Photo credit: Lehi Sanchez (APTNNEWS.CA)

UPDATED 5/6/2021

Today, May 5, 2021, people across the United States will wear red in recognition of missing and/or murdered American Indian (Indigenous) women. They will type #MMIW, #MMIWG or something similar in their social media feeds. If they are one of a few American Indians in their organizations, they may be asked (a bit ironically) to make special statements about missing American Indian peoples.

Why does “MMIW” exist? Recently, the skeleton of a Turtle Mountain Chippewa woman was found in a storage unit in Durham, North Carolina … 15 years after she went missing. All over North America, each week, murdered American Indian women are found in bushes, abandoned houses and trashcans. In 2017, in the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina, the disintegrating bodies of three women were found dumped on the same block within about 45 days. The many cases of American Indian disappearance and murder around North America highlight the fact that, in the United States, American Indian bodies remain disposable and invisible (not just disposable).

Campaigns like “MMIW” attempt to push against social, economic and political processes within which American Indian absence is simply accepted. This is tricky intellectual territory. American Indian peoples are present, but our presences tend to exist in very specific ways. To be American Indian is to carry a wardrobe with you that signifies genetic and cultural authenticity. This wardrobe might be as grand as traditional Indian regalia sewn with beads, shells and/or metal pieces (jingles). It might be as simple as a turquoise pendant worn on the lapel of a Ralph Lauren suit. Over the last decade, graduates of colleges and high schools have fought to place an eagle feather on top of standard, institutionalized graduation wardrobes.

However, there is a reckoning of wardrobe that is taking place in the age of MMIW. An increasingly popular act across Indian Country is to take a red-painted hand and cover your mouth in various social settings. This red hand over the mouth represents blood and silence – shed blood of American Indians which ought not to be normal, and the pervasive silences that American Indians die within and attempt to speak through. Several news articles have been written about the practice. What these stories tend to hilight is the fact that American Indian peoples are asking to be seen even as we are finding ways to step out of (or completely abandon) colonial expectations of how we ought to appear.

This has a lot to do with race. Years ago, I wrote an article about racial seeing in the Lumbee Tribe. Among other things, I made a distinction between Indian race as “blood” and Indian race as “phenotype”. In most political conversations in Indian Country, race as a blood-quantum concept is more important than race as a matter of how our bodies are shaped or how our bodies look. In my article, I made a very specific point that we (American Indians) are often not allowed to talk about how we look and how our composition (our physical substance) means a lot to the communities we are from.

A famous Lumbee folk singer, Willie Lowery, in the 1970s, composed a song titled “Brown Skin”. It was an ode to American Indian presence in a Black-White U.S. South. It was also permission to appreciate unique characteristics of Lumbee embodiment. My students often laugh when I tell them that many Lumbees say: “No baby smells like a Lumbee baby”.

Back around 2014, while teaching medical students in Chicago, I often made the case that American Indian physicians are needed because Indian people experience Indian bodies unlike other people. Part of being in medicine is being in close contact with a human being – feeling the vibrations of their body, smelling, and listening. A physician can affirm the presence of your body within the clinical space (which is the substance of good medicine) or they can abandon your body within the clinical space (which is the substance of medical harm). Diversity in medicine is about placing the right people in the clinical space to affirm bodily presences.

On that note, abandoning and disappearing (the actions that cause “MMIW”) don’t have to be murder and burial in a wretched place. They can exist in casual, seemingly innocent interactions. I recently spoke with a colleague who reminded me of the racial contexts of my being in the academy. He once heard another faculty member state that I didn’t “look Indian”. I asked him (my colleague) why he didn’t tell me what he heard when he first heard. He stated that it was tough because, on one hand, he thought that I couldn’t take the news. He thought I would be hurt. On the other hand, he didn’t know if it was ethical to make me more visible – to point out how I actually look: “David, I knew that in their eyes you would never look Indian enough, no one could be.”

My wife’s grandfather, Grandpa Ray, watched a lot of Western movies before his death in 2012.  When I was around the Lumbee community, I would sometimes join him in his living room, and we would laugh at portrayals of Indians by White actors such as Burt Lancaster in “Apache”. One day, Grandpa Ray looked over at me and said: “You know that is a White man, right?” I automatically replied: “Of course.” He laughed. “Let me tell you something; It is easy for us to tell that that is a White man playing us. But it isn’t easy for them (White people) to tell that we are Indians playing them.”

