Who is Indigenous?

One of those important tasks that accompany Retirement is clearing away the debris of a career in academia. But habits die hard, and it’s not always easy to convince myself I no longer need reams of papers, tons of data for books I should have written but never will. But the habit of data collection is hard to abandon, and I cannot quite convince myself that information is useless. So how about this compromise: I will post in this blog (which I’m pretty sure nobody reads) what facts and figures and bits of information I am still somewhat in love with. This is information and observations I cannot imagine every applying to my post-retirement writing projects, but which appeal to my ongoing curiosity.

And so here’s a share of some outdated numbers about global indigenous peoples that I have taken from my soon-to-be-discarded copy of the UNICEF Innocenti Research Center’s Digest (No. 11) entitled “Ensuring the Rights of Indigenous Children.” I believe this report came out in 2003. There's a link at the bottom if you want to download a pdf copy of the report.

Who is Indigenous?
It is difficult to define who fits within the category of “indigenous people.” The UN settles on criteria such as: 1.) the historical time that a people have laid claim to the land; 2.) the group’s voluntary perpetuation of themselves as culturally different across various categories such as language, social organization, religion, and modes of survival or production; 3.) recognition of group distinctiveness by State powers; and 4.) an historical experience of “subjugation, marginalization, dispossess, exclusion or discrimination.”

Indigenous peoples are “distinct from ethnic minorities.” Indeed, in places such as Guatemala, Bolivia, and Greenland the indigenous populations represent the majority. Further, indigenous groups often claim self-identification based on a separate culture linked to a specific territory, while ethnic minorities often emphasize political autonomy rather than cultural autonomy.

Where are Indigenous Peoples?
According to UN estimates, there are some 300 million indigenous people in more than 70 countries around the world, and approximately half of these are in Asia.

East Asia may claim some 70 million indigenous people, South Asia maybe 50 million, and Southeast Asia around 30 million. Many of the major State authorities are uncomfortable with the idea of identifying these communities as “indigenous,” so you will see a variety of terms used by these official sources: Malaysia calls them “hill tribes,” Indonesia calls them “isolated and alien peoples,” India identifies them as “scheduled tribes,” and China absorbs them as “minority nationalities.”

After Asia, Latin America is the region with the largest indigenous population, with estimates placing some 32 million people within Mexico and Central America (13 million), the Amazonian region (1 million), and the Andes (18 million).

Things get more complicated in Africa, where UN officials find they must lean more heavily on histories of discrimination to determine whether or not to include the nomadic peoples or the Pygmies as indigenous. Altogether, the organization identifies some 15 million (or fewer) as “indigenous” throughout the continent.

Identifying “indigenous” peoples in North America is a simpler endeavor that gathers together the 1 million Inuit in Russia as well as the many tribes already officially designated by the United States and Canada who number some 1.5 million people.  

In the Australasian region there may be 1.5 million indigenous Pacific Islanders, as well as only 350,000 Maoris in New Zealand and 300,000 Australian Aborigines.

What are the Political Realities?
Indigenous peoples often experience discrimination that results in cultural exclusion, economic exclusion, and political marginalization. Cultural exclusion results in a perception of tribal cultures as “inferior,” a belief that is sometimes expressed in national policies aimed at the active suppression of those cultures. Economic exclusion blocks the tribes from the expected benefits of national economic development. Political marginalization hinders access to decision-making processes and governmental representation. “Often these manifestations of exclusion are overlapping and interrelated.”

Indigenous communities often experience crises in terms of healthcare and education. While many tribal populations demonstrate higher birth rates, which means younger and more vulnerable demographics, they are also more likely to have reduced access to healthcare. This is a phenomenon in both rich and poor nation states.

As for education, many indigenous schools find it difficult to pay adequate teacher salaries, so finding the best teachers is difficult, especially for tribal areas located in more “inaccessible” regions. On top of that is the crisis of imposing a monolingual or monocultural educational system upon children who come from backgrounds with unique learning habits. Children who leave tribal communities and attend schools in non-tribal areas then face the age-old misery of racially motivated bullying or school rules that demand the abandonment of indigenous practices of dress or hairstyle. Of course, the “trickle down” aspect of these educational challenges mean tribal school systems also have trouble finding well-trained or professionally qualified teachers of indigenous heritage.

