“Being” Indigenous “Now”

How does the special issue look set beside similar 1960s survey texts from other settler states or nations? What questions do such juxtapositions provoke?

To begin, consider brief overviews of the publication and distribution histories of relevant international texts. In 1962, prior to the publication of the special issue, the Indian Affairs Branch of Canada’s Department of Citizenship and Immigration published a brief promotional booklet titled The Indian in Transition: The Indian Today.⁷ Addressed to “other,” non-Native Canadians, the illustrated booklet highlights mid-twentieth-century Indian “progress” toward integration in a number of key areas and promotes the branch’s several programs for Indian advancement. The booklet’s rhetorical strategies also work to engender goodwill toward First Nations peoples among the general public. The following year, the Indian Affairs Branch appears to have updated and repackaged its booklet into a more concise, essay-length version less obviously a promotional vehicle for government policies. Titled “Canadian Indians Today” and attributed to the non-Native writer William Dunstan, the illustrated essay was the lead article in the December 1963 issue of the Canadian Geographical Journal, a monthly publication of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, based in Ottawa. Dunstan was a former journalist and public relations counsel, as well as a former Information Officer for the Department of Citizenship and Immigration; in 1963 he worked for the Indian Affairs Branch as an administrative officer in public relations and information services.⁸ It is possible he either wrote or helped produce The Indian in Transition in 1962. Similar to its more official-looking predecessor, Dunstan’s essay is addressed to non-Native “fellow Canadians” who have recently “rediscovered” Indians living in their midst. Following journalistic rather than governmental discourse conventions, the essay supports its arguments for Indian “progress” and builds its case for promoting goodwill by profiling the considerable accomplishments of contemporary First Nations individuals and communities. In 1964, as part of its ongoing efforts, the Indian Affairs Branch released a slightly updated but otherwise identical edition of The Indian in Transition.⁹

Also in 1964, a year before publication of the special issue, when it would have been in copyediting and early production, the Hawaiian writer John Dominis Holt saw his short book and photo essay On Being Hawaiian published with the Star-Bulletin Printing Company, an arm of Honolulu’s major newspaper.¹⁰ Holt’s project, intended primarily for an audience of Hawaiian state citizens, residents, and tourists, was a response to the kinds of questions repeatedly posed by non-Hawaiians about the distinctiveness and value of Hawaiian identities “today.” (A second printing, with a new introduction offering an account of the book’s origins, was issued a decade later by Honolulu-based Topgallant Publishing.)¹¹

In Australia, the Sydney-based commercial press Angus and Robertson released a collection of scholarly essays, Aborigines Now: New Perspective in the Study of Aboriginal Communities, edited by the non-Native anthropologist Marie Reay.¹² Like the 1965 special issue, Aborigines Now had been inspired by an unprecedented event in 1961, the Conference on Aboriginal Studies sponsored by the Australian Social Science Research Council and convened by the renowned non-Native anthropologist W. E. H. Stanner of the Australian National University. According to Reay and to reports she cites from the Sydney Morning Herald, the conference featured the work of older, eminent anthropologists but ignored contributions by their junior colleagues. In her introduction Reay promises a surprisingly singular “new perspective” on “aboriginal questions” [sic] by presenting, instead, essays by a range of “younger” anthropologists, non-Native researchers whose fieldwork had begun no earlier than 1950 (xv). Their research reveals how contemporary policies promoting “assimilation” and “integration” affect “aboriginal life today” [sic].¹³

Meanwhile, across the Tasman in Aotearoa New Zealand, in 1964 the Department of Maori Affairs, based in Wellington, released an updated and expanded third edition of its illustrated promotional booklet The Maori Today. Emphasizing a narrative of ongoing Māori “progress” alongside the maintenance of Indigenous cultural traditions, this publication was aimed at both a national audience and at educated international visitors. Previous editions had been produced under the same title in 1949 and 1956. Between the release of the second and third editions, in 1960, the New Zealand National Film Unit, working in conjunction with Maori Affairs and the Departments of Information Services and Tourist and Publicity, completed a sixteen-minute documentary film version of the booklet, also titled The Maori Today. The short film was screened at locations throughout Aotearoa New Zealand in 1961. As with its print publications, the government hoped its film would not only highlight a record of achievement in race relations but also inspire Māori to work toward the “progress” it desired. Over the remainder of the decade, the film circulated among New Zealand’s international diplomatic postings, in its original English version and in several versions dubbed into European and Asian languages, for the purposes of building a positive image abroad and promoting tourism.

Finally, in 1968, the year the revised special issue appeared in book form, the New Zealand commercial press Blackwood and Janet Paul, based in Auckland, published a substantial collection of essays, The Maori People in the Nineteen-Sixties: A Symposium, edited by Erik Schwimmer, who was a Pakeha (New Zealander of European descent), a former officer in Maori Affairs, and a former editor of the department-sponsored journal Te Ao Hou/The New World.¹⁴ The press editors had conceived this project in 1964 as an updated version of the 1940 collection The Maori People Today: A General Survey, edited by the Pakeha scholar I. L. G. Sutherland and published by the Auckland branch of Oxford University Press. Although this text remained popular two decades after its initial release, its focus and much of its content were no longer current, and it was long out of print. The Maori People in the Nineteen-Sixties was expected to appeal, similar to its 1940 predecessor, both to scholars and students and to educated lay people interested in Māori culture. Although published commercially, cost of production was defrayed by a literary grant from the Maori Purposes Fund Board of the Department of Maori Affairs.

One immediate effect of setting the special issue within this broader context is to further highlight its editors’ choice of the relative time marker. Levine and Lurie were not alone in giving prominent place to ambiguous language, but they clearly had other options. It seems appropriate to ask: Is their “today” the same as that asserted for First Nations peoples in Canada or Māori in Aotearoa New Zealand? Does it coincide with the “being” of Hawaiians or the “now” of Indigenous Australians? And given Levine’s and Lurie’s non-Native identities and secure locations within the U.S. academy, what is the political and ethical valence of their ambiguous “today”? Is it a recognition of survivals and transformations, a celebration of people continuing to “be” Indigenous “now” “in the Nineteen-Sixties” despite change, or is it a sad accounting of communities and individuals judged “today” to be inevitably less Native than their ancestors? We might highlight, as well, the varying use of the authoritative definite article and universalizing singular noun. The titles by Dunstan and Reay stand out for their lack of any article and for their explicit use of the plural nouns “Indians” and “Aborigines.” A more significant effect of placing the special issue beside similar surveys is that it raises questions about which individuals and institutions possess the material power to have their “accurate” and “up-to-date” assessments of Indigenous peoples published in the dominant media and circulated widely within a given historical period. In the 1960s, following the success of the AICC—which had brought together some 460 delegates representing ninety Indigenous nations and which had incited the formation of the National Indian Youth Council—whose voices were invited to speak within the expressive field of the provocative phrase “The Indian Today”?¹⁵ And who ultimately controlled their selection, arrangement, tenor, and volume?

Consider basic comparisons of the eight print texts I list, including subject positions and status of their authors and editors, their relative sizes, their organizing structures and methodologies, and their inclusion of illustrations or supplementary materials:

1. “The Indian Today” (United States, 1965)
   • It is coedited by two non-Native scholars, one man and one woman.
   • It comprises eleven pieces (one of which is cowritten) by twelve contributors, six men and six women, all but one of whom has an academic affiliation.
   • Two contributors are American Indian, one man and one woman, though they are not identified as such; both have academic affiliations.
   • Eleven contributors, including the two Indians, work within anthropological or sociological methodologies; one, the regular editor, works in the interdiscipline of American studies.
   • A small cartoon heads each essay; two essays include as illustrations a total of thirteen black-and-white photographs of older Indian individuals, Indian artifacts, and reservation buildings.
   • The front cover includes a color photograph of a “Sioux dance and give-away” on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota, taken by the regular editor.
2. The American Indian Today (United States, 1968)
   • It is coedited by the same non-Native scholars.
   • It comprises thirteen pieces (one of which is cowritten) by thirteen contributors, six men and seven women.
   • The essays are now arranged into five titled sections, including an overview section on American Indian history.
   • It includes a section titled “About the Authors,” which identifies two contributors as American Indians, one man and one woman.
   • It includes a brief bibliography and, as an insert, a fold-out map of the North American Indian population distribution in 1950.¹⁶
   • It includes nine black-and-white photographs as illustrations for only one essay.
   • The same photograph is on the front cover.
3. The Indian in Transition: The Indian Today (Canada, 1962, 1964)
   • It is an anonymous government publication.
   • It is divided into eight titled sections.
   • It is primarily written from a sociological perspective.
   • It is illustrated with sixteen black-and-white photographs of mostly contemporary Indian men, women, and children in a variety of relevant scenes: labor, housing, education, government, and health.
   • The front cover uses stark black-and-white contrasts and incorporates a subtle graphic design of arrows and tipi.
4. “Canadian Indians Today” (Canada, 1963)
   • It has a single male non-Native author with no academic affiliation, employed by the government.
   • It is an essay-length text with a primarily sociological perspective, presented in a journalistic style.
   • It is illustrated by seventeen black-and-white photographs of contemporary men, women, and children in various occupations, plus a map of the Indian population distribution in 1961, a chart of the Indian population by linguistic families in 1962, and a chart of the Indian population distribution by province in 1963.
5. On Being Hawaiian (Hawai’i, 1964)
   • It has a single male author of Hawaiian descent, with no academic or government affiliation.
   • It is an essay-length text followed by fifty-three illustrations, historical and contemporary black-and-white photographs of Hawaiian landscapes, artifacts, and men, women, and children in a variety of scenes.
   • It is written from an insider’s perspective and has a primarily literary rather than a primarily anthropological or sociological voice.
   • The front and back covers feature a thousand-year time line of Hawaiian history, illustrated by a contemporary mural of relevant Hawaiian scenes.
6. Aborigines Now: New Perspective in the Study of Aboriginal Communities (Australia, 1964)
   • It is edited by a single female non-Native anthropologist.
   • It comprises a foreword by an established, male non-Native anthropologist and an introduction by the female editor, followed by thirteen pieces written by younger contributors, seven men and six women, all non-Native. Seven of the contributors are identified as holding PhDs, four master’s degrees, and two bachelor’s degrees; eight are identified as currently having academic affiliations, one as holding a government position, and one as working as a journalist.
   • Nine of the contributors work within the field of anthropology; the other four work within the fields of history, human geography, demography, and literary studies.
   • The essays are loosely arranged by geographical location of researcher’s fieldwork.
   • It includes ten black-and-white photographs of contemporary Indigenous men, women, and children as general illustrations and three reproductions of contemporary drawings as figures for a specific essay. It also includes a brief note on terminology and a list of contributors.
   • The cover features four of the black-and-white photographs included as illustrations.
7. The Maori Today, third edition (New Zealand, 1964)
   • It is a mostly “anonymous” government publication.
   • It comprises a foreword by the minister of Māori affairs, a male Pakeha, followed by thirteen titled chapters. Only one chapter is attributed to a specific author, who is male with an academic affiliation and who is identified as being of Māori descent.
   • It is illustrated with ninety-five black-and-white photographs of contemporary Māori men, women, and children in a variety of scenes and includes three maps, lists of relevant statistics, and a table of Māori population figures from the 1961 census.
   • It is written with a predominantly sociological approach but includes a chapter on Māori language written by a linguist.
   • The front cover features detail of a Māori feather cloak, and the back cover features the same cloak with a greenstone hei tiki (jade carving).
8. The Maori People in the Nineteen-Sixties: A Symposium (New Zealand, 1968)
   • The male academic Pakeha editor is supported by an editorial board, two male Pakeha scholars and one male Māori consultant who works in broadcasting and continuing education.
   • It comprises sixteen pieces (one of which is cowritten) by fifteen contributors, twelve men and three women, nine of which are identified as having academic affiliations in New Zealand (the editor moved to Canada during production).
   • Five contributors are of Māori descent, three men and two women; two of the men have academic affiliations.
   • Approaches are dominated by anthropological and sociological methodologies but include linguistics, literature and arts criticism, Indigenous history, and creative writing. Pieces are arranged alphabetically by author rather than by subject matter or approach.
   • Fifty-four contemporary black-and-white photographs of Māori men, women, and children are organized into four groups interspersed among the chapters. The book includes a glossary of Māori words, an extensive general bibliography, and a separate comprehensive bibliography of literary representations of Māori.
   • The front cover features a photograph of a contemporary Māori wood carving; the back cover lists contributors and affiliations.

