Comments on: Native American Ethnic Anxiety Part Two: Black Indians /2005/10/08/native-american-ethnic-anxiety-part-two-black-indians/ Notes and Queries in Anthropology Fri, 08 Dec 2017 18:00:10 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.1 By: Anthropology.net /2005/10/08/native-american-ethnic-anxiety-part-two-black-indians/comment-page-1/#comment-1847 Tue, 25 Oct 2005 09:22:27 +0000 /?p=255#comment-1847 Links

This page is a work in progress and needs your help to be more completed. Please submit any Anthropology website/pages that you know of by commenting on this article with the URL of your recommended site. Equally so, if a link is broken or misrepresented

]]> By: oneman /2005/10/08/native-american-ethnic-anxiety-part-two-black-indians/comment-page-1/#comment-1729 Sat, 08 Oct 2005 18:08:49 +0000 /?p=255#comment-1729 The interesting thing about this article (for me, anyway) is the different ways Indians with different interests are being forced into accepting as definitions of Indianness. You have black Indians, descended from crucial players in Cherokee history, playing strong roles in the local community, participating in religious rituals and so on, who have turned to DNA testing in order to establish their authenticity as Indians, while the article also quotes a council member insisting that all the DNA evidence in the world doesn’t matter if you are not on the Dawes Roll. Both involve an appeal to sources of legitimacy outside of the local communities of which people are a part, in a way that would be troubling to any Indian in any other context. I mean, there are Indians who refuse to carry blood quanta cards because they refuse to be defined by the Anglo government and it’s Dawes Roll. Meanwhile the Lumbee have besed their claim to legitimacy not on genetics nor on government censuses (of which there aren’t any) but on “know-one-when-I-see-one” local cultural recognition, exactly the kind of recognition the black Indians in the article are striving for.

Another interesting thing about the article is how frequently these genetic tests identify Pakistanis as American Indians…. I will remember that next time a race-is-good-biology advocate confronts me with the “forensics question”. (The forensics question asks why, if race is “only” a social construct, foresics science can identify race “so easily” from human remains.)

]]>