What is the Best Path Forward?
A central message of this report is that “successful and sustainable initiatives for indigenous children … are most likely to be founded upon a human rights approach that is, by definition, intercultural and incorporates indigenous worldviews.” In other words, the tribal communities themselves know what they need, but a good deal depends upon the larger authorities to grant them both the full economic support and the political autonomy to promote their languages, customs, and social structures.

Taking this post for a personal spin, I'm just going to give a shoutout for Taiwan, where the political shift from a fascist tyranny to a modern democratic state has brought good things for Aboriginals. The fascist government used to crush the cultural qualities of the tribes, but now they are allowed and even encouraged to express their traditional cultures. Much still needs to be dealt with, including the ongoing debate between some tribes and land management. But overall their access to education and healthcare is stronger than what may even be achieved in North America. Certainly the terrible suffering inflicted upon Native American communities by the Wuhan Coronavirus demonstrate the larger reality of unequal access in the United States. Let's all just hope that Taiwan continues forever in the expression of democratic governance that offers tribal people greater access to improved healthcare, education, and economic opportunity.

Download a pdf copy of the 2003 report here.

 

 

 

 

 

When Gold Led to War

In an effort to clean out my bookshelves and discard “research” materials I no longer need now that I’ve retired and no longer engage in academic scholarship, I did a speed reading of Larry McMurtry’s short biography of Crazy Horse, part of the Penguin Lives series. Even though I knew nothing about Crazy Horse going into the book, and have already forgotten most of what I read, I came away with some interesting general understandings about American history and the Indian Wars in the West. Perhaps it's because this bit of "cause and event" is tied too closely to modern phenomenon, a world where the desire for money or things that can be translated into money within a system of Capitalism can be a cause of war. 

My takeaway from the very short book …

Historian Stephen Ambrose argues that General Sherman foresaw the coming of the Union Pacific and Northern Pacific Railroads, and expected the trains would be a free ride into Indian territory for soldiers and buffalo hunters alike. Sherman’s was still a scorched earth policy, but now it would be paid for by the railroad barons. Apparently the inability to “put enough men in the field to scorch the vast earth of the west” was quite troublesome to the hero of the Civil War. It further frustrated him that fellow military veterans such as General Hancock and George Armstrong Custer had spent a good deal of money on campaigns that got some buffalo killed, earned the army a bit of publicity back east, but did very little militarily other than stirring up the anger of the southern Cheyenne who hitherto had managed to stay clear of hostilities. These endeavors had proven that “large forces of soldiers, dragging mostly useless equipment, could rarely catch up with the hostile Indians; the army was far more likely to blunder onto peaceful villages of Indians who were merely minding their own business.”

All that blundering was bad for business. The Federal government was actually forced to consider peace and offerings of money to tribes, financial reimbursements that apparently were hard to come by for a government mired in not only war debt but a miserably economy. For an economy based on the gold standard, the Depression of 1873 had sent a wave of panic throughout the bureaucracy in Washington D.C. and the major Eastern cities.

Years earlier in 1868 the government had signed a treating giving unequivocal and irrevocable ownership of the Black Hills to the Sioux, with “unusually clear provision that … the whites, were to be kept out.” But that U.S. economy craved gold.

Interestingly, it was Custer who was sent out to provide protection for the railroad geologists who scoped the land for future track laying, and he was sent again with an expedition of miners to “find gold in sufficient quantities to quench the thirst of the starving markets.” (78)

Unfortunately for the tribes, Custer announced in 1875 that the Black Hills were rich with gold. The citizen-led invasion of the Black Hills by miners, some as individuals and some as corporate mining employees, began in earnest. Conflicts between miners and the legal tribal land heirs also started in earnest, and the gold-hungry United States government had an excuse to start another war to drive the Native Americans from their land.

