An absolutely correct swipe. Libertarians are against regulation of commerce and associated consumer protections.
I have a friend who I got into a squabble over vegan mayonnaise. I explained the origin of protecting these terms to avoid food adulteration and ensure that what people bought what actual mayonnaise, but he felt it was regulating bodies “overstepping their bounds” and that consumers should self educate about what’s in their food.
Not all of them, and not to all degrees.
Unfortunately “Indian” is still a legal term because it was the term used in legislation when is was written and legislators don’t see fixing this legislation as a priority for them. Canada and the United States both have extremely paternalistic legal systems regarding indigenous people.
The pseudo-scientific rationale for this, which was made extremely explicit at the time, was that all Virginia indians had interbred with African slaves and “degenerate” whites to the point where they were considered subhumans, prone to “hereditary idiocy and imbecility”.
And in Virginia, being a degenerate subhuman imbecile could get you imprisoned and forcibly sterilized; between 1924 and 1979 the state castrated well over 7,000 people in an attempt to “protect the purity of the white race.”
So yeah, you’re right - it’s no big wonder that Indians in Virginia would disavow their heritage in order to avoid being classified as “not white.” Plecker and Priddy were rounding up people who’d had poor educational opportunities and gelding them, and the only defense was whiteness.
There is certainly a legitimate concern towards rewriting agreements and not making them worse for the parties so protected.
I did a google search and seems like some may prefer to be called American Indian over Native American but there doesn’t seem to be a clear consensus. I have thoughts on it but not being part of the group i’m not sure what’s the best way to go. My experience having lived in Nevada near some reservations was to use Native American. So i dunno.
When I call it a Dumb Law it’s not that the very idea of the law is Dumb, it’s that it was written by people who had very little idea about the subject they were legislating on. They’re legislators, they don’t know much about anything other than fundraising and usually one pet subject. Or they did know what they were doing and it’s deliberately exclusionary, which would be something else.
For people worried about ‘fake tribes’ and white appropriation of Native culture - of course it’s real, happens here too, (especially with all that casino money splashing around). But letting the Federal bureau created to oversee the extermination, resettling, and forced assimilation of natives decide the legitimacy of the native tribes is kind of an ultimate irony, isn’t it. Okay, sigh you survived, here’s your certificate.
As always Wiki isn’t the final say but it’s a good place to start and find references. This is some interesting reading:
Nope. Whatever tribe others insisted they were part of ( I think a mohican tribe quite a ways away) did not accept the connection. They were recognized by the State of New York but not the feds. And a mishmash of recognized indian tribes. Many of them on the other side of the country. The whole thing always seemed like a brush off. They ended up with federal recognition in 2010, but the other two groups are still fighting it.
The montaukett are the really weird edge case. They seem to have never had any sort of recognition. Because their “full blooded” leaders died before any of these structures came about. And afterwards the “disappearance” of the Montauk Indians became a popular local story. So even though they’ve always been right there everyone keeps responding to them with “you guys died out”.
ETA: this seems to be a bigger problem in the North east where more Indian groups have died out, split up, become geographically isolated. Or over all populations are much lower. A lot of these cultures were already pretty well eradicated or assimilated long before the treaties establishing these systems came about. So they were too small or to invisible to get involved.
But I’ve heard similar stories about smaller bands getting rolled into tribes they have no actual relation to. Then struggling to get tribal memberships, or federal recognition from points west.
Very interesting. Thanks for the comment!
i feel for her, but fighting the government on this is going to take more then one person and a lot of time and resources, getting her tribe federally recognized is no small task.
in the meantime is there anything stopping her from labeling her art “Patawomeck Tribal Art” or something similar that would convey the spirit of the meaning without the words in contention?
Thanks for the info. I guess I don’t know enough about this tribe to say if it is a fake one, or one that has been legitimately pushed aside. Which is why I wondered if other Tribes recognized it or not, I would think that would be a decent gauge.
Ouch, big mistake. I guess that explains why the other tribes might have mixed feelings about being associated with them.