None of these surveys develops sustained international comparisons. Each equally focuses on its national situation; if contributors glance outward, typically it is to engage examples of better-known “minorities,” such as African Americans, or “immigrants,” primarily from Europe.¹⁷ Juxtaposed, however, their outlines demonstrate significant differences and draw attention to what is either minimal in the special issue of the MASJ or absent from its pages: an individual and personal Indigenous perspective on contemporary identity, status, challenges, or aspirations; a diversity of methodological approaches; maps, statistical data, and comprehensive bibliographies made available for readers’ study; photographs of Indigenous men, women, and children in a variety of contemporary scenes; and a keen interest in language, literature, and the arts as vital aspects of indigeneity. What are the implications of these differences?

Although it lists authors’ academic affiliation at the end of each article, the special issue includes no contributor biographies and gives no indication of the twelve authors’ ethnic or tribal identities. Two contributors, Shirley Hill Witt (Mohawk) and Robert K. Thomas (Cherokee), identified personally and professionally as American Indians, but since their names do not mark them as Native, it is likely that many original readers were unaware of their Indigenous status or links to specific Indian nations.¹⁸ The placement of Witt’s and Thomas’s work is thus of particular interest, as is the tenor of their published voices and how they are framed by their own prefatory remarks or those of the non-Native editors.

Witt’s and Thomas’s essays are positioned directly after those of coeditors Levine and Lurie, giving them some prominence. Titled “Nationalistic Trends among American Indians” and “Pan-Indianism,” respectively, the essays appear related to each other but, at first glance, stand out as distinct from the seven essays that follow. All but one of these are based on localized anthropological or sociological fieldwork in primarily reservation or rural settings, and all offer accounts of how a set of issues affects a specific (often isolated) Indian community. In fact, Witt’s and Thomas’s essays are more similar to the others than they first appear: both work comfortably within anthropological or sociological methodologies. In the 1960s, this means their authors take a more or less “objective” stance toward their subject and do not emphasize their perspectives, experiences, or feelings as individuals or members of specific groups. It appears, however, that the editors worried about this aspect of the essay by Witt. Hers is one of only two preceded by a headnote written by the regular editor.¹⁹ Levine draws attention to the potentially polemical nature of Witt’s position and voice, confirming that anthropological “objectivity” is the expected norm. The headnote also subtly hints at but does not disclose Witt’s Indigenous identity: “The paper which follows is not only a review of the historical antecedents of Indian nationalism, but also a characteristic statement of the point of view of the highly vocal National Indian Youth Council.—SGL” (51; emphasis added). Witt is not identified as a member of this activist organization, and the tone and actual content of her work are professional. There is no personal or political voice active in this scholarly essay, marked or unmarked. If anything, a distinctly Indigenous voice is carefully avoided.

The inclusion of an Indigenous personal voice, whether primary or one mode among several, profoundly affects On Being Hawaiian and The Maori People in the Nineteen-Sixties. Holt’s rumination on the early 1960s experience of “being” Hawaiian was originally intended for newspaper publication, and his words fill only twenty of the book’s ninety-five pages, the others being devoted to fifty-three illustrations. This brief meditation is powerful as a personal statement on contemporary Indigenous identity and an ethical statement on human dignity and the rights of colonized peoples to be subjects as well as objects of study. Early on, Holt states, “They tell us we are all kinds of things, but what do we think of ourselves?” (7). Though well educated, Holt was not a professional scholar; he confronts the complexity of his own and others’ identities as Hawaiians from an unapologetically insider’s perspective and in a decidedly literary voice. He begins with two related but distinct questions: “What is a Hawaiian?” and “Who is a Hawaiian in the modern state of Hawaii?” (7). In his answer, it becomes clear that Holt’s intended audience includes not only non-Native state citizens, residents, and tourists but other Hawaiians, especially those, like himself, in a position to influence the sentiments of the dominant culture. Holt’s arguments are not those of a nationalist; he concedes the loss of a sovereign Hawaiian nation (11). Instead, he positions himself as a patriotic citizen both of the state of Hawai’i and of the United States of America who is “statistically, as well as ethnically, a keiki hanau o ka aina—a child born of the land—and a part-Hawaiian” (9). Similar to other Indigenous intellectuals in the post–World War II era, part of his project is to respond to “exaggerations, misrepresentations, half-truths, and sentimental images” of his ancestors and contemporary community produced by outsiders (23).

In his effort to more accurately conceptualize and better articulate 1960s Hawaiian experience, Holt develops two main paradigms. The first, “sentiment,” “aesthetics,” and “consciousness,” can be grouped together under the rubric of epistemology, particularly epistemology of the self, by which I mean ways of organizing knowledge and self-knowledge. Holt writes, “I am a Hawaiian in sentiment, perhaps in a sense aesthetically, for I am governed in my feelings as a Hawaiian by an ideal, an image, a collection of feelings fused by the connecting links of elements that go deep into the past, and which play in my consciousness with the same result produced by great music, painting, or literature” (11). His analogy with the effects of experiencing the arts—psychological, emotional, and embodied—evokes the affective aspects of culture and inheritance. These are perhaps the most difficult to describe in anthropological or sociological terms, but they are often considered the most important aspects of culture by community members. Moreover, in Holt’s formulation these important “felt” aspects of culture are transhistorical and intergenerational: “To think as a Hawaiian of the fantastic navigational feats of our ancestors [. . .] inspires awe . . . respect! I gain a vicarious sense of courage” (13; emphasis added).²⁰ It is this difficult-to-describe “thinking as a Hawaiian” and connecting to the Indigenous past that Holt is most interested in expressing for his mixed audience. In his second paradigm, Holt concentrates on the land itself and, inseparably, the fact of Hawaiians’ relatively long tenure in the islands. In this way, Holt explicitly relates land to epistemology: “The land quivers,” he writes, “from the southern tip of Hawaii Island to Kauai’s far western shores, with living elements of the ancient past” (22). Everyone in Hawai’i is “in one degree or another, affected by the impact of the abstract force of past events”; for Indigenous Hawaiians, however, this impact is a particular “burden”: “We are, to some extent, the walking repositories of island antiquity; living symbols of a way of life long dead, but which strangely persists in shaping the character of life in the fiftieth state” (22, 23). Relationship to the vital force of the land and sensitivity to local history distinguish Indigenous experience. In Holt’s terms, this “burden” has been compromised by outsiders’ representations of Hawai’i and Hawaiian culture, which have become dominant to the point that many Hawaiians are “confused” and “do not know how to think about the past, even if we have some glint of knowledge of what happened then” (21, 22).

Having claimed inextricable links between Hawaiians, land, and history, Holt concludes his rumination with possibilities for the future.²¹ “All around me,” he writes, “I see evidence among Hawaiians of a renewed interest in themselves, and the future, and their community.” Yet despite this evidence of enabling self-interest with which to fight “confusion,” Holt resists both certainty and ambiguity, offering instead a vision pragmatic and complex: “I see scores of handsome children who will grow up to be less the victims of their heritage than I and my generation were; and who will be somewhat less able to enjoy the aesthetic lift we enjoyed for being Hawaiians; but who will be less hampered, less bound to the fragmented, but imposingly powerful, image of the past” (26; emphasis added). In each iteration, repetition of a phrase linking “being” with “less” enacts a shift in tone, optimism to melancholy, liberation to loss; Holt strains two semicolons and two conjunctions to coordinate the four phrases of his vision across Hawaiian heritage, aesthetics, and history. From his vantage in 1964, he sees inevitable loss of cultural feeling as the next generation achieves material and social gains. In the juxtaposition with the special issue of the MASJ, we note the connection made in these statements between the rhetorical and affective complexity of Holt’s Indigenous personal voice and his ultimate focus on contemporary children and the coming generations.