This was an eye-opening conversation. Grandpa Ray wasn’t attempting to describe how American Indians really look. He also wasn’t saying that we (American Indians) attempt to be White. No, he was making an assertion that we (all Americans) are trained to see Whiteness, and that decades (or centuries) of our being taught to see, respect and possibly fear Whiteness made it almost impossible to hide Whiteness under brown/red paint. The power of ‘red face’ (Indians being played by non-Indian people) was that you can never put on enough paint and fake hair to look Indian. At the same time, we (American Indians) always attempt to make ourselves seen in response to ‘red face’. American Indian people often change our behaviors (our gestures, our mannerisms, our ways of being in the world) for non-Indians to catch a glimpse of us.

My point here is that, in a world of racial cosplay, American Indians are constantly defaced and disembodied.

The transformation of Indianess into a disembodied reality – into a costume to be worn – began during the emergence of military operations in the United States. In elementary school, you may have learned about the Boston Tea Party of 1773. However, I doubt that your teacher was prepared to explain why White politicians dressed in brown paint and feathers as part of their participation in this critical colonial event.

By the 1800s, during the Civil War, the famous outlaw Jesse James disguised himself as my grandfather, Henry Berry Lowry, during a bank heist. His theory was that my grandfather had become so infamous (he had a bounty on his head larger than Jesse James) that no one would follow after them if they disguised themselves as my grandfather’s gang. During World War 2, the US military used American Indians as decoys (in addition to using Indian languages within “code talking”) during assaults on islands in the Pacific. By the Vietnam War, planes and tanks were named after American Indian communities and persons.

Placement of American Indians as a skin on top of the American colonial project mirrors an equally powerful intellectual project within the United States to re-racialize America within Black-White, immigrant-citizen dichotomies. Recently, sociologist Nancy Yuen, when asked about the roots of Whites portraying Asians in Hollywood, stated that this practice came out of minstrelsy (White people playing Black people). I disagree. White portrayal of non-White people was first and foremost based in White portrayals of American Indians from the mid-1700s to today.

Meanwhile, American Indians are defaced. For example, our bodies are easily confused for Puerto Rican, Italian, South Asian, Colombian or Asian bodies. We look like everything and nothing, simultaneously. When Deb Haaland was announced as the Secretary of the Department of Interior, my friend who lived in India part of his childhood stated in humor: “As long as she keeps turquoise necklaces on and not gold, we will remember that she is the other Indian”.

The defacement of American Indians – our identities being attached to cultural realities rather than to a physiologically recognizable self – is becoming especially problematic in an age of artificial intelligence and facial, biometric security. When I was at MIT directly after 9/11, my wife (then girlfriend) warned me to shave “appropriately” before I went to Boston’s airport. Her fear was that newly improvised security (there were rumors back then that the FBI used facial recognition) might have seen me as a potential Arab threat. In 2020, in the midst of COVID19 and tumultuous conversations about racial recognition and artificial intelligence, MIT’s School of Humanities and Social Sciences published a series of discussions by faculty who spoke from the conditions of their research about the meaning of masks. I was quickly reminded that MIT didn’t have American Indian faculty present to critique or offer insight within MIT’s academic debates about artificial intelligence. American Indians were not present as scholars or subjects of AI scholarship. There were no concerns for how or when American Indians were written into software codes. The recent removal of the R-word mascot seemed to end any chance of American Indians being facially recognized.

At that same moment, I was regularly present on social media asking for anyone and everyone to pay attention to Major League and National Football League teams who manufactured and sold face masks adorned with American Indian mascots. In the Lumbee Tribe (my home community) teachers in the local school system notified me that Black teachers wore masks with the R-word mascot. “They don’t care,” one Lumbee teacher told me, “it is like they know we can’t say anything about their masks because (their masks) are for health and safety. One of them (a Black teacher) even had a Black Lives Matter shirt on with an (Indian) mask.”

Image: During the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic, online shops like etsy.com have become central hubs for the circulation of face masks featuring American Indian mascots. I tend to call them “red masks” because of their over celebration of American Indian caricature, genocide and marginalization. 

This is an especially important conversation in the midst of emerging policy changes across the United States that seem solely focused on relationships of the American police-state to Black bodies. As “Black Lives Matter” and similar frameworks of racial testimony help frame journalist accounts, academic awards and other streams of influence, and as George Floyd and other Black victims of police shootings become the faces of racial justice in America, we are pushed to forget that the American Indian Movement (AIM) began in Minneapolis as a response to police violence directed toward American Indian bodies.

The emerging devotion of Americans storytellers to Black-White politics is affecting conversations that, just ten years ago, would have placed American Indians at the center. The Guardian and other newspapers recently published accounts of a controversy that has been brewing at Princeton University over the use of “bones of Black children” to teach anthropology. Upon first reading Guardian’s article, I shouted:

How, in an article about the role of anthropology in the use of bones from murdered children, do you not mention the fact that the bones of murdered American Indian children established the discipline of anthropology?

