Reflections on Bridging Political/Ethnic Group Experiences at the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA) Second Conference

The second annual conference of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association met for three days at the Westin La Paloma in Tucson, AZ on May 20-22, 2010. Gathered together were scholars and students from all over the world. The event was hosted by the University of Arizona (U of A) American Indian Studies program. The conference program and schedule (mine now in dog-eared condition from consulting it so much) indicates the three-prong mission of the U of A’s American Indian Studies as the following:

• seeks to develop a strong understanding of the languages, cultures, and sovereignty of American Indians/Alaska Natives, which honors our ancestors and their wisdom
• maintains productive scholarship, teaching, research, and community development; and provides unique opportunities for students and scholars to explore issues from American Indian perspectives which place the land, its history and the people at the center.
• promotes Indian self-determination, self-governance, and strong leadership as defined by Indian nations, tribes, and communities, all of which originated from the enduring beliefs and philosophies of our ancestors.  (NAISA, 2010, p. 3)

 Two key themes stood out for me from my experience (and probably mediated through my place within an American Indian Studies program that still remains in an Ethnic Studies program) at the conference:

1)      Scholarship on the erasure and invisibility of Indigenous Peoples/Alaska Natives/Native Hawaiians¹

2)      The valuable contributions from scholarly and relational-building across different areas of study and individual/group experiences in Ethnic Studies as a whole (both comparative and group-specific, such as Latina/o Studies and African American Studies).²

These themes seem contradictory because drawing from Ethnic Studies or multicultural approaches may contribute to the erasure of Native Peoples as a key group of diverse people in their own right with unique political relationships, histories, worldviews, and sciences. Preventing this erasure requires the centering of Indigenous Peoples. However, Native American/Indigenous Studies may also benefit from being connected to the diversity of the world: group experiences of non-Indigenous groups, settler groups, and People of Color. Some papers at the conference actually showed this clash occurring including Margaret Bruchac’s presentation on how the invention of potato chips in the Adirondacks is not given due credit to an Indigenous-run establishment and chef, but to an African American-run establishment and chef in her paper “Venison and Potato Chips: Native Peoples as Purveyors of High Culture in the Adirondacks.”  Explaining this occurrence of mistaken identity benefits from centering Indigenous Studies (and the erasure of Native Peoples), and also drawing from African American Studies, and Ethnic Studies. Another conference paper in a different panel was entitled, “Remembering Blackness, Forgetting Indianness: The Story of Charley Patton, King of the Delta Blues” by Malinda Maynor Lowery from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. This presentation emphasized the tribally-specific Indigenous cosmology and worldview that appears in some of Charley Patton’s song lyrics. Both of these paper topics require knowledge from group specific studies, but not necessarily through a balancing act of both African American Studies and NAIS nor combining or blending them with some quantitative-like percentage. Required for all projects of a similar kind is a careful form of qualitative blending and constructive bridging for the pertinent parts of the topics of inquiry and applications. Though this seems practical and goes without saying, it is not often discussed outright.  It can get lost in the vital discourse on “centering.” Indigenous Peoples live in world with and alongside a diversity of communities and the Indigenous categorization itself holds great diversity.  A bridged center or a center with bridges, traversable waterways, sky ways, ladders, chutes, and tunnels may be another metaphorical way of imagining this process of having a connected center.  

 Another way the intersections of these two themes of erasure and bridge-building through a connected center appeared was through the immigration law panel of SB1070³ when a representative and border activist from the Yaqui Nations, Jose Matus, presented the long difficulties of Indigenous Peoples  crossing the Mexico/U.S. border and how this law adds another layer of difficulty and obstacle. The often-silenced, erased, and made invisible experiences of how this law impacts Native Peoples was provided a voice amid linking the struggle against the law with other people adversely impacted.

 For many in Indigenous Studies, their work will not be amenable or require a bridging approach, but for some this will remain important to ponder.

  Endnotes

1. I am excited about a new book specifically on a regional erasure: Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England by Jean O’Brien
2. A paper I wish I had heard presented, which also relates and seems to combine these two themes is the following:  "Don’t Let Wales Become a Reservation': Images of Removal in Welsh and American Indian Alliances” by Kate Williams from the University of Minnesota.  I also want to be especially careful in discussing the papers that I did hear as they have not yet been published.
3. This panel was added to the conference events after the law passed to bring the issues of the eradication of Ethnic Studies programs in Kindergarten through High School and the immigration law to the forefront of NAISA rather than going ahead with boycotting Arizona.

