The Ohlone/Costanoan-Esselen Nation of Monterey, California: Dispossession, Federal Neglect, and the Bitter Irony of the Federal Acknowledgment Process
T s article presents a sketch of the Ohlone/Costanoan-Esselen Nation of Monterey County, California, focusing on the making of the tribe's federally unacknowledged status. Consisting of over four hundred fifty enrolled members, the Ohlone/Costanoan-Esselen Nation (hereafter OCEN, Esselen Nation, or Esselen) is currently petitioning to clarify its status as an American Indian tribe through the federal acknowledgment process (FAP) administered by the Branch of Acknowledgment and Research (BAR), Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). A history of junctures between federal action and acknowledgment of this community and instances of governmental neglect fostered the dispossession of tribal lands. I begin by briefly exploring the effects of Spanish colonization and missionization on the initial treatment of this tribal community by the federal government after American occupation. I argue that coastal, missionized Indians were overlooked during a period of treaty making in the 1850s as they were deemed already "domesticated," due in large part to their incorporation into the ~ 41 dominant economic order. I end by discussing the implication of this history for the Esselen Nation's struggle for federal acknowledgment and for the federal acknowledgment process. Simply put, the FAP criteria of sociocultural and political persistence and external recognition do not account for 230 years of state-sponsored violence, crass federal neglect, expropriation, and assimilationist policies.
The Lumbee Problem: The Making of an American Indian People
How does a group of people who have American Indian ancestry but no records of treaties, reservations, Native language, or peculiarly "Indian" customs come to be accepted--socially and legally--as Indians? To discover how this unlikely transition has been made by the Lumbee Indians of Robeson County, North Carolina, is Karen I. Blu's object in this book, a penetrating inquiry into the makeup of the Lumbee as a people as well as a revealing look at the shaping of Indian--and group--identity in general. The Lumbee Problem traces the political and legal history of the Indians of Robeson County, arguing that Lumbee political activities have been powerfully affected by the interplay between their own and others' conceptions of who they are. The book offers insights into the workings of racial ideology and practice in both the past and the present South--and particularly into the nature of Indianness as it is widely experienced among nonreservation Southeastern Indians. Race and ethnicity, as concepts and as elements guiding action, are seen to be at the heart of the matter. By exploring these issues and their implications as they are worked out in the United States, Blu brings much-needed clarity to the question of how such concepts are--or should be--applied across real and perceived cultural borders. Karen I. Blu is an associate professor of anthropology at New York University.
Rumsen I: Methods of Reconstitution
1. In various parts of the world, linguistic researchers face the problem that, although there are no longer any living speakers of a given language, old vocabulary lists or texts collected by travellers, missionaries and traders are available. The usefulness of these documents varies widely, depending on the training and linguistic background, of the collectors. They may be far from the modern standards of phonetic transcription, and phonemicization, if any, is on a strictly intuitive basis. As they stand, such records are quite inadequate for the purposes of the modern linguist. There would be no point in using them if any living speakers existed. But when all speakers are gone, such documents contain the only information about the particular language that we are ever going to have. We must either devise methods for using them, or remain forever in ignorance. Such is the situation with Rumsen, the southernmost language of the Costanoan group of the Central California coast. Considerable searching has not brought to light a single living speaker, although there are many descendants of these Indians. It is doubtful whether there are any surviving speakers of any Costanoan language. But we do have several old vocabulary lists, and any knowledge of the language must be gleaned from these. I have worked out a method for extracting from this material as much and as reliable information as it will yield.'