Modern Filológiai Közlemények, 2003 (5. évfolyam, 1. szám)
Kultúra - Szabó F. Andrea: A Contested Place: The Grand Ronde Reservation, Western Oregon
Modern Filológiai Közlemények 2003. V. évfolyam, 1. szám 95 their tribal lands took shape as an idea. Furthermore, Leavelle also notes that Indians at Grand Ronde Reservation were worried that they might be relocated again after they had made the soil of the reservation arable. They even wrote a letter to the President of the United States to express their concerns after having learnt that the treaties they signed included a clause that made a second relocation possible provided that the State of Oregon needed the territory of the reservation (Leavelle 1998: par. 20). (This also gives another spin to the Indians’ efforts at securing individual allotments because private property seemed less violable than tribal possession.) Both Spores and Leavelle acknowledge the centrality of place for the five confederated tribes. But ‘place’ is a tricky word, “a suitcase so overfilled one can never shut the lid” (Hayden 1995: 15). Yi-Fu Tuan (1977: 179) defines place as “an organized world of meaning,” a center of “felt value where biological needs, such as those for food, water, rest, and procreation, are satisfied” (Tuan 1977: 4).Tuan emphasizes that there are general traits that all humans share in the way they organize space and place, some of which are biological, and only the rest of which are cultural. Place as a cultural construct, however, includes the response to the physical environment, the history of the place and the history of the people that engage it, and the language available to describe these. All of these work towards the definition of identity. The cultural identification of the Indians comprising the five confederated tribes then was under attack from various directions when their removal and relocation was decided for them. On the one hand, they were migrating people with strong attachment to their place, who were forced into a sedentary mode of existence in an environment that they were not familiar with. However, as Tuan remarks, a new environment alone does not necessarily mean that people are unable to form attachments to it. Place is formed as soon as people are located in a landscape and start to search for subsistence. Familiarity with the landscape and the assurance that it is capable of providing nurture and security may facilitate the formation of an identifying relationship with it over time (Tuan 1977: 159). Once biological needs are satisfied, places as cultural constructs too are ready to be formed, and as we have seen reservations as places of protection from white invasion were continuously impressed into Indian minds. Relocation affected the cultural creation, de-creation, and re-creation of both the lost tribal lands and the new reservation territory to the largest extent. The change in place on the most mundane level meant that Indians may have experienced their language inadequate to describe the new physical environment: on the one hand, they may have lacked the vocabulary to describe it, on the other, their vocabulary may have included items that they found redundant in the new setting. In addition, we should also bear in mind that on arriving at the reservation, Indians had to face the fact that they spoke mutually unintelligible languages. Thus they needed to find a