 References

 NAISA (2010). Native American and Indigenous Studies Association. Tucson, AZ: American Indian Studies University of Arizona:



Ten Principles of Environmental Health Interlocking with Ethnic Studies

Environmental justice and injustice topics especially interest me and inform my work.  Recently, I was able to attend a student’s presentation on Environmental Justice, Health, and Nursing focused on the topic of farmworkers and pesticides.  During her presentation, she unveiled a large easel with two works of art juxtaposed:  first, the Sun Maid Raisin Girl and then she unveiled the Sun Mad Raisin Girl (1982) by artist Ester Hernández.  The juxtaposition of the two art pieces still held shock value and deeply evocative meanings.   Artist Hernández visually expressed the environmental and occupational health hazards within the growing process of the raisins within that replica (as if it is a piece from the front of a cardboard box) and the human impacts on the farmworkers themselves. The same student introduced me to the American Nursing’s Association’s Principles of Environmental Health for Nursing Practice with Implementation Strategies (more on this below).  I also was intrigued with the idea of modeling and rolemodeling that was part of these nursing class presentations (for this could also be part of the teaching profession, as well). From what I understood, rolemodeling and modeling includes a practical understanding of the many aspects of the patient’s life including cultural aspects and unique health hazards. The idea of modeling and rolemodeling pertains to the Ten Principles of Environmental Health within nursing practice as the nurse or health care practitioner works at understanding the patient’s life as well as their own and how to work preventatively while being informed by many areas of study (multidisciplinary).  Some of the foundational background for developing the principles include the following:

• “Human health is linked to the quality of the environment.”
• “Air, water, soil, food, and products should be free of potentially harmful chemicals.”
• “Environmental and social justice is a right of all populations and assumes that disparities in health are not acceptable.”  (ANA, 2007, p. 12) The ANA explains in the book that impoverished and minoritized communities face a larger share of the environmental burdens and less of the positive environmental amenities. Additionally, health disparities within the U.S. population occur along lines of class and racialization.

These are just three of nine stances that provide reasons for the principles. Within the ten principles themselves, number six clearly links to Ethnic Studies.  

1. Knowledge of environmental health concepts is essential to nursing practice.
2. The Precautionary Principle guides nurses in their practice to use products and practices that do not harm human health or the environment and to take preventative action in the face of uncertainty.
3. Nurses have a right to work in an environment that is safe and healthy.
4. Healthy environments are sustained through multi-disciplinary collaboration.
5. Choices of materials, products, technology, and practices in the environment that impact nursing practice are based on the best evidence available.
6. Approaches to promoting a healthy environment respect the diverse values, beliefs, cultures, and circumstances of patients and their families.
7. Nurses participate in assessing the quality of the environment in which they practice and live.
8. Nurses, other health care workers, patients, and communities have the right to know relevant and timely information about the potentially harmful products, chemicals, pollutants, and hazards to which they are exposed.
9. Nurses, participate in research of best practices that promote a safe and healthy environment.
10. Nurses must be supported in advocating for and implementing environmental health principles in nursing practice.

Another theme within the Environmental Principles is that working to fulfill and implement these principles requires collaboration of many stakeholders and people involved through their jobs and in volunteer capacities to work toward these principles.  To me, it is great to see how different career paths like nursing (and other very meaningful career paths) can be informed by work in Environmental Studies and Ethnic Studies and vice versa.

                                                                       Reference

 ANA (2007). American Nursing’s Association’s Principles of Environmental Health for Nursing Practice with Implementation Strategies. Silver Spring, MD: ANA.



"Need to Know" Replaced "Now" on PBS

The following blog entry will be mediated through my own experience, thoughts, and reflections, as all of them are, just more directly.

Having a moment to take a breath after one semester and at the cusp of another enabled me to switch on the PBS television channel on Friday night. Guess what? No more Now and Bill Moyer’s Journal.  Need to Know, a news magazine linked to an internet platform, was premiering. It was very different than other PBS shows such as The News Hour and Now.  I had found Now to be an important resource for my own information. (I thought it was giving me what I needed to know.)  I even could use some of the Now clips for my teaching with full disclosure of it as a news source and not an academic source (has not been reviewed by other experts before being released to the public).

With hopeful interest, I watched Need to Know without knowing that Now was gone until I read about it later.  Well, my nutshelled view of this new show is the following:

1) The show contained little analysis to help the viewer contextualize what was presented;

2)  A B-movie-like structure emanated from the set and the journalist dialogue on the set (which is not to say that can’t be interesting);

3) The stories also were heavily based for the New York region; and

4) I could not find the diversity of life in the U.S. (or even in New York or the world as a whole) presented.

