This was an interesting article that brings up two major points I think are relevant. The first is the idea of blood purity and its use in different groups. There are hate groups that want to...
Exemplary
This was an interesting article that brings up two major points I think are relevant.
The first is the idea of blood purity and its use in different groups. There are hate groups that want to proliferation of “pure blood” factions but these same ideas are being used to take down people in different ethnic groups because they are not “ethnic (whatever that ethnicity is)” enough. Growing up I saw that in different black and latino groups where if you came from a middle class background you weren't part of the struggle and were not accepted because you didn’t suffer enough.
In this article, if you believe the professors account, she grew up participating in native american activities. Then later in life she finds out she is not blood related to any native american families and thus is not a “true” native american. Her detractors are loudly telling everyone that she is just pretending to be something that she is biologically not. That she is pretending to get special treatment, that without her someone more worthy would get the resources she is using. These arguments are identical to the transphobic, racist, and sexist arguments that have been the justification to block transgender care, affirmative action, and equal rights for decades.
Who is the arbiter of any of these communities? The ending of the article has a graduate student who meets the professor at an event where the tribal elders accept her but the academic world doesn’t, so where does she belong? And can small marginalized groups benefit from adding imperfect members or is it better to exclude everyone that doesn’t “belong”? There have always been groups that will say someone is not “american enough” and what test should we use or master list of people should we use to decide Americanism?
The other big issue I have is now I have an opinion about this person and should I? I’m sure that everyone here who is reading this has never done anything wrong in their entire life. They have never lied about anything or used any advantage that was available to them so of course we can judge this person. We could hold up our own life as the paragon of virtue and every facet could be examined and nothing bad would be found. Let he who has not sinned cast the first stone is sage advice.
In my world view, the tribal elders should decide this question. Native American is a political affiliation more than an ethnic one. The tribes control membership and should. The people who...
In my world view, the tribal elders should decide this question. Native American is a political affiliation more than an ethnic one. The tribes control membership and should.
The people who strongly object to this sort of thing come from a place of resentment and distaste that any hiring preferences based on history or membership in a disadvantaged group exist at all. Seeing someone 'gaming' that preference is something they percieve as adding insult to injury. This reminds me of accusations that someone has achieved a promotion through sleeping with the right person.
Fairness in hiring is a tricky topic. Many people who get hired in very selective fields have some kind of advantage that could be interpreted as unfair or seem to.
I wonder if requiring native genetics for a position would even be legal. Wouldn't that be a pretty clear case of racial discrimination? You're literally hiring or firing someone solely because of...
I wonder if requiring native genetics for a position would even be legal. Wouldn't that be a pretty clear case of racial discrimination? You're literally hiring or firing someone solely because of their race. Affirmative action can exist, or schools can try to recruit people of different racial backgrounds. But explicitly refusing to hire someone due to their ancestry? There's no way that's legal. A university can certainly have a Native American studies department, and they can certainly staff that department with people who have done teaching and research on Native American communities and issues. They might even be able to put something in a job description such as, "candidates must be well-connected with native communities and have lived experience of native cultural practices" or similar. But I'm struggling to see how a university could even legally require native genetics for any position, even a Native American studies department. They could write the requirements specific enough that the only people likely to qualify are those with native ancestry. But there will always be odd ducks like Hoover out there.
Or imagine a more extreme case of Hoover's situation. What if a native family adopted an non-native child and raised them, from birth, fully in native communities and traditions? Should that kid, when they grow up, be able to teach at a native studies department?
I'm fully onboard with having some sort of process to make sure the professors in native studies departments really do have the cultural roots and connections they claim. But requiring genetic testing just seems to me to be clear racial discrimination. Perhaps the best solution is to just let tribal elders decide it. When applying to a position, candidates could be asked to provide details on their tribal background or cultural connections. They could be asked to list a specific tribe that they claim affiliation with. Then, if the candidate is selected, the school can contact the tribe. Tell them, "this person is claiming to be either a member of your tribe or someone who is so deeply affiliated with your tribe's culture and customs that they should be able to teach as a professor of native studies. Can you confirm their tribal status? If not a formal member of the tribe, are they a part enough of your community that you feel they should be able to represent it?"
