Environmental Clashes on Native American Land: Framing Environmental and Scientific Disputes [1st ed.] 9783030341053, 9783030341060

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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN MEDIA AND ENVIRONMENTAL COMMUNICATION

Environmental Clashes on Native American Land Framing Environmental and Scientific Disputes Cynthia-Lou Coleman

Palgrave Studies in Media and Environmental Communication Series Editors Anders Hansen School of Media, Communication and Sociology University of Leicester Leicester, UK Steve Depoe McMicken College of Arts and Sciences University of Cincinnati Cincinnati, OH, USA

Drawing on both leading and emerging scholars of environmental communication, the Palgrave Studies in Media and Environmental Communication Series features books on the key roles of media and communication processes in relation to a broad range of global as well as national/local environmental issues, crises and disasters. Characteristic of the cross-disciplinary nature of environmental communication, the books showcase a broad variety of theories, methods and perspectives for the study of media and communication processes regarding the environment. Common to these is the endeavour to describe, analyse, understand and explain the centrality of media and communication processes to public and political action on the environment. Advisory Board Stuart Allan, Cardiff University, UK Alison Anderson, Plymouth University, UK Anabela Carvalho, Universidade do Minho, Portugal Robert Cox, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA Geoffrey Craig, University of Kent, UK Julie Doyle, University of Brighton, UK Shiv Ganesh, Massey University, New Zealand Libby Lester, University of Tasmania, Australia Laura Lindenfeld, University of Maine, USA Pieter Maeseele, University of Antwerp, Belgium Chris Russill, Carleton University, Canada Joe Smith, The Open University, UK More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14612

Cynthia-Lou Coleman

Environmental Clashes on Native American Land Framing Environmental and Scientific Disputes

Cynthia-Lou Coleman Department of Communication Portland State University Portland, OR, USA

Palgrave Studies in Media and Environmental Communication ISBN 978-3-030-34105-3    ISBN 978-3-030-34106-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34106-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Jim West / Alamy Stock Photo Cover design: eStudioCalamar This Palgrave Pivot imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For my family. You provide me a safe harbor to think and write, and you offer unconditional support. For Scott, and Megan and Rachel, and Olivia and Lincoln Teal. For my brothers and sisters, whose names my mother would holler in one breath: Becky, Jenny, Martha, Muffy, Jimmy, Ann and Tod. And for all my relatives.

Acknowledgments

Many thoughtful people with keen insight have shepherded me through life’s passages, and I am especially thankful for their guidance. My faculty advisors—Carroll and Cliff, and Sharon, Jack, Mike, Gary and Hemant, and Roberto and Bill—and fellow graduate students, with whom I shared countless cups of coffee and tea, bonding over statistics, methods and theory courses—Thorgerdur, Benami, Jan, Frank, Marilee and Jocelyn. A heartfelt thank you to friends and relatives who have read and reread manuscripts and grant applications, and offered comments—Rachel, Megan, Molly, Bob, George and Scott—and to my colleagues who support the fellowships that steal me away from department duties—Dave, Jeff, Lauren, Lee, Erin, Brianne, Brian, David, Gisele, Kenny and Bailey. I am honored by the confidence the College has shown me, by supporting my sabbaticals, fellowships and grants—Karen, DeLys, Matt, Grant and Marvin. I appreciate the scholars who have taken me under their wing—Susanna, Ben, Scott, Stephanie, Orin and Doug. And I am especially grateful to my friends in American Studies, Indigenous Nations Studies and other arenas, who believe in the work I do—Cornel, Ted, Winston, Grace and Judy—and my pals in the community—Chuck, Jackleen, Rose, Terri and David. Special thanks to Erin and Doug, who have been collaborators and coauthors in our studies of Kennewick Man, Occidental knowledge systems and Indigenous epistemologies. I am grateful that artists Lawrence Tripoli and Nicolas Lampert shared their images with readers. I also want to acknowledge the Illinois State vii

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

University Special Collections at the Milner Library, for permission to use images of the Sauk warrior, Black Hawk. Finally, I am indebted to the students who brave my classes. You inspire me. There are many, many of you, and a few who, recently, wrote a letter that earned me a national teaching award—Tay, Gray, Jen, Derek, Laura, Preston, Zoe, Justin, Marisa, Bailey, Elizabeth, Crystal, Samantha and Daniel. Thank you.

Contents

1 Setting the Stage  1 2 The Arc of the Book 13 3 Buckshot for Brains: Cultivating the American Indian Mind 27 4 Black Hawk’s Skull 45 5 The Kennewick Man Story 59 6 Discourse and Resistance in the Kennewick Man Story 69 7 How Sioux-Settler Relations Underscore the Dakota Access Pipeline103 8 We Came to Fight a Black Snake123 9 Concluding Remarks141 Index153

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List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2 Fig. 5.1 Fig. 7.1 Fig. 7.2

Making meaning in the public sphere and in social discourse. (Credit: Diagram created by the author) Illustration of Black Hawk from the American Phrenological Journal and Miscellany. (Credit: Used with permission from Illinois State University’s Special Collections, Milner Library) Illustration of Black Hawk from the American Phrenological Journal and Miscellany. (Credit: Used with permission from Illinois State University’s Special Collections, Milner Library) Pen and ink drawing of Kennewick Man. (Credit: Original artwork by Lawrence Tripoli, 2004, used with permission) We Came to Fight a Black Snake. (Credit: Original artwork by Nicholas Lampert, used with permission) Join or Die woodcut, 1754. (Credit: Image courtesy the US Library of Congress)

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CHAPTER 1

Setting the Stage

Abstract  This chapter sets the stage for the book by tracing media and environmental communication and by proposing a diagram where meanings are created and transmitted, moving through various junctures, over and over, in a recursive flow. The definition of environmental communication by J.  Robert Cox, as a “pragmatic and constitutive vehicle for our understanding of the environment,” allows us to think of communication as both functional (pragmatic) as well as meaning-making (constitutive). Keywords  Environmental communication • Public sphere • Science communication • Social discourse This book is part of a series that is devoted to environmental communication and the media, which requires a look at how the field of communication has evolved, and where environmental communication falls under its disciplinary umbrella. From my perspective, communication is one element—and a critical one—in how people learn what things mean. From a broad perspective, this book examines how meanings are constructed in communication: a scholarly area referred to as social constructionism. Writers like me—who try to understand how the processes of communication help create meanings—examine the structural and cultural forces that shape how we understand our world. © The Author(s) 2020 C.-L. Coleman, Environmental Clashes on Native American Land, Palgrave Studies in Media and Environmental Communication, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34106-0_1

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To begin, I will briefly unpack some of the structural and cultural forces that shape communication. Scholarly attention to communication in the West grew swiftly after the end of World War II, according to the National Communication Association (NCA).1 In the aftermath of “fascism and violence in Europe and Asia,” universities—which had traditionally offered courses in rhetoric and public speaking—expanded their curriculums to explore effects of communication and mass media on a variety of publics, adopting empirical methods from the social sciences. New courses in mass communication effects, persuasion, interpersonal communication and social influences were offered.2 Today more than 240 subcategories of peer-reviewed communication scholarship are included in the research resource called the Oxford Bibliographies and range from advertising to whistleblowing and, of course, environmental communication.3

Environmental Communication In many ways, the subcategory of environmental communication reflects the range of interests in the discipline as a whole. That is, some researchers are keen to discover whether green advertisements—those designed to appeal to ecologically minded consumers—are more effective than other forms of advertising, while their colleagues might examine how the civic actions of whistleblowers—such as the Ohio townsfolk and attorneys who successfully sued DuPont for polluting the environment—yielded a $671 million settlement in 2017.4 Communication scholar James Shanahan notes in the Oxford Bibliographies that some academics consider science, environmental, health and risk communication a single discipline,5 while, for others, environmental communication, health communication and risk communication fall under the rubric of science communication. An illustration is seen by the formation of the Science Communication Interest Group in 1991 as a sub-unit of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC)—one of the oldest organizations for teachers and scholars in communication in the United States. Eighteen years later, the group enlarged its focus, which is reflected in its current name that reveals a wider scope: The Communicating Science, Health, Environment and Risk Interest Group. Shanahan adds that environmental communication traces its beginnings to the 1962 ground-breaking book, Silent Spring, by Rachel Carson,

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an American naturalist who revealed the harmful effects of bug-killing chemicals on living organisms. Carson’s cri de coeur pointed out the unchecked power of industry, and her whistleblowing manuscript bolstered a nascent social movement keen on making transparent the health effects wrought through commerce for the sake of progress. Environmentalist Bill McKibben said Carson “was the very first person to knock some of the shine off modernity.”6 From my perspective, the underpinnings of the culture of science—as a discipline, as a practice and as a social value—provides a shared foundation for research in the areas of environment, health and risk communication. Modern, Western views on science shifted dramatically beginning in the period known as the Enlightenment, when empiricism, logic and facts began to assume greater currency than faith and religion. While the practice of faith was associated with questions of the soul and free will, questions about the moon’s orbit and the cure for tuberculosis landed in the bailiwick of the scientist. How we think about the environment, health and risk in our Western culture arises from a foundation of scientific empiricism and practice.  And while Western scientific perspectives are often presented as free from bias and subjectivity, my colleagues who examine communication from environmental, health and risk perspectives are quick to point out that the notion of value-free science is a contrivance. That is, scientific perspectives are shot through with cultural values. James Robert Cox’s best-selling textbook on environmental communication—now in its fifth edition—is considered a core text, according to Shanahan. Cox defines environmental communication in a way that grounds the concept in the tradition of rhetoric and the transactional model of communication: The pragmatic and constitutive vehicle for our understanding of the environment as well as our relationships to the natural world; it is the symbolic medium that we use in constructing environmental problems and negotiating society’s different response to them.7

Three key elements comprise the definition. Cox describes human communication as a pragmatic and constitutive vehicle, which encompasses a range of activities, from cognition to persuasion, and through a range of channels, from face-to-face conversation to the Internet. “Pragmatism”—the first element—refers to communication functions,

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such as educating and mobilizing. As for “constitutive”—the second element—Cox means communication is more than the transmission of information. Rather, communication is an active process where meanings are “constituted” and negotiated. And third, Cox refers to environmental communication as a “symbolic medium” that “helps to constitute, or compose, representations of nature and environmental problems … as subjects for our understanding.”8 Because communication is more than spoken and written expression, it can be described also as a symbolic act, where “we draw upon language and other symbols to construct a framework” to understand the world.9 Cox borrows from the tradition of linguistics and semiotics, particularly from Ferdinand de Saussure, in describing communication as symbolic, meaning, words are signs or symbols that represent things or ideas. After more than 100  years, Saussure’s theories on language continue to be included in communication textbooks, where the word is an arbitrary sign (the signifier or signifiant) for the concept it represents (the signified or signifié). Saussure deftly points out that the meanings of words shift over time and depend on context and history. A contemporary example that L. David Ritchie and I studied is the term “designer baby,” which refers to a human embryo fertilized outside the womb and selected for eye color or gender: a baby designed and then chosen for certain features. But designer baby might also refer to an infant sporting a Gucci onesie: dressed in designer duds. Thus, the meaning of the term designer baby depends on the context of its use.10

The Public Sphere and Social Discourse Communication students wisely ask how and where meanings such as designer baby emerge, take shape and grab hold. Cox notes that one arena where meanings are created is in the public sphere. The idea of the public sphere, envisaged by Jürgen Habermas in the 1960s, sounds vague, because no such place exists in actuality: it’s not a television program or a murder trial; rather, the public sphere is a metaphor for a space or place to discuss issues. The public sphere might be thought of as a marketplace of ideas—not a veritable market, but a virtual market where citizens debate and analyze issues that emerge as a discourse. Philosopher Michel Foucault—a contemporary of Habermas— described social discourse as “an instrument and an effect of power” where a “multiplicity of discursive elements” come into play.11 From this

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perspective, the public sphere provides a fulcrum for discourse; where meanings are created and challenged, including dominant as well as subjugated viewpoints. Foucault adds another element to the mix: the idea that power relationships are illuminated in discourse. He notes: In a society such as ours there are manifold relations of power which permeate, characterize and constitute the social body, and these relations of power cannot themselves be established, consolidated nor implemented without the production, accumulation, circulation and functioning of a discourse.12

Foucault—and a host of other philosophers and critics—offers communication researchers another lens through which to view the social construction of meanings: power relationships. The construction of meaning is far from a random act. Rather individuals and groups with special interests—regardless of whether their interests are driven by the economy, politics, religion, materialism and so on—strive to have their viewpoints gain traction in the public sphere. The idea of a social discourse is the realm of communication that arises within the public sphere. In other words, the public sphere is the space where issues and ideas take shape, while social discourse is seen as the forum where issues and ideas are communicated and, thus, infused with meanings. Although many scholars conflate public sphere with social discourse, I refer to the public sphere as the theatre where ideas and issues arise, while social discourse emerges from the public sphere as an arena of communication. Some scholars, such as Winfried Schulz, argue that social discourse materializes through mass communication. Schulz considers the metaphor of a “forum” to describe the public sphere, where “Mass media offer to the various social actors a space where they can articulate their opinions and interests. The forum is a public sphere in the sense that it is accessible, at least in principle, to everyone.”13 Moreover, individuals understand what issues mean by engaging in discourse. For example, media scholar Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann reasoned that citizens believe they can discern mass opinion through an “intuitive” sense of “what others are thinking” through a discourse nourished by mass media.14 An apt illustration of an issue embraced in the public sphere that includes aspects of science, the environment, health and risk is climate change. If you look at scholarly publications as one aspect of social discourse, you will find the Social Science Citation Index lists 241 articles

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concerning climate change in 1990 and 2653 in the year 2000: an increase of 11-fold in one decade. In the next decade, climate change articles totaled 14,507 in 2010: an increase of nearly 5.5-fold from the year 2000. Since 2010, scholarly attention to climate change has continued steadily, and by the time this book goes to press in 2020, the number of publications doubled from 2010 to 32,015 articles.15 And while the Index tracks only peer-reviewed publications, the growth of academic interest in climate change represents one significant presence in the public sphere.

Mass Media, Interpretive Packages and Framing Habermas’ notion of the public sphere meshes well with the idea of a social discourse where issues emerge surrounding such topics as climate change. That said, empirical researchers face a difficult task of gauging how issues are constructed and by whom, how issues evolve over time, and how they impact members of discourse communities. The task seems Herculean when you think about a researcher’s first step: make a list of every opportunity where some special interest might define climate change within the field of discourse. As a researcher your second step is to track down how meanings surrounding climate change are created, expressed and framed, and how those meanings get shared. The third step seems even more onerous: How do you determine how citizens encounter such definitions and interpret them? Knowing the taxing and time-consuming nature of investigation, many researchers—including me—choose a more simplified approach: We select a sliver of social discourse over a particular timeframe on a specific topic because the approach is more manageable. And because social discourse is communicated through the mass media, a repository of discursive elements—advertisements, billboards, blogs, fiction books, films, games, museum exhibits, paintings, plays, podcasts, news articles, social media sites, situation comedies, song lyrics, speeches, textbooks, television programs and more—offer distinct channels to test our arguments, on the assumption that: Meanings are constructed in social discourse, and can be witnessed in mediated artefacts—ranging from advertisements to stories of whistleblowers—which comprise the human creations of language, sounds, symbols and visuals that reflect structural and cultural meanings.

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Examining Environmental Messages in Discourse Two sociologists—William A.  Gamson and André Modigliani—were among the first researchers who put this sort of research to an empirical test in the 1980s. Gamson and Modigliani were keen on finding linkages between the public sphere and two fields that emerge within social discourse: mass media narratives and public opinion about an issue that encompasses science, the environment, health and risk: nuclear power. Like Cox, Gamson and Modigliani situate issues about the environment in the arena of the public sphere, where they are constructed and communicated through social discourse. Gamson and Modigliani view discourse through the lens of mass media, arguing that, within the public sphere, nuclear power takes on the mantle of an “issue culture.” They describe issue culture as a “value-added process” that moves along a continuum and gains traction as it picks up momentum through discourse and through mass media channels.16 An issue culture is rooted in the cultural ethos from which it springs. They note: Nuclear power, like every policy issue, has a culture. There is an ongoing discourse that evolves and changes over time, providing interpretations and meanings for relevant events. An archivist might catalog the metaphors, catchphrases, visual images, moral appeals, and other symbolic devices that characterize this discourse. The catalog would be organized, of course, since the elements are clustered; we encounter them not as individual items but as interpretive packages.17

Gamson and Modigliani conclude that meanings about nuclear power come from an issue culture and take the form of an interpretive package, which they describe as “a central organizing idea, or frame, for making sense of relevant events.”18 The two sociologists examined artefacts of mass media, including news stories (written texts and broadcast items), opinion columns and political cartoons, to discern how the issue culture of nuclear power is revealed—framed—through words and symbols. The authors borrow the idea of a frame from a fellow sociologist, Todd Gitlin, whose landmark book in 1980 on news coverage of the Vietnam War sparked a trend in mass media studies on the concept of framing.19 Gitlin describes framing as “principles of selection, emphasis and presentation composed of tacit little theories of what exists.”20 From this vantage point, a frame structures meaning by the use of a word or phrase and

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is chosen by the speaker or writer who hopes the frame will resonate with audience members in a persuasive vein. An example is the use of the term “Frankenfoods” to describe genetically modified seeds, fruits, plant life and vegetables. The “tacit little theory” Gitlin suggests—in this case— stems from the story of a creature brought to life by Victor Frankenstein in Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s 1818 novel about a scientific experiment run wild.21 For Gamson and Modigliani, references to Frankenstein appeared as an interpretive package—or frame—in narratives about nuclear power. Frankenstein’s monster was used in news coverage and political cartoons in the 1980s as a symbol that countered the progress frame surrounding nuclear power as science run amok. And the Frankenstein frames fused with other narratives and images, including the unleashing of atomic destruction on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan in 1945. Frames can have a snowballing effect, in that their interpretations can resonate beyond their original meanings and invoke new “tacit little meanings.” The notion of “intertextuality”—examined later in the book—imagines how narratives intersect with one another. Today, for example, the symbol of Frankenstein encompasses more than the madness of science: the monster’s image intertextually invokes candy, breakfast cereal, punk songs, board games, lunch-pails, internet memes, popular films and a dim-­witted-­ but-kind-hearted monster satirized in the 1960s American television program, The Munsters. In summary, framing studies in the communication discipline have resulted in a bevy of descriptive research that examines how words and symbols illustrate meanings.22 In a parallel fashion, research on communication about the environment has followed a similar path, where the construction of messages encompasses much of the bandwidth of scholarly attention.23 With the bulk of attention focused on descriptive research over the last four decades, media scholar Anders Hansen suggests that scholarship in environmental communication will be bolstered by examining two largely under-reported areas: the relationships between message production, distribution and impact, and the unequal distribution of power and equity in the public sphere.24

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Synopsis I have distilled my treatise on meaning-making in a graphic representation that traces the arc of the communicative process in the public sphere, through communication channels, and resulting in potential audience effects. In essence, I argue that environmental issues—such as nuclear power and climate change—are wrangled in the public sphere: an imaginary arena where a variety of publics tackles broad, cultural topics. Before reaching the public sphere, however, special interests—political, religious, economic and so on—vie to leverage pet projects. In other words, the public sphere serves as a stanchion for dialogue about, for example, protecting Uluru (Australia’s ancient Ayers Rock) by forbidding tourists from climbing the sacred mount. As Fig.  1.1 shows, such issues enter the public sphere where they become fodder for dialogue among “private people gathered together as a public and articulating the needs of society with the state,” according to Habermas.25 While the public sphere inhabits a space where issues and ideas take shape, social discourse is the forum where issues are communicated. I have argued that, in both terrains, ideas are infused with cultural meanings. Gamson and Modigliani assert that, once ideas enter into discourse, their meanings reflect an issue culture. That is, a concept such as nuclear power, “like every policy issue, has a culture.”26 In turn, mass media offer readers and viewers interpretive schemata to understand concepts. Such interpretive packages invoke cultural tropes that might describe nuclear power as a Frankenstein-like scientific experiment gone mad. Gitlin refers to such linguistic and symbolic packages as framing and notes that news reporters actively frame messages by highlighting some aspects of meaning while ignoring others. Frames, in turn, have the potential to influence individuals at the micro-­ social level and policies at the macro-social level. That said, the relationships between message construction and message effects are complex indeed and rather difficult to study empirically.27 Still researchers agree that some messages exert some level of influence some of the time, whether a slow simmer that cultivates a social reality that seems more violent than it is in actuality or the false notion generated through media channels that the causes of climate change occur naturally. As a result, making meaning in public discourse is iterative: although the diagram may impress you as a linear process, the movement of

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Fig. 1.1  Making meaning in the public sphere and in social discourse. (Credit: Diagram created by the author)

Making Meaning in the Public Sphere and in Social Discourse SPECIAL INTERESTS Social, Cultural, Political, Religious, Economic, Material PUBLIC SPHERE

SOCIAL DISCOURSE

ISSUE CULTURE

EFFECTS Individual-level Social-level

FRAMES

MASS MEDIA

INTERPRETIVE PACKAGES

messages and their meanings ebb and flow, double-back, hibernate, disappear, reappear, circulate and recirculate. The next chapter digs more deeply into the diagram, as we search for more explicit ways to describe how meanings are created.

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Notes 1. What is Communication? (n.d.). National Communication Association website. Downloaded from https://www.natcom.org/about-nca/ what-communication. 2. Op. Cit. 3. Communication, Oxford Bibliographies (2019). Patricia Moy, Editor-in-­ Chief. Downloaded from https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/brows e?module_0=obo-9780199756841. 4. Alejandro De la Garza (2019 November 25). Dark waters tells the true story of the lawyer who took Dupont to court and won. But Rob Bilott’s fight is far from over. Time magazine (Entertainment). https://time. com/5737451/dark-waters-true-story-rob-bilott/. 5. James Shanahan (2019 July 2). Environmental Communication, Oxford Bibliographies. Downloaded from https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199756841/ obo-9780199756841-0141.xml. 6. Eliza Griswold. (2012 September 21).  How “Silent Spring” ignited the environmental movement. The New  York Times Magazine. Downloaded from https://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/23/magazine/how-silentspring-ignited-the-environmental-movement.html. 7. J.  Robert Cox (2006). Environmental Communication and the Public Sphere. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage, p. 12. 8. Op. Cit. 9. Op. Cit., p. 15. 10. Cynthia-Lou Coleman and L.  David Ritchie (2011). Examining metaphors in biopolitical discourse. Lodz Papers in Pragmatics, 7(1): 29–59. 11. Michel Foucault (1976/2004). Power and Knowledge, in Charles C. Lemert (Editor), Social Theory: The Multicultural and Classic Readings (Third Edition). Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, p. 470. 12. Op. Cit. 13. Winfried Schulz (2004). Reconstructing mediatization as an analytical concept. European Journal of Communication, 19(1): 87–101. 14. Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann (1977). Turbulences in the climate of opinion: Methodological applications of the spiral of silence theory. Public Opinion Quarterly, 41: 143–158. 15. Data for the year 2020 were not available when the book went to press. 16. William A. Gamson and André Modigliani (1989). Media discourse and public opinion on nuclear power: A constructionist approach. American Journal of Sociology, 95(1), p. 5. 17. Op. Cit., pp. 1–2. 18. Op. Cit., p. 3.

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19. Framing as a theoretical and a methodological tract in communication studies has grown exponentially since publication of Todd Gitlin’s 1980 book, The Whole World Is Watching. A few researchers have examined how framing studies has evolved over time, and a group of students and I joined in the analysis. We picked up the trail in the year 2000 after others had completed their work and found that in the period from 2000 to 2014, some 8000 articles centered on framing were published in social science research journals, surpassing agenda setting, knowledge-gap and rhetoric studies. 20. Todd Gitlin (1980). The Whole World is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the New Left. Berkeley: University of California Press, p. 6. 21. Cynthia-Lou Coleman and L.  David Ritchie (2011). Examining metaphors in biopolitical discourse. Lodz Papers in Pragmatics, 7(1), p. 39. 22. Cynthia-Lou Coleman, Joseph Provencher and Benjamin Smith (2017). Framing theory and research: Where have been and where are we going? Paper presented to the Western States Communication Association (February), Salt Lake City, Utah. 23. Anders Hansen (2011). Communication, media and environment: Towards reconnecting research on the production, content and social implications of environmental communication. International Communication Gazette 73(1–2), p. 9. 24. Op. Cit. 25. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a category of Bourgeois Society. Translated by Thomas Burger with Frederick Lawrence. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1991. p. 176. 26. William A. Gamson and André Modigliani (1989). Media discourse and public opinion on nuclear power: A constructionist approach. American Journal of Sociology, 95(1), pp. 1–2. 27. Michael A. Cacciatore, Dietram A. Scheufele and Shanto Iyengar (2016). The end of framing as we know it … and the future of media effects. Mass Communication and Society, 19:1, 7–23, https://doi.org/10.108 0/15205436.2015.1068811.

CHAPTER 2

The Arc of the Book

Abstract  Building on the diagram of the communication process offered in Chap. 1, this chapter explores two overlays on the diagram: one called the Media Hegemony Thesis, which examines power relationships in the process, and the other named Indigenous Metaphysics, which looks for Native knowledges and values in the context of conflicts featured in this book. I have accepted the challenge by critics to add muscle to the investigation of framing by examining how meanings transfer from one juncture in the diagram—such as social discourse—to another—such as mass media. I also ask how frames produce meaning, how meanings are constructed over time, the ideological nature of relationships unfold in discourse, and how equity and justice unfold in frames. Keywords  Hegemony • Indigenous Metaphysics • Morals • Power relationships • Reflexivity • Resilience • Resistance • Respect Like many aspects of media and communication, environmental communication is concerned with the intersections of the public sphere, social discourse and mass media and their influences on individuals, communities and nations. As the previous chapter shows, my interest centers on how meanings are created and transferred along the mediated communication pathway, which is iterative in nature. That is, information moves in starts and fits, © The Author(s) 2020 C.-L. Coleman, Environmental Clashes on Native American Land, Palgrave Studies in Media and Environmental Communication, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34106-0_2

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not necessarily in a straight-forward fashion, and recirculates in unexpected, non-linear ways. An example of the circulatory pattern is illustrated by individuals who learn about issues through messages in the mass media and, as a result, become active in movements for social change. One issue that caught the attention of publics ranging from young children to commercial fishermen has been the recent migration of California sea lions to the Columbia River in Oregon and Washington, where they feast on salmon during spawning season. Native American tribes—whose treaties with the United States protect their rights to fish and hunt—sought permission to kill sea lions that consume between two and three percent of the salmon run. While Native fishers, commercial fishers and stakeholders urged for the removal of the sea lions, other groups, including the Sea Lion Defense Brigade, American Rivers and the Humane Society, have called for legal action to halt the killings. The case study reveals how special interests are keen to define issues in the public sphere by, for example, describing the pinnipeds as either “doe-eyed sea lions” or “ravenous varmints.” For the Native American tribes, the issue boils down to their livelihood. News coverage tends to focus on laying blame for the conflict and the blame falls on the sea lions, politicians, the dam, fishermen, government and environmental laws. And when it comes to how media messages inform publics, it turns out that audiences who share ecological values are opposed to killing sea lions.1 In other words, an issue like the sea lion salmon-feast on the Columbia River can be traced through the communication process by looking at how issues are produced in the public sphere, how meanings are constructed in social discourse and then channeled in mass media, and how messages influence public opinion. Environmental issues gain traction by taking shape in social discourse, most notably through the mass media—where words, symbols and images forge what William A.  Gamson and André Modigliani call interpretive packages. Think of an interpretive package as a kind of reduction—like a French sauce—that gets boiled down—reduced—to its essential elements. For Gamson and Modigliani, one symbolic reduction is the trope of Frankenstein as an emblem of nuclear power: science run wild. Interpretive packages contain myriad linguistic meanings, visual symbols and cultural narratives laminated together. Frames, defined as “principles of selection, emphasis and presentation composed of tacit little theories of what exists,”2 structure meanings through the use of words or symbols that shape

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connotation—such as the frame “alternative fact” as a replacement for the word “lie.”3 The phrase alternative fact was uttered to excuse falsehoods surrounding the US presidential inauguration in January 2017 as “the largest ever” by at least two of the president’s advisors.4 Prior to the 2017 US inauguration, the term alternative fact was recorded 71 times by the news-tracking database Nexis-Uni.5 Since President Donald Trump’s formal installation, mentions of alternative fact rose by 2422: an increase of 34-fold, which indicates the frame became ensconced in the news production process. Mass media scholars often engage in studies of meaning construction, such as studies of the use of the term alternative fact to soften the act of lying. I pursue a similar practice by focusing the book on how environmental and scientific conflicts that impact Indigenous communities in North America—which can be studied along the arc of the communication process described earlier—by following the agenda of special interests through construction of meanings, and through the framing and distribution of messages, and discovering how words and symbols convey narratives that are packed with cultural meanings. This approach follows in the social constructionist tradition adopted by such scholars as Paul D’Angelo, William A. Gamson, Todd Gitlin, André Modigliani and Charlotte Ryan. Only a handful of communication scholars, however, has examined Native American perspectives in such contexts. In his assessment of four decades of research in media and environmental communication, Anders Hansen agrees that much of the field has followed a familiar constructionist path. Hansen challenges researchers to expand their studies by attending to the junctures between the stages of the communication process discussed above and to the dynamics of power and justice at all stages of the process.6 Hansen is not alone. Earlier in the decade—the 2010s—Kevin M. Carragee and Wim Roefs argued that most of the research on framing has neglected the role of power. Carragee and Roefs encourage scholars to attend to the notion of hegemony advanced by Antonio Gramsci and to summon the media hegemony thesis: The media hegemony thesis directly connects the framing process to considerations of power and to examinations of the relationship between the news media and political change. Studying the framing process within the context of the production, distribution, and interpretation of hegemonic meanings

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enables researchers to chart the relationship between news and distribution of power in American society.7

Carragee and Roefs’ recommendations to researchers that are most germane to my task today include: 1. Examine  the ways frames produce meaning, rather than examine frames as “content features,” 2. Examine how meanings are constructed over time, and 3. Examine the “ideological nature … of the framing process as well as the power relationships that influence the process.”8 I accept the gauntlet offered by Hansen, and Carragee and Roefs, and, with this challenge in mind, I offer the first of two conceptual veneers I lay atop the diagram titled, Making Meaning in the Public Sphere and in Social Discourse. That is, each component of the diagram—special interests, public sphere, mass media, frames and so on—can be considered along the lines of hegemony. As you will see from the discussion of hegemony below, I situate power within the definition of hegemony. The second veneer, which I will discuss later, is an overlay of metaphysics Indigenous scholars regard as critical to any scholarly inquiry into Native, Aboriginal, Indigenous or similar ontologies and epistemologies.9

Hegemony The concept of hegemony described by literary theorist Jonathan Culler is used commonly and is defined as: An arrangement of domination accepted by those who are dominated. Ruling groups dominate not by pure force but through a structure of consent, and culture is part of the structure that legitimizes current social arrangements.10

What makes Culler’s definition so appealing is that it identifies the subtle quality of power relationships—not as an iron fist—but as a velvet glove. Hegemony is sometimes considered an impermeable cloak of power that dominates all that it surrounds, when, in fact, Gramsci characterized hegemony as a “moment” where “a certain way of life and thought is dominant” in both the philosophy and the practice of society, according

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to philosopher Gwyn A. Williams.11 Williams writes that Gramsci’s view of hegemony encompasses: A sociopolitical situation, in his terminology a “moment,” in which the philosophy and practice of a society fuse or are in equilibrium; an order in which a certain way of life and thought is dominant, in which one concept of reality is diffused throughout society in all its institutional and private manifestations, informing with its spirit all taste, morality, customs, religious and political principles, and all social relations, particularly in their intellectual and moral connotation. An element of direction and control, not necessarily conscious, is implied.12

Williams goes on to show that, for Gramsci, “the masses” were neither faceless, nor idiots: Nowhere in Gramsci do the “masses” function as mere material to be molded by their “enlightened vanguard” … This awareness of and belief in the creative capacity of the working-class is perhaps the clearest differentiating factor in Gramsci’s thought, its dominant motif.13

In the final analysis, hegemony may indeed be a form of control, but it is control through consent that becomes normalized as routine and standard practice within a social system or, as Culler attests, a culture. For the purposes of the book, I will look for and describe how power relationships reveal hegemony by examining the communication process—from social discourse to frames—with the understanding that such relationships emerge through the social incarnation of hegemony. As noted earlier, the investigation will take shape as an inquiry into environmental and science issues that impact Indigenous communities in North America.

Examining Power The concept of power is used freely in the definition of hegemony, but what do its authors mean by power? Philosopher Michel Foucault makes a crucial point when he writes about power as a force. He explains: It seems to me that power must be understood in the first instance as the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate and which constitute their own organization; as the process which, through

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ceaseless struggles and confrontations, transforms, strengthens, or reverses them; as the support which these force relations find in one another.14

In this respect, power is characterized by its operations or functions— what Foucault means by relations or relationships—and not as a currency that can be procured. His thesis aligns with the communication process model presented earlier, where social structures intersect to create the public sphere, discourse, frames and more. As Law Professor Naomi Mezey observes, “Foucault’s influential conviction that power is not a thing but a set of specific and local social relations” works “together with his suspicion that investigations of power relations are most fruitful at the sites of resistance.”15 Foucault describes force as a “moving substrate” which brings to mind the metaphor of an earthquake where the terrain’s plates slip horizontally, creating resistance, and then submission, when one plate dips partly under the other.16 In reflection, therefore, power can be described as “the multiplicity of force relations” which Foucault locates at the intersections of social and structural relationships, which are comprised of “ceaseless struggles and confrontations.” I consider power forces nested within the construct hegemony—defined as “control through consent”—which gets normalized as normal practice in a social system. Looking at the meaning-making diagram that describes the communication process at a social level, think of hegemony as layered onto the diagram like a veneer, where the elements—such as the public sphere and social discourse—are suffused with power relations.

Metaphysics: Indigenous Ontology and Epistemology I place a second veneer onto the diagram, which I refer to as Indigenous Metaphysics, which reflects the ways in which Aboriginal knowledge systems unfold. Scholars in this arena argue that aspects of ontology—ways of being—and epistemology—ways of knowing—are essential when conceptualizing knowledge systems. Vine Deloria, Jr., one of the foremost scholars of Native American studies, has long argued that Indian Metaphysics embrace a social reality that differs from the Cartesian system on which Western knowledges draw their epistemologies. Deloria writes:

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The realization that the world, and all its possible experiences, constituted a social reality, a fabric of life in which everything had the possibility of intimate knowing relationships because, ultimately, everything was related. This world was a unified world, a far cry from the disjointed sterile and emotionless world painted by Western science.17

In their book Power and Place, Deloria and Daniel R. Wildcat illuminate key rubrics of American Indian knowledges that are grounded in a holistic network comprised of relationships. Relationships constitute the central underpinning of Indigenous life. Moreover, relationships emerge from place, Deloria and Wildcat argue, adding that to be Indigenous is to be of place: “Indigenous people represent a culture emergent from a place. And they actively draw on the power of that place physically and personally.”18 The anchor of place allows its denizens to “discern immediately where each living being had its proper place and what kinds of experiences that place allowed, encouraged and suggested. And knowing places enabled people to relate to the living entities inhabiting it,” Deloria writes.19 In essence, it is through relationships—that emerge from place—where meanings arise. Deloria and Wildcat argue that relationships are personal, not theoretical, as they are drawn from an individual’s experiences. Knowledge, therefore, is lived experience. Tewa scholar Gregory Cajete notes that in many Native American traditions, humans are simply one additional element in the ecosystem of flora, fauna, lakes, forests and deserts. Rather than viewing each element as a discrete and independent entity, Indigenous Metaphysics designates relationships—rather than “things”—as the nexus of life. Wildcat frames the notion in this way: We, human beings, in all our rich diversity, are intimately connected and related to, in fact, dependent on, the other living beings, land, air, and water… [and] our continued existence as part of the biology of the planet is inextricably bound up with the existence and welfare of the other living beings and places of the earth.20

Tlingit Elder Teri Rofkar summed up the perspective in an interview in the 2015 documentary film, Harvest.21 Rofkar said Indigenous knowledges lie within a webbed, interlocking system. While settlers to her territory—the Pacific Northwest—consider otter, sheep and deer as resources, Rofkar frames such connections as relationships.

