Native Americans of North America

D2

b

Canada

By any measure, health issues are one of the most pressing concerns in aboriginal communities in Canada. The prevalence of diabetes among First Nations is at epidemic levels, at least three times greater than the national average, with high rates occurring in all age groups. The rates of diabetes are higher on-reserve than off-reserve. An aboriginal peoples survey showed that Métis also have diabetes at rates above nonaboriginal people. They also have less access to health services compared to the general population. Diabetes rates are also increasing among Inuit, who have the lowest access to health-care services. This increase is due to the rise of risk factors such as obesity and physical inactivity in some Inuit communities.

Statistics show that AIDS cases among aboriginal people in Canada rose steadily from 1984 to 1996, when aboriginal people constituted 5.6 percent of all AIDS cases for which the ethnicity of the patient was known. A higher proportion of aboriginal people are diagnosed with AIDS at less than 30 years of age than nonaboriginal people. Aboriginal people who travel between cities and rural reserve communities are a factor in the spread of HIV/AIDS.

Tuberculosis (TB) still strikes aboriginal people in Canada. A combination of malnutrition, confinement on crowded reservations with poor sanitation, and lack of immunity to the TB bacterium create conditions for the epidemic. Incidences of TB leveled off in the 1980s, but aboriginal Canadians living on reserves were still ten times more likely to have TB than nonaboriginal Canadians in 1990.

No national studies provide information about the prevalence or incidence of family domestic violence in aboriginal communities. However, several provincial and regional studies have grim findings. One 1997 Health Canada study of some northern aboriginal communities reported that between 75 percent and 90 percent of women were battered. The study found that 40 percent of children in these communities had been physically abused by a family member. A 1991 study by Aboriginal Nurses Association of Canada found alcohol and substance abuse and economic problems are factors in much of the family violence.

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Other physical health issues that affect aboriginal peoples in Canada are poverty and suicide. According to a report by First Nations leader Matthew Coon Come, six out of every ten aboriginal preschoolers live in dire poverty. Aboriginal babies are more than twice as likely to die at birth than nonaboriginal babies. Grinding poverty, hopelessness, and despair have led some Indian youths to commit suicide at higher rates than the overall Canadian population.

Health services for First Nations are the responsibility of provincial, territorial, and federal governments. The provinces and territories provide or pay for physician and hospital services that are covered under their health insurance plans. The federal government provides treatment and public health services to First Nations that are not included under provincial and territorial plans, such as prescription drugs, dental services, eyeglasses, and medical transportation in remote areas.

In 1979 Canada’s new Indian Health Policy recognized the need for increased involvement of aboriginal people in the health-care system. Indeed, the federal government supports the transfer of control of health programs to First Nations and Inuit organizations. It funds services through contract arrangements. Community-centered health-care systems such as the Cree Regional Board of Health, Labrador Inuit Health Commission, and Blood Tribe Department of Health service the special needs of their communities. Aboriginal organizations such as the Assembly of First Nations have worked with Health Canada on strategies for eliminating TB on reserves. Inuit Tapirisat Canada has initiatives concerning HIV/AIDS and mental health as well as a cancer information project.

Despite aboriginal involvement, major challenges still exist to solving the aboriginal health crisis in Canada. Federal funding does not come close to addressing aboriginal physical and mental health needs. Thousands of aboriginal health-care workers need to be trained, and doctors who set up practices in remote regions need to be retained.

E

Arts and Culture

In the United States and Canada, Native American cultures are reaffirming their identities by combining aspects of their ancient traditional ways with 21st-century mainstream culture. Native Americans, like any other peoples, live in apartment buildings, shop at malls, and surf the Internet. They also dress in traditional clothes, speak their own languages, and practice their own religions. Native ceremonial practices such as Haida potlatches, Lakota Sun Dances, and Iroquois (Haudenosaunee) thanksgiving rites coexist with satellite dishes and cell phones.