An Indigenous personal voice informs The Maori People in the Nineteen-Sixties, as well, and here it is conspicuously focused on the perceptions of Indigenous children. “One Two Three Four Five” by Arapera Blank dramatizes the experience of a five-year-old Māori child entering the New Zealand school system. Engaging the conventions of the short story rather than the academic essay, Blank writes in the first-person perspective of the child and in the colloquial Māori English of rural Aotearoa New Zealand. Fictional discourse allows her to present the psychological and emotional effects of dominant (colonial) institutions on Māori children—both positive and negative—in a highly expressive manner. Blank concludes with a postscript titled “O nga ao e toru,” which can be translated into English as “Of Three Worlds.” This section is set when the child has grown into a young man and is better able to reflect upon the complexities of leaving his Māori-speaking home for school, where only English is allowed: “I am older now. I have finished school. And now I like everything. That’s what’s wrong with me. I am a three-legged creature. I can’t put my three legs down at once either. The world isn’t ready for such a creature. But this is what education in a European world has given me. Three legs” (94). He explains the significance of these three “legs”: one Māori, one Pakeha, and a third leg “fashioned from looking at the other two” (95; emphasis added). In the mid-1960s, the bifurcated optics that create this third leg—the double consciousness demanded by contemporary Aotearoa New Zealand—is “too much of a nuisance” and brings mostly confusion and pain for the educated young man who no longer feels fully at home among Māori but is not fully Pakeha, either (95). Blank refuses easy resolution, ending with the conundrum of the protagonist’s situated anguish: “No one wants to see two sides of the question. Only liars can see two things at once. [. . .] And now nobody wants me. All three legs are a curse. I wish I could have had only one as I would have had if I had never turned five” (96).

Like Holt, Blank valorizes the affective, deeply personal, conflicting aspects of Indigenous experience that standard anthropological accounts either exclude or unduly pathologize. This can have an obvious appeal for Indigenous audiences. In addition, the Indigenous personal voice takes non-Native readers especially—and perhaps uncomfortably—out of the familiar terrain of the third-person ethnographic present, abstract statistics, generalized “types,” and highly managed informants, insisting that Indigenous peoples be understood as complex, contemporary individuals as well as members of Indigenous communities and descendants of Indigenous ancestors. If this personal voice is successful, it offers all readers the potential for a different kind of experience of intellectual engagement and, possibly, a different kind of psychological and emotional empathy.

Works by Holt and, especially, Blank highlight the potential for analytical methods and discursive practices other than the typical anthropological or sociological survey approaches of their day to evoke important aspects of Indigenous experience. Their works demonstrate, moreover, how individuals and communities who identified as Indigenous in the 1960s in Hawai’i and Aotearoa New Zealand lived in multiple forms of relationship with non-Native peoples, dominant settler culture, and its public and private institutions. Complex and diverse, such relationships defy simple binaries of gain and loss, or positive and negative effects. These and other 1960s works thus point, as well, to the limitations of Levine’s attempts to frame the special issue of the MASJ as an analysis of “the” Indian in isolation or in a one-sided exchange rather than as an analysis of ongoing interactions among Indigenous peoples and settlers.

Similar to its 1949 and 1956 predecessors, the 1964 edition of The Maori Today showcased the recent history of New Zealand race relations as a story of Māori “progress” for which Māori and Pakeha could both take credit and be proud.²² Such stories were meant to meet two distinct aims of the government: to “inspire” Māori to better themselves by participating fully in mainstream society and to promote an international image of New Zealand as a progressive nation with a superlative record of interracial harmony. (Both the Canadian government’s promotional publication and Dunstan’s essay had similar goals and used similar strategies, if on a more limited scale.) The booklet’s chapters highlight Māori “progress” in a range of areas: government administration; farming and land development; housing, health, and education; apprenticeship, occupational, and career opportunities; welfare programs and community building; participation in men’s and women’s sports; language revival and instruction; and, especially, a record of exemplary military and civil defense service during two world wars, the Korean conflict, and the Malayan emergency.²³ Each chapter is generously illustrated with black-and-white photographs of Māori men, women, and children participating in all aspects of New Zealand society. The booklet includes maps of the North Island showing historical iwi (tribal) areas and contemporary Māori demographics, as well as Māori population tables from the 1961 census. It ends with “The Future,” a section that acknowledges, albeit briefly, that New Zealand’s record on race relations is not “without blemish” but focuses mainly on the rich promise of the future Māori and Pakeha will share together. Māori cultural heritage is described as “fine and noble”; the expectation expressed is that Māori culture will not lose its specificity or distinctiveness but will continue to be “adapted to the conditions of the times.”

The Maori People in the Nineteen-Sixties, published in 1968 and edited by Erik Schwimmer with the assistance of John Forster, a Pakeha lecturer in Education at Victoria University; William (Wiremu) Parker, a Māori broadcaster and educator; and James Ritchie, a Pakeha sociologist, focuses similarly on ongoing Māori–Pakeha relations. The project was conceived in 1964 as a study of “Aspirations and Stresses of a Minority,” and the editor imagined commissioning essays on nineteen relevant topics by “some eighteen of the best qualified people in New Zealand,” including professional scholars, community-based researchers and educators, and seven writers of Māori descent: John Rangihau, Jacqueline Baxter (J. C. Sturm), Hugh Kawharu, Hei Rogers, William (Wiremu) Parker, Katarina Mataira, and Pei te Hurinui Jones.²⁴ During their first meeting, the editorial board revised the table of contents from nineteen to an even twenty essays, now arranged into five sections: (1) “General Survey,” (2) “What Do the Statistics Mean?,” (3) “Personality,” (4) “Community,” and (5) “Forms of Expression.”²⁵ Two Māori authors were dropped from the list of invited contributors, but two others, Arapera Blank and Bruce Biggs, were added, maintaining a total of seven.

A number of factors kept several invited authors, Pakeha and Māori, from completing their essays before the publisher’s deadline. Including Schwimmer’s lengthy introduction, “The Aspirations of the Contemporary Maori,” and a brief postscript written in 1957 by the Pakeha anthropologist Ernest Beaglehole, the published volume comprises sixteen pieces by fifteen contributors (Schwimmer wrote an essay, as well as his introduction).²⁶ The sections have been removed, and the essays, covering a wide range of topics—language, education, social conditions, intermarriage, the King Movement, urbanization, art, literature, development, health, labor and employment, children, and government institutions—are arranged alphabetically by author’s surname. Five authors are of Māori descent: Biggs, who writes about language; Blank, who writes about education; Jones, who writes about the Māori King Movement; Kawharu, who writes about urban immigration; and Mataira, who writes about art. Four groups of photographs are interspersed among the chapters under the headings “Family Life and Education,” “Maori Leaders,” “Artists in the Community,” and “The Maori in the Community.” The book concludes with a three-page glossary of Māori words, an extensive general bibliography, and a separate bibliography to “The Maori and Literature 1938–65” by the Pakeha scholar Bill Pearson. Pearson’s bibliography is divided into three sections, “Writing by Pakeha,” “Writing by Maori,” and “Other References,” with the first two subdivided by genre.

While the five essays written by Māori draw particular interest for their range of subject matter, discursive style, and political tone, The Maori People in the Nineteen-Sixties as a whole is remarkable, juxtaposed with the special issue of the MASJ, for its variety of methodological approaches. The non-Native editor of each collection had definite ideas about what he saw as the contemporary status of Indigenous peoples in his settler nation-state and what he thought should be the proper course of future Indigenous development. A striking difference in their editorial projects, then, is that Schwimmer—who had considerably more experience working with Indigenous colleagues and who was arguably better informed about the diversity of contemporary Indigenous lives—either encouraged or allowed competing voices and alternative visions into the collection under his charge. A number of these potentially challenge or shift emphasis away from the arguments of his introduction, which promotes a model for national “inclusion.” In contrast to Schwimmer’s endorsement of Māori integration into the Pakeha mainstream, Blank details the potential negative effects of the dominant school system on Māori children; Jones deploys Māori epistemological traditions to record an Indigenous history that does not end with the coming of Europeans but extends into contemporary times; and Kawharu reveals the complexities of ongoing relations among different groups of Māori living in urban centers, where new immigrants to the city find themselves in potential conflict with not only Pakeha, Pacific Islanders, or other non-Māori residents but established tangata whenua (people of the land, or hosts; those Māori indigenous to the specific area). These contrasts result in a wide-ranging collection that aspires to the ideals of a symposium. The lack of agreement offers a vision of a modern Indigenous people living in a settler nation-state in the 1960s that, while not exhaustive, is more diverse and complex than the singular vision of “The Indian Today.”

At this point it is instructive to consider the counterexample of Aborigines Now, published in 1964 in Australia. This collection of thirteen essays by younger scholars is similar to The Maori People in the Nineteen-Sixties in its range of methodological approaches, which includes literary studies, history, human geography, and demography along with conventional anthropology. It is more closely aligned with “The Indian Today,” however, in the way it promotes itself as “progressive” yet often assumes a paternalistic tone. Moreover, Aborigines Now exceeds the colonial implications of “The Indian Today” in its inclusion of only non-Native contributors and the tendency of these authors to overgeneralize from limited studies and to represent the Indigenous sources of their research as anonymous voices rather than as specific individuals. The editor, Marie Reay, a fellow in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at the Australian National University in Canberra and a member of the Advisory Panel on Anthropology of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, illustrates these alignments and deviations in her opening and closing remarks. In the introduction Reay characterizes the collection’s diverse essays in terms of their break with orthodox research and policy:

Two themes recur in these essays. Firstly, the authors stress that the aborigines’ [sic] own wishes and choices are important in planning successfully for the future; secondly, they draw attention to the presence of aboriginal [sic] communities and urge that the method of administering native policy in Australia should change from a preoccupation with individual assimilation to an emphasis on community development. (xvi)

At the same time, her discourse moves effortlessly from seemingly progressive language (“all [contributors] are sympathetic and try to see the aborigines’ [sic] point of view and what is behind it” [xvii]) to language that is overtly racist (“despite their dark skins and savage ancestry” [xviii]) to language that is more subtle but equally prejudicial (for instance, when she repeatedly refers to the so-called Aboriginal problem [xix]). Throughout the introduction, Reay exercises her power as editor to correct or rebut the more liberal conclusions of her contributors, typically in the first-person voice: “I would not like to see . . .” (xvi), “I myself think that . . .” (xvii), “It may be wiser, in my view . . .” (xviii).