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To pause for a moment, we can see how—in everyday parlance—the term resources bring to mind material items needed to sustain our lifestyles: milk and eggs, bread and wine, petrol and electricity, and clothing and shelter. But what Rothkar asks viewers of the documentary to do is to think about where the resources come from. In essence, such materials are extracted from the earth, the forests, the rivers and wildlife: all of which bear a relationship with us as humans. We have learned to distance ourselves from such relationships when we discover we can buy bread at the grocery store or flip a switch to warm a room by using electricity. Human relationships with the world, Wildcat adds, is reduced to “discrete objects or things.”22 As a result we lose sight of what he refers to as our intimacy and dependency with other living things.23 Essentially, observers such as Wildcat, Deloria, Rofkar and Cajete argue that, speaking in broad generalities about metaphysics, Indigenous communities tend to acknowledge and value the interconnectedness of living beings and view humans as only one element in a complex and interdependent ecosystem. Such interconnectedness is understood in terms of relationships where resources are more than mere materials to be exploited, but seen rather as corollary elements in the system. And, traditionally, knowledges that draw from subjective experiences are place-bound. Professor Kyle Powys Whyte extends the foundation by adding three important elements to the metaphysical mix: morality, respect and resilience.

Morality, Respect and Resilience Whyte echoes Deloria’s perspective that relationships, viewed through a metaphysical lens, are by their very nature moral and ethical.24 Both Whyte and Deloria—who use the terms interchangeably—argue that relationships form the backbone of being and knowing (ontology and epistemology) because they arise from nature’s network and all the network comprises, from the earth to the beings that inhabit it. This is where Deloria stakes his claim of morality: The broader Indian idea of relationship, in a universe that is very personal and particular, suggests that all relationships have a moral content. For that reason, Indian knowledge of the universe was never separated from other sacred knowledge about ultimate spiritual realities [emphasis added].25

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Whyte notes that moral relationships are those that honor the loops stitched into the web of connections: Many human societies … have longstanding sciences, collective practices (such as agriculture and ceremonies), arts, and philosophies that seek to maintain moral relationships with ever-changing environments that lessen harms and risks to humans and nonhumans alike.26

Thus, Whyte adds another layer to the relationship-morality axiom by infusing respect into the precept by noting that Indigenous knowledges “prescribe respectful relations” with other individuals, with the earth’s elements and with “nonhuman beings and entities.”27 What Is Meant by Respect? Scholar Jo-Ann (Q’um Q’um Xiiem) Archibald has written widely about respect and its intersections with the underpinnings of Indigenous Metaphysics. Like her North American colleagues, Archibald views respect as a scaffold on which Indigenous peoples buttress their relationships. And for Archibald, respect is woven into the ways in which knowledges are shared: respectfully. She writes: Some teachings from my nation, the Stó:lo, are about cultural respect, responsibility, and reciprocity. According to these teachings, important knowledge and wisdom contain power. If one comes to understand and appreciate the power of a particular knowledge, then one must be ready to share and teach it respectfully and responsibly to others in order for this knowledge, and its power, to continue. One cannot be said to have wisdom until others acknowledge an individual’s respectful and responsible use and teaching of knowledge to others. Usually, wisdom is attributed only to Elders, but this is not because they have lived a long time. What one does with knowledge and the insight gained from knowledge are the criteria for being called an “Elder.” Continuation of the Stó:lo knowledge and power relationship happens through a reciprocal process between teachers and learners [emphases added].28

Whyte recently carved out another foothold on the theoretical rampart through his discussion on morality and respect, asking readers to consider the concept of resilience, arguing that actualizing “moral relationships, including responsibility, spirituality, and justice … are at the heart of how we understand resilience.”29

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The idea of resilience—in the context that Whyte describes—is more narrow than the typical definition of resilience, which signifies a “rebounding from crisis.” That Indigenous peoples are still here, and many of that our cultures remain intact, offer proof of resilience. While resilience typically is defined as the ability to “bounce back” from some sort of disruption of equilibrium, I prefer the more macro-level description of resilience offered by ecologist Crawford Stanley Holling in the 1970s.30 Holling argues that living systems are continually in flux, and that framing resilience against a backdrop of equilibrium or stasis is faulty, because it poorly depicts resilience. He asks us to consider instead an ecosystem with myriad components that intersect with other systems, at numerous levels of connection, under multiple circumstances, at various points in time, and with a variety of effects. Some elements may come under threat, but resilience embedded in the system sustains the ecosystem as a whole. But Whyte is actually talking about a sort of cultural resilience, and—in this sense—resilience is characterized as a defensive response to an external force that impacts the system. Consider a community that was shattered by having citizenship revoked for some of its members, as in the case of German Jews in the 1930s, who became refugees in their own nation. The problem with this viewpoint of resilience is that it fails to account for resistance: when communities do more than adapt in order to survive. Communities also resist. Whyte says that Native Americans have resisted threats and survived in spite of prodigious attempts to eliminate us. Resistance—which Foucault described as an effect of power relations— arises when a group responds actively to powerful forces. Whyte adds that at the heart of cultural resilience is Indigenous Metaphysics: “developing moral relationships, including responsibility, spirituality, and justice” as the vigor that enables Indigenous peoples to resist.31 In summary, Indigenous Metaphysics is the construct that captures the semblances of Indigenous ways of being and knowing. Core values of morality and respect are woven throughout what Deloria calls the “fabric of life,” which is defined, in part, by relationships within the entire ecosystem and by the fundamental meaning of “place.” And, for Indigenous communities, the notion of resilience is essential in light of efforts to wipe the social landscape clean of traditional Native cultures, languages, knowledges and spiritualities.

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Synopsis The foundation for a book that examines environmental communication in mass media requires more than a discussion about how information ebbs and flows: I am also required to build a case that shows how information gets created, massaged, pruned and filtered through myriad junctures. With this objective in mind, I offer a template of the communication process that borrows from a rich landscape of criticism, theory and empirical research and hope to persuade you that a public sphere exists where ideas and issues are considered and examined, often because advocates find methods where their special interests can gain traction among publics. Issues and ideas migrate from the theatre of the public sphere to the arena of public discourse, where they may reach audiences through a range of communication channels. How audiences respond to ideas and issues filtered through such avenues is poorly understood, but that has not stopped researchers from digging deeply to better discern the effects of communication as part of a process that is iterative in nature: it continues to ebb and flow, cycling through stages where meanings are created and then reshaped: some remembered and some forgotten. I ask readers to consider how the communication process conveys information and produces meanings, and then to consider the process through the filters of hegemony, and through Indigenous Metaphysics. The first fuses the concept of hegemony onto the model, suggesting that, in each node of the communication process, power relations can be discerned that reflect dominant ideologies that publics accept—knowingly or not. The second filter overlays the construct of Indigenous Metaphysics onto the model. For our purposes, the discursive narratives of environmental struggles in North America that impact Indigenous communities can be considered against the backdrop of traditional Native American concepts and theories. This book offers two exemplars of environmental and scientific clashes on Native American land—the unearthing of an ancient skeleton and the construction of a crude oil pipeline—as a way to discover how meaning-­ making unfolds in the communication model with overlays of hegemony and Indigenous Metaphysics. The next chapter helps us understand the nature of the two clashes by offering an essential backdrop: historical turning points that have shaped the context of Indian-settler relationships. I examine how scientific forays into the characterization of human racial types in the 1800s set the stage

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for modern disputes. By studying science, I offer readers a contextualist view of the quality and texture surrounding the two case studies in this book. In his explanation of contextualism, mass communication scholar David K.  Perry argues that explaining phenomena requires us to consider the nature of events, which “change continuously and point both to past antecedents and to future outcomes.”32 Our understanding, therefore, is both conditional and situational. Pierre Bourdieu’s reflexive approach pairs well with contextualism in that he cautions critics to consider how one’s position—or standpoint—influences the ways we interpret phenomena. In this sense, reflexivity is the ability to exercise self-critique, from a personal vantage point, or disciplinary critique, from a structural perspective, by “casting an ironic gaze on the social world, a gaze which unveils, unmasks, brings to light what is hidden.”33 By employing a contextualist approach with a reflexive vision, I hope to summon Bourdieu’s advice and unveil some of the assumptions about how ideas about the environment and science inform contemporary clashes on Native American lands.

Notes 1. Tess McBride and Cynthia-Lou Coleman (2012). Examining news coverage and framing: The case study of sea lion management at the Bonneville Dam, in Proceedings from Between Scientists & Citizens: Assessing Expertise in Policy Controversies, Great Plains Society for the Study of Argumentation. 2. Todd Gitlin (1980). The Whole World is Watching: Mass Media in  the Making and Unmaking of the New Left. Berkeley: University of California Press, p. 6. 3. One of the US President’s advisors famously told the broadcast news that “falsehoods were simply ‘alternative facts’” after the president and his press officer falsely described the inauguration attendance as “the largest ever.” See Nicholas Fandos). (2017 January 22). White House pushes “Alternative Facts.” Here are the real ones. New York Times, downloaded from https:// www.nytimes.com/2017/01/22/us/politics/president-trump-inauguration-crowd-white-house.html. 4. Jim Rutenberg. (2017 January 22). “Alternative Facts” and the costs of Trump-branded reality, Mediator. New York Times, downloaded from https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/22/business/media/alternativefacts-trump-brand.html.

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5. Nexis-Uni is the current iteration of the online Lexis-Nexis database that houses international news, business information and legal content. According to its website, Nexis Uni draws from a repository of some 15,000 sources. 6. Anders Hansen (2011). Communication, media and environment: Towards reconnecting research on the production, content and social implications of environmental communication. International Communication Gazette 73(1–2), pp. 7–9. 7. Kevin M. Carragee and Wim Roefs (2004). The neglect of power in recent framing research. Journal of Communication, 54, p. 222. 8. Op. Cit., pp. 214–233. 9. I use the terms Indigenous, Native, Indian and Aboriginal interchangeably, taking my lead from the Newberry Library’s exhibit, What is the Midwest? The Library’s reasoning for using such terms in the 2019 exhibit is “to be inclusive of all peoples who are the original inhabitants of a place.” For more see the website for the exhibit at https://www.newberry.org/ what-is-the-midwest-exhibition. 10. Jonathan Culler (1997). Literary Theory. Oxford, England: Oxford Press, p. 50. 11. Gwyn A. Williams, 1960. The concept of “Egemonia” in the thought of Antonio Gramsci: Some notes on interpretation. Journal of the History of Ideas, 21(4): 586–599. 12. Op. Cit., p. 587. 13. Op. Cit., p. 591. 14. Michel Foucault (1976/2004). Power and Knowledge, in Charles C. Lemert (Editor), Social Theory: The Multicultural and Classic Readings (Third Edition). Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, p. 465. 15. Naomi Mezey (2001). Out of the ordinary: Law, power, culture, and the commonplace. Law & Social Inquiry, 26(1), p. 147. 16. Michel Foucault (1976/2004). Power and Knowledge, in Charles C. Lemert (Editor), Social Theory: The Multicultural and Classic Readings (Third Edition). Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, p. 465. 17. Vine Deloria Jr., in Vine Deloria, Jr. and Daniel R. Wildcat (2001). Power and Place: Indian Education in America. Golden, Colorado: Fulcrum Resources, p. 2. 18. Daniel R.  Wildcat, in Vine Deloria, Jr.  and Daniel R.  Wildcat (2001). Power and Place: Indian Education in America. Golden, Colorado: Fulcrum Resources, p. 32. 19. Vine Deloria Jr., in Vine Deloria, Jr. and Daniel R. Wildcat (2001). Power and Place: Indian Education in America. Golden, Colorado: Fulcrum Resources, pp. 3–4.

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20. Daniel R.  Wildcat, in Vine Deloria, Jr.  and Daniel R.  Wildcat (2001). Power and Place: Indian Education in America. Golden, Colorado: Fulcrum Resources, pp. 12–13. 21. Michael Dempster and Andrew Lewis, co-directors and producers (2015). Harvest: Quyurciq (documentary film). 22. Daniel R.  Wildcat, in Vine Deloria, Jr.  and Daniel R.  Wildcat (2001). Power and Place: Indian Education in America. Golden, Colorado: Fulcrum Resources, p. 15. 23. Op. Cit., pp. 12–13. 24. The readings that inform the section on morality and ethics make no distinction between the two constructs. 25. Vine Deloria Jr., in Vine Deloria Jr. and Daniel R. Wildcat (2001). Power and Place: Indian Education in America. Golden, Colorado: Fulcrum Resources, p. 23. 26. Kyle Powlys White (2018). Critical investigations of resilience: a brief introduction to indigenous environmental studies & sciences. Deadalus, 147(2), p. 138. 27. Op. Cit., p. 156. 28. Jo-ann Archibald (2008). Indigenous Storywork: Educating the Heart, Mind, Body, and Spirit. Vancouver, British Columbia: University of British Columbia Press. 29. Kyle Powys Whyte  (2018). Critical investigations of resilience: a brief introduction to indigenous environmental studies & sciences. Deadalus, 147(2), p. 137. 30. Crawford Stanley Holling (1973). Resilience and stability of ecological systems. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, 4, 1–23. 31. Op. Cit., p. 137. 32. David K. Perry (1988). Implications of a contextualist approach to mediaeffects research. Communication Research, 15(3), p. 247. 33. Pierre Bourdieu (2004). Science of Science and Reflexivity (R.  Nice, Trans.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

CHAPTER 3

Buckshot for Brains: Cultivating the American Indian Mind

Abstract  The human skull became a symbol of character in the 1800s when scientists and practitioners of phrenology linked the brain to race. Social discourse at the time cultivated the Caucasian mind as sophisticated and clever, and the Indian mind as savage and stubborn, paving the way for social policies that would treat Native peoples as subhuman and setting the stage for environmental conflicts between Indians and settlers. I argue that the study of phrenology cultivated a narrative about the American Indian Mind, which would continue through many generations, and long after phrenology was discounted as a pseudoscience. Native Americans would endure the narrative that they are savage and war-like in disposition. Such assumptions paved the way for political decisions that relegated Indians to the category of “non-civilizable” because of the nature of their brains and justified treatment that relegated Indians to a scientifically sanctioned sub-human classification. Keywords  Phrenology • Savage • Scientific progress • Sciencing When clashes over the environment and science erupt in North American Indian communities, the issues surrounding conflicts often share in common several traits. For example, anthropologists argued they needed to study the 9000-year-old bones of a skeleton called Kennewick Man to © The Author(s) 2020 C.-L. Coleman, Environmental Clashes on Native American Land, Palgrave Studies in Media and Environmental Communication, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34106-0_3

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enrich scientific knowledge and that denying them access would hinder scientific progress. Tribal members living near Kennewick Man’s burial site in the Pacific Northwest reasoned the elder is an ancestor and that he should be returned to the earth—where he was found—in a manner that respects the cultural traditions of Indigenous inhabitants. In another salient sample, an Indigenous tribe in North Dakota discovered that a crude oil channel—called the Dakota Access Pipeline—had been diverted from the city of Bismarck to run through their traditional homelands and underneath the tribe’s water supply: without their permission. The company building the pipeline argued the construction would boost economic growth and that the new pipeline “translates into greater energy security.”1 But the financial rewards would benefit few, according to the chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, David Archambault II. “Whether it’s gold from the Black Hills or hydropower from the Missouri or oil pipelines that threaten our ancestral inheritance, the tribes have always paid the price for America’s prosperity,” Archambault said.2 In each case, tribal peoples find their civic rights and their cultural traditions dismissed at several junctures: on the policy stage, in a cultural milieu and in the arena of social discourse. Turning to policy, a legal judgment allowed the anthropologists to study the ancient skeleton despite a Federal law that protects and repatriates (returns to tribes) ancient remains, and the courts dismissed the claims by the Sioux that the pipeline would harm vegetation, wildlife and humans. As for cultural traditions, Native tribes in the Pacific Northwest found their spiritual and moral practices denounced as insignificant when compared with the progress of science, while the Sioux at Standing Rock argued that the pipeline would course through lands that are culturally important—indeed: sacred—that had been promised to the Sioux in treaties signed by US officials in the 1800s. In the arena of social discourse, one of the scientists who sued to study Kennewick Man was considered a savior, as the following example, from his government website, shows: “Without his intervention and subsequent analysis the important information provided by the Kennewick Man remains would more than likely have been lost to science.”3 Critics of the Dakota Access Pipeline have argued that mainstream news coverage in social discourse largely ignored the conflict, and one national reporter called the dearth of coverage a “media blackout.”4 Scientific progress and social progress—concepts indelibly intertwined—are two features that undergird such conflicts, which makes it imperative to examine how some aspects of progress in past eras helped

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frame how settler-Indian relationships take shape in the public sphere. One important benchmark of the 1800s was advancement of the sciences: in particular, the discipline of phrenology. Practitioners of phrenology—the study of the mind—helped foment the notion that several racial types constituted humans: the Ethiopian, the American, the Malayan, the Mongolian and the Caucasian. Phrenologists considered racial types as arising from separate human strains, and they ordered humans in a hierarchy, with Caucasians at the top of the ladder, and with Ethiopians on the bottom-­ most rung. By typing humans in this way, phrenologists added gravitas to their studies by arguing their conclusions were reached through sophisticated scientific analysis. And while scientific journals added a layer of propriety to phrenology, the notion of multiple races reinforced stereotypes of difference, yielded by skin-color, culture and geography. Poetry and paintings, travelogues and diaries, and newspapers and lectures offered publics myriad opportunities to learn about phrenology and the hierarchy of the races in the avenues of social discourse. This chapter explores how the study of phrenology cultivated a narrative about the American Indian mind that was moored in scientific empiricism, scientific methods and scientific progress. Learning more about the narrative offers readers a contextual and a reflexive approach to contemporary conflicts because we can view how the “changing nature” of events influence issues (contextualism)5 and, at the same time, critique how the interpretation of events is shaped to highlight some ways-of-knowing over others.6 I offer a discussion that lets us consider how the characterizations of personality, morality, intellect and adaptation framed the Indian in ways that—among other decisions—justified progressive policies by North American governments regarding Native inhabitants, including removal of tribes onto reservations because they were incapable of being civilized, as evidenced by their brains. In order to examine how phrenology unfolded in social discourse in the 1800s, I invite you to recall the diagram of the communication process, Making Meaning in the Public Sphere and in Social Discourse, introduced earlier. We can envision how phrenology entered the public sphere by imagining learned men discussing the relationship between the brain and the mind. We can then trace how such ideas entered the arena of social discourse in several ways: through studies published in journals and presented at scientific meetings, through public

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lectures and gallery exhibits, and by practitioners of phrenology who would examine your head for a fee. The diagram shows how messages moved within social discourse to mass media channels, where we can imagine an issue culture arising that characterizes racial types according to their brains, ensuring that Caucasians are “distinguished for the facility with which [they] attain the highest intellectual endowments,” while American Indians are “averse to cultivation, and slow in acquiring knowledge; restless, revengeful, and fond of war.”7 Social constructionists William A. Gamson and André Modigliani would consider the cultivation of the mind in discourse an example of an “issue culture,” which operates at two levels. At one level, the association of the mind and brain with racial type resonates with notions that conform to stereotypes that emerge with the theatre of the public sphere (e.g. Caucasians are the most intelligent among all racial groups). When an issue culture enters the arena of social discourse, its meanings get massaged within the junctures of communication and can take on new interpretations. Phrenologists fleshed out the issue culture surrounding race and intelligence by offering evidence to support their claims in the scientific American Phrenological Journal. The diagram also provides an opportunity to see how struggles over power—through Michel Foucault’s lens—might be explored along the communication continuum. For example, Foucault argues that some perspectives have dominion over others, such as the phrenology-based argument that Caucasians are superior to Mongolians, Malayans, Americans and Ethiopians. Other knowledge systems—such as Indigenous ways-of-­ knowing—are diminished, and seen as “subjugated,” an idea explored later in the book. I invite you now to imagine a time 90 years ago when science, technology, literature and politics percolated with promise in North America. We will explore how phrenologists studied the mind by examining the human skull; how phrenologists created empirical techniques to measure intelligence; how merchants capitalized on phrenology by creating a cottage industry of pamphlets, ceramic heads and “mind reading”; and how phrenology became legitimized as a bona fide science that helped cement the idea of racial types informed by personality, mortality, intellect and adaptation.

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Progress in the 1800s To set the stage, imagine the year is 1838. Samuel Morse is perfecting the telegraph, which will revolutionize communication, and Charles Darwin begins writing about his groundbreaking idea that species adapt and survive through random selection, rather than by divine intervention. Victorian editor, translator and writer Elizabeth Barrett Browning publishes the first of her romantic poetry books and Charles Dickens treats readers to the woeful tale of an orphaned pickpocket called Oliver Twist. Meantime, at a seaport in North America, a 20-year-old slave named Frederick Douglass—who will become a prominent abolitionist—boards a train with fake papers and escapes to New York where he will become a free man. While Douglass flees the shipyards of Baltimore, the Cherokee Indians, who had won a Supreme Court battle to keep their ancestral homeland in Georgia, are met by a militia and ordered to abandon their village at New Echota, just seven years after their landmark court victory. The remaining Cherokee—and any Creeks, Chickasaw, Choctaw and Seminole left behind—will trudge hundreds of miles to unfamiliar territories North and West. Thousands of Native peoples will die during the forced marches on what we now call the Trail of Tears. The Cherokee were relieved of their homelands because—in part—little credence was given to their ability to manage their own lives when contrasted with the yearnings of settlers to claim the rich Georgia forests, streams and wildlife for their own. Notions about Indigenous approaches to living, being and knowing were largely circumscribed in the social discourse by non-Indians who created, wrote and performed theatrical productions, public lectures, news stories, scientific journals, books and paintings that constructed a social reality that etched Native Americans in a discursive amber. Scientists at the time who studied the human mind helped cement ideas of the human race through a branch of study called phrenology. Studying the culture of phrenology, and its intersections with empiricism, ideology, ways-of-knowing, policy-making and race, shows how scientists and pseudoscientists at the time helped cultivate a narrative about the American Indian mind: a narrative that frames Native peoples within a racialized milieu where character and intellect are pre-ordained by the shape of their skulls. I argue that phrenology lent an air of authority and authenticity to the study of race, which was quantified scientifically, and placed Indians on one of the low ranks of humankind.

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Philadelphia: A Hub for Science and Pseudoscience Philadelphia of 1838 was vibrant with activity, where the city’s thriving mercantile industry burgeoned, built around commercial shipping and passenger travel.8 With the state’s bountiful coal deposits, Philadelphia became a hub for coal-fired energy, principally through steam power. “By 1838 there were more steam engines in Pennsylvania than any other state [and] … Philadelphia had become a center of steam locomotive manufacturing.”9 City life energized entrepreneurs, including two brothers, Orson Squire Fowler and Lorenzo Niles Fowler, who were inspired by scientists to share with citizens their virtuosity in reading minds. The Fowler brothers became itinerant phrenologists, who lectured throughout the United States and abroad on the principles of studying (logy) the mind (phreno). The Fowlers and their associate, Samuel Robert Wells, set up a shop in what they christened The Phrenological Museum on Chestnut Street in 1838, where they began writing and editing the American Phrenological Journal. Phrenology struck a chord, and the trio expanded the business, opening up offices in New York, Boston and London. The Fowler brothers and Wells—their sister’s husband—began a brisk publishing venture that “produced hundreds of titles and editions and, literally, thousands of copies of phrenological texts,” plus “charts, sets of cranial casts, and the famous symbolical heads. In addition to their mercantile ventures, the Fowlers were educators, training an army of phrenologists and supplying them with the tools of their trade.”10 The Fowlers took a page from Aristotle for their motto, Know Thyself, and claimed that self-knowledge, through the science of phrenology: Shows us our natural talents, capabilities, virtues, vices, strong and weak points … and develops the laws and conditions of human and personal virtue and moral perfection, as well as of vice, and how to avoid it. It is, therefore, the quintessence of all knowledge.11

The Fowler brothers popularized the practice of phrenology by reading bumps on peoples’ heads. For three dollars, you could have your head examined: literally. Their clients included poet Walt Whitman, humorist Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) and American Red Cross founder Clara Barton.

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The Fowler brothers elevated the science of phrenology by assigning it rigor. In the introduction to one of the first issues of their journal, the editors entice readers with the science, the facts and the truth: The object of this work will be to preserve from oblivion the most interesting of the very numerous facts, confirmatory and illustrative of the truth of phrenology—to show the true bearings of this science on education (physical, intellectual, and moral), on theology, and on mental and moral philosophy.12

True believers, the Fowlers assiduously advocated for the new-found science of phrenology, as illustrated by their comment: “We do not expect phrenological matter will be so eagerly sought for, or so highly valued, in this country for many years. But we do know that the time will come, when works of real merit on the science will be properly estimated and extensively circulated.”13 While the Fowlers ran their fingers over the scalps of sentient beings, Samuel George Morton was peering into the boney vestiges of the once-­ living.14 Armed with calipers and lead weights, a straight-edge and a strap, and a craniometer to measure spaces between bone, Morton painstakingly calibrated the mass of human skulls, keeping meticulous notes he would use to write his three-volume book, published in sections between 1839 and 1849: Crania Americana, An Inquiry into the Distinctive Characteristics of the Aboriginal Race of America and Crania Aegyptiaca. Morton worked as physician, scientist, scholar, writer and bureaucrat in his hometown of Philadelphia, where he and his wife, Rebecca Pearsall Morton, raised eight children on Arch Street: just a few blocks from the Fowlers’ bodega, the Phrenological Cabinet.15

The Skull as a Virtual Personality Map Morton and a host of medical doctors and scientists in the United States, Great Britain and Europe believed the skull offered a virtual map that reveals the landscape of the brain and affords a glimpse into an individual’s personality and moral judgment: the mind. Phrenologists were among the first researchers to conceptualize a linkage between the vessel—the skull— and the organ for thought—the brain. Morton drew from the substantial work of François (Franz) Josef Gall, who is considered the founder of phrenology. While Morton is arguably

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the most prolific scholar of phrenology, we need to consider Gall’s influence on Morton’s ideas. Gall believed that mental, emotional and instinctive attributes—ranging from the love of family to an affinity for calculation—stem from segments within the brain he called “faculties” and “organs.” Gall surmised that the segments—each with its set of attributes—can be discerned by examining the brain’s casement: the skull. For example, a place in the brain where self-esteem is generated might be seen by a lump, indicating an abundance of confidence. In contrast, a skull that reveals a hollow in the area of self-esteem would indicate timidity. With skillful examination, a specialist—like Orson or Lorenzo Fowler—could detect the presence or absence of qualities that reveal the personality of the individual. Gall created a list of human attributes that, over the years, was tweaked by fellow phrenologists: some traits were added while others were tossed aside. Gall assigned numerals to the characteristics he mapped graphically onto the skull. For example, the number 6 refers to combativeness, while the numeral 13 represents self-esteem. You can find each of the relevant characteristics by examining a poster, pamphlet or ceramic skull that matches the numeral with the attribute. Novices could locate the personality features on an image or replica of a skull and then review the attributes on a guide. The Fowlers created and sold a passel of merchandise that guided the amateur through phrenological investigation. Below is a list of 37 attributes that were used to analyze skulls. Each trait corresponds to a pinpointed segment on the human skull that houses the trait. Images, posters and ceramic replicas of the skull, created and sold by the Fowler brothers, show the locations of each trait.

Phrenological Characteristics of Humans 1. Amativeness (physical love) 2. Philoprogenitiveness (love of offspring) 3. Adhesiveness (attachment) 4. Inhabitiveness (desire of permanence in place) 5. Concentrativeness (concentration, attentiveness) 6. Combativeness (courage to meet danger)

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7. Destructiveness (desire to destroy) 8. Alimentativeness, alimentiveness (hunger, thirst) 9. Acquisitiveness (desire to possess) 10. Secretiveness (tendency to conceal) 11. Cautiousness (fearful) 12. Approbativeness (love of praise) 13. Self-esteem (self-respect, independence) 14. Firmness (perseverance) 15. Conscientiousness (love of truth, justice) 16. Hope (faith, expect future good) 17. Marvelousness (senseless astonishment, belief in magic) 18. Veneration (respectfulness) 19. Benevolence (compassion) 20. Constructiveness (creativity) 21. Ideality (love of the beautiful) 22. Imitation (copies the manners of others) 23. Mirthfulness (wit) 24. Individuality (cognizant of existence and simple facts) 25. Form (observant of form) 26. Size (the idea of space, dimension and distance) 27. Weight and resistance (perception of momentum, weight and resistance) 28. Coloring (perception of color, harmony and discord) 29. Order (love of physical arrangement) 30. Calculation (talent for computation) 31. Locality (perception of relative position) 32. Eventuality (cognizance of occurrences, events) 33. Time (perception of time, duration) 34. Tune (sense of melody, harmony) 35. Language (facility to acquire knowledge of arbitrary signs to express thoughts, readiness in use of them, and the power of inventing and recollecting them) 36. Comparison (power of discovering analogies, resemblances and differences) 37. Causality (traces the dependences of phenomena and the relation of cause and effect)16,17

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The Appeal of Sciencing Gall, who held medical positions in Vienna and Paris, wrote an influential book on phrenology in 1825, titled, On the Functions of the Brain and of Each of Its Parts: With Observations on the Possibility of Determining the Instincts, Propensities, and Talents, or the Moral and Intellectual Dispositions of Men and Animals, by the Configuration of the Brain and Head. Gall related his conjectures that physical features of the brain are associated with personality. In the book, he describes a “dear friend”—a philosopher—as “endowed with great mental vivacity.” Gall surmised that his friend’s intellectual powers were housed in the forehead: I observed in the external superior middle part of the frontal bone, a great lengthened prominence, to which I had not given attention till that moment. This prominence commenced in the anterior superior middle part of the forehead, where it was about an inch broad, and contracting itself in the form of a cone, reached the middle of the forehead, where it touched the organ of educability.18

Gall tested his hypothesis by searching out men with “similar vivacity” and found they, too, had  a prominent forehead. He then inverted the technique by seeking out men with protruding foreheads. He discovered they possessed vivacity. “All my observations confirmed my supposition,” Gall writes.19 Critics however, note that phrenologists like Gall sought evidence to support their claims, rather than attempting to find evidence that would falsify their beliefs—a marker of modern scientific methods. In other words, Gall set out to demonstrate a link between mental acuity and forehead shape, and he found exactly what he hoped to find. By employing methods that were deemed scientific—keen observation and careful measurement—Gall legitimized phrenology as grounded in science. But his method also reveals that by searching for evidence that supported his views, he diminishes our confidence that individuals with prominent foreheads have a vivacious countenance. We cannot know if the men he selected to verify his suppositions were already prone to vivacity, nor do we know how Gall chose his subjects. Still, the spread of phrenology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was due, in part, to the assumption that practitioners and scholars alike used scientific methods, adding a dash of veracity to their assumptions. I argue that, at times, we conflate the veracity of scientific studies with the methods used. That is, methods can charm us and create an effervescence

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that excites us. For example, a current scholar examines the modern technique of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)—a method used to examine brain activity that yields pictures—as an exemplar that dazzles us with its promise.20 In her studies of lay responses to images gleaned from looking at fMRIs, Diane Beck says that news coverage uncritically reports on how fMRIs interpret how the brain works and that “non-­ experts are ‘fooled’ by scientific-sounding, but uninformative, neuroscience language.”21 Beck adds that colorful images appeal to non-scientists, who are awed by two features: the expensive piece of machinery that translates blood flow into a picture of the brain at work and by the scientific experts who interpret what the images mean. But interpreting the images is subject to considerable debate in neuroscience circles, and the software used in fMRI research was determined to be seriously flawed in 2016, thus calling into question the findings of hundreds of studies of the brain.22 Thus, the allure of technology can obscure the very evidence we hope to glean, and the act of doing science—sciencing—gets conflated with the outcome.23 While the methods of phrenology gained acceptance among expert and lay-folk alike, the roots of the theories of human personality were blithely ignored. Like Aristotle, Gall created a taxonomy: in this case, a list of human attributes. But the list that was created from Gall’s encounters with residents at the Insane Asylum where he worked, and the location of personality in segments of the brain, was presented as scientific fact, when, in reality, his suppositions were part conjecture, part invention.

The Quantification of Race Samuel Morton spun Gall’s work in ways that had profound effects on the public sphere. Skull shape, which phrenologists claimed corresponds with moral character, also indicated the race of the individual. Morton’s most important written work, Crania Americana, presaged the modern impact of race on politics, capitalism, culture and scientific empiricism in North America. Morton argued that five main racial types could be characterized by the nature of the skull: Caucasian, Mongolian, Malayan, American and Ethiopian. As noted earlier, the skull shape of each race indicated personality, morality, intellect, judgment, emotional stability, adaptation, civilizability and resilience. Morton and other scientists arranged the skulls

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hierarchically, with the Caucasian race the most noble. The following excerpt from Crania Americana distinguishes Caucasians as superior: The Caucasian Race is characterized by a naturally fair skin, susceptible of every tint; hair long and curling, and of various colors. The skull is large and oval, and its anterior portion full and elevated. The face is small in proportion to the head, of an oval form, with well-proportioned features. The nasal bones are arched, the chin full, and the teeth vertical. This race is distinguished for the facility with which it attains the highest intellectual endowments.24

Caucasians included Germanic, Celtic, Arabian, Libyan, Nilotic and Indostanic peoples. The other four races fared more poorly in terms of beauty and sagacity. Mongolians follow Caucasians in hierarchy and are characterized by “sallow or olive colored skin … eyes are small, black … In their intellectual character the Mongolians are ingenious, imitative, and highly susceptible of cultivation.”25 Mongolians include Tartars, Turks, Chinese, Indo-­ Chinese and Polar peoples. The next race, Malayans—or—Polynesians, have dark complexions, “varying from a tawny hue to a very dark brown … nose is short and broad, and apparently broken at its root … This race is active and ingenious, and possesses all the habits of a migratory, predaceous and maritime people.”26 Morton called the fourth group-Indigenous people from the New World-Americans, noting members of this race are: Marked by a brown complexion, long, black, lank hair, and deficient beard. The eyes are black and deep set, the brow low, the cheek-bones high, the nose large and aquiline, the mouth large, and the lips tumid and compressed. The skull is small, wide between the parietal protuberances, prominent at the vertex, and flat on the occiput. In their mental character the Americans are averse to cultivation, and slow in acquiring knowledge; restless, revengeful, and fond of war, and wholly destitute of maritime adventure.27

Seated on the bottom-most rung on the human ladder are the Ethiopians— or—Negroids, who comprise native inhabitants of Africa. Morton said African denizens are:

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Characterized by a black complexion, and black, woolly hair … In disposition the Negro is joyous, flexible, and indolent; while the many nations which compose this race present a singular diversity of intellectual character, of which the far extreme is the lowest grade of humanity.28

While Morton’s analysis of racial types reflects long-held beliefs among Westerners (and others) regarding Indigenous peoples and “foreigners”— individuals from any culture other than our own—his scholarship added empirical fuel to the notions of racial personality types and intellectual prowess, captured within a hierarchy with Caucasians positioned at the top. More impressive, however, is the notion that racial attributes are determined and immutable. Focusing on Native Americans, we discover that no amount of tutoring will change the character of the Indian, which is determined by God, according to Morton.