I was once again reminded that American Indian death is not prioritized within institutions of social justice. As we have seen with countless videos of Black men shot by police over the last few years, Black deaths are hyper-visualized. American Indian deaths are not.

In the meantime, American Indian bones have been moved from evidence of a crime (colonialism and genocide) to a symbol of entrepreneurship and social movement. There are many stories of all-White fraternities at Yale and other places that used Indian skulls for ceremonies. More recently, as fashion entrepreneurs have selected symbols to represent their work, Indian skulls have become aesthetically pleasing medallions worn by American consumers. This over-representation of Indian death and disfigurement on clothing parallels under-representation of Indian identity and perspective in the clothing/fashion industry.

During one of my recent exchanges on Twitter about Indian mascots, a White man from Tennessee interjected:

Don’t you realize by getting rid of references to Native American culture (i.e. Indian mascots on sports uniforms), you are the one advocating for genocide. In fact the final genocide where they are no longer even talked about in society

I quickly responded:

You sound like a drug trafficker suggesting that the end of drug dealing will be the end of the American economy. You sound like the head of the KKK suggesting that the end of his organization will be the end of community service.

We cannot allow American Indian bodies to be transformed into a fossilized fuel for the colonial project. As we put away our masks – which we have worn faithfully over the last year of pandemic – we cannot forget what they have taught us about mattering in America…we cannot forget what they have taught us about what we wear and how we are worn.

David Shane Lowry

David Shane Lowry, a member of the Lumbee Tribe, is the Distinguished Fellow in Native American Studies at MIT. In this role, David is leading a new conversation at MIT about the responsibilities of MIT (and science/technology education, more generally) in the theft of American Indian land and the dismantling of American Indian health and community. Since 2013, David has lectured across the United States – roles in which he has become well versed in conversations at the intersection of race, (health) science & popular culture. His first book, titled Lumbee Pipelines (under contract with University of Nebraska Press), explores American Indian utilization of colonial conditions to create opportunities that are both uplifting and oppressive. His second book, titled Black Jesus, is an ethnography of Michael Jordan. It began when David realized that he and Jordan shared the same anthropology advisor at UNC … 23 years apart.

Source

Image: The title “Kroeber Hall” being removed at the University of California-Berkeley on January 26, 2021. (Photo Credit: Irene Yi)

In 2017, the theme of the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association was “Anthropology Matters”. I didn’t hear folks criticize the theme too much, but I wondered who had chosen it in the age of “Black Lives Matters” to make a point about the value and substance of anthropology. It was a bit … tacky … mostly because it was attracting attention to a discipline (anthropology) that has often treated human lives as if they do not matter.

Over the last few days, I have returned to this conversation about anthropology’s “mattering” in the aftermath of a recent building name change at University of California – Berkeley. Throughout 2020, petitions came from students, staff and faculty to eliminate the name of Alfred Kroeber from the building that houses the Department of Anthropology. The petitions focused on one main point: Kroeber’s insistence on collecting Native American remains, matched with his role in ethnic cleansing (e.g. pronouncing particular American Indian nations “culturally extinct”), made him a symbol of human disenfranchisement that should not be celebrated by the University. On January 26, 2021, the deed was done.

The story of Kroeber’s career is long and complicated. However, his legacy revolves around his treatment of a Yahi man known as “Ishi”. Kroeber placed Ishi into his laboratory for several years at Berkeley where he (Ishi) swept floors and otherwise remained imprisoned within the University. In those years and subsequent to Ishi’s death in 1916 from tuberculosis, Ishi remained a staple of anthropological conversations because he was labeled “the last wild Indian”. Ishi’s brain ended up in the hands of the Smithsonian. Ishi, as an anthropological specimen, warranted the objectification of American Indian bodies in burial sites across the United States. His life and his body were studied by a nation of anthropological foragers who were shepherded by the logic of Kroeber.

Last week, as the story of the name change reached a national audience, I was interested in hearing how journalists summed it up. CNN titled their article about the event: “UC Berkeley removes the name on a school building over an anthropologist’s controversial past”. The Los Angeles Times editorial board titled their editorial: “How UC Berkeley can make up for Native American disrespect”.

“Disrespect”? Let’s try “genocide”.

The CNN article quotes famed anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes who, back in July 2020, wrote a letter to the Berkeley campus newspaper. In this letter, she asserts:

I was deeply distressed to learn about an administrative plan to remove the name of AL Kroeber from Kroeber Hall. The decision was not discussed with the anthropology faculty. Moreover, the ‘statement’ on Alfred Kroeber was woefully misinformed and in the pop style of social media “cancel culture”, based on shaming and removing public figures thought to have done something objectionable or offensive. But ad hoc censoring without a process including factual knowledge, evidence, and research has no place in a public university.

