immanence

This post is the third in a series on the topic of Indigenous identity, universities, and processes of (re-)indigenization. Part 1 can be read here; Part 2, here. While the following is most relevant to the case of Vermont, I hope it can also contribute to a broader consideration of these issues.

Who is indigenous?

The question of who is and isn’t Indigenous in Vermont has heated up over the last two years. I make no claims either to being Indigenous (I am a child of refugee-settler parents from Eastern Europe) or having special insights into this. But I’ve given it a fair bit of thought, considered and consulted with people on different “sides” of the debate, and would like to share my thoughts as part of my own self-education and (hopefully) that of my colleagues at the University of Vermont.

As I’ve recounted earlier, the university for which I work, a land-grant institution, has benefited from territory and property taken from Indigenous peoples, and so it has a responsibility to ethically account for those benefits.

In 2011 and 2012, the state of Vermont recognized four organizations as representing the state’s Abenaki people. While that process seemed worthy of celebration, it ignored the input of the state’s Abenaki descendants who reside across the national border in Odanak, Québec (and their relatives in New England who, for the most part, are not part of the four state recognized tribes).

Members of the Abenaki community at Odanak have for years questioned the Indigenous identities of Vermont’s self-identified “Abenakis,” but they began doing so more publicly, and in a more unified way, in the past few years. I was a member of the organizing group of an event this past April that, for the first time, allowed the Abenaki of Odanak First Nation and its relatives living in New England to speak on this issue to a public audience at the University of Vermont. The event was, to say the least, controversial.

While Vermont’s state-recognized Abenaki groups defend their claims and consider this at best as an “inter-tribal” affair, and at worst as “lateral violence” and “ethnocide,” Odanak’s representatives have made clear that they see this as part of a larger issue shaking up academe and other institutions in Canada and the U.S.: the issue of Indigenous self-identification and its claiming by European descendants with no historical connections to Indigenous communities.

Many people have now been hired, especially in Canada, into positions of respect and authority as Indigenous, i.e., claiming to be Indigenous, and given the authority to represent Indigenous culture and/or affiliation in their positions. Some have been questioned on this, and at a series of institutions, this has led to bitter conflicts and much reflection.

As a result of one of these flare-ups at Queen’s University in Ontario, the university commissioned the Ottawa-based First Peoples Group Indigenous consulting firm to write a report exploring the implications of Indigenous identity for universities. That report makes clear that Indigenous identity is not something one claims as an individual; rather, it comes from a recognized Indigenous community, with a continuous lived history of being Indigenous, claiming individuals as their members.

In other words, Indigenous identity is not yours or mine to claim, based on “blood,” “feeling,” family stories (as with Elizabeth Warren, for instance), distant ancestry, choice, or sheer fantasy. It is, by definition, relational: to be Indigenous is to be a member of a community that has lived its history as Indigenous within the settler-colonial context of the Americas, Australia, or analogous parts around the world — a context in which Indigenous peoples have been subjected to exterminationist and assimilationist policies that have deeply impacted their members.

Among others, Indigenous scholar Kim Tallbear gets at this in her critical account of identity as a concept, and of its use by non-Indigenous people claiming Indigenous identity.

The debate in Canada

A recent cover article of Maclean’s magazine (Canada’s equivalent to Time or Newsweek), written by a former staff person at Emily Carr University who resigned in part over that university’s treatment of another such controversy, discusses these issues in detail and with penetrating insight.

The article, by Michelle Cyca, discusses the case of former faculty member Gina Adams, who was hired as part of a “cluster hire” of Indigenous faculty in 2019. Adams’s Indigenous identity was questioned in social media, which led to several months of consternation and confusion among students, colleagues, and others. When Cyca asked administrators how they were addressing the claims of Adams’s false identity, she writes,

They informed me that Professor Mimi Gellman, who identifies as Anishinaabe, Ashkenazi Jewish and Métis, and Brenda Crabtree, a Nlaka’pamux and Sto:lo staff member who serves as the Aboriginal program manager and special advisor to the president on Indigenous initiatives, had spoken with Adams and believed her to be truthful. Their endorsement of Adams was apparently enough for the administration to consider the case closed.

I found this baffling. Crabtree and Gellman, though respected and thoughtful Indigenous leaders on campus, are not part of the Ojibwe community that Adams had claimed; they could not confirm Adams’s relations or connections. 

