Christopher said:
The "tribe" notion comes from an early European belief that the Native Americans might be a lost tribe of Israel. Although Native Americans didn't traditionally organize their cultures along tribal lines based on blood inheritance, they were forced to begin doing so by United States laws that assumed they followed such a model and therefore assigned territorial and other rights on the basis of "tribal" affiliation. The only way they could keep the rights to their own land was by convincing the US government that they had an ancestral, tribal claim to it. So their lives ended up becoming organized along tribal lines out of necessity rather than tradition.
Do you have a source for this, Christopher? Because this doesn't quite jive with my recollection, though goodness knows I've misrecollected before. And I also think it would depend on the particular culture we're talking about - there were significant differences from tribe to tribe, naturally.
It comes from the class on Native American history I took in college. I don't have a specific text to cite, just my memory of lectures. Indeed, one of the problems we faced in that course was that there aren't a lot of available texts on the subject because it doesn't get covered enough in academia. So it doesn't surprise me that a lot of this might not be widely known.
Of course, a lot depends on one's definition of "tribe." At least some American Indians were definitely subdivided into...well, let's call it "distinctive cultures" - Navajos, for example, divided (and some might still do this for all I know - it's many years since I visited Navajoland) the world into "us" and "them," and "us" was definitely and specifically Navajos. I think that preceded resettlement and all that crap, but of course it's hard to be sure. Is a "tribe" the same thing as a "distinctive culture"? I guess it kind of depends.
A tribe is defined as a group of people sharing a common ancestry. A distinctive culture is just that, a culture. Tribes are defined on the basis of heredity. Under US law, in order to claim the rights afforded to a given Native American "tribe," you have to demonstrate to the satisfaction of the government that you are related to that tribe by blood. Which is different from the traditional Native American practice (at least among Algonquian/Mississippian peoples) to define cultural affiliation independently of heredity. I never said they didn't define themselves as distinct and separate cultures, just that those definitions weren't based on genetics. A given culture could have members of multiple different genetic backgrounds. For instance, the way a breakaway group of Creeks who migrated to Florida merged with free Africans and escaped slaves in the same region to form the Seminole nation. The fact that their ancestors belonged to different ethnicities, even came from different continents, wasn't (and isn't) relevant to their shared cultural identity.
The Navajos (and other tribes, too) refer routinely to the Navajo Nation - that's what's on their website. Tribe...nation...distinctive culture...I for one am pretty sure I couldn't come up with definitive definitions that would adequately differentiate between these.
There is a clear differentiation if the terms are defined technically. A tribe is a group of people who live together in a community defined on the basis of shared heredity, biological relationship. It's a kin group larger than a clan or family. A nation, in modern terms, is a political entity, a sovereign state consisting of people with a shared identity, an identity that can be based in common ethnicity, common culture, common beliefs, common language, or whatever. A culture is something much broader and less specific -- the behaviors, beliefs, values, creations, arts, and institutions that characterize a community or society. Tribes and nations
have cultures, because every human community has a culture, but the definition of culture is not limited to those two things, and those two things are not identical to one another at all.
And as I said, the way Native Americans define their culture has changed over the past couple of centuries in response to changing demands and circumstances. They define their cultures in tribal terms today because they've had to -- it's the only way they can claim any rights under the US laws based on the assumption that they're tribally organized. So they've had a vested interest in embracing tribe-based identities. So what started out as a misunderstanding several centuries ago has retroactively become the truth today. As for the Navajo Nation, the modern concept of a nation as a distinct political entity originated during the French Revolution and was adopted by other cultures over time. The Navajo defined themselves as a nation as a way of competing for political standing with the United States. To be able to stand up to that nation and engage with them politically, diplomatically, and economically, they had to engage on the same terms, by asserting their own nationhood and the territorial and other rights that go with it.
This is what happens when cultures interact. They change. They adapt to new circumstances. And after an adaptation has been in place for a couple of generations, people just assume it's the way they've always been. It's always a mistake to assume that the beliefs, values, and customs a culture has today are the same ones it had in the distant past before it was contacted by other societies. Even before contact, any given culture would be a dynamic thing, going through growth and change over time. This is a point that was driven home repeatedly in my Native American history courses.
Known for their use of the plains Tipi in a mountain forest.
