Proof Reading

The etymology of "proof" includes the "standard of strength of distilled liquor" and of "reading" to "explain, read, rule, advise."  So, proof reading...?

As I have been engaged in proof reading my book for publication, with an April 12 deadline looming, I arrive at chapter 4, remembering with gratitude and humor the evening I presented a part of it at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque in October 2010.

Gratitude because I met some mighty fine Native people and allies at the University, humor because of our good talk and laughter both before and after the public presentation.

Of course, as I proof chapter 4, an academic exercise in looking for typos and any factual errors in what you have written, I cannot help but wish I could include some marginal notes for the reader about that evening and the broader issues in Native social politics that I can only gloss over in the book.

I should note that the chapter is sharply critical of the kinds of sexist ideologies and practices that get represented by tribal governments as “traditional” to rationalize all kinds of discrimination (and even violence) against Native women and their children. It spends a good deal of time analyzing the trial testimonies, with a focus on how the case was presented and vetted through the courts.

When finished with my public presentation, the invariable Q&A discussion began with a set of comments from a Lakota professor of the UNM Law School. He was harshly critical of me and my work and spoke for several minutes before getting to his question. Essentially, he felt that my critiques were anti-tribal sovereignty and that I just needed to affirm the Supreme Court’s decision in Martinez as the most important legal affirmation of tribal sovereignty U.S. history. He would pose then and later, “Do you or do you not support tribal sovereignty as affirmed by the Martinez decision?”

A familiar refrain: You cannot criticize how sexism, homophobia, or racism has become a part of tribal sovereignty without being accused of being anti-sovereignty and, really, anti-Indian. You simply cannot.

A descendant of Martinez asked the next question. Actually, he kept on asking questions for the remaining Q&A period. Every time someone else posed a question, I hardly had a chance to respond before he would have his hand raised again. I think in the half hour or so of the Q&A, he probably posed about ten questions/comments.

Partly, he just wanted people to stop talking about his family. And the more he spoke, the more empathetic I was to his appeal. It is not easy being an unenrolled member of any tribe on whose reservation you live and culturally participate.

But mostly, he wanted to tell me that I was just using the Martinez case to advance my own career, that it was in the past and should be left in the past, and that I needed to update my scholarship by reading Ward Churchill, the most important Native writer today.

What was the most difficult aspect of his participation, however, was not these remarks. It was navigating the language he chose to represent his concerns through. Language that became more and more violent in tone as the Q&A period transpired. About how I was going to be “taken out” by people who would read my work and be angry. Not by him, of course, but someone was going to “come up from behind me” and “take me out” for my work.

A wonderfully smart Navajo woman, a graduate student at UNM, spoke up and called him out. He refused to hear her.

The Q&A closed when the Lakota law professor insisted, again, that I answer his question, “Do you or do you not support tribal sovereignty as affirmed by the Martinez decision?” I told him it was not the question I would ask and that my talk had been about how sovereignty is defined by Native peoples. That I felt Native cultural beliefs and practices provided a much better model for Native governance than the U.S. nation-state’s version of a tribal sovereignty based on sexism, racism, and homophobia.

I wish there were a way to record the viscous and viciousness of the law professor’s question and the Martinez descendant’s remarks and manner within the text of the book. Maybe as decorative scribbles in the margin. But alas, I must resign myself to academic prose…

I wonder if the book will always feel inadequate to the task of representing and analyzing the issues Native peoples confront in their interpersonal and social politics with one another, or if that is merely the state of things at this stage of the production process?

Part III: More Musings...

Imperial Privilege: A Conclusion…

“Settler” belongs etymologically to “reconcile.” It suggests an internal consistency and making right within the colonialism it qualifies as “settler colonialism.”

I think a great part of the disclaimers at the heart of nation-state apologies to indigenous peoples is inseparable from the historical and ongoing efforts of nation-state governments to protect their legal and economic entitlements to indigenous governments, lands, and bodies. The nation-state has, after all, been able to establish and maintain its privileges and access to indigenous peoples’ governments, lands, and bodies without any real fear of international accountability or legal consequence.