That's the kind of high bar that could be drawn without requiring a likely illegal genetics test. You could make the requirements strict enough that the only ways to meet them are to either be born into a tribe or be have been adopted into and raised in it from birth. But basing things on genetics really seems like racial discrimination to me.
Native American lands are sovereign. A nation-within-a-nation. My understanding is that any laws of the US federal government do not apply, so things like drug use are completely legal (if the...
I wonder if requiring native genetics for a position would even be legal.
Native American lands are sovereign. A nation-within-a-nation. My understanding is that any laws of the US federal government do not apply, so things like drug use are completely legal (if the governing tribe says they are), and any law regarding discrimination wouldn't have to be followed.
I would almost classify this reply as "not even wrong," unless I'm really missing something here. Yes, you're right that Native American tribes can do what they want on their lands. However, we're...
I would almost classify this reply as "not even wrong," unless I'm really missing something here. Yes, you're right that Native American tribes can do what they want on their lands. However, we're not talking about tribal lands here. We're talking about whether it's legal for public and private universities located nowhere near tribal lands to hire people based on their genetics.
A tribe can certainly put in whatever requirements it wants for someone to qualify for tribal status. That includes genetic requirements. They can say, "you must have this percentage of tribal descent to qualify to be a member."
But that's not what we're talking about. We're discussing whether Columbia University can put a genetic requirement on a job description. Columbia University is located at 116th and Broadway in New York City, not on a native reservation. If federal anti-discrimination laws don't even apply in Manhattan, where exactly do they apply?
While it hasn't come up practically in my life, my understanding is that recognized Native American tribes in the US have official membership rolls, and that public universities typically rely on...
While it hasn't come up practically in my life, my understanding is that recognized Native American tribes in the US have official membership rolls, and that public universities typically rely on those for, for instance, certain scholarships. But I'm not sure if the same thing holds for hiring decisions; scholarships aren't regulated in the same way as those.
Sorry, I was responding to the first sentence. Not the entire post/paragraph. Obviously if this is a position at a university no where near tribal lands then any sovereignty from the tribes...
Sorry, I was responding to the first sentence. Not the entire post/paragraph.
I wonder if requiring native genetics for a position would even be legal.
Obviously if this is a position at a university no where near tribal lands then any sovereignty from the tribes doesn't apply.
State laws do not apply. The FBI does law enforcement on tribal territory, but they are stretched thin and have other priorities. Tribes have their own laws and police but they are not completely...
State laws do not apply. The FBI does law enforcement on tribal territory, but they are stretched thin and have other priorities. Tribes have their own laws and police but they are not completely free from federal law.
I did a semester long course in native american law years ago. It's a complex mix of specific treaty rights, federal law, tribal autonomy/sovereignty and tribal law. I would have to go back and...
I did a semester long course in native american law years ago. It's a complex mix of specific treaty rights, federal law, tribal autonomy/sovereignty and tribal law. I would have to go back and research to find details, but the feds do have rights to enforce law on tribal territory when they care enough to do it.
I agree. The other problem with people denouncing others is how can you know if it is genuine or another way to advance by tearing down the people above you.
I agree. The other problem with people denouncing others is how can you know if it is genuine or another way to advance by tearing down the people above you.
I generally don't feel any need to be involved in the determination of anyones ethnicity. Much rather live and let live. There is some frustration I feel around highly selective affirmative action...
I generally don't feel any need to be involved in the determination of anyones ethnicity. Much rather live and let live.
There is some frustration I feel around highly selective affirmative action (it's really not my favorite practice, I'll be honest). There also seems to be apparent social norms surrounding who is "allowed" to discuss issues pertaining to specific ethnic groups. I have seen the question posed: are people of European descent allowed to discuss the realities that indigenous people face, and the experiences they went through, or should that be left to the groups that were actually there? And then we quickly see how this would degrade into terrible analytics of ancestry and participation to determine if you are the "right" sort of person to hold these discussions.
