Session Abstract
“Disputed Peoples and Places: Struggles among Indigenous Nations in the Twentieth Century Pacific Northwest”
Our panel explores indigenous constructions of places and identities, focusing on disputes among Native peoples over resource sites in Oregon and British Columbia in the twentieth century. Changing property and resource usage policies in North America compelled indigenous people to formulate new identities to claim disputed places. Aboriginal efforts threw the meanings of those places into question both within colonial and tribal administrations and within local constructions of indigenous knowledge. The ways in which indigenous identities have shifted in response to threatened cultural and economic resource sites in the Pacific Northwest have become increasingly relevant to Native communities and scholars, and are among the most important legacies of North American colonialism.
Our presenters are Dr. Keith Thor Carlson (University of Saskatchewan), Dr. Gray H. Whaley (Southern Illinois University), and Monika Bilka, a PhD student of Dr. Donald Fixico (Arizona State University.) Dr. Elaine Marie Nelson (University of Minnesota, Morris) is chair, and Dr. Nicolas Rosenthal (Loyola Marymount University) will comment. Rosenthal’s new book Reimagining Indian Country: Native American Migration and Identity in Twentieth-Century Los Angeles (The University of North Carolina Press, May 2012) promises to contribute substantially to the studies of indigenous identities and places, particularly in urban areas. His commentary should attract considerable attention to an already distinguished session.
Carlson will present “Fishing Wars: Inter-tribal Conflicts and Definitions of Territoriality.” His paper looks at the way that colonial-era coerced migrations and economic restrictions regarding the salmon fishery have resulted in an underground illegal fishery that pits family against family, and tribe against tribe along the Fraser River in British Columbia. He argues that new definitions of “tribe” are emerging from out of the colonial caldron of conflict.
Whaley will present, “Disputed Property and Tribal Identities among Western Oregon Indians: The Indian Hall of Coos Bay, 1940-1989.” His paper looks at the ways in which Native peoples of coastal Oregon navigated the Court of Claims, Congress, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and one another to establish modern “tribal” identities and legal claims to a property donated by a local timber baron in 1940. In the process, these Native families helped redefine Native identity and sovereignty in the United States.
Bilka will present, "Intergenerational Place-making and Cultural Identity: The Klamath Tribes' Responses to the Termination Policy and Its Effects on Their Community." The Termination policy ended the Klamaths' sovereign relationship with the United States in 1961. Through this policy, Congress transferred nearly one-million acres of land from Klamath ownership to the Department of Agriculture and the private sector. The Klamaths fought for access to their former homeland and regained federal recognition in 1986. Bilka argues that, despite the changes termination imposed on their community and landscape, the Klamaths maintained cultural identity and social cohesion through "intergenerational place-making," that is, social relationships across the urban-rural divide, storytelling, and cultural experiences with the physical landscape from the 1950s to the 1980s.