You Keep Using This Word; or, How Can I Leave This Behind?

I happened on a book called Queering Gay and Lesbian Studies, by Richard Piontek, published in 2006 by University of Illinois Press.  The publisher's blurb proclaimed it 

a broadly interdisciplinary study that considers a key dilemma in gay and lesbian studies through the prism of identity and its discontents: the field studies has modeled itself on ethnic studies programs [sic], perhaps to be intelligible to the university community, but certainly because the ethnic studies route to programs is well established.  Since this model requires a stable and identifiable community, gay and lesbian studies have emphasized stable and knowable identities.  The problem, of course is that sexuality is neither stable, tidy, nor developmental.  With the advent of queer theory, there are now other perspectives available that frequently find themselves at odds with traditional gay and lesbian studies.

Hm.  Okay, that's the blurb, I won't hold the author responsible for it.  I looked in the text, where essentially the same claim is made.

The notion of a coherent and unified gay and lesbian identity also made gays and lesbians candidates for the project of minority history by constituting them as a minority akin to ethnic and racial ones. Minority history lets gays and lesbians be inserted into the historical canon alongside other previously excluded groups. At the same time, however, defining “bad history” as the only problem, and thus merely multiplying the number of historical subjects as a remedy, evades important epistemological questions. Here I take up postmodern challenges to traditional historiography, seeking, among other things, to determine how historical knowledge is produced and how particular viewpoints established dominance and allowed for the exclusion of minority points of view.

I hope to read the entire book soon, so I may be able to account for Piontek's statements.  Some of this makes sense to me. I've thought along the same lines, and I've encountered slighting references to the "ethnic model" of gay people, along with sloganizing claims by some activists that "we are a people."  Those claims resonated for me at times, but they also made me uneasy.

What is "a people"?  The blurb writer seemed to assume that the ethnic model "requires a stable and identifiable community, gay and lesbian studies have emphasized stable and knowable identities.  The problem, of course is that sexuality is neither stable, tidy, nor developmental."  Ethnic communities aren't stable, knowable, tidy, or developmental (where did that come from?) either.  Nor are other identitarian conceptions like gender, disciplines, religion, the arts. "Challenges" to those conceptions aren't postmodern either: they are part of modernism itself, and go back to the beginning of the twentieth century if not earlier.  Jason Josephson Storm has an excellent discussion of this issue in his Metamodernism: The Future of Theory (Chicago, 2021).

Maybe Piontek went into this later in the book, but the divide he starts with has been present since the late 19th century, continued through the response to Alfred Kinsey's work, and has persisted to the present.  It's not a matter of one model succeeding an older, inferior one, which incidentally is a model of linear progress that self-identified postmodernists supposedly reject but have difficulty leaving behind. The field that Queer Theory superseded was never particularly stable either: it originally was simply "gay studies," became "gay and lesbian studies" as gay men struggled with their sexism, then "gay, lesbian and bisexual studies" and so on - just as the formerly gay movement added subgroups, "queer" among them.  

I hope I'll have more to say on this in due time.  It may be unfair to pick on a book that is now twenty years old, but I haven't noticed that the field has improved much since 2006.  It might be worth adding that a cursory online search found many references to "LGBTQ culture" and even to "queer culture." Queer culture is postulated as something that has persisted visibly over centuries, even millennia, despite attempts to stamp it out. That would seem to imply a stable and identifiable community with knowable identities, inserted into the historical canon alongside other previously excluded groups. As I've said before, queer and trans scholars have objected to imposing "gay" and "lesbian" on societies and eras that supposedly didn't have those concepts, but have then imposed "queer" and "trans" on them even though the same objection applies. At best Piontek was over-optimistic about the postmodern challenge to traditional historiography, as queer theory was simply assimilated to existing approaches and categories.

Dude, I'm a Gay and Lesbian Academic

It's been a busy couple of days, and I'm already feeling swamped by topics I should write about.  So I'll be sneaky and do what I hope will be a quick and easy one.

