Duane Champagne: Tribes willing to adapt without losing identity

One of the most powerful forces arrayed against Indigenous Peoples are the forces of modernity. Many, if not most, people in the world are modernists of some kind. They believe the world is progressing, and through technology, education, health, and policy, the world can be made an increasingly better place to live.

The modernist view rejects tradition as old fashion and often harmful. The arguments that U.S. policy makers made about Indian people was they needed to be liberated from the constraints of tradition and culture, since those beliefs and lifestyles kept them in a state of bondage, poverty, bad health, and ignorance. Christian churches lobbied hard during the late 1800s to gain allotments of land for individual Indians, and turn them away from tribal collective identity, culture, and economy, in order to enable Indian individuals to take advantage of modern civilization. In this way, traditional tribal governments, cultures, communities, and economies were put to the side and abandoned. Treaties and indigenous self-government, collective land, and culture would no longer be required, and Indian people would be included in modern national economy, government, and life.

The rejection of termination policy during the 1950s is a benchmark event. Many Indians were willing to accept U.S. citizenship, but were not willing to give up Indian identity, self-government, treaties, land, and culture. The world has changed dramatically over the past centuries, and many Indian communities have learned to adapt. Left to their own ways, Indians would prefer their own cultures and nations. However, the world has become globalized politically and economically, if not, socially and culturally. Most Indian nations cannot live as they did two or three hundred years ago. The Indians that met the Puritans in the early 1630s are not culturally the same today, just as the Puritans not the same. Indigenous Peoples have learned to adapt, but they want to change in ways that make sense for themselves and their futures.