When White People Assume a "right" to Define Indians

30.5.09

Image via Wikipedia

I have no idea what Rob Schmidt's problem is with this newsblog's editor. He seems to spend more and more time and effort these days looking for ways to stir up unnecessary pissing contests over the useless debate concerning Prof. Ward Churchill's ethnic identity by creating animosity where none exists. For some odd reason he likes to drag my name into his personal obsession with defaming, or exposing if you will, Mr. Churchill as a fraud and apparently believes that he, a non-Indian, is answering a divine call from the Great Spirit to save Indian Country from fake Natives claiming to represent the "real" Indians portrayed in the comic books he sells on his website.

The juvenile swipes he takes against this writer on his blog mean little to me. Mr. Schmidt is not Indian, and by fiat has not had to live in the U.S. as an Indian and is not subject to the painful negativity Indians face on a day-to-day, century-to-century basis. So in effect, his opinions on Indian subjects amount to little more than resonated air as do his personal attacks towards IIN. When White folks arrogantly take it upon themselves to define past and contemporary Indian realities and dare go so far as to present themselves as qualified experts on what North American Indians think and feel about the subjects that directly impact our lives as individuals and our communities, we are witnessing just another colonialist presumption of racist White privilege. Even if the perpetrator in question claims to support Indian peoples and spends a large majority of his or her free time publicly displaying their fetish, White commentary concerning Indian issues is just that, White commentary. It is not his place, or any other White person's place for that matter, to take it upon themselves to define Native identity ethnically or otherwise.

It goes without saying that White Euro-settler society has traditionally made a habit of telling Indigenous people who and what we are. And make no mistake, modern White folks who enjoy thinking themselves above such obvious racist attitudes often find it difficult to admit that these old habits are hard to break. In fact, they vociferously deny such charges outright despite the bluntly blatant tone of their biases and display a seething viciousness when challenged on their "right" to impose their opinions on subjects that frankly have nothing to do with them.

If Mr. Schmidt were Native, it could be argued that he would have a legitimate claim to question Mr. Churchill's assertion to some form of Indian identification. But Mr. Schmidt is not Native by his own admission, so unless he carries some measurable degree of North American Indigenous blood that he has failed to mention in his critiques of the professor, his commentary about Churchill, myself or anyone else he chooses to take aim at for dissenting from the assimilationist "good Indian" playbook should be regarded for what it is, unsolicited colonialist poppycock from a White man totally obsessed with the mythical Indian of traditional rather than realistic Americana.

Reading his blog Newspaper Rock is often not unlike reviewing the half-truths and utterly fanciful fantasies of FOX News when it comes to North American Indian activism. His published opinions on the American Indian Movement and nearly everyone connected with Indigenist/Indigenismo politik make it clear that his opposition to Indian people speaking on their own terms without regard for Euro-settler interests or sensibilities offend him personally. His nit-picking of my ideological defence of Mr. Churchill's right to free speech also reflects this mood and he has gone to great lengths to erroneously translate my support of Churchill’s socio-political dissent and his efforts to expose, in detail, the genocide of Indigenous people in the U.S. and elsewhere as star-struck groupie-ism. But as regular readers of Inteligentaindigena Novajoservo and my editorials know, other than an occasional article concerning the animosity generated around him and the posting of previously reported news items, Mr. Churchill receives no more attention than any other issue involving North American Indian news.

The biggest mistake that Mr. Schmidt and others make in attacking this writer over Ward Churchill is that unlike most of them, I actually have met and talked with the man. Did I challenge him on his identity, no. We had a very brief discussion about the meeting we were both attending and that was it. Was I star-struck, no. Apart from Mr. Churchill’s large physical presence, he seemed no different than anyone else attending the function. So Mr. Schmidt’s suggestion that this writer worships the ground Mr. Churchill walks on is a falsehood if not an outright lie. I admire his political work and that’s about it. I can care less about his ethnic background. In fact I’ll say this again for the record, outside of his written work and vocal activism, I really don’t think about Churchill. But others, namely those spending quality time contemplating how many different ways they can make him out to be a pariah, think about him all of the time. I have not written nearly as much about Mr. Churchill as his neo-conservative and assimilationist critics have.

Outside of pointing out that the negativity developed around Churchill only serves to pull necessary attention away from the more pressing issue of Indian survival in the 21st century, I don’t spend any serious time or effort on him or the eugenicist conflict over his ethnicity. Yet the ethnic police can’t seem to drop the issue and do everything they can to make sure that Ward Churchill is hated and despised across Indian Country if not the entire world. If anyone has a fixation on Ward Churchill it’s bloggers like Mr. Schmidt who refuse to ignore someone they so angrily assert isn’t worthy of attention. If Mr. Churchill has become a darling of the radical elements of American politics, it is solely the fault of blogs like NR that make a point of keeping him in the media. When you add to this the personalised insults towards his character, his politics and the horrible Nazi-like remarks concerning his “Indian-ness” while Chuck Norris and other light-eyed blonds make equally questionable claims to Indian identity, it becomes clear that the problem with Churchill isn’t Churchill, it’s really with those elements aggressively seeking to squash what Churchill has come to represent, a voice for the downtrodden reservation and urban Indians only seen and heard when a news camera happens to document what is left of Native American existence.

The Indian in the United States is suffering. I know this because I live with this indignity every day of my life. Ward Churchill is only one of many such Indigenist activists pointing out these issues and before 911 he was quite invisible to mainstream America until the neo-conservatives decided to create a straw man to push their own agenda. And dutifully like the assimilationists they are, conservative Indians jumped on the White man’s bandwagon and concentrated all of their energies on going after Mr. Churchill instead of the colonialist system that is doing the actual damage to us. Ward Churchill is not responsible for sterilising Indian women, nor is he the creator of he reservation system or racial profiling. White Christian society is and to deny this is purely complicity in genocide, regardless of who does it.

Mr. Schmidt can only assume what our lives are like and the ridicule he accords Indigenist activists is unambiguous evidence of this. Everyone is entitled to their opinion, but when those opinions have no other basis than political differences expressed in personality attacks, defamation and classic White American racism, they differ little from the ideologies that led to North American genocide against the “Indian” in the first place.

Indian identity is an Indian issue. Period. The opinions of White people utterly fascinated by Indian peoples and cultures matter only to the insecure tin-god that lives in the hearts and minds of those Whites stubbornly reluctant to relinquish what they assume is their right to tell us who we are, how we should think and who we should respect. Such ideas are the basis of the anachronistic rubbish found in comic books based on Indian myths. Real Indians who live this life suffer the actual consequences. White hobbyist admirers of Indians can only speculate on these subjects and dream of visions created within the muddle of their own dispersions. They see what they wish to see, not what is actually there. And if they, or he for that matter, really had anything of value to say, it would be expressed without insult and intent to elicit negativity. Mr. Schmidt has nothing to say and says what he does say without any ethical authority from Indian people. He isn’t Indian and should refrain from commenting on issues that really do not concern him. In other words, he should stick to what he knows best. Namely being a White man who finds his own cultural and ethnic identity to be a bore and seeks adventure by living vicariously and parasitically through others largely unable to speak for themselves.

- The Angryindian

Related articles by Zemanta

• Divide and Conquer: Why is Newspaper Rock Trying to Create Animosity Between Native Writers? (indigenist.blogspot.com)

Labels: Indigenous, Indigenous peoples of the Americas, Prof. Ward Churchill