic system-"special neocolonial institutions such as tribal governments which exercise[d] only a modicum of control over their affairs."

Historian Richard White, in his examination of how U.S. policies undermined Native American subsistence strategies, not only incorporated the broad dependency frameworks suggested by Frank and Jorgensen but also examined how "underdevelopment" impacted the land and indigenous cultural practices. Drawing from the work of anthropologists and other social scientists who were thinking about capitalist development and underdevelopment in the Third World, his work shows the existence of similar types of historical dynamics in the United States. In the Navajo case, he argues that federal restrictions and non-Indian settlement patterns circumscribed Navajo land-use methods. Confiscation of livestock and enforcement of strict grazing limits undermined the subsistence base for many Navajo families and forced them into the wage labor market, into a dependency relationship with the federal government, or both.

Dependency theory supplied an emerging Pan-Indian, nationalist movement with a fundamental explanation for what caused Native American impoverishment and connected that struggle with other liberation movements in the United States and abroad. But like nationalist discourse in general, it was rife with internal tensions and contradictions. As Partha Chatterjee has suggested, nationalist discourse both contests the "alleged inferiority of the colonized peoples" and asserts "that a backward nation could `modernize' itself while retaining its cultural identity." The result is a discursive trap. According to Chatterjee, nationalism "produced a discourse in which, even as it challenged the colonial claim to political domination, it also accepted the very intellectual premises of `modernity' on which colonial domination was based." By contesting the legitimacy of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) and demanding control over natural resources, the discourse of dependency and the discourse of development were two sides of the same coin. Activists and advocates demanded an end to super-exploitation but did not challenge the goal of capitalist development. The dependency paradigm provided a compelling set of political objectives, including control over land, political sovereignty, and a moral case for retribution, but it prohibited a discussion of alternative models of development. Scholars and activists then faced the prospect of choosing between "tradition," which relegated culture to a timeless past, or "modernity," a homogeneous future within the dominant capitalist society. The dichotomy is preserved, only in reverse as "romantic primitivism or crude nationalism."

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