E

1

Religion

Despite a long history of persecution and suppression by the U.S. and Canadian governments, hundreds of indigenous religious traditions have endured in North America. Ancient traditional religions of the Pueblo and Iroquois (Haudenosaunee), for example, survive and remain strong, while other Native Americans practice Christianity exclusively. Some Native Americans pray in church and attend Indian healing ceremonies, finding that both traditions offer comfort. Still others follow the Peyote religion, which attracts followers from many U.S. tribes.

Native Americans in both the United States and Canada have a long tradition of transmitting religious ceremonies and ideas through traditional stories. There is no written sacred book like the Bible, although some North American Indians keep records with sacred symbols written on wooden sticks or woven into wampum belts. Native North American storytellers have kept alive spiritual and cultural traditions by telling stories that pass on a wide range of teachings about a people’s creation, moral behavior, laws, and survival skills.

Tribes have also worked to protect important religious items. In the United States, tribes have been outraged by the desecration and looting of Indian graves. They have demanded the return of skeletal remains, burial goods, and other sacred objects taken from them. For many years, Native Americans fought to reclaim ancestral remains and sacred objects despite tremendous opposition by some museum directors and curators, state historical societies, physical anthropologists, archaeologists, and National Park Service officials who wanted to study them. Native American protest efforts paid off in 1990 when the U.S. government enacted the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). NAGPRA protects Indian gravesites from looting and sets up legal procedures for Indians to reclaim artifacts of religious or ceremonial importance. Reclaiming skeletal bones, totem poles, masks, wampum belts, medicine bundles (collections of objects believed to heal disease and ward off ghosts), and other objects from museums has inspired tribes to revive old ceremonies and tribal traditions. In Canada, the Cultural Property Export and Import Act, a federal law passed in 1977, protects aboriginal cultural property, including sacred objects and human remains.

E

2

Language

In the past, a community’s elders passed on Native American languages to the young. As Native American communities have become more dispersed, however, this natural process has been disrupted, and hundreds of spoken languages have died out. Of the more than 300 original languages in North America, only 150 are still spoken, and less than 50 are widely spoken. Some of the most widely spoken languages include Yupik and Inuit-Inupiaq (Eskimo), Navajo, Ojibwa (Chippewa), O’Odham (Papago and Pima), Cherokee, and Choctaw. A 1990 Canadian House of Commons report stated that 43 of Canada’s 53 indigenous languages were on the verge of extinction. Only three languages—Cree, Ojibway, and Inuktitut—were believed to be strong enough to survive.

Many Native American communities in the United States and Canada have sought to revitalize their languages before elderly speakers die. Without languages, ceremonies cannot continue, children cannot communicate with their grandparents, and adults cannot voice prayers. On many reservations and reserves, Native Americans are preserving and revitalizing languages through classroom and online instruction and radio shows broadcasting in languages such as Inuktitut, Lakota, Mi’kmaq (Micmac), and Navajo.

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3

Arts

Native North Americans have long defined and shaped their own art forms. Today, Native American artists create with clay, animal hides, and grasses as well as with computers, camcorders, and welding equipment. They produce quillwork, ceramics, baskets, jewelry, and other traditional art forms as well as contemporary beaded baseball hats and steel sculptures. Many Native American artists produce work that has a clear connection to their forebears but incorporates Western techniques and styles. Other artists create works that reflect upheavals that have decimated Native American societies.

In the United States, there are countless Native American artists. A few prominent artists during the second half of the 20th century included Arthur D. Amiotte (Oglala Lakota), who was influenced by the traditional artistic legacy of the Lakota, and Harry Fonseca (Maidu), who created a series of works placing coyote figures in contemporary settings. Peter Jemison (Cattaraugus Seneca) used mixed media in his work, and Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (Salish/Cree/Shoshone) created abstract landscapes using ancient pictographs as inspiration. Kay WalkingStick (Cherokee/Winnebago) often painted two sections—a landscape and an abstract image—in one work, while Emmi Whitehorse (Navajo) used large canvases to explore nature. Important sculptors included Allan Houser (Apache), who produced sculpture in stone, wood, and bronze, and Truman Lowe (Winnebago) who sculpted out of natural materials such as wood and leather.

