After decades of tribes aggressively kicking members out, the disenrolled are kicking back.

2018/06/14 Leave a comment

Interesting account of Indigenous identity and membership from the US:

It was an early morning in May 2012 when Eddie Crandell got the call that his ex-wife’s parents were getting evicted from their home on the Robinson Rancheria, where they had lived for 25 years as members of the Pomo Indian tribe on the federal reservation in Northern California.

When he reached the scene, family members, who had not been prepared to move, were already scurrying through the house, packing their belongings into boxes and loading them into vehicles under the watchful eye of four tribal police officers.

Crandell’s 5-year-old son didn’t understand. “Why are you kicking out my grandparents,” he asked an officer, who didn’t respond. But Crandell knew his extended family was being targeted for disenrollment, the process by which Native Americans lose citizenship within the tribe. Just over the hill, six other families were being evicted in a large-scale action by the tribal council to remove all members not viewed as “real Indians.”

“It was very contentious,” Crandell said. “People worried that they would be targeted if they talked to [opponents of the tribal council]. Nobody wanted to approach anyone. Everyone was afraid.”

Thousands of Native Americans across the country have had their Indian citizenship terminated in disenrollment proceedings that have stripped them of their identity, acceptance in the tribe, and access to tribal resources like health care and educational grants. The once-rare practice has accelerated rapidly, experts said, but some ex-members and their advocates are pushing back, and there have been signs in recent years that the tide has turned against tribal disenrollment. Crandell, for example, has successfully restored membership to about 60 people, and disenrollees throughout Indian Country have also won a series of significant victories.

Since the earliest recorded instances of tribal disenrollment in the late 19thcentury, researchers believe nearly 80 tribes across 20 states have engaged in the practice that has affected up to 10,000 people, said David Wilkins, who co-wrote the book Dismembered: Native Disenrollment and the Battle for Human Rights. Although disenrollment is a relatively modern phenomenon among the 567 federally recognized tribes, its causes—greed and government corruption—are familiar.

The success of the gambling industry brought newfound prosperity to tribes as they looked for ways to alleviate poverty and improve living conditions on reservations. According to the most recent data from the National Indian Gaming Commission, gaming revenue increased more than 4 percent in 2016 to $31 billion, spurring economic development and supplementing federal funds with “per capita” payments to tribal members. It was the seventh-consecutive year of growth in gross gaming revenues for the tribal market as a whole. Critics say that wealth is exactly what caused disenrollment to reach epidemic levels. The logic is simple: Reducing the number of tribal members means more money for those who remain.

Such was the case for the Picayune Rancheria of Chukchansi Indians, whose membership of 1,800 people was cut in half after the opening of the Chukchansi Gold Resort & Casino in 2003, according to a This American Life program from 2013. In the segment, the remaining tribal members told reporter David Ferry that they saw increases in their payout checks after people were kicked out.

Disenrollment proceedings continued through 2016, when council Chairwoman Claudia Gonzales confirmed that she had sent about a dozen disenrollment letters to some of the tribe’s founding families. The dispute was never settled, but in October 2017, the tribe permitted open enrollment for the first time that many could remember. Many viewed the move as a hollow gesture from incumbent council members to drum up support just days before an election, and it was unclear whether previously disenrolled people could reapply.

Disenrollment is occurring even among tribes that do not have significant gaming wealth. Take, for example, California’s Pechanga Band of Luiseño Mission Indians, whose tribal council sought to consolidate power by targeting political opponents through disenrollment. “It was simply a political issue,” said Rick Cuevas, who was dismissed from the tribe, along with nearly 100 extended family members, after the council posthumously disenrolled his ancestor in 2006. “There were votes they couldn’t control. It’s not just about the money. It’s about power and control.”

Unlike Crandell, Cuevas’ relatives were allowed to remain on the reservation—in the house that his father built in 1957—albeit without access to tribal resources, such as health care, housing grants, and other benefits provided by the federal government, which were annulled in the disenrollment proceedings. “They’re basically living under an apartheid system,” he said.
“They can’t go to the park without a tribal member. They can’t drink out of the water fountains. They can’t go to the pool. That’s segregation.”

For many Native American communities, the ability to determine who is and who isn’t a member is the single greatest indicator of tribal sovereignty. Once a tribe has disenrolled its members, they are left with few legal options for reinstatement. They can appeal the disenrollment ruling, as Cuevas did, but tribal courts seldom overturn a council’s membership decision. And the U.S. government washed its hands of Indian affairs long ago.

“You are placed in a legal Wonderland,” said Wilkins, a professor of Native American policy and federal Indian law at the University of Minnesota. “You are in between worlds. Federal courts have basically closed the door to you, and tribal councils don’t want their own courts hearing disenrollment cases. You are left without any recourse whatsoever, which is the status of many of the disenrollees today.”

Traditionally, pre-Columbian tribes viewed belonging in terms of extended kinship groups, defined broadly to emphasize the need for interdependence among everyone in the tribe, Cherokee scholar Eva Marie Garroutte said. Kin groups administered justice, assembled leadership groups, organized local farming and other aspects of daily life. But as the United States expanded into Indian territory, it sought to impose more legalistic blood quantum requirements that measured the amount of “Indian blood” a person had to determine membership. For example, the Navajo require its members to possess a minimum of 25 percent Navajo blood. American politicians of the 19th century hoped that, over time, Native Americans would breed themselves out by intermarrying with non-natives, reducing their percentage of Indian blood and thereby releasing the government from its obligations to the tribes.

The United States essentially removed itself from the contentious issue in 1934 by passing the Indian Reorganization Act, which imposed constitutional governance on tribes with membership criteria that caused blood quantum laws to be widely accepted throughout Indian Country. Since then, the United States has largely deferred to tribal sovereignty in internal Indian disputes. In 1978, the Supreme Court’s Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez decision, written by Thurgood Marshall, said Native Americans do not have the right to use federal courts as a way to correct civil rights violations committed by individual tribes. Wilkins said the ruling disappointed many Native Americans, who wanted more protection against tribal governments, and sparked debate about the role of the federal government in Indian affairs.

“The U.S. has a moral trust obligation to ensure tribes persist and sustain,” said Gabe Galanda, a Native American attorney whose firm represents many disenrolled members. “That responsibility gets looked at in a narrow, legal way that sounds only monetary. For example, if the government allowed a tribal facility to fall into disrepair, now it’s liable for the financial repercussions. What’s been lost is the moral trust responsibility. The U.S. has a legal duty to prevent a tribe from annihilating itself.”

Without help from the judiciary, disenrolled members are turning to firms like Galanda’s for assistance. Still, there is little lawyers can do to change their clients’ fates.

“For those who have been disenrolled, I continue to advise them to act, however and whenever they can, as if they still belong,” Galanda said. “The rule of law is not what it once was in this country, but that cuts both ways. Why should any legal Indian who belongs cower to a corrupt tribal politician and adhere to the so-called legal result of a corrupt leader?”

