No authentic Indians left?

Remaining 'authentic' in a changing world"Authentic Indians" are for many non-American Indians only those who look and dress like the stereotypical image of a Plains Indian--stoic and vanishing. There is a tendency for the general public--and often sympathetic foreigners--to believe that the only true Indians are those who greeted the Mayflower in 1620, and continue to live in the same way.

Famous anthropologists like Alfred Kroeber, a major researcher of California Indian tribes, and Franz Boas, the father of American anthropology, argued there were no authentic Indians in the United States after 1850. These men did not study the Indian communities they found during their field research, but tried to reconstruct Indian communities as they existed in the past, before significant Western contact. Rather than find examples of living history and continuing customs, they consulted elders who could remember the languages and cultures, the old ways.

There is no doubt that the anthropologists provided great service to tribal communities by preserving cultural knowledge and aspects of languages. But the emphasis on "salvage" anthropology, researching to find the last remnants of indigenous communities before they were lost, and the absence of interest in living indigenous communities, did a great disservice to indigenous peoples.And:The question of authenticity, however, continues to plague contemporary American Indians. Native images and authenticity are frozen in time and are most often defined by non-Native people. The general public receives vast amounts of images from modern media, including movies and television. Most film and television writers of shows depicting Native people and history are often non-Natives with no particular study or first-hand knowledge. American Indians are treated as one-dimensional characters--as noble savages, the unfortunate victims of history, or as bloodthirsty warmongers. Even some American Indians today have adopted a static imagery of authenticity. When Native people are called "apples," white on the inside and "red" on the outside, putting aside the racial connotations, the imagery suggests that individuals and communities cannot change, and that being Indian is and always will be a static condition.

Indian people do change. We just may not change in patterns that are recognized or common to Western or American society. Indian people are willing to change and adapt to necessarily uphold their values, cultures and ways of life. The world is changing rapidly, and Indian people must make decisions about how to manage relations with local, state and federal government, while trying to gain economic self-sufficiency and maintain cultural and political autonomy. Changing world conditions require Indian people to meet the new conditions in order to continue as communities or distinct cultures. Since the world is fundamentally different from the past of say, 200 years ago, the ways of meeting the demands of contemporary and future life will also require change. Even more so, the new conditions often require new solutions, sometimes not contained in the traditions. New ways of approaching economic self-sufficiency or cultural expression are found useful. The changing world offers new choices. Native individuals and communities have more choices and ways of finding solutions to issues as they pertain to cultural survival.Comment:  To reiterate the obvious: "The general public receives vast amounts of images from modern media, including movies and television."

There's only one problem in this otherwise fine editorial. When the author says:[F]or tribal groups who petition for federal recognition by way of the mixed blood community clause in the Indian Reorganization Act must show that the surviving mixed bloods continue to live in the style of Indians. These views do not allow that the world has changed considerably over the past 200 years, and that Indians today do not, and cannot, live like their ancestors. Americans expect authentic Indians to remain unchanging, although no one expects Americans to look and behave like pilgrims.If a tribe has none of its traditional culture left and has only a fraction of "Indian blood," in what sense are they Indians? The point of federal recognition is to restore a tribe to a semblance of its previous existence. It's not to create a facsimile of a tribe from people with no cultural or biological links to the tribe's past.

That's why the BIA imposes stringent rules on who gets to be federally recognized as a tribe. And why most "tribes" fail to get recognized. Without strong cultural or biological ties, they're no longer Indians.