Sharing fingerprints

at tribal level?

They mean that your mom will be examining your underwear both before and after internaional flights. In front of a team of highly trained customs agent-nuns, most of whom knew you when you were 13. The underpants inspection will of course take place on national TV.

You should be glad that Ashcroft didn’t get what he really wanted.

Keith is spot on. Many legislators have been very, very sad to discover that failure to include tribal governments accidentally fatally hampered favorite laws.

Until only recently, many under-age smokers were very, very happy that someone committed this very oversight. Pyromaniac firework lovers remain, for the most part, pleased with Tribal sovereignty as well.

What I wonder: since it is impossible to sue tribes, how long before they start operating drag-racing strips?

I have to say that I’ve only rarely met Native Americans who preferred any term other than “indian”. Clearly, this experience may well be a-typical.

Posted by Kikuchiyo at April 3, 2004 03:36 PM

If I understand your comment correctly, you may be conflating “tribal” with “indian”. The sovereign territories of Native Americans or Indians are referred to in the format of Nation, as in Navajo Nation or Lummi Nation, closer to my neck of the woods. The governments are referred to as “Tribal Governments”. This is common nomenclature. Although there is a derogatory sensibility to the use of “tribal”, as in association with un-modern, I don’t think it is viewed that way by Indians/Native Americans. As far as I know, they refer to themselves as belonging to the tribe, or a member of a nation. The organizational elements of these terms tribe, nation, and band are conflated by the fact that in many instances the US government put members of different tribes onto one reservation and thus I believe there are differences in self identificaion based on these individual historical differences.

Use of the term Native American or Indian is problematic, for many of the groups that form indigenous Americans. In Canada, they are called and refer to themselves as “First Nations”. This nomenclature is slipping into the U.S. discourse. In Alaska, they refer to themselves as “Alakan Natives” and consider themselves quite separately from continental indigenous Americans.

Use of the term “Indian” follows a trajectory similar with other oppressed groups in the U.S., such as Black/Negro/African-American. It was Indian, then it went to Native American, then in the sixties, there was the “American Indian Movement” which sought to reclaim “Indian” represented by Vine Deloria’s book “Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto”. The federal government has always, to my knowledge, used the term “Indian”, as in “Bureau of Indian Affairs”.

“It just seemed interesting to me that academic writing seems so much more concerned about the problematic nomenclature then the agents to whom the nomenclature is applied.“—kikuchiyo

That’s how it seems to you, and it well may be true in some cases. But you don’t really know how concerned these people are about “the agents to whom the nomenclature is applied”. You’re assuming a lack of concern in general because it is your observation that, in these cases, the choice of nomenclature gives little weight to the preferences of the people referenced.

And I do think that sort of consideration (for preference) is both polite and instructive. But I don’t agree that it should necessarily be normative. The way that I describe others asserts a worldview that has consequences in its assertion. The description is a moral act. I believe that my use of “Indian” would have adverse consequences and I wish to avoid those. I am, unfortunately, also insulting a number of people who would prefer that I describe them otherwise. I regret that. But, in my estimation, it’s the lesser of two evils. What people want to be “called” is important and relevant. But it’s not decisive, I don’t think.