Disenrollees may have lost in the courts, but they are winning the battle in the court of public opinion. In the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, tribal leaders did not take stances on disenrollment because they did not want to speak ill of other tribes. There was also a misconception among members that their silence would prevent disenrollment from happening within their own tribe. But all that is changing thanks to an active network of social media groups, from Galanda’s Stop Disenrollment to Emilio Reyes’ Stop Tribal Genocide, that has helped kindle discussion among tribes about this formerly taboo topic.

“It was kept in the dark for so long, it spread like a cancer,” Galanda said. “It’s been brought into the light through mainstream media attention, legal advocacy, social media, and interpersonal communication, all of which has caused the ebb of the practice we’re witnessing now. In the process, the taboo associated with disenrollment has waned in favor of shame upon tribes that engage in the practice.”

Throughout Indian Country, there are encouraging signs that disenrollment is waning. There have been no new mass disenrollments since 2016, two years after the numbers peaked, and some tribes have reversed course and reinstated disenrolled members, Galanda said. In August 2016, a tribal appeals court in Oregon overturned a decision by the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde to disenroll 66 members after a three-year battle. In March 2017, Robinson Rancheria became the first tribe to voluntarily reinstate 60 members after Crandell helped lead a successful recall election of corrupt officials. Now, as council chairman, he is working to pass legislation that will prevent unjustified disenrollment in the future.

“We were able to do it with the support of the membership,” Crandell said. “It was a well-orchestrated plan that we did together. We were all on the same page, and it was a really impactful time.”

Also in March 2017, the Elem Indian Colony in California reversed a motionfiled by members living off the colony to disenroll all 132 people who lived on the reservation. In August, a federal judge ruled that the Cherokee Nation, based in Oklahoma, must reinstate 2,800 descendants of enslaved people owned by the tribe after the tribe stripped the descendants of their rights in a 2007 vote. (The descendants, who are well-connected with the Congressional Black Caucus, cited a specific treaty obligation, spurring the federal government—which has the power to intervene depending upon the tribe and situation—to step in.)

But the battle isn’t over for reinstated members. Although some tribes have had success with integrating the disenrolled in leadership positions, they still face discrimination within the tribe. At a Grand Ronde council meeting in February, a tribal elder said members who had been targeted for disenrollment should not be serving on the enrollment board, the tribal newspaper Smoke Signals reported. “We know they’re zero Grand Ronde, and now they’re on our enrollment committee,” elder Brenda Gray said. “To me, they’re still not tribal members. Courts made them, but they’re not.”

The lingering animosity is concerning for activists, but they remain cautiously optimistic about the future.

“I feel like we’ve turned a corner,” Wilkins said. “I’m very cautiously optimistic, but I’m not sure we’re out of the woods yet because the forces that led to disenrollment—increasing revenues, the blood quantum problems—they are still at play. We have to keep an eye on this. We can’t put the genie back in the bottle.”

Source: After decades of tribes aggressively kicking members out, the disenrolled are kicking back.

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Indigenous rights are not conditional on public opinion: Pam Palmater

2018/06/11 Leave a comment

As is the case with all rights:

In 2017, Abacus Data, in partnership with Equal Voice, released the findings of their nationwide survey about Canadians’ views on women in politics. The majority of those surveyed—58 per cent—believed that there are just the right number or too many women in politics—this, despite the fact that women hold only 25 per cent of the seats in the House of Commons, and in provinces like New Brunswick, women make up as little as 16 per cent of the seats.

It’s a galling dissonance, but the premise of the question also feels frankly immaterial to how change is made. How relevant is it that Canadians think this dismal representation of women in government is either enough or too much female representation, when laws and policies in Canada specifically advocate for gender equality and protect against gender discrimination? How much should public opinion matter about whether Canadians agree with gender equality, when it is in fact the law? After all, if women had to wait for all men in Canada to agree with or like women’s equality, we might still be waiting. Women had to agitate for change. It’s never convenient to the comfortable, and discomfort polls poorly—but it’s the only way it happens.

The same thing might also be said about public opinion on Indigenous rights in Canada. The most recent Angus Reid public opinion survey, which polled 2,500 Canadians about their views on Indigenous peoples generally, and Indigenous public policy specifically, exposes a deep divide in opinion. A slight majority (53 per cent) feels that Canada spends too much time apologizing for residential schools and another 53 per cent think Indigenous peoples should integrate into Canadian society and have no special status—even if that means losing Indigenous cultures and traditions. Yet these are the very same attitudes held by former prime ministers and administrators of Indian Affairs that led to assimilatory policies like residential schools.

Therein lies the stark contradiction: Canadians feel we apologize for residential schools too much, and yet exhibit the same racist attitudes for which the apology was made.

Former Prime Minister Stephen Harper made a formal apology in the House of Commons on behalf of all Canadians on June 11, 2008 for the harms done in residential schools. It said, in part: “Two primary objectives of the residential schools system were to remove and isolate children from the influence of their homes, families, traditions and cultures, and to assimilate them into the dominant culture.  These objectives were based on the assumption Aboriginal cultures and spiritual beliefs were inferior and unequal. Indeed, some sought, as it was infamously said, ‘to kill the Indian in the child.’  Today, we recognize that this policy of assimilation was wrong, has caused great harm, and has no place in our country.”

In other words, the idea that Indigenous peoples should abandon their own cultures and assimilate into Canadian culture is an idea that “has no place in our country.” Yet, a decade after the apology, half of the Canadians polled still hold these racist views. This is not surprising when many political leaders and media commentators have espoused similar racist views or denied racism exists altogether. Even Angus Reid himself seems to have difficulty accepting the racist undertones of his poll’s findings; he says he does not consider the Canadians who hold these ideas to be “racist,” but instead “hardliners” who don’t think more money is the answer to growing poverty in First Nations. It’s a surprising conclusion given the over-abundance of research and data that shows just the opposite.

In addition to the crippling economic legacy left behind by the colonization of Indigenous lands and resources, broken treaties, and rigid federal control over reserves, Canada’s gross underfunding of First Nation social programs is in fact the major contributor to First Nation poverty today. One need only read any of the auditor general’s reports to show that Canada has been underfunding essential social services like education and housing for decades. Dr. Cindy Blackstock, the head of the First Nation Child and Family Caring Society, won her discrimination case against Canada at the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal, which found that Canada’s purposeful and chronic underfunding of child and family services in First Nations was racial discrimination and a direct cause of the over-representation of First Nations children in foster care. This underfunding across all social programs is so comprehensive and so severe, that even if the racially discriminatory funding stopped this year, it would take decades to close the socio-economic gap. This isn’t a matter of public opinion—it’s a fact.