I found a copy of Poisoned Ivy: Lesbian and Gay Academics Confronting Homophobia (Temple UP, 1997) by Toni A. H. McNaron at the library book sale the other day, and it looked interesting, so I bought it.  McNaron, who began teaching in 1964 at the University of Minnesota, surveyed a generational sample of LBGTQ with questionnaires, and I'm always interested in seeing what people have to say about their experiences.

But once I sat down and started to read the book, I was frustrated by McNaron's writing.  Like so many academic writers (though not only academics, I concede) she thanks various friends and colleagues and editors for assiduously going over and improving her prose.  I can only wonder what it looked before they worked on it, and with that in mind I too must thank them for their efforts.

More important, though, I keep stumbling over strange errors that apparently no one caught despite the numerous hoops that academic writing must jump through.  For example:

In 1973, the American Psychological Association (APA) removed homosexuality from its catalogue of diseases, reducing its classification from psychosis to neurosis [17].

This is a mess.  First, it was the American Psychiatric Association (APA) that in 1973 removed homosexuality from its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual.  It's easy to confuse them with the American Psychological Association, since they have the same initials; many people do, I've done it myself, and so does Google, which brought up this New York Times article on the American Psychiatric Association when I searched for the American Psychological Association.  Even the organizations themselves get confused: this American Psychological Association page says that the APA has opposed stigmatization of homosexuals since 1974, while this one says 1975.

Second, while homosexuality was removed from the DSM-II, there was enough dissension among psychiatrists that a new category replaced it: sexual orientation disturbance, which meant that if you felt bad about being gay, a practitioner could take your money to make you feel better about it.  Given the poor results of most psychotherapy, I wonder how effective such treatment actually was.

Third, I can't find that homosexuality was ever classified as a psychosis by either APA, though some individual practitioners may have done so, if only as a term of abuse.  As far as I can tell, then, McNaron's claim that homosexuality went from psychosis to neurosis is false.  It also conflicts with her own statement that homosexuality was "removed" from the DSM; if it was simply reclassified as a neurosis, it was still a "disease" and so was not "removed."  Since both of us are old enough to remember that period, I wonder where she got this interesting misconception.

Next, McNaron writes:

Since much queer theory argues against identity politics as being too solipsistic and narrow to be helpful in understanding a post-modern world, it has become possible for a faculty member to conduct and publish research about gayness or lesbianism without necessarily being gay or lesbian.  To the extent that this new field of inquiry provides a protective umbrella for some faculty who might otherwise refrain from integrating their sexual orientation into their work, it can only benefit students and faculty alike.  To the extent that it runs counter to the ideas of an older generation or academic era, those who continue to advocate for greater visibility in asserting the existence of intimate and unavoidable connections between the personal and the intellectual, queer theory runs the risk of diluting gains made at great risk to individual faculty members [18].

My objections to McNaron's analysis here are perhaps less factual than interpretive, but there are still facts she leaves out.  (However: "solipsistic"?  It's a much-abused word, but ...)  First, before the rise of openly gay and lesbian scholarship in the 1970s, academics took for granted that only heterosexuals could be impartial and objective about homosexuality, so gay and lesbian academics who wrote about the topic didn't reveal their personal connection to their material because to do so would have discredited them in their profession.  An example that comes to my mind is Laud Humphreys, the sociologist whose controversial observations at sites of gay men's anonymous sexual encounters, published as Tearoom Trade (Duckworth Overlook, 1970), nowhere revealed that Humphreys (who was heterosexually married) was himself gay, though he did acknowledge it later.  Two decades before Humphreys, Alfred Kinsey presented his research team as married heterosexual males, though he and some of his team weren't exclusively heterosexual; but the reason was the same, to comply with professional and cultural norms of objectivity.  One of the motives of openly gay and lesbian scholars was to demolish the notion of objectivity; it's not just a "post-modern" concern.