Too many thoughts come spinning into my mind from this, but what’s the right way to handle them, order them, control them? For that I will take up a fountain pen and a notebook. Sometimes that’s the only way I can get a hold on the hydra. 

When History Hides Behind Pedagogy

Pedagogical reforms within public school systems in the United States across the latter decades of the Twentieth Century were touted as undertaken for the benefit of the nation’s children coming from backgrounds of working class and urban impoverishment. And though many of these changes in curricula were appealing to the generation that came into adolescence during the exciting yet turbulent period of the late 1960s and early 1970s, can we be sure these reforms were of any benefit to the advancement of the core values of liberal humanism?

One area where we might get a clearer picture of how pedagogical changes look good on the surface, but do very little to actually challenge old ways of thinking, may be in the field of education for Native American communities. In the early 1960s educators and policy makers with backgrounds in the social sciences of anthropology and education began a push for school reform that was, in their eyes, designed to improve the opportunities of achieving economic success for future generations of Native Americans. 

Is it possible that these major curricula changes in public educational settings could actually have been designed not for the empowerment of the Native American individual, but for the disempowerment of the tribal nations themselves? That’s the question I ask myself after what I confess is an embarrassingly quick perusal of Guy B. Senese’s 1991 book called “Self-Determination and the Social Education of Native Americans.” What follows in this post is a “summary” of what I see (correctly or incorrectly) Senese saying in his text. 

“Self-Determination and the Social Education of Native Americans” begins with the reminder that the U.S. Congress holds Constitutional power to abrogate its trust responsibilities, its promise to financially care for the Native American people inhabiting the reservation lands that they have been promised under treaty, and most importantly to protect the material resources of the reservation lands the Native people agreed to call home in exchange for having abandoned far greater territories to an aggressive U.S. government. Those reservation lands and the resources within them could not be owned by anyone other than the tribes themselves. The reservation is effectively the property and management responsibility of each tribe’s government, so no individual member of the tribe can claim land ownership (the ability to sell the land to a non-tribal member).  

But of course, almost as soon as the ink was dry, the U.S. government would experience a hankering for the resources available within those lands. The need for gold was, for instance, at the heart of the “Indian Wars” in the postbellum years. Even as late as the early Twentieth Century that hankering had continued, with the Hoover Administration eager to release tribal lands from governmental oversight during the Great Depression. It was FDR’s New Deal program that temporarily stalled this Federal push to reclaim tribal lands. 

The end of the Second World War and the coming into its own of the Truman Administration reignited the impetus to release heirship-allotted lands into the control of returning Native American veterans. In other words, veterans returning from the war had the right to sell the land dwelt upon by their parents, even if that land was part of the tribal nation and was forbidden to be sold to individuals outside the tribe.

One representative of the Pine Ridge Reservation expressed worry that if “tribesmen” were given the land, they would sell it to outsiders and “spend their money foolishly.” This would be how great tracts of tribal land would end up in the ownership of non-Natives. Tribal leaders were fearful of the powerful interests that would try to separate them from their lands, a warning handed down by their elders. 

But in Washington D.C., the stronger argument was for “G.I. Justice” and payback to Native veterans who had so honorably served the United States in the Second World War. Federal officials within the Truman Administration therefore doubled down on efforts to terminate the reservation status of tribal lands and give former Native American soldiers the right to sell their lands for profit. 

Another factor was in play at the time: in the postwar years the nation was still recovering from the trauma of global conflict and loss, and the dominant mood was against “pluralistic sentiment.” This trend gave strength to the idea that Native people should be “assimilated” into the national (white) culture and economy (industrial).

This powerful cultural breeze, always swirling around the bureaucrats in Washington D.C. who oversaw “Indian Policy,” was whipped into a furious storm with the Truman Administration and its adherence to the goals of “Termination.” Interestingly, the push to terminate tribal reservation status lost some of its fury when the reins of power transitioned to the Eisenhower Administration. 