So, while costly and difficult, it would seem that indigenous peoples should stop asking the nation-state (or its churches) for apologies and demand a full court legal redress of their self-determination and territories. Unless or until the nation-state is genuinely made to make these kinds of reparations, its apologies are disingenuous at best and insulting at worst: there can be no “restoration” or “reconciliation” without legal responsibility and reparation.

It is not about understanding the dynamics of “settlement” quasi- or neo- colonial, but the need to understand and strategies the anarchy of the empire.

Part II: More Musings...

Nowhere are the politics of “settler colonialism” more pronounced for me than when I consider the apology syndrome affecting nation-state relations with indigenous peoples in the United States, Australia, and Canada.

§ The 103d United States Congress passed Joint Resolution 19 (Public Law 103-150) on November 23, 1993. The purpose of the Resolution was, “To acknowledge the 100th anniversary of the January 17, 1893 overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaii, and to offer an apology to Native Hawaiians on behalf of the United States for the overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaii.” It stipulated to several historical and legal facts regarding the sovereign status of the Kingdom of Hawaii and the U.S. congressional and military backed overthrow of its government, which violated U.S. constitutional and international treaty law. It also provided a disclaimer that, “Nothing in this Joint Resolution is intended to serve as a settlement of any claims against the United States.”

§ In Australia, the members of Parliament passed a motion in February 2008 to apologize to Aboriginals "for the laws and policies of successive parliaments and governments that have inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss on these our fellow Australians.” The motion focused on the painful history, that took place through the 1960s, of the Stolen Generations of Aboriginal children abducted from their homes by the state to become servants for whites.

§ In Canada, a formal apology was delivered by the Prime Minister to First Nations people in June 2008: "I stand before you today to offer an apology to former students of Indian residential schools. The treatment of children in Indian residential schools is a sad chapter in our history…. We now recognise that, far too often, these institutions gave rise to abuse or neglect and were inadequately controlled, and we apologise for failing to protect you…. The government of Canada sincerely apologises and asks the forgiveness of the aboriginal peoples of this country for failing them so profoundly. We are sorry."

§ In December 2009, U.S. President Obama signed the Native American Apology Resolution, which states that the U.S. “apologizes on behalf of the people of the United States to all Native Peoples for the many instances of violence, maltreatment, and neglect inflicted on Native Peoples by citizens of the United States.” It “urges the President to acknowledge the wrongs of the United States against Indian tribes in the history of the United States in order to bring healing to this land.” The Resolution included a disclaimer that nothing in the Resolution authorizes or supports any legal claims against the United States and that the Resolution does not settle any claims against the United States.

The Stolen Generation Action Group in Australia has sought financial compensation through the courts for individuals who were illegal taken from their families and placed in white homes. A lawsuit from victims of Canada’s residential schools resulted in an award of financial compensation, and another has proceeded to court in Newfoundland and Labrador.

But in the United States, the disclaimers about legal or financial culpability in the 1993 Hawaiian apology and the 2009 Native resolution has made it impossible for indigenous peoples within the U.S. and its occupied territories in the Pacific and the Caribbean to make any claims for restitution or reparation, financial or otherwise.

The United States is an imperial power. It is an empire. If you do not believe so in relation to indigenous populations, then consider its military and private security contractors’ activities in South and Central America, northern Africa, and the Middle East. Consider its support of Israel’s occupation of Palestine. From those locations, the U.S. is still acting like and perceived as an imperial empire.

As in Australia and Canada, the U.S. has deployed official apologies to indigenous peoples to coopt the historical and legal implications of its empiric invasion, occupation, and forced assimilation policies to serve its interests.

Whether you read the apologies as articulated through dominant religious dogma about “forgiveness,” or through a more secular humanist claim to the “public good,” what the apologies work to “restore” is not healing and empowerment of the abused and the oppressed. What they work to “restore” is the formation of the very same interpersonal and social structures that uphold the nation-state’s power (like certain kinds of families and certain kinds of communities) and in which violence against women, children, and racialized groups is made possible (rationalizing and warranting ever-expanding forms of state control).

While indigenous peoples have welcomed (for the most part) the apologies as an acknowledgement of the severe historical wrongs and grossly unlawful actions of their nation-states in regards to their self-determination, well-being, and territorial rights, the apologies have completely foreclosed the possibility of any real legal responsibility or reparations of indigenous governance and territories in the context of those wrongs and actions. It is as if the nation-state has submitted its statement in a confessional booth, and expects, in due course, to be forgiven and excused.

