Yeah it's a big problem because now with Indian gambling, none of the tribes want to register new people because there's the whole issue of money. So if you're Native American and want to apply for federal funding to go to college, unless you're registered (and if the tribe won't accept new registrees due to casino paranoia), you can't get the funding & are screwed.
My friend applehangover's mom is from OK (Creek) and got sent off to the government school as a kid. So we've had lots of conversations about these types of issues, like how the policy for so long was assimilation, how people have lost parts of their culture/language, and how now people want to be recognized as such - sometimes cynically because of the casino issue or the whole "cachet" of being able to say you're more than just a suburban white hipster.
We had some people come out from Elko last summer about a project they're doing to "archive" Paiute culture and there was a whole discussion about interviewing older tribe members. All by the almost completely white cohort in the room. When I started asking questions about the above, the one person in the group who actually was Paiute started talking about how yeah, it's going to be really hard to get people's trust to participate when they've been told for so long to deny that essential part of themselves, not to mention the whole issue of outsiders like anthropologists and linguistics coming in to study their "exotic" culture.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2006-01-06 02:22 am (UTC)Yeah it's a big problem because now with Indian gambling, none of the tribes want to register new people because there's the whole issue of money. So if you're Native American and want to apply for federal funding to go to college, unless you're registered (and if the tribe won't accept new registrees due to casino paranoia), you can't get the funding & are screwed.
My friend
We had some people come out from Elko last summer about a project they're doing to "archive" Paiute culture and there was a whole discussion about interviewing older tribe members. All by the almost completely white cohort in the room. When I started asking questions about the above, the one person in the group who actually was Paiute started talking about how yeah, it's going to be really hard to get people's trust to participate when they've been told for so long to deny that essential part of themselves, not to mention the whole issue of outsiders like anthropologists and linguistics coming in to study their "exotic" culture.