Session Abstract

As colonized peoples, all American Indian communities have to varying degrees and in varied ways suffered loss of land, lives, and liberty.  This shared grievance provides a basis for understanding a diverse array of twentieth-century Indian actions as spurred by a common aim: to regain control over crucial rights, resources, and relations that sustained their communities.  Whether exercising tribal treaty rights to economic resources or claiming tribal jurisdiction   extended to everyone on their reservations, American Indians in the last century launched a historic drive to defend indigenous lifeways, redefine their relationships to other Americans, and give practical meaning to the concept of tribal sovereignty.

Through four case studies examining both micro-level, tribal conflicts and their macro-level, national implications, panelists for this session will document the primary motivation behind Indian actions as a desire to reclaim control over vital components of their community, and then investigate how this understanding of Native American intentions enhances our analysis of twentieth-century Indian history and Indian/non-Indian relations.  What happens when we view American Indian labor struggles as movements to exercise sovereign rights rather than a collection of marginalized minorities struggling for incorporation into the American economic and political system?  What was the relationship between tribes’ efforts to control reservation resources or the non-Indians in their midst and their understanding of the legal doctrine of tribal sovereignty?  And how did these efforts to re-assert control over important elements of indigenous societies affect the values and practices of the groups themselves?  Who defined those “crucial” ingredients worth fighting for and determined the “appropriate” tactics for reclaiming control over them?  What did the outcome of these struggles mean for a group’s shared identity?  In specific terms, what did it mean to be Crow and work for hourly wages in an industrial mining complex or to be Quinault but be denied power to enforce law and order on your reservation?  These questions animate our individual and collective pursuits to understand the meanings American Indians attached to their “economic” actions and their unique political status, as well as decipher the effects of these struggles on indigenous communities.

We also seek to stage our examination into twentieth-century American Indian actions in an innovative fashion.  Each participant will produce a paper of original scholarship, but as a group, we are committed to being interactive contributors to that that work.  Thus, panelists will circulate drafts of their papers ahead of time, and at the conference, each presenter will first summarize their major findings before drawing connections across projects.  Our hope is the common ground we establish as a group will lead to a provocative discussion on these shared themes, which will not only improve the individual projects, but also help us say something important about the shared experiences of American Indians in the twentieth century.