While many Canadians may feel that they are reminded too often about what happened in residential schools, it seems that in fact, they are not reminded enough. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s final report concluded that Canada was guilty of genocide—not just cultural genocide, but physical and biological genocide as well. Canadians should never forget what their country did to Indigenous peoples. Scalping bounties, smallpox blankets, forced sterilizations, and starvation policies were all part of Canada’s genocidal policies towards Indigenous peoples that, in addition to residential schools, have a lasting legacy in First Nations.

Real reconciliation is also about truth and justice. The truth requires never forgetting the rapes, tortures and deaths of thousands of children in residential school, and justice requires putting an end to the racist attitudes that allow these human rights abuses—in the form of foster care—to continue today. The same is true about historic and contemporary violence against Indigenous women and girls.

Reconciliation also requires the end of the idea that the future existence of Indigenous peoples and their identities, languages and cultures are up for debate. We have a right to exist as Mi’kmaw, Mohawk and Cree. We have a right to govern ourselves. We have a right to our lands and resources. We have a right to enjoy our Aboriginal and treaty rights. Our ancestors paid dearly for these rights. All of these rights are protected in Indigenous, Canadian and international laws. These rights form part of Canada’s founding document—the Constitution Act, 1982. Canadians do not get celebrate their own constitutionally protected rights and freedoms without recognizing ours. Our rights are not conditional on public opinion.

It’s long past time that pollsters stop asking Canadians if they like Indigenous peoples or agree with our rights—and start asking them whether they feel like they’ve put Canada’s apology into action.

Source: Indigenous rights are not conditional on public opinion

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On First Nations issues, there’s a giant gap between Trudeau’s rhetoric and what Canadians really think: exclusive poll

2018/06/09 Leave a comment

While the wording of the questions appears to prompt this kind of response, nevertheless of interest:

From the front steps of her home in Brantford, Ont., Linda Johns looks down the street toward the Mohawk Institute, one of Canada’s oldest residential schools, and says she wishes they’d simply “torn the damn thing down.” The building is currently under renovation to “save the evidence,” as the fundraising campaign for repairs puts it.

Linda has visited the grounds as a tourist with her family, years ago, and says it was awful what happened to Indigenous youth there over the decades, “but now that we’re adults, I don’t care to hear about it. What they’re trying to do is blame other people for the problems they have now.”

She says Indigenous Canadians should have unique status in this country, but equally feels that, through our government, we are “almost climbing over ourselves to apologize” for past transgressions. As for federal spending on First Nations issues, Johns accepts that Indigenous people in northern areas need the money, but she says: “Around here, I think they could get off their butts and work.”

Her husband of 38 years disagrees. For starters, he wants the Mohawk Institute restored: it will serve as a reminder to Canadians of what the residential school did to him when he went there. “The food was terrible. You never got enough to eat. When it came for roll call to make sure everyone was still there, it went by number, not by name,” Doug Johns recalls. “It was almost like being in a prison.”

The front steps of the institute—where Doug was forced to relocate at the age of 10, away from his family on the nearby Six Nations of the Grand River; where he saw classmates beaten for speaking their native tongue; which he first ran away from when he was 12, by way of country fields on a winter night to avoid police detection; where an abusive schoolmaster with a riding crop was more than willing to issue Doug lashings to his rear after every failed escape—are about 100 m from his front porch.

Linda says she doesn’t understand why her husband would want a building where he was so poorly treated to still stand. “She’s not Native,” Doug says of his wife. “We don’t see eye to eye on all these issues.”

Neither does the rest of the country. The most comprehensive public opinion survey on Indigenous issues since the Trudeau Liberals took office has uncovered deep fractures over key questions facing First Nations and the rest of Canada, suggesting the current government’s promises of reconciliation may be as hard to deliver as ever. The findings of the nationwide survey from the non-profit Angus Reid Institute point to divergent yet entrenched attitudes on both symbolic and existential questions.

Fully 53 per cent surveyed said the country spends too much time apologizing for residential schools and it’s time to move on (compared to 47 per cent who believe harm done by the schools continues and cannot be ignored); more than half of respondents said Indigenous people should have no special status that other Canadians don’t; the same proportion said Indigenous peoples would be better off if they integrated more into broader Canadian society, even if the cost is losing more of their traditions and culture. Such ideas are, to put it mildly, anathema to the future many First Nations people—and the politicians who advocate on their behalf—envisage.

The wide-ranging survey, provided exclusively to Maclean’s, polled nearly 2,500 Canadians, and deliberately oversampled in regions with high Indigenous populations, only to uncover solitudes that the Johns household neatly encapsulates: sympathetic yet resolved; divided yet finding ways to co-exist. “This country is split down the middle on many of these questions,” says pollster Angus Reid in an interview. “It tells me the perspective of Justin Trudeau and [Minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs] Carolyn Bennett on some of these issues is certainly not shared by a lot of Canadians.”

Sheryl Lightfoot isn’t surprised to see a divided public opinion at this point regarding Indigenous issues. “Given the heightened attention to them since 2015, with the shift in government to the Liberals, I could see it enhancing that polarization because people will view it—depending on their perspectives—as either too much or too little,” says Lightfoot, who holds a Canada Research Chair in global Indigenous rights and politics at the University of British Columbia. “What we’ve got is a country that’s woefully uneducated on Indigenous history and issues. Or they are living it every day and are close to it. There isn’t a lot in the middle.”

A lack of contact, familiarity and exposure defines Canadian relations with First Nations issues in many ways—most importantly by relegating them to the bottom of the political agenda. For decades, politicians have shied away from debating Indigenous matters regarding public policy, says Ken Coates, senior fellow in Aboriginal and northern Canadian issues at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute. “There’s been an implicit assumption in the Canadian political process for decades that if you had parties say we should do more [for Indigenous people], you’re not going to win many votes, so stay away from it.”

As such, the Trudeau government deserves credit for “moving ahead with something they feel is important,” Coates adds. But the fact that fully a third of Canadians polled feel Trudeau gives too much attention to Indigenous issues, compared to 17 per cent who feel he gives too little, highlights a gap in how the country prioritizes this relationship. (The rest are divided, saying either Trudeau gives them the right amount of attention, or they’re unsure.) “So long as you have a public that doesn’t believe Indigenous issues are a big deal, or doesn’t understand their context, then those issues are going to persist,” says Tunchai Redvers, co-founder of We Matter, a national support campaign for Indigenous youth. “Look at the Colten Boushie case.”When a Saskatchewan jury acquitted farmer Gerald Stanley for the 2016 shooting death of Red Pheasant First Nation resident Colten Boushie, the Prime Minister said, “There are systemic issues in our criminal justice system that we must address.” Trudeau’s words of support for the family of the deceased 22-year-old drew support from advocates, but scorn from others who felt he’d undermined the court’s authority and independence. In what has become a common avenue to express public support, a GoFundMe page set up for the Stanley family “to recoup some of their lost time, property and vehicles that were damaged, harvest income, and sanity” garnered more than $220,000 in donations in three months—surpassing the $200,000 in GoFundMe donations for Boushie’s family over a nine-month span.