In effect, in other words, the apologies have been about amnesty for the imperial state, providing for the operationalization of the empire’s power over indigenous peoples, to disclaim and be recused from any legal obligation or responsibility to redress their historical wrongs and illegal actions in any real kind of way.

(Part III...)

More Musings on Why “Settler Colonialism” Doesn’t Work (For Me)

Part I

First Nations “talking circles” and the “truth and reconciliation commissions” in South Africa aim at a “restorative justice” for the victims of domestic and state-sanctioned violence. Out of both of these forums, people who have experienced violence at the hands of their lovers and relatives, or the apartheid state, have been critical of the way that their abusers have been returned home in the name of “reconciliation” and healing, only to find them continue their violent and bigoted behavior.

So I wonder what it means that the more interpersonal aspects of the talking circles or the public testimony and confrontation of commission hearings anticipates the absolution and amnesty of restoration and reconciliation in the name of the family or in the name of the nation? What would it mean if the situation of telling about one’s experiences of violence and their consequences anticipated legal responsibility and reparation?

To be clear. Of course First Nation “talking circles” and the South African commissions have and still produce much needed moments of interpersonal and public support and healing around matters of violence. They have the potential to do so. This is because indigenous cultural beliefs and practices offer a viable alternative for personal and collective accountability for violence, certainly more so than those that have so staggeringly failed within the world’s military and prison industrial complexes.

But the perceived aim of “restorative justice” models is, after all, to restore. To reconcile. So, what does it mean when the talking through, the testimony, and the confrontation of one’s oppressor(s) is made to anticipate the absolution and amnesty of that violence? What would it mean if the situation of talking about one’s experiences of violence anticipated legal responsibility and reparation?

No Forgiveness

I have been thinking a lot about how indigenous models of “restorative justice” have been co-opted by nation-state interests in the service of their power over indigenous peoples, by perpetuating interpersonal violence and military and police abuse. And they seem to do so with the aim of deflecting their culpability within the structures and forms of violence onto specific individuals or groups who commit wrongful acts. These individuals and groups are then represented as deviant criminals—in contrast with good citizens and the state. But further, deploying the rhetoric of “restorative justice,” they are treated as deviant criminals without the real need to take lasting responsibility or make reparations to those they have abused.

So excused, the nation-state maintains its authority as effectively having dealt with both crime and criminal. The nation-state can then lay claim to being democratic and humanist, even as it is actively facilitating and perpetuating a violence without lasting consequence.

For the record, no, I do not believe in “forgiveness” without legal responsibility and reparation. Forgiveness is the stuff of dominant religious/church practice, where the mere confession of guilt serves as the occasion for an exoneration that tacitly endorses the very actions needing to be “forgiven.” (I can’t help but think of Amy Berg’s 2006 documentary “Deliver Us From Evil,” about the way the Catholic Church endorses pedophilia.)

The Settler Colonial

I believe that the lack of legal responsibility and reparation in the nation-state’s violence is exactly what is made illegible in  “settler colonial” narratives. These narratives historicize the subtle, local differences of colonization between “settlement” and the empire. I guess I am still having a hard time appreciating that difference. I feel we lose some things in our histories and understandings of how societies are formed by not retaining imperialism and empire in our analyses.

Some might contest that “settler colonialism” is about understanding the nation-state’s history of land dispossession and forced  assimilation in a post-imperial, post-empire historical context. I have certainly learned a lot from writers like Wolfe and Ford about the historical specificities and comparativities of colonies, settlements, and empires.

But I still do not think “settler” is the term indigenous peoples want to describe these specificities, their transformations over time, or their lasting consequences in indigenous-state relations. “Settler” suggests a legitimacy in the modernist teleologies of progress—from less civilized to more civilized, from empire to settler—and often within the very critical space of accounting for the nation-states’ resilience as an imperial power.

Some examples.

(See Part II...)