When openly gay and lesbian scholars began to emerge and publish in greater numbers in the 1970s and afterward, they took different approaches to this problem, though this was, again, controversial, flouting professional norms of impersonality.  Some, influenced by Second Wave feminism, wrote more personally, but most continued to produce professional work that left the observer out of the discussion.  Often personal revelations were confined to prefaces and introductions.  I've seen some disagreement about the extent of this greater personalization, but this is how I perceived it as an interested observer during that period.

As for queer theory, the distinction between it and "gay and lesbian studies" was never well-defined or -maintained.  The textbook The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader (Routledge, 1993), for example, contains many contributions which, properly speaking, are queer theory, including an important excerpt from Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick's ovarian queer-theoretical The Epistemology of the Closet (California, 1990).  Sedgwick was also controversial because though she at times would accept the label "queer," she was heterosexually married, and both gay-and-lesbian-studies and queer-theory types disputed whether she really was queer and whether she should be doing queer theory if she wasn't.  Identity politics has been disavowed by queer theorists, but they have their own identities and their own politics about them.  The younger queer scholars I've read or met don't seem interested in excluding their queerness from their  work; they have other fish to fry.

So, whatever effects queer theory may have had on academics, McNahon's claims seem dubious to me.  One effect of greater gay visibility was, in my opinion, that it made it harder for scholars to do work on homosexuality while dodging questions about their own sexual orientation.  Older scholars, who'd grown up in a time when homosexuals were expected (under great coercion) to pretend, as much as possible, that they were not One of Those People, even when everyone around them knew otherwise, no doubt found it difficult to adjust.

What I've read of Poisoned Ivy so far confirms this.  One of McNaron's informants describes how a closeted colleague torpedoed his appointment to a choice position by tattling about his erotic past to the college president.  "He was obviously afraid I would expose him as a closeted gay," the informant writes (16).  Really?  There are other ways to read the incident.  One is that the informer exposed him partly to divert attention from himself: by fingering someone else, he could prove his own normality. Another is that while he was aware of his own vulnerability to exposure, he disapproved of anyone but himself being queer: he was different, a respectable academic, and this young upstart a disreputable perv.  It's impossible to say for sure in this case, at this distance in time, but I have known people with this attitude, and the trashier their own private lives were by their own standards, the more outraged they were by others.

I've peeked ahead in the book, and there is more to come.  Still, I hope to learn something by reading on, so I will.

The Ancient Way of the Feminist

While trying to read Twilight of the Elites is no fun, I'm enjoying Scott Richard Lyons's X-Marks: Native Signatures of Assent (University of Minnesota Press, 2010).  Lyons, who is Ojebwe/Dakota, is assistant professor of English at Syracuse University.  Though his thinking is informed by postmodernism among other approaches, he writes accessibly, and he actually uses postmodernism.  Ever since I began reading such writers -- including some prominent ones -- in the eighties, I've noticed that many of them announce their postmodern deconstructive allegiances in their theoretical introductions, but when they get down to business they fall right back into older, simpler modes. Lyons actually works on the assumption that identities are unstable, for example, and that concepts like sovereignty "have to be claimed in order to contest or revise them (136).  People who are afraid that rejecting foundations or absolutes means you can't contest or revise standards might want to read Lyons and see how it's done.

But even better, I enjoy Lyons because he generally agrees with me.  This is a pleasure I first encountered when I was researching the New Testament and early Christianity thirty years ago: after wading through hundreds of pages by scholars whose conclusions (as far as I could tell) didn't follow from their evidence or arguments, I'd come upon a scholar who criticized those conclusions for the same faults I saw, and who at least gestured toward possibilities I'd seen, but which were ruled invalid out of hand by most scholars.  Of course this didn't necessarily mean that I, or they, were right.  What it meant was that a person could be a trained professional and reach the same conclusions I did.  It could even indicate that some of the standard conclusions, which most scholars seemed to consider certain, were at least debatable.  The reason they weren't debated had more to do with the faith commitments of the scholars involved -- until recently most professional Bible scholars were believers, and often clergy -- than with the strengths or weaknesses of the arguments.  I'm willing to be the only person who holds a certain position if necessary, but I'm enough of a social animal to take comfort from knowing that there are other people who hold it too.

