Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
One worry is the question of identity. As has been posted here, some long-time American Indian critics of Churchill have been questioning whether or not Churchill really counts as "American Indian."
Not an intensely compelling question, but Churchill seems to think it's important.
Doug
Who counts as "Indian," "Black," "officially poor," etc. of course matters a great deal in bean-counting. The fewer of them there are, the less money the federal and state governments need to hand out.
<blockquote>_When did this "blood quantum" business begin? Is that an invention of the Bureau of Indian Affairs?_
There are a number of references to it. I think the points of origin or inception vary throughout the hemisphere. The Spanish were involved in categorization of various genetic combinations almost from the onset. You could say that five hundred years ago was the basis of blood quantum in Ibero-America. But in Anglo-America, while there was some preoccupation with it, it was not formalized until the passage of the General Allotment Act, mid-1880s. At that point they began to define Indian as being someone who was demonstrably and documentably of at least one-quarter by quantum blood indigenous in a given group. You couldn't be an eighth Cheyenne and an eighth Arapaho and be an Indian. You had to be a quarter Cheyenne or a quarter Arapaho or hopefully a quarter and a quarter. The reason for this was quite clear. They were identifying Indians for purposes of allotting them individual parcels of land in the existing reservation base at that point. If they ran out of Indians identifiable as such, then the rest of the land would be declared surplus. So it was clearly in the interests of the government to create a definition of Indianness that would minimize the number of Indians that were available. It was an economic motivation for the application of this genetic criteria to Indianness in the first place. It's become increasingly so ever since.
("Historical and Current Perspectives: David Barsamian interviews
Ward Churchill," Z Magazine, December 1995,
<http://zena.secureforum.com/Znet/zmag/articles/dec95barsamian.htm>)</blockquote>The best way for the power elite today to handle the "officially poor" is to arrest many of the dark-skinned "officially poor" in multi-racial inner cities and send them to predominantly white rural areas to be locked up in prisons and turned into ghostly presences in rural census tracts. That way, the power elite can take money away from left-leaning cities and spend it to win the allegiance of white rural voters twice, in the forms of budget appropriations based upon census figures as well as jobs in the prison industry -- all the while neutralizing the most combative members of the relative surplus population, who are also the most liable to revolt.
In another context, Norman G. Finkelstein has demonstrated that the Holocaust Industry has inflated the number of Holocaust survivors in order to extort money from Swiss banks, so much so that, if we were to accept the number blandished by the Holocaust Industry, we would be engaging in a Holocaust denial.
<blockquote> In my last chapter I explore the material compensation issue. I contend that the Holocaust industry is guilty of a "double shakedown": it misappropriates monies from European governments as well as from the actual survivors of Nazi persecution. Even the official history of the Jewish Claims Conference acknowledges that the Conference made improper use of the monies originally earmarked by the German government for Holocaust victims. During the recent slave-labor negotiations, the Claims Conference put forth wildly inflated figures for still living former Jewish slave-laborers. In doing so, the Conference forces a radical revision of our understanding of the Nazi holocaust: increasing the number of survivors means decreasing the number of victims. Indeed, the numbers used by the Claims Conference place it uncomfortably close to the arguments of Holocaust revisionists. "If everyone who claims to be a survivor actually is one," my mother (a concentration camp survivor) used to exclaim, "who did Hitler kill?"
(Norman G. Finkelstein, "Will _The Holocaust Industry_ Incite Anti-Semitism?" Sueddeutsche Zeitung, <http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/article.php?pg=3&ar=36>, August 11, 2000)</blockquote> -- Yoshie
* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * Greens for Nader: <http://greensfornader.net/> * Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * OSU-GESO: <http://www.osu-geso.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>