How Phrenology Cultivated the Native American Mind Phrenological pronouncements about the races, conveyed through a range of discursive channels—from museum exhibits to public lectures— informed myriad publics about the pseudoscience of race. In the case of the North American Indian, the vocabulary created by Morton and his colleagues in scientific writings is reflected in popular media of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, where Indians are portrayed as bereft of gentlemanly qualities, including aesthetic taste and intelligence. Morton’s views of the American Indian mind helped justify efforts by the militia, settlers and politicians to procure lands from Indigenous denizens in the 1830s. Morton, who amassed nearly 1000 human skulls by the end of his career, wrote that the Natives of North America could never be civilized, as evidenced by the shape of their heads, including the “Lenape, Iroquois, Cherokee, Mandans, Ricaras, Assinaboins, Osages, Ottoes, Missouris and Dacotas.” He added that, “In character these nations are warlike, cruel and unforgiving. They turn with aversion from the restraints of civilized life, and have made but trifling progress in mental culture or the useful arts.”29 Native Americans could never be civilized because they lacked the brain structure that would allow their mental and cultural endowments to flourish. Morton considered them savage and barbarous. Historian Robert Bieder asserts that one of the most damning assumptions cultivated by

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Morton was that Indians lacked moral character. A critical aspect of this conclusion is that the brains of Indians are incapable of intellectual and moral resilience: they could never adapt. “In Morton’s hands statistics not only delineated the Indian but also judged him: the hand of God, not the environment, shaped the Indian’s cranium.”30 Such deficits could never be overcome because they were fixed and binding. In Morton’s words, the primitive nature of the Indigenous mind prohibited the prospect of civilizing the Indian: The intellectual faculties of this great family appear to be of a decidedly inferior cast when compared with those of the Caucasian or Mongolian races. They are not only averse to the restraints of education, but for the most part incapable of a continued process of reasoning on abstract subjects. Their minds seize with avidity on simple truths, while they at once reject whatever requires investigation and analysis. Their proximity, for more than two centuries, to European institutions, has made scarcely any appreciable change in their mode of thinking or their manner of life; and as to their own social condition, they are probably in most respects what they were at the primitive epoch of their existence. They have made few or no improvements in building their houses or their boats; their inventive and imitative faculties appear to be of a very humble grade, nor have they the smallest predilection for the arts or sciences.31

Morton characterized the Native American brain as inferior, of a very humble grade, and a lesser caliber compared to the more prestigious races of Caucasian, Mongolian and Malayan. His conviction that Indians would never change—and that they could never advance beyond savagery—is evidenced by their exposure for two centuries to the more sophisticated settlers. Even education, Morton asserts, fails to improve their minds. In summary, Indians could never be civilized. Morton invoked science to address the question of Indian character, and his colleague, George Combe, wrote that Morton’s sciencing demonstrates a “more perfect method of investigation.”32 Indigenous peoples had been characterized in the popular press as barbaric brutes, and Morton’s work added credulity to such descriptions by offering a scientific rationale for savagery: Imperfect historical descriptions have been given of distant nations, and particularly of barbarous and savage tribes, whose manners have been imperfectly observed, and whose language has been scarcely at all comprehended;

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and it may ultimately be discovered, that the characteristics indicated by the size and forms of their brains have been more correct than the hasty impressions of travelers.33

Morton’s sciencing resulted in quantifying human features, ranging from amativeness to combativeness. Amativeness (loving), for example, was “measured from the point where the external occipital crest intersects the lower semi-lunar line.”34 Using calipers, Morton examined characteristics ranging from individuality to philoprogenitiveness (love for one’s children). He quantified “benevolence, veneration, firmness, conscientiousness and hope” by examining “above the plane drawn through the centers of ossification of the frontal and parietal bones.”35 That is, Morton applied empirical methods to his theories: he divided the skull into chunks, according to Gall’s guidelines, and measured each section carefully. One of Morton’s most memorable contributions was his theory that the girth and mass of the cranium indicate intelligence: the bigger the brain, the smarter the man or woman. Such techniques required Morton to find a fresh head, scoop out brain matter, boil the skull, and then weigh it. He used several items as substitutes for brain matter, beginning with mustard seeds: he filled the hollowed cranium with seeds, then dumped the pips into a container and weighed them. He compared crania according to the weight of the seeds to demonstrate scientifically that more weight indicates greater intelligence. Morton found a better substitute for brain matter and replaced seeds with buckshot as his preferred medium. He poured buckshot into the cavity and discovered: the more the buckshot, the more the brains. Native Americans were summarily dismissed for their smaller skulls that held less buckshot than those of settlers. Morton helped bolster the notion that Indians were incapable of being civilized due to a lack of requisite mental hardware to achieve social advancement.

Synopsis By using empirical methods to lubricate their ideas in the public sphere, phrenologists invited publics to consider their techniques as a sign of good science: what the Fowler brothers framed as facts and truths. I hope to persuade you that social discourse surrounding phrenology helped preserve impressions of American Indians within a discursive amber where we were—and still are, in many respects—considered inferior to settlers in

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terms of our intellect, moral judgment, adaptability and cultivability, and inferior due to our “trifling progress” in the arts and sciences.36 The next chapter looks at a specific case study, where the Fowler brothers analyze the skull, brain and mind of the Sauk warrior Black Hawk. In summary, phrenology offers ideas that were captured within a racial climate, where Caucasians were characterized as the most noble, most cultivated, most sophisticated, most intelligent and—indeed—most beautiful of all human types. I argue that such notions about race and Native Americans, which were enveloped in the theatre of the public sphere and in the arena of discourse, impact the ways that environmental and scientific struggles play out in today’s social landscape.

Notes 1. Webpage, Dakota Access Pipeline Facts. Energy Transfer Partners. Downloaded from https://daplpipelinefacts.com/. 2. David Archambault II (2016 August 24). Taking a stand at Standing Rock (Opinion). New York Times. 3. Douglas Owsley website. Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. Downloaded from https://naturalhistory.si.edu/. 4. Dakota Access Pipeline: Behind the ‘media blackout’. (2016 December 11). The Listening Post, Al Jazeera. Downloaded from https://www. aljazeera.com/programmes/listeningpost/2016/12/dakota-access-pipeline-media-blackout-161210071122040.html. 5. David K. Perry (1988). Implications of a contextualist approach to media-­ effects research. Communication Research, 15(3), p. 247. 6. Pierre Bourdieu (2004). Science of Science and Reflexivity (R.  Nice, Trans.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 7. Samuel George Morton (1839). Crania Americana: A comparative view of the skulls of various aboriginal nations of North and South America. To which is prefixed an essay on the varieties of the human species. Philadelphia: J. Dobson. London: Simpkin, Marshall & Co. Kindle version. 8. Webpage, “Philadelphia 1830: The Athens of America,” from the Hopkin Thomas Project. Downloaded from https://himedo.net/ TheHopkinThomasProject/TimeLine/Philadelphia/Philadelphia_1830. htm. According to the website, the purpose of the project concerns “the activities of a Welsh engineer who emigrated to America in 1834 bringing with him technical knowledge which was instrumental in the development of anthracite-fueled steam locomotives used by the Beaver Meadow and other railroads in the eastern Pennsylvania coal fields.” See http://himedo.net/TheHopkinThomasProject/TheHopThomasProject.html.

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9. Op. Cit. 10. Archives from the Center for the History of Medicine at Harvard University, downloaded from https://collections.countway.harvard.edu/ onview/exhibits/show/talking-heads/the-fowler-brothers. 11. Op. Cit. 12. Prospectus, American Phrenological Journal and Miscellany, 1839. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: A.  Waldie, publisher. Downloaded from http://www.iapsop.com/archive/materials/american_phrenological_ journal/american_phrenological_journal_v1_1839.pdf. 13. Op. Cit. 14. Colonial Families of Philadelphia (1911, January 1). Volume 2. John Woolf Jordan, editor. Lewis Publishing Company, p.  1719. Downloaded from https://archive.org/details/colonialfamilies02jord/page/n10. 15. Samuel George Morton papers (1832–1862). Philadelphia Area Archives Research Portal (PAARP). Downloaded from http://dla.library.upenn. edu/dla/pacscl/detail.html?id=PACSCL_LCP_LCPMorton. 16. Character of Black Hawk: Phrenological developments and the character of the celebrated Indian chief and warrior, Black Hawk, with cuts (1839). American Phrenological Journal and Miscellany. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, A.  Waldie, Publisher. pp.  51–61. Downloaded from https://catalog. hathitrust.org/Record/003987208. 17. Definitions from George Combe (1853). A System of Phrenology, Fifth Edition. Maclachlan & Stewart: Edinburgh, Scotland. As cited in John van Wyhe, The History of Phrenology on the Web, 1999–2001 (webpage). http://www.historyofphrenology.org.uk/system/system_intro.htm. 18. Francois Joseph Gall (1835). On the functions of the brain and of each of its parts: with observations on the possibility of determining the instincts, propensities, and talents, or the moral and intellectual dispositions of men and animals, by the configuration of the brain and head. Boston, Massachusetts: March, Capen & Lyon. Nahum Capen and Winslow Lewis (editors). Downloaded from https://archive.org/stream/onfunctionsbrai03gallgoog/onfunctionsbrai03gallgoog_djvu.txt. 19. Op. Cit. 20. Diane Beck (2010). The appeal of the brain in the popular press. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 5(6): 762–766. 21. Op. Cit. 22. Anders Eklund, Thomas E. Nichols and Hans Knutsson (2016). Cluster failure: Why fMRI inferences for spatial extent have inflated false-positive. PNAS 113(28): 7900–7905. 23. Cynthia-Lou Coleman (2018). How discourse illuminates the ruptures between scientific and cultural rationalities, in Ethics and Practice in Science Communication, University of Chicago Press, Susanna Priest, Jean Goodwin and Michael Dahlstrom, editors, pp. 270–289.

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24. Samuel George Morton (1839). Crania Americana: A comparative view of the skulls of various aboriginal nations of North and South America. To which is prefixed an essay on the varieties of the human species. Philadelphia: J. Dobson. London: Simpkin, Marshall & Co. Kindle version. 25. Op. Cit. 26. Op. Cit. 27. Op. Cit. 28. Op. Cit. 29. Op. Cit. 30. Robert E. Bieder (1986). Science Encounters the Indian, 1820–1880: The Early Years of American Ethnology. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, p. 70. 31. Samuel George Morton (1839). Crania Americana: A comparative view of the skulls of various aboriginal nations of North and South America. To which is prefixed an essay on the varieties of the human species. Philadelphia: J. Dobson. London: Simpkin, Marshall & Co. Kindle version. 32. George Combe (1839). Appendix to Crania Americana, by Samuel George Morton, p. 68. 33. Op. Cit. 34. Samuel George Morton (1839). Crania Americana: A comparative view of the skulls of various aboriginal nations of North and South America. To which is prefixed an essay on the varieties of the human species. Philadelphia: J. Dobson. London: Simpkin, Marshall & Co. Kindle version. 35. Op. Cit. 36. Op. Cit.

CHAPTER 4

Black Hawk’s Skull

Abstract  The Fowler Brothers famously studied the skull of Black Hawk—an Indian warrior—before he died in 1838. The studies of his skull—published in the American Phrenological Journal and Miscellany— describe Black Hawk’s mind as in a “savage state.” The warrior’s personality was characterized as bellicose, courageous, destructive and secretive: traits revealed by examining a plaster mold of his head. Public discourse surrounding the skull weaves intertextually with cultural notions that collecting skulls served as a gentleman’s pastime. A sign of refinement was displaying human skulls like household knick-knacks. A darker side to skull-collecting came from grave-robbers who could earn cash by selling Indian body parts to museums and collectors. As we learn later, one such collector dug up Black Hawk’s corpse and stole his skull. Keywords  Black Hawk • Fetishism • Phrenology • Skull-collecting

Final We are now well armed with examples from phrenological writing in the 1800s about how personality could be determined by examining the human skull, and how different races exhibited different personality characteristics: particularly Native Americans. © The Author(s) 2020 C.-L. Coleman, Environmental Clashes on Native American Land, Palgrave Studies in Media and Environmental Communication, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34106-0_4

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Lorenzo and Orson Fowler seized an opportunity to meet Black Hawk, a Sauk warrior captured by the US military, to see first-hand how their analysis of a Native American skull might reveal personality. A fierce fighter of renown, Black Hawk was apprehended in 1832 and, along with several other Indigenous warriors, was jailed near St. Louis, Missouri. He would spend the next few years in and out of prisons, dictating his autobiography to an interpreter and editor, and touring the United States before being sent home to his family in Iowa, where he died in 1838. After being sequestered initially for several months, the captured Indians were taken to Washington, D.C., to meet the president, Andrew Jackson. Black Hawk—who spoke almost no English—described the historic meeting: On our arrival at Washington, we called to see our Great Father, the President. He looks as if he had seen as many winters as I have, and seems to be a great brave. I had very little talk with him, as he appeared to be busy and did not seem to be much disposed to talk. I think he is a good man; and although he talked but little, he treated us very well. His wigwam is well-­ furnished with everything good and pretty, and is very strongly built.1

The Native troupe spent the next few weeks as prisoners at Fortress Monroe in Virginia, before resuming their touring duties. Mark Wallace, an English professor, notes that in every city he visited, “Black Hawk drew large audiences who came to see the Indian who had caused the American government so much trouble.”2 Black Hawk was welcomed as a celebrity who “had become a reason for public fascination rather than hate or fear,” and he sat for portraits painted by such artists as George Caitlin, John Wesley Jarvis and Robert Matthew Sully, Wallace notes.3

Black Hawk’s Skull When the Fowler brothers learned that Black Hawk would be visiting New York in 1838, they received permission to meet the Native headman, who allowed the Fowlers to fashion a plaster of Paris mold of his head. The plaster cast was used as a template for phrenological measurements and yielded the verdict that Black Hawk had very large faculties of secretiveness, eventuality (memory) and philoprogenitiveness (love of offspring). The Fowlers published their findings the following year in their phrenological journal.

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The examination of Black Hawk’s cranium—in plaster form—confirmed for the Fowlers that Indians are powered by their physical stamina and by their child-like emotions, while lacking a constitution for civil life. The Fowlers had already claimed that all American Indian skulls reveal a personality that “is always cunning, revengeful, wild, and free.” Orson Fowler wrote: Nothing can subdue him. Enslave an Indian! Who ever saw his proud spirit sub’dued? Torture him with our utmost ingenuity, and he laughs in your face, and taunts and defies you—his proud spirit absolutely indomitable … You may kill his body, but his lofty soul never surrenders. This love of liberty is innate, as is also his gratitude for favors and revenge for wrongs. He is always eloquent, but never forgiving. By nature he loves the chase, but hates to work, observes the stars and predicts the weather, but dislikes books.4

Fowler echoed phrenologist Samuel Morton’s views that education could never alter the Indian’s personality: That these characteristics are innate rather than educational, is proved by his phrenology—always peculiar to himself. The developments of the infant papoose—and the author speaks from the personal inspection of hundreds from among various tribes—are essentially Indian, and partake of that same shortness from occiput to forehead, low and short coronal region, and breadth in the region of propensity, especially Destructiveness and Secretiveness.5

The Fowlers’ analysis of Black Hawk, titled, Character of Black Hawk: Phrenological developments and the character of the celebrated Indian chief and warrior, Black Hawk, with cuts, appeared in the 1839 issue of the American Phrenological Journal and Miscellany. They note: “As his head was mostly shaved, they [the dimensions] are probably as perfect and accurate … as though measured directly on the skull itself” (Figs.  4.1 and 4.2).6 Below is the list of Phrenological Developments of Black Hawk that accompany the journal article. The list is the same as the one that appears earlier in the book, and this version includes the phrenological assessment of Black Hawk’s characteristics, which are mapped onto his head, as seen in the images. Note that the weight of the characteristics ranges on a seven-part scale, as very small, small, moderate, average, very large, large and full.

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Fig. 4.1  Illustration of Black Hawk from the American Phrenological Journal and Miscellany. (Credit: Used with permission from Illinois State University’s Special Collections, Milner Library)

Fig. 4.2  Illustration of Black Hawk from the American Phrenological Journal and Miscellany. (Credit: Used with permission from Illinois State University’s Special Collections, Milner Library)

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Phrenological Characteristics of Black Hawk: Combative and Animal Qualities 1. Amativeness (physical love) large 2. Philoprogenitiveness (love of offspring) large 3. Adhesiveness (attachment) large 4. Inhabitiveness (desire of permanence in place) large 5. Concentrativeness (concentration, attentiveness) large 6. Combativeness (courage to meet danger) very large 7. Destructiveness (desire to destroy) very large 8. Alimentativeness, alimentiveness (hunger, thirst) average 9. Acquisitiveness (desire to possess) large 10. Secretiveness (tendency to conceal) very large 11. Cautiousness (fearful) full 12. Approbativeness (love of praise) very large 13. Self-esteem (self-respect, independence) very large 14. Firmness (perseverance) very large 15. Conscientiousness (love of truth, justice) moderate 16. Hope (faith, expect future good) small 17. Marvelousness (senseless astonishment, belief in magic) large 18. Veneration (respectfulness) very large 19. Benevolence (compassion) moderate 20. Constructiveness (creativity) small 21. Ideality (love of the beautiful) moderate 22. Imitation (copies the manners of others) large 23. Mirthfulness (wit) full 24. Individuality (cognizant of existence, simple facts) very large 25. Form (observant of form) very large 26. Size (the idea of space, dimension, distance) very large 27. Weight and resistance (perception of momentum, weight, resistance) large 28. Coloring (perception of color, harmony and discord) large 29. Order (love of physical arrangement) large 30. Calculation (talent for computation) large 31. Locality (perception of relative position) very large 32. Eventuality (cognizance of occurrences or events) large 33. Time (perception of time, duration) uncertain 34. Tune (sense of melody, harmony) uncertain

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35. Language (facility to acquire knowledge of arbitrary signs to express thoughts, readiness in use of them, and the power of inventing and recollecting them) large 36. Comparison (power of discovering analogies, resemblances and differences) large 37. Causality (traces the dependences of phenomena and the relation of cause and effect) average7 The Fowlers write extensively about what their phrenological findings mean. They interpret each attribute according to Morton’s instructions, noting that—for example—Black Hawk’s skull reveals very large reservoirs of combativeness and destructiveness: attributes that reflect his barbarism. In contrast, constructiveness and benevolence are much smaller, indicating a lack of initiative and creativity (constructiveness) and a dearth of kindness and altruism (benevolence). The analysis of Black Hawk’s skull considers the Indian leader’s intellect as well as his savagery.8 The authors measured the front segments of his head and pronounce: “his head is large, giving much more than an ordinary amount of intellect and feeling, and indicative also of weight of character and extent of influence.”9 However, when these attributes are scrutinized in the context of the characteristics of confidence and ambition, the combination results in a warlike appetite. The authors measured the back of Black Hawk’s head in search of textures that reveal self-esteem, firmness and approbativeness (seeking praise), which they found in abundance. “These organs, when large, or very large, give a great amount of character, ambition, and influence of some kind.” When the attributes blend with “animal propensities”—which Black Hawk possesses—“they would give a warlike ambition, and a great love of independence and power.”10 The authors praise Black Hawk’s endurance and concentration, while noting that his skills in battle, including courage, are demonstrated by the size of the faculties of combativeness and destructiveness, especially when paired with secretiveness and cautiousness. Altogether, Black Hawk’s personality traits are seen through the lens of what the authors call a savage state.11 The investigators stand firm in their conclusions that “any experienced phrenologist would have sketched the same, or a very similar character, from the … data.”12 The Fowlers buttress their claims by deconstructing stories told by Black Hawk in his 1833 autobiography. They match text

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from the memoir with the Indian’s character traits as proof, “showing the beautiful and almost perfect harmony between his real and his phrenological character.”13 Following are some of the linkages the authors draw from Black Hawk’s translated words to their rendering of his personality. Combativeness is seen in the quote where Black Hawk describes his wife (drawn from his autobiography) as “a good woman, and teaches my boys to be brave.” Destructiveness shows up with the comment that, “I had promised to avenge the death of my adopted son.” And firmness and veneration are seen in the statement, “I fulfilled my promise, hoping the Great Spirit would have pity on me.”14 The authors feel certain the descriptions accurately reflect Black Hawk’s character, and they spend several pages of the journal scanning the memoir through a phrenological lens, noting that his “vivid descriptions” demonstrate “very large approbativeness [love of praise], self-esteem, firmness, combativeness, destructiveness and secretiveness.”15 Contemporary critics of the Black Hawk memoir doubt the authenticity of the translation of the original text, from which the analysis occurs. Wallace points out that Black Hawk spoke no English, and that the book’s writer and editor, John N. Patterson, imposed his own voice on the narrative.16 And, as Wallace notes, Black Hawk’s words were “mediated by a translator” (Antoine Leclaire, whose heritage was French and Potawatomi). “White voices” in the text, “are overwhelming, even if those voices claim only to establish the importance of Black Hawk’s words,” writes Wallace.17 Nevertheless, the Fowlers’ study of the Indian warrior’s skull offers readers of the era convincing empirical evidence to bolster stereotypical claims, achieved through their measurements of the plaster bust, by Black Hawk’s own narrative, and by distancing themselves as scientists from the object of their study. The Fowlers’ analysis of the warrior’s character is fraught with assumptions—including the localization of personality in the landscape of the brain and the purported authenticity of Black Hawk’s voice in his narratives. Moreover, the practice of doing science—sciencing—obscures the ideological framework that underpins the investigation: that Native Americans were amoral denizens who required civilizing.

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Skull as Synecdoche While the image of Black Hawk’s skull, reproduced in this chapter, serves as a hallmark representing racial studies of Native Americans, the mortal skull itself is a synecdoche (shorthand) for humanity. The skull piques our imagination and represents—among other tropes—mortality. While Black Hawk’s skull serves as a type of synecdoche for humankind, the skull also invokes a history of trophy-hunting from victors in battle and from noblemen who collected artifacts of carnal remains. In the seventeenth century, for example, William Shakespeare’s prince, Hamlet, comes across a grave-digger who uncovers a skull that belongs to the king’s jester, Yorick. In the scene, Hamlet remembers “a fellow of infinite jest,” now bereft of flesh: Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? Your gambols? Your songs? Your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now, to mock your own grinning?18

The scene from Act V brings the symbol of death to the stage and foreshadows several approaching murders in the play. Skulls, including Black Hawk’s, evoke an era when gentlemen acquired heads as trophies. Anthropologist Simon Harrison notes that the symbol of the skull represents “nobility, honor, virtue and loyalty,” particularly for nineteenth-century European collectors.19 Such relics were understood to be embodiments of human qualities, and to acquire a memorial object of this sort, or to form a possessive relationship with it, could therefore be understood as a claim to a certain position in society.20

Grave-robbing and skull-hunting reflect what scholar Pauline Wakeham calls the fetishization of Indigenous peoples—with characterizations of Indians as toys, trinkets and objects of desire—that arrives on the heels of phrenology. American Indians are caricatures motivated by passion, incapable of shrewd thought and animal-like in nature—truths supported by sciencing. Scientific research, Wakeham notes, raised “the spectre of technoscience’s fascination with using biological ‘data’ to authenticate or disprove Native identity, and thus, to revivify forms of racial taxonomization.”21 For Wakeham, body parts of Indigenous peoples—bones and skulls and

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hair and teeth and blood—are embraced as taxidermy: preserved specimens to place on a shelf or dissect in the laboratory. “Branches of technoscience,” she writes, “prey upon the remainders of bodily decay” and “fetishistically reconstruct so-called lost precontact authenticity, and reinscribe taxonomies of otherness.”22 That is, scientists and novelists preserved Indians in a sort of discursive amber. Black Hawk’s skull yields myriad images in popular culture: what philosopher Jean Baudrillard would call a simulacrum—an ersatz replica of the original.23 In today’s popular culture, forgeries of Black Hawk abound: Chicago’s hockey team has been called the Blackhawks for nearly a century,24 the US military has named a type of helicopter a Blackhawk,25 and you can buy a button to pin on your jacket with the warrior Black Hawk’s image from the online designer, Zazzle.26 Native American remains and remnants became an amusement among gentlemen, who displayed body parts that “expressed the social identities, tastes, and aspirations of their owners,” Harrison writes.27 Soldiers, he adds, required little encouragement to save scalps and skulls as trophies. In North America, at the end of the Civil War in 1865, surgeon general John Hammond issued an order to Army medical officers “to collect, and to forward … all specimens of morbid anatomy, surgical or medical, which may be regarded as valuable.”28 Journalist and scholar Steve Coll writes that, at Army posts throughout the plains, Indian-hunting Army surgeons fanned out to comply. The surgeons eventually collected about 800 skeletons, including those of some Indian battle victims who were boiled down to their bones, packed up and shipped by train to Washington. There they joined the remains of about 2000 other Indians at the Army Medical Museum, a macabre laboratory of saws and brain measurement devices located for many years in Washington’s old Ford’s Theatre, after it was closed because of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination.29

Enthusiasm soared for Indian remains, according to Coll: Bone fever gripped museums across the country, from the Smithsonian to Harvard to New York to St. Louis. Curators competed for skeletons from commercial brokers. Rewarded with cash and inspired by early American naturalists such as Thomas Jefferson, western travelers routinely robbed Indian grave sites or bartered for skulls, hoping to contribute to science. Back East, scientists aiming to prove the innate superiority of whites studied

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crackpot textbooks such as Samuel Morton’s influential Crania Americana. Scribbling by candlelight, the scientists poured birdshot into hollowed Indian skulls to measure just how little brain they could hold. Their work created a foundation for the race science that later offered intellectual underpinnings for the Holocaust.30

Black Hawk’s Skull Stolen Not long after Black Hawk was buried near Iowaville in 1838, a local doctor, James Turner, dug up the body, removed the head and brought home the skull. A neighbor staying with the family—a young woman who was tending to Turner’s sister-in-law—heard the doctor return in the early hours, carrying the trophy. The neighbor—Sarah Welch Nossaman— relates the tale in a monograph, Pioneering at Bonarparte and Near Pella.31 She continues: He got in with it at four o’clock in the morning and hid it till the afternoon of the same day, when he cooked the flesh off the skull. So I can say that I am the only one now living that witnessed that sight, for it was surely a sight for me. If the rest of Black Hawk’s bones were ever removed it was a good many years after his head was stolen.32

It took only two days for Black Hawk’s relatives and friends to track down the thief. One morning, a dozen Indians arrived at Turner’s door, where they were met by the doctor’s brother. The group’s leader said he would give the brother ten days to find Turner and return Black Hawk’s head. Turns out, the doctor had fled to Illinois and gave the skull to a friend for safekeeping. Nossaman says the friend: Took it [the skull] to Burlington and sold it to a museum and the museum was burned down, so Black Hawk’ skull is not now in existence. The Turner family were warm friends of my father’s family. They stayed in St. Louis two or three years, I don’t remember just how long, and they all three died with the cholera. So I am left alone to tell the story.33

Collecting Indigenous skulls became a cottage industry in the 1800s in North America. One of the founders of contemporary anthropology, Franz Boas, not only amassed Native American body parts for study, but he also gained a profit from their sale. Boas justified his hunt for Native American remains in the following note from his diaries: “It is most

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unpleasant work to steal bones from a grave, but what is the use, someone has to do it.”34 Boas continues, recounting a grave-robbing expedition: Someone had stolen all the skulls, but we found a complete skeleton without head. I hope to get another one either today or tomorrow … I have carefully locked the skeleton into my trunk until I can pack it away. I hope to get a great deal of anthropological material here. Yesterday I wrote to the Museum in Washington asking whether they would consider buying skulls this winter for $600; if they will, I shall collect assiduously.35

Scholar Robert E.  Bieder writes that Boas coaxed others to help him unearth bones, and that he procured about 100 skeletons and 200 crania. Boas would “rationalize this digging” as centered in the “interest of science.”36

Synopsis Black Hawk symbolizes for some historians and poets the end of an era. The Sauk headman earned the reputation of a powerful fighter, who was left depressed after his capture. The Fowler brothers, who wrote extensively about the warrior’s phrenological attributes, captured Black Hawk’s words from one of his speeches to demonstrate his countenance: My heart is dead, and no longer beats quick in his bosom. He is now a prisoner to the white men; they will do with him as they wish. But he can stand torture, and is not afraid of death. He is no coward—Black Hawk is an Indian.37

The symbol of the vanishing Indian permeated discourse of the nineteenth century, exemplified by an article on the American Indian in the Phrenological Journal and Life Illustrated, in 1883: The Native Americans have … receded uniformly before the Europeans. Surrounded by civilizing influences the Indian nature is slowly modified but the race will have disappeared before the missionary and the teacher will have completed their work in transforming the child of the forest to a member of civilized society.38

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Was the Native American of the 1800s fated to vanish? Popular scribes imagined the Indian fading away like a vestigial remnant of a primitive era. The next chapter examines social discourse of the 1800s that reinforced the departure of the Indian, which paired well with deliberate efforts in government and commercial quarters to rid the West of its Native inhabitants. Many observers, such as Francis Parkman, author of the popular Oregon Trail, predicted the demise of the Indian, and others, such as poet Walt Whitman, painted a more romantic exodus in his 1856 poem, Starting from Paumanok. Whitman was likely influenced by the Fowler brothers, who were his friends and who distributed his book of poetry, Leaves of Grass, published in 1855.39 Whitman’s poem captures the essence of European encroachment, tinged with racial shadings of natural and primal Indians, who melt away, replaced by a new race. Whitman observes, in one stanza, that the Natives will depart: The red aborigines, Leaving natural breaths, sounds of rain and winds, calls as of birds and animals in the woods, syllabled to us for names, Okonee, Koosa, Ottawa, Monongahela, Sauk, Natchez, Chattahoochee, Kaqueta, Oronoco, Wabash, Miami, Saginaw, Chippewa, Oshkosh, Walla-Walla, Leaving such to the States they melt, they depart, charging the water and the land with names

Whitman then injects a racial flavor into the poem: A new race dominating previous ones and grander far, with new contests, New politics, new literatures and religions, new inventions and arts.

And, finally, he frames the settlers’ arrival against  the Native Americans departure in the distance, left behind (arrière): See, in my poems immigrants continually coming and landing, See, in arrière, the wigwam, the trail, the hunter’s hut, the flat-boat, the maize-leaf, the claim, the rude fence, and the backwoods village

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Notes 1. Black Hawk (1833/2013). Life of Black Hawk, or Ma-Ka-Tai-Me-SheKia-Kiak. San Francisco, California: Simon & Brown (The Internet Archive at archive.org). pp. 97–98. 2. Mark Wallace (1994). Black Hawk’s “An Autobiography”: The Production and Use of an “Indian” Voice Author(s). American Indian Quarterly 18(4), p. 482. 3. Op. Cit. 4. Orson Squire Fowler (1847). Hereditary Descent: Laws and Facts. New York: Fowler & Wells, p. 312. 5. Op. Cit. 6. Character of Black Hawk: Phrenological developments and the character of the celebrated Indian chief and warrior, Black Hawk, with cuts (1839). American Phrenological Journal and Miscellany. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, A. Waldie, Publisher, p. 51. Downloaded from https://catalog.hathitrust. org/Record/003987208. 7. Op. Cit., p. 51. 8. Op. Cit., p. 52. 9. Op. Cit., p. 52. 10. Op. Cit., p. 54. 11. Op. Cit., p. 55. 12. Op. Cit. 13. Op. Cit., p. 56. 14. Op. Cit. 15. Op. Cit. 16. Mark Wallace (1994). Black Hawk’s “An Autobiography”: The Production and Use of an “Indian” Voice Author(s). American Indian Quarterly 18(4), p. 482. 17. Op. Cit., pp. 487–488. 18. William Shakespeare (1599). Hamlet. The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Downloaded from The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, The Tech (newspaper), Massachusetts Institute of Technology, by Jeremy Hylton. 19. Simon Harrison (2014). Dark Trophies: Hunting and the Enemy Body in Modern War. Oxford & New York: Berghahn Books, p. 83. 20. Op. Cit. 21. Pauline Wakeham (2008). Taxidermic Signs: Reconstructing Aboriginality. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 22. Op. Cit. 23. Jean Baudrillard (1994). Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press.

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24. Chicago Blackhawks (2019). Team Name Origin (website). Downloaded from http://teamnameorigin.com/nhl/nickname/chicago-blackhawks. 25. Several of the US Army’s rotary aircraft bear Native American monikers, including Apache, Chinook, Lakota and Huron. See US Army website (2019) at https://www.goarmy.com/about/army-vehicles-and-equipment/army-helicopters-and-uavs.html. 26. Black Hawk: Sac Sauk Indian Chief Button, Zazzle marketplace (website). Downloaded from https://www.zazzle.com/ black_hawk_sac_sauk_indian_chief_button-145314686405193174. 27. Simon Harrison (2014). Dark Trophies: Hunting and the Enemy Body in Modern War. Oxford & New York: Berghahn Books, p. 83. 28. Steve Coll (2001  June 3). The body in question: The discovery of the remains of a 9000-year-old man on the Columbia River has set off a conflict over race, history and identity that isn’t just about the American past, but about the future as well. The Washington Post. Washington, D.C. 29. Op. Cit. 30. Op. Cit. 31. Sarah Welch Nossaman, (1922). Pioneering at Bonaparte and Near Pella. The Annals of Iowa, 13, p. 444. 32. Op. Cit. 33. Op. Cit. 34. Franz Boas and Ronald Preston Rohner (1969). The Ethnography of Franz Boas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, as cited in Robert E. Bieder (1986). Science Encounters the Indian, 1820–1880: The Early Years of American Ethnology. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, p. 67 (footnote). 35. Op. Cit. 36. Robert E. Bieder (1996). The Bodies in Question. Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies, 2(1): 35–42. 37. Character of Black Hawk: Phrenological developments and the character of the celebrated Indian chief and warrior, Black Hawk, with cuts (1839). American Phrenological Journal and Miscellany. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, A. Waldie, Publisher, p. 51. Downloaded from https://catalog.hathitrust. org/Record/003987208. 38. The American Indian: Cerebral structure and character (1883). Phrenological Journal and Life Illustrated, Vol. 27 (6), p. 290. 39. Walt Whitman (1856/1994). Starting from Paumanok, in Poems. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, pp. 66–83. Downloaded from https://www. loc.gov/collections/feinberg-whitman/articles-and-essays/timeline/ leaves-of-grass-1855-to-1861/.

CHAPTER 5

The Kennewick Man Story

Abstract  On the heels of stories about grave-robbing, we turn to the story of a 9000-year-old skeleton that was discovered in the Pacific Northwest’s Columbia River in 1996: Kennewick Man. The unearthing of the ancient remains exposes the bedrock beneath social discourse surrounding the discovery, where notions about the meanings of race, Indigeneity, justice and knowledge are forged. Although a federal law in the United States protects Native remains and relics, a group of scientists who wanted to examine the bones—rather than have them returned to tribes as required by law—won a lawsuit to enable them to  examine Kennewick Man. The backstory is explained before we engage in the study of social discourse surrounding the skeleton. Keywords  Genetics • Kennewick Man • Caucasian • Scientific empiricism • Sovereignty

Introduction This chapter explores how North American Indian tribes became embroiled in a 20-year dispute over an ancient ancestor and how, despite disparagement of their legal and moral position, they resisted attempts to re-frame their claims as foolish and superstitious. © The Author(s) 2020 C.-L. Coleman, Environmental Clashes on Native American Land, Palgrave Studies in Media and Environmental Communication, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34106-0_5

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Centered at the very heart of the dispute is the right of American Indians to make their own decisions about their cultures, their arts, their sciences, their stories and their ancestors: what we call sovereignty. This right springs from the notion that human beings—regardless of who we are or where we are born—are endowed with rights simply because we are human. The wellspring of this philosophy, wrote Emmanuel Kant, is the right to freedom. The idea of freedom is woven throughout a 244-year-old document designed to sanctify self-governance of the nascent United States: the Declaration of Independence. Written in 1776, the treatise affirms that human rights are inalienable. That is, the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” sanctify that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”1 In this context, inalienable rights are fundamental to being human and cannot, therefore, be surrendered. Fifty-six members of Congress signed the treatise. Native American denizens—speaking broadly—recognized the self-­ governance framework and assumed it applied to them, too, especially when arguing that their formal relationship with the United States is described as nation-to-nation. That is, when American Indian tribes engage in treaty-signing they do so as independent, sovereign entities, on equal footing with the US government. At least, this was the understanding in spirit, if not in practice. As history has unfolded since the Puritans landed, Native Americans earned scant acknowledgment of their inalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, which frames the backdrop against which I examine the issue culture surrounding the discovery of a primordial skeleton in 1996. Social discourse surrounding the find illuminates how Native rights and beliefs are defined, defended and delegitimized in the skirmish with scientific progress. This chapter foregrounds my examination of discourse with the story of the two-decades-long scuffle between Native Americans, anthropologists, government officials, politicians and news reporters. We begin the tale on a warm, July day in 1996, when two college students were wading through the Columbia River near the city of Kennewick, Washington. One of the lads stumbled over a human skull. The pair alerted authorities, who dug up a nearly complete skeleton from the drink (Please see Fig. 5.1 for a pen and ink drawing of the skull).2 City officials sought help from an anthropologist with a doctoral degree from the University of Washington, James Chatters, who had assisted the

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city officials with forensics cases. Chatters would later tell reporters he thought the remains belonged to a homesteading pioneer, and he took a hunk of bone and sent it off for carbon dating. When he received the test results several weeks later, Chatters called a news conference at Kennewick City Hall and announced the ancient bones—dubbed with the moniker Kennewick Man—were more than 9000 years old: among the oldest and most complete ever discovered in North America.3 And he would tell reporters the skeleton looked Caucasoid, which news reports translated as Caucasian (Fig. 5.1). Chatters’ speculation of the skull’s origins as Caucasoid was based on how the visage looked to him, and he would claim the ancient skull resembled no Native American skull he had ever seen. The terms “Caucasoid” and “Caucasian” have been used by ethnologists to describe features of the cranium, which resonates with the ways that nineteenth-century phrenologists classified humans by distinct races, which they characterized as Caucasian, Mongolian, Malayan, American (Indian) and Ethiopian. Racial categories, as discussed in another chapter, were based on appearance, regionality and a host of attributes (such as cunning and intelligence) determined by the shape of the skull.