Scheper-Hughes’ resistance to “cancel culture” is newsworthy. There are plenty of testimonies of anthropology’s role as a culture of cancellation. Do you remember the shift in leadership at HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory because of testimonies of abuse from administrators toward employees of the journal? White anthropologists from across the world loudly and proudly critiqued the colonial, cancelling foundations of anthropology and the ways in which they were lived out through HAU’s leadership. In response to these foundations, they issued calls for particular people to resign from HAU.

American Indians, however, have not inherited the privilege of cancellation within anthropological conversations. About a year ago, I gave a talk at James Madison University (JMU). During a conversation with a White faculty member, I discussed my desire to bring American Indian intellectual frameworks to the front of anthropology. In response, they laughed and told a story of a graduate student at University of Virginia (UVA) who was consistently mocked by faculty because he “wanted to tear the place up”. I assumed that this JMU faculty member meant that the American Indian student at UVA wanted to bring forth American Indian points-of-view while removing the power of traditional, White anthropological points of view.

Gayatri Spivak famously asked: “Can the subaltern speak?” Please let me relocate this question to the stolen Indian land on which your University resides: Can American Indians speak? The neo-colonial anthropological project is empowered by profits from a century of extracting American Indian land, knowledge, artifacts and bodies. This currency loses all of its value if American Indians begin to extoll our ideas, insights and governance within the anthropological apparatus.

Something tells me that there is a (corporate?) interest in not allowing this. Bronislaw Malinowski, who remains standard reading in American anthropology, was an entrepreneur in early anthropology. Rowman & Littlefield lists Malinowski’s book, Crime and Custom in Savage Society, on their website with a description that makes it seem like Malinowski’s ideas are valid today:

His Crime and Custom in Savage Society is now one of the classic works of modern anthropology. In his book, Malinowski describes and analyzes the ways in which Trobriand Islanders structure and maintain the social and economic order of their tribe. This is essential reading for anyone interested in anthropology.

Any argument that Malinowski is “essential reading” reminds me that we have allowed our anthropological forefathers to replace “racial inferiority with cultural inferiority”. We have allowed anthropology to lay intellectual groundwork for human suppression in the United States by leaving room for “savage” customs to remain entertainment for the masses. (Will any of you be watching the Kansas City “Chiefs” in the upcoming Super Bowl?) Rowman & Littlefield might as well be selling Confederate flags and Klu Klux Klan badges on their website.

My underlying point here is that we cannot separate the tyranny of anthropology – the ability for anthropologists to do the work of White suppression of non-White peoples – from intellectual frameworks and schools of thought. We cannot say: “Well, Kroeber did a lot of good. He just made that one mistake with Ishi.” Many White anthropologists don’t like to “throw out the baby with the bath water” when faced with critiques of White anthropology’s abuses. Oftentimes, the baby isn’t a baby. It is an effigy that they…worship.

The timing of Scheper-Hughes’ July 2020 defense of Kroeber was simply not good. Several months earlier, in March 2020, High Country News released a scorching analysis of the ways that American universities profited from the theft of American Indian land through the Morrill Act of 1862. This article, not ironically, begins with a discussion of Ishi that connects his abuse to the orchestrated theft of Indian land across the United States:

Ishi may be known in Indian Country and to California Public School students, but his story remains mostly obscure – though considerably less so than that of the millions of acres of Indigenous land sold to endow the land-grant universities of the United States.

Franz Boas, the “father” of American anthropology and Alfred Kroeber’s academic advisor, pushed doctoral students out of Columbia in the early 1900s. His hopes were that they would plant anthropology into various intellectual communities around the United States. Many of them found academic homes in universities funded by the Morrill Act and their academic gaze, almost reactionarily, turned toward documenting American Indian peoples whose communities the universities displaced. Stolen American Indian land led to the formation of academic disciplines – political science, history, anthropology, etc. – none of which placed themselves in positions of responsibility for this genocide. However, what made anthropology the most grotesque of these disciplines was that its patriarchs and matriarchs made the victims of this post-Morrill Act academic colonial violence into museum and fair exhibits.

Within those contexts, American Indians remain caught in a liminal space. On one hand, we continue to be used by White and Black anthropologists as specimens in the great American anthropological project. Our being measured in the early 20th Century by Franz Boas and his students (a group that included Alfred Kroeber, Ruth Benedict and Zora Neale Hurston) has evolved into our token presence inside/beside anthropology in the early 21st Century. American Indians remain specimen-scholars. Not Indian enough. Not scholarly enough.

