U.S. exporting ‘Indian country’ to the Holy Land

This article passed through the TUPOCC listserv. It strikes me as a biting reality-check for those in the US who understand Palestinians as nothing more than an oppositional concept. Extermination of people doesn't just happen, and those of us who live in the US rarely take pause to understand the mechanism that turned "indians" into geographical references or sports team mascots. We are so blind that we cannot even recognize that those same mechanics are turning in our midst, albeit by satellite and internet feeds.

Good Fox: Palestine: Stop the re-creation of ‘Indian country’ in the Holy Land | Indian Country Today | Opinion

As historians and scholars will remind us, Jewish people generally thrived and lived in respectful coexistence with Christians and Muslims in Palestine while they were subjected to prejudice (and far worse) in Europe and the United States. It was only during the mid-20th century that sustained violence began to occur between the populations – when the U.S. and Europe, out of their collective guilt for allowing the Shoah to happen, formed the state of Israel on top of Palestine.

This formation did not occur on empty land. Known as “Al-Nakba” (Arabic for “the Cataclysm”), this 1948 event involved the expulsion of an estimated one million Palestinians from cities and villages, massacres, torture and rape, and the destruction of nearly 500 Palestinian villages. Zionism, which activist Gabe Camacho has correctly described as synonymous with manifest destiny, is the hegemonic ideology of the colonizers in the Holy Land. And one of the ideas of Zionism/Manifest Destiny is the concept of “Indian country,” an anti-human rights activity that the U.S. exports internationally.

“Indian Country” is a U.S.-designated term for our remaining and secondary homelands; however, the term also is common in the U.S. military and colonization parlance such as when it was employed in the invasion of Vietnam or as seen in the ongoing occupation of Iraq. We see this term in action, too, in Palestine.

Uncovering the racism of nativism in the US

Recent reports about the murder of Marcelo Lucero in the TUPOCC Yahoo! group prompted me to ask us to consider how legal activists of color, and our friends, might use critical legal theory and our experiential insights to uncover the racism of US nativism and and change popular understandings of today's anti-immigrant movement.

I referred to a Facing Race conference workshop that some of us attended on this subject last week, and a compañero in New York just mentioned today's Black Alliance for Just Immigration (BAJI)'s conference on Galvanizing our Power for Action: Building Bridges between African-American and Immigrant Communities.

BAJI does great work, and I think we should all learn and talk about the relationship of US racism and nativism. In my Chicanos, Law, and Criminal Justice class at UC Berkeley, I teach about how the US has historically racialized Latinas/os vis-a-vis Indigenous and African peoples. In this post I share some resources and sketch my understanding of the racism of US nativism.

Let's start with the Anglo seizure of Tejas and the US invasion of México in the first half of the 19th century.  

(N.B. Before continuing, it's important to acknowledge that all history is highly complicated, and we have imperfect means from fragmented sources to know the past.  Certainly some Tejano elites joined Anglos in establishing Texas as an independent republic in 1836; similarly, the US-Mexican War had multiple factors.  However, as I have asserted, my critical analysis of these past events has led me to frame them as the Anglo seizure of Tejas y the US invasion de México.)

As many have written, relations between the US and México soured in that early to mid 19th century period.  In particular, numerous influential US congressmen railed against México as a nation of degenerate mongrels and expressed fear about incorporating territories with substantial numbers of them (us, colored folks).

I use a few excerpts to teach about this history, including Chapter Four, "Latinas/os" of Perea, Delgado, Harris, Stefancic & Wildman's Race and Races: Cases and Resources for a Diverse America, 2d ed. (2007), and the excerpt of Ian Haney López's The Social Construction of Race: Some Observations on Illusion, Fabrication, and Choice in Davis, Johnson & Martínez's A Reader on Race, Civil Rights, and American Law (2001).

The important point vis-a-vis conventional ideas about the "black-white binary" of race in the US today is that Latinas/os--particularly Mexicans and Puerto Ricans--in the 19th century challenged the US Anglo imaginary with a somewhat different dilemma than that posed by "the peculiar institution" of slavery.  

Instead of an internal non-white "minority," México y Porto Rico presented the specter of already racially-mixed societies.  And, according to the US Anglo conceptualization of race in the 19th century, the inferiority of a racially-mixed mongrel was even greater than that of a non-white Indian or African.  Contemporary ideas promulgated at that time held that mixing the races produced an inferior breed to any of the "pure" races.  

