Dear All -
Since I am on vacation all next week visiting family in a health emergency and therefore unable to meet remotely even, I have to briefly state my position here - for what it is worth, being a former assisting organizer to AIW 2023. If I composed this badly, with the wrong phrasing, please give me the benefit of the doubt - I am doing this too hurriedly for a thoughtfully worded piece.
I am truly sorry over James' resignation, since he speaks truth to power, and we would have badly needed to hear him about this and other issues.
I do not think that approaching this issue from the practice of categorizing Native and Indigenous identity and enrolment is productive at all. It is harmful for the AIW to be even appearing to be adjudicating Native lineage, enrolment and recognition. This is a colonialist practice, and our colleague's expertise in it should help us critique and be wary of it, and not judge a complaint based on the background of the person making it.
Instead, I am asking us consider the two issues that I see being raised in this complaint:
- Creating/identifying/clarifying a mechanism in AIW for conflict resolution and addressing needs
- Increasing Native participation in AIW
As for the first, I suspect that our members who have been with AIW for longer than I may know something about either past practices or an actual policy that have been used before.
As for the second, I think it would be productive to approach it from the angle of redoubling our efforts to secure funding for the conferences - but especially for the expenses of Indigenous participants and speakers. In my view, our scholarly community's relative privilege carries a moral imperative to work to empower Indigenous colleagues to share their research and art. I would be eager to hear from Judit and from various colleagues who have tried to secure funding in the past, and generate ideas and best set up a team/working group for something more permanent. From my own experience I know that so much work goes into funding bids unnoticed and unrewarded, but we should be trying again and again. As for blue sky thinking, it is my dream for the AIW to get a big donor company to fund a set number of Indigenous participants for each conference, and not just funders for each conference every year, which may greatly vary.
This is my two cents' worth. Wishing you all a good summer, and thanking you for your service -
Gyorgy "George" Toth, M.A., Ph.D., FRHS, FHEA(He/him)
Lecturer in Post-1945 US History & Transatlantic Relations
Division of History and Politics
Faculty of Arts and Humanities
University of Stirling
Stirling FK9 4LA
Scotland, United Kingdom
Email: gyorgy.toth@stir.ac.uk
Online: https://www.stir.ac.uk/people/257093
Book: Memory in Transatlantic Relations From the Cold War to the Global War on Terror. https://bit.ly/32aCjfQ
From: committee <committee-bounces@list.american-indian-workshop.org> on behalf of James Mackay <J.Mackay@euc.ac.cy>
Sent: 14 July 2023 15:43
To: Reni Bartl <renate.bartl@t-online.de>; AIW Committee <committee@list.american-indian-workshop.org>
Subject: Re: [Committee] Keshia Talking Waters De Freece Lawrence EmailCAUTION: This email originated from outside University of Stirling. Do not follow links or open attachments if you doubt the authenticity of the sender or the content.
Dear colleagues –
Please consider this my resignation from the committee. I have felt for some time that I was not in synch with the values and methods of this organisation, and these last email exchanges have cemented that belief.
Kind regards,
James
Dr James Mackay (he/him)
Associate Professor
European University Cyprus
[t] +357 22713257
[w] www.euc.ac.cy
Latest article publication:
“Antecedents of Instapoetry: Considering the Commercial Short Form Aphorism Before and Beyond the Social Media Sphere.” European Journal of American Studies 18:2 (2023).
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From: committee <committee-bounces@list.american-indian-workshop.org> On Behalf Of Reni Bartl
Sent: Thursday, July 13, 2023 4:32 PM
To: AIW Committee <committee@list.american-indian-workshop.org>
Subject: [Committee] Keshia Talking Waters De Freece Lawrence Email
Dear all,
this is my personal evaluation of the behavior of Keshia Talking Waters De Freece Lawrence. She is a member of the Ramapo Mountain Indians who self-identify as Ramapough Lenape Munsee Tribe (among many other Indian tribal identities). This is a group of African-Dutch descent, where members switched into in “Indian” identity in the 18th century, because the racial category “colored” was not available at that time or on the forms on which they had to identify racially (e.g. military draft forms and census forms). They were denied US federal acknowledgement as an Indian tribe in 1998 and they are denied recognition as a state tribe by New York State. They are recognized as a state tribe by New Jersey, but New Jersey recognizes any group as a state tribe that brings votes at the next election for their governor and governing party. New Jersey does not have any procedure to verify the Native American descent of the groups they recognize as state tribes. This is true for all New Jersey state tribes. Additionally, all federally recognized Delaware Munsee Nations in the USA and the Delaware Munsee First Nation in Canada deny the claim of the group to Lenape Munsee identity and refuse to enroll them as tribal members into their tribes.