Some are, and some aren’t. I even think there could be anecdotal evidence to suggest that there are increasing numbers of people who identify as libertarian (which I don’t) and argue for economic regulation along with consumer and environmental protections based on libertarian principles.
So, if the word “Indian” is not legally allowed, could she use the words “Native American” and get around the legal issues?
Seems a strange and unnecessary extension of the title, at least as used in the US.
I mean I get you not wanting to take a random stranger’s word for it. But they’re pretty unequivocally not a “fake”. Though tribe isn’t the proper description for what they are. They tend to go with “Band”, though even that’s sort of an artificial catagory that comes out of the treaty system. For recognition purposes I think The Shinnecock and Unkechaug go with “Nation”.
Either way the total group (which I think in history and anthropology gets labeled a cultural complex) is really well attested historically. Down to extent signed paper work from when the land for my town and the one immediately South were sold to English settlers. We’re some of the oldest white people towns in the US. There are archaeological sites, both at the two reservations and elsewhere. And there are multiple related bands (to just go with it) that no longer exist, including the Corchogue who were centered like around the block from my house. Records and genealogy connecting current families directly to known band members from the early colonial period. Its really all there.
They are still often labeled “fake” by both whites and other tribes. But absolutely everything I’ve seen seems to indicate that this fakeness is entirely down to the fact that they are small groups of heavily mixed people. No 100% Native Americans among them, but many (especially on the Reservations) hit those weird markers for percentage of decent to qualify officially.
I guess the whole subject makes me curious about this concept of fake tribes. There are certainly no end of white folks claiming decent from a mythical Cherokee princess or some such. But a lot of the fake tribe situations I hear about are a lot like the situation with my neighbors. An actual extent group, a real culture. But isolated from large more influential tribal groups, very small, and heavily assimilated and mixed. In their case their issues are really exacerbated by mixing with the wrong sorts. I can’t tell you how many times I hear, even now, that they’re not Indians at all. Just [ethnic slur]'s looking for a hand out.
No, it just appears to me that this is the inevitable sort of edge case that you’ll get when you try to pull together the very prescriptive world of legislation with the much greyer, fuzzier ideas of ethnicity as self identified, and group membership, and all the arguments about who has the right to determine group membership.
I’m also rather wary of government involvement in enforcing and regulating a form of ethnic identity because of what’s happened pretty much every time this has been put in place in the past. However benign the supposed intention of imposing classifications like this, the end result has usually been to provide a paper trail for official or unofficial persecution, discrimination and deepening of divides.
It sets even more alarm bells ringing when the groups it tries to entrench and support are the same pseudo-scientific blood and “racial” divisions that plagued the last few centuries. These should be our first target for disrupting and dissolving, not putting the force of the state behind them.
Well, again I only know enough about this to be dangerous. I was first aware of this years ago when doing research on my heritage, and found many articles and discussions about fake tribes. I was trying to find this page I found before, but it included a list of tribes with no merit and is basically white people LARPing.
In looking for it, I have found many similar articles. It seems the Cherokee are extra vigilant as so many of the fake tribes seem to claim to be part of the Cherokee tribes, including in areas the Cherokee never lived. Indeed the website of the tribe the lady belongs too looks very white - but a lot of tribes do nowadays, especially those on smaller reservations who have been mixing things up more and more. Heritage is more than just skin color.
So at the same time I see the issue of tribes falling through the cracks and deserve recognition.
I guess I am lucky that the Potawatomie has a long, rich history in dealing with the French, British, and Americans, including a bunch of treaties, censuses, and a march or two, and now have reservations in five states currently (IIRC).
You and me both. I keep meaning to read up on it more. Whole subject is deeply weird and depressing. I’m prone to thinking the whole sovereignty/reservation/officiallyanindianaccordingtothegovernment thing can’t help but disenfranchise and isolate people. But then I look at those groups near me and in the surrounding states. And most of the Indian groups here that survived long enough to get to it, have slowly eroded and disappeared for lack of access to that whole thing. Including the three extent groups near me. Which are tiny. You’re talking less than 1500 people total between the 3 groups. So that system is totally fucked. But it does genuinely seem to have kept the cultures existing.
And then my brain breaks.
This is a tragedy.