I think that it is quite telling that Theodora Kroeber, Alfred’s wife, titled her book Ishi in Two Worlds. As long as Alfred is celebrated for his work – as long as the story of Alfred and Ishi remain valuable as part of the foundation of American anthropology – American Indians will never be adequate enough. You won’t see American Indians in significant numbers in your Departments of Anthropology or, more generally, in your Universities. We remain stuck in some unstated savagery.

At this point, you might be asking: “Aren’t there American Indians in anthropology?” Yes, I am one of them. However, if you look across the landscape of higher education, American Indians are missing from tenurable/tenured faculty positions in all disciplines and across all universities. A report from the National Center for Education Statistics states that our numbers were so low in 2018 (significantly less than 1% of all tenurable/tenured faculty) that our numbers couldn’t be broken down into sex/gender. If you look at reports commissioned by the American Anthropological Association to study race in our discipline, there is no sign that American Indian anthropologists have any real presence in the discipline. (A 2010 report mildly references American Indian experiences in Anthropology, but the committee that issued the report consisted of no – zero – American Indian faculty. Most of its members were/are scholars of Black racial experiences.) We remain odd visuals within the academic marketplace – unable to occupy faculty offices like our non-Indian colleagues.

American Indian anthropologists exist in a state of academic homelessness. Ella Deloria, a Dakota anthropologist who studied under Franz Boas, lived out of her car as she travelled around the United States collecting American Indian cultural residue. Vine Deloria Jr., her nephew, resented the idea that Boas transformed his aunt into an impoverished anthropological scavenger, which is why I believe he critiqued anthropology in Custer Died for Your Sins.

Around 2008, I took a political anthropology course at Duke University with anthropologist Orin Starn, the author of Ishi’s Brain. If you have never read Ishi’s Brain, it is a story of the journey of Starn to return Ishi’s brain to the Yahi people (which he did successfully!). In class, Starn introduced us – a class full of PhD students in anthropology (I was the only American Indian) – to this journey.

One of the most impactful aspects of Starn’s course was his intra-class conversation with fellow anthropologist Lee Baker. Baker discussed his book (then in progress) Anthropology and the Racial Politics of Culture. That was when I first heard the argument that American Indians are “out of the way” and not “in the way”. As “out of the way” peoples, American Indians are often knick-knacks on the shelf of anthropological inquiry.

I remained curious about the implications of Starn’s advocacy and Baker’s analysis. Were their stories going to help anthropology overturn the colonial system that made it a powerful intellectual space? Were they going to demand that American Indians be hired onto Duke’s faculty? Were they going to demand that American Indian land be returned? Duke’s anthropology program has never had an American Indian anthropologist on faculty. Also, to my knowledge, neither Duke University nor UNC have ever been asked by their faculty to return property/land to American Indian communities (such as the Lumbee or Occaneechi-Saponi Tribes).

That is what makes the de-nailing of K,R,O,E,B,E, and R so interesting and important. It is perhaps the first substantial crack in the façade of American anthropology’s imprisonment of Native America. From those few removed nails, the Department of Anthropology at Berkeley ought to move into a state of forming an American anthropological model that is governed by the people that Ishi represents/ed. Yes, it is time for a new age of American Indian/Native American scholarship that is led by American Indian people and includes permanent faculty positions for American Indians across disciplines. But anthropology must lead the way! American Indians should no longer be sweeping up dust from – should no longer be the dust on – the floor of anthropological laboratories.

Is this not what we are waiting for? For Ishi to be granted tenure? Perhaps not Ishi, but members of his Tribal community and other American Indian communities. Aren’t we waiting for American Indians to leave the category of ethnographic subject (specimen) and be invited into positions as senior academics, Deans, and Chancellors? This ought to be normal in 2021.

Let’s be frank. The death of Kroeber – the removal of his name from the sanctuary of anthropology – is part of a process of placing American Indian voices in positions of intellectual authority. This moment, which is defined by a global pandemic of injustice and colonial viruses, is the perfect moment to move on with this process. As university buildings are closed down for the safety of faculty, staff, and students, the hallowed grounds of anthropology ought to be restored to their rightful owners.

I hope that we are not invited to a Forty-Niners game during this transition.

[*Note: Ryan Anderson (one of the editors for Anthrodendum) reminded me of the work of visual/performance artist James Luna. (Find one of his Ishi-related pieces here.) I first learned about Luna’s work when I visited one of the artifact rooms of the Harvard University Peabody Museum and my MIT classmate (who was a Native from Southern California) yelled out: “Should the alive Indians here go jump up on the shelf?”]