Termination was nothing new. By the end of 1947 the Department of Interior had begun a termination policy that removed reservation status from a number of tribes, a program overseen by the same officials responsible for the incarceration of Japanese Americans during the war. There was ground enough for the Truman Administration to plant its flags of “G.I. Justice” and resume the push for Native Americans assimilation and tribal nation termination that had begun with the Hoover Administration but was shunted aside by the need to deal with the Great Depression. 

For some reason, however, the Eisenhower Administration stuck its foot out and tripped the policymakers in their race to termination. But that might simply be a result of a new leader wanting to do something to stand apart from his predecessor, because the Eisenhower Administration never actually abandoned the goals of assimilation and termination. Instead, the new government maintained the end goal, but disguised the vehicle for achieving this aim with an increasingly sophisticated form, hiding behind various socioeconomic and psychological models that received the applause and active engagement of professional educators and academics, especially those in the social sciences. This newly garbed assault upon tribal survival found shelter beneath the umbrella of “self-determination.” 

The Eisenhower Administration and the new Congressional embrace of assimilating the Native and taking tribal lands was driven in part by the Cold War which made clear the need for the minerals that lay beneath so much tribal territory. It was argued that national security depended upon the acquisition of these resources, which included oil and gas as well as uranium deposits. But a brutal policy of termination could not be easily achieved, especially as the newly arising leaders of the “Third World Movement” and the propaganda ministry of the Soviet Union were pointing to the economic despair of Native tribal areas as proof of Capitalism’s failure. 

If termination goals could not be rushed through as eagerly as hoped for, at least the territories could be more easily controlled through the agency of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). But of course, the energy industry still slavered over the thought of operating free of BIA and tribal regulatory interference, possibly benefitting from the inexperience of even the most sophisticated tribal councils. 

Assimilationist policies that sought to draw individual Native citizens away from their tribal lands were invigorated by economic attitudes that envisioned people as resources. Put bluntly, Native individuals were little more than incredibly cheap labor. In a sort of feedback loop, economists saw in underdeveloped areas a workforce that would itself be crucial to developing a comfortable investment climate. This resulted in official programs that encouraged major industries to establish production lines in or near reservation lands. 

The BIA was eager to cooperate in this program, while the Eisenhower Administration saw international public relations gains in the “industrialization” of tribal communities. Tax incentives guided many non-Native business interests to open assembly lines on reservation lands where labor proved quite cheap, trainable, and tractable. Enticements were also provided to corporations that could draw Native workers away from their tribal homes and into urban industrial economies where they would be divorced and divided from the ways and worldviews of their ancestral inheritance.

It was unquestioningly assumed that industrial development would itself be an educative force, endowing tribal people with factory capable work habits, bank favorable values of thrift, and an overall embrace of Euro-American nationalist cultural values. These values, centered upon the ideals of individualism and “self-support and self-help,” could erode traditional, tribal, and communal sensibilities. It was hoped that these “assimilated” Natives would themselves abolish the tribal authorities and embrace the philosophy of “self-determination,” the popular new way of saying “termination.”

But when, in some instances, these same workers proved themselves quite adept at adopting Western labor practices by going on strike, the corporate investors were noticeably distressed. Production most noticeably came to a halt in the Navajo nation as poorly paid laborers attempted to unionize their workplaces, and investors did not hesitate to remove themselves from reservation lands. Unionization and the fight for a fair living wage in the mid-1970s was a wrench tossed into the BIA’s smooth running program since the 1960s of guiding Vietnam war-related defense monies to electronics assembly lines and garment manufacturers on tribal lands. 

Thus came crashing down the claim that the tribes had never had it so good and would eagerly be satisfied with economic exploitation in the form of low pay. What to do?

Academics turned to Education as an available route to assimilation and eventual undertaking by Natives themselves to sell off their reservation lands. 

Under the many decades when boarding schools dominated the national government educational policy, Native children were taught vocational subjects. Nearly 75 percent of their learning time was dedicated to preparing for repetitive assembly line skills and the development of “desirable attitudes” toward physical labor. 

