Identity As Idiom: Mashpee Reconsidered
. Identity as Idiom: Mashpee Reconsidered Jo Carrillo* Introduction In the late 1970s, at the height of the American Indian rights movement, the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe filed a lawsuit in federal court asking for return of ancestral land.' Before the Mashpee land claim could be adjudicated, however, the tribe had to prove that it was (just as its ancestral predecessor had been) the sort of American Indian tribe with which the United States could establish and maintain a govemment-to-govemment relationship. The Mashpee litigation was remarkable. For one thing, it raised profound and lingering questions about identity, assimilation, and American Indian nationhood. For another, it illustrated, in ways that become starker and starker as time goes on, the injustice that the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe has endured. The Mashpee had survived disease, forced conversion, forced education; they had maneuvered through passages of history in which well-meaning and not-so-well-meaning non-Indians "freed" them from their Indian status, thereby exposing Mashpee land to market forces; they had survived the loss of their language. In spite of it all, the Mashpee maintained their cultural identity, only later to be pronounced "assimilated," and therefore ineligible for federal protection as an American Indian tribe. What the Mashpee tried to characterize as syncretic adaptations to the harsh realities of colonialism, others called the inevitable and wholehearted embrace by the Indians of "superior, rational, ordered" white ways. Hence when the Mashpee prayed with their own Indian Baptist ministers, non- Indian commentators claimed they had embraced an African-American version of Protestantism; when they spoke English, they were said to have benefitted fi-om white education; when they used legal forms like deeds, it was cited as evidence of their preference for American law.
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