David Shane Lowry

David Shane Lowry, a member of the Lumbee Tribe, is the Distinguished Fellow in Native American Studies at MIT. In this role, David is leading a new conversation at MIT about the responsibilities of MIT (and science/technology education, more generally) in the theft of American Indian land and the dismantling of American Indian health and community. Since 2013, David has lectured across the United States – roles in which he has become well versed in conversations at the intersection of race, (health) science & popular culture. His first book, titled Lumbee Pipelines (under contract with University of Nebraska Press), explores American Indian utilization of colonial conditions to create opportunities that are both uplifting and oppressive. His second book, titled Black Jesus, is an ethnography of Michael Jordan. It began when David realized that he and Jordan shared the same anthropology advisor at UNC … 23 years apart.

Source

In this series of posts, I provide an account of my new relationship with the American Geophysical Union (the largest community of earth & space scientists) as an anthropologist who is doing inter-disciplinary research in the Lumbee Tribe after Hurricane Matthew (2016). Thank you to Matthew Thompson for inviting me to write with Anthrodendum. [“Syringes in Rocks” photo credit: Control@ltvsquad.com (2009); “Chumash Firefighters” photo credit: http://www.santaynezchumash.org/fire.html]

The concept of the “anthropocene” seems like a way for us (the big collective “us”) to get together & narcissistically describe how we have affected the earth since 1950…how what we have done will show up in the earth’s crust. Your uncle says, “We have eaten lots of chicken wings at football games & family reunions, so the chicken bones will probably show up.” So scientists add your uncle’s observations to the list of markers.  Your cousin says “we love coca-cola, and those empty bottles will show up too.” Scientists use plastic soda bottles as markers. In reading articles about how the anthropocene shows up, we seem unwilling to inspect how the residue of our life will really look.

So, here, let me provide an alternative name for the epoch that we live in: eugenicene.

eugenicene (n): the current planetary age; the period during which policies & products of corporations & government work in tandem to systemically abandon & manipulate the lives of marginalized human communities.

What does the euginicene look like? In the eugenicene, the earth’s crust will be consistently speckled with amber bottles from CVS, Walgreens, and Costco Pharmacies from the 1950s until today. Oh, we will also see the plastic syringes from the on again-off again heroin epidemic speckled within the rocks. Oh, and we can’t forget the plastic containers that have been used to package lard and other “commodities” for Native American reservation communities. What about the cellophane from all those packages of corporately crafted cigarettes? They will help the earth’s crust sparkle.

My point here is that the materials that will show up in the earth’s crust will signify processes, policies, and economics engineered to destroy humans.

In 1904, Francis Galton spoke before the British Sociological Society:

The aim of eugenics is to represent each class or sect by its best specimens; that done, to leave them [alone] to work out their common civilization [survival] in their own way […] Let us for a moment suppose that the practice of eugenics should hereafter raise the average quality of our nation to that of its better moiety [part] at the present day, and consider the gain.

Galton’s vision of eugenics contained a powerful socialization of cognitive dissonance: say that these “classes or sects” are left alone, but in reality manufacture their demise in hands-on ways. The magic of eugenics is that it makes members of society who live comfortably think that the humans who suffer/die via eugenic policies are dying in unfortunate and/or inevitable circumstances.

Looming questions remain: How do we see eugenics policies within the panic of global climate change? That is, if we are all vulnerable vis-à-vis melting polar caps and unprecedented “super storms”, are there people who have been made to be more vulnerable? Is this epoch, in its totality, defined by the processes, policies, & geographies meant to rid society of particular human communities?

Back in October 2017, Luisa Black wrote an online article titled “Hurricanes Disproportionately Harm Communities of Color”. After Hurricane Katrina (2005), corporately owned news agencies regularly featured Black citizens of Louisiana requesting justice from state and federal officials. Many of the journalistic stories that came out post-Hurricane Katrina were quasi-ethnographic narratives of how African Americans had been systematically placed in the way of Katrina over several centuries. Unfortunately, these same news agencies didn’t place Native American suffering in Louisiana on a national stage, which actually wasn’t surprising since governments & oil corporations had spent the last few decades destroying Native American tribal lands in the process of moving/removing oil from the gulf coast United States.

In October 2016, in the aftermath of Hurricane Matthew in the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina, I began thinking about the intersections of Native American survival, state/federal governments, and corporations. My family spent weeks gathering supplies – from bath towels, to cereal, to everything in between – and we took them to various people in the Lumbee Tribe. Along the way, we examined how the Lumbee story was being told. There were the anger-creating stories that seemed isolated, like that of a deaf Lumbee man who, in the midst of the hurricane passing through the community, was shot by the North Carolina Highway Patrol. But then there were what seemed like purposeful silences.