And while in this instance there may not have been malice or even intent (it's impossible to say), we have created a cultural environment where there is a perverse incentive to claim illegitimate indigeneity. Only in this way can you be on the "correct" side of the issues I mention above. This is emphatically not good.
This was a really good read, thank you. It seems fairly clear that Hoover at least suspected that her ancestry might not be what she was saying it was. But I'm also very sympathetic towards her....
This was a really good read, thank you.
It seems fairly clear that Hoover at least suspected that her ancestry might not be what she was saying it was. But I'm also very sympathetic towards her. It's easy to imagine a scenario in which she discovers that she can't substantiate a genetic connection, but chooses not to pursue it further out of hope that maybe the connection is there somewhere and she just couldn't find it.
And many of the criticisms against her are the kind of cultural chauvinism referenced in the article. I noted that there weren't any critiques levied against her scholarship, for instance - only against her ancestry. The author of the article touches on how she may have taken an opportunity from someone else, but - apart from the fact that this argument also didn't have any problems with her actual work, only with her blood - there weren't many quotes from the interviewees suggesting that was their primary concern. She's right, after all, when she says "I still did all that work. I did the research, I did all the learning, I did the teaching...”
Mostly, I think, the concerns were stuff like this, the last sentence in the article:
"And then she was at the campfires, laughing really loud, like how Native women usually laugh,” the grad student said. “It’s weird she laughs like that.”
And I think levying that kind of criticism is shameful. We're talking about a woman who is acknowledged, even by her biggest detractors, to have grown up going to native events. It's not "weird" that she would laugh like a native person.. whatever the fuck that even means.
TL;DR: I doubt Hoover and I would be friends - but I also think the way she's being treated is remarkably devoid of compassion.
It's a very interesting and controversial question: how do you define membership in indigenous communities? Let me offer an example of a different approach from a different part of the world. Here...
It's a very interesting and controversial question: how do you define membership in indigenous communities? Let me offer an example of a different approach from a different part of the world. Here in northern Scandinavia, there's an indigenous population called the Sámi. They have various legal rights and protections, but have historically been mistreated, and suffer from discrimination and prejudice to this day. One of these legal protections is an advisory political entity called the Sámi parliament, which has very limited formal legal powers, but is a very important advisory entity on Sámi matters. In order to vote in elections to this parliament, you need to be a member of the Sámi census. The criteria for membership are basically 1) self-identification and 2) language. Specifically, speaking a Sámi language in the home or having an ancestor going back three generations (parent, grandparent or great-grandparent) who did so.
This does away with the need for any blood relation, but is problematic in its own right. The state conducted a policy of forced assimilation over a period of about 100 years, from roughly the mid-19th to mid-20th century, which involved trying to destroy markers of indigenous identity including language. Now, traditionally, many Sámi people were seminomadic reindeer herders, and those communities held on to their language and customs until the state basically began kidnapping children and placing them in boarding schools were they were not allowed to speak their native language. But some Sámi lived in settled communities, and those were a lot easier to forcibly assimilate, so the process got going earlier.
Which means that the descendants of these communities lost their language at an earlier time in history, and therefore some of them might be excluded by the linguistic criterion. But while language is an important marker of identity, it's far from the only thing that marks someone as belonging to a particular culture, ethnicity, or social group. The linguistic criterion is intended to select people who have a meaningful relation to the culture, and exclude those who don't - which could mean including some who have a vague blood relation and excluding some who have a strong genetic claim but have been isolated from that heritage for a long time. It could also exclude a lot of people who did maintain ties to their heritage, just not specifically linguistic ties.