At the end of the volume, in a brief “Note on ‘Aborigines’ and ‘aborigines,’” Reay remobilizes this voice to defend her personal preference—and her editorial insistence across the essays, no matter the wishes of the authors—to write the general term “aborigine” without an initial capital letter. In response to a contributor who petitioned for the capital, Reay states:

I would argue that if I, an Australian, lay claim to Scottish descent I am not claiming Scottish nationality but simply an ancestral association with a geographical region and a tradition. That is all any name of our aboriginal people needs to imply. To use a general term with world-wide applicability as a distinctive name for a tiny segment of a particular nation seems to me parochial in the extreme. These people will doubtless find a name if they ever develop the kind of social, cultural, or political unity that might inspire a need for one.²⁷ (168)

Followed only by the list of contributors and the index, Reay’s remarks conclude the volume with the dismissive phrasing “these people” and an exposed chauvinism. As we shall see, Reay’s assertive and at times acerbic voice, her personal beliefs, and her editorial stance help bring into sharper focus the voices, beliefs, and editorial stance of coeditors Levine and Lurie in the 1965 special issue of the MASJ.²⁸

The 1960 documentary The Maori Today was produced to fulfill similar promotional goals as the publications of the same title, and its content is similar to that of the 1964 booklet.²⁹ The New Zealand government is less effective in its presentation of Māori “progress,” however, in the visual and aural medium. The film’s narration is generally too vague or simplistic to convey the complexities of contemporary life, and the absence of a central storyline makes the film appear a random collection of scenes. Unlike in the print texts, many images feel dated or less than representative. In fact, in 1968 New Zealand’s ambassador to Germany sent a detailed memo to the secretary of external affairs in Wellington complaining that the film was of little use as a promotional tool, since it is too misleading for foreign viewers. In particular, he notes the lack of a specific theme; the film’s episodic nature; the use of both too obviously posed shots and shots that were fortuitous but will be seen by foreign viewers as typical; that Māori are on display but never seen speaking to each other or speaking the Māori language; and that the film focuses on the positive role of government but fails to show Māori helping themselves. The ambassador strongly suggests the film “be re-made in the near future.”³⁰ Despite such cogent critique, it never was.

Even as we acknowledge its significant limitations, it is important to point out what the film does well, which is to provide viewers with actively present images of younger Māori men and women participating in multiple aspects of society, including “traditional” cultural practices as well as contemporary occupations and leisure pursuits, and to provide viewers with actively present images of thriving children, the future generation of Māori. These are, in the main, not the kinds of photographic still or moving images of Indigenous peoples produced at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, in which individuals, communities, and cultures understood or desired to be “vanishing” were captured on film—and typically posed in a limited range of contrived scenes—for the dominant culture’s pleasure and self-edification.³¹ On the contrary, although these images inevitably participate in the ethnographic mode of that earlier “salvage” photography, they are oriented to the present and future. This power of photographic representation to emphasize the possibilities of the near and more distant future, and to imagine specifically Indigenous futures, is also evident in many of the print texts described in the previous sections.³²

The fifty-three illustrations in On Being Hawaiian are exemplary in this respect. Holt arranges his diverse photographs to disrupt the strict time line on the front and back covers of his book.³³ Supporting his primary theme of Hawaiian epistemological continuity despite material changes, grounded in Hawaiian relationships to the land, Holt mixes contemporary and historical images, including photographs of his own ancestors, among representations of early contact with Europeans and photographs of Hawaiian artifacts and landscapes. He relates the distant past, the recent past, the present, and possible futures—in the form of contemporary children—by principles other than strict chronology or a narrative of cause and effect. Importantly, he captions the final photographs in the book “Keikis—A Trio of Hawaiian boys” (91) and “Crew of an outrigger canoe. This is still a popular Hawaiian sport” (92). On Being Hawaiian ends with images of smiling children at play and robust young men participating in an innovated “traditional” sport, suggesting a “new” Hawaiian future still linked to the Hawaiian past.³⁴

Other print texts include almost exclusively photographs from the late 1950s and early 1960s to illustrate their analyses of Indigenous “progress.” The Indian in Transition: The Indian Today includes a photographic juxtaposition to demonstrate this central thesis. Positioned on facing pages, the photographs are captioned “Yesterday . . .” and “Today”; the former depicts a staged camp scene of staked tents and drying meat (it could be a cropped photograph of an old museum diorama), whereas the latter depicts modern houses of wood (12, 13). Other photographs in the booklet prominently feature children and young people participating in contemporary activities at school, play, work, and home. The twelve-page article “Canadian Indians Today” includes seventeen black-and-white photographs; moreover, four are a half-page size and others are a quarter page. All support Dunstan’s claim that “progress of Indians is evident everywhere” (190). While most depict adult men (and one woman) successful in a range of rural and urban occupations—trapping, politics, fishing, nursing, ranching, mining, construction, steelwork, engineering, and traditional and contemporary arts—several depict children at school or on family outings; one depicts an Indian child in happy conversation with a child who is non-Native.³⁵ Māori children and young adults are similarly prominent in a range of scenes in The Maori Today, third edition, and The Maori People in the Nineteen-Sixties.

In contrast, the special issue of the MASJ employs a limited range of photographs that emphasize not the vibrant present or possible future but a waning, stereotypical past. Each version features the same color photograph on its cover, taken by Levine on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota, of a “Sioux dance and give-away honoring a boy leaving for Haskell Indian Institute [in Lawrence, Kansas].”³⁶ Although vivid and attractive, the image contributes to the problematic of juxtaposing the monolithic term “The Indian” with the relative time marker “Today” in that it fulfills U.S. and international stereotypes of “authentic” Indians as exclusively or ideally Sioux.³⁷ Moreover, its caption rehearses a colonial scene in which Indigenous children are removed to boarding schools, typically associated with the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and its most prominent figures are young men sporting feathered dance regalia in an outdoor setting. And although the caption potentially reveals the close proximity of the Haskell Indian Institute to the University of Kansas, where Levine worked and produced the special issue, a photograph of students actually attending Haskell in the 1960s, appropriately captioned, would have made this connection more clear and more vital.³⁸

Only two essays in the special issue, and one in the expanded book version, include photographs as illustrations. Set beside those in the texts from Hawai’i, Canada, and Aotearoa New Zealand, these black-and-white images stand out for their almost exclusive depiction of elders and artifacts. Younger adults and children are visible in but one of the thirteen photographs in the special issue, and they are part of the background, obscured by the central figure of an elder described in the caption as deceased. The book features nine photographs; including that previously described, only two include younger adults or children. The second resembles the first in that its central figure is also an elder, now dressed in regalia; its extended caption reads: “Polyethylene Indianism. When Pow Wow day comes around, representatives of the assimilated, off-reservation faction appear in costumes which bear little resemblance to authentic, traditional Potawatomi wearing apparel. Conservative Potawatomi refer to these plastic and nylon outfits as ‘Santa Claus’ suits” (n.p., inserted between 122 and 123). “Polyethylene” suggests “synthetic” or, less euphemistically, “fake.” Whatever the intentions of the authors or editors, the effect is to reinforce stereotypes of Indian “authenticity” as existing only in the past or outside contemporary society, on the brink of extinction.

Here, it is instructive to return to Aborigines Now. Its ten black-and-white photographs are divided into two sets. The first contains four photographs, two on each side of the leaf inserted between pages 28 and 29, three-quarters of the way through “The Self-conscious People of Melbourne” by the anthropologist Diane Barwick. The two photographs facing page 28 are each captioned “Pintubi women, June 1962.” In the upper image, five women and three children sit on bare ground among scrub grass, several holding wooden bowls, all unclothed. In the lower image, what appear to be the same five women now stand on similar bare ground, each carrying a billy can in her hand, three also supporting cans or boxes on their heads, all clothed in ill-fitting shirts or dresses that suggest government or mission handouts.³⁹ The two photographs facing page 29 are captioned “Pintubi men, June 1962” and “Pintubi family, July 1962.” Similar to the first set, in the upper image four men sit on bare ground among scrub, apparently unclothed. In the lower image, a man, a woman, and two children sit on bare ground before a small fire, the children naked, the man and woman dressed in ill-fitting clothes that again suggest handouts.

None of these “ethnographic” images, presumably taken in the Pintubi’s desert homelands in Western Australia and the Northern Territory, directly illustrates the essay by Barwick, which describes “the Kuris” or so-called dark people of Melbourne—that is, urban Indigenous Australians in the southern state of Victoria.⁴⁰ Barwick’s statements at these points in the essay, however, create jarring captions for the photographs of the Pintubi. In the middle paragraph on page 28, facing the women sitting or standing together on bare ground, Barwick states: “Apparently an assimilated aborigine must live in standard urban housing, keep off the relief rolls, and must avoid large and conspicuous groups of relatives and friends.” And farther down, Barwick states: “The dark people of Melbourne do not as yet form one community.” On page 29, facing the men and family, Barwick states, “Some new forms of interaction help to reassure the Kuris that they can achieve standards of dress, behaviour, and organizing ability equal to those of the white,” and, “Family celebrations such as weddings, anniversary dances, and twenty-first birthday parties are highly valued forms of conspicuous consumption.” The juxtapositions disturb because the statements appear to belittle the individuals captured in the photographs; in turn, the apparent realism of the ethnographic images alongside this authoritative anthropological discourse reinforces stereotypes of Indigenous Australians as backward and degraded.

