Identity, Militancy, and Cultural Congruence: The Menominee and Kainai
Authors: Spindler George D. , Spindler Louise S. 
Published: March 2007

Recent movements of varying degrees of mili tancy on the part of American Indians can be better under stood if we have a grasp of the kinds of adaptations Indians have made to the long-term and continuing confrontation with white culture, white power, and white world views. Native Americans do not constitute a single group. The Menominee are taken as an example of an Indian tribe with a hitherto unaggressive record that has recently engaged in militant activity. The diversity within the Menominee popula tion is described in terms of four major types of long-standing adaptation that were observed as dominant in the 1950s and 1960s and that emerged some time before that. Recent militancy is regarded as a fifth type of adaptive response to the continuing confrontation between Menominee and white culture. Militancy is interpreted, in part, as an assertion of identity. The responses of the Kainai, the Blood Indians of Alberta, Canada, to white culture and power are contrasted briefly at certain critical points to demonstrate the fact of diversity among American Indians in regard to current actions and to reinforce the interpretation that the degree of difference in cultures and world views between Indian cultures and white culture is a significant factor in the kinds of adaptive response to confrontation native American groups have made and will make. his doctorate at the University of California at Los Angeles in 1952. They have done much of their field work together, in three American Indian communities, and most recently, in Germany, where over the past decade they have studied the influence of elementary schools on the adaptations children make to an urbanizing environment. Together they have published a number of books and articles, including one on the Menominee published in 1971, Dreamers Without Power. The Spindlers were editors of the AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST from 1963 to 1967. 1. Our terminology will vacillate between American Indians and "Native Americans," as it does in the current literature. 2. The term "Whites". or "Whiteman" is used by many Indians to refer to all non- Indians in a general way meaning people who live in the United States in a main stream, Anglo manner. We will use the term "white" as an adjective and "White" as a noun, as a convenience, to avoid cumber some alternative terminology. 3. See George D. Spindler and Louise S. Spindler, "Fieldwork among the Me nomini," in Being an Anthropologist: Field work in Eleven Cultures, ed. George D. Spindler (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970), pp. 267-302. 4. See George D. Spindler, ed., The Mak ing of Psychological Anthropology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978) for an analysis of the history of the field and a chapter by Louise S. Spindler on the re search with the Menominee and Blood. 5. See Louise S. Spindler, "The Me nominee," in Handbook of North Ameri can Indians (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, forthcoming) for a synopsis of the history and ethnohistory of the Menominee. 6. Our understanding of the traditional Me nominee culture and the confrontation with Western culture is developed in Dreamers Without Power: The Menomini Indians (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971). 7. See George D. Spindler and Louise S. Spindler, "The Instrumental Activities In ventory : A Technique for the Study of the Psychology of Acculturation," Southwestern Journal of Anthropology, vol. 21 (1965), pp. 1-23 for a synopsis of Blood cognitive orien tations. 8. The chapter on the peyote road in Dreamers Without Power combines the ob servations of the Spindlers and of J. Sidney Slotkin, who made a special study of the Na tive American Church ( The Peyote Religion: A Study in Indian-White Relations [Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1956] and Menomini Peyotism [Philadelphia, Pa.: American Philosophical Society, 1952]). 9. Others have done research with the Menominee during the past two decades, and we cannot catalogue their influence upon our thinking except to acknowledge that of William H. Hodge, in private conversa tions. Our interpretations differ, in part due to the different time periods in which we have worked, in part due to his focus on urban Menominee, and our focus on the native- oriented and peyote groups, and in part due to differences in our world views. His "Eth nicity as a Factor in Modern American Indian Migration: A Winnebago Case Study with References to Other Indian Situations," in Migration and Development, eds. H. I. Safa and B. M. Dutoit (The Hague, Mouton, 1975) has proven useful. Neils W. Braroe, Indian and White: Self-Image and Interaction in a Canadian Plains Community (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1975) has also in fluenced our thinking about Indian-white relations.