“Is there a Native American and Indigenous Diaspora?

The project brings together the interdisciplinary discourses of

 African American and African Diaspora Studies (AAADS)
 Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS)

1. Diaspora
 Mobility and instability;
 a “condition of modernity” (Paul Gilroy in The Black Atlantic);
 a methodological “practice,” which “can be articulated only in forms that are provisional, negotiated, [and]
asymmetrical” (Brent Hayes Edwards in The Practice of Diaspora);
 includes: 1) Reason for, and conditions of, the dispersal, 2) Relationship to the homeland (generational), 3)
Relationship to the hostlands, [and] 4) Interrelationships within communities of the diaspora.” - Kim D.
Butler, “Defining Diaspora, Refining a Discourse,” Diaspora, Vol. 10 No. 2 (2001): 189-219; 195.

2. Citizenship and Nationhood in NAIS

 The Nations Within by Vine Deloria Jr. and Clifford M. Lytle (1984);
 Exiled in the Land of the Free, written by Oren Lyons, John Mohawk, Vine Deloria, Jr., Laurence Hauptman, Howard
Berman, Donald Grinde, Jr., Curtis Berkey, and Robert Venables, and the more recent (1992);
 Forced Federalism by Jeff Corntassel and Richard C. Witmer (2008).

3. Revision of Citizenship and Nationhood as diasporic

 Citizenship is unstable and mobile, conditional and provisional.
 “Native diaspora . . . refers not only to landless Natives’ imagining and maintaining connections with their
tribal nations, but also to the development of intertribal networks and connections within and across
different nation-states.” - Renya K. Ramirez, Native Hubs (2007)
 Re-imagines the space or geography of diaspora to be a “hub” for gathering.

California as diasporic case study - Why California?

 Personal connection to the geography of CA as a member of the Miwok of the El Dorado Rancheria;
 California has had the highest population of indigenous peoples since its admission to the union in 1850;
 California and its Rancherias and reservations are at once home and host land;
 According to the 2000 census, nearly thirty million people who claim American Indian identity live in California
(censuses are problematic measurements of community);
 Long history of dispersal (through assimilation, termination, recognition, and revitalization);
 sixty percent of CA Indians live in urban areas, off reservation, as a result of termination of “wardship” and
relocation programs that placed Native Americans in jobs (Ramirez, Buff, Immigration and the Political
Economy of Home, 2001);
 1950s termination era was prompted in part as a way to combat communism by preventing the “red threat” of
tribal communalism. (Buff);
 Divisive interrelationships between and within tribes symptomatic of vexed relationship as national formation.

Future Research
 22 “landless” tribes in twenty-two federally recognized tribes in California, Alaska, Arizona,
Washington, and Michigan.

Cierra Olivia Thomas-Williams, Associate Instructor

Department of Gender Studies, cthomasw@indiana.edu