a grand don't come for free
More Ward-blogging:
One of the more curious developments to emerge in the coverage of this story has been the effort to, among other things, parse together - or take apart - Churchill's native lineage: for the record, he claims a national and racial heritage of Cherokee Indian, 3/16ths, and has said that he is enrolled as a member of the Keetowah Cherokee tribe.
It's hard to say where the local papers are coming from here: American Indian activists have made clear time and again that that "Indian-ness" is not a matter of ethnicity, but a nationality, defined by the American Heritage Dictionary, Fourth Ed., as "The status of belonging to a particular nation by origin, birth, or naturalization." Meanwhile, ethnicity is "ethnic character, background, or affiliation." Politically aware American Indians generally refer to themselves as members of indigenous nations, and for the most part - no matter how we choose to remember it today - the United States of America treated - as in, made treaties with - American Indian tribes as nations separate from the U.S. (That's where the "This Is Stolen Land!" sign slogan you see on telephone poles every October comes from - it's not just lefty bullshit).
Anyway, aside from the fact that Ward looks a helluva lot like a native person, what his blood quota is should make little or no difference to writers for the Denver Post or the RMN or the Westword - it's a bit like putting too-fine-a-point on a Chinese person's Tibetan background - and it's hard to say exactly how Ward's Indian heritage impinges on "Some Push Back", which is, as I recall, the controversial essay in question.
It's also racist.
In what sense have Ward Churchill's detractors opened a line of inquiry into his "racial" or "ethnic" ancestry? In what sense could they have? To speak more frankly, who wants to know about Ward Churchill's American Indianness? About his Native Americanhood? And why? I mean, what are they really interested in finding? Do they want to know the names of Churchill's biological parentage stretching back, say, over 12 generations? Over 24 generations? No. They most certainly do not. I know and you know that this whole line of inquiry into Ward Churchill's Native Americanhood betrays a racist mentality. Plain and simple. Dress it up anyway you like.
(snip)
What kind of people publishes charts in newspapers (or does the equivalent on TV) to determine whether Soandso's biological ancestors were or were not ethnically or racially of suchandsuch a pedigree? Where else in human history (besides the United States of America in 2005) do we find other examples of this line of inquiry? This kind of interest? This kind of curiosity?
There's acutally a grand tradition of determining "Indian-ness," most notably the Dawes Act, which effectively marked the end of the so-called "Indian Wars" that "closed" the western frontier. The Dawes Act helped establish a system of measuring "Indian-ness" via blood quotas, mainly for determining land ownership and census rolls, which (as Ward Churchill himself has pointed out) introduced antithetical concepts of racial and national heritage, as well as individual-patrilineal inheritance, into land ownership (which itself could be construed as rather foreign). Though in fairness, maybe said reporters are using the one-drop theory.
The endgame for this bit of nastiness may be on the horizon, however. A well-informed source (who I am beginning to suspect may actually be this guy) propped up an otherwise speculative post by yours truly by putting forward the notion there may be a big fat pay-off for Ward to leave, presumably if he doesn't drag CU into court. It may not seem very Churchillian to take the package, but the dollar amount mentioned would bail a lot of brothers out of jail on Columbus Day.
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