When the University of Colorado asked Ward Churchill to prove his Native-American ethnic identity, it raised the question of what makes a person one race or another.
After all, who is the “we” determining for others who they are? Can someone be Native-American and not be on any tribal roster? Can’t individuals be of multiple groups?
In Churchill’s case, a group of non-Native professors will decide if he is of a particular ethnic group. Will they begin their process with a self-evaluation of whichever criteria they devise? Should they be asked to first prove their whiteness? Can they?
Can someone decide for you what your ethnic background is and have it listed in a government-approved roster?
Steve Sailer, founder of the Human Biodiversity Insitutute, reports that 30 percent of whites in America have some level of African-American blood. Sailer, a national correspondent for UPI, in 2002 reported on Mark Shriver, a molecular anthropology professor at Penn State University. In his study of race, Shriver discovered that he was African-American when he analyzed his own blood sample.
Presidents Calvin Coolidge, Warren Harding, Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Jackson and Thomas Jefferson all had black blood in their ancestry, according to Leroy Vaughn, author of “Black People and Their Place in World History.”
With a high ethnic mix among whites, there is a high probability that some members of the committee questioning Ward Churchill may not be what they appear to ethnically claim. Aren’t most of us just good old American mutt, a mixture of a lot of fine groups? Can you prove your own ethnic blend?
In the 1890s, the Dawes Commission established the categories “Black Indian,” “White Indian” and “Native Indian” as part of efforts to create member rolls for the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek and Seminole tribes in Oklahoma. The tribal rolls were necessary to establish land allotments. Many Indian leaders, such as Chito Harjo, resisted the allocation plan and the concept of tribal rolls. Since the government lacked any way of proving ancestry, they left it up to the tribes.
Kent Carter, regional administrator of the National Archives & Records Administration, in his report, “The Dawes Commission and the Enrollment of the Creeks,” stated that “the rolls were wildly corrupt. Many were supposedly on the rolls as a result of fraud or bribes to the tribal officials … .”
Carter states that there were no official records by the tribes at that time and families relied on what they could remember or what neighbors shared.
Are you asked to prove you are Irish or Italian or Polish or German when you join ethnic clubs? And if you are a mixture of groups, who has the right to ask you to make one choice and certify your choice? Can black-Hispanics not be black and Hispanic?
Look at me and you could rightfully guess that I am Apache. But look at my mother and you would say she is white. She is of Spanish ancestry via Mexico. Her ancestors came into northern Spain from the Russian steppes of Galicia. My father is Gavilan Apache from Mexico. But Mexico keeps no tribal rolls.
In “The Lost Land,” John C. Chavez estimated that 80 percent of Mexican people have Native-American blood. Since the majority of the Latino people in the United States come from Mexico, this suggests that 80 percent of those 40 million Latinos could be Native-Americans and are not on any tribal rolls.
When I asked my uncle, Manuel Alvarado (who fought for six years with Pancho Villa) about our Indian identity, he said, “We did not want to be known as Indian because if you said you were Indian they killed you, but if you said you were Mexican in the USA they just beat you up.” Many of the oppressed Natives passed for white to avoid persecution. Neither these Mexican-Indians nor those who could pass for being white are on any tribal or government lists.
As I travel the Southwest and speak with non-reservation Indians, many of them tell me that their radical ancestors refused to live on a reservation in the United States or on the church/hacienda lands of Mexico. Since the 1500s, many Natives were captured and sold as slaves to plantation owners. These Indians and those from war-torn South American countries are not on any official Indian list, either.
Is Professor Churchill’s having to defend his Indian ancestry a practice applied to all the staff in the CU Ethnic Studies Department? Do African-American, Latino, Asian-American, Anglo-Americans and all identifiable ethnic group professors have to prove their ancestry at CU?
If we all studied our ancestry as Professor Shriver at Penn State did, would we all find surprises?
Ernesto Alvarado (neto3@aol.com) is a retired school administrator/psychologist who was raised as a migrant worker and is of Mexican-Apache ancestry.