Analogously, then, I take heart from Lyons's differences with some of his fellow Indians, including academics.  He disagrees with Craig Womack, for example, in much the same terms I do, though I don't assume that Lyons would agree with all of my criticisms.  So my disagreements with Womack can't be explained away as the result of my not being Indian, since Lyons, who is Indian, has similar disagreements.  Again: I might still be wrong; so might Lyons.  But we can't be dismissed with ad hominems; our arguments must be dealt with on their merits.

Lyons also has some useful anecdotes:

I am reminded now of several arguments I had as an instructor at Leech Lake Tribal College with culture cops who wanted to shut down our science programs because they taught evolution. "Nothing in our oral traditions says that we came down from trees." Science was considered suspect because its origins lay outside an Ojibwe epistemology; because the latter was deemed suspect and pure, it had to be protected from contamination. My side eventually won the day, though not (as one might expect) through our claim that we needed to teach science to produce more local doctors and nurses. It was only after we successfully argued that our clan origin story could be read as a kind of proto-evolutionary theory that the culture cops backed off [96].

I'd been wondering what Indian traditionalists (or Indian Christians, for that matter) think about Darwin. "Culture cops" are cultural purists: "enthusiastic reclaimers of culture, often young, male, and educated, frequently with urban roots, who straddle a fine line between support and condemnation in the name of cultural revival" (76).  Note "educated": as Lyons says later, they "try to resist Western modernity and the 'white world' by employing discourses that are themselves rather Western, modern, and 'white' in character' (96).

Lyons distinguishes between culture cops and elders, who he says tend to be much less rigid.  He also compares culture cops to "fundamentalists," which is ironic because what is fundamentalist in this story is reinterpreting the clan origin story to reconcile it with evolutionary theory. Fundamentalists don't take sacred texts literally, as is often said: they consider them inerrant, free from error. To keep error out, you need a lot of very non-literal interpretation.

In a discussion of Native American nationalism, Lyons discusses the First Nations Canadian scholar Taiaiake Alfred, whose three books on reviving Native culture have been very influential.  Here's part of what Lyons (who largely approves of Alfred's work) has to say. 

First those negative legacies [of colonialism] must be transcended: "People must be made whole and strong and real again before they can embark on a larger struggle" ... This is not really an individual pursuit so much as a community project of "warriors" empowering each other.  Alfred wants to witness "one-to-one mentoring, face-to-face interaction, and small-group dialogue to effect the regeneration of our minds, bodies, and spirits.  This is the ancient way of the warrior" ... Of course, this was also the ancient way of second-wave feminists, who called it "consciousness raising," but there are traditional Indian equivalents to what he describes: talking circles, sweat lodges, vision quests, and other such occasions for dialogue and introspection ... [137]

"Warriors."  Sigh.  Warriors aren't an ideal for any culture: they're parasites who run a protection racket.  Pay me, give me your daughters and the best food, and I'll protect you from the guys like me in the next town. (Just between you and me, I feel much more kinship with them than I do with you civilians.)  I wonder what place Alfred has in his regenerated Native societies, not just for women, but for non-warrior men.  No, we can't all be warriors, any more than we can all be Superbowl champs: the guy at the top of the pyramid is held up by everybody under him. Will women be allowed into the talking circles, the sweat lodges, the vision quests, or will they be expected to chew the hides, cook the meals, and nurse the wounded?  I don't think many of today's Native women will go along with that, any more than their distant foremothers would have.

