Modern Filológiai Közlemények, 2003 (5. évfolyam, 1. szám)
Kultúra - Szabó F. Andrea: A Contested Place: The Grand Ronde Reservation, Western Oregon
Szabó F. Andrea common language, while they also had to learn English to make communication with the representatives of the federal government possible. Losing ancestral lands, the land where the ancestors of the indigenous population lived and were buried, probably meant the greatest loss. It is however not the loss of the pragmatic space that previous generations inhabited that might have bothered the Willamette Valley Indian, but the loss of the mythical space that frames the pragmatic one. The mythical space for the North-American Indian is like a “storied location,” the geographic anchor of community narratives (Nabokov 1996: 22-3). Losing touch with the mythical space then leads inevitably to the loosening of the community as topography has always played a more significant role in native histories than chronology, as Vine Deloria, Jr. points out (Deloria 1973: 138). Questions about the transformation, or the preservation, of the Willamette Valley Indian then should not be formed in the survivalist mode, as these circumvent the tough issues. Focusing on survival does not allow one to ask: but how did these Indians make it their place? Have they preserved the memory of their native lands? Have they been able to acknowledge the loss they suffered? Also, the reservation was the physical site of their displacement, both in the literal and the figurative sense of the word, it was both a place of protection and a place of exclusion, safe haven and place of containment. Was it the place of nothing but the only viable form of civilization available to Indians? Or did it offer more? Has it ever become a mythical space? In short, have Indians ever been able to recover an identifying relationship between themselves and their new place? There are no easy yes-or-no answers to these questions, as these questions presuppose the existence of a dynamic theory of identity formation for native-American communities that allows for the loosening-up of old attitudes and the formation of new ones without questioning the authority of anyone to lay claim to Indianness. That a new Grand Ronde Indian was born is undeniable. What we need to emphasize is that he or she is not an impoverished Indian on account of losing moral authority or a vanishing one, who is to lose in a capitalistic society; instead he or she is one who calls Grand Ronde a home. And is there a more convincing proof than the fact that after the termination of the tribes in the 1950s, remaining Indians forced the federal government to restore their tribal status in 1983? And since then Grand Ronde Indians have infused new life into their confederacy with the aim to re-create their lost “homelands,” the Grand Ronde Reservation (Useem 2000: par. 2).