Kinds of Plains Cree culture

The Nehiyanak, a Canadian Plains Cree band, is renegotiating an imposed identity as morally inferior to an estimable ethnic segment of local society. Evidence includes Nehiyanak assertiveness in the display of cultural symbols and a growing visibility in the community ceremonial calendar. Comparing the 1990s to the 1960s, a restricted use of the culture concept in current ethnic theory is contrasted to a more inclusive meaning in traditional anthropological description. Nehiyanak ethnological culture, while not immediately relevant to ethnic cultural work, nonetheless provides content to the latter, and mediates ethnic choices. (Cree Indians, ethnicity, culture theory, culture change) ********** The Nehiyanak, a Plains Cree band, has had a change of fortune since I first encountered them in the 1960s. They then held a stigmatized ethnic identity in the rural Canadian community of Short Grass (2) that they had no means to repudiate. An asymmetrical relationship of wealth and power severely limited Indian opportunity for projecting moral self-worth. Now, with expanded resources and a claim to an estimable identity, the Nehiyanak speak with a voice formerly denied them to say who and what they are. They employ a special version of contemporary Cree culture in doing so. This essay compares the community of the past to that of the present, and explores the utility of current theorizing about the culture of ethnicity for explaining what has happened to the Nehiyanak. It examines a restricted usage of the concept of culture that is a part of ethnic theory, one that contrasts with a traditional ethnological sense of the term. It argues that failure to attend to the most inclusive cultural context, resulting from exclusive focus on Cree ethnic culture, gives a misleading and fragmented account of band life, and only a partial explanation of Nehiyanak ethnic action. The preoccupation of Indians with certain identity attributes, such as spirituality, assumes different forms depending on whether an activity takes place within band confines or in exchanges with whites; that is, whether it is relevant ethnologically or ethnically. To consider such differences mere situational compartmentalizations overlooks what crosses between them, and misses instructive insights into the culture of which the ethnological and ethnic are analytical parts. Taken together, the ethnic and ethnological constitute the total culture of the band, and this essay discusses several ways the two are processually intertwined. NEHIYANAK IN THE 1960S During my early fieldwork (1963-1970), the reserve was the home of about 150 Crec living in eleven households, segregated from the white world. There had never been a Christian mission there, nor a resident agent of the Indian Affairs Branch (IAB). Officials seldom visited the band. Families got by on very small incomes provided by government relief, augmented by sporadic agricultural work for whites during haying time and by fencing. For ready cash, Nehiyanak sold fence posts cut and cured on the reserve. Small-scale grazing of whites' cattle, in transactions between individual Indians and ranchers, was kept hidden from the IAB. Money spent on the band was entirely under the control of an agent who decided when and for whom houses were built (by a white contractor) and who approved charges for road work and fencing. In the 1960s, a white schoolteacher managed relief payments and compelled class attendance as a requirement for family aid. The IAB decided who would be included on the band list. The unpaid chieftainship circulated informally among men who had no occasion to speak on behalf of the band or deliver services to its members. Although there were in principle three councilors, there was no accord or fuss about who filled the offices at any given time. Band officers did not make trips to the IAB agency, a day's drive away. …