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.
American Indian Lives and Voices: The Promise and Problematics of Life Narratives
This essay explores the promise and problematics of ethnographic life stories as products of complex collaboration, both old and new, between American Indians and anthropologists. Four books reviewed here represent a range of narrative forms, historical experiences, and social settings. I pay particular attention to issues of voice and subjectivity, as reflected in these Northern Arapaho, California Indian, and Oneida life narratives. I also argue that these life stories can and should be read as intersubjective, intertextual narrations of shared subject and researcher lives, as they are constituted, and live on, through the very act of collaborative engagement.
L’Opinion Publique et l’Europe
Les militants europeens aiment evoquer les „grands ancetres“. Cependant entre l’Europe de Charlemagne, de Podiebrad, de Sully, de Saint-Jean Capistran, de Briand, de Stresemann et celle qu’on essaie de construire aujourd’hui, il n’y a pas beaucoup plus qu’un rapport d’homonymie.