Tribal ecopoesis in the Eastern United States

This study examines the place-making and cultural invention of newly-recognized federal Indian tribes (NRTs) in the Eastern United States. This new place-making is an effect of a modernist technical-rational bureaucracy and, paradoxically, of a countercultural and self-inventive tum away from the sterility of that technocracy.

Contemporary federal policy encourages and enables Americans of Indian descent to organize themselves as tribes and to spatialize new identities as reservation Indians. Once recognized as federal tribes, however, NRTs are bound by the options for cultural revitalization that accompany the federalization of their identities. That is, this revitalization follows the cultural lines of Indian exceptionalism, a romanticized set of generalizations about Indian history that shrouds to a significant degree who NRTs are. Indian exceptionalism shapes the place-based group identity emerging on NRT reservations. This new identity is an Eastern version of the Western identity forged in the bureaucratic reservation system. The Western reservation-based identity makes a poor model for NRTs who have no historical experience as federal tribes. NRT histories reveal people with unique cultural qualities, but this uniqueness is not expressed on the landscapes of new reservations.