The show really missed opportunities for analysis that would be of interest to a diverse viewership or, at least, a viewership that is interested in diversity. The  aired Gulf Coast story could have highlighted the Vietnamese fishing community being impacted by the oil leak.  The online topical piece did carry the following Number 3 of the “Five Things You Need to Know about the Gulf Oil Spill”:

One of the populations that could be hardest hit is the area’s Vietnamese-American community.   Thousands of people who came to the U.S. as refugees in the 1980s brought their experience in the  fishing and shrimping trades and settled along the Gulf Coast. According to Bichnga “Jay” Boulet, a NOAA employee who regularly translates regulations for the Vietnamese-speaking community, many “were not able to learn new skills and have had hard times learning English in a short time period.” Let’s keep our fingers crossed someone is giving thought to job training if people are forced out of the fishing industry. (hyperlinks deleted, Chapman, 2010)

 In the television excerpt, watching a White lawyer selling his services  (to sue BP Oil) to an Asian American fisherman made me wonder about the lawyer’s persuasive tactics and what it means to try to do business in a multilingual community.  I am not sure that every viewer is going to go online and read the related internet coverage.  I wonder about how and if the oil spill will impact the Houma Tribe of Louisiana. From some Ethnic Studies perspectives, it seems the television aired story provides a White-centric version of what you “need to know.”

 The gun carry law story did not cover attitudes or experiences in any communities but some in White communities. (Didn’t Jon Stewart on his cable comedy show do a spoof on the open carry movement that was thought-provoking when the skit compared racial discrimination to gun carry “discrimination” in a way that made that an absurd comparison?)  Growth in States rights movements during a time when we have an African American President, guns, crime, fear, control, and racialization all seem to be issues that must be talked about together through various subject area lenses: sociology, history, and ethnic studies.

 I am excited to listen to this interview with David Brancaccio  discussing the cancellation of Now. He is very gracious in his comments about Need to Know and Rush Limbaugh. I hope you find parts of this interview thought-provoking.

http://www.witf.org/news/smart-talk/3082-david-brancaccio-on-radio-smart-talk

                                                                           References

Chapman, E. (2010) Five things you need to know about...The Gulf oil spill. Retrieved from http://www.pbs.org/wnet/need-to-know/five-things/the-oil-spillleakfiasco-in-the-gulf-of-mexico/363/

Some Links to Current Media and Issues

Some thought-provoking media shows hosted guests on two serious issues occurring in the U.S. and in North America. I include the internet links to those below.  I apologize in advance for any broken urls as the internet changes quickly and some of these links may not be available after I have posted this blog entry. 

Minnesota Public Radio’s Kari Miller on Mid Morning facilitated a discussion with immigration expert Professor Marcelo Suarez-Orozco and Telemundo journalist, Jose Diaz-Balart about the Arizona Law labeled the “Support Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act.”  This name tries to hide that some law enforcement do not feel supported by this law and that the use of the word “safe” does not make everyone safe, in fact, it can work to jeopardize the safety of Latinos and those visually identified as Latino, those who speak other languages such as Spanish, and those who speak English with a hint of an “accent” assumed to be not regional to the U.S.  This radio discussion is interesting to listen to in juxtaposition to Raul Grijalva’s interview on National Public Radio.

Minnesota Public Radio (MPR)

Mid Morning hosted by Kari Miller

Interview with Prof. Suarez-Orozco and Jose Diaz-Balart

http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2010/04/28/midmorning1/

Interview with Raul Grijalva

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126395057

 To move to another hot-button issue, Charlie Rose hosted Lloyd Blankfein, Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of Goldman Sachs on April 30, 2010.  See http://www.charlierose.com/

This interview really shows examples of providing an interpretation to persuade viewers, that-is -just-how-the-system-works explanations, and how claims of financial illiteracy or economic illiteracy become a way for Lloyd Blankfein to lessen his transnational companies’ responsibility and systemic responsibility because these systems and his company serve a “social good”  and were just part of the daily workings of a capitalist system. Goldman Sachs provides the mechanism for transactions to occur in the world-wide economic  system, but not everyone democratically benefits from such transactions. The ideas in the book Mindful Economics: How the U.S. Economy Works, Why it Matters, and How it Could be Different by Joel Magnuson provide more solutions.  In the “Mindful Economics” framework,  Magnuson would agree on some levels with Lloyd Blankfein but goes further to explain that systemically the current world economic system is not democratic. He points out that it is just the opposite.  Magnuson goes further to explain how alternative economic organizations and processes can be put in place to co-exist with capitalistic organizations. He also claims that the goals of profit-making must be intertwined with democratic principles and regulation. This website contains an interview with Economist Magnuson: http://www.soundauthors.com/interview-with-joel-magnuson-sound-authors-radio.htm

