"We Still Live Here"

• Film: Highlights the divide in participation in the Wampanoag language program.

• Course Discussion: Focuses on the evolving sovereign status of indigenous people and judicial inconsistencies.

• O’Connor's Lecture: Explores community justice in Indian Tribal Courts.

• Norgren's Book: Uses colonial language in comparing indigenous people to ethnic minorities.

• Modern Concerns: Pondering whether language and technology will erode historical traditions.

Watching the film “We Still Live Here” (Makepeace 2010) I was struck by the fact that only a few people among the Wampanoag were participating in the language program constructed by the Tribe.  In other communities where I’ve lived and worked, it seems there are camps of people that are either engaged in reviving language and another camp of people that are close to indifferent.  There is a divide between looking into the past, and looking into the future.  I wonder if technology will cause more people to cast their gaze toward the future, as tribes and the world continue to age.

We are discussing “The Third Sovereign” in History of American Indian Sovereignty this semester and grappling with the future and features of sovereign status for indigenous people in a country where the judiciary has been haphazard and inconsistent in applying the canon of liberal construction envisioned by treaty-makers and other people in the 17th-18th centuries.  We read Sandra Day O’Connor lecturing in 1997 on Indian Tribal Courts, carefully threading Western legal ideals into a broad picture of community, or mediated, justice delivered in traditional ways like the Navajo, via their Peacemaker Court. (O’Connor 4-6) And in our textbook for the course the scholar Jill Norgren slips into the language of colonialism in the conclusion of her book The Cherokee Cases when she (inadvertently?) compares indigenous people to ethnic minorities in the context of American law. (153) I wonder if the language and technology of today will perpetually erode the past until it is gone altogether.

References

Norgren, Jill. The Cherokee Cases: Two Landmark Federal Decisions in the Fight for Sovereignty. Norman: U of Oklahoma, 2004. Print.

O'Connor, Sandra Day. "Lessons from the Third Sovereign: Indian Tribal Courts." Tulsa Law Review 1st ser. 33.1 (1997): 1-6. Web. 30 Mar. 2016.

<http://digitalcommons.law.utulsa.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2107&context=tlr>.

We Still Live Here: Âs Nutayuneân. Dir. Anne Makepeace. Perf. Jason Baird, Mae Alice Baird. N/A, 2011. Web. 30 Mar. 2016.