In my own family, the lore goes that we have some indigenous ancestry. I think it's very common if you just go back a few generations - it's not like people who lived in the same area for 1000+ years never intermarried just because they belonged to different cultures. In my case, it's far enough back that I would never feel comfortable claiming indigenous identity for myself. The likely candidate is a great-great-grandparent who was born in the mid-1800s. I'm inclined to believe it, because the relatives who told me the story weren't proud of it. Quite the opposite. They're quite prejudiced against indigenous people and make jokes about it because it makes them uncomfortable. I've tried to confirm it, but at least as far as a preliminary search goes, the records do exist but not in digital form, which would mean more of an investment than I'm willing or able to make to go to a physical archive.
So at present, my position is that I've been told but can't confirm there is some small amount of indigenous ancestry, but it's so far in the past I would never be comfortable claiming it as an identity anyways. But I could imagine if I were actually raised to be proud of this ancestry and regularly participated in indigenous cultural activities, I would feel quite differently. Right now if I were to find out the family lore was mistaken, it's not a big deal because I didn't make it part of my identity. If my parents had told me over and over again that this is my identity, brought me to activities to solidify that identity, and I had adopted it as my own, it would've been devastating to find out it wasn't true and I'd probably prefer not to investigate it unless I knew for sure the result would be positive.
This was an interesting article that brings up two major points I think are relevant.
The first is the idea of blood purity and its use in different groups. There are hate groups that want to proliferation of “pure blood” factions but these same ideas are being used to take down people in different ethnic groups because they are not “ethnic (whatever that ethnicity is)” enough. Growing up I saw that in different black and latino groups where if you came from a middle class background you weren't part of the struggle and were not accepted because you didn’t suffer enough.
In this article, if you believe the professors account, she grew up participating in native american activities. Then later in life she finds out she is not blood related to any native american families and thus is not a “true” native american. Her detractors are loudly telling everyone that she is just pretending to be something that she is biologically not. That she is pretending to get special treatment, that without her someone more worthy would get the resources she is using. These arguments are identical to the transphobic, racist, and sexist arguments that have been the justification to block transgender care, affirmative action, and equal rights for decades.
Who is the arbiter of any of these communities? The ending of the article has a graduate student who meets the professor at an event where the tribal elders accept her but the academic world doesn’t, so where does she belong? And can small marginalized groups benefit from adding imperfect members or is it better to exclude everyone that doesn’t “belong”? There have always been groups that will say someone is not “american enough” and what test should we use or master list of people should we use to decide Americanism?
The other big issue I have is now I have an opinion about this person and should I? I’m sure that everyone here who is reading this has never done anything wrong in their entire life. They have never lied about anything or used any advantage that was available to them so of course we can judge this person. We could hold up our own life as the paragon of virtue and every facet could be examined and nothing bad would be found. Let he who has not sinned cast the first stone is sage advice.
In my world view, the tribal elders should decide this question. Native American is a political affiliation more than an ethnic one. The tribes control membership and should.
The people who strongly object to this sort of thing come from a place of resentment and distaste that any hiring preferences based on history or membership in a disadvantaged group exist at all. Seeing someone 'gaming' that preference is something they percieve as adding insult to injury. This reminds me of accusations that someone has achieved a promotion through sleeping with the right person.
Fairness in hiring is a tricky topic. Many people who get hired in very selective fields have some kind of advantage that could be interpreted as unfair or seem to.
I wonder if requiring native genetics for a position would even be legal. Wouldn't that be a pretty clear case of racial discrimination? You're literally hiring or firing someone solely because of their race. Affirmative action can exist, or schools can try to recruit people of different racial backgrounds. But explicitly refusing to hire someone due to their ancestry? There's no way that's legal. A university can certainly have a Native American studies department, and they can certainly staff that department with people who have done teaching and research on Native American communities and issues. They might even be able to put something in a job description such as, "candidates must be well-connected with native communities and have lived experience of native cultural practices" or similar. But I'm struggling to see how a university could even legally require native genetics for any position, even a Native American studies department. They could write the requirements specific enough that the only people likely to qualify are those with native ancestry. But there will always be odd ducks like Hoover out there.
Or imagine a more extreme case of Hoover's situation. What if a native family adopted an non-native child and raised them, from birth, fully in native communities and traditions? Should that kid, when they grow up, be able to teach at a native studies department?
