Abstract
In 1921 the U.S. Office of Indian Affairs (OIA) attempted to suppress ritual public performances in the Southwestern Pueblos. Several reams of documenting text were used to support this authorizing text. These documenting texts were affidavits purporting to describe “degrading tendencies” and “immoral relations” in the Puebloan habitus. The OIA used these sensationalized representations of the habitus of Native Americans’ communities to promote and justify the policy of forced acculturation in the waning days of its implementation. What is perplexing is that these supporting texts were trotted out so late, decades after the major thrusts of the forced acculturation program had first been put into play. My purpose is to analyze the place of these texts in the forced acculturation program. I suggest, following Anne McClintock (1995) that the obsessive fascination that the public performances seem to have held for those who reported on and condemned them, represent a layered and complex intertwining of ambivalence about domestic social relations and gender with confusion about culture and labor. Examining a slice of the U.S. Government’s policy of forced acculturation in a corner of the Native American world reveals a potentially implosive anxiety of reconciling the imposition of a desired mode of production with the persistence of a habitus perceived as celebrating the violation of appropriate domesticity.
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Notes
The policy was first initiated in 1869 but foundered in foot-stomping pique on the part of Christian denominations that did not get a big enough slice of the pie as contractors for running the Grant administration’s faith-based initiative to have missionaries operate federally-funded schools on Indian reservations.
Anthropologist Mischa Titiev discovered the affadavits in his concerted, meticulous search of archival material in the 1930s when he was reconstructing the events of socio-political strife among the Hopi around 1906 and their aftermath (Eggan 1979, personal communication). Historian Martin Duberman rediscovered the affidavits in the 1970s, and regarded them as indicators of “psychosexual dynamics” of Puebloan life (1980: 177). Duberman selected some of them and printed them in an issue of Radical History Review. According to Duberman (1979: 100) the collection in the National Anthropological Archives is “bulky” and the texts printed in Radical History Review are only a fraction of what exist. The documents describe performances at Jemez, Sia, San Felipe, Santo Domingo, Cochiti, Tesuque, Santa Ana, Sandia, Isleta, Acoma, and the Hopi pueblos. For some reason Duberman selected descriptions primarily from the Hopi pueblos to print, and therefore erroneously dubbed them as referring to “Hopi Indian Sexuality”.
The Indian Rights Association was founded and supported by Indians and non-Indians who championed assimilation and the granting of rights to Indians such as citizenship, voting rights and complete financial independence from trust status.
Spanish colonizers brought melons, peaches, apricots, apples and onions and emigrants that the Spaniards brought along from Native American communities in Mexico brought chili peppers. These were added to Puebloans’ cuisine and horticultural activities.
Their marriage as well as their antics and the photographs of them were secret until Munby’s “remarkable will of disclosure” was revealed upon his death in 1910.
Masked deity. However, it is more likely that the observer could not tell the difference between a masked clown and different dancers who were actually representing Katsinas.
Although missionaries and traders routinely learned the Hopi language, it was uncommon for government functionaries to do so. The observer probably requested a translation from a by-stander.
With rare exceptions, Katsinas were impersonated by men.
Production of pottery in large quantities had been going on at some Pueblos such as Cohciti, Tesuque and Santa Clara for more than twenty years (Batkin 1999; Clemmer 2008). It got a boost when the Santa Fe Railway opened its El Tovar Hotel at Grand Canyon in 1905, and its partner in tourism (the Fred Harvey Company) began aggressively marketing Native American artisinal products.
Wool uniforms were found to be too hot for combat in the Philippines and Cuba during the Spanish-American War and wool uniforms had been gradually phased out by 1910.
The cacique is the ceremonial chief of the Pueblo; the Governor, originally an office imposed by the Spanish, is selected annually and installed on Epiphany.
Expanded to eleven by 1910.
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Clemmer, R.O. “A carnival of promiscuous carnal indulgence”: bureaucrats’ ambivalence in reconciling capitalist production with native American habitus . Dialect Anthropol 33, 51–70 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-009-9103-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-009-9103-z