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Matthew Kelly wrote: "In distinguishing actions that lead to ethnocide from those that lead to a refusal of formal recognition, Brown seems to rely on a belief that both are intentional acts. Hence his suggestion, correct in my opinion, that refusing to recognize a tribe doesn't amount to attempting to eradicate them culturally. However the erasure of cultural practices and beliefs can be made to occur even with the best of intentions, as the Indian boarding school experience shows; more importantly, it can also take place without any thought at all." -- Intentions are important too. The ethnocidal school looks at historical outcomes and attaches a pejorative label to outcomes they find disturbing, regardless of the actors' intentions. This pejorative labeling is as much a political move as it is an analytical move, and if you push it beyond that it devolves into identity politics and becomes incompatible with scholarship. If we really want to understand a social movement such as anti-recognition politics, then looking at the actors' intentions is crucial. And ethnocide isn't even on the radar screen here. The issues are land use, taxation, and concerns over the distribution of tax dollars. Also, it's a mistake to assume the tribe-ness of the petitioners. Many of these groups are formed and/or shaped by the existing recognition policy and the benefits it could bring them. Do established folk cultures ordinarily cease to exist simply because they don't get official government recognition? If they already existed prior to recognition, then why would anyone expect that declining to recognize would be ethnocidal? Conversely, if a group comes into being in a particular form for the purposes of getting recognition, is it ethnocidal to decline to recognize that group? -- Matthew continues: "So many elements of the indigenous-immigrant relationship in North America are taken for granted that large swathes of its history are disappeared from view, at least for many non-indigenous peoples. While Bruchac and Brown focus on the policy of recognition, neither questions the idea of "policy" itself, or those behind the institutions whose histories and operations have produced the baroque body of principles and doctrines known as "federal Indian law." Consequently, the political and epistemological justifications for such institutions, and the ideological figure of the 'Indian' upon which they rely, are elided in the presumption that there is a coherent, coordinated, and uniform body of thought and action called "policy." -- You missed what I was getting at when I wrote: "We have yet to have much of a public debate on the ideals of ethnic nationalism versus cultural pluralism, and how the policy process should be framed accordingly within the context of Indian recognition." The prevailing federal recognition policy came to be in the administrative rulemaking process, which is practically obscured from public view. The only participants in the rulemaking were those with an immediate interest in the outcome, who were lucky enough to be informed about what was happening at the BIA during those few months, and who knew how to take advantage of that opportunity. It seems absurd to me that something as putatively significant as recognizing an internal sovereign should be decided by low-level federal bureaucrats deep within the bowels of an administrative agency--working under rules that many people on all sides of the issue criticize as arbitrary and obscure--rather than in the political arena. The antirecognition activists--whether we agree with them or not--are trying to bring the process back into politics. I'm not arguing that legislatures would make better recognition decisions than the BIA does. I would rather expect legislatures to make worse decisions on recognition. But if we as scholars want to make sense of the recognition process, we need to acknowledge that it is inherently political, a prosaic struggle over rights and resources in the here and now. Thomas Brown Sociology, Lamar University browntf@hal.lamar.edu
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