The Boushie case points to one of the survey’s most puzzling findings: that non-Indigenous Canadians with regular exposure to reserves were more likely to take a rigid stance on Indigenous issues.

The institute found that Canadians are divided into four groups of roughly the same size on most questions: those who advocate for First Nations self-determination; those sympathetic to Indigenous people; those wary of Indigenous people asserting their priorities; and full-on hardliners who oppose special status and accommodation. “Western Canadians tend to be more hardliners,” Reid says. “Quebec has very liberal attitudes, but it’s also where we have the least likelihood of contact.”

Hardliners—a group that encompasses nearly a quarter of the sample—unanimously said Canada spends too much time apologizing for residential schools, and almost unanimously felt Indigenous Canadians should have no special status, while 85 per cent of them said Indigenous people would be better off if they integrated into broader Canadian society. “The hardliners are not racist, but they don’t buy the idea of separate status,” Reid says. “I think what the hardliners are saying is they don’t think the answer to the issues confronting Indigenous communities is going to come through more spending, but it’s going to come through improved leadership in Indigenous communities and through a heavier emphasis on integration.”

If there’s one thing respondents to the Angus Reid Institute survey agreed on, it’s that tax dollars meant to help First Nations people are generally failing to do so. Two out of three said government funds going toward Indigenous issues are generally ineffective—and a new report from the auditor general’s office will hardly quell that pessimism. Among other things, it found that data on high school graduation rates on reserves left out students who dropped out prior to Grade 12, meaning the department overstated the graduation rate by 22 percentage points.

Similarly, Employment and Social Development Canada—despite 30 years of supporting Indigenous employment—didn’t collect data or measure whether its key skills development fund resulted in Indigenous people getting steady meaningful work. Back at Six Nations, Doug Johns credits Trudeau with good intentions, but asks, “How many terms will he get to serve before he gets any of that accomplished? It would take two or three terms to see anything really done.”

Canadians might not have that kind of patience. Indeed, the survey results raise the question of whether a politician might succeed by taking a hardline stance on Indigenous issues. No mainstream leader is running on an explicitly integrationist platform, or argues the government should stop apologizing for residential schools. But Sen. Lynn Beyak published on her website letters of support from Canadians on these exact issues after she commented about the positive outcomes of residential schools. Her actions prompted Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer to call some of the letters “simply racist” and booted Beyak from caucus for refusing to remove them. But other letters voiced opinions that, while taboo, have a discernible market.

As it stands, only a third of Canadians believe Indigenous communities should move toward greater independence and control over their own affairs, according to the survey, compared to two-thirds who feel First Nations communities should be governed by the same rules and systems as all Canadians. Kim Baird, former chief of the Tsawwassen First Nation in B.C., wonders whether Canada has attained a critical mass of people who grasp basic truths about residential schools and the foundation of the country. “There needs to be more knowledge about the systemic reasons why reserves don’t look like other places, why they’re trapped in poverty, why there’s a lack of resources and infrastructure. It’s such a complex story to unpack. I think the residential school story is a good starting point.”

The Mohawk Institute, alas, will remain closed for a while, though visitors can take a virtual tour of the grounds. Before the work began, Doug Johns took his own kids through the school’s deserted corridors. He showed them where he ate, where he slept and the visitors’ room, where he got the whip for his attempted escapes.

He recalls new students getting beaten for not speaking English; because of the language barrier, they couldn’t understand why they were being punished. He remembers it being a “terrible place,” with fights often erupting on the grounds. “The whole idea of residential schools was to kill the Indian and save the child,” he says. “A lot of non-Native people aren’t aware of that, so I want them to restore the institute so people can see it.”

Source: On First Nations issues, there’s a giant gap between Trudeau’s rhetoric and what Canadians really think: exclusive poll

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Art gallery renames Emily Carr’s ‘hurtful’ Indian Church, but critics say it’s the wrong approach

2018/05/24 Leave a comment

Agree. More appropriate to put in an interpretative panel, including a more neutral name, acknowledging rather than erasing history:

The painting depicts a colonial structure in an Indigenous setting, but it’s the name of the work that’s spurred a debate about how the art world should address reconciliation.

The Art Gallery of Ontario has renamed a painting by Canadian artist Emily Carr as part of a broader effort to eliminate culturally insensitive language from titles in its collection, a curator says.

But others in the artistic community contend that displacing a work from its historical context does far more cultural damage than a name.

In the 1929 painting, a pallid white church stands out amid the verdant forest in an Indigenous village on Vancouver Island, with dense foliage encroaching on a thin steeple from above and a scattering of cross-marked graves from below.

Carr exhibited the painting as Indian Church, and for nearly nine decades, the name stuck.

But at the Toronto’s Art Gallery of Ontario, the work now hangs under the title Church at Yuquot Village, a reference to the Mowachaht/Muchalaht community where the missionary-built church was located.

A panel near the painting notes the name change beside an asterisk, explaining that the artist’s title was in keeping with “the language of her era.” The text goes on to say that the gallery is in the process of amending titles containing terms that are considered “discriminatory” by modern standards.

“People are wondering about this idea of: “If we change this title, does that mean that we’re changing the past?” And my argument is not at all,” said Georgiana Uhlyarik, the gallery’s curator of Canadian art.

“We’re interested in inviting people into this conversation that we’re having in order for us to move forward, so that we learn from the past and that we figure out what is constructive.”

Uhlyarik said the effort to “contextualize” Carr’s painting is of a piece with the gallery’s decision last October to appoint her and Indigenous curator Wanda Nanibush to jointly head the newly rebranded Canadian and Indigenous Art department.

As part of their “nation-to-nation” artistic approach, the co-curators are working to remove “hurtful and painful” terminology from the titles of works on a case-by-case basis, Uhlyarik said, but the Carr painting marks the first time the gallery has revised a name in such a public and “deliberate” way.

“I don’t think that it changes the meaning of the work itself at all. I think the painting of the church is incredibly powerful, and the title is simply what it’s referred to as,” she said. “I wanted to make sure it wasn’t a poetic title in any way, that it was in some ways, much more descriptive.”

After consulting with the residents of Yuquot and Carr scholars, Uhlyarik said she decided to swap the word “Indian” for a geographical descriptor, hoping that the new title would prompt further examination of the history of the church, which she said burnt down and was rebuilt as a community centre due to its significance to the village.

“I think this is how we open up a conversation about colonial history,” she said.

“If there’s a way for us to still have the conversation, and still display the work and remove this immediate insult, then we’re trying to figure out what that way is.”

But for Ligwilda’xw interdisciplinary artist Sonny Assu of Campbell River, B.C., changing the name of the painting does not spark a conversation about colonial history so much as it “revises” it.

“I think (the painting) becomes more hurtful and problematic, because it does erase that history,” Assu said. “It comes off as almost revisionist in a way where it’s repainting that picture of inclusion and of tolerance that just wasn’t there.”

