Bordewich on "Sovereignty"

As I promised, below is the entire passage from Bordewich's Killing the White Man's Indian which I quoted in class. In terms of context, I would just say that he brings out some examples of sovereign Indian tribal governments treating Indians and some non-Indians on reservations in a racially discrimnatory way and being allowed to get away with that. So, in criticism, Bordewich comments:

"On a deeper plane, the ideology of sovereignty seems to presume that racial separateness is a positive good, as if Indian bloodlines, economies, and histories were not already inextricably enmeshed with those of white, Hispanic, black, and Asian Americans; it seems to presuppose that cultural purity ought to, or even can, be preserved. With little debate outside the parochial circles of Indian affairs, a generation of policymaking has jettisoned the long-standing American ideal of racial unity as a positive good and replaced it with a doctrine that, seen from a more critical angle, seems disturbingly like an idealized form of segregation, a fact apparently invisible in an era that has made a secular religion of passionate ethnicity. As Arthur Schlesinger has written in The Disuniting of America:

Instead of a transformative nation with an identity all its own, America increasingly sees itself in this new light as a preservative of diverse alien identities. Instead of a nation composed of individuals making their own unhampered choices, America increasingly sees itself as composed of groups more or less ineradicable in their ethnic character.

The belief that Indians are somehow fundamentally different from other Americans, however romantically the idea may be expressed in terms of native "tradition" or magical notions of affinity for the earth, implies a failure of basic American values, for it leads inexorably toward moral acceptance of political entities defined on the basis of racial exclusion. Although the concept of tribal sovereignty has parallels in other ideologies of racial and ethnic separatism, it is potentially far more subversive, for Indian tribes, unlike the nation's other minorities, possess both land and governments of their own and have at least the potential to transform not only their hopes and creativity but also their biases into political power in a way that others never can. It should, moreover, be obvious to anyone that legitimizing segregation for Indians will set a precedent for its potential imposition upon black, Asian, and Hispanic Americans."


Finally, let me take this opportunity to remind you that the essay on Chapter 8 of Killing the White Man's Indian is due next Thursday (Nov. 8th). You also want to begin reading our next book, Translation Nation. See you Tuesday.