(Contrast these ideas with the 1990's celebration of multi-racial minorities, or the (re)discovery of bi-raciality.  In turn, understand that always already, folks be hella mixed.  Racial purity is a lie and an invidious illusion.)

From these first moments when the US incorporated of parts of México (starting with Tejas from 1836 to 1845, then including the lands ceded under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 and finally those later acquired in the Compromise of 1850 and the Gadsen Purchase of 1853), the idea of US nativism became even more complexly tied to racism.  Previously the notion of US nativism was already fraught with contradictions given the genocide of Indigenous people and the situation of "native-born" African Americans, who were nonetheless legally excluded from enjoying their (our) human rights, including of course U.S. and state citizenship.

In the two decades prior to the Civil War and Reconstruction, however, the US incorporated a massive new territory inhabited by a substantial new "minority," which demaned an evolution in the means of subordination, i.e., the racialization of "Mexicans," first as "Greasers" (as in the infamous California anti-vagrancy law of 1855) and later as "cheap labor."

A foundational resource for understanding this history is Tomás Almaguer's Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California (1994, new edition forthcoming 2008).  Chapter One, "'We Desire Only a White Population in California' - The Transformation of Mexican California in Historical-Sociological Perspective," is particularly useful.  Another useful resource is Gilbert Paul Carrasco's Latinos in the United States: Invitation and Exile in Juan Perea's Immigrants Out! The New Nativism and the Anti-Immigrant Impulse in the United States (1997).  

A new book that I will likely incorporate into this section of my class is Laura Gómez's  Manifest Destinties: The Making of the Mexican American Race (2008), which provides critical insights into this history beyond the California context.  Understanding "Mexican" racialization in New Mexico is particularly important because that region remained a territory for 62 years -- from 1850 to 1912 -- until the Anglo population outnumbered the Hispano population.  New Mexico is also important en la conciencia xican@ (in Chicana/o consciousness) because the New Mexico Territory was broken into parts to form Arizona, parts of Colorado and eventually New Mexico; it also has great importance as a site of centurial armed resistance to Anglo domination, from Las Gorras Blancas of the late 19th century through the efforts of Reies López Tijerina y La Alianza Federal de Mercedes in the 1960s.)

As Almaguer argues persuasively, using archival historical sources, the racialization of "Mexicans" in the US extended and evolved earlier forms of US racism against Indigenous and African people.  In turn, Carrasco's chapter details how the racialization of "Mexicans" was particularly linked to the evolving labor demands of the 19th and 20th century, e.g., the Gold Rush, agricultural work, World War I, the Great Depression and the so-called "repatriation" campaigns of the 1930s, World War II and the second Bracero Program, "Operation: Wetback" and the H-2 visa program.  (Gómez's arguments complement these by advancing her notion of Mexican Americans being "off-white," meaning sometimes defined as legally white but almost always defined as socially non-white, and grounding her concept in the particular history of New Mexico.)

Here is the take away point for folks open to understanding (and interested in articulating clearly) how racism is at the root of US nativism: Anglos evolved and extended US racism from the history of Indigenous genocide and African slavery as the US conquered and annexed the vast Mexican territory now known as the Southwest.  In so doing, the US force a terrible Faustian pact onto Mexican Americans (and by implication all Latinas/os): deny your Indigenousness, denigrate your Blackness and aspire to racial Whiteness, or be ready for subjugation like an African and slaughter like an Indian.

Geography, region and social space is the critical factor that blinds some of us from seeing the connections between historical and contemporary racism(s) and nativism(s).  Without understanding the foundational historic racialization of "Mexicans" (and the also salient historic racialization of Puerto Ricans) vis-a-vis Anglo American government, citizenship and political economy, it might be confusing to hear me say that US nativism is a form of racism, or and to understand how these ideologies overlap substantially.

However, to one who knows this history, today's nativism--whether it be in Congress, en la frontera or in Long Island--looks like it clearly continues the sorry past.

***

I'll end by citing two more important texts about these ideas.  See Robert S. Chang & Keith Aoki, Centering the Immigrant in the Inter/National Imagination, 85 California Law Review 1395, 10 La Raza Law Journal 309 (1997) (published simultaneously in both journals).  While I have not taught it yet, I read Chang & Aoki's explanation of "nativistic racism" during law school and recall it being rich with insights on this subject.

