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Abstract
This dissertation is a comparative study of intra-tribal political factions and community conflict in the four American Indian tribes: the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, the Isleta Pueblo, the Rosebud Lakota Sioux Nation, and the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation. This work argues that the variation of intra-tribal conflict between these tribes, both in terms of intensity and form, is a result of opposing socio-psychological classes created during colonial and post colonial periods. The historical processes of exclusion ( pain), such as removal or massacre, and inclusion (profit), such as economic development, created divergent interest groups that became supported by certain worldviews that hold conflicting moral outlooks.
In examining these questions, my dissertation bridges gaps in two literatures. The first is how human behavior is conceived of in the social sciences and the second is how politics is located in American Indian populations among Indigenous Studies and American Indian Studies. The mainstream social sciences generally under-theorize the formative nature that experiences of pain and loss have on individuals and communities. Compared to the meticulous treatment of acquisitive transformations such as modernization or economic development, loss has not been given sufficient appreciation as a formative community experience. In that way, this study is a systematic examination on the role of loss in constructing the worldviews of indigenous societies in post colonial states. Fields dedicated to the study of American Indians have, for the most part, placed the role of social construction at the periphery of the explanation of why contemporary indigenous political behavior takes the shape it does. This dissertation attempts to show how native worldviews, moral outlooks, identities and political behaviors are informed by historical experience as much as they are by ancient cosmology. In doings so, this project aims to divert part of the study of native politics back to a study of tribes and indigenous communities.