He said he would rather the gallery feature a panel offering Indigenous perspectives on the work.

Jan Ross, curator at Emily Carr House, said renaming a work in contradiction with the artist’s intentions is tantamount to “censorship.”

“That is sacrosanct,” she said. “It robs the artist … I think it behoves us to examine things within the context of their day.”

She said the best way for a curator to affirm their commitment to the principles of reconciliation is to place a work within its appropriate context, not impose one’s curatorial perspective.

Source: Art gallery renames Emily Carr’s ‘hurtful’ Indian Church, but critics say it’s the wrong approach

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You can’t drink an apology

2018/05/05 Leave a comment

A somewhat cynical column by Scott Gilmore on apologies. While I agree that an apology by itself may not address (or redress) historic injustices, their symbolic value should not be discounted:

Canadian parliamentarians are so chronically petty and partisan they typically cannot agree on the colour of the sky. Yet, all but 10 were able to agree on one seemingly important issue yesterday. They voted in favor of an apology for the now infamous residential school system.

Our political leaders have already made two previous apologies for the residential schools. A decade ago, Prime Minister Stephen Harper stood in the House of Commons to express our collective regret and then nine years later his successor Justin Trudeau repeated the apology, this time while in Newfoundland. For this third time they’ve opted to kick it upstairs to a higher authority, the Pope.

Our MPs were unified in believing that since we’ve already done our bit and apologized, and given that the corrosive legacy of the residential schools continues to persist, obviously it’s now someone else’s turn to sort this thing out. Amen.

It has been theorized that there are 12 different types of Canadian “sorries,” including the “sympathetic,” the “ostentatious,” and even the “libidinous.” There is, in fact, a thirteenth type: the “political.”

Abroad, we have the reputation for being chronic apologizers. Compared to our politicians, though, the average Canadian looks callously unrepentant. An incomplete list of their official apologies includes Acadians for being deported in the 1700s, Japanese-Canadians for interment during World War Two, Chinese-Canadians for imposing a head tax, Sikh-Canadians for turning away migrants, and gay and lesbian Canadians for discrimination.

All these official “sorries” have two things in common, which explains why our politicians are so eagerly remorseful. First, the official apology is the least expensive thing they can do. In many of these cases the legacy of the original sin is so vast and pervasive there would not be enough money in the federal treasury to fully repair the damages done to the victims or their descendants. By comparison, apologies are cheap and in full supply. Here, have another.

Second, these statements of regret are for sins committed almost entirely by white, male, straight Canadians. We, as a group, have done very well over the last few centuries. And while our position of power and wealth is no longer unassailable, we’re still on top and would like to stay there. When public values shift, and we are forced to acknowledge that our previous behavior was utterly criminal, we really don’t want to do anything too dramatic.

In light of this, and the low cost, it is obvious why our political leaders like to apologize so often. But it’s well past time we recognized these rituals for what they are: distractions. The politicians making the apology (or telling the Pope he should), are probably genuinely remorseful for the sins of the past. But sincerity will not right past wrongs. Even worse, it just reduces the pressure to prevent future ones.

Consider the fact that just hours after the House voted on the Pope’s apology, the Prime Minister was across the river in Gatineau speaking at the Assembly of First Nations. There he pledged (again) to fix the water problems plaguing Canadian reserves for decades. There are currently 76 Indigenous communities without clean drinking water. Since coming to office, the Liberal government has managed to remove 61 communities off that list, but another 32 were added.

If the people of Rosedale or Westmount woke up this morning to discover they had to boil their tap water, the problem would be fixed by the end of the day.

Given this indisputable truth, standing in front of a room of Indigenous leaders to promise yet again that we are eventually going to fix this should be so unbearably humiliating that it would render Trudeau speechless from shame. Instead, he walked up to the podium with a smile. He had just voted for another apology (via the Pope). That’s something. It’s a step in the right direction. Sure, you can’t drink an apology, but it’s progress. Right?

Source: You can’t drink an apology

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Mohawk community’s law against mixed couples on reserve ruled unconstitutional | National Post

2018/05/02 Leave a comment

Interesting case that privileges (correctly IMO) individual rights:

A controversial membership law that requires residents of the Mohawk reserve of Kahnawake to move out if they marry a non-native violates the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, a court ruled Monday.

The ruling by Quebec Superior Court Justice Thomas Davis declares that a 37-year-old rule invoked to preserve Mohawk culture discriminates against Kahnawake members on the basis of family status and civil status.

The judge acknowledged that Kahnawake, just south of Montreal, has been disadvantaged by the actions of the federal government. “An important part of their land was expropriated for the (St. Lawrence) Seaway. The reserved lands have shrunk in size. For many years, the Mohawks were actively discouraged from practicing their culture,” Davis wrote.

But that does not justify an internal law that has sown division and sparked vandalism and online abuse as residents turned against each other.

The judge said the “Marry Out, Get Out” provision of the Kahnawake Membership Law is “largely (if not solely) grounded in a stereotypical belief that non-native spouses will use the resources and land of the Band in a way that is detrimental to it and that will have a negative impact on the ability of the Band to protect its culture and its land.”

The Mohawk Council of Kahnawake, the defendant, said it needs time to study the decision.

“Obviously, we maintain the position that matters that are so integral to our identity have no business in outside courts,” Grand Chief Joseph Norton said in a statement. “However, a decision on the case has been rendered. We are now taking the time to analyze the decision and will inform the community further in the coming days.”

Julius Grey, who represented the 16 plaintiffs, said he is optimistic the ruling can lead to reconciliation. The judge concluded there was “a clear violation” of Charter rights, but he left room for discussion, Grey said.

The lead plaintiff was Waneek Horn Miller, who represented Canada in the 2000 Summer Olympics, where she met her future husband, Keith Morgan. They have been a couple since 2002 and have three children.

When they were building a new home in Kahnawake in 2010, a petition began circulating demanding that the construction stop. In 2014, she learned her name was on an eviction list, and when she went to a band meeting to defend herself, she was verbally attacked and later received online abuse.

“Despite all of this, Ms. Miller would like to return to Kahnawake and would like her children to have access to the culture,” the ruling said. “She believes that she can contribute to the Kahnawake community. However, she is fearful of the consequences of moving back to Kahnawake for her family.”

The decision documents the verbal abuse suffered by the children of mixed marriages, who have been called “half-breeds” or “white bastard.” Tensions got particularly high in 2014 when a “grassroots” campaign began to persuade mixed couples to leave.

Marie Stacey, who lives on the reserve with her non-native partner, testified she received a notice telling her to leave. She attended a public meeting where one participant suggested a return to the 1970s, when “we burned their (non-natives’) houses,” she told the court.

“Ms. Stacey is scared of what is happening on the Reserve, scared that people might come to her home,” the decision reads. “Being a plaintiff in the present lawsuit has given her little comfort, as at least one Facebook post referred to the plaintiffs as having targets on the back of their heads.”

