{"title":"An Introduction to Settler Science and the Ethics of Contact","authors":"D. Shorter, K. Tallbear","doi":"10.17953/aicrj.45.1.shorter_tallbear","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17953/aicrj.45.1.shorter_tallbear","url":null,"abstract":"Providing the history and significance of the varied collection of articles in this American Indian Culture and Research Journal special issue, coeditors David Shorter and Kim TallBear describe involvement in an Indigenous studies working group formed in conjunction with the Making Contact 2018 workshop hosted by the Berkeley SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Research Center. As a whole, “Settler Science, Alien Contact, and Searches for Intelligence” takes a critical eye to frontiers, space exploration, the history of science, and the colonial politics of surveillance technologies.","PeriodicalId":80424,"journal":{"name":"American Indian culture and research journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46569466","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"G-Men, Green Men, and Red Land: Extraterrestrial Miscreants, Federal Jurisdiction, and Exceptional Space","authors":"F. Painter","doi":"10.17953/aicrj.45.1.painter","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17953/aicrj.45.1.painter","url":null,"abstract":"In the 1970s a string of cattle mutilations grabbed national attention. Thousands of cows in twenty-one states were turning up dead under suspicious circumstances. The culprits left no tire tracks or footprints, only exsanguinated cows missing trademark body parts. Many members of the public suspected (and still suspect) aliens were responsible. This article analyzes FBI files on the mutilations and reveals the central role Indian land played in the FBI’s search for the cow killers. It then wields Indian land to launch an Indigenous critique of settler speculations about the alien.","PeriodicalId":80424,"journal":{"name":"American Indian culture and research journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45531455","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“What’s on the earth is in the stars; and what’s in the stars is on the earth”: Lakota Relationships with the Stars and American Relationships with the Apocalypse","authors":"S. Kite","doi":"10.17953/aicrj.45.1.kite","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17953/aicrj.45.1.kite","url":null,"abstract":"How is colonialism connected to American relationships with extraterrestrial beings? This commentary analyzes contemporary and founding US mythologies as constant, calculated attempts for settlers to obtain indigeneity in this land stemming from a fear of the “unknown.” From Columbus’s arrival to the Boston Tea Party, from alien and UFO fervor to paranormal experiences, spiritualism, New Age, and American Wicca, American mythology endlessly recreates conspiracy theories to justify its insatiable desire for resource extraction. I examine the US American mythology of extraterrestrials from two directions: the Oglala Lakota perspective of spirits born through a constellation of stars, and the “American” perspective of extraterrestrials born out of settler futurities. Manifest Destiny goes so far as to take ownership over time and reconfigure it into a linear, one-way street that is a progression towards apocalypse. For American Indians and other peoples targeted by the United States government, conspiracy theories prove true. Those who are targeted, Native and otherwise, understand as the violence of American mythology pours across the continent—abduction and assimilation, or death. How can Indigenous nonhuman ontologies orient settler ethics for the future?","PeriodicalId":80424,"journal":{"name":"American Indian culture and research journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43798195","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"From Interstellar Imperialism to Celestial Wayfinding: Prime Directives and Colonial Time-Knots in SETI","authors":"William Lempert","doi":"10.17953/aicrj.45.1.lempert","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17953/aicrj.45.1.lempert","url":null,"abstract":"This article traces parallels between James Cook’s 1768 Endeavour voyage to measure the transit of Venus and current initiatives searching for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). While separated by vast time and space, both are united in their appeal to celestial frontier science in the service of all humanity, and contain discrepancies between their ethical protocols and probable outcomes. Past, present, and future colonial projects are interwoven by drawing on Dipesh Chakrabarty’s “time-knot,” Star Trek’s “prime directive,” and firsthand experience in SETI’s Indigenous studies working group. This analysis cautions against the current trend toward unabated interstellar imperialism and suggests alternative approaches for engaging outer spaces and beings through celestial wayfinding.","PeriodicalId":80424,"journal":{"name":"American Indian culture and research journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46316180","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"On Being Late: Cruising Mauna Kea and Unsettling Technoscientific Conquest in Hawai‘i","authors":"D. Maile","doi":"10.17953/aicrj.45.1.maile","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17953/aicrj.45.1.maile","url":null,"abstract":"Conquest of new frontiers in the universe requires the colonization of old ones. This article interrogates technoscience desires to explore outer space, and how time and territory for discovering extraterrestrials and habitable planets are organized through settler colonialism on our own. Examining modern astronomy at Mauna Kea, I argue the technoscientific promise of the Thirty Meter Telescope hinges on a temporality of lateness—late to show up and late in time—that contributes to the dehumanization, elimination, and dispossession of Kanaka Maoli, the Indigenous people of Hawai‘i. I demonstrate further that kia‘i—mountain protectors—unsettle technoscientific conquest by cruising Mauna Kea as an alternative tempo that disrupts the pace of building the observatory.","PeriodicalId":80424,"journal":{"name":"American Indian culture and research journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45008031","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A Dissonant Education: Marching Bands and Indigenous Musical Traditions at Sherman Institute, 1901–1940","authors":"V. Veerbeek","doi":"10.17953/aicrj.44.4.veerbeek","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17953/aicrj.44.4.veerbeek","url":null,"abstract":"At the end of the nineteenth century, the US government established a system of off-reservation boarding schools in an effort to assimilate Indigenous youth into the American nation-state. Music emerged as one of the most enduring strategies that these schools