James Clifford: "Identity in Mashpee." (01/14/2002)
In his chapter on cultural identity in Mashpee, a township on Cape Cod in Massachusetts, James Clifford (The Predicament of Culture, "Identity in Mashpee," Harvard UP, 1988: 277-346) describes a trial in Federal court "whose purpose was not to settle the question of land ownership but rather to determine whether the group calling itself the Mashpee tribe was in fact an Indian tribe" at all, or in any way. One central issue in the trial concerned the difficulty of using a term like "tribe" to characterize the organizational reality of the way in which native Americans lived before and after contact with Europeans. Clifford notes, for instance, that "[i]t is well known that the political institutions of many bona fide American Indian "tribes" actually emerged during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in response to white expectations and power" (302-303). He goes on to clarify the issue by saying that "[t]he Chief in Mashpee, when there was one, shared authority with a variety of respected leaders, women and men. Politics was not hierarchical and did not need much in the way of institutional forms" (310). Several important facts are implied by what Clifford is saying here but are left unspoken in his will to focus on the issues raised by the problem of fashioning identity out of the constraints imposed by a judicial proceeding.
For instance, in his narrow focus on the Mashpee township, Clifford tends to suggest that just this particular "tribe," out of the thousands that existed in native America, had people who acted occasionally in the role of Chief and that there was a an absence of formal hierarchical structures there because of the special circumstances that define the nature of Mashpee. This is not the case at all, of course, since native American culture is best distinguished from European on the ground that hierarchy, which has its origin in the Myth of Eden, as I have consistently argued throughout this entire discussion, does not have a recognizable source in the clan and tribal structures that characterize animistic ideology and the civilizations that embrace it. Hence, to say that the Mashpee "tribe" does not have hierarchical structures and a formal political system that always assigns one person or another to the role of Chief, is the best proof there is that the group of people who are called Mashpee really are native Americans and that their political organization really does reflect the deepest and longest held traditions of tribal people. The court ruled they were not a "tribe" partly on the ground that they did not have a long enough tradition of political organization based on recognizable hierarchical structures. Ironically, the Mashpee were denied legal status as a "tribe" because they exhibited the one, most significant, characteristic that defines them as, and affirms that they are, a tribal people. This is inevitable because Europeans, whether anthropologists or not, have never understood, have never recognized, this characteristic of animistic culture as being one that defines its nature and cannot themselves conceive of a cultural entity that does not exhibit hierarchical structure. In other words, if a people do not organized themselves hierarchically, as Europeans always consistently do, they cannot be said to possess any culture at all, tribal or otherwise.
Following Clifford's reasoning back one more step, when he says that contact with Europeans is the primary force behind the emergence of tribal structure in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, what he is really referring to is the unbearable pressure of European genocide against native populations in the Americas and how that pressure forced them to respond by attempting to live outside the natural limits of their own culture in an effort to survive the mass destruction that was being visited upon them by the white invaders and their power structures. Clifford, like most Europeans, always refuses to call genocide by its proper name in order to make it sound like an unfortunate series of events occurred in the distant past that inadvertently resulted in the near-extinction of an entire population of indigenous people for reasons that cannot now be understood, much less, articulated. Here, Clifford refers to the fact that "tribes," prior to "specific contact periods" with Europeans, did resort to the "election" of war-chiefs to lead them against their "enemies" from other "tribes." War, however, in native America, was never an occupation the way it has always been in Europe. Hence, a person who assumed the role of Chief often only did so under pressure from the demands of a "tribal" council and gave it up again as soon as possible. Positions of leadership in native America never involved a desire to have and exercise power over other people in the same way such things have always been done in European civilization. Hence, and again, when the court went looking for signs that the Mashpee were in fact a "tribe," it applied a model defining culture in European terms, where those terms describe Europe quite well but have nothing whatsoever to do with native Americans.
