Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Introductory Remarks

2001; University of Nebraska Press; Volume: 25; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/aiq.2001.0007

1534-1828

Rena Martin, June-el Piper,

The papers included in this section of American Indian Quarterly were originally presented at the ninety-ninth annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association held in San Francisco on 17 November 2000, at a session entitled "Native Places, Public Spaces." The overarching goal of the session was to explore and discuss Native American connections with the land and its resources, and the inclusion of tribal and other concerns in decision making about those places. The designation of large tracts of land as public space in the American West has had a profound negative effect on the lifeways of Native Americans and on the landscape itself. Equally detrimental have been the restrictions on access to ocean resources. The original inhabitants have been removed from and denied access to these lands and waters, and restraints have been placed on their use of traditional resources such as medicinal herbs and shrines. These restraints have affected the transmission of cultural history, economic self-sufficiency, and the landscape and resources themselves through development for tourism, recreation, and resource extraction. Public spaces are created for preservation or for multiple use, but seldom have the aboriginal uses been considered in management decisions. Today Native Americans are renewing their connections to the land and water through tribal projects and programs. These papers describe efforts to affect management decisions, to educate the public users of these Native places, and to enable Native Americans to take an active role in the management of public spaces. The papers also present the voices of Native people and their connection to places that are now in the public and tribal domain. We were fortunate to have these voices heard in such a large conference; we know there were other Native presenters amidst the more than five thousand anthropologists who routinely attend the annual meeting. Tribal people have to decide whether to give presentations in a non-Native venue or stay at home to maintain the traditions that connect them to the kinds of places that are mentioned in these papers. [End Page 1] Because of these complex decisions, four of the people who originally planned to participate in our session were unable to attend, but we would like to acknowledge them here: Reba Fuller, currently working for her Central Sierra Mi-wuk people in a rescue operation; Joe Joaquin, traditional advisor who was called to represent his Tohono O'odham tribe at a national advocacy forum; Terry Knight, Ute Mountain Ute, who stayed home to fulfill a traditional responsibility for his people; and Brian Vallo, who was working in his village that weekend to obtain funding for the Pueblo of Acoma's preservation efforts for their historic church. One of the vacant discussant roles was ably filled by Wesley Thomas (Navajo), a professor in the Native American Studies program at Idaho State University in Pocatello. The introductory paper at the original session, presented by Miranda Warburton and Robert Begay, has been submitted for publication elsewhere. It focused on the connection between the land and traditional knowledge; how traditional knowledge is transmitted across generations and from plants, animals, and the land to people; and the consequences of losing that connection, of losing place. In addition to introducing the other authors and their work, we will also mention some of the important issues that were discussed at the end of the session. For Native people, the maintenance and preservation of culture has been ongoing throughout their existence. In a more bureaucratic sense, historic preservation has been increasingly funded as a tribal activity on many reservations in the last half of the twentieth century. The coauthor of our first paper, John Welch, began living and working on the Fort Apache Indian Reservation in 1984. He serves the White Mountain Apache Tribe as its historic preservation officer. Ramon Riley, John's coauthor, is a cultural advisor and the tribe's cultural resources director. John and Ramon's paper focuses on...