This confusion and turmoil you describe is found throughout Indian Country today in many cultural venues. It's unfortunate, and is largely a response to years of abuse by the dominant colonizing culture. I run into this regularly regarding American Indian literature and the discussion of what is important and who should or may write it. And if such restrictions are reasonable or fair and to whom they should apply.

Living cultures grow and change, and they build on their pasts. Interpretation and reinterpretation are two separate and ongoing activities we see as groups attempt to contract into their elemental footprints culturally and territorially (this doesn't apply just in North America). The trouble is, there has been so much warfare, relocation, interference and intermarriage that searching for the Ur-Indian is not only impossible it's foolish. American Indians today are toting around as much baggage as your average colonial resident, plus they have what they remember from their Indian cultures. It is intermingled, first and foremost, in the language. The best hope for tribal solidarity is when groups come to terms with the past that can't be changed and work to reinforce what they know and move forward from here. How they go about it is why I referred to "interpretation and reinterpretation.

I have seen two really distinct directions in the area of cultural and tribal reclamation. Land issues and culture issues. Though the cultures that are being reinforced from within grew in places (land), the relocation that has happened since colonization began have broken some of those connections.¹ In the cultural issues, of music, literature, art, food, etc., you have participants who don't live on the tribal land any more, who were forcefully or voluntarily relocated. At this point in time over fifty percent of tribal peoples don't live on their tribal lands, they're in cities where they can find work. They have intermingled with other cultures, but they still retain vestigial (or much more) traditional material and memories. Family songs, stories, photos, writings, papers, etc.

One major problem occurs when people start arguing entitlements or authenticity. In its most basic and open form, the idea that doing something the "Indian Way" could mean that it is the way anyone who happens to have Indian blood does a thing, whether it is cook a meal, sing a song, tell a story. That Indian person may have been raised on the reservation or in a large eastern city. Those two conditions (city or rez) alone can't tell you anything about the "authenticity" of the experience or training. Is a white child who grows up on a reservation "more Indian" than an Indian child who grows up in a largely-white city? Who can say without knowing what cultures these children are exposed to?

Self-reporting is good enough for many tribes. But not all Indians look like what people think Indians should look like. What percentage blood (quantum) do they possess? Some tribes accept simple explanations and paperwork, others are very rigid in their requirements of who may belong formally to the tribe. Because of tribal sovereignty, there isn't one set of rules, there are hundreds. May full-blood Indians, who happen to be half one tribe and half another, can not be members of their home tribe because of this mix. Others are accepted in one or both. It varies from tribe to tribe. The fighting about this is intense and sometimes nasty. I have seen mainstream characterizations of the passion that modern tribes use to define themselves (some of the non-Indian politically conservative critics would say they're no longer Indian because they're modern and they've assimilated). Those who think of Ur-Indians as peaceful and childlike without the usual sophisticated passions of humans elsewhere in the world would say that the nasty European interference has taught Indians this behavior. I think both views are nonsense; while ways of thinking and philosophy change over the years--the ways people were thinking about things 500 years ago are different than the way they think about similar things today, because we know so many more and different things now. But Indians had wars and arguments and power struggles just as every other culture. The kind of restrictions that Julia (remember Julia?) posted about come when tribes try to weed out what they think is non-Indian in their attempts to confine their culture to themselves and to reinterpret the colonial interpretations of their cultures as gathered by anthropologists. It gets pretty dicey, as you can well imagine. Because when mixedblood Indians want to practice their religions or learn more about their Indian culture, the fullblood/mixedblood/wannabe accusations can come to the surface.

My suggestion to your friend Laura is to hold onto everything she has. Don't destroy it, don't give it away. She has been trying to preserve a form and by doing so helps keep it alive. Have her get in touch with Joseph Bruchac (his web page is at http://www.josephbruchac.com/). He has been researching and publishing about northeastern tribes (he is also Penobscot) for years. He may have some useful advice. The politics of tribal councils are often such that they stifle good work and research, especially if hardliners are elected. She might want to consider expanding her research into the larger area, in a pan-Indian approach even though she is continuing to make distinctions regarding tribal musical practice.

The bottom line for the cultural arts in ANY culture is that if they aren't practiced and shared, if they don't continue to grow, then they are dead. If you're not an Indian and you're learning and sharing Indian music and make it clear that you're not an Indian, that is the best you can do. But to suggest that she may not use, sell, perform, or research within this framework is insupportable.

The situations that I find disturbing are when non-Indians try to fake it by claiming tribal connections they aren't entitled to. It's as if their own hard work isn't enough, they have to claim that this is somehow in their blood. A couple of examples. Ruth Beebe Hill and her novel Hanta Yo. She wrote an original story about Indians, then (her story goes) had it translated into that Indian language and then BACK into English for publication, as if such an act was going to add Indian cultural baggage to make her white woman's romance story an Indian story. And the scholar Jimake Highwater who published a great deal, and probably was accurate in his research, but cast it all into question when he, a man of Greek ancestry, tried to add authenticity by claiming over the years several tribal affiliations. This kind of antic simply neutralizes any good these two thought they might be doing. And they caused a backlash that makes it difficult for other non-Indian scholars to study Indian arts.

No one is going to tell an Indian student "you can't study and write about John Steinbeck or Jane Austen, because they're not of your culture." So the reverse also must be true--you can't restrict the study of Indian issues just because a scholar is non-Indian. There are many non-Indians who are well received in the field, though there are others who try too hard and are always viewed on the fringes by both Indians and white scholars alike. It's all in how you approach your topic, and in how you conduct yourself. It sounds like Laura has done nothing wrong, and probably needs to wait out this particular tribal administration.

This went long, but Julia logged on as a guest, so there was no way to send this backchannel. [disclaimer: I'm not Indian. My scholarship in graduate school focused on American Indian literature.]

SRS

¹ Although we can regret the fact that tribes were moved involuntarily from the land they were living on at the time colonizers arrived, one must not presume that these locations as tribal lands were set it stone. Tribes were moving and changing constantly. Some were agrarian and built durable communities of structures, others hunted and traveled within regions and transported good and dwellings, but evidence exists throughout North America of the migrations of most all tribes; their origin stories tell of this. For example, the Navajo are a large established tribe in the Four Corners region, but they are relative newcomers to the area. Their Athabascan language is tied to people who live in the southern part of Western Canada. I'm haven't pulled out a book to confirm this, but I believe they arrived between 600-800 years ago. The Navajo migration may well have to do with the "disappearance" of the Hohokam. The Choctaw creation story describes a long trip to reach Nanih Waiya where a great mound was built and the bones of their ancestors, brought along on the journey, were buried.