http://insidehighered.com/news/2005/08/23/churchill
Victory for Churchill or Reprieve?
Another stage in the University of Colorado?s long process of reviewing
Ward Churchill is done ? and his lawyer is claiming that it was a victory
for the controversial professor.
(clip)
Lane told The Denver Post that one charge that is not being forwarded for
additional review concerns allegations that Churchill has misrepresented
himself as being an American Indian. Churchill has always said that he is a
Native American, but as the controversy over the professor has grown in the
last year, several newspaper reports ? with backing from some Indian groups
? have questioned his ethnicity. Lane told The Denver Post that he was
pleased that the committee had rejected these charges.
===
NY Times, August 21, 2005
The Newest Indians
By JACK HITT
(clip)
How much easier (though scarier) life might be if we all got ethnic
identification cards so that when encountering a very light-skinned person
claiming to be black, you could reply, ''O.K., show me your federal
identification card guaranteeing the proper amount of African blood to
qualify you as an African-American.'' Here's the thing: you could ask an
Indian that question. Some Native Americans carry what is called,
awkwardly, a white card, officially known as a C.D.I.B., a Certificate of
Degree of Indian Blood. This card certifies a Native American's ''blood
quantum'' and can be issued only after a tribe has been cleared by a
federal subagency.
The practice of measuring Indian blood dates to the period just after the
Civil War when the American government decided to shift its genocide policy
against the Indians from elimination at gunpoint to the gentler idea of
breeding them out of existence. It wasn't a new plan. Regarding Indians,
Thomas Jefferson wrote that ''the ultimate point of rest and happiness for
them is to let our settlements and theirs meet and blend together, to
intermix, and become one people.'' When this idea was pursued
bureaucratically under President Ulysses S. Grant, Americans were
introduced to such phrases as ''half breed'' and ''full blood'' as
scientific terms. In a diabolical stroke, the government granted more
rewards and privileges the less Indian you were. For instance, when
reservation lands were being broken up into individual land grants,
full-blooded Indians were ruled ''incompetent'' because they didn't have
enough civilized blood in them and their lands were administered for them
by proxy agents. On the other hand, the land was given outright to Indians
who were half white or three-quarters white. Here was the long-term catch:
as Indians married among whites and gained more privileges, their blood
fraction would get smaller, so that in time Indians would reproduce
themselves out of existence.
Compounding this federal reward for intermarriage was the generally
amicable tradition most tribes had of welcoming in outsiders. From the
earliest days of European settlement, whites were amicably embraced by
Indian tribes. For instance, the leader of the Cherokee Nation during the
forced exile of 1838-39 -- the Trail of Tears -- was John Ross, often
described as being seven-eighths Scottish.
A lot of Indians haven't looked ''Indian'' for quite a while, especially in
the eastern half of the country, where there is a longer history of contact
with Europeans. That fact might not have been the source of much anxiety in
the past, but in the post-Civil Rights era, the connotations of the word
''white'' began to shift at the same time that the cultural conversation
progressed from the plight of ''Negroes'' to the civil rights of
''blacks.'' Suddenly ''white'' acquired a whiff of racism. This association
may well account for the rise of more respectable ethnic descriptions like
''Irish-American'' or ''Norwegian-American,'' terms that neatly leapfrog
your identity from Old World to New without any hint of the Civil War in
between. According to the work of Ruth Frankenberg and other scholars, some
white people associate whiteness with ''mayonnaise'' and ''paleness'' and
''spiritual emptiness.'' So whatever is happening in Indian Country is
being aggravated by an unexpected ethnic pressure next door: people who
could be considered white but who can legitimately (or illegitimately) find
an Indian ancestor now prefer to fashion their claim of identity around a
different description of self. And in a nation defined by ethnic anxiety,
what greater salve is there than to become a member of the one people who
have been here all along?
The reaction from lifelong Indians runs the gamut. It is easy to find
Native Americans who denounce many of these new Indians as members of the
wannabe tribe. But it is also easy to find Indians like Clem Iron Wing, an
elder among the Sioux, who sees this flood of new ethnic claims as
magnificent, a surge of Indians ''trying to come home.'' Those Indians who
ridicule Iron Wing's lax sense of tribal membership have retrofitted the
old genocidal system of blood quantum -- measuring racial purity by blood
-- into the new standard for real Indianness, a choice rich with paradox.
The Native American scholar C. Matthew Snipp has written that the
relationship between Native Americans and the agency that issues the
C.D.I.B. card is ''not too different than the relationship that exists for
championship collies and the American Kennel Club.''
full: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/21/magazine/21NATIVE.html
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