The plaintiffs had been seeking $50,000 damages each, but the judge said the sum was excessive. He awarded a total of $35,000 to be divided among seven plaintiffs who he said were harmed.

The judge disputed the Mohawk Council of Kahnawake’s contention that “Marry Out, Get Out” is theoretical because the council has not forcibly evicted anyone. “People’s lives have been affected,” he wrote.

via Mohawk community’s law against mixed couples on reserve ruled unconstitutional | National Post

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‘White judge, white lawyer’: Quebec inquiry into discrimination lacks Indigenous voices, critics say

2018/03/16 Leave a comment

It does appear that the inquiry did make serious efforts to include Indigenous voices:

The Quebec inquiry tasked with investigating discrimination is being criticized for its own lack of representation, as it examines how Indigenous people are treated by provincial services.

The Viens commission — named after its chair, Jacques Viens — was created by the Quebec government in 2016  in response to public pressure after prosecutors decided not to lay charges against six provincial police officers accused of sexually abusing Indigenous women in Val-d’Or, a city about 525 kilometres northwest of Montreal.

When Premier Philippe Couillard announced the inquiry, he said there was a “need to act rapidly to restore the relationship of trust broken since the events in Val-d’Or.”

The inquiry, which is wrapping up its 16th week of hearings, has been mandated to look into treatment of Indigenous people by six specific government institutions: police services, corrections, legal services, the health system, social services and youth protection.

One Indigenous advocate who testified before the commission last month said she was struck by the absence of Indigenous people heading up the inquiry.

“You’re walking into this sterile environment that is not welcoming,” said Nakuset, director of the Native Women’s Shelter of Montreal who goes by just the one name. “You have this white judge and then you have a white lawyer on your side who’s proceeding.”

“There are some people [with the commission] that are Indigenous. [But] I don’t remember seeing them there. They’re not sitting in front.”

There are 18 Indigenous staffers — roughly 21 per cent of the commission’s members — who serve on various teams, including Aboriginal relations, research, pscyhosocial support, wellness and communications.

None of them are part of the legal department.

Indigenous lawyers were sought

Inquiry head Viens is also not Indigenous, though the retired Quebec Superior Court judge spent 25 years of his career in the judiciary district of Abitibi, which encompasses Val-d’Or, and also practised law in Cree and Inuit communities.

Commission chief counsel Christian Leblanc said attempts were made to recruit Indigenous lawyers, but many were not willing to relocate to Val-d’Or, the base of operations for the commission.

Nakuset, a vocal Indigenous advocate in Quebec and the director of the Native Women’s Shelter of Montreal, testified before the commission in February. (Commission on relations between Indigenous peoples and specific public services in Quebec)

He said it was difficult to find experienced lawyers — Indigenous or non-Indigenous — who were willing to interrupt their lives and careers for the duration of the inquiry.

“You have to understand, to know that we did offer jobs and opportunities to Indigenous lawyers to come work with us,” he said.

Leblanc said he had serious conversations with at least four Indigenous lawyers about joining the inquiry, but they all declined.

He said his team was careful to only hire legal counsel with experience working in Indigenous communities or on Indigenous issues.

Leblanc also underscored the role that Indigenous commission staff play in decision-making.

“In the best world, if we could have had 50 per cent, it would have been a good statistic. But what’s important is not the quantity, it’s the quality. It’s the role those people play in the work we do.”

He said the inquiry also makes every effort to ensure the hearings are held in a welcoming and culturally sensitive atmosphere.

“We try to have an audience room that is as different as it can be from a court hearing room,” he said. “We set the table in a circle. Everybody sits.

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“We have the decor. We try to make it Aboriginal.”

That’s not good enough for Nakuset. She said she can’t understand why the Quebec government wouldn’t name an Indigenous judge to head the commission.

“They have a connection and an understanding of our realities,” she said. “It’s always easier to see someone in power who has lived a similar experience.”

via ‘White judge, white lawyer’: Quebec inquiry into discrimination lacks Indigenous voices, critics say – Montreal – CBC News

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Les « Métis » du Québec misent sur le G7

2018/03/09 Leave a comment

The complexities of Métis identity:

Des Québécois qui réclament le statut de Métis et revendiquent des droits ancestraux sur un territoire qui inclut La Malbaie veulent profiter du passage du G7 dans Charlevoix pour faire valoir leur cause devant les caméras du monde entier.

« Ce n’est pas impossible qu’on aille porter notre message d’une façon ou d’une autre. Quelle forme ça prendra, on ne sait pas encore. Mais le G7 est un gros forum, il y aura beaucoup de caméras », explique leur porte-parole, René Tremblay, en entrevue avec La Presse.

La cause de ces Québécois qui réclament le statut de Métis est actuellement devant les tribunaux. Elle est à la fois complexe et importante, car elle pourrait avoir des répercussions majeures.

L’organisation de M. Tremblay, la Communauté métisse du Domaine du Roy et de la Seigneurie de Mingan (CMDRSM), compte 5000 membres. Mais ce sont jusqu’à 20 000 personnes qui, selon lui, pourraient aspirer au statut de Métis dans la région du Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean seulement.

M. Tremblay et les siens cherchent à obtenir une reconnaissance, comme les Métis de l’Ouest canadien. Ils clament être les descendants d’unions mixtes entre Blancs et autochtones, et revendiquent un territoire ancestral qui va de la Baie-James à la Côte-Nord. La Malbaie, où les leaders du G7 vont se rencontrer les 7 et 8 juin, fait partie de ce territoire.

Mais La Malbaie est reconnue comme un territoire ancestral des Hurons-Wendats ; des Innus affirment également que Charlevoix fait partie du leur. Les prétentions des « Métis » du Québec sont d’ailleurs accueillies froidement par plusieurs autochtones, tout comme de nombreux experts en droit.

« Depuis 40 ans, pas mal toutes les Nations ont dû aller devant les tribunaux et, avec le temps, on a réussi à se bâtir une jurisprudence acceptable. C’est naïf de leur part de croire que du jour au lendemain, en claquant des doigts, ils deviennent les bénéficiaires de tous les droits des Indiens », laisse entendre Konrad Sioui, grand chef de la Nation huronne-wendat.

« Le Ralliement national des Métis, c’est les enfants de Louis Riel, c’est la rivière Rouge dans l’Ouest. En Ontario, il y a eu un jugement en faveur des Métis, mais très étroit. Les critères établis par la Cour suprême pour se faire reconnaître Métis sont très étroits et difficiles à remplir au Québec », ajoute le grand chef.

DEVANT LES TRIBUNAUX

La cause des Métis du Québec devant les tribunaux commence avec une histoire de chasse. Stéphane Corneau, un Saguenéen, occupait un camp illégal sur les terres publiques. Contestant la décision du gouvernement de le détruire, il affirme être Métis et bénéficier de droits ancestraux sur la forêt, dont celui de pratiquer des activités traditionnelles, comme la chasse.