The second set, inserted between pages 44 and 45, toward the end of “Aborigines, Alcohol, and Assimilation” by the anthropologist Jeremy Beckett, contains six photographs, three “ethnographic” head shots and one “fashion” head shot of Indigenous individuals on one side of the inserted leaf and two journalistic shots of indoor urban scenes on the other. The three ethnographic head shots were all taken outdoors, and their captions indicate they were produced in New South Wales, the far west of which was the setting for Beckett’s fieldwork in 1957. In addition, the captions read: “Resident of an aboriginal station” (an older woman), “Part-aboriginal man” (also older), and “Part-aboriginal lad” (pictured with his bicycle). In contrast, the fashion head shot was taken indoors; while its caption does not designate location, it both names and describes its subject: “Aboriginal model, pretty Lois Briggs.”⁴¹ The two images of contemporary urban scenes are captioned “Robert Tudawali, bearded film star, with friends in Melbourne” and “Aboriginal night life in an Australian city.” Both shots focus on three individuals, and both appear posed, as for a newspaper photographer. In the first a smiling Tudawali, wearing a tuxedo, stands between two well-dressed Indigenous women, who also smile for the camera.⁴² In the second an attractive, well-dressed Indigenous woman is flanked by two Indigenous men who wear tuxedos and hold boomerangs. Juxtaposed with Beckett’s essay about Indigenous alcohol consumption in small towns in western New South Wales, these evidently positive images, especially the fashion shot of Briggs and the group scenes of urban success, leisure, and sophistication, are subtly undermined. On page 45, facing Tudawali and his female friends, Beckett states: “Worse, drunken men are liable to assault their wives.” And facing the well-dressed woman and the men holding boomerangs in a restaurant or club, the text reads, “This does not imply a sense of guilt or a resolve not to drink in future; drunkenness seems to provide him with a moral alibi. The whole affair is viewed with a wry amoral cynicism which is characteristic of aboriginal attitudes on many matters.”⁴³ Stereotypical views are once again reinforced through the juxtaposition of realistic image and authoritative discourse. As with her voice and editorial vision, Reay’s selection and placement of photographs in Aborigines Now better situate choices made by Levine and Lurie in “The Indian Today.”

Read alongside similar 1960s survey texts from other settler states and nations, perhaps the most glaring absence of the special issue of the MASJ is its lack of sustained interest in contemporary Indigenous languages, literatures, and arts. The Maori People in the Nineteen-Sixties provides an obvious contrast. Scattered among the symposium’s anthropological, sociological, and historical pieces are Biggs’s essay on Māori linguistics and language revival, Mataira’s essay on new developments in Māori arts practice, and Pearson’s essay on Māori and literature, which considers work by both non-Māori and Māori writers.⁴⁴ Also included are photographs of contemporary Māori poets, singers, carvers, painters, and sculptors and examples of recent Māori artwork.⁴⁵ The latter, especially, concretely demonstrate how Māori artists innovate both Indigenous and settler aesthetic traditions.

The inclusion of these essays and photographs may reflect Schwimmer’s personal interest in language, literature, and the arts or his knowledge of these fields from his experience as editor of the Māori affairs journal Te Ao Hou/The New World from 1952 through 1961. They may also reflect a general awareness in New Zealand of the high quality of Māori artistic and performance traditions or a greater degree of comfort with depictions of a “modern” Indigenous people, at least within academic and government circles. But whatever the specific reasons, the effect is similar to that of the inclusion of personal voices and photographs of young people in this collection and in Holt’s On Being Hawaiian, a greater sense of contemporary—and future—Indigenous vitality. As I have argued, an Indigenous personal voice and realistic, contemporary depictions of Indigenous young adults and children offer greater potential for developing a more nuanced understanding and empathy among Native and non-Native readers than do orthodox anthropological and sociological approaches on their own. Sustained attention to language, literature, and the arts engages more fully the complex and at times contradictory realities of Indigenous experiences and aspirations. This is true for any historical period, but certainly for twentieth-century periods marked “today.” These elements potentially do more, as well. They help challenge outmoded, stereotypical ideas about Indigenous peoples, their representation, and their agency developed and calcified over the course of many “yesterdays.” Surely this should be a primary aim of any project in the field of Indigenous studies that claims among its goals comprehensiveness and greater cross-cultural understanding.

An international approach to analyzing the 1965 special issue within its discursive and representational contexts suggests that such inclusion is, in fact, not too much to ask of settler surveys of Indigenous status produced in the mid-1960s. Forty years on, it seems even less to ask of our own decade—or of the many decades ahead. These first, global juxtapositions raise questions, however, about the conventions of U.S. survey texts. Was the special issue of the MASJ actually typical of U.S. practices in the twentieth-century representation of American Indians “today”?

Survey texts with titles similar to that of the 1965 special issue were published in the United States across the twentieth century. Keyword searches in Internet databases, walks through the stacks of a university library, and visits to used bookstores reveal a wealth of material for juxtaposition and analysis. Among such texts published in the mid-1960s, several offer, similar to the special issue, general overviews of American Indian status; others focus more narrowly on specific geographical regions, states, or tribal groups. In 1964, for instance, the Tourist Division of the New Mexico Department of Development, based in Santa Fe, published the booklet New Mexico’s Indians of Today by the anthropologist Bertha Pauline Dutton, head of the Division of Research at the Museum of New Mexico. In 1965, Hildegard Thompson, a former chief of education in the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) and the author of books used in BIA schools, published the illustrated juvenile title Getting to Know American Indians Today through the New York–based commercial press Coward-McCann.⁴⁶ Also in 1965, the Mormon writer Dean L. Larsen published the booklet American Indians Today through the Division of Continuing Education at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah.⁴⁷ In 1966, Dorothy F. Robinson, an Arizona-based author of popular books for young adults, published Navajo Indians Today through the San Antonio, Texas–based commercial press the Naylor Company (“Book Publishers of the Southwest”). Although introduced by an associate professor of education at Arizona State University, Dr. Bruce S. Meador, Navajo Indians Today is directed primarily at adolescent readers. Similar to the special issue, which was revised and expanded into a book, Robinson’s book was rereleased in a “revised and enlarged” edition in 1969.⁴⁸ At least one survey in this period limited its focus to a specific individual. In 1967, Ruth Kirk, an accomplished photographer and a prolific author of travel, natural history, and juvenile titles, published David, Young Chief of the Quileutes: An American Indian Today with Harcourt, Brace and World, a major commercial press based in New York.⁴⁹ Through an engaging story and sixty black-and-white photographs, Kirk introduces readers to four generations of Quileute living on Washington’s dramatic Olympic Peninsula by staging a visit with the family of eleven-year-old David Rock Hudson (Hoheeshata)—“Chief of an ancient people in a modern world” (8).

Though these mid-1960s surveys all include an ambiguous “today” in their titles, all but Kirk’s, which is focused on an individual rather than a collective, render the term “Indian” explicitly plural, whether referring to a national category, a state-specific category, or a specific Indigenous nation category. This minor distinction suggests the possibility of a less monolithic approach to describing Indigenous peoples living in what is now the United States. Similarly, none of the titles employs an authoritative definite article. Their target audiences are diverse, however, including scholars and educated general readers but also tourists, juvenile readers, and readers from a particular religious denomination, making it perhaps less meaningful to juxtapose their methodological approaches with those of the special issue. Instead, given this diversity, it seems more productive to analyze how each text asserts or implies its primary audience.

Similar to their international counterparts, these mid-1960s U.S. surveys are directed primarily and often explicitly to non-Native readers. Robinson’s Navajo Indians Today is of particular interest because there is a disjuncture between the description of the book’s target audience in the foreword and that in the preface. In the foreword Meador asserts the text is aimed not at general readers (that is, non-Natives) but rather at Navajo, especially young adults. He writes, “The Navajo have asked, in private conversations and in public meetings, for books such as this one. There is widespread interest among the Navajos in education, and it is only natural that they would want books included which teach their youth about their traditions” (viii). Meador bases his claims on personal experiences at Arizona State: “I have observed many Indian college students, and I have noticed a keen interest on the part of many of them—not all—in learning about Indians. This book will help fill a void that exists among the Navajos, a readable account of their past and present” (ix–x). In contrast, Robinson, whom Meador describes as having “an interest in, and an admiration for, the Navajo and a professional background in writing and research,” is much less assertive that the book is intended for or likely to appeal to Navajo. She begins her preface, which immediately follows Meador’s foreword, “This book is written so that non-Navajos will become aware of this important tribe which has lived in the Southwest for hundreds of years, and appreciate their struggles in the past as well as the efforts they are making to build a good future.” She then states, somewhat tentatively in the passive voice, “It is also hoped that this book will help the Navajos themselves to realize that they can not only be proud of their history but also have real contributions to make to others” (xi). While Robinson’s statement is less confident and rhetorically less dramatic than Meador’s assertion that the book will help “the Navajo retain his Navajoness” (viii), it describes a more realistic ambition for this book.

From the first page of the first chapter, the focus of Robinson’s descriptions and the highly generalized nature of the information she presents—as well as her overall tone, specific word choices, and phonetic pronunciation guide for many Navajo and Spanish words—make clear that this work is intended primarily if not exclusively for non-Navajo (and non-Native) readers and that it is unlikely to appeal to many Navajo (or other Native) young people. Robinson opens chapter 1, “Navajoland Today,” with a brief description of “Bennie Begay [. . .] a Navajo pupil at the Phoenix Indian School.” Almost immediately, she refers to this child as “the small redskin,” using language that many readers in the period—and certainly “today”—would recognize as offensive, especially if directed toward a Native audience (1). The chapter, marked as focused on contemporary life, consists of less than five pages. The book quickly moves to the brief chapter “Early Navajo Life” (that is, before the 1860s); it then moves to the more developed chapters “Resettlement” (an oblique reference to the Navajo Long Walk, which is the title of a subsection, followed by a second subsection titled “Back Home”), “Changing Patterns of Life” (with subsections devoted to education, economy, government, industry, farming, arts, and health), and “Religion and Tribal Customs” (with subsections on religious beliefs and tribal ceremonies). The trauma of the 1864 Long Walk, while discussed in some detail, is introduced in surprisingly positive terms: “The idea [of resettling the Navajo at Fort Sumner, New Mexico,] was excellent, but many things went wrong” (30). Pressing contemporary issues, such as federal relocation programs, are mentioned only in passing and, similar to the Long Walk, described positively: “Another answer to overcrowding would be to have families learn skills, leave the reservation and get jobs in cities. At present more than 3,000 men, women and children have done that. However, they keep close ties with the life at home” (53). In her discussion of “religion,” Robinson demonstrates her desire to create goodwill and understanding among non-Indian readers by comparing Navajo conceptions of “gods” to those of “Greek and Norse myths” (67) and Navajo conceptions of “ghosts and witchcraft” to the “similar beliefs” of “the Puritans” (70). The Navajo “today,” in other words, are made to represent distant “yesterdays” of the dominant culture.

