State Recognition and the Dangers of Race Shifting

Daedalus

This essay is offered as a tribute to Golden Hill Paugussett Chief Big Eagle and his defiance of the entrenched racism to which his tribal community has been subjected. I situate this analysis in Connecticut in the early 1970s at a moment of particular historical significance in tribal nations' centuries-long struggles to assert their sovereignty, defend reservation lands, and ensure their futures. I analyze how the racialization of Native peoples in Connecticut informed the state's management of "Indian affairs" in this period and argue that the virulent racism of the state's antirecognition policy in the late twentieth century reflects a long history of institutionally embedded racist policies and practices. In this essay, I call for politically engaged, antiracist research that is concerned with understanding the complexities of tribal sovereignty asserted in local contexts in which governmental control of Indian affairs reproduces and validates White-supremacist ideology.

2013

This engaging collection surveys and clarifies the complex issue of federal and state recognition for Native American tribal nations in the United States. Den Ouden and O'Brien gather focused and teachable essays on key topics, debates, and case studies. Written by leading scholars in the field, including historians, anthropologists, legal scholars, and political scientists, the essays cover the history of recognition, focus on recent legal and cultural processes, and examine contemporary recognition struggles nationwide.Contributors are Joanne Barker (Lenape), Kathleen A. Brown-Perez (Brothertown), Rosemary Cambra (Muwekma Ohlone), Amy E. Den Ouden, Timothy Q. Evans (Haliwa-Saponi), Les W. Field, Angela A. Gonzales (Hopi), Rae Gould (Nipmuc), J. Kehaulani Kauanui (Kanaka Maoli), K. Alexa Koenig, Alan Leventhal, Malinda Maynor Lowery (Lumbee), Jean M. O'Brien (White Earth Ojibwe), John Robinson, Jonathan Stein, Ruth Garby Torres (Schaghticoke), and David E. Wilkins (Lumbee).

American Indian Culture and Research Journal , 2020

For the past five years, I have been studying race shifting among white French descendants, those who count among their ancestors the first French settlers in the Americas (pre-1665). Most of this population currently resides in the easternmost provinces of Canada and in parts of New England in the United States. What I discovered is that since the early 2000s, tens of thousands of these French descendants have shifted into an “Indigenous” identity based solely on ancestry that is 325–400 years old. Throughout these regions, this social movement has led to the creation of nearly a hundred new “Indigenous” organizations that, on behalf of their white-settler membership, now lobby for a variety of Indigenous rights. Because these efforts have succeeded in altering the political landscape to varying degrees—notably through four “Abenaki tribes” in Vermont that received state recognition in 2011 and 2012—similar groups have emerged as “Abenaki” in New Hampshire and Quebec, “Algonquin” in Ontario and Quebec, and “Métis” in Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Maine. The two largest organizations in Quebec were created by white men seeking to entrench their hunting rights while Indigenous territorial claims were being negotiated. These two organizations alone now have more than 25,000 paying members, combined.

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000

American Anthropologist, 2005

Invisible Indigenes: The Politics of Nonrecognition. Bruce G. Miller. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003. 248 pp.Forgotten Tribes: Unrecognized Indians and the Federal Acknowledgement Process. Mark Edwin Miller. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004. 355 pp.Gambling and Survival in Native North America. Paul Pasquaretta. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2003. 202 pp.

Citizenship Studies, 2011

American Indian tribal members are citizens of both tribal nations and the larger national body. Tribal nations’ contemporary resurgence has made tribal citizenship politically visible, materially significant, and politically contested. Conflicts about tribal members’ status are not merely racial or ethnic in character, but reflect fundamental tensions between settler societies and indigenous survivors who challenge national narratives and demand collective rights. Tribal members’ dual citizenships and the conflict about them are the result of discordant federal policy legacies, tenacious tribal survival, and the erosion of racial barriers to citizenship. Differences between ethnonational tribal citizenship and republican-based US citizenship fuel public criticism in the context of widespread ignorance about treaties and tribal rights. Crucially, while legal and political dimensions of citizenship have been partly extended to tribal members, they remain excluded from the national identity.

Hypatia, 2003

The regulation of Native identity has been central to the colonization process in both Canada and the United States. Systems of classification and control enable settler governments to define who is “Indian,” and control access to Native land. These regulatory systems have forcibly supplanted traditional Indigenous ways of identifying the self in relation to land and community, functioning discursively to naturalize colonial worldviews. Decolonization, then, must involve deconstructing and reshaping how we understand Indigenous identity.

2008

This paper proposes that a cross-tribal sense of belonging, similar to modern conceptions of racism, facilitated the formation of multi-ethnic communities among the Indian populations living to the west of Hudson's Bay in the eighteenth century. Based upon observations made over the course of a century by employees of the Hudson's Bay Company regarding the attitudes held by their Native American trading partners towards the region's Inuit populations, this paper concludes that Indians living to the west of Hudson's Bay in the eighteenth century constructed an inclusive trans-Indian sense of identity based, at least in part, on the exclusion of the Inuit "other." Indian prejudice against the Inuit stretched across the boundaries of dialect and language-family and, within the scope of this manuscript, included Chipewyan, Cree, and Yellowknife Indians. Individual Indian communities An inclusive, trans-Indian identity was perpetually reinforced through trade, cohabitation and marriage, and joint raiding activities by the "in groups," activities from which the Inuit were excluded. This exclusion was both result and cause of the continual hostility present between Indian and Inuit groups throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth century.