Second, Juan Perea's, Demography and Distrust: An Essay on American Languages, Cultural Pluralism, and Official English, 77 Minnesota Law Review 269 (1992) is a well structured history of the hidden past of US multilingualism, e.g., French, German, Spanish and English, at the founding and throughout the history of the US and its various states.

Leonard Peltier update, March 2008

Subject: Please get this Peltier info out there

KFAI's Indian Uprising for March 16, 2008 from 7:00 - 8:00 p.m. DST #257

Leonard Peltier vs. FBI, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, Case
No. 07-1745MN, University of St. Thomas School of Law Frey Moot Courtroom,
Minneapolis, March 11, 2008.

Peltier was convicted of killing two FBI agents during a 1975 shootout on
the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota. But his supporters, including
some human rights groups, believe that he is innocent and that he was
targeted because of his political activism.

About 3,500 pages were turned over for Peltier's original trial in 1977. But
his attorneys have discovered over the years that the actual number of
documents the FBI has on Peltier is 142,579, said attorney Michael Kuzma.

Peltier has tried for nearly seven years to use the federal Freedom of
Information Act to get the tens of thousands of pages still being withheld.
"I just think this thing stinks to high heaven," Kuzma said after the
hearing. He told the court, "We still don't know the truth about what
happened back then."

Judge Lavenski R. Smith asked Kuzma what the remedy would be for Peltier.
Kuzma said the court should conduct "a full in-camera review of the
documents." When Smith expressed some disbelief at that idea, Kuzma added
that, if that were too burdensome, the court could focus on the documents
from 1977, of which Peltier has received none.

Tom Byron, an attorney with the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington,
D.C., argued that "there's no support" for an in-camera inspection of the
records. - St. Paul Pioneer Press excerpt,
http://www.twincities.com/ci_8539140?nclick_check=1
Court recording: http://8cc-www.ca8.uscourts.gov/OAaudio/2008/3/071745.MP3
Tonight our Guests are:

Michael Kuzma, Arguing attorney for Leonard Peltier; Sr. Legislative Assistant to City Council President, Buffalo, New York and keith rabin producer/co play write of the Stage Production

"My Life Is My Sun Dance" "www.mylifeismysundance.com

To help sponsor or support or for additional information
contact keith @ keith@mylifeismysundance.com

* * * *
Indian Uprising a one-hour radio Public & Cultural Affairs program relevant
to Native Indigenous people, broadcast each Sunday at 7:00 p.m. CST over
KFAI 90.3 FM Minneapolis and 106.7 FM St. Paul. Producer and host is
volunteer Chris Spotted Eagle. To receive or stop getting announcements:
radio@spottedeagle.org

For internet listening, visit www.kfai.org, click Play under ON AIR NOW or
for listening later via their archives, click PROGRAMS & SCHEDULE > Indian
Uprising > STREAM. Programs are archived only for two weeks.

Border Fence to Divide Three Native American Nations

Border Fence to Divide Three Native American Nations

By Rodrigo Paras; translated from Spanish by Elena Shore
October 6, 2006, New American Media

http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=c17899ed7975f1ada871e1da0c8b52f2

(this article originally appeared in Rumbo
http://www.rumbonet.com/rumbo/portada.asp )


Criticism by Native Americans who Live along the Border

Three Native American nations and 23 tribes live in the
borderlands between the United States and Mexico. The
construction of the border separation fence approved by
Congress will divide in two the ancient history of these
peoples.

"The land is the place God put us from time immemorial. I
can't imagine that now it will be difficult to visit my
family," because of the construction of the fence, said Louis
Gussac, chief of the Koumeyaay nation located on both sides of
the California border.

These sentences are repeated time and time again on the
reservations' international limits.

The tribes' situation has been difficult since 2001 as a
result of an increase in the Border Patrol, the presence of
National Guard troops in the last four months and narco-
traffic activities in some areas along the border.

O'odham, Cocopah and Kickapoo are the three Native American
nations that will see their culture and land divided by a
fence that is at least five feet tall and, according to
Congress, is expected to be completed in May 2008.

"Although the project is meant to stop the undocumented, it
affects our life," said Gussac.