Here is one:

When Hurricane Matthew made its trek through the Caribbean, President Obama held a special news conference in which he pointed out the long history of suffering in Haiti. However, when the Lumbee Tribe (the largest Native American community east of the Mississippi River) began to drown in Hurricane Matthew just days later, Obama said nothing about our nation. And it gets a bit stranger. In the days after Matthew’s winds calmed, the Trump/Pence campaign bus showed up with supplies. Trump’s actions were quite valuable in the eyes of the Lumbee Tribe. Indeed, Obama’s silence and Trump’s humanitarian activity in eastern North Carolina may have played a significant role in Donald Trump’s winning North Carolina (a pivotal state!) in the 2016 presidential election.

The actions of indigenous peoples & the actions that indigenous peoples expect towards their communities are often overshadowed by America’s fascination with where indigenous people live. Keith Basso’s Wisdom Sits in Places (1996) states his concern that we (anthropologists) don’t know what people “make of places”. He argues that we haven’t paid attention to “sense of place”. In a subsequent publication, Karen Blu (anthropologist & wife of anthropologist Clifford Geertz) applied Basso’s place-centered theoretical framework to the Lumbee Tribe, but she was mistaken. In the Lumbee Tribe, when you talk to someone on the phone you ask “what’chu doing?” before you ask “where you at?”. Sense of place is almost always captured in the actions of Lumbee people going to those places, acting in those places, and struggling with those places. Place is sort of like an actor…to struggle against, with, and for.

These were important lessons as I began a research relationship with a team of environmental scientists in November 2016. As we developed an NSF RAPID research proposal, we agreed that what we planned to do must be relational. We weren’t entering a field-site void of complicated human relationships. We looked at Hurricane Matthew as the newest layer atop a multi-layered history of Lumbee people being pushed into hazardous environments & surrounded with poisonous materials. Our scientific data was sure to become part of century-old political battles for sovereignty & survival in a place that contains anxieties related to state-sponsored and corporate-sponsored eugenics projects that Lumbee people continue to actively fight.

Recent Southern California wildfires remind me of the tensions between indigenous suffering, geophysical change, & senses of place in the Lumbee community. As the fires in Southern California multiplied, Chumash people began to secure sacred sites within the fires. A Chumash firefighter and cultural specialist spoke about his experience:

“I know that we’re not always going to save all the sites. There’s going to be times where we need to save people’s lives”…“Cultural sites are important to us. But my number one job that I’m hired to do is [be a] firefighter.”

His statement is telling. As the planet changes – as sacred sites and other important places disappear in fires & mudslides – how do we support the actions of indigenous people to save life?

To be continued…

David Shane Lowry

David Shane Lowry, a member of the Lumbee Tribe, is the Distinguished Fellow in Native American Studies at MIT. In this role, David is leading a new conversation at MIT about the responsibilities of MIT (and science/technology education, more generally) in the theft of American Indian land and the dismantling of American Indian health and community. Since 2013, David has lectured across the United States – roles in which he has become well versed in conversations at the intersection of race, (health) science & popular culture. His first book, titled Lumbee Pipelines (under contract with University of Nebraska Press), explores American Indian utilization of colonial conditions to create opportunities that are both uplifting and oppressive. His second book, titled Black Jesus, is an ethnography of Michael Jordan. It began when David realized that he and Jordan shared the same anthropology advisor at UNC … 23 years apart.

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In this series of posts, I provide an account of my new relationship with the American Geophysical Union (the largest community of earth & space scientists) as an anthropologist who is doing inter-disciplinary research in the Lumbee Tribe after Hurricane Matthew (2016). Thank you to Matthew Thompson for inviting me to write with Anthrodendum.

In recent years, anthropology has joined many other academic disciplines in accusing humans of destroying the earth. This destruction has been summed up in one word: “anthropocene”. The word “anthropocene” has a mysterious history. Wikipedia contributors have created a fairly accessible article that sheds light on the origins of the word. One of the most interesting origin stories is that “anthropocene” was sort of an accident that jumped off the lips of Dutch chemist Paul Crutzen in the early 2000s. An article in Smithsonian magazine documents how “anthropocene” subsequently became fashionable in the planetary science community. Afterwards, British scholars in the journal for the Geological Society of America (GSA) asked readers to consider the term “anthropocene” – which is literally a mashup of  “human” & “new” –  as the official label for the planetary epoch within which we now live.