In other words, the community Adams claimed was hers was never consulted. Identity was considered a matter of individual self-representation, not of community citizenship. The stakes here, as Cyca relates, are as follows:

But in recent years, people who are self-Indigenizing — claiming an identity based on distant or specious connections — can profit from their fantasies by capitalizing on a slew of opportunities meant for Indigenous people. Overwhelmingly, these have been open to anyone who self-identifies as Indigenous.

Cyca also lays out the other stakes, for universities and their employees:

Despite their promises to Indigenize, universities require their Indigenous staff and students to comply with the institutional ways of doing things. Our inclusion is always on their terms. And their reluctance to act in the face of widespread identity fraud suggests that their primary concern is always for themselves: their reputations, their rankings, their finances. After all, it’s difficult to fire professors, particularly when they’re tenured. So far, no permanent faculty member who has been accused of or admitted to Indigenous identity fraud has been fired outright. The lack of precedent is paralyzing. Universities are like herds of nervous antelope. They all want to run from danger at the same time, in the same direction, and none of them want to be the first to break away from the group.

(It’s worth noting that Adams resigned as the article was going to press.)

But let’s pause here for a moment.

These stories of academics or cultural figures “race-shifting” are stories about individuals profiting from their Indigenous identity claims. They are not stories about communities, and that’s where things get even more complicated.

In Cherokee country, in the wide swath of communities identified in Canada as “Métis,” and in other parts of “Indian country,” we have an increasing number of organized groups that have attained recognition — by state, provincial, or federal (“settler”) governments — as Indigenous communities. Some of these are not recognized by other communities, whose histories of existence as communities with their own governance processes, that have lived through centuries of dispossession by colonial powers, are not in question.

The case of the “eastern Métis” is instructive here. Sociologist Darryl Leroux has analyzed many recently formed organizations claiming this identity, an identity that the longer-standing Métis nation of Canada has largely rejected. Leroux’s conclusions — that many of these Indigenous-identifying groups are “race-shifters,” whose ancestries are largely European and whose claims to Indigeneity are deeply problematic, not least because of their impacts on real Indigenous people and communities — are largely shared by Indigenous scholars. That Leroux has now concluded more or less the same thing about Vermont’s state-recognized Abenakis is part of what has made this issue flare up.

As with all scholarly arguments, Leroux’s has its detractors, but their positions have not been held up by Indigenous scholars in the ways that his have. This isn’t necessarily something you’d know from a quick Google search, or from talking to one or two people. It’s something one learns through a deeper acquaintance with Indigenous scholarship, including its relationship to Indigenous communities.

Back to Vermont, and the need for self-education

With a few (prominent) exceptions, Vermont’s state-recognized Abenakis are not academics, nor necessarily individuals who benefit professionally from their Indigenous (or indigenized) identities. They are people who have grown up hearing stories about being Indigenous and who, for at least a few decades now, have felt part of an Indigenous community (that has been around since the mid 1970s in the Swanton area, not as long elsewhere). There is no evidence that any such community existed before that, except perhaps in oral narratives passed down by individuals or in small family contexts (narratives that have not been made public). But that community, or four of them, exist today.

This distinction between “grassroots” communities and self-seeking professionals is a significant one. It’s also one that’s difficult to draw in practice. For non-Indigenous people, it’s a tricky one to even begin to assess. This means there really is only one way for those of us who want to be allies to Indigenous people to proceed. That way is through self-education.  

For Vermonters (in this case) to understand their own histories and those of the descendants of the Abenaki and other communities that lived here for centuries or millennia, it is important to learn the histories and current status of those communities. This includes:

(1) Learning the history of the Abenaki who ended up retreating to Odanak in the wake of the French and Indian War and the U.S. War of Independence, their history since then (which included movement across their traditional territories, including across the Canada-U.S. border), and their status as a nation today;

(2) Learning about the largely unrelated history of French-Canadians settling Vermont since the early 1800s (and their being targeted during the eugenics débacle), so that their descendants now constitute about a quarter of the population of Vermont;

(3) Learning about how the Abenaki Nation of Missisquoi constituted itself beginning in the 1970s (and others like Nulhegan, Elnu, and Koasek followed); how narratives were assembled and unified to claim an identity that was not verified by those who have held and cultivated that identity continuously (at Odanak); and how the latter have responded; and

(4) Learning about Indigenous definitions of citizenship (which I’ve referred to above), and about Indigenous struggles to survive amidst broader histories of (intended) extermination, cultural assimilation, and more recently by histories of romanticization, or whites “playing Indian,” “race-shifting,” and so on.

