Below is an extract from a post by News Hounds, a website that apparently monitors Faux News (strong stomachs they must have over there), on the topic of the charge that Ward Churchill is not an Indian, and on the matter of his alleged fabrication of history regarding the Mandan Sioux. This portion of the post followed a transcript of Bill O'Reilly's show last night:
(http://www.newshounds.us/2005/02/10/oreilly_vs_churchill_the_battle_rages.php)
[begin quote]
I’m going to let my friend who is a professor of Ethnic Studies at at major university, answer Paul Campos and O’Reilly. Here, verbatim, is what she wrote to me in response to my sending her a copy of Campos’ original column against Churchill, published in the Rocky Mountain News (2/8/05), in which he set forth the same arguments against Churchill that he used during this interview.
SUBJECTS: Thomas Brown, Plagiarism and Paul Campos
Thomas Brown is a sociologist, not an historian, let alone an historian of Native American studies. One of the sources he cites is from 1945, for crying out loud. For an assistant professor of sociology to declare that he can "set the historical record straight" in an eight-page essay quoting scholarship that is decades old is ridiculous. The matter of genocide as it pertains to Native Americans is a contested issue among historians. They disagree with each other. It is hardly academic fraud to hold one viewpoint instead of another.
Nevertheless, Indians then and now blame the military for deliberately spreading smallpox through infected blankets. In a speech on the day he died of smallpox, Mandan chief Four Bears blamed whites for the disease and told his people they should "rise all together and not leave one of them alive," even though the Mandans had always had peaceful relations with them. There has to be some reason why the Indians in the U.S. died at much higher rates of smallpox than did those in Canada, where the government aggressively encouraged smallpox vaccination among tribes. Brown says Congress appropriated money for vaccination, but he doesn't say how effectively any such program was implemented.
b. I am handicapped by not having read Churchill's entire work. I don't trust Brown to quote accurately and within context from it. Churchill's critics certainly did not do so with the 9/11 essay and I suspect they are not doing it here, either. I would caution any reader to withhold judgment until the full essay appears.
c. Plagiarism as grounds for loss of tenure? Didn't happen to Doris Kearns Goodwin a few years ago when she admitted taking a passage from someone else for one of his books. Didn't hurt the reputation of Stephen F. Ambrose, who also was accused of it before he died. If Churchill committed plagiarism, it certainly is not grounds for dismissal. Plagiarism need not be lifting an entire passage from someone else's book. It can merely mean using someone's idea, rephrased in your own words, without including a footnote.
d. The title "Truth Tricky for Churchill" says a lot about the agenda of Paul Campos and the rest of the right-wing lynch mob chasing Churchill now. Historical truth has become tricky for everyone, not just Churchill, because increasingly scholars see what we have been taught about our past to have been shaped and twisted by ideology. In trying to identity that ideological gloss, scholars risk attack by those who want to confer sainthood on our ancestors, ignore the mistakes of past American policy, and continue living the fiction that everything America has done, is doing, or ever will do is right and just and anyone who opposes our policies is evil and must be destroyed.
e. In short, the attack on Churchill is morphing into another front in the "culture wars" from which the right can attack affirmative action (he "lied" about being an Indian), as well as recent scholarship (last 20 years or so) that departs from the white-man centered view of America the Great.
SUBJECT: Indian Identity
1. Indian identity: Determining who belongs to what race is extremely difficult because race, as we all know, is not a biological concept, but a social one, defined by many factors besides biology. The "one drop rule" of southern states, which defined was black anyone with a single drop of black blood, is an example of such social rules that determine race. Indian racial identity is even more complicated, and Cherokee identity is one of the most complicated of all.
One can be Indian by birth, if one has Indian parents, of course, but tribes often adopted people into their tribes and considered them "Indian" regardless of their biological heritage. Some black slaves of Cherokee owners were adopted and considered fully Indian by the tribe, despite biology, and were raised as Cherokee, spoke Cherokee, and so on. Yet someone with a Cherokee mother raised by a white father in white society might never have considered himself Cherokee and neither would his or her descendants. So it is complicated even on a biological basis.
Furthermore, the federal government complicated matters with the General Allotment Act of 1887, which tried to identify all Indians and give them each 80 acres of land so that the rest could be sold to whites (that's how Oklahoma became a state.) But the law's rolls of Indians were incomplete, some people were left off who considered themselves and were considered by others to be Indians. Nevertheless, some people use these so-called Dawes Act rolls as "proof" of Indianness and Indian ancestors. They are especially useful for people who want to show that someone does not have an Indian ancestor. Actually, being on the rolls is only proof that the federal government considers one an Indian.
The federal government added another layer of complexity in the 1930s, when tribes were encouraged to adopt constitutions. Sometimes the constitutions defined everyone living on the reservation at the time as full tribal members, so many people were grandfathered in who biologically may not have been from that tribe. Furthermore, some tribes require that a parent consent to enrolling a child as a member. A child with an Indian mother and a white father cannot be enrolled in some tribes. Or a child with two Indian parents and a father who refuses to fill out the paper will be left off the rolls.
In short, there is no simple way to determine who is an Indian. As sovereign nations, tribes do not like relying on federal laws to determine their membership. Personally, I don't think they should have to. If someone considers themselves an Indian, holds traditional Indian beliefs, and is accepted by other Indians as one of them, that is good enough as far as I am concerned.
[end quote]
I send this not professing to be knowledgeable about Native American history.
-- Sunil Sharma unregistered Indonesian/Indian
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