I'm fully onboard with having some sort of process to make sure the professors in native studies departments really do have the cultural roots and connections they claim. But requiring genetic testing just seems to me to be clear racial discrimination. Perhaps the best solution is to just let tribal elders decide it. When applying to a position, candidates could be asked to provide details on their tribal background or cultural connections. They could be asked to list a specific tribe that they claim affiliation with. Then, if the candidate is selected, the school can contact the tribe. Tell them, "this person is claiming to be either a member of your tribe or someone who is so deeply affiliated with your tribe's culture and customs that they should be able to teach as a professor of native studies. Can you confirm their tribal status? If not a formal member of the tribe, are they a part enough of your community that you feel they should be able to represent it?"
That's the kind of high bar that could be drawn without requiring a likely illegal genetics test. You could make the requirements strict enough that the only ways to meet them are to either be born into a tribe or be have been adopted into and raised in it from birth. But basing things on genetics really seems like racial discrimination to me.
Native American lands are sovereign. A nation-within-a-nation. My understanding is that any laws of the US federal government do not apply, so things like drug use are completely legal (if the governing tribe says they are), and any law regarding discrimination wouldn't have to be followed.
I would almost classify this reply as "not even wrong," unless I'm really missing something here. Yes, you're right that Native American tribes can do what they want on their lands. However, we're not talking about tribal lands here. We're talking about whether it's legal for public and private universities located nowhere near tribal lands to hire people based on their genetics.
A tribe can certainly put in whatever requirements it wants for someone to qualify for tribal status. That includes genetic requirements. They can say, "you must have this percentage of tribal descent to qualify to be a member."
But that's not what we're talking about. We're discussing whether Columbia University can put a genetic requirement on a job description. Columbia University is located at 116th and Broadway in New York City, not on a native reservation. If federal anti-discrimination laws don't even apply in Manhattan, where exactly do they apply?
While it hasn't come up practically in my life, my understanding is that recognized Native American tribes in the US have official membership rolls, and that public universities typically rely on those for, for instance, certain scholarships. But I'm not sure if the same thing holds for hiring decisions; scholarships aren't regulated in the same way as those.
Sorry, I was responding to the first sentence. Not the entire post/paragraph.
Obviously if this is a position at a university no where near tribal lands then any sovereignty from the tribes doesn't apply.
State laws do not apply. The FBI does law enforcement on tribal territory, but they are stretched thin and have other priorities. Tribes have their own laws and police but they are not completely free from federal law.
Ah, I see. Thanks
I did a semester long course in native american law years ago. It's a complex mix of specific treaty rights, federal law, tribal autonomy/sovereignty and tribal law. I would have to go back and research to find details, but the feds do have rights to enforce law on tribal territory when they care enough to do it.
I agree. The other problem with people denouncing others is how can you know if it is genuine or another way to advance by tearing down the people above you.
I generally don't feel any need to be involved in the determination of anyones ethnicity. Much rather live and let live.
There is some frustration I feel around highly selective affirmative action (it's really not my favorite practice, I'll be honest). There also seems to be apparent social norms surrounding who is "allowed" to discuss issues pertaining to specific ethnic groups. I have seen the question posed: are people of European descent allowed to discuss the realities that indigenous people face, and the experiences they went through, or should that be left to the groups that were actually there? And then we quickly see how this would degrade into terrible analytics of ancestry and participation to determine if you are the "right" sort of person to hold these discussions.
And while in this instance there may not have been malice or even intent (it's impossible to say), we have created a cultural environment where there is a perverse incentive to claim illegitimate indigeneity. Only in this way can you be on the "correct" side of the issues I mention above. This is emphatically not good.
This was a really good read, thank you.
It seems fairly clear that Hoover at least suspected that her ancestry might not be what she was saying it was. But I'm also very sympathetic towards her. It's easy to imagine a scenario in which she discovers that she can't substantiate a genetic connection, but chooses not to pursue it further out of hope that maybe the connection is there somewhere and she just couldn't find it.