Those are all relevant contexts within which current debates over Indigenous identity are occurring, and they should be standard curriculum at a state university that is hoping to act in the midst of them.

As Cyca points out,

Indigenous identities aren’t about racial or biological characteristics that can be reduced to a 23andMe result. They’re nationalities, which exist only in relation to specific communities. 

Another relevant question is whether such communities can create themselves, or whether they must be recognized by their (claimed) Indigenous relatives in order to be an Indigenous community.

Whatever else we may know about the present debate, there is no question that the Odanak First Nation has sustained a continuous community identity since the late 17th century, while Vermont’s state-recognized tribes did not exist in any recognized form before the 1970s. Far from being a foreign entity, Odanak maintains a governance structure representing the historically recognized Abenaki community which still lives on traditional Abenaki land — land that extends from the St. Lawrence River to northern Massachusetts and from the Lake Champlain basin to the Connecticut River basin.

Odanak has been the principal governmental seat for territories including most of Vermont since at least the 18th century. As documented in old newspapers, census records, town histories, et al. (some shared at the April 29 event), Odanak’s citizens have lived in or visited Vermont regularly, even during the years when the state-recognized tribes claim to have been “in hiding.” It bears repeating that as far as Abenaki identity is concerned, the Canada-U.S. border is a non-issue, as it artificially divides the homeland into two jurisdictions.

Needless to say, there are issues here that won’t be easy to resolve. Cyca writes,

The relationships that constitute Indigenous identity have been deliberately fractured across generations, through residential schools, the Sixties Scoop, and the ongoing overrepresentation of Indigenous children in foster care. [In the United States, the details have been different, but certainly no better.] As a result, many Indigenous people don’t know where or who they come from, and they deserve respect and care as they navigate their journeys of reconnection.

Those sentences deserve repetition, especially in contexts like Vermont, where the loss of Indigenous identity can be taken as a natural side effect of colonization and the wars that accompanied it (between the British, French, and their respective Indigenous allies, and later between the Americans and the French and Abenaki). Filling in the details of that “loss” can therefore be expected to be a tricky and contentious process.

What follows these sentences is more specific to the question of professional identities, and which has so far been less directly relevant to the University of Vermont:

But finding one’s way back to a community is very different from using an identity claim as currency to buy one’s way into a prestigious job. And anyone in a position of power should be held to a high standard of transparency and truthfulness.

A hopeful conclusion?

It is that standard of transparency and truthfulness that institutions like my university ought to aspire to.

Until recently, I considered both the state of Vermont and the University of Vermont to be behind the curve with all of this. Now I recognize that they are both behind and potentially ahead of the curve, in different ways. They are behind because the state of Vermont has only been dealing with its own Indigenous history for a few decades, and because the University has, to my knowledge, not yet hired any prominent self-identified Indigenous people into positions of authority over what it means to be Indigenous. We have had self-identified Indigenous faculty members as well as students, but the university has no Indigenous studies program and no one (again, to my knowledge) has ever been hired, on more than a single-project basis, into the capacity of representing Indigenous issues or identities in any public-facing way.

The University has begun taking concrete steps to “do the right thing” (e.g., see here, here, and here). But it’s become very unclear what that may mean. If the Odanak position is taken seriously — and I can think of no valid reason not to do that — then the University must consider the possibility that by embracing the state-recognized Abenaki at the expense of the Odanak First Nation, it may in fact be complicit in a state-supported project of Abenaki exclusion. This is a serious charge, and it must be taken seriously.

The University, however (less so the state), can be considered ahead of the curve because this means it can still do it right. In its process of “Indigenizing,” or at least “decolonizing,” that is, of righting historical wrongs in relation to its own Indigenous histories, the University of Vermont can learn from the mistakes of others.

The first step in doing that is to understand what Indigenous identity is (recognition by a historically known, sovereign Indigenous people or nation) and what it isn’t (self-identification, whether by an individual or a recently constituted tribe).

This also means engaging with Abenaki history and with contemporary Indigeneity, as it is understood by Indigenous peoples throughout North America and by Indigenous scholars working directly in the field of contemporary Indigenous studies.

All of this will take some careful navigating.  

This article was slightly amended in a few places (for flow and grammatical clarity) on October 5, 2022.