One additional piece not covered in the Lloyd Blankfein interview was additionally troublesome aspects of “risk.”  One aspect being something that scholars in Critical Race Studies, Ethnic Studies, and Sociology examine: the way “risk” becomes code for “race” in specific situations. Law professor Patricia J. Williams in her essay “Of Race and Risk,” a commonly anthologized essay, explains her experience with getting a mortgage to purchase a house.  When the bank discovered she was African American they changed the terms of the loan to be less favorable than when they had thought she was “White.” Because they used the language of “risk” rather than race the institution deemed this “acceptable.”   You can read her essay here: http://www.li.suu.edu/library/circulation/Gurung/soc1020sgOfRaceAndRiskSp10.pdf

To bring the idea of risk into the current recession, recent scholarship investigates and shows how a disproportionate amount of racialized groups face home foreclosure related to balloon and inferior loan terms (with statistics showing that White buyers with the same incomes and credit received better loan terms).   

Thanks so much for reading!!! I hope you continue to peek in at my blog when you can.

Thinking about the “Ocular Ethic” in the book Missing Bodies: The Politics of Visibility by Monica J. Casper and Lisa Jean Moore

This book, not an introductory academic text, introduces an “ocular ethic” to the reader by drawing on the body as a unit of analysis among many approaches and theories. Casper and Moore (2009) urge us to “see” or notice those bodies of people that don’t matter as much or matter for the wrong reasons. Some bodies get more attention and access to resources than others. Some bodies simultaneously are under more surveillance and dismissal. Some bodies suffer from the impact of structural oppression more than others or in different ways. Rhetoric or discourse, statistics, and physical segregation make invisible specific bodies and their experiences, both while living and in death. “All discourses and practices rely on the actions, regulations, interactions, and positioning of human bodies and the agents inhabiting them. But because society is stratified along lines of gender, race, class, sexuality, age, disability status, citizenship, geography, and other cleavages, some bodies are public and visually dissected while others are vulnerable to erasure and marginalization.” (Casper & Moore, 2009, p.9) The chapter that attracted me to this book was on the Infant Mortality Rate (IMR) because I include a section on this topic in my introductory ethnic studies course.¹

Casper and Moore show us that behind the IMR statistics are actual lives and deaths, pain and loss. The number reduces the actual experience of loss to a neat and tidy numerical indicator without considering human experience or how “[i]t is, in fact, fundamentally shaped by racialized disparities of income, status, and access to preventive health care.” (p. 62) African American families in states such as Louisiana have the highest rates of infant mortality in the U.S. An often cited statistic hidden in small news articles once in a while is that the U.S. has the highest IMR of all industrialized countries. Other countries around the world with even less resources face similar issues with their youngest and most fragile.

 This is not a key concern in public opinion, but it does come up in academics and in organizations such as Annie E. Casey’s Kids Count. Scholars that study security and conflict rely on high infant mortality rates as one indicator to determine the risk of civil conflict in a country (Hewitt, Wilkenfeld, & Gurr, 2008). In that context, IMR is viewed as a symptom of a lack of basic structural and social assistance mechanisms. However, this is not always how it is understood by medical practitioners or policy makers. Very explicitly, Cooper and Moore write, “Yet because numeric data often conceal social structures (e.g., hiding dead bodies in a table or graph), they also shape policy and biomedicine in narrow ways that can place potentially quite restrictive burdens of surveillance and behavioral modification on women” (p. 77). The “ocular ethic” mentioned earlier helps magnify those structural aspects rather than simply relying on the discourse used to explain away the structural influences.

 Several current event issues could benefit from the use of an “ocular ethic.” One with a similar pattern of structural complicity is the new legislation signed in Arizona, called the harshest immigration law in the country, against people moving across human-made boundaries, neighbors, immigrants, and those who help them. The recession also provides examples of how an unemployment number hides the experience and causes of unemployment and that communities of color have faced such high unemployment numbers in pre-recession conditions.² Lines to apply for social assistance and full homeless shelters also reveal missing voices and lives. But we must also realize missing people exist who, as Casper and Moore point out, we can’t conceive of because we don’t know about their lives, struggles, decisions, resistance, actions, or deaths and how larger social forces impacted them.

1. IMR is the number of infant deaths per 1000 births (often measured to be those infants that die before the age of one year old).

2. African American men have faced double digit unemployment rates for multiple years before the 2009 recession. Additionally, it is well known that the unemployment rate only measures those who are actively looking, not those who have given up on looking for paid work.

 References

Casper, M. J., & Moore, L. J. (2009). Missing bodies: The politics of visibility. NY: New York University Press.

 Hewitt, J. J., Wilkenfeld, J., & Gurr,T. R. (2008). Peace and conflict 2008. Boulder & London: Paradigm Publishers.