[PEN-L:294] Ward Churchill on Cherokee slave-owners

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Yes, well...

I, too, find the Lipsitz' idea of "currying favor" less than convincing.

But Ms. Meyer's complaint borders on the idiotic. What "terrible
stereotype" is at issue here? That Cherokees weren't just like white guys
(albeit a bit "culturally retarded")?

Methinks she needs to drop the "sympathetic" rhetorical veneer on her
namecalling and go have herself a quick enema. She'll feel lots better.

Meanwhile, at a somewhat more sihnificant level, she's trying to be
clever. Take her little demographic manipulation as an example. She says
"some" of the Cherokee elite were "mixed." The fact is that virtally ALL
the people in question were.

The reason for her curiously careful word choice is that she's trying to
make the institution of slavery seem as Cherokee as white. Wrong (but,
nice try, twit).

This is not a matter of genetics, but of acculturation. The mixed-blood
elite was raised white to a considerable extent. They weren't trying to
curry favor with whites so much as they were for all practical intents and
purposes trying to BE white.

Big difference.

The emergence of the mixed-cultural elite within Cherokee society had
effectively destroyed the functioning of traditional functioning of
Cherokee society quite a while before the struggle over Removal.

Hence, the phenomenon at issue is decisively NOT Cherokee. It is as much a
phenomenon of Euroamerica within the Cherokee Nation as it was without, no
matter how much Ms, Meyer would like it to have been otherwise.

While I'll aggre with her that the dynamics of all this were exccedingly
complex, and warrant a great deal more study, I wish  she'd stop using
that entirely reasonable proposition as a pretext for perpetuating
"terrible stereotypes."

Do feel free to quote from this and/or forward it to Meyer.

Meanwhile, we didn't really get to talk much after the gig was over, a
matter for which I'm sorry. Next time...



Louis Proyect
(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)