Fig. 5.1  Pen and ink drawing of Kennewick Man. (Credit: Original artwork by Lawrence Tripoli, 2004, used with permission)

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Critics charged that Chatters’ conjecture—that the ancient skull skull  looked Caucasian—was nonsense. Local Indian tribes agreed and demanded that the Ancient One—their preferred nomenclature for the skeleton—be returned and reburied, according to their customs. Tribes were empowered with evidence from oral stories that confirmed relatives had long populated the lush landscape that graces the Columbia River. Moreover, tribal demands were buttressed by a landmark piece of federal legislation that protects Aboriginal ancestors and relics against theft and desecration: the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). The legislation was hard-won when you consider the history of grave-robbing and bone-stealing. In 1990 NAGPRA was passed: six years before Kennewick Man was unearthed. Naturally the tribes assumed the Ancient One would be returned. Besides, as a freelance anthropologist who took on a variety of clients, Chatters was cognizant of tribal peoples’ rights and the laws that protect their cultural heritage. Faced with the prospect the ancient remains would be handed over to Native communities, Chatters spent weeks fabricating a full cast of the skeleton. One reporter offered the following details about the process: “Helped by friends, Chatters collected some 380 bone fragments, and spent a month measuring, photographing and videotaping them.”4 He asked a friend and sculptor, Tom McClelland, to help him construct a fleshed-out replica of the skull fashioned from clay, which he would share with the press. Chatters and McClelland would later make copies of the skull they would sell.5 In the weeks that followed the unearthing of the skeleton, the US Department of the Interior and the US Army Corps of Engineers stewed over the case and then announced in September the decision to return— repatriate—the bones to local tribes. A group of eight scientists and researchers from universities, and private and public institutions, including the Smithsonian, responded with a lawsuit, filed in October, in a federal district court as an attempt to block the handover to Native Americans.6 The Nez Perce, Umatilla, Colville, Wanapum and Yakama peoples from Oregon and Washington created a coalition to fight the scientists in court. Over the next months, the lawsuit crawled slowly through the legal maze, and Kennewick Man was sequestered in temporary quarters at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in nearby Richland.7 Chatters’ supposition that the skeleton was Caucasoid sowed doubt about his origins in the arenas of social discourse and added leverage to

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the scientists’ legal arguments, especially in light that NAGPRA applied to Native American—not Caucasian—remains and relics. Because Chatters speculated the skull bore no resemblance to modern Indians, a handful of reporters world-wide seized on the news story, taking apparent delight in dime-store tropes that beg attention, with headlines like: “Restless natives fight it out,” “Skull skullduggery” and “A bone to pick.”

The Skeleton’s Doppelgänger While Chatters’ claim the skeleton was Caucasian burned like an ember in discourse, the story caught fire the next summer, in 1997. In a feature story for The New Yorker, Douglas Preston, a science writer, interviewed Chatters, who declared the British actor Patrick Stewart was a doppelgänger for Kennewick Man: I’ve been looking around for someone who matches this Kennewick gentleman, looking for weeks and weeks … I turned on the TV, and there was Patrick Stewart—Captain Picard of Star Trek—and I said, My God, there he is! Kennewick Man!8

Although no evidence was found to corroborate the assumption of the skeleton’s ethnicity or background, and no DNA was available to assess his genetic makeup, headlines trumpeted: Human bones suggest Caucasian-like early Americans9 Skeleton may prove Indians were not the first Americans10 First scalp for truth in the race debate11 Were Europeans here before Indians?12

Jean-Luc Picard’s mug-shot was placed side-by-side with the ersatz clay likeness of Kennewick Man’s head in media reports. Journalists compared the actor who plays a Star Fleet commander from the future with the antediluvian hunter-gatherer. An Associated Press writer, for example, said, “Seeing a clay model formed around the head of a 9200-year-old man, you almost expect it to exclaim: Make it so. Yes, the bust of Kennewick Man resembles Patrick Stewart.”13 A tongue-in-cheek brief from an Australian tabloid notes:

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We can only presume that, in a plot worthy of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Captain Picard somehow managed to travel back in time to North America, where he fathered the entire local Indian population before, apparently, suffering a painful death from a spearhead embedded in his pelvis.14

And a reporter for the South China Morning Post began a story titled Bones of Contention, with a nod to the fiction-based television show: Captain’s Log, 1998: Got caught up in the hornet’s nest of American racial politics. Did the current Star Trek commander, Patrick Stewart, have a life before the Starship Enterprise? Apart from doing Shakespeare, we mean.15

Looking at discourse, Jean-Luc Picard—or Patrick Stewart—emerged as a synecdoche for Kennewick Man. After years of hearing arguments and after culling through some 20,000 pages of the case record, the federal magistrate, John Elders, ruled in favor of the plaintiffs—the scientists—in August, 2002, and ordered officials to make Kennewick Man available for study. Four tribes—the Nez Perce, Umatilla, Yakama and Colville—filed a joint suit in the Ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals to block the scientists from conducting studies on their ancestor.16 The case would languish for another 18 months until February, 2004, when an appeals court panel of judges upheld the earlier ruling that favored the plaintiffs. The tribes appealed. In April 2004, the appeal was denied. Scientists would wait for more than a year for permission to study the skeleton, which was by then under lock and key at the Burke Museum in Seattle, where it would remain until 2017. But the story was far from over. Scientists started their studies on the skeleton in 2005, resulting in a coffee table-sized tome edited by Douglas W. Owsley and Richard L. Jantz, who were among the plaintiffs in the lawsuit. The 669-page hardcopy book weighs 2686 grams (nearly six pounds) and currently sells for $100 at Powell’s Books (the largest, independently owned bookstore in the world, the company claims).17 Owsley and Jantz write in their conclusion that although Kennewick Man’s skull closely resembles Polynesians, his relatives “are like those of the Moriori of Chatham Islands,” an archipelago about 840 kilometers east of Christchurch, New Zealand.18 Owsley, who is curator of biological anthropology for the Smithsonian National

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Museum of Natural History, told reporter Douglas Preston—the same writer whose interview with James Chatters compared the ancient skeleton with Patrick Stewart—that Kennewick Man: Belongs to an ancient population of seafarers who were America’s original settlers. They did not look like Native Americans. The few remains we have of these early people show they had longer, narrower skulls with smaller faces. These mysterious people have long since disappeared.19

DNA Studies Cement Authenticity The story of Kennewick Man gained new traction with the publication of the comprehensive book in 2014, but took a sharp turn some ten months later that junked the book’s conjectures when researchers in Denmark announced they had successfully sequenced DNA from the ancient skeleton. Kennewick Man, they write, “is closer to modern Native Americans than to any other population worldwide.”20 The research team, which had been given a bit of hand-bone from the remains, asked permission from members of the tribal coalition—the group that fought for return of the Ancient One—if they would supply samples of their own DNA for comparison. The Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation agreed, according to Carl Zimmer, science writer for the New York Times.21 “We were hesitant … science hasn’t been good to us,” Tribal Chair Jim Boyd told Zimmer. But residents were persuaded and sent back samples of saliva to the researchers, who, in turn, invited members of the coalition to Copenhagen to see the scientific process first-hand. “They donned body suits to enter a clean room in the lab in order to perform a ceremony in honor of the Ancient One,” Zimmer writes.22 Eske Willerslev, a geneticist at the University of Copenhagen who led the research team, told Zimmer they compared Kennewick Man’s DNA with other ancient specimens, from genomes across the globe, and from Native Americans, including the Colville. They found the Colville are “closely related” to the 9000-year-old North American skeleton. “It’s very clear that Kennewick Man is most closely related to contemporary Native Americans,” said Willerslev. “In my view, it’s bone-solid.”23 The team published its findings in July 2015 in one of science’s most prestigious journals, Nature. But what about the evidence that suggests Kennewick Man’s relatives are Moriori, Ainu or Polynesian? Willerslev and his colleagues argue in

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their Nature commentary that the cranial analyses are flawed. “It is not possible,” they write, “to affiliate Kennewick Man to specific contemporary groups” based on the methods presented in the Owsley and Jantz book. The scientists from Denmark write: “We can reject the hypothesis that Kennewick Man is more closely related to Ainu or Polynesians than he is to Native Americans.”24 They surmise that the studies based on skull morphology lack enough data to support the conclusion that Kennewick Man was Polynesian. Armed with the Danish findings, local tribes enlisted the support of Senator Patty Murray of Washington State, who introduced a bill in Congress to repatriate the Ancient One to Native Americans. President Barack Obama signed the bill, and on Friday, February 17, 2017, the Burke Museum in Seattle returned the remains to local Indians. On Saturday morning, the next day, more than 200 members of the 5 tribes—the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation, the Nez Perce Tribe, the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, and the Wanapum Band—“came together to lay the Ancient One to rest,” writes Chuck Sams, communications director for the Umatilla. He adds: “Religious leaders from each of the tribes jointly conducted a ceremony ending the Ancient One’s journey among the living. The remains were buried at an undisclosed location on the Columbia Plateau.”25

Synopsis Details about the Kennewick Man case foreground the next chapter on social discourse that spanned more than 20 years since the unearthing of the 9000-year-old skeleton. The anthropologist—James Chatters—who summoned news reporters in 1996 to declare that Kennewick Man “looked Caucasian” wrote the first episode in a tale that would pit Indians against scientists over their rights and their knowledge systems. The tale would get muddier when reporters questioned the authenticity of Native Americans as Indigenous to North America, as witnessed when Chatters announced that a fair-skinned British actor looked just like the model he constructed of the skull’s image. Not long after the scientists published their massive volume on Kennewick Man, a team of geneticists reported that DNA extracted from the ancient bones matched the DNA among contemporary Native Americans living in the Pacific Northwest. And, finally, the skeleton was repatriated to tribes and returned to the earth.

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Notes 1. Declaration of Independence: The Want, Will, and Hopes of the People (webpage). U.S. History.com, Downloaded from http://www.ushistory. org/declaration/document/. 2. Cynthia-Lou Coleman and Erin V. Dysart (2005). Framing of Kennewick Man against the backdrop of a scientific and cultural controversy. Science Communication, 27(1): 3–26. 3. My earlier work refers to the Ancient One as 9300 years-old. The age was adjusted—after additional testing—to about 9000  years, according to Owsley and Jantz, 2014. 4. Peter Huck (2001 February 23). Racial skullduggery. Australian Financial Review (magazine). Australia: Fairfax Media Publications. 5. Kennewick Man Skull. Bone Clones, Inc. Chatsworth, California (webpage). Downloaded from https://boneclones.com/product/kennewickman-skull-BH-047. 6. Plaintiffs included Robson Bonnichsen, C. Loring Brace, George W. Gill, C. Vance Haynes Jr., Richard L. Jantz, Douglas Owsley, Dennis J. Stanford and D.  Gentry Steele. The Kennewick Man Skeleton (webpage). Archaeology & Contemporary Society. University of Liverpool. Downloaded from https://pcwww.liv.ac.uk/~Sinclair/ALGY399_Site/ kennewick_man.html. 7. Douglas Preston (1997 June 16). The Lost Man. The New  Yorker, pp. 70–87. Downloaded from http://archives.newyorker.com/?i=1997-0 6-16#folio=074. 8. Op. Cit., p. 73. 9. Human bones suggest Caucasian-like early Americans (1997 April 15). Agence France Presse, accessed from Nexis-Uni, 2019 July 17.  10. Tunku Varadarajan (1997 June 11). Skeleton may prove Indians were not the first Americans. Times Newspapers Limited (UK). Accessed from Nexis-Uni, 2019 July 17. 11. Andrew Roberts (1997 June 15). First scalp for truth in the race debate. The Sunday Times (London). UK. Accessed from Nexis-Uni, 2019 July 17. 12. Keith Easthouse (1997 August 10). Were Europeans here before Indians? Santa Fe New Mexican (New Mexico). Accessed from Nexis-Uni,  2019 July 17.  13. Ancient skull has familiar features (1998 February 11). Associated Press and The Columbian (Vancouver, Washington.). Retrieved May 2019 from Nexis-Uni.

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14. Patrick McDonald and Simon Yeaman (1998 June 22). Star Trek the past generation? The Advertiser (Adelaide, Australia). Accessed from Nexis-­ Uni, 2019 July 17. 15. Simon Beck (1998 April 5). Ancient bones of contention. South China Morning Post. (Hong Kong). 16. Cynthia-Lou Coleman and Erin V. Dysart (2005). Framing of Kennewick Man against the backdrop of a scientific and cultural controversy. Science Communication, 27(1): 3–26. 17. Kennewick Man: The Scientific Investigation of an Ancient American Skeleton. Powell’s City of Books (website). Downloaded from https:// www.powells.com/book/-9781623492007. 18. Douglas W. Owsley and Richard L. Jantz, editors (2014). Kennewick Man: The Scientific Investigation of an Ancient American. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, p. 634. 19. Douglas Preston (2014 September). The Kennewick Man finally freed to share his secrets. Smithsonian Magazine. Downloaded from https://www. smithsonianmag.com/history/kennewick-man-finally-freed-share-hissecrets-180952462/?no-ist=&=&page=3. 20. Morten Rasmussen, Martin Sikora, Anders Albrechtsen, Thorfinn Sand Korneliussen, J.  Víctor Moreno-Mayar, G.  David Poznik, Christoph P.  E. Zollikofer, Marcia S.  Ponce de León, Morten E.  Allentoft, Ida Moltke, Hákon Jónsson, Cristina Valdiosera, Ripan S.  Malhi, Ludovic Orlando, Carlos D. Bustamante, Thomas W. Stafford Jr, David J. Meltzer, Rasmus Nielsen & Eske Willerslev (2015 July 23). The ancestry and affiliations of Kennewick Man (Letter). Nature 523, p. 455. 21. Carl Zimmer (2015 June 19). New study links Kennewick Man to Native Americans. New York Times, p. A14. 22. Op. Cit. 23. Op. Cit. 24. Morten Rasmussen, Martin Sikora, Anders Albrechtsen, Thorfinn Sand Korneliussen, J.  Víctor Moreno-Mayar, G.  David Poznik, Christoph P.  E. Zollikofer, Marcia S.  Ponce de León, Morten E.  Allentoft, Ida Moltke, Hákon Jónsson, Cristina Valdiosera, Ripan S.  Malhi, Ludovic Orlando, Carlos D. Bustamante, Thomas W. Stafford Jr, David J. Meltzer, Rasmus Nielsen & Eske Willerslev (2015 July 23). The ancestry and affiliations of Kennewick Man (Letter). Nature, 523, p. 455. 25. Chuck Sams (2017 February 19). The Ancient One Finally Laid to Rest (news release). Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation (webpage). Downloaded from https://ctuir.org/communications/ ancient-one-finally-laid-rest.

CHAPTER 6

Discourse and Resistance in the Kennewick Man Story

Abstract  Discourse surrounding the 20-year-old battle over the remains of the Kennewick Man skeleton illuminates the ideological stances of local Native American tribes and the scientists who fought to examine the skeleton. Indigenous values concerning moral choices, traditional knowledges and spiritual practices held little sway over the scientists’ desire for evidence and data. The scientists argued that scientific and social progress would be halted if they were not accorded the freedom to examine Kennewick Man. Despite receiving short-shrift in media coverage, local tribes resisted attempts by outsiders to re-frame their arguments, noting that their principle concern is sovereignty: having the choice to make their own decisions about their ancestors. Keywords  Ideology • Kennewick Man • Native American knowledge systems • Race • Resistance • Scientific empiricism

Introduction For more than 20 years, the discovery of an ancient skeleton in the river that separates the American states of Washington from Oregon brings into focus how different cultures understand and explain their worldviews. © The Author(s) 2020 C.-L. Coleman, Environmental Clashes on Native American Land, Palgrave Studies in Media and Environmental Communication, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34106-0_6

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One cultural approach to managing human remains is offered by mainstream, Western scientists, who consider the 9000-year-old Kennewick Man a “rare treasure” that can help them understand life in the Holocene era—also known as the Bronze Age and Iron Age. Such beliefs systems are underscored in discursive commentaries about the lawsuit that sought a court judgment to examine the bones, rather than repatriate them to Native American tribes, as required by law. News media captured the scientific viewpoint in mediated coverage by situating the perspective as the cornerstone of modern, progressive beliefs. Perspectives that varied from the mainstream were presented as odd, bizarre, antiquated and flawed And, because news coverage pitted anthropologists against Indians, scientific perspectives became the foil against which Indigenous views were judged. As a result, Native American belief systems were commonly framed as outside the mainstream. My colleague Erin Dysart and I discovered this feature when we studied the first eight years of discourse surrounding the conflict over the bones of Kennewick Man.1 Progress was braided with the notion of unrestrained scientific exploration. For example, one reporter remarked that scientists needed “freedom” to study ancient remains because such freedom is critical for “the future” of “archeology and physical anthropology in this country. If not, the future could be bleak for a scientific understanding of the past.”2 As media scholar Robert A. Logan notes, scientific endeavors are considered progressive because they elevate “human confidence and capacity to create a modern, industrial, self-critical, tolerant, and democratic society.”3 Indigenous viewpoints offer a counterpoint for journalists, who contrasted value-free scientific empiricism with quaint and primitive beliefs wrapped in cultural values, such as morality, spirituality and religion. In addition to themes of scientific progress, Indigenous beliefs and rights (legal and moral), Erin and I noted two additional dimensions in news coverage: reporters highlighted the conflictual nature of the dispute by framing stories as wars, battles and fights and infused a political flavor throughout the conflict. We found that the US government, the tribes and the scientists were accused of having political motives. For example, when the US Department of the Interior decided to return the skeleton to tribes, the leadership was accused of acting politically: “the government’s decision serves neither science nor the tribes. Indeed, it seems primarily political—aimed at placating Native Americans and their supporters rather than seriously grappling with the provenance of Kennewick Man.”4

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Tribes were accused of myth-making, according to a professor of anthropology, who wrote: The driving force behind the “repatriation” effort, however, is primarily political, involving the most literate, the most assimilated, and the most politically aware members (and would-be members) of the Indian population. For them and the advancement of their interests, value lies not in knowing what really happened in the past, but rather in an image of the past which best serves their purposes. In short, the interests of such activists lie not in science but rather in defense of a political myth.5

And the scientists? One of the specialists advocating for DNA testing— four years following the discovery—said such tests would likely prove inclusive in linking the skeleton genetically with regional Indians, but the exercise was important for a political “win”: It is a real long shot to try to say anything meaningful on the cultural affiliation question (with a DNA test) … On the other hand, they are doing science, so the scientific position is winning time after time.6

In essence, the initial discursive landscape—from the time of the unearthing of the skeleton to the 2004 court decision that gave scientists access to the bones—was characterized by conflict, rights, politics, progress and epistemologies: scientific and Indigenous. On balance, our findings proved only mildly surprising, as they tend to align with the literature on media and communication in the context of scientific and environmental calamities. I wondered how two decades of news coverage might reflect the tenets proposed in the book. That is, how does discourse reveal Kevin Carragee and Wim Roefs’ idea of the media hegemony thesis, which is characterized by power relationships? How does news coverage reveal what Anders Hansen called “the deeply ideological nature of public communication?”7 How is—what Hansen calls “communicative power”—distributed? And, finally, in what ways do the mass media reflect on Indigenous Metaphysics, as conceptualized by Vine Deloria, Jr.?

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The Current Study Armed with this cluster of questions, I reviewed news articles from 1996 to 2016 with an eye on narratives that would link to the questions drawn from scholars who have challenged researchers to dig more deeply into the junctures between the core features of the communication process diagrammed and explained earlier: special interests (sponsors and stakeholders), the public sphere, social discourse, mass media, and the effects on individuals and societies. I offer a humble start by examining one stage upon which to investigate power, ideology and metaphysics: news reports on the Kennewick Man case. The Investigation My first task was to examine narratives for references to conflict (war, battles, etc.) which position reporters to write about power dynamics, often in binary terms, such as Us versus Them.8 Media scholar Teun A. van Dijk has written convincingly on the efficacy of the conflict frame in positioning one view in opposition to another.9 I then looked for ways that stories invoke authorities to speak to the controversy, arguing that sources used in narratives have the ability to exert power by setting the terms for debate by how they characterize a conflictual scenario. Journalism Professor James Tankard has argued that authorities embed the notion of the cause and the solution to a problem by creating a frame for the story.10 The frame might appear in the form of a media package: a constellation of meanings packed tightly together that offers readers the rhetorical scope of an issue, including its beginnings and trajectories, its causes and effects, its truths and lies, and its defenders and detractors. Power can also be assessed by looking at how news stories suggest an ideological perspective, as suggested by Hansen. Literary scholar Jonathan Culler observed in his treatise, Structure of Ideology and the Ideology of Structure, that ideology refers to “a theory which justifies particular economic, political, and intellectual practices by concealing their historical origins and making them the natural components of an interpreted world.”11 Culler adds that ideological thought restricts believers in their self-critique because of the very nature of ideology. With this in mind, I approached news coverage with three features of ideological maxims. The first feature includes morality and ethics as twin

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ideological elements essential to ways-of-knowing, particularly—but not limited to—Indigenous Metaphysics.12 The second feature highlights traditional, Native American knowledges, traditions and beliefs. The third feature explores characteristics of scientific empiricism along two dimensions: the explanation of the Kennewick Man story as a scientific one with reference to evidence and characterization of the story according to scientific methods. Finally, I borrow van Dijk’s judgment that the construct race offers meanings that bring to bear on power relationships in addition to ideological viewpoints. Van Dijk argues that racism—which he uses interchangeably with ethnic prejudice and ethnicism—has attributes at the personal level and the social level. Racism is therefore an individual, negative belief that some members of a community are defined by their divergence from dominant members of a community, as well as “an abstract property of social structures at all levels of society that manifest itself in ethnic prejudices as shared group cognition.”13 I examined texts for references to race, ethnicity and similar terms. In summary, I conducted my analysis by exploring how power relationships, ideological thinking and metaphysics (epistemological ways of knowing and ontological ways of being) are framed in discourse by examining the following elements: • Conflict (wars, battles, fights, etc.) • References to authorities, experts, stakeholders and others embroiled in the case • Infusion of morals, ethics or similar terms (but not religion or spirituality) • Beliefs, attitudes, traditions or practices framed as Native American, Aboriginal, tribal and so on, and beliefs of a spiritual, religious, sacred or faith-based in nature • Scientific knowledge gleaned through evidence, facts, truths and so on • Scientific knowledge gleaned through methods, such as tests, studies, techniques and so on • References to race, ethnicity or minorities.

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The Findings Conflict Frame As expected, news coverage of Kennewick Man over two decades is principally conflictual and the discourse reveals power struggles. At first blush, headlines give news organizations a chance to offer stereotypical tropes of Native Americans, as the following headlines illustrate: “Restless natives fight it out over 9000-year-old bones”14 and “First scalp for truth in the race debate.”15 The references to “restless natives” who “scalp” serve to paint modern Indians with a well-worn Colonial trope of savage creatures. As the case unfolded, the notion of race became infused in conflict frames. The idea that nomadic Caucasians may have populated North America—rather than by who we think of as Native denizens—gained a foothold in news coverage, sparking a lingering question over “Who was here first?” After reflecting on the coverage, it appears that the origin question was manufactured by news reporters and spiked by the suggestion by anthropologist James Chatters that Kennewick Man looked like no modern Native American. A salient example emerges in an interview by Lesley Stahl of the award-winning American news program, 60 Minutes. Stahl, who spoke with key players in the Kennewick Man case, including Smithsonian anthropologist Douglas Owsley, framed the narrative as an origin story: STAHL:

But I’m asking about the central question of concern: Who was here first? Doesn’t he [Kennewick Man] already challenge that? Mr. OWSLEY: He challenges it. STAHL: He challenges it. Mr. OWSLEY: He does. Because Chatters announced early in the narrative that the unearthed skull looked Caucasian to him, reporters wondered, in print, whether Indigenous Americans were deserving of First Nations status. As one reporter opined: “The Caucasian, light-skinned looks of the clay reconstruction, unveiled recently by anthropologist James Chatters, immediately started a fight over who populated early America, in terms of race.”16 Associated Press writer Nicholas Geranios framed the story as a battle that could threaten our collective understanding of history: “A year after high water washed his 9300-year-old remains out of the Columbia River’s

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edge, the bones are the subject of a battle that threatens to obscure new insights into prehistoric peoples of the New World.”17 Writer Timothy Egan of the New York Times begins a feature story about a “battle,” with Chatters’ comparison of Patrick Stewart to the Ancient One, which begs the question of origin and race: If the anthropological casting seems inspired to some, it has heightened an already bitter and muddled battle over the rights to Kennewick Man’s remains and his origins. It is a battle that extends to questions of race and the origins of the first Americans.18

War-like references also permeated discourse with such terms as bombshell and, in the following example, ammunition: “It’s impossible to know if Kennewick Man would share … genetic affinity with Native Americans. But the results [could] add ammunition to the tribes’ argument that just because his head is shaped differently from theirs doesn’t mean they aren’t related.”19 Two news reports used incendiary in their coverage. For example: “The incendiary implication inherent in the skull’s Caucasoid features is that when the ancestors of the modern-day American Indians arrived on their new home soil, they expelled and/or expunged the existing population.”20 While news reporting framed the conflict—in part—as an origin story, representatives from the regional tribes expressed confidence in their oral histories. Armand Minthorn, an elder from the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, said, in more than one interview: “We know our history” through oral stories which confirm for the tribes that Kennewick Man is an ancestor.21 Minthorn told a reporter that oral histories “go back 10,000  years. I know where my people lived, where they died, where they hunted, where they fished and where they were buried, because my oral histories tell me that.”22 Another reporter explained, “According to Indian oral history, the Umatillas were created in the place where they now live.”23 Conflictual coverage included what van Dijk has called the Versus Frame, which pits one perspective against another. Overall, the frame tended to describe rivals in a somewhat broad fashion. Stories tended to frame the conflict in two ways: Scientists against Indians and Science versus Religion. For example, archaeologists were “pitted against” American Indians “in a bitter, legal stand-off.”24 Discovery of the skeleton

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positioned “religion against science”25 while evoking “years of scientific aggression against indigenous identity.”26 Ben Guarino of the Washington Post describes the bout “that would last 20 years” with boxing metaphors: In one corner were the scientists, who over the years have wanted to sequence the Kennewick Man’s DNA and scrape his molars to see what he ate … In the other corner was a coalition of five Native American groups-the Nez Perce, Yakama, Wanapum and Colville tribes, along with the Umatilla, who refer to the Kennewick Man as the Ancient One.27

Conflict frames highlight key arguments that evoke questions of ethnic background and race by asserting the dispute balanced on the question, Who was here first?—a question that Native American stakeholders rejected. The answer to the question suggests that North America’s first inhabitants would be endowed with an authority of provenance, as the authentic, original denizens. The implication that Kennewick Man may have roamed the earth prior to ancestors of local tribes raised the specter of privileging the so-called Caucasian race over Native Americans, echoing phrenological perspectives in the 1800s. Authority Frame A major player in the narrative is the US government—especially the agencies that share control over the Columbia River: the Army Corps of Engineers and the Department of the Interior. Their authority is not necessarily presented as neutral, however. While the Army Corps of Engineers “controls the land”28 and the Department of the Interior “took control of the remains,”29 some reporters characterized the agencies of “taking sides.” For example, after the skeleton was unearthed, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt “agreed with Native American tribes who said the skeleton was that of an ancestor and should be buried immediately under the tribes’ religious and social traditions.”30 The neutrality of the government agencies was questioned, as the following quotes show: “The government blocked the scientists, mishandled the ancient skeleton and buried the discovery,”31 and “Government has imprisoned Kennewick Man in his vault to deny the scientists access.”32 Members of the US Congress and other politicians were embroiled in the case. A congressman from Washington State, Richard Norman (Doc) Hastings, garnered attention after he introduced a bill to change the

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Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) to allow scientific study on the remains—which local tribes overwhelmingly opposed (the bill never progressed beyond the hearings phase).33 Scientists were key players in the controversy and were framed both as unnamed experts and as specific researchers identified by name, such as James Chatters, who was interviewed frequently. Chatters told reporters he took the case personally: “I have a stake in this.” He added that Northwest Indians are not the only people with a claim to kinship: “If he [Kennewick Man] is anybody’s ancestor, he’s everyone’s.”34 Chatters was presented—at times—as having an agenda. For example: “Chatters seemed to be deliberately—provocatively—trying to help those who want to roll back these tribal rights.”35 On the other hand, Douglas Owsley of the Smithsonian Institution, and a plaintiff in the lawsuit, consistently framed claims around his right— and the rights of scientists—to study the skeleton: “It comes down … to the right to ask questions of the past.”36 The scientists’ rights were a common refrain: “[We] scientists stood up for the rights to ask questions of the past and challenge what’s in the archaeology books,” Owlsey told a reporter.37 Stories tended to frame the anthropologists’ desire to study the bones as “legitimate scientific research.”38 Authority is also framed as the dominion of the courts and the rule of law. The NAGPRA act was regarded in dualistic terms: as bona fide rationale to return the bones to Indian tribes or as a flawed policy. For example, proponents of the federal law were presented as “demand[ing] that the bones immediately be buried.”39 Moreover, laws were depicted as giving tribes authority: Besides NAGPRA, federal laws such as the National Historic Preservation Act and the Archaeological Resources Protection Act have given Indians new control over historic sites and artifacts on great swaths of western land.40

But news reports also questioned laws. For example, one scientist, Dennis Stanford, charged that the seizure of Kennewick Man under NAGPRA “is invalid.”41 An attorney for the scientists suggested, “the government has used NAGPRA to deny scientific access to the bones, deferring instead to politics in making its decisions.”42 Courts—referred to generically and specifically—also project authority: “But since the historic find, the ancient chap has been festering while the courts decide over at least two lawsuits relating to his race,”43 and

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“Anthropologists have challenged the repatriation of Kennewick Man in court.”44 Native rights were often presented in concert with laws, such as NAGPRA, as the following demonstrates: “They say they have that right under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, which requires that human remains and artifacts be returned to Indian tribes that can show a cultural link.”45 Native American claims were noted in coverage, although less frequently than scientific claims. As the case study unfolded, some complained their voices were ignored. For example, Jeff Van Pelt of the Umatilla says: Tribes in his region have been fighting with the federal government over human remains since the past five decades. The debate over Kennewick Man is nothing new to them. And the lack of tribal input in human remains issues is also nothing new.46

As the case continued, an attorney for the Colville Indians said, “What the tribes want now is just to have a seat at the table … They want to know what’s going on. That is a right that is being denied them by both the scientists and the United States.”47 After news the skeleton was found to be more than 9000-years-old, a reporter noted, “The discovery and the subsequent revelations drew a firestorm of protest from five Northwest Indian tribes, who succeeded in halting the studies and now want the bones reburied without further examination.”48 Native American stakeholders seized the opportunity to discount scientists and scientific perspectives. For example, van Pelt remarks that scientific epistemology had “many holes in it” and “the science is not very accurate.” He adds that the scientists “are very romantically involved.”49 In another news story, Native Americans and scientists critique each other along colonial lines. The story also suggests racial entailments: The scientists’ desire to study Kennewick Man, and perhaps shed new light on human evolution, has been blasted as cultural imperialism by indigenous peoples. Some believe scientists want to replace creation myths with myths of their own. Vine Deloria, a Sioux academic, writes scathingly of “white lies” and “scientific myths,” arguing that science is a fallible belief system. Maybe it is. But some U.S. anthropologists have questioned the use of creationism, or oral traditions, as legal proof of ancestry, arguing that this violates the constitutional separation of church and state.50

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In essence, authority frames reveal power dynamics that exude friction, often in binary ways, with Indians opposing scientists. A closer examination of the frames reveals other features are woven into conflict, ranging from race to politics. Framing the discourse according to authority or rights invokes what writer Nick Estes calls colonialism and capitalism.51 Ideological Frames I argue that we can find ideological entailments in three ways as  the Kennewick Man news unfolded: discussions of morality and ethics, coverage of Native American knowledges and beliefs, and messages about scientific knowing through evidence and methods. Morality and Ethics. Vine Deloria, Jr. has argued that traditional, Indigenous relationships with the natural world are “always ethical.”52 A reporter for a national radio program in the United States echoed the sentiment in his synopsis of the Kennewick Man case: Five tribes argued Kennewick man is their ancestor, and rather than being studied, should be returned to them for burial. Armand Minthorn of the Umatilla Tribe says in tribal culture, the dead stay connected to their physical remains and disturbing them upsets the moral fabric of the world.53

In a similar vein, a reporter for the Australian Financial Review accorded the tribes a moral stance: Indians insist the repatriation of such remains is a human rights issue. Backed by NAGPRA, tribes have blocked excavation at scores of sacred sites, insisting such work is sacrilegious. There is a strong moral argument for this. Indians are angry about what they see as desecration of their ancestors’ graves.54

Although morality and ethics were mentioned only a few times in the sample of news articles, the term “moral authority” appeared more than once, in more than one context. One group that opposed the Native Americans’ request to have the skeleton returned told a reporter that “Kennewick Man is a threat to the Indians because he jeopardizes their moral authority and argument that they were the victims of Europeans who succeeded them.”55 The term “moral high ground” also appeared.

