This article bridges the traditionally segregated fields of Native American history and the history of American foreign relations by investigating a series of activities in the late 1960s and early 1970s that interconnected Native American development and American counterinsurgency agendas in the unstable political landscapes of Southeast Asia. A small coterie of American bureaucrats, with careers spanning foreign assistance and Native American development work, saw great potential in selectively showcasing Indian economic “success stories” to serve “hilltribe” development and counterinsurgency programs in Laos and Thailand sponsored by the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Central Intelligence Agency. One result was a series of “intertribal” development tours arranged for Laotian and Thai representatives in multiple Native American communities in Arizona and New Mexico. Moreover, sharing a sense that Native Americans could offer unique advantages as direct development agents among other “tribes” overseas, the tours’ organizers garnered support from a diverse range of actors—CIA and USAID officials, Laotian and Thai military officers, and Indian political and business leaders—for launching a “tribe-to-tribe” foreign assistance program. Viewed together, these transnational schemes and discussions reveal how the flexible and multivalent meanings of key development concepts at the time—such as Indian achievement, tribal initiative, and “intertribal” understanding—both facilitated and constrained official designs to employ Native American models to support political and military agendas in the “shadow” theaters of the escalating Vietnam conflict.

The current study examined within- and cross-language connectivity in four priming conditions: repetition, translation, within-language semantic and cross-language semantic priming. Unbalanced Hebrew–English bilinguals (N = 89) completed a lexical decision task in one of the four conditions in both languages. Priming effects were significantly larger from L1 to L2 for translation priming and marginally so for cross-language semantic priming. Priming effects were comparable for L1 and L2 in repetition and within-language semantic priming. These results support the notion that L1 words are more effective primes but also that L2 targets benefit more from priming. This pattern of results suggests that the lower frequency of use of L2 lexical items in unbalanced bilinguals contributes to asymmetrical cross-language priming via lower resting-level activation of targets and not only via less efficient lexical activation of primes, as highlighted by the BIA+ model.