Why "Settler Colonialism" Isn't Exactly Right

In his groundbreaking book, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event (1999), Patrick Wolfe defines “settler colonialism” as the structure of permanent invasion focused on usurping indigenous land rights. On their website, the settler colonial studies blog, Edward Cavanagh and Lorenzo Veracini define “settler colonialism” as  describing a social formation and political order in which settlers claim sovereignty over a territory and seek to eliminate indigenous peoples’ rights from those territories (2010).

In numerous books and articles published in between these definitions (1999 and 2010), authors have sought to flush out the specific historical conditions of when, how, and why settlers have claimed sovereignty and territorial rights over indigenous peoples. These conditions have been located within settler programs of genocide (Patrick Wolfe’s 2006 essay “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native”), settler segregationist land rights laws (Sherene H. Razack’s 2002 edition, Race, Space, and the Law: Unsettling a White Settler Society), settler theft of indigenous children (Margaret D. Jacobs’ 2009 book  White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880-1940), and settler assertions of jurisdiction over indigenous lands and crimes (Lisa Ford’s 2010 book Settler Sovereignty: Jurisdiction and Indigenous People in America and Australia, 1788-1836).

I have not been entirely convinced by the arguments about “settler colonialism” in these works, and have been thinking much about why that is so.

I have learned a lot about the important historical differences between what is described as “imperial,” “colonial,” “settler,” and “nation-state” understandings and claims of their own sovereignties and territorial rights against those of indigenous peoples. I have also had lots of unease with the claim that something new or unique has happened within “settler colonialism” from the empiricism and imperialism of the nation-state.

So I begin with the etymology of “settler” as a thing or person that settles, within the etymology of “settle” as a thing or person that “comes to rest,” that establishes a “permanent residence.” Fair enough. That would seem to be in line with the important efforts of scholars like Wolfe, Cavanagh, Veracini, Razack, Jacobs, Ford, and so many others to figure out the kind of “colonial” structure and social formation that has been historically articulated through the ascension of the Nation-State and its usurpation of indigenous sovereignty and territorial rights through criminal jurisdiction and violent programs of genocide and child theft.

But “settle” also belongs etymologically to “reconcile” or “reconciliation,” which in turn belongs to “bring together” (again), to “make friendly,” and to “make consistent.”

And here is where I have troubles with “settler colonialism.” Because it suggests not merely an important set of contingencies within the historical genocide and dispossession of indigenous peoples, it anticipates a reconciling of those histories within the current structure and social formation of the nation-state. A nation-state that is treated as albeit colonial, but as no longer imperial or colonial proper. The nation-state is treated within “settler colonialism” as having moved beyond its own tragically imperial and colonial history to be something else that is not quite entirely colonial because it has been “reconciled” and “made consistent” within/as the nation-state.

I guess I am wanting to hold onto harsher terms like “imperialism” and “colonialism” to describe the current relationship of the United States to American Indians, Alaskan Natives, Native Hawaiians, and the indigenous peoples of its occupied territories in the Pacific and the Caribbean. I think it is important and necessary to secure indigenous self-determination and decolonization to hold onto the “empire” in our understanding, describing, and strategizing ways of empowerment and revolution.

Of course, the U.S. as an empire has gone through many transformations since the 1770s. Of course it is important to understand those transformations in all of their historical contingencies and cultural specificities.

But I do not think “settler colonialism” helps us understand the current structure or social formation of the U.S. as a global force or in relation to indigenous peoples within its various kinds of borders. It dilutes the serious consequences of the U.S. empire now for indigenous peoples for an assumed historical reconciliation and consistency of the nation-state within the global.

P.S.

See Scott Morgensen's interview about his new book, Spaces Between Us (2011), on the First People's Blog in which several posts here on "settler colonial" are discussed.

A Call Against Anti-Muslim Racism in the U.S.

I was forwarded an email this past year from someone wanting to let me know what was circulating among some of the students at SFSU. We’ve all seen these emails before – the ones that take on a life of their own as they make their way through various list-serves. And this one I had seen before. About ten years ago. Right after 9/11.

Late one Saturday afternoon, a local west Texas cowboy had ridden his horse into the nearby town of Pecos and stopped at the local watering hole. While seated at the bar having a beer, in walked an old Indian and a devout Muslim, dressed with turban and all. Both persons went to the bar and took a stool on either side of the cowboy. Eventually, their conversation drifted around to their varying cultures of history and background.