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Writing for The Guardian, Christopher Reed presents the following anecdote: When white Americans make remarks about their ancestors’ arrival on the Mayflower, the Indians—the Native Americans—like to respond: “Oh yeah? Well, mine met the boat.” This is not merely an artful riposte but a reminder of which race on the continent occupies the moral high ground, who was there first, and who mistreated whom.56

The reporter then interviewed James Chatters—the anthropologist who first encountered the skeleton—and “moral high ground” assumed a different slant: Chatters, who wears a T-shirt depicting the Christian fish symbol with legs and the word Darwin inside, argues that no Americans own the moral high ground and Indian claims to it are invalid. “I have conducted excavations showing that Indians were slave traders and they killed women and children.57

The implication seems to be that, because Native people engaged in warfare, they cannot claim the moral high ground. One tribal member questioned scientific approaches that engage Native Americans, as a reporter noted: The tribes accuse the scientists of perpetuating exploitive study of Native American bones. “We are very much involved as well as intrigued and interested in our own history, as well as all history,” says Jeff van Pelt of the Federated Tribes of the Umatilla Reservation. “But science needs to have some kind of ethical foundation on controlling how far is too far.”58

The report later adds that some anthropologists “accept that their profession is due for a moral reckoning.”59 Native American Knowledges, Traditions and Beliefs  nowledge and Tradition Frame K An objective of the investigation of discourse was to discover how knowledge systems were characterized over the 20-year period. The basis for the frames arises from scholarship on Indigenous knowledge systems and

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Western, Occidental ways-of-knowing. I wanted to see how epistemologies were characterized: are Indigenous knowledges described, as Foucault suggests, as naïve? Are Western, scientific knowledges seen as objective and value-free, as Horkheimer and Adorno suggest? To dig into the questions, I read news stories for references to traditional or historical knowledge—regardless of linkages to Native groups. That said, nearly all references to such knowledge are associated with American Indians. Indigenous knowledge—in the Kennewick Man case—was linked to oral stories, traditions and practices. “According to tribal traditions,” one news article states, “American Indians … have been living in North America since the world was made.”60 A tribal member adds: “We do not believe that our people migrated here from another continent, as the scientists do.”61 Native peoples learn traditions through story-telling and oral history: “Our elders have taught is that once a body goes into the ground, it is meant to stay there,” said Armand Minthorn of the Umatillas.62 Minthorn explained knowledge in this way to another reporter: We know what happened 10,000  years ago. I know what happened 10,000 years ago at home along the Columbia River, because my teachings from my older people tell me how life was 10,000 years ago. And the scientists cannot accept the fact that just because it’s not written down in a book, it’s not fact. It’s fact to me, because I live it every day.63

The importance of oral histories was noted frequently, most likely because traditional stories can be used to substantiate tribal claims concerning the remains of an ancestor, such as Kennewick Man. A professor of Indian law underscored the importance of story-telling as knowledge-keeping: What the [NAGPRA] statute is saying is, for native people, we are going to give deference to native ways of thinking about kinship, and the statute specifically indicates that that is so because it permits evidence of cultural belief systems and oral testimony and oral history and all of these other ways of thinking about it.64

An anthropologist who was asked to examine oral histories of the Columbia River people told a reporter that he “became quickly convinced that there’s a collective memory on the plateau that goes back very far. Some

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of the oral traditions speak of such times as when the land was covered with snow and ice about 10,000 years ago.”65 Beliefs Frame Spiritual, religious and sacred beliefs intersected with traditional knowledge systems, such as caring for human remains: an issue relevant to the skeletal discovery. On several occasions, Minthorn expressed dismay the Ancient One was disturbed in the first place: his remains were excavated, strangers sorted through his bones, and his body was stored unceremoniously. Treatment of the skeleton was not only disrespectful: it was sacrilegious, Minthorn noted.66 “Sacred human remains are not artifacts. They are what they are—sacred—and they are our ancestral remains, and they need to be treated as such.”67 Minthorn drew a parallel from the Umatilla perspectives to those of Christianity. “Archaeologists have desecrated Indian burial sites in the name of science,” he said. “They failed to recognize what those remains mean to us as Indian people. “Ancestral remains … are very sacred: just as is a Bible to the Christian belief.”68 A handful of reporters writes that Native beliefs were discounted as superstitious: “From the start, the scientists suing over Kennewick Man have shaped public perception of the case by emphasizing their free speech arguments and painting the Indians as irrational and superstitious.”69 Mainstream religious ideology also took a hit in print. One reporter noted that Judeo-Christian beliefs, and the practice of science, cemented the idea of racism: Race became the idea by which English and other European settlers justified the subjugation of Indians and African slaves. Initially, white settlers explained their concept in biblical terms. Later, Darwin provided a biological framework for racists: White superiority had resulted from natural selection.70

Scientific Empiricism Evidence Frame The frame is designed to capture how facts, proof, data, documentation and evidence bolster ideas of knowledge-making, regardless of which stakeholder group is making the claim. The desire for data became a recurring theme on the part of scientists, their attorneys and pundits. And the

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scientists’ need for evidence served as a rhetorical hoist to leverage their claims, as the following excerpt shows: A year after being discovered on the banks of the Columbia River, the bones of Kennewick Man are considered one of the archaeological finds of the century. Yet they remain off-limits to experts because of demands that they should be buried in accordance with Indian religion. The demands have triggered a legal feud between four Indian tribes and eight scientists, who say reburial would be a loss to science and a grave injustice.71

The search for proof illustrates the yearning for evidence, as the four examples below demonstrate: Further study of Kennewick Man could prove that people who once lived in Europe or southern Asia lived in North America before the ancestors of American Indians.72 Chatters is vehement about the scientific community’s need to study Kennewick Man. “We want to know what the hell we’re dealing with,” he said. “This could prove that the Indians were not here first—that there was somebody before, and I know the tribes are extremely worried about this.”73 Further study, they insist, could prove the bones belonged not to an Indian, but to a “Caucasoid” with European features and even white skin.74 It is a race row that spans more than 9000 years, centering on the skull of a man which could dramatically overturn perceptions of early American history and prove that “Caucasoids” from Europe were the first to colonize the country.75

The specter of “losing” evidence and “harming” science also played out on the news pages. For example, Douglas Owsley “expresses regret as a scientist that so many of the skulls are being returned to tribes,” according to a Washington Post feature story on legal obligation to return bones to tribes. “There is a loss of information to the future, because they are irreplaceable,” Owlsey said.76 Rob Bonnichsen, an Oregon professor and a plaintiff in the lawsuit, elevated the potential loss of the skeleton to humanitarian concerns: We’re talking about the fundamental question: who were the first Americans? The story is very complicated and it is not all in. If you bury the evidence it will never be in. It would be a loss to all people, all mankind.77

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Evidence was used to bolster arguments that studying Kennewick Man would reveal his origin. For example, an attorney for the scientists told PBS (the American Public Broadcasting Service): “The evidence in hand indicates that this individual is probably not Native American.”78 Other news echoed the conjecture. For example, in 2014, the Washington Post reported: “The scientists argued that there is no evidence linking any of today’s tribes to the skeleton.”79 The battle over the bones called for confirming data: New evidence suggests that the Indians are not quite as indigenous as previously believed, that they themselves might be descended from the same stock as their erstwhile European tormentors. The scientists, who have thus far reached only preliminary conclusions, want to examine the evidence further. The Indians want, quite literally, to bury it.80

But the veracity of evidence was also questioned in reporting, characterizing the narrative as steeped in conflict. For example, Steve Coll, writing for The Washington Post, said scientists “saw no convincing evidence of European origin” in Kennewick Man, and that, “Archaeologists investigating prehistory have no records, no texts, and very little undisputed evidence. Their work necessarily depends on evidence and imagination.”81 Methods Frame Scientific evidence and methods were paired in discourse. I have argued that the lure of techniques—sciencing—can get conflated with the outcome. Doing science does not guarantee that the results are understood or applied judiciously. With this in mind, I looked for words and phrases that referred to empirical techniques, tests and other methods related to knowledge-making. Sciencing was indeed a feature in stories: bones were chemically analyzed for carbon and nitrogen isotopes, Kennewick Man was subjected to CAT-scans, and researchers donned rubber gloves and masks to handle the ancient remains.82 In an Associated Press story, we learn that “Scientists … took scans of the skull and the pelvis, which has a spearhead embedded in it, and created a three-dimensional picture that has been used to construct models of the bones.”83 A photo in Newsweek describes how “skull detectives” Richard L. Jantz and Douglas W. Owsley “make up to 90 measurements to determine the ethnic ancestry of mystery skulls.”84

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Long before the DNA could be extracted successfully, news articles cast genetic sequencing as the definitive test to determine the skeleton’s history.85 As a reporter for PBS notes, “Anthropologists say scientific study, including DNA testing of Kennewick Man, may offer important answers on how the North American continent was settled.”86 An editorial quotes scientists as suggesting that “DNA preserved within [the skeleton’s] bones may help explain who first settled the Western Hemisphere and when. That’s even more important now that traditional theories, which held the first Americans arrived over the Bering land bridge at least 11,000 years ago, are being re-examined.”87 Once the team of geneticists in Copenhagen released details that they discovered similar DNA between the skeleton and members of the Confederated Tribe of the Colville Nation, readers learned that scientific technique “found that Kennewick Man … is more closely related to living indigenous people than any other know group—a finding that was in the past disputed by some scientists.”88 The lead geneticist, Eske Willerslev, told a reporter: It’s very clear that genomic sequences show he’s most closely related to native Americans. Not all Native Americans have been sequenced, however one of the tribes, the Colville, has been and they the most closely related.89

Personification of Science I discovered an unanticipated frame when reading the news stories for ways that science and methods were framed. In more than one instance, science was personified: animated with attributes. For example, following the decision by the US Army Corps of Engineers in the fall of 1996 to return the skeleton to tribes, a reporter writes: “This was not what science wanted to hear.”90 When the Corps said it would wait to make a definitive judgment, a New York Times reporter writes that, “Science got a bit of a reprieve.”91 And a writer for New Scientist notes, “it is tempting to see science as a hostage to irrationality.”92 Science was personified when reporters characterized the rift over the provenance of the skeleton. For example, The New York Times notes: “But even researchers … who are sympathetic to the tribe’s position, say such a burial would be a huge loss to science.”93 Similarly, a headline in the Ottawa Citizen refers to “Science’s loss of Kennewick Man” as “the penalty for past misdeeds.”94 In the same article, science was characterized in secular terms: “To be sure, in most non-native

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religions death and burial are held as sacred, but somehow these beliefs consistently lose out to the new religion of science.”95 Race Frame As I noted earlier, the construct race can be seen in discourse as a reflection of many issues, including power struggles. In our earlier study, Erin and I found that Native American arguments were often disparaged in epistemic, political, economic and cultural ways. For the current study I examined news stories for references to race and ethnicity and found that skin color and semi-technical terms, such as Caucasoid, were used in concert with race. As the Kennewick Man discourse unfolded, classifications of race emerged in the discussion of human origins, often explained as Asian, Polynesian, European, Ainu, Mongoloid and Negroid types. That is, the news reported early—just a month after the discovery—that the skull was Caucasoid and looked Caucasian. I found that such descriptors were used to refer to race. The more technical terms, such as Caucasoid, were conflated with everyday parlance: Caucasian, White and European. More than one reporter used the descriptions Caucasoid, Mongoloid and Negroid to refer to “racial types.” That said, scientists tended to use such categories in descriptive—not always derogatory—ways: “Kennewick Man bore little resemblance to modern native Indians,” and his “cranial features” are “closer to those found in skeletons of South Asians, Polynesians or the Ainu of Japan.”96 Kennewick Man was also described as having “Negroid” features: “His skull, Caucasoid in its high, narrow cranium and cavity … also bears features associated with Native Americans and, surprisingly, Negroid people.”97 The terms “Caucasoid” and “Caucasian” were often used interchangeably, although only a few reporters offered definitions. As Steve Coll of the Washington Post notes: “Caucasoid” is a term used by physical anthropologists to describe skull and skeletal shapes common today in Europe, the Middle East and South Asia, and does not typically refer to skin color. However, the word “Caucasian,” which is often used by Americans to refer to whites, is defined in Webster’s as a synonym of “Caucasoid.”98

Reporters used the term “Caucasian” when referring to Kennewick Man, who “may have belonged to a Caucasian ethnic group given that his head

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was longer and narrower than the broader skulls of native Americans and their Mongoloid ancestors from Asia.”99 Writing for the New York Times Magazine, Scott L. Malcomson raises the issue of race: But because no one tribe can assert an exclusive tie to that strip of the Columbia River—and because the bones are so old—the Native American claim has quickly become more “racial” than tribal. Scientists interested in studying Kennewick Man have sometimes abandoned caution in describing what one anthropologist called a 9000-year-old “white person.” Soon enough, the media spread far and wide the possibility of a European wandering across North America many millenniums ahead of schedule.100

At times, the descriptions edged toward stereotypes, and one reporter referred to humans as “stock,” a term also used to describe chattel: “Modern day Indians, who typically have prominent cheekbones and flat, roundish faces, stem from Mongolian stock.”101 Another reporter framed the rhetoric as: “Racial sensitivities of the present … playing the biggest role in the ongoing wrangle.”102 The writer adds: The incendiary implication inherent in the skull’s Caucasoid features is that when the ancestors of the modern-day American Indians arrived on their new home soil, they expelled and/or expunged the existing population. It is an uncomfortable echo of the slaughter that occurred when white men returned eight and a half thousand years later and in some quarters there is an uneasiness that it casts doubt about the status of native Americans and their historical claims for reparation.103

Shades of color were used to refer to individuals or groups of people. For example: “Who are the true native Americans? Are red men ‘true’ native Americans?” and “The [US Army] Corps’ alacrity in responding to the tribes’ demand over the skeleton does not typify their army ancestors’ usual dealings with the Red Man.” The descriptor White was used frequently, as in the headline: Old Skull Gets White Looks, Stirring Dispute and Examinations of the Skull Shape Suggested the Man Was a White European.104 Being White was not necessarily complementary. For example: “Congress passed [NAGPRA] in response to Native American fury that 200,000 of their sacred remains had been unearthed by white men to be traded and sold like commodities”105 and “After centuries of white

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indifference or hostility to their beliefs, Indians now have a powerful if unexpected ally: Christian fundamentalists.”106 Sometimes White served as a descriptor for Christians, supremacists, government actors, settlers and even scientists: “A 1990 federal law … seeks in part to redress grave-­ robbing and racist theorizing by Nineteenth Century white scientists who studied Native American bones.”107 Essentially, race was characterized in several ways that were braided together: by skull classifications that resonate with phrenological typing of humans, by skin-color, by geography and by politics. When joined, politics and race became “racial politics,” a term used to leaven the idea of race by wrapping it within a political package. An apt illustration is an opinion piece written by an editorial board member at the Edmonton Journal: “It’s tragic and wrong to turn Kennewick Man into a weapon in a war of racial politics. The issues here aren’t racial. They’re universal.”108 In this quote, the speaker is emphasizing both politics and race. James Chatters also disdains race as essential to the discourse and told a reporter: “I’m incensed by the fact that this individual is being used to promote racial politics when the lesson I think he brings to us is that race doesn’t mean very much.”109 Ironically some observers opined that Chatters himself added a racial hue to the rhetorical landscape by posing Patrick Stewart as Kennewick Man’s clone: “By giving a late-Pleistocene-era skull the face of a late-­ Twentieth Century British actor, some anthropologists say, Dr. Chatters has given a racial identification to something that may ultimately defy racial categories.” Writing for Salon, Juno Gregory notes that Chatters’ “inappropriate racial classification of the remains” inspired white supremacists, who found support for their “Caucasian genes-equals-civilization scenarios.”110 Native tribes were accused of political gamesmanship. And while race goes unmentioned in the following examples, references to Native Americans, New World origins and history—in context—inflect race. For example, one of the first television features about the skeleton was aired on 60 Minutes, a national news program produced by the American network, CBS. Reporter Lesley Stahl interviewed Chatters, who says: “They’ve [the tribes] got a history now, the way it’s-it’s laid out, that fits their present-­ day political needs quite effectively. If that history changes, it may not fit so well.”111 Another reporter referred to the ramifications of discovering who first occupied North America as “huge … for Native Americans, who have major spiritual and political stakes in how their New World origins

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are explained.”112 Another writer characterized the ongoing saga as follows: “The Corps knew that when they seized Kennewick Man they seized control of the politically valuable tale the bones could tell about the nature of the earliest inhabitants of North America.”113 Another notes: “Eight scientists have sued for research access to the skeleton, all of which was stopped by the government … because the issue had become such a political hot potato.”114 Several instances referred to political correctness, which the Urban Dictionary translates, as “A method of controlling and dictating public speech and thought.”115 Again, we see entailments of race with references to culture and Indians: But this is one time when cultural relativism collides head-on with the cold logic of science. It would be intellectual cowardice of the mostly craven, politically correct kind to atone for the past sins of science by returning Kennewick Man to the earth, before he has shared his secrets.116

The Times of London interviewed Chatters for a story with a headline that reads: Bones put Indians on warpath, where the anthropologist complains about political correctness: Chatters says he has been blacklisted, threatened and accused of racism by Indians. “This is political correctness gone wild,” he said.117 To summarize, political frames are enmeshed with notions of race, morality and authority. Moreover, the term politics is sometimes used to illustrate a red herring—a sort of smoke screen—that hides other elements, such as bigotry or greed: “it’s politics gone wild,” according to one quoted authority. Stakeholder claims are dismissed with a rhetorical turn-­ of-­phrase that their motivation is merely “political.” Intertextuality Frame Julia Kristeva ventures that intertextuality reflects a texture (from which the word text is derived)—that is woven—such as a piece of fabric or a literary script. Scholar James E. Porter adds that intertextuality yields “bits and pieces of text which writers or speakers borrow and sew together to create new discourse.”118 “Intertextuality,” he writes, “animates all discourse.” I am interested in how “bits and pieces” animate discourse in the Kennewick Man narrative. I looked for references to books and movies,

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films and myths, and advertising and television and found many references that reflect intertexuality in the context of the case study.  odern Actor Portrays Kennewick Man M Perhaps the most palpable exemplar is the choice of Patrick Stewart to visually represent the 9000 year-old skeleton. The comparison insinuates several intertextual layers. In addition to his role as a Star Fleet commander in the futuristic Star Trek series, Stewart is an award-winning British actor who has played roles ranging from Shakespeare’s Macbeth to Charles Xavier of the X-Men film franchise. The comparison of Kennewick Man to the actor—who is not a Native American—most likely helped cement the claim that the skull was that of a white man. One reporter notes: “A face has been put to the oldest and most complete human remains ever found in North America … 20th-century actor and Star Trek hero, Patrick Stewart, a full-blooded Caucasian.”119  keleton as Treasure and Antiquity S In addition to being animated by a celebrated actor, Kennewick Man was reified: James Chatters calls him “an absolute treasure.”120 The treasure metaphor fits nicely with booty plundered from Egypt, namely, the cherished Rosetta Stone. The stone, which is the tip of a much larger hunk of Granodiorite—an igneous rock like granite—and named for the Egyptian city of Rashid (Rosetta), was claimed by Napolean Bonaparte when he and his troops invaded Egypt in 1798.121 The enigmatic rock was compared to the ancient skeleton. “We knew that it was scientifically very, very important. In some sense, it is a little human Rosetta stone,” says Paula Barran, a Portland lawyer representing the scientists.122 Barran failed to tell the reporter that Egyptian officials have repeatedly asked the British Museum to send home the stolen slab. Egyptian erudition was noted by several stakeholders in the Kennewick Man case, who compared the skeletal find to the Great Library at Alexandria. According to historian James Turner, more than 2000 years ago—around 300 BC—Egyptian patriarch Ptolmey I hoped “to challenge Athens as cultural center of the Greek world.”123 The pharaoh and his successors created a “Great Library,” which was destroyed around 43  BC under mysterious circumstances—perhaps by fire—which modernists refer to as the Library of Alexandria. “Archaeologists have likened the idea of reburying Kennewick Man to the burning of the library at Alexandria,” notes The Times of London.124 The Washington Post quotes a

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paleontologist who claimed burying Kennewick Man “would be like burning the great library of Alexandria.”125  op Culture and Bitter History P References to relationships between Native Americans and settlers invoked myriad intertextual linkages along two dimensions: mass media references to films and to the beloved Leatherstocking tales, and darker historic events, such as thievery of Indian graves and the massacre at Sand Creek. When a headline announced—about a year after the Kennewick Man discovery—Inside story: Skeleton in the Cupboard, the headline’s story reports the bones are locked in a vault and “imprisoned” by the US government. Several reporters followed suit: “Kennewick Man, meanwhile, languishes behind locked doors,”126 where “His bones are locked in a special vault.”127 That said, the allusion to the cupboard in the children’s tale is never explained: the headline simply provides a simile for the cubicle where the skeleton is stashed. But for anyone familiar with the best-selling children’s book by Lynne Reid Banks, or the Frank Oz movie of the same name, Indian in the Cupboard tells the story of a young lad whose plastic toy comes to life: keeping his pocket-size form.128 Like Kennewick Man, the toy Indian is both relic and souvenir. Another writer set the stage early in the dispute as a race wrangle that: Spans more than 9000  years … an imbroglio that pits native Americans against archaeologists, the government against anthropologists and creationists against evolutionists. And the results of this stand-off between empirical science and religious belief will set a precedent with major repercussions for the study of the birth of a nation.129

For film and literature buffs, the birth of a nation echoes D. W. Griffith’s 1915 film, which critic Richard Brody describes as a “grand and enduring aesthetic” yoked “to the cause of hatred.”130 The film had endured for its repugnance and its cinematic grandeur in illustrating the rise of the Ku Klux Klan.  he Noble Savage T Literary tropes are also mentioned in discourse, including the noble savage, which is offered in contrast to the plain savage. Historian Francis Jennings points out that, for colonists, the meaning of savage depends on the user.131 The Dutch and Germans referred to denizens as wild (wilde and

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wilder) while the French sauvage had something of a romantic ring, Jennings notes. The British, however, considered the word “pejorative” and hoped to ignite an aggressive response from benefactors in England interested in ridding the New World of Native peoples. Jennings writes: “The special development of savage in English was a stress on beastly ferocity that displaced simple wildness as the dominant meaning of the word.”132 If the word savage was used in service to agitation, then noble savage was framed in service to reverence. While many writers trace the phrase’s origins to Jean Jacques Rousseau—an eighteenth-century philosopher—a pedestrian illustration took shape a century later with the Leatherstocking Tales of James Fennimore Cooper. Critics argue that Cooper’s Indians tip the extremes of good and evil.133 For example, Cooper describes the Mohegan protagonist Uncas in The Last of the Mohicans with: Dark, glancing, fearful eye, alike terrible and calm; the bold outline of his high haughty features, pure in their native red … the dignified elevation of his receding forehead, together with all the finest proportions of a noble head, bared to the generous scalping tuft.

Dignified and noble, Uncas represents the unspoiled savage, harkening back to Rousseau’s belief that American Indians were pure in their intimacy with the natural world. James Chatters gave the notion a sideways kick when he grumbled to a reporter in 1997 that “he has been blacklisted, threatened, and accused of racism by Indians.”134 From his perspective, “You can’t say anything about the Indians’ heritage that might differ from Rousseau’s concept of the noble savage.” Chatters’ injection of the noble savage in discourse infers that the construct is a compliment and that “you can’t say anything” that departs from the stereotype of the “noble savage.” That said, scholars have roundly criticized the invective of the noble savage, arguing that the label cements the American Indian in what I have called a discursive amber, where the stereotype persists in time like a dead fly trapped in fossilized resin.

Synopsis We can deconstruct the discourse surrounding the tale of Kennewick Man by heeding the advice of communication scholars who urge researchers to approach media frames more critically, by examining how frames produce

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meaning, examining how meanings are constructed over time, examining the ideological nature of the framing process, examining the junctures between the processes, and considering the role of justice and equity. Some of the ways that frames produce meaning are embedded within the news production process, where reporters turn to experts to define an issue and offer a solution to the problem at hand. In the case of Kennewick Man, scientists are seen as the authorities, and, as a result, their views are the ones most likely to construct the nature of the Kennewick Man story: in this case, an origin story about the peopling of North America. Over a 20-year period, the eminence of scientists changed little: they are still considered the experts in the case, a notion buffeted by the geneticists who found a DNA  link between the skeleton and local Native Americans. Ideological positions unfolded in discourse, most notably the traditional beliefs described by the tribes, which were placed as oppositional to scientific knowledge and practice. Looking more deeply into this sort of framing, however, shows that the division between ideologies is socially constructed, too. For example, scientific claims and methods are often presented as bias-free and value-free, when, in practice, science is steeped in values, including the cherished American value of progress. Experts interviewed for the Kennewick Man story argued that science would be lost or harmed if the hunt for answers was halted. Indigenous values held much less currency in the face of such progressive arguments. The revelation that a portion of the discourse embraced discussions about race, ethnicity and origins brings to mind the imbalance of justice. Native Americans were described in ways that sound separatist: they have their own religion, they wear braids and their skin is red. And references to Caucasians can’t help but remind some readers that humans were once classified hierarchically, with Caucasians at the top and American Indians and Africans at the bottom. By positioning Native Americans as The Other, their viewpoints command less attention, and the attention that is accorded might arrive wrapped in a package laced with stereotypes. Such disparagement is well illustrated in the following quote: Sometimes the scientists sound as if what they want in the Kennewick Man case is not just the right to study his bones, but a rollback of Indian sovereignty. One of the scientists’ lawyers, Alan Schneider, says he simply cannot understand why Indians don’t just assimilate into America the way the Irish did.135

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Notes 1. Cynthia-Lou Coleman and Erin V. Dysart (2005). Framing of Kennewick Man against the backdrop of a scientific and cultural controversy. Science Communication, 27(1): 3–26. 2. Brad Knickerbocker (2001 June 21). Science vs. Indian tradition in Kennewick Man case. The Christian Science Monitor. 3. Robert A.  Logan (2001). Science mass communication: Its conceptual history. Science Communication, 23(2), p. 138. 4. Boneheaded. (2000, September 30). Economist, 356(8190), p. 84. 5. Glynn Custred (2000). The forbidden discovery of Kennewick Man. Academic Questions, 13, p. 26. 6. Umatillas blast plans for DNA tests (2000 February 2). The Associated Press State & Local Wire. 7. Anders Hansen (2011). Communication, media and environment: Towards reconnecting research on the production, content and social implications of environmental communication. International Communication Gazette 73(1–2), pp. 20–21. 8. Teun van Dijk (1987). Communicating Racism: Ethnic Prejudice in Thought and Talk. Newbury Park: Sage, pp. 27–28. 9. Op. Cit. 10. James W.  Tankard (2001). Empirical approach to the study of media framing. In Framing Public Life: Perspectives on Media and our Understanding of the World. Stephen D.  Reese, Oscar H.  Gandy and August E.  Grant, editors. Malwah, New Jersey, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, p. 97. 11. Jonathan Culler (Spring, 1973). Structure of ideology and ideology of structure, in New Literary History, 4 (3). Ideology and Literature, pp.  471–482. The Johns Hopkins University Press. https://doi. org/10.2307/468530, p. 471. 12. None of the scholars writing about Native American ideologies distinguished between ethics and morality, so I have treated them as do the scholars: as interchangeable constructs. 13. Teun van Dijk (1987). Communicating Racism: Ethnic Prejudice in Thought and Talk. Newbury Park: Sage, pp. 27–28. 14. Judith Woods (1997 June 16). Restless natives fight it out over 9000-year-­ old bones. The Scotsman, p. 11. 15. Andrew Roberts (1997 June 15). First scalp for truth in the race debate. The Sunday Times (London). 16. Ros Davidson (1998 April 19). Race row rises from the grave. The Scotsman, p. 16.

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17. Nicholas K. Geranios (1997 September 21). The Kennewick Man crisis: Archeologists and Indians clash over a 9300-year-old skull that could rewrite New World history. The Toronto Star/Associated Press, p. F-8. 18. Timothy Egan (1998 April 2). Old skull gets white looks, stirring dispute. The New York Times. Section A, p. 12. 19. Sandi Doughton (2014 May 16). Paleoamerican skeleton has DNA link to tribes. Spokesman Review (Spokane, Washington). 20. Judith Woods (1997 June 16). Restless natives fight it out over 9000-year-­ old bones. The Scotsman, p. 11. 21. Op. Cit. 22. Lee Hochberg (2001 June 19). Patients’ rights; rough road; equal justice; Kennewick Man. The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. 23. John Carlin (1997 October 10). Who are the true native Americans? Are red men true native Americans? Who really were the first Americans? The Independent (London), p. 13. 24. Doug Ward (2000 January 15). Unlocking the ancient secrets of K-man. The Vancouver Sun (British Columbia). News, p. A1. 25. Giles Whittell (1997 October 4). Bones put Indians on warpath. The Times (London). 26. Mike Davis (2000 June 19) Alas, poor Qisuk: Digging up a museum’s past. New York Observer. 27. Ben Guarino (2016 April 28). 9000-year-old Kennewick Man set to receive Native American burial after decades in limbo. Washington Post Blogs. 28. Patrick McDonald and Simon Yeaman (1998 May 22). Star Trek the past generation? The Advertiser. Adelaide, South Australia. 29. Duane Emmons (1998 November 4). Skeletons in the closet. The Washington Daily via U-Wire. 30. Scientists can proceed with study of Kennewick man (2004 March 1). Deutsche Presse-Agentur. 31. Alcestis Cooky Oberg (2002 October 1). Kennewick Man transcends political correctness. USA Today. 32. Christopher Reed (1997 September 3). Inside story: skeleton in the cupboard. The Guardian (London), p. T-4. 33. H.R.2893, 105th Congress (1997–1998), from the Congress.gov website. Downloaded from https://www.congress.gov/bill/105th-congress/house-bill/2893/all-actions?overview=closed#tabs. 34. Nicholas K. Geranios (1997 August 24). Scientists and Indians battle for the bones of Kennewick Man. Associated Press. 35. Jerry Adler and Juliet Chung (2005 July 25). A 9000-Year-Old Secret. Newsweek, U.S. Edition. 36. Op. Cit.

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37. Carol Smith (31 August 2002). Kennewick Man to go to scientists, judge says. Native American coalition had sought 9300-year-old remains for burial. Seattle Post-Intelligencer. 38. Op. Cit. 39. John Woestendiek (1998 June 28). Battling over a 9000-year-old man. The Philadelphia Inquirer, p. A3. 40. Steve Coll (2001 June 3). The body in question: The discovery of the remains of a 9000-year-old man on the Columbia River has set off a conflict over race, history and identity that isn’t just about the American past, but about the future as well. The Washington Post. Washington, D.C. 41. Judith Woods (1997 June 16). Restless natives fight it out over 9000-year-­ old bones. The Scotsman, p. 11. 42. Linda Ashton (2000 June 15). Kennewick Man’s origins could be revealed in September. Associated Press. 43. Simon Beck (1998 April 5). Ancient bones of contention. South China Morning Post (Hong Kong). 44. Karen Wright (2000 January 19). Out of the closet: Faith, reason clash over remains of some of the oldest North Americans. The Gazette (Montreal, Quebec), p. B-3. 45. Timothy Egan (1998 April 2). Old skull gets white looks, stirring dispute. The New York Times. Section A, p. 12. 46. Mark Anthony Rolo (1999 November 1). Still in limbo, tribes want reburial, scientists want access. Indian Country Today. 47. Melanthia Mitchell (2005 July 7). Study of Kennewick Man gets started. The Columbian/Associated Press (Vancouver, Washington). 48. Nicholas K. Geranios (1997 August 24). Scientists and Indians battle for the bones of Kennewick Man. Associated Press. 49. John Carlin (1997 October 10). Who are the true native Americans? Are red men true native Americans? Who really were the first Americans? The Independent (London), p. 13. 50. Peter Huck (2001 February 23). Racial skullduggery. Australian Financial Review (magazine). Australia: Fairfax Media Publications. 51. Nick Estes (2019). Our History is the Future. London and New York: Verso, p. 14. 52. Vine Deloria, Jr., in Vine Deloria, Jr. and Daniel R.  Wildcat (2001). Power and Place: Indian Education in America. Golden, Colorado: Fulcrum Resources, p. 27. 53. Lee Hochberg (2001 June 19). Patients’ rights; rough road; equal justice; Kennewick Man. The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. 54. Peter Huck (2001 February 23). Racial skullduggery. Australian Financial Review (magazine). Australia: Fairfax Media Publications. 55. Ros Davidson (1998 April 19). Race row rises from the grave. The Scotsman, p. 16.

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56. Christopher Reed (1997 September 3). Inside story: skeleton in the cupboard. The Guardian (London), p. T-4. 57. Op. Cit. 58. Steve Coll (2001 June 3). The body in question: The discovery of the remains of a 9000-year-old man on the Columbia River has set off a conflict over race, history and identity that isn’t just about the American past, but about the future as well. The Washington Post. Washington, D.C. 59. Op. Cit. 60. Tim Cornwell (2000 January 15). Custody battle over Kennewick Man. The Scotsman. p. 8. 61. Op. Cit. 62. Op Cit. 63. Profile (2002 September 15). 60 Minutes. CBS News transcripts. Lesley Stahl (reporter), Shari Finkelstein (producer). 64. Bob Edwards (2001 June 19). Federal magistrate to hear arguments by scientists, Native American groups and the US government over rights to skeletal remains of the Kennewick Man. NPR Morning Edition. 65. Lee Hochberg (2001 June 19). Patients’ rights; rough road; equal justice; Kennewick Man. The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. 66. Op. Cit. 67. Op. Cit. 68. Ellen O’Brien (3 February 1997). Kennewick Man skeletal remains. The Philadelphia Inquirer, p. E01. 69. Steve Coll (2001 June 3). The body in question: The discovery of the remains of a 9000-year-old man on the Columbia River has set off a conflict over race, history and identity that isn’t just about the American past, but about the future as well. The Washington Post. Washington, D.C. 70. Op. Cit. 71. Giles Whittell (1997 October 4). Bones put Indians on warpath. The Times (London). 72. Op. Cit. 73. John Woestendiek (1998 June 28). Battling over a 9000-year-old man. The Philadelphia Inquirer, p. A3. 74. Giles Whittell (1997 October 4). Bones put Indians on warpath. The Times (London). 75. Judith Woods (1997 June 16). Restless natives fight it out over 9000-year-­ old bones. The Scotsman, p. 11. 76. Steve Coll (2001 June 3). The body in question: The discovery of the remains of a 9000-year-old man on the Columbia River has set off a conflict over race, history and identity that isn’t just about the American past, but about the future as well. The Washington Post. 77. John Carlin (1997 October 10). Who are the true native Americans? Are red men true native Americans? Who really were the first Americans? The Independent (London), p. 13.

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78. Rod Minott (1997 January 3). Deluge; crime watch; bones of dispute; political wrap. The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. PBS. 79. Joel Achenbach (2014 August 26). Scientists: Mysterious Kennewick Man looked Polynesian and came from far away. Washington Post Blogs. 80. Steve Coll (2001 June 3). The body in question: The discovery of the remains of a 9000-year-old man on the Columbia River has set off a conflict over race, history and identity that isn’t just about the American past, but about the future as well. The Washington Post. Washington, D.C. 81. Op. Cit. 82. Kim Murphy (2012 October 12). Kennewick Man: Scientists unravel 9300-year-old skeleton’s past. Newstex LLC. 83. Melanthia Mitchell (2005 July 7). Study of Kennewick Man gets started. The Columbian/Associated Press (Vancouver, Washington). 84. Sharon Begley and Andrew Murr (1999 June 7). The First Americans. Newsweek. Atlantic Edition, p. 56. 85. Note that all but three of the 35 articles were published prior to the announcement that the skeleton’s DNA had been sequenced and linked to Native Americans living today in the Pacific Northwest. See Rasmussen et al. (2015). 86. Rod Minott (1997 January 3). Deluge; crime watch; bones of dispute; political wrap. The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. PBS. 87. Politics and the past (2012 October 12). Editorial. St. Louis Post-­ Dispatch (Missouri), p. 3. 88. Steve Connor (2015 June 18). Kennewick man: DNA taken from 8500  year-old skeleton found to be related to nearby native American tribe. The Independent (UK). 89. Op. Cit. 90. Peter Huck (2001 February 23). Racial skullduggery. Australian Financial Review (magazine). Australia: Fairfax Media Publications. 91. Timothy Egan (1998 April 2). Old skull gets white looks, stirring dispute. The New York Times. Section A, p. 12. 92. Seeing further (2015 April 18). New Scientist (United Kingdom). 93. Timothy Egan (1998 April 2). Old skull gets white looks, stirring dispute. The New York Times. Section A, p. 12. 94. William Hipwell (2000 October 10). Return of the native: Science’s loss of Kennewick Man is the penalty for past misdeeds. The Ottawa Citizen, p. A19. 95. Op. Cit. 96. Doug Ward (2000 January 15). Unlocking the ancient secrets of K-man. The Vancouver Sun (British Columbia). News, p. A1. 97. The tussle over a 9300-year-old skeleton (1997 July 8). Agence France Presse.

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98. Steve Coll (2001 June 3). The body in question: The discovery of the remains of a 9000-year-old man on the Columbia River has set off a conflict over race, history and identity that isn’t just about the American past, but about the future as well. The Washington Post. Washington, D.C. 99. Steve Connor (2015 June 18). Kennewick man: DNA taken from 8500  year-old skeleton found to be related to nearby native American tribe. The Independent (UK). 100. Scott L. Malcomson (2000 April 2). The Color of Bones. The New York Times Magazine, p. 40. 101. Peter Huck (2001 February 23). Racial skullduggery. Australian Financial Review (magazine). Australia: Fairfax Media Publications. 102. Judith Woods (1997 June 16). Restless natives fight it out over 9000-year-­ old bones. The Scotsman, p. 11. 103. Op. Cit. 104. Timothy Egan (1998 April 2). Old skull gets white looks, stirring dispute. The New York Times. Section A, p. 12. 105. Lee Hochberg (2001 June 19). Patients’ rights; rough road; equal justice; Kennewick Man. The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. 106. Christopher Reed (1997 September 3). Inside story: skeleton in the cupboard. The Guardian (London), p. T-4. 107. Steve Coll (2001 June 3). The body in question: The discovery of the remains of a 9000-year-old man on the Columbia River has set off a conflict over race, history and identity that isn’t just about the American past, but about the future as well. The Washington Post. Washington, D.C. 108. Paula Simons (2000 October 11). To bury Kennewick Man is to bury the truth. The Edmonton Journal. 109. Rod Minott (1997 January 3). Deluge; crime watch; bones of dispute; political wrap. The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. PBS. 110. Juno Gregory (2002 April 22). Bones of contention. Salon.com. 111. Profile (2002 September 15). 60 Minutes. CBS News transcripts. Lesley Stahl (reporter), Shari Finkelstein (producer). 112. Juno Gregory (2002 April 22). Bones of contention. Salon.com. 113. Op. Cit. 114. Ros Davidson (1998 April 19). Race row rises from the grave. The Scotsman, p. 16. 115. Political Correctness. Urban Dictionary. Top Defintion. Downloaded from https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=political%20 correctness. 116. Paula Simons (2000 October 11). To bury Kennewick Man is to bury the truth. The Edmonton Journal. 117. Giles Whittell (1997 October 4). Bones put Indians on warpath. The Times (London).