Lyons also points out the "chicken-or-egg dilemma" in Alfred's prescription: "we could just as well argue that strong sovereign nations would produce cultural revitalization" 138), an argument with which I'm in sympathy.  So, as you can see, I'm enjoying myself greatly as I read X-Marks.  But it's not just an echo chamber in which I get my own pet ideas bouncing back endowed with academic authority: Lyons also traces out difficulties in political concepts like "culture," "nation," and "race," among others, going places I haven't gone.  I'm learning as well as having my prejudices stroked.  If I weren't, I wouldn't enjoy the book as much.

Part of My Culture

A good place to begin might be with the story of eighteen-year-old Laxmi Sargara from the great state of Rajasthan in India, who was betrothed to the slightly older Rakesh when she was one year old.  She knew nothing of this agreement until very recently ("a few days ago," according to the BBC story), when her in-laws tried to claim her.  (It's reminiscent of a motif in some European fairy tales, isn't it?)  Her parents wanted her to go through with it, so she consulted an NGO and with their help, was able to annul the marriage.  Child marriages are now illegal under Indian law anyway, but they are still common in "rural and poorer [read: "traditional"] communities."  (I suspect that the parents were trying to get around the law by delaying the actual wedding [as opposed to the betrothal] until the kids were of age, but they didn't reckon with the growing disrespect and rebelliousness of Kids These Days.)

According to the BBC, this is "thought to be the first case of its kind in India."  Needless to say, I hope, I consider find it immensely cheering and I admire Laxmi Sargara for her courage and determination; I hope her parents don't feel obliged to punish her for her defiance of their wishes and their authority, to say nothing of their shame before their neighbors.

I found Sargara's story in my Tabloid Friend's news feed on Facebook, along with this comment from one of his friends: "This is sick, this is wrong. What kind of 'parents' did this poor girl get stuck with? And how many instances are there that we don't know about." I replied:

"‎Sick" and "wrong" are two different things. But arranged marriages are examples of the "traditional" marriages that so many gay people have told me they want. They're biblical, in fact. Betrothal at the age of 1 is a bit extreme, but only in kind, not in degree. At least they didn't turn the girl over to her in-laws at 8 or 10, as often happens. This was a fairly liberal arrangement, and not abnormal for good families in India -- to answer your question of "what kind of 'parents' did this poor girl get stuck with?" Normal Indian parents, that's what kind. 

Understand: I'm not saying this was a good arrangement, and I'm cheering that girl for her courage and determination. It takes physical courage to go against your culture as she did. I'm just saying is case like this are why I cringe when people assume that marriage is a beautiful thing, and talk about "marriage equality." Marriage is a lot of things, many (or even most of them) bad -- especially for women.

The earlier commenter replied that just because it's biblical doesn't make it "right or proper," and I naturally agree.  Nor does the fact that something is normal in a culture.  That's why I drew the analogy to marriage in the US today.  Almost everyone seems to pay lip service to the goodness of monogamous marriage -- it's the benchmark that same-sex marriage "equality" aspires to -- even though that institution is problematic for women in many ways.  Even someone like the anti-religious, sexually radical Homo Superior can claim that "there is no progressive case against gay marriage as an issue of social justice," and that "all social justice movements of the past have sought to change access to existing institutions".  By his logic, there's no real problem of social justice in Laxmi Sargara's case, since both children were betrothed by their parents: no inequality between the sexes was involved.  If parents betrothed two male or two female infants, you'd have arranged-marriage equality.

This is just one instance in a larger problem that I've written about before: the "respect" that supposedly is due to different cultures than our own.  It's not easy to resolve; in fact I believe it is impossible, and can only be dealt with on a case-by-case basis.  But a lot of bad arguments are deployed whenever it comes up.

I came upon the story of Laxmi Sargara soon after I started reading Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism (Minnesota, 1999) by Craig S. Womack, a Creek/Cherokee writer who's now Associate Professor of English at Emory University, specializing in Native American literature.  I'm only about 60 pages (of 300) into Red on Red, and so far I'm conflicted about the book.  Womack has plenty of sense, but he also swerves into bad sense periodically.