Texas Has its own History Too

The Kickapoo nation resides in the Eagle Pass area. These
Native Americans see the fence that will be built there as a
tragic sign.

Congress approved a span of the fence that will go from five
miles northwest of Del Rio to five miles southeast of Eagle
Pass.

"The territory of this reservation will be permanently divided
by the hand of man," said anthropologist and Kickapoo expert
Rebeca Brush.

Throughout history, the Kickapoo have had to change their
traditions. In the 17th century, they lived in the Great Lakes
region. A century later they were displaced to Kansas and
Texas.

"It's one thing to change where you live, but it's something
else to have a fence separate the members of a nation," Brush
explained.

"It's truly a tragedy. The construction of the fence doesn't
make any sense," says Jose Aranda, a member of the Kickapoo
in Eagle Pass.

"This isn't the way to solve a problem that's more complicated
and needs a more intelligent solution," explained Jaime
Loiaono, the priest of a church in Eagle Pass.

"Fifty percent of the high school students on the reservation
are Black Rocks. What's going to happen to them?" the priest
asked.

The mayor of the city, Chad Foster, has expressed strong
criticism of the fence. "It's a cure that is worse than the
disease," he said before Congress approved the bill.

The Kickapoo, despite living in the United States for
centuries, were not recognized as a nation until 1983.

Two decades later, various miles of fence will divide the land
where they live, and the steel beams will be nailed like a
threat to the preservation of their unity, family and customs.


=================================================================

US-Mexico Border Actions
No Militarization of Borders! Support Immigrant Rights!
Tel: (213)403-0131

e-mail: Info@ActionLA.org
Please subscribe Border Information listserv, send e-mail to: Border01-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

Leonard Peltier's lawyers arguing to release FBI files

Chris Spotted Eagle <chris@spottedeagle.org> wrote:

Date: Fri, 08 Sep 2006 01:51:31 -0500
Subject: Leonard Peltier's lawyers arguing to release FBI files
From: Chris Spotted Eagle <chris@spottedeagle.org>
To: Dist 7 LS <chris@spottedeagle.org>

PRESS RELEASE

Leonard Peltier's lawyers arguing to release FBI files

Place:    U. S. Courthouse, 300 South Fourth Street, Courtroom 9E, Minneapolis
Date:    September 8, 2006
Time:    9:30 a.m.
Hearing:  Open to the public

Barry A. Bachrach, Esq. and Michael Kuzma, Esq. will be arguing before United States Magistrate Judge Susan R. Nelson for the full release of all FBI files maintained by the Minneapolis Field Office relating to Leonard Peltier and RESMURS.  The FBI reviewed 77,149 pages and released 66,594 pages in full or in part, however, 10,555 pages were withheld in their entirety.

Of utmost significance is that Mr. Peltier seeks release of documents relating to informants, particularly with respect to the extent the Federal Bureau of Investigation paid informants to infiltrate Mr. Peltier's defense team.  Mr. Peltier's legal team just discovered evidence establishing that Douglas Durham, who was a confidential source paid by the FBI to infiltrate the highest levels of the American Indian Movement and who was exposed on March 7, 1975, spoke with, and provided information to, William Halprin, the Chief Prosecutor from Canada  against Mr. Peltier in connection with the extradition proceedings.  Halprin requested Durham's involvement "to enable him to utilize source [Durham] to refute statements made by Peltier's defense."  The FBI instructed Durham "to provide information requested by Crown Attorney [and] Š. If recontacted by Halprin, he would cooperate fully and would keep Omaha advised of developments."

Knowing full well the impact such revelations would have on Mr. Peltier's case, the government is fighting vigorously to prevent these documents, that date back over 30 years, from being publicly released.  Among other things, the FBI claims that the release of this information would harm national security and reveal the identities of confidential sources.  Mr. Peltier's lawyers have argued that these are nothing more than pretexts to prevent the release of further evidence of the continuing violation of Mr. Peltier's constitutional rights and further drives home the fact that Mr. Peltier never received a fair trial.

For further information contact the Leonard Peltier Defense Committee:  (915) 203-6358.   www.leonardpeltier.net.

TUPOCC Co-Chairs:
Renee Sanchez
Ranya Ghuma
Matt Nelson

http://www.nlg.org/TUPOCC/TUPOCChome.html

               

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