Remaining 'authentic' in a changing world

Editorial - Indian Country Today

Authentic Indians'' are for many non-American Indians only those who look and dress like the stereotypical image of a Plains Indian - stoic and vanishing. There is a tendency for the general public - and often sympathetic foreigners - to believe that the only true Indians are those who greeted the Mayflower in 1620, and continue to live in the same way.

Famous anthropologists like Alfred Kroeber, a major researcher of California Indian tribes, and Franz Boas, the father of American anthropology, argued there were no authentic Indians in the United States after 1850. These men did not study the Indian communities they found during their field research, but tried to reconstruct Indian communities as they existed in the past, before significant Western contact. Rather than find examples of living history and continuing customs, they consulted elders who could remember the languages and cultures, the old ways.

There is no doubt that the anthropologists provided great service to tribal communities by preserving cultural knowledge and aspects of languages. But the emphasis on ''salvage'' anthropology, researching to find the last remnants of indigenous communities before they were lost, and the absence of interest in living indigenous communities, did a great disservice to indigenous peoples.

Indian people do change. We just may not change in patterns that are recognized or common to Western or American society. Indian people are willing to change and adapt to necessarily uphold their values, cultures and ways of life.

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