I know all this, because I am researching these groups (which usually call themselves “tri-racial”) in the eastern USA since the 1980s, I have written my dissertation on them and I have published a book on them:
Bartl, Renate. 2021. American Tri-Racials: African-Native Contact, Multi-Ethnic Native American Nations, and the Ethnogenesis of Tri-Racial Groups in North America. Dissertationen der LMU München 43. Dortmund: readbox publishing GmbH.
https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:bvb:19-268747. [open access publication]
I am discussing how these people switch into an Indian identity on pp. 31-43 and I am discussing the Ramapo Mountain Indians several pages (e.g. on p. 75f). Sorry for advertising my book, but this will shorten my email.
Such groups are very frustrated, because they conceive themselves as indigenous, but lack Native American descent. This becomes obvious when Keshia complains in her email that members of federally recognized tribes were favored over members of state tribes (her) and detribalized peoples (non-recognized groups). This frustration is the reason why these people make trouble at conferences. I have seen how such persons of state and non-recognized groups attacked, spammed, and disrupted online lectures, webinars, and virtual conferences with their insults and self-victimization. The argumentation and accusations are always the same and concur with what she wrote in her email. If they are not allowed to speak, they spam the chats with their frustrations and accusations.
The problem is that they can become very aggressive and insulting, even towards members of federally recognized tribes and First Nations if those do not side with them and support their claims to indigeneity. Members of the Ramapo Mountain Indians have threatened scholars, who do not support their narrative of being Munsee Lenape, to kill them, if they give public talks! Therefore, it is my opinion that these people should not be allowed to participate in our workshop, neither in-person nor virtual.
I agree with Livia that Keshia’s email really damaged the conference and the reputation of AIW as an academic institution.
Therefore, my claim is not to allow members of non-recognized tribes, Pretendians, and Wannabees as participants and speakers to our AIW conferences, and members of state tribes only if their claim to Native American descent can be verified. There is even a Federal Indian Tribe, the Lumbee of NC, whose Indian ancestry is questioned by other Federal Indian Tribes (e.g. Cherokee Nation) and the attendance of members of this tribe might cause problems. Therefore, my claims are:
- The AIW must avoid providing a platform for persons and groups misusing it for self-expression and self-victimization. We lose our credibility if we do so and we harm the reputation of our association.
- The AIW should not serve as an academic platform to provide academic credibility and recognition of indigeneity to such people.
- The AIW must avoid providing a platform for persons and groups using it for public self-victimization and general accusations. Our workshop meetings and email lists cannot be misused for that.
Keshia complains that “Conferences are expected to have codes of conduct, procedures for conflicts, and boards or committees to accept complaints and address them.” All this won’t help if persons do not know how proper behavior functions. It is ok that we will formulate codes of conduct and put it on our webpage, but this won’t help against those people. All the online conferences and webinars I attended had codes of conduct on their webpages and in their conference information, but these people simply ignore that, because profiling themselves as “Indigenous” and victimizing themselves as being mistreated by non-Indians (preferably whites and government institutions) is more important to them than any proper behavior. Moreover, we have the members of our AIW Committee with email links on the webpage and we had the organizers of the Budapest AIW with an email link on the webpage. Why didn’t she use these channels of communication for her complaint?
What can we do to avoid being misused like this by members of non-recognized and phony “tribes,” Pretendians, and Wannabees? You can ask me, for example. You can also check my book where I have listed Federal Indian Tribes, state tribes, and non-recognized tribes on pp. 409-438. Members of Black and Colored groups that have switched into an “Indian” identity can usually by identified by their surnames. For example, De Freece (and its different spellings) is a typical Dutch Ramapo Mountain Indian surname, so even if Keshia wouldn’t have identified “tribally” to us I would have known to which group she belongs.