The native American stated, "Once my people were many, but now we are few."

The Muslim then chimed in and said, "Once my people were few, but now we are many."

The cowboy glanced at the Indian a moment, then he looked directly at the Muslim and said with a sly grin, "That's cause we ain't played cowboys and Muslims yet."

The email had made me cringe ten years ago for a number of reasons, including the cavalier way that it refers to the historical genocide and violence against American Indians while romanticizing Texas cowboys (like George W.?) as America’s saviors against old and new threats perceived.

But jokes are easy enough to dismiss as jokes.

Not so funny is the way that the awe-inspiring ignorance in the United States of north African history and culture – and of Arab and Muslim people and beliefs in particular – is vividly exposed by news media and some public reactions to the current political movements in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, and the Ivory Coast.

Ignorance folds easily into fear and anxiety which produce and are produced by uninformed federal officials' legislative proposals and hearings on the "radicalization" of Muslim people in America, public gatherings against Muslim organizations and places, and news' pundits and commentators stupid musings of all kinds of possible causes and consequences of the movements in Africa for the United States. These proposals, gatherings, and news coverage have extolled anti-Muslim sentiment as a political fact of threat and terror, justifying anti-Muslim ideologies that inform everything from the Patriot Act to the illegal detention and interrogation of Muslim Americans. In other words, racism is covering over a rash of human and civil rights abuses of Muslim people in the name of “homeland security.”

In Tennessee, Republican Senator Bill Ketron has proposed a bill that would criminalize certain practices of Shariah, a Muslim legal and religious code of behavior, as a felony worthy of up to 15 years in prison. The bill explains its severe penalties by asserting that Shariah poses an imminent threat to the United States because it advances jihad (or holy war) to overthrow the U.S. government. The bill is supported by several conservative groups on the right, including the Tennessee Eagle Forum, who promise that law-abiding Muslims peacefully practicing their religion have nothing to fear. But this is hardly reassuring given that the bill would require Tennessee’s Attorney General to classify any organization adhering to Shariah codes as a potential “terrorist group” and to freeze their financial assets. Organizations would not be able to appeal the classification for two years.

Republicans in 13 other states have introduced similar bills that would prohibit state judges from considering Shariah when making decisions about child-custody or divorce. A version of this prohibition passed in Oklahoma last fall but a federal judge blocked it from taking effect during appeal.


And, then there is Representative Peter King, a Republican from New York and Chair of the House Homeland Security Committee, calling for hearings on Islamic "radicalization" in the United States (code words for the operation of al Qaeda). Many are saying it is his job, but his call parallels a fierce escalation of anti-Muslim Mosque rallies in NYC where Muslims and Arabs are being represented as the new, real, "homegrown," sleeper threat of U.S. society and national security.

These legislative proposals and hearings are concerning on their own, but even more so as they emerge from a public support of treating Muslims and Arabs like terrorists. This support has called for and rationalized the prison-and-information industrial complex that has willfully violated Muslim human and civil rights in the U.S. since 9/11 and in the name of national security.

I cannot help but think of Jack D. Forbes’ work (a Powhatan and Lenape scholar and activist). Describing the late 1800s state campaign of genocidal extermination of California Indians in Native Americans of California and Nevada (1982), Forbes emphasized that it was not merely officials who participated in it: “The sequence of events [are] all the more distressing since it serves to indict not a group of cruel leaders, or a few squads of rough soldiers, but, in effect, an entire people; for the conquest of the Native Californian was above all else a popular, mass enterprise” (69). As is the growing anti-Muslim movement in the United States. Alarming not because it is new or policy-driven, but because it is participated within and supported by a growing number of people.


Just this past Friday, two elderly Sikh men in the Sacramento suburb of Elk Grove were shot – one to death and one still in critical condition. Both men—wearing beards and turbans—were taking a walk when shot.

These attitudes and actions are unacceptable. From anti-Muslim legislation, to public rallies against the NYC mosque, to hate crimes against men taking an evening stroll in their neighborhood, we cannot allow ourselves to grow numb or indifferent to racist violence and cruelty. Not within federal/state law and not within one another.