Robinson provides no separate conclusion; following a space break at the end of chapter 5, “Religion and Tribal Customs,” she sums up her settler survey in two brief paragraphs:

The Navajo are a tough people—tough in the sense of being strong and durable. They had to be, to overcome their years of hardship and adjust to the Atomic Age. In less than a hundred years they have changed from a hunting civilization to a complex culture that requires many highly intellectual skills. Knowing their history, non-Indians agree to the justice of their proud boast, “I am a Navajo!”

In the future it is expected that the Navajos will take their places beside other Americans in industry, arts and sciences as the world of the future develops. (80)

In these few lines Robinson confirms her primary appeal to a non-Native audience. Though proffered as a compliment, her description of Navajo as “durable” is especially telling.⁵⁰ And rather than grapple with the implications of current problems or government policies for the future of the Navajo nation—or admit her inability to adequately describe their complexity—Robinson ends with an odd repetition of the word future and a number of well-worn clichés.

It is difficult to share Meador’s confidence that Navajo Indians Today will speak to Navajo readers and meet their specific needs. Following the earlier juxtapositions of international texts, however, we can identify at least two aspects of Robinson’s book that may have appealed to readers who identified as Navajo, American Indian, or Indigenous. First, although the image on the book’s cover is a “timeless” representation of a Navajo hogan and brush arbor set against an empty southwestern landscape, the endpapers comprise a detailed map of the contemporary Navajo reservation that indicates the presence of towns and roads, as well as the proximity of several cities. And second, sixteen black-and-white photographs are situated between the preface and first chapter, preceded by a list of detailed captions. The photographs depict contemporary men, women, and children in a variety of scenes, including individuals and groups weaving, dancing, showing livestock at a 4-H competition, traveling, going to school, and working, as well as several reservation landscapes and communities. One photograph depicts a group of contemporary tribal leaders, who are all named in the caption; another depicts a performance by the Los Angeles Navajo Club, which, Robinson reports in chapter 4, “won top honors in the tribal dance contest” held on the reservation in 1965 (53). While nine of the photographs were provided by the BIA, the Arizona Development Board, commercial studios, and Arizona newspapers, seven were taken by Dr. Robert Roessel, the celebrated non-Navajo educator and Indian advocate who founded the innovative Rough Rock Demonstration School (now Rough Rock Community School) in 1966. In 1968, along with Ruth Roessel, his Navajo wife, Robert Roessel helped found Navajo Community College (now Diné College), the first tribal college opened in the United States; he also served as the college’s first president.⁵¹

This reading of Navajo Indians Today suggests it may be productive to consider how the special issue described its own target audience. An academic periodical, the MASJ had an established readership of dues-paying members of the Midcontinent American Studies Association (MASA), but the editors hoped that their special issue, devoted to a specific topic, would attract an audience beyond its regular readers and be adopted for university courses. A year prior to its publication, as the special issue was being developed, the Fall 1964 issue announced that the editor and his special coeditor were in the process of collecting essays “devoted to briefing specialists in American studies on the current state of research in anthropological studies of the American Indian.” Explicitly designed for nonanthropologists, the essays are meant to serve “as a primer of current live issues in the field of American Indian Studies” (n.p.; emphasis added). The announcement ends with instructions for ordering “extra copies.” The following issue, published in spring 1965, announced that the “Indian Issue” would be devoted “to a series of papers on the current status of Indians in—and on the borders of—our society.” Why were these nonspecialist anthropological studies of American Indians being gathered for American studies scholars in 1965? “Because,” the announcement asserts, “although anthropologists are not agreed on a name for it, something important is happening in the Indian world.” The announcement then quotes from a letter Levine wrote to Tax, in which he repeats his interest in “live issues”: “One can’t be an interdisciplinarian without knowing the live generalizations in the different disciplines” (n.p.; emphasis added). Like the earlier announcement, this one ends with instructions for ordering additional copies. Moreover, it boasts that the unpublished special issue “has already been adopted as a text in three different courses” and invites readers to “please spread the word.”⁵²

The special issue was specifically targeted, in other words, to American studies scholars, nonanthropologists, and university students and expressly designed to update these readers on the current state of scholarship in American Indian studies. Given the mission of MASA and its journal, these goals make sense. What is notable, though, is the strong assumption that, while American studies is by definition an interdisciplinary field, the complexities of American Indian studies—its “live issues” and “live generalizations”—can be grasped through an exclusive focus on anthropology. No other fields need be consulted. Less overtly, the announcements indicate a target audience not only of American studies scholars and their students but also of non-Indians. Levine does not share Meador’s confidence, however misplaced in relation to Robinson’s book, in the possibility of an Indigenous readership—nor does he consider what these readers might expect from a general survey of “The Indian Today.”

At this point in the analysis, the casual phrasing of the second announcement’s title and its simple illustration draw attention. Set in all caps, the title reads, “now, about this indian issue. . . .” The black-and-white line drawing, running along the length of the page’s right margin, presents a stylized image of a male powwow dancer in full regalia (prominent bustle, knee-high moccasins, upright feather headdress) produced by the hand of Levine himself. Especially when viewed in conjunction with the pun on the word “issue”—suggesting that the title can be read “Now, about This Indian Problem . . .”—the illustration previews the problematic of the special issue’s cover. The image appears based on the same photograph or a similar scene of the “Sioux dance and give-away” Levine attended on the Rosebud Reservation.

In the special issue itself, Levine foregoes the language of “live” issues and generalizations. Instead, in his introduction, “The Indian as American: Some Observations from the Editor’s Notebook,” he emphasizes his interest in interdisciplinarity:

In scholarship, good fences do not make good neighbors. This set of essays is intended to break down as many fences as possible, not only to expose those of us who are not Indianists to what Indianists are up to, but also to expose the specialists to the attitudes and experience of those who deal with other areas of American Studies.⁵³ (3)

“Indianists”—that is, American Indian studies scholars—are equated with non-Native anthropologists (the inclusion of essays by Witt and Thomas notwithstanding). In the remainder of the introduction, Levine details his desire to create intersections among disciplines and reveals his and his field’s anxieties about the role of American studies scholarship within the larger academy and the larger world. Written by “specialists” as a “general briefing” for nonspecialists, “The Indian Today” is to serve as a model of and a catalyst for reciprocal scholarly exchange. “There are things we can learn from our ‘Indian problem,’” Levine tells his non-Native readers, “which we need to know in areas as diverse as cultural history and foreign policy, as well as things which we already know, from fields as diverse, which might help us to deal with Indians more successfully in the future than we have in the past” (3). The ambiguity of Levine’s pronouns potentially implicates Americanists in a wide range of scholarly and extrascholarly pursuits. Levine repeats his point that, “outside of his own specialty, every specialist is a generalist” (4), and he emphasizes his concern that for Americanist scholars, in particular, “whose field is so broad and whose specialties and angles of attack [are] so various [. . .] there is always danger of their getting out of touch with developments in specialties other than their own” (4). He then states what many readers may have begun to suspect: “A second purpose of this collection, then, is to promote scholarly cross-fertilization, in the hope that the thinking it produces will show hybrid vitality” (4). It is not the future of American Indians that is at stake in this work; it is the health of American studies scholarship, the “hybrid vitality” of its interdisciplinary research. These concerns are taken up again in the “MASA Bulletin” section of the issue, also written by Levine.⁵⁴

The aspirations expressed by Levine are admirable, and his concerns about potential pitfalls for the field’s practitioners are legitimate. As the editor of a prominent journal in a relatively young and still marginalized interdiscipline, he writes in an enthusiastic, even maverick style that must have been invigorating for colleagues and graduate students in the mid-1960s. Reviewing his introduction four decades later and through the lens of contemporary Indigenous studies, one is struck by how much emphasis Levine places on the figure of the (non-Native) American studies scholar and by how little emphasis he places on American Indians as members of sovereign nations. With the exception of a single, oblique reference to “old treaties,” Levine fails to explore the significance of the nation-to-nation relationship between American Indian nations and the United States confirmed in nearly four hundred treaties and other binding agreements (6). Levine focuses on Indians exclusively as individuals; deploying the rhetorical device of second-person address, he ostensibly offers such individuals this advice: “If you want to deal successfully with the dominant culture, you have to learn to think its way. In doing so, you of course become less Indian” (16; emphasis added). A substitution of pronouns reveals the statement as a conventional projection of the dominant culture, which can imagine only one future for Indigenous peoples—namely, assimilation into the mainstream. “If they want to deal successfully with the dominant culture, they have to learn to think its way. In doing so, they of course become less Indian.” From the dominant perspective, everyone wins. In a similar vein, Levine sets out to debunk any notion that American Indians remain distinctive from other U.S. “minorities.” Under the subheading “How Different Is an Indian?,” he concludes, “Thus the Indians, though certainly unique, are no more unique than many other groups” (17). “Besides,” he adds, “for what it is worth, even Indian diversity is not really unique” (18). “It is just as easy to list things which Indians have in common with other American minorities as it is to list ways in which they are different. [. . .] This list will not prove anything, but it does suggest that there is more potential for understanding and fellow-feeling than we may suspect” (19). Levine’s final sentence reiterates his sense of the inevitability of Indian assimilation: “All of this is probably for the best, not because our culture is ‘better’ than any of theirs, but because it is better for living in this country right now” (21).