employed to reshape the cultural sensibilities of young Native Americans. A lively music culture could be found, for instance, at Sherman Institute in Riverside, California, which was home to a marching band and dozens of other music groups throughout its history. Although school officials created these institutions for the purposes of assimilation and cultural genocide, this music program often had a more ambiguous place in the lives of students. To understand the role of music within Sherman Institute during the early twentieth century, this article examines the school’s marching band and the place of Indigenous cultural expression. While the school had students march to the beat of civilization, young Native Americans found various strategies to combat assimilation using the same instruments. At the same time, they also used the cultures of their communities to navigate life in an environment that the government created to destroy those very cultures.","PeriodicalId":80424,"journal":{"name":"American Indian culture and research journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43513216","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Medicines at Standing Rock: Stories of Native Healing through Survivance","authors":"Selma Hedlund","doi":"10.17953/aicrj.44.4.hedlund","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17953/aicrj.44.4.hedlund","url":null,"abstract":"In 2016, a historically large gathering of Indigenous peoples, tribal nations, and allies took place at the Standing Rock reservation, North Dakota, in response to the proposed construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). Under the assertion of Mni Wičoni (Water Is Life), a social movement emerged with the purpose of protecting clean drinking water and Indigenous lands. Drawing on Gerald Vizenor’s theoretical framework that emphasizes storytelling and active presence over settler resistance, this study argues that Indigenous water protectors’ collective action in the movement, as well as their stories and remembrance of Standing Rock, are acts of survivance, in which they are able to denounce othering and challenge the colonizer’s gaze. While water is often described as a first medicine by Indigenous peoples, the water protectors’ stories in this essay suggest that the movement itself represented another remedy as well. Specifically, this movement represents a pivotal moment of cultural revitalization and community across what participants refer to as “Indian country,” in which individuals are able to engage in large scale grassroots decolonizing praxis rooted in spirituality and ceremony, and suspend genocidal traps of victimry that they have long battled.","PeriodicalId":80424,"journal":{"name":"American Indian culture and research journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47437931","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A Duty to Protect and Respect: Seneca Opposition to Incorporation during the Removal Period","authors":"Claudia B. Haake","doi":"10.17953/aicrj.44.4.haake","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17953/aicrj.44.4.haake","url":null,"abstract":"When pressured to remove after the 1830 Indian Removal Act, some from among the Seneca appealed to the federal government to prevent displacement. In these letters and petitions, their authors periodically invoked the notion of protection, an instrument of cross-cultural diplomatic encounters of the previous century. Seneca authors sought to defend their tribe against settler takeover by invoking two different kinds of protection, external and internal. They further drew upon a civil right, petitioning, although originally it had been a method of exclusion from full political rights, and rejected the legal incorporation forced upon American Indians through the “domestic dependent nations” ruling.","PeriodicalId":80424,"journal":{"name":"American Indian culture and research journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49652711","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Playing (the Casino) Indian: Native American Roles in Peak TV","authors":"C. Mohler","doi":"10.17953/aicrj.44.4.mohler","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17953/aicrj.44.4.mohler","url":null,"abstract":"The current television era, sometimes called “Peak TV,” was ushered in with serious creatordriven shows of the late 1990s. The increasingly frequent Indian character type of the manipulative, money-hungry, and usually criminal casino “chief”/CEO simultaneously offers dramatically significant guest-star roles for Native actors and reflects a neoliberal version of the Noble Savage fit for twenty-first century audiences. This article analyzes examples of the “casino Indian: characterization found in the award-winning television dramas The Sopranos, Big Love, The Killing and House of Cards. Adapting the figure of the imagined “Indian” to suit the anxieties of our political and economic moment, each of these critically acclaimed shows have created an image of “Indianness” in relation to “casinos” and thereby have added the casino Indian trope to the long-established line of “Indian” characters crafted by non-Native “experts,” writers, and artists of the stage and screen.","PeriodicalId":80424,"journal":{"name":"American Indian culture and research journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44489315","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"An Expression of Self-Determination: Incorporating Alaska Native Knowledge into Community-Driven Energy Sovereignty","authors":"Joseph P. Brewer","doi":"10.17953/aicrj.44.4.brewer","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17953/aicrj.44.4.brewer","url":null,"abstract":"Traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) systems continue to demonstrate that they play a significant role in developing working relationships between Indigenous communities and the world. By narrowing TEK’s application to ecologically distinct regions, we begin to understand that Indigenous peoples’ local knowledge of a place is experienced and observed over time, and how the incorporation of these knowledge systems can strengthen community initiatives. The study of Alaskan Native knowledge (ANK) that is the focus of this article is specific to cultural regions of Alaska and to areas where certain communities live. To better understand the importance of this “Local ANK,” the author explored its incorporation during a timber harvest in Fort Yukon, Alaska and completed first-person interviews with project personnel of the wood-to-energy project. Local ANK is paramount in the planning and implementation of industrial projects that move Alaskan Natives towards self-determination.","PeriodicalId":80424,"journal":{"name":"American Indian culture and research journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46454078","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}