If we agree that he is correct, the whole idea of culture seems to slip through our fingers. How could we ever know if it were present or absent? If all of its elements are replaceable, what is it, and where is it?
Lomawaima’s article
WHAT IF MY GRANDMA EATS BIG MACS? 81
So strict and unforgiving a linkage of culture and identity often leaves Indian people with a pervasive legacy of insecurity and pain. Admitting to such sentiments, moreover, may only create more “evidence” of one’s insufficient Indianans for others to attack. Young people do not learn well when they are frightened — nor do adults or elders. The judgment that “he is not one of us” is a severe enough price that many people of Indian heritage with the potential to make significant contributions to Indian communities may choose not to participate in their traditional cultures at all, rather than risk the effort and be rejected for demonstrated lack of competence. There is probably no surer recipe for extinguishing a culture than this. This is not to say that Indian communities should abandon culture as a standard of identity. But perhaps they would do well to remember their histories — and their futures — as they think about how they use culture to define the boundaries of their communities in the present.
In reviewing cultural definitions of identity, it sometimes appears that they present an insoluble dilemma. One the one hand, many Indian people agree that their identities are closely bound up with distinctive ways of being in the world. Yet this is a position that easily edges over into an unrealistic demand that “authentic” Indian life ways must embody the farthest, most exotic extreme of otherness (such that no Indian person could ever satisfy the requirements). And there are good reasons why Indian communities might want to forgive themselves, and others, for the cultural losses they have suffered.
On the other hand, unless one is willing to surrender cultural definitions altogether, one must still ask: just how closely can Indian groups resemble their non-Indian neighbors and still embody a separate people, an Indian people? James Clifford, following his observations at the Mashpee trial, concluded that “all the critical elements of identity are in specific conditions replaceable: language, land, blood, leadership, reli-gion. Recognized, viable tribes exist in which any one or even most of these elements are missing, replaced, or largely transformed.”‘”
If we agree that he is correct, the whole idea of culture seems to slip through our fingers. How could we ever know if it were present or absent? If all of its elements are replaceable, what is it, and where is it? If all the ele-ments that compose a culture can disappear, while the cultural identity somehow remains, is there anyone who is not Indian? These are questions with no obvious answers, and to which we must return in a later chapter.