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118. James E. Porter (1986). Intertextuality and the Discourse Community. Rhetoric Review (5)1, p. 34. 119. Ros Davidson (1998 April 19). Race row rises from the grave. The Scotsman, p. 16. 120. Lee Hochberg (2001 June 19). Patients’ rights; rough road; equal justice; Kennewick Man. The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. 121. Jonathan Jones (2011 December 22). Napoleon Bonaparte and Egypt’s lost scroll. The Guardian. Downloaded from https://www.theguardian. com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2011/dec/22/ napoleon-bonaparte-egypt-lost-scrolls. Napoleon had invited some 167 scholars along for the grueling journey to study geography and antiquities, and they found hieroglyphs carved into the stone: a puzzle that gripped the scholars. No one could translate the script. But the British were close on the heels of Napoleon, who fled, leaving the rock behind. The British quickly claimed the antiquity for themselves and, in 1802, packed off the 760-kilo boulder (about the size of an American buffalo) for Portsmouth harbor. 122. Linda Ashton (2000 June 15). Kennewick Man’s origins could be revealed in September. Associated Press. 123. James Turner, James. (2014). Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. p. 9. 124. Giles Whittell (1997 October 4). Bones put Indians on warpath. The Times (London). 125. Ben Guarino (2016 April 28). 9000-year-old Kennewick Man set to receive Native American burial after decades in limbo. Washington Post Blogs. 126. Judith Woods (1997 June 16). Restless natives fight it out over 9000-year-­ old bones. The Scotsman, p. 11. 127. Nicholas K.  Geranios (1997 September 21).The Kennewick Man crisis Archeologists and Indians clash over a 9300-year-old skull that could rewrite New World history. The Toronto Star/Associated Press, p. F-8. 128. Cynthia-Lou Coleman and Erin V. Dysart (2005). Framing of Kennewick Man against the backdrop of a scientific and cultural controversy. Science Communication, 27(1): 3–26. 129. Judith Woods (1997 June 16). Restless natives fight it out over 9000-year-­ old bones. The Scotsman, p. 11. 130. Richard Brody (2013 February 1). The Worst Thing About “Birth of a Nation” Is How Good It Is. The New Yorker. Downloaded from https:// w w w. n e w y o r k e r. c o m / c u l t u r e / r i c h a r d - b r o d y / the-worst-thing-about-birth-of-a-nation-is-how-good-it-is.

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131. Francis Jennings, F. (1976). The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism and the Cant of Conquest, New  York: W.  W. Norton & Company, pp. 73–74. 132. Op. Cit., p. 74. 133. Cynthia-Lou Coleman (2012). How Kennewick Man and media constructs frame Indian identity, in American Indians and Popular Culture. Praeger Press (ABC-CLIO), Santa Barbara, California. Elizabeth DeLaney Hoffman, editor, 2012: 193–209. 134. Giles Whittell (1997 October 4). Bones put Indians on warpath. The Times (London). 135. Steve Coll (2001 June 3). The body in question: The discovery of the remains of a 9000-year-old man on the Columbia River has set off a conflict over race, history and identity that isn’t just about the American past, but about the future as well. The Washington Post. Washington, D.C.

CHAPTER 7

How Sioux-Settler Relations Underscore the Dakota Access Pipeline

Abstract  This chapter frames the controversy over rerouting a crude oil pipeline to run through the territory of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe in North Dakota—beneath the water supply—by examining the key events that shaped Sioux-settler relations in the 1800s. For years, settlers had been making their way Westward, and travel began in earnest in the middle of the century. Skirmishes erupted between migrants and Indians, and a treaty was brokered in 1851 that would ostensibly keep settlers at bay and reserve 134 million acres for Native peoples. But the treaty failed to restrain settlers, and discovery of gold, first in California, and then in the sacred Black Hills, became a turning point in hostile relationships. The battle at Greasy Grass, the murder of Crazy Horse and the massacre at Wounded Knee in the later part of the 1800s would be remembered as episodes that etched the fate of Native Americans at the hands of the US government. Keywords  Crazy Horse • Dakota Access Pipeline • Greasy Grass • Morality • Progress • Wounded Knee

The last two chapters of the book are devoted to a recent event in the United States that some scholars describe as a paradigm shift in how the public sphere, social discourse and mass publics embrace and respond to environmental struggles on Native American land. © The Author(s) 2020 C.-L. Coleman, Environmental Clashes on Native American Land, Palgrave Studies in Media and Environmental Communication, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34106-0_7

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When a crude oil pipeline was rerouted to bypass the city of Bismarck, North Dakota, and instead course through the territory of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, a social movement was sparked. Protestors gathered in spring 2016 at sites where the pipeline was scheduled for construction, and were joined by thousands of supporters for months, until the US Army Corps of Engineers decided in December to delay construction until an environmental assessment could be completed. With the construction halted, the number of supporters—who called themselves Water Protectors—subsided. But work was once again resumed when the new administration, taking the reins in January 2017, reversed President Barack Obama’s decision to halt the project. The Dakota Access Pipeline, part of the Keystone Pipeline System, was completed the same year. The story of the pipeline construction illuminates cultural clashes between Indigenous communities and corporate, legislative and governmental power-brokers. We can look at the case of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) through the lens of the communication process diagram discussed earlier and ask how the junctures within the process—between the public sphere, social discourse, mass media, frames, citizens and special interests—reveal power relationships and Indigenous metaphysics: the thrust of the book. I chip away at these issues by examining how progressive and moral values were shaped by pilgrims and pioneers in North America, and how such values underpin the history of Sioux-settler relations. Such values continue today, as we can witness in what William Gamson and André Modigliani call interpretive packages that resonate culturally, and flesh out news frames in discourse. Examining DAPL also offers us an opportunity to search for counter-frames: that is, instances where Indigenous Metaphysics—knowledge systems, beliefs, spirituality, ethics and values— take shape in arenas of social discourse that challenge—and resist—the status quo and disrupt normalcy. This chapter sets the stage for the clash over the pipeline construction against the backdrop of history, with a nod to the precepts of the country’s founding documents, which have been embraced by settler incursion and by movements westward that would result in legislation to parse North America into Indian and settler divisions that would prove disastrous for the Sioux. This chapter offers a view of three events that forge our collective memories of settler-Indian skirmishes at the close of an era, through the translated words of Black Elk, an Oglala visionary. The subsequent chapter embarks on deconstructing the pipeline story by examining how the historic backdrop of resistance continues to take shape in modern skirmishes.

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The Black Snake Native peoples and their allies protested the 3.78 billion-dollar oil pipeline that would flow more than 1000 miles across four states: about the distance from Seattle to Los Angeles or from Paris to Prague. The symbol that became the emblem of the movement took the form of a black snake: Zuzeca Sapa. David Archambault II, chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, told reporters in 2016 the pipeline is “a poisonous black snake made from nothing but greed.”1 Nicolas Lampert is one of several artists who captured the metaphor visually, in a drawing he calls, We Came to Fight a Black Snake (Fig. 7.1). Lampert’s artwork features a serpent with sliced segments that thread around a quote by LaDonna Brave Bull Allard of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. The quote reads: “We came to fight a black snake until it’s dead. We stand. That doesn’t mean put it five miles up the river, that means kill it dead.”2 Another tribal activist, Floris White Bull, explains that: The black snake has been prophesized for generations … It was foretold that it would bring death. That it would be the youth who would rise up, and behind them the mothers would rise. And behind them our warriors would rise. We, the seventh generation, are given the task of defeating it. It is called the Dakota Access Pipeline.3

And while the black snake embodies a Lakota prophecy, the snake is also a symbol that held power for North American settlers, highlighted by their formal claim to North America, beginning in the eighteenth century. Benjamin Franklin, a scientist, inventor and writer, used his newspaper, The Pennsylvania Gazette, to express his political views. In a now-famous editorial titled “This Disunited State,” Franklin urged colonies to “unite against the French and the Natives.”4 An uncredited woodcut accompanies the 1754 editorial and features a snake diced into eight pieces with the words: Join, or Die. Each filet represents a colonial stronghold: New  York, New Jersey, North Carolina, South Carolina, Vermont, Maryland, Pennsylvania and New England (Fig. 7.2).5 Franklin, who would become what American schoolbooks call a founding father of the United States, helped craft the nation’s most essential guideposts: the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and the Constitution in 1787.6 Journalist Patrick J. Kiger notes that the “severed snake” served to incite revolt:

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Fig. 7.1  We Came to Fight a Black Snake. (Credit: Original artwork by Nicholas Lampert, used with permission)

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Fig. 7.2  Join or Die woodcut, 1754. (Credit: Image courtesy the US Library of Congress) In 1774, Paul Revere used a version of it in the masthead of The Massachusetts Spy newspaper, as did several other colonial newspapers that promoted the developing rebellion against British rule. Today, it remains one of the most famous political cartoons ever published.7

Franklin argued that colonies should wrest control from the British, who constrained trade, demanded emigrants restrict their purchases to serve the Motherland, and exacted taxes from settlers. Franklin argued in favor of commerce, wealth and independence, writing: “It is, I suppose, agreed to be the general interest of any state that its people be numerous and rich.”8 He added, “Our whole wealth centers finally amongst the merchants and inhabitants of Britain; and if we make them richer, and enable them better to pay their taxes, it is nearly the same as being taxed ourselves and equally beneficial to the crown.”9 Franklin’s argument that the colonies deserve sovereignty—the right to self-governance—resonated with fellow emigrants, who successfully united to battle the British, the French and Indigenous communities to secure the Eastern coastline by 1783.

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Freedom from British control appealed to colonists, who set a high value on individual freedoms and rights. And while such endowments were inalienable—meaning: a fundamental quality of being human—such privileges were reserved for white, male, Christian land-holders. Native Americans had no such provision. Historian Francis Jennings argues that such endowments were undeserving of savages deemed inferior to their emigrant counterparts. That is, if God endowed men with inalienable rights, then they were reserved for the “super race”: Civilization was able to triumph because the people who bore it were unique from the beginning—a Chosen people or a super race. Either way American culture is seen as not only unique but better than all other cultures.10

The invaders, as Jennings calls them, “assumed an innate and absolute superiority over all other peoples because of divine endowment; their descendants would eventually secularize the endowment.”11 In other words, their God offered colonists a “divine sanction” that rationalized securing North America for their desires. The concept of “progress” required colonists to “conquer the wilderness” and its inhabitants.12

Progress and Morality Colonial values crystallized following the Protestant Reformation, when the idea of “a culture of progress” urged citizens to turn away from the past and look forward.13 Charles C. Lemert reasons that Western societies, post-Reformation, “inclined toward progress.” The concept of progress was swathed in truth, rationality, civic life and the future.14 Critical to our discussion of settler-Indian relations is the infusion of morality into the cultural framework of progress. Franklin was joined by fellow colonists in believing that progress is galvanized by a sense of moral correctness, and that “moral progress would win the day.15 For example, a trio of modern historians writes that the Declaration of Independence was: Instant history, the first coherent account of the coming of the Revolution … The grievances that made their nation-making war seem necessary may now look exaggerated, tediously self-interested, even boringly banal … Yes, the

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document was partly for the edification of France and other potential allies. But it was far more important for Americans to convince themselves that they needed “to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them.”16

In essence, the fusion of progress and morality—edified in the founding documents of the United States—justified colonists’ dominion over Natives of the continent, whom John Quincy Adams remarked had “accidentally ranged in quest of prey.”17 Depicted as neither progressive nor moral, and hence, undeserving of inclusion rights and freedoms, Lemert captures government policy in the following quote: “In these lands the English—Puritan and royalist alike—held the simple view that the natives were outside the law of moral obligation.”18 As outsiders, Native Americans were branded as savage, which served well the judgment that they lacked the biological requisites necessary to become civilized, Jennings notes. Such pervasive attitudes oiled the wheels of the westward advancement of pioneers.

Traversing the Holy Road It would take less than 100 years after the Constitution was signed for the landscape of North America to change as settlers encroached on Native soil. The Lakota, Nakota and Dakota peoples of the Oceti Sakowin (Seven Council Fires)—called the Sioux by the French—would resist the intrusion—just as the settlers had resisted British hegemony.19 The trespass by pioneers onto lands west of the Missouri River began in earnest in the mid-1800s. One of the first historians to popularize his forays into Sioux country was Francis Parkman, Jr., who described St. Louis, Missouri— where Meriwether Lewis and William Clark began their westward trek 42 years earlier—as a vibrant and bustling launching point, in spring 1846: Not only were emigrants from every part of the country preparing for the journey to Oregon and California, but an unusual number of traders were making ready their wagons and outfits for Santa Fe. Many of the emigrants, especially of those bound for California, were persons of wealth and standing. The hotels were crowded, and the gunsmiths and saddlers were kept constantly at work in providing arms and equipments for the different parties of travelers. Almost every day steamboats were leaving the levee and passing up the Missouri, crowded with passengers on their way to the frontier.20

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Parkman, just 22  years old when he set out for the Dakotas, would write one of the most popular memoirs of the west, The Oregon Trail, in 1849.21 Although trappers had traipsed through North America for decades, the allure of the territory west of the Missouri River flickered only as an ember for settlers until the 1840s. One of the first groups to journey to Oregon from Missouri included 70 pioneers who followed a path forged by fur traders in 1841. The next year about 100 settlers trekked to Oregon, and by 1843, the numbers mushroomed ten-fold, when 1000 souls headed west. Two years later, nearly 3000 pioneers migrated west, and the trek along the Oregon Trail became an annual event until 1883, when a transcontinental rail link was completed in Portland, Oregon, on September 11, making travel by railroad more attractive and accessible.22 While streams of migrants seeped into what is now Oregon, Washington, California, Wyoming, Montana, Utah, Idaho, Colorado, Nebraska and the Dakotas, the federal government devised ways to keep the Native Americans at bay. A pivotal point came in 1851, when the Fort Laramie Treaty was broached, which would secure peace between the United States and the Plains Indians. Thousands of tribal people, including the Arikara, Mandan, Hidatsa, Crow, Gros Ventre, Blackfeet, Assiniboine, Shoshone, Arapaho, Cheyenne, Lakota and Dakota, met to iron out treaty details.23 Writer Nick Estes notes the treaty was “signed by all parties,” which would allow the United States to build “wagon roads and railroads, and payment of $50,000 [to tribes] for fifty years for damages caused by the overland emigrations.”24 The proposed spread reserved for tribes was a fraction of the area they had long inhabited—some 134 million acres—a little over five percent of what is the United States’ current land mass.25 In return, much Sioux land was relinquished to the United States, displacing tribes west. Historians regard the treaty as a benchmark agreement, but, as Estes notes, the spirit of peace was short-lived. Over the next 17  years, skirmishes erupted between settlers and Indigenous peoples. More and more pioneers arrived, and the military— whose numbers had waned at outposts in the west during the Civil War— would be able to supply more manpower in an attempt to quell scuffles. Coupled with new railroad connections and the allure of gold in California, the United States abandoned its commitment to the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851. A revised treaty was brokered in 1868 that vastly reduced Indian territory to 25 million acres, less than one-fifth of what had been promised

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earlier: an area slightly larger than the state of Kentucky, or, about the size of Scotland and Wales combined. Historians write that agreement over the revised treaty was hard-won for the Sioux, especially since they insisted the sacred Black Hills would remain under their control and that the Holy Road (the Oregon Trail) would be free from settler encroachment. One of the tribal leaders, Red Cloud (Mahpiya Luta), pushed to secure Indian advantage and refused to sign the treaty until the US government agreed to respect the provenance of the Black Hills. The newly elected president, Ulysses S. Grant, promised to secure the Dakotas west of the Missouri for the Sioux and closed nearby military forts. “No whites would be allowed to enter this territory, on penalty of arrest, a stern provision that was violated before the ink was dry on the paper,” writes Larry McMurtry in his biography of Crazy Horse (Tasunke Witko).26 It took only a few years to break the new treaty wide open.

Gold Discovered Rumors of gold in the Black Hills began to spread after the new agreement was signed, and one influential politician figured too much land had been promised to too few Indians in the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868. Despite provisions made in the new treaty to respect the Sioux and Cheyenne territories, the Secretary of the Interior under President Grant approved an expedition to the sacred Black Hills in 1872. Interior Secretary Columbus Delano wrote in a memo: I am inclined to think that the occupation of this region of the country is not necessary to the happiness and prosperity of the Indians, and as it is supposed to be rich in minerals and lumber it is deemed important to have it freed as early as possible from Indian occupancy. I shall, therefore, not oppose any policy which looks first to a careful examination of the subject … If such an examination leads to the conclusion that country is not necessary or useful to Indians, I should then deem it advisable … to extinguish the claim of the Indians and open the territory to the occupation of the whites.27

Delano decided the Black Hills should be explored and, if riches were found, the territory would be opened for commerce. Delano ordered an expedition in 1874, and, in June, a 34-year-old Civil War veteran was assigned to lead the trek. The veteran—a former Major

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General who now held the rank of Lieutenant Colonel—took the Seventh Calvary’s 1000 soldiers into Indian territory that summer. In just a few weeks, Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer reported he found gold, and news circulated quickly throughout the country, alerting settlers to the prospect of fortune-hunting in the Black Hills. Headlines—like ones from the Bismarck newspaper below—announced just days after discovery of the precious rock: Gold! Confirmed! Custer’s Official Report! Gold and Silver in Immense Quantities!28

Investors carved out routes for the stagecoach, freight and mail, while thousands of prospectors swamped the landscape: so many that the National Park Service calls the throng a stampede. The population of the Black Hills encampments rose to 10,000 by 1876.29 The Oglala holy man Black Elk described gold fever to writer John G. Neihardt, who compiled the elder’s stories in a 1932 book, Black Elk Speaks. The holy man refers to white men as Wasichus. The term has a double meaning, according to Estes. Wasichun refers to people with a mysterious power, and “it was clear that this power also brought evil.” The second reference—Wasicu—refers to “fat taker,” meaning, the greedy settler. “To be called ‘Wasicu’ was the highest insult,” Estes notes.30 Black Elk explains: The Wasichus had found much of the yellow metal that they worship and that makes them crazy, and they wanted to have a road up through our country to the place where the yellow metal was; but my people did not want the road. It would scare the bison and make them go away, and also it would let the other Wasichus come in like a river. They told us that they wanted only to use a little land, as much as a wagon would take between the wheels; but our people knew better … And so when the soldiers came and built themselves a town of logs there on the Piney Fork of the Powder, my people knew they meant to have their road and take our country and maybe kill us all when they were strong enough.31

Officials were unable to stem what Black Elk called the river of settlers, forcing President Grant to invite Red Cloud and other Indian leaders to Washington, D.C. Grant tried to purchase the Black Hills.

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The Sioux refused. The next few years proved pivotal to Sioux-settler relations, etched by the battle at Greasy Grass, the murder of Crazy Horse and the massacre at Wounded Knee.

The Battle at Greasy Grass George Armstrong Custer returned to Indian territory with the Seventh Calvary in 1876—two summers after finding “yellow metal”—ostensibly to discourage the denizens from thrashing settlers searching for gold in the sacred hills. In June, Custer and his men—fewer than 300 in number—were overwhelmed by tribal people who had met at Greasy Grass— what is now called Little Bighorn, Montana—to celebrate the beginning of summer. Scholar Peter Nabokov put the battle into perspective, noting that: “It was poetic justice that … Custer’s small command should blunder into the largest gathering of Plains Indian fighters ever assembled—an estimated twelve to fifteen thousand Indians [who] … came together momentarily as a united front.”32 Many notables were on hand, including Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. At age 15, Black Elk had never been in battle and described what happened at Greasy Grass: My cousin came down there with the horses to give them a drink, for it was very hot now. Just then we heard the crier shouting in the Hunkpapa camp, which was not very far from us. “The chargers are coming! They are charging! The chargers are coming!” … Then out of the dust came the soldiers on their big horses. They looked big and strong and tall and they were all shooting … Then another great cry went up out in the dust: “Crazy Horse is coming! Crazy Horse is coming!” Off toward the west and north they were yelling “Hoka hey!” like a big wind roaring, and making the tremolo; and you could hear eagle bone whistles screaming. The valley went darker with dust and smoke, and there were only shadows and a big noise of many cries and hoofs and guns … The soldiers were running upstream and we were all mixed there in the twilight and the great noise. I did not see much; but once I saw a Lakota charge at a soldier who stayed behind and fought and was a very brave man. The Lakota took the soldier’s horse by the bridle, but the soldier killed him with a six-shooter. I was small and could not crowd in to where the soldiers were, so I did not kill anybody. There were so many ahead of me, and it was all dark and mixed up … We could not see much of the battle for the big dust, but we knew there would be no soldiers left.33

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Custer, his two brothers, his officers and his soldiers perished. Nabokov notes the tribes made no efforts to follow through with a “broader offensive” after the Greasy Grass melée and the Indians departed from their summer camp. A week later, the New York Times offered an editorial that predicted more violence: “The victory of the savages will inflame the border, and restless tribes will be impatient to share in the glory suddenly achieved by Sitting Bull and his braves.” The editorial suggests that defensive tactics will be needed in future to neutralize “so dangerous and determined a foe.”34

Crazy Horse Murdered After Custer’s defeat, the US government redoubled its efforts to eliminate or—at least—subdue the Native Americans, and by 1877, about two-­ thirds of all Sioux retreated to military and civilian outposts. The warrior Crazy Horse was among them, and, with reluctance, surrendered himself, in May 1877, at Fort Robinson in Nebraska. Crazy Horse handed over his rifle to secure the welfare of his people, writes Larry McMurtry. “No Indian was more respected by the Indian people than he was.”35 After surrendering, Crazy Horse refused to remain at the government outpost and instead camped far away from Fort Robinson for the next few months, showing up only when he had no choice. Although Crazy Horse was something of an enigma (Black Elk thought him “queer”), he was a respected warrior, particularly by the 900 followers who joined him near Fort Robinson. That summer, General George Crook ordered Crazy Horse to return to Fort Robinson and issued an order for his arrest. Crazy Horse finally arrived on September 5, near dusk, with a throng of Indians and soldiers. McMurtry writes that a lieutenant and a policeman tried to escort Crazy Horse to a prison cell at the fort, but when he balked, Crazy Horse was subdued and stabbed by Private William Gentles. Crazy Horse died that night, attended by Valentine McGillycuddy, who had befriended him years earlier when the doctor attended to Crazy Horse’s wife.36 Black Elk was also at Fort Robinson and told his biographer: That night I heard mourning somewhere, and then there was more and more mourning, until it was all over the camp. Crazy Horse was dead. He was brave and good and wise. He never wanted anything but to save his

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people, and he fought the Wasichus only when they came to kill us in our own country. He was only thirty years old. They could not kill him in battle. They had to lie to him and kill him that way. I cried all night, and so did my father.37

That year, the government confiscated the Dakota territories in what was termed The Agreement of 1877 and declared ownership of the Black Hills. A stronghold was established at Pine Ridge for the tribes, where McGillycuddy was appointed the first Indian agent to oversee life on the reservation.38 The Sioux, however, refuse to abandon the Black Hills and have rejected all entreaties for payment, including a Supreme Court ruling in 1980 to compensate the tribes with a $105 million payment. To this day, the Sioux have rejected payment for the sacred hills.

Massacre at Wounded Knee As predicted, the US military rounded up and arrested Native Americans in the wake of Crazy Horse’s death. One of the most memorable acts of butchery occurred near the Pine Ridge reservation at Wounded Knee Creek. In the middle of December 1890, a band of Miniconjou Sioux—120 men and 230 women and children—fled their village on the Cheyenne River and headed south for Pine Ridge, where they sought refuge from government agents and the US Army.39 “Fear drove them on,” noted writer and journalist Alvin M. Josephy, Jr., in his book, The Longest Trail. The Miniconjou, led by Spotted Elk (Unpan Gleska), also known as Big Foot, were fearful of soldiers “intent on arresting Indians who continued to practice the banned Ghost Dance religion, which the whites believed was whipping them up for war.”40 The Indians had good reason for their dread: Sitting Bull (Tatanka Iyotake), a Hunkpapa headman, had been killed days earlier, and rumors spread that Spotted Elk would be targeted next. Josephy notes that many of Spotted Elk’s Miniconjou band were devout followers of the Ghost Dance. With the Army on their trail, and with the Seventh Calvary spoiling for a fight after the trouncing of Custer a decade earlier, the Miniconjou band fled through snow and ice to reach Pine Ridge. On Sunday, December 28, the band encountered the Seventh Calvary, and they spent an uneasy night, camped together, at Wounded Knee Creek.41

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Josephy writes that Spotted Elk surrendered to the commander, Major Samuel M. Whitside. Spotted Elk was quite ill, probably from pneumonia, and was “wrapped like a mummy in an old overcoat, a scarf, and a blanket.” Whitside promised there would be no fighting. But sometime Monday morning, “a random shot started a panic.” By noon, most of the Miniconjou were dead.42 “I felt that something terrible was going to happen,” Black Elk recalls. He set out on horseback from Pine Ridge that morning and heard gunshots in the east: “I started out alone on the old road that ran across the hills to Wounded Knee. I had no gun. I carried only the sacred bow of the west that I had seen in my great vision.”43 After he reached the top of a ridge, Black Elk saw soldiers “riding along the gulch and shooting into it, where the women and children were running away and trying to hide in the gullies and the stunted pines.” Black Elk charged the soldiers and was able to rescue the women and children he had seen running. He was joined by other warriors arriving from Pine Ridge: We all charged on the soldiers. They ran eastward toward where the trouble began. We followed down along the dry gulch, and what we saw was terrible. Dead and wounded women and children and little babies were scattered all along there where they had been trying to run away. The soldiers had followed along the gulch, as they ran, and murdered them in there. Sometimes they were in heaps because they had huddled together, and some were scattered all along. Sometimes bunches of them had been killed and torn to pieces where the wagon guns hit them. I saw a little baby trying to suck its mother, but she was bloody and dead … After the soldiers marched away from their dirty work, a heavy snow began to fall. The wind came up in the night. There was a big blizzard, and it grew very cold. The snow drifted deep in the crooked gulch, and it was one long grave of butchered women and children and babies, who had never done any harm and were only trying to run away.44

Some 250 Miniconjou perished, along with 25 soldiers. The military sent a burial party to Wounded Knee a few days later and deposited the remaining bodies in a single, mass grave. Several photographers accompanied the burial crew, and images of the carnage were carried in news accounts across the globe.45 A picture of the body of Spotted Elk, knees bent and arms akimbo, frozen in the snow, would become emblematic of the slaughter. Researcher James E. Carter writes that the images are bleak:

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A snowstorm that occurred shortly after the massacre added a cold and grim edge to the scene of carnage. The photographs sold well and, together with news stories, carried the story of the massacre at Wounded Knee worldwide. Soon the event developed a meaning that transcended the reality of the tragic loss of life, and Wounded Knee became, and remains, the symbol of the inhumanity of U.S. government policy toward Native Americans.46

Synopsis I argue that first-hand stories told about the battle at Greasy Grass, the murder of Crazy Horse and the butcher of the Miniconjou at Wounded Knee are pivotal in understanding the Sioux perspective surrounding the construction of a crude oil pipeline through the territories granted them by government decree. Historian Pekka Hamalainen writes that the Sioux resisted the “hard, paternalistic grip” of the federal government that absorbed their lands and then divided and sold off parcels to homesteaders. Hamalainen writes: The federal government had abandoned its obligation to protect indigenous property for a distinctively colonial land policy. This was the dark side of the post-Civil War liberal order: the anxious, relentless impulse to absorb nonwhite people … into the nation’s fabric as individuals detached from their native cultures, while silencing the dispossessed in the name of progress.47

We will revisit progress by looking at the ways that the Dakota Access Pipeline construction was framed in discourse. But what makes the story so compelling—especially set against the backdrop of a history of starving, displaced and slain denizens—is the resistance of the Sioux: resistance that has transformed to cultural resilience on the part of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. The next chapter shows how, despite attempts to what Hamalainen calls “silencing the dispossessed,” the water protectors came to tell their own stories and shifted the paradigm that underpins the mainstream news process.

Notes 1. James McPherson (2016 August 15). Dakota Access pipeline owners sue North Dakota protestors. Associated Press International. 2. Allard’s quote was printed in a story in The Guardian newspaper (UK) after David Archambault II, Chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe,

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urged water protectors on December 5, 2016, to leave the camp sites along the Missouri River, where they had gathered since April to protest construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. Archmabault’s request came after the US Army Corps of Engineers decided to halt construction on December 4, pending public input on an Environmental Impact Statement. See: Wong (2016 December 6) Standing Rock protestors asked to go home by Sioux leader, The Guardian. 3. Awake, a Dream from Standing Rock, (documentary  film)  (2017). Kyle Cadotte, Josh Fox, Teena Pugliese and Deia Schlosberg, producers. Doug Goodfeather, Lauren Taschee, Shailene Woodley, Amy Ziering, executive producers. Myron Dewey, Josh Fox and James Spione, writers. 4. Join, or Die, The Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs On-Line Catalog, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2002695523/. 5. Pennsylvania Gazette. The Benjamin Franklin History website. Benjamin Franklin Historical Society, University of Massachusetts History Club, http://www.benjamin-franklin-history.org/pennsylvania-gazette/. 6. Constitutional Convention. The Benjamin Franklin History website. Benjamin Franklin Historical Society, University of Massachusetts History Club, http://www.benjamin-franklin-history.org/pennsylvania-gazette/. 7. Patrick J.  Kiger (2018 October 23.) How Ben Franklin’s Viral Political Cartoon United the 13 Colonies. History.com website, https://www.history.com/news/ben-franklin-join-or-die-cartoon-french-indian-war. 8. Franklin wrote several letters to William Shirley, the governor of Massachusetts, concerning taxation and restrictions the British placed on trade. The letter is titled, “On the subject of uniting the colonies more intimately with Great Britain by allowing them representatives in Parliament,” 22 December 1754. From “A Plan for Colonial Union,” The Constitution Society, https://www.constitution.org/bcp/colunion.htm. 9. Benjamin Franklin’s letter to William Shirley, titled, “On the imposition of direct taxes upon the colonies without their consent,” 18 December 1754. From “A Plan for Colonial Union,” The Constitution Society, https:// www.constitution.org/bcp/colunion.htm. 10. Francis Jennings, (1976). The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism and the Cant of Conquest, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, p. 328. 11. Op. Cit., p. 5. 12. Op. Cit., p. 15. 13. Charles C. Lemert (2013).  Social Theory: The Multicultural and Classic Readings (Third Edition). Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press. 14. Op. Cit. 15. Op. Cit., p. 147.

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16. Ed Ayers, Brian Balogh and Peter Onuf. (2008 July 4). Historians provide “backstory” on Declaration of Independence. UVAToday, University of Virginia Website. Downloaded from https://news.virginia.edu/content/ historians-provide-backstory-declaration-independence. 17. Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs to the Secretary of the Interior for the Fiscal Year. United States (January 1, 1868). Office of Indian Affairs, U.S.  Government Printing Office, p.  144. Ebook downloaded from https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=aldGAQA AIAAJ&rdid=book-aldGAQAAIAAJ&rdot=1. 18. Francis Jennings (1976). The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism and the Cant of Conquest, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, p. 212. 19. Louise Erdrich (2016 December 22). Holy Rage: Lessons from Standing Rock. The New Yorker. 20. Francis Parkman (1849/1982). The Oregon Trail. England and New York: Penguin Books, p. 37. 21. Parkman introduced his Oregon Trail readers to my great-great-great-­great grandfather, Henry Chatillon, a French-Canadian who served as Parkman’s guide. “Chatillion,” Parkman writes, “was six feet high, and very powerfully and gracefully moulded. The prairies had been his school; he could neither read nor write, but he had a natural refinement and delicacy of mind, such as is very rarely found even in women. His manly face was a perfect mirror of uprightness, simplicity, and kindness of heart” (p.  49). Readers would learn that Chatillon’s wife, my ancestor Bear Robe, was one of the daughters of Bull Bear (Mahto Tatonka), a Sioux (Kiyuska) headman. 22. A thousand pioneers head West as part of the Great Emigration (2009 November 16). History website: https://www.history.com/this-day-inhistory/a-thousand-pioneers-head-west-on-the-oregon-trail, and Railroad History of Portland, OR, Gallery, Pacific Railroad Preservation Association, 2010–2019. Website: http://www.sps700.org/gallery/essays/portlandrailroadhistory.shtml. 23. Nick Estes (2019). Our History is the Future. London and New  York: Verso, p. 94. 24. Op. Cit. 25. Kyle Powys White (2017). The Dakota access pipeline, environmental injustice, and US colonialism. Red Ink, 19(1), p. 161. 26. Larry McMurtry (1999). Crazy Horse. New  York: Lipper/Viking Press, 1999. 27. 1874 Custer expedition to the Black Hills (2017). Black Bills Visitor Magazine. Downloaded from https://blackhillsvisitor.com/ learn/1874-custer-expedition-to-the-black-hills/.

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28. Gary Enright (2018). Images of the Past. South Dakota history in film, photos, and video. Downloaded from http://www.sdpb.org/blogs/ images-of-the-past/sarah-aunt-sally-campbell/. 29. Western Frontier History, Black Hill National Forest webpage, Forest Service, US Department of Agriculture, from https://www.fs.usda.gov/ detail/blackhills/learning/history-culture/?cid=STELPRDB5115326. 30. Nick Estes (2019). Our History is the Future. London and New  York: Verso, pp. 96–97. 31. John G. Neihardt (1932/2014). Black Elk Speaks: The Complete Edition. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, p. 6. 32. Peter Nabokov (1991). Native American Testimony. New York, Penguin Books, p. 108. 33. John G. Neihardt (1932/2014). Black Elk Speaks: The Complete Edition. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, pp. 67–77. 34. An Indian Victory (1876 July 7). The New York Times (Editorial), downloaded from https://primarysourcenexus.org/2011/06/comparingreports-battle-of-little-bighorn/. 35. Larry McMurtry (1999). Crazy Horse. New  York: Lipper/Viking Press, 1999. 36. Op. Cit. 37. John G. Neihardt (1932/2014). Black Elk Speaks: The Complete Edition. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, p. 89. 38. One of my Lakota relatives, Irma R. Miller, wrote that McGillycuddy’s job was to civilize the Indians. Despite his seeming sympathy for the Sioux, McGillycuddy adopted practices that created greater dependency, thus diminishing the denizens’ resolve. In a short time reservation life dramatically altered everyone. Indians were forbidden from speaking lour anguages and practicing  our  religions. After becoming titular head of Pine Ridge, McGillycuddy cut so many corners that in a few years he was able to impress Washington by saving $50,000 in a short time, which he returned to the US government: funds that were earmarked to sustain Indian life. See Miller (2005) French-Indian Families in America’s West, Victoria, B.C.: Trafford. 39. Alvin M.  Josephy, Jr. (2015). The Longest Trail: Writings on American Indian History, Culture and Politics. Marc Jaffe and Rich Wandschneider (Editors). New York, New York: Vintage Books, pp. 24–25. 40. Op. Cit. 41. Op. Cit. 42. Alvin M.  Josephy, Jr. (2015). The Longest Trail: Writings on American Indian History, Culture and Politics. Marc Jaffe and Rich Wandschneider (Editors). New York, New York: Vintage Books, p. 25.