For the revised and expanded book version, a better-informed and less overtly assimilationist Levine titles his foreword “The Survival of Indian Identity,” the final section heading in the introduction to the special issue. Early in the new foreword, he points to the “special mention” given the special issue by D’Arcy McNickle in the Nation. What Levine fails to mention is the context for McNickle’s discussion. Titled “The Indian Tests the Mainstream,” McNickle’s article is a response not to the 1965 special issue but to Philleo Nash being ousted from his position as commissioner of the BIA. McNickle contextualizes Nash’s forced resignation, in part, by discussing the lack of understanding of Indian issues among U.S. politicians and among U.S. citizens more generally. While he does single out the special issue for “special mention [. . .] because its collection of articles does attempt to let the Indian stand forth as a person and a group member in our contemporary industrialized society” (275), he emphasizes the attempt over the accomplishment, and he devotes no space to Levine or his introduction. Instead, McNickle singles out coeditor Lurie, whom he inaccurately describes as “the guest editor for this special issue,” as “set[ting] the theme for the several essays by asking: Is there an Indian renaissance?” (275). He singles out as well the articles on Indian education by Murray and Rosalie Wax, on pan-Indianism by Robert Thomas, and on tribal self-government by Henry Dobyns as attempts to look at contemporary Indian issues from Indian perspectives (275–76).

Distinctly unlike Levine, McNickle supports his assertions about the contemporary Indian situation with quotations from a large number of U.S. and Canadian Indians. He ends his article in the Nation with a critique of government programs and a call for self-determination that counters Levine’s expressed opinions about the inevitability of assimilation:

The Indians are ready [to make their own decisions], as their own statements suggest—statements, as we have tried to show here, which grow out of consensus thinking, in the way of the Indian tradition. [. . .]

When decision making is restored to the Indian people (they were making decisions as living societies long before Columbus blundered into his first landfall), they can be expected to become involved in their own fate. It will be appropriate after that, and in due course, for them to become concerned with the fate of the larger society and with their place in it. (279)

Although Levine does not describe the process through which his thinking evolved in the period between writing his introduction to the special issue and writing his foreword to the book, he appears to have read McNickle closely and to have adjusted his language accordingly. He states in his foreword: “It would be presumptuous for this writer, a newcomer to Indian affairs, to offer any sort of general program or proposal for dealing with the problems and aspirations of this intriguing people. I don’t know enough to make recommendations; indeed, I am not sure that anyone does” (7–8). Like many newcomers before him, Levine makes suggestions nonetheless.

Beyond the mid-1960s, a surprisingly large number of twentieth-century texts were published with titles either anticipating or echoing “The Indian Today” and its variants. To conclude, we might ask how the 1965 special issue stands up among this catalog of surveys by non-Native and Native individuals, organizations, and institutions, equipped with diverse knowledge and training, different biases and purposes, and distinct investments in Indigenous futures. Some, of course, are more appropriate for juxtaposition with a special issue of an academic journal than others. Before the mid-1960s, relevant titles include George Bird Grinnell’s 1911 The Indians of Today; Charles A. Eastman’s (Dakota) 1915 The Indian To-day: The Past and Future of the First American (reprinted in 1975); Flora Warren Seymour’s 1926 The Indians Today; Robert Gessner’s 1931 Massacre: A Survey of Today’s American Indian; Mario and Mabel Sacheri’s 1936 Indians Today; the Indian Council Fire’s 1936 Indians of Today; the Indian Rights Association’s Indians Today, 1940 and Indians Today, 1944; the Indian Council Fire’s 1947 Indians of Today, second edition; the U.S. Department of Interior, Office of Indian Affairs’s 1950 pamphlet Indians Yesterday and Today; Carolissa Levi’s 1956 Chippewa Indians of Yesterday and Today; Edith Dorian and W. N. Wilson’s 1957 Hokahey! American Indians Then and Now; Encyclopedia Britannica’s 1957 short film American Indians of Today; the Minnesota Governor’s Human Rights Commission’s 1958 Minnesota Indians (Yesterday and Today); the Indian Council Fire’s 1960 Indians of Today, third edition; Gabe S. Paxton and Ann Nolan Clark’s 1960 We Are the Pima: The Pima Indians of Southern Arizona, Yesterday and Today, published by the Pima Indian Agency; Kathleen R. Kepner’s 1961 The Wisconsin Indians of Yesterday and Today, published by the Wisconsin Legislative Reference Library; Bertha P. Dutton’s 1961 Navajo Weaving Today, published by the Museum of New Mexico Press (with a revised edition published in 1975); and Kathryn Hitte’s 1961 children’s book I’m an Indian Today, published in the Little Golden Book series.⁵⁵

After the mid-1960s, relevant titles include the Portland (Oregon) American Indian Center’s 1970 American Indians of Today; the Indian Council Fire’s 1971 Indians of Today, fourth edition; the Society for Visual Education’s 1971 Indians of the Southwest Today; John I. Griffin’s 1972 Today with the Havasupai Indians; Howard M. Bahr, Bruce A. Chadwick, and Robert C. Day’s 1972 textbook Native Americans Today: Sociological Perspectives; Olga Hoyt’s 1972 American Indians Today, published for a juvenile audience; the proceedings of the 1971 Second Convocation of Indian Scholars, published in 1974 by the Indian Historian Press as Indian Voices: The Native American Today; Ervin Stuntz’s 1975 self-published work Our First Americans: The Indians of Today; BFA Educational Media’s 1976 film Native Americans—Yesterday and Today, produced for elementary and junior high schools; Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences’s 1978 volume “American Indians Today”; Elaine Jahner’s 1981 scholarly work American Indians Today: Their Thought, Their Literature, Their Art; Alvin M. Josephy’s popular 1982 work Now That the Buffalo’s Gone: A Study of Today’s Indians; Finn Madsen’s 1983 American Indian Today: The Native American in Text and Poems; Frank W. Porter’s 1983 Maryland Indians, Yesterday and Today, published by the Museum and Library of Maryland History; Brent Ashabranner’s 1984 To Live in Two Worlds: American Indian Youth Today, published for a juvenile audience; William L. Bryon’s 1985 Montana’s Indians: Yesterday and Today, published by Montana Magazine; Arlene B. Hirschfelder’s 1986 Happily May I Walk: American Indians and Alaska Natives Today; Judith Harlan’s 1987 American Indians Today: Issues and Conflicts; Floy C. Pepper and Pat Badnin-Yoes’s 1990 Indians in Oregon Today, published by the Oregon Department of Education; the BIA’s 1991 American Indians Today: Answers to Your Questions; Eleanor West Hertz’s 1991 The Chickahominy Indians of Virginia: Yesterday and Today; Roberta L. Hall’s 1991 The Coquille Indians: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow; Arlene B. Hirschfelder and Martha Kreipe De Mantano’s 1993 The Native American Almanac: A Portrait of Native America Today; renowned Laguna writer Leslie Marmon Silko’s 1996 Yellow Woman and the Beauty of the Spirit: Essays on Native American Life Today; and William Moreau Goins’s 1998 South Carolina Indians Today: An Educational Resource Guide.⁵⁶ If we add the first years of the new century, we can include Jack Utter’s 2001 scholarly work American Indians: Answers to Today’s Questions and the 2004 book series North American Indians Today, written by various authors and developed for use in public elementary and junior high schools, with separate titles for specific Indian nations, including Navajo, Iroquois, Cheyenne, Apache, Ojibwe, Sioux, Cherokee, Potawatomi, Seminole, Crow, Osage, Pueblo, Creek, Huron, and Comanche.⁵⁷

The catalog of twentieth- and early twenty-first-century variations on “The Indian Today” is actually more extensive than this list suggests. If we include not only books and films but also essays, articles, government and organizational reports, and published speeches, it grows exponentially. These titles and the histories of their publication and distribution indicate that the 1965 special issue is but one attempt to satisfy a perennial desire by non-Native and Native individuals and organizations, public institutions, and government agencies to understand, define, and proclaim how American Indians do and, more often, do not fit into a “contemporary” world. The long list of twentieth-century surveys indicates, as well, the kinds of choices the editors of the special issue made with the conventional and flexible but ultimately ambiguous language of “the” Indian juxtaposed with “today.” What is the effect of this limited phrasing compared with the effect of the more expansive juxtaposition of “the” Indian and its variants with the coupled relative time markers “yesterday and today”? And what can it mean that only two titles—one from 1915—refer to the promise of Indigenous lives beyond the present, either by adding a third relative time marker, “tomorrow,” or explicitly stating the “future”?⁵⁸

Within this diachronic approach to juxtaposition, of particular interest are those texts authored by American Indians or sponsored by Native organizations. In 1939, for instance, D’Arcy McNickle delivered “The American Indian Today” at the Fifth Annual Spring Conference of the Missouri Archaeology Society; the speech was then published in the society’s journal, The Missouri Archaeologist, in September of that year. A prominent employee of the Office of Indian Affairs (OIA; now the Bureau of Indian Affairs), McNickle was a strong advocate for the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act and other OIA policies developed under the administration of John Collier. In the early parts of the speech, McNickle addresses his audience of archaeologists as “students of the past” and, accordingly, recounts salient episodes from the “yesterday” of nineteenth-century U.S. and American Indian history (1). He focuses the majority of his remarks, though, on the contemporary “right of Indian culture to survive” and “to build a future world” (9, 10). McNickle makes his case for relating the Indian past to an Indian present moving into the future through brief but specific examples of cultural continuity. “The Hopi are a living people,” he states, “yet they are an archaic people. And throughout the Indian world this same symbiosis exists—the past functioning in the present. Sometimes that past is hard to discover; it may be fragmentary and distorted, yet inevitably it crops out” (4). He concludes by narrowing his focus to the defining relationship Indian people continue to have, he argues, with their land and by appealing to his audience’s sense of a common, land-based humanity: “The Indian has the quality of belonging to the earth which, I suppose, at one time all peoples of the earth had and enjoyed. He belongs to the earth because he has never divorced himself from it.” In the past, McNickle argues, misguided federal policies attempted “to break the Indian” from this sense of belonging in order to force assimilation. In contrast, with new OIA policies “we have decided that an Indian, like an Anglo-Saxon, is entitled to believe in himself, in the strength of his past, and in the glory of his future” (10). Addressed to a non-Native audience, and specifically to non-Native “students” of the Indian “past,” McNickle’s 1939 “Indian Today” concerns itself with ongoing Indigenous–settler relations and expresses explicit interest in creating a climate for Indian futurity. Set beside the 1965 special issue of the MASJ—addressed to scholars of the American past and present actively engaged in imagining its possible futures—McNickle’s speech in Missouri makes the “progressive” collection guided by Levine and Lurie look oddly narrow and old-fashioned.