Canada also had many noteworthy aboriginal artists in the second half of the 20th century. Carl Beam (Ojibwa) juxtaposed images from Western and Native American history in his art. Robert Davidson and Dorothy Grant, both Haida, worked together; he created designs for her clothing. Faye Heavyshield (Blood), a sculptor, combined elements from her Blood and boarding school upbringing. Alex Janvier (Dene) blended stylized abstract renderings of natural forms with traditional Plains arts, and Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun (Cowichan-Okanagan) used his work to address his Indian heritage along with a broader range of concerns such as controversial political issues.

Beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s there was a steady increase in contemporary Native American music. Native American musicians combined their ancient chants and instruments with folk, rock, reggae, country, New Age, or rap to convey their messages. Saxophonist Jim Pepper (Creek/Kaw) developed a unique mix of jazz and tribal music, while members of the Canadian band Kashtin (“tornado” in the Innu language) blended folk-rock and Cajun. Singers such as Buffy Sainte-Marie (Cree) protested against government mistreatment of indigenous peoples. Harold Littlebird (Pueblo), Joanne Shenandoah (Oneida), and John Trudell (Santee Dakota) became important U.S. recording artists in the 1980s and 1990s.

Native North Americans have a rich history of expressing cultural heritage through performance. In traditional societies, most celebrations, whether sacred or social, involved music and dance. Native Americans have continued to express themselves through traditional music and dance performances. They also have adopted Western forms of performance including ballet and modern dance. Renowned troupes such as the Native American Dance Theater in the United States and the Chinook Winds Aboriginal Dance Program in Canada stage dramatic dance performances.

When Kiowa writer N. Scott Momaday won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1969 for his novel House Made of Dawn (1968), the acclaim he received helped draw attention to Native American literature. Since that time, scores of Native North American people have published works. Drawing much of their power from the oral tradition, many Native American writers use their own tribal worldviews as the vehicle to present modern themes about Native American cultural experiences and struggles. Writers in the United States such as Linda Hogan (Chickasaw), Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna Pueblo), and James Welch (Blackfeet/Gros Ventre) explored the power of traditional beliefs and the despair of living in two worlds. They and others wrote about Native Americans struggling with alcoholism, dams that flood traditional fishing grounds, and tourists who invade sacred sites. The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993), one of the works by world-renowned poet and novelist Sherman Alexie (Spokane/Coeur d’Alene), formed the basis of his screenplay for Smoke Signals (1998), a movie he also produced. Native Americans such as Hanay Geiogamah (Kiowa/Delaware) also used plays to delve into indigenous issues.

In Canada, Jeannette Armstrong (Okanagan) explored the social obstacles and racial stigmas that indigenous peoples in Canada face in Slash (1985). Thomas King (Cherokee) wrote works that combined humor with commentary about the stereotypes indigenous peoples fight against. Alootook Ipellie was the first Inuit writer to have his collection of short stories, Arctic Dreams and Nightmares (1993), published. Lee Maracle (Métis) presented strong perspectives on cultural autonomy. Playwrights such as Tomson Highway (Cree) produced works that also explored indigenous issues.

Although a handful of Indian filmmakers were already making documentaries in the United States and Canada, in the 1970s hundreds of Native Americans began producing, directing, and acting in independent film and video. Since 1991, festivals organized by Native Americans have resulted in wider opportunities for Native American film and video artists. These artists include Victor Masayesva, Jr. (Hopi), Sandra Osawa (Makah), and Beverly Singer (Tewa-Navajo) in the United States, and Alanis Obomsawin (Abenaki) and David Poisey (Inuit) in Canada.

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