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43. John G. Neihardt (1932/2014). Black Elk Speaks: The Complete Edition. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, p. 161. 44. John G. Neihardt (1932/2014). Black Elk Speaks: The Complete Edition. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, p. 162. 45. John E.  Carter (2011). Wounded Knee Massacre. Encyclopedia of the Great Plains (Website). Downloaded from http://plainshumanities.unl. edu/encyclopedia/. 46. Op. Cit. 47. Pekka Hamalainen (2019) Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

CHAPTER 8

We Came to Fight a Black Snake

Abstract  This chapter examines a modern cultural clash over the construction of a crude oil pipeline on traditional Native American homelands in 2016 and 2017. The Dakota Access Pipeline snakes 1172 miles across four states and produces 570,000 barrels (23,940,000 gallons) each day. At today’s market price of 59.58 US dollars per barrel, that’s just short of 34 million US dollars per day. Critics charge that the pipeline represents a flagrant act of environmental racism, particularly in light that the course of the pipeline was redirected to skirt around the city of Bismarck’s water supply and instead run underneath the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s water source: Lake Oahe. This chapter explores scholarship on media coverage about protests over the pipeline. Keywords  Dakota Access Pipeline • Environmental racism • News media • Progress • Standing Rock Sioux Tribe In his newly released book called Lakota America, historian Pekka Hamalainen notes that “Indigenous dispossession, dysfunction, and subjugation, and … colonialism” gained momentum  in the years between Crazy Horse’s stabbing and the massacre at Wounded Knee and then  shifted into full throttle by the turn of the century as the Sioux

© The Author(s) 2020 C.-L. Coleman, Environmental Clashes on Native American Land, Palgrave Studies in Media and Environmental Communication, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34106-0_8

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became more and more subordinate, “subject to the whims of a foreign empire.”1 His people dispersed and his land sold off to homesteaders, Red Cloud told an interviewer in 1909: Think of it! I, who used to own rich soil in a well-watered country so extensive that I could not ride through it in a week on my fastest pony, am put down here… Now I, who used to control 5000 warriors, must tell Washington when I am hungry. I must beg for that which I own.2

Hamalainen writes that, faced with attacks on their languages, religions and traditions, the Lakota found ways to “preserve the core of their being.”3 He writes: They continued to meet, worship, dance, and celebrate life more or less as they always had …. That core, hardened by centuries of colonial intrusion, proved extraordinarily resilient, sustaining the principle of indissoluble Lakota sovereignty.4

Cultural resilience proves an apt description for the response of  the Sioux people. Dakota Access Pipeline.

Assessing the News Coverage More than one news reporter connected the dots across four generations from the human slaughter at Wounded Knee Creek to the contemporary protests at Cannonball River, where residents and protesters gathered for 21 months during 2016 and 2017 to oppose construction of the pipeline operated by Energy Transfer Partners. The extent of coverage ranged widely, from the Al Jazeera Media Network, based in Qatar, to the men’s magazine, Esquire, based in New York. One reporting team noted the “fight against the pipeline” was: The latest episode in two centuries of native resistance to U.S. government incursion into the northern Great Plains, part of a lineage that includes the 1876 Battle of Greasy Grass, where indigenous people defeated the U.S. 7th Cavalry in defense of their treaty rights to South Dakota’s Black Hills; the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee, where as many as 300 Lakota people were killed by U.S. soldiers.5

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A staff writer for the Christian Science Monitor agreed with the assessment, and went beyond mere linkage of historical acts, noting that the DAPL protest is Wounded Knee redux: For many protesters, particularly native protesters like Jim Jones, there is not much difference between the threat posed by DAPL and the threat the U.S. Army posed in the Sioux Wars … Mr. Jones can’t think of the DAPL protest without thinking of the Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890, which his grandfather witnessed as a boy. A Standing Rock member from the South Dakota portion of the reservation, he says he brings his grandsons here on weekends to remind them that, like Wounded Knee, “this will probably go down in history.”6

While some news coverage of the pipeline protests attended to the historical backdrop of Sioux-settler relationships, and thus provided viewers and readers with much-needed context, mainstream media attention tended to be episodic in nature: that is, superficial reporting on breaking news—rather than a deep analysis of social issues—describes stories that rise and fall in tandem with political and legal developments, such as the temporary halt to the construction toward the end of 2016. One group of researchers compared mainstream press coverage in the United States with Twitter coverage and explored stories surrounding DAPL and Indigenous opposition to shale gas exploration in New Brunswick.7 They report that most mainstream news was episodic. For example, news activity rose when bulldozers leveled the area near the Cannonball River—shattering Native American burial sites—in September 2016. Coverage escalated again when regulatory decisions were announced, such as the decision by the US Army Corps of Engineers in November to delay construction until an environmental assessment could be completed, and the announcement in January 2017 that the new administration would reverse President Barack Obama’s decision to halt the pipeline.8 Twitter activity about DAPL shows some of the same peaks and valleys when compared with quotidian media, according to the study. For example, regulatory decisions resulted in increased social media interest, similar to mainstream media. Unlike traditional news channels, however, Twitter posts rose substantially when protesters were tear-gassed, shot with rubber bullets, blasted with high-pressure hoses and slammed with stun grenades. The highlight of online activity came just days before the American

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Thanksgiving holiday in 2016, when temperatures near the protestors’ camps dipped to minus-7 degrees Celsius (19.4 degrees Fahrenheit).9 Observers captured live video—posted on social media—of protestors drenched by icy water. One reporter described the scene: Through the dark of a winter North Dakota night, some [were] so cold, and sprayed with water for so long, that their clothes were frozen to their body and crunching as they walked. So you could hear this crunching sound and this pop-pop-pop, and people yelling [to the police], “We’ll pray for you! We love you!”10

Demonstrators were assaulted for six hours, ending with 300 injured and 26 hospitalized.11 An observer for the United Nations called the attacks, “an excessive use of force,” notes freelance writer Jenni Monet, who covered the pipeline protests for months. Monet writes that Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, a representative of the United Nations, visited with Standing Rock residents after the violent melée and publicly criticized the use of stun grenades and rubber bullets to intimidate and harm dissenters.12 Tauli-Corpuz’s role as a Special Rapporteur is to assess and report back to the UN on human rights issues.13 Monet noted that the UN visitor’s journey to North Dakota signaled a historic event, which was covered by the Indian news and ignored by mainstream press (except for the Washington Post and the Associated Press), according to Monet. Critics castigated mainstream media for what they judged as lackluster coverage of the DAPL social movement. One source referred to the dearth as a “media blackout”: “It is astounding how little coverage they have gotten over these months. But this very much goes in  lockstep with a lack of coverage of climate change. Add to it a group of people who are marginalized by the corporate media, Native Americans, and you have a combination that vanishes them. And yet these protests have only intensified, the resistance camps have only grown over the months, without the media megaphone of the corporate media,” says Amy Goodman, host of Democracy Now!14

Paradigm Shift In their analysis of news coverage of the pipeline, Jill E.  Hopke, Molly Simis-Wilkinson and Patricia A.  Loew argue that mainstream media “largely ignored the concerns of demonstrators on-the-ground and their

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supporters until participation in the protests became disruptive.”15 Disruption, they note, describes the tenor of social movements, such as the one witnessed at Standing Rock, which followed on the heels of the Canadian political movement called Idle No More. The researchers write: We consider disruptive public participation to involve stakeholders who perceive themselves to be outsiders in the decision-making processes, or who are from historically marginalized groups, who make use of social media applications to amplify and document dissent when traditional modes of public participation are perceived to be ineffective [to] achieve their goals.16

In other words, online media offer social movement groups that are seen as outside the mainstream—including the DAPL water protectors and Idle No More protestors in Canada—who harnessed Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and other platforms to speak directly to publics without the typical oversight—or interference—of editors, censors and gatekeepers. Hopke, Simis-Wilkinson and Loew conclude that the DAPL coverage reveals  a wrinkle in the mass communication theory of agenda setting, where mainstream press—rather than establishing which issues get defined as newsworthy—rely on Twitter for their information-gathering strategy. The research team argues that, in the DAPL coverage, mainstream media appear to follow the lead struck by Twitter, piggy-backing onto stories generated on social media. The implication of this form of agenda setting implies that channels such as Twitter may hold some sway over traditional media, which—rather than investing in their own reportage—turn to social media as an “expert source” on civic issues. What this means is that—like the concept of a citizen scientist—social media provide opportunities and space for a sort of citizen journalist who offers insight, images and videos depicting issues where mainstream journalists have little entrée. In the case of the Dakota Access Pipeline, water protectors harnessed the channels of communication in ways rarely seen in mainstream news coverage of Native American environmental conflicts. One scholar noted Native leaders “took control of relations with media” during the DAPL resistance, “requiring them to check in while on site.”17 As a result, “Native people … created the cultural template that others were expected to learn and observe.”18 In addition to using Twitter, Instagram and YouTube, activists found Facebook an effective channel for reaching publics and distributing

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information largely free of gatekeepers. One researcher examined Facebook posts and video-sharing by water protectors during the last months of occupation on the Digital Smoke Signals site, which was overseen by Myron Dewey, an Indigenous filmmaker and journalist. Some 299 videos were posted and viewed more than 2.5  million times, according to the author of the study, Michele Martini.19 Martini argues that, in addition to reaching considerable numbers of viewers, Facebook engenders engagement, indicated by likes, comments and by the mere act of sharing videos. Martini concludes that, unlike traditional forms of mass media, online platforms enable users to participate, thus “redefin[ing] the act of witnessing as a networked, collective, and political experience.”20

Social Media Shift the Focus Research of online platforms by scholars like Martini, and Hopke, Simis-­ Wilkinson and Loew, suggests a shift occurred in the landscape of media coverage of political, social and environmental issues that embroil Aboriginal peoples. Mainstream media are frequently characterized as blind to Indigenous concerns until a crisis demands attention. For example, an analysis of television coverage of the American Indian Movement (AIM) in the 1960s and 1970s shows numerous events were altogether ignored, such as “an extremely important” treaty convention attended by thousands of Native Americans in 1974.21 Scholar Tim Baylor says the deaths of two FBI agents in 1975 during a protest at Wounded Knee received sizable attention in mainstream press. But, during 1973 and 1976, some 61 American Indians were slain on the Pine Ridge Reservation (deaths which Baylor says included AIM members and those sympathetic to their causes) that received scant national news attention.22 I have seen the same recalcitrance on the part of mainstream media to soberly approach Indigenous perspectives in news coverage. A similar example concerning environmental coverage surrounded the construction of a copper mine on traditional Ojibwe territory in Wisconsin in the 1990s, where I found that Native concerns over impacts on water, air and soil were dismissed in print, in favor of legal, technical and scientific rationalities. Indigenous concerns were framed as emotional and anarchist, while mining interests were framed as progressive and democratic.23 In essence, when mainstream media venture into some conflicts that affect Indigenous communities, reporters tend to disparage Native

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peoples and their perspectives. In studying AIM issues reported more than 40  years ago, Baylor found that traditional news focused on Native Americans’ “militancy” rather than self-defense.24 Similarly, researchers in Canada have argued that mainstream news media approach First Nations’ challenges to national authority in terms of “law and order.”25 For example, in his study of news framing of Idle No More in 2012 and 2013, Sibo Chen offers evidence that “traditional media” presented an “overwhelmingly negative stance” toward the movement.26 Idle No More was ignited in November 2012, by a piece of legislation, Bill C-45, that would revise policies that directly impact Aboriginal citizens, including, the Indian Act, the Fisheries Act, the Canadian Environmental Protection Act, the Navigable Waters Protection Act and the Canada Labour Code.27 Indigenous peoples were galvanized by the pending legal action, and the Idle No More movement was launched.28 A National Day of Action was called for Monday, December 10, and, on Tuesday, the chief of the Attawapiskat First Nation in Canada, Theresa Spence, demanded a meeting with Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the Governor General of Canada, David Johnston. Spence and her supporters began what would become a six-week-long hunger strike in protest of the legislation that would diminish Native rights.29 A researcher writing about the movement notes that social media spread information rapidly and served as a megaphone for Idle No More rallies and protests that mainstream media could no longer ignore.30 The grassroots movement gained traction through creative activities reminiscent of Saul Alinsky’s 1971 primer for community organizers, Rules for Radicals. One caper—that spread throughout Canada—was the flash mob, which took on a Native flourish: singers, drummers and dancers stopped traffic and interrupted holiday consumers in shopping malls.31 Mainstream media’s attention to the social movement shifted over time, Chen reports. Narratives sympathetic to the movement tempered more strident reporting in nascent mainstream coverage, but, on balance, “supportive voices were overwhelmed” with charges the activists were law-breakers.32 Chen adds that Indigenous peoples’ interests, according to news reports, “caused trouble for ordinary Canadians.”33 His research describes coverage as binary, in that Aboriginal peoples were presented in contrast (and in conflict) with “ordinary” Canadians.

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Us Versus Them In a similar vein, one group of writers examined DAPL news rhetoric with a word-parsing “cloud” program that segmented stories that used the term protestor from stories that described activists as water protectors.34 The team found the protestor frame invoked “authoritarian narratives” that “privileged a view of events around defiance”—findings that mirror those found by Chen in his analysis of Canadian coverage of Idle No More. Moreover, the news writing team report the use of protestor translates to fighting against—a perspective similar to the characterization of Idle No More activists as oppositional to “ordinary” Canadians. In contrast, use of the term water protectors signaled fighting for—a rhetorical point that positions those opposed to the pipeline construction as engaged in defense, rather than transgression. The authors add that using protector “privileged the Sioux’s, and any Native American tribe’s, right to define the very meaning of their activity as ‘protection’ instead of ‘protest.’”35 In researching the DAPL social movement, Erich Steinman observes that the water protector frame highlights an Indigenous perspective by affirming “relationships to land and water rather than an approach primarily resisting others and their actions.”36 He adds: In their own outward facing messages via blog posts, websites and other media, participating individuals and organizations could highlight additional dimensions, either as complementary to the message of Mni Wiconi— water is life—or foregrounding their own frames (such as the climate-oriented “keep it in the ground”).37

Tribes Pay the Price for America’s Prosperity Native American claims are often overwhelmed by the public relations, legal maneuvers and political machinations that oil and mining companies leverage in their own favor. For example, several key officials in the US government’s administration who assumed power in 2017—including the president—have had a personal interest in oil pipeline production. Carolyn Kormann, a staff writer for The New Yorker, reported that when Donald Trump assumed office, he “owned between fifteen and fifty thousand dollars of stock in Energy Transfer Partners.”38 Kormann said she could find “no documentation” that the president sold his shares to the company that operated the Dakota Access Pipeline. Similarly, one of Trump’s first

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cabinet picks was Rick Perry, who served as the US Secretary of Energy until he left office in December 2019. Perry was a member of the board of directors for Energy Transfer Partners and owned more than $150,000 in partnership units, Kormann writes. And, the chief executive officer (CEO) of Energy Transfer Partners—Kelcy Warren—donated more than $100,000 to the president’s election campaign.39 Other oil barons have shown support for the administration by donating to political action committees (PACs), which raise money for clients and causes. The CEO of one of the top oil producers in the United States—Continental Resources— “personally donated $500,000 to Trump-backed super PAC America First Action” and $100,000 to the president’s inauguration, according to one reporter.40 The president’s picks for head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the secretary of state have résumés rich with oil and gas connections. Scott Pruitt, who headed the EPA until ethics scandals forced his departure in July 2018, was among the “most hostile critics and a skeptic of climate change science,” according to a report in Politico.41 Pruitt not only captained a series of lawsuits against the agency he was appointed to lead; he also “faced accusations that he’s unusually close to energy producers … including an unprecedented, secretive alliance with the industry,” Politico reported.42 Ryan Zinke, the head of the Department of the Interior until his departure at the end of 2018, was investigated for his ties to industry, including Halliburton, “the nation’s largest oil services company,” according to the New York Times.43 The article notes that Zinke oversees gas and oil leasing on public lands. The president’s pick for the chief arbiter of America’s foreign relations, Rex Tillerson, is the former CEO of the world’s largest publicly traded oil and gas company, ExxonMobil. Tillerson left his state department leadership position in March 2018, which Vox reports as “one of the shortest tenures in modern history.”44 In light of blatant conflicts of interest on the part of the country’s leading decision-makers—both elected, gerrymandered into office, and appointed—it comes as no shock that American Indian peoples feel disempowered at the negotiating table when advocating for their rights and their resources. Sioux leaders argued vehemently that they were not consulted in good faith—as required by law—in the Dakota Access Pipeline planning stages. David Archambault II, chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe during the protest activities, notes in an editorial for The New York Times that the “permits for the project were approved and construction began without meaningful consultation.”45 Tribes, he writes,

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“have always paid the price for America’s prosperity,” including the Sioux’s water, soil and gold. Prosperity is linked to progress, an important, modern cultural value with a Janus-like personality. Progress springs from one, single word, which writer Yuval Noah Harari calls, “growth.” And growth births progress.46 While Harari discusses progress in economic terms, social theorist Charles C. Lemert provides a backdrop in social foundations, arguing that “Progress is truth.”47 Lemert explains the idea gained traction in the 1800s: at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution in Europe and as expansion began west of the Missouri River in North America. He notes: Modernity preached this simple, compelling faith. Progress was truth. In the 1890s, this idea predominated. The prevailing mood was expectation, and hope was strong even though the reality of life in the West had been hard. Thousands had died in revolutions … millions were degraded and exploited … There was no reason whatsoever to believe that life in Europe or the United States was dramatically better, or worse, for the masses than at an earlier, or later, time. Yet at the end of the nineteenth century, people continued to look ahead.48

Progress-as-value demanded a dramatic shift in thinking and behaving, encouraging citizens to take a leap of faith, away from devotion to the present, to planning for the future. Lemert braids the construct with the Protestant Ethic embraced by Max Weber: “A culture of Progress is a culture that encourages people to turn from the past, toward the future—to change their orientation in time’s space.”49 Lemert adds: “the ethical disposition of people who caught the spirit of capitalism was: Think about future goals … one had to have this ethical attitude in nearly the same measure as did the early capitalist entrepreneurs.”50 The fusing of such ideas—focusing on the future, managing growth and cementing ideology to ethics—offered loam for the seeds of capitalism, Harari notes. If we define “capital” using the notion of “goods” advanced by Adam Smith, then concrete, material “goods” get translated into corn or gold nuggets. The paradigm shifts when “capital” is no longer concrete, but rather, a function of our imagination: the idea of capital. Harari says that modern banks, for example, invest in ideas, not in capital: “What enables banks—and the entire economy—to survive and flourish is our trust in the future. This trust is the sole backing for most of the money in the world.”51 An apt analogy of such trust is paper currency used every day across the globe: the Dollar, Yuan or Rupee represents an idea that is printed on a piece of paper: the value is imagined.

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Harari’s point is that a tectonic realignment in social relations resulted from shifting our trust from today to tomorrow, and a new economic paradigm was created. “A crucial part of the modern capitalistic economy was the emergence of a new ethic, according to which profits ought to be reinvested in production,” an idea that was alien “to most people throughout history.”52 The new ethic is that economic growth is the supreme good, Harari writes. “Justice, freedom and even happiness all depend on economic growth.” Thus, investing becomes a faith-based gamble on tomorrow’s plenty, with the promise of increasing production and, in turn, investing those profits: thus the wheels of capital begin to spin. Capitalism brings with it the tenet that economic growth is the supreme good. Harari writes: “Justice, freedom and even happiness all depend on economic growth.”53 Harari’s remarks recall Benjamin Franklin’s urging to colonists in 1754 to rebuff Great Britain’s stronghold over the states so that emigrant Americans could be “numerous and rich.”54 That said, Native Americans were never included in Franklin’s vision of plentitude. Moreover, American Indian epistemologies—generally speaking—link the present with the past. Writer Nick Estes frames the Sioux perspective this way: How does ones relate to the past? Settler narratives used a linear conception of time to distance themselves from the horrific crimes committed against Indigenous peoples and the land … But Indigenous notions of time consider the present to be structured entirely by our past and our ancestors. There is no separation between past and present, meaning that an alternate future is also determined by our understanding of the past. Our history is the future.55

Today, one of the world’s most actively traded commodities is crude oil, which—beginning in February 2019—flows at the rate of 570,000 barrels (23,940,000  gallons) each day through the Dakota Access Pipeline.56 At today’s market price of 59.58 US dollars per barrel, that’s just short of 34 million US dollars per day.57 The people of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe say they will profit nothing from the pipeline. In fact, neighbors of the pipeline face a more risky future, particularly the threat of oil spills—which are not uncommon. Some of the more recent pipeline leaks include a fissure that discharged 210,000  gallons of oil in South Dakota in November 2017. According to the New York Times, the oil blackened “a grassy field in the remote northeast part of the state … sending cleanup crews and emergency workers scrambling to the site.”58 About

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a year earlier—as water protectors near Cannonball were protesting in freezing winter weather—a leak in the Belle Fourche Pipeline released more than 176,000 gallons of crude oil, which doused Ash Coulee Creek. A few months earlier, in nearby South Dakota, TransCanada’s pipeline leaked some 16,800  gallons, which took months to  redress.59 And in January 2015, a pipeline leaked into the Yellowstone River, spilling 32,000  gallons, shutting down water supplies in Montana. Since 2016, True Cos. companies reported “36 spills totaling 320,000  gallons of petroleum products, most of which was never recovered.”60 Author and environmentalist Bill McKibben called the Dakota Access Pipeline—particularly the decision to shift the burden of risk from the citizens of Bismarck to the residents of Standing Rock—“blatant environmental racism.”61 When the incoming president blocked President Obama’s decision to halt the pipeline, McKibben says the decision “fits in perfectly with one of this country’s oldest cultural practices, going back to the days of Plymouth Rock: repressing Native Americans.”62 Robert D. Bullard points to the method of risk assessment adopted by agencies created to protect people and the environment as flawed.63 Rather than focusing on “developmental, reproductive, respiratory, neurotoxic, and psychological effects” that humans and creatures face, the Litmus  test springs from the question: what is an acceptable level of risk? Moreover, the question is asked against a benchmark—not of harm or morbidity—but mortality. In other words, an oil spill becomes acceptable unless it leaves human bodies in its wake. As journalist Terri Crawford Hansen has noted, pipelines represent only the most current and newsworthy example of environmental racism.64 Hansen investigated Superfund sites in 2014—areas which the US government determines are contaminated from hazardous waste, manufacturing, landfill, mining and more—and learned that of the 1322 sites listed, 532 are located in Indian country: that’s 40 percent of all Superfund sites.65

Synopsis In summary, discourse surrounding the oil pipeline protests captures several layers of meaning that articulate the concept of progress: progress as a function of economic growth, progress as epistemological truth, progress as a buttress of capitalism and progress as ethical. Harari speculates the concept of progress shifted to a new ethos after the Industrial Revolution:

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one based on trust in the future. Such an abstract idea brings us full-circle: we return to the notion of progress that sanctifies reaping resources like gold and oil and replacing relationships with material goods: resources. A description of the pipeline’s purpose, published on Energy Transfer Partner’s website, echoes the tenet of economic progress an essential Western value. On the company’s web page, titled “Facts,” the pipeline “translates into greater energy security, lower trade deficit, and boosted economic growth” that will “improve the region’s drilling economics.”66 In contrast, writer Nick Estes argues that our collective objective should be to protect the earth for the benefit of everyone. “Indigenous and non-­ Indigenous peoples will have to turn back the forces destroying the earth,” Estes writes. And those forces? Estes called them “capitalism and colonialism.”67 The story of the water protectors who came to fight the black snake is unlike other social movements where Indigenous claims have been blithely ignored or discredited. Water protectors owned their stories and escaped— at least, in part—the social structures that relegate their narrative to an editor’s dustbin. The Sioux and their supporters wrote, filmed and distributed stories and addressed neighbors, citizens and audience members directly. In essence, the water protectors skirted around the margins of social structures, bypassing traditional media channels and created their own message frames. They shifted the news-making paradigm.

Notes 1. Pekka Hamalainen (2019) Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, pp. 380–383. 2. Warren K. Moorehead, 1914. The American Indian in the United States, 1850–1914. Andover, Massachusetts, Andover Press, p.  186. As cited in Hamalainen, 2019, pp. 380–381. 3. Op. Cit., p. 382. 4. Op. Cit. 5. Alleen Brown, Will Parrish and Alice Speri (2017 October 27). The Battle of Treaty Camp. Downloaded from https://theintercept. com/2017/10/27/law-enforcement-descended-on-standing-rock-ayear-ago-and-changed-the-dapl-fight-forever/.

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6. Henry Gass (2016 November 17). For Native Americans, pipeline sparks climate awakening. The Christian Science Monitor, Downloaded from https://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/Inhabit/2016/1117/ For-native-Americans-pipeline-sparks-climate-awakening. 7. Jill E. Hopke, Molly Simis-Wilkinson and Patricia A. Loew (2018 July 18). Social media in agenda-setting: The Elsipogtog First Nation and Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. SMSociety ‘18 Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Social Media and Society, pp. 310–314. 8. Op. Cit. 9. North Dakota protesters blasted with water cannons (2016, November 22). YouTube video credited to Al Jazeera. Downloaded from https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBP5DLt_PK8. 10. Alleen Brown (2016 November 21). Tear gas and water cannons. Downloaded from https://theintercept.com/2016/11/21/ medics-describe-how-police-sprayed-standing-rock-demonstrators-withtear-gas-and-water-cannons/. 11. Julie Carrie Wong. (2016 November 21). Dakota Access pipeline: 300 protesters injured after police use water cannons. The Guardian, https:// www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/21/dakota-access-pipelinewater-cannon-police-standing-rock-protest. 12. Jenni Monet (2017 Spring). Covering Standing Rock. Columbia Journalism Review. Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Downloaded from https://www.cjr.org/local_news/covering-standingrock.php. 13. Special Rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples, United Nations Office of the High Commissioner (webpage). Downloaded from https:// www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/Privacy/SR/Pages/SRPrivacyIndex.aspx. 14. Dakota Access Pipeline: Behind the ‘media blackout.’ (2016 December 11). The Listening Post, Al Jazeera, https://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/listeningpost/2016/12/dakota-access-pipeline-media-blackout-161210071122040.html. 15. Jill E. Hopke, Molly Simis-Wilkinson and Patricia A. Loew (2018 July 18). Social media in agenda-setting: The Elsipogtog First Nation and Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. SMSociety ‘18 Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Social Media and Society, p. 310. 16. Op. Cit., p. 311. 17. Erich Steinman (2019). Why was Standing Rock and the #NoDAPL campaign so historic? Factors affecting American Indian participation in social movement collaborations and coalitions. Ethnic and Racial Studies 42(7), p. 1083. 18. Op. Cit.

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19. Michele Martini (2018). Online distant witnessing and live-streaming activism: Emerging differences in the activation of networked publics. New Media & Society 20(11), pp. 4035–4055. 20. Op. Cit., p. 4051. 21. Timothy Baylor (1996). Media framing of movement protest: The case of American Indian protest. The Social Science Journal 33(3): 241–256. 22. Op. Cit. 23. Cynthia-Lou Coleman, (1995). Science, technology and risk coverage of a community conflict. Media, Culture and Society, 17: 65–70. 24. Op. Cit. 25. Glen Coulthard (2013 January 4). Placing #IdleNoMore in historical context (Opinion). The Tyee. https://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2013/01/04/ IdleNoMore-Historical-Context/. 26. Sibo Chen (2019). How to discredit a social movement: Negative framing of “Idle No More” in Canadian print media. Environmental Communication 13(2), pp. 144–151. 27. Canada’s Senate passes Bill C-45 as Aboriginals vow not to honor it (2012 December 6). Indian Country Today. Downloaded from https://newsmaven.io/indiancountrytoday/archive/canada-s-senate-passes-bill-c45-as-aboriginals-vow-not-to-honor-it-LeJwWoj5s0KD5yce5HH4QQ/. 28. Adam J. Barker (2015). A direct act of resurgence, a direct act of sovereignty: Reflections on idle no more, Indigenous activism, and Canadian settler colonialism. Globalizations 12(1): 43–65. 29. Op. Cit. 30. Op. Cit. 31. Op. Cit. 32. Sibo Chen (2019). How to discredit a social movement: Negative framing of “Idle No More” in Canadian print media. Environmental Communication 13(2), p. 149. 33. Op. Cit. 34. Natalie Gyenes, Connie Moon Sehat, Sands Fish, Anushka Shah, Jonas Kaiser, Paola Villarreal, Simin Kargar, Cindy Bishop, Rahul Bhargava, Rob Faris and Ethan Zuckerman (2017 March 1). Fighting for, not fighting against: Media coverage and the Dakota Access Pipeline. News Frames (webpage). Global Voices. https://newsframes.globalvoices.org/. 35. Op. Cit. 36. Erich Steinman (2019). Why was Standing Rock and the #NoDAPL campaign so historic? Factors affecting American Indian participation in social movement collaborations and coalitions. Ethnic and Racial Studies 42(7), p. 1083. 37. Op. Cit.

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38. Carolyn Kormann (2017 February 3). For the protesters at Standing Rock, it’s back to pipeline purgatory (Annals of Technology). The New  Yorker. New York, Condé Nast. https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/for-the-protesters-at-standing-rock-its-back-to-pipeline-purgatory. 39. Op. Cit. 40. Antonia Juhasz, A. (2018 October 19). Death on the Dakota Access. Pacific Standard Magazine. https://psmag.com/, Social Justice Foundation. 41. Alex Guillén and Andrew Restuccia (2016 December 7). Trump picks oil ally Pruitt to head EPA.  Politco (news article). https://www.politico. com/blogs/donald-trump-administration/2016/12/ oklahoma-ag-pruitt-epa-chief-232319. 42. Op. Cit. 43. Julie Turkewitz and Coral Davenport (2018 December 15). Ryan Zinke, face of Trump environmental rollbacks, is leaving the Department of the Interior. New  York Times. Downloaded from https://www.nytimes. com/2018/12/15/us/ryan-zinke-interior-secretary.html. 44. Zack Beauchamp (2018 March 13). Rex Tillerson has been fired. Vox (news article). https://www.vox.com/world/2018/3/13/16029526/ rex-tillerson-fired-state-department. 45. David Archambault II (2016 August 24). Taking a stand at Standing Rock (Opinion). New York Times. 46. Yuval N. Harari, (2015). Sapiens: A brief history of humankind. New York: Harper, London Vintage, p. 341. 47. Charles C.  Lemert (2004). Social theory: the multicultural and classic readings (3rd edition). Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, p. 143. 48. Op. Cit., pp. 143–146. 49. Op. Cit., p. 146. 50. Op. Cit. 51. Yuval N. Harari, (2015). Sapiens: A brief history of humankind. New York: Harper, London Vintage, p. 343. 52. Op. Cit., pp. 348–349. 53. Op. Cit. 54. Franklin wrote several letters to William Shirley, the governor of Massachusetts, concerning taxation and restrictions the British placed on trade. The letter is titled, “On the subject of uniting the colonies more intimately with Great Britain by allowing them representatives in Parliament,” 22 December 1754. From “A Plan for Colonial Union,” The Constitution Society, https://www.constitution.org/bcp/colunion.htm. 55. Nick Estes (2019). Our History is the Future. London and New  York: Verso, pp. 14–15.

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56. Devika Krishna Kumar (2019 February 21). Company News, Reuters (news article). https://www.reuters.com/article/energy-transfer-oilpipeline/update-1-energy-transfer-expands-bakken-oil-pipeline-capacityto-570000-bpd-idUSL1N20G0XW. 57. Crude Oil Prices Today: Live Chart (2010–2019). Macrotrends LLC web­ page. https://www.macrotrends.net/2566/crude-oil-prices-today-livechart. 58. Mitch Smith and Julie Bosman (2017 November 16). Keystone pipeline leaks 210,000 gallons of oil in South Dakota. New York Times. Downloaded from https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/16/us/keystone-pipelineleaks-south-dakota.html. 59. Tom DiChristopher (2016 December 12). Pipeline spills 176,000 gallons of crude into creek about 150  miles from Dakota Access protest camp. CNBC.  Downloaded from https://www.cnbc.com/2016/12/12/pipeline-spills-176000-gallons-of-crude-into-creek-about-150-miles-fromdakota-access-protest-camp.html. 60. Op. Cit. 61. Bill McKibben (2017 February 8). Trump’s pipeline and America’s shame. The New Yorker. New York, Condé Nast. 62. Op. Cit. 63.   Robert D.  Bullard (2000). Dumping In Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality. New York, Routledge, p. 115. 64. Terri C.  Hansen (2014, June 17). Kill the land, kill the people: There are 532 superfund sites in Indian Country. Indian Country Today, from https://newsmaven.io/indiancountrytoday/archive/kill-the-land-killthe-people-there-are-532-superfund-sites-in-indian-country-LpCDfEqzlkGEnzyFxHYnJA/. 65. At press time, the Environmental Protection Agency list increased to 1344 sites. 66. Facts. Dakota Access Pipeline Home Page. Energy Transfer Partners, LP. Downloaded from https://www.daplpipelinefacts.com/. 67. Nick Estes (2019). Our History is the Future. London and New  York: Verso, p. 14.

CHAPTER 9

Concluding Remarks

Abstract  This final chapter argues that, as readers, we can deconstruct junctures of power, ideological beliefs and social equity by examining social discourse surrounding the discovery of a 9000-year-old skeleton in the Pacific Northwest and by the recent construction of a crude oil pipeline on traditional Sioux lands. I argue that a sober examination of the discourse on the case studies shows power in play: where scientific viewpoints hold greater currency than Indigenous knowledges, and where empirical methods of conducting research sometimes displaces moral judgments. In essence, our beliefs are moored to cultural underpinnings that seem, well, normal. But, as critics have suggested, “normal” is the varnish that coats our beliefs. When scientists insist on their right to dig through the bones of an ancient human, their freedoms are framed as correct and just, because discourse conflates empiricism with truth. American Indian tribes in the Northwest argued that, in a pluralistic democracy like ours, their rights and freedoms are also just and no less legitimate than the scientists’ claims. News discourse offers a metaphorical slate where meanings are created and negotiated. But the discursive slate is hardly blank—the slate is engrainedd with meanings that arise from struggles over power: who gets to frame messages, and what are the ensuing  power dynamics? How are such messages ideological, and where how do equity and justice prevail? We can see how the construction of the crude oil pipeline gets framed as “energy independence” that offers “freedom” from reliance on foreign © The Author(s) 2020 C.-L. Coleman, Environmental Clashes on Native American Land, Palgrave Studies in Media and Environmental Communication, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34106-0_9

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sources of petroleum products. But the discourse poorly informs publics on who profits from such independence. Hidden from view are the junctures of power that link commercial power-brokers with government officials, news organizations, and other parties charged with making decisions and sharing information on behalf of all citizens. Social equity gets trumped by special interests, and, as a result, Native Americans pay the price for other Americans’ prosperity. Despite the toll taken on equity and justice for Native Americans, resistance seen in the pipeline protest and the demand for the repatriation of Kennewick Man signals a transformation from transgression and defiance to resilience. Perhaps we can take heart, knowing that Indigenous voices are being heard via their own media channels, and without censorship from non-Indians. Keywords  Discourse • Equity • Ideology • Intertextuality • Power dynamics • Resilience The driving force behind my inquiry centers on the question: How are meanings created and why? Taking a look at how conflicts unfold that embroiled Native American communities with government agencies, commercial entrepreneurs, news reporters, scientists and elected representatives in North America allows us to dig into meaning construction against the backdrop of the public sphere, social discourse and mass media. Communication researchers have explored meaning construction assiduously, and the study of message framing is one of the most popular in our field: thousands of papers have been presented at meetings and published in journals in the last decade alone.1 Critics, however, say this pursuit needs more muscle. Specifically, scholars have taken colleagues to task in academic forums, encouraging research that examines framing more deeply, asking how are meanings constructed not just in the moment but over time; who is producing meanings; where in the communication process do power disputes arise; what is the ideological nature of power struggles; how do we characterize dynamics in the junctures of communication; and how do equity and justice crystallize?2 I have tried to address the questions. This book unpacks the inquiry by looking at case studies that center on environmental and scientific skirmishes: Kennewick Man and the Dakota Access Pipeline construction. I offer two prisms to view the issues in social

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discourse: a prism of power relations that stems from the Media Hegemony Hypothesis and a prism that describes Indigenous Metaphysics. Each vantage point helps us deconstruct how disputes emerge from a disjuncture in power and in equity (fairness), and how ideological and cultural orientations to knowing and being are framed in discourse. Social discourse surrounding the 9000-year-old skeleton unearthed in the Pacific Northwest illuminates power relationships and equity issues. So does discourse that embroiled Native peoples over the construction of a crude oil pipeline. Studying both case studies enriches framing approaches to environmental and risk communication by considering how meanings are created over time and reveals who is empowered to construct meanings in conflicts among Native peoples and special interests, including government and industry. Examining news, blogs, websites, books, speeches and films exposes junctures where power relationships unfold and emerge. Moreover, a variety of texts—regardless of whether they are comic books or dime novels—pack references to other texts. For example, a modern headline that says “Indians on warpath” recalls Western movies from directors like John Ford, who framed cinematically “wild Indians” scalping settlers. Philosophers like Julia Kristeva argue that readers can infer one set of meanings—like “warpath”—from a decidedly different origin: a newspaper headline may seem to refer to a memorable film. The result is a patchwork of texts that represent a patchwork of meanings. Both case studies demonstrate ways-of-knowing from a range of views: Native American, empiricist, religious, consumer, activist, commercial and more; some of which are leveraged as superior in value and, more strikingly, as normal. And this book addresses the critic’s quest for more muscle in such studies by asking how equity and justice issues uncoil in discourse.