Of particular interest, too, are the four editions of Indians of Today sponsored by the Indian Council Fire organization based in Chicago and published by small Chicago presses in 1936, 1947, 1960, and 1971. Compiled and edited by the prolific non-Native writer and Indian advocate Marion E. Gridley, these collections of brief biographies spotlight “modern” and “living” American Indian educators, artists, physicians, judges, business people, athletes, and tribal, civic, and religious leaders. In his foreword to the 1936 edition, the noted politician of American Indian descent Charles Curtis writes, “The purpose of ‘Indians of Today’ is to indicate the progress of the American Indian race through the achievements of some of its outstanding individuals” (5).⁵⁹ This first edition contains ninety-six entries, most of which include a current black-and-white photograph of the notable man or woman. Several had achieved national and even international renown, such as Gertrude Bonnin (Zit-ka-la-sa), Henry Roe Cloud, Henry Chee Dodge, Charles A. Eastman (Ohiyesa), Mourning Dove (Mrs. Fred Galler), Arthur C. Parker, Mollie Spotted Elk, and James F. Thorpe.⁶⁰ The majority of entries, however, profile men and women whose achievements were largely unknown outside their local, tribal, regional, or professional circles. In her foreword to the 1947 edition, the Cherokee educator and activist Ruth Muskrat Bronson, then executive secretary of the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI), describes the subjects of these biographies more specifically as “Indians who have made successful adjustments in the White World” (4). The intended audience, Bronson writes, is “Indian youth” and “Indian boys and girls” who may be “insecure and doubting” of their ability “to hold their own in this alien, oftentimes hostile, White world” (3). These “examples of Indian accomplishments” will provide Indian children and young adults with “the incitement to endeavor” through “examples out of their own blood and cultural backgrounds against which to measure their own potentialities” (4, 3). In her focus on the urgent needs of Indigenous young people, Bronson’s sense of purpose in representing Indians “today” echoes McNickle.

The third and fourth editions continue to highlight the Indian present for the purpose of building Indian futures. In her foreword to the 1960 edition, Indian Council Fire president Ethel Frazier Walker (Santee Dakota) restates Bronson’s reasoning: “We therefore need encouragement, constructive criticism, and above all the inspiration specially provided by those of our own people who have accomplished and realized their ambitions in every profession and walk of life. These individuals serve as a beacon, as it were, to all who will heed and follow” (n.p.). The introduction to the 1971 edition notes that Gridley made a point to include biographies not only of adults but also of “young people . . . who, though just starting out in life, have already demonstrated ability and shown promise of potential greatness” (v). This final edition profiles 372 notable living American Indians and includes twenty pages of photographs of art produced by living American Indians, featuring paintings and print works alongside sculpture, pottery, and baskets. Of the hundreds of accomplished individuals profiled in the four editions of Indians of Today, almost none gains mention in either version of the 1965 special issue.

The most compelling survey to juxtapose with the special issue of the MASJ is the March 1978 issue of the bimonthly Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. Titled “American Indians Today,” the volume was coedited by J. Milton Yinger, a professor of sociology and anthropology, and George Eaton Simpson, a professor emeritus of sociology and anthropology at Oberlin College in Ohio. Composed of a brief foreword by the editors and twelve essays by sixteen contributors, twelve men and four women (including Yinger and Simpson, who cowrote an essay, as well as their foreword), the volume ranges across issues of economics, education, health care, government policy, culture and identity, law and litigation, the Indian Claims Commission, demographics, urbanization, and integration. Among the contributors are Lurie, Thomas, and the Waxes from the two versions of the special issue. In addition to Thomas, the Annals includes two other American Indian authors: Raymond V. Butler (Blackfeet), a BIA official appointed acting commissioner of Indian affairs in 1977, and Vine Deloria Jr. (Standing Rock Sioux), former executive director of the NCAI and former chairman of the Institute for the Development of Indian Law, as well as a prolific writer and social commentator. As Yinger and Simpson point out in their foreword, the March 1978 issue of the Annals was produced as a twenty-year follow-up to the May 1957 issue, “American Indians and American Life,” which Simpson and Yinger also coedited. Similar to its 1978 counterpart, the 1957 volume is composed of a brief foreword by the editors and sixteen essays by twenty-three contributors, sixteen men and five women (including Simpson and Yinger, who cowrote an essay with a third male author). In the 1957 volume, essays are arranged into four categories: “The Background,” “The Administration of Indian Affairs,” “Institutional Aspects of Contemporary Indian Life,” and “The Integration of American Indians.” The only contributor to the special issue also included here is Lurie. Like the 1978 volume, the 1957 volume includes essays by three American Indians: McNickle (listed as Flathead), then director of American Indian Development, a privately financed project devoted to Indian leadership training; Helen L. Peterson (Oglala Sioux), executive director of the NCAI; and Edward P. Dozier (Santa Clara Pueblo), an assistant professor of anthropology at Northwestern University.⁶¹

These “Indian” volumes of the Annals, published twenty years apart, neatly bookend the 1965 special issue of the MASJ, and a juxtaposition of Simpson and Yinger’s editorial framings with those of Levine suggests what may now seem an obvious conclusion to this chapter. Part of Simpson and Yinger’s 1957 foreword reads as extreme understatement “today”: “White Americans seem continually to be rediscovering the Indians” (vii). Indeed, my lists of publications make this observation abundantly clear. The coeditors note, however, an important mid-twentieth-century context never mentioned in either Levine’s introduction to the special issue or foreword to the revised book version: “World-wide attention to questions of colonialism and minorities have been among the forces renewing America’s interest in her Indian citizens” (vii; emphasis added). Two decades later, Yinger and Simpson open their 1978 foreword: “A great many changes have occurred in American society and among Native Americans since the appearance of an earlier issue of The Annals (May 1957).” Yet despite these “significant changes,” they comment, “We are struck also by the continuity” (vii).

What transpired during the decades between the two “Indian” volumes of the Annals? Indigenous peoples in the United States survived and protested the disastrous effects of Termination legislation passed in the early 1950s, finally seeing that legislation overturned in 1972. They survived (and sometimes benefited from) federal urban relocation programs begun in the same era, as well as a host of new economic, social, and education programs developed for (and occasionally by) American Indians across the 1960s and 1970s. A large number of Indian leaders, including a growing cohort of younger activists, attended the 1961 AICC; later that year, some of the younger activists founded the National Indian Youth Council. American Indian artists and writers began to attend the newly founded Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe in 1962; Navajo and other college students began to attend an Indigenous institution of higher learning, Navajo Community College, which the Navajo nation founded at the end of 1968. American Indian intellectuals gathered for the First Convocation of American Indian Scholars in 1970 and for the second convocation in 1971. A wide range of American Indians, of all ages, founded local, regional, and national activist organizations and instigated vibrant political activism: from major events that included the “fish-ins” begun in the Pacific Northwest in 1964, the occupation of Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay by Indians of All Tribes from 1969 to 1971, the Trail of Broken Treaties caravan and occupation of BIA headquarters in Washington, DC, supported by the American Indian Movement in 1972, the armed occupation at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in 1973, and the International Indian Treaty Council held in 1974 to an ongoing series of smaller sit-ins, occupations, protests, and councils organized throughout the settler nation. They anticipated and responded to the amnesia of the U.S. bicentennial celebrations in 1976. And they published an astonishing amount of writing in all genres, including journalism and social critique; history, anthropology, and linguistics; legal and political studies; memoir and drama; poetry and short fiction; and the novel, including N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn in 1968, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1969, and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony in 1977, which became the most discussed Indigenous literary text in the United States for several decades.

Moreover, between 1957 and 1978, Indigenous peoples in other settler nation-states fought similar political and social battles, often using similar tactics, and they made similar gains in access to education, political power, and publishing. The Federal Council for the Advancement of Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders was founded in Australia in 1959. Canada’s National Indian Council formed in 1961, regrouping as the National Indian Brotherhood and the Native Council of Canada in 1967–1970. In Aotearoa New Zealand, the Maori Organization on Human Rights was founded in 1967; the activist group Nga Tamatoa (The Young Warriors) emerged in 1970; and the first Maori Artists and Writers Conference was held in 1973. Indigenous Australians erected a Tent Embassy on the Parliament grounds in Canberra in 1972, and they formed the National Aboriginal Forum in 1974. Māori activists organized a National Land March in 1975, culminating in their own Tent Embassy erected on the Parliament grounds in Wellington. The World Council of Indigenous Peoples held a preparatory meeting in Guyana in 1974, followed by a first General Assembly in Canada in 1975 and a second in Sweden in 1977. The first Inuit Circumpolar Conference was held in 1977 in Alaska. Non-Indigenous organizations, too, took significant action on behalf of Indigenous peoples during these years, including the International Labour Organization, the United Nations, the International Work Group on Indigenous Affairs, Survival International, and Cultural Survival.⁶²

As Yinger and Simpson emphasized in 1978, these were “significant changes.” But the coeditors were so struck by how much things had not changed for American Indians over those twenty years they were prompted to simply reprint in full their foreword from the 1957 volume: “For it may suggest the distance we have yet to go before the country has truly redefined its racial and ethnic practices. It may also emphasize the importance of the study of those practices for an understanding of American society” (vii). Among the things that had not changed during the years of research, publication, revision, and republication of the 1965 special issue of the MASJ, of course, was the ongoing but evolving context of colonialism—and the ongoing lack of understanding of how the settler colonialism practiced within the borders of the United States might relate to off-shore U.S. imperialism and to various manifestations of colonialism around the globe.

Whose “Indian” is this? Whose “today”?

And what might be possible—if the term settler were openly articulated—“tomorrow”?