Last year a member of such a group had handed in an abstract for the Luxemburg AIW, but Carlo and Tania sent me the names of the persons who had handed in abstracts in advance and I was able to warn them. This year I warned the Budapest organizing team in March not to accept the paper by Keshia, but they decided to accept it.
There are hundreds of thousands of Black and Colored persons and hundreds of “tri-racial” groups of in the Eastern USA, whose claim to an Indigenous identity is questionable. Therefore, we will be confronted with a raising number of such person who want to attend our workshops.
What can we do?
My suggestion is to establish an Evaluation Committee, which checks the abstracts in advance together with the organizers of an AIW and provides recommendations. This Evaluation Committee can be our AIW Organizing Committee, or a committee we establish with specialist for the different areas of North American, who can identify such persons (e.g. I can identify such persons for the eastern USA). Brian Hosmer has asked whether he could do some voluntarily work for us, so we could ask him to help us.
But what can we do if organizers do not follow our suggestions not to accept speakers? How can we prevent that the reputation of the AIW general organization is damaged by this?
Additionally, AIW organizers must be aware that if you reject papers from such persons, you will be attacked as a white European racists, discriminating “Indigenous” people from North America, continuing colonialism and white supremacy, etc. You must also be aware that these people will use public platforms (social media) to accuse you of that. So, whatever we do, it might cause problems.
As to the Budapest AIW: ca. 50% of the participants were AIW members, which means that only ca. 5% of total AIW members were present and got the email.
So how do we react to this now? Shall we write an email to the participants, or to all our members, telling them about the measures we will take? Shall we write an (unpolite) email to Keshia?
We can talk about this in an online meeting. I will be available on July 20, 21, 24, and again from July 31 onward.
If we meet online, who will organize that? Or shall we ask James to set up a Zoom meting?
P.S.: I will attach some quotes to show you how serious the problem is:
U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census. 2021. “2020 Census Illuminates Racial and Ethnic Composition of the Country.” https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/08/improved-race-ethnicity-measures-reveal-united-states-population-much-more-multiracial.html:
“ From 2010 to 2020, (…) the American Indian and Alaska Native alone population grew by 27.1%, and the American Indian and Alaska Native in combination population grew by 160% since 2010.
An additional 5.9 million people identified as American Indian and Alaska Native and another race group in 2020, such as White or Black or African American.”
Indianz.com. 2023. “'Phony Tribes': Cherokee Nation Takes on Fraudulent Groups.” Accessed April 20, 2023. https://indianz.substack.com/p/phony-tribes:
“We all know there are many Pretendians out there. But we also know there a hundreds and hundreds of groups pretending to be Indian as well”.
Sobo, Elisa, J., Michael Lambert, and Valerie Lambert. 2021. “Land Acknowledgments Meant to Honor Indigenous People Too Often Do the Opposite – Erasing American Indians and Sanitizing History Instead.” Accessed October 13, 2022.
https://theconversation.com/land-acknowledgments-meant-to-honor-indigenous-people-too-often-do-the-opposite-erasing-american-indians-and-sanitizing-history-instead-163787“When non-Indigenous people allow pretendians authority regarding land acknowledgments and blessing ceremonies, it irreparably harms sovereign Indigenous nations and their citizens. The most threatening message communicated by these acts is that American Indian identity is a racial or ethnic identity that anyone can claim through self-identification. This is not true.
American Indian identity is a political identity based on citizenship in an Indigenous nation whose sovereignty has been acknowledged by the U.S. government. Sovereign Indigenous nations, and only these nations have the authority to determine who is and is not a citizen, and hence who is and is not an American Indian or Alaska Native.
Anything less would undermine the entire body of Indian Law, undoing tribal sovereignty.”
Best
Renate
-----
Dr. phil. Renate Bartl
Schopenhauerstr. 83
80807 Munich/Germany
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Fax +49-89-35 65 32 77
Cell +49 151 4128 2632
Email: renate.bartl@t-online.de
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