Aug 23, 2005
Churchill Inquiry
by Cliopatria
A faculty subcommittee at the University of Colorado has dismissed two charges (copyright infringement and false claims of ethnicity) against Ward Churchill and sent seven other counts against him forward for further investigation. For further information and reactions, see:
Jennifer Brown,"Tentative ‘Victory' for Prof," Denver Post, 23 August;
Kevin Flynn,"Churchill Inquiry Sent to Higher Level," Rocky Mountain News, 23 August;
Scott Jaschik,"Victory for Churchill or Reprieve?" Inside Higher Ed, 23 August; and
"One Step Forward in Churchill Saga," Rocky Mountain News, 23 August.
Ralph E. Luker -
8/24/2005
Your question seems right to me, Alan. It seems highly unlikely and near unthinkable that, given his credentials, Churchill would have been given an offer to join the faculty at CU in the first place, had it not been for the ethnicity claims. If they are thought to be a qualifying matter, I don't see how you can avoid making evidence of their accuracy a legitimate subject of inquiry. On the other hand, it probably would be very difficult to show that Churchill self-consciously committed fraud in making the ethnicity claims.
Sherman Jay Dorn -
8/23/2005
Hiram took the words out of my mouth: Don't believe a lawyer when he (in this case) makes all sorts of claims and then sort of—oops—forgets to let reporters see the report. The wheels of faculty committees grind slowly, and in this case I think they might be grinding mighty fine.
Alan Allport -
8/23/2005
So should identification as a Native American - with all the corresponding advantages that that status implies in, say, affirmative action hiring - simply be a matter of personal choice, then? If I decide I am Indian, does anyone have the right to demand that I prove it?
Louis N Proyect -
8/23/2005
It would appear that the demand that Churchill prove that he is Indian resonates with what NY Times reporter has written about the "blood quantum":
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