And many of the criticisms against her are the kind of cultural chauvinism referenced in the article. I noted that there weren't any critiques levied against her scholarship, for instance - only against her ancestry. The author of the article touches on how she may have taken an opportunity from someone else, but - apart from the fact that this argument also didn't have any problems with her actual work, only with her blood - there weren't many quotes from the interviewees suggesting that was their primary concern. She's right, after all, when she says "I still did all that work. I did the research, I did all the learning, I did the teaching...”
Mostly, I think, the concerns were stuff like this, the last sentence in the article:
And I think levying that kind of criticism is shameful. We're talking about a woman who is acknowledged, even by her biggest detractors, to have grown up going to native events. It's not "weird" that she would laugh like a native person.. whatever the fuck that even means.
TL;DR: I doubt Hoover and I would be friends - but I also think the way she's being treated is remarkably devoid of compassion.
It's a very interesting and controversial question: how do you define membership in indigenous communities? Let me offer an example of a different approach from a different part of the world. Here in northern Scandinavia, there's an indigenous population called the Sámi. They have various legal rights and protections, but have historically been mistreated, and suffer from discrimination and prejudice to this day. One of these legal protections is an advisory political entity called the Sámi parliament, which has very limited formal legal powers, but is a very important advisory entity on Sámi matters. In order to vote in elections to this parliament, you need to be a member of the Sámi census. The criteria for membership are basically 1) self-identification and 2) language. Specifically, speaking a Sámi language in the home or having an ancestor going back three generations (parent, grandparent or great-grandparent) who did so.
This does away with the need for any blood relation, but is problematic in its own right. The state conducted a policy of forced assimilation over a period of about 100 years, from roughly the mid-19th to mid-20th century, which involved trying to destroy markers of indigenous identity including language. Now, traditionally, many Sámi people were seminomadic reindeer herders, and those communities held on to their language and customs until the state basically began kidnapping children and placing them in boarding schools were they were not allowed to speak their native language. But some Sámi lived in settled communities, and those were a lot easier to forcibly assimilate, so the process got going earlier.
Which means that the descendants of these communities lost their language at an earlier time in history, and therefore some of them might be excluded by the linguistic criterion. But while language is an important marker of identity, it's far from the only thing that marks someone as belonging to a particular culture, ethnicity, or social group. The linguistic criterion is intended to select people who have a meaningful relation to the culture, and exclude those who don't - which could mean including some who have a vague blood relation and excluding some who have a strong genetic claim but have been isolated from that heritage for a long time. It could also exclude a lot of people who did maintain ties to their heritage, just not specifically linguistic ties.
In my own family, the lore goes that we have some indigenous ancestry. I think it's very common if you just go back a few generations - it's not like people who lived in the same area for 1000+ years never intermarried just because they belonged to different cultures. In my case, it's far enough back that I would never feel comfortable claiming indigenous identity for myself. The likely candidate is a great-great-grandparent who was born in the mid-1800s. I'm inclined to believe it, because the relatives who told me the story weren't proud of it. Quite the opposite. They're quite prejudiced against indigenous people and make jokes about it because it makes them uncomfortable. I've tried to confirm it, but at least as far as a preliminary search goes, the records do exist but not in digital form, which would mean more of an investment than I'm willing or able to make to go to a physical archive.
So at present, my position is that I've been told but can't confirm there is some small amount of indigenous ancestry, but it's so far in the past I would never be comfortable claiming it as an identity anyways. But I could imagine if I were actually raised to be proud of this ancestry and regularly participated in indigenous cultural activities, I would feel quite differently. Right now if I were to find out the family lore was mistaken, it's not a big deal because I didn't make it part of my identity. If my parents had told me over and over again that this is my identity, brought me to activities to solidify that identity, and I had adopted it as my own, it would've been devastating to find out it wasn't true and I'd probably prefer not to investigate it unless I knew for sure the result would be positive.
Mirror, for those hit by the paywall:
https://archive.is/RyTnT