Ideology in Play I have asserted that ideology underpins power relationships revealed in discourse. For example, officials representing government agencies and commercial interests are accorded legitimacy by setting the parameters of debate: authorities are able to define the core features of an issue and offer solutions to solve the conflict, and reflect an ideological viewpoint. In the case of Kennewick Man, the scientists’ stake in examining the ancient bones was paramount and outdistanced the legal, moral and cultural tenets

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of Indigenous concerns. As a result, scientists cemented meanings in their messages that proved salient throughout the 20-year timeframe. As we have discovered, the tenor of the messages is one in which scientific practices move societies forward. Practitioners of science, the doing of science (sciencing) and scientific ideologies were—at times—fused into a single frame: a personification of science animated in discourse as an entity that can suffer harm or be taken hostage. In a similar vein, the crude oil pipeline was framed to embody the progressive nature of energy extraction from the bowels of North America, providing citizens with freedom. Such freedoms arise from myriad quarters: freedom to engage in commerce, freedom gleaned through greater energy production, and freedom to provide “energy that moves our communities forward.”3 Scientists in the Kennewick Man debate also raised the specter of their freedom and right to conduct scientific studies, thus aligning their perspectives with energy producers in the pipeline dispute, and with the country’s founding ideological principles—principles that ignored the Indian, who was deemed ineligible for citizenship. Native peoples—both in the United States and in Canada—were entrusted in the care of their respective governments as wards of the state, unlike settlers who were endowed with the privilege of citizenship. Thus, scientists added an ideological inflection to their arguments. If scientists’ rights and freedoms outweigh American Indians’ rights and freedoms, then the Kennewick Man case study demonstrates how such power displaces equity. Equity worries arose in the pipeline construction when the Standing Rock Sioux argued their concerns went unheeded. Tribal Chairman David Archambault II pointed to a history of relationships with US power-­ brokers who were downright deceitful, and modern actions enabled the pipeline construction without meaningful consultation with Native American tribes, farmers, ranchers and townsfolk.4 “It’s a familiar story in Indian Country,” Archambault notes. “The Sioux peoples signed treaties in 1851 and 1868. The government broke them before the ink was dry.” More than 60 years ago, the United States flooded the tribe’s orchards and farmlands after damming the Missouri River and creating Lake Oahe, where the current pipeline snakes underneath. While protests over the pipeline were underway, the new seats of the administration in the United States—the power-brokers of the country—were occupied by men with personal interests in pipeline production, including the president, the head of the Department of Energy, the secretary of the Environmental

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Protection Agency, the head of the Department of the Interior and the Secretary of State. Thus, examining the discourse surrounding the dispute clarifies equity and justice claims on the part of the Sioux. Native American religious rights were metaphorically bulldozed and burial sites were actually leveled in 2016 when Dakota Access Pipeline construction workers destroyed ground that was home to ancient Native American cairns and sacred prayer sites.5 A similar story unfolded when Kennewick Man was extracted from his burial place, much to the dismay of Native Americans who consider the removal disrespectful and illegal. The anthropologist on the scene, James Chatters, added insult to injury by fetishizing the remains, which he called “an absolute treasure.”6 Chatters embraced the discovery as his own, claiming, “I had been given a gift from the past.”7 In 2004, Chatters and artist Tom McClelland created “a limited edition” of bronze busts of Kennewick Man they offered for sale.8 The ersatz likeness of Kennewick Man is fetishized in material form, available for purchase by “museums, collectors and other Kennewick Man aficionados.” McClelland told a reporter: “I think this is another way to enhance giving public ownership of this discovery.” For Chatters, the appeal of the replica is that “You can have it out for people to see and touch … It’s as permanent as anything is.”9 The business venture expanded, and Chatters partnered with Bone Clones, Inc., a company that sells reproductions of skulls and skeletons that are “virtually indistinguishable from the original,” according to the website.10 Today you can buy a reproduction of the Kennewick Man skull online for 387 US dollars. Selling facsimiles of the skull commodifies  an ancient being whom local tribes regard as a relative. Bone Collecting Casts a Racial Hue An overview of two decades of coverage illustrates racial themes throughout the coverage of Kennewick Man. The skull was described in ways that mirror racial typing of humans by phrenologists—as Caucasoid and Polynesian—and modern Indians were presented in contemporary press coverage as “Red men” and scientists as “White men.” The coverage typifies power relations and racial prejudices that Teun van Dijk describes as the institutional and elite “discursive presentation and legitimation for their policies, decisions and actions taken with respect to ethnic groups.”11 Discourse about ethnic events, van Dijk opines, is “consistently described from a White, Majority point of view.” Non-Indigenous scientists, like

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Chatters, seized the authority to name and classify Kennewick Man, while Native Americans bear the labels created by their oppressors: the vanishing Indian, the Indian Princess and the noble savage.

Knowledge Systems Chatters’ attitudes toward the tribes assumed a derogatory tone that reveals the ideological underpinnings that position scientific knowledges in opposition to Indigenous knowledges. As the Washington Post reported, Chatters is: Harshly critical of the Indians. “This modern-day hyper-politicized ethnicity business is irrelevant” to his pursuit of science, he says. “God, I will tell you, this has been an education in the racial politics of America.” He says some of the evidence presented by local tribes to support their claim of ancestral connection to the bones has been invented.12

Chatters dismissed the conflict as one of “political correctness” and “racial politics,” which serves to diminish the Indians’ legal rights under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) and reduces their claims to the ancient skeleton as—in Chatters’ words— “bunk.”13 Coverage of DAPL followed a similar pattern, where extracting resources was seen as a progressive, economic boon, promising “energy security” and “economic growth.”14 Native peoples in the United States and Canada who contested pipeline construction throughout North America are painted as trouble-makers and law-breakers and, in the case of the Canadian news, they caused strife for “ordinary Canadians.”15 News that framed citizens as “ordinary” and Native peoples as “peculiar” follows the ideological arc that van Dijk has labeled as racial prejudice, where ethnic groups are cast as different—either in language, appearance or norms—when compared with the “dominant majority groups.”16 Readers may recall that, earlier in the book, we saw how today’s American Indians are framed through a vintage lens: as artifacts and curios relegated to a time that has passed. And, in many ways—as seen through exemplars in social discourse—Indians are imaginary. Vanished. Relegating Native Americans to the past places them in a stasis that I have called a discursive amber. What emerges as a critical feature in the deconstruction of discourse in environmental and scientific scenarios is the creation of truth. Philosopher Michel Foucault reminds us that “Truth-claims are

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constructed through discourses. The question isn’t whether something is true, factual or correct-what matters is how truth is produced.”17 The ability to create truths by setting the framework for an agenda and crafting the parameters of debate is a mark of power—power to shape meanings. In the example of the Kennewick Man discourse, a reporter covering the story in its early stages successfully framed the issue when she said: “I’m asking about the central question of concern: Who was here first?”18 Tribal stakeholders regard the question as trivial and approached the issue over the ancient bones as one of legal rights, buttressed by claims of morality, equity and justice. That is, the federal government recognized the need to protect Indigenous remains and relics and passed NAGPRA in 1990 to honor cultural principles: albeit some five generations after the head of the warrior Black Hawk was stolen from his grave. The struggle among stakeholders to frame and convey the essence of the Kennewick Man story shows what Foucault described as: The multiplicity of discursive elements that can come into play in various strategies. It is this distribution that we must reconstruct, with the things said and those concealed, the enunciations required and those forbidden, that it comprises; with the variants and different effects—according to who is speaking, his positions of power, the institutional context.19

The struggle arises in part from differing knowledge systems, such as Occidental and Native American epistemologies, which occupy a significant portion of the discursive landscape examined in this book. In essence, studying discourse requires us to think structurally: to ask how we can focus our inquiry into the power dynamics in discourse. Knowledge systems offer one avenue of discovery where we can unpack how meanings appear within the historical backdrop of Indian-settler relationships. Clearly scientific ways-of-knowing were accorded greater currency than Indigenous metaphysics, which was dismissed as religiosity, myth or invention. In contrast, the cultural and ideological underpinnings of empirical knowledges and methods are often hidden from view, as if sciencing is stripped of social values. The so-called detachment of values arises from the premise that the explorer, the scientist, the anthropologist, the physician and the researcher, are isolated from the object: the focus of study. The idea of objectivity advanced by philosopher René Descartes championed “brute facts” and “unflinching neutrality” in a space freed from

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morality.20 A deeper dive into discourse reveals the taken-for-granted tenets of empiricism’s progressive arc: that progress enriches societies. Indigenous metaphysics that embrace relationships, respect, reciprocity, resistance and morality are framed as oppositional to progress: such perspectives are seen as regressive as the antiquated Red man. Foucault mused that traditionally held knowledge systems (such as Indigenous perspectives) are often hidden from view and thus overlooked in favor of more dominating perspectives. He notes: I believe that by subjugated knowledges one should understand something else, something which in a sense is altogether different, namely, a whole set of knowledges that have been disqualified as inadequate to their task or insufficiently elaborated: naive knowledges, located low down on the hierarchy, beneath the required level of cognition or scientificity.21

While subjugated knowledges may lie dormant in the public sphere, once they enter the arenas of discourse—as in the Kennewick Man and Dakota Access Pipeline narratives—the struggle over meanings begin to take shape. At this juncture, Foucault says, “criticism performs its work.”

Resistance Meets Resilience “Criticism performs its work” in large part through the resistance of the Native American stakeholders who fought for their legal and moral rights, thus bringing into the discursive limelight Indigenous Metaphysics. Tribal peoples in the Pacific Northwest actively resisted the scientists’ claims to truth and progress by forming an inter-tribal coalition to protect their dead through the courts of law and by creating a rhetorical platform within social discourse that captures their views. In addition to sharing their perspectives on public websites, local denizens met with government officials and reporters to have their voices heard first-hand, rather than having them reinterpreted and reframed by non-Indians. In the Kennewick Man case, local tribes held firmly to their traditions and beliefs, which signaled a transformation from resistance to resilience. Resilience was marked by what Ecologist Crawford Stanley Holling considers, “a robust, organic system that is continually in flux, and faces untold threats.”22 While resilience typically is defined as the ability to “bounce back” from some sort of disruption to a state of equilibrium, I prefer the more macro-level description of resilience offered by Holling,

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who argues that living systems are continually active—in motion and in flux—and that equilibrium or stasis poorly depicts resilience. Consider an ecosystem with myriad elements that intersect with other systems, at numerous levels of connection, under multiple circumstances, at various points in time, and with a variety of effects. Some elements may come under threat, but resilience embedded in the system sustains the ecosystem as a whole. I argue that cultural resilience can be witnessed by the continued presence of Indigenous peoples who have resisted threats and survived in spite of prodigious attempts to eliminate them. Threads of resilience are seen in the acknowledgment of Indian claims throughout the last two decades of the Kennewick Man coverage, despite references to tropes and stereotypes of renegades on the warpath. Resilience is seen in social discourse surrounding the Dakota Access Pipeline, where subjugated beliefs shot to the forefront of media coverage. So much so, that one group of researchers argues that mainstream media at times took their lead from narratives delivered by the Sioux peoples, demonstrators and supporters off-site. Activities during the pipeline protests in North Dakota penetrated social discourse with viral images, videos and stories launched by special interests. Spikes in social media attention were seized by mainstream media, thus influencing narratives presented in traditional news channels. The researchers opine that, “Journalists are now chasing public attention and employing social listening techniques that they did not need to in prior decades. There is a synergic relationship between social media posting, media attention, and public interest.”23 The twist—mainstream news engaging in sourcing from Indigenous voices on social media—has “decreased” the “role for mainstream media in setting the public agenda.”24 In essence, attention paid to protests over the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline waned and waxed over the (nearly) two-year period, with mainstream media coverage described as ebbing until major policy decisions—such as the temporary halt of construction or violence and arrests—sparked attention.25 Shining a spotlight on the pipeline construction and disruption may well have shifted the paradigm of traditional news gathering and agenda setting to encompass a wider range of voices heard in social media forums, thus giving subjugated viewpoints footing in social discourse.

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Synopsis Taken altogether, hegemony, ideology, economic progress and epistemologies offer structural dimensions to investigate power dynamics in discourse. Think of discourse as an intricately woven tapestry: the word for text—from the Latin textus—refers to the texture of a weaving.26 The concept of intertextuality arises from this simile and refers to the ways that texts (or songs or poems or Tweets) mirror and reflect other texts. Presenting images in news magazines of the actor Patrick Stewart as a doppelgänger for Kennewick Man fuses an intertextual relationship of a British actor, playing a fictional French Starfleet commander, who assumes the persona of an ancient Native American. In the case of the construction of a pipeline across more than 1000 miles in North America, where does the story begin? We can choose from myriad threads to chart the narratives: do we begin with the election of a reality-television host as president of the United States? Or do we start by looking at the policy that earmarked 134 million acres for Native Americans in 1851? If we consider how scientific rationalities have supplanted cultural rationalities, do we review the works of René Descartes or Vine Deloria, Jr.? A multiplicity of meanings is available in—which Kristeva calls “semiotic plurality”—a reflection of the myriad threads woven into the discursive tapestry that creates our meanings.27 Studying discourse means we can tack back-and-forth between the warp and weft of the text to catch a glimpse of meaning construction at work. The work is messy. An ancient skeleton is described as a treasure. Indigenous Americans are considered barbaric. Scientists say they need free rein to engage in their studies. Getting to the heart of the truth is a daunting task because of the forces that struggle to instill meaning. The best we can do is try to discern and describe those forces in play. Discourse is like patchwork: The text is not an autonomous or unified object, but a set of relations with other texts. Its system of language, its grammar, its lexicon, drag along numerous bits and pieces—traces—of history so that the text resembles a Cultural Salvation Army.28

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Notes 1. Coleman, Cynthia-Lou, Joseph Provencher and Benjamin Smith (2017). Framing theory and research: Where have been and where are we going? Paper presented to the Western States Communication Association (February), Salt Lake City, Utah. 2. See, for example: Anders Hansen (2011). Communication, media and environment: Towards reconnecting research on the production, content and social implications of environmental communication. International Communication Gazette 73(1–2); Kevin Carragee and Wim Roefs (2004). The neglect of power in recent framing research. Journal of Communication, 54; and Paul D’Angelo (2002). News framing as a multi-paradigmatic research program: A response to Entman. Journal of Communication, 52(4). 3. Moving America’s Energy, One Mile at a Time. Energy Transfer Partners website. Downloaded from https://www.energytransfer.com/. 4. David Archambault II (2016 August 24). Taking a stand at Standing Rock (Opinion). New York Times. 5. Standing Rock Sioux Tribe condemns destruction and desecration of burial grounds (2016 September 4). Indian Country Today. Downloaded from https://newsmaven.io/indiancountrytoday/archive/standing-rocksioux-tribe-condemns-destruction-and-desecration-of-burial-groundstbGDUq4PW0aOVUZEiVIweA. 6. Lee Hochberg (2001 June 19). Kennewick Man (section). The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. Downloaded from Nexis-Uni. 7. James C. Chatters (2002). Ancient Encounters: Kennewick Man and the First Americans. New York: Simon & Schuster. 8. Chris Mulick (2005 June 12). Kennewick Man or bust. Tri-City Herald. Kennewick, Washington. 9. Op. Cit. 10. Kennewick Man Skull. Bone Clones, Inc. Chatsworth, California (webpage). https://boneclones.com/product/kennewick-man-skull-BH-047. 11. Teun van Dijk (1987). Communicating Racism: Ethnic Prejudice in Thought and Talk. Newbury Park: Sage, pp. 44–45. 12. Steve Coll (2001 June 3). The body in question: The discovery of the remains of a 9000-year-old man on the Columbia River has set off a conflict over race, history and identity that isn’t just about the American past, but about the future as well. The Washington Post. Washington, D.C. 13. Op. Cit. 14. Facts. Dakota Access Pipeline Home Page. Energy Transfer Partners, LP. Downloaded from https://www.daplpipelinefacts.com/.

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15. Sibo Chen (2019). How to discredit a social movement: Negative framing of “Idle No More.” Canadian Print Media. Environmental Communication, 13(2), 144–151. 16. Teun van Dijk (1987). Communicating Racism: Ethnic Prejudice in Thought and Talk. Newbury Park: Sage, p. 27. 17. Michel Foucault (1976/1980). Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings. Colin Gordon, editor. New  York: Random House, p. 93. 18. Profile (2002 September 15). 60 Minutes. CBS News transcripts. Lesley Stahl (reporter), Shari Finkelstein (producer). 19. Michel Foucault (1976), in Charles C. Lemert (2004). Social Theory: The Multicultural and Classic Readings (3rd ed.). Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, pp. 465–471. 20. Clifford Christians, John P. Fackler and Mark P. Ferré (1993). Good News: Social Ethics and The Press. New  York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 36. 21. Michel Foucault (1976), in Charles C. Lemert (2004). Social Theory: The Multicultural and Classic Readings (3rd ed.). Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, pp. 465–471. 22. Crawford Stanley Holling (1973). Resilience and stability of ecological systems. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, 4, 1–23. 23. Jill E. Hopke, Molly Simis-Wilkinson and Patricia A. Loew (2018 July 18). Social media in agenda-setting: The Elsipogtog First Nation and Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. SMSociety ‘18 Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Social Media and Society, p. 314. 24. Op. Cit. 25. Op. Cit. 26. Oxford English Dictionary (online). Downloaded from https://wwwoed-com.proxy.lib.pdx.edu/view/Entry/200002?rskey=w3cTox&res ult=1#eid. 27. Chelsea Reynolds (2019). Building theory from media ideology: Coding for power in journalistic discourse. Journal of Communication Inquiry, 43(1), p. 50. 28. Vincent B.  Leitch (1983). Deconstructive Criticism. Ithaca, New  York: Cornell University Press, p. 59.

Index1

A Aboriginal, 16, 18, 25n9, 42n7, 44n24, 44n31, 44n34, 62, 73, 128, 129, 137n27 See also American Indian; Indigenous; Native American Acquisitiveness (phrenological characteristic), 35, 49 Adhesiveness (phrenological characteristic), 34, 49 Adorno, Theodor W., 81 Agenda setting, 127, 136n7, 136n15, 149, 152n23 Alimentativeness (phrenological characteristic), 35, 49 Alinsky, Saul, 129 Amativeness (phrenological characteristic), 34, 41, 49 American Indian, 19, 27–42, 47, 52, 55, 60, 75, 81, 83, 87, 92, 93, 101n133, 128, 131, 133, 136n17, 137n21, 137n36, 146

Ancient One, 62, 65, 66, 67n3, 75, 76, 82 See also Kennewick Man; Skeleton; Skull Approbativeness (phrenological characteristic), 35, 49–51 Archambault, David, 28, 144 Army Corps of Engineers, U.S., 62, 76, 85, 104, 118n2, 125 Army, U.S., 87, 115, 125 Authenticity, 31, 51, 53, 65–66 B Barbarism, barbaric, 40, 50, 150 Barton, Clara, 32 Battle of Greasy Grass, 124 Battle of Little Big Horn, 124 Baudrillard, Jean, 53 Benevolence (phrenological characteristic), 35, 41, 49, 50 Bering land bridge, 85

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2020 C.-L. Coleman, Environmental Clashes on Native American Land, Palgrave Studies in Media and Environmental Communication, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34106-0

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INDEX

Big Foot, 115 Birth of a Nation (film), 91 Bismarck (North Dakota), 28, 104, 112, 134 Black Elk, 104, 112–114, 116 Black Hawk, 42, 43n16, 45–56, 57n6, 58n37, 147 Black Hills, 28, 111, 112, 115, 124 Black snake, 105–108, 123–135 Boas, Franz, 54, 55 Bone clones, 145 Bourdieu, Pierre, 24 Brain, 27–42, 43n20, 51, 53, 54 See also Mind; Skull Buckshot, 27–42 Bullard, Robert D., 134 Burke Museum, 64, 66 C Caitlin, George, 46 Calculation (phrenological characteristic), 34, 35, 49 California, 14, 101n133, 109, 110 Cannonball, 125, 134 Capital, capitalism, 37, 132–134 Carbon dating, 61 Caucasian, 29, 30, 37–40, 42, 61–63, 74, 76, 86, 88, 90, 93 See also Caucasoid Caucasoid, 61, 62, 75, 83, 86, 87, 145 See also Caucasian Causality (phrenological characteristic), 35, 50 Cautiousness (phrenological characteristic), 35, 49, 50 Channels (media), 3, 6, 7, 9, 23, 28, 30, 39, 125, 127, 135, 149 Chatters, James, 60–63, 65, 66, 74, 75, 77, 80, 83, 88–90, 92, 145, 146, 151n7

Cherokee, 31, 39 Civil, civilized, civilization, 29, 39–41, 47, 55, 108, 109 Civil War, U.S., 53, 110, 111 Clark, William, 109 Clemens, Samuel, 32 See also Twain, Mark Climate change, 5, 6, 9, 126, 131 Colonialism, colonial, colonizing, 74, 78, 105, 107, 108, 117, 123, 124, 137n28 Colonies, 105–107, 118n8, 118n9, 138n54 Coloring (phrenological characteristic), 35, 49 Colville (Indians), 62, 64, 65, 76, 78, 85 Combativeness (phrenological characteristic), 34, 41, 49–51 Comparison (phrenological characteristic), 35, 50, 65, 75, 90 Concentrativeness (phrenological characteristic), 34, 49 Conscientiousness (phrenological characteristic), 35, 41, 49 Constitution, U.S., 47, 105, 109 Constructiveness (phrenological characteristic), 35, 49, 50 Cooper, James Fennimore, 92 Crania, 41, 55 See also Brain; Cranium; Mind; Phrenology; Skull Crania Americana (book), 33, 37, 38, 54 Cranium, 40, 41, 47, 61, 86 Crazy Horse, 111, 113–115, 117, 123 Crude oil, 23, 28, 104, 117, 133, 134, 143, 144 Culler, Jonathan, 16, 17, 72 Custer, George Armstrong, 112–115, 119n27

 INDEX 

D Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), 28, 103–117, 124–127, 130, 131, 133, 134, 137n34, 142, 145, 146, 148, 149 Declaration of Independence, 105, 108 Delano, Columbus, 111 Deloria, Vine, 18–20, 22, 71, 78, 79, 150 Department of the Interior, U.S., 62, 70 Destructiveness (phrenological characteristic, 35, 47, 49–51 Discourse, 5–9, 18, 23, 30, 42, 55, 60, 63, 64, 69–93, 104, 117, 134, 143–148, 150 See also Discursive Discursive, 4, 6, 31, 39, 41, 53, 70, 71, 92, 141, 145–148, 150 DNA, 63, 65–66, 71, 76, 85, 98n85, 98n88 Dysart, Erin, 67n2, 68n16, 70, 94n1, 100n128 E Economics, 9, 28, 72, 86, 132–135, 146, 150 Energy Transfer Partners, 124, 130, 131, 135 Environmental racism, 134 Epistemology, 16, 18–20, 71, 78, 81, 133, 147, 150 See also Knowledge, knowledge systems Ethics, 17, 20–22, 26n24, 29, 37, 70, 72, 79, 89, 94n12, 108–109, 147, 148 See also Moral; Morality Ethiopian, 29, 30, 37, 38, 61

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See also Negroid Ethnic, 76, 84, 86, 136n17, 137n36, 145, 146 See also Race Eventuality (phrenological characteristic), 35, 46, 49 Evidence, 30, 36, 37, 51, 62, 63, 65, 73, 79, 81–84, 129, 146 F Facebook, 127, 128 Faith, 3, 131–133 Fetish, fetishist, fetishism, 145 Firmness (phrenological characteristic), 41, 49–51 First Nations, 74, 129 Form (phrenological characteristic), 2, 7, 17, 20, 35, 36, 38, 41, 47, 49, 52, 72, 91, 105, 127, 128, 145 Fort Laramie Treaty, 110, 111 Foucault, Michel, 4, 5, 17, 18, 22, 30, 81, 146–148 Fowler, Lorenzo Niles, 32, 46 Fowler, Orson Squire, 32, 46, 47, 55, 56 Frame, 7–9, 12n19, 12n22, 12n27, 15, 16, 22, 24n1, 25n7, 67n2, 68n16, 70, 79, 93, 94n1, 94n10, 100n128, 129, 137n21, 137n26, 137n32, 142, 143, 151n1, 151n2 Framing, 6–9, 12n19, 15, 16, 22, 24n1, 25n7, 70, 79, 93, 94n10, 129, 142, 143 See also Frame; News framing Franklin, Benjamin, 105–108, 118n5, 118n6, 118n8, 118n9, 133, 138n54 Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), 37, 43n22

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G Gall, Francois (Franz) Josef, 33, 34, 36, 37, 43n18 Gentles, William, 114 Ghost Dance, 115 Gold, 28, 110–113, 132, 135 Grant, Ulysses S., 111, 112 Great Britain, Britain, 33, 107, 118n8, 133, 138n54 Great Library of Alexandria, 90, 91 H Hamlet, 52, 57n18 Harari, Yuval Noah, 132–134 Hegemony, hegemon, hegemonic, 15–18, 23, 71, 109, 143, 150 Holy Road, 109–111 Hope, 8, 23, 24, 35–37, 41, 49, 55, 132 Horkheimer, Max, 81 I Ideality (phrenological characteristic), 35, 49 Ideology, 31, 72, 82, 93, 94n12, 132, 143–146, 150, 152n27 See also Worldview Idle No More, 127, 129, 130 Imitation (phrenological characteristic), 35, 49 Indian in the Cupboard (book, film), 91 Indigenous, 15–23, 25n9, 26n26, 28, 30, 31, 39, 40, 46, 52, 54, 66, 70, 71, 73, 76, 78–81, 84, 85, 93, 104, 107, 110, 117, 123–125, 128–130, 133, 135, 137n28, 144, 146–149

Individuality (phrenological characteristic), 35, 41, 49 Inhabitiveness (phrenological characteristic), 34, 49 Intertextuality, 8, 89–92, 150 J Jackson, Andrew, 46 Jantz, Richard, 64, 66, 84 Jennings, Francis, 91, 92, 108, 109 Join or Die (woodcut), 105, 107 Journalism, 72 Journalist, 53, 63, 70, 115, 127, 128, 134, 149 K Kennewick (Washington), 60, 63 Kennewick Man, 27, 28, 59–66, 69–93, 142–150 See also Ancient One; Skeleton; Skull Keystone pipeline, 104, 139n58 Knowledge, knowledge systems, 18–22, 28, 30, 32, 35, 38, 42n8, 50, 66, 73, 79–82, 93, 146–148 See also Epistemology Kristeva, Julia, 89, 143, 150 Ku Klux Klan, 91 L Lakota, 105, 109, 110, 113, 120n38, 124 Language (phrenological characteristic), 35, 50 Lemert, Charles C., 108, 109, 132 Lewis, Meriwether, 109 Locality (phrenological characteristic), 35, 49

 INDEX 

M Macbeth, 90 Malay, Malaysian, 29, 30, 37, 38, 40, 61 Marvelousness (phrenological characteristic), 35, 49 Mass media, 2, 5–7, 9, 13–16, 23, 30, 71, 72, 91, 104, 128, 142 Materiality, materialism, 5 McGillycuddy, Valentine, 114, 115, 120n38 McKibben, Bill, 3, 134 McMurtry, Larry, 111, 114 Mind, 16, 18, 20, 23, 27–42, 72, 84, 93, 119n21 See also Brain; Skull Miniconjou, 115–117 Minthorn, Armand, 75, 79, 81, 82 Mirthfulness (phrenological characteristic), 35, 49 Mongoloid, 86, 87 Moral, 7, 17, 20–22, 26n24, 28, 29, 32, 33, 37, 40, 42, 43n18, 43n23, 59, 70, 72, 73, 79, 80, 89, 94n12, 104, 108–109, 131–133, 143, 147, 148 Morality, 43n23, 72, 73, 79, 94n12, 104, 131–133 See also Ethics; Moral Moriori, 65 Morton, Samuel George, 33, 34, 37 Murray, Patty, 66 N NAGPRA, see Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) Native American, 14, 15, 18, 19, 22–24, 31, 39–42, 45, 46, 51–56, 58n25, 60–63, 65, 66, 70, 73–76, 78–82, 84–88, 90, 91, 93,

157

94n12, 96n37, 97n64, 98n85, 98n88, 99n99, 100n125, 103, 108–110, 114, 115, 117, 125–130, 133, 134, 142–148, 150 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), 62, 63, 77–79, 81, 87, 146, 147 Negroid, Negro, 38, 39, 86 See also Ethiopian New Echota, 31 News framing, 7–9, 12n19, 12n22, 12n27, 15, 16, 22, 24n1, 25n7, 67n2, 68n16, 70, 79, 93, 94n1, 94n10, 100n128, 129, 137n21, 137n26, 137n32, 142, 143, 151n1, 151n2 News media, 15, 70, 129 Nez Perce (Indians), 62, 64, 66, 76 Noble savage, 91–92, 146 North Dakota, 28, 104, 126, 149 Nossaman, Sarah Welch, 54 O Obama, Barack, 66, 104, 125, 134 Objective, objectivity, 23, 80, 81, 135, 147 Occidental, 3, 18, 19, 53, 70, 77, 81, 108, 135, 143 See also Western Oil spill, 133, 134 Oral history, 75, 81 Order (phrenological characteristic), 35, 49 Oregon, 14, 62, 69, 83, 109, 110 Oregon Trail (book), 56, 110, 119n21 Osage, 39 See also Wahzhazhe The Other, 93 Owsley, Douglas W., 64, 66, 67n3, 74, 77, 83, 84

158 

INDEX

P Pelt, Jeff van, 78, 80 Perry, Rick, 131 Personification of science, 85–86, 144 Philadelphia, 32–33 Philoprogenitiveness (phrenological characteristic), 34, 49 Phrenology, phrenological, 29–34, 36, 37, 39–42, 45–47, 50–52, 55, 76, 88 Picard, Jean-Luc, 63, 64 Pine Ridge, 115, 116, 120n38 Pipeline, 23, 28, 104, 105, 117, 124–126, 130, 133–135, 143, 144, 146, 149, 150 Place, 4, 18, 19, 22, 25n9, 34, 49, 53, 75, 82, 112, 145, 146 See also Space Political correctness, 89, 146 Politics, political, 5, 7–9, 15, 17, 30, 37, 64, 70–72, 77, 79, 86, 88, 89, 105, 107, 125, 127, 128, 130, 146 Polynesia, Polynesian, 38, 64–66, 86, 145 Power, 3–5, 7–9, 14–19, 21–23, 30, 32, 35, 36, 50, 72, 74, 79, 86, 105, 109, 112, 130, 142–145, 147, 150 See also Power relationships Power relationships, 5, 16, 17, 21, 71, 73, 104, 143 Prejudice, 73, 145, 146 Progress, 3, 8, 28, 29, 31, 39, 60, 70, 71, 93, 108–109, 117, 132, 134, 135, 148 See also Economic progress Protestant Ethic, 132 Pruitt, Scott, 131

R Race, 29–31, 37–40, 42, 45, 54–56, 58n28, 61, 63, 67n1, 73–77, 79, 80, 82, 83, 86–89, 91, 93, 96n40, 97n58, 97n69, 98n80, 99n98, 99n107, 101n135, 108, 151n12 See also Racial/racialized; Racism; Racist; Prejudice, Ethnic Racial/racialized, 23, 29–31, 37, 39, 42, 52, 56, 61, 64, 67n4, 78, 87, 88, 136n17, 137n36, 145, 146 Racism, 73, 82, 89, 92, 134 Racist, 82, 88 Red Cloud, 111, 112, 124 Reflexivity, 24 Relationships, 3, 8, 9, 15–23, 29, 52, 60, 71, 73, 79, 91, 104, 125, 130, 135, 143, 144, 147–150 Repatriation, 71, 78, 79 Reporter, reporting, 9, 28, 60–66, 70, 72, 74–82, 85–88, 90–93, 105, 124, 126, 128, 131, 142, 145, 147, 148 See also Journalism; Journalist Resilience, 20–22, 37, 40, 117, 124, 148–149 Resistance, 18, 22, 35, 49, 69–93, 104, 117, 124, 126, 127, 148–149 Resources, 2, 19, 20, 131, 135, 146 Rosetta stone, 90 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 92 S Sacred, 9, 20, 28, 73, 79, 82, 86, 87, 111, 113, 115, 116, 145 Sauk (Indians), 42, 46 Savage, Savagery, 39, 40, 50, 74, 91–92, 108, 109, 114, 146

 INDEX 

Science, Sciencing, Scientificity, Scientism, 2, 3, 5, 7, 8, 14, 17, 19, 21, 24, 27–30, 32–33, 36–37, 40–42, 51–54, 60, 63, 65, 70, 71, 75, 78, 80, 82–86, 89, 91, 93, 131, 144, 146–148 Secretiveness (phrenological characteristic), 35, 46, 47, 49–51 Self-esteem (phrenological characteristic), 34, 35, 49–51 Seventh Calvary, 112, 113, 115 Shakespeare, Williams, 52, 64, 90 60 Minutes (television program), 74, 88 Simulacra, Simulacrum, 53 Sitting Bull, 113–115 Size (phrenological characteristic), 35, 41, 49, 50, 100n121, 111 Skeleton, 27, 28, 53, 55, 60–66, 67n10, 69–71, 75–80, 82–91, 93, 98n85, 143, 145, 146, 150 See also Ancient One; Kennewick Man; Skull Skull, 145, 30, 31, 34, 37–39, 41, 42, 42n7, 44n24, 44n31, 44n34, 45–56, 60–66, 74, 75, 83, 84, 86–88, 90 See also Brain; Crania; Cranium; Mind; Phrenology; Skeleton Social structure, 18, 73, 135 South Dakota, 124, 125, 133, 134 Sovereignty, 60, 93, 107, 124 Space, 4, 5, 9, 33, 35, 49, 127, 132, 147 Spence, Theresa, 129 Spirituality, 21, 22, 70, 73, 104 Spotted Elk, 115, 116 Stahl, Lesley, 74, 88 Stewart, Patrick, 63–65, 75, 88, 90, 150

159

Structure, 14, 16, 18, 39, 73 See also Social structure Subjugated knowledge, 148 Superfund sites, 134 Surgeon General, U.S., 53 Symmetry, Symmetrical T Tabloid, 63 Tauli-Corpuz, Victoria, 126 Taxidermy, 53 Tillerson, Rex, 131 Time (phrenological characteristic), 4, 6, 7, 9, 12n19, 15, 16, 22, 29–31, 33, 35, 36, 49, 64, 71, 77, 79, 82, 87, 89, 92, 93, 120n38, 128, 129, 132, 133, 142, 143, 146, 149 Trail of Tears, 31 TransCanada pipeline, 134 Tune (phrenological characteristic), 35, 49 Turner, James, 54, 90, 100n123 Twain, Mark, 32 See also Clemens, Samuel Twitter, 125, 127 U Umatilla (Indians), 62, 64, 66, 75, 76, 78, 79, 81, 82 United Nations (UN), 126 V Van Dijk, Teun, 72, 73, 75, 145, 146 Vanishing Indian, 55, 146 Veneration (phrenological characteristic), 35, 41, 49, 51

160 

INDEX

W Wahzhazhe, 39 See also Osage (Indians) Wanapum (Indians), 62, 76 Warren, Kelcy, 131 Wasicu, wasichun, 112 Water protector, 104, 117, 118n2, 127, 128, 130, 134, 135 Weight and resistance (phrenological characteristic), 35, 49 Wells, Samuel Robert, 32 Western, 147 See also Occidental Whitman, Walt, 32, 56 Wildcat, Daniel R., 19, 20

Willerslev, Eske, 65, 85 Worldview, 69 See also Ideology Wounded Knee, 113, 115–117, 123–125, 128 Y Yakama (Indians), 62, 64, 76 Yorick, 52 Z Zinke, Ryan K., 131