Clifford, then, if only in general terms, fails as much as any other European to rise above the stereotypes that prevented the court from comprehending exactly how the Mashpee, by virtue of their distinctions from European norms, qualified as a "tribe" of native Americans. A final issue of concern to Clifford involves concepts of how much or how little native Americans can travel from place to place, even from time to time over European perceptions of standard historical intervals, from first contact to the present moment, for instance, and still retain their identity as "Indians." He puts the question and answer in the following terms:
"How rooted or settled should one expect 'tribal' Native Americans to be-aboriginally, in specific contact periods, and now in highly mobile twentieth-century America? Common notions of culture persistently bias the answer toward rooting rather than travel." (The Predicament of Culture, Harvard UP, 1988: 338)
This is certainly a fair assessment. One problem that arose for the Mashpee in "proving" they were native Americans is that many of them could not trace their ancestry back to a single, specific "tribe," on the one hand, while others claimed only half or quarter consanguinity, on the other hand, or said their ancestral heritage included ties of blood relationship to "tribes" other than Mashpee. The court read this ambiguity of ancestral knowledge and connection as a sign that the people claiming tribal status were not "pure" enough to be called "Indians." When Clifford says "rooting" is more commonly seen as a sign of belonging than "travel[ing]" is, he means that mobility cancels a person's membership claim in this or that "tribe." If a Hopi marries a Lakota and moves from Arizona to North Dakota, he or she ceases to be a member of the Hopi "tribe" and does not qualify to be called Lakota either. Hence, this person ceases to be an "Indian," if only in terms of how the US government tabulates the number of people who are members of either "tribe." The question of identity, then, falls down to an issue of how individuals perceive themselves apart from the way a government chooses to count them.
Taking Clifford's discussion to a different level altogether, I wonder how he, or any other European, would look at a person, like myself, who has no clear claim to ancestral tribal heritage or identity (I never knew my grandfather and cannot say what "tribe" he belonged to) but have nevertheless experienced an ongoing relationship with a spirit-guide who has always taught me the values and traditions of native culture for almost as long as I have been alive and certainly for as long as I have been conscious of his presence in my life. I suppose if I could produce "him" as a witness at trial in a Federal court, I could get myself officially declared a native American. Short of such dramatic displays, however, there is clearly no way I can authenticate my identity in any legally recognized sense. To me, of course, that matters not at all.
In looking at this issue from a wider perspective, ancestral heritage is a bond between a person and the land his/her ancestors actually inhabited. For traditional people, those who follow the old ways of natural relationships, spirits are tied to the land by bonds that cannot be broken and hence spirits cannot be said to "travel." An issue that has always bothered me is that my first spirit-encounter occurred on the sacred mountain of the Mescalero Apache in southern New Mexico when I was about eight years old. I was attacked, but essentially unharmed, by a she-bear intent on protecting her cubs from harm. Seven years later I was approached by the spirit-guide who confronted me in the desert about 100 miles southwest of the sacred mountain. The question this raises concerns the fact that my grandfather was certainly not a member of the Apache nation because his home was somewhere between southern Illinois and eastern Nebraska. While it is not impossible for him to have been a displaced Apache living in Illinois at the turn of the nineteenth century, with all the BIA and missionary abduction activities that were going on at the time, where many native American children were removed from their parents and sent to church-sponsored conversion centers (Indian schools), the more likely possibility is that he was Cheyenne or Lakota. I have no problem with the idea that a spirit can recognize a person of native heritage who does not "belong" to his/her/its ancestral line. That seems reasonable enough. But if "tribal" lands actually matter in spirit-relationships, as traditionalist tend to believe, why was I approached by a spirit-guide who was tied to lands in southern New Mexico when I was bound ancestrally to ones in southern Illinois or eastern Nebraska?
Complicating the issue considerably is the fact that my spirit-guide mostly focused my learning experiences on concepts related to the practice of Maya calendrical astronomy in Central America. The question of his identity is irrelevant to the function of his presence in my life, according to him, as it were, and so I have never had an answer to that question, which is one I have put more than once. He insists it does not matter and I have learned to accept his silence.
Almost 13 years ago my spirit-guide sent me to this place. I expected to find him here when I arrived. The truth is that I have had no strong or compelling sense of his presence and have gradually come to terms with that absence in my life. He meant to teach me something about the relationship that spirits have to place, to tribal lands, or to any land they have walked when they animated the person they were when they lived among the people. During his life as a person, he traveled from Central Mexico to the sacred mountain of the Apache and to the river valley 100 miles to the southwest. When I saw him there we both occupied the same place, the same land, simultaneously. The only gap between us was time. He was in his time and I was in mine. When the Maya say that time is the bridge between this world (my time) and the spirit-world (his time) that relationship is exactly what they are talking about. Both of us stood together in the same place, came there on the same day-name of the Maya calendar, but separated by the interval that had elapsed from the time he counted it and the time I did the same thing in the ceaseless turning of the bridge that connects past to present, that links and binds his temporal experience to my own. One might even say that we are animated by the same spirit, since they too come back in the regular progression of the names that call them into existence.