M. Corneau affirme être descendant de Christine Kichera, une Innue qui s’était mariée à un Canadien français en 1805.

Dans un jugement de février 2015, la Cour supérieure a débouté M. Corneau. Le juge Roger Banford a écrit : « La conception de l’identité métisse, selon le défendeur, se limite à son lien de sang et son intérêt développé pour les activités de chasse et de pêche, ce qui ne le distingue guère d’une grande partie de la population saguenéenne. »

La cause a été portée en appel et a été entendue en mai 2017. Les Métis du Québec attendent le jugement avec impatience. Mais selon l’expert en droit autochtone et professeur titulaire à la faculté de droit de l’Université de Montréal, Jean Leclair, la jurisprudence joue en leur défaveur.

« La Constitution reconnaît des droits collectifs à des communautés métisses historiques qui ont perduré dans le temps. Il ne suffit pas d’avoir du sang blanc et autochtone. C’est plus compliqué que ça. »

Alors que les communautés métisses de l’Ouest, descendantes de Louis Riel, ont démontré leur présence historique, la réalité est tout autre au Québec, rappelle M. Leclair. En 2003, avec l’arrêt Powley, la Cour suprême a défini clairement les conditions pour être considéré comme Métis.

« Ils doivent démontrer qu’il y avait historiquement une communauté avec un mode de vie particulier, une spécificité culturelle donnée. C’est là que les revendicateurs d’un statut métis ont tous échoué en cour. Il n’y a pas juste l’affaire Corneau : je pourrais vous envoyer 10 décisions similaires. »

« Ça ne prend pas un juriste pour comprendre que si la Cour suprême avait dit : “Est un Métis toute personne avec une descendance indienne”, il y aurait eu des milliers de Canadiens qui auraient pu revendiquer des droits ancestraux, ajoute Jean Leclair. C’est sûr que la Cour suprême allait donner une interprétation restrictive au mot “métis” figurant dans la Constitution de 1982. »

Les Métis du Québec font quant à eux valoir qu’il existait des communautés métisses au Québec au moment de la colonisation vers 1850, même si elles étaient petites. « Le juge de première instance a cherché un village métis quasiment avec un panneau à l’entrée, qui dit “Métis”. Comme il ne l’a pas trouvé, il a déclaré qu’il n’y avait pas de communauté métisse ici », affirme René Tremblay.

L’affaire est loin d’être terminée : M. Tremblay pense que peu importe la décision de la Cour d’appel, il y aura appel de son groupe ou du gouvernement. « Le jugement que les trois juges préparent, ils l’écrivent pour la Cour suprême. Parce que peu importe la décision, ça risque de se rendre là. »

via Les « Métis » du Québec misent sur le G7 | Gabriel Béland | National

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To vilify Sir John A. Macdonald is to wrongly seek a single scapegoat for Canada’s mistreatment of Indigenous people: Bob Plamondon

2018/02/21 1 Comment

A more nuanced understanding of history:

The Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario wants to take his name off their schools. Because of vandalism, his birthday is no longer celebrated in Kingston. Members of the Canadian Historical Association will soon vote on dropping his name from its annual literary prize. Is it only a matter of time before we knock down Sir John A. Macdonald’s statue on Parliament Hill?

How could the man so extensively studied and widely admired for the past century – the man without whom this improbable country may never have come into being – now be so vilified?

It likely began with the 2013 award-winning book by historian James Daschuk, Clearing the Plains. While the book includes only two brief quotes from Macdonald, one strikes at the heart: “We cannot allow them to die for want of food. [We] are doing all we can, by refusing food until the Indians are on the verge of starvation, to reduce the expense.”

Mr. Daschuk’s case against Macdonald’s government is disturbing. But it is also incomplete. When Macdonald made his infamous remark in the House of Commons in 1872, during a debate on government spending, it was in response to a question by Liberal MP David Mills (who later served as Justice minister in the Laurier government and then on the Supreme Court of Canada). While protesting the cost of food rations, Mills warned, “… a barbarous population like the Indians may very easily be made wholly dependent upon the government … to the extent … that it will be very difficult to induce the Indians to devote themselves to industrial pursuits.”

What Mr. Daschuk omitted in his book was Macdonald’s admonition of Mills: “In the case of apprehended famine the matter is to be dealt with on the spot … When the Indians have been starving they have been helped.”

While Macdonald can certainly be criticized, he was nonetheless enlightened by the standards of his time. He was in rare company in expressing sympathy for the Indigenous people: “We must remember that they are the original owners of the soil, of which they have been dispossessed by the covetousness or ambition of our ancestors … the Indians have been the great sufferers by the discovery of America and the transfer to it of a large white population.”

While an overt policy of assimilation is offensive, Macdonald looks saintly compared with U.S. leadership. Indeed, many Indigenous peoples migrated north, referring to the Canada-U.S. border as “The Medicine Line.”

South of the border, the commander of the U.S. army in the West once remarked, “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.” Theodore Roosevelt moderated that statement, but only slightly: “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of every 10 are.” Macdonald wanted to avoid an “Indian war” that had ravaged the United States, arguing it was better to feed them than to fight them.

At a time when Canada was overwhelmingly and overtly racist against Indigenous peoples, Macdonald offered to extend the vote to Indians. One Liberal MP said it would be like bringing a scalping party to the poll; another that it was an insult to place white brethren “on a level with pagan and barbarian Indians.” Liberals also feared that Macdonald would get most of the “Indian vote.” Full voting rights were not given until 1960.

While Macdonald’s government failed to provide adequate food rations as was stipulated in the treaties in the case of famine, Mr. Daschuk points out there was rampant bureaucratic mismanagement, fraud, local prejudice and overt cruelty of the local agents involved. Macdonald, who wanted Indigenous people to replace hunting with farming, was bewildered by news of famine and death and set up a council to study the issue. It was perhaps the first in a long line of futile commissions to study Indigenous issues.

Macdonald’s reputation has also taken a dive after the attention given more recently to the residential-schools catastrophe. While Macdonald was acting on the recommendations of the experts in his day, he was succeeded by 18 prime ministers before the last residential school was closed. As the Truth and Reconciliation Commission records, residential schools were in place before Macdonald became prime minister and did not reach their peak until about 40 years after his death.

Macdonald’s priority was a railway that would enable Canada to achieve sufficient strength to withstand the continental pressures of the United States. This required land and immigration. A tragic consequence of implementing this vision was the eradication of a long-practised Indigenous way of life. Macdonald’s failure is Canada’s failure.