I'm sympathetic to the project of Native American academic separatism, as I am to separatism by other groups -- women, queers, people of color -- but I'm also aware of the contradictions it inescapably involves.  For example, American lesbian separatists of the 1970s did their best to withdraw not only from men, but from men's institutions; academic feminists of the same period were not separatists: Women's Studies (or Afro-American Studies or GLB Studies) Departments don't constitute separatism any more than Chemistry Departments or Business Schools do.  Native American Studies will have plenty of non-Indian students, just as Afro-American Studies draw whites, Women's Studies draws men, and GLB Studies draw straights, the more so since whites have been involved in Native American Studies all along.  Serious separatists know that they need to build their own institutions, not join those of the oppressor.  Which doesn't mean that it's invalid to do Native American (or other) studies within the white man's university, only that it's dubious as separatism.

I certainly don't object to Native American Studies programs being defined and directed by Indians; that's exactly what I want, as I want from everybody else: to hear from them how the world looks to them.  Separatism would demand that I not read, not listen, but as I've said before, I've never let that stop me before.

That's where the contradictions come in.  In the introduction, Womack quotes "Anna Lee Walter's cogent remarks" (9):

Scholars or authorities from academia, from outside tribal societies, do not necessarily know tribal people best.  There is an inherent right of tribal people to interpret events and time in their worlds according to their own aesthetics and values, as a component of American history, even when this interpretation is different from that of mainstream history.

"I might add," Womack adds, "especially when the interpretation is different from that of the mainstream."  To which I might add, oh, indubitably, but big whoop.  Walter's remarks can be transposed to any other other group: try substituting women, or gays, or African-Americans, or Jews, or Rajasthani parents for "tribal people."  There is indeed an inherent right of any group to interpret events and time in their worlds according to their own aesthetics and values, but that doesn't mean that academics don't have an inherent right to use their intellectual tools wherever they wish; academics are a tribal group with their own traditions and values, which often puts them at odds with the mainstream. (But what is the mainstream? -- a question to which I'll return.)  Academics just shouldn't be given power over others; I'm not sure if anybody should.

Think of conflicts between middle-American gays who know they were born gay and who denounce academic Queer Theorists who, they allege, think it's just a choice.  Think of conflicts between the Talented Tenth of middle-class African-Americans who made careers for themselves in historically black colleges (a prime example of separatism), and the other ninety percent of African-Americans.  Then think of white progressives who denounce hoity-toity academics of any color who make "race" an object of study, even though it's a social construct.  And then think of academics from non-Western societies who study in American universities and feel free to interpret and judge American gay communities by their (supposedly non-Western but actually Western-academic) aesthetics and values.  Think of Christians who are upset by academic Christian scholars for questioning and undermining the beloved traditional grounds of ordinary believers' faith.  And so on.

Womack declares, "I do not bother much in this book with the skepticism of postmodernism in relation to history.  It is way too premature for Native scholars to deconstruct history when we haven't yet constructed it" (3).  He then quotes "Abenaki poet Cheryl Savageau":

I never even encountered the word "essentialist" before coming to grad school, and then it was thrown at me like a dirty word, mostly because I wrote something about Native writers and the land in a paper.

.... The same professor who labeled me "essentialist," said there was no truth, no history, just lots of people's viewpoints.  I argued that some things actually did happen.  That some versions of history are not just a point of view, but actual distortions and lies.

It is just now, when we are starting to tell our stories that suddenly there is no truth.  It's a big cop out as far as I'm concerned, a real political move by the mainstream to protect itself that Native people, African Americans, gay and lesbian folks ... are telling.  If everybody's story is all of a sudden equally true, then there is no guilt, no accountability, no need to change anything, no need for reparations, no arguments for sovereign nation status,  and their positions of power are maintained [3-4].

