Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
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.
So you're saying that obsessing over ethnic definitions is the business of rulers, and not dissidents and revolutionaries?
Doug
Originally, it was the ruling class among settlers who came from various European countries that invented races. When first colonial settlers landed in North America, no indigenous person had any political consciousness of himself or herself as an "American Indian," an overarching identity that puts all tribes into the same category. That's a category that ruling-class settlers invented. Indigenous people possessed only tribal consciousness or at most consciousness of a confederacy of tribes (like the Iroquois Confederacy) -- that's one of their tragic downfalls, in addition to germs, horses, and weapons that settlers brought with them. At the beginning of colonial settlements, there was probably rough parity in military power between settlers and indigenous tribes given the latter's superior knowledge of terrains and weathers, but it didn't occur to indigenous people that they had better unite as Indians, rather than separately as individual tribes, to negotiate with or fight back settlers. Disunity among the indigenous gave settlers a decisive advantage. Had indigenous people been able to form a unifying political identity as "indigenous" (or "American Indian" or a confederate of all first nations or whatever), acting as one nation, and sided with the French, perhaps the French wouldn't have lost the French-Indian War, and the United States might be more like Canada today. :-> Or at least, subsequent history of North America as well as the rest of the world would have been very different from what we know.
Unfortunately, what happened is that, in the late seventeenth century (long before indigenous tribes began to adopt a political identity that could unify them), the ruling class in colonial America invented "the white race" as a social control mechanism, (with carrots and sticks) compelling bonded laborers, landless free men, and small-holders who originated from various European countries to side with land-grossing planters against bonded laborers imported from Africa (sometimes via the West Indies) as well as against Indians.
Therefore, there is no symmetry between the political identity as whites on one hand and the political identities as Blacks and Indians on the other hand. In the political identity as Indians there lies a germ of dissident anti-colonial consciousness, signifying the memory of dispossession and displacement, and in the political identity as Blacks there lives a potential for revolutionary working-class consciousness (especially if Blacks don't reduce themselves to "racial minorities" who are "African-Americans" and try instead to identify with the fate of the Black diaspora from Africa to the Americas), but to identify as whites is to identify with and support the ruling class -- no more, no less -- losing class consciousness in exchange for racial privileges. It is a good thing that many of today's young white youths, disdaining whiteness as a sorry mess of pottage, would rather identify with Blacks and/or Indians than white rulers, at least culturally speaking, which can become a ground of political identification as well. Think Black, think Indian, whether or not you are Black or Indian in the eyes of the ruling class. -- 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/>