By the early 1960s, however, it was generally agreed that Native children would be directed to public school on or near reservation lands. The dominant public school curricula appeared on the surface to be less invested in training an industrial labor force, but at heart educational policies continued to serve as producers of fodder for factory assembly lines. Professional educators, by and large, proved themselves thoroughly accommodating to the industrial economy.  

The influence of school reformers and social policy developers had endowed public education with a bright sheen of community development and self-determination. But many saw beneath this silver lining the ongoing strategy of transitioning tribal members toward eventual termination of their reservation governance. Bilingual, bicultural education, community control of local schoolboards, arts and crafts programs—all were seen as increasing a sense of apathy toward the warnings that colonial powers and nationalist endeavors could not be trusted. 

Among those who gave warning was Vine Deloria Jr., who separated “the means to educate” from “the intention.” He saw the “intention” behind all the late-1960s money and scholarly attention being given to the education of Native children as an effort to blunt the tribal person’s resistance to government termination policies. Education, he worried, was in the service of training Natives to willingly embrace their own eventual exploitation and termination of their own tribes. 

Deloria was part of a diverse movement of tribal thinkers and activists who had experienced a changing consciousness about “the anesthetic of false self-determination.” They cleverly used the ambiguous educational reforms of the 1960s to re-define for their communities educational structures that would benefit the economic and social development of the tribes without sacrificing actual power and control of the lands. With the occupation of Wounded Knee and the trashing of BIA headquarters in Washington D.C., this new generation of tribal activists saw not only the Federal government (and the succession of political leaders) as their adversary, but increasingly distrusted tribal governments they saw as non-representative of the majority of community members. The “invested” status of many tribal leaders, they suspected, was a barrier to their new nationalist definition of self-determination. 

As well as feeling unrepresented by tribal governments, these young activists also saw education as crucial to their goals of eventual self-determination. 

“Resource control and educational troll developed into key themes toward legitimate self-determination,” Senese says. The new generation encouraged curricular changes that would re-empower the cultures and values from which “self” arises. They believed that with self-regeneration would come a new form of tribal economy and development.

I’ll stop here, ruminating on the idea that all good education should contribute to the formation of a stronger, healthier sense of “self” that includes not only the individual but the communities that the person comes from and remains part of, a living social body.

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Photo Source: Teach for America, NYU Special Collections

The Awesomeness of Bookstagrammers

In a post at the Litreactor website, horror/thriller novelist Gabino Iglesias posted "10 Reasons Why Bookstagrammers are Awesome." Lists always intrigue me, so I was drawn to Iglesias' post. (The fact that I enjoy the author's work contributed to my interest, sure.)

Iglesia notes that, "Not many book reviewers will go into the feelings they experience when reading a book, but bookstagrammers will." The payoff is that such "honesty" encourages interest, perhaps leading to more book sales. For authors the prize is that these posts provide "a different version of what their work is accomplishing out there in the world."

Another point Iglesias makes is that blookstagrammers are "a positive force" insofar as they generally won't share a book they disliked, but will express great passion to support a novel they enjoyed.
And that leaves me wondering about the role of the critic. But are "amateur" online book reviewers "critics?" Are they even reviewers? Can their posts qualify them as "hobbyists?"

But wait, why bother asking these questions? One of the most important observations makes is that bookstagrammers "are great at building community." And if there's anything we need in this age of neoliberalism, it is the building of communities. What better community can we find than the community of book readers?

The Reading Brain Can Deteriorate

In his review of Reader, Come Home, Maryanne’s Wolf’s new book of essays on the neurobiology of reading, Mark Bauerline notes:

"If reading is not natural but invented, it can deteriorate. If the brain adapted to print because of repeated exposure, it can adapt away if exposure slows. The circuit will break if unused, or if something different from print draws more of the brain’s attention. If screens take the place of paper, the brain will react."

This is the topic Wolf focuses on in the last two of her four newly published essays. I speak for myself in recognizing the truth in her fear that our more frequent use of electronic screens is a real thing: the hyperstimulation (that thrill of a quick “like”) and loss of longterm focus.

In fact, my lazy brain tells me to stop summarizing and just leave a link to Bauerline’s review here.