For better or worse, most people probably encounter words and ideas in graduate school that they'd never encountered before; that's not in itself an argument against those words and ideas.  In fact, it's one of the reasons one goes to graduate school.  Which doesn't mean that Savageau's professor wasn't full of shit.

But notice the irony here.  There's nothing about "postmodernism," as Womack presents it, that forestalls anybody from "get[ting] our stories told" (4); rather the opposite: that stance would discredit any attempt by Savageau's professor to privilege his stories, his labels, his viewpoint over anyone else's.  If nobody's story is more valid than anybody's else's, there's no reason not to tell all of them.  But an essentialist stance would justify the professor's dismissal of Savageau's ideas, since he was the authority and she was just a lowly graduate student, and an Injun at that.  When I read stuff like this, I wonder what would have happened to me if I'd gone to graduate school.  Since I disagreed with my professors on such issues on more than one occasion as an undergraduate, I imagine I'd have gone on doing so, and it might have made my career or it might have ended it.  I can't help wondering if part of Savageau's problem was that her tribal truth required deference to elders "and their positions of power", no matter how wrong they were.

Later, Womack quotes "Phillip Deere, a full-blood traditionalist from Nuyaka Grounds" (54):

I think a lot about these things.  Sometimes it makes me wonder how many of our people will be destroyed?  How many of them will be lost forever?  I keep looking around.  I keep a thinking and I hope that I'm not the only Indian left because of knowing this.  We may look like Indians, we have the color of an Indian, but what are we thinking?  What are we doing to our own children who are losing their language, their own ways?

I sometimes think that even within the government, there's an all-out effort to lose Mr. Indian.  Even Reagan, his new Federalism or whatever it is, it means cutting off all the funding from the Indian people ... But on the other hand, what's our people acting like?  Are they still trying to be Indians or are they just benefit Indians, a three-day Indian, a clinic Indian, or BIA-school Indian, what kind of Indian are they? [55].

I take Mr. Deere's words very seriously; he says important things.  But he also sounds exactly like a white right-wing Republican conservative elder.  Let me just rewrite the first paragraph with a few minor substitutions:

I keep a thinking and I hope that I'm not the only American left because of knowing this.  We may look like Americans, we have the color of an American, but what are we thinking?  What are we doing to our own children who are losing their own language, their own ways?

When I read Womack, I find myself remembering the struggle over American history and how it's to be taught.  "Full-blood traditionalists" don't want a bunch of postmodernist college perfessors trampling on the inherent right of American people to interpret events and time in their worlds according to their own aesthetics and values.  The David Brooks column I just linked to is full of the same complaints that Womack vents, but from the Anglo-American tribal viewpoint.

I agree that different opinions and arguments should be listened to, especially when they go against the mainstream of history and culture.  But I'd apply that to Native Americans' mainstream interpretations, no less than I do to mainstream American interpretations.  Outside of academia and other select hotbeds of dissent and "deconstruction", I might be less inclined to question mainstream views, but in the university everything is fair game.  But why limit it to the university?  If I, and other people, don't question mainstream views that are objectionable, who will?  Consider again Noam Chomsky's and Martin Luther King Jr.'s dictum that one must first criticize one's own country and culture; is that a "mainstream" view?  Certainly not; it's why people like Chomsky and King are attacked by the mainstream. (Nietzsche said something similar: "A very popular error: having the courage of one's convictions: rather it is a matter of having the courage for an attack on one's convictions.")

So, when Womack writes that "an important characteristic of the Creek nation [is] its tendency to 'swallow up” smaller groups that moved into Creek country (these groups would often become assimilated Creek, most eventually adopting the Creek language) … This 'swallowing up' effect is important because it demonstrates that Creeks were able to view nationalism as a dynamic, rather than a static, process" (30-31), I have to giggle and smirk, just as I do when a mainstream American glosses over little problems in our shared history.  Perhaps the Creek aren't as different from the Whites as Womack wants to think, I suspect. Then I want to know more, which is why I'm going to continue reading.