One undeniable effect of the conquest and colonization that Columbus ushered into the Americas 509 years ago this week has been the disappearance and assumed extinction of many Indigenous nations. Beaten down, dispersed, introduced to horrendous diseases, tribes were dissipated, decimated and some among those who suffered the worst of war and cultural destruction, were judged to have become extinct.
Nevertheless, culture and genetic continuity are quite resistant. While chiefs or caciques, and many matriarchs were exterminated under the theory of ‘cut the head and the body dies,’ in fact, among many Native peoples, the body did not die. The Maya have a saying, ‘They cut the flower, they cut our branches, they cut the trunk of our tree, but they could not yank out our roots.’
This past week, when one more wheel in that extinction-making process moved again to grind over Native American tribal identities, came another indicator of how extinction can occur by bureaucratic decision, which often can go this way or that, depending on who weighs them, and are always likely to leave the broader realities aside.
Reversing decisions that recognized two tribes, issued in the final days of the Clinton administration, Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs Neal McCaleb last week moved to deny federal recognition to two branches of the Nipmuc, while also making a final determination against the Duwamish.
As a result of McCaleb’s decision, and other factors, these tribal peoples are allegedly denied, (terminated from?) status as American Indian governments before U.S. federal law ? while, previously ? these cases had been judged by a wide array of opinion, to be deserving of such recognition.
While perhaps governance may not have been highly visible, enough range of tribal ethnicity, continuous cultural bases and adaptations over centuries had been presented to convince serious professional American Indian legal minds that these peoples did actually exist and had continued to exist.
Now the factor of continuity of sustained ‘government-to-government’ relationships takes prominence. One interpretation means, yes, you have a right to continue to exist as a people; the other moves to put the final ax to the official identity of a people having the right to govern themselves.
Sorting out issues of identity, Indigenousness, making a well-documented case of tribal continuity, reestablishing a sense of peoplehood, these are not easy efforts. Much has been made in the mainstream press that the Nipmucs were primarily interested in achieving federal recognition to establish lucrative gaming enterprises. But their struggles for recognition began long before the Indian Gaming Rights Act was even imagined. Nevertheless, any interest in pursuing economic recovery models, so vital for the rebuilding of Native peoples and nations, should not be considered a disqualifier of existence.
Many nations were run over by the thrust of western civilization on this hemisphere. Added to the usual charges of savagery, primitiveness and barbarism, which nearly always precipitated armed force, came the declaration against many nations that they had simply ceased to exist. As historians are wont to repeat the assertions of official documents, the label of extinction, once applied, takes on a life of its own. As witnessed by McCaleb’s rulings it is a label nearly impossible to overcome.
For example, in the Caribbean, for the Taino, the people who first greeted Columbus, malice and ignorance have conspired to keep the myth of extinction alive. Despite a substantial continuity of evidence to the contrary, from the 1600s to the present, any assertion of Taino survival can expect to be formally greeted with hostility, derision, even hatred, by many officials.
While many scholars have accepted the reality of considerable Indigenous-derived culture among the Greater Caribbean populations and while recent DNA testing (in Puerto Rico) provides evidence of significant Amerindian mitochondrial DNA among the island’s contemporary population, and while in Cuba, Dominica and elsewhere communities exist that have well-documented continuity in place, the efforts by peoples of Indigenous heritage to reconstitute their societies are more often attacked than seriously considered.
We know that the term ‘indio’ was purposely dropped from the official census language by the Spanish sometime in the late 1700s. Instead, the term ‘pardo’ or ‘darkie’ was employed. The reason: to disallow any potential claim to lands or goods taken from the Indigenous population. When outright killing became too difficult and costly, a simple declaration that the Indigenous had ceased to exist proved just as effective to the fundamental mission of dispossession and the forceful taking of Indian lands and resources.
Such it is today, when tribes appear denied the right to existence, at least in part, because they might use such status to press for economic recovery options, properly formalized under federal law.
During this past week when so many celebrated Christopher Columbus’s intrepid and ill-fated voyages, it appears peculiarly of interest that the federal bureaucracy would still move to destroy rather than respect and assist tribal continuities.
Whatever problems the Nipmucs or Duwamish have had in the course of their histories, these were largely brought about by the very interests that now seal their fates. The Nipmucs and Duwamish deserve to be who they are. We wish them well in their continued legal struggles for federal recognition.
And we are mindful that during this tragic event, the deadly stroke was this time delivered by another American Indian, Chickasaw Neal McCaleb.
