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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Blood-Speak: Ward Churchill And The Racialization Of American Indian Identity, Casey Ryan Kelly
Blood-Speak: Ward Churchill And The Racialization Of American Indian Identity, Casey Ryan Kelly
Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications
After publishing a controversial essay on 9/11, Professor Ward Churchill’s scholarship and personal identity were subjected to a hostile public investigation. Evidence that Churchill had invented his American Indian identity created vehemence among many professors and tribal leaders who dismissed Churchill because he was not a “real Indian.” This essay examines the discourses of racial authenticity employed to distance Churchill from tribal communities and American Indian scholarship. Responses to Churchill’s academic and ethnic self-identification have retrenched a racialized definition of tribal identity defined by a narrow concept of blood. Employing what I term blood-speak, Churchill’s opponents harness a biological concept …
Orwellian Language And The Politics Of Tribal Termination (1953–1960), Casey Ryan Kelly
Orwellian Language And The Politics Of Tribal Termination (1953–1960), Casey Ryan Kelly
Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications
From 1953 to 1960, the federal government terminated sovereign recognition for 109 American Indian nations. Termination was a haphazard policy of assimilation that had disastrous consequences for Indian land and culture. Nonetheless, termination cloaked latent motivations for Indian land within individual rights rhetoric that was at odds with Indian sovereignty. Termination highlights the rhetorical features of social control under capitalism portrayed in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), in which opposing principles are fused and inverted. This essay critiques termination’s Orwellian language to show how ideographs of social liberation are refashioned by the state to subvert Indian sovereignty and popular dissent.