Today, many Indigenous Canadians live in disgraceful conditions without access to clean water and facing epidemic levels of suicide among the youth. How will we be judged by the generations that follow? So, before historians cast their vote on Macdonald, they might want to reflect more broadly than to look for a single scapegoat.

via To vilify Sir John A. Macdonald is to wrongly seek a single scapegoat for Canada’s mistreatment of Indigenous people – The Globe and Mail

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Hidden Cost of Federal Recognition of Native American Tribes | Time

2018/02/14 Leave a comment

Similar to some of the recent discussions regarding Métis identity and the implications of the recent increases in those self-identifying as Métis (see “White settler revisionism” threatens Métis-Crown reconciliation), Arica L. Coleman, author of That the Blood Stay Pure: African Americans, Native Americans and the Predicament of Race and Identity in Virginia, looks at the US situation and the interplay with Black identities:

For a Native American tribe, federal recognition comes with a host of benefits, including housing, health and education funding. But the process of achieving that recognition from the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) can be difficult — particularly because the BIA requires tribes to demonstrate continuous existence as an Indian entity from colonial times to the present. That’s a standard that, as recent news shows, doesn’t match up with the reality of American history.

On Jan. 30, President Trump signed H.R. 984, the Thomasina E. Jordan Indian Tribes of Virginia Federal Recognition Act of 2017, which granted federal recognition to six Virginia state-recognized Native American tribes via a special act of Congress rather than through the usual BIA process. The recognition means that members of the six tribes have achieved sovereign (albeit limited) status. Virginia Senators Tim Kaine and Mark Warner hailed the bill as having “righted a historical wrong.”

Yet the story of federal recognition for those six tribes—the Chickahominy, the Eastern Chickahominy, the Upper Mattaponi, the Rappahannock, the Monacan, and the Nansemond—also shows that at least one particular “historical wrong” remains unaddressed. In fact, their story illuminates a central problem with the way Indian recognition is managed on the state and federal level, as it is based on a problematic idea of racial purity.

The history behind that idea — that racial purity specifically requires the demonstrable absence of African-American ancestry — goes back to none other than Thomas Jefferson. His blood politics became the cornerstone of Virginia (and later federal) Indian policy, which poisoned Black-Indian relations and divided the families of those who struggled to maintain an Indian identity by seeking formal recognition.

As I demonstrate in my book That the Blood Stay Pure: African Americans, Native Americans and the Predicament of Race and Identity in Virginiainterracial intimacy between people of African descent and American Indians dates back to the early colonial era in Virginia. The Virginia General Assembly enacted its first proscriptions against interracial marriage in 1691, but this law only applied to intimacies between whites and non-whites. And, as noted by Jack D. Forbes in his book Africans and Native Americans: The Language of Race and the Evolution of Red-Black Peoples, by the end of the colonial period, enslaved Indians were classified as Negro along with their black enslaved counterparts.

By the late 18th century, in adherence with the idea that “one drop” of African blood defined a person as black, white settlers advocated for the state to stop recognizing Indian identity (and tribal land ownership) on the idea that the Native American identity had been lost due to intimacy with black Virginians. To wit, free Native Americans were classified on the census not as Indian but as free people of color or mulattoes.

By the end of the 19th century, the remnants of the state’s Powhatan people began to push back against the state-sanctioned reclassification of their identity with a dogged resolve. In order to do so, they embraced an identity not based on who they were, but rather on who they were not: black.

While complicated definitions of racial categories were not unique to Virginia, the state’s residents had another factor to deal with. Among the state’s most elite families were many that claimed descent from John Rolfe and Pocahontas. They were proud of their Native American heritage, but they were also adamant that they were white, and had to reconcile that idea with the widespread desire among the Virginia elitefor the Commonwealth to be the nation’s leading example of racial purity. So when the state enacted its Racial Integrity Act in 1924, it defined whiteness using the “Pocahontas Exception,” which spared those families from being forced to identify as colored, and thus subjected to Jim Crow.

But this raised the specter for the act’s backers that the Virginia Indian community would subvert the law to marry white people and “contaminate” the white gene pool. So, in the aftermath of the law’s passage, Walter Plecker, Virginia’s Vital Statistics Registrar, declared war on the Virginia Indian community. Plecker, who called Indians “Negroes in feathers,” sought to obliterate the Virginia Indians using what many have called “pencil genocide,” disallowing the use of the term Indian as a racial designation on government documents.

In the same period, the Virginia Indians found a steadfast ally in anthropologist Frank Speck of the University of Pennsylvania. Speck spent three decades among the Powhatan Tribes and became a fierce advocate for their formal recognition. In his monographs about the Powhatan Tribes, he significantly downplayed the historical kinship ties between blacks and Indians. In this view, these tribes were distinct from other Indian tribes and the state’s black population, because they had only intermarried with whites for nearly two centuries. Hence, Speck certified that the Powhatan Indians were racially pure.

During the 1930s and ‘40s, Speck lobbied the Federal Census Bureau to classify members of the Powhatan Tribes as Indian, despite Plecker’s strong opposition. The 1940 battle was a draw, as the bureau decided that the designation would be permitted, but with an asterisk to indicate racial uncertainly. Also at this time, prominent citizens began lobbying state and federal officials with petitions that certified that the Powhatan Tribes were of white-Indian only ancestry.

The resistance continued during World War II as three Caroline County residents were jailed for refusing to enlist in the Military as colored. One draftee of the Rappahannock Tribe expressed that he would rather go to jail than “go down in history as a negro.” Resistance to the “colored” classification also affected Powhatan Indian education; Indian schools only went to eighth grade. Because Virginia Indian children could not attend white schools and Powhatan parents refused to send them to colored schools, many Powhatan children did not attend high school. (Others, after Speck’s lobbying, completed high school at Federal Indian residential schools in North Carolina, Kansas and Oklahoma).

Even after Virginia’s schools were “integrated” after the Brown Supreme Court decision, the fallout from Speck’s campaign continued.

First, during the 1980s the Virginia Council on Indians (VCI) was established and eight tribes, seven of which were descendants of the former Powhatan Confederacy, received state recognition by a special act of the Virginia General Assembly. Second, tribal leaders and their anthropologist advocate Helen Rountree were appointed to the council to oversee Indian Affairs throughout the Commonwealth and to make recommendations to the VGA for tribes seeking state recognition. Third, in 1998, six of the eight state-recognized tribes began their efforts toward seeking federal recognition.

Yet, by 1990, the VCI established state recognition criteria based on the same BIA criteria for which tribal leaders sought and have now received exemption: the idea of continuous existence as a purely Indian entity. Hence, once the standard was adopted, the VCI did not grant a single Virginia Tribe a favorable recommendation for state recognition.

Even after last week’s historic signing, Plecker’s and Speck’s legacies are alive and well, in the idea that intimacy with blacks invalidates Indian identity. Broken friendships, disrupted kinship relations, and deep-seated animosities testify to the damage wrought by these men. Yet, as Lynette Allston, Chief of the Nottoway Tribe, told me just prior to submitting the tribe’s petition for state recognition, ”We are Indian people of white and black ancestry, and we won’t deny any part of who we are.”

via Hidden Cost of Federal Recognition of Native American Tribes | Time

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