Here, I want to draw attention to something. There are two (2) assumptions within conversations about “anthropocene” that I cannot ignore:

• There is an assumption that changes in the earth are the created by all humans who are equally present.
• There is also an assumption that we all had/have equitable opportunities to affect, craft, & enact policies regarding human vulnerability.

Although anthropologists have been talking about the anthropocene, I’m not sure if we have been talking  within it.

To be within the anthropocene means that we fully realize that the naming of a planetary epoch is, like many other things, a colonial process. Sidney Mintz (an anthropologist) prefaced his book Sweetness & Power (1985) with a poignant quote from J.H. Bernardin de Saint Pierre:

“I do not know if coffee and sugar are essential to the happiness of Europe, but I know well that these two products have accounted for the unhappiness of two great regions of the world: America has been depopulated so as to have land on which to plant them; Africa has been depopulated so as to have the people to cultivate them.”

Mintz began Sweetness & Power this way because it had become quite apparent in his fieldwork that Europe (and subsequently America) took the lead in a global endeavor to exploit brown and black peoples for the sake of stripping the Earth of indigenous natural resources & cultivating crops through the enslavement of those brown and black peoples. Mintz’s text was formidable in that it called out the capitalistic processes that were owned by White entrepreneurs & that placed inequitable pressure on non-White people to accept changes in land & reinventions of their diets.

For example, Mintz pointed out that, in the early 1900s, sugar was being “pumped” into the crevasses of many poor communities. As a result, sugar became associated with “the good life” (pp. 188-190). In indigenous communities today, the “good life” has become epidemic rates of diabetes and cardiovascular disease that are catalyzed by sugary (sugar-like) substances. Sugar replaced other (perhaps indigenous) sources of calories. Mintz asserts that sugar contained more calories per unit of land harvested than any other crop, a reality which led to the rise of corporations like Nestle that have turned the hyper-harvest of sugar into its current global domination of consumable goods. (Nestle is accused of hijacking water throughout the United States.)

This story of food-centered corporations hijacking land & water parallels stories of other corporations that aim to use particular sections of the American ecosystem to advance their profits against the cultural and biomedical needs of vulnerable and/or indigenous community members. Recent stories about Chemours (formerly Dupont) illustrate conditions within which the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has turned a blind eye toward corporate poisoning of ecosystems in eastern North Carolina. In other news, the state of North Carolina recently approved the advancement of the Atlantic Coastal Pipeline through eastern North Carolina, which allows natural gas companies to systematically target many of the state’s Native American communities.This type of collusion between federal, state, and local powerbrokers – vis-a-vis Native America – is not new.

Consider the disappearance of particular animals in the United States within Native American territories. Before the 20th century, the U.S. federal government sponsored the annihilation of herds of buffalo – effectively annihilating the ecosystems of various tribal communities in Native America. These sorts of policies continued into the mid-20th century when the federal government had a hands-off approach to financial practices in and around Native American farming communities. In North Carolina, laws protecting the fair sale/trade of land were positioned to advantage White landowners. White land owners would employ Native American sharecroppers and they (the White land owners) would demand that Native American sharecroppers purchase and use an overabundance of pesticides on the lands that the sharecroppers farmed. By the 1960s, the pesticide of choice was DDT, which was pushed by federal agricultural programs as a global cure-all in an era where jungles in Vietnam & swamps in the U.S. South were being cleared for reasons that we still don’t fully understand. Native American ecosystems throughout the U.S. South lost important animals like rabbits, raccoons, & quail. Even after the large-scale denunciation of DDT as a pesticide of choice across the United States in the late 1960s, ecosystems in North Carolina’s Native American communities have never been restored.

So, yes, as we enter into the “anthropocene”, we might find that the term remains wanting. We must consider what it means that the “anthropocene” possesses assumptions that we are equally present and that we equitably participate in the business & governance of the planet when both assumptions are wrong. Indeed, we must acknowledge that in our collective conversation about a changing planet, our goal ought to be to set the stage for purposeful human conversations about how we see the planet differently.

To be continued…

David Shane Lowry

David Shane Lowry, a member of the Lumbee Tribe, is the Distinguished Fellow in Native American Studies at MIT. In this role, David is leading a new conversation at MIT about the responsibilities of MIT (and science/technology education, more generally) in the theft of American Indian land and the dismantling of American Indian health and community. Since 2013, David has lectured across the United States – roles in which he has become well versed in conversations at the intersection of race, (health) science & popular culture. His first book, titled Lumbee Pipelines (under contract with University of Nebraska Press), explores American Indian utilization of colonial conditions to create opportunities that are both uplifting and oppressive. His second book, titled Black Jesus, is an ethnography of Michael Jordan. It began when David realized that he and Jordan shared the same anthropology advisor at UNC … 23 years apart.

Source